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In For A Ruble
By David Duffy St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2012 David Duffy
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-01244-9
CHAPTER 1
Everything about Sebastian Leitz was big. The man himself was six foot four and weighed two-eighty easy. A tractor tire wrapped his midsection, he wore size fourteen shoes, and nobody made gloves to fit his hands. The outsize head, with its fat pear nose, kidney-pool blue eyes and inflated inner-tube lips, made him seem larger still. The head was topped by a bushy, orange Afro that had last seen the barber when Brezhnev was general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A circus clown on steroids. His voice — a foghorn bass — could've filled a big top.
Leitz needed the big head to hold the brain. He'd earned two doctorates, mathematics and economics, from Harvard and MIT. He'd written countless papers and a half dozen books. He was a full professor at Columbia by twenty-six. People were talking Nobel Prize by thirty. That was before he quit academics and went to Wall Street to make big money.
Leitz was worth several billion, and he'd made it all himself — in little more than a decade. His hedge funds regularly ranked high on the performance charts, and Leitz himself consistently topped the compensation tables.
He had a blowback laugh and a blow-up temper. Both blew with the force of a saboteur's bomb — unseen, unexpected, until they knocked everybody in range off their feet. As I came to find out, not everyone got back up.
He had strong opinions and was willing to state them loudly and longly if he thought there was reason to do so. Otherwise he didn't waste breath. He ignored anyone he pegged as foolish or stupid. He didn't give a damn what they thought of him.
Leitz had a big penchant for secrecy. No one at his firm (other than himself, of course) was allowed to take anything home from the office. An idle comment in the elevator, if it involved the company's business, was a firing offense. He hated losing — big time. He was known to throw whatever was in reach at whomever put him on the wrong end of a trade. When I met him, he was working on the biggest deal of his life — buying and merging two of America's TV networks, thereby taking hold of a big chunk of the media landscape. His bid had dominated the financial press and the tabloids for weeks.
Leitz was a force of nature — one of those people God or whoever is in charge put here from time to time to shake things up, make life interesting. I suppose, despite everything, that's why I liked him. But all the size and smarts, money and privilege in the world are no guarantee you won't fuck it up.
CHAPTER 2
I didn't know any of this the first time we met. I didn't know much beyond what the press told me about his TV bid — BOLD! BIG TIME! BIG BET ON THE NEW FUTURE OF OLD MEDIA! — and his wealth. The New York papers were more forthcoming than Leitz's friend and my partner, Foster Klaus Helix, known as Foos, who arranged the meeting.
"How successful is he?" I asked.
"Leitz does okay," Foos said.
"What's okay?"
"Pretty good."
"S&P was up twelve percent last year. He do better than that?"
"Some."
"How much some?"
"Enough."
"He's a quantitative hedge fund manager, why's he trying to buy TV networks?"
"Thinks he'll make money."
"Their current owners think they don't make enough money. What's Leitz going to do different?"
"Make more money."
I let it go. I didn't really want the meeting. I didn't want the client. Leitz sounded like a bigger, richer, more opinionated pain in the ass than my last client, and he and his family turned out to be big trouble. But that was just an excuse. Truth be told, I didn't feel like doing much of anything, I hadn't in months. I was still thinking, unsuccessfully, about the woman who'd turned my life upside down before she walked out of it without even a kiss good-bye. She'd warned me she'd do that, twice, and she'd been true to her word. I couldn't blame her. I'd done my part to show her the door. I hadn't meant to, I'd had no choice. We're all our own best friend and enemy, as one of our proverbs puts it.
I kept hoping against hope she'd change her mind and come back. That carried me through the first few weeks. Then I heard she'd left her job — a high-profile appointment as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, something she'd worked hard to get — and blown town. After two weeks of not wanting to get out bed, I tried to convince Foos to let me use the Basilisk to find her. Maybe if I followed wherever she'd gone, pleaded my case, recanted, promised to change, she'd see the error of her ways. I didn't really believe it, but I had to try. Not that it mattered — Foos refused flat out.
"Who's side are you on?" I asked.
"What makes you think I'm dumb enough to choose sides?"
"She got to you, didn't she? Before she left. Made you promise not to help. What was the bribe? I'll double it."
He smiled and went back to banging on his computer keyboard. I don't know which was worse, the depression or the frustration. I knew the Basilisk could find her. That beast can find anyone. But its master wasn't cooperating.
* * *
"Don't believe everything you read in the papers," Foos said. I was doing more research in preparation for our meeting.
I ignored him on the grounds he was making me do my own homework — and I was still pissed off. I told myself Foos was right, I needed something to occupy my mind. I didn't really believe that either, but the alternatives for the day — vodka, beer, more vodka and beer — worked in his favor.
Even before he strode upon the media stage, Leitz cut a big swath, not that hard to do in New York if you've got the funds. He donated his way onto the boards of the Guggenheim Museum, Carnegie Hall and his teaching alma mater, Columbia. He bought expensive pictures at Sotheby's and Christie's, often bidding for himself instead of hiding behind a dealer or auction house functionary. He threw high-profile parties at his East Side mansion, packed with celebrities who invested in his hedge funds. He wasn't afraid to tell any reporter who'd listen that the government should stay the hell out of the hedge fund business. He might have been giving second thought to some of those comments, since the government — in the form of the SEC, FTC, FCC and Department of Justice — could have a lot to say about whether he was allowed to pursue the current objects of his desire. Still, not bad for a second-generation immigrant kid from Austria via Astoria.
Leitz came from a big family — a brother and two sisters, four kids in all. He lived in a double-fronted brick town house on East Sixty-second Street, to which he'd added the brownstones on either side, giving him twelve windows across the front — a ton of real estate anywhere, an enormity in Manhattan. I guess he needed room for his two kids (from two wives), housekeeper, nanny, and pair of Bernese mountain dogs, which I initially mistook for small Saint Bernards and was quickly corrected.
Foos had known Leitz before he became rich, when they were both ordinary, working-stiff, academic geniuses. They'd met at some conference of eggheads while Foos was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Leitz at Columbia. Probably struck up a friendship over the lunch buffet — the two biggest brains and bodies in the room. Both left academics soon afterward, Leitz to Wall Street and Foos to move modern data mining forward several decades in as many years.
After Foos sold his company, he gave Leitz some of his fortune to invest along with a chunk of the assets of the foundation he endowed and runs — STOP, short for "Stop Terrorizing Our Privacy." I'd read Leitz required a minimum investment of $5 million and regularly racked up returns north of 30 percent a year, after fees of 3 percent of assets under management and the first 30 percent of profits earned. Fees were another big thing about him.
When I asked Foos about that, I got the usual, "Leitz does okay."
I gave up. I checked STOP's records, which I'm entitled to do since I'm the other member of the board, although Foos neglects to send me financial reports — or any other reports for that matter. I don't know how much of STOP's money Leitz invested, since the assets could be spread among multiple managers. STOP's most recent tax return, which I downloaded from the Internet, showed total assets of $208 million. It started with $50 million five years ago. The markets had tanked in the interim. Leitz indeed appeared to be doing okay.
On our way uptown, I again pressed Foos about his friend.
"What happened to the first Mrs. Leitz?"
"Bad scene."
"You know her?"
"A little."
"How bad?"
"The worst."
"And wife number two?"
"Jenny. She's cute. Smart too."
"Bad? Cute? Smart? Care to add a little color?"
"Not my business."
He looked out the window, and we rode in silence the rest of the way. In the twenty years I'd spent with the KGB, I'd never heard of anyone standing up against a full-bore Cheka interrogation. Given the chance, Foos could've been the first.
Someone had left the Post on the cab's backseat. NEW BIDDERS EXPECTED IN TV WAR, the headline read. The story cited Wall Street sources, all unnamed, stating that several consortia, involving everyone from Warren Buffet to Bill Gates to a couple of Chinese billionaires, were in the process of putting together offers to rival Leitz's. Wall Street was in full M&A — merger and acquisition — frenzy. The fees alone were expected to run into the hundreds of millions. The ensuing battle could last months.
Normally, I'm as caught up as the next guy in stories like this one, events that promise change and upheaval in the landscape — economic, social and cultural — of my adopted country. My natural curiosity (a character trait I've never tried hard to tame) would be working overtime at the prospect of meeting the man who'd set it in motion. But today as I read the story, noted the names, registered the humongous amounts of cash involved, I felt no spark. Whatever Leitz wanted didn't matter much. He might occupy my time, perhaps a bit of my attention, for a day, a week or a month, but he and his bidding war wouldn't do a damned thing to alter the fucked-up mess that had become my life.
At the corner of Madison and Sixty-second, Foos paid the driver. We walked half a block east. The morning was bright and crisp, not too cold for the second week of January. The remnants of a New Year's storm lined the sidewalks, mostly frozen slush now, covered with a coat of city grime, nothing compared with the three feet of black encrusted snow I'd left in Moscow back before Christmas.
Leitz's spread was almost precisely midblock, on the north side of the street. A handsome six-story brick house at the center, with cream-colored trim. Half the façade was flat-fronted, half formed a graceful bay, as if the architect had tried to make one house look like two. Avoiding ostentation perhaps. The rest of the expanded mansion comprised two traditional New York brownstones on either side. Foos pushed a brass button by the black door, and a Filipina answered. She smiled hello, ushered us inside, and offered to take our coats.
We stood in a stone-floored, chandeliered entrance hall that occupied the full width and half the depth of the double brick house. An elliptical staircase swirled upward at the center. The hall was hung as a portrait gallery — nineteenth century European, maybe a few American, paintings covered three of four walls. One picture caught my eye, a handsome, bearded man in his late thirties. I went over for a closer look. It was what I thought — a self-portrait by Ilya Repin, probably painted in the 1880s. I'd seen one like it at the Tretyakov in Moscow. The Met has a couple of Repin's works, but they're hard to find outside Russia. Leitz was becoming a little more interesting.
Foos came up beside me. "Nice picture."
"We've got some good painters. He's one."
"Not surprised. Leitz knows his stuff."
"Please, gentlemen, upstairs. Mr. Sebastian waits." The maid stood by the staircase pointing. We followed her direction.
Carpeted wood steps, painted balusters and a smooth mahogany banister climbed all six stories. On the second floor, two sets of double doors opened off the central hall into a high-ceilinged, paneled room in the front. I got off to take a look. It ran the width of the brick house — six windows — with a marble fireplace at each end. The furniture was a mixture of English and French antiques. A Picasso cubist still life hung over one fireplace in refined revolutionary conversation with a Braque over the other. Matisse, Cézanne and Manet graced the other walls.
"One more flight, boys, the inner sanctum," a loud voice called, and I returned to the stairs to see a large head of curly reddish-blond hair flopping over the railing from above. Foos was already halfway up. I followed, regretting not being able to spend more time with the paintings in the drawing room. But I didn't know what was to come.
On the third floor, off the stairs, I came face-to-face with a huge Rothko color field — blue and red and purple. The closeness and intensity took me aback, until I realized that beside me was another one of the same size — yellow, orange, and red. I turned slowly around the hall. There were four of them, one for each wall, and the impact was overwhelming, a whirling cocoon of color, too close and too bright, and much too deep, to take in all at once.
Foos passed through unaffected. He'd been here before. I spun in my spot, trying to establish myself and get some perspective. It wasn't possible. Three-dimensional hypnosis. I had to fight to break the spell and pull my eyes from the color, infinite in its intensity. I turned to the red-haired man in the doorway.
He was smiling. "People say it's over the top, but I like a real kick in the ass."
"You got that, all right," I said, extending my hand, head still spinning
His paw enveloped mine in a tight grip. "Sebastian Leitz. Come in."
This room was as big as the one on the floor below, also paneled, but in blond wood with clean, contemporary lines. Fireplaces at both ends again, but these had simple, limestone mantels with no frills or decoration. Wood fires burned in both. The paintings were contemporary too — Franz Kline held down one end, Robert Motherwell the other, two more heavyweights thrashing out their own generation of abstraction. But it was the top right corner, above the desk, that caught my eye. A smallish canvas, compared with the others, eighteen inches by three feet, highlighted by a single spot. A collection of blue, yellow, red, green, and brown rectangles floating on a white background.
I remembered the painting — and where I'd first seen it. Kasimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition, painted in 1916. I'd gone to look at it at Sotheby's a few years ago, right before it sold for $80 million. I raised an eyebrow at the buyer. He nodded.
"Not many people get that. But you're Russian, right? Not Black Square, but the best I could do."
"You did well. It's ... You know as well as I do — words are hard to come by."
For my money, Malevich is the greatest of Russian painters, one of the greatest of all painters, and along with Kandinsky, perhaps, the first real abstractionist anywhere. Leitz had placed the picture in the traditional position of an icon in a Russian house, just as Malevich himself had done with his most famous painting, Black Square, when he showed it for the first time in 1915, declaring, none too subtly, a thousand years of representational painting passé.
"Thank you. It's my favorite picture."
"I like the Repin downstairs too."
He gave me a look that indicated I'd passed some kind of test. "You're the first to recognize that. Come sit by the fire."
Leitz led the way to a group of black leather Le Corbusier club chairs under the Motherwell. Foos lounged in one. At the other end of the room, under Kline's big, brutal, black brushstrokes, two flat screens sat on a desk and a row of monitors were embedded in the paneled wall. They flickered with red and green and blue, too far away to see the actual numbers.
Foos poured himself a cup of coffee from a chrome thermos without waiting to be asked and lifted an eyebrow at me. I shook my head. Leitz already had a cup in front of him.
I looked from one to the other while I waited to see who would speak first. Since I was a guest, and wasn't sure I even wanted to be here, I had no reason to get the ball rolling.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from In For A Ruble by David Duffy. Copyright © 2012 David Duffy. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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