Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  Terri puts a steaming latte on my desk. Her freckled face beams and her eyes meet mine. It is an intimate moment: Together, we triumphed over the forces of evil against great odds. Yet at this moment, absolutely no one is beyond suspicion. Et tu, Terri? I force myself to smile back, even as Rich Honeywell’s mocking voice unexpectedly fills my head.

  You get lost along the way, Barston?

  A TRADER’S LOT

  BY TWIST PHELAN

  1 North End Avenue

  Every morning for the past nine months, David Sherwin had disembarked from the Hoboken ferry and joined the flow of people on the walkway to the New York Mercantile Exchange. Chewing on an antacid from the roll in his pocket, he would shuffle along with the crowd, his mind on his meager market positions.

  But today, David didn’t reach for the tablets. Instead, he tilted back his head and inhaled the faint saltiness of the river, barely discernable under the stench of diesel fumes from the ferry. The flat gray strip of water stretched away to the horizon, where it merged into the overcast sky. For an instant David was back five years, to when he’d first met Malia and other things weren’t so important.

  Heedless of the heavy mist, David walked with an almost forgotten energy—dodging concrete barricades and posts topped with security cameras, threading through knots of traders, clerks, and Exchange employees—toward the fifteen-story concrete and marble box that housed the world’s most important trading floors for metals and energy. Everyone he passed was talking about the same thing. “It’ll be there in two hours” … “The Hub was evacuated this morning” … “Already Category Four.” David walked faster.

  He passed three homeless men crowded under a concessionaire’s canopy, driven there by an earlier downpour. Propped up against the storefront, one of them wore a discarded trader’s jacket, the splash of yellow garish against the otherwise unremitting gray. Although he usually didn’t give to street people, David stuffed a bill into the offered cardboard cup and wondered if the man was the jacket’s original owner.

  I’ll stop at Cartier on the way home. Malia had always wanted one of those watches, the kind with the twelve little diamonds around the face. Maybe I can get to the Porsche dealership before it closes. David pictured a low-slung convertible—red, her favorite color.

  “Up for this afternoon’s game, Dash?” The familiar voice jarred David from his daydreams. “They’re playing the Dodgers.” Mike Vigneri, a fellow trader in the natural-gas pit, came up beside him. When things were slow, Vigneri sometimes ducked out before the closing to catch an afternoon game at Shea.

  “Sure, if it’s quiet,” David said, knowing no trader would be leaving the Floor early today. Vigneri grinned at the joke.

  David pushed through the revolving doors of the main entrance and strode across the marble lobby. He inserted his ID card into the turnstile slot and walked through the metal detector.

  The Exchange was located less than two blocks from where the towers had stood, and security had been substantially increased since the attacks. In addition to the metal detector in the lobby, surveillance equipment had been installed on the Floor and around the building perimeter, public tours had been discontinued, and cops in flak jackets accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the premises. On elevated terror-alert days, a Coast Guard gunboat armed with missiles sat offshore in the murky Hudson.

  “This hurricane is sending gas to the fucking moon!” Vigneri said as they changed into their trader jackets in the locker room. He rubbed his thick hands together. “Gonna be some serious money made today.”

  “Yeah,” David said. If Vigneri only knew. He stuffed his pit cards and trade pad into a pocket of his bright blue jack t Except for the color, it looked like a med student’s lab coat. He clipped a yellow badge to his collar, just above his photo ID. The bright plastic pin was engraved with four letters derived from the initials of his name: DASH Traders called each other by their badge symbols and used them when writing up trades.

  The badge meant David had a seat on the Exchange. Not an actual place to sit—on the Floor, only the clerks did that—but rather the right to buy and sell commodity futures on the trading floor. Exchange seats sold for two million dollars, or were leased for upwards of twenty thousand a month. The seat David traded on was owned by his wife.

  At least it had been until two days ago.

  David popped an antacid and closed his locker. “I’ll see you up there,” he said.

  Although he usually took the elevator, today David bounded up the stairs, reaching the Floor five minutes before the opening bell. Crude oil, heating oil, gasoline, natural gas, propane, coal—the Exchange set the prices for the fuels that ran the world’s economies. Out of breath from the unaccustomed sprint, David pushed his way to his usual place in the natural-gas pit.

  While other exchanges were going all-electronic, and overnight energy trading could be done by computer, during business hours the New York Mercantile Exchange still transacted business as it had for over a hundred years—buyers and sellers announcing bids and offers at the top of their voices.

  As a rule, only a handful of natural-gas traders were usually in the ring this early. But today the pit was packed, the mélange of garish polyester jackets turning the space into a kaleidoscope. Traders who normally worked crude oil or gasoline pushed in next to the natural-gas regulars to get in on the action.

  The room had a musty, damp-clothes smell, despite the cold drafts pouring from vents in the ceiling. As the electronic clock moved toward 10 o’clock, David could feel a surge of anticipation roll through the pit, more intense than usual.

  His eyes went to the flat-screen television suspended overhead. The station was tuned to the Weather Channel instead of the customary Fox CNBC. The news crawl across the bottom of the screen read, Category 5—175 m.p.h. winds. David stared at the computer graphic, a swirl of neon red against a blue background. After Malia had gone to sleep, he had spent most of last night at his computer tracking the swirl as it moved across the Gulf. The tension in his shoulders eased as he saw the storm was still on course.

  The seconds on the digital clock slowly ticked by. 9:58:17 9:58:42 … David balled his hands into fists and jammed them into his pockets so no one would see them trembling. 9:59:36 … 9:59:53 … 10:00:00 The opening bell rang, and two hundred voices and two hundred arms were raised.

  “Hundred Deece at eleven even, hundred Deece at even!” … “Take ’em all!” … “Fifty Deece at thirty!” … “Buy ’em!” … “Fifty Deece at eleven fifty!” Traders screamed, waved their arms, bounced up and down—anything to get noticed and make the trade.

  Yesterday, natural gas had closed at ten dollars per contract. Overnight on the electronic market, the price had shot up a dollar. Now, seconds after the opening, it had jumped another fifty cents.

  David saw a pair of glasses knocked from a trader’s face by an errant elbow. Their owner was unfazed. “Two hundred Novy at twenty!” he shouted, his hands moving as if he were throwing down gang signs. Novy and Deece were slang for delivery months November and December.

  Instead of joining in the frenzy around him, David simply watched the quote board, where orange, green, and red numbers flickered against a black background. Natural-gas contracts were priced in dollars and cents, and normally moved up or down in one-cent increments. Today the price was increasing twenty, thirty cents at a time.

  A hurricane was heading for the Henry Hub, the gas-processing plant in Louisiana where over a dozen of the country’s major natural-gas pipelines converged. The Hub had been shut down the night before as a precautionary measure, squeezing supply and driving up the price. If the pipelines were damaged by the storm, natural-gas delivery would be held up for weeks, possibly months, resulting in default on billions of dollars’ worth of delivery contracts.

  According to the National Hurricane Center’s computer model, the hurricane would collide with the Hub in less than two hours. As the red swirl moved across the TV screen, the pit became a sel
ler’s market, the price of natural gas soaring as the big producers bought back their outstanding contracts and the speculators who had sold short scrambled to cover their positions. The only question was, How far up will it go?

  The rubber floor and acoustical padding on the walls did little to blunt the clamor. The din of the Exchange washed over David. Closing his eyes, he reveled in the sound of wealth being created. Mine and Malia’s

  Beside him Vigneri completed a sale. Trading jacket straining at the seams, he scribbled down details on price, quantity, and delivery month, and the badge symbol of the trader who had bought from him on a pit card before frisbeeing it toward a man sitting behind a low counter at the center of the pit. Wearing a baseball hat and plastic goggles as protection from the flying pieces of cardboard, the pit card clocker frantically collected and time-stamped the cards. They were then rushed to the data entry room for transmission onto the wire services and entry into the Exchange’s permanent records.

  We could go to Europe. Malia had studied French in college. David imagined the two of them sitting in a Paris café. Sunlight sparkled off the diamond trim on Malia’s new watch, and she was laughing like she used to.

  Vigneri nudged him. “What’s up, Dash? Don’t you want in on this?”

  “I’m already long.” David paused. “A hundred contracts.”

  Vigneri’s jaw dropped. “Well, fuck me.”

  Maybe I’ll fly Malia to Paris, give her the watch there. She couldn’t be mad at him then. He imagined her pink and glowing among the rumpled bedclothes in a romantic hotel. Perhaps they could finally start their family.

  Malia’s father had been a natural-gas trader, too, doing well enough to retire to Bermuda after Malia left for college. He had kept his seat on the Exchange, though, leasing it out to various traders over the years. When he died last year, Malia had inherited it. Her father’s second wife had gotten the house and bank accounts in Bermuda.

  After her father’s death, Malia had planned to continue leasing out the seat. But David knew the extra few thousand a week after taxes wouldn’t be enough, not if they were to have children. He wanted kids, but Malia claimed she wasn’t ready. Their discussions had become arguments, worsening each month. Malia’s parents, though distant, had provided her with a comfortable childhood—piano and riding lessons, nice house, trips abroad, private school. David figured his wife’s reluctance stemmed from not wanting less for their own kids. But that took wealth—real wealth—the kind her father had made. The old guy had never said a word, but David was sure that Malia’s dad thought his daughter had married beneath her.

  “This is our chance, Malia,” he had said. After a few weeks she had given in, and David quit his job at a brokerage firm and became a trader in the natural-gas pit. That had been nine months ago.

  But things didn’t work out as David had planned. Floor trading for his own account was worlds away from sitting at a desk taking telephone orders from clients. Although he had mastered the skills of buying and selling on the Floor, David wasn’t a “natural.” He didn’t have a feel for the market, and couldn’t anticipate its ebbs and flows. Before long, he had burned through their nest egg. With barely any capital left, David had been reduced to trading one and two contracts at a time, eking out less than his former salary.

  But David was convinced more volume could improve his returns. “To make money, you have to spend money,” he had told Malia. But they had no access to additional funds—unless Malia borrowed against the value of her seat. A million and a half dollars of trading capital, the clearing firm rep had told him. But Malia wouldn’t hear of it.

  “It’s all we have for our retirement,” she had said when David raised the subject. Despite his entreaties, this time she stood firm, and David had resigned himself to an exisence as a one-lotter. Until the phone call from his brother last week.

  In love with the ocean, Thomas Sherwin had dropped out of college with the aim of spending his life on the deck of a ship. He currently ran a fairly successful fishing charter business out of a small port town in Louisiana.

  “Got the boats out of the Gulf yesterday,” Tom had told David. “All the signs point to a big one coming our way—warm water, cold mass descending, no wind shear. Even the old timers are leaving. Looks like it’s going to hit around where those pipelines are.”

  Tom knew weather, especially hurricanes. His livelihood depended on it. When he said a tropical storm was headed through the ocean toward the Henry Hub, David believed him.

  After hanging up the phone, David had been overcome with a peculiar sensation. A hunch, a gut reaction. The other traders talked about them all the time, but David had never really understood before now. It was an awareness of having arrived at an unmarked intersection in life, the sense that if he didn’t act, he would forever suffer the misery of what could have been.

  Getting the money turned out to be easier than he had thought. David merely slipped the signature page of the loan documents into the stack of tax returns waiting for Malia’s signature. As usual, she scribbled her name without reading anything. His clearing firm accepted it without question.

  The Exchange required all members’ trades to be backed by a clearing firm. To secure the guarantee, members pledged collateral—usually cash, sometimes a letter of credit or the deed to an Exchange seat.

  David liked his clearing firm rep. Earl Kinder was a tall, middle-aged man with the dry understanding of someone who had heard too many lies and witnessed too many traders undone by the pits. Though a bit too cautious for David’s taste, he was one of the few who did business with one-lotters.

  Kinder’s fingers had hesitated over the keyboard. “There’s no shame in being a one-lotter, Dash.”

  A photograph sat on the clearing house rep’s desk. It showed a round-cheeked woman and two boys with Kinder’s red hair, standing among piles of leaves in front of a modest white house. David had studied it for a moment.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  Kinder had started typing, pushing back from the computer less than a minute later.

  “There’s your one-point-five, Dash. You know the drill. If you fall below your margin, start liquidating, or I’ll do it for you. Lose it all, and I have to pull your badge and sell the seat.”

  David briefly clenched his jaw. A million and a half dollars was in his trading account, secured by Malia’s seat. At last I’m holding size. It was like holding dynamite. He could feel the power—and the undercurrent of danger, too.

  “I’ll be fine,” he repeated. “There won’t be a problem.”

  After leaving the clearing firm’s offices, David had gone downstairs to the Floor. At an unattended computer, he had logged onto the National Hurricane Center’s website. The tropical storm was following the path his brother had predicted. We are not concerned about the Gulf Coast and we expect little if any impact on the oil industry, read the latest bulletin. But David hadn’t been swayed. Tom always called storms right. His gut told him there was no reason to doubt his brother now.

  With twenty minutes left before the close, David had commenced buying. Ten, fifteen contracts at a time, working his way up. Some of the traders had been curious about such volume from a one-lotter, but David explained he was doing a favor for a broker friend.

  After the closing bell rang, David had flipped through his trade pad, slightly astonished. He owned a hundred naturalgas contracts. Every ten-cent change in price meant a loss or gain of a hundred thousand dollars.

  On the ferry ride home, David had paced the deck, restless and jumpy. He wouldn’t be riding the slow, fat boat much longer. Maybe he and Malia would move to Manhattan, or better yet, Connecticut. Malia and their kids would have their own leaf-strewn yard.

  Now, thirty-six hours later, that life was within reach. All David had to do was watch the numbers go up as the red swirl moved across the screen. The hurricane closed in on the Hub, and the fifty-cent opening bump in price became sixty cents, then seventy-five.

 
“Thirty Deece at eighty-five!” someone yelled from the other side of the ring. David did the math in his head. Up a million and three-quarters. Caught up in the calculations, he didn’t hear the quiet voice right away.

  “Looks like you made a good call, Dash,” Kinder repeat-ed.

  Because a trader could buy or sell ten-dollars’ worth of contracts for every dollar’s worth of security posted, the clearing firms kept a close eye on their customers’ positions. If the market changed direction and a firm didn’t pull a trader’s badge in time, the clearing firm had to eat the loss. David had seen Kinder physically hustle a busted trader off the Floor so he couldn’t do any more damage—not to himself, but to the clearing firm’s credit line.

  “Remember, the market gives, and the market takes away,” the clearing house rep said. “Don’t you think it’s time you covered?”

  David checked the quote board. The December contract price had hit twelve dollars, up twenty percent from yesterday’s close. He’d made two million dollars in less than an hour—and the storm still hadn’t hit the Hub.

  “Not yet,” he said.

  But watching the clearing house rep walk away, David wondered exactly whom he was trying to convince. If he sold his position, he could pay back Kinder, redeem the seat, and be left with more trading capital that he had ever imagined, his one-lot days forever behind him. Malia would want me to get out. David stretched up on his toes, preparing to shout his offer, then hesitated.

  To make money, you have to spend money. His own words came back to him, and he felt a sense of certainty, destiny even. There was two million dollars’ profit in his account, enough to buy another hundred gas contracts. David glanced at the television screen. The hurricane was still bearing down on Louisiana.

  Successful traders all had a story about their Big Day—the moment on the Floor that had defined them, the day they made the trade that launched them into a new place. This was his Big Day—David was certain of it. At last Malia would respect him.