Man in the Middle

concentration for fear of inciting already frequent, verbal attacks. Plastic sacks—dozens of them, filled with enough paper to denude a small forest—lined a rear door, ready to be hauled away.

Peter sipped French Roast and took everything in, grateful his intelligence had counseled him not to drink to excess last night. While he now felt tired, at least he wasn’t hung-over. Sniffing his fingers, he rewound the evening’s events. Obviously, Stuart Grimes and Louise Hartman had had carnal knowledge of one another before last night. Their public groping preceded a disappearing act—to her hotel room—around eleven o’clock.

That left Peter and Aimie St. Claire alone in the hotel bar, enjoying expensive cognac, her hand camped on his thigh. The girls acted aggressively—not girls, Peter reminded himself. Both were in their late thirties and built for action. They didn’t show cleavage—didn’t need to. Instead, they chose colorful cashmere sweaters with statically launched strands begging to be stroked. Crow’s feet around their eyes presaged a raunchy worldliness.

Better than their physical allure were the stories they told of exciting Wall Street trades done on behalf of important clients, and of sexual escapades and scandal. They gesticulated, laughed, and whispered when speaking salaciously, and made it all sound wonderful and thrilling and fun. And they seemed to know everybody in the securities industry. Early in their careers, they’d been to Mike Milken’s Predators’ Ball during Drexel, Burnham’s heyday, before the firm went belly-up and before Milken went to prison for a few years. Back then, Drexel professionals dished out morsels of information like they were hors d’oeuvres designed to whet the appetites of powerful money managers. Drexel’s one-hundred millionaire investment bankers, in turn, sold junk bonds to these grateful fiduciaries as if the high-risk paper were as precious as everlasting life. “Milken even had the nerve to insist his people call those crap bonds, ‘high-yield.’ You used the term ‘junk,’” Aimie had said, “and you were likely to be canned and blackballed for life.”

Louise told an equally compelling story about handling a trade with Ivan Boesky in a company magically acquired in a take-over the next week. She’d been smart enough to piggyback the trade, she said, and sneak a few thousand shares into one of her secret, personal trading accounts—she’d made forty grand on that little investment, back in the day when forty grand meant something. They dropped names like “Blade,” “Skyball,” and “Helmet Head” as if Peter knew these people. He learned that when professionals used the term “Wall Street,” they meant the financial markets worldwide, not just in New York. Everyone considered Morgan Stenman, in fact, a Street icon and, as such, that officially made Stuart, and Peter, fellow citizens of Wall Street. And as silly as it seemed, knowing this made Peter happy.

And Peter didn’t particularly care that much of what he heard confused him. The evening was magical. And though he had suspected it was in the offing, he hadn’t intended to sleep with Aimie St. Claire—at least not until her hand moved from his thigh to his crotch. Now, less than two hours after rolling out of her king-sized hotel bed, her scent lingered. Before he’d allowed himself to be seduced, he wished she had told him she was married. With the clarity following meaningless sex, he now vowed: never again.

Behind him, a gruff voice caught Peter’s attention, pushing last night’s indiscretion to a back corner of his mind. From a second row of desks, a trader with a red-snaked nose spoke into a headset wrapped from his ear to his mouth. The conversation was in French. Peter understood a few words, but in the context of the conversation, none of them seemed to be meaningful. As soon as that call ended, the rotund man began another call. This time he spoke in what sounded like perfect German. Glancing at the computer facing the trilingual man, Peter watched rows of foreign symbols twitching ever-changing prices.

The trading room, Peter figured out, operated twenty-four hours a day, employing three semi-distinct shifts. If yesterday’s activity was indicative, these shifts overlapped by two or three hours. That put the minimum workday at ten hours, the maximum at twelve—before special projects and nights out.

When the man finished this second conversation, Peter introduced himself and asked what time Stuart Grimes normally arrived. “At half past five,” the trader said. Peter then asked where he might go to begin his project on tracking commissions.

The man’s breath smelled flammable, undoubtedly the result of recent eighty-proof shots. With Peter’s second question, the grizzled man lost his remaining splinter of patience. “First floor,” he said, spinning and punching a button on his phone bank, spewing rapid-fire French, and tuning Peter completely out.

With forty-five minutes to go before Stuart’s estimated arrival, Peter took the stairs to the first floor.

At six-fifteen, an hour after arriving, Peter left the Head of Administration and Support, feeling pretty good about his progress. Carl Butler was harried, but at least he had referred to Peter by his given name, and, when Peter mentioned that Howard Muller had assigned him this project, the name-drop worked like magic. Butler’s eyes wobbled the moment the word “Muller” vibrated against his eardrums and defiled his brain. The suddenly nervous man showed Peter how to log on and download the information he needed. With a few formatting hints, Peter felt he could complete the first part of his task over the next few weeks. The biggest problem would be gaining the cooperation of the traders, since, to assess brokers’ usefulness, he needed their opinions.

“One step at a time,” he told himself.

Bounding to the third floor, Peter spotted Stuart Grimes the moment he buzzed in. Stuart, barking into a phone, flapped his arms like an ostrich trying to fly. Amazingly, he exhibited no sign he’d consumed massive amounts of alcohol the night before or spent the night and morning doing the nasty. He had clean eyes, and was operating on a million cylinders.

How’d he do it? Peter wondered.

Peter made his way past animated bodies, their voices a garbled lace of frantic commands and profanity. By the time he got to Stuart, the trader had a second phone pressed to the other ear. He spoke back and forth, sliding one handset to his mouth, then pulling it into his neck while speaking into the other. All the while, Stuart’s eyes scrutinized his computer screens, absorbing bits of data on currency, bonds, foreign indices, and a multitude of other mysterious indicators.

“You say your guy’s preparing to address the sales force?” Stuart asked into the left phone.

Peter leaned in and heard a voice spill an answer. “Yes. He’s raising his estimates on Global-Tech by fifty cents for this and next year.”

Stuart lowered the left headset while pulling the right mouthpiece up. “Take the Global offering at fifty-five,” he said.

Just loud enough for Peter to hear, a second voice said, “You want them all?”

“Fucking hell, Lloyd. I said take the fucking offering. And you’re held!”

A moment of silence followed as Stuart clocked a buy ticket and wrote:

502,000 GLTS @ $55 — Held

Peter did the math. Stuart had just purchased $27 million worth of stock. He counted the zeroes again, just to make certain he hadn’t miscalculated.

Stuart acknowledged Peter’s presence with a nod. Pinching the right handset between his ear and shoulder, he tapped a pen against one of his screens, drawing Peter’s attention. In an unmodulated voice, he explained, “This is NASDAQ. I’m buying a block of Global in London, before the stock begins trading in the U.S.”

“What’s held mean?” Peter asked.

“It means I’m not giving idiot-stick Lloyd any discretion to screw things up.”

Peter didn’t understand, but he let it slide for the time being, making a mental note about this and the infinite number of curiosities clogging his brain. Over Stuart’s shoulder, on the NASDAQ terminal, Peter focused on the letters GLTS and a long line of brokers displaying prices. The market showed a best bid of 55, a best offering of 55.15.

Stuart turned his attention back to his phones. “Fine. I’m buying five hundred and two thousand GLTS at fifty-five, double net.”

Stuart dropped the right headset but still held the other to his left ear. He stamped the GLTS buy-ticket a second time. In a box along the left edge of the ticket, he checked OTC, then scribbled the word London. In a column labeled “broker,” he wrote CKLSN. “That stands for Clarkson Securities—they’re the U. K. broker I used to buy the stock,” he explained.

Stuart dropped the buy-ticket into the out-box for processing. In a nonstop motion, he scooped up a red-sell ticket. He wrote: 302,000 GLTS. Under broker he wrote: STTN.

“STTN stands for Stratton Brothers. I’m waiting for them to come back with a bid for the stock.” Stuart again pointed to his NASDAQ machine. “Look, Glo-Tech’s already moving higher. Market opens in five minutes. Nobody