"It's going to come quick."
"Tell me the numbers? I haven't been following it."
"It's riding around thirty-one. I want to get it up to forty-five, I'll take forty-three. I'd appreciate help around thirty-four as it's getting started, and maybe you'd get out at thirty-eight?"
"I'd rather get in at thirty-two, get out at thirty-five, six."
Martz smiled. "Knew you'd say that."
"I knew you knew."
"Okay, fine. Thirty-two on one end, thirty-six on the other."
"Anything else to tell?"
"Get your money ready. Be ready to night-trade. We're going to run this against a bunch of Chinese bastards who won't notice until their normal day of trading."
"Volume or speed?"
"I'll let you know how it will work. I don't have all the pieces in place yet."
"But you will? Because if I'm really going to get the cash together, not wait until the next meeting…"
"I'm getting the pieces into place. Don't worry."
"I'm too old to worry. Instead I just mentally masticate."
"Masturbate?"
"That would be a most welcome sensation. I said masticate. You know, chew."
The two men rose and ambled along the sandy trail between the rows of six-foot pine trees. As they neared the busier section of the nursery, Elliot turned to Bill and shook his hand. "Okay, big guy."
Bill watched Elliot trudge along in front of him. He stood a minute or two longer, to be sure Elliot left first. Connie thought he'd gone out to get the newspaper. He didn't like to do lifts, had only performed four in the last fifteen years, all with Elliot. Each case involved a smaller company on the way up, where something anomalous had driven the share price lower, interrupted the story line. Lifts were risky: they might fail after a lot of money got spent. The share price could stay sticky, not move much, too many people selling into the artificial buying. It could even go down. That had been known to happen; the volume rose but the price dropped slightly as shareholders looked to unload big positions without getting whacked. A lift was also risky, if the SEC noticed. Elliot was the best in the business, but that didn't mean he was invincible.
I'm really going to do this, Martz told himself glumly. I'm fucking how old and I'm still doing this shit? He found his car and buckled himself in. He needed Tom Reilly in his back pocket and he needed Chen. Well, he had Chen, who had called him just a few hours after the golden bull was delivered. They were on for tomorrow night. A surge of aggression ran through him as he gunned the car into traffic. He flipped open his cell phone as he drove, in violation of New York State law, and dialed his executive assistant, even though it was Saturday morning. "Call Kepler in China and transfer me," he ordered. The connection took a moment.
"Bill?"
"What'd you get on Chen?"
"Good bit. Hooked in to the biggest guys. Banks, heavy industry. Fancies himself a master of the universe. He's in New York looking for his sister. We got that through his personal assistant."
He knew this already, of course. But he needed to learn more before their dinner the next evening.
"He's a principal investor in the Dwai Group, which is getting big now. Many of their members have seats or affiliations on the Shanghai Exchange. They are very tough investors. My gut feeling is that if he were to call up some big pals and green-light a major move on an American stock, then they would take him at his word. He's made big money for people, he'd be in the country, they'd think he was talking to guys like you, whoever, you know, and they'd probably sign up, take the shot. But he's very loyal to these people, Bill, he's not just going to roll over."
"He needs the proper motivation."
"Don't we all."
Yes, Martz thought after hanging up. That's the part I don't have yet. I'm an old guy with a bad prostate and a wife with beautiful fake tits and my happiness rides now on understanding a young scam artist who crawled out of the gutter in Shanghai. Utterly ridiculous, except that it made absolutely perfect sense.
25
Violet had called him, a most unusual event. He waited for the buzzer, then climbed the stairs. She was in bed, shades drawn, smoking, a pile of magazines on the bedspread.
"Jesus, Violet, why don't you kind of, you know, get it together a bit, you know?"
She shifted her large bulk under the covers. "Can't, baby."
"Why?"
"Got what I need, more or less."
"So, what did you want?"
"I heard something that's going to interest you a lot."
"What?"
"Just pour me one first, okay?"
He went to the dresser. The bottle he'd brought her the day before was still there, half empty.
"So listen, Victor, I was talking to some people and they were saying about those girls who were found out by the beach-"
"What's this got to do with me?"
"Maybe nothing, all right?"
He brought her the drink and sat down next to her. She sipped the glass.
"I just thought you should know," Violet said, her eyes worried. He hadn't seen her like this in a long time.
"All right, what?"
"There was a third girl in that car."
"What?" But of course that made sense. He thought there might be three people when he was following the car along the Belt Parkway, then later figured he'd been wrong.
"Yes, she came out of the weeds, the grass near the little parking lot they got. Mrs. Polanzi's cousin has a house over there, she doesn't sleep much because her husband uses oxygen. She saw a pretty Chinese girl come running up the road there. It was raining, hard to see. She didn't think about it until later. She told the police about it the next day at the scene and they said thank you for the information, kind of like they knew already. Then a couple of days later she saw a big white limousine out there in the lot with a bunch of Chinese men in good suits. She'd never seen that before. It made her remember the Chinese girl. She wrote down the name of the limo company when the car went past again. She gave it to her cousin Frank, and Frank mentioned it to me and-"
"Frank some other guy who plays hide the salami with you?"
She punched him. "What do you care?"
"Just curious."
"You want to know?" she dared him. "You want me to tell you everything?"
He stood to go.
"Listen to me, Vic. I'm trying to help you. My friend Ronnie, who runs the limo service over in Bay Ridge, I asked him to make the call to the limo company even though it was a Manhattan company, he's got some connections there, you know, and he got through to the manager and the guy said that particular limo had real Chinese guys, from China, I mean, and that the bill went to some kind of Chinese bank or something. He said he charged them three times the usual, just to see what they'd do, and they said fine, whatever, charge it to our company, and he asked his driver, who was not Chinese, where they went and stuff and basically the driver said he didn't understand anything except that they were really looking for the girl who was in that car." Violet played with the edge of her nightgown. "Vic, she's some kind of important person for some Chinese guy with a lot of money, okay?"
He sat on the bed, thinking about it, incidentally rubbing his hand across her large, soft breast. He didn't care if Violet could tell by his silence that this information was important to him. The driver would know more than he pretended, like where the limo went and who else might have been in the car. Vic leaned close and kissed Violet on the cheek. "What would I do without you?" he said.
"Oh, Vic." She took his hand and kissed his fingers. "I just kinda got worried, you know."
He let his other hand caress the back of her head. She liked this, he could see. Ah, his thing with Violet. It was a thing they had, no doubt about it. Sad but real. She was maybe the only person who actually cared about it him. And for all he knew, she might have just saved his life. I've got the advantage now, Vic told himself, I'm going to get this guy.