“Fight for your job, Grove. I’m in your corner.”
The line went dead. Evelyn smiled from the photo.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Annie was right. No e-mails had arrived since 11:17 A.M. There should have been at least seventy or eighty new messages, breaking news, internal research, anything. There was nothing, and I could not help but see the irony. The IT department never hustled to fix day-to-day computer glitches.
Show me the door and tech buzzards start picking five minutes later.
I dialed Mancini. She answered, “Zola,” and her husky tone almost made the name redundant. Her distinctive voice would be a powerful asset on the phone.
She sounds confident. Good sign.
“Did you pass?” I asked without introducing myself. SKC gave brokers one chance to pass the Series 7, a regulatory prerequisite for selling securities. Fail and you were fired.
“Ninety-seven.”
“Great score, but you studied too hard. Anything above seventy is overkill.”
“Thanks. I think.” With that, our banter evaporated. “Frank briefed me,” she said. “I don’t like your trouble.”
“Me either. I assume your instructions are not to contact me.”
“You called me,” she said. “Fuck ’em.” There was no hesitation, no end
to Zola’s defiance. She had already joined the union of suffering brokers against the world. It was only a matter of time before Zola became a top producer.
“I need time to sort things out. And you need to trust me.” The knot in my stomach tightened.
“What can I do?”
“Play the game. Tell Kurtz whatever he wants to hear. When clients call, jump on the line and introduce yourself as my new partner.”
Makes it harder for Gershon.
“Is this where we say ‘I do’?” she asked wryly, marriage vows the PCS metaphor for partnership.
“You’re perfect for this business,” I observed. “If you need help, talk with Chloe and Annie first, then Cliff Halek. And stay away from Patty Gershon. No matter what she offers, no matter what she says, stay away from her. That woman can suck a raw egg and leave the shell intact.”
“She already approached me.”
“What’d she say?” I asked, trying to hide my alarm.
“Your U-4 will be thicker than
Crime and Punishment
, with all the dings and everything.”
Bet Patty never opened the book.
“What else, Zola?”
“She said you two agreed to joint coverage of Josef Jaworski.”
“Gershon’s doing a landgrab,” I corrected.
“I knew she was lying.”
“How?”
“Too big a bitch. There’s no way you’d work with her.”
Zola’s definitely top producer material.
“What else did Patty say?”
“That she met JJ at a party. That I should bring over some portfolio statements so we can prepare for a meeting.”
What meeting?
“Damn her.” Patty was already making her move. I wondered whether she had reached JJ.
“What should I do?” Zola asked.
For a moment we were both quiet, the silence atypical of people who talk about the markets for a living. “Stall,” I finally replied. “I need time to
think. Say yes to everything, but put off delivery of the statements until next week.”
“You know Gershon. I can’t delay forever.”
“Do your best.”
“Is there anything else?” Zola asked, trying to be helpful.
“Well, there is one other thing,” I said tentatively.
“Which is?”
“Don’t call me until I sort this out. If I call you again, hang up. I have no idea what’s ahead. And I don’t want to fuck up your career.”
“Hey, Grove.” Zola paused and waited, a clear demand for my undivided attention.
“Yes?”
“I’m in. I’m with you.”
“Like a wingman?”
“Hey now.” She laughed and hung up.
Zola had sounded convincing. But she stood to win whether I cleared my name or not. She knew it, too. She was street savvy and recognized that a share of my revenues had fallen into her lap. Not a bad start for a newbie. I immediately brooded over the decision. Charlie’s legacy made me second-guess everyone and everything.
Instead of checking my twenty-three voice mails, I called Sam. “It’s me.”
“Hi.” She went silent.
Had I interrupted something? My career depended on reading people’s moods instantly. Sam’s perfunctory “hi” sounded all wrong. “Did I catch you at a bad time?”
“I’m meeting someone.” There was no hint of goodwill.
“Have the police spoken with you?”
“They came yesterday and asked about us.”
“Us?”
“Yeah,” she shrieked. “Us.”
“Tell me.” Inadvertently, I had truncated the classic line salespeople use to probe prospects: “Tell me more.”
Why the anger?
“They focused on the seventy-five thousand dollars you wired. They think we’re sleeping together.”
“Piss on them.”
“The exact expression escapes me. It was something about going belly to belly.”
“Piss on Mummert. Piss on Fitzsimmons. The whole lot as far as I’m concerned. What else did they ask?”
“Whether you had any business dealings with Charlie, like referrals, that sort of thing.”
“What did you say?”
“I told the truth. Charlie hid our financial affairs from me. I have no idea what he did or with whom.”
“Good answer.” It would have been nice to get a stronger testimonial—a statement from Sam that Charlie and I had no business relationship. But I endorsed her honesty.
“I have to go,” she announced. “I’m not sure we should be talking with each other.”
“Why?”
“This suspicion is so complicated.”
I could almost see Sam through the receiver, fiddling with her bra strap as though it were a rosary.
“Sam, I’m only trying to help,” I soothed.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I’ll call you. Okay?”
Prospects had blown me off. But it had been years since a woman tossed me aside.
Damn, Sam.
It took a few seconds before the realization dawned on me. “Do you think I wrote that letter for Charlie?”
“I don’t know. I have to go,” she said. Abruptly, a dial tone jarred my ears. It sounded like police sirens en route to a crime.
Sam’s hang-up stung. The afternoon shadows peeked through the windows of my empty condominium. I had failed her. All that money, $75,000, and no questions asked. My wire, my attempt to help, bought five minutes of phone time and a curt hang-up. It also provoked police suspicion. My questions had scared Sam away. Why had she gone cold? It made no sense.
When there were snags at the office, I worked the phones. I called clients and traders, even Radio Ray, to resolve issues. My instincts screamed for me to work the phones now. “Start dialing, smiley.” But after the conversation with Sam, I could not bear further rejection. Nor could I bring myself to call
Betty Masters with an update. I had my own problems and cycled through voice mail instead.
Annie left six messages, not the twenty-two I had suspected. The first was a simple: “It’s Annie. Call me.” Her voice escalated in alarm with each communiqué. “Where are you?” led to “I’m worried sick.” She even threatened: “I’m sending sniffer dogs.” And so on.
Halek had called while walking the streets of Manhattan to an appointment. I could hardly make out his words. Traffic noise eviscerated any hope of a comprehensible message. Only a few words survived: “Don’t worry.” Angry horn. “Kurtz.” Screeching brakes followed by the crunch of metal against metal. “Dumb as an unplugged computer.”
Alex Romanov’s message surprised me the most. Where did he get the number to my cell phone? Annie or Chloe had not given it to him. That much was certain.
His voice mail was succinct: “Charlie’s notes didn’t arrive. Should I send a runner over to your place?”
I wondered what Romanov meant by “your place,” the office or my home. What did he know? Eventually, he would learn about my forced leave of absence. Word would spread.
Before long Gershon and a handful of other top producers would bellyache to Kurtz, resurrecting gripes and settling old scores: “You owe me, Frank. I’m always taking one for the team.” They would interrogate the boss with skills worthy of Fitzsimmons and Mummert: “If Grove is coming back, why was he escorted out the door?” They would gossip without shame. They would broadcast their opinions everywhere, almost like posting verbal editorials.
I could hear Scully, figuratively, not quite literally, even though he was the world’s loudest stockbroker: “Let me get this straight, Frank. You’re turning Zola loose on Grove’s centi-millionaires. She’s a rookie. Are you crazy?”
Casper kept detailed notes on all PCS clients—not just his. Who are they? How much money do they have? Which brokers cover them? He even recorded what stockbrokers confided during passing conversations. That way, he could ask for handouts when people left: “Grove told me all about the client, Frank.” I once caught Casper jotting reminders on a linen napkin during a top producers’ dinner.
Nail-clipping vulture.
Romanov probably knew about my forced exile. The thought prompted me to pull the red folder from my briefcase. Actually a stylized bicycle bag, my black leather satchel served as a dump for all things tedious. It contained “not-now” items ranging from medical claims to expense receipts. Good thing Charlie’s folder made the cut. Otherwise, the red file would be at the office and beyond my access.
Romanov’s request could wait until the morning. Instead, I looked for the pages where Charlie had scrawled “31.12” and “30.11.” I still had not reviewed Rugged Computers, the stock next to those scribbles. That was the problem with the “not-now” satchel. The stash usually gained in size and weight. My black hole of procrastination sucked papers, management memos, everything into its hungry void. I only dealt with the paperwork when it became too heavy to haul back and forth to work.
What had gone through Charlie’s mind? I found the page with his notes, inspected it briefly, and reached for the Hewlett-Packard 12c. Whenever I looked at numbers, my calculator morphed from circuitry to security blanket. I punched the 12c’s buttons as though they would reveal hidden secrets. Unfortunately, the display had changed. Commas were periods, and periods were commas.
The 12c did that at times, particularly when dropped. In the parlance of Hewlett-Packard, its display had gone from “U.S. mode” to “non–U.S. mode.” That’s why commas were now periods and vice versa. I hated this quirk. I never could remember how to fix it, which was a problem because the inversions bugged me. It was always necessary to dig through the instruction manual to fix the readout.
I studied Charlie’s notes and then the LCD display. Somewhere inside the fog of personal irritation, it occurred to me the two numbers did not look like stock prices. Even though securities were now priced in decimals, we still thought of shares in fractions—a throwback to the old pieces-of-eight thinking that had ruled Wall Street forever.
First trader: “I’ll throw in my dog for an eighth.”
Second trader: “I’ll give you a steenth.” A steenth was one-sixteenth.
There were no dollar signs, either. Everybody used dollar signs. Romanov’s words repeated over and over inside my head:
If Rugged Computers hits anything north of twenty dollars, I’ll own Bermuda.
They’re something other than money.
I scrutinized “31.12” and “30.11,” trying to identify a pattern. It would have been easy had they been Fibonacci numbers, the numerical sequence named for Leonardo of Pisa. Looking at the Hewlett-Packard, I suddenly realized what the pattern was.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” is the exclamation my mother would have used.
I went with my old standby: “Fucking shit.”
Charlie had been working in “non–U.S. mode.” The numbers weren’t stock prices. They were European-style dates. Probably trade dates. How could I have missed something so obvious?
What happened on November 30 and December 31?
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
That night I shed my suit and slipped into khaki shorts, flip-flops, and wrinkled button-down. It was the neo-tribal dress of a modern hunter-gatherer foraging the Upper West Side for the ultimate plate of carbs. My belly said one thing. With the right comfort food I could swallow troubles and everything else on my plate. My brain said another. All the pasta in Manhattan could never cure my problems.
Hungry and drained from the day, I slogged over to the trendy cafeteria in the basement of the Time-AOL building at Columbus Circle. Dozens of cuisines taunted my nose with their savory smells. The smorgasbord of bright colors and exotic spices, some complementary and some in competition, reminded me of trading floors at high noon. I wandered from one food cart to the next, surveying the alternatives from kitchens across the globe. They were all tempting. It was impossible to choose.
Twenty minutes later I stood at the checkout counter, plate in hand. The girl at the cash register, chunky beyond her years, looked first at my dinner and then at me.
