“I love sharing this with you,” he said quietly. “Promise me we’ll do this every year for the rest of our lives.”
I scoffed. “Don’t need to ask me twice, buster.”
Carrying on a romantic and professional relationship at the same time could have been disastrous, but Fred was too kind a man and the work too interesting. I buried myself in the literature of hedge funds and finance, an opaque, complex field. Fred had been recruited by a man named Peter O’Connell, who began his career in sports gambling and had gone on to make yet another small fortune betting on cryptocurrencies. Peter himself had no real computational talent, and in fact, was barely literate in programming, but he did have an impeccable instinct for talent in the field. He found brilliant programmers, and he owned a modeling system built by Ashir al-Hasan, widely thought to be one of the most important minds in the field of complex modeling. Fred brought a ferocious work ethic and a lifetime’s worth of connections to some of the richest players in the corporate world.
Their scrappy fund quickly gathered a lot of excitement due to the DNA of its proprietary model. They each put up $25 million of their own fortunes and were able to raise an additional $250 million. In the hedge fund world this was a modest beginning. But Peter’s model and his team of analysts—these whiz kids plucked from the Ivy League, the acne still bright on their cheeks—had something special on their hands, making bets with forward-thinking algorithms accounting for environment, weather, and water in groundbreaking ways. Their model embraced risk assets at speed, dumping them at the exact moment before they could plummet in value.
As Fred once put it, “It’s math but it’s also narrative… What are the underlying stories beneath the trends? And more importantly, how do we manipulate those narratives to our advantage?”
Within the first year we’d grown the fund to $3 billion in assets, and I’d made my first small fortune. I could now become an accredited investor and put money into the fund. This was jarring. I hadn’t been doing badly before, but I had the typical debts: student loans, a mortgage, credit cards, car payments. My retirement consisted only of my 401(k) and a bit of money in a Roth IRA I’d set up after college. Having learned the lessons of my father, I’d been prudent with money, and then suddenly, almost overnight, I was in a new class of investor. There was a grand casino, and very few people were even allowed to come through the doors and approach the tables. I understood why finance drew so many talented people. The competition, the adrenaline, the sense of permanent adventure was intoxicating the moment you had it at your fingertips.
In addition to my responsibilities with Tara Fund, Fred also turned over to me the keys to all his philanthropic work. His politics tended to skew much more libertarian than my own, but I created a series of regularized contributions to support the arts in the largest fifteen American cities, the American Cancer Society, the World Wildlife Fund, the Nature Conservancy, Planned Parenthood, Boys & Girls Clubs, three different LGBTQIAA+ organizations, a network of charter schools specializing in STEM education and no-excuses teaching philosophies, and of course, we gave a hefty contribution to A Fierce Blue Fire now that they’d embraced a less antagonistic philosophy.
After working at Tara only a year, I moved in with Fred. It was my first time living with a man since Jefferey, and though I had my hesitations, they proved baseless. Fred’s marital problems notwithstanding, the troubles with his son, who I’d still never met, these all felt inconsequential when we were together. When Fred trimmed his beard, he never left a single razor clipping in the sink. I never even mentioned it, he just knew to wipe them away.
“Check this out.” Fred handed me his phone as we descended in the elevator. At first I thought it was a puddle, but then understood it was a city, shot from an immense height.
“Oh my God. Is this real? Where is this?”
“Indianapolis. The whole city is underwater.”
The headline said something about flooding in ten states.
“Jesus, now I feel awful for complaining about the rain in New York.”
Peter waited for us at the table, a pair of aviator sunglasses masking his face, a white linen suit over a T-shirt with a picture of a rearing minotaur. I’d seen that same shirt for sale among the street vendors. He hugged Fred and kissed me on the cheek.
“Damn. This power couple. You put Bogie and Bacall to shame.”
Fred put his hand on my thigh as we took a seat in the shade of the umbrella, pushing the edge of my dress up ever so slightly, and I quickly adjusted it back down.
“Did you guys ever think we’d be here?” Peter threw one leg over the other and bopped a brown-sandaled foot. “Taking meetings in Venice with three fucking rainmakers? Fuck. I had to take out insurance on myself just in case I woke up and it turned out to be a dream.”
“Is that a product you’re thinking of creating?” I asked. “Goldman would probably draw it up for you.”
Peter looked from me to Fred. “See, this is why we’re both in love with her. This-Is-All-A-Dream Default Swaps. TIADDSs. They pay out when you wake up and the whole thing was too good to be true.”
Our three potential investors arrived at breakfast like a triptych of understated wealth. The first, Giuseppe Aleotti, was an Italian chemical magnate. Tan and weathered with thick black hair combed straight back and an enormous Blancpain watch on his wrist, he was the gaudiest person at the table. Norman Nate had earned (or self-coined) the nickname “the homeless billionaire.” Nate had made his first billion by winning the race with Slapdish to become the all-purpose social VR platform. Now he had his hand in everything from the carbon nanotubes for the upcoming Mars mission to solar radiation management. He still looked like someone’s little brother, tousle-haired, pug nose, and wearing a teenager’s overlarge pink T-shirt and jean shorts.
Archana Bhattacharyya came in behind the two men, her net worth the least impressive at the table (other than my own). She was a short seller who’d left JPMorgan Chase to start her own shop, Styx Capital Management, and had struck a pot of gold when she shorted an ultra-hot energy company, Envige. Envige had been buying up competitors, expanding too quickly, burning through cash to make all its bids. While Wall Street was still in love, she was shorting their stock. Then the Weathermen blew up a couple of their pipelines, and investors sprinted away, but Bhattacharyya had seen their weakness first. Some people called short sellers leeches, but it seemed to me she’d just found the right neck on which to drop the guillotine.
Our pitch lasted fifteen minutes. I finished by setting reports in front of each potential investor with a detailed road map, but Bhattacharyya didn’t touch the document.
“I’d like to dig in a bit more,” she said in her highly provincial Long Island accent. She wore a lovely magenta jacket, and had her hair elegantly pinned up in a short side sweep. This made the accent all the more jarring. “What’s the deal with CLK Metrics?”
“They’re a small part of our portfolio,” said Fred, lounging back in his chair, hands folded on his lap. “Minuscule is the word I would use.”
“That’s not what I hear. The word ‘alliance’ got tossed around by my source.”
Fred smiled. Breakfast had come and gone. My plate sat with cold, congealing egg yolk.
“They’re not a big deal. Just another psychometrics firm. Their sales pitch is strong, but like all these other guys, they’re going to claim greater powers of persuasion than the tech can actually pull off. Everyone thinks they’re Iago. But early indicators are promising.”
I almost opened my mouth to ask Fred what this meant, but Norman Nate spoke first.
“That’s not what I hear either.”
“Okay, so what do you both hear?” asked Peter, who seemed as genuinely curious as I was.