On the Floor (3 page)

‘I'm guessing Felix is thirty-something. Jacked in a Cambridge PhD and shipped out to Hong Kong years ago. No wife, no kids. Speaks Cantonese like a native. No one knows where the money comes from but the talk is it could be the Chinese government.'

‘And you're the only one who can get past the gatekeeper. So what's your secret, Geri?'

‘Kant.'

The Grope's mouth flopped open.

‘No, K
a
nt! As in Emmanuel. Felix has a thing for philosophy.'

‘Philosophy, huh?' the Grope narrows his eyes. ‘What else?'

‘He likes to watch me eat weird Chinese food. Lizard skin, rabbit tendons, that sort of thing.'

Naturally the Grope suspects I am fucking Felix, or at the very least providing some sort of sordid sexual service and therefore putting Steiner's order flow in jeopardy since I could be cast aside at any moment in favour of some sexual athlete. So every once in a while he hauls me off the trading floor and into his glass office to shoot the breeze, but I know he is really covertly checking me over for signs of wear and tear. Only last Wednesday he nabbed me just as I was leaving for Heathrow to bag Felix's order for the China Fire block and he tried to act all casual by taking out his golf club. ‘You never played?' he asked, positioning his Eezee Putt against the glass wall. ‘I used to spend all summer down the country club when I was a kid.' But I told him that golf wasn't such a big thing for convent schoolgirls in Dublin. The Grope took his time lining up, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, wiggling his hips. When he flunked the first shot, he held the club aloft to squint down the shaft as if his error might reveal a problem in the alignment. ‘PING,' he said admiringly, ‘you know the story, Geri?' and I didn't bother saying I'd heard it many times before. ‘Karsten Salheim,' he continued, ‘a lowly mechanical engineer at General Motors designed and made the world's best putter at his home in Riverroad, California. Just like Microsoft, it all started in a garage.' He leaned dreamily on the club and stared at his glass cabinet where a Stars 'n' Stripes stands guard
over the trophies and deal tombstones, lending the display a faintly funereal air and I imagined the Grope's embalmed body laid out among his spoils like a relic of the American Dream, preserved in this airless shrine to watch over the trading floor forever.

‘Never too late to start,' he offered me the Ping with an encouraging grin. ‘And it sure is a helluva day out with clients.'

I shook my head. ‘Felix hates sport. He thinks it's the pursuit of primitives,' and this remark had the desired effect because the Grope kicked the Eezee Putt to one side, tucked the little furry glove over his club and stashed it back by the coat stand.

‘I don't know what you're doing with Felix Mann, Geri,' he said, ‘and I don't want to know. Just keep it up and don't fuck it up.'

It is six years and a lifetime ago since I first heard Felix Mann's name and that was the same day the Grope threatened to rip out his fucking asshole. I'd been at Steiner's for a few months and was with my old boss, Ed Karetsky, who liked to end an evening's tequila slamming by climbing up on a bar stool to deliver Ivan Boesky's famous speech to the Berkeley class of '83:
Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself
. Ed had let me tag along to his meeting in the observer role of deaf and dumb graduate trainee, not realizing that by the end of that year he'd be breeding pugs in Illinois and – in an entirely unrelated but coincidental event – Boesky and the other 1980s corporate raiders would be behind bars.

As soon as we walked into the Grope's office, Ed clicked his fingers to indicate the wall space where I could disappear. He slung his leg across a corner of the conference table, oblivious to the stink of trouble in the air, the white lips of the two hotshots from Capital Markets at the table, the back of the Grope's head framed in the window like a warning sign. Ed stretched the elastic of his business school smile and just kept on swimming out to sea.
Hey, guys, howya doing?
Like they really had
nothing better to do in the middle of a 200 million dollar stock placing for Cargo International than sit there and shoot the breeze, when upstairs Steiner's client – the Cargo CEO – had popped in for an update on the deal only to find himself sitting in front of the screen watching his stock spiral down 15%.

All because Felix Mann had decided to sell the shit out of Cargo.

The Grope punctured the airspace in front of Ed with a sharp and steady finger.
Karetksy. What The Fuck Is Going ON?
Ed froze, forgot to paddle and his mouth filled with water, an Adam's apple swallow jerked his tie knot upwards and he said,
Word on the street says Felix is taking a run at Cargo. That he's short selling the stock all the way down. Though we can't be sure it's him
. The Grope thumped his fist into the back of the chair.
It's got Felix Mann's butt-fucking footprint all over it. So YOU need to talk to him
. Ed chewed his cheek and muttered
Thing is he…uh … still won't take our call
. He looked down at the familiar landscape of his shoes and the Grope stared at his bowed head as if from a great height, although it was really only a couple of inches.
This Cargo deal is sinking like a stone so I don't give a shit what you do, Karetsky, you STOP this guy
. I timed Ed's silence. After seven long seconds he nodded and mumbled
Yes
, which was all you really can say in a room where the knives are out. But the truth was Felix could sell Cargo's stock right down to zero if he wanted and there was absolutely nothing Ed could do to stop him. In fact, there was nothing anyone could do to stop Felix doing anything because no one at Steiner's had a relationship with him back then. And although this was ultimately the Grope's failure since he was Head of Trading and Sales, he needed to pass that efficiently down the food chain.

A sudden sunburst blazed through the window and the Grope flexed his shoulders, his white shirt flared yellow, like the rippling hide of a slow-motion lion tearing into a felled antelope. The two guys from Capital Markets tensed like a pair of craning coyotes and the Grope said the thing about Felix's asshole and I thought: well that's fine, but how can you rip out someone's asshole if you can't even get them to return your calls?

I half-ran along the corridor to keep up with Ed, scrambling for some upbeat remarks, trying to make him forget I'd witnessed his public humiliation, but it was too late, I had lost his good will. He stopped dead in the centre of the corridor, leaned in so close I could smell his mouthwashed breath.
Go play with the traffic, Geri
, he snarled,
I've got some real work to do
and he slammed through the double doors, leaving me to reflect on an important lesson that I was lucky to learn so early on: shit travels downhill, don't you ever forget it.

Cargo's stock fell 21% that day and the company was forced to call off the deal. Two months later, irregularities were discovered in their financial accounts, the CEO resigned on the back of the announcement and the whole embarrassing mess snowballed into a very public media witch-hunt, with Steiner's name written all over it. Felix had made an estimated eight million bucks buying back his stock and emerged from the rubble making a lot of smart guys look very stupid indeed. In the dash for cover and the ensuing whitewash, there was a rash of internal changes in the chain of command at Steiner's. A handful of analysts and bankers were quietly scalped for falling asleep at the wheel. Ed was sacked for running a sales force that had failed to develop a relationship with one of the most important clients outside of the US. When they came for him he said
I guess I should take my jacket, huh
, in a final attempt at gallows humour.
Watch your back, kiddo
he said to me but I just nodded. The rest of the desk buried their heads in the phones, shrinking from the noxious odour of failure as if it might be contagious. The security guard stood waiting by the exit like the Grim Reaper and Ed slapped him on the shoulder and turned to face down the trading floor.
I love you all, you fuckers
he bellowed but no one said a word and Ed walked out the double doors and was swallowed by the great sea, as if he had never been.

There but for the grace of God, etcetera
, said Al.
God's got nothing to do with it
, Rob muttered.
Karetsky was always a tosser
.

The general consensus at Steiner's is that the Cargo fall-out cost the Grope about two career years. It was his second stumble on the power
trip, the first was when his classmate James ‘Moose' Hanson Jr made it onto the Operating Committee in '83 and the Grope didn't. So it's no surprise that the Cargo experience has left him with an allergic reaction to Felix Mann, like he doesn't feel safe in the jungle knowing that Felix could be out there sunning himself on a rock, waiting for the Grope to come ambling across his path with a nice big juicy deal between his teeth. But I actually think that what really bugs the Grope more than anything, maybe even more than losing out to the Moose, is the fact that that the biggest swinging dick in the investor community just ignores him, just refuses to take his calls. Even though he knows that Felix does this to everyone, the Grope can't bear the snub. Because he can't be entirely sure that it's not personal, that Felix isn't still smirking up his sleeve.

Years later, when I felt we'd covered enough ground, I asked Felix how he'd known about Cargo's slimy dealings. I was sitting opposite him on a rickety chair in some hole-in-the-wall Kowloon restaurant, battling with the beginnings of a predictable nausea. Felix leaned over the mound of tepid food that crowded the table between us and said:
The purpose of being a selective listener is to hear more clearly. To listen to the right signal, to eliminate the background noise
.

The streetlights cut out and flicker as I accelerate into the dark sweep of Lower Thames Street. Past the blackened stone of St Magnus the Martyr marooned in a cluster of office blocks, Christmas lights still bobbing gently on the leafless branches of the churchyard tree and I wonder what gruesome death Magnus suffered. If it was worse than Peter's upside-down crucifixion, Catherine's wheel or Sebastian slowly bleeding to death gazing wistfully up at the heavens, the angels' chorus bellowing in his ears as he reached that zone where pain is nullified by sheer conviction, transfixed by a dazzling vision of God's open arms and the promise of luxuriant expiry in His holy embrace.

I round Tower Hill and head up Minories. Pass a lone cab and a
passenger head bent over an open
FT
, weakly illuminated by the backseat bulb. It is 06:31, not yet the half-light and I am doing record time, may even be first in, apart of course from Rob, who cannot be beaten. I crawl past his 911 at the front of the underground Porsche pack, then hang a sudden wrench on the wheel just to hear the tyres squeal. Twenty-two minutes exactly to the lift, which notches down my five-week running average to 24.2. I press 15 and the talking doll voice cuts through the silence. Of course it's entirely possible that Felix has already put his demand to the Grope. Perhaps the small matter of my consent to relocation has been overruled and I'll be met by a one-way ticket to Hong Kong as soon as I hit my desk. Or maybe the Grope has been suddenly recalled to New York for an urgent strategy session on how to get Steiner's through a war and still make a profit. Maybe all those marathons have finally caught up with him and he has keeled over with a massive coronary, is at this very moment being rushed to the Chelsea and Westminster, his wife sobbing into a monogrammed handkerchief,
I told him he should take it easy but he's always been a very stubborn man
. His left hand scrabbles weakly at his face and the paramedic lifts the fogged-up oxygen mask from his mouth. His wife leans closer, straining to catch the last words of a dying man barely audible above the siren and the engine roar and the Grope jerks his head a full inch off the trolley, expiring with a blue-lipped rasp:
Send the bitch to Hong Kong!

THE LIFT DOORS GLIDE APART
, I step out onto 15 and already I can feel the market pulse. On busy days you can hear the roar of the trading floor right here, a blurred wall of sound that hits you like a stun gun. Time decelerates to slow motion and I cover the twenty paces to the double doors like a drifting astronaut. There are guys who bless themselves on this spot each morning and once I saw Rob kneel down to kiss the carpet. For there is no place in the world quite like this and I pause for a moment at the gateway to heaven and hell, listening to the call of the wild, the stadium pre-match rumble, the sound of money being kicked around.

There are four parallel rows of screen-laden docking stations with a walkway loosely dividing Cash from Derivatives, thirty battery-hen slots in each row. A bank of wall-mounted clocks tells the time in every place that matters and right now we are between worlds: the Asian markets are closing, New York is fast asleep and Europe is waking up for business as risk is passed like a baton from one continent to the other in this twenty-four-hour relay. High up on the overhead TVs a muted Stealth bomber bisects one screen and, on another, a troupe of soldiers in berets and Ray-Bans trudge across a sandy plain. To my right the
ticker tape runs last night's closing stock prices above US Equities, a graveyard this time of day. The Grope's glass office spans a half-width of the floor and, suspended from a coat hook, is the only visible sign that he is in: the green umbrella that doubles as a golf club in his rare frivolous moments.

In the dead centre of the floor Joe Palmer sits tipped back in his swivel with his feet up on the desk, studying the football pages of the
Sun
. Behind him on the Japanese warrant desk, fifteen traders maintain an uneasy silence while studying his body language for some clue to the day ahead. Twenty-eight years old and five foot six in his brogues, Joe has a tight, wiry body and the cadaverous complexion of the shift worker, his skin a dirty grey, his eyes always red-rimmed as if he is battling an allergy. He wears his trademark blue shirt and a West Ham tie in a lurid claret and blue. His nose is a little misaligned, the legacy of a punch up on the Metals Exchange when he was a new boy. This is apparently not noticeable when you look at him full face, which I have never had the opportunity to do, because Joe does not speak to anyone who is not involved in the Jap warrant business and Felix gives all his Jap orders to Nomura since they bring in all the hot new deals.