Timothy Cone is a scrawny, hawkish man who’s never learned to shave close enough. Samantha Whatley is a tall drink of water with the lean body of a fashion model and the muscles of a woman at home on a balance beam. He is taller, but stooped, with a shambling gait. She is sharp-featured: coffin jaw and blue-green eyes. His spiky hair is gingery; her long auburn hair is usually worn up, tightly coiled. His nose is a hatchet, and his big ears flop. Her back is hard and elegant. His skin is pale, freckled. She is dark, with a ropy body that holds secret curves and warm shadows. He is all splinters, with the look of a worn farmer: pulled tendons, used muscles.
They have nothing in common except …
Naked on the floor mattress they have another skirmish. Not combat so much as guerrilla warfare with no winners and no losers. They will not surrender, either of them, but assault each other with whimpers and yelps, awaiting the end of the world. They think capitulation shameful, and their passion is fed by their pride.
They recognize something of this. Their relationship is sexual chess that must inevitably end in a draw. Still, the sweat and grunts are pleasure enough for two closed-in people who would rather slit their wrists than admit their vulnerability.
Shortly after midnight, he conducts her downstairs and stops an empty cab.
“Take care,” she says lightly.
“Yeah,” Cone says. “You, too.”
Then he goes back up to his desolate loft, eats both strawberry tarts, drinks a jar of vodka, and wonders what the hell it’s all about.
The offices of Pistol amp; Burns, Investment Bankers, on Wall Street, look like a genteel but slightly frowsty gentlemen’s club. The paneled walls display antique hunting prints in brass frames. The carpeting seems ankle-deep. Employees tiptoe rather than walk, and speak in hushed whispers. Even the ring of telephones is muted to a polite buzz. The atmosphere bespeaks old wealth, and Timothy Cone is impressed-not for the first time-by the comfortable serenity that avarice can create.
He is kept waiting only ten minutes, which he endures stoically, and then is ushered into the private office of G. Fergus Twiggs, P amp;B’s Chief of Internal Security. This chamber, as large as Cone’s loft, is more of the same. But on the floor is an enormous, worn Persian prayer rug, and on the beige walls are oak-framed watercolors of sailing yachts, most with spinnakers set.
G. Fergus Twiggs is a veritable toby jug of a man: short, squat, plump, with a smile and manner so beneficent that the Wall Street dick can see him with a pewter tankard of ale in one fist and a clay pipe in the other.
He is clad in a three-piece, dove gray flannel suit of such surpassing softness that it could have been woven from the webs of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant spiders. But the pale blue eyes are not soft, nor do they twinkle. They are the unblinking, basilisk eyes of an investment banker.
“Thank you for coming by,” Twiggs says genially, shaking hands. He gets Cone seated in a leather chair alongside his mastodonic desk. “I needn’t tell you how upsetting this entire matter has become; the whole house is disturbed.”
“Look, Mr. Twiggs,” Cone says, “there’s not much I can do about the Wee Tot Fashions deal. The cat is out of the bag on that one. You’ll just have to take your lumps.”
“I realize that. The problem is how to prevent it from happening again.”
“You can’t,” Timothy says. “Unless you figure a way to repeal human greed-and I doubt if you can do that. Listen, how do you define insider trading?”
“Define it?” Twiggs says, looking at him curiously. “Why, it’s the illegal use of confidential information about planned or impending financial activities for the purpose of making a personal profit.”
“Yeah, well, that sounds very neat, but it’s not that simple. Insider trading has never been exactly defined, even by the Supreme Court. Let me give you a for-instance. Suppose one of your guys is working every night on a megabuck deal. His wife is furious because he’s continually late for dinner. So, to explain his long hours, he tells her he’s slaving on this big buyout of the ABC Corporation by the XYZ Corporation. His wife mentions it to her hairdresser. He mentions it to another customer. She tells her husband. The husband mentions it to his car dealer, and the dealer runs out and buys ABC Corporation stock and winds up making a bundle. Now who’s guilty there? The original investment banker didn’t profit from his inside knowledge; he just had a big mouth. And the guy who did profit, the car dealer, was just betting on a stock tip. He didn’t have any inside knowledge. How do you stop that kind of thing?”
“Yes,” Twiggs says slowly, “I see what you mean.”
“Also,” Cone goes on, “the leak on the Wee Tot Fashions deal may not have been in your house at all. The arbitrageurs have a zillion ways of sniffing out a deal in the making while it’s still in the talking stage. They pick up one little hint, hear one little rumor, that XYZ is going to make an offer for ABC, and they go to work. They try to track the whereabouts of the chairman, president, and CEO of both corporations. They’ll even check the takeoffs, flight plans, and landings of corporate jets. They’ll bribe secretaries, porters, pilots, chauffeurs, office cleaning ladies, security guards-anyone who can possibly add to their poop on who is meeting whom and what’s going on. There’s a lot of money to be made on advance knowledge of deals in the works, and the arbs want some of it. But I wouldn’t call that insider trading-would you? It’s just shrewd investigative work by guys who want a piece of the action.”
“I suppose you’re right,” the little man says, rubbing his forehead wearily. “Very depressing. That men would go to such lengths to make a profit. It wasn’t like that in the old days.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Cone says. “In the old days there was only a handful of people who knew about a deal in the making-just the principals and a few lawyers-so it was relatively easy to spot the gonnif if someone leaked or made an illegal profit on his own. But now, in any big-money deal, there are hundreds of people with inside knowledge: corporate officers and their staffs, the investment bankers and their staffs, attorneys and their staffs, accountants and their staffs. Then you’ve got secretaries, telephone operators, and messengers. Any one of them could spill or make a dirty buck.”
“Ah, me,” Twiggs says, sighing. “So you believe it’s impossible to stop insider trading?”
“Sure it is,” Cone says cheerily. “As long as people’s itch for a dollar overrides their ethics or morals or whatever the hell you want to call them.”
“I should think that heavier penalties might be effective.”
“Yeah?” Cone says. “Ever hear of the ‘hangup gimmick’?”
“The hangup gimmick? What on earth is that?”
“An arbitrageur hears a rumor that ABC Corporation may be bought out by the XYZ Corporation. The arb has a drinking buddy with the legal firm that handles ABC. He calls his lawyer buddy and says, ‘I hear XYZ has made an offer for ABC. If the rumor is true, don’t say a word. I’ll stay on the phone. But if you’re silent and then hang up after ten seconds, I’ll know which way to jump, and you’ll get your share.’ So the ten seconds pass in silence, the lawyer hangs up, and the arb rushes to buy ABC stock. Who do you prosecute? The attorney, the insider, hasn’t leaked a word, and can swear to it in a court of law. How do you prosecute him? There are a hundred scams like that. So when you talk about heavier punishment for insider trading, you’ve got to realize how tough it is to get a conviction.”
G. Fergus Twiggs gives him a quirky smile. “Are you trying to talk yourself out of a job, Mr. Cone?”
“Nah. I just want you to understand the problems involved. And I’d like to know what you expect Haldering and Company to do about them.”
The investment banker takes a handsome pipe from his top desk drawer. He looks down at it, fondles it, then strokes the bowl slowly between his fleshy nose and cheek, inspecting it as skin oil brings out the grain of the brier.