Man in the Middle (21 page)

“The P&L ought to add up to . . . uh . . . shit, how much was that?” he asked himself in a voice loud enough for half the room to hear.

Stuart patted the desktop with both palms like a man trying to put out a small brush fire. Spinning his head, he said, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.”

He then darted to Muller’s office. With a rapid series of punches, Stuart typed a seven-digit password into a keypad, opened the door, and went in. A moment later, he reemerged and pulled Muller’s door closed. Stuart wore a ridiculous drug-fueled grin and looked as if he might be humming to himself. He waved a slip of paper as he bounded towards their desks on the balls of his feet. In the background, one of the clerks dinged a bell that signaled one p.m.—the stock markets had closed for the week.

“Here,” Stuart said, flopping into his chair, facing Peter. “This is on the QT. If Fat-Head knew about this, he’d cut my balls off, hang ’em up to dry.”

“What number am I trying to reconcile?”

Stuart rolled his shoulders to a silent rhythm as he squinted at his own handwriting. “Two hundred twenty-one and some change.”

“Two hundred and twenty-one what?” Peter asked.

“We’re dealing in millions of dollars.” Stuart grinned.

Peter felt bewildered. “You’re saying you or Muller or whoever did these trades made that much money this morning?”

Stuart horse-laughed. When he caught his breath, he said, “Yeah. That was me and the freak.”

Several traders turned, annoyed at the levity. “Shhh,” Stuart slurred, not able to take his own advice. “You mind crunching these numbers while I take recess in the conference room?”

“I don’t mind, Stu, but don’t you think”—Peter’s voice dropped to a whisper. He leaned into Stuart’s ear “—that you should go easy on that stuff. You’re already messed up.”

“Make the money, dude, and nobody’s gonna care. See you in ten.”

Stuart double-timed it to the conference room. A moment later, he drew shut the curtains. By now, Peter knew the routine. Four lines drawn on the table with a hundred. Roll that bill, inhale, switch nostrils, inhale. Wait five minutes, do it again.

“Get some help, Stu,” Peter said under his breath.

Peter picked up the first two tickets. They involved massive day-trades in the Japanese Yen.
Net profit:
$32 million. The account name was coded. The next two trades were in the British Pound Sterling, similarly large and coded, but something looked wrong with the information on the tickets. The purchase appeared out of whack. According to the ticket, the buy took place several hours
after
the sale. Unless this was a short sale, and nothing indicated it was, the trade times looked ass-backwards. Peter matched the last seven sets of trades—all hugely profitable—and discovered one other with a similar discrepancy. This second erroneous transaction was done through an Irish broker in a stock that appreciated fifteen percent between the purchase and sale. The transaction times also made no logical sense.

By the time Stuart returned, Peter had separated out two sets of confusing trades.

“How’d you do on reconciliation, Petey?”

Stuart’s brain, Peter guessed, now floundered in a stupor, light years from reality.

“Stuart—”

“Why you whispering, dude? Got a problem? You need a lesson in addition, subtraction?” Stuart’s lids and brows opened and closed in an annoying dance.

“Were any of these trades short sales?” Peter asked.

“Nope. All straight buys then sells.”

“So we didn’t sell stock or currency ahead of the purchase?” Peter grabbed Stuart’s hand and squeezed hard enough to feel bone bow.

“Hey, what’re you trying to do?”

Still whispering, Peter said, “These trades are backwards—the time stamps have sales occurring hours
before
purchases. What’s going on?”

Stuart managed to focus. “What?”

“Sales before—”

“I heard you the first time.” As if he had been caught stealing candy, Stuart looked side to side in an attempt to read others’ faces.

“Follow me,” Stuart ordered.

The two men quick-stepped to Howard Muller’s office. For the second time in the last hour, Peter watched Stuart punch numbers on the keypad lock.

“Muller changes the office code by four p.m. every Friday,” Stuart said. “Thank God you . . .”

Entering, Stuart skipped to a corner and opened a small index-card file, resting on a bookshelf. “This’ll be no problem,” he said. He took a small key from the file. A moment later, he unlocked the side-drawer of Muller’s desk. He removed the sophisticated remote that Peter had seen at his first formal meeting with Stenman’s CIO. “I can’t focus, Petey. Need your help.”

Having to reach over a mound of disorganized papers atop Muller’s desk, Peter took the slim ten-inch device from Stuart’s outstretched hand. He moved slowly, not wanting to disturb, drop, or knock against anything. He noted where Stuart had lifted the remote and reminded himselfto return it exactly to that spot.

“What in God’s name is going on?” Peter asked.

“Ain’t about God, my man. Backtrading is all. Not a big deal. Aim at this.” Stuart pointed to Muller’s timestamp machine.

“Why?”

“Please, Peter. Give me a break. If those tickets had gotten booked the way I wrote them, I’d be fired. I need you to program in the sell time on that first ticket.” Stuart slumped onto the floor in a near corner, looking the part of an exhausted man nearing total collapse.

Peter shook his head in defeat. “Now what?” he asked. “I want to get my sorry ass out of here.”

“Uh, was that the sell time we just entered?” Stuart asked.

“Goddammit, Stuart. Pay attention. Yes, that was the sell time. What’s next?”

“Okay. Stamp that time on a buy ticket. You get what we’re doing?”

“Yeah. I get what we’re doing. We’re reversing the times on these trades by using a programmable timestamp.”

“Bingo. You’re catching on. Better hurry. I didn’t tell you, but Howie-Boy is due back any minute.”

“Muller’s due back? You got to be shitting me.”

“Don’t ever shit my friends.” Stuart pulled a tissue from a box on a side-table and wiped his brow. Peter’s eyes widened as his friend then dropped the Kleenex onto the tabletop. Peter grabbed the damp discard— evidence of their intrusion—and shoved it into his pant pocket. “Three more tickets to write,” Stuart continued. “Better get them stamped, Old Paint.”

With his hands shaking, Peter entered the date and time for the last three trades. The buy times became the sell times, the sells became the buys.

When he finished, Stuart popped to his feet, looking halfway sober. “See over there?” he asked, gathering up the tickets. He raised his eyebrows at a far wall.

“Over where?” Peter asked.

“There.” This time Stuart pointed. “That panel retracts. I once had to make a delivery for Melon-Head. There’s a safe full of cash. Lots and lots of big bills. I’d love to get my hands on some. That’d be cool, but no use dreaming. Let’s blow this Popsicle stand before my cousin comes back and finds out I’ve shared a few of the family secrets.” Stuart sounded jovial.

“I do not want to know details,” Peter said, as a thick pain hit him in the gut. “Ever.” That what they had done stunk in the extreme wasn’t lost on him.

“It ain’t about nothing. I just screwed up on some ticket writing’s all.”

Peter shoved Stuart, who seemed in no hurry to get out of Muller’s office. Once the door finally shut behind them, Stuart put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll take this as a down payment on all I’ve done for you. I’ve got a surprise.”

“No thanks. This is surprise enough for one day.”

Unfazed, Stuart said, “Once I finish rewriting these tickets, I’m taking you out to meet a couple of old friends.”

“Who?”

“Not who, but what.”

“You’re making no sense.”

“Those spread-legged spinners from Gordon, Ashe are back in town, and Aimie St. Claire has cleared out the entire weekend for you—told her husband she had a convention to go to.”

Just then, Howard Muller entered the trading room. His head bounced above the turrets as he strode towards where they stood, ten feet outside his office. A couple moments earlier and no fan would have been big enough to handle all the shit flying their way.

Peter shook his head just as Muller shouted, “Numbnuts. Get those trades and reconciliations to my office.”

“Better hop, dude. I’ll bring the girls by your place later.”

“Don’t,” Peter said. “I won’t be there.” The image of ferocious animal sex with Aimie St. Claire made his heart race, but it also caused his stomach to turn. “I repeat, Stu. Don’t.”

“We’ll see.”

Peter went back to work, finishing his own paperwork. “If I’d known what he was up to,” he told himself, “I wouldn’t have helped.”

A few hours later, Peter sat in front of one empty and one full cocktail glass. He would stay out all night if that’s what it took to avoid another interlude with the married woman, Aimie St. Claire.

Billy Graham once said that the best way not to give in to temptation was to avoid being in the same room, alone, with a woman.

Old Billy gave sage advice, Peter decided, continuing to sip in solitude.

 
T
HE SPORTS BAR HAD TELEVISIONS HANGING FROM EVERY ANGLE
. A wall-to-wall mirror framed the shelves of liquor bottles, giving the appearance that the space—about the size of a high school basketball arena—was even larger. Six bartenders roamed behind a fifty-foot alley, serving as a watering hole for one-hundred thirsty bodies, all of whom mingled, sat, yelled, and cursed to the sounds of the main football game playing on a six-foot screen mounted in the center of the room.

Peter pretended to watch a different game playing on a thirty-inch, ten feet away. He sipped a double Jack with a splash of water, tasting nothing, still waiting for the numbing effects to take hold. Potato skins, filled with petrified cheese and undercooked bacon, sat uneaten in the center of his round table. From his corner location, Peter shifted his attention to the singles scene: at least three men for every woman, everybody working to get drunk, happy that the workweek had ended and the weekend party had begun. The waitresses all wore short, green, strapless dresses slung low in front, and exposing crimped breasts. Best of all, Peter thought, the place had a decibel level sufficiently high to make thinking optional, or impossible.

Peter checked his watch: 7:30. This promised to be a long night. Peter envisioned Stuart and the two Gordon, Ashettes hovering, waiting to descend on him when he arrived home. Stuart even had a key to Peter’s condo. They might be sitting in his living room, drinking his wine, watching his new television, while Aimie St. Claire stroked Henry’s fur. Maybe they had moved to his bedroom, doing God knows what.

With peripheral vision, he vaguely noticed a woman coming from the restroom to his left. Although something struck him as familiar, he didn’t turn until she stopped at his table. “Mr. Neil?” she said.

It hit him immediately. This was the girl who flirted with him that first day at Stenman Partners, who led him from the shrink’s office to the trading room door, and who said, “Call if you need anything.”

“My, God!” she now said with an excited voice. “What luck, finding you here. You never called.” She gave him a look that left no room for anyone or anything else.

“No, I, uh, I forgot your extension,” he lied, forcing a corner of his mouth to turn up.

“Twenty-two, but no longer my age. I’m twenty-three now. Maybe I need to change my extension to twenty-three.”

“Yeah. Good idea.” Peter partially ignored her, paying closer attention instead to a small man in a brown suit, moving in his direction, and staring at him through horn-rimmed glasses. When the man got within twenty feet, he stopped, went into an at-ease stance, and waited.

“Maybe you and I could have a drink,” the girl said. “I don’t know if you caught on, but I hoped you might ask me out. I hear you’re doing real good on the trading floor.”

Peter had ceased listening. The bone-thin man looked practically vaudevillian, except for his eyes—they were lasers, intense and unyielding, magnified behind thick lenses. Peter decided he had better find out what this guy thought he needed.