Two degrees from Harvard made no difference. I had sold out and become a word whore. A foul, fucking, four-lettered lexicon marked me as a wizened veteran of the capital markets. Wall Street was one of the few places on earth where a severe case of Tourette’s syndrome might go unnoticed. “Dickhead” and “asshole” were the favored terms of endearment in every shop, from Goldman to Merrill to SKC.
Sitting at my desk, waiting for domestic markets to open, I doubted my resolve to spar with Radio Ray. My computer snoozed in silence, still no sign of the craggy stock charts and blinking tickers that would flare up when trading began. I called Sam. And of course, the answering machine picked up.
Message eight or nine: “I’m worried, Sam. If you don’t call, I’ll swing by your place and bang on the front door until you answer.” I immediately regretted the words. They sounded insensitive and way too combative.
The recovering Catholic in me craved to confess. The message I never left:
Sam, the aquarium was my idea. I’m sorry
.
I called Cliff Halek next, my closest friend at the firm and the head of Derivatives. Medium height, rounding, and balding, Cliff was brilliant. Summa cum laude from Princeton. Weekend computer geek. He had a knack for reading the markets. Cliff could always tell when arbitrageurs or hedge funds were building positions. SKC recognized his genius. Halek made Managing Director at age thirty, a first in our firm.
“Cliff,” he answered on the first ring, his raspy voice the casualty of a career on the phone. His colleagues in Derivatives called him “the hoarse whisperer,” a tribute to the guttural tones.
Brevity was a time-honored tradition on Wall Street. A one-name greeting spoke volumes. It said in effect,
I’m really fucking busy. So quit screwing around and get to the point. Time is money, and I’m not here for my health or your small talk. Now, what do you have?
“It’s Grove.”
“Oh shit, I’ve been meaning to call. That guy on the news was your buddy. Right?”
“Yeah, Charlie Kelemen.”
“I’m sorry. Did he have family?”
“No kids. His wife has been a friend since college.”
Cliff recognized grief in my voice. “Grove, go home and take care of yourself. Or go see Kelemen’s wife and take care of her.”
“I can’t reach her. All I get is the answering machine.”
“Then give her some space. The press may be hounding her.”
“But—”
“But nothing. I need to fly. Sorry. Dinner tonight at our house. Lacey and I will see you around seven-thirty.” That meant no earlier than 8:15. “Foster misses you. We won’t take no for an answer.” He spoke with a rattat-tat cadence, and then he was gone.
Dial tone. There was no chance to argue. Cliff hung up without saying “good-bye” or “get fucked.” I took no offense. That was Wall Street. Testosterphone, our clipped conversations cut short by urgency and the next dollar, was acceptable etiquette. Extra words cost money.
Lacey was Cliff’s wife, charming and five months pregnant with number one. Foster, their Australian terrier named for the beer, was a legend on Wall Street. Several years ago, Cliff rigged up a web camera to keep tabs on their pooch. Whenever the phone rang, Foster would trot into the bedroom and lick the phone, the camera, and most everything in sight. The fish-eye lens made Foster look like forty-five pounds of wet doggy tongue.
Unfortunately, Cliff shut down “Foster Cam” several years ago. Word of the site had spread. And for a while, traders from every shop on Wall Street were conference-calling Cliff’s home. They usually bet how many rings it would take Foster to appear on camera. It all ended when an equity guy from Goldman Sachs spied the Haleks’ maid reading
Cosmopolitan
on their bed. Cliff decided enough was enough.
Noon and no word from Sam.
I waited all through lunch. It was the usual circus. Couriers from kitchens across Manhattan arrived in the lobby. Our assistants met them downstairs and returned with almost every food under the sun: ten-topping pizzas, hamburgers with blue cheese and sautéed onions, curly fries that had grown flaccid from the trek, five-alarm jalapeño burritos, Tabasco buffalo wings,
General Tso’s chicken swimming in Madame Chang’s sesame sauce, flat dogs with cheese grits, and spicy garlic meatball subs. No one ordered sushi. It had to be greasy. It had to be caloric.
One-fifteen and still no word.
By 2:30 P.M., PCS reeked of discarded food. The greasy, garlicky remnants now coagulated in open cardboard boxes piled high in the rubbish. The disparate cuisines, growing rancid by the moment, waged war on everybody’s nostrils. The stench was overwhelming.
I had not touched my salad and wondered whether to pitch it. Annie interrupted the deliberations. “Grove, Alex Romanov is on your second line.”
Why is he calling?
Romanov was not a client. We saw each other at Charlie’s parties from time to time but shared nothing in common other than the markets. When they were closed, I bicycled. He sparred in an amateur boxing league. Or he hang-glided. Or he raced his Porsche at a track on Long Island. Anything for a rush. But “the next Warren Buffett,” a title he owed to
BusinessWeek,
never phoned.
“Sam asked me to call, Grover.”
“Is she okay?”
“She’s pretty torn up,” Romanov replied, his voice soft but powerful nevertheless. “She’s with her parents. And yes, she’s okay, Grover.”
“I’m still sick about what happened.”
“We all are, Grover.”
It bugged me when people used my full name, especially three times in as many breaths. Condescending. Now was hardly the time, though, to reprimand the next Warren Buffett. “I’ve been trying to reach Sam since Saturday.”
“She told me. That’s why I’m calling. Services start at St. Joseph’s on Wednesday at ten o’clock. Gotta hop.”
“I’ll be there,” I answered to dial tone. For all my petty thoughts about “Grover” three times over, I was glad Romanov had called. Sam was okay.
At 3:35 P.M. I called it a day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had dropped steadily since the open. It was down 87 points, primarily because one of the pharmaceutical companies had pulled a promising drug from development. My portfolios, laden with medical stocks, had suffered. But I was
oblivious. My head was not in the game, the death image of Charlie still clear in my mind.
On the way out I heard Patty hammering a client: “Bobbie, listen to me. IBM. Did you hear that name? IBM is on sale. On sale, Bobbie, on sale.” She pounded her fist on the desk and then waved the same hand wildly. “You won’t find bargains like this in Filene’s Basement.”
Too pushy,
I thought.
Not my style
.
Ever vigilant, Patty spied me leaving prior to the market close and made a big show of checking the time. She covered the mouthpiece of her receiver and shouted for all PCS to hear, “Thanks for coming in, O’Rourke.”
What’s she want?
Patty’s attention made me suspicious. We never spoke. Like me, she was a top producer. Like me, she was one of the department’s biggest moneymakers—though not the biggest. I still had her. It probably bugged the shit out of her.
No matter. We focused on business and avoided distractions, Gershon’s intensity the stuff of legends throughout PCS. She was forever telling the younger stockbrokers, “Think golf. This business is not a team sport.” But Patty had initiated a conversation in the morning. Now she was breaking from a client to speak again. Top producers don’t do that.
I smiled, gave Lady Goldfish a thumbs-up, and headed for the elevators.
Somewhere over the din, the last thing I heard that afternoon was Casper. He was hard at work again.
Plink. Plink. Plink.
CHAPTER SIX
On Wednesday Monsignor Byrd presided over services, first at St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village and later at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. At times I had found Charlie a touch ungodly around his parish priest. He dubbed him “the Bird,” and it seemed to me a one-fingered salute was no way to describe the good father. But that was Charlie.
Monsignor Byrd overlooked these transgressions. “Charlie Kelemen gave more than he got,” he told the red-eyed congregation inside St. Joseph’s hallowed halls. His praise gushed nonstop, the eulogy flowing like a dime novel from Horatio Alger’s pen.
There was good reason. Charlie overcame every kind of adversity. When he was three, his father had abandoned the family for a floozy named “Jackpot Jane.” Charlie’s mother died a few years later, leaving him in the care of an ancient aunt. The skinny little boy, curly brown hair and big white teeth, somehow scraped together enough money to attend Providence College. He graduated with honors.
Shortly after returning his mortarboard and gown, Charlie joined Barclays Bank. He was already a portly young man. Good news: He met Sam in the training program. Bad news: Banking proved way too harrumph
harrumph. That was when Charlie founded the Kelemen Group, a money management firm that invested in hedge funds.
The business proved perfect. Through his philanthropic largesse, Charlie knew scores of the über-rich. He also possessed uncanny market instincts, a personal LoJack for finding hot hands among hedge funds. As Charlie married wealthy investors with his portfolio of talented money managers, he never looked back. He grew richer and fatter every day.
For a brief moment during the eulogy, Monsignor Byrd sounded more like a ringside announcer than a Catholic priest. “Last Friday we took a gut punch,” he lamented. “Charlie Kelemen taught us one of life’s great lessons.” The good father was referring, of course, to the prosperity that accompanied Charlie’s selfless altruism. My best friend was always charging off to help the sick, the needy, and the emotionally frail.
Or maybe Monsignor Byrd was prepping mourners for the collection plates at Mass. We numbered more than 250 inside the church: bankers, hedgies, and ad executives from Madison Avenue. Alex Romanov, whom Charlie called “the Mad Russian” rather than the next Warren Buffet, joined Annie and me in our pew. Betty Masters and Susan Thorpe came to grieve. So did Crunch, who arrived with hairdressers from each of his three salons. St. Joseph’s offertory plates promised prime pickings for a parish priest on the prowl.
Flashes of wealth were one thing. Fragile souls were another. Among the mourners were divorcées coping with betrayal, widows drifting in their private seas of desperate solitude. One high-strung I-banker, recently emasculated by a pink slip, was fretting whether he would ever see seven figures again. Charlie Kelemen—caretaker, guardian, champion—had rescued scores of emotional strays. His friends, in turn, embraced his largesse and became a personal posse. Dealing with the loss of their leader, they appeared shaken and weak.
Who picked up my friend and threw him over the Giant Ocean Tank’s guardrail?
In a pew off to the right, Lila Priouleau stood well over six feet in black stiletto heels. Perhaps the most notorious woman ever to walk Harvard’s campus, she had been one of three in Sam’s rooming group at Wellesley. More than most, Lila owed Charlie eternal thanks.
The Priouleau family had seldom asked anyone for help. What was the point? In the late 1980s
Forbes
estimated their fortune at $120 million. The family owned vast real estate and media interests. Their car business, whose advertisements always included goofy jingles with “Priouleau prices” in the refrain, made them famous throughout Atlanta.
Lila’s regal bearing confirmed the privilege of her childhood. Unlike many tall women, she carried herself with the perfect posture of a Soviet-era gymnast. Shoulders back, chest thrown forward, she was Nadia Comaneci plus twelve inches.
The salesmen in the family’s Mercedes dealership had noted Lila’s confident curves, the graceful lines. They referred to her jutting breasts as “hood ornaments.” But never to her face. She would have slapped their shit.
There was a time when Lila lost that magnificent posture. She bent under a torrent of withering abuse from Hurley, husband and ex–football star from Yale. At first, the beatings were verbal. Later, they became physical. No one noticed the warning signs from Atlanta’s perfect couple: quick tempers, raised voices, and innuendo that things in the bedroom sucked. No one spotted the ugly purple welts spreading under the cover of Lila’s blouses.
No one but Charlie. During a business trip to Atlanta, he smelled trouble and confronted Lila in private. Her bruises made him wince. He informed Cash, Lila’s father, and then used his considerable powers of persuasion to prevent the Southern gentleman from killing his son-in-law.
Charlie also referred Cash to a top-notch gumshoe from Baltimore. The detective caught Hurley red-handed with another woman. Graphic photos made the divorce settlement a one-sided affair. Charlie, intuitive and coldly calculating, probably saved the Priouleau family millions.
“Come to New York,” Charlie soothed Lila. “The change will do you good.”
He was right. Away from Hurley, away from the verbal and physical abuse, she recuperated. She had almost forgotten how to have fun. But Sam and Charlie made sure that Lila, now a single mother in New York City, had plenty to do. There were innumerable dinners and theater outings, so many new art exhibits to see. Lila regained her dignity and stood straight again.
She also exacted the sweetest revenge. Eighteen months after the divorce became final, Hurley returned to the Yale Bowl, where more than sixty thousand fans had packed the stands for the Dartmouth game. During halftime,
