I shifted in my chair so I could take Jackie’s hand. I gave it a hard squeeze.
“Wow. That’s intense,” said Alena.
“How was Jonathan to work for? Good boss?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. A peach. I really did like the guy. He was very good to me. Very generous and polite. It sorta made up for being, like, in solitary confinement all the time.”
“So, you handle the administrative stuff”
“I got a broker’s license, buddy. Series 7. I handled whatever Jonathan wanted me to handle.”
“You just dissed her, Sam.”
“Sorry Did you buy and sell? I thought Jonathan was strictly analysis.”
“Well, yeah, sort of,” said Alena, a little defensively, “but we did trades, too. I cleared them through a broker in the City. We’re full service. Coulda traded a lot more, if Jonathan wanted to. He liked the straight fee approach. Percent on assets. Said it was less stress. He didn’t like stress.”
She shook her head, remembering.
“Was he tense a lot?” I asked.
“No, never. That’s the point. He used to say that people ought to ascertain their personal level of stress tolerance, then engineer their whole lives around staying right there, right below what they can take. It was a theory of his. Only, he could afford to live pretty good and stay clear of his personal best, stress-wise. To stay that calm I’d have to, like, not work and lie around in bed all day, and eventually starve, which can be pretty stressful in its own right.”
Alena sat back in her office chair, which gave into a partial recline. She tapped her nails on the armrests.
“You mind if I smoke?” she asked us, looking at Jackie, who was already smoldering a bit herself. I pulled out my lighter and lit her cigarette and one for myself.
“Jonathan never woulda let me smoke in here in a million years. I suppose I still shouldn’t, in honor and all, but there’s not much else to do.”
“When do you leave?”
“End of the week. I got a gig in the City. No biggie. It was time for me to head out anyway. This is just a really shitty way to terminate employment.”
It was stuffy in the office, even with a window AC unit running on high. The smoke didn’t help. The ceiling was drop-acoustic panels and fluorescent lights. The carpet a smudged beige, indifferently vacuumed. Only the PCs looked new and alert, at the ready. Plugged directly into Jonathan’s lifeblood, the hemorrhage of information available off the Web. If it wasn’t for the communal impulse wired into most people’s genes, maybe everyone would run their careers like Jonathan’s. Separate, but jacked-in. Efficient, lucrative and stress free.
“So, no ideas?” asked Jackie, hackles still firmly in place.
“Beg pardon?”
“About the bombing. Your boss. The sweetheart.”
“Not my sweetheart, sweetheart. Strictly business. Anyway, I called him a peach. Not a sweetheart. Not that there’s a difference, semantically speaking.”
Alena glowered at Jackie over the top of her CRT. The situation took me back to running a huge corporate enterprise, where so much precious time was wasted mediating a particular flavor of institutional conflict my friend Jason Fligh, the president of the University of Chicago, privately characterized as bitch shit.
“You’re a smart young woman,” I said to Alena, bracing for Jackie’s snort. “You probably have a theory on what happened to Jonathan. Few knew him better. Nobody better, if you’re talking about his business.”
Alena pulled her eyes off Jackie and refocused on me. Approvingly, as if to say, now we all know who the sensitive one is in
“To me, the business here is basically research. We research companies people might want to invest in. We sell opinions. That’s really what this is all about. Opinions, not proclamations. Jonathan wasn’t a theater critic, he just told people what he could figure out about a company. That’s it. Sure, I bet some of the companies weren’t too happy about what he said, but that was their fault. And mostly, I think, the companies should all feel okay about him, because he was such a straight shooter. He told it like it was, which most of the time was pretty good for those guys. Frankly, I think he was overall pretty optimistic, and if you look at his record, you know, how these companies ended up performing, it was pretty much the way he had it scored. Where’s the beef in that?”
I was sitting there feeling some sort of odd warmth for Alenas simple loyalty and frank appraisal of her boss when Jackie went and spoiled the mood.
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
“Bullshit,” she repeated. “Jonathan Eldridge was a financial adviser of the first rank. Specializing in high tech, the most volatile and capricious market segment. Billions of dollars could be made or lost through decisions based on his analysis. You talk about it like he ran a local beauty pageant.”
Alena looked at me.
“Is she with you?”
“You bet, toots,” said Jackie. “Actually he’s with me.”
“What my colleague means,” I said, as I draped an arm over Jackie’s shoulders, “is there must have been occasional disappointments felt by Jonathan’s clients when certain recommendations inevitably missed the mark. Some people might’ve had some serious losses, which might’ve caused a little rancor.”
“He means thoroughly pissed off,” said Jackie, helpfully.
“I know what he means. Yeah, sure, not everybody loved everything we did. Though only a couple had a beef. People like Ivor Fleming.”
“Ivor Fleming?”
“Investor. Nasty stubby little jerk from up island. Made it in scrap metal, for Chrissakes. Pissed off at the world, I think. Anyway, only guy Jonathan ever fired. You know, stopped working for. Said he caused too much stress. You got that right.”
“Lost money on Jonathan’s recommendations?” I asked.
Alena looked down at her CRT, then off toward the one lonely, dirty window in the lightless office.
“Yeah, though I couldn’t entirely hundred percent tell you why. I managed the office stuff, ran the trades, made nice nice to clients when Jonathan was out of town, did research online. I said I handled everything, but there were things Jonathan did on his own. He didn’t exactly report to me on every conversation. I usually knew what was what, but I wasn’t always privy.”
Which hurt her feelings, obviously. Even Jackie let a little sound of sympathy escape her lips.
“Anyway” she said, rebounding, “he did his shit, I did mine, everybody was happy. Hard to believe, maybe, seeing this dump, but we were, you know, actually happy here in our little world.”
The canned air in the office sat heavily for a few moments, then Jackie struck out on a new tack.
“Are all his records still here?” she asked.
Alena looked around the room, as if for an answer.
“No, I don’t think so. After he got blown up the cops, serious cops in suits and earphones, came in here and swept everything away. All I got is the same administrative stuff I always had.”
“Names of clients?”
“I still got that. Names, addresses and phone numbers. I copied it all for the cops. Everything I had. Including stuff on Ivor, though they never asked me about him. They spent a lot of time messing with my computer, but finally gave it back to me. Good thing, since it’s all I had to settle everything out.”
“Can you copy that for me?” I asked. “The names, addresses, phone numbers?”
“And email addresses? You bet. Why the hell not.”
Jackie jerked her head toward the other computers in the room.
“What about those?”
Alena shrugged.
“If you want to anchor your boat, or need a doorstop. Cops took out the hard drives. You can knock, but nobody’s home.”
“For good?” asked Jackie.
