A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror (6 page)

So, here we go
.

“Yes, Patricia, the infantry. Other worlds sometimes seem to offer a little more sparkle, don’t they? I felt I ought to be operating on a couple of more cylinders, so to speak.”

“And?”

“And I found that Army life and civilian life aren’t really that much different.”

“How many cylinders are you working on right now, Louis?”
Flash
.

“Well, I guess I’m operating on all eight, but I’m not sure that my carburetor is adjusted properly.”

At that, Buck laughed, slapped the thigh, rose quickly and strode away toward the door. He refused to give her butt as much as a glance.

Winifred appeared at the door and spoke quietly: “Pardon me, Miss Buck. Your daughter’s in the waiting room.”

“Ashley!” Patricia roared.

A bulky girl of nineteen or so, a baseball cap crushing her voluminous brown hair, strode in and hugged her mother with one arm as an enormous leather shoulder bag slid down her other arm to the floor.

“Darling, this is Mr. Christopher out of the Paramus office.”

“How do you do?” she asked, reaching with the back of her hand.

“Hi, Ashley. Glad to meet you,” Lou said, gripping it lightly.
Go on. Kiss it. Go on.

“Sorry to interrupt. I’ll only be a second. Mother, I’m on my way to Bleeker and I’m really short. Could you...? Just a few bucks?”

Buck went swiftly to her writing table and her bag. She pulled out a sheaf of twenties and handed it to Ashley without looking at it.

“Thanks, Mom,” the girl said, kissing her mother on the cheek, slinging the bag to her shoulder again. “I’m out of here. Good to meet you, Mr. Christopher.”

“Goodbye, Ashley,” Lou said.

“Winifred, could we have some coffee in here?” Buck requested, following her daughter to the door. Returning, to him: “Where were you stationed, Lou?”
So, now it’s Lou
.

“I was mostly overseas in Germany, Korea, and Panama, and two tours in Vietnam. Is that Chippendale?”

“Are you interested in furniture? I know nothing about it. It’s supposed to go well with that mirror over there. They say it was made around 1760 or so.”

She abruptly stood and strode to the telephone. “Winnie, get me Bud Gilhaus in Institutional, will you?” Then almost immediately she started talking in a low voice as she paced over to the window and looked down on Wall Street leaving Lou adrift in mid-conversation. He sat back and gazed around the office. The woman had not a note, not a scrap of paper lying around.

Across the room, she pressed the phone to her chest and said: “So you were a field soldier?”

And before Lou had a chance to respond, turned her back to him again. She was looking out the window and murmuring into the phone. Terri Garr brought in the coffee and placed it on the table in front of him: a silver coffee service and real china.

We’re dancing all around it. Just go with the flow, as Cal put it. Wait her out.

Lou was finishing his cup of coffee when, off the phone, Buck dropped down beside him on the sofa and reached across him for the pot.
Okay, the personal touch. Very well
.

“Excuse me. As usual there are a number of things going on. Where were we? I think you said that most of your Army time was spent in the field, wasn’t it, Lou? I mean you didn’t get a chance to sit behind a desk.”
Flash.

“I didn’t say that, but that’s pretty much the way it was. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy field duty. I did.”

“But you wanted to move a little faster?”

“Something like that.”

“Calvin probably mentioned to you that I’m looking around for someone in the organization to handle an account. What kind of business have you been doing out there in Paramus, Lou? Anything in particular?”

“I’ve done some business in just about everything we handle, Patricia,” he said, playing the first name game. “Munis, common, mutual funds, even some commodities on occasion.”

“How about new issues, secondaries? Any of the oil drilling fund?”

“Those things only come along once in a blue moon for us out in the hinterlands. Any time we get some, we eat them up.”

“Okay, I’m going to turn this account over to you, Lou. All that’s involved is for the contact man on the account to call you from now on, instead of Bud Gilhaus here at 14 Wall. Bud knows that you’ll be handling the account. The client’s name is Barry Westover. I meant to have you talk to him this morning, but it didn’t work out. You’ll just have to deal with him over the phone to begin with.”
Flash.
“That shouldn’t be a problem?”

She worked her way over to the windows and the phone. She picked it up and spoke in a low voice again. For a good five minutes she talked into the phone, looking out the window.

Lou poured himself another cup of coffee. Finally, Buck turned around and covered the mouthpiece. “Barry Westover will make all of his calls straight to you out in Paramus, Lou,” she said. And five minutes later, off the phone and next to him on the couch again: “I’ll have Bud give you a call tomorrow morning with the account number. The name of the account isn’t important right now. We’ll try to get you and Westover together as soon as we can. Is there anything else you’d like to know about the deal?”
Flash.

Anything else, Patty? Yes, I have something else. This is a big new account, and I had squat to do with bringing it in.

“Why is it coming to me? Why now?”

“You’ve been with us close to four years, Lou. You’ve worked hard and we think of you as a quality guy, the kind we want to have sticking with us for a while.”
Flash.
“All of the producers had a break given to them somewhere along the line. This account was one of mine at one time. I want to know that it’s being handled properly. I want to know that the person who deals with Barry is going to be with the firm for a long time to come. So don’t worry too much about the formalities of how you came to get it. Just do your best to handle it the way we know you can. Okay?”

Bullshit.
“You’ve been asking all about my military career. It’s the first time it’s come up in four years with the firm. Anything to it?”

“Listen, Louis. Nobody said the account was yours forever. Think of this as a test; if you pass it, you keep it. As for your military career, it constitutes the bulk of your work experience. I look for dedication in a person before all other considerations. You’ve always shown exceptional commitment and loyalty to important causes, starting as a first lieutenant on Fire Base Eagle in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.”

Who had she been talking to? There probably weren’t two dozen people in the world who knew that Eagle ever existed
.

Buck sidled back over to the window and the phone again. With her back to Lou, she seemed to resume her last conversation without interruption. Suddenly she turned and, cupping the phone, said: “Louis, excuse me, I’m not going to be able to get away from the phone all morning and I don’t want to hold you up.”

“I’m out of here,” he said, regretting the mindless Ashley-ism before it was halfway out of his mouth.

“Very good. See Calvin when you get back to Paramus. And Louis, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep all this to yourself for the time being.”
Flash.

He stopped in the Trinity Churchyard on his way back to the tubes. He sat on a bench beside the cathedral, watching remnant leaves sail down to collide with eroded gravestones or be sent spinning off the finials of the wrought iron fence. The sounds of construction further down Broadway enveloped him. The April wind swirled down from above, the cold sneaking in through the open collar of his coat. His eyes moved up the wall of the building across the graveyard and came to rest on a mocking gargoyle near the roof line. “Laugh, you bastard,” he muttered.

On his feet, Lou walked the winding path through the churchyard’s sandstone slabs and benches with his hands plunged deep into his coat pockets. An old man, wrapped in a filthy black overcoat, lay sleeping by the stairs going down to Church Street. Lou kept walking toward the twin World Trade Towers ahead.

Slow down. It’s new, that’s all. Play it out. It’s a chance. Take it.

Chapter Four

“Call me Barry,” Westover said, above the buzz of fifteen other conversations in his trading room. “Where’d you run into Patty?”

“Hey, it’s a long story,” Lou said, imitating Westover’s bantering tone.

“She’s a piece of work, isn’t she? Sharp, though.”

“A legend in her own time.”

“You bet. Listen, Lou, I know this is going to work out terrific, so let’s not bullshit. All I really need is good execution.”

“Good execution you shall have,” Lou said.

“Forget about confirming calls and all that. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume everything went fine and I’ll be looking for the confirms the following morning.”

“Gotcha, Barry. No stroking.”

“Put me down for a million of the new Puerto Rico Highways that Pierson Browne’s managing and five hundred thousand of the Bergen County Sewer Authorities that closed out last week.”

“A million Puerto Ricos, five hundred thousand Bergen County Sewers. You got it,” Lou said.

It felt like a fish bone in his throat, a jab of something like panic. He could feel the heat rising up across his cheekbones. He didn’t move from his seat until he began to feel calm returning. Then he stood up and walked slowly all around the perimeter of the bullpen. He sat again and scribbled out orders, then stuffed them into the pneumatic tube cylinder. He punched the button and watched the cylinder fly away to the order room with a loud
whoosh
.

The next morning, the call came before the market opened. Buy five thousand shares of Inland Steel, five thousand Kennecott, and five thousand International Nickel. Barry mumbled something about probably being a little late getting into the basic metals.

On the third morning, Barry called just before the market closed, asked about the Dow, and promptly ordered the sale of four thousand Proctor and Gamble and the purchase of three thousand Du Pont with the proceeds. Those three days rounded out the pay period for Lou with the largest total of net commissions he ever heard of in a retail office, Buck included, let alone his personal high for a month. Forty-five thousand dollars in gross commissions to his account, counting the piddling eighteen hundred bucks he’d managed to scrape together in the preceding twenty days.

* * *

“Twenty-seven and a half percent of forty-five thousand bucks is what?” he asked, as he and Maggie giggled over the breakfast coffee.

“What did you do for this man, Lou?” Mag asked, lasciviously.

“Six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five bucks, net,” Lou said, looking up from his scratch paper. “In one month. How much does that add up to in a year?”

“You bust your stones for four years trying to get some of these old farts to part with a thousand dollars, and then strike it rich just because Patty Buck likes the cut of your spinnaker? I don’t get it.”

“Eighty-two thousand! Do you realize that, Maggie? Eighty-two thousand dollars!”

“I think the computer’s in heat.”

“It’s like a vending machine, Mag. Someone slaps in a dollar and the Snickers bar falls out. The machine couldn’t care less who dropped the coin; once it gets going, no one wants to know anything. Heaven forbid, they might step on some tender toes. Once your little name is put down as the man to call, they’ll keep calling until they get another little name. Nobody asks questions. Why should they? How can they? There are certain ways these accounts get set up. Mag, believe me, I could die tomorrow and they’d still be calling me to place orders. It’s beautiful.”

* * *

At first he acted as if nothing was new. Keep cool. Stick with the system. Put in all of the normal calls to drum up business: obligatory calls to the steady customers just to check in on the market and to keep them thinking in the trading way, and prospecting calls to people who had returned one of his mailers. Cater to the gaffers who sit on the sofa staring at the electronic tape marching along on the front wall and then stop at the desk to ask a question about a stock dividend or the latest hot tip from the research department.