The Donzerly Light Read online

  And again he slipped off, the next word never rising, his next bit of sage advice apparently forgotten as he looked away from Jay and over his shoulder to the window again. Out the window and up the Street in the direction of the church.

  “Sir?” Jay said after a very long and quiet time.

  Mitchell looked slowly back to him. “It’s late and I...” His free hand came up and rubbed his chin, kneading it like a mound of dough as he seemed to consider something. Something of great importance. “I have something to do.”

  And with that the old man moved past Jay like a slow rolling boulder. To his desk he went and pressed the intercom button and barked for Alonzo to get the car ready, and then to the door of his office, which opened as if on cue, his secretary holding it for him and stepping clear to give him passage. Jay followed him to the door, and just outside of the Old Man’s office he spied him waddling unevenly toward the elevator.

  Jay looked to Mitchell’s secretary, hoping for some sort of explanation of his sudden departure, but the wiry and homely woman did not meet his gaze, instead tending to a stack of papers aligned with precise neatness on her desk.

  Nuts, Jay thought as the Old Man disappeared onto the elevator. He calls me in, starts to ball me out for some stupid reason, and then he splits in the middle of a sentence. He’s nuts.

  Well, the bright side was that he wasn’t going to have to listen to some long ass lecture about the ‘good old days’, which was exactly the way things sounded like they were heading. And certainly he wasn’t going to have to hear the Old Man call him ‘hot shot’ anymore that night, something he hadn’t expected in the first place. Hadn’t expected at all, Jay thought with some murky disappointment and headed back to his cubicle for his things.

  “Get that ‘nice work, Grady, well done’ you were looking for?” Jude asked, coming up on Jay just as he reached his desk.

  “Not exactly,” he answered, slinging his coat and taking his briefcase in hand.

  “I could have told you as much,” Jude said. “He wants to reign you in, buddy. He wants you to ‘play it safe’.” And when Jay looked at him, Jude knew he had hit it on the head. “No glory for the little guy.”

  “I don’t get it,” Jay said. “I just don’t get it.”

  “Don’t try. Just get out.”

  “It’s a big step, Jude,” Jay told him, admitting some still harbored fears.

  “Sure, but we’d take it together. All four of us.”

  “You talked to them, didn’t you?”

  Jude nodded. “And they are hip to my thinking. To the possibilities.”

  Don’t ignore the possibilities. Right. Just quit your job. Sure. Okay. “I gotta get going.”

  And go he did, hearing Jude tell him to ‘think hard about it, farmboy’ as he drew away from his cubicle, thinking that his best buddy sure knew when to throw the nickname around. When it might be most useful to connote a gentler jab than calling him a dumbfuck outright. Well, maybe he was a farmboy, a stupidly loyal dumbfuck with some crazy gift that could be put to more profitable use outside the walls of S&M, but just because that might be the case did not mean that he had to accept said potentiality right there and then. He could think on it. Sleep on it. Sleep and sleep and sleep on it, if he wanted. Or do something else altogether, like forget about the whole thing for the immediate future. He could go to the elevator, and get on, and ride it down, and head on home, and see his girl and worry about everything later. He could do all of that, and planned to, and even got through the first three elements of the plan and part of the fourth before something interrupted the smooth unfolding of the rest.

  He had made it downstairs and out into the cooling spring air just outside the building when he saw Mitchell not twenty feet away, stepping into the back of his limo, using the roof for a handhold to lower himself into the seat. The big black Lincoln leaned severely on the side he had entered, punishing springs and shocks that must have become accustomed to the abuse. Alonzo, his driver and bodyguard, closed the door smartly and jogged around to get behind the wheel, and drove the long car down Wall past Broad, its sag evening out as the Old Man likely slid to the middle. Habit, Jay thought as he watched the limo turn left a bit up Wall. Mitchell liked to be at the center of things.

  And then Jay headed for home, walking toward the church as he always did, seeing Sign Guy already from halfway down the block. Noting the sign that he had seen that morning already, its bold black stenciled letters spelling out a humorous, if somewhat deriding play on a nursery rhyme.

  T H I S L I T T L E

  P I G G Y P L A Y E D

  T H E M A R K E T

  It was a nursery rhyme, wasn’t it? Jay wondered as he neared the crosswalk at Broadway and Wall. How did it go? This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy ate roast—

  The next word never spun from his recollection of the old rhyme. Never would, because there was something of more interest happening before him. Right across Broadway. Right in front of Sign Guy.

  That was where Mitchell’s limo glided to a stop.

  It had come from Jay’s right, and he thought that Alonzo must have gone over to Pine after turning off Wall, and from there come back down to Broadway. And now to this place.

  But why?

  And then Jay saw why. It was not an easy angle from which to observe as he stood at the crosswalk waiting for the light. Not easy at all. Another person might have thought nothing of it, or something strange of it, but not the truth of it. No, only Jay was privy to that. Only he knew that the fat arm poking from the lowered back window of the stretched Lincoln belonged to Horace J. Mitchell, and only he knew that the flabby mitt of flesh at the end of that arm was as unaware of its actions as the head that normally controlled it, and only he of all uninvolved observers (except for Alonzo, possibly, but Jay even doubted that considering how Mitchell probably barked at him for not keeping his eyes on the road ahead) knew that in that thick and puffy manpaw there would be money, and unless there was an observant fly on the light standard near Sign Guy only Jay was clued in to the fact that the money was almost certainly a green and gorgeous hundred dollar bill. And so it surprised him hardly at all when the bum took hold of his Yuban can and leaned a bit forward so the fat hand could reach his makeshift receptacle, and reach it it did, and through the slit cut into the opaque lid a bill was pushed, the gift given, another pocket picked.

  And then the limo pulled slowly away, blending into traffic until it turned off Broadway some distance down from the church. Jay watched it only briefly, because its leaving was not the matter of interest. Its being, and being where it had been, was. And how interesting it was, Jay thought, smiling. This Little Piggy Played The Market indeed, only the piggy weren’t so little, and it looked like sometimes the piggy got played himself.

  “Damn,” Jay said aloud, though mostly to himself, and gazed across traffic at the bum.

  Sign Guy was grinning back at him. And flashing that V.

  Life can be sweet, Jay thought right then, reveling in the beauty of the bum’s game, as well as in the fortunate fact that he was not a player. Just a lucky observer. A damn lucky observer.

  Ten

  The Severance Play

  Two weeks later, Jay was again in Mitchell’s office, again sitting across the desk from the Old Man, the latter tapping a single swollen finger over and over on the dull leather sheen of his blotter’s edge.

  “Didn’t listen, did you?” Mitchell asked, his head shaking in self-response. “Don’t remember a damn thing I said.”

  Well, Jay thought, actually he had heard what the Old Man had said. All of it up until the fat bastard toddled off to make his donation. Did he remember that?

  “This is what being a hotshot can get you, you young fool,” Mitchell lectured him, the ‘this’ being a surprise visit by investigators from the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, serious looking suits who were interested to know just how a wet behind the ears broker had d
one as well as Jay had, and still was. Hell, it didn’t even approach ‘good’. It was way past that. Into the realm of...fishy. And so the suits were here, going through his desk, his phone logs, his computer files, anything and everything that might point to that most convenient of explanations: insider trading. For certain this kid must be working with people inside these companies, getting sensitive info ahead of the investment community. Info that might send a stock soaring. And, well, the stocks this kid picked always seemed to do just that. Take off like rockets. So he must be just fronting for inside players. That had to be it.

  And in search of evidence to back that suspicion, a half dozen men were pawing through his stuff right then, while he sat in the company of the man who would likely throw him to the wolves with great gladness. Simply because he was a hotshot. A hot-hot-hotshot.

  Jude was right—there was heat all over him. Good heat, and lousy heat right then, all the fuck over him.

  “Brought this on yourself, you realize,” Mitchell observed from his creaking throne, the wood of his chair loosing small, pitiful cries whenever the fat man swiveled this way or that.

  Yeah, well, Jay was tired of letting the stressed piece of sitting furniture be the only voice of reply to the Old Man. And he would be tired no more. “Maybe so, but my ‘hotshot’ ways are bringing you business. I hear Teddy Malone is thinking of bringing his money here now. Ninety million—that’s a lot of green. Any chance that could be because of me?”

  Mitchell seethed in silence, the chunks and folds of his face flushing hot. After a moment he made the effort to stand, something akin to the raising of the pyramids, Jay thought while witnessing the event for a second time now.

  “You will wait in here until they are finished,” Mitchell instructed him, then the Old Man shuffled his mass to his door and left Jay alone. He stayed that way for three full hours.

  * * *

  The market was closed an hour and a half now, and the SEC boys were finally gone. And Jay? Jay stood before his workspace admiring the disaster the suits and their suspicion had wrought upon his things. Stood with Jude and Steve and Bunker and stared at the mess, the papers scattered, the drawers hanging open, computer disks missing. Even a pen of his missing from the cup that held it. A grade ‘A’ rutting had been done on him. And all Jay could do was laugh.

  “Man, how can you laugh at this?” Steve asked, shaking his head at the trash heap that had been his buddy’s cubicle.

  How? Jay thought, laughing still. Because it was hilarious. Because the joke was on the suits from the SEC. Yes, there had been insider information, but they’d never find it where they were looking. They’d have to open him up like one of his drawers to see just how inside his information was. But they couldn’t do that, could they, and so they were basically fucked.

  And that was why he was laughing. Laughing where another man might cry.

  “Believe me now?” Jude asked him, in a surprisingly sober way that exhibited not a speck of an ‘I told you so’. In fact there was some sorrow tingeing his words. Sorrow for a friend whose illusions of one small part of the world had just been shot down in flames. Loyalty, Grady. There’s your loyalty.

  Jay, though, was feeling not sorrowful at all. Not at all. He was, in fact, feeling quite joyful right then. Like a caged bird finally set free. Free into the limitless possibilities of the wide world around it.

  Around him.

  So from the scattered remnants of his desk he found a legal pad and a pen, and on the pad he wrote two words, and then he tore said message from the pad and taped it to the blank terminal screen that had once been his window to the financial universe. But would be no more.

  I QUIT

  He looked at it, as did they all, and then he looked to his friends. “What say we go make some real money, boys?”

  The smile crept first onto Jude’s face, then to Bunker’s and Steve’s as the glee set in. They were going to do it. Really do it. Yes!

  “‘Bout time, farmboy,” Jude kidded him, and then one hand each stabbed into the air and came all together at once in a joyous high five.

  And then they left. Together they left. Together and alone at the very same time.

  Eleven

  Big Plans

  The babes were on stage, spinning and thrusting and laying the heaviest tease that was legal and possible on the Friday night crowd. Christine Mellinger, alone and off the scale this night in a white mini so very, very mini that it set her admirers afire each time she uncrossed and recrossed her magnificent gams, moved easily to the throbbing beat where she sat, dancing slowly, seductively, from the waist up, her eyes mostly on the show and the titillations it offered, but every so often shifting so very casually to steal a glance at a table one row back from the stage. A table where plans were being made.

  “I had three calls on my machine at home from S&M clients,” Steve told them, causing a volley of looks between them all. Hungry looks.

  “What did they want?” Bunker asked, and to that question Steve preceded his answer with a smile that swelled upon his face.

  “They want their money to follow us.” But after a second he decided to clarify, and set his happy gaze upon one of their number in particular. “To follow Jay.”

  Bunker thought about this for a moment, a slight bout of puzzlement rising. “How’d they get your number?”

  “Money gets what money wants,” Jude explained, then put glass to lip and savored a slow taste of Jack. He had for some reason decided that, from this night forward, they would drink only whiskey, only Jack Daniels, and nothing else. Some sort of marker of their beginning, the others figured, and so they that night they were all in possession of medium sized glasses filled to various levels with the sweet brown taste of Jack.

  “No shit,” Steve agreed. “And there was plenty of damn money on that tape, if you know what I mean.” They didn’t, so he filled them in. “One of the messages was from Teddy Malone.”

  “Teddy Malone?” Bunker said, shocked in that way one might be when the lottery numbers were announced and sounded pretty damn familiar. “Teddy Malone?”

  Jay’s look bounced between Jude and Steve, both of whom were grinning like cats who’d just discovered the land of wingless birds. “So the talk wasn’t just talk.”

  “No it wasn’t, buddy,” Jude said, taking another sip. He was drinking different now, Jay thought. Not as hard, not as fast. Now it was almost an act of contentment, an expression of satisfaction. “He’s the kind of client Mitchell would have handled himself.”

  “Mitchell can hardly handle talking and thinking at the same time,” Jay exclaimed calmly, though he could have shouted and the outburst would have been lost in the pulse of the music. Latin tonight, he thought. Steamy, sexy rhythms that hinted at wonderfully obscene activities to be shared by man and woman. Or woman and woman, he corrected himself, spying Christine Mellinger and her obvious interest in the happenings on stage. Spying that and, as her head turned toward their table, the look upon her face and in her eyes that, itself, suggested activities that could get one arrested in certain Southern states.

  “Well we can handle him,” Jude assured his friend, then went on to share what he knew of Theodore Travis Malone of Boston, Mass. What his businesses were, his family ties, social and professional standings, estimated net worth, all information drawn on ‘sources’ which Mr. Jude Duffault referred to frequently but never saw fit to identify. But it was information that whizzed by Jay’s whiskey-flushed ears without taking hold because he was, at that very moment, otherwise engaged.

  Engaged in a bout of eyelock with Miss Christine Mellinger, breaker of hearts and maker of hard-ons. It was probably just a second, Jay figured, maybe just a split second, though it was seeming a lot longer than either. A lot longer. A glorious few seconds or minutes or hours it was that her gaze lingered, and lingered upon him. Locked with his. Saying nothing, but also saying...something. Something remarkable simply by the fact that it was her playing eye footsies with him.


  And then she was looking no more. Her head turned, back to the stage, those eyes sampling Buffalo Kabuki’s main course once again.

  “Yo, farmboy.”

  The nick drew Jay’s attention back to his buds. “What?”

  Jude looked past Jay to Miss Plastic Fantastic herself, then right at his friend, a hint of annoyance clear in his stare. “I thought we were here to talk about making some green.”

  “We’re doing that,” Jay said. “Aren’t we?”

  “Some of us are,” Jude parried. “If Bunk and Steve can keep their eyeballs off her for one night, maybe you could?”

  The man with the Midas touch or not, Jay knew his friend was right. Sure, he was the reason they were here, but they had all quit their jobs, not just Mr. Hot Shot. Steve and Bunker and Jude had all taken big old fucking leaps from a place where safe paychecks came with precise regularity every two weeks, and they had done so because of him. To be with him. To be together. What was it Bunk had said as they strolled out of S&M’s fourteenth floor office for the last time? What name had he given them? The Green Machine? Yeah, that was it. The Green Machine indeed. That was exactly what they were.

  Correction, Jay realized. What they were going to be. So it was time to get serious.

  “Right,” Jay said, signaling that he was a hundred percent present and accounted for. He took a healthy drink of Jack, knocking maybe ten percent off his attentiveness with that step toward the night’s inevitable state of drunkenness, and sneered dismissively in Christine Mellinger’s direction. “Fuck her. Let’s get down to it.”

  And down to it they got, hashing out a rudimentary plan of action. Naturally, they first discussed the split of all moneys earned—four ways, evenly, it was agreed (or ‘fifty, fifty, fifty, fifty’ as Bunker put it, his own drunk coming on strong already). Next they divided up the responsibilities that would come with running their own firm. Steve and Jude would be the front men, the glad handers, the ass kissers, the cold callers selling a very hot product. Bunker, he would handle the research, research, research (some S&M lessons had been learned, and learned well), and would do everything necessary to support the Green Machine’s money making engine, Jay, who would work his magic (though no one put it that way, they were all thinking it) the way he’d been working it for nearly a month now, without fail. And they talked about clients, those that had indicated their desire to follow the Green Machine, and those who would be made to see the light. Raiding, they were clearly talking about, a practice not only frowned upon, but one that the boys knew could bring the broker’s best friend and worst enemy into the picture: lawyers. But, they all decided, fuck it. People had free will. If they wanted to dump S&M, or any other broker on the Street, it was their God given right to do so, and more power to them. So that issue was put aside, and for a moment it was thought that all had been discussed. But it hadn’t.