Ride a Cockhorse (14 page)

“No,” Jeannine said, “he hasn't.”

“Has anyone called him?” Mrs. Fitzgibbons insisted.

“At home?” Mr. Zabac's secretary was startled by the outlandish idea. “
I
certainly haven't,” she said.

Julie Marcotte reported back as before. “They're just sitting there, staring at their machines. They look, you know, like paralyzed.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons saw herself as equal to the circumstance. In fact, the sense of developing ruin in the world's financial markets actually dissipated certain secret fears she had experienced that morning before coming to work. She had had some very paranoid thoughts. The reality of what was happening to certain big corporations out there was perversely reassuring. The telephone in her fist felt like a weapon, like a heavy black hammer, something solid and useful. When Mr. Zabac picked up his telephone at home, she didn't mince words with him. “Has Neil Hooton called you?” she said.

Mr. Zabac sounded very cold and distant. He recognized her voice. “What do you want, Mrs. Fitzgibbons?” His tone was laden with menace.

“Haven't you been informed what's happening? He hasn't called you? He's invested up to his neck, isn't he? I can't believe he hasn't called.” She affected amazement at Mr. Hooton's dereliction in not notifying Mr. Zabac of the Wall Street panic. She spoke of him as of a low-level functionary who would require punishing. Mr. Hooton had become overnight iniquitous to her eye, an adversary to be hounded and demolished. “The stock market is crashing!” She announced the news in a thrilling, timbral voice. “It's down hundreds of points. There's no end in sight. He must have called you. He's sitting back there like a block of stone. The man is terrified! I can't believe he didn't notify you. You've got to come right in.”

The silence on the line indicated the chairman's shock as he strove to come to grips with the sensational news, as well, perhaps, as with his reactions to Mrs. Fitzgibbons herself. Mrs. Fitzgibbons was not eager to get off the phone, as it was exciting to communicate the downward tide of great events. “Wall Street is trying to get the President to address the nation,” she said, repeating a report that Julie had overheard minutes before.

Here Mr. Zabac broke in frustratedly. “Mrs. Fitzgibbons, we are not an investment bank.”

Clutching the black receiver to her ear, Mrs. Fitzgibbons continued, undeflected. “That isn't all,” she said. “We're taking in tens of thousands in new deposits. That's the good news. We've opened dozens and dozens of new accounts this morning.” Mrs. Fitzgibbons felt a surge of contempt for the man on the other end, picturing him sitting in his pajamas in a breakfast nook overlooking his gardens. “It's because of that article of mine, the full page I gave to the
Telegram
. That's what's done it. We're having our biggest morning in the history of the bank. They're lined up all the way to the street!” Her voice took on a sharp, victorious rasp as she recounted these last developments.

By now, however, Mr. Zabac's ability to assimilate the torrent of news, with its admixture of calamity and triumph, compelled him to conclude the call. He assured her that he would be on hand at the bank in twenty minutes.

“I'm glad!” She said it just like that. She wanted to leave no doubt in the man's mind that his new chief executive officer was equal to the crisis. “We're going to come through it in good shape,” she said. “I'll see to that.”

“We are not an investment house,” he repeated acrimoniously. He was very angry.

“I can't believe,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons continued, shrewdly side-stepping the little chairman's riposte, “that man didn't notify you. That's unforgivable in my book.” With that, Mrs. Fitzgibbons banged down the receiver.

For the next half hour, she capitalized on the prevailing tension by issuing a stream of instructions, directing them in particular to individuals who had no clear understanding of her authority, except as they might have believed the account of her promotion in the Saturday newspaper. Mrs. Wilson, head of the auto loan section, received a typewritten, stiffly worded memo that typified Mrs. Fitzgibbons's spate of orders. “Instruct your employees,” it stated imperatively, “to STOP gabbing among themselves about today's stock market. We are NOT an investment bank! Let them tend to business!” Mrs. Fitzgibbons signed this memo with an extravagant flourish of her pink felt-tip pen and dispatched it by hand with Julie. Minutes later, Julie could be seen running to the office of Mr. Brouillette with a request that he set to paper a quick and succinct estimate of the effects to be expected in the secondary market as a consequence of the developing crash. Mrs. Fitzgibbons had no true understanding of the question she was asking but knew Howard Brouillette as an eccentric type, who would gleefully undermine his own position and virtually demote himself, in order to show off his knowledge. That done, Mrs. Fitzgibbons phoned Jack Greaney and told him to count up the number of new accounts opened that morning and to get her an estimate of the total dollar amount of the new deposits.

Jack called back in short order, but Mrs. Fitzgibbons made him wait on the line while she took an outside call from a building developer who offered his congratulations on her promotion to CEO. By that time, Mrs. Fitzgibbons's phone was ringing a lot, mostly from well-wishing business associates of the bank, lawyers and accountants, and from several prominent outside firms, some of them located miles away. In each case, Mrs. Fitzgibbons acknowledged their felicitations with businesslike terseness: “It was sweet of you to call. I'm in conference right now. I'll get back to you.”

“There are forty-seven new accounts already,” said Jack on the line. “Mostly of all sizes. Although one of them is big. The total is well over a quarter of a million.” His voice contained both pride and admiration.

“That includes our branches,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons assumed.

That remark left Jack speechless momentarily. “I haven't called the branches,” he confessed in a faltering tone.

This is what Mrs. Fitzgibbons liked. This called for a tyrannical outburst.

“Jack!” she shouted, as though he were a boy. “What earthly use are you to me if you don't get things straight? This is just the sort of blundering, thoughtless incompetence that has been the ruin of this place. What do you think I'm all about?” she cried. “What do you think I've been complaining about over and over?”

In her forty-five years on earth, she had never known how much fun a day's work could be. She spoke huskily into the phone. “I fire people for less than this.”

He answered softly. “I'll call the branches.”

“You get them on the phone!” she said.

Mrs. Fitzgibbons sent Julie to get the radio from the ladies rest room. Julie plugged it in on the floor by Mrs. Fitzgibbons's desk and tuned it to the local news station. After that, the voice of the broadcaster droned on and on about the sickness of the stock market. Recorded interviews with government officials, economists, even the president of the New York Stock Exchange, were aired at regular intervals. The market was going down in a long, frightening cascade of selling. Computerized trading programs, it was said, were continuously introducing tremendous new offerings, massive block trades to be sold without hesitation at market prices. Many specialists on the floor, it was known as fact, had already been wiped out. Now and again, Mrs. Fitzgibbons stopped to listen but understood next to nothing about the workings of the securities industry, or, indeed, of what constituted a Wall Street catastrophe.

Later on, after Mr. Zabac had gone upstairs to his office, she saw Neil Hooton making his way past the row of glass cubicles toward the rear staircase. He looked shaken. Seizing her felt-tip pen, Mrs. Fitzgibbons scratched out a note to Mr. Zabac, summarizing in a sentence the good news from the tellers' windows, as she thought it wise to pass this cheerful bulletin along to him while Mr. Hooton was sitting right there in front of him looking like death. “Mr. Z: By the end of the day we'll have one hundred new accounts and far in excess of a million in new deposits.”

For all her bravado, however, her confidence began to take a downward turn. Maybe it was the voice of the man on the radio, groaning in the background like the voice of fate itself. Or it might have been the knowledge that the hour of reckoning impended, when the little godlike master on the floor above would summon her. She was not so self-absorbed, after all, as to have missed the cold vein of anger in his voice on the telephone, or to blithely assume that her bold stroke in the pages of the local paper had carried the day for her. She imagined Louis Zabac standing red-faced behind his desk, shaking with fury. How he would shout at her in a big dwarf voice! He would order her back to her old desk. Mr. Frye would supervise her. They would slash her pay. She would be the laughingstock of everyone. And then it would get worse. Mr. Hooton would want her head. Mrs. Wilson would savage her left and right. Julie would be fired; Mr. Donachie would be demoted to a porter!

In the past month, Mrs. Fitzgibbons had suffered acute paranoia attacks, but none so gripping as now. Her scalp was damp, her pulse cold and drumlike. When Julie knocked on Mrs. Fitzgibbons's door and looked in, she found Mrs. Fitzgibbons staring at her with dilated eyes.

“He's come out,” she whispered. “He's coming downstairs. He looks terrible, Mrs. Fitzgibbons.”

In seconds, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was out on the floor. She hadn't reflected on it whatsoever but acted on an impulse that she later regarded as outrageous under the circumstances. She put herself in Mr. Hooton's way. Just as he came round the green-and-black-marble pillar, shuffling forward between desks with his head down, a manila envelope and clipboard in hand, she obstructed his path. He could not get by her.

“Well,” she exclaimed wryly, “what are we doing? Are we selling?”

Mr. Hooton reacted unpleasantly. “I beg your pardon!” He eyed her in disbelief. As always, he wore little gold spectacles on the tip of his nose. His eyebrows were like two white caterpillars; color invaded his cheeks.

She strove with all her faculties to remain calm, but her heart was racing. “What's the plan of action?” she persisted airily. “Are we in, or out?”

Certain that Neil Hooton's response would betray what had happened upstairs, Mrs. Fitzgibbons struggled to hold her ground. The man could not continue to where he was going without pushing her aside. His belligerence was not reassuring.

“Would you mind,” he said, superciliously, in a gruff, dismissive tone of voice, “if I went back to work?”

Again, she did not move. She summoned everything within herself to face him down. “I want to know what we're doing. That's a reasonable question. Are we in or out?”

“Is it necessary for you to know? What has it to do with you? The markets are in disarray from here to Frankfurt—”

“Is that what you call it?” said Mrs. Fitzgibbons, heartened by his unwillingness to reject out of hand her questioning. She breathed deeply and showed Mr. Hooton an obstinate eye. “That means we're still in.”

Once more, Mr. Hooton countenanced the question. He did not push past her, nor turn about and go the other way, as he surely would have done if Mrs. Fitzgibbons's extraordinary interview in the Saturday newspaper had already spelled her doom.

“If you must know,” he said, his voice dripping with dislike of her, “we're holding on.”

Mrs. Fitzgibbons stepped aside and allowed him to pass. Mr. Hooton went off muttering to himself. Mrs. Fitzgibbons returned to her office with a stunned look.

“I got it out of him,” she said.

“What's happening?” Julie asked softly.

“I insisted on an answer, and he answered me. He hasn't a leg under him. Nothing happened upstairs. How could it? Look at the business out there!”

“What did Mr. Hooton say?”

“They didn't talk about me,” Mrs. Fitzgibbons added. She reached and shut her door. Instantly, her attack of unreasoning dread gave way to buoyant spirits. She mimicked him. “ ‘
We're holding on!
' He's shaking in his shoes. I'll drive him from pillar to post! I'll hound him to the ends of the earth. The market's down a million points, his entire portfolio's going down the sewer, and I'm going after him. I have the will,” she said, “and nobody is going to stop me. Nobody.”

“Nobody would dare do that,” said Julie, her pink-faced sycophancy offering a mirror to Mrs. Fitzgibbons's egoism.

“I'll grind him into the floor. I'll beat his balls into a powder.”

Her resurgent spirits set her striding to and fro in front of Julie. “Everyone on the planet is selling his stock. In every city in America, in every country in the world, from Turkey to Poland, what's everyone doing?”

“They're all selling.”

“He's holding on.” While stepping vainly about, Mrs. Fitzgibbons raised a pedagogical finger. “He's standing up to them. A disaster of global proportions is taking place, and only one individual money manager on earth has the brains and guts and stamina to stick by his guns, and that man works for us. He wears a blue-and-yellow bow tie, and big yellow suspenders with little blue ducks printed on them, and he, of all people, knows what to do, because he gets a handsome fat bonus every winter, just for knowing what to do when everyone else also knows what to do.” In an access of irony, Mrs. Fitzgibbons slapped her palms together in rhythm to her words: “It's going to go down, and down, and down, and he's going to hold on. He's going to wait, and wait some more, and watch it sink further and further, hour by hour, until it hasn't anyplace else to go, and then,” she said, “he's going to crack. As God is my witness, he'll liquidate everything he can get his hands on. He's going to sell.”

Julie Marcotte had never seen anyone work themselves into such a hypnotic trance.