Not today. He scrutinized one document from the scatter of papers on his desk. When he looked up, he signaled for me to come back later. Get lost. He was busy. Frank never showed backbone.
Unless problems bite him in the ass.
I opened the door and barged inside his office. Bad decision. Frank glared at me over tortoiseshell reading glasses, the voodoo death stare of the un-dead. His face scowled,
Big mistake
, but he said nothing. The room was more silent than the inside of a coffin.
There was no turning back. “Frank, I need to see you.”
“And right now, I’m exercising the self-restraint of Mother Teresa. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” He stood and swept his right hand to the door, the age-old gesture to get the fuck out of his office.
“Frank, this is important.” I stood my ground.
He recognized trouble. “Sit down.”
I gave him the fax.
He said nothing for a moment. Then the third degree detonated. “Did I approve this? You said Kelemen wasn’t a client. What’s going on?”
“I didn’t write the letter, Frank.”
He looked at my signature and said, “You’d better start at the beginning.”
I described the Kelemen Group, the $1.25 million put options, and the $10 million investment. “Lila said this letter influenced her family’s decision to invest. The Priouleaus asked for a credit reference. Otherwise, they could not be sure that Charlie’s guarantee had any value. He produced this letter, and I think it’s a problem.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Frank barked. “Did you ever refer any investors to the Kelemen Group?”
He was already evaluating SKC’s liability. It was my turn to get pissed. “No, Frank. No fucking way.”
“What about your signature?”
“Forged. Or somebody used software to cut and paste.”
“What about our stationery?”
“I’m not sure. I keep some at home, and Charlie visited my condo plenty of times. But I’m not sure.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Let’s be really clear, Frank. I didn’t write that letter. I didn’t sign it. I think Charlie forged it, and I have no idea what he was doing.”
“I get it. I need to hear what our lawyers think. I’m sure we need to get the police involved.”
Great. Fitzsimmons and Mummert, the dynamic duds
.
Kurtz rose and said, “I told you not to get involved.” His body language said,
Dismissed
. It was like a Mafia don had kissed my cheek for the last time.
Back at my desk I called Betty. She answered on the first ring.
“I have a quick question for you.”
“No need to hurry,” she replied. Betty was always agreeable.
“Did I ever send you a letter about Charlie?”
“That’s a weird question.”
“Work with me. Did I ever send you a letter about Charlie?”
“No,” she said firmly. She paused before asking, “What kind of letter? Should I be concerned? Are you okay?” Her discomfort increased with each question.
I became careful, unsure how much to tell her about my own problems. “Sometimes, investors require reference letters before they put money with hedge funds or other money managers. Charlie never arranged for anything of the sort, right?”
“Grove, that’s crazy. Why would I need a reference for Charlie?”
“Not everyone knew him as well as you,” I hedged. Internally, I sighed with relief that there was not a second letter with my signature.
“You know,” she paused, “in the early 1980s kids with Down’s syndrome lived to age twenty-five on average. Most parents outlived the child. It’s different now. Kids with Down’s syndrome live to fifty-five on average. They’re outliving their parents. Charlie understood these issues.”
He also understood how to Photoshop signatures.
“In most families the siblings take over for the parents,” she continued. “But Fred only has me. Fred would run out of money without better investment returns. Charlie helped us.”
For all my cynicism, I felt conflicted when we hung up a few minutes
later. Once again Charlie had conducted himself like the quintessential caretaker. I berated myself for doubting him, for turning negative in less than twenty-four hours. But I still cursed him for sending that letter to Lila.
Charlie, how can you save Fred Masters one minute and torch my career the next?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Andy Warhol gets too much recognition. “Fifteen minutes of fame” misses the point. It’s not fame. It’s shame. In the future we will all weather fifteen minutes of humiliation. Just ask the executives disgraced by broadcast news or the politicians exposed by YouTube, each group starring for reasons other than choice.
Or ask me. Charlie’s letter crippled my credibility. It compromised my confidence. I was more of a top preacher than a top producer, lecturing high atop a sanctimonious mountain of righteousness, telling everyone the capital markets were no more than classic confrontations between good and evil.
“My job is to bring you the best of Wall Street and to protect you from it at the same time.”
Yeah, right. The notion of me guarding clients was a joke. I couldn’t protect myself. I had embraced a cancer, eaten spaghetti Bolognese with a melanoma, and guzzled cabernet sauvignon with a sarcoma. Afterward, my thank-you letters served as source material for Charlie’s forgeries. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
My best friend? Fuck him and his fat head. I was afraid of a forged letter,
of lies and secrets to follow. I was afraid of things easily explained, of auditors who never returned my calls. I was afraid of fifteen minutes.
On Wall Street we each have one reputation and a thousand opportunities to destroy it every day. Once a name registers horror, there is no turning back. There is no way to fix the damage and end the flux of unsavory associations.
Dennis Kozlowski. Jeffrey Skilling. Grove O’Rourke.
Financial scandals wreak havoc. We can beat the charges—maybe. We can walk freely among our colleagues—maybe. We can start fresh and allow time to dim the memories. Don’t bet on it. Salvaging reputations is like pissing into Hurricane Hugo. The stream boomerangs back at 180 miles per hour. The soil of bad press and tang of yellow journalism stain our careers forever. Unflattering articles never go away. They smear oblivious brokers who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thank you, Google. You will always be there for me in .18 seconds or less. Thank you for sharing all the sordid speculation. You are a credit to the forces of muckraking, with never a complaint, and no gripes about the workload. You deliver all the news fit to print, and some that is not, with tireless and unflagging dedication.
Twenty years from now, Google will still be there for me. I suspect the delivery time will improve to .007 seconds, given the relentless advance of technology. My old friends will be acquaintances by then, their judgments final about my character. They will still gossip behind my back and occasionally search my name to refresh their flagging memories.
“Poor Grove. What was that trouble again?”
My imagination runs wild. I foresee investors losing money at the Kelemen Group. Then I kick myself for worrying.
We have audited financials. There’s a reason the auditors don’t call.
I foresee the police linking me to the crime at the New England Aquarium. Then I reassure myself with an alibi more potent than innocence.
Five hundred people watched Charlie, Romanov, and me.
Back and forth, logic and alarm, my mind plays tricks. I foresee that article in the
New York Post
, now with a different angle. Mandy Maris paints
Charlie’s death in graphic detail before proceeding to Sam, the brilliant, if flaky, widow. She discovers Charlie’s pet description for Sam, and references to the “Siberian husky” fill the prose. She weaves a tale of sharks and shadows and New York’s most philanthropic couple. The money, the glamour, the gory death, they all sell copies of the city’s favorite “scambloid.”
At the heart of her story, at the core of her intrigue, Mandy Maris emphasizes one key component. Me. She poses leading questions about a top producer from SKC. “Who is this self-made millionaire, Grover O’Rourke? Why did he write that reference letter? Is he just a friend of Sam Kelemen’s? He lived with the couple for six months, and she is a striking, if unusual, beauty.”
Mandy’s editors are too smart to allow slander. Her innuendo slips through anyway. She minces words and vilifies my good name. She injects mystery into her pages and misery into all my waking thoughts. She asks: “Would you trust this man with your money?”
In my mind the
New York Post
runs a honey shot of Lila on the front page. Her olive face is perturbed, her cleavage in full bloom, her pant pockets pulled inside out from blue jeans. The caption underneath the photo asks: “Does Grover O’Rourke know the whereabouts of this woman’s money?”
The story debuts everywhere. From the news racks of Grand Central to the vinyl seats of yellow cabs, Lila Priouleau stands before New York City. Where-the-Fuckistan sees my picture splattered across page three and says, “I know that guy.” Throughout New York’s maze of subways, straphangers in wifebeaters read the article from hell.
The headline fascinates our jittery natives. They all fret about money—making great fortunes or making ends meet. They swig Mandy’s sentences like coffee. And they lock the unanswered questions about Grove O’Rourke into their memory banks forever.
I worry what my coworkers will say. The Ten A.M. Ablutions Club bugs me no end. PCS males habitually thunder into the bathroom stalls thirty minutes after the opening bell. Some wait and bitch and complain about the “full house.” Those who arrived first slip off their nymph and skull suspenders. Out come the pima-cotton shirts. Down go the pin-striped pants. Their fruity boxers drop like last week’s dirty laundry. The “Ablutionists” read their papers in earnest and chatter between the stalls. They debate the markets, concentrating amid the strains and grunts and other concert music from their extended stays.
“Fuck him. And fuck the press,” they opine from their porcelain perches. “O’Rourke is costing us money. Our clients don’t trust anyone at SKC.”
The Ablutionists prospect my guys. It’s reasonable retribution, to their way of thinking. There are other factions that join the free-for-all. One splinter group includes Scully. Casper belongs to another. Patty Gershon has a head start on everyone.
Sensing her advantage, Patty goes for my jugular. Her pitch to management is predictable: “We’ve got a situation on our hands, Frank. O’Rourke hasn’t been the same since he lost his wife and daughter. You know it. I know it.”
“This thing with Lila Priouleau is a doozy,” Frank says, not yet venturing an opinion, his indecisiveness an invitation for Lady Goldfish to strike.
“Call it whatever you like, Frank. O’Rourke’s dirty. He went off the deep end. He’s probably sleeping with Sam Kelemen. Do you really want him covering a client who invests two hundred million dollars with SKC and keeps another one hundred and ninety-one million in stock here? If you don’t assign me the account, JJ will make a decision for you. He’ll take his assets to Goldman. Or Morgan. Or Merrill. Get the point, Frank? You want that?”
Jestem udupiony.
Friday afternoon I was a wreck. Kurtz’s casual comment had not helped: “I need to hear what our lawyers think.” The business prevention units made every top producer nervous. We’re cocky until there’s trouble.
By three P.M. the office was half empty. PCS brokers and sales assistants were already hustling off to the beaches. For a moment I hatched my own escape. There was no place like Narragansett on the weekends. The rock beaches. The salty ocean air. The relentless crash of waves eclipsed any symphony Beethoven ever composed. Only I no longer heard their melodic roar.
A seaside photo had replaced the three-hour drive and empty house on the other side. On my desk Finn and Evelyn would laugh forever. They hugged under the dappled sun, the shadow of an autumn day. A white sliver over Evelyn’s left lip discolored her rose and mocha skin. I loved that scar, an old softball trophy from sliding into home plate. It marked the fighter, the lover, and the woman I had pledged to honor and protect.
As I stared at the photo my old nemesis reared its ugly head and asked,
Where were you when it counted?
In retrospect, the homunculus probably did me a favor.
The question pissed me off. Grief was no option. Escape, one of Rhode Island’s many draws, was no option. Charlie’s lies had turned personal. They threatened my career, my reputation.
Dennis Kozlowski. Jeffrey Skilling. Grove O’Rourke.
To understand my anger at that moment, you must understand cycling. During every tight race somebody always makes a move near the finish. It’s not any move. It’s
the
move—a short surge ending in glory for one person. That burst makes me crazy. It flips a switch inside, the one that reminds me I fucking hate to lose. There’s a certain ignominy to watching a spandex butt cross the finish line first. Somebody else’s victory equals joy at my expense. Maybe it was German cyclists who coined “schadenfreude” just for such moments. The move ignites my anger, fuels my desperate sprint to the finish. I don’t always win, but in those last few seconds I’m oblivious to crashes or the torture of my sport. I’m angry. I’m feral. My instincts take over, and I don’t think. That’s how I felt Friday afternoon.