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people like myself, if you want to know the truth. I admire people who’ve worked hard to get where they are. My snobbishness is entirely a tyranny of the interesting.”
    “That’s true of this whole town,” Duncan said.
    “I was brought up suspicious of inherited wealth, odd as that might sound. The family money’s all tied up in trusts—I actually live on my salary, believe it or not. Which is certainly not that hard to do, but still.”
    “I wasn’t offended, anyway,” Duncan said. “And I do think having to work for everything from scratch has its advantages.”
    “I’ve no doubt it does,” Leah said, with a smile that Duncan tried not to take as condescending. “So who were you talking to before? Back in your office?”
    “My pro bono client. We won a motion to dismiss, though it’s without prejudice.”
    “Meaning the case is still going to go forward.”
    Duncan shrugged as the waiter returned with his credit card. “I hope not,” he said. “My only defense on the merits is likely to be going after your security guard who busted my guy in the first place.”
    “Who’s the security guard?”
    “His name’s Sean Fowler. You know him?”
    Leah shook her head, though Duncan thought she’d reacted to the name. “Loomis’s crew are mostly ex-cops. They can probably take it. So do you enjoy doing pro bono work?”
    “I take it as seriously as anything else,” Duncan said. “But honestly, I prefer working on the big-ticket stuff. What’s the point of being the smartest person in the room unless you’re doing something that no one else in the room can do?”
    “I guess it’s no surprise that you’re ambitious,” Leah said. “What is it you want your ambition to get you?”
    It wasn’t a question Duncan knew the answer to, and he wasn’t inclined to try and come up with one for Leah. “My ambition is just to win,” he said instead. “I win for a living.”

4
    C LEAN AND sober at eleven at night: this was not Jeremy Roth’s customary state. Especially not when coming out of a three-hour dinner in the private dining room of Per Se. The restaurant was arguably the most exclusive in the city—not that Jeremy even so much as glimpsed his fellow diners from the private room, which was just past the entrance.
    Dinner had been with the Al-Falasi family from Dubai: Ubayd and his sons, Ahmed and Mattar. As a concession to the Al-Falasis’ religion, Jeremy’s father had instructed that dinner was to be entirely sans alcohol. The Roth family was courting the Al-Falasi family as potential silent partners on the Aurora. As was common, Roth Properties was directly covering only about ten percent of the Aurora’s construction costs. About three hundred million dollars’ worth of short-term, high-interest loans—the mezzanine loans—were coming due on the building. The plan had been to pay off the mezzanine loans as apartment units sold during construction, but suddenly the market had been asphyxiated. Even that wouldn’t normally have been a problem, as banks traditionally extended mezzanine loans as a matter of course. But credit for commercial real estate was drying up fast, everybody was getting nervous, and their skittish financiers were looking for an excuse to bail on the project. The largest source of their short-term financing was a Greenwich hedge fund that wouldn’t hesitate to play hardball if there was a problem with repayment.
    Although Roth Properties had a few billion dollars of commercial real estate in its portfolio, it had little liquidity, and coming up with a few hundred million dollars on their own was going to be a problem. They’d probably have to sell a building, and with the market rattled they’d inevitably sell for a loss, which would in turn raise alarm bells about the health of their company.
    Unlike their biggest project of the moment, the transformation of a tract of public housing, which was being done in partnership with the city and thus heavily