The Gods of Greenwich (27 page)

Every time Bentwing’s share price recovered, Hafnarbanki and the Qataris shorted and drove prices down. Ólafur shorted in his personal account. The Qataris enlisted the support of their associates in Greenwich, London, and Moscow. Bentwing’s stock price dropped every day, down, down, down, falling victim to the financial blitzkrieg.

Ólafur relished the sweet ruin of LeeWell Capital—hedge fund, upstart, and Greenwich parvenu that dared attack his bank. He had always respected Plato’s take on conflict: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” Before long, Leeser and his employees would see no more. The Icelandic bank would terminate their war with brutal finality, an experience similar to gutting a fish, and a bit more satisfying.

Even better, Ólafur had recouped some personal losses. His gains totaled over $2 million from shorting Bentwing Energy. With help from the Qataris, the allied forces would continue their assault.

“And force Greenwich to leave us the hell alone.”

There was one problem: the second chart on his LCD display. Hafnarbanki’s shares were trading at 704 kronur, down 40 percent since January. And Chairman Guðjohnsen’s warning still rang in his ears: “If our war goes bad, you’re fired.”

Ólafur willed himself not to worry. The share price was the temporary setback of battle. The Qataris were buying Hafnarbanki shares. The shares would turn. “Someday, I’ll be commander in chief,” he mused aloud.

FRIDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
12
BENTWING AT
$33.26

Leeser sat inside his office with the door closed. He was squeezing a tennis ball with his left hand, keeping rhythm to his clenching jaws. Nothing good ever happened on a Friday afternoon. Clients called to complain. Trading errors surfaced. Lenders called to deliver hard news about their loans. As Cy spoke on the phone, his office at Two Greenwich Plaza felt less like Mount Olympus and more like a crematorium.

“I’m trying to imagine you with a brain, Eddy.”

“Let’s do the math,” replied the Merrill trader, ignoring Leeser’s dig. “You started the year with just over two hundred and fifty million in margin debt. You added thirty million during early August alone. That doesn’t include the previous seven months.”

“That makes me a good client,” Cy interrupted dismissively. “Now I need more money.”

“Don’t you get it?” asked Eddy in exasperation.

“Bentwing’s stock price is a joke, and we both know it.”

“Irrelevant,” the Merrill trader shot back.

“If you were worth a shit, you’d help me fight Sheikh Bin What-the-fuck.”

“It’s official,” Eddy decided. “You don’t get it.”

“Who else is shorting Bentwing?”

“Who isn’t?” replied the Merrill trader.

“Is Hafnarbanki on my ass?”

“You know the game. Everybody attacks the weak sister, and right now that’s you.”

“Let’s cut to the chase,” barked Leeser. “Why’d you call?”

“Your debt totals three hundred million.”

“Your point, Eddy?”

“We have our own issues, Cy. Which means we’re scrutinizing borrowers, including you.”

Leeser dropped his voice, making the Merrill trader strain to hear. “Fine, I’ll take my commissions elsewhere. Tell your boss to hoard cash and pull his girls out of boarding school.”

“That game’s over, pal. Nobody’s lending on the Street. The Dow’s off twelve percent, and we’re all scared that’s the tip of the iceberg.”

“We’re not close to a margin call,” snapped Leeser.

“It’s a demand loan, Cy.”

“I’ve been through this drill. Right after my partner died.”

“So you know how it works. We demand. And you pay.”

“Is this a margin call? Are you demanding payment? Are you telling me to sell assets? Is that why we’re speaking?” Cy punched out the questions like he was smacking a speed bag. His voice grew louder with every word.

“Not officially. But one—”

“Get off my phone. And don’t you ever threaten me with a margin call again,” Leeser screamed. He slammed down the receiver, sending dial tone and a big “fuck you” to the Merrill trader. And throughout LeeWell Capital, in the pool room, across Victor’s trading floor, in the kitchen with the screaming-eagle cappuccino machine, every employee including Cusack heard two words:

“Margin call.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

MONDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
15
BENTWING AT
$30.71

Early in the morning an unattended computer at KfW Bankengruppe wired out 300 million euros. It expected 426 million dollars in return, a routine “foreign exchange swap.” The German bank soon discovered, however, that it had flushed the money down a toilet of bankruptcy litigation. Or driven 2,130 Ferraris off a cliff. Or taken a wrecking ball to Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres.

Lehman Brothers, the other side of KfW’s trade, failed that day. Most citizens of Hedgistan, bright faced and talcum fresh in their late twenties and early thirties, had never seen such a powerful institution fail. Nor had they ever seen the resulting loss of confidence in the capital markets. The world was on edge. No one, god or wannabe, trusted anyone or anything. Not even their beloved technology.

*   *   *

Victor gripped the handle of his sixteen-ounce Estwing hammer. He stared at the three thirty-inch LCD displays. He would need more Premarin soon. He put down the hammer and rubbed his chest. It hurt like a bastard.

Nothing, it seemed, had helped Victor’s trading. Early mornings and late nights—long hours made no difference to trading desks around the world. Securities were indifferent to work ethic or pharmaceuticals. The markets would do what they would do. There was no good news anywhere.

Victor’s eyes gleamed red and moist behind his horn-rimmed glasses. “It’s a shit show,” he had whined to Cy that afternoon. His voice lacked the usual confidence, none of the cocky, testosterone-infused bravado.

“Hang in there,” replied Leeser, resolute and with no hint of the Friday afternoon blowup with Merrill Lynch.

With fifteen minutes to go in the trading session, Lee grabbed the sixteen-ounce hammer with his left hand, then his right. He repeated the motion over and over again. He was watching history. A few more minutes and the Dow would close under 11,000, a drop of 4 percent–plus in one miserable day.

The phone rang. It was Numb Nuts, Eddy’s sidekick at Merrill. “You guys have a new boss,” said Victor. He was referring to Bank of America’s surprise acquisition of Merrill Lynch, announced that morning. “How’s it affect us?”

“You heard about Eddy’s call with Cy on Friday?”

“Yeah. A page right out of the seagull school of relationship management.”

“What’s that mean?”

“You squawk, shit all over the place, and fly out.”

“We’re serious, Victor.”

“You’re serious about losing a client.”

“Not sure we care,” Numb Nuts countered. “It’s B of A. Their people are crawling all over our shop, examining our books, loans, anything.”

“Are you nuts?” Victor asked. “Whatever happened to the long-term perspective?”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Numb Nuts said, not so much hesitant as distant. “Your account is dropping like a rock.”

Victor blinked through his horn-rimmed lenses. He rubbed his forehead with both hands. He hated debt. He hated to lose. At this rate, his beach rental in the Hamptons would go the way of Lehman Brothers.

“Don’t do anything you regret.” Face flushing red, Lee swigged from a big can of Diet Coke and added, “I gotta go.”

On the LCD screen, LeeWell’s stocks continued to fall. Victor averted his eyes, his focus drifting to the sixteen-ounce Estwing hammer. He looked back at the portfolio. And in one brief, insanely glorious second of absolute clarity, the trader realized what he must do.

Victor grabbed the hammer and pummeled the middle screen, full of cratering stocks, with all his might. The screen exploded on contact, shards of metal and plastic and all the internal electric organs sailing through the air and showering the junior traders. In a frenzy, he beat the left screen. He bludgeoned the right. Over and over he clubbed the displays, fury etched across his features. His glasses sheltered his eyes from the circuit shrapnel exploding everywhere.

Nikki, Cusack, Shannon, and Cy—they all heard the explosions, the shattering circuits. They raced to Victor’s trading station. They stared, wide eyed and slack jawed, as Victor looked at each and every face. At all the bewildered expressions. At his three junior traders, who watched him lose it.

In that one instant he buried his face in his stubby little hands and sobbed with big wheezing gasps, “I’m so ashamed.” The head trader, Cusack realized, was succumbing to the pressure like everybody else.

*   *   *

A hammer was not the only weapon of choice. Nor were LCD screens the only targets.

“I’ve solved the problem with Conrad Barnes,” said Rachel.

“I don’t need the details.”

The employer’s brusque reply annoyed Rachel. It was time for her to take control. “Conrad and his wife go to the Bronx Zoo every Thursday.”

“What is it you don’t understand about ‘I don’t need the details’?”

“Well, it’s not like I can pop by for coffee and Danish, Kemosabe.”

“What do you want?”

“I’ve been watching Conrad for two months,” she said.

“Don’t say his name on the phone. I keep telling you we need to be more discreet.”

“Do you have any idea, Kemosabe, how many hours go into a stakeout?”

“Is this call about money?”

“I’m working two jobs to be this poor. I need a raise.”

“Raise! You can’t make what I pay you anywhere else.”

“Remind me when it’s cash,” Rachel countered angrily.

“You don’t have shit without me.”

“Then treat it like manure, Kemosabe.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Spread the money around a little more. And see what grows. You know what I’m saying?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

WEDNESDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
17
BENTWING AT
$32.01

“Get Bianca on the line, Nikki.”

Leeser shut the door and stormed back to his desk, bracing for another round with his plastic-faced wife, whose hair would feel like hardened concrete tomorrow night at MoMA. He had no choice but to double-check her work before the black-tie fund-raiser. Bianca missed details all the time.

Cy wondered how she pissed through the days with her damn dachshunds and the effete toothpicks who drank too much coffee at Starbucks and read
Vanity Fair
while working out on ellipticals. Which is what they all did when not stretching at Pilates or fingering through trunk shows at Randolphs, the clothing store on West Putnam Avenue that specialized in excuses to buy Isaia, Alberta Ferretti, Magaschoni, and other multi-vowel designers that could savage ten grand in a single blink of unbridled credit-card fury.

Bianca’s head was not in the game. It would take her thirty seconds to propose counseling—for the hundredth time that week. Cy had neither the time nor the patience to enter therapy with a guy named Alfredo who charged seven hundred bucks per hour to watch husbands and wives fling acid at each other. The shrink, Leeser decided, got the better side of that trade. Most spectators paid to watch, not the other way around.

“I have your wife on the line,” said Nikki over the phone. “May I put her through?”

“Make my day.”

Leeser reminded himself to be careful. He needed Bianca to pick up laundry. He needed her to trowel on the game face for MoMA. He had one chance to make a good first impression with old man Phelps. And frankly, it was equally important to shine in front of tomorrow’s crowd. His public persona was all about the execution of perfection.

“Hi there,” said Bianca. “How are things?”

“Another day in paradise,” he replied. “Is everything set for tomorrow night?”

“All done,” she replied, cheery but without the annoying self-satisfaction that follows a completed to-do list.

“Did you invite Jeff and Lizzy?”

“They RSVPed yes two weeks ago.”

“Did you pick up my black tie from the cleaners?”

“It’s hanging in your closet,” she said. “Along with your shirt, starched just the way you like.”

“Great. What am I missing?”

“You need to call Paul and twist his arm for a check.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Leeser said. “I almost forgot.”

“How about your speech? Do you need any help with it?” offered Bianca. “I’m pretty good with words.”

“No. I’ll figure it out.”

“Any chance you can make it home early?” She sounded hopeful but tentative.

“I’m drowning at the office.”

“I was hoping,” Bianca began earnestly, “we could pick up our discussion about Alfredo.”

Cy checked his watch. He had underestimated his wife’s reserve. She waited forty-five seconds to mention counseling. And he knew what would happen without some care. Their discussion would start slow, gain momentum as it soured, and his tux would land on dachshund piles in the front yard just in time for tomorrow night.

“Sweetie, let me get through the fourth quarter. And then,” Leeser paused a beat, “we’ll start working on us.”

“We need some affection back in our lives, Cy.” Bianca spoke without bitterness, even though she had heard the same excuse before.

“Just another quarter. I promise.”

Leeser smiled when they hung up. His tux was ready, and there had been no verbal fisticuffs. He would rather sit through a root canal than discuss affection with a guy named Alfredo. Bianca could get herself a pool boy and hose a romance novel for all he cared.

There were bigger problems at the office.

*   *   *

This year was a disaster. Leeser faced three major problems, the first being the environment. Things were bad—so bad that “toxic” and “transparency,” the trendy new buzzwords of finance, were outpacing F-bomb usage by a factor of two to one. And 2008, to the universal regret of everybody who made their living from the markets, was far from over.

Bear Stearns was gone, sold to JP Morgan. Merrill Lynch was gone, sold to Bank of America. Lehman was gone, the carcass picked buzzard clean and sold to Barclays in a deal announced that morning. The government, according to CNBC, was seizing control of AIG. And it appeared Morgan Stanley would be the next financial institution to take a dive.