The Escape Room

Pretend inferiority and encourage their arrogance.’ Sun Tzu, The Art of War.

They were like capitalist soldiers in their two-thousand-dollar suits, pressed razor-sharp. Impeccably groomed. You’d think they’d never been touched by perspiration, dirt, or excrement. But no one gets to make the kind of money those four did without tarnishing their soul. Their hands were soft, and clean, and free of calluses. But only because they never touched the blood they spilt.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. —SUN TZU

One day she was your best friend and the next she was your mortal enemy.

My mother used to tell me that the best revenge is to live well. I couldn’t agree more.

The scarcest resource in the world is time.

She once told me that there were too many interesting things to learn in this world to care about what other people thought

Humans, by contrast, are born with the ability to see but become blind—figuratively speaking. We learn to block out the things that we don’t want to see.

The way that I saw it, gravitas was a masculine quality. A characteristic of men in suits.

Men never act grateful; we always complain,” said Sam. “It doesn’t matter how much we’re blown away by the amount, we always look disappointed. Like it’s a major financial blow.

I was as despicable as the rest of them, really, when I think about it.

I noted that Vincent did not mention that those deals earned the firm close to a quarter of a billion dollars.

The deals were little more than numbers, statistics, profit margins, rates of return. They never had a human face.

By the end of the week, any ideals we’d held before we started working at the firm, whatever half-baked notions we’d held on everything from climate change to social justice were wiped away in one fell swoop.

I float on my back for a while, thinking about everything I’ve been through to get here; the loneliness and the overwhelming sense of helplessness when I felt trapped by seemingly insurmountable obstacles. All those times when I thought there was no way out. And yet here I am. A lifetime of worry and stress dissolves as I watch the sun’s rays glint against the azure sky. As I emerge from the sea with water running down my skin and my long hair all slicked back, I feel as if I’ve been reborn. My mother used to tell me that the best revenge is to live well. I couldn’t agree more.

Sometimes I think that’s why he chose me – he liked the thought that I would have a debt of gratitude that would make me eternally loyal. That’s how strongmen built their empires.

Despite my misgivings, I was addicted to the cachet and perks of my job. Cold-pressed fruit juices lined up in neat colourful rows in the office drinks fridge, free gym membership, vouchers for massages and facials that would suddenly appear on my desk as part of the employee welfare program. The never-ending supply of free tickets to Broadway shows or prime seats at sports games. And, most importantly, the money they dangled in front of us. It all gave me temporary amnesia, or perhaps wilful blindness, at the damage we wrought on the lives of the nameless people at that factory in Michigan, or a hundred other places affected by our decisions. We used profit as justification for shattering lives. It was that simple.

Sure, Lucy was idiosyncratic, borderline obsessive-compulsive and often immersed in a world of numbers and concepts that were beyond my comprehension. But she was loyal, and that was a rare quality in our line of work. When I went out with other people from work, we had a great time but the atmosphere crackled with an underlying sense of distrust. I could never let my guard down or relax. I definitely couldn’t confide in them or show any vulnerability. I had to be uber confident. I was constantly under scrutiny. Anything I said or did could, and would, be used against me if it helped them get ahead.

When we got to know each other better, I realised that her brain became so immersed in work that she blocked out everything else as background noise. She compared her mindset to an airplane landing: it was only once she landed that she was able to engage with anything else.

You could count the female investment bankers at the firm on two hands. And the number of female executives on one finger. The head of human resources was a woman and there was a woman on the board – a great niece of the original Stanhope founder. That was it. Most of the women employed at the firm were in support roles; marketing, communications, HR and admin. The army of personal assistants was almost entirely female. Without them the firm wouldn’t function. The firm’s senior executives paid lip-service to diversity just as they gave lip-service to corporate social responsibility, another buzzword they bandied about in employee communications and brochures. All they really cared about was making money. It was the firm’s raison d’être and it was ours as well.

There was always an undercurrent of conflict in the firm. The air crackled with a permanent sense of distrust. In the firm’s toxic worldview, conflict was good. Conflict made people work harder and smarter. It made them ruthless.

Men barely need to think about what to wear to the office. They throw on a Ferragamo suit and tie and they’re instantly classy. Women have it tougher. We have to be feminine and yet professional. Fashionable yet conservative. It’s hard to navigate all the contradictions.

The message they pummelled into us was that our world revolved around money. Making it. Accumulating it. Spending it. In that order. It was Stanhope’s version of the holy trinity.

By the same token, she was an outcast. She did not comply to the firm’s standards for looks, or dress, or social skills. But she more than made up for her deficiencies in other departments. Sam once told me that Lucy had an instinctive, uncanny ability to make money. “She doesn’t realize how good she is.

Lucy was a genius when it came to finance. Her ability to see patterns and opportunities was unparalleled, which made her work critical to the team’s success.

The others subtly mocked Lucy. They liked to pretend they were ribbing her, as if they were older siblings giving their younger sister a hard time, but it wasn’t genuine. There was an underlying nastiness to their comments that made me wonder what it was they said about me behind my back.

It wasn’t that Lucy was intentionally rude; she genuinely didn’t know how to handle social interactions. It was like a foreign language to her. Jules had told me that Lucy had Asperger’s. While her social skills might have been poor, when it came to smarts, Lucy was in the stratosphere.

Exactly. I pointed to the fucking rock on her finger and told her that investment bankers don’t need religion. We don’t need to wait for the next life to enjoy paradise, not with the money we make.

There were days when I almost believed that I’d never left Chicago to work at Stanhope. Days when it felt as if my life in New York had happened to someone else and that I’d awakened from a deep coma, only to find myself trapped in a hellish existence that I couldn’t escape. Sometimes, when the medication wore off, my memory would come back into focus. I’d remember the injustice. The public humiliation. The way they’d chipped away at my self-esteem until there was almost nothing left of me.