As an analyst for JP Morgan, Dana Vachon learned that money can buy you anything—except a life. An exclusive excerpt from his debut novel, Mergers & Acquisitions

The following excerpt appeared in the March/April issue of Radar, on newsstands now. To get a risk-free copy of the print magazine delivered to your doorstep, click here!

Frances and I met Roger Thorne and Lauren Schuyler outside of Cipriani, amid the tables that spilled out onto the sidewalk of West Broadway, all covered in white linen and teeming with long-limbed, listless models and the paunchy foreign playboys who date them. One Latin man punched a number into his Nokia. Five tables away another man's Motorola began playing the ring-tone version of Enrique Iglesias's "Escape."
   "Giacomo!" said the first man, throwing his arms into the air.
   "Simone!" replied Giacomo, rushing over to greet his long-lost friend.
   We walked inside, where Lisa Gastineau sat with two other older, attractive women at a table beyond the bar. She raised her neck to look at Thorne. Though aware of his middle-aged admirer, Thorne was apprehensive about returning her gaze. Perhaps he could feel Lauren Schuyler's disapproving eyes on his back, at once daring and forbidding him to acknowledge the would-be Mrs. Robinson.
   Thorne stared not at the aging siren, but over at the bar, where stood all five feet eight inches of Sophie Dvornik in the Dolce & Gabbana jeans that had so shocked the prep school girls during our first year in college, and fit her as though Domenico and Stefano had conceived them with only her legs and ass in mind. Just as these jeans struggled to contain Sophie's limbs, a vintage micro T-shirt fought against her formidable chest. Silk-screened on this shirt was a nude woman, and upon closer inspection it became clear that the nude woman was in fact Sophie Dvornik. Beneath the picture was a statement in Arabic that was familiar to anyone familiar with the work of Yves Grandchatte, at that point perhaps the most celebrated artist on the island of Manhattan, and undoubtedly the darling of the Pace Wildenstein Gallery, where Sophie had found work as an assistant.
   "Yves Grandchatte made the shirt for me," Sophie boasted as she approached, and joined us in walking to the table where Frances's friends were already seated. Everyone except for Frances looked at Sophie's chest with jealousy, and it wasn't only for her breasts. Just that past week, New York magazine had run a feature on Grandchatte and his myriad addictions, his black belt in karate, and his ongoing feud with Homeland Security for boarding airplanes with the words "I'll be your suicide bomber today" emblazoned across his chest in various foreign languages. The interest in Yves was writ so large that Sophie had no choice but to address the subject.
   "I work with him at Pace Wildenstein," she said, and relished in explaining. "Did you know he's French-Algerian? What a genius. I've been working on his MoMA gala, and it is going to blow everyone away. He's totally self-taught. Totally sui generis ..."
Phoebe's favorite topic of conversation was how her boyfriend had recently been given a $600,000 bonus   No one knew exactly what sui generis meant, only that they had heard the term on a few occasions, and that on those occasions they had also not known what it meant. This didn't stop the table from nodding in agreement. Frances alone seemed to know what Sophie had said and, smiling mischievously, she broke the momentary silence.
   "And, impudens leno es, at least that's what I think," she said.
   "Absolutely," said Sophie. Again everyone agreed.
   "What did you say?" I whispered to Frances amid the nodding heads.
   "That she is a shameless pimp," she replied, and burst into beautiful laughter.
   Unaware of Frances's insult and content to have established herself as a cultural arbiter of some merit, Sophie smiled confidently and worked herself into a seat. Everyone at the table chattered brightly, and Frances introduced me to her friends.
   "Tommy, this is Phoebe ..."
   Phoebe had eyes like costume jewels, shiny and unconvincing. Her father was a senator from a flyover state, and you did not need to look very deeply into her intricately highlighted hair to see her Midwestern roots. One afternoon that summer, when we were laying in her bed at the beach, Frances had told me that Phoebe had been the sweetest girl at Choate. During those years her father was only a state attorney general. Frances had said that Phoebe changed with her father's ascension to national politics. Indeed, the exfoliated, overly tanned woman seated before me had little in common with the ponytailed girl I'd seen in pictures. Phoebe leaned in for hello kisses, a kiss on the left cheek, another on the right. She had done a year abroad, studying in Florence, before landing a job as an editorial assistant at Seventeen magazine upon her return, and she demonstrated both her worldliness and world-weariness by kissing everyone twice. She introduced me to her boyfriend, who gave further testimony to her worldliness. He looked like a kinder, gentler Uday Hussein, and moved a green Lehman Brothers duffle bag from his lap before offering a lazy handshake.
   "I'm Biglari," he said, before settling back down from his semi-standing position.
   "Big Larry?" I was puzzled.
   According to Frances, one of Phoebe's favorite topics of conversation was how her boyfriend had recently been given a $600,000 bonus. That is a lot of money, it's true, but did it really entitle him to call himself Big Larry? To go from Larry to Lawrence for a bit of added prestige would be considered acceptable, but adding an adjective like Big was crass even by the most vulgar standards.
   Phoebe giggled and rolled her head. "No. His name is Biglari! He's Purrrrsian."
   "Biglari," he said again, emphasizing the first syllable this time, to make the point. "I work at Lehman Brothers."
   I soon learned that Big Larry's family had been part of the exodus of wealthy Iranians who'd fled the country before the Ayatollah toppled the Shah in the late '70s. He seemed none the worse for wear. Way down in his Lehman Brothers duffle bag, Larry's Lehman Brothers Blackberry vibrated with Larry's Lehman Brothers e-mail. He was a Lehman Brothers bond trader, and he had no choice but to bend down and dig around for it. Soon he was happily punching away, oblivious to anything beyond the high-resolution screen of his little device, which he spoke of only to praise.
   "Lehman gives us these," he boasted, admiring the device and his own fingernails. "They are not Blackberries, but Blueberries. The new Blueberries, with color and Internet. Lehman is always at the cutting edge, always the very best.
"Tommy. Roger. Tell me. Does J.S. Spenser's M&A group give you a Blueberry?"
   Roger and I were silent, and taking this silence as a no, Biglari went back to typing.
   Staring disinterestedly around the table from her seat next to Phoebe was CeCe, another friend of Frances's from Choate. With a head of blond hair and a naturally golden complexion, CeCe looked as Phoebe wanted to look, and seemed to know it. A girl with 1,500 ways to say "fuck you," she worked as a publicist for Carolina Herrera, but carried herself as if she guarded the Holy Grail. Frances had told me that CeCe's father had gone to jail for illegal funding schemes, joking that so far as anyone could tell the experience had only made him a more cunning and successful financial criminal when he emerged from prison in the '90s. CeCe seemed just right as the daughter of such a figure. From the start she gave me the impression that all of Manhattan was a large soiree, and she was in charge of the guest list. Even Frances seemed a bit nervous when she introduced me as her new boyfriend, and relieved when CeCe nodded to her that I passed muster, but perhaps only barely. She certainly didn't bother getting up for a formal hello, but it was really just as well. I'd been lucky to guess Phoebe's ritual kissing greeting correctly, and could not be assured repeated success. Half of the young women in New York think themselves European and kiss on both cheeks when you meet them, while the other half live content in their American identities and kiss only on one cheek, if at all. So you never know where you are going to get kissed, or how many times. I've anticipated second kisses that never came, and found myself with puckered lips staring at some poor terrified girl. Other times I've shifted my face after the first kiss, only to receive a second awkwardly on the lips.