He also excelled in another dimension, and that was loyalty. He was good at keeping his mouth shut. Everyone in the firm knew this, not least of all Steinbach. It’s why they could trust him with all personnel matters, even the delicate ones.
When a trader needed to be poached from a rival shop, it was Perlow they called, and only Perlow knew about it until the news broke over AP and Reuters. When an offshore investor was in town overnight and needed tickets to a sold-out Broadway show, it was Perlow’s extensive Rolodex they mined — he knew every scalper in town. And if this investor wanted a little in-room entertainment after the show, there were entries in his Rolodex for that, too.
What of the really sensitive matters, the rare cases that crossed the boundary between merely questionable and flat-out illegal? Well, Perlow was a prudent young man — no telltale entries in the Rolodex for men who would eliminate an employee’s wife, say. But that didn’t mean he didn’t know such men, or that he’d never had cause to retain them.
He kept a steel cashbox in the bottom drawer of his desk, out of which he now drew ten thousand dollars in non-consecutive hundreds. One of the benefits of being a billion-dollar financial firm was the close relationships you had with all the big banks in the city. Occasional favors were traded in confidence; nothing illegal, understand, but merely agreeing not to record the serial numbers of a de minimis cash withdrawal, where’s the harm in that?
This was the cash with which Perlow paid his scalpers and his procurers, and it was the cash that would wind up in the pocket of the man Perlow was e-mailing now, one anonymous Hotmail account talking to another across the Internet.
New job, the message ran. Ten men want to meet you this afternoon to discuss it, and ten more will want to talk with you next week after it’s done. F&J’s at 3 p.m.?
The reply came in half an hour later: OK. That was all.
Perlow grabbed his coat, rode the elevator down to the street, and walked out of Quilibrium’s offices into the heart of Times Square. The crowds were swarming beneath the giant computer-controlled video screens and animated signs. Fifty years ago, the signs would have been advertising singers and cigarettes and stage plays and such, but now in direction you saw the giant Nasdaq board pouring out its endless torrent of stock quotes and in the other you saw the Morgan Stanley ticker streaming its financial data the side of a building. Not to mention the Reuters screen and the Lehman Brothers ticker and... hell, even the sign in front of Toys “R” Us periodically flashed the stock prices of Disney and Mattel. This was the twenty-first century Times Square, and Alec Perlow couldn’t get enough of it. Wall Street wasn’t confined to Wall Street anymore, and it wasn’t confined to fat middle-aged guys in suits either, with their Harvard MBAs and their secret handshakes. Now there was room for a new type of company to shake things up, as long as it had the right technology and the right people and the right contacts — and even an English major from Amherst could be part of it, if he found way to carry his weight.
As he crossed the narrow concrete mall separating Seventh Avenue from Broadway, he saw Simon Kurnit coming the other way, a couple of folded-up cardboard packing boxes in his arms. Alec waved at him as he went past, got a smile and a nod in return. Poor bastard, Alec thought. But who the hell told him to quit?
Kurnit dragged the roll of packing tape across the top of the box, cut it off, and pressed it down. At this point, his office was basically packed — what was left were papers that belonged to the company and a few items too large to pack. He lugged the box to the corner of his office and lifted it onto the stack already there. He dialed his own phone number one-handed while uncapping a Sharpie with the other. The marker squeaked as he wrote his name and new Texas address on the side of the box.
Maureen answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
“Darling, it’s me. I’m finishing up here. I should be able to leave in, I don’t know, ten minutes.”
“Is that a real ten minutes,” she asked, “or one of those ten minutes that turn into an hour because Michael asks you to do something as you’re walking out the door?”
“Michael’s not here. He left early for some charity benefit. Put on a suit. Even combed his hair.”
“So it’s a real ten minutes.”
“Yep.”
“I can count on it.”
“Yep.”
“As in, I can order food now and you’ll be there to pick it up before it’s all cold and disgusting.”
“Yes,” he said. They had this conversation nightly, and neither of them actually meant the mock annoyance in their voices. Except when they did.
“I’m going to order Chinese, okay?”
“Sure.” He snapped the cap on the marker and dropped it on his desk. “Get me beef with broccoli — no, wait, if I got General Tso’s would you have a little?”
“I’ll get you beef with broccoli,” Maureen said, “not spicy, with brown rice. And I’ll get General Tso’s chicken for myself.”
“I’ll pick it up. In ten minutes.”
“Fifteen’s okay.”
“I love you.”
“But not twenty. I love you, too.”
“See you soon,” he said.
Kurnit left the office twenty-five minutes later — he hadn’t meant to be late, but there’d been e-mails to answer and an exit interview HR insisted on his filling out before he left. Fortunately, he lived close to the office, on West 44th Street near Ninth Avenue, and the restaurant was just down the block. He raced over to the place and caught his breath while the pregnant woman behind the counter sorted through a batch of bagged orders to find his.
“Beef with broccoli, General Tso?” She repeated this to herself while peering at the characters scrawled on the receipts stapled to each of the paper bags until finally she found the one she was hunting for. “Beef with broccoli, General Tso chicken. Twenty-one fifty.” He counted out three bills and pocketed the change she handed back to him.
It still felt warm, for whatever that was worth. Maureen had probably allowed an extra ten minutes before calling in the order. She usually did, even when he told her it wasn’t necessary, because, well, it usually was.
At the front door to his building, a squat fourteen-unit co-op with paired fire escapes zigzagging down the front, Kurnit had his keys half fished out of his pocket when a man in a black turtleneck swung the door open. He was carrying a bulging plastic garbage bag and held the door as they squeezed past each other in the tight vestibule.
“Good night,” Kurnit said. The other man didn’t say anything.
The building was pre-war but it had an elevator, a relatively recent addition that had added two thousand dollars to their monthly maintenance bill for a year. Kurnit stripped off his gloves and crammed them in his coat pocket as the elevator slowly carried him to the fifth floor. He still had his keys in his hand.
Normally Maureen would make it to the door before he had both locks open — the sound of the Medeco was enough to bring her running, especially when there was food and he was late. But not this time. Kurnit dropped the bag of Chinese food on the small table next to the door, hung up his coat in the closet, and locked the door.
“Darling?” he called.
He carried the food into the kitchen, popped the staples holding the bag shut, and took two large plates down from the china cabinet. Two forks, two serving spoons. He tore off two paper towels to use as napkins.