A Matter of Will

by Adam Mitzner

  “No need, my friend. A bottle of the Screaming Eagle, 2010.”

  “Excellent,” the waiter responded. “And for dinner?”

  Without even a nod to Will or Eve, Sam proceeded to order: the steak for two, “black and blue,” the hash browns, “very well done,” and every nonstarch vegetable on the menu, which he explained was on account of Eve being a vegetarian, although he said the word as if it were some type of disease.

  The waiter once again told Sam his selections were excellent, then retreated to implement the command. A minute later, he returned with the wine. After the tasting ritual was completed, the waiter poured a full glass for each of them.

  “To the Devils. Long may they reign,” Sam said with a smirk.

  This time Will felt their camaraderie had been established well enough that a rejoinder was appropriate. “And to those that will defeat them in the end,” he said with a similar grin.

  They each took a sip. Will was not much of an oenophile, but he recognized that this wine was not in the same league as anything he’d ever drunk before. It was incredibly rich, almost a meal by itself.

  “That’s some seriously good juice, don’t you think?” Sam said.

  “It’s very good,” Will confirmed.

  As Sam took another swallow of the wine, Will considered the best way to segue the conversation to business. He had already surmised that Sam was the kind of man who would respect the direct approach. Still, he had to ease into the topic a little bit, so as not to appear too desperate.

  “What do you do for a living, Sam?”

  “You might say that I am a collector of things of great value.”

  “Like art?” Will asked.

  “Among other things,” Sam replied, looking at Eve to punctuate the point that he clearly included her among his possessions.

  “Always nice to be treated like an actual, living human being with a brain,” Eve said.

  “A joke, a joke,” Sam said, actually looking a bit chastised. “Apologies if I offended you, my dear.”

  The source of Sam’s income was irrelevant to Will. As was this moment of bickering between Sam and Eve. All that mattered was that Sam had capital to invest.

  “Are you in the market?”

  Sam chuckled, almost as if to himself. “I make it a rule never to discuss business with anyone I don’t want to spend time with outside of work. So think of it this way: by getting to know each other, we are discussing business.”

  Sam held his hand into the air, and the waiter rushed over. “Antonin, if you’d be so kind as to provide us the check?”

  As soon as the waiter returned, Will seized the opportunity. He grabbed the bill out of Antonin’s hand. “Allow me, Sam. I can charge it back to my firm as a business expense.” Will grinned at Sam. “Assuming, of course, that I passed your test about being someone you wouldn’t mind spending time with outside of work, and you allow me to pitch you Maeve Grant’s products and services.”

  Without waiting for an answer, Will opened the case. He almost had a coronary right there on the spot. The bill, before tip, was $12,516. The Screaming Eagle alone had cost twice what Will earned in a month!

  He tried to get his eyes to focus, thinking he must have read it wrong, misplaced the decimal point. But even after a series of blinks, the bottom line didn’t change.

  Sam grabbed the check from Will’s hand. “That’s very generous of you. Or maybe I should say, of your employer. But this is my treat.”

  Will breathed a sigh of relief. Maeve Grant would never have approved the expense. Not to mention that he didn’t have nearly that much spending power on his credit card.

  “Thank you, Sam. Tonight was truly an extraordinary evening.”

  “It was at that,” Sam said. “And yes, Young Will, you did pass my test as someone who I’d be more than happy to spend time with outside of business.”

  It was music to Will’s ears. Enough for him to even give silent thanks to the Devils for bringing Samuel Abaddon to him.

  4.

  The Maeve Grant Tower had opened only a few weeks before Will joined the firm eighteen months earlier. In short order, the building had become a recognizable feature of the New York City skyline. Not due to any architectural significance, but because it was a good 30 percent taller than its neighbors, which made its placement on Park Avenue look like some type of mistake. At ninety-five stories, it was the third-largest building in the city, behind only the Freedom Tower and the Empire State.

  Will entered the lobby at 6:30 a.m. He knew if he arrived much later, he’d likely be unable to get to his desk before his boss, Robert Wolfe, made his 6:45-sharp phone call to ensure that Will was in and ready to work—even though the official start of the day wasn’t until 7:00.

  Even on his busiest mornings, when Will’s head was crammed with earnings information he needed to impart on cold calls, he always stopped for a moment to look up at the lobby ceiling. It was nine stories above him and was actually the glass bottom of an aquarium that served as the focal point of the restaurant on the tenth floor, which was, aptly enough, simply called The Tenth Floor. It was the most expensive eatery in Manhattan and, from what Will had been told, made the typical high-end places like Wolfgang’s seem like McDonald’s by comparison.

  When he’d first joined Maeve Grant, Will had assumed it would be only a matter of time before The Tenth Floor became his regular lunch spot. Not only had that not come to pass—in fact, he had never once been there—but now he realized he would be denied the privilege of continuing to even look up at the place from the lobby if he didn’t make his numbers this quarter.

  Maeve Grant’s wealth management business was located on the twenty-ninth through thirty-fourth floors. Those spaces didn’t at all resemble the grandeur of the lobby. More than anything else, Will’s workspace reminded him of a rat maze. Gray industrial dividers formed eight-foot-high walls for cubicles as far as the eye could see. Only Maeve Grant’s biggest producers, like Wolfe, merited a windowed office.

  Will’s cubicle was at the perfect center of the floor. Like the middle seat on a plane, it was the least optimal location. Every sound seemed to collect there; he was too far from the exits to be able to leave unnoticed; and one of the large screens displaying stock tickers hung right above him, which always made Will flinch whenever he stood, because it hung down close to his head.

  Brian Harrold was Will’s next-door neighbor in the cube maze, and also his closest friend. It was a damning reality because he and Brian weren’t truly friends; they lacked the intimacy that Will believed would cause the term to have any substantive meaning. They were much more akin to “work bros,” knowing little about each other beyond the careful construction each had built for public consumption. But the title still fit because Will didn’t have any other friends at the office. Or anywhere else, truth be told. The hours at Maeve Grant left little time for a social life—except for the occasional dates with women he met online, few of which had progressed past a second.

  When Will arrived that morning, he could hear Brian pecking furiously at his keyboard. “Fucking Footsie!” his cube neighbor shouted.

  “What are those limey bastards up to now?” Will said, knowing that Brian could hear him through the divider, which didn’t extend all the way to the ceiling.

  “Screwed up my YTD is what,” Brian replied. “The one hundred is down again.”

  Like Brian, Will had also begun mimicking the jargon and mannerisms of the muckety-mucks at Maeve Grant. As a result, Will knew that he often sounded just as ludicrous as Brian sounded now. Brian’s year-to-date results—the YTD he referenced—probably showed, at most, a modest five-figure profit, which would be considered loose change for most brokers and a rounding error for the big dogs. Besides which, the London market—the FTSE, or Footsie in Wall Street speak—had been volatile since New Year’s, so the fact that it was down again was hardly an earth-shattering event.

  Like virtually all the other members of their trainee cl
ass aside from Will, Brian was an Ivy Leaguer, a graduate of Yale, with a degree in history. He hadn’t known a derivative from a mortgage-backed security when he started, even though he had “summered”—that’s the term he used, as if the season could be made into a verb—at Maeve Grant between his junior and senior years of college.

  When Will had asked Brian about the summer program, Brian answered him with a joke.

  “This guy is on his deathbed, right?” Brian began. “And the Archangel Michael or whoever tells him that he has a choice after he dies: he can go to heaven or to hell. So the guy says, ‘Can I visit each before deciding?’ And Michael says, ‘Sure, why not?’ And he whisks the guy up to heaven. It’s certainly nice enough there. Everybody sitting on clouds, playing their harps, that kind of thing. But the guy thinks it’s a little boring, so he asks to see hell. Michael takes him to the underworld, and it’s amazing. There are people dancing and drinking, and everybody is having just the best time. He figures it’s a no-brainer, right? The guy tells Michael he definitely wants to go to hell. Okay, so fast-forward a few months. The guy finally dies, and he gets his wish. But when he gets to hell, everyone is suddenly miserable. They’re doing the worst type of drudgery, and the devil is cracking the whip on them nonstop. The guy is confused, so he says to one of his fellow toilers, ‘I was here just a few months ago, and it was great. Everybody was partying and drinking and having fun.’ And the guy looks at him and says, ‘You must have been visiting during the summer program.’

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Brian said. “You got a good one last night. I had to sneak peeks at my phone when Sarah went to the bathroom, because all hell would have broken loose if I checked a hockey score on Valentine’s Day. But except for the Rangers being on the wrong end, seemed like a good game to watch from the luxury boxes.”

  Will found Brian’s reference to the game comforting. There had been moments since he woke up when he thought he might have dreamed the entire evening’s revelry. But this was tangible proof that he had, in fact, watched the Rangers lose to the Devils. That left only his interaction with Sam and Eve as potential figments of his imagination.

  “Yeah, it was great,” Will said. “There was this guy in the seat next to me with this absolutely stunning redhead, and we got to talking. Then we all went out for dinner after.”

  This tidbit had apparently piqued Brian’s interest, because Will heard him get up and walk the four feet to the threshold of Will’s cube. “You were picked up by a married couple?” Brian said, with a tone that suggested this scenario was the plot of a porn film he’d recently seen.

  Will grinned. “Get your mind out of the gutter. It wasn’t like that . . . but the guy was pretty rich, and so I was thinking he might be a potential client.”

  “What makes you say that? The rich part, I mean.”

  “He ordered a twelve-thousand-dollar bottle of wine for dinner.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “I know, right? It was so . . . crazy. The guy doesn’t say a word to me for most of the game. Then, out of nowhere, he starts on about how great the Devils are. The next thing I know, we’re at this steak place having this lavish meal. So I offer to pick up the tab like a hero, figuring that Wolfe will let me charge through three hundred bucks in the name of business development. But when I look at the check, it’s for over twelve grand. I almost threw up. Without missing a beat, the guy says it’s his treat.”

  “You need to reel that whale in, my friend. You should call him right now.”

  “Yeah . . . There’s one small flaw in my master plan for world domination. When I woke up this morning, I realized that I have no way of contacting him.”

  “He didn’t give you a business card?”

  “A lot of the night is blurry—a twelve-grand bottle of wine packs quite the punch—but I don’t think so. I certainly didn’t have one in my wallet or any of my pockets. I’m not even sure what the guy does for a living. I thought his name was Sam Abaddon, but I’m not getting any hits about a guy with that name in finance or art or who lives in New York City. I even tried googling his girlfriend, but she has a French-sounding last name, so I’m not sure I’m spelling it right.”

  “Yabba dabba? Like what Fred Flintstone says?”

  “What?”

  “Didn’t Fred Flintstone say ‘yabba dabba doo’?”

  “Not yabba dabba. Abaddon.”

  Brian laughed. “Your whale sounds more like a Swedish rock band.”

  Will could appreciate how strange it all seemed. It didn’t make too much sense to him either, and he’d lived it. Or at least he thought he had. Maybe he had hallucinated everything.

  “I guess I’m just going to have to wait for him to track me down,” Will said.

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s going to happen,” Brian replied as he headed back to his cube.

  5.

  At least according to the expression, digging ditches was supposed to be the worst way to make a living. “It beats digging ditches” was the standard refrain in response to any employment complaint. Will, however, suspected that ditchdiggers had their own comeback: “It beats cold-calling.”

  Will could scarcely imagine a more soul-sucking way to spend his day than asking strangers to give him money to invest based on promises that were predicated on little more than wishful thinking. Still, until he had a book of business under his broker number, he was expected to fill his day by contacting the people on the call list the firm provided and wresting from them whatever money he could.

  On his first day, he and the other trainees had been given a script for these calls. The instruction was to follow it verbatim:

  “Am I speaking to [INSERT FULL NAME OF CLIENT]? Excellent, and a very good [MORNING/AFTERNOON/EVENING] to you. My name is [INSERT YOUR FULL NAME], and I’m a vice president in the wealth-management division at the international investment bank Maeve Grant, which, I’m sure you’re aware, is one of the most respected institutions on Wall Street. I’m going to spend all of a minute and a half with you, because ninety seconds is enough time for me to provide you with an opportunity that may very well change your entire life.”

  At this point in the script, the broker was supposed to engage the customer by saying something like, “How does that sound?” Will had learned from repeated experience, however, that letting the customer answer an open-ended question invited a hang up. So he always plowed forward:

  “Plain and simple, Maeve Grant has the inside track on a block of stock that we’re making available to a select few highly qualified individuals. Let’s be honest. We’re all in this to make a buck, and Maeve Grant wouldn’t itself control a large block of this company’s stock if it wasn’t highly confident of a huge return. So why wouldn’t you want to be along for the ride too?”

  The script was “true,” which in Wall Street terms meant it was not demonstrably false. Will was a vice president, although every single broker at the firm held at least that title, even the trainees. There were four levels of vice president above his rank, and the big producers were managing directors. It was also true that Maeve Grant was one of the most well-respected names on Wall Street, although that reputation was largely due to the strength of its investment-banking department, where the billion-dollar corporate deals were struck.

  It was when he got to talking about the stock he was selling that the script became even more unmoored from reality. Will had very little reason to believe that a few hundred shares of whatever corporation he was pitching were going to change anyone’s life. Nor did he have any basis from which to conclude that Maeve Grant actually was highly confident that the security in question would generate a huge return.

  But he reasoned that such a statement was hardly different from the outsize claims made by car manufacturers about the performance features on the latest model of a sports car, or by some diet company about its ability to help someone lose twenty
pounds. Or that anything that was advertised, for that matter, was going to change anyone’s life. And there was nothing unethical—and certainly not illegal—about claiming it might in order to make a sale. Indeed, it was the first rule of sales: you sell the sizzle, not the steak.

  The market took a beating that day. The Dow was down over 300 points, and the S&P lost almost 2 percent. The international markets had not fared much better.

  “Jesus,” Brian said when the bell rang on the trading floor, signifying the end of the carnage.

  Will rubbed his face. Today’s results put him that much closer to being out of a job.

  To add insult to injury, he saw Robert Wolfe approaching.

  Each trainee was assigned to a more senior broker and given a small share of that broker’s business to manage, while spending the bulk of his or her time cold-calling for new clients. Will had been paired with Wolfe, one of Maeve Grant’s biggest producers—and an even bigger asshole. Will wondered why a man named Wolfe would want to consciously look like one, but his boss either didn’t get the joke or reveled in it, because he wore his hair past his collar and sported a thick beard that he groomed to perfection. On top of that, he was a caricature of what a Wall Streeter had looked like circa the 1987 crash. Today, that meant he was sporting a blue shirt with a white collar and cuffs, and the yellow braces holding up his pants perfectly matched his tie and silk pocket square.

  “You really took it up the ass today, Matthews,” Wolfe said without any preamble.

  “Tough day all around in the market,” Will replied.

  “Not for me. I saw the correction coming and shorted some tech and transportation as a hedge.”

  Will was certain that was a lie. Wolfe began each day with an email to his team, which included four brokers and Will, his sole trainee, touting the opportunities he saw in the market. The subject line was always “The Wolfe Pack,” which Wolfe undoubtedly thought was witty. Today’s missive hadn’t recommended shorting anything, nor had it counseled caution.