“It’s the best thing.” I knew what he meant. A good friend, he sensed something amiss. “Trust me.”
“Something wrong?”
“It shows?”
“Yeah.”
“The
New York Post
just called. They’re researching a feature on Charlie Kelemen.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“Nothing. I just hit the transfer button to our PR department.”
“Good answer,” he said. “But you knew it was only a matter of time before the press called.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Have you spoken with the police yet?” Halek continued.
“A detective named Michael Fitzsimmons called Wednesday. I left a message for him late last night.”
“Glad to see your sense of urgency,” Halek chided playfully.
“NYPD.” I paused. “One-hundred-million-dollar guy.” I paused. “You make the call.” It was hardly a close play at second. There had been plenty of time to phone Fitzsimmons. The reality: After the funeral I was in no shape to handle a discussion about Charlie with anyone.
“I bet NYPD has a mile-long list of questions for you.”
“What’s to tell? Charlie was a stand-up guy. Whoever tied the cart to his leg was a sick fuck.”
“You may know that sick fuck.”
“I doubt it. His friends loved him.”
“Somebody didn’t.”
“Tell me what you think about the market,” I said, flipping into work mode, avoiding Cliff’s rock-solid logic.
“Oil prices are spooking the hedge funds,” he replied. “The hedgies are convinced the Dow will correct ten percent, and they’re asking my desk to lever the short trades.”
By “lever,” Halek meant “magnify.” The D-boys could invent products that lost 20 percent of their market values if the markets fell 10 percent. The shorts would be thrilled because they made money in collapsing markets.
“Good info, Cliff.” His insights always made me better on the phone. “My guys will be lining up for bonds.”
“Ah, security.”
There is no such thing as the “securities industry.” The term is oxymoronic, emphasis on “moronic.” There is only pace, the rush for money and the frenzy of combatants, the distractions from memories eighteen months old.
Wall Street is all about angst. My contemporaries fear everything. We fear the loss of clients. It happens all too often. We fear that others have better information. Somebody wants to sell what we want to buy. We fear the Securities and Exchange Commission and the other regulators who govern us. We fear risk. But we fear running in the middle of the pack even more. So we take risks. We fear our wagers will look stupid and talking heads will expose our follies within seconds. Wall Street may be about “swag,” the best word I have ever heard for money. It may be about ego and hormones and the glory of betting big and being right. But it is fear that makes us who we are. I worry about my clients and pray they never succumb to our schizoid mind-set.
Fear is one thing. Greed is another. Everybody has an agenda. There are no exceptions.
Patty Gershon stopped by my desk around ten A.M. When she used my first name, I knew something was up.
“Grove,” she said, “I came to apologize.”
Chloe whipped around from her terminal to face us. Annie, her blue-green eyes wide from disbelief, studied Patty suspiciously.
“For what?” I asked.
“Those bait jokes. I’m such an ass. Charlie Kelemen was your friend.”
“How’d you hear?”
“Kurtz told me. Grove, I’m really sorry.”
“Forget it, Patty. No harm, no foul.”
“Always the Southern gentleman,” she said. We both smiled. Cheer replaced remorse in her brown eyes, and our truce was complete.
“Lady Goldfish” may be too harsh.
“What do you like in these markets?” Patty asked, changing the topic.
“Bonds.”
“Besides bonds.”
“BRICs,” I replied, using Wall Street’s acronym for the fast-growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China.
“I like Jack Oil,” she countered, eager to weigh in with her opinion. The company sold high-tech drill bits to oil producers like Exxon and traded under the ticker symbol “JACK.”
Taking the bait, I said, “It’s a good company.”
Setting the hook, she replied, “And I heard you cover Jumping JJ.”
Josef Jaworski, the CEO of Jack Oil, was my biggest client. He became “Jumping JJ” during his company’s initial public offering. When one of Fidelity’s market mavens nodded off during a road show presentation, Jaworski jumped up on the conference table and danced an Irish jig to rouse the somnolent investor. The nickname Jumping JJ soon spread through money management circles.
JJ’s offering worked beyond everyone’s wildest expectations, including his own. He had already diversified half his position in Jack and still owned 2.3 million shares worth $190 million at $83 per share. Not bad for an emigrant from Poland.
“Who told you Jaworski is a client?” I immediately suspected Kurtz, our boss, the department’s “Monthly Nut.”
“JJ did.”
I almost coughed up my liver.
“We met at a party last weekend,” Patty explained. She leaned in close, too close, close enough to share buttonholes, close enough to flash her plastic surgeon’s handiwork. “We hit it off.”
“How is JJ?” I asked, trying to sound calm but feeling my heart pump faster.
“I bet I can help you with him.” There it was, the beginning of a fight. Lady Goldfish was angling to share the economics on my biggest client.
“We have a good working relationship,” I said, trying to defuse her interest, “but let me think about it.” It was important that she save face. There were no rewards for fighting with Patty.
“You know where to find me, O’Rourke,” she called out breezily on her way back to Estrogen Alley.
When Patty was out of earshot, I called JJ to assess the damage. Jumping
JJ and I enjoyed an excellent rapport. But we disagreed on some basic investment strategies, like the need for safety in his portfolio. He found bond discussions worse than scraping dead flies off flypaper. It was possible that Patty had sabotaged my market advice. It was also possible I needed another axiom.
Four: Top producers are paranoid. Otherwise, we never become top producers.
“Hello,” Jumping JJ answered on the first ring. That one word signaled something was wrong. JJ never picked up the phone. Ginger, his ace assistant, screened all calls. And Jaworski’s inflection usually resonated with power, the vocal mix of sarcasm and remnants from a lingering Polish accent. Think Jack Nicholson from Warsaw.
Not today. That “hello” sounded limp. Now was no time to probe about Patty.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Jestem udupiony,”
he replied.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s Polish for ‘I’m fucked.’ ”
“That’s no good.”
“You know Ginger, right?”
“Of course. How could I forget?” His personal assistant was a model of corporate productivity. She also distracted every male within fifteen feet. JJ once convened a male-only meeting on her behalf. He instructed the men of his office to stop ogling her
cycki
, which was Polish for “boobs.”
“Ginger resigned yesterday,” he said.
“You’re kidding.” I wondered how JJ could function without her. “What happened?”
“Over the weekend we put in a new phone system.”
Where’s this going?
“Okay?” I said aloud.
“The phone mail burped.”
“It what?”
“It burped. Ginger was having an affair with a married guy in our office,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“On Wednesday night the guy left a fifteen-minute voice mail for her. Apparently, they had just broken up. He asked Ginger to take him back.”
“I still don’t understand how you know this.”
“Our cutting-edge phone system forwarded his message into everyone’s voice mail.”
“Oh shit!” I exclaimed. “Everyone heard it?”
“All eight hundred and thirty-seven of us. All our offices around the world.”
“What did he say?” However aghast, I could not help but indulge my prurient curiosity.
“The guy dictated a sequel to the
Kama Sutra,
” JJ replied, the Polish accent reverberating through his words. “ ‘Ginger, I’ll get on my knees and do this. Ginger, I’ll spank you and do that. Ginger, I’ll teach you stuff they haven’t figured out in Hollywood.’ And so on.”
“Fifteen minutes is a long time to talk dirty into an answering machine.” I never really understood the whole phone sex thing.
“It wasn’t all sex. He sniveled, too.”
“Sniveled?”
“ ‘Please take me back,’ ” JJ mocked the man with a whiney, Polish-accented voice, or Eastern-bloc Jack Nicholson. “ ‘I’ll leave my wife for you.’ ”
“Asshole.”
“You’re telling me. My inclination is to fire him if he doesn’t quit.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“Lawyers.”
“Gotcha.”
“Hey, listen,” JJ started, switching subjects, “I can’t talk about my shares right now.” I had been urging him to sell some Jack, maybe even hedge, anything to get safe. He had no idea that Patty Gershon, not derivative trades, had prompted my call.
“Whenever you’re ready, JJ.” There was no point in discussing Patty. JJ’s abrupt change of topic telegraphed his need to end the call.
As soon as I hung up, Annie said, “Sam Kelemen’s here to see you.”
“Is she all right?” I asked, alarmed.
“She’s fine.” Annie nodded. “But hurry up. She needs you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Trust me. It’s a girl thing.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Companies start their sales pitches in reception areas. We have a competitor headquartered on West Fifty-seventh Street whose lobby views are stunning: the emerald foliage of Central Park from sixty stories high, the refined elegance of Manhattan’s eclectic architecture, and the structural majesty of the George Washington Bridge off in the distance. The company is telling investors,
We’re prosperous and rock solid. Work with us and you will be, too
. I would sign papers just to look out their windows. That reaction is precisely what they want.
Inside PCS we lack a rarefied view of New York City. Only four floors above Rockefeller Plaza, we see the grotty instead of the grand. Our windows overlook peripatetic swarms, perhaps a few media executives from NBC, but mostly map-toting tourists who push through the congested streets and haggle with choleric sidewalk vendors over fake Louis Vuitton handbags. We see shoppers who struggle with the weight of their booty, dazed as much by their reentry into the crowds as by the disturbing realization of what they spent at Saks and the other self-indulgent stores encircling us. Even from our perch, it is clear that crowds avoid the homeless as though the perfume of urine and living on the streets is somehow
contagious. We see society’s success coexisting uneasily with its failure, the mixed results hardly the foundation for a responsible corporate message.
But make no mistake. We start selling immediately. Clients realize SKC is different from the moment they arrive. Our lobby, neutral walls appointed with splashy paintings by emerging masters, has no seating. There are no chairs or couches to give the dogs a break. The reason is simple. Our clients do not wait. We greet them when they arrive.
Our corporate message:
We’re here for you
.
I hustled into the reception area and found Sam. She sagged. Her head drooped. Her arms hung listlessly. Bent, dispirited, she looked defeated. Even those marvelous Siberian-husky eyes appeared gray and unremarkable. Sam did not speak. Nor did she did make eye contact.
She seemed at odds with the orientation of our reception area, her background colors misplaced in the foreground. Sam wore the urban, neo-Gothic garb of a freshly minted widow: black jeans, black ribbed top, no earrings or necklaces from her cache of bangles, and the ultimate heresy for a kid from Boston, black Yankees cap pulled low. Behind her, the paintings danced in a conga line of dazzling colors against the PCS walls. It should have been the other way around, the bright colors out in front.
Charlie would have gagged at Sam’s ebony monotones, and frankly, her appearance distressed me as well. For in Sam I found my reflection from eighteen months ago—despair, melancholy, a face without hope. That night in New Haven began my new life, the one I now hated. A voice inside my head, the homunculus from hell, punished me every day with one unanswerable question:
Where were you when it counted?
Eighteen months later I still cursed the truckers that menaced I-95. And myself. If only I had caught the earlier flight from Miami to LaGuardia. If only I had said no to that extra martini with my client. If only I had been the one driving to our beach house in Rhode Island.
Sam and I shared too much death: her husband, my friend; my wife, her friend; my daughter, her goddaughter. During our undergraduate days of vodka and academic enlightenment, we had never anticipated how
sharks and truckers would one day entwine our lives in shrouds of darkness. Perhaps through osmosis, Sam’s depression suddenly welled up inside me.
Our lingering clasp, the clutch of body against body, invited curious stares from visitors round the reception area. Earlier that week Annie and I had drawn similar stares from Lady Goldfish and her unholy spawn in Estrogen Alley. There was more to be gained from holding a woman, it seemed to me, than the uneasy sensation of being on exhibit.
