“Coke?” he asked.
I shook my head. “A Bud.”
He pulled one from the cooler. “If you want lunch, you’re early.”
I took a long drink. “I can wait.”
He shrugged and tossed a thumb at the television. “You want to watch something else?”
“This is fine,” I said.
A lacquered blonde was interviewing an edgy-looking guy in a dealing room somewhere. The edgy man was talking about another broad sell-off in equities—led again by financial stocks—but I wasn’t listening. My attention was on the background: the long, crowded rows of desks, the well-dressed bodies hunched over keyboards, the dense mosaic of glowing monitors, the chirping telephones, the muted rumble of a thousand urgent conversations—all the low-gear chaos and white noise of money made and lost.
It hauled me back to my first day on the Ketchum Leeds trading floor, on the interest rate swaps desk. Eight years ago, and it still made my face hot. I could barely figure out how to work the telephones that morning, much less make sense of what the traders were talking about on the calls. Everything I learned in b-school seemed to blur and slide and wash away, until all I heard was meaningless sound and I was covered in sweat. When the senior trader who’d been saddled with me asked if I had questions, I choked on my embarrassment and shook my head no. He pursed his lips and raised an eyebrow, and we both knew I was lying.
I deciphered the phones eventually, and the vocabulary, too, but I’d never escaped the feeling of that day—of being two steps behind everyone else, of never being the first, or even the second, to see the bud of an opportunity or the tip of an iceberg. Of being in over my head. Two mortifying months later, the senior trader took pity on me, and put me down in front of something that sat still when I looked at it—something that made sense to me—a spreadsheet.
It was a pricing model—a collection of formulas that determined the value of the instruments we were trading, and let us mark our positions to market every day, and calculate our profits and losses. At least that’s what it was supposed to do. The trader was convinced it was fucked-up somehow, and low-balling his P&L.
“Some dick from accounting came by last week with an IT guy who didn’t know a discounted cash flow from his asshole. They swear up and down they were just tweaking it, but now I don’t believe the numbers.”
I pored over the spreadsheet for two hours, and every time I glanced up the senior trader was looking at me. The problem, when I found it, was a subtle one—a change in how the yield curves were being built—and it wasn’t so much a glitch as a more conservative approach to valuing our swaps. I explained it all to the trader, who listened without expression and smiled when I was done.
“They think I’m a little too aggressive,” he chuckled. “Now change it back.” And I did, without pause or question. It added 108 grand to that month’s profit, and the senior trader grinned wider. It was Carter Strickland’s test, and I had passed.
“You want some?” the bartender asked, and brought me back with a jolt.
It was the lunch special—brown and lumpy. It was a long way from the Four Seasons, but the beer and coffee needed something to hold them down. I nodded and he dropped a ladleful into a bowl and set it on the bar and picked up the remote.
“Enough of this,” he said, and changed the channel to ESPN. They were covering the trade of a reliable closer and two journeymen right-handers for a big-hitting catcher and an aging first-baseman whose wife was a country singer. The bartender shook his head.
“Fucking Cubbies,” he sighed. “Every year the same thing—always a master plan.”
“You know what they say about plans.”
“What’s that?”
“That everybody has one—until you hit ’em in the face.”
“Mike Tyson, the great philosopher, right?”
I nodded and looked up. I saw the bumper sticker over the cash register—Bleed Cubbie Blue—and the Sammy Sosa bobblehead with the chipped nose next to it. The bartender followed my eyes.
“Never missed a home opener,” he said.
“You have a lot of patience.”
“What else can you do? Eventually they’ll get it right.”
“Optimistic too.”
He shrugged. “You do what you can with the cards you’re dealt, and you hope for something better on the next go round. The important thing is to stay in the game, right?”
“That’s the plan.”
He put the remote on the bar and went in back. I pushed my food around and flicked the channels. There was a cop show rerun on TBS, with world-weary detectives and an arrogant prick of a suspect who’d be a pathetic wreck by the end. I kept surfing.
I stopped at the fashion channel. It was something about making perfume, and I wasn’t sure where the show left off and the commercials started, but I watched anyway. I was looking for Mia. I knew there was little chance of seeing her—she’d only been on that once, and it was months ago—a documentary about aspiring fashion designers. Still, I looked. I remembered how nervous she’d been the night before it first aired, her over-caffeinated engine amped higher than usual.
“They’re going to make me look like an asshole, I know it. That’s what they do on these things. Either that or I’ll come off as a babbling idiot. Or maybe both. And they probably won’t even show the clothes. That cocktail dress is one of my best things, and I bet they cut it out.” She got nine minutes and fifty-one seconds of screen time, total—more than anyone else—and no one looked better.
Strickland had introduced us a year and a half ago, at Milk & Honey. She was raising money, and glad to see anyone who would pick up a check. I was looking for the usual—a model to fuck—and though she’d never made it on the runway, Mia looked the part: tall and pale, with a glossy wing of hair across a naughty, sulky face. I’d fronted the cash for her fall line, and for the spring one afterwards, and six months back she’d given up her apartment and moved into mine. I wondered how long it would be before someone asked her to move out again. Probably around the time my monthly maintenance check didn’t show.
A knot rolled through my gut and I pushed the bowl away. The perfume show ended and another one, about eyeliner, began. I called into the kitchen for the check.
I was crossing the lot at the Lethe Lounge when a rust-scabbed pickup turned too fast off the road. It churned up stones and a cloud of icy dust, and its rear end slewed wildly. I jumped out of the way. A big guy in a blue parka with an American flag patch on the sleeve fell out of the passenger side and stumbled into the bar. The driver paused by the door and looked back at me. He took off his red cap and waved.
On the third day I bought maps. The quick-mart had more of these than it did newspapers, and I got ones for points north, south, and west. I bought a twelve-pack of tallboys and a bag of pork rinds, too, and carried it all to my room. I turned on the TV and spread the maps on the bed and opened a beer.
I’d had no plan when I left New York—nothing besides getting as far as I could from the office and from the questions that’d been growing like barnacles on my trading desk ever since that fucking auditor, DiMarco, had come around. But now I was running out of country. A couple of days driving and I’d hit water, and then what? South to Mexico? North to Canada? Or maybe straight on through, into the Pacific.
I opened another beer and stared at the roads and dotted borders. Lines and colors braided into impossible knots, and the place names began to squirm like bugs. I rubbed my eyes and jabbed at the remote. The channels flew by like towns through a train window, and after a while it made me dizzy. I grabbed my coat and the pork rinds and went to the Lethe Lounge.
There was a dented gray van in the lot, and a blue parka with a flag patch on the sleeve hanging on a barstool inside. A big guy was working the pinball machine and drinking a beer. The bartender was leafing through the sports section of a newspaper. I slid onto a stool and he eyed the pork rinds.
“There a problem with these?” I asked.
>
He shrugged. “Not if you finish them fast. You want a Bud?” I nodded, and he opened the cooler. I looked at his newspaper. The Chicago Tribune.
“Where’d that come from?” I asked, and dug into the chips.
“They have it at the store sometimes. I read it online, but the real thing’s good when you can get it.”
I offered him the bag. “Any more trades?”
“Just rumors,” he said. He reached in and ate a chip.
I pointed to the paper. “Mind if I look?”
He slid the paper over and went into the kitchen. It the local news, sports, and arts sections—no business. I folded it and pushed it aside, and the big guy from the pinball machine knocked an empty beer bottle on the bar.
“Hey, Mickey,” he called, “lemme get another.”
“In a sec,” the bartender answered, and the big guy looked at me. His face was lined and freckled, with scars around the eyes. His teeth were gray, and the smell of cigarettes and asphalt rolled off him. He looked at the newspaper and back at me and frowned.
“You a Chicago boy, like ol’ Mick?” he asked. I shook my head. “No? But you from the city somewhere. What the hell you doin’ out here?”
Mickey came out and pushed a beer in front of the big guy. “What else do you need, Len—more quarters for the machine?”
“Sure,” Len said, “quarters.” He put two bills on the bar, but kept staring at me. Mickey gave him change and he went away
“Friendly,” I said.
Mickey frowned. “You want to keep away from him. From his buddy Ross, too.” I thought back to the guy in the red cap, waving in the parking lot.
“Why? They don’t like strangers?”
“Something like that,” he said, and looked up as the door opened. A girl came in, awkward in a coat like a sleeping bag. The pimply girl from the Sunset. She unzipped the coat and went behind the bar.
“Sorry I’m late, Pops,” she said. Mickey nodded and she went into the kitchen.
“Your daughter?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“You run the motel too?”
“I own it, like I own this place.”
I ate a pork rind. “How’d you end up out here?”
He shrugged. “Company early-retired me, and I always wanted to buy property out west. I didn’t necessarily have this in mind, but the 401k didn’t go as far as I planned.”
“You like it?”
He took my empty beer bottle and replaced it with a full one. “Keeps me in the game. What about you?”
“Me? I’m headed west.”
He nodded and produced the remote from under the bar and turned on the tube. He started surfing through the channels and stopped when his daughter called from the kitchen. He left the remote by the chips.
The box was tuned to Court TV, a grimy video—the interrogation of a scrawny teenage boy by two big cops in a bleak white room. I took a long pull on my beer. The cops were shouting and pacing, and the kid had his head in his hands. He was saying something about a girlfriend. I picked up the remote, but my thumb froze above the button as the kid’s voice broke.
I knew it was only a matter of time for me. I’d tossed my cell phone in a trashcan in Altoona, but eventually I’d run out of cash and have to use a credit card or an ATM, and that would be it. Then it would be me in a room somewhere, with my head in my hands. How did you do it? How long was it going on? Was anyone else involved?
How long wasn’t easy to nail down. When, precisely, did panic become a plan? When did I pass through the gray zones of deniability—the honest mistake, the error in judgment, the pardonable miscalculation—and into the pitch black? Hard to say, but fixing that spreadsheet for Strickland was the first step. He’d shined that too-wide smile on me, dropped a big hand on my shoulder, and promised he’d square everything with the accountants. Then he’d christened me with a nickname, and made me what he called his go-to guy for numbers.
“You’ve got a feel for the models, P-Man, and before we put up any new ones, I want you to check them out—make sure everything is copasetic.”
I was stunned. Relieved, of course, that he wasn’t canning my ass, and wildly flattered—but stunned. I’d protested—that I didn’t have the experience, that I knew the math but not the markets—but Strickland didn’t care. He winked and spoke in a stage whisper. “Don’t worry about it, P, nobody else around here knows what this stuff is worth either. Anybody asks questions, you throw some math at ’em. If that doesn’t scare ’em off, you send ’em my way.”
He took me out for drinks after that, a blurry bar crawl that ended nine hours and a dozen lap-dances later at the Platinum Playpen. Everyone knew him there, and I can still see the colored lights shining on his teeth, and the glitter and sweat on that stripper’s tits. He took me back to the Playpen four months later, when he was starting up the hybrids desk.
“It’ll be a different gig—more of a boutique business. The guys we’re trading with need customized stuff—derivatives to hedge against ice in Orlando, or too much rain in Napa, or pipeline problems in Kazakhstan. It’s exotic shit, each time a one-off, and we can charge big premiums and still have them lining up. Assuming, of course, we can price things right. That’s where you come in, P-Man. And who knows—if the business takes hold, maybe we can get you back to trading. It’s more cerebral than what we’re doing now—more up your alley.”
I’d been handed my first bonus check by then, and though it was hefty for a numbers guy—enough for a new Beemer and a down payment on a Tribeca loft—it was nothing like the monsters the traders took home. I wasn’t inclined to argue.
After that, things went according to Strickland’s plan: We built it and they came. And they paid. They bitched about it, but in the end they paid. Actually, there was bitching all around at first—from customers about our pricing, and from our own accountants, who were antsy about our mark-to-market calculations. Too aggressive, they said. Overly optimistic. But whenever anyone came around with questions, I followed Strickland’s advice and dazzled them with bullshit. The complexity of the models intimidated eighty percent of the worriers off the bat, and they went away nodding wisely, as if they had a clue about what I’d said. Anyone more persistent I referred to Strickland, who worked his hale-fellow mojo and somehow turned their doubts into soap bubbles. Maybe he took them to the Playpen.
As profits mounted, less and less mojo was required, and the questions all but vanished amidst high praise and promotions. In two years’ time, riding an ever-growing wave of revenue, Carter Strickland became head of the entire dealing room. Two years later he became president of Ketchum Leeds.
And me, I held tight to his coattails. Strickland hadn’t been jerking me off about trading again, and a few months after we opened for business I had a book of my own to run. This time I knew how to work the phones. I made managing director at the end of our first year, and when he moved up to take over the dealing room, I took over the hybrids desk.
It was a steep climb, and not without its bumps. There were months when the P&L slipped, but never two in a row—Strickland wouldn’t allow it. When trouble loomed, he’d saunter over to my desk, drop a hand on my shoulder, and invite me to his glassed-in office. We’d prop our feet, drink espressos, and shoot the shit about his latest vacation, his latest car, or his latest wife, and when we’d exhausted the chat and the coffee, he’d sigh and say the same thing.
“Numbers looking a little hinky, don’t you think, P-Man? Maybe you oughta check the models—see if something needs goosing.” After which we’d stroll back to the dealing room and I’d take up my keyboard.
There was never any talk of my leaving the desk—not when Strickland took over the trading floor, and not when he stepped up to run the whole bank either. Somebody had to do the goosing, after all. And besides paying for a bigger loft, the house in East Hampton, and Mia and her line of clothes, the seven-figure bonus checks made staying behind easy to take. At least until DiMarco.
I
took another drink and gagged on the warm beer. On TV, one of the cops pounded the table. His partner shook his head and asked more questions, and the kid slumped lower in his chair. I thought about the maps on the motel bed and my car, icing over in the parking lot, and about throwing my stuff in the back and driving off. Mexico, or maybe Canada. I tried to remember where I’d put my car keys. In my coat pocket, maybe. Inches away, but too far to reach.
I slept late on the fourth day—past noon, and through the pimply girl’s knock on the door. I awoke in my clothes, on top of maps and surrounded by beer cans. There was a car chase playing silently on TV—a minivan rolling down an empty highway, five cop cars and the shadow of a helicopter in pursuit. My head was full of road salt and pieces of a dream. DiMarco standing over my desk, holding a report and tapping it with a boney finger. There was a smug, triumphant look on his librarian’s face, and a noise like static whenever he opened his mouth. Mia at the beach house, making blender drinks and laughing. Her hair was up, and her long neck was pale and damp. Her hands were bandaged, and there were red streaks in my margarita. Mia and Carter Strickland at the Playpen, bite marks on her breasts and colored lights shining on his big teeth.
My bones were like lead, and it was all I could do to lever myself up and into the shower. I stayed there until the dry heaves subsided and my skin was a savage red, and it was night by the time I set out for the quick-mart. I picked up a Snickers, some beef jerky, and another six of beer, and I was looking at the magazines when the state trooper came in. He bought coffee and a sandwich that he heated in the microwave, but he didn’t even glance down the aisle while it cooked. Still, I waited until he’d pulled out of the lot to pay for my stuff. My hands were shaking when I paid the clerk, and he gave me the eye when he handed back change.
“What are you looking at?” I said. He frowned and shook his head.
Even with every light on, a brown twilight was the most I could manage in my room. I turned on the radio and found the one station that wasn’t static. An angry guy was talking to an angrier guy about weakness and depravity on both coasts. It was drivel, but I wanted voices.
Wall Street Noir Page 17
