“It’s my act,” he said. “She’s just there for color, know what I mean? I do some magic and she keeps the rubes from watching too closely.”
I pocketed the card. “Nice to meet you, Jacques. I’ve got to run.”
“It’s Roger. Jacques is the name of the clown.”
“I’ll remember,” I said.
I ordered us a round.
“So how ya been?” He did a little hop that got his butt up onto the barstool.
It could have been a loaded question—my picture had been plastered all over the news two years earlier—but maybe I was being paranoid. I didn’t want to talk about where I had been the day before or the two years prior. But I trusted Roger. We’d been friends—bar friends. We didn’t vacation together or even send cards at Christmas, but we had spent hours together talking about everything and nothing once upon a time.
“I’ve been away, Roger,” I said, hoping he would hear my reluctance.
“I ain’t talkin’ about that,” he said. “You moved downtown, what? Five years ago? Six? And you never once come uptown to see your old friend? You should be ashamed.”
Something else to be ashamed of. Pile it on.
“I got married. Had a kid. Things got a little crazy with work for a while.”
He was shaking his head. “I coulda read all that in the paper. I’m asking, how you been?”
I had no prospects of a career. Few friends. An ex-wife, who I may still have loved, but maybe not, and maybe I didn’t really know what that meant anyway. And a son. Sick and a thousand miles away and being cared for by the alcoholic ex. It was all rather complicated.
“I’ve been better.”
“I hear ya.”
“And worse,” I said.
“Ain’t it always the way.”
And something went click and I felt like I was home. The wolves were still outside, there was a hurricane brewing, and madmen ruled the world. But for the moment, a cold beer in a comfortable bar was pure bliss.
—
FRIDAY MORNING I MET
with my parole officer. He had bad hair plugs and breath that stank of cigarettes and coffee. The man who would have absolute control over my life for the next three years didn’t bother to hide his boredom. He rattled off all the restrictions I would have to live with—including no travel outside the five boroughs without his written permission and don’t expect it anytime soon—then he gave me a list of ten employers who would hire ex-cons. I ran my eyes down the page. Terrific, I could become a bicycle messenger or a dishwasher. He saved his inspirational speech for last.
“Listen up.” For the first time, he made eye contact. They were not kind eyes. “I wish you the best of luck and I hope you make it. Nobody wants to go back, but it happens. It happens often. I’ve got a good record with my clients and I’d like to keep it that way. But have no doubt—you screw up, you start missing meetings, you get caught hanging with the wrong people—I will file a request for an arrest warrant and never give it a second thought. Are we clear on that?”
For a moment, I felt the walls closing in and thought I smelled the stench of prison. “Understood,” I managed to say.
Still, the interview marked my first official act as a free man. No one was coming to take me back today. I headed home. When I walked through the door of the Ansonia, a smiling man in uniform held it open for me. A second greeted me by name and held the elevator. I had gone from a prison to a palace, and I could luxuriate in the differences.
There was a broken spring in the seat of my leather easy chair, so that I had to shift my butt over sideways, but it was the best seat in the house. Looking out on the city, I had not a touch of the claustrophobia that had been haunting me since my release. The weather had turned again. It was stunningly hot, a late-September surprise, and the women on Broadway had responded with shorter skirts and skimpier tops. I considered investing in a pair of binoculars.
I pulled out my cell phone—my lifeline to this new world of freedom—and started picking up the pieces. My first call was to my father—to check in, give him the number, and assure him I would see him that night.
Then I made a flurry of calls to old colleagues. Though I was barred by court order from contacting anyone from my old firm, there were plenty of other acquaintances to be renewed. Networking, my parole officer had assured me, was the key to finding some kind of employment.
Some people would not take my call. I respected that. Others took it and shined me on. Cowards. But a few sounded genuinely glad to hear from me, wished me luck, and promised to keep an ear open for anything that might fit.
I was going to be a tough fit. Anything but advisory or consulting work in the securities industry was out of the question. I was also specifically prohibited from any position where I would be handling money—a basic requirement for just about any job on Wall Street.
I was avoiding making the one call that mattered.
—
A LESSON LEARNED EARLY
in my trading career was “Always do the hard thing first.” Once you get whatever it is out of the way, the rest feels easy and your brain functions better without the distraction. I was having a difficult time applying that discipline to my life.
I was afraid to make that call. Whatever Angie might have to say, the odds were good that it was going to hurt.
I finally dialed the number anyway.
Her mother answered on the third ring—not enough of a delay for me to chicken out and hang up—and as soon as she realized who was calling, her voice went into that shrill effusion that is often mistaken for southern charm. She was so pleased to hear from me. She had missed me. She was so sure that I was good for Angie and it was all so sad about my legal problems, but she was sure it would all be sorted out someday and those men who had hounded me—hounded me, she repeated—would have to accept that they were wrong. She was sure of it. And then she asked after my dear father. All of it came out without a pause, almost without a breath. It was like being smothered in butterflies and molasses.
“I was hoping to get to talk with Angie,” I said.
That brought on another tornado of words. She was thrilled to have her little girl around, though she didn’t get to see her as much as she wanted because her Evangeline was so busy, reconnecting with all of her old friends and such, and she could not understand why that girl had felt the need to rent herself a house down to Morgan City while there was plenty of room right there.
I fought my way through. “Could you give me her number down there?”
She couldn’t. She would not give out Angie’s number, or her address, without checking with her first.
“After you-all’s difficulties, it just would not be right, I don’t think,” she whispered, as though speaking of our divorce in a normal tone of voice might have been offensive. “But I will pass on your good wishes and I’m sure she will get right back to you. I will be seeing her this weekend, of course, when she comes up to visit the boy. She comes up every weekend. Without fail. She is such a good mother to that boy.”
Once a week.
“How is my son?”
“Well, he is a trial. A trial. But I believe the Lord has a plan for that boy, Jason.”
That made me nervous.
I let her ring off with her usual “Bye-bye, now.”
Sometimes doing the hard thing first turns out to be ripping the top off Pandora’s box.
The last time Angie came to visit up at Ray Brook, she was drunk. Not falling down. Not even sloppy. Just a little louder than absolutely necessary. Louder and a lot more Bayou.
It was eleven o’clock in the morning and she was telling me about our son’s latest round of doctors’ examinations. Four years old and barely able to speak. He communicated in grunts, growls, and snatches of ads he picked up from the television. Angie made it sound like he wasn’t trying. I lost it. I yelled at her. Told her to clean up her act. She owed it to the boy. Implicit, of course, was the accusation that all of the Kid’s problems were in some way her fault.
She cried. Then she screamed. Then she called me a maggot and I laughed. I thought it was funny that in the midst of her histrionics she would think of the word “maggot.” And that’s when she hit me with the BIG news.
Autism. Our son had been slow to walk, slower to talk. He never goo-gooed or giggled like other babies. He practically flinched when anyone tried to look into his eyes. If I hadn’t had my head screwed on backwards all that time, I might even have noticed.
When I first accepted that my illegal accounting scheme wasn’t going to go on forever—and before I had felt the SEC closing in—I had set up the divorce scam. I signed over the Tribeca loft and half the assets to Angie and set up a small trust fund for the Kid. It worked. The Feds let me keep my old apartment uptown, but they took everything else. They left Angie alone. They never even looked her way.
The plan was that we would hook up again as soon as I got out. We’d move to some tax haven and live off the interest. Of course, the whole fantasy depended upon Angie coming through—being there when I came home. Like building a mansion on a cliff, the view may be great but the foundation is the key.
I made the assumption that my chances of getting my P.O. to approve me taking a trip to Louisiana were exactly zero. Therefore, he must never find out. I called and made my travel arrangements.
I was due at my father’s house for dinner at six. There was nothing to do until then but drink coffee, stare out at Broadway, and write the script for what I was going to say to Angie.
My cell phone rang, giving me a sudden shock. It was the first time. So far every conversation I had had on the little device was one I had initiated.
“Jason Stafford.”
“Mr. Stafford? This is Gwendolyn in Mr. Stockman’s office. Are you available to speak with him?”
My mind was racing, trying to place the name. “I’m sorry. You’re with . . . ?”
“Weld Securities.” A medium-sized boutique firm, I remembered, with a middle-market focus. “Mr. Stockman is our Chief Financial Officer.”
I remembered him. We had been introduced at a Federal Reserve meeting years ago. An accountant, not a trader. A lightweight, I thought, a bit out of his depth and working too hard to impress. He dressed too well and wore cologne to a business meeting. He was also on the short side, which I didn’t hold against him, but judging by the lifts on his custom-made shoes, I had guessed it was an issue for him.
“Certainly. Do you have any idea why he wants to talk to me?”
“I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Stockman does not always confide in me. Will you hold, please?”
I held. I vowed to project confidence, aggressiveness, and strength. I felt desperate, unsure, and needy. Minutes dragged by, draining my strength.
Finally. “Jason? Thanks so much for waiting. I’m glad I could get you. How are you? How you holding up?”
So he knew my history. Now we could comfortably talk around it.
“I’m doing well. Glad to be enjoying this weather. Looking forward to being productive again, in some way.”
“Excellent. Excellent. This might dovetail nicely for both of us. I was talking to an old friend of yours today—Al Pierce, over at your old shop.”
Al Pierce had never been my friend. He had been CFO at Case Securities when I was there and it was discovered that the billion dollars in profits my group had run up over three years was, in fact, only a half-billion dollars, the rest being a function of my imagination and faking a few hundred trade tickets. Al hadn’t caught it and was gobsmacked when the Feds showed up with the evidence. It was a mystery to me how he’d held on to his job. He had no reason to be doing me any favors.
“He suggested I should give you a call. We have a situation here and he thought you might be able to pilot us through these troubled waters.”
“Listen, Mr. Stockman . . .”
“Bill, please.”
“Okay. Bill. It’s nice to be thought of, but I’m not sure what I can do for you. I am permanently barred from my old job, and I don’t know whether Al mentioned it or not, but I’m under court order not to even speak to him.”
There it was—as out in the open as I could make it. If he was still interested, that told me something. It told me he was scared.
“Yes, he made that clear. But this is an unusual situation, Jay . . .”
I hated it when people called me Jay. They always wanted something.
“. . . and we would not be asking you to do anything that would jeopardize your legal standing.”
There was a tell in Stockman’s voice. He was smooth—a Wall Street senior bureaucrat, and they’re the worst kind—but he didn’t sound smooth. He sounded like somebody had his balls in a vise, but hadn’t started squeezing. Yet. I wanted to hear more. But I didn’t want him to know I wanted it.
“Bill, I’m sorry. I just got home. I have personal things I need to sort out. What’s your timing on this?”
“We are prepared to make this worth your while.”
“You have my full attention.”
“A young trader at the firm was in an unfortunate accident this summer. There was no question at the time that it was an accident. A boating accident . . .”
“Is this the story that was in the news this week?” I interrupted.
“Ahh, you saw it.” He sighed, as though the world would be a much better place if William Stockman controlled the flow of all information. “Yes, well, what was not mentioned by the press was that the SEC has indicated an interest in his trading reports. They have asked us to turn over all of his trade blotters, tickets, reports, notebooks, and market diary.”
“What are they looking for?”
“I don’t know. I have had our internal auditors and compliance officers go over everything and they’ve come up with nothing that would interest the regulators.”
“But you’re not comfortable with that?”
“The markets are in turmoil every day. I am focused on doing whatever it takes to guarantee the survival of this firm . . .”
I wondered if I was supposed to salute.
“. . . and if there is anything there that could jeopardize my work, I want to know about it. Before I hand it over to the SEC.”
I was interested. My parole officer would be happy. My bank account would be happy. And I wouldn’t mind beating the Feds at their own game. A little bit of payback.