The First Billion

All Gavallan had to do was breathe one word of his wrongdoing anywhere in his home, office, or car and DiGenovese and his superiors would know it. It was only a matter of time before the man slipped up.

DiGenovese waited a few more seconds, then edged the Ford over to the left, tilting his head to see around the bakery truck. A train of unfamiliar cars clogged the lane in front of him. The white Mercedes was nowhere to be seen. Panicked, DiGenovese craned his neck to the right and left, his eyes darting over every inch of the roiling cityscape. "Fuck," he muttered, chastising himself for his daydreaming. Signaling, he pulled into the fast lane and accelerated. He made it ten yards before a red light stopped him cold. Slamming his hand on the wheel, he swore again, this time loudly. He glanced to his right. There was Gavallan, a hundred yards away, trawling down Hope Street.

DiGenovese leaned on the horn, then jumped into the intersection, cutting off an oncoming taxi. He threw a hand out the window, showing his badge. Horns blared, voices shouted, fists threatened. In fits and spurts, he edged across the cluttered intersection. After what felt like a lifetime, he was barreling up Hope, the Mercedes no longer in sight.

He found Gavallan three blocks away, parked catty-corner to a playground next to St. John's Hospital. The guy was seated in his car, still as a bird. If DiGenovese wasn't mistaken, he was watching a couple of crips playing some early-morning roundball.

"Go figure," DiGenovese whispered. "Go fuckin' figure."

The score was 16-8, with Flint pulling away.

Gavallan sat at a distance watching the two soldiers battle each other on the basketball court, the men rolling this way and that in their graphite low-profile wheelchairs, chasing down rebounds, clearing the ball, making fast breaks. Flint was the quicker of the two and, with his arcing hook, a better shooter. A close look revealed he was missing both legs below the knees and most of his left hand. Jaworski had the better bank shot and was speedier off the mark, but he was going to fat and his stamina was weakening down the stretch. A sliver of shrapnel no bigger than a needle had severed his spinal cord at the twelfth vertebra. He hadn't walked or made love in eleven years.

Gavallan watched another five minutes, until Flint had roundly defeated Jaworski, then started the car and headed back to the office. Passing the hospital's entrance, he felt a jab of shame bow his shoulders. "Man of the Year." The words made him wince. And for the first time, he acknowledged that he might soon have to write a letter explaining why due to financial circumstances, wholly of his own making, he would be unable to meet the terms of his commitment to the hospital.

He drove faster.

He wanted to be back in the office.

Byrnes might have called.

6

Standing on a granite pedestal opposite Gavallan's desk was an imposing four-foot statue of a shaman carved from the wood of a Canadian maple by the Haida tribe of the Queen Charlotte Islands, south of Alaska. It was a strange-looking creature, with an abbreviated torso, narrow neck, and large, grotesque head that was all bulging eyes, flattened lips, and flared nostrils.

"The shaman is a mystical and omnipotent medicine man," the dealer in Indian curios had explained to him when he'd first seen the statue three years before. "He knows all, does all, and judges all." Gavallan had locked eyes with the carving and decided at once that he had to have it.

Since then, whenever something unforeseen came up in his life- good or bad, important or trivial- he consulted the shaman. When the markets caught fire or fell in the dumps, when his putts rimmed out or his drives sailed a mile, when his emotional entanglements threatened to suffocate him if his commitment to his business didn't, he consulted the shaman.

The statue didn't offer any answers. He didn't speak in tongues or send telepathic messages. He just looked back, bored, impassive, and generally disdainful of all things human, counseling faith in the grand scheme of things while reminding Gavallan that he wasn't as important a shit as he sometimes got to thinking.

Sinking into his chair, Gavallan gazed imploringly at the shaman. He didn't need any reminders about his human frailties this morning, no rejoinders about hubris, arrogance, or cocksureness. He simply needed its help.

Returning to the office, he'd found no messages waiting from Grafton Byrnes. Nothing on his E-mail or voice mail. No chits left with Emerald, Gavallan's secretary of seven years, to call him back at the Metropol or the National or any of Moscow's better hotels. Nothing. The harried executive in him told him to wait until noon before reacting and to concentrate on other matters. The concerned friend urged him to get on the horn with Konstantin Kirov, tell him of their plans to disprove the Private Eye-PO's accusations, and demand his help in tracking Byrnes down. Respect for his friend's judgment and Gavallan's i

"You take care of my buddy, okay?" he said, holding the shaman's eye.

Opening his satchel, Gavallan withdrew the copies of the documents he'd signed at Norgren's and filed them in his drawer along with the other markers routing his path to perdition. He folded the receipt for the two-million-dollar check in two and slipped it into his pocket. Then he leaned back his chair, kicked his feet up onto the desk, and laughed.

It was not a joyful laugh, nor one with any hint of amusement hidden inside its rolling baritone folds. It was a sad laugh, a mocking laugh, one tinged with doubt, disdain, and wonderment at his own folly. Oh yes, he was cutting it close this time. He was hanging it out there in the wind real far. He'd always been one to enjoy the roll of the dice, to crave the giddiness of a measured risk, but this time he had overextended himself. This time he'd bet on events that he could not control, only witness. This time he'd been plain old stupid, and it was about time he admitted it.

Gavallan felt a wave of reckless anger build inside him, a steady roar expanding in his chest, filling his lungs, and scratching at his throat. If his rage was directed at himself, it was no less explosive for it.

In response, he made himself absolutely still. He slowed his breathing and laid his palms facedown on his desk as if he were about to stand. But he didn't move, not a muscle. Instead, he closed his eyes and began to count. He'd taught himself this trick years ago, when he was young and wild and given to bouts of unbridled fury. As a teenager he'd gotten into frequent fights. Not the clawing, awkward wrestling bouts of high school rivalries, but knock-down-drag-out, bare-knuckled exchanges with older, stronger men, the wi

Gavallan didn't know from what spring the violence inside him flowed. His father was distant, but kind; his mother a fixture in the household; his sisters adoringly attentive. He himself was for the most part an obedient, dutiful, and undemanding youngster. Yet there was no doubting the wild streak, the inclination toward anger, the predilection for the nervy, rash act. Twice he was arrested for disorderly conduct. The first instance was when he beat the tar out of a Texas A &M lineman who'd stood up his oldest sister for her senior prom; the second and less valiant occasion occurred when, shit-faced in a Matamoros bar, he picked a fight with the biggest Mexican in the room just to prove he could whip him. He did, but he'd ended up with three broken knuckles, a cracked rib, and an eye swollen to the size of a grapefruit. Only through the benevolence of a local police officer had both acts been expunged from his record.