CHAPTER ONE

Gold was up 2 percent the morning Benjamin Raab’s life began to fall apart.

He was leaning back at his desk, looking down on Forty-seventh Street, in the lavish comfort of his office high above the Avenue of the Americas, the phone crooked in his neck.

“I’m waiting, Raj…”

Raab had a spot gold contract he was holding for two thousand pounds. Over a million dollars. The Indians were his biggest customers, one of the largest exporters of jewelry in the world. Two percent. Raab checked the Quotron screen. That was thirty thousand dollars. Before lunch.

“Raj, c’mon,” Raab prodded. “My daughter’s getting married this afternoon. I’d like to make it if I can…”

“Katie’s getting married?” The Indian seemed to be hurt. “Ben, you never said-”

“It’s just an expression, Raj. If Kate was getting married, you’d be there. But, Raj, c’mon…we’re talking gold here-not pastrami. It doesn’t go bad.”

This was what Raab did. He moved gold. He’d owned his own trading company near New York ’s diamond district for twenty years. Years ago he had started out buying inventory from the mom-and-pop jewelers who were going out of business. Now he supplied gold to half the dealers on the Street. As well as to some of the largest exporters of jewelry across the globe.

Everyone in the trade knew him. He could hardly grab a turkey club at the Gotham Deli down the street without one of the pushy, heavyset Hasids squeezing next to him in the booth with the news of some dazzling new stone they were peddling. (Though they always chided that as a Sephardi he wasn’t even one of their own.) Or one of the young Puerto Rican runners who delivered the contracts, thanking him for the flowers he’d sent to their wedding. Or the Chinese, looking to hedge some dollars against a currency play. Or the Australians, tantalizing him with uncut blocks of industrial-quality stones.