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In Marisa’s and her first weeks in Nevada, Betsy wondered sometimes if it would be more in her daughter’s best interests to insist that they move in with Frankie now, since she had a sense that eventually they would anyway, and she wouldn’t want Marisa to have to change schools in ninth or tenth grade. The house was a twenty-minute drive from their apartment without traffic, but forty when there was. And, of course, he was paying for that apartment, as well as the mortgage on his new home, plus the cash that was heading back east to the woman who was becoming his ex-wife in Vermont.
One afternoon when Marisa was at a day camp Betsy found for teenage computer geeks, she and Frankie were lying in the colossal California king in his master bedroom. It was the only piece of furniture that had arrived for that room, so his clothes were still in boxes or on the elegant hangers he insisted upon in the walk-in closet. Her head on his shoulder, his arm cradling her against him, she asked, “How much of all this house and this new life is from investment banking and how much is from crypto?” She was curious.
“I did fine at the bank. Made a good living. But crypto is insane. Sure, it’s a little unpredictable. But it’s lucrative, like equities, if you know what you’re doing or you invest in the right coin. If you have the right friends. You’ve heard of the House That Ruth Built? Yankee Stadium? This is the House That Invisible Money Built. My whole fucking life—as you know—has been helping the filthy rich get even richer.”
She didn’t know that. He’d never been that direct. She ran her two fingers along the hard bone of his sternum.
“Look, you asked,” he went on. “Crypto has been very good to me. Guys like Rory O’Hara and Damon Ioannidis. Very generous. Crazy. But generous. And Futurium will be very good to you, too.”
“I rather hope so,” she murmured.
“Rather,” he repeated. “Such a British word. And you said it just now with a slight British accent.”
“Now did I?”
“Now did I?” he repeated, imitating her because she had indeed said those three words as if she were her sister onstage.
“One of the weird things Marisa told me is that before Diana met Charles, when she was slumming—so to speak—at menial jobs in London she didn’t really need, it was a thing for her and her friends to speak as if they weren’t all aristocrats. As if they weren’t girls who lived on the cusp of the royal family.”
“I have got to see that show.”
“Ayobami said there were no seats available on the website until October, but she thought she might be able to get a pair for her and Marisa a little sooner through a scalper she knows.”
“That’s your new friend who works at the Luxor?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll get us tickets for the next day or two. You and me and Marisa will go.”
“Oh? You already have connections?” She was teasing him, but she wasn’t surprised.
“In a few years? Futurium will own this town,” he added.
“I don’t know. I gather there’s an actual mob museum out here.”
“And a pinball museum. And you don’t suppose pinball machines own this town, do you?”
She smiled at his small joke. “No,” she agreed.
“Besides. Damon? Rory? Some of my friends in L.A.? They’re Mastabas.”
“What does that mean?”
“Okay, I’m about to tell you something, and it’s going to sound like more of a big deal than it is. But you were going to figure it out soon enough anyway when you started really working at Futurium.”
She waited.
“A mastaba is like a crypt. An Egyptian tomb, but you got the burial chamber and you got a room to store stuff: offerings. And the Mastaba—big M, not little m—used to be a crime family. A syndicate. Think Mafia, but not just Italians. It began with politics and geography, not ethnicity. Californians and Floridians, mostly. Dudes from L.A. and West Palm Beach. Very sophisticated. Risi e bisi, not spaghetti and meatballs. Money laundering instead of murder. But not so much anymore. Now it’s mostly above board. Investments. Political gamesmanship. Anyway, some of our Futurium friends are big deals in the Mastaba crowd.”
“Investors?”
“Investors. Owners. Directors. And, yeah, Rory and Damon.”
She sat up in bed. “Are you insane?”
“It’s not like that. People not in the know think everything the Mastaba does is corrupt. Or if a person has some criminal ties, everything they do is criminal. That’s not the case. We all compartmentalize. You know that. You know my old bank’s history.”
“I don’t,” she said.
