Melville, Moby Dick.

Later when I tried to remember what I had done during the last few months that I had worked at Winston Stone, the time I would think of first was one sunny March day when I had spent most of the afternoon in my office with the door closed staring at a copy of the Winston Stone organization chart. It was such a complicated thing that it was printed on a huge sheet of paper and you had to unroll it like a nautical chart or a blueprint. I loved it because it was the first one on which I had advanced fair enough up the corporate ladder to make an appearance. I had my own small box very near the bottom of the page.

It was a marvelously intricate document. Winston Stone was a huge company. The chart resembled the schematic drawing of some mysterious new computer chip. It looked a little bit like a street map of Manhattan, but what it really reminded me of was some manic - marathon version of the children's game of Chutes and Ladders. Chutes and Ladder intended to be played over a lifetime.

It was a maze of boxes of slightly different sizes. A larger box signified a more important person. The boxes were joined with a maze of solid lines, signifying direct reporting responsibilities, and dotted lines signifying advisory responsibilities. My little box at the bottom was labeled, Supervisor, Chicago, Options Clearance. I scanned the other boxes for names I knew. I was twenty-nine when I was promoted into the job and there was only one person whose name I saw who I knew was younger than I and he was the son of a past chairman who was responsible for something in the home office personnel section. There were many people ahead of me of course but no one who had their own box.

The chart also suggested one of those tables by which the progeny of a family spread out over the decades from a single source. But that was a misleading analogy. This plan represented a contraction over time and not the expansion represented by a family tree. It was more like the chart they print at the beginning of a basketball tournament where at each step someone was eliminated and someone advanced. That was not a particularly happy comparison because at each level half the hopefuls were sent away and then it happened again and again until there was only one happy survivor.

After that thought I stared again at the chart but it had lost its abstract beauty and seemed something grimly concrete. My own little box was one of six equally sized boxes that were joined by solid lines to the box which held by my boss, David Fortier. His box was labeled Operations, Chicago. The line from David's box shot straight to the top of the page, an express line on a map dense with locals, where it was one of sixteen lines that led to a large box labeled, Domestic Operations. That box was a little more complicated because two lines emerged from it. One was a solid line connecting it to a larger box on the second tier labeled Martin Reynolds, Domestic Retail but there was a second dotted line which led to Samuel Palmer, Domestic Institutional. What did that mean, I wondered? I hadn't a clue. It must be very complicated to inhabit a box from which both solid and dotted lines emerged. Martin was my boss David's mentor, and from that connection I had received some dim warmth and small exposure to the upper levels. The last time Martin came to Chicago, my girl friend Carol and I had joined the crowd for cocktails and Martin had seemed to be impressed with us. We had been expected to excuse ourselves before dinner, though. Dinner was an honor reserved for David and a few other people on his level.

I traced the solid lines from my little box up the page through David to Martin and then along his solid line which led directly to the Chairman. It was an impossible journey. I would never make it. But perhaps the best analogy of the chart was the idea of Chutes and Ladders and if that was the truth then the way was clear. I needed to find a ladder. Halfway up the sheet and far to the left side was the box inhabited by Tony Sarceti, labeled Sales/ Metro and Northeast. On the previous chart his box had been labeled Sales/Metro which meant New York only. In the interim Tony had won some kind of victory and doubled the number of lines that led to his box. Tony was my mentor. That was where I had to go. That was my immediate ladder. If I could manage the right throw of the dice and make the climb up a couple of levels I could be well established by the time I was thirty-two. I rolled up the chart. I realized it was time to call Tony but I couldn't figure out what I would say.

As I thought about what I hoped to do, I realized there was another problem. I wasn't particularly good at any of the things that were represented by the boxes in the express path that I imagined for myself. I wondered if it would matter. There were plenty of people who were better than I was at everything that mattered but there was only person younger than I who had their own little box. I was a smart guy. I would figure it out.

Winston Stone was as structured as the Federal Government. At each level the rewards and perks were clearly defined and as a senior supervisor I was a grade seven and was nearing the top salary I could expect in my current job and so any advancement meant being promoted to some job which carried the title manager, which meant I was in charge of more people and carried me into a grade 8 through 11 job.

My job title was senior supervisor options clearing support. I knew almost nothing about options clearing, my real strength was in the area of risk management and margin accounts, but that was almost beside the point. What I did was fill out reports and kiss ass and politick among our bosses and hope that the people who worked under me knew how to do their jobs.

My office was 14' by 14' and was furnished with a large desk, a cadenza, and two comfortable chairs for visitors. The size of office and their furnishings were carefully regulated with each step up the ladder bringing certain very clearly defined perks. With my next promotion I could expect an office that was eighteen foot by eighteen foot and in addition to my current furnishings I would have a soft couch. The next step beyond that was a small table for conferences.

I wore my job title like a legion of honor but if I tried to explain myself to anyone who didn't understand the internal code of Winston Stone, I felt I was speaking gibberish. There were many times too when I thought about the rag tag underpaid crowd of people who worked for me when I wondered if my job title wasn't somehow the equivalent of managing a fast food restaurant and not some job with the status I seemed to expect.

The reason I had spent so much time that day poring over the organizational chart was that I was putting off something unpleasant. It was a bad year for the brokerage business and for Winston Stone and I was going to have to lay off some of the people who worked for me. David had left the decision to me. He had just said, "Reduce your payroll by fifteen percent by the end of the month." I was going to take the easy way out by laying off the five people who had the least seniority. I wasn't happy with my decision. If I had chosen instead to start by laying off the poorest performers I would have to lay off only four people and I would be left with a more efficient operation, but one of the four was a man of forty two who had a family to support. He had two young children. I couldn't imagine him finding a job as grand as a night watchman if I let him go. The five I would lay off were people I had hired and they were all bright and young and eager and I sincerely hoped that they would soon find new jobs.

The thing I hate most in the world is firing people, but I am good at it. Over time I have learned to let myself be the bad guy. I never talk of this hurting me more than them. Of course, it doesn't. This is what is happening I say, matter of factly. I'm sorry but this is what is happening. I let them hate me if they want. It's the best thing I can do for them. It's not your fault, I am an asshole. I don't say that but I hope that is my gift to them. I made my mark at Winston Stone by firing people who had become redundant after Winston Stone bought out another firm. I flew around the country and fired people and I was rewarded for it.

I get sick the night before I fire people and I try to drink myself to sleep with scotch and sodas and then I wake up usually at 2:30 or 3:00 . On the night before I have to fire someone I feel terrible.

Of course firing strangers is easier than firing people you know and this was the first time I would have to fire people I knew. Sometimes I will read in the business magazines about so and so being hired as a turn around specialist to fix a floundering company and I think all that means is that he hasn't worked there before so he'll be able to fire the people without losing sleep.

I was eager for a promotion but that was awkward in a way because the next promotion I got would almost certainly involve a transfer to some other city. That would almost certainly mean the end of my relationship with Carol. I could hardly expect her to play the demure corporate wife. She was firmly anchored in Chicago and if anything her job was more promising than mine.

I didn't know what she would say if I asked her to marry me. Sometimes when things were going well I could imagine her saying yes, but there were just as many times when I would imagine her laughing in my face.

I wasn't looking forward to moving to New York, but there was no way to pursue my career that avoided spending time in New York. Even the idea of moving to a smaller firm didn't solve the problem of New York because none of the regional firms seemed to offer a chance to have the kind of career that I wanted for myself.

A word about Carol and me. She is three years younger that I, bright and a bit of a flirt. She is a pretty woman but her face is too thin and boyish for her to be beautiful. She has the lean and wiry body of an athlete. As a girl she had been a good enough swimmer to place third in a state championship and she is an avid competitor still on the tennis or squash court. She has an easy way with people that seemed to draw them into her confidence. A recent honors graduate DePaul Law School, she is an associate with the large La Salle Street law firm that employs my older brother and rumor has it that she is likely to be the firm's second or third woman partner, particularly since she is seen as an protege of Tommy who is very well regarded there.

The previous summer I had met Tommy at a party he was hosting in a northside bar and when I showed up I found him surrounded by some young lawyers who had just been hired by his firm. Most of them were as repressed and self-conscious as young school boys rushing a fraternity. Carol was the only woman among them and the only one who seemed relaxed. She was clearly different from the others as she enjoyed her double scotches and the ease with which she could shock my stuffy, conventional brother. Her energy dominated the crowded bar and her eyes flashed about the room, missing nothing.

She was wearing a plain gray skirt and a sheer white blouse with a lace top that was cut low enough to reveal the shadow at the top of her small breasts. After we had been talking for a while I noticed that she had a small cigarette case and when I complimented her on it she passed it to me to examine. It was fashioned from solid silver that had tarnished gently with many years of use. It reminded me of a meerschaum pipe which our father had particularly cherished.

"My grandmother gave it me," she explained. "It belonged to my grandfather who used to keep it full of Luckies. When I passed the bar she took me aside at the party. You must understand that she is very mild. A true patrician. The very picture of a well bred, white haired, old woman. 'This is yours, my dear,' she said and then she gave it to me. Carol is a gifted mimic and all of her gestures were given over to an imitation of dignified old age. "It should go to your brother, by all rights, I suppose, but he quite simply does not have the balls for it."

I had noticed that Carol was smoking Merits and that the case was no longer than a regular, non filtered cigarette.

"Do you keep it full of Luckies?" I asked.

"Open it."

I found the catch and it snapped open solidly in my palm. On one side, held neatly in place by a metal clasp, were three neatly rolled joints. The opposing side held a book of matches with a pale blue cover bearing the name and lion's head emblem of the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

After an hour or so my brother excused himself and left. Most of the young lawyers took that as sign and they left too but Carol and three or four of the others stayed on and I joined them.

At the time I was coming to the end of a series of affairs with women who for various reasons (often because they were married to someone else) were completely wrong for me. I probably should have thought a little bit about the fact that she was working for my brother but a night at a time was about as far ahead as I could think those days.

Around midnight we all went to another bar where Carol met some people she knew. She left me for a guy who seemed to be her boyfriend but they got into a nasty argument and he left. She was drunk by then and I took her back to my apartment where we both slept the deep chaste sleep of the very drunk.

She stopped by my apartment a couple of days later to see if she had left her address book there and we went out to dinner, had a wonderful time and ended up spending a very unchaste night together.

The next month or so was very uncomfortable. I would see her every ten days or so but it was clear that she was still seeing someone else. Finally she stopped by and announced that she was through with Andrew and moved in with me. It was a welcome surprise but it somehow seemed like a whim, like something that was clearly temporary. The looseness of our arrangement suited me at first but as I grew more used to have her around it began to bother me and I couldn't figure what I was going to do about it.

Two days after I had spent the afternoon studying the chart, I got into work a little late and David came into my office as I was hanging up my jacket. "Did you see the news release?" he asked

"No, I just got in."

He looked at his watch and nodded. "You look like a piece of shit, Larry," he said.

"Long night." I said.

"Maybe you ought to give yourself a performance review," he said. "My basic rule is I don't care what you do so long as you get to work on time and your name stays out of the papers but if I should be asked I don't think I could say that your habits weren't effecting your work, and I wouldn't be surprised if I was asked."

I nodded, trying to take in what he was saying.

He slid the release across the desk to me. It had been torn off of the teletype machine and the slick paper curled slightly.

The header said: Distribution - Full Internal. All news media - immediate.

The head line said. Winston Stone Announces Appointment of New Managing Directors.

Yesterday there had been three managing directors; Walter Bright in charge of International business. Samuel Palmer in charge of Domestic Institutional business, and Martin Reynolds in charge of Domestic Retail. The three of them had all reported directly to the Chief Operating Executive. There were now six managing directors. Walter Bright was still in charge of the International business. Samuel Palmer in charge of investment banking services, Dwight Jones in charge of special functions, which included the real estate division and information services. Allen Larsen in charge of domestic sales both retail and institutional, Dan Dillard in charge of operations and Martin Reynolds who was named managing director in charge of overseeing the transition from three managing directors to six. If you could read the special language of Winston Stone corporate-speak it was a very brutal document. It meant that as soon as the transition was complete Martin Reynolds would be out of a job.

"So what happened?" I asked.

"Martin came in well under his business plan target for the year and Allen Larsen convinced the President that changes were needed."

"Christ," I said. "Everyone is under plan by 30 percent. The whole brokerage business is in the toilet."

"Precisely what Martin said apparently and then he went on the make the point that he was a nice guy and wanted to help his people through the tough times. Allen Larsen ate him alive. And he was waiting nearby to step in with his legion of assholes. You know, I assume how close Allen Larsen and Dan Dillard are."

"I hear things," I said. "The truth of a situation like that is hardly something that reaches down to my level."

"There is more to it, of course. Martin called me last night. He was practically in tears, because he can't take care of us anymore. It was pretty embarrassing but I did feel sorry for him. Allen Larsen will have two subordinates. I forgot what the titles are but it boils down to operations New York and Operations, Other. We are assigned to Operations, Other and we report to Harvey Knox."

"Fuck," I said. "I thought Harvey was gone."

"Only in hibernation it seems and mostly whispering in Allen's ear that what Winston Stone really needs is a cadre of hard asses. "

"Harvey hates me," I said.

"So I've heard. Is there a rational reason?"

"I refused to blow him."

"Seriously?"

"No. I just refused a job that he offered me when the Pass Wansworth thing was unwinding. And once I said something very stupid in a meeting with him."

"That's probably enough," David Fortier said.

"Yeah, it probably is."

When I first started to work at Winston Stone I was amazed at the inefficiencies that were built into the management structure. It was only gradually that I realized that that was the point. The periodic reworking of the management structure was the way in which people were punished and rewarded, the way in power was exercised within the massive firm.

In my first visits to corporate headquarters in New York I hadn't been able to temper my habit of speaking my mind and I was late to realize that clear thinking was less admired in a young man, that obsequiousness. I had embarrassed Harvey Knox once in a meeting and then later rejected a job that he had tried to force me to accept. I had cultivated Sarceti and hoped that he could protect me but that turned out to be a simple minded strategy.

Perhaps most importantly since returning to Chicago on the strength of a few years of real achievement out in the backwaters I had had one average performance review followed by one that could be seen as negative. Not really fast track stuff.

I suppose to anyone who had a look at the big picture I must have been a man who was walking around with a large bull's eye painted onto the back of his suit.

The week that it finally happened had been a terrible week generally. Around noon on Monday (from 1983) one of the young brokers, a drinking buddy of mine, stopped by my office, closed the door and with a reluctant, funereal tone, he told me that over the weekend he had seen Carol twice, late in the evening at a bar on Rush Street with another of the associates from her law firm, looking happy, drunk and very glad to be with the young associate. The man's name was Biff Covington. She had told me that she had been away from home over the weekend because she was working nearly around the clock on an acquisition that was being made by one of her clients. She hadn't been home at all except for a brief stop around noon on Sunday to pick-up some new clothes.

I allow Carol considerable freedom in the conduct of her personal life but when I discovered that she was involved with a grown man named Biff, I felt I had to draw the line.

I encountered her that night when she walked in the door to our apartment.

"So, who is Biff?" I said before she had a chance to get a drink.

"Charles Henry Covington, the fourth," she said.

She put down her heavy briefcase and poured herself a scotch.

"An attractive and witty friend," she said. "If you want to cross examine me, get a subpoena."

"Look," I said, "if you are going to live with me, I think I have the right to ask you to be discreet."

That was a terrible move on my part. It gave her far too many responses, including, the chance to say, 'Ok, I won't live with you,' which was the last thing I wanted to have happen.

"You don't own me," she said. "You don't even lease me." With that she finished the drink went into our bedroom and changed into blue jeans and a sweater.

"I'm going out," she said. "See if you can't find a way to get over this, will you?"

"Carol," I said as she left. "Biff?"

"I didn't name him," she said. "Call his mother if you have a complaint."

When she left I settled into a uncharacteristic night of straight scotch and loud rock music. When I woke up the next morning it was about an hour later than I usually woke and I had a crushing hangover. I felt like I was sweating scotch. Carol was asleep beside me on our broad bed but she gave no sign of being awake or ever waking up. When I got to work there were three yellow messages on my desk telling me David wanted to see me.

I went straight to his office and he asked me to shut the door. He looked pretty grim. I felt sorry for him.

I took the chair in front of his desk and asked, "So what has Harvey decided? Is he going to transfer me to Anchorage?"

"No," David said. "He is going to fire you or rather I am."

I went numb. It had never occurred to me that I could be fired. I was smart. I worked hard. We Turners were all hard workers.

"I gather he's decided that if he shoots some of the dissenters then the masses will be a little more docile," David added.

I waited for the anger to come but all I felt was numb.

"So, how is going to play?" I asked. "What is the word on the street going to be?"

"I'll do what I can for you," he said, "but the official word is going to be inadequate job performance."

"Can I go back to my desk?" I asked. "Can I say good-by to my people?"

"I'm sorry," David said. "Amy is cleaning out your desk right now. Security will see you out of the building."

So it was that in the March of 1982, I found myself at age thirty, unexpectedly out of a job. People who knew me were surprised at my lack of anger. At first I was almost cheerful. I quickly drew up a new resume, some well-crafted covering letters, a long list of references and mailed them to a wide range of banks and brokerage firms. I called on my considerable number of acquaintances in the Chicago financial community and then I settled back to see what would happen next.

It was a bad time for the stock market and for the economy and as the weeks passed I got little response except from friends calling to express their sympathy and shock at my situation. Soon several of these friends led by my brother were urging me to "get out and make it happen" "to sell myself", and to "find a good headhunter". I refused to do any of these things and many of my friends were soon shaking their heads at my inaction.

Carol who had known me for eight months and shared my apartment for four months was also baffled. She had known me only as a young and slightly manic manager for Winston Stone and now she was obviously troubled by the changes in me.

As the third and fourth weeks passed I was troubled too, troubled by my total inability to pick up the phone and force an interview with some of the people who might need my skills. Finally I realized that the reason I was not acting was that I was deeply weary of the politics that had gone with managing ("But everything is politics," Carol had shouted in exasperation) and that on the other hand I lacked the direction or strength of character to make any radical change in my life.

I had been aggressive and assertive in my years at Winston Stone, but it seemed that those habits had been a part of the job and were gone now just as completely as my old office was. The one thing I had been trained to do was to simply be a responsive part of the corporate machinery at Winston Stone and now that was the one thing I couldn't do. I was at an impasse and I relied on my wide but random collection of associates and the random resumes which had been cast out into the disinterested financial community as if they were the coins of the I Ching to provide my direction.

add)

When the chance call finally came after forty days of idleness it came from a company that was so small, with an offer that seemed so inappropriate, that I had to question the wisdom of my own method.

My brother, Tommy, was visiting us that evening. He was clearly delighted when he realized the nature of the call. I must have been something of an embarrassment and a puzzle to him.

My older brother is about as complete an example of a successful young attorney as you could imagine. He's been a partner at the large law firm of Bell Boyd for a year now and he made a successful marriage with the daughter of a surgeon that ensured the big house on the north shore and the membership in a good country club that his position required but he could not yet quite afford. He is so prefect for the role that it astounds me that he grew up in the same small Iowa household that I did.

I don't suppose that someone can manage to be a person in high school, a type is about the best that anyone can manage and he was the golden boy type, second team end on the football team, head of the debate team, class vice president. I was successful myself then but I couldn't quite match him on his chosen field. Our parents realizing the dangers of sibling rivalry at that stage arranged for me to get a scholarship to a Eastern prep school and though that helped to give me my own space, I didn't escape the competition, I played soccer rather than football, did badly in Russian, while he did well in French, and stayed away from politics entirely. Tommy went to Bettner college and graduated in 1969 at which point the waves of 60's revolution had just barely reached the small Indiana town where Bettner is located. I showed up at the same school in the fall after he graduated in the spring. He was a political science major who made extra money by being in ROTC and belonged to a fraternity and I majored in Art and drug use. By my time the sixties had hit Bettner full force and there was no way any intelligent person in my class was going to do anything remotely close to the establishment. Tommy somehow managed to do a few years in the National Guard to avoid serving in Vietnam and got a law degree from the University of Illinois. There were years were we didn't speak at all for fear of angrying the other. He was in love with America and I hated the machinery that had brought on the disaster of the Vietnam War. He wanted the whole boat and I wanted nothing more then a little house in the country side where I could paint pictures. We were still only types. Now there is some sentimental affection between us but I can't help thinking he is still a type. His opinions, even the very words he speaks could come from the mouth of any successful young attorney. He says nothing original, nothing unique to him. But I had to admit there is some envy here on my part. When I left school and realized that my skills as an artist qualified me for jobs that paid little more than the minimum wage I was envious of the career that Tommy had managed to make for himself. Did the energy I spent trying to make an unlikely career at Winston Stone come from a desire to prove myself Tommy's equal? Probably. It was hard to understand it in any other terms except pure ego on my part. I certainly had no desire for the material things that Tommy's success had bought him.

He had been stopping by fairly often lately. His wife, having reached something close to her fated place in life, had recently gotten a case of the screaming respectables and had decided that a man in his position should not smoke dope, which was what had brought them together in the first place and so he visited us, or rather Carol, whenever he had a urge to get high. He had the perfect excuse because as a high powered corporate lawyer he always got home late and was often incoherent with fatigue when he made it. Tommy's job had always struck me as a nasty compromise between the hours required of a long haul truck driver, hours so extreme that it seemed impossible to work them unless you had a methadrine habit, and a plumber's or carpenter's practice of billing by the hour, a practice which seemed sure to make you work slowly and methodically. It seemed like a hellish combination to me. It amused me to think of Tommy as a speed freak who has to move slowly.

I wasn't too crazy about Tommy stopping by all the time. I would have preferred to have Carol's full attention but she enjoyed his visits. It gave her someone to get stoned with and gave her a chance to keep up with the gossip of their firm.

Recently Tommy had been trying very hard to make his new wife pregnant for the first time.

"Sounds like fun," Carol said when he mentioned that.

"Seems like work," Tommy had said.

"So?" Carol asked me when I returned to living room. "What was the call about?"

"Valesti, Price and Lowe wants to see me tomorrow as early as I can make it."

"Not bad," Tommy said. "That's a very well connected little firm."

"And very little," I said. "It's hard to imagine anything of consequence coming from a firm with only one office."

"It's not hard to imagine you making some money there though," Tommy said. "They are very tight with the carriage trade."

When I left Winston Stone I had a large bag full of excuses ready to explain my failure - the dirty politics of my fellow managers, the stingy budget with which I hoped to perform miracles, the heartless policies of the firm. The fact, I think, was that I was a lousy manager. I was too sensitive to nuance and detail, too much in love with the ideal way of doing things (as I alone perceived it) and with my dream of putting myself above the politics of the situation in the name of superior skill.

"I may not know what I'm looking for," I said, "but I am sure that it's not Valesti, Price and Lowe."

That irritated Tommy and he let me know that it did.

"I don't know why you think you are some how above this shit. Why you some how think you don't have to do the things that the rest of us do."

In our family voices were never raised, anger was never overtly expressed, frustrations were expressed in code, so Tommy's outburst shocked me. Was it part of his courtroom technique?

"Mom and Dad put you through four years at Bettner," he continued, "and then what do you with it. You decided you wanted to be an artist. Four years at a great business school and you decide to be an artist! Well, just maybe that was a good idea but then when even that started to look like it was too much trouble you abandoned that. It took you four years as a crummy clerk at Winston Stone before you even got to be a supervisor and then you blew that too. You know if you were a lawyer I wouldn't hire you. You would always be telling me that you couldn't handle this case or that case because the client wasn't a saint. You would want to be Clarence Darrow."

Carol seemed to be alarmed by the direction the conversation was taking. The last thing she wanted was to choose sides between Tommy and me.

"Thomas," she said. "Reconsider. He could handle all our pro-bono work. I bet he would work for peanuts."

"Darrow used to work for the railroads," I said.

As I figured it would that remark sent him over the edge. Tommy hates it when I stand up to him.

"Great," he said. "Fucking terrific. Being Clarence Darrow isn't even good enough for you. You want to be Saint Francis. You know, Mom and Dad are not exactly thrilled by this development. Dad says,'Eight years of the best education I could buy and all the kid wants to do is sit and read books.'"

I realized that I was red with anger. The only way I could imagine our father saying something like that was with an air of humorous detachment. But maybe I had that wrong.

"I am not real clear," I said evenly, "on why this is any of your fucking business."

I had not fought my brother since I was 13. He had whipped me then but I was pretty sure that I could take him now.

Tommy seemed to realize that he had gone too far. "You're right," he said. "I'm getting killed on a case I running for the Wood Pulp people. I guess it made me a little cranky. But, damn it, Larry, you really could take the job."

Carol was glad that the storm had passed and she clicked open the silver cigarette case and passed Tommy a joint. He considered it carefully and decided that he needed to give me one more shot.

"You know, Carol," he said. "I am totally mystified by the fact that you can live with this guy."

"He kind of grows on you," Carol said kindly.

"Not on me," Tommy said as he lit joint.

Even then he couldn't resist taking one more shot. He noticed a book that lying on the coffee table in front of him. It was a modern reissue of a 1880's book of the chess games of Paul Morphy, who had been a romantic chess phenom of the 1800s, a sort of complementary character to Maurice Gottshak whose music I had borrowed from the library to listen to during my long employment free afternoons.

"Morphy!" he said. "He's all calvary charges and romance. If you play chess you ought to be studying Karpov. Karpov is the winner."

"Karpov is not beautiful," I said. "Morphy is beautiful."

"Karpov wins," Tommy said.

"Karpov is not beautiful."

"Boys, boys, boys," Carol said wearily.

Later, as Tommy stood to leave, he leaned forward to kiss Carol. It was light and quick, a respectful kiss, but then their eyes met and held the gaze of the other for several seconds. When I was younger I became expert in the subtle tricks needed to carry on an affair in secret. A quick and friendly kiss is ideal because it conveys far more to the participants than to the casual observer but the long, longing glance is madness. It is a dead give away. When it happens by accident between un-involved people they quickly look away, it is too powerful. Tommy is clumsy and Carol is careless. Still, I hoped I was wrong and that there was nothing to it. Either of them would be quick to tell me that this didn't constitute evidence. My brother is an overly serious man and not nearly agile enough to pull off a thing like that without incurring at least a minor tragedy.

At the door Tommy shook my hand with uncharacteristic vigor. "I hope your new job works out for you, kid. I really do."

"Thank you," I said.

That night for the first time in several weeks I wanted to make love to Carol but she refused me.

The next morning as I talked with Joseph Valesti I quickly decided that he was a pompous man with a lazy mind who didn't have any grip on the company he was trying to run and I decided I would not take the job that he was offering me.

That evening I changed my mind. As Carol lit a thick joint and stretched out on the couch she reminded me of a pertinent fact. "Well," she said, "you don't have a job."

Later Guy La Rue who handled operations for Valesti called. He sounded frantic to the point of incoherence. "You're not going to take it?" he shouted. "You've got to. It's madness. The guy needs you. He's rich. Ask for twice what you want. He's got to pay. But take it. Take it for me. We've got to have a good margin man."

"He was so cranked up I could hear him from here," Carol observed after I had hung up. "What's he want?"

"Me."

"He's got a problem."

"So it would seem."

About 8:30 Tommy stopped by. He regards himself as my tutor in corporate matters and he wanted to bring himself up to date. I filled him in.

"Take it, Larry," he said. "It sounds like a good, quick job. It'll look good on your resume to have something besides Winston Stone. Maybe you can get some of your connections back." He took the joint from Carol's hand, drew heavily and added, "And you don't have job, kid."

While Tommy and Carol talked about a case they were working on together, I settled back to consider my situation. The reasons for not taking the job were plain enough. My skills as a manager would be wasted there, the things I had hoped to accomplish within a large firm would be impossible there. I had heard horror stories about the irrationality of management in small firms and Valesti's brief, unprofessional interview of me that morning had done nothing to dispel my doubts. Still, I had committed myself to chance in lieu of any firm direction and if this turned out to be a disaster it would certainly teach me something about relying on chance.

Job hunting was a situation that had crystallized the extremes of my nature. On the one hand I hated the idleness, the lack of direction that went with my unemployment: on the other my life seemed momentarily to be that posited, single point through which an infinite number of lines could be drawn. Hypothetically, I could choose to move in any direction. My resume was impressive. My experience and credentials were excellent (I had become a manager at Winston Stone at an unusually young age), but my motivation was suspect. What motivated people in this business? Greed? Need for status? I had little use for anything but the distraction, the game of it, and at Winston Stone that had proven to be an insufficient motivation.

I knew I was growing too comfortable in that idleness brought on by my unemployment. There was something restful in spending the long spring days with Mozart and Bach on the stereo. I had money in the bank and a desire to read. But at the bottom I was a worker. I needed to see myself as a part of the heart of current society, as a contributor. I had been trying to reason my way into a new arrangement with a business full of people who were only in it for the money. I was trying to make an acceptable, marketable package out of my vices. It was difficult to approach the business without donning a cloak of greed and self-interest. They could understand how to motivate a man who wanted to be rich but they were threatened by someone who wanted to be in the business for non-materialistic self-satisfaction.

One sleepy afternoon as I was waiting for the phone to ring in response to my glittering resume I had picked up a copy of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics that was left over from a prep school course in philosophy. I soon returned the book to its place on the shelf. The clear relentless logic was too seductive. I imagined myself in an interview with some harried corporate manager. "And why do you think this would be a good job for you, Larry?" "The proper goal in life is happiness, sir." "What would make you happy, Larry? A new car? A bigger house?" "No sir, it has been proven that happiness lies in the pursuit of moral virtue, by which I mean . . . ." No, that would not do at all. It would make me seem insane. One thing I do know is that insanity is often not mis-apprehension or miscomprehension but only a divergence from a norm. The insane often have a fierce grip on truth or at least some truth. What they don't have is a facility for getting along with the way things are, with what is. No, it's better to sit there smiling and say, "Why, I want to be rich and famous, sir. Of course." and then finesse things from there.

As a man who still reads Aristotle, I also have to wonder why it is I chose to go back into the brokerage business to make a living when there are fields, teaching, for example, or social work, that might be considered more apt to draw the ethically sensitive? And why for that matter would I choose Chicago, a city that practically delights in its corruption? I can only think of a friend of mine who now made his living making fine furniture by hand but then he went back to Viet Nam for three tours. "Why?" I asked him. "It's very hard to explain," he said. "There's something I am good at. It's making quick and complex choices in matters of life and death. But it only works in the jungle."

Someone once wrote that boredom is the most underrated motivation in the world and perhaps it was boredom that finally nudged me towards taking the job. I had noticed that my relationship with Carol worked better when we each had something else in our lives to bring to it. It was an isometric bond. Our best days were the ones on which we compared notes, gossiped and laughed about the madness in which in which we had to work.

Having made my decision I slept well that night and gave no further thought to the consequences.

Early the next morning I phoned Valesti and requested another interview. At 10:00 I was sitting again in his paneled office, scrubbed, dressed in my best blue suit and a silk rep tie. At 11:00 I was hired and being shown through their small back office. LaRue shook my hands for five minutes. The money they offered me seemed incredible. It was Thursday.

The newspaper reports that appeared later described Valesti, Price and Lowe as a small, profitable, local brokerage firm, well connected with the business elite of Chicago. It was well-known as a market maker in Chicago area bank stocks. Valesti was said to be from a well-known Lake Forest family, wealthy, and a member of the board of several suburban hospitals. Much was made of the fact that the firm owned a fifty foot sailboat that was used for the entertainment of their customers.

I'm sure those were the facts but they were not my facts. Mine were far more mundane. The office took up a corner on a high floor of one of the older buildings along the dense canyon of La Salle Street. Valesti's office was overly large and furnished with extravagant antiques but the rest of the office was cramped and almost seedy. The salesmen worked at old desks that were covered with papers and notebooks and in the back office things were even more confined. The desks there were broad but seemed at least fifty years old and it wasn't uncommon to find drawers that wouldn't open or ones which opened too easily leaving their contents strewn across the floor. The file cabinets were unmatched and painted in wide variety of different shades of green and brown. The clerks had personalized their work area with cartoons cut from the newspapers that had yellowed where they hung taped to the faded, painted walls.

I had been expecting to be offered an office but it seemed that no one there other then Valesti had an office. They sat me down at an old wide desk in a corner next to the mailroom. It was far from the desks of the clerks who I would be working with and from the records I would need. I asked LaRue to move me but he said that it was impossible with a tone that suggested great urgency so I located the coffee machine, unpacked my pen and pencil set and went to work.

My years as a manager at Winston Stone had taught me the importance of first impressions and so, lacking any other direction, I spent the rest of the day acquainting myself with the staff. I tried to present myself as easy-going, yet demanding and highly competent. The people there were experienced enough but somnambulistic and as entrenched in their particular jobs as feudal serfs. At Winston Stone I had gotten a lot of work out of young people in return for the promise of quick advancement within a large firm. It seemed unlikely that that approach would work here. The office was supposed to be open until a quarter of five but after four fifteen it would have been hard to find someone to answer the phone.

I stopped at the supermarket on the way home and bought a lot of things. Recently I had been doing all the shopping and cooking and I wanted to be sure that I wouldn't have to worry about dinner if the job should get busy in the next few days. Carol called and said she was visiting friends and wouldn't be home till late. I was in bed but not asleep when she arrived.

"How was your day?" she asked.

"Fine. It's like being in a rest home. Peaceful. I can't quite figure out what it is they want me to do."

"You're a bright boy," she said. "You'll figure it out."

I realized that she was a little stoned. She went into the bathroom to change into a long flannel robe before she joined me in the bed.

"Do you realize that we have only one stereo?" she said.

"How many do we need?" I was something of an ascetic and Carol knew she could get under my skin by suggesting that we absolutely had to have a trash masher or a dishwasher.

I waited for her answer. I was uncomfortable when we talked while Carol was stoned. There seemed to be a great distance between us. She seemed to be lost in thought. Her eyes were closed and I wondered if she were not about to fall asleep.

"Becky and Phil are splitting."

That was a surprise that shouldn't have been a surprise. They had a hostile, turbulent relationship but it had always seemed to be founded on a deep affection. Perhaps they had grown tired of fighting.

"They're dividing the stereo. She gets the speakers. He gets the amps. Seems terribly peculiar to me."

Before Carol, I had had several relationship but only one that was serious enough to require breaking apart a household when it ended. The problem there had been the books and records and we had labored over the balance of it, judging each item for it's emotional association rather than any material value. It would be a simple task for Carol and I to split. This was a coalition and not a marriage. Our tastes hardly overlapped except in the pursuit of our careers. My experience with Winston Stone had aged my tastes as I searched desperately for anything that might have given me the comfort of a longer view. When I was alone I would listen to Bach or Mozart or the operas of Verdi. Carol liked young black rhythm artists and the cool, current jazz. The list of her favorites changed so fast that I could hardly keep track of them. I wondered if you could measure the relative submission of the partners in a relationship by the small choices made when tastes were in conflict. Carol and I labored to keep a balance and when that was not possible we avoided the issue. We always spent Fridays apart.

For fifty years, Valesti, Price, and Lowe had made their money on the institutional side of the securities business, by selling stocks and bonds to other brokerage firms and to banks. They did trades with individuals only when they happened to stumble upon them. Then, ten days before I joined them, they had hired C. Ryan Edmunston, one of the most successful stockbrokers in Chicago, away from the large firm of Benright Parkis and suddenly they found themselves with a large number of individual customers, many of whom traded on margin, which means that they borrowed money from the firm to make their purchases. Valesti, Price and Lowe had no experience with this manner of trading and so they hired me.

I soon found myself involved with management. Friday morning about ten LaRue stopped by my desk and told me that we had a meeting with Valesti. Two of the salesmen were waiting in Valesti's office. They had taken the two wooden chairs which sat in front of Valesti's desk leaving LaRue and I to sit on the soft brocaded couch which seemed uncomfortably close to the floor. Valesti began the meeting immediately.

"They are demanding a certified check," he said.

There was a long silence. I whispered to LaRue. "Who is?"

"Benright Parkis," one of the salesman said loudly. I was seriously under-informed.

"What do we do?" Valesti asked. He was looking directly at me and I had an absurd feeling that he was addressing the question to me. What were they expecting?

LaRue's glance told me that the question was in fact directed to me. He gave me my clue. "We owe it to them on a trade."

"Give it to them," I said. "They're within their rights to demand it." Then showing off a little bit I added. "The only reason it's not normally done that way is that it's assumed to be unnecessary."

Valesti's face wore a look that was more of pain than disgust and I instantly wished that I had had the sense to keep my mouth shut.

"Can we do that, Guy?" Valesti asked.

"Yes, just barely."

"Do it then," he said. "Thank you, gentlemen."

The salesmen stayed rigid in their chairs but Guy rose and after a second I realized that I was expected to follow him. In the hallway outside I asked, "Why such a big deal about the check?"

"It's for a million four and change."

I had handled payments of that size often enough before. In certain areas of the business it was normal. Here, it seemed that it might logically be a cause for celebration.

"Look," Guy said, "I've got to go to the bank to set this thing up. Why don't you go to work."

"And do what?" I asked.

"Whatever it is that margin guys do?"

I stood for a while at the window at the front of the sales area. From there you looked over a short building across the street and beyond to the pale blue expanse of Lake Michigan. It was beautiful, serene vista, a particularly Chicago sort of beauty. These stunning, high level views were one of the little benefits that came to the privileged and the wealthy in this town. I remembered the note of pain in Valesti's expression and I finally had a clear idea of what my job in this place should be.

Valesti's secretary, Agatha, was a woman in her mid-fifties, graying and lean. She had a constant smile and seemed to welcome Valesti's customers as if she were bringing them into a parlor for a nice cup of tea. In response to my request she produced a copy of the firm's latest financial report from her meticulous files. It was a simple printed card sent to customers annually or on their request. Most of the figures were impressive. There was no debt. That was impressive. What was not impressive was the figure at the bottom of the page, the firm's total capitalization was $1,555,000. To be settling a single trade for a million four was bad business practice at best and at worst it was sheer madness. I took the elevators down to the lobby and bought myself two packs of Camels. I had been smoking Merits but there was something about hard work that demanded strong cigarettes.

Andy, the head cashier, was surly and unhelpful. Nobody had told him what I was supposed to be doing there but somehow he had heard that my salary was higher than his. It took me quite a while to find out where he kept his file of open trades. He had a very unusual style of filing. It occurred to me later that those idiosyncrasies were his job security. Once I found the trades and separated out the tickets for the shares we had bought from other brokers it was easy to isolate the trades we had made with Benright Parkis. They represented almost two thirds of the total trades. His file was crammed to the point of breaking. Apparently this was unusually heavy volume for the firm. Incredibly, they were all for a single security. The stock was the common stock of National Brewing Co which traded over the counter and produced several beers that enjoyed a moderate local following. There was one trade for 50,000 shares, another for 10,000 and two more for 5,000 shares. The price varied from $68 to $70 a share and all of them settled that day. I ran a total on Andy's adding machine. The money came to $1,430,300.00.

"How are we going to handle these trades with Benright Parkis?" I asked Andy.

"LaRue is handling it," he said.

"We aren't going to hold this stuff are we?"

"No," he said with scorn in his voice. "Of course not. We're buying for the new guy's customers. Edmunston. That guy is amazing. I can tell you."

"Do you have the trades for the customers who bought them?"

'No. Benny does. He handles the customer side."

"I thought he was the dividend clerk."

"He is but he had some extra time and we don't have a lot of customer business. We are an institutional house."

He put his hand proudly on top of his trade file as if he were guarding the crown jewels.

Benny was a man in his late fifties with a lot of experience in the business and the slow ambling walk of a man who was constantly tired. His desk was at the far end of the room and when I got there I found that he was gone for the day. He had to pick up his daughter at the airport. I found out later that it was something of an office joke. You never found Benny in the office after noon on Friday. His personal calls were directed to a nearby bar; business waited till Monday. The girl who took in checks didn't know anything about any special money coming in and she never touched anything on Benny's desk.

About an hour later I was back in Valesti's office.

"Well, how are we?" he asked.

"Assuming Edmunston's people pay you'll be all right. From a compliance point of view I would think you would want to get some of the customers a bit diversified. Edmunston is in love with one stock and I don't have to tell you that that is an unhealthy situation."

"These are substantial investors. I am sure that they have other holdings with other firms. There is a rule that limits the amount of margin debt we can have, I understand."

"Yes, but it would allow you about thirty million."

"And what do we have?"

"About six million. It'll be about four and a half when the customers pay. But it's nearly all collateralized by one stock."

"Is there a rule about that, too?"

"I'm not sure but it's only common sense that it's a dangerous situation."

"And what should we do?"

"Lay off some of his big accounts to other firms. Stop Edmunston from buying more National Brewing."

"And if he's right about there being a takeover?"

"My job is to protect us if he isn't right."

"I'll consider your suggestions."

Guy La Rue had had a busy afternoon. The firm's line of credit had been used up the previous day by margin accounts being transferred in from Benright Parkis. LaRue's only chance of getting the loan to pay for the stock we had bought for that day's settlement was to use the purchased stock as collateral at our bank. A conference call with his banker and Benright Parkis representatives from New York and Chicago had been futile. Benright Parkis refused to give up the stock without a certified check in hand. It looked for a time as if he would be unable to come up with the needed check but then Valesti had called an officer at the bank who was a good friend of his and arranged to support the loan with his personal property. The check was delivered a little before two and within twenty minutes Benright Parkis had credited our account at the Midwest Stock Exchange with the shares.

"You've got to give these guys credit," LaRue said when the transaction was completed. "They are really on top of this thing. You'd think this was the most important thing they had to deal with."

"Maybe it is," I said.

My next step seemed to be a chat with C. Ryan Edmunston. He proved to be elusive. The secretary assigned to him was a bright young woman whose careful, conservative style of dress showed she thought of herself as a career woman. She was also a woman under assault, juggling a huge flow of phone calls and orders. One of the other secretaries was trying to help her handle the confusion. I waited quietly while she handled four or five waiting calls. At last there was a break and she sighed deeply. "Whee," she said and smiled.

"Can I help you?" she asked.

"Are you expecting Mr. Edmunston?"

"Who knows?" she said brightly. "He was here yesterday for a hour. He's a very busy man. Always on the move." There was more than a hint of adoration in her voice. She was clearly looking forward to the day when she would be such a figure of importance that her day would resemble a whirlwind.

"How does he enter orders?" I asked.

"He calls them in to me. I get calls from all over. All day long."

"A very impressive man," I said.

"He is careless though."

"Careless?"

"He's terrible with account numbers. Look at these." She held up a handful of orders all of which were purchases of National Brewing. "He put the wrong account numbers on all of them."

I took the confirmations and considered writing down the numbers but I realized it would be unnecessary. I could easily get the corrections from the billing clerk.

"Have him call Larry Turner, will you. It's very important."

There was no call and I discovered that he had been to the office twice that afternoon without getting in touch with me. A very busy man indeed.

Finally after five, as LaRue and I were leaving for the day we met him waiting impatiently for the elevators. LaRue introduced us, calling Edmunston our new star salesman and referring to me as the margin clerk. "You two must get acquainted," LaRue said. "You're going to be working closely together."

Edmunston proved to be a bizarre amalgam of the flashy and the mundane. He was a short man, standing no more than 5' 4" with a round soft face and reddish, slightly unhealthy skin. His brown hair was thinning noticeably at the top. He was trembling slightly. I noticed later that he was only still when he was talking which he did at length. He was an intense, rambling conversationalist whose words served first to establish control over the listener and the space between them. A customer of his later said to the SEC that he often bought the stocks Edmunston recommended in order to get him to shut up. But there was his flashier side as well. He wore an eye patch. It was a neatly strapped cup of leather that fit precisely over his left eye. His suit was carefully tailored, but it was tailored to his vanities rather then to his body. The shoulders of his jacket were padded and the waist was painfully narrow. His tie was immense, a great yellow river of silk flowing across the front of his tattersall shirt.

"Yes, yes, yes. A pleasure," Edmunston said and then he lurched past us into the elevator.

His secretary had shown me a picture of Edmunston and his wife at a charity ball that he had set prominently on the cadenza behind his desk. His wife was a beautiful woman with the high cheek bones and refined posture of the upper class. In the picture she smiled with a broad, studied ecstasy, clearly an aristocrat of the north shore. Edmonton and I apparently had different views on the mutual problem of being a plain man in love with a beautiful woman.

C. Ryan Edmunston. Later the newspapers reported that his first name was Chester.

The apartment was dark when I got home. Friday nights represented the first and most successful compromise of my relationship with Carol. Fridays we each went our own way, spent time with whomever we pleased. On Fridays, a group of the young associates from Carol's firm usually started drinking together in a basement bar beneath their office building and continued on to the bars along Lincoln Avenue. She would be home some time between ten and two and she would be high enough that all she would want to do would be to go to sleep. After changing into a pair of loose khaki pants and a heavy work shirt, I poured myself a scotch.

I found nostalgic pleasure in my Friday evening ritual of relaxation. It felt good to be working again. When I finished the scotch I fixed a small dinner. Some cold chicken from the refrigerator and a small salad. The tomato was from the supermarket. Now neither Carol nor I had the time to go to the out of the way vegetable stand where we could buy good produce. The tomato was hard and almost yellow and under the knife seemed to have the texture of balsa wood. I decided against having a glass of wine and took the meal to the coffee table in the living room where I could watch a pair of talk shows on PBS. I enjoyed the air of knowledge of these shows, the suggestion that things could be explained if you had the intelligence and the connections, if you were on the inside. When the shows ended I tuned the stereo to WFMT and listened to the Minneapolis Orchestra play a Brahms symphony. After a while I brought out my chess board and a book of Bobby Fisher's games and tried to puzzle out the logic of his genius. After a time I made a minor decision.

LaRue answered his phone on the eighth ring. He sounded drunk.

"It's Larry," I said. "I'm going to work tomorrow. Where does Benny keep his customer trades."

"What?"

I repeated the question.

"There's a file box in the upper left hand drawer."

"Is the desk locked?"

"Are you kidding? I don't think that son of a bitch knows enough to lock up his house."

When Carol got home about 1:00 I was asleep but she woke me up as she climbed into bed beside me.

"Have fun?" I mumbled.

"Hmmm," she said.

She was breathing deeply. She was drunk and would soon be asleep.

"Larry, be a pal and remind tomorrow that I promised Becky I would stop by this afternoon."

"I'm going into work. I'll leave you a note."

"Oh," she said, "how terribly noble."

She kissed the middle of my back gently and soon she was lost in a deep sleep. I pulled the blanket up over her slender body. I noted that she smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat. But not excessively. There had been an unfortunate series of Fridays soon after she moved in when she had returned to our bed, smelling clean and scented with a fine soap that I had never smelled before, the ends of her hair still damp from the shower. Carol's heart is in the right place but she is shockingly casual about the minutiae.

My days at Winston Stone had always been frantic, an endless barrage of problems and choices. It is a business that by its nature demands instant choices and nearly instant solutions. There were days when you literally had no time to think things through and were forced to survive on your reflexes. It was my habit then to work on Saturdays for then I could work in peace and it often seemed to me that I got as much done on a Saturday as I did during the rest of the week.

This Saturday, at Valesti, Price and Lowe, I located the trades that had not been settled and listed them on a legal pad with the idea that I would cross them off as they were paid. The money had been due on Friday and although it was not unusual for customers to pay late the fact that not a single check had come in was unnerving. Edmunston had apparently been strongly selling National as a company that would soon be bought out by another at a very high price and the trading price of National was far higher than it had been for years although the market in general was depressed. I was disturbed to discover that over the previous week, our small firm had accounted for almost 70 per cent of the total trading in the stock for the entire country. That was a very unsettling fact.

The firm's general situation was precarious. It was important that Edmunston customers pay us promptly. We were badly overextended. A small drop in the price of National Brewing would be painful, a severe drop in the price was something I hardly dare think of. We were like a navy with two ships. It was important that we win every battle.

I took another sheet from my legal pad, made a list of the things I had to do first thing on Monday and I got home in time to listen to most the Texaco radio opera.

That night Carol and I went to a party. She spent most of the evening talking to my brother and a tall, sandy-haired preppie, who I assumed made his living as an advertisement for sports shirts, but who turned out to be yet another young associate at my brother's firm. I called him Biff but he turned out to be someone else. I drank too much and played bridge better than I had for months.

Sunday we drove out to Hinsdale to see Carol's family. While Carol talked to her mother and sister I was left in the company of her father. He is warm and articulate man, the assistant general counsel at Standard Oil, but he has a very low opinion of me. When I told him the good news that I was reemployed I discovered that Carol had never told him that I had been fired and I dropped another few notches in his eyes. I spent the afternoon helping him remove the storm windows from his house. It seemed as if there were thousands.

Visits to her family raise the shadow of marriage with Carol as does nothing else in our relationship. When we got home she immediately lost herself in a pile of urgent work she had been carrying with her for weeks.

I went to bed early.

Some people are successful because they adapt, they see and they think. They change in response to their own careful analysis of things. If I am successful it will be because of this. Others are successful because they are so thoroughly, so completely themselves that they become almost a force. Edmunston was of the second type. He was constantly in motion, always on the phone, selling, persuading, wheedling, overpowering. He was the type of man for whom lulls in the conversation represent crises.

Late on Monday morning, I finally managed to approach him regarding the failure of this customers to pay. He was standing beside his desk watching the ticker tape at the front of the room. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was a gesture that a taller man uses with a shorter man and I was nearly a half foot taller then he. His vest crawled up his side and a puff of white shirt burst free of his belt as if eager to make its escape. His eyes however never came close to me. They remained riveted on the ticker tape at the front of the room. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "Look, I'll get back to you after the close. Things are really starting to happen." He looked at his watch and then twisting so that I was facing the back of his head he picked up his phone and dialed. "Yeah, you can," he said. "You can tell him it's C. Ryan Edmunston. The man that made him rich."

I thought for a second and then walked straight into Valesti's office.

"Have someone call these people," I said as I dropped my list onto his desk. "Tell them they're expected to pay no later then tomorrow."

As I got back to my desk I realized that if Edmunston himself wouldn't tell me what was going on, I would have to find out from someone else. I called Ben Harbison, an old timer who was a partner in a tiny firm and something of an institution on the street. He had made himself an unofficial clearing house for all sorts of information.

"Who can tell me about this guy Edmunston?" I asked. "I need to find out what he's up to and I'm afraid I need to know in a hurry."

"You might try Terry Ballard," he said. "He runs the Margin Department at Benright Parkis. Edmunston was his problem until two weeks ago. There is one thing though. Tell him I referred you. And tell him it's off the record and then be damn sure that you keep if off the record."

I got a hold of Terry Ballard who said that he would talk to me at the Anchor Room which was a bar along side the Kennedy Expressway not far from his northside home. I checked the morning mail and discovered that we had not received money from any of Edmunston's customers. I had a brief lunch and then sat back to ponder the reason why Terry Ballard should desire this extraordinary cloak and dagger routine. In mid-afternoon my phone rang. It was Agatha saying that Mr. Valesti wished to see me immediately.

I found him pacing behind his desk. His coat was hanging from the high leather back of his chair. It was the only time I was ever to see Valesti in his shirt sleeves. I took that as a positive sign that dignity was no longer foremost in his mind.

"This list you gave me. I called a couple of them. A contractor who did some work for our church in Highland Park and a lawyer I know from the symphony. You know what they said?"

"No."

"They said they didn't know anything about the damn trades. They said they didn't make them."

"Are they going to pay?" I asked. It was an old operations joke and under the circumstances a very poor one. Valesti took it seriously and it made him angry. His world was coming apart.

"Oh course not." His face bore an expression that seemed sorrowful, the look of a gentle man betrayed. I would have preferred to see anger. "Edmunston took off like a fox as soon as he saw you come into my office this morning. He's got the phone at his home switched over to his damned answering machine."

He stopped, recovered a bit, and then turned to me.

"Recommendations?"

I looked at my watch. It was 3:15. The market was closed for the day.

"Call up everyone who bought National Brewing. Tell them that we must have the money tomorrow. You're pretty much in your rights to do that. And then tomorrow cancel all the trades that are disclaimed."

"You mean sell them out, don't you?" The difference was who had to accept the profit or loss, the customer or the firm.

"Under the circumstances I don't think we could do that."

He thought. "No, I don't suppose that we can."

As I was leaving the office I ran into Danny Kantor, one of the younger partners. He was in a good mood. Most of the young partners were in a good mood. Snaring Edmunston had been quite a coup for them.

"Earning your money, Turner?" he asked lightly.

I raised my eyebrows and shrugged as if to signify something on the order of, "Boy, am I ever."

"Say, Danny," I asked, "What's Valesti worth?" After I asked I realized that it was a very rude question. I added, "Roughly. Ball park figure. I really have no idea."

Danny took no offence though. Perhaps in his circle it was common to discuss net worth. "Seven or eight mill, I guess. Not counting the house. He comes from a very good family."

Terry Ballard was waiting for me at the bar of the Anchor Room which was a large dark cavern lit by a galaxy of brightly colored beer signs. The bar was covered with linoleum and the jukebox played mournful country songs. No one from the business would be caught dead in such a place.

Terry was in his early thirties. He wore a nice gray suit and had a sharp haircut. You could have mistaken him for a young lawyer. Most of the people in the operations side of the business are high school grads who have worked their way up and they have more that a few rough edges. Still Benright Parkis did have a reputation for being one of the few well run firms on the street. Along with Winston Stone.

"So you're the guy who inherited Edmunston?" he said.

"More or less. I'm new there. I guess I'm sort of a consultant."

"I heard that you guys never even allowed margin trading before. That's unbelievable."

He was drinking a double scotch. I ordered him another and got a scotch and soda for myself. Our industry has a drinking problem.

"I don't mean to sound petty," he said, "but we've got to keep this off the record."

"Of course, but do you mind if I ask why?"

"Edmunston's kind of a gray area. We did fire him, of course."

"That's news to me."

"We did fire him but we should have hung a big banner out on La Salle Street that said don't touch this guy."

"Only if you did that then you would have to eat the losses on the National Brewing."

"You got it. The notice of dismissal that we sent to the New York Stock Exchange said that his customers had a tendency to pay late. That and nothing more. Made it look like we were just being scrupulous in our house cleaning. But there was lots more. Toward the end he was transferring trades from one account to another. Two or three times till he found somebody he could coerce into taking the trade. He had guys kiting checks for half a million. They got wise to him just about the same time that they gave him the salesman of the year award. They gave him a nice plaque and a bonus and they kicked his ass out the back door. Into the waiting arms of Valesti who has been strutting around with a big grin on his face ever since, thinking that he picked our pocket."

"That's not the way he looks these days."

Terry laughed. "No, I suppose not." Margin managers are paid to avoid disasters like this and together over a few drinks they are apt to talk about the chances and quirks that nearly brought them down. Shop talk.

"There's a little more. I had to come by this under the table myself which is why I'm giving it to you. You figure Edmunston makes three or four hundred thousand a year right? He should have it made, right?"

"Right."

"Well, he's got bank loans out all over the city. I bet it comes to a couple of million. And the only thing that's securing most of it is the damn stock of National Brewing. So what I am saying is cover yourself a little bit. Be sure your personnel people got him to sign a financial disclosure before he came on board. It'll probably be false but it might do you some good anyway."

"I'm not sure that we have any personnel people," I said.

There was a silence then and I ordered another round of drinks. My head began to ache.

"So what's his problem?" I asked.

"Some of the guys think the Mafia is into him. I figure he's just a jerk, a poor kid from the southside who's decided he's going to be the richest man in Highland Park." He finished his drink and with a little gesture of his forefinger got the bartender to bring us another round of drinks. I didn't need it but it would have been rude to refuse.

"So, how do you like working for a little firm?" he asked.

"It's weird," I said. "I feel like I joined a low grade circus."

"Sounds a lot like Winston Stone, only smaller."

Later people in the business who wanted to seem like they were in the know but who could not possibly have had access to the facts whispered that Edmunston had been in debt to the Mafia. It was possible of course. He was a man of such immense vanity and drive that he would have seemed like a natural mark to the Mafia. The published facts were enough. The man spent frantically and he was deeply in debt to a number of Loop and suburban banks. The loans it turned out where all collateralized by the stock of National Brewing. They amounted to a little over two million dollars.

It was after eight before I got home. Carol had the dining room table covered with sheets of yellow legal paper. A cup of hot tea rested on a battered manila folder. She was wearing a long, flannel robe and her severe reading glasses. I don't think she truly needed the glasses but she used them whenever she desired a serious or scholarly effect and perhaps she was wearing them then to remind herself that she had work to do.

I kissed her and she grimaced at the strong taste of scotch and tobacco in my mouth. Her scent filled my nostrils and I wanted very badly to make love to her.

"How's it going?" she asked.

"It's a mess. A very big mess."

"Really? Give me the details."

"Can't. It's proprietary. You might end up handling the litigation."

I meant it as a joke but if someone other than brother with his sense of propriety had handled the assignment of associates at her firm it might have happened.

"You got a call this evening," Carol said.

"Yeah?"

"From Linda."

"Linda?"

"Your Linda."

"Oh."

"She seemed very nice."

"You talked?"

"For quite a while. She and her husband just moved from L. A. to Tucson and I think she wanted you to be sure that you have the new address. Just in case."

"What did she have to say?"

"She said she was fine and she asked how you were, of course."

"And was I fine too?"

"I said you were ecstatic."

Carol has a weakness for handsome strangers, the taller the better. I have a weakness for the wives and women of my friends but it was a weakness I had learned to curb because the results of yielding to it were always disastrous.

Whenever any of my old friends showed up, Carol watched them intently like a bemused Sherlock Holmes. I had come home once after drinking too much and found a brief card from Melissa announcing her wedding to Benjamin. Carol had noticed my reaction and when she questioned me I told her rather more than I should have about the fierce entanglements of that time of my life. She soon realized that in my mind it had all become as ordered and intricate as a fugue, interwoven in a way that from a distance of time seemed orderly, which it was not, and complicated, which it certainly was.

That night after we had made love, ending a drought that had clearly lasted for too long, she asked sleepily. "Are you fucking Becky?"

"No."

"My sister Theresa?"

"No."

"Do you plan to?"

"No."

It seemed that this was a great declaration of faithfulness on my part but from her response you might have guessed that I was thoroughly bored with her.

On Tuesday morning it seemed as if we were at last making some progress. Valesti had found the courage to prohibit the purchase of additional shares of National Brewing. We cancelled the trades of the customers who had actually disavowed them. That involved a total of 5000 shares. We were able to sell 2000 shares at $70 1/2 back to Benright Parkis. This surprised me at the time but it turned out that Edmunston had been badgering some of his friends there to make some purchases and the management there soon discovered this and put a stop to it. We sold another 500 shares to Winston Stone at $68 but we had buy the rest of the shares ourselves and hold them in our inventory. Danny Koster who was handling the trading seemed concerned about the thinness of the market for the shares but Valesti was delighted with his show of firmness and he seemed confident that we were nearly out of the woods.

I returned to my desk and tried to figure out where we really stood. It was still a dangerous situation. We had been unable to contact many of Edmunston's customers (he seemed to list their phone numbers in some sort of code) and therefore we could not in good faith ask the stock exchange to extend the amount of time they had to pay and by the rules we should take action to close out their positions the following morning. A break in the price of National Brewing could seriously harm the firm. The million dollars in capital was small protection. Still, if the money our customers owed us did come in and if the price of National Brewing held up we might just be able to thrive along our tightrope. Edmunston was a true salesman, a salesman of heroic size and the commissions on his mad surge of trades added up to a sizable amount of money. He didn't seem to discount the rates even to his best customers. I had heard from Ben Harbison that a number of people elsewhere on the street were eager to sell short the stock of National Brewing and that the supply available to them for borrowing was very small. We were now sitting on a pile of stock that might be profitably loaned out. A quick calculation showed that we could make several thousand a week that way. If a small firm was more vulnerable to the quirks of the market it was also easier to make money that was significant to them. Anything but the most substantial innovation was unlikely to make a difference in the bottom line of a firm like Winston Stone.

In the early afternoon I got a call from Ben.

"Stick around a bit tonight, will you," he said. "Lou Price is coming over."

"Who's he?"

"An old margin guy from Brison."

"I don't think we need his help," I said.

"Valesti's looking for a second opinion. He seems to think you've prematurely pronounced it a terminal case. By the way, did he give you a contract?"

"Of course not."

"Pity."

Lou Price showed up about four o'clock. The board room was nearly empty by then. He seemed to know everyone. He stopped to make small talk with everyone who remained. A customer was standing at the small window to the cashiering area paying for a purchase and Lou put a broad arm across his shoulder.

"I always give this guy the needle," Lou said. "Listen to this."

The man finished writing his check and passed it through, he considered the balance in his checkbook for a second and turned and smiled at Lou.

"Lou," he said, "How the hell are you?"

"Good, Dutch, really good. Say stick around here for a second will you? We were just talking about you and I got a couple of questions to ask. We were just wondering how you managed to get to be a slumlord."

The man smiled and I knew Lou was on safe ground. They must have talked like this many times before.

"Simplest thing in the world, Lou. I just hang around with a lot of slumlords and after a while it just seemed like the most natural thing a man could do."

After the customer had left Lou surprised me by using the same peculiar compliment I had heard so many times from my grandparents. "That old guy is a very wealthy man, you know, very wealthy indeed but deep down he's as common as dirt."

Lou was a man in his late sixties with thinning gray hair that was combed tightly back across his temples. A dark tan hinted at a recent vacation in the south. He had a round pleasant face and a full hard stomach that you would expect to find behind the counter in a delicatessen.

We sat down at my desk. We talked for an hour or so. He was an easy man to talk to. We talked about margin and I learned he shared my love of opera. It seemed that he was always telling me a story but at the end of the hour I realized that he had managed to grasp my whole history in the business and had determined that I was well versed in the things I would need to know to do my job. He had not been sent to judge our situation but to judge me. It seemed that his own qualifications centered on his longevity. He had worked in the business for forty years and he was well past any vanity about titles. He was quite satisfied with his job as a margin clerk. A little after five o'clock we realized that the office was empty.

"So, why don't you show me what you've got?" he said.

When I had finished he said, "You've been doing a pretty good job, kid. Looks to me like you've got all the facts."

"The facts I've got," I said. "What I need is a solution."

'If you've got all the facts than you must have some conclusions."

"Well," I said. "We can choose to cancel all the unpaid trades tomorrow morning. We could take our losses right away. It would piss off some of the customers and Edmunston but it would be legal. We could sell off the stock to other dealers. I suppose with the amount of National Brewing we have we would lose a ton on that but it's still our best option."

I expected to be complimented on my firm stand but instead Lou shrugged. "Sell it to who?" he said. "You've got the only damn guy in the whole country who wants it at this price. You guys are a joke along the street. No trader would help you out of this. You could pray that Edmunston finally manages to find an asshole company out there to make a buy-out but at this price that would just be a waste of good-will."

"So what then?"

"Put a god-damn big pad-lock on the door and call the SEC."

"So, if I have the truth," I said, "why aren't I happy?"

"The truth shall set you free?" Lou asked with a sarcastic snort. "Maybe. But if you ever want to run a brokerage firm you would do better to hitch your wagon to illusion, try greed. Greed is always good."

I stared at the old man. He seemed perfectly serene although there was nothing about him which suggested prosperity.

"Did you ever want to run a brokerage firm?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said. "As amazing as it may seem, once I did."

I must have looked very distressed.

"You're a bright college boy," Lou said. "You know your Shakespeare?"

"Some."

"From Lear, Glouster.'The gods are just and of our petty vices make the instruments to plague us.'"

I felt a sudden sympathy for my brother's irritation when I broke into some conversation that he felt to be of great seriousness with a quote from the classics.

"I like to mention that to new kids in the business," Lou said. "So they figure out that it isn't all carbon paper and paper clips."

Carol was in the bentwood rocker. She was wearing one of my loose sweaters over a pair of yellow panties. Her bare legs were drawn up against her chest and her head was back against the caning so that the chair tilted back ominously. There was a movie on the television in which various recognizable stars were running about inside a fiercely burning skyscraper trying to save one another. Carol was stoned and wanted nothing more than to be entertained.

"Have you eaten?" I asked as I wrenched off my tie.

"Hmmm."

In the kitchen I judged from the dishes sitting on the butcher block that she had eaten and I fixed myself an omelet which I brought into the living room. I think I would have paid $50 then to have Carol ask me how my day had been.

On the screen there was a fiery explosion that sent bits of flooring, windows, and what appeared to be several bodies tumbling out into the air beside the huge building. I ran my hand along Carol's bare shin affectionately.

"Time to shave."

"Hmmm."

Two or three more burning people fell from the burst window and then mercifully there was a commercial for laundry soap.

"Jesus," Carol said with a deep sigh.

After I had finished my dinner I considered listening to Mozart's symphony in G-minor over the earphones but I felt I needed whatever companionship I could find. I sat back and watched the rest of the movie.

A long, sleepless night yielded no better ideas than Lou's so the next morning I made a point of being in the office early enough in the morning that I could relay Lou's suggestion to Guy first thing. I was preempted. As I stepped from the elevator, LaRue was standing in the foyer. He was obviously in a foul mood.

"He's a whore, a fucking whore," LaRue muttered. "Everybody on the damn street knows he's in bed with the hedge funds. Run something up, run it down and then split the profits. Everybody knows it."

"What's going on?" I asked. "Who?"

Guy thrust a tightly folded copy of the morning's Wall Street Journal into my hands. The corners were slightly damp and crumpled from the grip of an angry fist. In the right column of the first page I found the offending piece.

Over the by-line of Sam Abrahamson was an article entitled, "Too Much Foam at National Brewing?" I tuned out LaRue's rage and began to read. It was a quiet, carefully written piece. Beginning with the simple question, what's going on at National Brewing?, Abrahamson chronicled the quadrupling of National's price over the previous six months. He addressed the question of the rumored takeover by quoting firm denials from the executives of all the firms who might be possible buyers. Top executives at National said that the idea had never been seriously considered and an analyst from Winston Stone said in effect that a company would be insane to buy National when the same assets could be bought for far less elsewhere. Lastly there was a quote from a J. H. Macdonald who was identified as a spokesman for the family and various trusts which controlled 58% of the stock (Christ, I thought, it was even more closely held than we had imagined) which stated roughly that they were damned tired of talking about it. It was an un-American idea and all they really wanted to do was make beer.

The article continued on the inside back page of the second section. At a point where the article might have turned lurid it became quieter still. He calculated National's current and prospective earnings, it's asset value, and it's cash flow and stated them all as a figure per share. He compared these figures to the same calculations for other brewers and even added a small sampling of companies in industries that might be considered similar. The conclusion was that the price of National's stock was high by a factor of at least five. The article ended with the phrase, "So what's happening at National Brewing?"

"Terrific," I said sadly.

"He's a whore, I swear. Don't you think?"

"I think he's a competent security analyst."

I meant that to be gentle but later I learned that LaRue quoted that remark angrily as proof that I had not only been practically useless but that I had never really come on board.

"It's a god-damn conspiracy," LaRue said angrily.

Yes, I thought, a conspiracy of the facts.

There was a meeting at 9:30 in Valesti's office. He was immaculate in a new blue suit, a bright yellow silk handkerchief was folded perfectly into his breast pocket. It reminded me of a military man's array of bright decoration. Indeed Valesti himself suggested a pompous naval officer who was unable to grasp the incredible central fact that his ship has sunk.

Danny Koster, the partner nominally in charge of trading, began the meeting with the news that National had traded in small amounts at prices that fluctuated between $24 and $26 a share. Even at that price there seemed to be far more people eager to sell than willing to buy. The management of National Brewing had risen early in the morning to state that they felt that $25 a share was a reasonable price though perhaps still a bit too high.

Valesti spoke next. "Mr. Edmunston was in my office early this morning, suggesting or more accurately demanding that we buy as much National stock as was necessary to support the price. Effective this morning he is no longer associated with the firm."

The split would not prove to be as easily accomplished as Valesti hoped.

"I think our task now," Valesti continued, "is to unwind the trades. We must remember how much in this business depends on trust and reputation." He stopped to let the dignity of the situation settle in. He struck me as ridiculous. "Larry, do you have any suggestions?"

I remembered my sleepless night and Lou's serene suggestion.

"Call the SEC and put a padlock on the door," I said.

I could feel La Rue cringe on the sofa beside me. Valesti's response was barely controlled rage. "That's hardly the advice we're paying you for."

I was silent for the rest of the meeting. Later that afternoon the firm's most junior partner made a call to the SEC and the following morning there was in fact a small padlock on the door along with a neatly typed sign stating that Valesti, Price, and Lowe was no longer in business and referring questions to an office in the Dirkson Federal Office Building.

Only a small portion of Edmunston's customers admitted to authorizing the final purchases and they later sued saying that they had been coerced by false promises.

That is pretty much the story of Valesti, Price and Lowe. An accountant for the SEC showed up on Thursday. On Friday there were four. They formally closed the firm four days later. The management didn't make much of an effort to arrange a saving merger and in fact Valesti left town for a couple of weeks. The rumors located him variously in Florida, St. Croix, and just locked in his basement refusing to answer the phone. The customers were well protected by various agencies and insurance funds although it was a hell of a problem figuring out just what to do with the last wild trades in Edmunston's big accounts. The other brokerage firms and banks had some trouble getting their records straight but no one else failed or took an unacceptable loss. The story appeared in The Wall Street Journal two days later and there was a lot of talk about it on the street. The people seemed to find it almost a classic case of what can go suddenly wrong in a business.

I suppose it was tragedy but not a tragedy in the sense of King Lear where the stage was littered with bodies at the end of the play. There weren't many corpses. The firm was gone of course and the Valesti family had lost a lot of prestige and several million dollars but from my lowly point of view I couldn't see how their life style was changed. Still as the years passed I heard Joseph Valesti had become a bitter man. Edmunston spent the next few years in court, battling a swarm of slow lawsuits while he tried to recoup his fortune by trading gold and silver futures.

Valesti, Price and Lowe was regarded as one of the best firms on the street. It was well-connected and conservatively managed. So why is it no longer in business? I used to talk a lot about systems and strategic planning when I was at Winston Stone. I used to champion a rational self-review and a logical approach to the problems on the business. I spoke of the need to temper the effects of personality in all but the highest management. It seemed to me that success was only the end product of proper logic. But all that had hidden the most important fact. What was really going on was personality, the interaction of these particular, peculiar people. All it really comes down to in the end was the interaction of people. Valesti's ambition, Edmunston's fantastic, misplaced ego, everyone's desire to hope for the best, Harvey Knox's vindictiveness and elephantine memory, my own inability to keep my mouth shut and to do the job that Winston Stone obviously expected me to do. If I was going to be stuck with human failings I would do it in a world small enough that I could figure out how it worked. There are rules and wisdom but what it all comes down to in the end is these few personalities.

The salesman all found jobs with other firms, except for two who had never done much business but were friends of Valesti's and that was probably just as well. They got different jobs in other businesses with different friends of their families. The people who worked in the back office soon had new jobs. The best of them had several offers which surprised me at first but then I learned again that Valesti, Price and Lowe was well thought of.

And me? Within a week I had three job offers. That surprised me. My brother, Tommy, offered an opinion. "They rate firemen," he said "by the size of the fire they fight. The bigger the better." A friend of mine from Winston Stone said that many people liked me but were glad to see me with my hands dirty. They thought that I was too smug.

I was changed, or rather unchanged. Not changed in fact, not changed in the eyes of others but changed in the way I saw myself. I was no longer a leader of men, rushing to the top of giant, wealthy company. I became a watcher, a sly, relaxed, careful watcher and I am making a comfortable living in the business. I took a job as compliance man, watching, recording, and reporting the sins of the business's losers and its stars. Carol was unnerved by the inexplicable loss of my ambition. She was surprised that I settled so easily into a job that was not on the fast track, and from which I am likely to become chairman of nothing. It has become an undiscussed barrier between us as she strains and sacrifices to make partner in my brother's firm but she hasn't left me and late on Fridays as she returns to our bed she smells of cigarette smoke and sweat but not excessively.