Nothing Personal: A Novel of Wall Street

by Offit, Mike

  “Yeah, but have you even known one person who’s been killed before? Now two in a few months? Hey, maybe you’re next.” She pointed a maple-coated finger at him and shot him in mime.

  “No, not really.” Warren reached out and smoothed her hair, and his eyes met hers. She smiled at him, and didn’t look away. “Funny, there were two girls in school at Columbia who died in accidents, but Anson was a son of a bitch. Dougherty was a good guy. That was sad. At least he had a lot of insurance, though. Evidently that’s big with the Irish.” Warren sat forward and plucked a corner of waffle from the plate. “Besides, why would anybody bother killing investment bankers? Usually, if there’s going to be genocide based on financials, it’s the Jews who go first. I mean, you didn’t see Hitler herding the Hapsburgs out of the Deutschebank.”

  “What is it with you Jews? If someone else gets killed, you figure it was a mistake, and they were aiming for you. It’s like there’s a Holocaust in every closet.” She was waving a waffle in the air for emphasis.

  “Uh-oh. Do I detect a little of the fascist in you? This could be it! I always had a thing for Mussolini. Great outfits! He did the same thing with his food. Waved it around and ate with his hands. And you’ve got a similar figure. Better hair. I think I’ll call you Il Duce.” Warren ducked as the waffle came whistling at his cheek. He grabbed Sam’s hand and brought the waffle back to his mouth. He ate it slowly, then licked the syrup off each of her fingers, working his way up her arm to her neck. “You have beautiful hands, did you know that?”

  “Yuk. Your lips are all gooey.” She made a halfhearted attempt to push him away. He resisted and got her plate onto the night table before he pushed her back onto the bed and started searching under her T-shirt for where she had hidden the other waffles.

  * * *

  They didn’t make it out of Warren’s apartment until almost noon. The sun made them squint as they went through the front door. Warren still managed to catch Angelo’s glance as the doorman sized Sam up with an appraiser’s eye. Invariably, Warren would get a critique the next time he passed through the lobby alone. His building only had doormen on duty from 8:00 a.m. to midnight, so he had to remember to get Sam a key for the lobby door.

  Warren’s two front rooms each had small balconies with planting boxes, which he had filled for the winter with ivy and miniature evergreens. He’d taken his first vacation from Weldon and spent a long weekend days furnishing the rooms in an eclectic collection of French country antiques mixed with Biedermeier and art deco pieces from antique stores in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village. His mother had always told him the way to make a room interesting was to blend periods and styles. Larisa had designed the curtains, which had been sewn and hung by a frail Argentinian gentleman who ran a tiny workshop on upper Amsterdam Avenue. His prices had been unbelievably reasonable, but he was so nervous that Warren had given him a glass of brandy to calm him down halfway through the day he spent putting them up.

  Sam had complimented him on the décor, as it was unusual for a young, single guy to invest in anything more complicated than a sectional sofa and a couple of posters. She singled out the curtains, and the care taken in picking fabrics. Larisa had spent three days in the Decorators and Designers building obsessing over moiré silks, velvets, and the like, bringing him dozens of swatches, settling on an art deco printed velvet. He had thanked Sam for the compliment and shamelessly took full credit.

  They hailed a taxi on the corner and headed east, through the roadway that cut across Central Park and emerged just south of the Metropolitan Museum. From there, they turned down Fifth Avenue. They both had some last-minute Christmas shopping to do. Warren had suggested Bergdorf Goodman as a likely source of gifts for her family, and he had to get something for his dad.

  The store was bustling, but Warren found the layout confusing. In the small men’s department, Sam picked out six pairs of boxer shorts with silly, colorful designs, two each for her father and uncles, and Warren was split between a heavy pigskin suede duffel coat and a brown leather polo bag. The overly helpful salesman was pushing him toward the bag, but Warren finally opted for the coat. The price was almost breathtaking, $1,200, but it was an awfully nice coat. He’d already sent his mother a handbag from Bottega Veneta.

  Before they left, Warren wanted to look at some suits. They went up in the elevator, to a part of the floor divided into a dozen small niches, each representing a single designer. Warren recognized some of the names from Goering’s clothes. After five minutes, he told Sam it was time to go. He hadn’t seen a single item under $1,300. “It may be the 1980s,” he’d said to Sam, “but those prices are just crazy.”

  Outside, in the cold air, Sam realized she was hungry again.

  “Isn’t it a bit late for lunch?” He felt as if he’d hardly digested the waffles.

  “Lunch, dinner, who cares? C’mon, what’s good around here?” Sam waved with an expansive gesture. Warren noticed that she started moving her hands a lot when it was feeding time.

  “I dunno. Whaddaya want?” He shrugged his shoulders. Picking a restaurant in New York was impossible. There were simply too many to choose from.

  “Oh, anything. Maybe seafood. Clams. Shellfish. Whatever.” Her eyes half glazed over, and Warren imagined for a moment that little lobsters were floating in her eyes, like in the cartoons.

  “Anything, as long as it comes in a shell?” Warren asked, picking up the scent.

  “Yeah. Salty, maybe even briny. You know. That’s what I want.” She hugged his arm.

  “How about the Oyster Bar right over there at the Plaza?” Warren pointed a gloved finger across the street at the famous hotel. “They have oyster pan roasts, you know.”

  “That sounds yummie. Okay!” The pair made their way across Fifty-Eighth Street to the side entrance to the restaurant. The dark walnut paneling, bright lighting, and red leather banquettes hadn’t changed in almost a hundred years, since the days when men would think nothing of quaffing two dozen oysters and two or three pints of beer before a serious eight- or nine-course dinner. Sam ordered only one dozen Cotuits and a bottle of Sam Adams, to be followed by a half dozen littlenecks, an oyster pan roast, and finally by a plate of snow-crab legs. Warren had a dozen littlenecks and asked if she’d share her pan roast. She looked a little crestfallen, but agreed.

  “Let me ask you something,” Warren started as she inhaled the fifth oyster and took a pull of beer. “Do you always eat like this? How do you stay so thin?” He’d also ordered a crabmeat cocktail and a cup of clam chowder.

  “I like to eat. No, I don’t really put on weight, unless I go to town. Hey, once, in Austria, on a trip for work, I put on twelve pounds. I got hooked on buttercream. I think I had it on toast and maybe even on fish. It was this incredible stuff they had in their cakes. I had to dry out for a week or two when I got back. I did the same thing once with my ex-boyfriend.” She jabbed a tiny fork into another oyster, then changed her mind and just sucked it down.

  “Ex-boyfriend, eh? And here I thought I was your first man.” Warren smiled and took a sip of his beer.

  “Oh, maybe my first real man. Yeah, he turned out to be a cretin. Stole almost all my money.” She put down the shell. “That really was not a great moment.”

  “I thought you said your business manager took your money?” Warren was confused. “Was this a habit with the men in your life?”

  “No. They were the same. He was my boyfriend. Or so I thought. Told me he had a Harvard MBA. Put me into offshore hedge funds, leveraged buyouts, blah, blah, blah. They were all phony. Except the car dealership. Took about a million bucks. Six hard years of modeling, a house I bought and sold, two commercials, and a sitcom. Hey, but he nailed some Hollywood big shots for some pretty good dough too, so it wasn’t just me.”

  “Oh, yeah, like who?” Warren was interested in gossip, though he denied it.

  “Well, for one, this big, hotshot lawyer who represents all the singers and supposedly does these big deals, but actually j
ust bails them out of trouble and helps supply them with drugs and chicks. She’s married to this sleazeball art dealer. He used my boyfriend to sell me some bogus painting for eighty-five thousand bucks that was worth maybe ten, but who knew? He was selling stuff to these idiot studio heads for millions. They used to drive everywhere in this Rolls convertible, each of them talking on their own fancy car phone. So when Artie screwed them out of five hundred thousand, I didn’t feel so bad about it. Uggh.” Sam had finished the oysters and was working on the littlenecks. “These are good. Really cold and sweet. Want one?” She held the pinkish bivalve under Warren’s nose.

  He detested the slimy creatures unless they were cooked to a cardboard consistency. “No, no thanks. Well, I’m glad to see your experience hasn’t hardened you at all.” He looked the other way as she chewed the clam.

  “C’mon. What about you? You think these are fun people I’m talking about? In your business? The world’s full of them. It doesn’t mean you have to be one of them, but it pays to know what you’re dealing with. I wish I had a lot earlier.” She put her beer mug down on the table with a bang. “Some people want to screw you in every possible way.”

  “I don’t think I’m naïve. Hardly. I just think you’ve gotta look for the best in people rather than the worst. My dad always said he tried to find one thing to like in everyone.”

  “A noble idea. Most people do find one thing to like in everyone. Their hand in your pocket.” She had made short work of the creamy pan roast—Warren had managed to spear only two bites before it ws gone—and was already halfway through the crab claws, picking the meat out expertly with the fork. “Could you wave him down and get me another beer?”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right, but I try to maintain a more positive attitude and just watch my butt, so there’s nothing else going in someplace it doesn’t belong. But you can only control so much.” He put down his spoon and asked the waiter for another Sam Adams. “It’s like Anson—the guy who got killed. He manipulated everyone at work, screwed lots of people, probably had all kinds of strange stuff going on. Then one day, despite all the plotting and planning, strategizing and tactical analyzing, he wakes up dead with his head pounded in, and none of it matters any more. He kind of deserved what he got, but that doesn’t happen very often. Usually bad things happen to good people and vice versa.”

  “Well, if someone could catch up to Artie and bust his skull, I wouldn’t be crying at the funeral.” She punctuated the comment by cracking a claw with a resounding crunch.

  “What happened to him? Didn’t he get caught?”

  “No. Guys like him never get caught.” She was relishing the last few bites of the sweet, white meat. The second beer arrived and she downed half of it quickly. “He stole like ten million bucks and then moved it around all these countries. He took me to Liechtenstein, on my credit card, supposedly to visit these friends of his in a big castle for a vacation. We stayed three days. That’s how long it took him to move my money from the Channel Islands through Liechtenstein to an Arab bank and then into never-never land. Two weeks later, he was gonzo alonzo. He spoke pretty good Greek and real good Italian, so everyone figures that’s where he is—Greece or Italy.”

  “But they have treaties with the US. Can’t you trace the money?”

  “Nope. Between Panama and Liechtenstein, the banking laws are unbelievable. We got absolutely nowhere. The US Justice Department couldn’t even trace the money. Besides, my investigator thinks he turned it into hard currency and smuggled it out. It’s gone. I gave up, and so did everyone else. He won. But he left me in the car-rental business with the Demecelli brothers. Thank God they’re silent partners. Ten to twenty in the federal pen will do that.” She had finished the crab claws, drained the beer, and threw her napkin on the table. “Great snack. Perfect choice.”

  “You’re welcome. Snack? I can’t believe he just got away with it.” Warren picked up one of the discarded oyster shells. “Hey! What’s that in there? What’s going on?” He had palmed the earrings and seemed to pluck them out of the shell. “We better ask the waiter what kind of oysters these are.”

  “What?” Sam looked confused. Then she saw the earrings. “Oh my God … They’re beautiful.”

  “They’re for you. Kind of a welcoming present.”

  “Come on. Wait a second here. I can’t be taking something like that from someone I hardly—”

  “You don’t want to finish that sentence. We know each other pretty well by now. At least, I’d like to think so.” He still had the jewels in his outstretched hand.

  “Yeah, well, maybe so. But, you know, jewelry puts things on a different level.”

  “What, a more serious level? Maybe that’s the level I want to be on here.”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t there some saying about this kind of thing? Like strangers bearing Trojan horses or something?”

  “Forget about it. Take them on a test drive, and we’ll worry about the levels later.”

  She tried them on, carefully clipping the posts behind her lobes. She bent over to check herself out in one of the mirrored walls. “Jesus, they look great. I can’t believe it.”

  “Modesty becomes you, my dear. But those actually become you more.”

  “God, I think these are the nicest gift anyone has ever given me. Are you sure…”

  “Hey, I’m sure. I don’t want you thinking this whole thing is about a plane ticket and a couple of weekends. When you decide that I’m just a dull bond salesman and dump me for some Hollywood big shot, at least you’ll have something to remember me by, or to hock when he steals the rest of your money,” Warren said with a smile creasing his eyes.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s right. I meant to tell you—Bob Redford just invited me down to his place for the weekend with George Lucas and Dustin Hoffman. Gotta go!… Come on, you’re not dull at all! All your friends are getting killed all the time, you know all about jerk-off bonds, and you play golf, a very exciting game. This is kind of fun.”

  “Yeah, until they decide to kill me.”

  “Well, until then we’ll have a good time and be well fed. Now, let’s pay the bill, take a walk, and start discussing dinner. I like Italian food a lot.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “It takes a lot of fuel to keep me going.”

  “Well then, what’ll it be—regular or premium?”

  “Umm … I think you know the answer to that question.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  forty-three

  After loafing around town with Sam, going back to work was something of a shock to the system, and a relief to the digestive tract. The week before Christmas is traditionally supposed to be slow on Wall Street, but according to most of the veterans on the trading floor, it never turned out that way. Warren had a backlog of calls to return, and the day passed quickly and stressfully, arguing with the treasury-bond traders about some prices they gave his clients for trades, and missing a lot of business to other dealers. By four o’clock, Warren realized he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and he’d only had time for a brief chat with Sam, who was at his gym getting a massage.

  Finally, there was a lull, and Warren caught up with Kerry Bowen, who also looked totally spent, her hair mussed, and her eyes red. Warren was uncertain how to broach the subject of his pay with Malcolm Conover, as he knew he’d be earning a straight commission on his own accounts for the year, but wasn’t sure how he would be paid for the work he’d done the past months with Dougherty’s old accounts. Kerry had advised him to go right in to Malcolm the first week after Dougherty’s death and straighten it out, but when he’d tried, Malcolm had been evasive and told him not to worry about it. She was writing out the day’s last trade ticket when she felt Warren staring at her.

  “Okay, Warren, what’s up? I feel like the Gorgon is watching me. This has been the day from hell.” She looked up from her work, sensing that he wanted to talk.

  “The usual. It’s driving me nuts. I’m go
ing nonstop here, but I have no clue what it all means.” He shrugged his shoulders.

  “Listen, they’re doing all the traders’ final bonus numbers today. In fact, I think they’ll start telling people after the close. I’m sure you’ll be told, too. Relax, it’s almost over, and there’s nothing you can do about it, so why worry?” Kerry already knew to the penny what she would be paid for the year, since she was on a straight commission. Warren honestly didn’t have a clue. On full commission, he’d be getting just under $2 million. The commissions on his base accounts were $750,000. He had increased his production 50 percent with them. It was a lot of money either way, but a huge range. In his heart, he figured they’d give him $1 or $1.1 million. What galled him was that the rest of the money, almost a million dollars, would probably be split up by the three department heads.

  “Yeah, you’re right. I should just sit back and enjoy the ride.” His sarcastic tone elicited a wan smile from Kerry.

  “C’mon. It’s Christmas. It could be worse. You could be actually working for a living, instead of just pushing bonds. Cheer up.”

  At that moment, Malcolm Conover appeared behind Kerry. “Hey, Warren, got a second?’ Malcolm gestured toward his office.

  “Absolutely.” Warren felt his stomach tighten. They must have finished preparing everyone’s pay numbers early for a change. It was showtime.

  Malcolm’s office was smaller than Frank Tonelli’s or Jamie Holik’s, but had a better view out over the harbor. He had decorated the walls with posters from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Warren knew that Malcolm had been a mediocre salesman in the Philadelphia office before being asked to come to New York as national sales manager. “Those who can, do; those who can’t, manage” had been Bill Dougherty’s favorite description of Malcolm. Warren took a chair and crossed his legs. He held his hands in his lap to cover his nervousness.