“What’s your point, Tom?”
“I need to come clean with you,” Galvin said. “I’m in serious trouble.”
50
“What kind of trouble?” Danny asked. He felt his body start to uncoil.
“Ever think about just, you know, disappearing? I mean like, go off the grid.”
Danny nodded, didn’t know what to say.
“Just disappear forever,” Galvin went on. “Leave all this behind. Shuffle off this mortal coil. Erase your digital footprints and go somewhere like Belize or Madagascar or New Zealand and start over.”
“Sure,” Danny said slowly. “Sometimes.” But he had the feeling Galvin wasn’t speaking hypothetically. “Of course, it’s probably not so easy to do anymore. With everything online and all…”
“There are books about how to do it. People who specialize in it. I’ve thought about it a lot. I’m out on my boat and I slip and fall over the side and my body’s never found.”
“And you’re alive and living in Madagascar.”
“Like that.”
“A fantasy, sure. But you can’t do it. You have a wife and kids. We have people who depend on us.”
Danny turned to look, but Galvin seemed to be peering into the chasm. “Tom,” Danny said quietly. He paused for a few seconds. “You almost sound like you’re planning to kill yourself.”
“Remember I told you I was just a lucky son of a bitch?”
A smile played on his lips, but not a happy smile. Danny watched and waited. Galvin was still peering down at the yawning chasm below their feet. “Look up right place, right time, you’re gonna see my picture, right? Well, my luck finally ran out.”
Danny nodded. “Your luck… with, what?-Money? Business?”
He shook his head. The wind howled. It stung Danny’s cheeks and ears.
His mind raced. Was Tom Galvin about to unspool some elaborate lie to explain what Danny had seen? When in fact Danny had seen nothing more than a meeting, two men in a slopeside shack. Galvin, though, seemed to be agonizing over something, struggling.
“About twenty years ago,” he said, “I went down to Cancun to scout out an investment opportunity in Playa del Carmen. A couple of Mexican businessmen had a vision for a high-end, luxury resort on the Mayan coast near Tulum. I thought the business plan looked great, the location was perfect. The lead partner was this guy named Humberto Parra Fernández y Guerrero.” Galvin pronounced the name quickly and fluently in his native-sounding Spanish. He paused for a long time. “The guy seemed to be loaded. Someone told me he used to be the governor of the state of Michoacán before he went into business. I guess that’s one way to get rich in Mexico-get elected to political office and then make a bunch of deals.”
Danny nodded.
“So Fernández and his associates wined and dined me, showed me a good time. They knew I was working for one of the biggest mutual fund companies, so I represented a hundred billion in assets. And they really seemed to want me to invest some of that money.”
“Okay.”
“I went back home. Told my bosses I thought we were onto something that might really work big-time. I convinced them to make the investment. A month later I went back down to Playa del Carmen, and we closed the deal.” He paused. “Mexicans are big into family, you know? Fernández invited me to have dinner with his wife and his daughter. His beautiful daughter.”
Danny smiled. “Celina.”
“I asked her to join me for dinner the next day, and we totally, you know, clicked. Head over heels. I stayed down there in Mexico and we started seeing each other. Really fell in love. When I first met her, I spoke a little high school Spanish, but, man, did I learn the language.” He laughed ruefully. “After I got back to Boston, I started making up reasons to fly back to Mexico. I had to see her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Lina would fly to Boston, or we’d meet here, in Aspen, or go to New York for a weekend. Four months later we got married.
“Well, I guess her dad saw something in me he liked. I was family now, but that wasn’t the main thing. He saw I had a good head for deals. I was a young guy on the make, and he liked that. He gave me some money to invest on my own, not with Putnam-half a million US dollars-and I guess I did all right. More than all right. Good timing, good picks, whatever whatever-and I more than doubled it in five months. So he gave me more cash.” He shrugged, turned back to Danny. “What can I say? When you’re hot, you’re hot. I didn’t double it in five months again, but I beat the market easily. He said no one in Mexico even came close to what I was doing. Pretty soon he was one of my biggest private clients.
“And then one day, I told him I was thinking about leaving Putnam and going off on my own, starting my own investment-management firm, and he said he had a proposal for me. He had a hundred million dollars for me to invest.”
“Jesus.”
Galvin nodded slowly, as if remembering his own amazement. “He said he’d see how I did after a year, and if I kept performing the way I’d been performing, there’d be more. A lot more.”
“Amazing. So he wasn’t just rich, he was super-rich.”
Galvin made a funny head movement, half nod, half tilt, accompanied by a shrug. “Or so I thought. But the money came with one condition. He had to be my only client. I had to agree to invest no other money besides his. So I had this huge decision to make. Do I leave Putnam and go off on my own with one client? Who happened to be my father-in-law?” He turned slowly and said, “Let’s walk, okay?”
Danny followed Galvin along the middle of the road. It was off camber, sloping down toward the outside edge. The surface was dirt and loose gravel, caked with snow and ice and scattered with the detritus of broken rock.
Galvin pointed. “If you look over there, you can see the old mining town. It’s a ghost town now.”
“You’ve really driven this road?”
“Sure.”
“Not in the Suburban, though…? The wheel base is too long.”
“No, I used to have an old Land Rover Defender 90.”
“Love those trucks.”
“I miss it.”
“But I wouldn’t call this a road.”
“Not here it’s not. It’s barely a trail. Forest Service wants to close it. They’re losing too many tourists.” He kicked a rock, sending it over the edge. It rolled wildly downhill, accelerating, and then launched into the air and plummeted down toward the stream.
Danny couldn’t hear the rock hit ground. It was too far away.
“So obviously you made the deal,” Danny prompted.
“Here’s the thing. I’d been working for Putnam for five years by then, and I was making around three hundred grand, maybe three fifty. And I’m thinking, why in hell should I bust my butt working for chump change when I could be making real money?”
“Sure.” Danny winced inwardly-three hundred fifty thousand dollars a year didn’t sound like chump change to him-but he said nothing.
“I was tired of being a lackey. Working for idiots in a giant bureaucracy. The only reason to keep working there was job security. And, I mean, you want job security, go work for the post office.”
“Sure.”
“Here, finally, was a chance for me to prove how good I really was. Put myself on the line every single day. And I ran the numbers. I figured, if I run my own fund, I’m gonna make two and twenty-two percent management fee, twenty percent of the profit, right? Assuming I make twenty percent and I don’t splurge on fancy office space, whatever whatever, I’m taking home five mil. In one year, Danny. Five million bucks in my first year.”
“Not bad for a plumber’s boy from Southie.”
“And get this: Worst-case scenario, if I screwed up and lost money, I’d still pocket a million bucks! How could I say no to that?”