Project X

Illustration by Liz Priddy based on a photo by Samy Lamouti (dzpixel.net)

The trip couldn’t have mattered more: it was my first, and the potential client was worth half a billion dollars. Maybe I wasn’t flying to London, Tokyo or Dubai as I’d often imagined, and maybe the shuttle was too small to have a business class, but after three years of work, I was finally getting a foretaste of the future and a chance to prove myself. Since I’d started, a callow Math and Economics BSc from Yale, I’d long mastered the spreadsheets I used, also improved them and created some new ones, become a real pitch book wizard in the process, but as far as meeting clients went, I was still a nobody in a fancy suit. Then all at once everything changed.

Just two days before our departure, Billy Rabin had stopped by my cubicle with a folder in his hands. “An Xavier Heschel for you—five hundred mil,” he said. At thirty-two, Billy was a millionaire himself and the one broker never to have treated me like his private footman or cabana boy. “Might be your big break,” he added. “Guy’s from your neck of the woods, and you’re in on the pitch, kid. Powers will fill you in, but come see me if you have any questions.” Feeling like I’d just gotten a present, I asked what he’d meant by that “neck of the woods”—Poland or Canada. “What Poland?” he said. “Le fucking Montréal, kid.”

So Montreal it was. As for the prospective client, the man was Jewish—this much was clear from the name—but I made nothing of this fact. And there was no reason why I should have. Yes, I’d been born in Krakow, just forty miles from the barracks in Auschwitz, but the folder didn’t have a single word about Mr. Heschel’s boxcar journey from his native France, not a word about his twenty-month internment. As a matter of fact, there was so little information that this very scarcity should have perhaps raised some flags, if not in my head, then in Powers’s or Billy’s. Besides the usual legal filings, all I had in front of me were Billy’s notes, things he’d learned from our investment bankers and from his own encounter with the man, a lucky run-in in Hawaii just two months back. Mr. Xavier Heschel, aged eighty-one, father of David and resident of Montreal, was a French Jew-turned Canadian, and our bankers had advised the corporation that had just bought out his real estate empire. Monies that were still tied up in Canadian shopping malls and office parks, just over half a billion all told, were about to turn as volatile as air and would have to be professionally managed. My part in all this—and, I couldn’t help but hope, a gateway to becoming a broker like Billy—was to allocate this influx of cash, shares and options into a handful of sample portfolios, to run a series of regressions, forecast risks and returns, and arrange the whole big lot into a collection of bar graphs and pie charts. I’d done it hundreds of times, and by the time Powers called me into his office, a cushy spread with windows on most of Manhattan, I’d nearly finished and was eager to impress.

“This Heschel,” I said, “if he sits on those options for a year or two—”

“Got people waiting, so just listen up, Zadomski.” Then he started throwing papers in his briefcase as he lectured me. I was to work on the pitch book with Billy and to have it ready without fail—here he shot me one of his imperious looks—by noon in another two days’ time. Further, the meeting would actually be a dinner late in the evening, so I should pack for an overnight stay. “After that, when we see the guy, you just look and [End Page...