Villiers Touch (3 page)

“Then there you are.”

“On the other hand, you know, NCI's involved in a lot of things besides law-enforcement supplies. When you look to invest in these conglomerates, you've got to see the whole picture. Now, take these shale oil stocks—they're bound to start moving pretty soon now….”

Russ Hastings stopped eavesdropping then; he paid his check and pushed his way out of the place, squinting with thought. He picked up a
Times
at the corner stand and folded it back to the financial section and stood on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street running his eye down the columns.

197O Stocks and Div. Sales Net High Low in Dollars 100s High Low Last Change
31½ 24½ NorthEastCon 1.25 779 31½ 30½ 31½ +1

He rolled the paper up and put it under his arm; his face had taken on the expression of a man not sure whether he had made a significant discovery. He turned into Wall Street, looking for a phone.

His cheeks stung in the heat from shaving rash. He rubbed his jaw and turned into a revolving door, found phones in the lobby, went into a stifling close booth, and dialed Quint's number. As the connection whistled and clicked, he could picture Quint—the fattest man he had ever met—perched in his huge leather wingback chair, lapless, grunting as he counted candy wrappers in his abalone-shell ashtray.

The call, on Quint's direct line, would not have to go through the switchboard; Hastings was spared the operator's saccharin chirp, “
Good
morning? Securities and Exchange Commission? Whooooooom did you wish, please?” Instead, Quint's private secretary came on the line, sterile and brisk, and put Hastings through.

“Gordon Quint here—Russ?” Quint's slurred roar thundered in the earpiece, the London accent completely at odds with the hearty bellow of the voice. “How are things in the financial fleshpot?”

“I'm beginning to learn the language,” Hastings said, sweating in the airless booth. “Question for you. Have we got anybody working on Northeast Consolidated?”

“I very much doubt it. Why? Should we?”

“I'm picking up a few vibrations. The last week or so, all of a sudden every other tongue in Wall Street seems to be wagging about NCI.”

“Just rumors, or something firm?”

“Rumors—loose ones at that. But a lot of volume to them.”

The sound, like crackling flames, meant Quint was unwrapping another hard ball of low-cal candy. Quint said, in the cultivated English drawl he hadn't relaxed a bit in the thirty-odd years he'd been in America, “I shouldn't think too much of it if I were you. Perhaps you haven't been in this job long enough to strike the proper balance. You've still got a bit to learn, you know. Rumors come and go—they're all fads. Last month it was airlines, next month we'll have another favorite; it might as well be the hit parade.”

“I haven't heard one come up quite so fast before, with nothing at all behind it.”

“How do you know there's nothing behind it?”

“I don't—I'd like to find out.”

There was a pause; the creak of the burdened springs of Quint's swivel chair; finally Quint said, “I should imagine your ears would be particularly sensitive to any mention of NCI, since your father-in-law occupies its throne. What if there were no personal involvement with Elliot Judd? What if this were a company whose board chairman you'd never heard of? I suppose you've given thought to that?”

“My
ex
-father-in-law,” Hastings corrected mildly. “Yes, I've taken that into account. I still think the vibrations are too strong for the usual run of things. There haven't been any applications for merger clearance? Big stock options exercised? Insiders buying blocks of stock?”

“All I can tell you is, nothing's come to my attention. I'm quite sure—”

“Then why did it sit still at twenty-six for four or five months and suddenly shoot up four points in the last two weeks?”

“I'm sure I couldn't give you an answer to that off the top of the head, Russ, but it's hardly a startling movement in the price. Perhaps a few of the big funds decided to pick up blocks of it—after all, it's a sound security.”

“It always has been. But don't you get suspicious when there's a sudden flurry of excitement over a blue chip?”

“Mildly interested, perhaps. Suspicious? No—not unless there's much more to go on. We've far too much work here to chase down every odd rumor. Have you any idea how far behind schedule we are in processing applications?”

Hastings pulled the booth door open an inch for air. “I'd like to look into it, Gordon. How about it?”

Quint hesitated. When the fat voice finally replied, it was as avuncular as a handpat on the head. “Look, old boy, don't take this the wrong way, but don't you think it might be worthwhile for you to take a holiday—a week or two in the country to unwind and get your breath?”

Hastings closed his eyes briefly. “What I do not need right now is to take time off so I can brood.”

“I'm sorry I mentioned it.”

“I suppose I'll forgive you.”

Quint chortled. “May the Lord save us from eager beavers.”

“How about it, then?”

“Oh, I suppose—all right, Russ. You'll, ah, forgive me for saying so, but it should do you a bloody bit of good to work off some of that office fat.”

“Coming from you, that's droll. Another twenty pounds and you'd have to wear license plates.”

“I am not overweight,” Quint purred, “I'm merely too short for my weight. According to the chart, I ought to be eleven-foot-eight. All right—just one thing. Are you certain you know how to handle this sort of investigation? It won't do to trample unnecessarily.”

“I won't step on any sore corns unless I have to. You'll remember I did enough investigative work for Jim Speed to learn the ropes.”

“Ah, yes. But that was politics. This is finance.”

“The object of the game may be different but the rules are the same.”

“Don't be too sure of that, Russ.”

“I'll be circumspect,” Hastings said.

“Good luck—keep your pecker up, old boy.”

Hastings hung up and dialed another number, trying to imagine the stares he might attract if, in fact, he kept his pecker up.

Gloria Sprague's matronly voice spoke to him briskly: “Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Hastings' office. May I help you?”

“That depends on what sort of help you're offering,” Hastings said, deadpan.

“Oh, Mr. Hastings.” Brief, nervous, spinsterish laugh. “I'm glad you called. The papers on the National Packaging case just came up from the Justice Department. They have to have your signature before we can send them down to court.”

“How soon do they have to be signed?”

“Anytime today, but I wasn't sure whether you planned to be in the office at all today.”

“Do I play hooky that often, Miss Sprague?”

“Oh, I didn't mean—” she began quickly.

Hastings laughed at her and cut her off: “It's all right, never mind. I'll be up sometime this afternoon. In the meantime I want you to do a quick research job for me.”

“I've got my notebook—go ahead.” Her tone implied not only businesslike efficiency but a mild rebuke; Miss Sprague, after twenty years' service as secretary to the bland civil servants who had preceded Hastings, had not quite learned how to cope with his quiet, sometimes wry brand of humor.

He said, “The subject is Northeast Consolidated Industries. I want a rundown on large-block trades within the past two weeks—identities of buyers and sellers. You'll have to call some of the brokers, of course—let me know if any of them give you static.”

“Static?”

“Resistance, hesitation.”

“All right. How large is ‘large'?”

“Let's say anything over five thousand shares. I'm going down on the floor myself this morning, so I'll get some of the information direct from the specialist. What I want you to do is check through the larger brokers and find out if there've been any large trades negotiated privately, not through the Exchange. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. When will you want this?”

“Ten minutes will do.”

“All right, I'll—ten minutes, did you say?”

“Just a little joke, Miss Sprague,” he said wearily. “Do it as quickly as you can, but don't break your neck over it. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I'll see you this afternoon.” He rang off and went outside, a tall man in his late thirties with a lot of loose brown hair and a wide, blade-nosed Saxon face. His expression was the small, distracted frown of mild irony of a man looking for something he had lost. At the corner of New Street he waited in a crowd for the light to change, presenting a picture of easygoing indolence, of which he was sometimes acutely aware, particularly when it was spurious, as it was now, and had been since the break-up with Diane. It was sheer habit that coated his turmoil with a surface pose of relaxed self-confidence. The brows that hooded his eyes were thick and unruly, of a lighter shade than his hair; his skin was the sort of smooth light brown which would take a deep tan and hold it if he spent any time at all on the beach; he never did, abhorring crowds and being by nature a land animal. Big and limber, with flat shoulder muscles and a long, loose gait, he had an easy way of moving, a natural taken-for-granted grace, the result of genetic endowment more than conscious care.

He joined the New Yorker's endless war against aggressive taxis trying to nose through the pedestrian crossflow, reached the far curb intact, and stood for a moment looking at the great gray tomb across the street—11 Wall Street, the hub of it all.

Standing here, he was alert to his awkward presence: a pariah in an alien land where a foreign tongue was spoken, the language of blocks and odd lots, margins and floats, puts and calls, dollars divided into eighths, hedge funds, mutual portfolios, letter stocks, bid and asked. He had come to it by an odd route; he had not planned it.

In the beginning, he thought whimsically, you're a fair corporation lawyer, and you're a long way from home now, brother. You were one of the faceless juniors in a giant midtown partnership: practice in estates, corporate-charter drawing, real estate, mergers. Respectable law; no negligence cases, no criminal cases, no divorces, no insurance torts. So why right away did you begin to think about changing jobs?

Restless. You were restless, looking for action. You were in that frame of mind when you married Diane. It was a mistake from the start, but in those days you enjoyed challenges. Your own family was embedded as solidly in the social strata as hers, her money wouldn't become a problem between you, but what you never counted on was her discontented ambition: her father's wealth should have been a cushion, but to her it was a goad.

You quit private practice and you went to work for Jim Speed—fiery muckraker, stubborn digger, eminent exposer of corruption. That was where the challenge was. Doing Speed's investigative work, unearthing the grit for the white papers on military-industrial collusion and Mafia labor corruption. It got Speed elected to Congress, and you spent those years running his home office in New York, and then the mayor tapped Speed to take over as commissioner of the scandal-staggered city Finance Department, and you, his chief assistant, helped clean it up, you with your mesomorphic curiosity and righteous indignation, and, just incidentally, with your home disrupted by a part-time wife who had a compulsion to succeed on her own and flung in your face, as an act of defiance (against you or against her father?), the art gallery she opened on Third Avenue. The senseless, brittle competition between the two of you—the divorce; and then, still rocked by that, you're propelled out of your job when Speed dies in the crash of a private plane and a new commissioner moves in, complete with staff.

You didn't know what you wanted to do then. You had dealt often with Quint's SEC office. There were half a dozen good job offers, law firms and city jobs, but you didn't see any promise of action in the rest of them. Maybe with Quint …

And so here you are
, he thought, dour. If there was going to be any action, he would have to create it himself. Take up skydiving, maybe. Rob a bank.

Around him the street was still crowded, but the rush to get to work was nearly ended. The financial district's working hours were earlier than those uptown; Wall Street was a city of its own, little known to midtown businessmen, bounded by Bowling Green to the south; the swift, filthy East River; Fulton Street (or perhaps Chambers Street, depending on your vintage) on the north; and on the west a mute anachronism: the cemetery of Trinity Church, where no human corpse had been buried in living memory, since Manhattan had long since run out of space for its dead.

By now the brokers, bankers, secretaries, corporation potentates and their entourages had long ago hurried into their offices. The streets still flowed with workers and late arrivals, rushing, as thick as pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. In offices looming all around, men would be swiveling toward Quotron tickers and watching their clocks, synchronizing like field generals preparing for battle. In these slow-ticking moments, all over the world, men and women would be drawing their telephones near—waiting, adrenalin flooding in anticipation, for the Market (
very
capital “M”) to open.

They waited keenly, in offices and homes and hotels, for the Magic Hour when they could dial their stockbrokers, ask “How's Motors?”, talk about yesterday's closing Dow-Jones, place buy or sell orders, discuss the weather or the day's political news with brokers who only wanted to be let alone by the lonely phone callers so they could run their businesses.

All over the United States right now they would be converging into the funeral-parlor board rooms of Stock Exchange member firms: wise investors, ignorant speculators, compulsive gamblers, ticker-tape addicts, retired bored pensioners. In the Far West, to coincide with New York's exchange hours, brokers' offices would open as early as seven
A.M.
The customers would sit for the next five hours with faces studiously guarded against any show of feelings as they watched the boards tick over, watched the stock news chatter by like an endless freight train, pacing off the latest sale price, bid-and-asked, high, low, and close of all active listed stocks….