“I suppose it is.” Frye smiled innocently.
“Bullies collect enemies, as a rule. Did Danes manage not to, somehow? Did none of these people stay angry with him?”
He shrugged. “None of them stays angry with the weather either, I imagine. And once you know Greg, you realize that’s what he’s like. He’s like a force of nature: a natural bastard. But there’s nothing personal in it- or, rather, it’s personal but indiscriminate. Sooner or later, the rain falls on everyone.” Frye raised an eyebrow. “Why the interest? Do you think Greg’s run afoul of someone? Is that why he hasn’t returned?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know enough to think much of anything yet,” I said. “All I have now are questions. Most of them will come to nothing, but I have to ask.”
“Hell of a job,” he said. I nodded. We were coming up on the UN, and traffic had come nearly to a halt. Frye swore softly and called Maureen again. I thought about some things Irene Pratt had told me. Frye rang off and I had another question for him.
“Winning personality aside, how is Danes as an analyst?”
“Greg is undeniably a very bright guy: keen insights into companies and industries, a very quick study, and a phenomenal memory. I’m the first to admit I learned a lot from him.”
“Though not from his work on Piedmont, I’d guess.”
“That again.” Frye sighed. “People never tire of it. But in truth, it’s unreasonable to expect that Greg- or any other analyst- would have known what Denton Ainsley was up to. Greg may have smiled in a few too many photo ops with Ainsley, and gone on a few too many Piedmont junkets, but that doesn’t make him an accomplice. Foolish, perhaps, or vain, but not complicit.”
“Piedmont was just one bad call; what about the rest? If Danes is so smart, how did he end up so wrong?”
“There are lots of smart people in this business, March, but smart isn’t the whole story. Smart isn’t always enough. You need insight into how the market moves and a feel for the people who move it.”
“Danes doesn’t have that?”
“Everyone has blind spots,” Frye said. “Greg’s, I suppose, are a reluctance to revisit his calls- even in the face of a changing market- and perhaps a certain susceptibility to manipulation by fund managers.”
“I understand the first part more or less, but what does that last bit mean?”
Frye smiled. “One of the things an analyst does is talk to people who hold big positions in the shares of companies they cover. In part they do it to solicit investor views on where the companies are going, and in part it’s to pitch their own ideas. But those conversations can be very tricky things.
“Say, for example, you cover Company X, and Mr. Smith, a hedge fund manager, holds a big stake in X. If you were getting ready to rate X as a strong buy, it would be nice to know that Mr. Smith was going to hold on to his shares of X- or perhaps even increase his position. So before issuing your report, you might go have a chat with Mr. Smith. With me so far?”
I nodded.
“Good. Now, Mr. Smith is no fool. He knows that if Company X gets a buy rating from so eminent an analyst as yourself, its shares are likely to rise. And he knows that if he sells off his position into that run-up, he can make a pretty penny for his fund. So given all that, and being a devilish and manipulative bastard like all his ilk, Mr. Smith might seek to mislead poor gullible you. He might try to convince you that he thinks your ideas about X are brilliant and subtle and altogether sublime and he agrees with them entirely. And if you were so deceived, you might trot back to your office and issue your strong buy report- and find yourself in for a nasty surprise when Smith unloads his position into your nascent rally, momentum swings south, and shares of X tank in a big way.”
“Is that the sort of thing that happened to Danes?”
Frye nodded. “My example’s simplistic, but it captures the flavor. In Greg’s defense, it’s a subtle game, with lots of permutations. And it’s played against some very clever people whose cards are almost always better than yours. Even the best find themselves wrong-footed now and again.”
“But with Danes it was more often than now and again?”
“He has a hungry ego. It makes him vulnerable to stroking from smart, powerful people.”
I thought about that for a while. “Insightful, for a stock analyst,” I said, and meant it.
Frye laughed. “I’m a strictly amateur psychologist, I assure you. But Greg’s quite a specimen; it’s impossible not to speculate. And that’s ex- stock analyst, by the way.”
Our cabbie had fought his way off the FDR and onto the midtown streets, but we were not moving fast enough for Frye. He cursed vigorously at each red light, and at 47th Street and Third Avenue, he tossed a bunch of bills through the Plexiglas divider and got out. He headed up Third at close to a trot.
“What are you doing now that you’ve left Pace?” I asked, following.
“What every analyst dreams of, of course.” Frye grinned. “I’m starting a hedge fund.” And he disappeared into Smith amp; Wollensky.
Peter Spiegelman
JM02 – Death's Little Helpers aka No Way Home
11
Fort Lee is perched high above the Hudson River, atop the wooded cliffs of the Palisades, and an easy drive from Manhattan: straight up the West Side Highway and across the George Washington Bridge. It’s an old town, with a past that stretches back to the first English settlers and to the Dutch before them. The welcome sign at the town line boasted of it: Rich in history, it read, in flowery white script. Maybe so, but they kept it well hidden. Mostly the town seemed rich in on-ramps and off-ramps and parking lots, in shopping centers and drive-through banks, in video stores and copy shops and nail salons and pizzerias. What poverty it suffered seemed mainly in the areas of architecture and zoning.
It was midafternoon and raining when I crossed the GW, and traffic was heavy near the tolls. So I had plenty of time to gaze upon the tangle of highways where the toll plaza morphed into the New Jersey Turnpike and several other routes, and to study the thicket of indecipherable road signs posted there. Despite this contemplation, I had only the vaguest notion of where I was supposed to go. New Jersey does that to me.
I steered my rented Toyota to an off-ramp. The local streets were pitted and gray, and the local drivers had little patience with uncertainty, but I paid them no heed and eventually found my way to Lincoln Avenue.
It hadn’t been difficult to come up with an address for Richard Gilpin’s firm, Morgan amp; Lynch, though the one I’d found was not the one listed on the company’s Web site- that address belonged to a commercial mail drop in one of Fort Lee’s many strip malls. I’d plugged the Morgan amp; Lynch telephone number into a reverse directory, and out had popped a listing for something called Ekaterinberg Holdings, with an address on Lincoln.
It was a small office building, with a faA§ade of white brick that was going brown and narrow metal-framed windows. The windows were dirty and most of them were dark. The building had only four stories, but it loomed above its neighbors on the block, which included a Korean restaurant, decked out in mirrored glass and white stucco, a travel agency with a torn red awning, a two-level municipal parking lot, and a surgical supply company with barred windows and a sign proclaiming the area’s largest selection of latex gloves. Office space must’ve been tight down in the Caymans.
I drove past the building and pulled the Toyota into a space a block and a half down, in front of a bar called Roxy’s. Rain was falling harder now, and slanting in the wind. A wet shoe box flip-flopped across the street, following a plastic grocery bag that drifted like a ghost. I turned up the collar of my field jacket and opened my umbrella.
The lobby was a little larger than a broom closet, and done in algae-green tiles and fluorescent lights. There was a dusty plastic plant to the right as I came in, and a building directory on the wall to my left, behind a cracked pane of glass. I consulted it but learned little, as the only plastic letters left there had been arranged to spell the word SHAT. The elevator was to the rear, and taped on the wall next to it, in red ink on cardboard, was a handwritten note to the mailman. From this I learned that anything for Ekaterinberg Holdings or EK Industries or Gromyko Construction was to go to the fourth floor. I figured that included me, and I wedged myself into the tiny car.