The Court

by William J. Coughlin

  “FCC,” he told the driver.

  “Foreign Correspondents’ Club?”

  “Right away.”

  It was the only place open at night in Hong Kong where he knew he could get access to a Bloomberg box—that magical electronic screen that displayed every stock and bond price in every market around the globe. He pulled out his cell phone and called his broker in London.

  “Jane, this is Charlie Ravich,” he said when she answered. “I want to set up a huge put play. Drop everything.”

  “This is not like you.”

  “This is not like anything. Sell all my Microsoft now at the market price, sell all the Ford, the Merck, all the Lucent. Market orders all of them. Please, right now, before London closes.”

  “All right now, for the tape, you are requesting we sell eight thousand shares of—”

  “Yes, yes, I agree,” he blurted.

  Jane was off the line, getting another broker to carry out the orders. “Zoom-de-doom,” she said when she returned. “Let it rip.”

  “This is going to add up to about one-point-oh-seven million,” he said. “I’m buying puts on Gaming Technologies, the gambling company. It’s American but trades in London.”

  “Yes.” Now her voice held interest. “Yes.”

  “How many puts of GT can I buy with that?”

  She was shouting orders to her clerks. “Wait…” she said. “Yes? Very good. I have your account on my screen…” He heard keys clicking. “We have … one million seventy thousand, U.S., plus change. Now then, Gaming Technologies is selling at sixty-six even a share—”

  “How many puts can I buy with one-point-oh-seven?”

  “Oh, I would say a huge number, Charlie.”

  “How many?”

  “About … one-point-six million shares.”

  “That’s huge.”

  “You want to protect that bet?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Buy the puts, Jane.”

  “I am, Charlie, please. The price is stable. Yes, take this one…” she was saying to a clerk. “Give me puts on GT at market, immediately. Yes. One-point-six million at the money. Yes. At the money.” The line was silent a moment. “You sure, Charlie?”

  “This is a bullet to the moon, Jane.”

  “Biggest bet of your life, Charlie?”

  “Oh, Jane, not even close.”

  Outside his cab a silky red Rolls glided past. “Got it?” he asked.

  “Not quite. You going to tell me the play, Charlie?”

  “When it goes through, Jane.”

  “We’ll get the order back in a minute or two.”

  Die on the shitter, Charlie thought. Could happen to anyone. Happened to Elvis Presley, matter of fact.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes.”

  “We have your puts. One-point-six million, GT, at the price of sixty-six.” He heard the keys clicking.

  “Now tell me?” Jane pleaded.

  “I will,” Charlie said. “Just give me the confirmation for the tape.”

  While she repeated the price and the volume of the order, he looked out the window to see how close the taxi was to the FCC. He’d first visited the club in 1970, when it was full of drunken television and newspaper journalists, CIA people, Army intelligence, retired British admirals who had gone native, and crazy Texans provisioning the war; since then, the rest of Hong Kong had been built up and torn down and built up all over again, but the FCC still stood, tucked away on a side street.

  “I just want to get my times right,” Charlie told Jane when she was done. “It’s now a few minutes after 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday in Hong Kong. What time are you in London?”

  “Just after 2:00 p.m.”

  “London markets are open about an hour more?”

  “Yes,” Jane said.

  “New York starts trading in half an hour.”

  “Yes.”

  “I need you to stay in your office and handle New York for me.”

  She sighed. “I’m due to pick up my son from school.”

  “Need a car, a new car?”

  “Everybody needs a new car.”

  “Just stay there a few more hours, Jane. You can pick out a Mercedes tomorrow morning and charge it to my account.”

  “You’re a charmer, Charlie.”

  “I’m serious. Charge my account.”

  “Okay, will you please tell me?”

  Of course he would, but because he needed to get the news moving. “Sir Henry Lai just died. Maybe fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Sir Henry Lai…”

  “The Macao gambling billionaire who was in deep talks with GT—”

  “Yes! Yes!” Jane cried. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not just a rumor?”

  “Jane, you don’t trust old Charlie Ravich?”

  “It’s dropping! Oh! Down to sixty-four,” she cried. “There it goes! There go ninety thousand shares! Somebody else got the word out! Sixty-three and a—Charlie, oh Jesus, you beat it by maybe a minute.”

  He told her he’d call again shortly and stepped out of the cab into the club, a place so informal that the clerk just gave him a nod; people strode in all day long to have drinks in the main bar. Inside sat several dozen men and women drinking and smoking, many of them American and British journalists, others small-time local businessmen who long ago had slid into alcoholism, burned out, boiled over, or given up.

  He ordered a whiskey and sat down in front of the Bloomberg box, fiddling with it until he found the correct menu for real-time London equities. He was up millions and the New York Stock Exchange had not even opened yet. Ha! The big American shareholders of GT, or, more particularly, their analysts and advisers and market watchers, most of them punks in their thirties, were still tying their shoes and kissing the mirror and soon—very soon!—they’d be saying hello to the receptionist sitting down at their screens. Minutes away! When they found out that Sir Henry Lai had died in the China Club in Hong Kong at 8:45 p.m. Hong Kong time, they would assume, Charlie hoped, that because Lai ran an Asian-style, family-owned corporation, and because as its patriarch he dominated its governance, any possible deal with GT was off, indefinitely. They would then reconsider the price of GT, still absurdly stratospheric, and dump it fast. Maybe. He ordered another drink, then called Jane.

  “GT is down five points,” she told him. “New York is about to open.”

  “But I don’t see panic yet. Where’s the volume selling?”

  “You’re not going to see it here, not with New York opening. I’ll be sitting right here.”

  “Excellent, Jane. Thank you.”

  “Not at all. Call me when you’re ready to close it out.”

  He hung up, looked into the screen. The real-time price of GT was hovering at fifty-nine dollars a share. No notice had moved over the information services yet. Not Bloomberg, not Reuters.

  He went back to the bar, pushed his way past a couple of journalists.

  “Another?” the bartender asked.

  “Yes, sir. A double,” he answered loudly. “I just got very bad news.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” The bartender did not look up.

  “Yes.” Charlie nodded solemnly. “Sir Henry Lai died tonight, heart attack at the China Club. A terrible thing.” He slid one hundred Hong Kong dollars across the bar. Several of the journalists peered at him.

  “Pardon me,” asked one, a tall Englishman with a riot of red hair. “Did I hear you say Sir Henry Lai has died?”

  Charlie nodded. “Not an hour ago. I just happened to be standing there, at the China Club.” He tasted his drink. “Please excuse me.”

  He returned to the Bloomberg screen. The Englishman, he noticed, had slipped away to a pay phone in the corner. The New York Stock Exchange, casino to the world, had been open a minute. He waited. Three, four, five minutes. And then, finally, came what he’d been waiting for, Sir Henry Lai’s epitaph: GT’s pric
e began shrinking as its volume exploded—half a million shares, price fifty-eight, fifty-six, two million shares, fifty-five and a half. He watched. Four million shares now. The stock would bottom and bounce. He’d wait until the volume slowed. At fifty-five and a quarter he pulled his phone out of his pocket and called Jane. At fifty-five and seven-eighths he bought back the shares he’d sold at sixty-six, for a profit of a bit more than ten dollars a share. Major money. Sixteen million before taxes. Big money. Real money. Elvis money.

  * * *

  It was almost eleven when he arrived back at his hotel. The Sikh doorman, a vestige from the days of the British Empire, nodded a greeting. Inside the immense lobby a piano player pushed along a little tune that made Charlie feel mournful, and he sat down in one of the deep chairs that faced the harbor. So much ship traffic, hundreds of barges and freighters and, farther out, the supertankers. To the east sprawled the new airport—they had filled in the ocean there, hiring half of all the world’s deep-water dredging equipment to do it. History in all this. He was looking at ships moving across the dark waters, but he might as well be looking at the twenty-first century itself, looking at his own countrymen who could not find factory jobs. The poor fucks had no idea what was coming at them, not a clue. China was a juggernaut, an immense, seething mass. It was building aircraft carriers, it was buying Taiwan. It shrugged off turmoil in Western stock markets. Currency fluctuations, inflation, deflation, volatility—none of these things compared to the fact that China had eight hundred and fifty million people under the age of thirty-five. They wanted everything Americans now took for granted, including the right to piss on the shoes of any other country in the world.

  But ha! There might be some consolation! He pushed back in the seat, slipped on his half-frame glasses, and did the math on a hotel napkin. After commissions and taxes, his evening’s activities had netted him close to eight million dollars—a sum grotesque not so much for its size but for the speed and ease with which he had seized it—two phone calls!—and, most of all, for its mockery of human toil. Well, it was a grotesque world now. He’d done nothing but understand what the theorists called a market inefficiency and what everyone else knew as inside information. If he was a ghoul, wrenching dollars from Sir Henry Lai’s vomit-filled mouth, then at least the money would go to good use. He’d put all of it in a bypass trust for Julia’s child. The funds could pay for clothes and school and pediatrician’s bills and whatever else. It could pay for a life. He remembered his father buying used car tires from the garage of the Minnesota Highway Patrol for a dollar-fifty. No such thing as steel-belted radials in 1956. You cross borders of time, and if people don’t come with you, you lose them and they you. Now it was an age when a fifty-eight-year-old American executive could net eight million bucks by watching a man choke to death. His father would never have understood it, and he suspected that Ellie couldn’t, either. Not really. There was something in her head lately. Maybe it was because of Julia, but maybe not. She bought expensive vegetables she let rot in the refrigerator, she took Charlie’s blood-pressure pills by mistake, she left the phone off the hook. He wanted to be patient with her but could not. She drove him nuts.

  * * *

  He sat in the hotel lobby for an hour more, reading every article in the International Herald Tribune. Finally, at midnight, he decided not to wait for Julia’s call and pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed her Manhattan office.

  “Tell me, sweetie,” he said once he got past the secretary.

  “Oh, Daddy…”

  “Yes?”

  A pause. And then she cried.

  “Okay, now,” he breathed, closing his eyes. “Okay.”

  She gathered herself. “All right. I’m fine. It’s okay. You don’t have to have children to have a fulfilling life. I can handle this.”

  “Tell me what they said.”

  “They said I’ll probably never have my own children, they think the odds are—all I know is that I’ll never hold my own baby, never, just something I’ll never, ever do.”

  “Oh, sweetie.”

  “We really thought it was going to work. You know? I’ve had a lot of faith with this thing. They have these new egg-handling techniques, makes them glue to the walls of the uterus.”

  They were both silent a moment.

  “I mean, you kind of expect that technology will work,” Julia went on, her voice thoughtful. “They can clone human beings—they can do all of these things and they can’t—” She stopped.

  The day had piled up on him, and he was trying to remember all that Julia had explained to him about eggs and tubes and hormone levels. “Sweetie,” he tried, “the problem is not exactly the eggs?”

  “My eggs are pretty lousy, also. You’re wondering if we could put my egg in another woman, right?”

  “No, not—well, maybe yes,” he sighed.

  “They don’t think it would work. The eggs aren’t that viable.”

  “And your tubes—”

  She gave a bitter laugh. “I’m barren, Daddy. I can’t make good eggs, and I can’t hatch eggs, mine or anyone else’s.”

  He watched the lights of a tanker slide along the oily water outside. “I know it’s too early to start discussing adoption, but—”

  “He doesn’t want to do it. At least he says he won’t,” she sobbed.

  “Wait, sweetie,” Charlie responded, hearing her despair, “Brian is just— Adopting a child is—”

  “No, no, no, Daddy, Brian doesn’t want a little Guatemalan baby or a Lithuanian baby or anybody else’s baby but his own. It’s about his own goddamn penis. If it doesn’t come out of his penis, then it’s no good.”

  Her husband’s view made sense to him, but he couldn’t say that now. “Julia, I’m sure Brian—”

  “I would have adopted a little baby a year ago, two years ago! But I put up with all this shit, all these hormones and needles in my butt and doctors pushing things up me, for him. And now those years are—Oh, I’m sorry, Daddy, I have a client. I’ll talk to you when you come back. I’m very— I have a lot of calls here. Bye.”

  He listened to the satellite crackle in the phone, then the announcement in Chinese to hang up. His flight was at eight the next morning, New York seventeen hours away, and as always, he wanted to get home, and yet didn’t, for as soon as he arrived, he would miss China. The place got to him, like a recurrent dream, or a fever—forced possibilities into his mind, whispered ideas he didn’t want to hear. Like the eight million. It was perfectly legal yet also a kind of contraband. If he wanted, Ellie would never see the money; she had long since ceased to be interested in his financial gamesmanship, so long as there was enough money for Belgian chocolates for the elevator man at Christmas, fresh flowers twice a week, and the farmhouse in Tuscany. But like a flash of unexpected lightning, the new money illuminated certain questions begging for years at the edge of his consciousness. He had been rich for a long time, but now he was rich enough to fuck with fate. Had he been waiting for this moment? Yes, waiting until he knew about Julia, waiting until he was certain.

  He called Martha Wainwright, his personal lawyer. “Martha, I’ve finally decided to do it,” he said when she answered.

  “Oh, Christ, Charlie, don’t tell me that.”

  “Yes. Fact, I just made a little extra money in a stock deal. Makes the whole thing that much easier.”

  “Don’t do it, Charlie.”

  “I just got the word from my daughter, Martha. If she could have children, it would be a different story.”

  “This is bullshit, Charlie. Male bullshit.”

  “Is that your legal opinion or your political one?”

  “I’m going to argue with you when you get back,” she warned.

  “Fine—I expect that. For now, please just put the ad in the magazines and get all the documents ready.”

  “I think you are a complete jerk for doing this.”

  “We understand things differently, Martha.”

  “Yes, because
you are addicted to testosterone.”

  “Most men are, Martha. That’s what makes us such assholes.”

  “You having erection problems, Charlie? Is that what this is about?”

  “You got the wrong guy, Martha. My dick is like an old dog.”

  “How’s that? Sleeps all the time?”

  “Slow but dependable,” he lied. “Comes when you call it.”

  She sighed. “Why don’t you just let me hire a couple of strippers to sit on your face? That’d be infinitely cheaper.”

  “That’s not what this is about, Martha.”

  “Oh, Charlie.”

  “I’m serious, I really am.”

  “Ellie will be terribly hurt.”

  “She doesn’t need to know.”

  “She’ll find out, believe me. They always do.” Martha’s voice was distraught. “She’ll find out you’re advertising for a woman to have your baby, and then she’ll just flip out, Charlie.”

  “Not if you do your job well.”

  “You really this afraid of death?”

  “Not death, Martha, oblivion. Oblivion is the thing that really kills me.”

  “You’re better than this, Charlie.”

  “The ad, just put in the ad.”

  He hung up. In a few days the notice would sneak into the back pages of New York’s weeklies, a discreet little box in the personals, specifying the arrangement he sought and the benefits he offered. Martha would begin screening the applications. He’d see who responded. You never knew who was out there.

  * * *

  He sat quietly then, a saddened but prosperous American executive in a good suit, his gray hair neatly barbered, and followed the ships out on the water. One of the hotel’s Eurasian prostitutes watched him from across the lobby as she sipped a watered-down drink. Perhaps sensing a certain opportune grief in the stillness of his posture, she slipped over the marble floor and bent close to ask softly if he would like some company, but he shook his head no—although not, she would see, without a bit of lonely gratitude, not without a quick hungered glance of his eyes into hers—and he continued to sit calmly, with that stillness to him. Noticing this, one would have thought not that in one evening he had watched a man die, or made millions, or lied to his banker, or worried that his flesh might never go forward, but that he was privately toasting what was left of the century, wondering what revelation it might yet bring.