Brian Garfield: Villiers Touch

“How about it, then?”

“Oh, I suppose-all right, Russ. You’ll, ah, forgive me for saying so, but it should do you a bloody bit of good to work off some of that office fat.”

“Coming from you, that’s droll. Another twenty pounds and you’d have to wear license plates.”

“I am not overweight,” Quint purred, “I’m merely too short for my weight. According to the chart, I ought to be eleven-foot-eight. All right-just one thing. Are you certain you know how to handle this sort of investigation? It won’t do to trample unnecessarily.”

“I won’t step on any sore corns unless I have to. You’ll remember I did enough investigative work for Jim Speed to learn the ropes.”

“Ah, yes. But that was politics. This is finance.”

“The object of the game may be different but the rules are the same.”

“Don’t be too sure of that, Russ.”

“I’ll be circumspect,” Hastings said.

“Good luck-keep your pecker up, old boy.”

Hastings hung up and dialed another number, trying to imagine the stares he might attract if, in fact, he kept his pecker up.

Gloria Sprague’s matronly voice spoke to him briskly: “Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Hastings’ office. May I help you?”

“That depends on what sort of help you’re offering,” Hastings said, deadpan.

“Oh, Mr. Hastings.” Brief, nervous, spinsterish laugh. “I’m glad you called. The papers on the National Packaging case just came up from the Justice Department. They have to have your signature before we can send them down to court.”

“How soon do they have to be signed?”

“Anytime today, but I wasn’t sure whether you planned to be in the office at all today.”

“Do I play hooky that often, Miss Sprague?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean-” she began quickly.

Hastings laughed at her and cut her off: “It’s all right, never mind. I’ll be up sometime this afternoon. In the meantime I want you to do a quick research job for me.”

“I’ve got my notebook-go ahead.” Her tone implied not only businesslike efficiency but a mild rebuke; Miss Sprague, after twenty years’ service as secretary to the bland civil servants who had preceded Hastings, had not quite learned how to cope with his quiet, sometimes wry brand of humor.

He said, “The subject is Northeast Consolidated Industries. I want a rundown on large-block trades within the past two weeks-identities of buyers and sellers. You’ll have to call some of the brokers, of course-let me know if any of them give you static.”

“Static?”

“Resistance, hesitation.”

“All right. How large is ‘large’?”

“Let’s say anything over five thousand shares. I’m going down on the floor myself this morning, so I’ll get some of the information direct from the specialist. What I want you to do is check through the larger brokers and find out if there’ve been any large trades negotiated privately, not through the Exchange. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. When will you want this?”

“Ten minutes will do.”

“All right, I’ll-ten minutes, did you say?”

“Just a little joke, Miss Sprague,” he said wearily. “Do it as quickly as you can, but don’t break your neck over it. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll see you this afternoon.” He rang off and went outside, a tall man in his late thirties with a lot of loose brown hair and a wide, blade-nosed Saxon face. His expression was the small, distracted frown of mild irony of a man looking for something he had lost. At the corner of New Street he waited in a crowd for the light to change, presenting a picture of easygoing indolence, of which he was sometimes acutely aware, particularly when it was spurious, as it was now, and had been since the break-up with Diane. It was sheer habit that coated his turmoil with a surface pose of relaxed self-confidence. The brows that hooded his eyes were thick and unruly, of a lighter shade than his hair; his skin was the sort of smooth light brown which would take a deep tan and hold it if he spent any time at all on the beach; he never did, abhorring crowds and being by nature a land animal. Big and limber, with flat shoulder muscles and a long, loose gait, he had an easy way of moving, a natural taken-for-granted grace, the result of genetic endowment more than conscious care.

He joined the New Yorker’s endless war against aggressive taxis trying to nose through the pedestrian crossflow, reached the far curb intact, and stood for a moment looking at the great gray tomb across the street-11 Wall Street, the hub of it all.

Standing here, he was alert to his awkward presence: a pariah in an alien land where a foreign tongue was spoken, the language of blocks and odd lots, margins and floats, puts and calls, dollars divided into eighths, hedge funds, mutual portfolios, letter stocks, bid and asked. He had come to it by an odd route; he had not planned it.

In the beginning, he thought whimsically, you’re a fair corporation lawyer, and you’re a long way from home now, brother. You were one of the faceless juniors in a giant midtown partnership: practice in estates, corporate-charter drawing, real estate, mergers. Respectable law; no negligence cases, no criminal cases, no divorces, no insurance torts. So why right away did you begin to think about changing jobs?

Restless. You were restless, looking for action. You were in that frame of mind when you married Diane. It was a mistake from the start, but in those days you enjoyed challenges. Your own family was embedded as solidly in the social strata as hers, her money wouldn’t become a problem between you, but what you never counted on was her discontented ambition: her father’s wealth should have been a cushion, but to her it was a goad.

You quit private practice and you went to work for Jim Speed-fiery muckraker, stubborn digger, eminent exposer of corruption. That was where the challenge was. Doing Speed’s investigative work, unearthing the grit for the white papers on military-industrial collusion and Mafia labor corruption. It got Speed elected to Congress, and you spent those years running his home office in New York, and then the mayor tapped Speed to take over as commissioner of the scandal-staggered city Finance Department, and you, his chief assistant, helped clean it up, you with your mesomorphic curiosity and righteous indignation, and, just incidentally, with your home disrupted by a part-time wife who had a compulsion to succeed on her own and flung in your face, as an act of defiance (against you or against her father?), the art gallery she opened on Third Avenue. The senseless, brittle competition between the two of you-the divorce; and then, still rocked by that, you’re propelled out of your job when Speed dies in the crash of a private plane and a new commissioner moves in, complete with staff.

You didn’t know what you wanted to do then. You had dealt often with Quint’s SEC office. There were half a dozen good job offers, law firms and city jobs, but you didn’t see any promise of action in the rest of them. Maybe with Quint…

And so here you are, he thought, dour. If there was going to be any action, he would have to create it himself. Take up skydiving, maybe. Rob a bank.

Around him the street was still crowded, but the rush to get to work was nearly ended. The financial district’s working hours were earlier than those uptown; Wall Street was a city of its own, little known to midtown businessmen, bounded by Bowling Green to the south; the swift, filthy East River; Fulton Street (or perhaps Chambers Street, depending on your vintage) on the north; and on the west a mute anachronism: the cemetery of Trinity Church, where no human corpse had been buried in living memory, since Manhattan had long since run out of space for its dead.