Once at the window Mitchell stood in silence and stared out, down at the darkening street and the insect-like throngs scurrying about.
Jay stood and turned to face his boss’s wide back.
“Hotshots don’t...” Mitchell didn’t finish the statement, not then. He retreated to silence once more as his head turned slowly right, eyes tracking up the Street. Looking toward Trinity Church, it seemed to Jay. It was as though he’d disconnected from the moment, from the exchange
he
had initiated, and drifted off as he gazed blankly at the church. But after a moment his lapse of connection ebbed, and he was back, and he hobbled his bulk around to face Jay in a motion reminiscent of a semi trying a three-point turn. “Expectations, you young fool.”
Jay’s brow folded down, puzzled. “Sir?”
Mitchell jabbed a stubby finger at Jay. “People think you’re a hotshot, they expect it. And when you’re no longer so hot...” He shook his bald and spotted head, jowls wagging. “Hotshots always disappoint, and I don’t like disappointing my clients. Consistency, young man. Good old, stable, ten or twelve percent a year.
That
is what keeps people happy. That...”
And again he slipped off, the next word never rising, his next bit of sage advice apparently forgotten as he looked away from Jay and over his shoulder to the window again. Out the window and up the Street in the direction of the church.
“Sir?” Jay said after a very long and quiet time.
Mitchell looked slowly back to him. “It’s late and I...” His free hand came up and rubbed his chin, kneading it like a mound of dough as he seemed to consider something. Something of great importance. “I have something to do.”
And with that the old man moved past Jay like a slow rolling boulder. To his desk he went and pressed the intercom button and barked for Alonzo to get the car ready, and then to the door of his office, which opened as if on cue, his secretary holding it for him and stepping clear to give him passage. Jay followed him to the door, and just outside of the Old Man’s office he spied him waddling unevenly toward the elevator.
Jay looked to Mitchell’s secretary, hoping for some sort of explanation of his sudden departure, but the wiry and homely woman did not meet his gaze, instead tending to a stack of papers aligned with precise neatness on her desk.
Nuts
, Jay thought as the Old Man disappeared onto the elevator.
He calls me in, starts to ball me out for some stupid reason, and then he splits in the middle of a sentence. He’s nuts
.
Well, the bright side was that he wasn’t going to have to listen to some long ass lecture about the ‘good old days’, which was exactly the way things sounded like they were heading. And certainly he wasn’t going to have to hear the Old Man call him ‘hot shot’ anymore that night, something he hadn’t expected in the first place. Hadn’t expected at all, Jay thought with some murky disappointment and headed back to his cubicle for his things.
“Get that ‘nice work, Grady, well done’ you were looking for?” Jude asked, coming up on Jay just as he reached his desk.
“Not exactly,” he answered, slinging his coat and taking his briefcase in hand.
“I could have told you as much,” Jude said. “He wants to reign you in, buddy. He wants you to ‘play it safe’.” And when Jay looked at him, Jude knew he had hit it on the head. “No glory for the little guy.”
“I don’t get it,” Jay said. “I just don’t get it.”
“Don’t try. Just get out.”
“It’s a big step, Jude,” Jay told him, admitting some still harbored fears.
“Sure, but we’d take it together. All four of us.”
“You talked to them, didn’t you?”
Jude nodded. “And they are hip to my thinking. To the possibilities.”
Don’t ignore the possibilities
. Right. Just quit your job. Sure. Okay. “I gotta get going.”
And go he did, hearing Jude tell him to ‘think hard about it, farmboy’ as he drew away from his cubicle, thinking that his best buddy sure knew when to throw the nickname around. When it might be most useful to connote a gentler jab than calling him a dumbfuck outright. Well, maybe he
was
a farmboy, a stupidly loyal dumbfuck with some crazy gift that could be put to more profitable use outside the walls of S&M, but just because that might be the case did not mean that he had to accept said potentiality right there and then. He could think on it. Sleep on it. Sleep and sleep and sleep on it, if he wanted. Or do something else altogether, like forget about the whole thing for the immediate future. He could go to the elevator, and get on, and ride it down, and head on home, and see his girl and worry about everything later. He could do all of that, and planned to, and even got through the first three elements of the plan and part of the fourth before something interrupted the smooth unfolding of the rest.
He had made it downstairs and out into the cooling spring air just outside the building when he saw Mitchell not twenty feet away, stepping into the back of his limo, using the roof for a handhold to lower himself into the seat. The big black Lincoln leaned severely on the side he had entered, punishing springs and shocks that must have become accustomed to the abuse. Alonzo, his driver and bodyguard, closed the door smartly and jogged around to get behind the wheel, and drove the long car down Wall past Broad, its sag evening out as the Old Man likely slid to the middle. Habit, Jay thought as he watched the limo turn left a bit up Wall. Mitchell liked to be at the center of things.
And then Jay headed for home, walking toward the church as he always did, seeing Sign Guy already from halfway down the block. Noting the sign that he had seen that morning already, its bold black stenciled letters spelling out a humorous, if somewhat deriding play on a nursery rhyme.
T H I S L I T T L E
P I G G Y P L A Y E D
T H E M A R K E T
It was a nursery rhyme, wasn’t it? Jay wondered as he neared the crosswalk at Broadway and Wall. How did it go?
This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy ate roast
—
The next word never spun from his recollection of the old rhyme. Never would, because there was something of more interest happening before him. Right across Broadway. Right in front of Sign Guy.
That was where Mitchell’s limo glided to a stop.
It had come from Jay’s right, and he thought that Alonzo must have gone over to Pine after turning off Wall, and from there come back down to Broadway. And now to this place.
But why?
And then Jay saw why. It was not an easy angle from which to observe as he stood at the crosswalk waiting for the light. Not easy at all. Another person might have thought nothing of it, or something strange of it, but not the truth of it. No, only Jay was privy to that. Only he knew that the fat arm poking from the lowered back window of the stretched Lincoln belonged to Horace J. Mitchell, and only he knew that the flabby mitt of flesh at the end of that arm was as unaware of its actions as the head that normally controlled it, and only he of all uninvolved observers (except for Alonzo, possibly, but Jay even doubted that considering how Mitchell probably barked at him for not keeping his eyes on the road ahead) knew that in that thick and puffy manpaw there would be money, and unless there was an observant fly on the light standard near Sign Guy only Jay was clued in to the fact that the money was almost certainly a green and gorgeous hundred dollar bill. And so it surprised him hardly at all when the bum took hold of his Yuban can and leaned a bit forward so the fat hand could reach his makeshift receptacle, and reach it it did, and through the slit cut into the opaque lid a bill was pushed, the gift given, another pocket picked.
And then the limo pulled slowly away, blending into traffic until it turned off Broadway some distance down from the church. Jay watched it only briefly, because its leaving was not the matter of interest. Its being, and being where it had been, was. And how interesting it was, Jay thought, smiling. This Little Piggy Played The Market indeed, only the piggy weren’t so little, and it looked like sometimes the piggy got played himself.
“Damn,” Jay said aloud, though mostly to himself, and gazed across traffic at the bum.
Sign Guy was grinning back at him. And flashing that V.
Life can be sweet
, Jay thought right then, reveling in the beauty of the bum’s game, as well as in the fortunate fact that he was not a player. Just a lucky observer. A damn lucky observer.
Ten
The Severance Play
Two weeks later, Jay was again in Mitchell’s office, again sitting across the desk from the Old Man, the latter tapping a single swollen finger over and over on the dull leather sheen of his blotter’s edge.
“Didn’t listen, did you?” Mitchell asked, his head shaking in self-response. “Don’t remember a damn thing I said.”
Well, Jay thought, actually he
had
heard what the Old Man had said. All of it up until the fat bastard toddled off to make his donation. Did
he
remember
that
?
“This is what being a hotshot can get you, you young fool,” Mitchell lectured him, the ‘this’ being a surprise visit by investigators from the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, serious looking suits who were interested to know just how a wet behind the ears broker had done as well as Jay had, and still was. Hell, it didn’t even approach ‘good’. It was way past that. Into the realm of...fishy. And so the suits were here, going through his desk, his phone logs, his computer files, anything and everything that might point to that most convenient of explanations: insider trading. For certain this kid must be working with people inside these companies, getting sensitive info ahead of the investment community. Info that might send a stock soaring. And, well, the stocks this kid picked always seemed to do just that. Take off like rockets. So he must be just fronting for inside players. That had to be it.
And in search of evidence to back that suspicion, a half dozen men were pawing through his stuff right then, while he sat in the company of the man who would likely throw him to the wolves with great gladness. Simply because he was a hotshot. A hot-hot-hotshot.
Jude was right—there was heat all over him. Good heat, and lousy heat right then, all the fuck over him.
“Brought this on yourself, you realize,” Mitchell observed from his creaking throne, the wood of his chair loosing small, pitiful cries whenever the fat man swiveled this way or that.
Yeah, well, Jay was tired of letting the stressed piece of sitting furniture be the only voice of reply to the Old Man. And he would be tired no more. “Maybe so, but my ‘hotshot’ ways are bringing you business. I hear Teddy Malone is thinking of bringing his money here now. Ninety million—that’s a lot of green. Any chance that could be because of me?”
Mitchell seethed in silence, the chunks and folds of his face flushing hot. After a moment he made the effort to stand, something akin to the raising of the pyramids, Jay thought while witnessing the event for a second time now.
“You will wait in here until they are finished,” Mitchell instructed him, then the Old Man shuffled his mass to his door and left Jay alone. He stayed that way for three full hours.
The market was closed an hour and a half now, and the SEC boys were finally gone. And Jay? Jay stood before his workspace admiring the disaster the suits and their suspicion had wrought upon his things. Stood with Jude and Steve and Bunker and stared at the mess, the papers scattered, the drawers hanging open, computer disks missing. Even a pen of his missing from the cup that held it. A grade ‘A’ rutting had been done on him. And all Jay could do was laugh.
“Man, how can you laugh at this?” Steve asked, shaking his head at the trash heap that had been his buddy’s cubicle.
How?
Jay thought, laughing still. Because it was hilarious. Because the joke was on the suits from the SEC. Yes, there had been insider information, but they’d never find it where they were looking. They’d have to open him up like one of his drawers to see just
how
inside his information was. But they couldn’t do that, could they, and so they were basically fucked.
And that was why he was laughing. Laughing where another man might cry.
“Believe me now?” Jude asked him, in a surprisingly sober way that exhibited not a speck of an ‘I told you so’. In fact there was some sorrow tingeing his words. Sorrow for a friend whose illusions of one small part of the world had just been shot down in flames.
Loyalty, Grady. There’s your loyalty.
Jay, though, was feeling not sorrowful at all. Not at all. He was, in fact, feeling quite joyful right then. Like a caged bird finally set free. Free into the limitless possibilities of the wide world around it.
Around him.
So from the scattered remnants of his desk he found a legal pad and a pen, and on the pad he wrote two words, and then he tore said message from the pad and taped it to the blank terminal screen that had once been his window to the financial universe. But would be no more.
I QUIT
He looked at it, as did they all, and then he looked to his friends. “What say we go make some real money, boys?”
The smile crept first onto Jude’s face, then to Bunker’s and Steve’s as the glee set in. They were going to do it. Really do it. Yes!
“‘Bout time, farmboy,” Jude kidded him, and then one hand each stabbed into the air and came all together at once in a joyous high five.
And then they left. Together they left. Together and alone at the very same time.
Eleven
Big Plans
The babes were on stage, spinning and thrusting and laying the heaviest tease that was legal and possible on the Friday night crowd. Christine Mellinger, alone and off the scale this night in a white mini so very, very mini that it set her admirers afire each time she uncrossed and recrossed her magnificent gams, moved easily to the throbbing beat where she sat, dancing slowly, seductively, from the waist up, her eyes mostly on the show and the titillations it offered, but every so often shifting so very casually to steal a glance at a table one row back from the stage. A table where plans were being made.