Kurnit sat in silence.
“I don’t imagine you can look at it objectively right now,” Steinbach continued, “but if you do look at it objectively, you’ll see what I’m talking about. It’s like the distressed securities business — a company’s going bankrupt, the owners are behaving emotionally, you go in and price the trade accurately, and if the numbers come out positive you pull the trigger. Now, in this case it didn’t work — it failed to work pretty spectacularly, in fact. But that doesn’t mean it was a bad trade. It just means it was a trade that moved against us. So you count your losses and move on. I’m telling you this, Simon, for two reasons.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “The first is that you asked, and you’re right, you deserve a straight answer — whether you can handle it or not is up to you. The second is that I think you handle it. You’re angry, I understand that, but you’re a rational man and extremely intelligent and I think you can put that aside and come back and be just as strong a businessperson as before.”
“What odds would you give it?” Kurnit asked, and this time his voice did shake, but he didn’t care. “What odds that I can come back and be a strong businessman for you?”
Steinbach considered the question seriously. “Thirty per-cent. Which may not be great, but it’s not a trivial percentage.”
“No,” Kurnit said, “that’s not trivial.”
He got slowly to his feet. Leaning on his cane with one hand, he reached into his jacket pocket with the other. After getting out of the hospital, the first place he’d made his way on his crutches was back to Frankie and Johnnie’s. He couldn’t navigate the stairs, of course, but he’d called ahead and the bartender had come down to meet him. Kurnit wanted to thank him, he’d explained, and maybe the bartender would’ve come down for that reason alone, but he’d also told the man he was looking for someone who could hook him up; he didn’t need anything like the shotgun the bartender kept under the bar, just something he could keep in the night table at home, something to give him a little peace of mind. Not a problem, the bartender had said, I know a guy.
The handgun Kurnit took from his pocket now was smaller than the one Mesh had used, and older, too, but still powerful for all that, and it frightened him to look at it, to hold it, to point it at another human being. Strangely, Steinbach didn’t seem frightened at all. A little exasperated, maybe; a little angry.
“Come on,” Steinbach said. “Think about this rationally. There’s zero chance that you could shoot me and get away with it. Literally zero. And what do you stand to gain?”
“A little peace of mind,” Kurnit said quietly.
“Peace of mind?” Steinbach shouted. “You’ll be on trial, you’ll be in jail, you’ll be on the front page of the fucking New York Post — what do you think the odds are that you’ll have anything like peace of mind?”
Kurnit found himself crying again as he pulled the trigger.
“Thirty percent maybe,” he said, though Steinbach could no longer hear him.
Make me rich
by Lawrence Light
257 W. 36th Street
Make me rich.” Russ Ickes, newspaper reporter, whispered the code words into his cell phone. His heart began to thump faster. The insider trading scheme had been going so well. But things had changed.
“And?” Trip Pennypacker’s cool drawl sounded in Russ’s ear with the tiniest hint of impatience. You wouldn’t detect it if you didn’t know Trip well.
Russ felt himself starting to sweat. “Make me rich,” he stammered again. He didn’t understand why Trip insisted he still use the identifying code. Surely after all these years, Trip knew his voice. Russ himself would know Trip’s voice from just one syllable.
“You’re repeating yourself. You’re calling me late, after the market close, and I’ll have to use after-hours trading. That’s more conspicuous. What’s up, champ?”
“We have to talk, Trip.” Russ could actually hear his heart. His eyes zipped around the busy newsroom. No one seemed to be noticing him.
“I’m a little tied up now.” Trip had been too busy for Russ ever since they were in college. “What do you have for me?”
A squall of perspiration had erupted on Russ’s forehead. He took a shaky breath and choked out the red-alert code. “Trip, there’s Barney Rubble.”
“Barney Rubble?” Very little ruffled Trip, the guest of honor at the unending party that was his life, but he was ruffled now. “Barney Rubble, you say, champ? What kind of Barney Rubble?”
Russ grimaced from the saltwater sluicing into his eyes and from a sudden, stinging memory. Right after college, and before he started on Wall Street, Trip and his friends had jetted over to London for a fling. During their whirlwind of intoxication and fornication, they had encountered cockney rhyming slang, where “going to the Jack Tar” meant “going to the bar,” and “having Oedipus Rex with a twist and twirl” meant “having sex with a girl,” and “brown bread” meant “dead.”
When Russ picked up Trip and his pals from their return flight — Russ hadn’t been invited to the London blowout — they were joking away in rhyming slang. The revelers, who hadn’t bothered to bid hello to Russ or thank him for the lift home from the airport, suddenly started calling their driver “jam roll.” Russ laughed along, as if he was in on the joke. He stopped laughing when Trip playfully told him it meant “arsehole.”
Years later, when they set up their deal, Trip decreed they use cockney rhyming slang as an addition to their code, although he didn’t remember many of the rhymes. Russ did. They were burned on his brainpan as if by sulfur. “Barney Rubble” meant “trouble.”
“Big trouble, Trip, federal trouble,” Russ whispered. His heart slammed in his chest like an industrial press about to overheat. Huge wet blobs from his forehead rained on his keyboard. He skidded his chair back from the desk. “The U.S. Attorney’s office called. They want me to come in.”
The flat-out uncoded statement hung spinning in the air. Trip stayed eerily silent for a full minute while Russ listened to his hyper heartbeat. Russ was about to ask if Trip was still there when Trip said, “Come see me right now.”
The familiar self-possession was back in Trip’s tone. He might have been telling one of his female admirers to pay him a late-night visit. No one refused Trip.
“I’ll be right over.”
“Didn’t you forget something?”
“What? Forget something?”
“What do you have for me?” Trip asked nonchalantly.
“A time like this, do you think that—?”
“What do you have for me?”
“I... Okay, Chimera Genetics. But if we’re accused of insider trading—”
Trip hung up on him — to arrange, Russ knew, for the purchase of shares of Chimera Genetics. Chimera was an under-appreciated stock that had been flatlining at ten dollars for the past year, but when investors read Russ’s bullish story in the next morning’s newspaper, extolling Chimera’s new wonder drug in final clinical testing with federal approval imminent, that would change fast. They would bid the stock price up much higher, and Trip would be there to sell his shares to them, and to skim a creamy and very illegal profit.