Villiers Touch Page 3

  He joined the New Yorker’s endless war against aggressive taxis trying to nose through the pedestrian crossflow, reached the far curb intact, and stood for a moment looking at the great gray tomb across the street—11 Wall Street, the hub of it all.

  Standing here, he was alert to his awkward presence: a pariah in an alien land where a foreign tongue was spoken, the language of blocks and odd lots, margins and floats, puts and calls, dollars divided into eighths, hedge funds, mutual portfolios, letter stocks, bid and asked. He had come to it by an odd route; he had not planned it.

  In the beginning, he thought whimsically, you’re a fair corporation lawyer, and you’re a long way from home now, brother. You were one of the faceless juniors in a giant midtown partnership: practice in estates, corporate-charter drawing, real estate, mergers. Respectable law; no negligence cases, no criminal cases, no divorces, no insurance torts. So why right away did you begin to think about changing jobs?

  Restless. You were restless, looking for action. You were in that frame of mind when you married Diane. It was a mistake from the start, but in those days you enjoyed challenges. Your own family was embedded as solidly in the social strata as hers, her money wouldn’t become a problem between you, but what you never counted on was her discontented ambition: her father’s wealth should have been a cushion, but to her it was a goad.

  You quit private practice and you went to work for Jim Speed—fiery muckraker, stubborn digger, eminent exposer of corruption. That was where the challenge was. Doing Speed’s investigative work, unearthing the grit for the white papers on military-industrial collusion and Mafia labor corruption. It got Speed elected to Congress, and you spent those years running his home office in New York, and then the mayor tapped Speed to take over as commissioner of the scandal-staggered city Finance Department, and you, his chief assistant, helped clean it up, you with your mesomorphic curiosity and righteous indignation, and, just incidentally, with your home disrupted by a part-time wife who had a compulsion to succeed on her own and flung in your face, as an act of defiance (against you or against her father?), the art gallery she opened on Third Avenue. The senseless, brittle competition between the two of you—the divorce; and then, still rocked by that, you’re propelled out of your job when Speed dies in the crash of a private plane and a new commissioner moves in, complete with staff.

  You didn’t know what you wanted to do then. You had dealt often with Quint’s SEC office. There were half a dozen good job offers, law firms and city jobs, but you didn’t see any promise of action in the rest of them. Maybe with Quint …

  And so here you are, he thought, dour. If there was going to be any action, he would have to create it himself. Take up skydiving, maybe. Rob a bank.

  Around him the street was still crowded, but the rush to get to work was nearly ended. The financial district’s working hours were earlier than those uptown; Wall Street was a city of its own, little known to midtown businessmen, bounded by Bowling Green to the south; the swift, filthy East River; Fulton Street (or perhaps Chambers Street, depending on your vintage) on the north; and on the west a mute anachronism: the cemetery of Trinity Church, where no human corpse had been buried in living memory, since Manhattan had long since run out of space for its dead.

  By now the brokers, bankers, secretaries, corporation potentates and their entourages had long ago hurried into their offices. The streets still flowed with workers and late arrivals, rushing, as thick as pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. In offices looming all around, men would be swiveling toward Quotron tickers and watching their clocks, synchronizing like field generals preparing for battle. In these slow-ticking moments, all over the world, men and women would be drawing their telephones near—waiting, adrenalin flooding in anticipation, for the Market (very capital “M”) to open.

  They waited keenly, in offices and homes and hotels, for the Magic Hour when they could dial their stockbrokers, ask “How’s Motors?”, talk about yesterday’s closing Dow-Jones, place buy or sell orders, discuss the weather or the day’s political news with brokers who only wanted to be let alone by the lonely phone callers so they could run their businesses.

  All over the United States right now they would be converging into the funeral-parlor board rooms of Stock Exchange member firms: wise investors, ignorant speculators, compulsive gamblers, ticker-tape addicts, retired bored pensioners. In the Far West, to coincide with New York’s exchange hours, brokers’ offices would open as early as seven A.M. The customers would sit for the next five hours with faces studiously guarded against any show of feelings as they watched the boards tick over, watched the stock news chatter by like an endless freight train, pacing off the latest sale price, bid-and-asked, high, low, and close of all active listed stocks….

  Hastings went across the street into the old mausoleum—the New York Stock Exchange. Crowds churned through the doors. There were virtually no women in the place—the Street was one of the few masculine preserves left in the world. He had a brief vision of Diane, talking archly: That’s probably what’s wrong with it.

  A group preceded him into the visitors’ gallery; the young girl-guide spoke briskly, identifying the shirtsleeved men on the crowded floor below: floor traders, two-dollar brokers, commission house representatives, odd-lot dealers, specialists—“You are looking at the men who do the actual physical trading of listed stocks.” Not true, Hastings thought—not physical. No stock certificates passed these portals. Here it was all word-of-mouth—trading on faith, always assuming the stock certificates which were traded here did, in fact, somewhere, exist.

  It was getting on toward ten o’clock. The floor men began to coagulate around the eighteen trading posts. No one ran: the milling crowd must be protected. No one smoked: paper must be safeguarded—the slips on which orders from a few dollars to a few millions were jotted in cryptic symbols, as vital as certified bank checks. But these restrictions would not observably reduce the frenzied bedlam that was about to erupt.

  Precisely at ten o’clock the gong on the south wall sounded its brassy doomsday clang.

  The New York Stock Exchange was open for another day’s pandemonium.

  All noise and confusion, traders clustered at their posts, licked pencils, hurtled their voices against the babble. By the end of the day the floor would be ankle-deep in paper. Overhead, giant boards signaled floor brokers by number on turning metal flaps. Thump, slap. Roar. Trades were made in seconds; the words “We buy from you” were enough to bind a transaction—not even a handshake was needed.

  He moved along the rail, looking for Herb Capps’s bald head in the foaming sea below: Herb Capps, floor specialist in Northeast Consolidated Industries stock. Finally Hastings spotted him, at a post near the west wall.

  Hastings went downstairs, flashed his identification to the guard, and went onto the floor. He went across like a swimmer pushing against the current; he came up to Capps’s station just as a floor broker approached:

  “How’s NCI quoted, Herb?”

  “Thirty-two to 32⅝.”

  “Put me down for an odd lot—fifty shares at 32½.”

  “Might be a few ahead of you on the list at that price.”

  “How many?”

  Capps glanced past the broker and grinned at Hastings. “You know I can’t give that out, George. There’s an SEC hawkshaw breathing right over your shoulder.”

  The broker turned and shook hands with Hastings. Then he looked at his watch. “I’ve got a buy order too, five hundred shares at the market. You said 32⅝?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. We buy from you five hundred.”

  Capps nodded his bald head; the broker and Capps checked each other’s badges before they separated to send word to their customers. Hastings waited for Capps to return.

  The transaction was completed; if the market’s ticker machinery wasn’t jammed, the trade would appear on the tape within a minute or two, and a new market would be established in NCI stock—up an eighth over the prev
ious close.

  Capps came back, amiable and unperturbed by the thunder around him. Hastings said, “NCI’s started to move in the past couple of weeks—what do you think?”

  “It keeps me busy.”

  “Do you see anything behind it?”

  “Not that I know of. From down here you don’t see much anyway. I just execute orders, you know?” Capps was friendly and smiling, but there was something vaguely defensive in his answers; he wheeled to meet a new broker who came up to trade. Hastings watched Capps flip pages in his notebook while the broker talked in characteristic clipped phrases. The floor specialist’s notebook was on a par in value with a top-secret copy of a diplomatic document. Capps would have his buy and sell orders listed on facing pages, written down in the order received: he acted as a one-man auction market, and the knowledge of the listings in his book gave him the insider’s advantage—he knew the volume of buy orders just below the current market, the number of sell orders just above it. Specialists like Capps were forbidden to divulge the contents of their notebooks to anyone but Exchange officers and the SEC.

  Of the men on the trading floor, market specialists like Capps made up at least one-fourth of the population. The specialist’s function was to “make a market” for one or more listed stocks. Every stock listed on the Big Board had at least one specialist, sworn to “maintain a fair and orderly market” by buying or selling against the trend of the market.

  Regulations were strict: the specialist couldn’t be an officer of any company he handled on the floor; he was not allowed to operate for his own personal account if he had any public bids or offers—they always had to come first—but he was required to trade for his own account when it was necessary to keep the market balanced. The specialist split his commissions with brokers, made his income on profits in trading his own account. It was his duty to execute stop orders for clients—to buy if the stock was rising, or to sell (to prevent further loss) if the stock was falling.

  The rules were stringent; but it was not unheard of for a specialist to get nervous when the market started to slide—to start selling fast, to get in ahead of the public, which would keep buying the stock until the news caught up on the tape. Nothing, in this gambling casino, was guaranteed; nothing was certain.

  In all this bustle and press, Russ Hastings was supposed to be traffic cop and detective all at once. It was his job, the SEC’s job, not to police the price of shares, but to make sure investors were informed of all activity that might have an effect on stocks. “Full disclosure”—that was the SEC’s aim, and its limitation. The government agency could not prevent an idiot from forming a corporation and selling shares for the express purpose of hijacking airplanes to Cuba. It could only see to it that the corporation openly declared its intent, its assets, its liabilities, and its structure.

  Jostled by fast-moving traders, Hastings kept shifting his stance; he felt awkward, as if he had wandered into a football play by mistake. He watched Herb Capps conclude a trade and come forward smiling. Capps’s amiability was a shell which ended a fraction of an inch beneath the surface, beyond which there seemed no clue to his real personality. The Exchange, having put all its specialists through the strenuous screening process of examinations and investigations, assumed Capps and all the rest of them were trustworthy; but one couldn’t always go by that. Capps could easily be a rock of honor; he could just as easily be a thief.

  Capps said, “Still waiting for me?”

  “I’m curious about NCI.”

  Capps’s smile switched on, confidential and neighborly. “Look, I know you’re a bit of a rookie, maybe you haven’t seen this kind of activity before, and you’re wondering about it. Believe me, it goes on all the time.”

  “Maybe. Don’t you think NCI’s too big to be acting like a volatile penny stock?”

  “Three, four points in a couple of weeks? I wouldn’t call that volatile.”

  “It is when you’re talking about a blue chip that’s exactly the same company it was a month ago. It’s been moving against the averages, remember. Look, maybe I’m green, but a violent upheaval in the stock of a giant like NCI could snowball the whole market into a mess.”

  The bald man gave him a dry look. “You’re trying to build a mountain where you haven’t even got a molehill. Look, here’s my book—records of the past few weeks. Look for yourself, if you want.”

  It was exactly what he wanted. He had wondered if he could goad Capps into offering his book without being asked for it; he had succeeded, but it would have meant more if he had failed. By proffering the book, Capps was proving nothing. Either he had nothing to hide or he was clever enough to be one jump ahead—and there was no way to determine which it was.

  Hastings gave the book a quick riffling through and said, “You’ll have to interpret.”

  “Sure. We all use our own shorthand. I haven’t got time to give you a complete translation, but let’s see if we can—yes, here. A block trade, ten thousand shares, bought by a broker in Montreal. I happen to know that one was bought for the portfolio of a Canadian mutual fund. Back here, let’s see—two weeks ago today, two lots of twenty thousand shares each. First one bought by the Vancouver Trust, second one bought by an Ottawa broker in a street name—could be any client, of course.”

  “All Canadian? Why all the Canadian interest?”

  “Who knows. Maybe somebody started to float a rumor up there. NCI’s got several industrial plants in Quebec and Ontario. Diesel engines, earth-moving equipment, chemicals, that kind of stuff. I’ve heard some talk myself, that NCI’s going to be bidding on the construction job at the new Alaska Slope oil fields. Nothing to it, far as I know, but that’s all it ever takes, you know—a little loose talk.”

  “What’s this one—nine thousand shares?”

  Capps looked over his shoulder. “Three weeks back. That was local, here in New York. The broker’s Hackman and Greene.”

  “Who was the client?”

  “I’d have to ask Hackman and Greene. That’s their floor trader right over there—want me to ask him?”

  “If you don’t mind,” Hastings said, and watched Capps move away through the throng, eyes forever darting to the raised fists and fingers which communicated coded information like semaphore signals across the noisy, crowded floor. Traders swirled around Hastings. Slips of paper fluttered to the floor around his feet. The bedlam made him dizzy. Capps returned with another man in tow—a tall gaunt old man with yellowish-white hair and a face that looked as if it had been slept in. “Paul Meaghan, of Hackman and Greene,” Capps said, and introduced Hastings. The old man shook hands, unsmiling; Capps spun away to meet a customer, and Meaghan said, “You wanted some information?”

  “About an NCI purchase you made three weeks ago, nine thousand shares.”

  Meaghan flipped through his notebook. “I have it here. You wanted the price?”

  “No. The name of the client.”

  Meaghan gave him a sharp look but thought better of asking why; he said, “I have it down for a Miss Carol McCloud. You’d have to get her address from our main office.”

  Hastings made a note of the name. “Have you bought any other blocks of NCI in the past few weeks?”

  “Sure. I suppose everybody has. What is this, a spot check?”

  “Call it that.”

  The old man’s glance flicked across the crowd, not willing to miss any business; he consulted his notebook at brief intervals and spoke in gusts: “Well, the largest block we’ve bought recently was twenty-five thousand shares, in the street name. I believe it was for one of the Swiss investment trusts. Then, I’ve got a note here on fifteen thousand shares just last Friday for the McGill Niagara Fund.”

  “That’s a Canadian fund?”

  “Of course. Nothing to do with the university, though. Here’s one, seventy-five hundred shares we bought for the Claiborne Fund—that’s New York, of course, old Howard Claiborne of Bierce, Claiborne & Myers. Here’s five thousand shares in the street n
ame again—I don’t remember who the client was, probably one of our regulars. Here’s a purchase last week, ten thousand shares sold to Salvatore Senna at a Montreal address. I recall that one because I’d never heard the name before, and you don’t usually associate Italian names with French Canada. Then, let’s see, two weeks ago five thousand shares for the street name, a Swiss account on that one—no name, just a number, you know how they work. Then I’ve got—”

  “Okay,” Hastings said. “I wonder if you’d do something for me after the market closes today. Have your secretary make up a list of all sales of NCI to Canadian clients in the past thirty days and send the list over to my office. Would you do that?”

  “No trouble. Is this something I should know about?”

  “No. As you said, it’s just a spot check. A pattern survey of the market, you know?”

  Meaghan, not quite satisfied with that vague explanation, nodded and walked away, carrying one of Hastings’ business cards. Hastings intercepted Herb Capps on his way across the floor and left with him a request for a list of Canadian purchases of NCI similar to the one he’d asked of Meaghan; he went on through the throng, hearing vaguely the pretty tourist guide’s glib spiel on the balcony above; he made his way outside. The sidewalks were too narrow to hold the crowds; people walked in the streets, herded by slow-moving cars. At the Broadway corner, trucks stood jammed into the intersection. Stifled in the surging crowd, he felt momentarily as if he had lost his identity, as if he had been turned loose in a foreign country without passport and unable to speak the tongue. Hands pocketed and shoulders lifted in defense toward the crowd that pushed itself against the shell of his enforced indifference, he walked along with false nonchalance, thinking of Diane and all the things that had gone wrong in his life. In moments like this he was not able to shake the feeling of being somehow in the wrong place—as if there was, somewhere, a right place.