Man in the Middle

by Ken Morris

  Close to three o’clock, Stuart spun around his chair and said, “Let’s grab the conference room and begin your education. I’m meeting a New York broker for drinks and dinner at five, so that’ll give us a couple of hours.”

  Before rising, Peter asked, “What’s a New York broker doing in San Diego?”

  Stuart put a paternalistic hand on Peter’s shoulder. “We’re gods, dude—that’s what they’re doing here: paying homage to the money. We fork-over a hundred million a year in commissions to brokers. Every trade, every time we buy stock in a secondary or IPO, some institutional salesperson makes some serious scratch—we have several sales-traders who make over a million dollars a year, just off our account. These bozos come to town all the time to brown-nose. Wait until Christmas.”

  “A hundred million in commission?”

  “More than that,” Stuart answered. “I have no idea what Howard Muller pays out on his shit. And that doesn’t even include Stenman’s farmed-out money.”

  “What’s ‘farmed-out’ mean?”

  “Morgan’s taken some of the money she’s raised offshore—that means money domiciled abroad—and turned it over to outside money managers. You remember that guy Stanley Drucker? The one that blew himself up?”

  Peter nodded. “Yeah. Hard to forget.”

  “He was one of the managers that had a small chunk. Guys like Drucker charge us 1% for their efforts. We still get to keep 20% of the profits. Between you, me, and these walls, even though the money is supposedly invested at the sole discretion of these outside managers, Muller and Stenman tell them what to buy and sell.”

  “Why not manage it ourselves?” Peter asked, confused by such a convoluted scheme.

  Stuart took his hand off Peter’s shoulder. Across the room, Howard Muller filled the doorframe of his office. “I don’t know,” Stuart said, sounding tense.

  “Neil! At five. That’s when I’ll have time for you.”

  Peter nodded. “Fine . . . good. Five. Okay, Mr. Muller.”

  The CIO shook his enormous head as if what Peter had said was idiotic. “Fine, good, okay,” he mimicked. Muller turned and shut his door.

  “Is he always such a prick?” Peter asked.

  “Pretty much a two hundred forty-pound blood blister,” Stuart confirmed.

  “A misanthrope,” Peter said.

  “A what?”

  “He’s a misanthrope. Someone having an aversion to his fellow man.”

  “What’re you? A dictionary?”

  “He’s a jerk,” Peter said, wishing he hadn’t stretched his vocabulary. “That sound better?”

  “Yeah, he’s a hammered-shit jerk. But—and it’s the almighty but— Muller’s got contacts in high places, and he’ll pay you some big-bucks if you learn how to make him and this firm money. What’d you think of his hobby?”

  “The Civil War stuff?”

  “Strange, don’t you think?”

  “Is there a story to that?” Peter asked.

  “Muller is a closet bigot, I think—wishes the South had won. He’d like to have slaves working these phones.”

  “That’s funny,” Peter said, smiling at the thought of traders chained to computers, and Muller, in a golf cart, whipping them to make more money.

  “Not that funny. The man’s schizo in the head. Last time he overindulged in my presence, he talked about his Nimrodic war theories. That was after the SEC dropped the Treasury manipulation investigation. Morgan treated us to Dom Perignon—a case of the stuff. A small reward for all of us circling the wagons.”

  “Treasury investigation?” Peter asked.

  “A long story with a happy ending. I’ll tell you about it another day. Anyway, Muller drank too much and let his hair down. I had to endure a profane lecture on why the South lost the Civil War. He thinks the Southern generals weren’t, in his words, ‘fucking ruthless enough.’ When Northern generals like Sherman marched through the South, they burned plantations, raped women, murdered everyone in their path. If Lee and the South’s other gentleman-generals had done the same thing, the North would have capitulated. At least that’s Muller’s theory.”

  “Sounds a tad revisionist. The South lost because they had limited resources, no manufacturing, and—”

  “Who gives a rat’s-ass, dude?” Stuart said, hiking his shoulders into his neck.

  Peter felt stupid for debating the issue. “You’re right. Who cares? I used to collect baseball cards.”

  Stuart leaned back and said, “Anyway, with Muller it’s more than a hobby; it’s life. He looks at creating wealth as warfare—and in a way, he has a point. His theory about the effectiveness of ruthless tactics applies. This is a business where the weak perish. Scruples are . . . anyway, it’s all about making scratch, no ifs, ands, or buts.”

  “Okay. Since you brought it up, how the hell does one make all this money for the funds?”

  “Good question. I should write a book, but then I’d end up in jail.” Stuart grinned.

  “Jail?”

  “I’m kidding, dude. Back to making money. First, you gotta learn the various trading vehicles: options, futures, stocks, bonds, currency, commodities, whatever. Then you gotta develop relationships with CEOs, specialists on the floor of the exchanges, analysts, syndicate managers, anybody and everybody. Find out what punches their button, then punch away. That’s why I go out with these brokers when they travel to San Diego—that and occasionally getting laid. Then squeeze everyone and everything for all their worth. Gain access to the best sources of information. Use money as leverage to acquire what you need to know—commission dollars are as good as cold, hard cash. If commissions aren’t an option, then . . . well, you’ll figure that out in due time.”

  “To that end,” Peter said, “let’s get me up to speed.” He pointed his head at the empty conference room.

  “They told me to take you under my wing, so might as well get started. By the way, when you finish with Muller, you ought to come join me with the salesperson from Gordon, Ashe. She’s a hotty and she’s bringing along a co-worker.”

  Peter thought he saw a shameless leer overtake Stuart’s grin.

  Once inside the conference room, Peter plowed through his list of questions, but each answer produced a new set of questions.

  Another two hours later, standing outside Muller’s office and waiting to be summoned, Peter felt his head ache with an overdose of information.

  Peter waited a couple of minutes for Attila the Boss to notice him. He leaned against a pillar off to one side. Once Muller made eye contact, his brows furrowed and his eyes rolled. Peter took that as an invitation to enter.

  The moment Peter stepped in, Muller snatched a phone and pasted it to his ear. Turning from Peter, not bothering to excuse himself, he said, “At 4:07 Pacific time, the dollar cross-rate was: 3.32. I buy one billion. Sold at . . .” Muller lifted and bent his left arm, exposing a heavy gold wristwatch. Peter noticed he wore a wedding ring. Poor woman.

  Muller continued: “It is now 5:02 p.m., and the cross rate is 3.11. I’m selling one billion back to you.” The CIO entered something into a handheld calculator. “I am netting sixty-six million, two hundred twenty-five thousand, one hundred. That goes against Grand Cayman, booked to . . .”

  Peter couldn’t hear the rest.

  Once Muller hung up, he reached inside a drawer and removed what looked like a sophisticated television remote control. He aimed it at a metal box, sitting on the near corner of his desk, and began pressing buttons. He next picked up a black-bordered trade ticket—one that Peter now recognized as a buy ticket—and inserted it into a slot in that box. An electronic hum announced a time stamp. Muller wrote something on the face of the ticket.

  Finished writing, Stenman’s CIO aimed the remote a second time. This time he grabbed a red-bordered ticket—indicating an asset sale— inserted it, then removed it. He made a few notations, clipped the buy and sell tickets together, and crammed them inside a Plexiglas vacuum tube, into which they disappea
red. These transactions, or whatever they were, took less than three minutes from start to finish.

  Muller refocused on Peter. “Sit down.” He aimed his finger like a gun at the leather-bound chair angled across from his desk. Peter obediently complied. “I will explain this project one time—” Muller’s eyes darted between three computer screens as he spoke “—so I want you to shut up and listen. We’ve done a crap job of monitoring commission payments. Most of these piece-of-shit brokers we do business with receive more money from us than they’re worth. Your job is to review year-to-date payouts to each deadbeat firm, then go to my traders and get them to rate how useful these idiot-sticks have been. Is that clear?”

  Peter unbuttoned his jacket, pretending relaxation. He then cleared his throat and said, “You want me to correlate—”

  “I said: shut up.”

  Peter nodded, grateful Stuart had explained how the brokers made money from Stenman’s trading. Without that, even this elementary request might have passed a mile over his head. “Uh—” Peter cringed, knowing an attack was inevitable “—who do I contact to get this information?” That his voice sounded apologetic seemed unavoidable.

  “Listen, Asswipe. That’s for you to figure out. And I expect this project not to interfere with your workday—you’re going to stay married to Numbnuts until I decide whether to fire you, or give you more responsibility. Now get out.”

  Another phone must have flashed because as Peter prepared to slink out, Muller picked up a headset and said, “Oil futures trading at . . .”

  It seemed like a lot had happened, but the entire episode had lasted less than seven minutes. Remembering Stuart’s suggestion that they meet for drinks and dinner, Peter decided to do just that.

  On the way down the elevator, he committed to coming in to work at four the next morning. “If Muller wants a dedicated worker,” he said to himself, “then a dedicated worker is what he’s gonna get.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Peter leaned across a table in a crowded hotel bar and shook hands with Aimie St. Claire, sales backup from Gordon, Ashe International. Across from her, with Stuart’s arm already draped around her shoulder, sat Louise Hartman, lead salesperson on the Stenman Partners’ account.

  Two glasses later, the champagne had just enough of an effect that Peter forgot everything. Everything, that is, except how to have one hell of a good time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ON FRIDAY, PETER ARRIVED AT WORK HALF-AN-HOUR LATER THAN HE had intended, but still early. Faces he did not recognize worked the phones—many traders spoke in foreign languages. Peter sat, listened, and observed. With about half the number of bodies as later in the day, the room felt more subdued, but the intensity was still evident. These workers seemed like nocturnal animals, creeping around in a mysterious world where everything they did arose from instinct or impulse. But Peter already understood the difference between decisions made in milliseconds and a lack of thought. See, react, trade, move on, then do it again and again and again. As impossible as it seemed, he’d seen Stuart Grimes make a hundred such decisions over those few hours yesterday, most of them yielding positive financial results.

  In the background, janitorial personnel silently worked between desks, careful not to distract traders’ concentration for fear of inciting already frequent, verbal attacks. Plastic sacks—dozens of them, filled with enough paper to denude a small forest—lined a rear door, ready to be hauled away.

  Peter sipped French Roast and took everything in, grateful his intelligence had counseled him not to drink to excess last night. While he now felt tired, at least he wasn’t hung-over. Sniffing his fingers, he rewound the evening’s events. Obviously, Stuart Grimes and Louise Hartman had had carnal knowledge of one another before last night. Their public groping preceded a disappearing act—to her hotel room—around eleven o’clock.

  That left Peter and Aimie St. Claire alone in the hotel bar, enjoying expensive cognac, her hand camped on his thigh. The girls acted aggressively—not girls, Peter reminded himself. Both were in their late thirties and built for action. They didn’t show cleavage—didn’t need to. Instead, they chose colorful cashmere sweaters with statically launched strands begging to be stroked. Crow’s feet around their eyes presaged a raunchy worldliness.

  Better than their physical allure were the stories they told of exciting Wall Street trades done on behalf of important clients, and of sexual escapades and scandal. They gesticulated, laughed, and whispered when speaking salaciously, and made it all sound wonderful and thrilling and fun. And they seemed to know everybody in the securities industry. Early in their careers, they’d been to Mike Milken’s Predators’ Ball during Drexel, Burnham’s heyday, before the firm went belly-up and before Milken went to prison for a few years. Back then, Drexel professionals dished out morsels of information like they were hors d’oeuvres designed to whet the appetites of powerful money managers. Drexel’s one-hundred millionaire investment bankers, in turn, sold junk bonds to these grateful fiduciaries as if the high-risk paper were as precious as everlasting life. “Milken even had the nerve to insist his people call those crap bonds, ‘high-yield.’ You used the term ‘junk,’” Aimie had said, “and you were likely to be canned and blackballed for life.”

  Louise told an equally compelling story about handling a trade with Ivan Boesky in a company magically acquired in a take-over the next week. She’d been smart enough to piggyback the trade, she said, and sneak a few thousand shares into one of her secret, personal trading accounts—she’d made forty grand on that little investment, back in the day when forty grand meant something. They dropped names like “Blade,” “Skyball,” and “Helmet Head” as if Peter knew these people. He learned that when professionals used the term “Wall Street,” they meant the financial markets worldwide, not just in New York. Everyone considered Morgan Stenman, in fact, a Street icon and, as such, that officially made Stuart, and Peter, fellow citizens of Wall Street. And as silly as it seemed, knowing this made Peter happy.

  And Peter didn’t particularly care that much of what he heard confused him. The evening was magical. And though he had suspected it was in the offing, he hadn’t intended to sleep with Aimie St. Claire—at least not until her hand moved from his thigh to his crotch. Now, less than two hours after rolling out of her king-sized hotel bed, her scent lingered. Before he’d allowed himself to be seduced, he wished she had told him she was married. With the clarity following meaningless sex, he now vowed: never again.

  Behind him, a gruff voice caught Peter’s attention, pushing last night’s indiscretion to a back corner of his mind. From a second row of desks, a trader with a red-snaked nose spoke into a headset wrapped from his ear to his mouth. The conversation was in French. Peter understood a few words, but in the context of the conversation, none of them seemed to be meaningful. As soon as that call ended, the rotund man began another call. This time he spoke in what sounded like perfect German. Glancing at the computer facing the trilingual man, Peter watched rows of foreign symbols twitching ever-changing prices.

  The trading room, Peter figured out, operated twenty-four hours a day, employing three semi-distinct shifts. If yesterday’s activity was indicative, these shifts overlapped by two or three hours. That put the minimum workday at ten hours, the maximum at twelve—before special projects and nights out.

  When the man finished this second conversation, Peter introduced himself and asked what time Stuart Grimes normally arrived. “At half past five,” the trader said. Peter then asked where he might go to begin his project on tracking commissions.

  The man’s breath smelled flammable, undoubtedly the result of recent eighty-proof shots. With Peter’s second question, the grizzled man lost his remaining splinter of patience. “First floor,” he said, spinning and punching a button on his phone bank, spewing rapid-fire French, and tuning Peter completely out.

  With forty-five minutes to go before Stuart’s estimated arrival, Peter took the stairs to the first floor.

 
; At six-fifteen, an hour after arriving, Peter left the Head of Administration and Support, feeling pretty good about his progress. Carl Butler was harried, but at least he had referred to Peter by his given name, and, when Peter mentioned that Howard Muller had assigned him this project, the name-drop worked like magic. Butler’s eyes wobbled the moment the word “Muller” vibrated against his eardrums and defiled his brain. The suddenly nervous man showed Peter how to log on and download the information he needed. With a few formatting hints, Peter felt he could complete the first part of his task over the next few weeks. The biggest problem would be gaining the cooperation of the traders, since, to assess brokers’ usefulness, he needed their opinions.

  “One step at a time,” he told himself.

  Bounding to the third floor, Peter spotted Stuart Grimes the moment he buzzed in. Stuart, barking into a phone, flapped his arms like an ostrich trying to fly. Amazingly, he exhibited no sign he’d consumed massive amounts of alcohol the night before or spent the night and morning doing the nasty. He had clean eyes, and was operating on a million cylinders.

  How’d he do it? Peter wondered.

  Peter made his way past animated bodies, their voices a garbled lace of frantic commands and profanity. By the time he got to Stuart, the trader had a second phone pressed to the other ear. He spoke back and forth, sliding one handset to his mouth, then pulling it into his neck while speaking into the other. All the while, Stuart’s eyes scrutinized his computer screens, absorbing bits of data on currency, bonds, foreign indices, and a multitude of other mysterious indicators.

  “You say your guy’s preparing to address the sales force?” Stuart asked into the left phone.

  Peter leaned in and heard a voice spill an answer. “Yes. He’s raising his estimates on Global-Tech by fifty cents for this and next year.”