Which made what Simon Kurnit had to do that much harder.
He stood with one hand poised to knock on Steinbach’s door, the other hovering inches away from the knob. It’s not that he had any doubt about the decision he’d made — he just dreaded having to break the news. But there was no way around it.
“Yes?” Steinbach shouted when Kurnit knocked.
Kurnit stuck his head into Steinbach’s office. “Is this a good time?”
Steinbach lifted his PDA from his desktop, glanced at it, and laid it down again. “For a few minutes.”
Kurnit came in. Steinbach’s desk was covered with papers, a mixture of computer printouts, pages torn from professional journals, and post-it notes filled with jagged scrawls. The man looked nearly as messy as his desk. His hair was nominally parted but flew away from his scalp in several directions. The whiteboard on his wall was covered with formulas and figures, and his fingers were smeared with its erasable ink. But the appearance of disorder stopped at the man’s eyes, which were penetrating and intense and felt as though they were systematically peeling you apart like a lab experiment on a dissection tray.
“What?” Steinbach said.
“Listen,” Kurnit began, “I’m sorry to do this — I wanted to tell you sooner — but...” He raised his hands, palms up, hoping for a sympathetic nod, a gesture, something — anything — that would make this easier. But he didn’t expect any help and didn’t get any. “I really appreciate what you’ve done for me—”
Steinbach’s eyes narrowed. “You’re leaving.”
“I don’t want to,” Kurnit said. “Honestly, I’m happy here, you pay me well, the work’s good. If it were just me, I’d stay forever—”
“But you’re leaving.”
“You know Maureen’s been looking for a teaching position, and it’s just... they’re hard to find in her field. NYU’s not hiring and Columbia, they just, they won’t hire you onto the faculty if you got your degree there, it’s their policy...”
“You make enough money,” Steinbach said. “She doesn’t need to work.”
“It’s not the money,” Kurnit replied, “it really isn’t. It’s just... she’s a teacher. That’s what she does, it’s what she’s always wanted to do. She put it on hold for me, for my sake; she spent the past five years here for me, but now... she got an offer from the University of Texas in Austin. It’s a good offer and... I’ve got to do this for her. You understand.”
If Steinbach did understand, he gave no indication of it. His face, generally affectless to begin with, was entirely blank. Except for those eyes, ticking away, trying to get under his skin.
“I’ve been offered a position at Blackshear. It’s not as good as the job here, but it’s... it’s fine. I’ll do fine. Obviously, I won’t take any of the algorithms I’ve developed here — I hope that goes without saying. I’ll start fresh there, do all new work. You’ve got my word.” Kurnit paused. “I’m sorry to leave this place, I’m sorry to leave you, but...” He didn’t have an end for the sentence, so he just stopped, looked up, and waited for Steinbach to say something. Anything.
Steinbach looked at his PDA again. “I’ve got a call in three minutes.”
Kurnit took an envelope out of his pocket. “I don’t know if you need a formal letter of resignation, but I wrote one, just in case. I’m giving thirty days notice, but if you need more — even, I don’t know, sixty days — I’m sure I could get Blackshear to agree.”
“Thirty is fine,” Steinbach said. And he reached out across the desk. At first Kurnit thought Steinbach was reaching for the letter, but after a second he realized the man was trying to shake his hand.
He stepped forward cautiously, reached out, shook.
“Simon,” Steinbach said, and something like warmth came into his voice, though it didn’t sound at all natural there. “You’ve done excellent work for us. Without you, we wouldn’t be trading warrants at all, and you know you’re responsible for most of the alpha in our foreign exchange strategy. It’ll be a real blow to lose you. The one thing I ask is that if anything changes, you remember you’ve always got a home here.”
A home? Quilibrium offered its employees many things: the possibility of making a fortune, the chance to work in an exciting, fast-paced environment, intellectual challenges... but no one would have used the word “home” to describe it, and certainly no one had ever heard Michael Steinbach talk about it in those terms.
Kurnit looked into Steinbach’s eyes and saw nothing there — nothing bad, nothing good. It was like looking into a computer screen after the plug has been pulled.
“I appreciate it,” Kurnit said. “You’ve always been good to me—”
Steinbach released his hand and turned back to his keyboard. Whatever warmth there had briefly been was gone. Kurnit waited for a moment before deciding that Steinbach had, with his customary grace, ended the conversation. Well, no matter. At least he’d gotten it over with. And it could have gone worse.
Kurnit stepped to the door. “Closed or open?” he asked.
“Closed,” Steinbach said.
When Kurnit had left the office and drawn the door shut behind him, Steinbach lifted his PDA again, screwed a foam-covered earpiece into his ear, and tapped a few times on the screen with a stylus. He had to let the phone ring seven times before it was finally picked up. It was only 9 o’clock, but the man sounded as though he’d been woken up.
“Perlow?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Michael Steinbach.”
“Oh, Mr. Steinbach, I’m sorry.” The voice woke up in a hurry. “What can I do for you?”
“Simon Kurnit just came into my office to quit. He says he’s following his wife to Austin, where she’s accepted a teaching job.”
“Aw, jeez.” Silence. “Did he say where he’s going?”
“Doesn’t matter. He’s not going anywhere. We need him here. And there’s no fucking way he’s taking what he knows to one of our competitors. Period.”
More silence. “What do you want me to do?”
“Kill the wife,” Steinbach said.
Alec Perlow had graduated from Amherst with a 4.0 GPA, but his degree was in English and Comparative Literature and he could no more have programmed a computer than he could have stepped off the ledge outside his window and flown. Nor did he have the mathematical skills to be a quant or the personality to be a trader. But he was smart — Quilibrium smart, as they liked to say in the office when evaluating a candidate (Yes, he’s smart... but is he Quilibrium smart?) — and Steinbach himself came out of the interview saying they had to hire the kid. So they hired the kid. But what to have him do?
At the time, the company was small, just a few dozen people, and Steinbach couldn’t launch half the strategies he wanted to, not without doubling or tripling in size. And good luck getting a quant or a trader to spend time on recruiting. So that’s the job they gave to Perlow. While they were at it, they dumped the rest of Human Resources on him, too: benefits and space planning and employee relocation and, well, who the hell knew what else, but there was plenty of it, plenty of work that wasn’t financial or technical but needed to get done in a firm this size. And Perlow got it done. Exceptionally well. If there had been grades in the world of business, he’d have maintained his stellar GPA.