Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (49 page)

The man who had been working with the powder looked up and squinted at the woman I had followed into the room.

“Hey, Janie!”

Janie continued toward a door on the other side of the room. The tableau by the bed did not seem to make any impression on her one way or the other. She tried the door handle and found it locked. She turned and looked at the people by the bed.

“Hey, Janie! Come here!”

She paused for a moment, a vague expression on her face, and then turned and proceeded out of the room. I watched as the second man directed his attention back to the woman on the bed, reaching up under her skirt and pulling at her underpants while she labored at the other man with her hands and mouth. I turned and followed after Janie, not knowing what I had in mind. The slow, graceful swaying of her hips.

She was already disappearing through a door farther down the corridor, and by the time I reached it she had crossed through another, smaller bedroom and was closing the door to a bathroom behind her. Stepping into the bedroom and shutting the door to the hall behind me, I switched off the overhead light and went over to the bathroom door to wait for her.

I knew that it was in every way a bad idea. But at that moment nothing seemed as important as putting my hands on her, my arms around her. Just to touch her would be worth more than anything I might be afraid of. How would she ever know in the darkness that I was not really quite there? My heart was pounding, as I tried to screw up my courage. I was like some trembling adolescent unsure of whether it was the right moment to reach over and kiss the girl. Was the whole thing even remotely plausible? How, in my state, could I judge? That or anything.

Trembling with indecision and anticipation, I listened to the stream of urine, the flush of the toilet, the water running in the basin, clothes being straightened. There was an inexplicable pause and then two slow steps across the tiled floor. She pulled open the door and switched off the light, leaving the two of us facing each other in total darkness.

Before she could reach back and switch the light on again, I put my arms around her and pulled her towards me, twisting my head down so that my cheek was against hers and then drawing my mouth across her face until it pressed against hers. My tongue pushed between her lips, and her mouth opened wide. I felt her arms wrap tight around me, and my ribs ached with pleasure where they touched me. Her mouth seemed to open for my tongue like a vast cavity. The feeling of her thighs and breasts, flattened compliantly against me, was agonizing, exquisite.

I had until this moment believed that I would never know these sensations again, never feel a woman against me. My entire body seemed about to explode.

I slid one leg over so that it was between her thighs, pushing them apart. I felt her twist up her pelvis, rubbing the tender flesh and the hard bone beneath it against me. I was walking her across the room, kissing her and holding her tight against me all the while. She moved as I directed her, with a languorous passivity. Still holding her, I toppled her over onto the bed and we lay there, writhing slowly, legs entangled. She hardly moved except to pull me toward her or to open her mouth or her legs. I lay between her legs, feeling her through the layers of clothing, twisting, heaving against her, her limbs around me. I was running one hand over her body, over her large floating breasts, between her thighs, feeling through the thin fabric of underpants the downy hair. The moist lips.

Somewhere, physically close by but at the remotest edge of my consciousness, I heard a door open. There was light flooding through the room.

I saw her vacant, uncomprehending eyes staring through me, and for a brief moment her body went utterly slack beneath me as though it were no longer a living thing. Then, instantaneously, it hardened into something rigid and alien, and she began to emit a horrible, piercing scream. Her face was contorted with terror and revulsion. She was pushing me away. Now she was flailing at me with her arms, hitting me over and over. The awful screams were coming like the rhythmic blasts of a siren. I was scrambling off the bed and across the room into a corner. There were people pouring into the room, crowding around the bed.

“Take it easy, Janie. Take it easy.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“Was anyone with her?”

“Too much to drink.”

“Someone get some water.”

The screams became convulsive, then transformed themselves momentarily into dull, gurgling explosions, and I realized she was retching on the bed.

“Is she all right?”

“Let’s get her into the john.”

Shaking, I picked myself up and scurried across the room, hardly caring whether I stumbled into anyone or not. Down the corridor and out of the apartment. In the hall outside you could still hear her screams.

F
or the rest of the summer I worked long days and stayed in evenings, avoiding other people as much as possible and changing apartments every day or two. I devoted all my time to searching for new opportunities in the stock market, and although the work was dull and a bit shabby — ranging, as it did, from eavesdropping to outright burglary — I worked far harder than I ever had in my days as a conventional securities analyst with a handsome salary. But of course the potential reward was so much more compelling now. Survival.

After giving Willy and his employers a couple of weeks to settle down and turn their thoughts to other matters, I called and delivered once again my apology for the $200,000 which had still not arrived. It was not a problem, Willy assured me — although with a bit more reserve and wariness in his voice than formerly. He also wondered whether the funds were eventually going to get there.

“My father’s filing some sort of lawsuit having to do with the whole thing,” I said. “I was supposed to call and let you know that someone from the law firm will probably be getting in touch to verify a few things. By the way,” I added, “I have a little bit of money in my account, don’t I?”

“Yes. Let me see… Ten thousand four hundred seventy-six and some change. You might as well do something with that in the meantime. I’m just looking at an interesting situation, as it happens, a biotechnology company out in California called Orex. It’s true that they’ve never reported any earnings, but they’ve been around for over three years, so they have a track record that—”

“Actually,” I said, “I had some suggestions from a friend of my father’s…”

“Would that be the same friend who put you into Allied Resources? Because that had a nice move. It’s too bad you sold so soon. The next day there was an acquisition announcement that pushed it right up to 19.”

“This is a different friend, actually. I wonder if you could get me four hundred shares of Westland Industries. That’s ‘over the counter’ — is that the right expression?’’

“Yes, it is, Jonathan. Let’s see. That’s 6
-½
bid, 7 asked. Now, I’m not sure if I went over this with you before, but we can put in an order to buy that at a certain price or we can just go ahead and do the best we can, which means putting it in at the market. Do you follow me?”

“Yes, that’s a very clear explanation. That sounds fine. Just get everything at the market.” The last thing I wanted was Willy calling the Crosby apartment at a random moment to report the execution of some standing order. “This next one is on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s called
RGP
. Are just those initials enough?”

“Yes, they are, Jonathan.”

“If you could get me three hundred shares, that would be great. I’m sorry to make this so complicated.”

“That’s perfectly all right, Jonathan. That’s what I’m here for. Let’s see—”

“And then the other thing was, I wanted to buy some calls, someone explained to me that you can make a lot more money that way—”

“Options can play a useful role in structuring an overall investment strategy, Jonathan. You do understand that with a call you can lose your entire—”

“I wanted them for a company called Great Appalachian… Wait, I’ve got this all written down here… I wanted two thousand October forty-fives. Is that the way you say it? At the market.”

Fifteen minutes later Willis called back to report on the executions. They had bought the calls at 1-⅝. The Westland and the
RGP
did not much interest me. They were just the sort of rational, well-researched, long-term investments I would have made as Nicholas Halloway, but now I thought of them only as camouflage for the Great Appalachian calls. On that day the shares of Great Appalachian were trading at 44, but having spent many hours in the offices of Distler Corby, the investment bank which was working with the management of Great Appalachian on a leveraged buyout, I happened to know that before the end of the month an offer would be made for those shares at around 70. Buying the shares themselves, I could have had a return of over 75 percent in roughly three weeks, which you might think ought to be enough for anyone. However, that move in the stock would take the calls, which are an option to buy the stock at a stipulated price, from 1-
⅝
up to around 20, for a return of over 1,000 percent in the same period. Even so, I was uneasy about buying the calls rather than the shares, because I was afraid that it was more likely to attract attention, but I had to go ahead with it anyway. I had so little time.

For the moment it was easy to find places to sleep. In August whole buildings can be virtually empty in New York. And in the warm, dry weather it was easy to move around. But I knew that I had only a few more weeks before people began to return and reoccupy their apartments, and then I would again have to spend most of my time searching for places to stay. And the risk of being noticed would be greater. Then the weather would become steadily wetter and colder, and I would need more clothing than the suit I had been wearing for the last four months. I would have to get back to New Jersey for some of the clothing I had left there. But that was another reason why I desperately needed my own apartment: I had to have someplace to keep my invisible possessions; if I had more things in New York I could not go on carrying everything with me all the time. Furthermore, I was sick of sardines, tuna, and noodles. I wanted desperately to eat fresh food again, but I could not risk having it delivered to one of these apartments that was supposed to be empty.

Then there would be an absolutely inflexible deadline in December: the John R. Crosbys would return to their apartment. By then I had to have at the very least another telephone number and mailing address if I wanted to keep Jonathan B. Crosby in existence.

And there was one more thing that kept me moving. Walking down York Avenue one afternoon, I saw, or thought I saw, Gomez coming out of a building a block and a half further south. It might have been Gomez, anyway, and it sent a shock of fear through me. It was a building I had stayed in two nights before. As I ran to catch up with whoever it was, he climbed into a car and pulled away.

It might be nothing. A mistake or a coincidence. They were probably not even sure whether I was in New York. But it was pointless, absolutely pointless, to speculate and brood about what they might be thinking or doing. There was nothing I could do differently. I had to keep moving, as quickly as possible, and hope to stay ahead of them.

In the last week of August, on the morning of the day on which the management of Great Appalachian would announce their leveraged buyout at 69, I called Winslow.

“Willy, I think I’d like to sell those Great Appalachian calls.”

“There seems to be some activity here in Great Appalachian. You might think about holding on to your position and seeing if something is going on with it.”

“Gee, I’ve done pretty well with it, and I think I’d like to sell it this morning.” The stock was at 63 and the calls were at 19. The
SEC
claims that it scans transactions in these situations, looking for possible insider trading. Even if that is true, I doubt that they look at people who have sold out before the announcement.

“Also, I’ve been watching this Westland you bought. It hasn’t done anything here,” he told me. He always talks about these things as taking place “here,” as if the market were located in one of the drawers of his desk. Next to the pint of gin perhaps. “When you’ve been in the market for a while,” he was explaining to me, “you get a feel for when a stock is going to move and when it’s not. Kind of a sixth sense that goes beyond just number-crunching. Really, it’s fair to call it an art…” I badly wanted to ask him why, with this talent, he was wasting his time as a registered rep, sneaking drinks from his desk drawer, while Warren Buffett accumulated all the wealth and fame. But I needed him. I told him I would be sure to heed his advice next time. And really, the fact that Willy never seemed to notice how well I was doing was one of his most endearing and useful qualities.

I got 19-⅝ for the calls. My portfolio was now worth a little over $49,000. A very satisfactory performance, considering that I had started less than two months before with zero. Very few things produce such a feeling of well-being as success in financial markets. It combines the best features of contemplating a difficult job well done and of winning the lottery. And there is something particularly pleasing about being able to look in the newspaper each day and receive a grade, a numerical score, for your work. Sometimes the score would be lower than the day before — it is impossible for anyone, even me with my extraordinary advantage, to predict a market with complete reliability; the markets are too efficient for that— but more often than not my score would be higher. Come to think of it, I was, in my small way, contributing to the efficiency of the market, seeing to it that useful information was transmitted a little more quickly through the price mechanism. The invisible hand taking its own small cut, as it were. And success makes one labor even harder. Tedious as the work might be, I became absolutely absorbed in it. I was happier than I had been since the accident, although occasionally I would remember how in the old days I had liked from time to time to call some friend and discuss what I was buying or selling and how I had won or lost.