Nothing Personal: A Novel of Wall Street

by Offit, Mike

  “The question is,” Johnstone said, “how important is money to you, really? All of this is based on the same drive—greed. You’re not saving lives or making art.”

  Warren leaned back in his chair. “I never really thought about it before. But now that I’ve made some, I like it. But this place is just plain nuts. It’s all risk, no certainty. I don’t know how these guys can stand it.”

  “Warren, you can make over a million dollars a year at an investment bank if you’re any good at it and never risk a cent of your own money. You might get fired, but even then, you’ll probably get hired somewhere else.” Johnstone smiled a little. “The best thing that ever happened to me was getting fired by Smith Barney.”

  Warren let out a low whistle. A million dollars a year? That was as much as Ivan Lendl made playing tennis! “Jesus. You think I’d have a shot at a decent school?”

  “You went to Brown. With your experience down here, you’ll walk in. You’re a good-looking kid and Lucien Nahid likes you.” Johnstone waved at Warren. “I’d get out of here as fast as I could if I were you.”

  Like so many things he did on impulse, Warren had called Columbia University that afternoon and asked about the admissions process for the Business School. He was told to take the GMAT, a standardized test used like the SATs to evaluate applicants. Another call to the Educational Testing Service in Princeton got him the registration forms, and four days later he went as a walk-in to an auditorium at Pace University. The majority of the other people in the testing room looked dead serious and slightly nervous. A nice-looking, tall brunette came and took the seat next to Warren, smiling at him. The proctor checked everyone’s ID and went through the rules. Warren realized he hadn’t brought any pencils! He raised his hand, and when he asked the proctor if any were available, the girl reached over and poked him, then tossed him a crisply sharpened pencil with the International Paper logo printed on the shaft.

  “You wake up late or something?” she asked him. He shrugged, smiled, and thanked her. Warren knew he had a knack for standardized exams and finished each section quickly, comfortable that he had done well. After he finished the last section with fifteen minutes to spare, he’d run across the street and bought a $60 roller-ball pen and managed to catch the brunette before she got to the subway.

  “I wanted to return the favor,” he said, extending the Montblanc box.

  “Are you kidding? That’s like a confirmation gift or something!”

  He liked her big smile. “I’m Warren.” He leaned toward her and put the box in her hand. “And I wrote my phone number on the bottom … there.”

  “Well, Warren, I’m Deborah.” She was still grinning and opened the box. “Give me your hand.”

  “My hand? Jeez, we’ve just met!”

  He let her take his right hand in her left. She turned it over, opened the top of the pen with her teeth, and wrote her phone number on the meaty part of his palm. “Maybe you can give me a call and explain to me how you finished every section of that test half an hour before me. Did you actually answer any of the questions?”

  “I guess so. Who knows? Are you free for dinner tonight? Does International Paper let you out for meals?” She really was pretty, and he liked the way her hair fell across her eyes.

  Deborah stepped back and gave him a long once-over. She nodded. “You’re pretty cute. Pretty sure of yourself too. You think you can figure everything out so fast?”

  Warren smiled and looked down, a little embarrassed. “I’m not that quick, and I don’t get phone numbers from girls like you very often. I didn’t want to let you get away.”

  “You’re good! Modesty and flattery are a lethal combination. I live on Forty-Ninth and Second. Call me at six thirty and we’ll meet at seven thirty. You got that, Warren?”

  “I’ll be early.”

  Deborah looked at him for a second and smiled. “I just hope you’re not always in such a rush!”

  * * *

  His almost perfect score on the exam, together with a nice letter from Johnstone, and a pleasant interview through which Warren remained charming and enthusiastic, had secured Warren a place in the January class at Columbia despite his slightly lackluster grades from Brown. His date with Deb had also gone well, and he had seen her once or twice a week in the three months since the test. She was hoping to go to Kellogg at Northwestern University in Chicago or UC Berkeley Business School, so they both knew it wasn’t likely to last. She got in to NYU and Berkeley, and Warren was disappointed when she told him she would be moving to California. IP had an office where she could work part-time across the Bay and would pick up her tuition. He always liked having a girlfriend and couldn’t stand going to parties or out to clubs to try to meet girls. Deb was smart and funny, and with her long legs and high energy she was a lot of fun in bed. But, he was in New York for good, and he couldn’t convince her to stay.

  When he got the acceptance letter from Columbia, he called his dad, who had moved back to Millbrook, New York, after he’d left for college. He taught at an indoor tennis club four days a week and also worked with the team at the Millbrook School. “Jesus, Warren, I never thought you’d have any interest in business. You only read the sports pages and the funnies.”

  “I think you’re the only person left alive who calls the comics funnies,” Warren had said into the phone, smiling.

  “Well, your mother thought you’d do something in the art world. She figured you had a nose for it—the ‘commercial instinct’ is what she called it.”

  “Dad, I think the only people less honest than art dealers are probably commodities traders,” Warren said with a tinge of disdain for the thievery he’d witnessed.

  “Warren, I’m not sure you’re going to run into a whole lot of honest people in the finance world. My pops always told me the only straight people he’d ever met were bookies. They told you the odds, paid when you won, and you knew up front what the vigorish was.”

  “Yeah. Don’t I recall Grandma saying something about being able to buy a mansion with all the dough Gramps blew on the horses?” Warren loved the way his dad used the language of the twenties and thirties.

  “Nobody ever said you could beat a straight game. That’s probably why everyone’s trying to get the fix in all the time. And Pops never bet on anything.”

  Warren laughed a little and thanked his father for the advice. His own grubstake had grown to almost $75,000, which, even after taxes, meant he had more than enough money to pay his living expenses and tuition. Money wouldn’t be a problem, at least until he figured out what he would actually do with an MBA.

  “I always figured you’d be okay. Maybe I didn’t hand you a lot of money or a family business, but at least I didn’t beat you up over your lousy grades, kiddo. I remember someone telling me Albert Einstein flunked math.”

  “Yeah, well, that wasn’t exactly right, Pop. He was a brilliant student. But your heart was in the right place. And besides, money would’ve just made me miserable. Look at all the rich kids we knew. And how will I ever get rich if I didn’t start out poor? Where’s the motivation?” In college, he’d had several friends who went on to run their family businesses. All of them complained about it, yet most of them also immediately sprouted huge egos and paychecks while everyone else was struggling just to pay the rent. His resident adviser at Brown had moaned and whined about the soul-deadening work at his family’s multibillion-dollar Midwestern real estate company, but three years later he had abandoned linguistics for a senior job with his dad, a giant penthouse on Lake Michigan, and a seat on the board at the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Warren also got to see firsthand the problems of kids with lots of money but bad family lives. He spent his junior year at a private high school in Manhattan, and of the twenty-one boys, almost all from immense wealth and old families, four had committed suicide before graduation. His dad saw it too. A garment executive had built three tennis courts at his Long Island home so his son could practice on the same surfaces that
the Grand Slam tournaments were played on. The boy’s total winnings as a professional wouldn’t have paid for the fences. Warren’s father, Ken, had tried unsuccessfully to get the boy interested in his family’s clothing business, but having been told all his life how great an athlete he was, and then realizing that he was not even average among the elite, the boy became a coke and heroin user and almost killed himself in a car accident on the European tour stop at Bordeaux. The boy’s father had shrewdly taken advantage of the trip to the French hospital as an opportunity to buy and ship home a few dozen cases of wines from the great château, and a new Porsche the boy crashed soon after his recovery, killing a Yale undergraduate.

  “Yep, well, maybe you’re right there, kiddo,” Ken said, sharing the unspoken thought. “I guess I always had a master plan and just didn’t know it! Anyway, let me know how you’re doing. I’ve always heard economics is a regular joy.”

  “You bet, Pop. Listen, all I know is you’ve got to suffer if you want to sing the blues.”

  two

  When Warren got to the Hertz counter at West Palm Beach airport, the only vehicle available was a white Lincoln Town Car.

  “Excuse me, but are you certain you don’t have anything available in any size that is a bit less immediately ethnically identifiable?” Warren asked the girl who was struggling with the endless ID number on his New York license.

  “What?” She seemed confused by his request.

  Sometimes Warren wondered whom he thought he was amusing.

  After a few minutes filling out the new computerized forms, and a brief shuttle-bus ride, he was winding his way up the coast toward Jupiter Island and Hobe Sound at the end of a warm, sunny day. Although he spoke about Hobe Sound as if he’d been there, Warren’s only knowledge of the place had come from oblique references in the gossip columns, and the occasional mention of it by the wealthy women whose horses he’d groomed as a kid in Millbrook and at the equestrian barns out in Bridgehampton. It was evidently the winter home to the old-money WASP establishment, much farther up the social food chain than Palm Beach.

  With his map in one hand, he mentally followed Chas’s instructions until he found himself crossing a small bridge. Shortly thereafter, a police car appeared in his rearview mirror, and only a few moments later he was signaled to pull over with a brief blare of the siren.

  The uniformed and armed man who emerged from the vehicle came up beside Warren’s window and tipped his hat. “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t recognize your car. Who are you visiting?” It wasn’t clear to Warren if this man was actually a police officer or simply a private security guard.

  “Hi. My name is Warren Hament, from New York, and I’m visiting the Harpers.”

  “Oh, yes. They’re up the road about a half mile on the right. The gray columns. Thank you, Mr. Hament.”

  The man turned and walked back to his car, and Warren noticed as he drove on that he was followed and watched until he had pulled into the driveway. The short coral-gravel driveway opened to a circular car park that held an old Volkswagen Bug, an aging Mercedes sedan, and a Ford station wagon. The façade of the house was neoclassic, of cut limestone, surrounded by dense vegetation that made judging its dimensions impossible. As he rang the bell at the broad teak door, the security man was still watching from the road, waiting to see him greeted.

  Galbreath Harper had founded the American branch of his family’s London and Edinburgh bank in 1935. What had been a small investment advisory grew into a major private bank and investment manager by the early 1950s. They were respected for their honest advisory work, and banking acumen. When he failed to have any sons and his daughter evinced no interest in the business, he sold the firm to a German bank for a reported $270 million. Since then, he had been an economic adviser to two presidents and had amassed one of the best collections of Pre-Raphaelite art in the world. He had donated a great deal of it to the Boston Athenaeum and made the seed contribution toward building a new wing, named for him, to house the works. Chas was proud of his background and did nothing to hide it. The Harper’s money came from an era when bankers actually helped build companies and create new and viable businesses. There was no doubt that he would work with his family’s fortune, although he might spend a few years learning about investments at a bank after graduation.

  Like many of his generation who had succeeded after the Depression, “Gal” Harper built himself winter homes in Islesboro, Maine, and tiny Hobe Sound, Florida. His house, like all the other great structures along the beach, was referred to as a “cottage,” although it had nine bedrooms and was built of Indiana limestone in the style of a Roman villa. From the moderately scaled entry, a grand square foyer opened, its cream-marble floors worn smooth, but highly polished. Through a broad opening directly ahead was the parlor, or living room, decorated in bright yellow chintzes and a finely woven coir carpet, with fifteen-foot-high arched French doors that opened out to a panoramic view of the Atlantic Ocean. The furniture was oversize and comfortable looking, and every table held a small collection of objects. Warren was invited in to wait in the living room, where he was drawn to a group of tiny, albino sea creatures nestled at the base of an imposing Chinese vase that had been wired as a lamp. He gingerly lifted a minuscule crab, its shell as smooth as stone, and every feature crisp, reproduced in perfect detail.

  “My grandfather found those in Dakar. They’re all made of ivory—before it became illegal. Neat, huh?” Chas had come in from one of the wings.

  “Incredible.”

  “Yeah, they were made for some prince about three or four hundred years ago, and now here they are in our living room. You want to take a swim?” Chas was in a pair of the most garish swim trunks Warren had ever seen. They were surfer length and baggy, with bright blue, orange, and fuchsia flowers everywhere. In them, Chas’s lean, taut body looked almost sticklike.

  “If you’re going to wear those, let’s hit the ocean. No shark will come within a mile of us. Bad taste.” Warren had noticed that Chas loved to be teased about his preppy clothes and purposefully played up the outrageous colors so popular with that crowd.

  Chas laughed and directed Warren out to the foyer, then through a door that opened to a long, columned stone pergola. The house extended from two long Ls around a court, which contained a broad limestone patio with steps leading down to a massive swimming pool. To the left of the pool facing away from the main section of the house, the pergola fronted a row of guest suites. A matching pergola across the pool fronted steps to the beach, and the Atlantic Ocean. At the far end of the pool, a sculpture of a nude female figure at the center of a fountain created a gentle splash of water, which echoed within the court and blended with the sound of the breakers.

  “That’s a Frishmuth, isn’t it?” Warren asked, pointing at the fountain.

  “Jesus, Hament, Corelli is right. You do know everything.” Chas opened a door to one of the guest rooms. “That’s a Frishmuth, all right. Gramps evidently knew her.”

  “Nah, I don’t know everything, I just paid attention in art history because the professor was so hot.”

  Actually, Warren’s mother, Susan, an art historian, had taught him about painting and sculpture before she and his father had split up, and he’d kept the passion through school and an unpaid internship at the Guggenheim during the summer of his freshman year. When she had moved to Cambridge, she gave up custody of Warren to Ken, and since Warren’s brother, Danny, was at boarding school and spent his summers working in the top hospitals and labs in Boston, Danny wound up much closer to their mother. Warren stepped past Chas into the bedroom, a large, bright space with muted, pastel-upholstered furniture and the anomaly of two twin beds.

  “Pretty shabby accommodations, wouldn’t you say?” Part of Chas’s charm was the way he professed amazement at the luxury that surrounded him. The windows on the far wall looked over a small, formal garden filled with roses and vines climbing over bright white arbors. The property was grand and yet the scale somehow livable
, and every detail had been meticulously planned.

  “Not bad at all. But I see you’ve provided at least one obstacle to my love life. Maybe you can prep me. What’s the best line to use when I’m on this bed, the girl’s on that bed, and I’ve got to get one of us to move? Really, I’m lost here. Help me.”

  “Hament, I have faith. If you manage to get some girl back here, she’ll probably volunteer to push the beds together for you.”

  “She may have to after this stupid tennis tournament. Let’s swim.” Warren shucked his travel clothes and pulled on a brand-new pair of Polo boxer swim trunks. Two nights before, he’d carefully removed the horse-and-rider logo, which he hated. There was something grasping about that trademark, given that Ralph Lauren was the son of a Jewish housepainter named Lifshitz and had probably never been within fifty feet of a polo pony. But there was no denying he had a genius for classic style.

  After a race up and back in the pool, which left Warren the surprisingly winded winner, they toweled off, and Chas told him to change into his tennis clothes and they’d go practice a bit. Warren went back to his room and pulled out one set of Fred Perry whites that he’d laundered the night before, and his two Head racquets. He’d arranged to play against a pro at Crosstown tennis courts over the days before break, hoping he could shake the rust out of his game. The savings from his commodities earnings were getting a little lean, but he still had enough for tuition and rent through the end of school, and to keep up the checks he’d been sending to his dad every month. His mother’s new boyfriend, a lawyer, had relieved any need to help her, although, after meeting him, Warren doubted that would last too long. His dad never asked for any money, but Warren knew the alimony and his age were wearing on him. Warren hoped his mom would get remarried.