Free The Fixer by Joseph Finder Page A

wine was probably excellent. It had to be. It cost a thousand dollars a glass.
    Andrea was watching him, her head tilted, a wry smile, amused. He noticed her crooked tooth in the corner of her smile, and he smiled back. She used to be cute. She’d become gorgeous. She was also confident in ways she’d never been before.
    She took a sip and nodded. “I’m sure it’s great. But it’s definitely wasted on me.”
    Four thousand dollars and neither of them was experiencing a sensory orgasm.
At least,
he thought,
it’s not my money.
    “So you didn’t get the jokes,” Rick said, back to Goldman Sachs.
    She shrugged. “You play along. So you’re trading credit derivatives. Credit default swaps. You’re basically betting against some poor cash-strapped company and hoping they go down the tubes so you’ll get rich, cashing in your death-spiral convertibles—oh, sorry, I meant ‘floating convertibles.’ You’re inside the donut machine making . . . synthetic collateralized debt obligations and selling them to rich schmucks. Arcane, exotic financial instruments no one understands. And so what?”
    Rick didn’t understand most of what she’d just said. She might as well have been speaking Serbian. He took another sip of wine. He could taste a little cherry, some tannin in the aftertaste. It was actually quite good. It was definitely opening up. “But at least you’re making good money.”
    “Crazy money. Ridiculous money. Enormous amounts of disposable income. But you know what? You’ve got no time to spend it anyway. Because you’re working a hundred hours a week or more and that’s all you’re doing. You have no life.”
    Rick nodded. “I get it.” He took another sip. He noticed a grapefruit note, and something dark and dusky, almost bricklike. It was truly a spectacular wine.
    “I mean, you spend every minute of your day buying and selling shit for someone else. Really. That’s all you’re doing. Meanwhile, you’re looking at the hedge fund guys and thinking, how come I don’t bring home
that
kind of money? If they ever stopped to think about it, which they usually don’t, they’d consider it a waste of a life. I mean, I think that’s why some of those guys throw their money away without even thinking about it, so they can at least have something to show for all that wasted life. So they can feel their life has some kind of meaning. So they can tell people they saw Paul McCartney or Sting on the beach at Saint Bart’s. Or they’ll go to Per Se and dump thousands of bucks for a single bottle of . . . of freaking fermented
grape juice,
you know?” She lifted her giant wine glass. “It’s stupid. It’s
obscene
. It’s gross.” Then she smiled. “No offense.”
    Rick smiled back, starting to feel a little queasy. “So Geometry Partners is, uh, what, a hedge fund?”
    “Oh,” she said with a quick, musical laugh. “Oh, God no. It’s—well, I took some of the money I made in the Distressed Opportunities Fund at Goldman and started this little nonprofit. We try to make low-income kids fall in love with geometry.”
    It was his turn to laugh. “So you mean
actual
geometry.”
    She nodded. “I did Teach for America for a year before Wharton, and, well, I liked it, but I figured I could do a lot better someday. Just dealing with math—you remember how much I loved math, right? I mean, geometry is so concrete. It’s so visual. It’s real world. It’s buildings and houses and rockets and baseball—the angle of a pitch, right?—the sun and the moon. And if you bring it to them that way, kids
get
it. They love it. They realize they might actually be good at math, and that gives them the confidence to do well in school.”
    Rick nodded, took another sip of the four-thousand-dollar wine, which was starting to taste a little like a horse barn.
    “We bring in math teachers and train them how to make math fun—we pay them for it, of course—and then we get the kids in there, and the