That took him by surprise. “That would be very unusual! What if your charges are less than that?”
I barked out a short laugh. “Trust me, they won’t be.”
“How can you be sure?” he asked.
I shook my head and smiled. “Because charter flights cost more than the per diem you’ll be allowing, and I won’t be catching cabs or staying at the Best Western. I’m not doing this for the money, but just so the book gets out there and noticed. This is important.” The funny thing was just how much I believed it, too. I had always believed in the importance of infrastructure, and now, after going through Harry’s work and the other reports I had read, it meant even more to me.
“The money’s not important to you?” he asked, confused.
I shook my head. “I don’t think I ever mentioned this at the beginning, but any of my share of the proceeds I’ll be donating to the Red Cross. I assume you can handle this?”
“Exactly what do you do?”
I gave him an odd look at this. I had provided him the same bland biography we provided everybody, but he obviously never connected the dots. “I’m president of the Buckman Group. We’re an investment company. I thought you knew that.”
“Well, yes, but you’re listed as Doctor Buckman, along with Doctor Johnson.”
“Right, I have a PhD in applied math from RPI. I thought you knew that already.” I looked over at Harry and he just shrugged his shoulders back at me.
“So what is this Buckman Group? Do you work for your family or something?”
Oh, Lord! “Let me make this very simple for you. It’s my company. We’re an investment firm and do private equity and investment deals. I am worth about three quarters of a billion dollars. I’ll have my staff handle the transportation details. With any luck, I’ll be able to meet some clients and investors in my off hours.”
“You’re worth a three quarters of a billion dollars?” asked an incredulous Harry Johnson.
“There’s no need to bow to me, Harry. Kissing my ring will suffice.” I turned back to the agent, who was just staring at me. “It’s not that big a deal. I’ll have my travel agent arrange for a small plane to fly me around, a car and driver in each city, and a decent hotel room. If there are any changes to the schedule, get them to her. I’ll give her a heads up when I get back to the office.”
“How come nobody’s ever heard of you?” asked the agent.
“Because I don’t advertise. We’re not a public company. We’re very private.” It amused me at times. I had qualified to be on the Forbes 400 list for the last three years, but they had never twigged to me. That probably wouldn’t last, but as long as it did, I would enjoy the anonymity. Besides, I was way down the list. My friend, Bill Gates, was much higher up than I was.
He left shaking his head, and Harry and I chatted a little while longer. He had seen our operation, but never really understood the amounts of money tied up in the business. He asked about getting involved, but I told him the minimum buy-in to our pools was currently set at a fifty grand, and we weren’t structured like Merrill Lynch or one of the other stock brokers. Then I told him it wasn’t that big a deal. In many ways I still considered myself a mathematician.
That night I told Marilyn over dinner what was happening. She knew about the book, of course, since I had often spent a few hours at night working on it in my study. She also knew we had sent it off, finished, and had met Harry and his wife. “When does this start?” she asked.
“Next Friday, I think, or maybe the following Monday. I can’t imagine we would get all that much accomplished over the weekend.”
“And you’ll be gone for two weeks?”
I shrugged. “I guess so. I’ve never done this before. I don’t know whether it will be enjoyable or a pain in the tuchas. I am betting it will be the latter.”
“What’s a tookis?” asked Charlie.
“It’s what gets walloped when you interrupt grownups,” I replied with a smile.
“What’s walloped?” asked Holly.
“That’s when Daddy spanks the two of you for being girls,” he told her.
That got the twins to squawking and Marilyn to laughing, and Charlie hopped off his seat and ran off to the kitchen with a big smile on his face, while I simply muttered under my breath about my smart-assed son. “Oh, brother! And you wanted kids?” I asked Marilyn.
“Well, I know what you wanted!”
“We’ll talk about that later!” I answered. “You know, he’ll be the perfect soldier some day. He just loves to pull the pins on hand grenades and toss them around.” That earned me a derisive snort.
In one way, I was glad to get out of town. The Securities and Exchange Commission had decided to investigate the Buckman Group’s ‘miraculous’ returns on Black Monday and the following week. This was our biggest single return in a one day or one week period since we had started the firm. They were naturally curious, and asked for some ‘informal’ talks. Of course, if you wanted to stonewall, feel free. They’ll simply crawl up your anus and take up residence until you decide to cooperate.
When I made my first million betting on the Yom Kippur War raising oil prices, I was such small potatoes nobody knew my name. When I made my next big killing on the Hunt Brothers and the silver market, I was still too small to notice. They were betting billions, and I was betting a few millions. The biggest chunk of cash since then was in private equity, investing with Bill Gates and Michael Dell, and the other direct investments we had made. Black Monday had gone back to my pattern of gambling on the market, only now with hundreds of millions of dollars. Somebody had noticed.
I wasn’t going to delay the book tour over this. Melissa was going to be point on this one. She had the various SEC credentials. Most importantly, she could sit there and testify on a stack of Bibles how we had spent the spring and summer discussing the weakening market and developing plans to counter it. She and the various traders could swear how we discussed it ahead of time, that she had been the one to call us into the office, and how we had made the Code Red and Code Green calls based on the market moves and the other’s input. Unless they could prove I was a time traveler, we were going to be pretty safe.
To a certain extent, I had debated with myself making the big gains, even though I was probably inviting Federal scrutiny. Still, I couldn’t get past the fact that while we would make a fortune, it wouldn’t be off a single company. The big charge that brought down so many Wall Street high fliers was insider trading, where an Ivan Boesky or Martha Stewart knew somebody on the inside and made bets in a single stock. We had bet on the market as a whole. Nobody could track this to a single stock or company. We would be safe.
Sunday night, November 1, I drove over to the Westminster airport, where Taylor had a Beechcraft King Air waiting for me, along with a pilot. I was flying into Logan in Boston, well within the plane’s range, about an hour and a half flying time. If I was flying commercial, which is what Simon and Schuster had planned, it would take me half the day. There was a limo waiting for me at the charter office and I was at the Ritz-Carlton fifteen minutes later. If there is one truly wonderful thing about having serious money, it is the ability to fly charter.
The next morning, I was in the studio of WBZ, “NewsRadio 1030”, getting ready to sell the book. Glamorous, it ain’t. Small rooms, cramped spaces, listening to idiots yammer half the time. I had ten minutes from 7:46 to 7:56, with a commercial break in the middle. Then it was out of there and off to WRKO, AM680, “Boston’s Talk Station”, to repeat it all from 8:31 to 8:41. The topic was the “Big Dig”, a new tunnel across the harbor which had been part of a federal roadwork bill passed into law over President Reagan’s veto. Some people were for it and some were against it. I just said that if we don’t take care of bridges and roads, they collapse. I didn’t tell them that the Big Dig would be a colossal boondoggle. That wasn’t because it was a bad idea, but because Boston politicians have enough graft and corruption in their veins to make any politician proud!