Black Fridays

by Michael Sears

  He nodded once, like it hurt.

  “I just don’t get the ‘why’ of it. The SEC would have turned them up anyway. Then they’d be sure they were on to something.”

  He looked deflated, beaten—embarrassed. “That’s what Bill was reaming me out about. I thought you heard it all.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t hear a word. So, what was the point?” Then it hit me. “It was about me, right? You wanted to trip me up.”

  “I figured if I sent you off on some wild-goose chase with the Arrowhead bullshit, you’d waste your time and still come up with nothing in the end.”

  “So I would get the boot and you’d be Stockman’s go-to guy again.”

  “Something like that.”

  Spud was still back in the conference room up to his earlobes matching Arrowhead trade tickets.

  “Well done. It worked.”

  If the problem wasn’t with the Arrowhead trades, it could be anywhere. I’d have to start again from the top.

  “Look, thanks for the shirts. And thanks for opening up. Believe me, Jack, I am not your problem. I’m going to be gone in less than two weeks.”

  “From now on you’ve got my full cooperation. Anything you need, you let me know.” He handed me a business card with both his office and cell-phone numbers. I tucked it into my wallet and left.

  I had been reassured. Comforted. Confessed to and cosseted. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had also been manipulated. Outmaneuvered. Maybe it was a hangover from my time upstate, but I was not comforted by the thought that an ex-cop was now my bosom buddy. Cops were the best liars of all.

  I GOT HOME minutes before the Kid and Heather arrived.

  The Kid came in the door first, looking borderline meltdown. The eyes were darting, his fingers were beating an odd rhythm on the palms of his hands, and he was doing the one-note hum without ever seeming to take a breath. I went into a near meltdown of my own. I wanted to hold him and comfort him, I was afraid of the coming explosion, and I felt guilty that a moment before I had been happy and not thinking of my son.

  Heather followed him in. “He’s okay, Mr. Stafford. Really. Actually, he’s doing really well. We just ran into Mrs. Montefiore in the elevator.”

  When the Ansonia converted to condominiums, enough of the opera community that had always called it home stuck around and kept the place interesting. The Kid loved music, but some of the Ansonia’s characters were a bit larger than life—operatic—with all the trappings of divadom. Mrs. Montefiore spoke in arias, projecting to the back of the house in any setting. She was also a big woman—in every direction—and dressed to be noticed, in brilliantly colored caftans and hibiscus-print muumuus. She wore too much dangly jewelry and seemed to douse herself in Tabu each morning. For a five-year-old autistic child, being in an elevator with her was like being locked in a closet with Godzilla.

  “Maybe I should read to him,” I said, looking wildly about for one of his car books.

  “He’s coping, Mr. Stafford. Let him.” She crouched next to him and spoke in his direction, but not directly at him. “He’s home now. He’s in his safe place.” She turned to me. “The finger thing is healthy. Stimming. It helps him focus.”

  Heather had a tattoo of an ornate butterfly trapped in barbed wire on her arm that made me uncomfortable every time I looked at it. But she had the magic when it came to the Kid.

  The Kid took a breath and began pacing. He walked from the front door to the living room window, to the door to his room, and back to the start. He did the circuit three times, his fingers flicking impossibly fast the whole time, keeping exactly to the same course, the same steps, each time. And with each lap, he became less stressed. He stopped next to Heather and turned to me.

  “Hello, Jason.” He spoke in his little robot voice—no inflection or emphasis. Heather, the school, and I were all coaching him on the basics of social interplay. He had surprised us all by being a quick study.

  “Hey, Kid. Rough day?”

  “Fine.” A quick study, but still as communicative as a teenager.

  “How was school?”

  He thought about the question for a very long minute. It was too non-specific. I thought of amending it, but he answered first.

  “Fine.” And he turned and walked into his room. A perfectly normal American child.

  —

  SPUD LOOKED EXHAUSTED. I must have looked worse; he at least had youth, natural good looks, and all of his hair.

  It was four o’clock on Thursday afternoon and we had been plowing through trades all day, with only short breaks for coffee and bathroom. The mountains of computer printouts had moved from one side of the room to the other.

  “We are wasting our time,” I announced. My neck muscles were so tight I thought I was developing a hump.

  Spud leaned back in his chair. “Maybe we’re finding out there’s nothing there.”

  I didn’t believe it. “I need a different approach. Context. I need to speak to those other traders.”

  “You’ve got a full day with them tomorrow.”

  I nodded. “Tell me something. Barilla told me that Sanders was not a big producer for his first two years. Then this year he suddenly explodes. He’s a power hitter. Six months later, he’s dead and the SEC is asking questions. Why didn’t someone check up on him earlier?”

  Spud shook his head. “No one asks why when you’re making money.”

  “Nyah. It’s a natural question. Some junior trader comes along and thinks he discovered the money tree, the first thing you ask is ‘How are you making it?’”

  “It wasn’t anything illegal. Everybody knew what he was doing.”

  “Spud, lad. Have you been holding out on me?”

  “No! Really, there’s nothing to tell. He made a few big bets early on this year. The big guys on the desk knew all about it. He checked with them first.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Brian thought the market had been too quiet for too long—we were due for a shakeout. When the shit finally hit the fan, he figured two things would happen. First, volatility would explode. So he loaded up on options. It was the cheapest way to get the most leverage out of the trade. He cleared over five mil on that trade alone.”

  “Wasn’t he over his risk limits?”

  “Yeah, but the big guys knew. They let him.”

  Risk limits are internal controls—the SEC wouldn’t have cared. “What else?”

  “He figured the most vulnerable part of the market was still housing. Mortgages. He wasn’t supposed to trade in that stuff, but he made a good case. So they let him go short a few hundred mil or so.”

  “The guys in risk management weren’t all over him?”

  “The senior guys on the desk backed him up. I think they had the same trade on.”

  Again. Nothing illegal. It was fairly typical internal rule-bending but nothing that should have brought in the regulators.

  “It was that big options trade that showed me there were missing trades.”

  “Say again.”

  “All those trades that were hidden in the system? The Arrowhead trades.”

  “Yeah, I remember. And this big trade, where he cleared millions, was one of those?”

  “The unwind, yeah. Arrowhead took him out of the whole position. Brian was psyched. I thought he left some money on the table, too. Arrowhead probably made a half-mil or so themselves.”

  “Goddamnit!” If I’d known what questions to ask, I could have saved myself a lot of time and headaches. “Spud, that client keeps coming up. I want you to pull every Arrowhead trade. We’re going to look at them all over again.”

  “Not again.”

  “Think of it as penance for holding out on me,” I said.

  “I wasn’t holding out.” There was no passi
on in his denial. “I don’t know why anybody would care.”

  “I don’t either. But I don’t think Barilla had any idea this was going on. Stockman certainly didn’t. It may all be quite legal, but it keeps failing the sniff test. I’m not letting go until I know everything about those trades.”

  He made a show of looking at his watch. “And you want me to start now?”

  “Got a date?”

  “As a matter of fact. Remember? I’m supposed to meet Lowell Barrington for drinks.” Sanders’ buddy over on the stock side.

  “All right,” I sighed. “Soften him up for me. Do what you can on the Arrowhead trades before you leave. We’ll pick it up again in the morning.”

  I stood up and tossed my empty coffee cup into the trash.

  “And you’re cutting out?” He sounded more teasing than aggrieved.

  “Privileges of age and seniority.”

  “Got a date?”

  “As a matter of fact . . .”

  I SHAVED, SHOWERED, DEODORIZED, and trimmed my nose hairs. I put on a fresh pair of boxers and one of my new Thomas Pink white dress shirts. I gargled a second time, just to be sure. And I reminded myself of my father’s advice: “It’s not what you say to a woman, it’s how well you listen.”

  The last time I had gone on a date, I was a multimillionaire Wall Street managing director with a summer house in Montauk that I rarely had time for. And I had all my hair.

  Now I was an ex-con and celebrating my first paycheck in years. I looked my age and then some. Though my face had picked up a touch of normal color, the rest of me was still the standard prison hue—pasty white. I gave myself an honest appraisal. I smiled. The mirror didn’t break. Wanda was right—I looked better smiling. Still, I was no prize.

  Wanda and I had traded voice mail messages all day but had not yet actually had a conversation, so there was a touch of relief in seeing her striding up Amsterdam from the subway. I was waiting for the light. She saw me, waved, and gestured for me to wait.

  She walked like an athlete, long-legged and confident, with a touch of street attitude. Her wraparound dress clung in just the right spots. I liked watching her. So did other guys on the street—she turned heads. I felt more than a bit outclassed.

  “Hey. Would you mind if we didn’t start the evening in there?” She gestured toward P&G’s.

  “Not at all. I was going to suggest that myself.”

  She smiled, acknowledging the lie, but accepting it as a compliment. She put her arm through mine and turned us toward Broadway. With her heels, we were the same height.

  “I made reservations at Cafe Luxembourg, but if there’s someplace you’d rather?”

  She gave a short shake of her head. “Too showy. Too expensive. And they have nothing I like.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “Never. Let me ask you. Do you do Greek?”

  “Not on a first date.”

  She laughed lightly. “Come on, make an exception.”

  “Where to?”

  We started up Broadway. There was a Greek restaurant a few blocks up, but Wanda strode past it and continued uptown. I tried to match her pace. It wasn’t easy.

  “Is it far? Shall I get us a cab?”

  “I like to walk.”

  Maybe conversation could get her to slow the pace a bit.

  “So, do I ever get to find out what you do in Roger’s act?”

  “Ah, yes. My secret.” She smiled. It was a great smile. “Very little. I wear a costume like Wonder Woman—that seems to be the most important part—and I hand him props. It also helps if I act a bit clueless.”

  “I can’t imagine you as clueless.”

  “Thank you. I am, after all, a doctoral candidate. It’s all misdirection. Smoke and mirrors.”

  She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and struck a pose—one hip forward, back bent to accentuate her tits and ass. Her face was transformed by a smile of pure brilliance—or incipient idiocy—and a gaze of unfocused elation. She had magically lost all signs of higher brain functions, and it didn’t matter.

  “Scary, huh?” she said, relaxing the stance and turning uptown again.

  “No, not at all. Impressive, in fact. I’d say Roger’s lucky to have you.”

  “He acts like a stinker, but he’s not so bad. It’s easy money and it doesn’t interfere with school.”

  The conversation hadn’t slowed her pace at all. I swallowed a huff and kept up.

  “How far uptown are we walking? Columbia?”

  “My school. Not quite.”

  We passed the Zabar’s empire.

  “Why physical therapy?”

  “That’s a story,” she said.

  “But not a secret?”

  “No,” she laughed again. I was already in love with that laugh. “I was a dancer. I spent eight years with the Rockettes, did two national tours—Fosse and 42nd Street—and for three years I did Cats in London, Paris, and Frankfurt.”

  “Wow. That’s some résumé. Like I said, Roger’s lucky to have you.”

  “And one day my left hip started to hurt. Like any dancer, I ignored it for six months until both hips hurt so bad I couldn’t work. I came back to New York, and saw a bunch of doctors who all told me the same thing. If I wanted to keep walking, I had to give up dancing.”

  “Your walking is just fine.”

  We had crossed Eighty-sixth Street and were charging up past Murray’s Sturgeon Shop. I was barely maintaining.

  “After months of physical therapy. That’s when I became a believer. And next May I will take my hard-earned degree and go to work treating other dancers.”

  “Do you ever dance these days?”

  “Are you asking me to go dancing?”

  “Please. There’s all sorts of ways I can embarrass myself. I don’t need to go out on a dance floor to do it.”

  “Aaah. I bet you’re a natural. You’ve never had a secret passion for salsa? Rumba?”

  “Secrets, again.” I hop-skipped a quick step to keep up.

  “Am I walking too fast for you?” She deliberately slowed.

  “You have the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen.”

  “That’s a yes, then.”

  “It is.”

  “Hmm.” She didn’t look happy, but she did walk a touch slower.

  We were well north of Ninety-sixth Street and still moving uptown. The character of the street had changed incrementally. A tourist would not have noticed. My sensors automatically went on the alert.

  “We are heading out of my area of expertise,” I said.

  “And into mine. Come on, you’re more than halfway there.”

  We walked steadily, if just a hair slower, for the next few blocks.

  “I thought all New Yorkers walked fast,” she said.

  I laughed. “We do, don’t mind me. Set your pace. I’ll manage.”

  She threw her head back in victory. “Thanks,” she added. We sped up again.

  “So you’ve had me doing all the talking.”

  “And I’ve been enjoying it,” I said.

  “I’ve got to ask you something, though.”

  Here it comes, I thought. The “prison” question. She’s heard about my past and has to ask. I tried not to cringe.

  “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “Tell me about your son.”

  The Kid was an even more convoluted subject.

  “Ah. He and I are just getting to know each other.”

  The tension of not talking about it ran head-on into the tension of talking about it. I decided I wanted her to understand. I kept talking.

  “His universe is very small, unique, and nothing like the one you and I travel through. And it is my challenge every
day, first, to try to see the world through his eyes—and I fail at that all the time—and second, to try to get him to see the world as we see it—and I fail at that, too, but not as badly. I think.”

  I gave her a quick glance and got an encouraging nod.

  “He is autistic. There are all levels of functionality. You have geniuses like Temple Grandin and Daniel Tammet, and you have kids who can’t speak and have zero connection to the real world. A couple of weeks ago, my son was living in a locked room because my wife—and her mother—thought he couldn’t do any better and he tended to hurt himself if he got out. I took a chance that there was something more there—having no clue about what I was getting into. I’m blown away by how much progress he’s made already. But . . .”

  I had tried sharing some of these thoughts with my father, but I constantly choked myself off. There was no one else. Once started, I found it impossible to stop.

  “I don’t care about his becoming a genius. I’d just like to have a conversation with him. That would be huge. Right now he speaks almost exclusively in quotes—mostly from commercials. I’d like him to be able to play a game with other kids—without biting them. But I can’t imagine that ever happening. He barely acknowledges the existence of other children. Someday I’d like him to have a girlfriend. It happens. But nobody can tell me yet what’s attainable. They don’t know. He’s two years behind some of the other kids in terms of training. That’s a lot. Some kids never make it up. Some do. We’ll see.”

  We had stopped walking. Wanda was staring into my eyes, following every word.

  “He hates being touched or picked up. Hugs are out. Most of the time he looks right through me, like I’m not there. Unless he’s hungry. And sometimes he flies into a rage or screams in terror over nothing and the only thing that quiets him is for me to wrap myself around him and we rock back and forth together until his body just gives out on him and he collapses. And it makes me feel like a brute. Like I’m his jailer. But it feels really good to be able to actually do something for him.”

  I was beyond trying to make her understand—I was talking for my benefit alone. I looked away and continued.