© 2010

THE WARNING SIGNS WERE THERE. I JUST COULDN’T SEE THEM. MY nose was in my BlackBerry-“crackberry”-except when I was talking into it.

“Can you get me the numbers on Argentine debt denominated in Japanese yen?” I said. I was on with my Asia investment team leader.

The cabdriver glanced at me in the rearview mirror as if I were speaking Martian.

“Michael, give it a rest,” said Ivy. “We’re supposed to be on vacation.”

Ivy and I were stuck in traffic on the busy Dolphin Expressway, having just flown in from New York. We were headed to the port of Miami for a Caribbean cruise that was luxurious by anyone’s standards, all expenses paid-one of the perks of being a top young producer at Saxton Silvers, one of Wall Street’s premier investment banking firms.

“This is the last phone call, I promise.”

She knew I was lying, and I knew she really didn’t mind. More than any woman I’d ever dated, Ivy Layton understood my world.

We’d met when she was a trader at Ploutus Investments, a multibillion-dollar hedge fund with offices in Manhattan and-where else?-Greenwich. It was also Saxton Silvers’ biggest prime brokerage client. Ivy’s boss managed the fund and steered all that business my way because he was incredibly intuitive and completely understood that on the day that I was born the angels got together and decided to create a-puh-LEEZ. Chalk it up to the fact that I was one of the lucky bastards who had correctly timed the burst of the IT bubble, making me a financial genius in a field of idiots.