19 Purchase Street (9 page)

It hadn't been since Norma's year of the three weeks.

During those three weeks one of the arrangements Vicky had made for Norma was Laurence Davidson. Two hundred for most of a night.

During the course of that night, actually when the purpose of it was accomplished, Davidson wanted to know about Norma and she told him the truth because it sounded like fiction.

Davidson believed her. “Try something else,” he advised.

“I know I'm not very good at this …”

“Have you ever considered becoming a broker?”

“What kind?”

“Stockbroker, you can take courses to get a license. There's a school downtown on Pine Street especially for that.” He jotted the name of the brokerage school on the back of one of his business cards. “If you're really interested give me a call.”

“Here?”

“At my office.”

Only later, from the card, did she realize he was an account manager with L. E. Horton, the prestigious Wall Street investment firm. She chalked it all up to just talk under the circumstances.

Davidson called Vicky again, wanting to arrange another evening with Norma, but her available time didn't coincide with his and when he next called her three weeks were up.

It was purely chance that Davidson saw her again. At the restaurant in the financial district where she waitressed. When she was serving him he said, “I want to see you again.”

“I don't work there any longer.”

“I still want to see you.”

“No.”

“As a friend …”

They got together the following night. A pleasant, casual dinner with no mention of their previous piece of business. Davidson still believed she should try being a stockbroker. He'd be her mentor. His firm, L. E. Horton, would pay for the courses.

“Do well, get your license and there may even be a spot for you at L. E. Horton,” he told her.

“Why should L. E. Horton pay my way?”

“It's not unusual. Like most other large firms it has a fund set aside especially for that purpose, rather like a scholarship. Besides,” he shrugged, “it's deductible.”

She went to school.

Three nights each week from five-thirty to eight. The courses assumed that one would have some relevant background and the language was technical. Norma felt out of place, but she kept at it and soon found that stockbrokering, like many professions, was made to seem extremely special and complicated to protect the self-importance of those in it. She had to learn the precise answers to many questions that would rarely, if ever, come up.

In three months, under the sponsorship of L. E. Horton, she took the examination required by the New York Stock Exchange and the National Association of Security Dealers. She passed the exam easily and received her broker's license.

In her twenty-six years, she'd never been more delighted with herself. L. E. Horton took her on, as Davidson had said they might. To start, her draw was fifteen hundred a month. Within a year, her commissions averaged twice that.

Davidson remained her friend and business confidante. Now strictly a platonic relationship. She trusted him. He never disapproved of her being so ambitious. To the contrary. He encouraged it, advised her to take some advanced courses at a school in Boston where she could learn the intricacies of foreign trading. No loss of income while she attended, he assured her.

After doing exceedingly well in Boston, Norma was assigned by L. E. Horton to deal exclusively with foreign stocks and commodities. It was then necessary for her to make frequent trips to London and Paris and she was so often in Zurich she maintained an office at the L. E. Horton branch there.

O
N
a late autumn day in 1971 she went for a country drive with Davidson. The leaves were at the peak of change, blazing, the roadsides layered gold. As they drove along Norma fell into a reflective mood, thought how ironic it was that the high in her life had come as a consequence of such a low.

They stopped in Banksville for a dinner at Le Cremaillere. They ordered extravagantly and about two hours later, when their hands were warming and swirling Remy Martin, Davidson complimented her on how well she'd done with her career.

“Thanks to you,” she said.

“I only saw to it that you were always headed in the right direction.”

“Only?”

“Those advanced courses you took in Boston positioned you perfectly.”

She agreed.

“As a specialist in foreign trading for L. E. Horton you have the most credible sort of reason to make trips overseas, now
and
for years to come.”

“I enjoy the traveling.”

“Good. From now on that's just about all you'll have to do.”

She thought he was exaggerating.

“From now on you don't have to give any attention to brokering or otherwise servicing your accounts or, for that matter, concern yourself with making an impression with your supervisors at L. E. Horton. Just act the part, make it look good.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“To be blunt, I'm saying you'll use your L. E. Horton job as a front,” Davidson told her.

He was straight-faced.

“A front for
what?”

“To carry money.”

Norma still wasn't sure he was serious. She kept her eyes on him, hoping she'd discern some contradiction to his words. “What do you mean carry?” she asked.

“Exactly that. Every time you go out of the country you'll take cash along with you. Large amounts. Cash that needs to be, as the saying goes, laundered.”

Norma took two deep breaths to let it sink in. Her color left her and then returned, an angry flush. “I don't want any part of it.”

“You're already in it, Norma, you've been in from the start.”

“That's not true.”

“I recruited you, saw that you got along. Consider yourself fortunate.”

The bottom was dropping out. “Are you saying that I was set up, that I couldn't miss, that all along it was arranged that I do well?”

“No. Your accomplishments were mostly genuine. Allowing that the way was cleared, you got where you are on your own.”

“Then surely you don't expect me to
carry
, as you call it. I don't have to.”

“You must.” A shade of threat in his tone.

“Okay, I'll leave Horton. As a matter of fact I was approached just recently by another firm.”

“You won't get a reference. L. E. Horton will see that no one in the business will touch you.

“This is
your
sideline, not L. E. Horton's,” she said.

Davidson answered with a slow shake of his head.

Norma was stunned.

It was difficult for her to accept that L. E. Horton was part of such an arrangement. Not old-line, ultra-respectable L. E. Horton. Large, powerful L. E. Horton.

“L. E. Horton is no more than a leaf on the tree,” Davidson told her.

Norma felt deceived, smaller. What it had come down to again was take it or leave it.

Davidson, as though nothing had changed between them, ran down some of the advantages that would be in it for her. He didn't try to sell her, merely stated that as a carrier practically all her time would be her own, and, of course, anywhere she went she'd go first class.

“This cash that's … laundered, where does it come from?” Norma asked.

“Don't concern yourself with that.”

“But how dirty is it?”

Davidson's shrug said money was money.

“Just out of curiosity,” she asked, “how much would I make?”

“At least a hundred thousand a year. L. E. Horton will continue paying you what you're now making each month and that will serve as a plausible income. You'll only have to declare that much for taxes. Whatever you receive from L. E. Horton will be deducted from your other, real earnings. The difference you will receive out of the country and will not report.”

“You still haven't said how much.”

“If you're conscientious you can clear two hundred, two hundred fifty thousand a year.”

Good lord.

Davidson seemed to hear her. He nodded.

“I'll think it over,” she said.

“I have to have your decision.”

“When?”

“Now.”

“That's ridiculous. It isn't something one could just jump into.”

“Now.”

“The big money involves a big risk, no doubt.”

“Practically all the risk has been programmed out of it.”

“I need time to consider what I'm getting into, for God's sake,” Norma protested.

Davidson pushed back his shirt cuff, glanced at his thin-as-possible watch. “Some people are expecting us. Tonight.”

Norma brought her brandy beaker up, inhaled from it. As though that cleared her head, she gave her decision. “No,” she said crisply, definitely, “no.”

She wanted to hear how it would sound as much as she wanted to see how Davidson would react.

Davidson merely patted her hand, signaled for the check.

Minutes later they were gone from the restaurant and under way in the car and Davidson's conversation was on a different, casual subject.

Norma noticed that the dusk was taking the color from the autumn leaves. The rock walls didn't look charming now, the rocks just hard worthless hunks piled up. She remembered the first night she'd worked at the bakery with Mr. Larkin, the dough caked on her bare feet, and then all the sweat, the bowing and scraping for tips in so many restaurants … even Theodor Beecher Junior's face came back to her for review.

After three or four miles of all
that
, Norma looked intently at Davidson. “Okay,” she told him, “I'll … carry.”

“Good for you,” he said, and turned the car around and headed for Harrison.

Within a half hour they were turning in at the drive of 19 Purchase Street.

It was a kind of paragraphic point for Norma, so much of a shift in her life it made her think of all other events as having happened either before or after it.

F
OR
Gainer, a similar important time mark was his quitting college. It didn't matter that he was on the dean's honor list, he was plain bored with it. Over the past three semesters he'd switched his major study four times. At that rate he might have gotten a degree in another few years, but by then it probably would have been a degree in something that no longer interested him.

He enjoyed history, all periods; but he figured that the going rate for historians was never likely to be much. Psychology was his choice for a while and maybe he could have lived with the theoretical aspects of it, but sitting on his ass soaking up other people's twists and turns was hardly his idea of adventure.

So, he quit college. Went into a business of his own. Something he believed he was one of the best at, already had a good amateur reputation for around town.

Handicapping.

He became a professional handicapper, for anyone who wanted to wager on sports, especially football.

Gainer himself was not much of a bettor. Less active than most. The bets he'd made on some ballgames had been like finding money and a number of times he'd gotten down fairly heavy on horses that might as well have been running alone. Usually, however, he'd gotten enough out of it from just handicapping, making mind bets, a good feeling from just knowing he was right more often than wrong about these contests that perplexed so many people. (Like his father.) It was satisfying to prove again and again that he had the mental control and objectivity to keep out of range of blind enthusiasm for a certain team or horse. Also, it was certainly no harm to his ego to have people going out of their way to ask his advice.

Once, when he was eighteen and only mildly regarded as a handicapper, an old guy Gainer hardly knew had handed him a ballpoint and a football betting card and implored with the eyes of a tired loser. Gainer circled ten choices on the card, casually, as though he were checking a shopping list. The payoff for picking ten out of ten on such a card was three hundred to one. The actual odds against it, possibly ten thousand to one. A sucker's bet. Nevertheless, the old guy heeded his gambler's inner voice that had so often deceived him and put fifty dollars on that card. As it turned out, Gainer's picks were right all the way down the line. The old guy won fifteen thousand and tried his best not to lie that he'd done it himself.

Word got around. Then practically everywhere Gainer went, football betting cards were thrust at him. It was almost like he was being asked for his autograph. He refused politely and appeared modest. Smart. He realized how impossible it was that he could repeat his ten out of ten feat, or, for that matter, five out of five. No reason to spoil the image.

As time went on, Gainer was presented with numerous other more likely chances to live up to his reputation and, eventually, the smart money, that most skeptical core of big bettors, became convinced that he deserved to have an opinion. He was included in the coterie they referred to as “the talent.”

Such was the equity Gainer brought with him when he turned professional. He could have operated out of his pocket as did most handicappers, but with Norma as his backer and silent partner, he opened a regular place of business in a commercial building on Forty-fifth Street, just west of Fifth Avenue. No name on the door and nothing fancy within. Two ordinary desks face to face in front of partitions that created two rather small offices. The desks for the two girls who did the paper work and relayed incoming calls to one another as though they were floors apart, the extra office for Gainer's sideman, a glib but honest enough guy named Billie who had been performing in the trade for a dozen years. The place was unified by a nearly indestructible gray carpet, an elaborate telephone system, including two Watts lines and the letterhead-logo that said:

POINTWISE, INC.

Gainer had plenty of confidence, and competition. Practically every sports journal was thick with ads of handicappers trying to induce bettors to call for information. Invariably the wording of the ads implied the handicapper had inside knowledge, knew which team or horse would win because of access to those who manipulated such things. It was never said straight out that a game or race was fixed but that was the inference. Such an appeal was well-aimed at the bruised, the cynics, the losers who needed something to blame other than their own bad judgment.