Free The Fixer by Joseph Finder Page B

damn thing is, it
works,
Rick. Like today—there’s this kid Darnell who goes to this school in Dorchester, and the teachers all hated him because he was so hostile. His brother’s in prison and his mother has a drug problem. I mean, Darnell’s exactly the kind of kid the gangs would love to sweep up, help them count keys of coke or cash or whatever. You can just see him disappearing into the life. But today I was showing him this math game on the iPad? And I could see him transform before my eyes—that hostility, that wariness—it was all gone. He was
into
it. He felt empowered. And I think—I don’t know, maybe I’m crazy, but I think this kid might . . . just might . . . make it.” Her eyes were moist, shining. “Distressed opportunities? One day it just popped into my head: How about public education? Isn’t
that
a distressed opportunity?”
    Rick had fallen silent. He was fairly drunk by now from the Champagne and the wine, and his head was reeling. He hadn’t just underestimated Andrea. He realized he never knew her.
    A couple of waiters appeared with golden plates, which they set down in front of Andrea, then Rick. Rick peered bleakly at the obscene display, crepes stuffed with caviar, tied up with chives, actual gold leaf on top of each one. They were loathsome now to look at, and besides, Rick had lost his appetite.
    “Sir, madam? Your beggar’s purses. Osetra instead of beluga, just as you requested!”
    “Thank you,” Rick said weakly.
    Andrea glanced from her plate to Rick’s eyes. Her smile now seemed chilly. “Beggar’s purse, huh?” she said.

11
    W hen he got back to his king-size bed at the Charles, he was unable to sleep. He was drunk. The hotel room tilted on its axis, wobbled, and capsized. He thrashed around the bed as he replayed the evening over and over, agonized. How could he have been such a buffoon? Jesus! What the hell was he thinking, throwing money around like that? He saw himself through Andrea’s eyes, and it was painful. He might as well be one of those Goldman Sachs dicks she despised. The ridiculous beggar’s purses.
Beggar’s purses
—could there possibly be a more offensive name? And that . . .
four-thousand-dollar
bottle of La Tâche, wasted on both of them.
    He could almost hear her words playing in an echo chamber.
They’ll go to Per Se and dump thousands of bucks for a single bottle of . . . of freaking fermented
grape juice
, you know? It’s stupid. It’s
obscene.
It’s gross.
    He was no better than one of those swaggering, splurging, callow investment bankers whose life was hollow and meaningless. He was just the kind of asshole she was railing about. Exactly the sort of guy
Back Bay
magazine used to publish worshipful profiles about. With only one difference: He had less money.
    He’d been trying to impress a girlfriend he’d once dumped, to win her over with a fraudulent optical illusion of his “success.” When that was the fastest way to repel her. And he’d repelled her for sure. He could see it in her face, now that he reviewed the tapes of the evening, the way her smile had gone from sweet and nervous and hopeful to amused and then cloyed and finally outright disgusted. She saw him for what he was: a tool. A pompous, pretentious, affected jerk.
    Yesterday, that three and a half million dollars had been a vast, almost incalculable fortune. And then? Between his fancy duds from Marco (ten thousand dollars), paying Jeff, and the seven thousand bucks he’d dumped at Madrigal, his fortune—which was how he thought of it now,
his
—had been depleted by twenty-five thousand dollars. If he kept up spending at this rate, after a month and a half he’d have nothing left.
    *   *   *
    He awoke late the next morning, head thick and pounding and mouth tasting like asphalt, as though a truck had driven through it, farting its foul exhaust. He got up carefully, balancing his throbbing head as if it were a fragile globe made of