so she could keep her records up to date. He was very respectful of her capabilities.”
“But you never met him.”
“Face to face? No, never met either one of them face to face. Not unusual. No need. Especially with professional people like that. A dream account. Very large pool of assets, fair number of trades, though not too many, low maintenance, utterly fluent with the process. Knew what they wanted, but would listen to advice, not that they needed much.”
“You’re gonna miss them,” said Jackie.
I think Brad raised his eyebrows a tiny bit at that, but I can’t be sure.
“Once you folks unfroze the assets the sub-accounts were vacated by the consultancy.” He used a ballpoint pen to tap down a column of numbers that coincided with the sub-accounts, all showing zero balances. “Though Mrs. Eldridge has opted to maintain the core account as it stands for now. Her attorney, Mr. Szwit, seems quite capable of carrying on with the management on her behalf, with my assistance, of course.”
Appolonia’s balance was anything but zero. I felt an uncomfortable surge of protectiveness toward her for no other reason than the scale of loss should she fall prey to incompetence or evil.
“I guess old Jonathan was pretty good with investments.”
“Indeed he was. Played the tech thing like he had a time machine. Not a lot of frantic trading, just steady, even brilliant. Especially in retrospect. I’m an S&P type myself, like to stay away from big peaks and valleys. I’ve done okay for myself and my clients, but I wish I’d just followed this guy around. When I did, I was always happy.”
Jackie had her manila envelope on her lap. She pulled out a Xeroxed page.
“Do me a favor, Brad, and look up the history on 115 and 123.”
This time I was sure I saw his eyes brighten. Or maybe it was just a reflection off his glasses.
“I think I know what you’re getting at,” he said, spinning the monitor around and tapping at the keyboard. “Jonathan’s players.”
“Players?”
“That’s my word. Every broker has them. Just can’t stop messing with the portfolio. Day trader mentality. No patience, no adherence to a sound investment plan. No sense of diversification or dispersal of risk. Absolutely the wrong type of investor for an elegant adviser like Jonathan Eldridge. Here we are. Oh yes, I remember now. Some very unfortunate moves.”
He spun the monitor back around for us.
“There’re a lot of numbers here, but look at this column, then this one here. Note the red brackets.”
“Ouch,” said Jackie.
“You can lead em to water,” said Brad.
“Do you know who these people are?” I asked.
He put his hands over his ears.
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I can’t tell you how unhappy our compliance people were when this whole thing erupted. There’s nothing improper or illegal about this approach. But our liability extends only to Jonathan Eldridge Consultants, since technically, everything in this account belongs to them. It gets grayer when you have knowledge of his client relationships upstream. I just don’t want to know.”
I remembered Alena saying that Jonathan worked hard to calibrate his level of stress to just the right pitch. It looked like he’d found in Brad Maplewhite the ideal partner for the downstream portion of the calibration.
I reached over and took the Xeroxed sheet from Jackie.
“What about the other side of the equation. Any luckiest of the lucky?”
Brad worked at the screen for a while, occasionally cocking his head from side to side as he typed like a concert pianist. The chatter of keys was fleet enough to betray a true virtuoso. Something you wouldn’t see much with men my age, most of whom had barely mastered the technological intricacies of IBM Selectrics before typewriters turned into television sets.
“Well, 102 and 105 have faired very well over the years. Especially in the months preceding the, ah, event. Quite a burst of activity, mostly funded out of the ECM.”
“The cash pool.”
“That’s right. It’s just a total figure here. You’ll have to see Alena for the backup.”
Jackie tried to read the sheet, squinting her good eye.
“Who are they?” she asked.
“Hey Brad, stick your fingers in your ears,” I said, which he did with eyes shut and elbows held high. I leaned over to whisper in Jackie’s ear just to be sure. A distant part of me hoped someone from his office would pick that moment to poke his head in the conference room.
“Neville St. Clair and Hugh Boone.”
“All the sub-accounts have been emptied out,” said Jackie. “Including 102 and 105?”
“At Alenas instructions,” said Brad, unblocking his ears again. “You saw the columns.”
If Brad was an S&P type, I was a passbook savings type. I hated everything relating to investments and money management, and all that crap. Abby had tried to take it over, probably alarmed by my irritability over the subject, but I hadn’t let her. I knew a guy who ran an investment desk for a bank in Stamford who was honest and easygoing enough to put whatever I came up with for retirement into the most conservative instruments he could find. Without argument or reproach. I think in this way Abby was right about my working-class upbringing, where the distrust of banks and brokers, and anyone else who used the word “finance” when he meant “money” ran deep. Money we knew about. You got it when you worked your ass off and then spent every dime of it just getting by. All that talk about investments and portfolios was just a dangerous abstraction.
“How did it work?” I asked him. “You wrote a bunch of checks?”
“More or less. Alena did. We could have transferred each bundle of assets to another account or brokerage house if they’d been in the clients’ names, but as you know, they weren’t. So we sold everything and deposited the proceeds into the ECM, from which Alena drew the appropriate disbursements. Probably had some unpleasant tax implications for some, but given that their adviser had been blown to Kingdom Come, it wouldn’t seem politic to carp.”
“So you could identify individual investors by the names on the checks drawn against the ECM.”
Brad thought about it a moment.
“I suppose you could. Of course. Not that I would. But somewhere here there’s a scan of every one of those checks. Lord knows how you’d find it. You don’t know the word labyrinthine’ until you’ve dealt with our internal administration.”
Jackie started to say something, but I put my hand on her leg to stop her. I needed a second of quiet. I closed my eyes and saw a miniature version of a bank check, a smudged-looking photostat, festooned with stamps and inked-in notations. I’d seen one once when someone had stolen my checkbook and used it to buy a set of tires. They’d copied the front and back, so you could see the endorsement was clearly a fake, not even an attempt at forgery.
“Do you have the addresses and phone numbers for all these clients?” I asked Jackie, holding up the sheet.
“Not here. In my computer with the stuff Alena gave me. But I’m sure she still has all that. I could give her a call. Nobody’s given much thought to the non-hostiles. Actually none. Why are we now?”
“I feel like I know those guys. Neville and Hugh.”
“You must have played darts with them at the pub.”
“Yeah. Sound like Brits.”
“The Oppressors.”
“Don’t start getting tribal.”
“I’ll confirm with Alena.”
Brad looked like he was about to put his fingers back in his ears, so I got him back in our conversation.
“So Gabe Szwit’s doing okay for Appolonia. Jonathan’s wife. Far as you know.”
“Yes, seems quite competent. We did some rebalancing last month. He had a plan, but was interested in what I had to say. Asked some very insightful questions. Felt like old times, though without Miss Zapatas charm. That I’ll miss.”
I looked for the first time to see if he had a wedding ring, which he did. Too bad. Would be another excellent
