“I guess,” he says, sighing. “The bottom line.”
“You better believe it, buster. I see these guys raking in the bucks. … Like those banditos pa went to pay off tonight. I’ve got more brains than they’ve got, but they’re living off our sweat. What kind of crap is that?”
“Life is unfair,” he says, smiling and pouring them more wine.
“If you let it be unfair. Not me. I’m going to be out there grabbing like all the rest-if I ever get the chance.”
He looks at his paintings hanging on the walls. “There’s more than just greed, Sally.”
“Says who? What? Tell me what.”
“Satisfaction with your work. Love. Joy. Sex.”
“Sex?” she says. “Sex is dead. Money is the sex of our time.”
He doesn’t reply. They sit silently, comfortable with each other.
“You’re a meatball,” she says finally.
“I know,” he says. “But a contented meatball. Are you contented, Sal?”
“Contented?” she says. “When you’re contented, you’re dead. Once you stop climbing, you slide right back down into the grave.”
“Oh, wow,” he says. “That’s heavy.”
She drains her wine, rises, digs into her shoulder bag. She comes up with bills, smacks them into his palm.
“Here’s a couple of hundred,” she says. “Go buy yourself some paint and spaghetti. And a haircut.”
“Sally, I can’t-”
“Screw it,” she says roughly. “It’s not my dough. I’ll take it out of petty cash at the office. Pa will never know the difference.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Before she leaves, he embraces her again.
“You’ll think about posing for me?”
“I will. I really will.”
“I love you, Sal.”
“And I love you. Stay well and say hello to Paul for me. I’ll be in touch.”
She gets back to Smithtown a little before midnight. Goes up to her mother’s bedroom and opens the door cautiously. The night-light is on, and Becky is snoring grandly. Sally goes back downstairs to the office-den. The books for the accountant and tax attorney and IRS are kept in the office safe of Steiner Waste Control on Eleventh Avenue in Manhattan. The real books are kept here, in a small safe disguised as a cocktail table.
She spends a half-hour crunching numbers, using a pocket calculator that has no memory. Profits are up over the corresponding week of the previous year. But not enough. The tax paid to the bentnoses for the right to collect garbage is a constant drain. Go sue city hall.
Next she flips through the current issue of Barron’s to see how their equities are doing. A small uptick. Jake lets his daughter do all the investing. “I can’t be bothered with that shit.” He doesn’t know an option from a future, but he can read the bottom line. Every month. Then it’s a grudging “Not bad” or a furious “You trying to bankrupt me?”
Sally pushes the papers away on the big, leather-topped desk scarred with burns from her father’s cigars. She sits brooding, biting at the hard skin around her thumbnail.
They’re doing okay-but nothing sensational. Most people would consider the Steiners rich, but they’re not rich rich-which is all that counts. It’s not for lack of trying; the want is there. But what Sally calls the Big Chance just hasn’t come along. She can buy a thousand shares of this and a thousand shares of that, and maybe make a few bucks. Terrific.
But she’s also bought some dogs and, on paper, the Steiner portfolio is earning about ten percent annually. Hurrah. She’d be doing better if she socked all their cash away in tax exempts. But where’s the fun there? She doesn’t go to the racetracks or to Vegas; stocks are her wheel of fortune. She knows that playing the market is a crapshoot, but once tried, never denied.
Later, naked in bed, hands locked behind her head, she tries to concentrate on the Big Chance and how it might be finagled. But all she can think about is Eddie asking her to pose in the nude.
That’s the nicest thing that’s happened to her in years.
Judy Bering, the receptionist-secretary, opens the door of Sally’s office and sticks her head in.
“There’s a guy out here,” she says. “Claims he was hired and told to report for work this morning.”
“Yeah,” Sally says, “pa told me he’d show up. What’s his name?”
“Anthony Ricci.”
“Sure,” Sally says. “What else? What’s he like?”
Judy rolls her eyes heavenward. “A Popsicle,” she says.
Ricci comes in, an Adonis, carrying his cap and wearing a smile that lights up the dingy office.
“Good morning, miss,” he says. “I am Anthony Ricci, and I am to work here as a loader.”
“Yeah,” Sally says, “so I heard. My name is Sally Steiner. I’m the boss’s daughter. Sit down. Have a cigarette if you like. You got all your papers?”
“Oh, sure. Right here.”
He digs into his jacket pocket, slides the documents across Sally’s desk. She flips through them quickly.
“Everything looks okay,” she says. “You been over here six months?”
“Maybe seven,” he says. “I never want to go back.”
“You speak good English.”
“I thank you. I study hard.”
“Good for you,” Sally says. “You know what a loader does? He lifts heavy cans of garbage and dumps them into the back of a truck. You can handle that?”
Again that high-intensity smile. Ricci lifts his arms, flexes his biceps. “I can handle,” he says.
“Uh-huh,” Sally says. “We’ve had three hernias in the past year. They call you Tony, I suppose.”
“That’s right. Tony.”
“Well, Tony, the boss isn’t in right now. He’s out inspecting a new territory we just took over. He should be back soon, but meanwhile I’ll show you around. Come along with me.
As they’re going out the door, he flashes those brilliant choppers again and asks, “You married?”
“What’s it to you?” Sally says sharply.
She shows him around the dump: sheds, unloading docks, compactors, maintenance garage, shower and locker room. She leaves him with old gimpy Ed Fogleman who got a leg caught in a mulcher but won’t quit. Jake Steiner keeps him on as a kind of plant caretaker, and is happy to have him.
Sally goes back to her office, draws her third cup of black coffee of the day from the big perk in Judy Bering’s cubbyhole, and gets back to her paperwork.
She is vice president and truck dispatcher at Steiner Waste Control. She directs, controls, hires, fires, praises, berates, curses, and occasionally comforts a crew of tough men, drivers and loaders, who make a living from their strength and their sweat. They work hard (Sally sees to that), and they live hard.
But Sally does more than schedule garbage trucks. She’s the office manager. She leans over the shoulder of the bookkeeper. She solicits and reviews bids on new equipment. She negotiates contracts with old and new customers. She deals with the union and approves all the city, state, and federal bumf required, including environmental reports.
Big job. Stress. Tension. Dealing with a lot of hardnoses. But she thrives on it. Because she’s a woman making her way in this coarse men’s world of the bribed and the bribers, the petty crooks, the thugs on the take, and the smiling lads with their knives hidden up their sleeves. Sally Steiner loves it because it’s alive, with a gross vitality that keeps her alert and steaming.
At about 12:30, she runs across Eleventh Avenue and has a pastrami and Swiss on a seeded roll, with iced tea, at the Stardust Diner. She and Mabel, the waitress, exchange ribald comments about the crazy Greek chef who recently flipped a hamburger so high that it stuck to the tin ceiling.
She returns to the Steiner dump. A loaded truck is coming in, driven by Terry Mulloy, a redheaded, red-faced harp. Sitting beside him is his loader, a black named Leroy Hamilton who’s big enough to play noseguard for t
he Rams. Both these guys are beer hounds, and on a hot day you want to stand well upwind from them.
“Hey, Sally baby,” Terry calls, waving. “How’ya doing?”
“Surviving,” she says, walking up to the truck. “How you two putzes doing?”
“Great,” Leroy says. “We’re getting a better class of crap today. You know that restaurant on Thirty-eighth? I picked out enough steak scraps to feed my Doberman for a week.”
“Bullshit!” Sally says. “You two morons are going to have a barbecue tonight.”
They laugh. “Hey, baby,” Terry says, “when are you and me going to make it? A night on the town. Maybe a show. A great dinner. All you can eat.”
“No, thanks,” Sally says. “I got no use for shorthorns.”
She flips a hand and starts away. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Terry Mulloy yells after her.
She goes back to her office, smiling. That guy will never give up. But it’s okay; she can handle him. And she enjoys the rude challenge.
She works on the next week’s schedule, assigning drivers and loaders to the Steiner fleet of trucks. For a couple of years now she’s been trying to convince her father to computerize the whole operation. But Jake continues to resist. It’s not that they can’t afford it; he just doesn’t want to turn control over to machines; he’s got to see those scraps of paper with numbers scrawled on them.
Late in the afternoon he comes lumping into Sally’s office, collapses in the armchair alongside her desk.
“Jesus, Jake,” she says, “you smell like a distillery. You been hitting the sauce hard today.”
“A lot of people I had to see.” He takes off his hat. His balding head is covered with sweat. It’s been a warm April day; he looks wiped out.
“You want something?” she asks anxiously. “Coffee? A cold Coke?”
“Nah,” he says, “I’m okay. Just let me rest a minute.”
“You look like the wrath of God.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve been on the go since this morning. What’s been going on around here?”
“Nothing much. The new guy showed up. His name’s Tony Ricci.”
“That figures,” Jake says. “He’s Mario Corsini’s cousin. Did I tell you that?”
“Yeah, pa, you told me.”
“What kind of a guy?”
“A good-looking boy. Fresh-but that’s okay.”
“Wait’ll he puts in a week lifting hundred-pound cans of dreck, he won’t be so fresh. You can handle him?”
“Oh, sure, pa. No problem. So tell me, how does the new territory look?”
“Not so bad,” Jake says. He takes out his handkerchief, wipes his face. He straightens up in the chair. “Pitzak had some good wheels. Three Loadmaster compactor trucks only a few years old. The rest of the stuff is shit, but still rolling. Their dispatcher is a lush; he doesn’t know his ass from his elbow; you’ll have to take over.”
“Okay, pa, I can do that. What about the customers?”
“Mostly industrial, thank God. Some restaurants, some diners, two apartment houses. But most of the stuff is clean. Like scrap wood, steel shavings, and so forth. There’s one paint factory and one chemical outfit that might give us some trouble. We’ll have to dump in Jersey. And three or four printers. But that’s only paper, so that’s no problem there. We can bale and sell.”
“What kind of printers?”
“One does magazines, a couple do catalogs and brochures, and one does printing for Wall Street outfits. Annual reports, documents, prospectuses, stuff like that.”
“Yeah?” Sally Steiner says. “That’s interesting.”
Two
Late in May, Timothy Cone comes off a case that’s a real doozy. Cone’s an investigator for Haldering amp; Co., an outfit on John Street that provides “financial intelligence” for corporate and individual clients.
Early in May, a venture capital partnership hired Haldering to look into something called Ozam Biotechnology, Inc. Ozam had been advertising in the business media with big headlines: NEW ISSUE! Shares of Ozam available at ten bucks.
The legal and accounting departments of Haldering amp; Co. couldn’t find any record of Ozam anywhere. It apparently had no bank accounts, wasn’t chartered by the State of New York, nor was it registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
So Timothy Cone went to work. He soon found there were two other eyes doing the same thing: a guy from the SEC and a woman from the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
The three finally discover that Ozam just doesn’t exist. It is an out-and-out stock swindle dreamed up by a con man named Porfirio Le Blanc. How much loot he took in on those fraudulent ads they never do determine, but it must have been hefty because when Porfirio flies the coop, he flies first-class to Bolivia.
No one is interested in trying to extradite the rascal; just getting him out of the country is enough. So the Immigration and Naturalization Service is told to put Senor Le Blanc on the “watch list,” and Timothy Cone returns to his cubbyhole office to write out his report.
When he tosses it onto the desk of Samantha Whatley, who bosses the five Haldering amp; Co. investigators, he slumps in the doorway while she reads it.
“You’re a lousy speller,” she tells him. Then she shakes her head in disbelief. “Can you believe this? A guy takes out ads in newspapers, and people send him money. Fan-tastic.”
“It’s happened before,” Cone says, shrugging. “Years ago there was an ex-carny pitchman working the Midwest. He bought ads in small-town newspapers. All the ad said was: ‘Last chance to send in your dollar,’ with a P.O. Box number in Chicago. He was doing okay until the postal guys caught up with him.”
“Barnum was right,” Sam says. “Well, here’s a new one for you.”
She holds out a file folder, and Cone shuffles forward to take it.
“What is it?” he asks. “Some guy selling the Brooklyn Bridge?”
“No,” Sam says, “this is heavy stuff. The client is Pistol and Burns. You know them?”
“The investment bankers? Sure, I know them. Very old. Very conservative. What’s their problem?”
“They think they may have a leak in their Mergers and Acquisitions Department.”
“Oh-ho. Another inside trading scam?”
“Could be,” Samantha says. “Tim, this is a new client with mucho dinero. Will you, for God’s sake, try to dress neatly and talk like a gentleman.”
“Don’t I always?”
She stares at him. “Out!” she says.
Back in his office, he opens a fresh pack of Camels (second of the day) and lights up. He parks his scuffed yellow work shoes atop the scarred desk, and starts flipping through the Pistol amp; Burns file.
It’s a sad story of unbridled greed-and a not uncommon one. About a year ago, P amp;B is engineering a buyout between a big food-products conglomerate and a smaller outfit that’s making a nice buck with a nationwide chain of stores that sell cookies, all kinds, made on the premises, guaranteed fresh every morning. The takeover is a marriage made in heaven. Or, as they say on Wall Street, the synergism is there.
As usual, the ladies and gents in the Mergers and Acquisitions Department of Pistol amp; Burns work in conditions of secrecy that would do credit to the CIA-so word of the impending deal won’t leak out prematurely. But it does. The computers of the Securities and Exchange Commission pick up evidence of heavy trading in the cookie company in the weeks prior to the signing of the buyout documents and the public announcement. The cookie stock goes up almost ten points.
So the SEC launches an investigation to try to discover the insider leak. It turns out that a yuppie-type in the Mortgage Insurance Department of Pistol amp; Burns, who has nothing to do with mergers and acquisitions and is supposed to know zilch about them, is a drinking buddy of another yuppie in the M amp;A section. Not only that, but they’re both doing coke and shagging the same twitch who supplies the nose candy and also dances naked at a joint on East 38th Str
eet called Aristotle’s Dream.
The whole thing is a mess. The two Pistol amp; Burns’ yuppies confess their sins and admit they made almost a quarter-mil dealing in shares and options of the cookie corporation in the month prior to the takeover. What’s worse, they were paid for their insider information by arbitrageurs and attorneys who work for other investment bankers.
This clique of insiders, all with MBAs or law degrees, make a nice buck until the SEC lowers the boom, and everyone has to cough up their profits, pay fines, and is banned from the securities business for three years. The two original Pistol amp; Burns insiders also get a year in the slammer, which means they’ll be out in four or five months. There is no record of what happens to the skin dancer at Aristotle’s Dream.
The entire scandal is a painful embarrassment for Pistol amp; Burns. It is one of the few remaining investment-banker partnerships on the Street. The original partners, Leonard K. Pistol and G. Watson Burns, have long since gone to the great trading pit in the sky, but the present partners try to preserve the stern probity and high principles and ideals of the two founders. Their oil portraits glower down on the executive dining room, spoiling a lot of appetites.
But Pistol amp; Burns muddles through, cooperating fully with investigators and prosecutors from the SEC and district attorney’s office. P amp;B also appoints one of the senior partners, Mr. G. Fergus Twiggs, to be Chief of Internal Security. He institutes a series of reforms to make certain such an insider coup will never again tarnish the reputation of such a venerable and respected institution.
(Which somewhat amuses students of the history of our nation’s financial community. They happen to know that Leonard K. Pistol kept a teenage mistress, and G. Watson Burns drank a quart of brandy every day, without fail, and once had to be dissuaded from making a cash offer to buy the U.S. Government.)
Timothy Cone, reading all this with enjoyment, pauses long enough to light another cigarette and call down to the local deli for a cheeseburger, an order of French fries, a kosher dill, and two cold Heinekens. He munches on his lunch as he continues reading the preliminary report provided by the client.
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