Wicked Pleasures (59 page)

‘No. Tommy lives in Vegas. He’s a gambling freak these days. He used to do battle with fish, now it’s the wheel. Sad, really.’

‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘very sad. Do you have an address for him?’

Charlotte, 1984

Charlotte knew exactly when she had fallen in love with Gabe Hoffman. One minute she had been thinking how much she loathed him, how much she couldn’t wait to be rid of him, away from his office, and the long, miserable boring days with him; and the next she had been staring at him, fiercely and almost painfully aware of the extraordinary dark brown of his eyes, the wild unruliness of his hair, the oddly rakish way he smiled, the thick dark hair on his arms, right down to his wrists (she normally loathed hairy men), the urgent impatient way he moved around, the size of him, oh God, the size of him. Charlotte imagined, very briefly, lying underneath Gabe Hoffman and felt faint; allowed her mind to linger, more briefly still, on the particular part of his anatomy that might be most intimately engaged with hers, and felt first hot and then chilled with horror at herself. What was she doing, thinking, reacting to him like this, in precisely the way the entire female population of Praegers did? At – she glanced up at the array of clocks on his wall, showing the time in New York, Tokyo and London – at half past ten in the morning, for God’s sake, stone cold sober. Then she forced her mind back onto what he had just said to her, what she was supposed to be replying – and she realized what had made the difference, what had done this to her, what had turned all the emotions she had in a great tumbling heap inside her head. Or rather her body. Oh well all right, her head and her body.

‘You’ve got it,’ he had said. ‘That’s it. You’ve fucking got it. You’re a fucking genius.’ And he had picked up the telephone and stabbed out a number, staring at her at the same time with an expression of profound and almost awed admiration. Charlotte stared back at him, still only half understanding, but understanding also that this was what she had been waiting for, looking for ever since she had been handed this bank, her legacy, at her grandfather’s birthday party, all those years ago, ever since she had been working, day after day, on the seemingly endless boredom of her apprenticeship. The real world, the heady world of deals, of buying and selling and grabbing and protecting: a sense of tension, excitement, urgency; the smell of money in the air, an almost tangible feeling of greed. And she was part of it now, as Gabe was, she was no longer a trailing, reluctant accessory, she was in there, part of it, adding to it. And as if almost in celebration, she had toppled over into love with him. Just like that.

It hadn’t even seemed to her that she had said anything particularly clever. Gabe had been wrestling for days over a hostile bid, unable to establish quite why the target company – a paper manufacturer that was only modestly successful – should be so attractive: Charlotte had looked up casually from her desk and made the observation that one of the company’s original parts – small stationery goods and office equipment – had to be of almost inestimable value in terms of
customer good will – ‘greater than its whole, in a way,’ she said. And Gabe had stared at her, very white and still, his hand frozen on the keyboard of his Quotron. ‘Shit,’ he said, ‘of course. Of course. Crown jewel sell-out situation.’ And then he made his pronouncement. And then she fell in love with him.

Gabe explained to her about crown jewel sell-outs. ‘You sell off the one bit of a company that’s most valuable. Quickly. So it isn’t really very desirable any more.

We do that, and the others’ll drop their bid. It’s the customers they want. Watch.’

The crown jewels were sold; the bid was duly dropped. Everyone was very excited. Gabe was very fair and told Fred III it had been her idea about the retail outlets. Fred told her he hoped she wouldn’t start to think she was the best thing in banking since the invention of the dollar bill. Charlotte assured him she wouldn’t. He was smiling at her as he spoke; Freddy was in the room, and she saw his face suddenly, coldly furious. It almost frightened her.

Charlotte had watched in a state of acute excitement as Blackworth sold off its stationery division, and Wrightson dropped their bid. She was invited to the celebratory lunch. She thought how dull it would be without the deal and that afternoon she found herself beginning all over again, on a new bid, for another company, a new set of stockholders, a new buyers’ list. She wondered how she could ever have thought Praegers was boring. Her own work had scarcely changed, but she was suddenly completely enraptured by the process. Gabe was, along with the rest of Wall Street, deal-obsessed. The stream of negotiations, of bids and counter-bids, of rumours and counter-rumours, of leaks and denials, was like a physical presence in the office. Gabe sat at his computer, hour after hour, like some large restless bird of prey, watching it with his brilliant dark eyes, ready to swoop into its permanently shifting network of information, opportunity, challenge. For the first time, she was aware of the bank as a vital, living force. Its ability to convert money into power and thus to manipulate people seemed to her almost mystical. It held her in thrall. She knew it was a huge factor in her new, helpless passion for Gabe; but that seemed to her irrelevant. The two things, the two excitements were two halves of a whole. She was constantly if uncomfortably happy.

Gabe had shown absolutely no signs of reciprocating her feelings. Apart from saying ‘well done’ when a particularly difficult deal had been finally accomplished, he treated her exactly as he treated the other people who worked for him – carelessly, arrogantly, thoughtlessly. Charlotte didn’t care; if anything it intensified the way she felt. She was uncomfortably aware she was feeling rather like a schoolgirl with a crush on a prefect, but she didn’t really care about that either. She didn’t care about anything, except getting to the office in the morning, and being with Gabe. Physical proximity to him was all she asked. Occasionally his hand would brush against hers, and once he put his arm round her shoulders, to move her out of the way; Charlotte could not believe he wouldn’t recognize the scorching hunger in her reaction. Her only anxiety was that he might, in some dreadful way, realize what she felt. It was
hard to imagine that such feeling, such highly charged sexual intensity, could go unremarked. She tried to make sure that her behaviour was, if possible, cooler than ever, and told herself he was too arrogant, too insensitive to see beyond the end of his desk.

As far as she knew, he had no regular girlfriend; he never mentioned one, and the office gossip was simply of an endless stream of long-legged cool beauties seen waiting for him, with commendable patience, in the reception area of the bank. Charlotte being neither long-legged, nor even, strictly speaking, beautiful, found this slightly disturbing; but so long as none of them moved into his Upper West Side apartment for longer than a night at a time, she felt she could stand it.

She was still living with Fred and Betsey, but she had made a friend at last, a real friend, someone to talk to, and to laugh with, to spend at least some of her very limited spare time with, and that had given her confidence: a girl called Chrissie Forsyte who was a trader on the foreign exchange floor. Charlotte had noticed her first in the queue at the staff restaurant in the basement, handing over her polystyrene box of salad to be weighed at the check-out with a confident ‘324’.

‘That’s 331, Chrissie,’ said the girl behind the till, ‘you did good.’

‘Excuse me,’ said Charlotte, intrigued, from behind her, ‘but what did that mean?’

Chrissie turned and smiled at her. ‘I was betting on the weight. Want to share a table?’

‘Yes, that’d be nice. Thank you,’ said Charlotte. Her difficult situation at Praegers meant she didn’t often find someone to eat with; people were still either suspicious of her, or nervous. Most days she carried her own box of salad back up to her office, rather than sit conspicuously alone in the restaurant.

‘I don’t normally sit down here,’ said Chrissie, ‘I eat at my desk. But it is
really
quiet today, and I guess I can take a fifteen-minute break.’ Her voice was light and pretty, her accent Southern and musical, straight out of
Gone with the Wind
. She smiled at Charlotte. She was tall and very thin, pale, with long brown hair and thick, wire-framed glasses. Most of the traders wore glasses.

‘Do you always bet on the weight of your lunch?’ asked Charlotte.

‘Traders bet on everything,’ said Chrissie. ‘The floors the elevator will stop at – not that that amounts to much here – the number of wrong buses that come by before the right one arrives, the number of messages waiting when you get back from lunch. Or even the bathroom.’ She laughed. ‘We’re wildly superstitious too. There are lots of stories about people who won’t make a single trade until three people have said good morning to them, or who’ve bought or sold on the toss of a coin. My boss always makes his first trade of the day on multiples of the change he got from his cab fare. We’re all a little crazy.’ She smiled at Charlotte again. ‘You spent any real time on the trading floor?’

Charlotte shook her head. ‘Only whizzing through on my first day.’

‘Yes, I remember. Come and spend some time there one day. It’s really fun. I still love it and this is my sixth year. Only problem is my eyesight. When I started on this I had forty-forty vision. Now I have two new prescriptions a year.’

Charlotte had been up several times since then, and sat enthralled at Chrissie’s side in her small empire, measuring roughly three metres by three metres, watching her as she stared for long hours at the screen on which her destiny was fixed, talking into one of her three telephones, another tucked beneath her chin, a half-drunk can of Coke and a half-eaten sandwich on her desk.

‘All you have to be in this game,’ she said to Charlotte, ‘is quick, efficient, bossy and aggressive. For some reason I don’t find that too terribly difficult.’ She grinned. ‘It’s a war between yourself and the market. The trading floor is the cutting edge. It’s the centre of the universe, I tell you.’

And Charlotte had looked around her at the bedlam of shouting voices and ringing, endlessly ringing phones, of white faces and shirt-sleeved arms waving in the air, of foul language and puerile behaviour, and contrasted it with the investment banking floor, where all was sobriety and suits, Bostonian voices and Bulgari watches, and the three-hour lunch was as crucial as the morning’s work that preceded it, and her own department, where ambitious young men like Gabe Hoffman spent their days almost frantically matching one man’s need to another’s greed, and building their own reputations and futures in the process, and marvelled that something as basically simple as the manipulation of money could manifest itself in so many and diverse ways.

She could see now why Fred had put her to work with Gabe; it was like attending a masterclass every day. She watched him as he sniffed out possible deals, pulling them apparently from the air, persuading colleagues, clients, to go along with him, back his judgement; she listened as he coaxed and urged a deal along, counselling caution one day, steadying nerves the next, arguing with the lawyers, playing with the press; she stared at him transfixed as he talked confidently of buyers where there were none, of money that was not raised, of imminent completions that were not remotely in sight. And always, every time, it seemed, he pulled it off. One of his biggest coups, which had won them their biggest client since the BuyNow TV sales business, had been advising Myonura, the Japanese electronics company, to buy into a TV network. It had been a bold and brilliant move, and much talked of in Wall Street. He was regarded as a star, in spite of his youth, his inexperience, Fred’s suspicion of such animals. And some of the stardust rubbed off on Charlotte, she was seen as part of his team: admired, envied, often resented, sometimes disliked, but always noticed.

And Freddy Praeger, of course, was not in their team.

Max, 1984

The girl pushed her knee between Max’s legs hard. She was standing behind him, and her arms were round his neck, her hands pressed, palm downwards, on his naked chest. Gradually she slithered them downwards, towards his crotch. Max tensed; he could feel his erection forming, growing. The sweat pants he was wearing were mercifully loose, but not entirely all-concealing. The girl felt his tension and giggled, reaching down inside the waistband of the pants. ‘What have you
got
in there?’ she whispered. ‘That is quite something, little Lord Max.’

‘OK, Opal, that’s great. Really fucking great. Hold it right there.’

‘My pleasure, darling. My great pleasure!’

‘Now don’t smile. That’s better. That’s great.’ Flynn Finnian, current darling of New York’s fashion photographers, started firing his Hasselblad.

‘Max, relax, baby. She isn’t going to eat you. No, for Christ’s sake I said don’t smile. Oh shit, or laugh. Opal, stop laughing. Look, you two, you can go and fuck yourselves stupid in the dressing room in five minutes, but right now can you spare a thought for a poor starving photographer and pose! Pose! Did you ever hear of posing? It’s the new thing in modelling. That’s better. Pose pose pose! Gorgeous, Opal. God, I could almost fuck you myself when you look like that. Max, that’s good. That’s great. Now turn a bit. Yeah, that’s right. Look at her. Look at her mouth. No, that’s no good. Try the other way round. Opal, what happens if you put one hand behind him. Right into the pants, yes, that’s right. Yeah, that’s great. Fantastic. Good. Good. Max, get a grip. Think wanky, OK? Fine. Great. Fantastic. OK, that’s it. Take a break. I’ll see you guys in half an hour.’

Max walked into the dressing room, frantic for a cigarette. He was shaking. He was lighting the cigarette when Opal appeared in the doorway behind him. She smiled at him in the mirror, walked lazily forward and slipped her hand back into his pants; he could feel her long nails scratching him slightly as she sought out his anus, and lazily forward, towards his balls. He looked at her, all six foot of her; she was a black African, her hair cropped close, an incredible beauty, with a neck at least nine inches long. She was wearing nothing but a pair of extremely small red briefs and a four-strand pearl choker. The long red boots, which had been her only other clothing for the shot, had been kicked off. She was a year older than he was, funny, raunchy, bi-sexual. Her agency had put it about that she was a princess from some remote African kingdom, but actually she was third-generation Bronx.