Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (62 page)

The trip was a complete failure. I spent three and a half days hiking through the streets from one intelligence agency to another, trying to find the people to whom Jenkins reported and to learn anything at all about Jenkins himself. The weather was milder in Washington, but that was not much comfort, because there is very little public transportation there, and I had to walk for miles, twice all the way over to Virginia and back, shivering miserably from the cold the entire time. I could not risk entering a club, because Jenkins might have them watched, and I spent my nights shivering on the floor of a cafeteria, not daring to eat more than a few scraps of bread for fear of being seen.

In the end I located the office of a man named Ridgefield, who seemed to be Jenkins’s immediate superior, but I was unable to find so much as a piece of paper with Jenkins’s name on it. Everywhere I encountered locks. Offices were locked; file cabinets were locked; corridor doors were locked. There were people on duty at all hours of the day and night, and in any case I did not dare stay in these places overnight, because I would have no way of safely feeding myself the next day.

After four days of this I was so weak and cold and hungry and disheartened that I could not go on. I rode back to New York on the train physically debilitated and completely defeated, having learned nothing, and sustained only by the knowledge that I would soon be back home, where Alice would take care of me. It came to me, perhaps for the first time, that Alice had saved my life. I should tell her and thank her. Sometime when it was safe.

It was bitterly cold when I arrived in New York, and the subway ride up from Penn Station was an agony. I ran as hard as I could — which in my condition did not amount to much of a pace — from the subway stop to Alice’s apartment to keep my body from succumbing altogether. It would be so much better when I got to the apartment. I had been continuously miserable and afraid for the last four days, but now I would be able to stay inside where it was warm and secure and Alice could feed me.

The key was not in the usual place. Could she have gone somewhere? I had told her I would be gone two days and it had been four and a half. I should have called.

But before I could knock, the door had swung open, and she was standing there.

“Nick!”

I was too relieved or overcome to speak.

“God, I’m so glad you’re back. Where have you been?”

“I… I’ll tell you another time.”

“I was afraid you were gone for good. You’re shivering! What’s happened to you?”

Alice ran a hot bath for me. Then, while she prepared dinner, she gave me a mug of hot soup. She wrapped a blanket around me that looked like a child’s tent erected over the couch, and I sat there warm and safe, wondering how I could ever have imagined that I could get through the winter on my own. At the realization that — at least until next spring — I no longer had to consider whether I ought to leave, I felt an enormous wave of relief and gratitude.

I
n December it became so cold and it rained and snowed so much of the time that I could hardly go out at all, and I did most of my work in the apartment now. I had Alice subscribing to all sorts of financial publications and receiving a steady stream of annual reports and 10Ks. I still tried to get to the Crosbys’ apartment once a week to be safe, but all my statements were now mailed to me care of Bernie Schleifer, who handled all the paperwork. I managed my accounts and made the actual trades by telephone while Alice was at work, so that she did not really know what I was doing, but the sight of all those financial statements spread out over the dining room table in the evening and of the pencil magically jumping through the air to compute cash flows and rates of return seemed somehow to offend her sense of propriety.

“Why do you spend all your time studying these things? Are you hoping to be an accountant in your next incarnation? It’s awfully unromantic of you.”

“It just happens to be what I’m interested in.”

“I thought you were supposed to lose interest in earthly riches when you passed on.”

“Maybe it’s because I seem not to have passed very far on.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem right for a ghost to be in trade.”

“Beneath my spiritual station, you think? Anyway, I’m not in trade at all. I’m an investor.”

“Really? Where exactly do you invest? And why?”

“Actually, it’s mainly the intellectual challenge of the thing that interests me.”

“Tell me, Nick, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate yourself for
candor?”

“Ghosts have to make a living like anyone else.” A thought struck me. It was a thought that ought to have struck me long before, and I wondered momentarily why it hadn’t. “Alice, it suddenly occurs to me that it must be quite expensive feeding me and buying all this expensive wine.”

“It hasn’t been a problem.”

“Tell me, do you have a brokerage account?”

“No. I have some AT&T stock I inherited from my grandmother, though.”

“How much?”

“I’m not sure, but I can show them to you. They mailed me a lot more stock certificates afterwards for different telephone companies.”

She pulled out a stack of certificates interleaved with countless mailings and booklets detailing the intricacies of the AT&T divestiture and the probable tax consequences to shareholders and the disputed position of the
IRS
. There must be tens of thousands of people in the same situation as Alice. If they ever sell their shares, they will have to use all the proceeds to pay accountants to compute the tax on the transaction.

“Alice, take these certificates to this address tomorrow — it’s a discount broker — and tell them you want to open an account and sell these shares. They’ll show you exactly how to endorse them over. Then put in an order to buy these stocks — I’m writing everything out on this piece of paper.”

“Then you can predict the future!”

“I cannot predict the future. No one can predict the future,” I said with some irritation in my voice.

“Then why are you telling me to buy these stocks?”

It must have seemed as if I could predict the future though, because Alice’s account prospered at once, and she no longer commented on how unromantic she found the study of financial statements. Furthermore, as time went on she pressed me less and less with questions about myself.

And in the warmth and security of Alice’s apartment I began to forget again about Jenkins. In fact, the only thing that marred that winter for me was being kept constantly inside by the weather. But in early January a new possibility was suddenly suggested to me by the sight of a child bundled up in a parka and gloves and a wonderfully sinister woolen ski mask completely covering his head. I immediately made reservations at Stowe and had Alice outfit me with clothing and equipment from a ski shop in the city.

Alice set out early on the day of our departure to fetch her car from its garage somewhere in Queens. On her return she found me waiting in front of the building, fully arrayed in gloves and ski mask and dark glasses. The doorman had been a bit startled to see me emerge like that from the elevator — the lobby being maintained at a steady eighty degrees — and as he helped me load the skis and the luggage, he kept glancing at me suspiciously, but I was too elated to care.

The snow was only fair and the weather unspeakably cold, but I had a wonderful time. I acquired an extensive wardrobe of face masks. When the sun came out and the temperature rose, I explained to people that my skin was sensitive to the sun. It is true that we had to eat most of our meals in our room, but otherwise I was just like everyone else, able to go anywhere without worrying about coughing or inadvertently colliding with someone. It was Halloween all over again. I would strike up conversations with strangers in lift lines. And Alice would suddenly become quite exuberant as she walked in some public place on my arm.

T
he Winter was a success for Jonathan Crosby as well. Before the end of October I had accumulated $100,000 in his account, and by the end of the year I had amassed more than a quarter of a million. I was showing a rate of return that would, if maintained, rapidly render me rich beyond all imagining. Of course, in practice, you cannot go on doubling your money every month for very long without attracting all sorts of attention, and attracting attention was the one thing that I absolutely could not afford to do, so as the amounts involved grew larger, I began to make less obtrusive investments, avoiding especially the acquisitions and buyouts in which the
SEC
is always eagerly looking for signs of insider trading. As a result, I found myself more and more making the sorts of investments I had made in my former life, only with much more accurate and timely information now. This change in investment strategy should have slowed down my rate of success dramatically, even in the kind of buoyant, rising market we had then. But somehow, whenever I bought something, it would move right away, and although I was no longer enjoying enormous windfalls, one solid success followed another with uncanny reliability.

By the beginning of March my account was worth over $500,000. Although an account that size is nothing out of the ordinary as brokerage accounts go, I still should not have let even that amount of money accumulate in one place. It was an entirely unnecessary piece of carelessness. But my life with Alice had come to seem so secure. And furthermore, I had such confidence in Willy’s inability to notice anything unusual about my performance. Really, he had never seemed to notice much of anything at all. But I underestimated him.

If I had been paying attention I would have seen that Willy’s attitude toward me had gradually changed: at some point he had started asking me questions rather than trying to sell me his ideas. Then, one afternoon, glancing through a glossy magazine that had appeared in Alice’s mail –
GOTHAM
,
The Monthly Chronicle of Upper East Side Living
– I saw a picture of someone who looked vaguely familiar, a bland looking man in his thirties, wearing a club tie. The caption identified him as “hot young superbroker, Willis Winslow — a rising star on Wall Street.”

I was astounded. Reading the article, I found that Winslow was “one of the creative new breed of young brokers.” In today’s more competitive financial markets, I learned, a broker had to be able to do more than take orders: he had to be someone who could understand market forces and even shape them. This was disturbing news: it is all right with me if stockbrokers want to try their hand at understanding something — although they might start with something easier than market forces — but I am frankly shocked at the thought of their trying to “shape” anything whatever. Some examples of Winslow’s wisdom were quoted. “There are no shortcuts in this business. The only way to find value is to put in long, painstaking hours looking for it. You can’t just be swept along with the crowd. Now, I put a lot of my customers in Hutchison Chemicals. To most people it looked like a pretty unglamorous, uninteresting situation. But if you did your homework you knew that besides its basic business of producing chemical feedstocks, it had one of the most creative research laboratories in the industry. Now, that was a stock that we started buying at twelve and watched go over thirty…”

Hutchison was something I had come upon, and it had indeed been selling at twelve at the time, although I remembered with annoyance that most of my original order had been executed at thirteen. I had learned that someone at Hutchison had discovered some sugar substitute that, unlike other sugar substitutes, would purportedly not break down when raised to temperatures high enough actually to cook food. I doubted that the stuff would ever be manufactured: there would be years of force-feeding rats with it until they developed cancer or died of despair. But I correctly concluded that the thing was plausible enough to run up the stock for a while in this kind of market. Now I wondered how far and how quickly my trading orders were propagating.

I called Willy up immediately.

“Jonathan, hello,” he said enthusiastically. “How are you? Can you hang on just a second. I have two calls on hold, and I just want to get rid of them… Hello, Jonathan? Sorry. I’m really busy here. What can I do for you? I see that your
ACL
has had a nice move. Do you think it’s got anything more in it?”

“Willy, I want you to sell everything, and—”

“Sell all the ACL?”

“Not just the
ACL
. I want you to sell everything.”

“Everything?”

“That’s right. I’ve been talking to some friends of my father’s and they told me I should be in cash right away. So I think you should sell everything today. Put a hundred thousand dollars into a tax-exempt money market fund and send me a check for the rest at Bernie Schleifer’s office.”

“Jeez, Jonathan, your friends think this market is about to go over the cliff? I guess they’ve called some things pretty well in the past…” Willy sounded concerned.

“Well, Uncle David said, ‘It could be tomorrow, it could be next year, but you’d better be a hundred percent in cash.’”

I figured this might be the kindest thing I could do for Willy’s other clients, who would otherwise now be entirely at the mercy of his analytical skills. Long term, however, they were probably doomed anyway.

I immediately had Bernie open cash management accounts for me with two other brokers. In the future I would be careful to keep everything broken up into discreet pieces that no one would notice.

It was living with Alice that had made me so confident and careless. I reminded myself that spring was almost here, and I realized that I had been dreading its arrival. But I had no choice: I would have to leave Alice as soon as the weather turned warm. I had to keep moving.

But soon March was gone and the season had changed, and yet somehow I had not moved out. It would actually be safer, I told myself, to go on as I was until I had established a secure place of my own to live in. Really, living with Alice was the prudent course of action for the time being, and I could put off thinking about leaving for a few more months.