By the time he got burned and lost his arm, Hobie was a seriously rich man. His next coup was to get the whole of his fortune home, undetected and complete. Not everybody could have done it. Not in the particular set of circumstances he found himself in. It was further proof of his greatness. As was his subsequent history. He arrived in New York after a circuitous journey, crippled and disfigured, and immediately felt at home. Manhattan was a jungle, no different from the jungles of Indochina. So there was no reason for him to start acting any different. No reason to change his line of business. And this time, he was starting out
with a massive capital reserve. He wasn’t starting out with nothing.
He loan-sharked for years. He built it up huge. He had the capital, and he had the image. The burn scars and the hook meant a lot, visually. He attracted a raft of helpers. He fed off whole identifiable waves and generations of immigrants and poor people. He fought off the Italians to stay in business. He paid off whole squads of cops and prosecutors to stay invisible.
Then he made his second great breakthrough. Similar to the first. It was a process of deep radical thought. A response to a problem. The problem was the sheer insane scale. He had millions on the street, but it was all nickel-and-dime. Thousands of separate deals, a hundred bucks here, a hundred and fifty there, 9 or 10 per cent a week, 500 or 1,000 per cent a year. Big paperwork, big hassles, running fast all the time just to keep up. Then he suddenly realized less could be more. It came to him in a flash. Five per cent of some corporation’s million bucks was worth more in a week than 500 per cent of street-level shit. He got in a fever about it. He froze all new lending and turned the screws to get back everything he was owed. He bought suits and rented office space. Overnight he became a corporate lender.
It was an act of pure genius. He had sniffed out that grey margin that lies just to the left of conventional commercial practice. He had found a huge constituency of borrowers who were just slipping off the edge of what the banks called acceptable. A huge constituency. A desperate constituency. Above all, a soft constituency. Soft targets. Civilized men in suits coming to him for a million bucks, posing much less of a risk than somebody in a dirty undershirt wanting
a hundred in a filthy tenement block with a rabid dog behind the door. Soft targets, easy to intimidate. Unaccustomed to the harsh realities of life. He let his enforcers go, and sat back and watched as his clientele shrank to a handful, his average loan increased a millionfold, his interest rates dropped back into the stratosphere, and his profits grew bigger than he could ever imagine. Less is more.
It was a wonderful new business to be in. There were occasional problems, of course. But they were manageable. He changed his deterrence tactic. These civilized new borrowers were vulnerable through their families. Wives, daughters, sons. Usually, the threat was enough. Occasionally, action had to be taken. Often, it was fun. Soft suburban wives and daughters could be amusing. An added bonus. A wonderful business. Achieved through a constant willingness to change and adapt. Deep down, he knew his talent for flexibility was his greatest strength. He had promised himself never ever to forget that fact. Which was why he was alone in his inner office, up there on the eighty-eighth floor, listening to the quiet background sounds of the giant building, thinking hard, and changing his mind.
Fifty miles away to the north, in Pound Ridge, Marilyn Stone was changing her mind, too. She was a smart woman. She knew Chester was in financial trouble. It couldn’t be anything else. He wasn’t having an affair. She knew that. There are signs husbands give out when they’re having affairs, and Chester wasn’t giving them out. There was nothing else he could be worried about. So it was financial trouble. Her original intention had been to wait. Just to sit