Margin Call

The condensation dripped down my whiskey glass, pooling on the mahogany desk like the tears I couldn't shed. Twenty years of friendship evaporated in five minutes.

"It's not personal, Richard," Martin said, not meeting my eyes. "The numbers don't lie."

The orange sunset flooded his corner office, painting everything in that sickly sweet hue that always precedes darkness. Outside, the city glittered like a casino about to close.

"We made forty million together," I said. "Remember that bull market in '08? We rode it together."

"That was then." He finally looked at me. "This is now. The firm's taking a bath on your positions. The margin calls are astronomical."

"So you're throwing me under the bus to save your own skin?"

"I'm protecting the partners." Martin adjusted his cufflinks—gold bull heads, I'd bought them for his birthday. "Your position's untenable, Michael. You're leveraged to the hilt. The audit's going to uncover everything."

Everything. The offshore accounts. The manipulated trades. The client funds we'd borrowed against when things got tight. It had seemed so brilliant at the time. A temporary bridge across troubled waters.

"I could expose you," I said quietly. "We built this house of cards together."

Martin smiled then—a thin, chilling expression I'd never seen on my oldest friend's face. "No documentation links to me. You signed everything. You made the trades. You're the bull in this china shop, Michael. I'm just the guy who tried to stop you."

The silence stretched between us, heavier than all the money I'd lost. Then his phone buzzed.

"That's Patricia," he said, standing. "We're having dinner at the club. She's made reservations at the chef's table." He paused at the door. "You should probably call your wife. The detectives will want to question her too."

The door clicked shut. I sat alone in the orange light, watching my whiskey pool on the desk, thinking how strange it was that after two decades of friendship, I'd never really known him at all.