Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (45 page)

Jonathan B. Crosby’s newly assigned social security number appeared on the screen, and I committed it to memory. Happy Birthday, Jonathan.

I
went every few days to the Crosby apartment to pick out any mail addressed to Jonathan B. Crosby, always making particularly sure to get there on Monday evenings, before Mrs. Dixon arrived on Tuesday morning. Of course, at first there was only my social security card to watch for, but I hoped soon to be getting all sorts of confirmation slips and statements from brokerage firms.

But before I got a brokerage account I would have to be ready with some very specific investment ideas. And I had to revise my whole investment strategy radically. I could no longer set myself the goal of being right more than half the time over the course of a couple of years, which had in the past always seemed a perfectly splendid outcome. I now needed an investment that would appreciate a great deal in a short time — and with virtual certainty. Of course, a lot of people feel they need investment ideas like this, and they are consequently not easy to come by, but my condition did give me some advantages.

One place to look for such situations is in the 13D business, named after the form you must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission when you acquire more than 5 percent of the stock of a public corporation. If you are in this business, you look around for a corporation which you think is undervalued by the stock market, or which you think you could make more valuable if only you controlled it. You get together with some friends and start gradually buying up the stock — as discreetly as possible, since you don’t want to do anything to drive up the price unnecessarily. Then you cross the 5 percent mark, and pretty soon you have to start telling everyone more or less what you are up to, and probably you make some offer to buy out other shareholders at some price well above the recent market price. You hope in all this either that you will be bought off or outbid, in which case you expect to make a vast and rather quick profit, or else that you will wind up controlling the corporation, in which case you do whatever it is you think will make it more valuable — restructure it, replace the incompetent management, sell off the pieces, whatever. But no matter what happens — even if you bungle the whole thing — the price of the stock will probably have shot up dramatically, at least for a while.

There are all sorts of people in New York who are involved in this kind of thing pretty much all the time, and I began to spend my days, and some of my evenings, in their offices, watching for promising situations. There are not only the actual principals — the individuals or corporations that actually do the acquiring — but the law firms and investment banks that advise and assist them and that may be involved in any number of takeovers at any given time. They also put together other sorts of transactions, such as leveraged buyouts, which can send a share price shooting up suddenly. The investment banks perform all sorts of interesting services and acts — in fact, any service or act that can be performed in a suit, this being the limitation imposed by their professional ethics.

I would walk down to midtown, or sometimes even to the financial district, in the afternoon and hike up the endless flights of stairs — the more useful the information, the further off the ground it seemed to be-to whatever office I was interested in. I would spend hours listening in on meetings and telephone conversations. When someone was out of his office, I would slip in and read through whatever was on his desk. I spent hours and days this way listening to investment bankers plot takeovers that were never launched. I watched people accumulate huge blocks of stock and then change their minds and sell it. But gradually I began to find out where my time would be most usefully spent and which lawyers and bankers were involved in everything that was going on in their firms. After a while I had several particularly promising situations that I was following closely. And I had become extraordinarily fit hiking up and down all those flights of stairs.

In the meantime, however, I was making no progress at all in finding a broker. Which seemed odd when I considered all the effort I had had to devote to avoiding them in my previous life. The trouble was, I couldn’t use anyone who knew me as Nicholas Halloway, but on the other hand, given my condition, it seemed to be impossible to meet new people. But when the twenty-seventh came around, and I remembered Charley Randolph’s invitation to his cocktail party, it occurred to me that that might be the answer. Eventually I would need not only a broker but a lawyer and an accountant, and what better place to search for them than at social gatherings where I could observe large numbers of new people half-drunk and talking continuously. I would begin that night at Charley Randolph’s. There would even be some people there I knew, and, at the thought, I was suddenly full of eagerness to see familiar faces and hear familiar voices again.

However, standing outside the Randolphs’ door at half past seven that evening I nearly abandoned the whole idea. Hearing the roar of cocktail babble within, I was suddenly filled with dread at the idea of walking into a room full of people, and only my investment of the thirteen-story climb kept me from fleeing the building. The door swung open, and a man I had never seen before walked out. This was my chance, and I instinctively seized it, catching the door before it closed and slipping past it into the foyer.

The foyer opened into a drawing room half filled with people, all with drinks in their hands, talking to each other in little groups. In the opposite wall was a doorway through which I could see people drifting in and out of another public room. It was a good party for me: the rooms were large and not very crowded. When a party really starts to fill up, I have to be on my way. I need some open space between the clusters of people.

I saw, with a flood of emotion which startled me, that there were indeed people I knew. A number of them. There were Bob and Helen Carlson and the Petersons and Corky Farr and Bitsy Walker. Some of them I had known more or less all my life. As I think about it now, there was actually no one there to whom I had been terribly close, but at that moment I suddenly felt an intense intimacy with these people, and I thought for an instant that I was about to weep. I thought of going up to them and announcing my presence, telling them everything. They would swarm around me, amazed. Imagine how they would welcome me. Everyone would want to touch me. Comfort me. They would look after me. It is important not to let oneself begin to think this way.

But it was reassuring to be among them, even if I could not speak to them. And it would be exciting to watch and listen to them secretly. I would see and hear everything. In a way, I would know them better, be closer to them, than ever before.

There was another thing that I noticed right away with pleasure: most of them were reasonably drunk. Nothing does more to put me at ease in these situations than drunkenness in others. Whatever mental capacity these people retained would be entirely devoted to remembering how the sentence they were in the middle of had begun and where it might plausibly go. I can be almost comfortable with people in that state.

I instinctively looked for my hosts. Charley Randolph was standing in the front of the drawing room with an eye on the foyer for arriving guests, half listening to a fat man in a pin-striped suit who seemed to be lecturing rather than conversing. I joined them as best I could, creeping up to within two feet of them and standing there listening.

“They’re going to report a dollar fifteen for the second quarter,” the fat man was saying. He spoke emphatically but as if he were unaware of Charley’s presence, as if he were talking to himself. Perhaps this would be the stockbroker I was looking for. “Worst case, maybe a dollar five,” he went on, “which is ten percent off last year.” Charley’s eyes were shifting around the room as the man talked. “But that includes a one-time writeoff of their entire Biloxi operation, and when you add that back in, you’re looking at earnings of a dollar forty to a dollar fifty for the quarter and five fifty to six dollars for the year, and that’s assuming no regulatory relief whatever.”

“What is the regulatory picture?” Charley asked absent-mindedly, his eye on the door. Something about the man was absolutely deadening. But I ought to wait and see if he was a broker.

“Well, that of course is an extremely interesting question. We have a subsidiary in essentially the same business down in—”

I saw Corky Farr on the other side of the room leaning over a girl with a panoramic décolletage, one arm extended past her to the wall to steady himself. I walked over to them: at a party you always tend toward the people you already know — even if you can’t speak to them. Although the way the dress was wrapped tight around the woman’s breasts, forcing them up and out at the top, may have been a factor as well.

Corky would be drunk. At least at the times of day I saw him, he was always drunk, and getting drunker. But he would also want to sleep with the girl despite the handicap he had set himself.

“But then,” he was saying — and he treated the consonants with special care, knowing from experience that they would slip out of control and slur if not watched, “what do these people have in their heads?” He indicated the other guests by waving his gin and tonic in a wide arc, slopping some of it in the process onto the floor. He studied the glass analytically for a moment and then solved the problem by drinking from it.

“Understand me, these are my friends… I love them.” Corky, his head inclined forward, was staring directly down at the breasts. He paused, either because he had lost the thread of his argument or simply in order to enjoy a moment of quiet contemplation. “But what, in the end, do they have in their heads… in their souls, if you will?”

It was clear enough what Corky had in his: gin, unbridled lust, and a vestigial capacity for speech. I wondered whether he could remove his other hand from the wall and remain standing.

Still gazing into her dress, he went on. “But I can see there’s more to you than to the rest of these people.” He indicated the rest of the assembly again by tossing a little more gin on the floor. Corky seemed to be making a rather primitive approach, but then, given his condition, he was probably wise to take a strong, well-defined line of attack and hold to it unswervingly. Judging from her rather unfocused expression, his interlocutor had been well supplied with gin herself, so it probably didn’t matter much. Someone at some point must have told her what her best feature was, because she kept herself erect with her shoulders back and her torso thrust forward. “There’s a good deal more…”

She raised her glass to drink from it, twisting her body at the same time so that one breast brushed across Corky’s ribs. Corky’s entire body shifted in place. He seemed to move into another gear.

“Why,” he said, “don’t we wander over to Mortimer’s for some dinner.”

“Brad and Sally and a whole gang of us were going out together for something,” she answered vacantly. “Why don’t we go somewhere with them. We haven’t decided where.”

Corky screwed up his features in concentration. He looked as if someone had given him a complex mathematical problem which, if he could hold it in his head, he might try to solve presently.

“Mortimer’s,” he said with deliberation, “would be closer.”

“Closer?” she said uncomprehendingly. “To what?”

“To my place,” he replied after a moment’s thought. “I’ll tell you what. Why not find out where they’re going to be and we can always join them later.”

Suddenly, out of the tangle of voices coming from the next room, I picked out my own name. I would have liked to stay and follow the course of events unfolding before me. It would be close: a question of whether Corky could retain consciousness and hold her attention long enough to achieve the desired consummation. But the sound of my name — people talking about me — sent a thrill through me. And it created for me a connection with these people whom I had not spoken to — been one of — for what seemed like a very long time.

I plunged into the next room in search of whoever was speaking of me. Standing by a window I saw Roger Cunningham and recognized at once that it had been his voice I had heard. He was talking to Charley Randolph and a woman I did not know. I walked eagerly over to them. Bitsy Walker and Fred Cartmell, who had evidently been talking to each other nearby, had both half turned to join the conversation.

“When did you talk to him?” Roger was asking Charley.

I was quite excited. Here I was with my friends, unseen, the fly on the wall, listening to them talk about me.

“It was just a few weeks ago. He said he’d be here, but I haven’t actually seen him in months. Really odd. He was just going along like everyone else and then suddenly — no warning — he just drops out. Disappears. And then you’ve got all these bizarre stories—”

“Is he the one who joined the Moonies?” asked the woman I did not know.

“That’s the one,” piped in Bitsy with a smirk. “Only I think it was the Hare Krishnas, actually.” I had known Bitsy for years. I had slept with her once when we were in college. “Amazing, isn’t it? That it should be Nick, of all people. He’s always been so predictable in everything.”

Standing there unseen, listening to her — to all of them — speaking about me, I began to feel as if I were taking the tour with the ghost of Christmas Future.

“Well, we probably shouldn’t be talking about this, and I don’t really know a thing about it,” said Charley, assuming the air of one who probably knows a great deal but expects everyone to understand that he is not at liberty to say much, “but I wouldn’t be surprised if he was up to something very hush-hush — the
CIA
or something. And this Hare Krishna thing is just a cover. Some sort of operation or whatever.”

“You mean Nick Halloway is going to infiltrate the Hare Krishnas for the CIA?” asked Fred Cartmell with a sardonic little smile. “That’s a hell of an idea. I mean, I’m sure it’s vital that someone do the job and all, but I’m not convinced that Halloway is the best choice. For one thing he’d need all new clothes, at least if he wanted to go about the thing properly. And even then, if the Hare Krishnas ever get wind of the fact that they’re being infiltrated, I should think that Halloway would be high on their list of suspects.”