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At lunchtime, Paul ambled to the break room to check out the spread. A few other employees were there already. Chad Forrester, several years older than Paul, balding with short, pale-blond hair and vague eyes, said hello.

“We’re neighbors, right?” Paul said to him. “We share an admin?”

Chad nodded. “Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys,” he said.

“Jake Larsen,” said another new colleague he’d been introduced to at the meeting. Jake was a tall guy with longish brown hair parted in the center. He gave Paul his hand. “Nice to meet you, Paul.” They shook. “Don’t listen to anything Chad tells you.” The men laughed politely.

All the guys seemed to dress alike—chinos, open-collar shirts, leather sneakers. It was a private equity uniform. Galkin and Mr. Frost dressed more formally, but maybe that was a signifier that they were the bosses.

“Seems like not a lot of women work here, is that right?” Paul asked. “I saw only two at the morning meeting.”

“Wasn’t it that way at Aquinnah?” Larsen asked.

“Same,” he admitted.

“So we’re not all that different from other investment firms in that sense,” said Larsen. “Just sexist in the usual way, I guess.” He paused. “But we’re different in other ways. You’ll see. I gotta get back to my desk.” Larsen waved and left.

“What did he mean?” Paul asked Chad.

Chad’s smile faded somewhat. “Wanna grab a drink later? I can give you the lay of the land, if you want?”

“Sounds good,” Paul said. It made sense to meet his colleagues informally outside work if possible. Why not the first day? “Thanks, Chad. I look forward to it.” He plucked a grape from the fruit tray. “Is the food always this good?”

“They don’t stint on meals.”

“The boss man himself warned me I’d gain weight here if I weren’t careful.”

“Who, Frost?”

“Arkady.”

“Galkin did?” Forrester chuckled.

“Yeah, and that from a guy with Dunlap’s disease.” He regretted saying it even as it escaped his mouth—a feeble old joke, referring to a condition in which the victim’s gut “done laps” over his belt, and Arkady had been nothing but welcoming. Whom was he trying to impress here?

Forrester winced, shook his head. “The walls have ears.”

*

There were people like that in every office, Paul decided. The walls have ears . . . Which was another way of saying “Beware, people gossip.”

He spent the afternoon getting up to speed, studying the portfolio, noting what he wanted to trim, what he wanted to add. He began to figure things out. Galkin’s firm had an asset value of around five billion dollars. Of that, about two billion was in U.S.-based stocks. That chunk was his responsibility. He wondered what had happened to the last guy in his job.

Chad stopped by his office at 7:30 p.m., just as Paul was starting to lose steam. “Time to knock off,” he announced. He was wearing a navy quilted vest over his blue button-down shirt and a Yankees cap to conceal his balding pate. He wore trendy, chunky black-framed glasses. His Stan Smiths were pristine.

“Good idea,” Paul told Chad. He texted Tatyana: Home late tonight. Drinks with new colleague .

The two men walked to the elevator, took it down to the lobby. Chad was about Paul’s height, maybe a little thinner. He had a particular bar in mind, a few blocks away. They talked as they walked.

“So you do emerging markets, right?” Paul asked. “What are you working on?”

“I invest in the new chip plant in India, solar power in Brazil, mining deals in Africa. You know. So . . . head of U.S. stocks, huh? Impressive. That a big jump for you?”

“Admittedly, yes,” Paul said.

They had arrived at a grand old bar, which had that iconic old New York look—tin ceiling, beautiful mahogany bar, beveled mirror behind it, old-style urinals in the men’s room dating from 1910.

They settled in at a beat-up-looking table.

“Welcome aboard,” Chad said.

“Great to be here—excited to learn my way around.” Paul clinked Chad’s beer bottle as a toast, took a sip. He noticed Chad’s watch, a Patek Philippe that must have cost tens of thousands of dollars. A lot of Galkin’s senior employees wore expensive watches, he’d observed, but that wasn’t much different from Bernie’s shop.

“What are our colleagues like? Finance bros?”

Chad shook his head. “It’s not bro-y at all. You’re working with smart people, quants, mental athletes. If you don’t put up numbers, you’re out. Up or out.”

Paul nodded. “About as expected.”

“You gotta skate to where the puck is going. This isn’t some white-shoe private equity fund where the most important thing is to join the right country club and talk college football, be a bro. People who work for Galkin are far more analytical. And more socially awkward.”

Paul smiled, sipped his beer. They talked for another five minutes or so. The waiter brought a second round. As Chad finished his first beer and went on to his second, he got a little looser. He started telling jokes. Most of them weren’t very funny. “Hey,” he said after a while, “someone just sent me a Russian oligarch Advent calendar. Every time you open a window, an oligarch falls out.”

Paul laughed politely. He’d already heard that one. “You warned me ‘the walls have ears.’ Are we discouraged from making jokes about our boss?”

“Off campus is safe, but definitely watch it in the office.” Chad was seated at a right angle to Paul. His eyes slid to the side to meet Paul’s. “So you’re married to the boss’s daughter.”

There it was.

“Ummmm . . . well, not married, technically—we’re engaged. Who told you?”

“Everyone knows.”

Paul’s eyebrows shot up. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but it was still kind of annoying. “Arkady wants me to keep it on the DL. Plus, I’m going to be treated like everyone else, so.”

“Well, good luck with that. Like that’ll happen. You’re the boss’s son-in-law. He’ll never fire you.”

Paul shook his head, didn’t know what to say. Was that true? How would he know? “Why are we the Island of Misfit Toys anyway? How so? If we’re all ‘mental athletes’?”

“Everyone here screwed up in some way in their old job.”

“Really? What’d you do?”

“What’d I do? At my last job, we were taking a company public, and I decided to skim off a little cream for one of my clients.”

“How?”

“I arranged for him to invest in a pre-IPO funding round. Then I did a sort of end run. Arranged for him to evade the lockup and sell his shares immediately post-IPO. Made a shitload of money for the client.”

“But broke the rules in the process. You get fired?”

“Oh, yeah. And no one would hire me. But Galkin didn’t mind.”

“Was he the client?”

Chad gave a slow smile but didn’t answer.

“All the other hires did something similar?”

“Ones that I know about, yeah. Jake did a penny stock trade on the side without telling his firm. His firm found out and fired him.”

“For doing a deal in penny stocks?”

“A deal based on inside information he got working for the firm. Totally illegal.”

All these screwups, Paul noticed, were ethical ones. Everyone here was ethically challenged. They hadn’t lost money, though. Galkin wouldn’t hire anyone who’d lost money. He would just hire cheats, apparently. Everyone except me , Paul thought. He hadn’t fucked up. The opposite: He’d pulled off something impressive. And he hadn’t done it by cheating.

“I thought I was dead meat,” said Chad. “I got no callbacks. I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. And then Galkin hired me.”

“So what’s the catch?”

“You keep your mouth shut. And don’t fuck up again.”

“I see.”

“Galkin’s a fascinating guy,” Chad said. “What’s he like at home, among family?”

“I like him.” Paul didn’t know what else to say. “How is he as a boss?”

Chad shook his head. “Pretty much invisible. We never deal with him directly. We deal with Mr. Permafrost. Who’s Russian, in case you hadn’t guessed.”

“I did.”

“He’s a ballbuster. You’ll see.”

“He was awfully welcoming to me.”

“But you’re not a normal employee, are you?”

Paul didn’t answer, not sure how to reply. Did he really have a special cachet because his father-in-law was the boss? Probably so. But he didn’t want to say it.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I really don’t.”