Megan Abbott - Wall Street Noir

“Sure, if it’s quiet,” David said, knowing no trader would be leaving the Floor early today. Vigneri grinned at the joke.

David pushed through the revolving doors of the main entrance and strode across the marble lobby. He inserted his ID card into the turnstile slot and walked through the metal detector.

The Exchange was located less than two blocks from where the towers had stood, and security had been substantially increased since the attacks. In addition to the metal detector in the lobby, surveillance equipment had been installed on the Floor and around the building perimeter, public tours had been discontinued, and cops in flak jackets accompanied by bomb-sniffing dogs patrolled the premises. On elevated terror-alert days, a Coast Guard gunboat armed with missiles sat offshore in the murky Hudson.

“This hurricane is sending gas to the fucking moon!” Vigneri said as they changed into their trader jackets in the locker room. He rubbed his thick hands together. “Gonna be some serious money made today.”

“Yeah,” David said. If Vigneri only knew. He stuffed his pit cards and trade pad into a pocket of his bright blue jack t Except for the color, it looked like a med student’s lab coat. He clipped a yellow badge to his collar, just above his photo ID. The bright plastic pin was engraved with four letters derived from the initials of his name: DASH Traders called each other by their badge symbols and used them when writing up trades.

The badge meant David had a seat on the Exchange. Not an actual place to sit — on the Floor, only the clerks did that — but rather the right to buy and sell commodity futures on the trading floor. Exchange seats sold for two million dollars, or were leased for upwards of twenty thousand a month. The seat David traded on was owned by his wife.

At least it had been until two days ago.

David popped an antacid and closed his locker. “I’ll see you up there,” he said.

Although he usually took the elevator, today David bounded up the stairs, reaching the Floor five minutes before the opening bell. Crude oil, heating oil, gasoline, natural gas, propane, coal — the Exchange set the prices for the fuels that ran the world’s economies. Out of breath from the unaccustomed sprint, David pushed his way to his usual place in the natural-gas pit.

While other exchanges were going all-electronic, and overnight energy trading could be done by computer, during business hours the New York Mercantile Exchange still transacted business as it had for over a hundred years — buyers and sellers announcing bids and offers at the top of their voices.

As a rule, only a handful of natural-gas traders were usually in the ring this early. But today the pit was packed, the mélange of garish polyester jackets turning the space into a kaleidoscope. Traders who normally worked crude oil or gasoline pushed in next to the natural-gas regulars to get in on the action.

The room had a musty, damp-clothes smell, despite the cold drafts pouring from vents in the ceiling. As the electronic clock moved toward 10 o’clock, David could feel a surge of anticipation roll through the pit, more intense than usual.

His eyes went to the flat-screen television suspended overhead. The station was tuned to the Weather Channel instead of the customary Fox CNBC. The news crawl across the bottom of the screen read, Category 5—175 m.p.h. winds . David stared at the computer graphic, a swirl of neon red against a blue background. After Malia had gone to sleep, he had spent most of last night at his computer tracking the swirl as it moved across the Gulf. The tension in his shoulders eased as he saw the storm was still on course.

The seconds on the digital clock slowly ticked by. 9:58:17 9:58:42 ... David balled his hands into fists and jammed them into his pockets so no one would see them trembling. 9:59:36... 9:59:53... 10:00:00 The opening bell rang, and two hundred voices and two hundred arms were raised.

“Hundred Deece at eleven even, hundred Deece at even!”... “Take ’em all!”... “Fifty Deece at thirty!”... “Buy ’em!”... “Fifty Deece at eleven fifty!” Traders screamed, waved their arms, bounced up and down — anything to get noticed and make the trade.

Yesterday, natural gas had closed at ten dollars per contract. Overnight on the electronic market, the price had shot up a dollar. Now, seconds after the opening, it had jumped another fifty cents.

David saw a pair of glasses knocked from a trader’s face by an errant elbow. Their owner was unfazed. “Two hundred Novy at twenty!” he shouted, his hands moving as if he were throwing down gang signs. Novy and Deece were slang for delivery months November and December.

Instead of joining in the frenzy around him, David simply watched the quote board, where orange, green, and red numbers flickered against a black background. Natural-gas contracts were priced in dollars and cents, and normally moved up or down in one-cent increments. Today the price was increasing twenty, thirty cents at a time.

A hurricane was heading for the Henry Hub, the gas-processing plant in Louisiana where over a dozen of the country’s major natural-gas pipelines converged. The Hub had been shut down the night before as a precautionary measure, squeezing supply and driving up the price. If the pipelines were damaged by the storm, natural-gas delivery would be held up for weeks, possibly months, resulting in default on billions of dollars’ worth of delivery contracts.

According to the National Hurricane Center’s computer model, the hurricane would collide with the Hub in less than two hours. As the red swirl moved across the TV screen, the pit became a seller’s market, the price of natural gas soaring as the big producers bought back their outstanding contracts and the speculators who had sold short scrambled to cover their positions. The only question was, How far up will it go?

The rubber floor and acoustical padding on the walls did little to blunt the clamor. The din of the Exchange washed over David. Closing his eyes, he reveled in the sound of wealth being created. Mine and Malia’s

Beside him Vigneri completed a sale. Trading jacket straining at the seams, he scribbled down details on price, quantity, and delivery month, and the badge symbol of the trader who had bought from him on a pit card before frisbeeing it toward a man sitting behind a low counter at the center of the pit. Wearing a baseball hat and plastic goggles as protection from the flying pieces of cardboard, the pit card clocker frantically collected and time-stamped the cards. They were then rushed to the data entry room for transmission onto the wire services and entry into the Exchange’s permanent records.

We could go to Europe . Malia had studied French in college. David imagined the two of them sitting in a Paris café. Sunlight sparkled off the diamond trim on Malia’s new watch, and she was laughing like she used to.

Vigneri nudged him. “What’s up, Dash? Don’t you want in on this?”

“I’m already long.” David paused. “A hundred contracts.”

Vigneri’s jaw dropped. “Well, fuck me.”

Maybe I’ll fly Malia to Paris, give her the watch there. She couldn’t be mad at him then. He imagined her pink and glowing among the rumpled bedclothes in a romantic hotel. Perhaps they could finally start their family.

Malia’s father had been a natural-gas trader, too, doing well enough to retire to Bermuda after Malia left for college. He had kept his seat on the Exchange, though, leasing it out to various traders over the years. When he died last year, Malia had inherited it. Her father’s second wife had gotten the house and bank accounts in Bermuda.