S
EPTEMBER
15, 2002
M
onday morning, 8:59
A.M.
At first, silence.
A moment frozen in time, like a reflection caught on a pane of glass. Air choked with electric tension, every atomic particle seemingly on the verge of sudden and catastrophic motion. A massive hall with impossibly high ceilings, a warren of low computer tables and cubicled workstations spiraling out from a half-dozen circular pits. And the pits themselves, a few feet descended into the floor of the hall, crowded with men in strange bright jackets—blazers in patterns ranging from dark solids and pastels to intricate stripes and even plaids, some approximating a Jackson Pollock of swirls and even spots, all the colors of the rainbow. A rainbow frozen and hushed like the air around, pregnant with anticipation, exhilaration—and maybe even a little fear.
Then—chaos.
It began with a bell. Piercing, metallic, a sound that cut through the tense air and instantly shattered the metaphorical glass. Suddenly, the room exploded. The men in the Jackson Pollock jackets were shouting and physically shoving each other,
jockeying for position. Hands were up in the air, fists clenching tiny slips of paper, hoarse voices shouting to be heard over the scuff of shoes, the whir of computers, and the metallic echo of the bell. The fists swung back and forth, the voices cried out, and the tiny slips of paper rained down toward the floor like confetti. Above it all, lights flashed and numbers splayed out across a magnificent, luminescent digital board that hung, precariously, from the ceiling.
“Welcome to the asylum,” Reston whispered in David’s ear as they stood at the edge of the biggest of the pits, watching the chaos. David jumped back just in time to keep from getting clocked by a wildly gesturing trader in a barber-pole jacket. Reston grinned at him.
The asylum.
David thought it was a pretty good description of the place. Barely a blip on the radar of the outside world, this frantic trading floor known as the NYMEX was like nothing he had ever seen before. It had taken him twenty minutes slogging up and down the windswept streets of Lower Manhattan to find the place. Finally a cop standing in front of a barricade that had probably been up since 9/11 pointed the way. Lodged in one of the most secure buildings on earth—protected by dozens of armed guards, multiple X-ray scanners, a veritable pincushion of security cameras—and located at the very southernmost tip of Manhattan—as far south as David could go without tasting the Hudson—it was really like something out of a Hollywood movie. Reston had met him by the scanners in the lobby, then led him straight to the trading floor.
“May as well start at the heart,” he’d said simply, “then work our way up to the brain and the soul.”
The heart of the Merc seemed like a cardiac arrest waiting to happen. The traders in their brightly colored jackets were shouting so loud that their voices blended into one ear-shattering roar. The slips of paper that represented the only real record of their trades were already ankle-deep across the floor, and it was only a few minutes into the trading day.
“Christ,” David said. “How does this possibly work?”
“Biggest casino in the world. These meatheads are trading billions of dollars a day. It looks like pure chaos, but it’s coordinated.”
As Reston was talking, one of the meatier of the bunch turned to face them from the pit. A kid really, probably not even David’s age, in a red-and-orange-striped jacket.
“Hey, Nicky,” he shouted, his voice raspy and used. “I see you brought your girlfriend to work with you.”
“That’s right, Vitzi,” Reston responded. “This pretty thing is David Russo. Giovanni’s newest pain in my ass. This one’s a Harvard boy.”
David groaned inwardly. He knew, instinctively, how that was going to go over. Looking around the room at the traders, he felt like he’d suddenly raced backward in time to his childhood split between Staten Island and Brooklyn, to the family reunions and grade-school playgrounds and neighborhood streets. Giovanni and Reston hadn’t been kidding about the makeup of the trading floor. Their ages seemed to range from early twenties to late forties—even a few fifties and sixties in the mix—and it was almost entirely male. Tough guys, from the looks of them, despite their Day-Glo-colored clothes.
Two more of the traders turned around to look at David, both young men in their twenties like Vitzi, both obviously Italian and more than a little rough around the edges. One was burly, with a protruding paunch and wild brown hair. The other was thin and lanky, with at least two days’ beard growth on his jaw.
“Just what we need. Another rocket scientist. How long did the last one make it? A week?”
“I think his mommy came to rescue him by day three,” Vitzi joked back.
David felt like he was about to get eaten alive. He wanted to respond, nip this shit right from the start—maybe even swing at one of them just to set things right—but he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to get fired five minutes into his first day. Especially considering the bridge at Merrill was still burning, and, as
far as he could tell, the financial job market hadn’t gotten any better over the weekend.
Reston responded before he had a chance. “I’m guessing this one is gone by tomorrow, but I’m hoping he makes it a bit longer. Nothing worse for me than having to deal with you boneheads face-to-face.”
With that, he led David off the trading floor, straight to a bank of elevators. Once they were secure in the ascending steel box, Reston turned to look at him.
“Those guys are right, you know. You can take your Harvard degree and shove it up your ass.”
David felt his cheeks turning red.
This was going great so far.
“This place bleeds Brooklyn,” Reston continued as the digital numbers on the elevator readout blinked upward. “This place sweats Queens. This isn’t the New York Stock Exchange. You can’t just get a fancy degree and apply for a job at the Merc. This place is an apprenticeship system, like a fraternity, with secret handshakes and hazing rituals. Those guys are going to call you my girlfriend until you prove to them that you’re not.”
David wanted to melt into the elevator wall. When he’d met Reston at Morton’s, he’d sensed some animosity, but he’d assumed that it was something he’d be able to work through. He wasn’t so sure anymore.
“That meathead Vitzi,” Reston continued, “is one of the hottest kids on the floor right now. And he came from fucking nowhere. He’d tell you himself—if he wasn’t doing this, he’d be selling shoes. Grew up on the street in Bensonhurst, stealing car radios and knocking over ATM machines. Somehow stayed out of jail long enough to worm his way into a clerk job here—maybe a cousin or an uncle brought him in. Got paid ten thousand a year to be someone’s bitch—the shittiest fucking job in the world. But he was smart, sharp as a fucking tack. Now he’s playing in the game—and if all goes well, he’ll make fucking millions.”
David blinked, taking it all in as best he could.
“I get it. They’re going to haze the hell out of me until I prove myself. You went through this in the beginning too?”
Reston laughed. “Hey, don’t lump me in with you, Harvard. I’m an Irish kid from Plano, Texas. I nearly flunked out of high school and got into college because I’m good at throwing a baseball. After college, I found out I was good at something else—trading. When I got the offer from the Merc, I’d never been out of Texas—but I hopped on a plane the next day.”
David tried to imagine getting on that plane, heading off toward the unknown; it wasn’t that hard for him, considering that he’d done the same thing when he’d gone to England, crossing an ocean for the first time.
“I met my wife on the flight to my first interview,” Reston said. “I became a trader and a New Yorker all in one week. I got my ass handed to me so many times by this place and this city, fuck, you have no idea.”
“But you hung in there,” David said. He wasn’t just kissing ass, he was truly a bit unnerved by the chaos of the trading floor, and especially the character of the traders he’d seen. He hadn’t expected Ivy Leaguers, but he hadn’t expected a high school locker room either.
“They have a saying here: from garbagemen to millionaires. Guys like me and Giovanni and Vitzi come to this place with nothing, scratching and clawing our way through the front door. And if we’re smart, if we’re lucky, if we’ve got the balls—we get rich beyond our wildest dreams.”
David didn’t know if it was hyperbole or bravado, but if Giovanni was any indication, there had to be some truth to the saying. David had to admit that he liked the sound of it: garbagemen to millionaires.
“Well, it won’t be the first place I’ve ever been where my education was a negative. That trading floor looked like my family reunion.”
Maybe he’d have to revert to the person his parents had spent
a hundred grand to get rid of—but David wasn’t going to give up as easily as the last Giovanni Kid.
“Well, don’t throw away your gray matter just yet, boyo, because your office isn’t in the heart of the Merc.”
The elevator came to a stop, and Reston pointed to the digital readout.
“Fifteenth floor. This is where you work. The brain.”
T
he first thing David noticed as he stepped out onto the fifteenth floor was that it was quiet. Wonderfully, soothingly quiet—such a stark contrast from the trading pits downstairs that it was hard to believe both were encased in the same fortresslike building. The second thing he noticed was that straight ahead, at the end of a long, carpeted hallway banked on either side by low cubicles, hung a picture of himself. Eye level, maybe a little crooked, directly above a glass desk behind which sat the woman he’d been picturing for an entire week. He hadn’t been that far off considering that he’d been working only from her voice. She was matronly but pretty, more curves than edges, with overflowing, reddish-brown hair barely controlled by what seemed to be a mix of hair spray, barrettes, and prayer. Though she was wearing a gray suit that looked expensive, her thick makeup and blood-red lipstick and nails told David that she had probably grown up on the same streets as his cousins—well, maybe not Brooklyn, but probably New Jersey. And if she was anything like David’s cousins, although she seemed sweet as sugar, she’d probably have no problem clawing your eyeballs out if you looked at her the
wrong way. At the moment, she was all smiles, already up and out of her chair by the time David and Reston had made it halfway down the long carpeted hall.
“Glad to see you survived the trading floor with all four limbs still attached,” she said by way of a greeting. Instead of a handshake, she offered David a manila envelope. “Here’s your employment package. Nothing too confusing in there, I promise, just a W-2 and a welcome letter. We like to keep things simple up here.”
Reston patted David on the back. “Harriet will take care of you. She’s like our den mother—none of us would have survived without her. After you get settled—ten minutes should cover it—meet me back at the elevator, and we’ll continue the tour.”
Reston headed toward a row of doors beyond the cubicles.
“Those are the board members’ offices,” Harriet explained as she came around her desk, straightening her suit with quick sweeps of her long, brightly painted nails. “Mr. Reston’s office is next to Mr. Giovanni’s—who, by the way, won’t be in today, as he’s flying back from London this evening. But he’ll be there at the board meeting tomorrow, so make sure you aren’t late. Your first board meeting is an important event, and you’ll want to make a good impression.”
She spoke much faster in person, the words running together in some places, and David noticed for the first time that she did indeed have a hint of a Jersey accent, something that hadn’t come across over the phone. He let her lead him to one of the cubicles—directly outside of the two doors that she’d indicated led to Reston’s and Giovanni’s offices.
“This is your desk for now. You’ll be spending most of your time in Mr. Reston’s and Mr. Giovanni’s offices, or running up and down to the trading floor.”
David took in the cubicle: desk, chair, IBM workstation, and a steel telescoping lamp. He could have been right back at Merrill—except the other cubicles surrounding his seemed to be vacant, no signs of life clearly visible, no pictures tacked to walls or sad little plants trapped in equally sad little pots.
“Where is everybody else?” David asked.
“There is no everybody else,” Harriet answered, turning back toward her desk. “The other board members’ assistants have cubicles on the fourteenth floor. The traders live in caves and eat their assistants during the cold winter months. The fifteenth floor is just for board members. And me.”
She smiled back at him, chasing an errant, oversprayed lock out of her eyes.
“And now you.”
David blushed. She saw the color in his cheeks and laughed.
“You’re cuter in person, David, but don’t get the wrong idea. I didn’t put your picture up above my desk—Mr. Giovanni did. The old man has an odd sense of humor sometimes. Though I really did like the flowers and chocolates.”
When she was gone from view, David lowered himself into his chair, testing the springs, getting the feel of yet another cubicle. They never taught you about cubicles in business school. Maybe that was because, until a year ago, business school grads didn’t have to deal with cubicles.
David put the manila envelope on the center of his desk and went to work on the metal clasp. The W-2 came out first, followed by a letter from the Merc, welcoming him and laying out his payment package. He took a deep breath as he searched for the numbers—then exhaled as they hit him like a club to his gut.
Fifty-eight thousand dollars, plus benefits. Nearly a third less than what he was making at Merrill Lynch. He knew that money wasn’t everything—but hell, with his school loans and his apartment and his girlfriend, it was going to be a tough year.
Sometimes you gotta move lateral before you move forward,
he sighed to himself, repeating one of his dad’s mantras. The thought brought him back to the night before—to the party celebrating his dad’s completed year of therapy. It had been quite a Russo affair: aunts, uncles, cousins, food flying everywhere, little kids running around with snot running down their faces, David’s mother making everyone toast again and again—hell, the whole
group would have been thrown out of the restaurant in the heart of Little Italy if it hadn’t been owned by a distant cousin. David smiled inwardly as he remembered how elegant Serena had looked in the midst of all that Russo chaos, sitting right next to his dad the whole time, matching every toast glass to glass. And David’s dad had truly looked so good, it was hard to believe that a year ago he was in that hospital, the panic attacks that had resulted from the accident so fierce that his heart had literally seized in his chest—David shook the thought away. Lateral motion—that’s exactly what his dad had called the monstrous thing that had ended his career at the accounting firm, because, well, it had ended the accounting firm as well. And he truly was moving forward again, putting himself back together emotionally, rebuilding his career at a new company that was kindly letting him work at home until his rehabilitation was over.
So what the hell did David have to complain about? Fifty-eight thousand dollars was a hell of a lot better than not being able to do the simplest things in life, like get into a compact car or walk down a set of stairs—
“Is it that ugly?” a voice interrupted David’s thoughts—a damn good thing, considering where those thoughts might have taken him—and David turned to see a smiling face peering over the edge of his cubicle. Midfifties, ethnically Jewish, with a receding hairline graying at the edges and ears that stuck out a little too far.
“Alex Mendelson,” the man said, extending a hand, which David shook. “Board member. Crude oil was my game until I hung up my trading jacket and took a seat with the brain trust up here. You must be Giovanni’s Harvard boy.”
David instinctively rolled his eyes. Had Reston made an announcement over the PA or was he using a fucking bullhorn? David may as well have worn his Harvard tie.
Mendelson laughed. “It’s okay, I’m class of ’69 myself. Yeah, that’s right—Summer of Love and somehow I ended up in banking. Thank God I discovered this place before I was too old to throw a good punch.”
David slid his employment package back into the manila envelope and rose from his chair.
“You need to know how to punch to get by here?”
“Hell, yeah. You’ll learn soon enough. This place is a cockfight. Sometimes literally. There are fistfights on the trading floor every now and then. But you look like you can handle yourself.”
Mendelson started toward the elevators, and David followed.
“What about up here? Do you have to fistfight to get by up here too?”
Mendelson grinned at him. “No, up here it’s full-fledged warfare. Armored tanks and AK-47s. You’ll see soon enough. Your first board meeting is tomorrow, right? Well, don’t worry, Harvard, I’ve got your back.”
He made a pistol with his hand, fired off two faux shots at David’s face, then cut left toward an office on the other side of the room. David watched him go—and realized, for the first time, that Mendelson wasn’t wearing any shoes. His suit was tailored and obviously expensive, he had on a Rolex watch and a tie that could have been Prada or Gucci, but his feet were bare and he was padding along the carpet like a kid on Christmas morning.
David was still staring after him as he reached the elevators. Reston was already there, a grin on his face.
“Yeah, Mendelson’s a character,” he said, holding the elevator door open for David. “He made a fortune trading crude. He was so good that some of the other traders got together, made a million-dollar bet with him that he couldn’t make three times that in a single afternoon. Mendelson was so sure he’d win that he even raised the bet by throwing in a pair of his favorite shoes.”
David raised his eyebrows as he stepped into the elevator, Reston right behind him.
“Mendelson lost?”
“By one hundred thousand. He made 2.9 million, had to pay a million of it to the other traders—and he never wore shoes to work again. Still, he came out with 1.9 million for himself, so don’t feel too bad for the guy.”
The elevator doors slid shut. Again, the digital readout blinked upward. Before David could ask any questions about Mendelson or the traders or his measly employment package or tomorrow morning’s board meeting—which obviously was a big deal—the elevator was already slowing down. He glanced at the readout and saw that they had come to a stop on the eighteenth floor.
“You’ve seen the heart and brain of the Merc,” Reston said as the doors slid open. “That only leaves the soul.”