Bank

by David Bledin

  “It’s showtime,” Clyde says, winking. He strides across the room, a beaming smile on his face as he offers up his congratulations, and benevolently holds out the Rolling Rock. After a clinking of bottles, Clyde scurries back to our huddle, shoving a finger down his throat and gagging.

  “All right.” Clyde checks his watch. “Less than twenty minutes before the first effects.”

  “So what should we expect?” Postal Boy deadpans.

  “I put the entire bottle in. I figured we were going all-out or bust. Trust me, gentlemen, very soon our golden boy is going to be an absolute wreck.”

  Suddenly I’m not sure how I feel about this. A slight remorse is creeping in.

  “Guys, do you really think we should be going ahead with this?”

  The Defeated One comes close to spitting out a mouthful of beer, prompting a coughing fit.

  “What the fuck, Mumbles? Are you serious? Don’t tell me you’re turning into Postal.”

  Postal Boy quips back, “Hey, I’m fully behind this. Did you ever get any doubt from me? Drug the bitch, that’s what I say.”

  From across the room, a throat is being cleared: “Ahem, ahem.”

  The Toad is standing beside the Prodigal Son. Their height difference is staggering; the Toad barely comes up to the Prodigal Son’s chest.

  “As you are all aware,” the Toad begins, “we are gathered here this afternoon to congratulate this fine young man on his excellent work ethic and a well-deserved promotion. He should stand as a fine role model for the rest of you—”

  “What, slacking off and playing squash with the Fish?” Postal grunts loud enough for a few of the other analysts to turn around and frown at us.

  “—to follow. Thus, will you please raise your beer and toast him on this tremendous accomplishment.”

  A surge of bottles is held aloft.

  The Toad sputters frantically, “A beer! Won’t somebody pass me a beer?”

  The Prodigal Son leans down and slips him the Rolling Rock. The Toad holds the bottle up to the room, blinking once, twice.

  “Oh fuck!” Postal Boy whimpers.

  “Shit shit shit shit shit,” the Defeated One says.

  The Toad takes a deep breath and belts it out with gusto: “To the Prodigal Son—”

  Before he can finish his toast, Clyde lets loose a strangled bellow and bolts across the room, leaps off the ground, and tackles the Toad’s pudgy frame. Picture it in slow-motion if you will: The hollow thud of two bodies connecting forcefully, a bestial groan from the Toad, the bottle flying out of his hand and flying over the crowd in a graceful trajectory before it smashes against the wall in an explosion of sparkling glass. A shuddering oomph as the Toad topples over, Clyde tripping forward and collapsing on top of him. Then the mass of analysts instinctively covering their mouths, the nervous stares, a shocked yelp from Lulu Heifenschliefen, and finally, conclusively, a pervasive silence.

  Eleven

  Clyde is given the boot the next morning. After knocking the Toad flat-out unconscious, then rolling over and splicing the Toad’s palm with a shard of the broken beer bottle—the gash deep enough to require a trip to the emergency room and twenty-three stitches—he gave the greater forces at work in the HR department really no choice in the matter. He was summoned into the Toad’s office first thing, beckoned in by the bandaged hand, and two minutes later he was being escorted directly to the elevators. No passing Go, no collecting $200. According to Lulu, Clyde is only the fifth analyst ever to get the pink slip, rounding off a venerable list, in chronological order:

  1.The analyst who locked himself in a bathroom stall and wouldn’t come out for three days.

  2.The analyst who took off at five every day to do a round of shopping before the stores closed. She had connections with those high up, of course, but they didn’t hold much water after she splurged on a few pairs of five-hundred-dollar heels using the company card.

  3.The analyst who rolled out of bed one day and just stopped giving a shit: wearing T-shirts, taking two-hour lunches, and barking rabidly at the senior guys if they dared approach him with any real work. (Personally, I think this one is an urban legend of the corporate world, though Lulu insists on its veracity.)

  4.The analyst who thought it would be a great idea to leave a giant turd on the Fish’s leather chair as an April Fool’s joke.

  It’s the last one that gets to me the most, the guy with the turd. I mean, what sort of rational creature would have ever schemed up mixing human excrement and the Coldest Fish In The Pond, two entities as incompatible as oil and water? I can’t even begin to fathom what he could have been expecting: the Fish arriving in the morning, poking at the brown mound with a gold fountain pen, scratching his chin in befuddled amusement—“By golly, how did that lump get there?”—then clutching at his sides, collapsing in a fit of hysterical giggles, tears welling up in the corners of his eyes? Though to be fair, this ingenious prank was probably hatched at four in the morning after a few weeks of intense sleep deprivation, the poor analyst going a bit loony as he slugged back cup after cup of caffeine. So, yeah, now that I’m thinking about it, I can sort of see how it could have happened.

  Clyde’s disappearance was like an illusionist’s gimmick: One minute he was sitting at his desk with his morning coffee and then—poof!—the next thing you know, there’s the Utterly Incompetent Assistant boxing up his personal effects. The evil Toad and his HR cronies didn’t even give him five minutes to exchange any final words with the rest of us.

  Shortly after Clyde’s anticlimactic departure, the three surviving members of our Gang of Four head down to Starbucks to regroup. Gang of Three now. It’s not quite the same.

  “It’s surreal.” I say, shaking my head sadly. “I just don’t believe it.”

  Postal Boy nods in agreement. “It’s fucked up, that’s what it is. I tell you, even though Clyde was a bit, well—how do I put this gently —?disturbed at times, I’m really going to miss the guy.”

  The Defeated One has been particularly quiet throughout this morning’s ordeal.

  Turning to him, I ask, “What about you, man?”

  The Defeated One shrugs.

  “What about me? This happens all the time. Face it: Investment banking is a highly volatile industry. People come, people go. You just have to accept it and move on.”

  Postal Boy’s left eye twitches in disgust.

  “What do you mean, just move on? This is Clyde we’re talking about. Clyde. And let’s not forget, it’s not as if any of us is completely blameless. We were all in on the plan, right? Shouldn’t we be feeling a little guilty about this?”

  The Defeated One smirks and says, “Trust me, we’re all going to be paying for it too.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” the Defeated One reasons, “as I see it, I’m down for a cool twenty-five grand, both of you for fifteen. Fat chance we’re ever going to see that money now.”

  Oh god. The painting from the auction, the one with the paddling Indians; I’d forgotten about that consequence of Clyde’s firing in the mayhem of the last few hours.

  “Fuck,” I say.

  Postal Boy looks equally downtrodden as we place our orders with the nauseatingly chipper barista, a woman who will never know the gut-wrenching conflict of losing a close colleague and fifteen thousand dollars all in the same cruel stroke of fate. But no—isn’t this what I’ve learned during my brief tenure as an investment banker, that money only goes so far, that human relationships are infinitely more valuable than a closet full of new ties and shirts, and perhaps one of those mini i-Pods thrown in for good measure?

  Fifteen thousand dollars. Oh Jesus.

  I raise my cappuccino and struggle to get the words out:

  “To Clyde finding his footing in the great world beyond.”

  The Defeated One and Postal Boy intone gravely, “To Clyde.”

  I have less than an hour to brood and sulk before the Crazy Brit summons me into his office. He
’s busy dividing a stack of papers into an obsessive-compulsive’s piles, peering at the edges to ensure they are all perfectly in line.

  “Close the door and sit down,” the Crazy Brit orders gruffly.

  Before I’m even settled in the chair, he’s blitzing through the rundown of a new mandate and my pen is shooting across a legal pad as I struggle to get it all down:

  Biotech merger of equals. Pipeline synergies: one firm with mature cashcow acne medication and anti-something-something, the second with Fleuvo-huh(?) in first phase testing with FDA. Tax shield something something something. Combined market cap of ? Strong backing from management and board of directors—

  “This means we will be working with the Biotech team on this—”

  I blurt out reflexively, “You mean the Sycophant?”

  His thin lips purse together. “Who?”

  Oh, right, he doesn’t have a clue who I’m talking about.

  “Never mind,” I mumble.

  The Crazy Brit raises an eyebrow and continues:

  “This is going to be a challenging mandate. A significant amount of work needs to be completed in a relatively short time span. And I must mention, it’s a very important deal to substantiate the Bank’s reputation in the biotech industry. As such, I feel obliged to pose the question: Do you think this assignment will be beyond you? If so, please advise me now so I can seek a more suitable replacement . . .”

  He chews on the nib of a pencil, eyeing me up and down with obvious skepticism. I’m torn between a desire to slap him silly and a pathetic need to prove my worth. I default to the latter, perhaps inspired by Clyde’s recent brush with sudden unemployment:

  “I, uh, I think I can manage it,” I stammer.

  “Good.” The Crazy Brit returns to organizing his piles of paper. “Begin by putting together an information package for both companies. Are we clear?”

  “Of course.”

  The Woman With The Scarf licks the foam on her latte and reclines against a pillar. Though it’s freezing out and my nose is a faucet of dribbling snot, she was craving a cigarette, so we headed to the courtyard. For some obscure reason I’m smoking as well. I take a puff and struggle to ward off a coughing fit.

  “Yeah, things are still going great.”

  Taking a drag, she cocks her head. “You’re so full of shit. Why are you lying to me?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s a policy I’ve set for myself, keeping all work-related matters confined to the office.”

  She’s unconvinced.

  “Look, it’s perfectly all right to have a lousy day. And that wasn’t what was getting to me before; it was only that you weren’t spending any time with me. Completely different things entirely.”

  Wrapping her scarf more tightly around her neck, she says, “So, now that we’ve established that bitching about work is well within the parameters of our relationship, what’s up with you?”

  Taking a sip of my coffee and trying to inconspicuously wipe the snot from the groove below my nostrils, I say, “All right, so I was just staffed on this horrible project. And then Clyde got fired this morning; he’s one of the analysts I was pretty close with.”

  “Why, what did he do?”

  “He, uh—”

  It dawns on me that I don’t really have an easy way of explaining this. I could take a purely clinical approach, stating the cold, hard facts—Clyde gave our head of HR a concussion to prevent him from overdosing on extra-strength Ecstasy intended for this other analyst we all despise because he’s screwing around with this super-hot assistant—but then she’d justifiably conclude we’re all a bunch of psychopaths. I mean, is that ever normal, to try to drug one of your colleagues? When we were sitting in our office, hatching the plan, it had all seemed so perfectly natural. Genius, even. Yet now, confronted with relaying our scheme to an external source of judgment, I’m not feeling all that confident about it. Maybe it’s the same as that guy who left the turd on the Fish’s chair; maybe in his internalized world the whole plan had made complete sense.

  “He was skipping out a lot. Not showing up to work. Senior guys finally got fed up with it.”

  She stifles a yawn.

  “A pity.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He deserved it, though, it sounds like.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Anyway”—she scoops up the remaining foam with her fingers—“what are your plans Thursday night? I was thinking I’d cook a little dinner perhaps, something hearty to warm us up: roast chicken and squash soup, maybe some asparagus. And then we could watch a movie. Play Scrabble. Or,” she says, licking a dollop of foam from her pinkie, “something else entirely.”

  Roast chicken. Something else entirely. I’m getting all giddy just thinking about it.

  “Sounds fantastic. What time were you thinking?”

  “Eight or so?”

  “Eight-thirty just to be on the safe side?”

  She shakes a finger at me and we slip back inside with a quick kiss before she heads into Starbucks to pick up a round for her senior people. As the elevator ascends to the thirty-second floor, I’m still euphoric at the prospect of Thursday night, beaming cheerfully as I toss out my coffee cup and settle down at my desk. I haven’t even checked my e-mail before the Defeated One sniffs at the air.

  “What’s that smell? Mumbles, were you out smoking just now?”

  I sniff my shirt. Dammit. It’s the curse of the lightweight smoker, I’ve found, that one or two cigarettes really stick to you. I contemplate making a jaunt down to the flamboyant Spanish retailer in the lobby and forking over a hundred bucks for a shirt that will inevitably be too disco-era flashy to ever wear to work again, when my phone rings.

  Not now.

  “Yes?”

  “Drop by my office.”

  I hang up. Muttering the entire range of expletives I have at my disposal, I turn to the Defeated One.

  “Okay. Twenty bucks if you lend me a spare shirt right now.”

  The Defeated One smirks. “Serves you right for smoking those cancer sticks.”

  “Forty bucks.”

  “I would, Mumbles, I really would. Problem is, all my shirts are at the dry cleaners.”

  He swivels back around. Good-for-nothing bastard. I turn to the Star.

  “Hey, you wouldn’t be able to help me out with this, would you?”

  He looks up from an annual report.

  “Huh?”

  “You happen to have a spare shirt?”

  He opens up a few of his drawers. Extending his palm and smiling apologetically, he offers, “Cuff links?”

  My phone rings again. Fuck. I throw on my suit jacket, hoping the extra layer will somehow neutralize the smell, and make my way to the Crazy Brit’s office. Stepping inside, I have the wind momentarily knocked out of me: Leaning against the wall, thumb-typing away on his BlackBerry, is the Sycophant. It strikes me that this is the first time we’ve been reunited since he made the move upstairs. We make eye contact and I smile nervously, though we both remain silent as the Crazy Brit motions for me to sit down.

  “Well, then”—the Crazy Brit shuffles through his pile of perfectly aligned papers—“let’s begin. I’ve mapped out a rough timeline of the work to be completed by the project team over the ensuing weeks.”

  The Crazy Brit distributes the timelines. A quick review indicates the bulk of the analysis is expected to be churned out over the next thirty-six hours. There is a catharsis that comes with the realization that the Crazy Brit’s timeline is simply impossible. Even the Sycophant acknowledges this fact.

  “Do you really think this is reasonable?”

  The Crazy Brit glares at him, and the Sycophant visibly flinches, the three feet between them crackling with the tension of office politics.

  “Yes,” the Crazy Brit snaps irritably. “I do think this is perfectly reasonable.”

  The Sycophant shrugs and turns back to his BlackBerry. The Crazy Brit addresses me.

  “You
will have the comps completed by early afternoon. The precedent transactions by first thing tomorrow morning. Are we clear?”

  Even the Sycophant joins me in mumbling a disheartened “Yes.”

  As I rise from the chair, the Crazy Brit wrinkles his nose.

  “For god’s sake, what is that horrible odor?”

  He sniffs at the air before scowling and leaning over his desk.

  “You’ve been smoking, I take it?”

  “I, uh, it was a friend of mine at lunch, secondhand . . .”

  The Crazy Brit curls his lip in revulsion.

  “If you must feel the need to blacken your lungs, I suggest you bring a change of clothes. You will never again come in here smelling like a chimney, is that clear?”

  “It wasn’t—”

  The Crazy Brit puts up a hand.

  “I believe you now have a sufficient amount of work to do. Given your level of competency, I advise you not to waste any more time.”

  Affirmation of a new slippery slope: The Sycophant passes me a sympathetic stare as I make my way out of the office.

  The back of my chair is kicked hard.

  “Mumbles, coffee break.”

  Without looking up from my spreadsheet, I say, “I really can’t.”

  I brace myself for another kick. Sure enough, it lands a few seconds later, my chair pitching forward until I collide with the edge of the desk. A few paper clips topple to the floor, but otherwise my elbows minimize the impact. It’s like I’m turning into Postal Boy.

  Picking up the paper clips and checking my peripheral vision to ensure the Defeated One isn’t gearing up for another kick, I say, “What about Postal? Can’t you go bother him?”

  “Not around. He snuck off to a dentist’s appointment. The little fucker; you’d think he’d know better than to take off like that.”

  “Seriously. I haven’t been to a dentist in, what, at least a year now.”

  “Probably for the better, dude. Your teeth have got to be rotting from all that coffee you drink.”

  I grunt and say, “I’d hate you if it wasn’t the truth.”

  By six o’clock I’ve effectively missed all of my deadlines. I just handed in the Crazy Brit’s comps two hours overdue, and I’m still plugging away at the DCF model for the Sycophant. Postal Boy comes into the office, loosening his tie.