Bull Street (11 page)

She had that feeling in her tummy again, that airiness, like driving too fast. Then the same feeling, but lower, as if her legs were disconnected from her brain and were going to wrap themselves around him. She bet he was a great kisser. She was sure he didn’t try to force his tongue into your mouth the instant your lips touched, like most guys, trying to act sophisticated. Like they’ve kissed all kinds of girls, showing you how cool they are. No, she bet Richard kissed you like he meant it. Tonight might be difficult. She didn’t want to say yes to him. How silly women could be. Knowing what they wanted, and not wanting it at the same time.

By the time they’d finished a bottle of wine, Conan O’Brien was coming on the television. Kathy was now sitting in an armchair by herself, having gracefully slipped off the sofa when it looked like Richard was moving toward her—twice. If he did it again she was going to get pissed off.

Near the end of Conan’s monologue, she bent over in the chair laughing. When she sat back up, Richard had walked over from the sofa and was standing right there. He did it smoothly; leaned over, kissed her. She pulled away.

“Richard, don’t.”

He didn’t move, didn’t say anything. He just looked into her eyes and smiled; very confident. He put his hand on her cheek and came toward her again.

“Don’t,” she said and stood up. She balled her hands into fists, narrowed her eyes and stuck out her jaw. “Stop it!”

“I don’t get it.” He stood there, eyebrows furrowed.

“What don’t you get?”

“Calm down.”

“I’ll calm down when you back off.”

Richard shook his head and put his hands up as if in surrender. He crossed to the sofa and sat down.

“Don’t look so shocked. You’re acting like you’ve never had a woman say no to you before. Besides, what were you thinking? God, we’re cubicle-mates.”

He smiled and chuckled. “It was pretty clear to me we were moving in this direction.”

“Maybe clear to
you.
But you’re not thinking clearly; you’ve been pining away over me for a while now. And it’s beginning to get in the way.”

“I’m not trying to hide that I’m interested, but I’m getting mixed signals here. You were downright coquettish in the bar. And how often do grown women invite male friends over for TV after a few drinks, then a bottle of wine if they aren’t at least thinking about something more?”

Kathy let out a long sigh and sat back down. She looked him in the eye and said, “At least once.”

He didn’t say anything for a few moments, maybe waiting to see if she had anything else to say. All of a sudden she just wanted him to leave. Maybe he was right: she’d probably been putting out what she was thinking as they got to her apartment. But still, after two failed passes he should have backed off.

“I think you should leave. I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”

“Message received.” He stood up. “Thanks for the wine.”

She didn’t get up to show him to the door.

She felt lousy. But after Morgan Stanley, there was no way she was ever getting involved with anyone from the office again. My God, it was downright humiliating with everybody finding out about Frank and her within a few weeks. Separated from his wife or not, a Managing Director and an Analyst was juicy gossip. And it made it worse that she was working for him in the Healthcare Group. Under him, some snickered. At the time she tried to tell herself she was above the gossip because she loved him, but it hurt, made her feel cheap.

And she wasn’t blind to the fact that it was the only time she let a man get in the way of what she wanted. In prep school, Harvard undergrad, even HBS, her relationships never lasted more than a few years, if that. The shrink she saw for six months after Frank helped her see that a man wasn’t important enough to her to let the obligation of a commitment slow her down—at least up until then. When Dr. Oldman started probing her on why it took a man ten years her senior to open her up for the first time, she stopped going.

Now she wished she could ask Daddy for advice about Richard, but at the same moment she knew what he’d say: that crude aphorism about not shitting where you eat. Thinking of him now made her ache. How could she still miss him so much after all these years? She realized she was just staring at the television. She got up, picked up the wine bottle and glasses and walked into the kitchen.

Croonquist got off the elevator on the 47
^th
floor of the GM building. The receptionist at Surrey Capital Management’s offices looked like a model on the cover of Vogue.
Only in New York.
She smiled like she was posing, head cocked to the side.

“Mr. Croonquist?” she said.

“I must have that rumpled public servant look about me.”

“Not at all, Mr. Croonquist. Jamie said to expect you at noon, and that you were always punctual.” She looked over at her computer monitor. “You’re two minutes early.”

Croonquist smiled and shrugged.

She walked him into the center of the office, which was a single trading floor that took up a full third of the building’s footprint. They entered a series of trading stations arranged in concentric circles around a single circular desk raised slightly above them. Croonquist felt cool air from the floor. He knew from prior visits the floor was raised to accommodate the myriad wires and communications cables running underneath the panels, chilled to help dissipate the heat emanating from all of the computer and communications technology in the room.

Croonquist guessed 60 people sat in the trading stations positioned in the circles around the center desk, all in front of multiple LCD screens. Most wore headsets with microphones. Their voices blurred together into a monotone buzz.

Jamie Swift, the founder and manager of Surrey’s $15 billion in hedge funds, smiled at Croonquist from the center desk, where he presided over the rocket scientists who worked for him. As he approached Swift, Croonquist felt more cool air cascading down from the ceiling. He smelled nothing. He recalled that one of Swift’s rules was no perfumes or colognes: nothing to interfere with the ozone-charged air, designed to enhance creativity and a positive outlook.

“Roman,” was all Swift said, standing and shaking hands. He motioned for Croonquist to sit across from him, then sat and said, “Great to see you. Whatcha got?” No extended pleasantries, right to it. Croonquist had known Swift for over 15 years and it was always the same.

“Something, I think. But I hope you can tell me for sure.”

“Okay, lemme take a look,” Swift said, reaching across for the papers Croonquist pulled out of his briefcase. Swift flipped pages for a few moments. “These must be code names.”

“Of course. But can you figure out what they’re doing without knowing the company names?”

“Yup. They put on a colossal bearish macro sector put trade with a long stock hedge. They’re real gamblers.”

“Care to put that in English?”

Swift laughed. “Somebody made a huge short bet that the stocks in a single industry would all decline.”

“Yeah, that really clears it up for me.”

“Okay, these guys placed a couple billion dollar wager the stocks in this industry would drop—fast, and made three hundred million or so in profits by the time they unwound the trades.”

“How did they do it?”

“They bought puts—options to sell the industry companies’ stocks, which increase in value when the stocks drop—and simultaneously bought the stocks, to moderate their loss if they were wrong and the industry’s stocks went up. A hedged bet with a major downside bias.”

Croonquist slid a piece of paper across the table with the real names of the homebuilding companies on it.

Swift smiled. “Of course, the homebuilders.” He flipped back through the first pages Croonquist had given him, then looked
back up at Croonquist. “The instant Milner’s IPO of Southwest Homes was announced, the rest of the homebuilding sector traded down 10%—because a lotta money managers sold off their homebuilding stock positions in anticipation of buying Southwest’s stock once it became publicly traded.”

“What are you saying?”

“Somebody knew in advance about Milner’s IPO of Southwest and anticipated the market’s reaction. Either that or they’re geniuses and guessed that the housing bubble was getting ready to pop, and that the homebuilding stocks would tank.”

“What do you think?”

“A short bet this big on an industry sector as hot as the homebuilders were a month ago? Nobody’s that smart. I’d say somebody’s a crook.”

Now Swift was talking a language Croonquist understood.

Richard buzzed for entry at the door into the sealed-off Mergers and Acquisitions Department. Cynthia Jackson, the administrative head of the department, waited for him on the other side. She ushered him into the windowless conference room.

“May I see your ID, please?” she said.

“Cynthia, we’ve ridden the elevator together for four months. You know who I am.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?” She recorded Richard’s employee ID number into a loose-leaf notebook, opened it and pushed it in front of him on the conference table. “Okay, Richard this is serious. This is the M&A Department Security Procedures Manual. I need you to read it before you do anything else, even if it takes you all morning. Sign both copies of the form at the
front, give one to me and retain the other and the manual for your records. Don’t sign the Consent and Waiver of Injunctive Relief unless you fully understand and agree to be bound by the rules of the manual and the applicable Securities and Exchange Commission statutes summarized in it. If you need any clarifications, we’ll get you a full text, and we can have the General Counsel of the firm explain them to you in detail. I’ll leave you alone now to read.”

Remind me to stay the hell outta
your
way.
She walked out and closed the door. Richard skimmed through the table of contents. Topics like Confidentiality, Persons with a Need to Know, Document Shredding Procedures, and so on. A section had sample questions and answers regarding preserving confidentiality of inside information on pending merger and acquisition transactions. He signed the forms and called Cynthia.

“I meant it when I said
read
it,” she said.

He read through it. He recalled being fingerprinted on his first day of work, like everybody else in the securities business, and felt an ominous rumbling in his stomach when he read the waivers of rights that he would be signing. They meant if he screwed up he was on his own. They included signing away his right to being represented by Walker & Company’s legal counsel, and his right to enjoin the firm from testifying against him if he broke the securities laws, particularly for insider trading. He called Cynthia back about 45 minutes later. Cynthia then led him, smiling now for the first time, from door to door of the glass-walled offices of the Managing Directors and Vice Presidents around the periphery of the department, introducing him. Then the rows of movable office partitions that made up the cubicles of the Associates and Analysts. He felt a smile cross his face; hell, he felt it down in his groin and creep upward all the way up to his chest.

She walked him into another windowless conference area. “This is the War Room. The Comm Room in the Corporate Finance Department was the original version of this. As you can see we’ve got much more high-tech stuff in here now.” The War Room was a buzz of activity. The Dow Jones and NASDAQ tickers streamed across the far wall. A row of flat panel plasmas tuned in CNBC, Bloomberg, CNN and a few foreign news channels. Two rows of desks in the center of the room sported flat-panel LCD screens, rows of tickers and trades blinking on them, Associates and Analysts hunched in front of half of them, punching keyboards. A shredder stood in the corner, scraps of paper near it proving it actually got used. A team headed by François LeClaire reacted to some news story impacting their deal.

After Richard was introduced to the rest of the department at the following morning’s 8:30 a.m. departmental meeting, he followed François LeClaire to his office for his first deal assignment. Richard had learned a lot about LeClaire since his screening interview back in March. Ecole Poly technique, where he got his undergraduate engineering degree, was France’s equivalent of MIT, Harvard and Stanford combined. It was regarded as the premier engineering school in the world. He’d then immediately gone to work for GCG. GCG soon saw his potential and sent him to Harvard Business School, then injected him into GCG’s new investment, Walker & Company. Ron Elman, the firm’s resident genius buffoon, said the combination of LeClaire’s technical education at quant-jock Polytechnique, overlaid with the all-case-study, touchy-feely teaching method at Harvard, had left LeClaire permanently confused. “So he’s syncopated,” Elman said, referring to LeClaire’s accent. “Puts the
em-pha
sis on the wrong syl-
la
-ble. Ha-ha-ha-ha.” LeClaire was now a respected Senior Vice President. He was feared by the Associates.
White-hot smart.
Richard told himself to be careful, remembering LeClaire grilling him in his interview.