Wall Street Noir

by Peter Spiegelman

  “He’ll see you now.” An assistant in stilettoes as thin as ice picks came striding up the hall, carrying herself with a kind of daunting confidence meant to convey a sense of both her own importance and the visitor’s provisional status.

  Nancy struggled to her feet and followed her past a row of mounted platinum records and movie posters, feeling that familiar hummingbird flutter in her gut. Come on, you can do this. Don’t be such a girl. A great oak door opened onto a sweeping godlike view of northern Manhattan, a perspective that made the trees of Central Park look like the current occupant’s private garden and filled her with an uncomfortable mixture of envy and awe. Its majesty was only slightly undercut by the presence of a Styrofoam backboard in the corner and the brutal thump of hip-hop coming from a pair of four-foot-high Altec Lansing speakers.

  “So you’re supposed to be the new coach, huh?” He spoke without taking his eyes off his computer monitor. A stocky, thick-necked young man in charcoal double-breasted pinstripes, with a pair of black suede Bruno Magli loafers insouciantly up on his desk. “No disrespect,” he said. “But if it was up to me, you wouldn’t even be here.”

  “And why’s that?” She sat down before him without being asked, trying to stake a claim and accommodate herself to the deliberate thuggishness in his manner. A lot of them were like that these days. The new breed, who wore flashy jewelry to the office, listened to misogynist rap, and left copies of Maxim on their desks, in full view of their pregnant guests.

  “I don’t think I need it,” he said matter-of-factly. “When I took over as head of worldwide media last year, this company’s stock was in the toilet. Now we’ve got three CDs in Billboard’s Top Ten, four of the top-rated shows on the networks, and the top-grossing game system in the country for the last three weeks running. Nothing wrong with the way I’m doing my job.”

  “So why do you think the board hired me to work with you?”

  He finally took his eyes off the monitor, to give her the

  “I guess somebody thinks I need a little ‘seasoning.’” He made little quotation marks with his fingers. “They want me to work on my ‘sandbox skills.’ Apparently, Scottso might have hurt somebody’s little feelings when he took over. Like that has any relevance.”

  “And you don’t think it does?”

  “Revenues have been up every quarter since I came in. All these Ivy League bitches with their Harvard MBAs and their Yale degrees wouldn’t know a hit if it came up and bit them in the ass. Things needed to be shaken up. A couple of dishes got chipped along the way? So fucking what? I never knew this industry had so many pussies.”

  She tried to cross her legs, knowing that she was being tested here. Pussies. Bitches The language of intimidation. If you protested, you were barred from the boys’ locker room. But if you put up with too much, you were a doormat for life.

  “So you’re the only one with balls around here, I guess,” she said flatly, letting him know she could play if she really had to.

  He snorted in contempt. “You’re the only one with balls,” he mimicked her. “Listen to you. Like you’re going to tell me about my business? And where’d you go to college, Princeton?”

  “I did my graduate work in organizational psychology at the University of Michigan.” She started to stick her chin out and then caught herself. “Why is that important to you?”

  “Organizational psychology.” He looked like he’d just licked a cat. “That’s like a tofu hamburger, isn’t it? What are you? You’re not in business and you’re not a real shrink. Who do you think you’re kidding?”

  She felt the little form squirming and kicking inside her, not wanting to let on that she’d asked herself the same question at least once a week for the last twelve years. She wondered if he somehow knew this was the biggest account she’d ever landed. Twelve years of patiently handing out business cards, trying to spread her name around, billing for less than she was worth, trying to build on each of her little success stories. Twelve years of holding hands with brusque, socially underdeveloped executives who needed a coach to keep them from alienating colleagues and damaging their companies.

  “Well, my understanding is that I have a mandate to work with you on your management skills,” she said, trying to sound firm. “And I usually don’t get called in if everything is hunky-dory.”

  He fidgeted a little, his left loafer waggling on the edge of the desk.

  “But how the hell can you understand my position? Have you ever even run a business?” He paused for effect, hoping to humiliate her. “I’ve got fifteen hundred people answering to me worldwide and I bet you can’t even balance your checkbook. And now you’re going to walk in here and tell me something I don’t already know?”

  She had the sensation of finding herself pressed up against a cold wall. If she let him push her around now, she’d never gain his respect. Her eyes moved across the office, searching for something that would put them on more even footing. When everything else failed nowadays, she could usually make her pregnancy into a conversation piece, sometimes even a bond she could share with other women and family-minded men. But there were no photos of children here. Just shots of several different silicon-enhanced stripper-types accompanying him on Cancún vacations, fishing expeditions in the Florida Keys, and autographed photos taken with members of Bon Jovi and various sports luminaries she didn’t quite recognize.

  Instead, with mounting unease, she found her gaze drawn to a life-sized cut-out in the corner, the figure of a barrel-chested man in a tuxedo with a picture of her client’s face imposed on the top.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Whadayya mean, what’s that? It’s the Don.”

  “The Don?”

  “Whaddaya, kidding? The Don. The Don!” He looked incredulous. “Don Corleone. From … The … Godfather Maybe you’ve heard of it …?”

  He smiled as if he was addressing a child with special needs, and she nodded, mildly embarrassed, not daring to let on that somehow she had reached the ripe age of thirty-eight without ever seeing that particular film.

  Oh, of course she’d heard of it. She even vaguely remembered her older sister and her middle school friends whispering and giggling about some tawdry bit of business on page twenty-seven of the novel it was based on. But the truth was, the story had never interested her enough to actually sit down and watch it, even though most of the men she worked with referred to it as some kind of sacred inviolate Ur text. All those dark muttering codes and oaths of masculinity, all those silly posturing threats from a bunch of frat boys. She could never take it seriously, even when her husband begged her to watch it with him.

  “Ohhhh, so you’re the Don,” she said.

  He looked pleased, perhaps hearing an undertone of admiration that she had not really intended.

  “What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully?” he mumbled. “Had you come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.”

  She froze in alarm, until she realized he must have been reciting lines from the film.

  “You sound just like him,” she said.

  Who was in this movie anyway? Marlon Brando? Al Pacino? She was more partial to films about women triumphing over adversity. A League of Their Own Pretty Woman

  “I better.” He laced his hands behind his head. “I must’ve watched it two, three hundred times with my old man.”

  “Really?” She pretended to be impressed.

  “Well, whaddaya want? You grow up in Bensonhurst, it’s like learning the Pledge of Allegiance.”

  “Sure. A rite of passage.”

  She watched the way his body language changed as he began to talk about it. How his feet finally came off the desk and he sat forward in his seat a little, looking her in the eye for the first time.

  “You ever wonder …?”

  He’d started to ask an earnest question but stopped himself, not sure if he was quite ready to show her any kind of d
eference yet.

  “What?”

  She saw him wrestle with an idea, his eyes narrowing as he tried to pin it down, a flush of boyish pinkness rising in his cheeks.

  “Did you ever really wonder why Kay left Michael?” he asked.

  She steepled her fingers, as if it was a question that had long troubled her as well.

  “Well, why do you think Kay left Michael?”

  She watched him for cues, seeing that she’d set off a circuit of associations. He looked down at a shrink-wrapped CD that had been lying on his desk and scratched at the edge of the cellophane with his fingernail.

  “I don’t know,” he said, turning pensive. “She acts like she’s shocked when she finds out what he does for a living, but c’mon—like she didn’t know already from being at the wedding and seeing his father? What business did she think they were in, State Farm home insurance?”

  “Maybe she just came to realize he wasn’t the man his father was,” she said glibly.

  He looked as if he’d just been slapped. You could almost see the outline of a palm print on his cheek.

  Why’d you say that?

  She shrugged, not having really meant anything by it. But of course he was going to react. A therapist getting a rise out of a client by bringing up his parents was like a cook turning on a stove. If it didn’t occur to you, you were probably in the wrong business.

  “So are you saying that if Michael could’ve learned to be strong like the Don, he wouldn’t have lost his family?” he said, again reading more into her words than she’d put in.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  In the course of just a few seconds, he seemed to have transformed from a truculent executive to a parochial school boy working up the nerve to raise his hand in class.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said quietly. “And if you tell a soul I asked you this, I swear I’ll throw you out the window.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I hire you, can you teach me organization principles according to the Godfather?”

  “Can I …?”

  “Can you be a wartime consigliere? That’s what I’m asking.”

  She weighed her answer as she looked around the room, calculating that there were at least six pieces of furniture present that would probably cover a year’s mortgage for their “classic six” co-op on the Upper West Side. The guy who took care of the plants in the office was probably making as much as she was. She tried to fight down her growing resentment, reminding herself that she was supposed to be here to help. Then she remembered a line from a spunky Meg Ryan comedy she’d loved a few years back, something Tom Hanks quoted from The Godfather

  “I’m ready to go to the mattresses,” she said.

  He grinned. “Bella.”

  Two nights later, she lay sideways on the living room couch, watching Diane Keaton stand helplessly on the threshold as one of her husband’s henchmen closed the door in her face and the closing-credits theme swelled.

  “Because he’s a beast,” she said.

  “What?”

  Her husband Mark, shaggy-haired, unemployed, and banished to the club chair at some point after the murders of Sollozzo and the police captain, looked up bleary-eyed.

  “It’s because he’s a beast,” she explained. “That’s why she’ll end up leaving him. Plain and simple.”

  “So you’re not going to take this job?”

  “Of course I’m going to take this job. Are you kidding? Did you see what our mortgage rate went up to today? We need this job.”

  He pulled a well-thumbed copy of Maximum PC out from under his buttocks, having just noticed he was sitting on it.

  “I thought you couldn’t stand this guy, Scottso.”

  “But now I get him.”

  “I don’t know.” He yawned and scratched his stomach. “How can you help someone you don’t like?”

  “Because unlike some people, I’m willing to do what it takes to …”

  She stopped herself from saying more, sucking in her lip. No point in flaying him again for being out of work for two months. It wasn’t entirely his fault that his little software start-up collapsed so soon after she got pregnant. If she wanted to marry a master of the universe, an industry leader, a true tycoon, she could have gone for some Wall Street lifer or some Cro Mag alpha-male type, like Scottso, instead of settling for her college boyfriend.

  “Well, just as long as it’s strictly business, I suppose it’ll be fine,” he said, holding the magazine in front of his face as if she hadn’t wounded him. “You’re a pro.”

  Larry Longman, head of the TV division, was a nervous man who always needed to be doing something with his hands. If he wasn’t squeezing a ball or fingering a pen, he was shooting his cuffs and making a half-closed fist, like he was holding a pair of dice.

  “I think I have a good relationship with Scott,” he said. “I only have good things to say about him.”

  Nancy nodded, already hearing something in his voice the way a police officer would hear gunshots from two blocks away. “I understand, but I want to assure you that everything we say here in the evaluation process is anonymous. He’s not going to know where it came from.”

  “Well, not that I would say anything negative, but how do I know that?”

  He rearranged the pens and paperweights on his desk, touched his computer mouse, and tugged on the fat end of his tie.

  “You can trust my discretion. I wouldn’t have much of a reputation in the consulting business if I couldn’t guarantee anonymity when I’m interviewing different people in a company to do a 360-degree evaluation of an executive.”

  “True.” Larry rubbed his palms together. “True. But couldn’t he still guess who your source is when he reads your report? I mean, if somebody’s talking about how he treats people in the TV division, he’s going to know it’s me, isn’t he?”

  “You have my word that I’ll protect you by disguising your comments.” She smiled. “I mean, we all have the same goal here, which is to improve overall performance for the company.”

  “Right. Right.

  He reshuffled his pens, fingered his cell phone, smoothed his tie, and shot his cuffs again. She made a note to herself, seeing how much of a disturbance Scottso could cause without even being present in a room.

  “So why don’t you just start off by telling me a little about Scott’s management style?”

  “Well … obviously, he’s very, very bright …” He made the half-fist again and began shaking it, as if he was getting ready to throw the dice. “And very, very energetic …”

  But… “ She leaned forward, as if she was trying to see something smoking under the hood.

  “But…” The fist tightened. “Some people sometimes feel a little shut out of the decision-making process …”

  “He can be autocratic,” she ventured, making it a statement rather than a question.

  Definitely.” He nodded, emboldened, beginning to trust her a little. “Some people might even call it arrogant. Rude. Bullying. Not that that’s always a bad thing …”

  “It’s better to be feared than loved,” she said.

  “That’s funny.” He fumbled for his rubber ball, looking startled. “Scott’s always saying the same thing.”

  Michael Corleone was plotting again. On the screen, Al Pacino was playing it cool, all steady sunken eyes and coiled posture in a coat black as crow’s feathers, as he carefully explained to hot-headed Frank Five Angels what he wanted done to Hyman Roth for his treachery.

  “There are many things my father taught me here in this room,” he was saying. “He taught me: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”

  “Amazing,” said Nancy, sitting up on the couch.

  “What?” Mark looked up from studying the tech column in the Wall Street Journal.

  “The way he takes power, by using people and turning them against each other.”

  “You know, I don’t think you’re supposed to admire him.” Mark fol
ded the paper over. “He had his brother-in-law killed at the end of the last movie.”

  “I know, but he’s so … controlled. The way he takes care of his family.”

  “Sounds like you’re falling in love,” he said, watching the movie again. “Maybe you’re spending too much time on your client. He’s starting to rub off on you.”

  “Maybe you need to start working again.”

  Ouch.”

  “Well, it’s true. Did you see what the prime rate went up to today? I don’t think we’d be struggling with the mortgage if one of us was willing to be a little more ruthless sometimes.” She lay back again, immediately regretting her sharpness with him. Still, it true. Why couldn’t he be a little stronger, a little more deliberate, a little more cold-blooded like these contained and quietly decisive men on the screen? After all, he had a baby of his own coming, a family to take care of.

  She was beginning to understand what men like Scottso and Mark saw in these films, but also how short they fell of the image. They all thought they could be the Don, but really they were Fredos and Sonnys, either too weak-willed or too impulsive to hold onto power. They lacked the necessary detachment, the patient willingness to stand in the shadows letting events play themselves out until the right opportunity presented itself.

  “I want you to open an account,” she said.

  What?”

  “You heard me. I want you to set up an account, in your own name.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Just do what I’m asking you for once. Okay? Is that too much for you?”

  “You know, you’re getting kinda bossy all of a sudden, Mama.” He reached over and touched her stomach, seeing if the baby was moving. “Am I going to end up sleeping with the fishes before my son is born?”

  “Don’t tempt me.” She pushed his hand away.

  Scottso threw the evaluation report down on his desk, almost hitting a platter of tea and cookies his secretary had brought in, his face starting to redden.