Turn of the Century (97 page)

In the basement, Fanny and Willi are finishing their large mushroom pizza. The fourth computer, the Virgin, is booted up and online. It will be their observation post.

“I guess it’s like some form of really high-priced push,” Fanny says. “I guess five hundred thousand business guys really need to have, like, every piece of information at their fingertips immediately, all the time.”

“But isn’t Reuters’ news free on the web site?” Willi says. “And even on Yahoo!?”

“Not all of it. Not as fast. And some people would just rather pay for stuff. It’s America.”

Humfried is coming downstairs. He’s got a big smile.

“Yes?” Willibald asks his friend.

“Zero,” Humfried says. “Zero degrees.”

It’s 1:22 Central Standard Time.

“Do it?” Fanny asks.

“Just do it,” Willi tells her. “Assassination time.”

Fanny clicks her mouse once.

“Awesome,” she says in a little voice.

This interlude of temperatures in the sixties and seventies, three days running, gives everything an unreal, antic cast. It’s the twenty-ninth of November, and the windows are open. The regular south-side pigeon, the fat, dirty, yellowish one they call Steinbrenner, is hopping in and out over the sill, a little crazily, pecking at bits of soy-soaked sushi rice from Dianne’s lunch, going momentarily airborne every time he hits wasabi. Frank Melucci is wearing his $ softball T-shirt. Ben figures the disorienting weather will help camouflage any odd behavior on his part. He’s made two dozen trades today, routine stuff, and no one in
the Big Room has any clue. He’s wound up tight as a crackhead about to stick up a 7-Eleven, but that’s normal. He hasn’t taken his eyes off the screens all day, but that’s not abnormal either. They can’t tell he’s paying exceptionally close attention to the news-wire feeds stacked above the rows of green and red stock prices on one of the ILX screens, the three inches of one-liners from Bloomberg and Dow-Jones and First Call and Reuters. A new bead of information distillate drips onto the screen two or three times a minute.

Ordinarily, Ben finds none of it tedious, these dribs of information appearing one by one on his screens. The picture Ben tries to see is vast, the whole sprawling pointillist mural of the world, changing relentlessly and endlessly, sometimes in a shocking splash of dots but mostly speck by speck by speck. His job is to recognize the new image as it’s forming, first, faster, before every dot of color falls into place. Today, though, he’s indifferent to the itsy bits of the picture accreting here and there, the weakening euro, the strengthening ruble, the fiscal paralysis caused by the bloating federal budget surplus, the names being bruited for the new cabinet. Today Ben feels like a civilian, a yokel waiting for one big, dumb, dramatic piece of news. He’s staring.

It’s 2:22 Eastern Standard Time. Microsoft is 131½ bid, 132
¹
⁄
₁₆
asked.

“Look,” Frank Melucci says, “Steinbrenner is actually all the way inside.” Frank stands and creeps toward the pigeon.

Ben glances over at the window for an instant.

“St. Francis the sissy,” says Heffernan, watching Frank Melucci tiptoeing as Billy waits for his Morgan guy to come back on the wire with a price for Yahoo! January 280 calls.

And then Ben looks back at the ILX screen.

“Holy
fuck!
Holy mother fuck. This is huge.”

Before anyone can ask Ben what has happened, before the second “Holy,” his hands are at the Reuters keyboard, tapping—

—and before the second “fuck!” the full story is up on his Reuters screen.

“Billy!” Ben says as he reads, “start selling the Microsoft puts. Blow out of the puts.
Now!
Gates and Ballmer may have croaked. Reuters.”

Heffernan thinks the panic has made his boss misspeak. “Sell puts, Ben? You mean
buy
more puts, right? This is
bad
news.”

“No,
sell
. Sell as many of the fucking puts as you can. The company is going to be okay. Do it, Billy.
Now
.”

Missing. Only
missing?
That makes Ben nervous.

“Billy,” Ben says, looking up from his screen, then back to the green blinking line of Microsoft
BID
and
ASKED
prices, “get me a size-ola market in the Microsoft puts, the Decembers first, as many as we can, all of them, as fast as you can. The programs are going to take it down fast. Go, go,
go
.”

“Nothing on Bloomberg or Dow-Jones,” Berger says, tapping furiously. “AP says Ballmer and Gates are down there, though, diving.”

Ben hears Heffernan saying
“Sold … sold … sold … sold,”
hitting every sane bid, selling the Microsoft puts as quickly as he can to anybody who’ll buy.

Not a month has passed in the last decade that Ben Gould hasn’t thought of himself as John Henry, muscling ahead on instinct to make trades against the giant, rapacious steam engines of the mutual funds that buy and sell giant tranches of stock automatically, blindly, stupidly, at any price they can get, blasting through transactions recklessly, faster and harder than any normal human trader can or would. This is his ultimate John Henry moment, the apotheosis. He will triumph in the next hour, or he will die.

“Screen price is 129½,” Melucci says, “but the screen may not be updating. Might be a bad quote.”

That’s down two points since two twenty-one
P.M
. Eastern. In the last minute, the value of Microsoft Corporation has been reduced by $14 billion.

“Sold … sold … sold,”
Billy Heffernan is saying.

It’s now 2:27
P.M.
, and Microsoft is trading at $109, down 22 points a share, or around $60 billion in market value. Billy Heffernan has sold 19,000 of the 24,200 Microsoft puts Bennett Gould Partners owned seven minutes ago. The profit on the 19,000 is $21 million.

“Ben,” Billy says, “they’ve declared it a fast market.”

A fast market is an official options-exchange designation meaning that prices for a particular company’s puts or calls are moving up or down so quickly that the prices listed on computer screens are unreliable, essentially irrelevant. It’s every trader for himself. There are no trustworthy prices for Microsoft puts, so if Ben wants Heffernan to keep selling, he will have to let him give a market order—that is, an offer to sell with no minimum sales price. Other traders would be able to buy the remainder of Ben Gould’s Microsoft puts for a pittance. “They’ll pick us off,” Heffernan says. “We’ll be fucked.”

“Christ, when are they going to halt trading?” Frank Melucci says. “It’s five minutes already.”

When
are
the men who run NASDAQ, Microsoft’s stock exchange, going to certify the chaos, declare a time-out, and halt trading? This is the great do-or-die timing variable in the Perfect Trade. How many minutes will Ben have to buy and sell? Only a few. Certainly a very few. He needs to start buying Microsoft stock at these prices, and fast, because he knows that the bargains will be fleeting, finished the instant Gates and Ballmer are resurrected.

“Frank!” he says to Melucci, his other trader, his common-stock guy, “let’s cover ourselves, I want to do the common. Billy, double-check me—how much are we short?”

“The stock’s looking 95. You’re still short 500,000,” by which he means that Microsoft is down to $95 a share, and that Heffernan managed to sell three quarters of the puts before the fast-market declaration.

“Frank?” Ben says, waving toward himself as a signal to his trader, but with both hands, like a loading-dock foreman guiding a truck into the bay. “Take Microsoft until I tell you to stop.”

This is the first order Ben has given so far that surprises everyone. This is rare. This is balls-out.

“Any limit at all?” Melucci asks, his voice almost cracking.

“Don’t pay north of 95. Let it run. Buy Microsoft common until I tell you to stop.”

Frank Melucci has already picked up his phone and hit the wire for Sam Zyberk at Morgan Stanley.

“No, I think that’s true, Willi,” Humfried says, already unplugging and pulling the hard drives out of the dirty computers. “Even for a few minutes, this might affect the cost of the stock, you know? Make it go lower.”

Willibald, stroking his goatee as he rereads their first dispatch on the Reuters Moneynet web site, shakes his head.
“No,”
he says to Humfried with absolute Thaelmann Pioneer confidence. “At this stage of advanced capitalism, the business of a giant corporation is not so dependent on the living or dying of individual managers. That’s why they’re corporations.”

“How long’s it been?” Fanny asks.

“Almost two minutes,” Willi says, pointing at the screen of the Virgin machine. “And SCUBA, I swear, should be all big letters, I don’t care what your spellcheck says. It is an acronym.”

“I’m not going to change it now. That’d look lame.” She clicks. “Boom,” she says. “
Adiós
, dudes.”

His Burbank assistants, Cissy and Hector, were surprised to find Saddler already at his desk when they arrived at 8:30. “Hold
all
my calls, Cissy,” he said. “I’ll be working flat out all day on an important online project.” He loved saying that, and really meaning it. His favorite television show in high school was
The Name of the Game
, Gene Barry and Tony Franciosa his favorite stars, and “Hold all my calls” is just the sort of Gene Barry or Tony Franciosa line he’d gone into the media hoping one day to say. He finally feels like a man in charge, a real insider, a top,
top
executive, now that his office is up here on the seventh floor. Even with the internal connecting staircase, it has always rankled him a little to be down on six, below Harold and Timothy. After Timothy’s death, it made a lot of sense for him to move up right next to Harold, and to give his office down on six to Laura Welles.