by Scott Turow
“His term,” said Stern.
“His term,” she said. They smiled at one another. Dixon, with his quirks and passions, and his well-concealed inner core, was secret terrain they had both explored. They were initiates. Acolytes. In their shared understanding of this phenomenon, there was a strange intimacy.
“This, as they say back home, this is the good part.” Port, she said “One day Dixon’s in the Union League Club in DuSable, and guess who’s there? Why, it’s ol’ Brady. You’d think Dixon’d pick up an ashtray or somethin and bang this boy on the head, but no, sir, he’s downright friendly. Dixon shakes his hand. Tells him how glad he is to see him, too, sorry they lost touch, all kinds of buddy-boy sweet-talk. And Brady, you know, he’s like everybody else, he never knew whether to smile or pee in his pants when Dixon showed up, he’s quite relieved. Dixon takes his business card. Brady’s working as a back office consultant, and Dixon starts sending Brady work. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the checks, I got on the phone, I said, ‘Dixon, what the hell are you doin now?’ He just says, you know, ‘Leave me be, lady, I know my business.’ I figure maybe he’s had a character transplant or somethin, he’s become forgiving, maybe he’s been hearin Billy Graham.”
She took a drink and Stern lifted his glass with her. He had never seen this side of Margy before. She was a storyteller in the old tradition. She needed a porch and a jug of corn whiskey. He had a sense, listening to her, of the way she had grown up watching men, admiring them, taken in by them in a certain way. That perhaps was the key to her longtime attachment to Dixon and the swashbuckling privateers of the markets.
“Anyway, next thing I hear, Dixon and Brady are quite chummy again. They’re goin out, them and the wives. Brady’s one of these types married to a skinny little lady who always wants more. You know what I’m talking about? She’s got to make up for something. I don’t know what it is. But they’re at plays, havin dinner. I tell you. Maybe they went out with you and Clara.”
“I never heard a word,” said Stern.
“No,” said Margy, correcting herself, “I wouldn’t think. Then one day I’m talkin to some ol’ boy, I don’t remember who, and he says, ‘Word is Brady’s comin back to MD to run your operations in Kindle.’ Dixon won’t answer me, you know how he gets, but I check, everybody’s heard it. Sure enough, word comes from the Kindle office, there’s gonna be a big announcement. Dixon sets up this fancy luncheon over at Fina’s. He gets all his key people around. I flew my little Oklahoma fanny in there. You know, we’re all sittin there havin a nice time. Then ol’ Dixon looks at Brady. ‘By the way,’ he says, right in front of everyone. Cheerful as a chickadee.” Margy took a drink and looked straight at Stern with her bright, hard eyes. “‘I fucked your wife last night.’ Just like that. And he had, too. No doubt about that with good-buddy Dixon. Can you imagine this? He’s got eight folks around the table to hear this. Lunch was over before they served the soup. I’m not kiddin. Believe me, that made some ripples around here. So that’s why I’m tellin you: nobody’s sayin diddly-doo about Dixon.”
Stern was quiet. He took the bottle and finished off the wine. “Remarkable,” he said at last. He meant it. The story filled him with a peculiar sense of alarm. The truth about Dixon was always uglier than Stern could quite conceive of on his own.
“Ain’t it, though. Ol’ Dixon, boy, sometimes I think he oughta have himself a peckerectomy. He’s got an unusual way of doin things.”
Stern chuckled, but Margy passed him a meaningful look, liquor-loosened and reproving, as if to warn him of the amount he did not understand. This woman, he knew, comprehended things about men and women, about carnality, that were remote from him.
“Let’s get goin with these boring old papers.” She smiled, sat up, smoothed her skirt and blouse. But she was not quite done. She looked lost for a moment, glancing away. Somewhere along in the telling, much of her own pain about Dixon had emerged from hiding. Distress had reduced her good looks, brought a wincing closeness to her features. “That son of a bitch,” she said suddenly. Stern was somehow penetrated by her forlorn tone and the thought of glamorous Margy, here in her forties, with her career and life in the shadow of Dixon’s mountain.
Stern reached out and briefly held her hand.
“Well, you’re a kindly ol’ boy, ain’t you?” she asked.
Stern knew what was going to happen now. Now that he’d had enough to drink, he realized that he’d known for hours, since she looked at him that way and asked with apparent disinterest about the women hovering around him. Beneath it all perhaps was the polar tug of loneliness, the sore yearning of the isolated soul, but now, adrift on the ether of the alcohol, he was suddenly filled by the hot itch of anticipation. There was a racing tempo in his hands as he waited for the next move.
He did not have to wait long. Margy reverted for a few moments to the papers; she spoke; mumbled; then suddenly peered at him with a drunken intense look of heat, appetite, disorder. If he had been sober, perhaps he might have found it comic, a woman turning a gaze on him hot enough to scale paint. But he wasn’t. He simply held his ground and watched as she stood and then leaned down and kissed him as he sat in the brocaded hotel armchair. Her lips were chapped, and, as he would have imagined, somehow crusted hard. There was a taste of salt from the meal she had eaten.
“How do you like that?” She laid his head against her breast. Dove-soft. The strong sweet smell of her perfume was all around him, and on his cheek he felt a silky undergarment shifting beneath her blouse. He did not move. He was certain he would receive further instruction.
She kissed him again, then released him and strode off to the bathroom, the water splashed. Stern moved to the edge of the bed, bracing himself. Dear God, he was drunk. The room had not begun to move, but he sensed that it was unglued, starting to become slippery in the peripheral world just beyond the corners of his eyes. What was the old line? A drop of courage. Well, he felt courageous. He was willing.
The lights went out. Margy was poised by the switch. She wore nothing now but her jasmine-colored silk blouse, which was unbuttoned and parted an inch or two over her chest and hung at the length of a negligee. Her legs were bare, her hair was down, and without her fashionable attire and high-heeled shoes, she looked far more delicate. Her skirt and a silky flag of lingerie were bundled in her hand. She tilted her head.
“Well, look who’s gettin lucky,” Margy said.
Stern turned off the lamp behind him. Moving across the room to meet her, Stern kicked through two or three piles of records. She was much smaller than she appeared, an inch or two shorter than he, but solid in his arms. Her mouth was raw and smoky.
How strange and friendly this all seemed. She even drew back at one point to laugh. He swept aside her shirt, touched her breast, and then bent gallantly to kiss the small dark button where his years with Clara had taught him to expect more. Drunk as he was, this was awkward, and they rolled almost at once onto the the bed. Body to body, there was in the small details—the texture of flesh, the precise location of elbows and knees—the exciting news of contact with a different female structure, but over him swam, surprisingly, the sensation of something familiar; he was more relaxed at this than he would ever have imagined. It was this old mysterious human thing relived, man and woman, nothing larger than that. She worked off his tie, opened his shirt. Her leg was up over him as she embarked on this enterprise, and almost casually his hand came up to the warm slick arena at her bottom. She had washed there and his fingertips slid in a bit, and this, this ancient sweet warm feel, this! sent a spectacular surge through him so that he suddenly groaned.
In a few minutes they were joined. Margy for her part slid into a transport of her own. Her eyes were closed, and as Stern rolled, she made a peculiar internal hum, pulling herself down into him with every stroke. There was something oddly practiced and isolated about it; Margy knew how to look after herself. Near the end, she put one hand on his butt and held him where she wanted him, dove onto
him a final time and then approached the peak and reached it with a terrible tremolo whinny, setting both hands and their long red nails groping in his back. The thought of those crimson-tipped hands pressed into the loose pale flesh of his own back—the image reached him as something remarkably tantalizing, and that, as much as Margy’s agitation, the rising pace of her breath, set him off finally, so that he momentarily lost track of her, still struggling against him, and then waked to her, this soft, sweet-smelling woman beneath him going still at almost the same second as he did. She pulled him to her in a kind of gratified, comradely hug. “Terrific,” she said, a remark which Stern heard as praise of the process really, rather than him. Her eyes were still closed and she smiled faintly; her makeup was messed. Her familiarity with all this, her comfort in a strange man’s arms, was a phenomenon. Somewhere long ago she had vowed to take whatever was to be had for herself.
She kissed him beside the ear and rolled away, grabbing the pillows on her side of the bed. Familiar as any man’s wife, she arranged her rump solidly, so that it found some part of his flank, and then she disappeared into sleep, so quickly that Stern somehow recognized that, more than anything which had gone before, it was this moment of refuge which had been the goal for Margy. To her, he was a man she could calmly sleep beside. In her drowse, she murmured. The light, Stern supposed. He leaned closer to the strange, intimate smell of her, to catch her whisper.
“Oh, God,” he said when he heard her, and then embraced her, fit himself to her, and, once the lights were out, slept.
Don’t bill us, she had whispered. Don’t bill us for the time.
Sometime he woke. He bolted upright, staring blindly in the dark. He had no idea, no inkling where he was, until he recognized a chair where his suit hung and remembered the hotel, Chicago, Margy. He could still feel the weight of her form beside him, but he dared not reach for her. There was a distinct line of pain boring inward from his temple. He groped for his watch on the bedside table, then realized he could read the hieroglyphics of the blue digital numbers on the clock radio: 3:45. That was not what struck him, though. It was the calendar, also there in smaller figures.
He sat at the edge of the bed, calculating as Margy’s heavy sounds came to him in the dark.
Forty, he thought. Since the day he came home to find her. Forty days, exactly.
10
WHEN HE WOKE, she was sitting on the bed, legs crossed, wearing his shirt. Pillars of photocopied records had slid into a slatternly mess before her. Margy’s head was on one hand.
“Well, I figured it out,” she said. “He’s a peckerhead, okay.”
Stern, naked, found his shorts beside the bed, and narrowly parted the drapes. The sun had only begun to rise in an overcast sky. He went briefly to the bathroom. There was a woolen feeling in his mouth and head. A hangover? He groped in his jacket pocket for his reading glasses.
“Now, what is this?”
“House error account doesn’t look very good.” Margy flopped over onto her belly. Her bottom was bare and her position on the bed pressed up an appealing décolletage. Stern for a second tried to take account of events. He was a widower, in his underwear, engaged in a business conference, and his penis was already growing firm. She picked up a copy of the subpoena and penciled check marks beside four trades, large positions, four different dates. “Now, these guys are gonna move the market, right?”
Perhaps because of the distraction, he was momentarily confused. Then he recalled Dixon’s explanation last month: large orders, a thousand contracts at a time, would cause a sharp movement in the price of the future.
“Supply and demand,” said Stern.
“Right,” she said. “Now, suppose you got a customer’s gonna be comin into the pit with a huge buy order that’ll run up prices through the roof. And you’re a big peckerhead and wanna make a buck or two. What’d you do?”
Stern thought. “Purchase what the customer intends to buy?”
“Dang right.”
“Prior to the customer?”
“Dang right.”
“And then sell once the market has risen.”
“You betchum. They got all kinds of names for it. ‘Front runnin.’ ‘Tradin ahead of the customer.’ But they been playin this game ever since there was a market.” Margy looked up. Ungroomed, her hair was darker, and her eyes seemed bloated a bit by the short night. She remained, however, a pretty sight, this large hearty woman, smart and energetic. Stern noticed that she had never removed her earrings, little berries of gold.
“I would assume that the compliance staff of the Exchange is alert to this?”
“Shore. Exchange catches you at it, you’re out on your keester in a big goddamn hurry. And they’re always lookin.”
“And how, then, were such precautions avoided here?”
“Error account.”
“The error account,” said Stern, merely for the sake of repetition. Somehow, as she snaked along on her belly, the shirt had came away completely from one breast, which rested pale and round on the bedclothes. He had momentarily fallen into their discussion, but this new sight revived other inclinations. Libido was like a rusty gate, he decided; finally open, it was difficult to close. He picked up a piece of paper on the bed and casually hid his erection.
“I gotta give it to ol’ peckerhead. I’d never have figured this one. The house error account is where we clean up mistakes. Right? Sometimes we buy or sell a contract on one commodity, customer wanted another. We buy three cars, customer only asked for two. Any dumb ol’ mistake. Account number isn’t right or somethin. Soon as somebody notices the error, down on the floor or in accounting or when the customer complains, trade gets moved to the error account. If we can’t get the trade where it belongs, we close out the position—you know, sell what we bought or buy what we sold. Okay?”
Okay, said Stern.
“Now suppose I’m a real clever peckerhead and I wanna trade ahead of my customers and I don’t wanna get caught. I buy a little in Kindle of what I know they’re gonna buy a lot of in Chicago. Price’ll move tick for tick in both places. All I gotta do is wait for the market to jump. And I don’t do it in my name. I make a mistake. Deliberately. Wrong account number, say. Then, after the market runs up, I sell out the position.”
“Once more, with a wrong account number?”
“Right. Couple days later, when the smoke clears, both trades are sittin over in the house error account. Compliance’ll never be lookin at Kindle, and even if they do, they won’t find anybody buyin ahead of the market. All they see is some dumb ol’ mistake. But when we close out the two positions, the buy and the sell, we got a hell of a nice little profit in the error account.”
Stern wagged his head in amazement. How nice a profit, he wanted to know.
Margy shrugged. “I haven’t finished lookin yet. Four trades here made close to a hundred thousand, though. I’d say you probably got six times that. Not bad, you know, for a few phone calls while you’re scratchin your fanny.”
Six hundred thousand, thought Stern. Ms. Klonsky was not pursuing a petty offense.
“Only thing,” said Margy, “is this little scam still doesn’t seem much like our friendly peckerhead.”
That had been Stern’s thought as well, that the rewards were not worth the risks for a man of Dixon’s wealth. But Margy laughed at the idea when Stern said that.
“Oh, he’d screw you in the ground for a buck and a quarter, let alone half a million. Naw, it isn’t that. Just doesn’t seem like Dixon. Our customers? That’s his religion. I can’t figure him makin them suckers. He’s loyal.” Lawl. She grabbed Stern’s hands. “But I know he done it,” she said.
“Because he must be informed before any large order is traded?” This fact, which Dixon had admitted in Stern’s office, had already come to mind.
“That’s one thing. But lotsa folks in house know what we’re doin. Only, if I stole five, six hundred thousand bucks, am I gonna hide it in your pocket? It’s the house
error account. And ol’ Dixon Hartnell is shore enough the house. He owns MD Clearing Corp, MD Holding Corp, Maison Dixon. The whole shootin’ match is his. This is probably some dumb old game he was playin, seein’ if he could get a laugh or two up his sleeve.”
Stern contemplated the notion of Dixon committing crimes for his own amusement. It was not impossible. With Dixon, of course, nothing was.
“And what became of the money?” Stern was thinking about the subpoenas the government was serving at Dixon’s bank.
Margy turned onto her back and wobbled her head a bit to indicate that she did not know. Her breasts went loose and splayed against her chest; beneath her chin, where the blush-on ended, a pale rim of flesh was visible, oddly pallid, as if the years of cosmetic treatments had drained her complexion of color. These flaws meant little to Stern; he remained in heat.
“I can’t tell without a lot more lookin. But you want my guess about what he did with the money?”
“Please.”
“Nothin.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothin. Just leaves it there. That’s what I’d do. Error account always runs at a deficit. That’s because when you goof on an order and the customer makes money on it, he won’t tell you it’s an error. He just accepts the trade. You only hear about the losers. And that’s okay. Cost of doin business. But you can lose forty thousand a month, and if you start makin some profits, all of a sudden you’re only losin two thousand a month. See? Nobody knows the difference. Except ol’ peckerhead. Cause, at the end of the year, that six hundred thousand’s gonna end up on the bottom line. Sort of like he give himself a bonus.”
“Very clever,” said Stern of the entire scheme. “And quite adept of you, Margy, to figure all this out.” He kissed the back of each of her hands.
“Oh, I am a clever harlot,” she said, smiling up at him. Stern wondered whose phrase that was, who had called her that before; it seemed to be something she was repeating. He, naturally, might guess. “But I’m not the smartest one.”
