Arroyo Systems occupied part of a low floor in an anonymous building on Broadway, near Fulton Street. The reception area was windowless and small, furnished with a black leather chair, a matching love seat, a chrome and glass table, Brie’s command center, and a dead plant in a large plastic pot. The sheetrock walls were scuffed, and the carpet was worn and stained. A couple of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs were out, and the working ones buzzed annoyingly. Some dusty photos of canyons hung on one wall. There were a half-dozen old banking and software trade magazines on the glass table, along with last Friday’s Post and a few brochures about Arroyo Systems. These were filled with colorful but indecipherable diagrams, photos of smartly dressed people staring raptly at computer screens, and gobbledygook like “object-oriented n-tier message-based architecture.” It was impossible to tell from them what Arroyo Systems did. I started reading the Post.
“You sure it was today-Tuesday?” Brie asked without looking up.
“I set it up with Mr. Lenzi yesterday morning-for one o’clock today. Why don’t you just call him?” She looked at me like I was speaking Urdu, then turned back to the monitor. She was still delicately pressing keys and gazing uncomprehendingly at her screen when a wiry, intense-looking man opened the interior door and spoke to her.
“I’m expecting a guy around one.” He paused and looked at me. “Maybe that’s you. You March?” I nodded. “Mike Lenzi.” He gave me a hard handshake. I followed him inside. Brie noticed none of this, and we left her pondering her screen, pristine nails poised above the keyboard.
“How long she keep you out there?” he asked.
“No more than a week,” I said. He snorted.
“I don’t know where we get them from-Mars, maybe. And we can’t keep them longer than a month or two. We had one a while back- didn’t make it through lunch. Went out on her break and that was it, never saw her again. Took a laptop and a couple of wallets with her.”
I followed Lenzi down a short hall, past a conference room and a kitchen, to a warren of cubicles with shoulder-high partitions. We picked our way through them and headed for a row of offices along the back wall. The cubicles were densely packed with computer hardware and wild tangles of cabling, and every surface was covered with a thick, unstable sediment of paper, technical manuals, CDs, takeout food containers, candy wrappers, soda cans, coffee cups, and other stuff too deeply buried or decomposed to identify. The space was cramped and chaotic and smelled like a dorm room, or an airport transit lounge after a week of canceled flights.
I heard Russian being spoken, and another language that I didn’t recognize. Most of the people I saw were young and male. Nearly all of them were casually dressed, some in suit pants and dress shirts, some in jeans and T-shirts, and others in what could have been pajamas.
Lenzi was the exception to the dress rule. He wore the pants to a navy suit, a blue-and-pink-striped shirt with cuff links, and a blue tie with a red geometric pattern. He was short, about five foot five, with dark, curly hair that had begun to gray and recede. His face was thin, and his dark eyes were deep-set. The skin beneath them looked soft and loose. He was clean-shaven, but the faint shadow on his jaw meant he had to work at it. I put his age at forty-five.
His office was small and had too much stuff in it. The grimy window, with its view of an airshaft, only made things worse. He ushered me into one of the guest chairs and shut the door. He edged around me and slid behind his big, dark desk.
“Lots of all-nighters?” I asked, gesturing out toward the cubicles.
“Programmers,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em. They’re a fucking mess-excuse my French. If you were a client, I wouldn’t take you past the conference room.” Lenzi shifted restlessly in his seat. He picked up a paper clip and started playing with it.
“What kind of software do you guys make?” I asked.
“Trading systems. For FX, money markets, and derivatives. We do pricing, trade capture, position keeping, some risk. That probably doesn’t make any sense to you.” I shrugged.
“How big a company is it?”
“Small. We’ve been around almost two years, got sixty people or so, most of them out there,” he cocked his thumb toward the door. “Couple of sales guys in London. But we’re getting there.” His optimism sounded more habitual than sincere.
“You’ve been here from the start?”
“Not from the start, but soon after.”
“You’re not a programmer, though,” I said.
He snorted again. “Me? No, I do sales.” He’d unbent the clip and wound it into a spring shape. Now he straightened it again. His hands were large and pale, with black hair and blue veins on the backs. His movements were quick and a little twitchy, like he’d had too much coffee.
“And before this-you were in banking?” I asked.
Lenzi bristled. “Whoa, buddy, before we start in on my resume, how about you filling me in on what the hell this is about?”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Ever hear of Merchant’s Worldwide Bank?” Lenzi blanched, and paused in his torture of the paper clip.
“I’ve heard of it,” he said.
“Your name came up in some work that I’m doing that’s tangentially related to MWB-”
Lenzi cut me off. “Came up how?” He was quite still now.
“Only in the vaguest way. Just that you did some business with them a while back, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago.” Lenzi placed his palms flat on the desk. His face was immobile except for a small, pulsing vein high on his forehead. I went on. “That you dealt with a guy there named Gerard Nassouli.”
It was like I’d spit in his face. Lenzi pushed back from the desk and gripped the arms of his chair. His hands were white, and the veins in them stood out like blue wires. The skin of his face seemed to contract around the muscle and bone underneath, and two red patches flared at his cheeks. His mouth was a taut furrow, and his whole body seemed to coil. I had at least seven inches on him, and probably fifty pounds, but the guy was ready to come across the desk at me.
“Who are you, and what the fuck do you want?” The words came out in a dangerous hiss, like steam rushing from a valve. But he was fighting his rage, breathing deeply, flexing his fingers, trying to get the tiger back in the cage.
“I’m looking for some answers,” I said evenly. “Nothing else. I just want to know if you knew Gerard Nassouli. And if anyone else has contacted you over the last few years about your dealings with him.” Lenzi stared at me in silence, his chest rising and falling sharply. I kept going. “I don’t care how you knew him, or what business you had with him. I don’t want to know. All I want to know is if you were threatened on account of it. Were you squeezed because you had dealt with him?”
When he finally spoke, Lenzi’s voice was a choked whisper. “You get the fuck out of here. Get out now, and if you ever come near me again, I’ll fucking kill you-I swear it,” he said.
This was not going well-death threats are always a sure sign. The rage that had overtaken him at the mention of Nassouli’s name had made Lenzi deaf to everything else I’d said or might say. And my sitting here wasn’t going to make it better. If I hung around any longer I was going to have to fight him or watch him have a stroke. I stood up and placed a card at the edge of his desk.
“I don’t mean you any harm, Lenzi. If you decide you want to talk, give me a call.” I left him alone with his tiger.
There was an espresso place around the corner from the Arroyo offices, and I went in and ordered a double and thought about Michael Lenzi. I was willing to bet I wasn’t the first person to bring up the unwelcome subject of Gerard Nassouli with him. The indirect confirmation was useful, but I needed more. I finished my coffee, walked over to Fulton Street, and caught the subway.