A Bridge to Treachery From Extortion to Terror

by Larry Crane

  “Very good. See Calvin when you get back to Paramus. And Louis, I’d appreciate it if you’d keep all this to yourself for the time being.” Flash.

  He stopped in the Trinity Churchyard on his way back to the tubes. He sat on a bench beside the cathedral, watching remnant leaves sail down to collide with eroded gravestones or be sent spinning off the finials of the wrought iron fence. The sounds of construction further down Broadway enveloped him. The April wind swirled down from above, the cold sneaking in through the open collar of his coat. His eyes moved up the wall of the building across the graveyard and came to rest on a mocking gargoyle near the roof line. “Laugh, you bastard,” he muttered.

  On his feet, Lou walked the winding path through the churchyard’s sandstone slabs and benches with his hands plunged deep into his coat pockets. An old man, wrapped in a filthy black overcoat, lay sleeping by the stairs going down to Church Street. Lou kept walking toward the twin World Trade Towers ahead.

  Slow down. It’s new, that’s all. Play it out. It’s a chance. Take it.

  Chapter Four

  “Call me Barry,” Westover said, above the buzz of fifteen other conversations in his trading room. “Where’d you run into Patty?”

  “Hey, it’s a long story,” Lou said, imitating Westover’s bantering tone.

  “She’s a piece of work, isn’t she? Sharp, though.”

  “A legend in her own time.”

  “You bet. Listen, Lou, I know this is going to work out terrific, so let’s not bullshit. All I really need is good execution.”

  “Good execution you shall have,” Lou said.

  “Forget about confirming calls and all that. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll assume everything went fine and I’ll be looking for the confirms the following morning.”

  “Gotcha, Barry. No stroking.”

  “Put me down for a million of the new Puerto Rico Highways that Pierson Browne’s managing and five hundred thousand of the Bergen County Sewer Authorities that closed out last week.”

  “A million Puerto Ricos, five hundred thousand Bergen County Sewers. You got it,” Lou said.

  It felt like a fish bone in his throat, a jab of something like panic. He could feel the heat rising up across his cheekbones. He didn’t move from his seat until he began to feel calm returning. Then he stood up and walked slowly all around the perimeter of the bullpen. He sat again and scribbled out orders, then stuffed them into the pneumatic tube cylinder. He punched the button and watched the cylinder fly away to the order room with a loud whoosh.

  The next morning, the call came before the market opened. Buy five thousand shares of Inland Steel, five thousand Kennecott, and five thousand International Nickel. Barry mumbled something about probably being a little late getting into the basic metals.

  On the third morning, Barry called just before the market closed, asked about the Dow, and promptly ordered the sale of four thousand Proctor and Gamble and the purchase of three thousand Du Pont with the proceeds. Those three days rounded out the pay period for Lou with the largest total of net commissions he ever heard of in a retail office, Buck included, let alone his personal high for a month. Forty-five thousand dollars in gross commissions to his account, counting the piddling eighteen hundred bucks he’d managed to scrape together in the preceding twenty days.

  * * *

  “Twenty-seven and a half percent of forty-five thousand bucks is what?” he asked, as he and Maggie giggled over the breakfast coffee.

  “What did you do for this man, Lou?” Mag asked, lasciviously.

  “Six thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five bucks, net,” Lou said, looking up from his scratch paper. “In one month. How much does that add up to in a year?”

  “You bust your stones for four years trying to get some of these old farts to part with a thousand dollars, and then strike it rich just because Patty Buck likes the cut of your spinnaker? I don’t get it.”

  “Eighty-two thousand! Do you realize that, Maggie? Eighty-two thousand dollars!”

  “I think the computer’s in heat.”

  “It’s like a vending machine, Mag. Someone slaps in a dollar and the Snickers bar falls out. The machine couldn’t care less who dropped the coin; once it gets going, no one wants to know anything. Heaven forbid, they might step on some tender toes. Once your little name is put down as the man to call, they’ll keep calling until they get another little name. Nobody asks questions. Why should they? How can they? There are certain ways these accounts get set up. Mag, believe me, I could die tomorrow and they’d still be calling me to place orders. It’s beautiful.”

  * * *

  At first he acted as if nothing was new. Keep cool. Stick with the system. Put in all of the normal calls to drum up business: obligatory calls to the steady customers just to check in on the market and to keep them thinking in the trading way, and prospecting calls to people who had returned one of his mailers. Cater to the gaffers who sit on the sofa staring at the electronic tape marching along on the front wall and then stop at the desk to ask a question about a stock dividend or the latest hot tip from the research department.

  After the third day of Westover calls, the old song and dance went right in the toilet. No way was he going to babysit the dorks out there or break his neck on the phone trying to cajole nervous Nellies into sticking their first thousand dollars into the stock market.

  The office was dark and quiet when Lou plopped behind his desk in the front of the bullpen. It was a large, open space where all the beginning “account executives” cut their teeth until they were either washed out or they moved into one of the glassed-in offices spaced around the outside wall. Brian Mutcheller, a trainee right out of school, was Lou’s only company in the office. Mutch hunched over a copy of the Wall Street Journal in the back row. The ticker was stopped on the last message of the preceding day’s trading:

  VOLUME 2,567,458,123 SHS TRADED

  The green letters on the Quotron still recorded his last request of yesterday: IAL 32 ¼. Only the lights from a couple of offices and the fluorescent lights in the back of the pen near Mutcheller kept the office from total darkness. Lou sat back with his feet on the desk.

  Just wait. Right? Obviously it was one of the institutional accounts normally handled in the city, where they have direct access to the research department and the syndicate people. Hell, Westover still had to be in touch with those guys. He seemed to know the details of all the latest syndicate deals and what the research mavens were pushing. So wait. Wait. Just wait.

  He walked to the back of the bullpen toward the rear corner of the floor: Calvin Swisher’s office. Inside, he placed a little note on his desk: “Cal, can you fit me in for a couple of minutes this morning?”

  Swisher hadn’t said a word to him since Lou had stopped into his office to report on what Buck had said. Swisher had to know what was going on. He saw every trade that left the place, but he had chosen to stay away and was going to let Lou come to him.

  * * *

  It was a year ago now since he had gone to Swisher looking for other answers.

  “Cal, listen. I want you to do something for me.”

  “Shoot”, Cal said.

  “I know you stuck your neck out for me...”

  “You’re quitting?”

  “No. I’m not quitting, and I don’t have something else to go to. I just want you to ask around for me in town.”

  “What, go looking for something in operations?” he said.

  “Operations, anything. I’m not making it here. We both know it.”

  Swisher reached down into his briefcase at his side and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “I’m looking at your sales aptitude scores, here. It says you’re a sure thing. Psychologist’s recommendation, same thing.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they say, Cal.”

  “The hell it doesn’t! They’re the reason I signed you on in the first place, pal.”

  “They didn’t say anything about scrambling for two-bit accounts
for months on end.”

  “We didn’t hire you to work in the back office. We’ve got a couple of hundred high schoolers doing that.”

  “All right. Forget it. Forget I said anything.”

  “Go looking, Lou. I couldn’t care less. Any way you slice it, when you wash out of sales, it’s going to come out of my ass. I took you in. It was my mistake.”

  “Forget the whole thing,” Lou said, standing to leave.

  “The only job you’ll ever have at Pierson Browne, if I have anything to say about it, is sales, mister. Retail fucking sales.”

  * * *

  Lou had stuck it out for another bad year. Then, thanks to Patricia Buck’s little talk and the Westover account, the nasty little contretemps with Swish quickly became a dim memory.

  It wasn’t until shortly before noon that Swisher came out of his office and stood beside Lou’s chair. “Let’s go over to The Brazier for lunch,” he said.

  They had martinis and ordered lunch. Cal started out talking about the Jets and how lousy they’d looked on Sunday.

  “How’re Maggie and the little ones, Lou?” he asked, switching subjects in midstream.

  “Everybody’s fine, Cal. The little ones aren’t little. The last one flew the coop eight years ago.”

  “You want another drink? I’m going to. Miss!” Cal called out, swirling his finger around in the glass. “Yeah, two more over here!” He was uncharacteristically nervous, misfiring his lighter before finally touching flame to the end of his Parliament Extra Long. “Cigarette? No, you don’t smoke these little fuckers, do you?”

  “Not anymore. Cal, what the hell’s going on? The account hit me with forty-five bills gross in three days. What’s happening? I don’t care how good a guy I am. You know more about all of this than you’re letting on. All I know is an account number and a name. Who’s Westover?”

  “Hold on, Lou. You’re shooting questions at me so goddamn fast I can’t keep up with you. I don’t go around second guessing Patty Buck, all right? The broad just about runs this outfit, in case you didn’t know it. She does what she pleases. Now, why don’t you just sit back and relax? You act like a guy who can’t stand prosperity.”

  “Calvin, I want you to give Patricia a call today and try to find out something. I can’t function working in the dark .”

  “You can function until hell freezes over with this kind of a deal. What the fuck? Lou, almost every man sitting in one of those offices got some kind of a break they weren’t expecting. It must have occurred to you by now that you don’t gross $100K making cold calls. Now, just shut up and eat. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll try to get through to Patricia sometime today.”

  * * *

  Cal Swisher obviously didn’t want to touch the subject with a ten-foot swizzle stick. Why should he? There was no reason for him to get on the wrong side of Patricia Buck. Branch managers don’t make a practice of questioning prerogatives.

  They settled back with a cup of coffee to finish off the meal. “Doesn’t the branch get credit for the gross from this account too?” Lou asked. “I mean, what will all the other branch managers think when they find out that Buck is passing out institutional accounts to the Paramus office?”

  “Hold on. Don’t you ever utter a word about this account to anybody in this office or anywhere else. There’s no fucking way in the world that I’m going to let on that it’s in the branch. I’d have an armed rebellion on my hands. Besides, the other managers will never find out either, unless Patricia wants them to. Can’t you get it through that Army brain of yours? You’re fortunate enough to have had Lady Luck come along and sit on your shoulder. If you mind your own business, she’ll just keep right on sitting there. If you make a fuss, the little lady just might drop something there you wouldn’t like.”

  * * *

  Stock charts are like treasure maps. And while it’s merely fun to spend a couple of hours poring over the charts—looking for a probable breakout, gauging the possible upside potential, confirming against a halfway decent fundamental story, and then going to your book for possible sales—when you’re doing it for your own account, it’s orgasmic.

  You drum up some business that way; maybe a dozen trades here and there. They’re good sales because they’re short term. You know the guy’ll get squeamish after a week or so and want to get out. Then there’s the sell side and another commission. And if you hit a couple of winners, you keep going to the same well again and again. Even with a drought of three or four bummers in a row, there’s always that afterglow of a winner that keeps beckoning. You hit it big once or twice and that’s the name of the game. Cut your losses and let your winners run.

  Stock charts are simple, concrete, irrefutable, a regular book of color coded graphs of the daily high, low and closing prices of stocks. You can draw in your own trend lines. You can see stocks moving up and moving down. Charts. They’re the direct opposite of fundamental analysis in which some whiz kid expounds on the prospects for a publicly held company in what amounts to a master’s thesis, on IBM for instance. And think of it, with a little extra-curricular study, you can spot a stock in the chart book where the recent activity has busted up through the long-term trend line—and then, oh, joy!

  Lou saw one of those “break outs” in the chart of United Semiconductor, a low price stock, which in itself was a turn-on to the average speculator because he could buy more shares of it, and feel like a big time operator. Put all this together with the fact that there was something on the wire about rumors of a merger. It was one of the best stories in the office for a couple of days, and it was all his. It was lucrative, but more, it was a small triumph, a twinge in the scrotum, when he opened his own margin account and slid an order for two thousand shares into the pneumatic tube. Whoosh!

  What happens when you stop having to struggle? Part of it is opening a margin account and taking a flyer on a ten-dollar stock off the charts. Part is offering that stock to a client and truly not caring whether she buys it or not.

  “Mrs. Gruenwald, this is Lou Christopher. We’re up about two points on the Dow. About eighteen million shares. Not bad for this time of day.”

  “How are mine?”

  “You’re even on the Talbert and up a quarter on General. Why don’t you get rid of that?”

  “I still like it.”

  “You’ve been sitting with it for a month and it hasn’t moved at all. I’ve got something else for you. United Semi. Did you ever hear of them? They make components for computers.”

  “Computers aren’t going anywhere.”

  “Listen, Tilly, let’s not kid ourselves. It’s not fundamentals we’re working here. It just looks good on a chart. Okay? I’m looking for about three or four points in here. You could trade your General for it, even up.”

  “What else is good?”

  “I’ve got my own money on this stock.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Look, I’ve got another call. Think about it.”

  “How much is it?”

  “It’s right around ten. Gotta go. Give me a call.”

  Chapter Five

  There was a difference, coming into the office a little before the market opened and sitting at the desk with the Journal, ignoring the tape, checking through yesterday’s tickets, matching them against his confirms, and calling in a mild complaint to Ed the margin clerk, all quietly and deliberately, and then leaning back in the chair to take a call.

  “Hello, Vince. Oh, we’re doing just fine. And you?”

  “Can you give me some prices, Lou?”

  “Vince, I’m going to ask you to take them from Suzy. I got another call. Okay? See you, Vin.”

  Lunch was at The Brazier at least three times a week now. Brown bagging it up to the lunch room was a thing of the past, along with hurried tips off the wire between bites of a wilted sandwich.

  “Who is it, Suzy? Westover? Put him on. Karl, I’m going to have to cut this short. I’ve got another call. Okay? Call me.”r />
  “Hello. Barry? Good morning. How’s the world treating your bod?”

  “Hi, Lou. I just got out of a little two-hour meeting and my ass is squared off. You know what I mean?”

  “Those weighty decisions will do that to you every time.”

  “Hey, I just got back from a weekend in Connecticut. You gotta get up there. The trees are something else.”

  “Where’d you go, Barry?”

  “You know New Windsor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “About halfway between New Windsor and Danbury. I found me a sweet little inn off the beaten track. You have to get away from this crap sometimes. Hell, let me give you this order. We need some of those Kentucky GO’s. Put me in for 250 of those. And if you can get me Telephone under fifty-eight, I’ll take 5000. Got it?”