“Tell me about him.”
“He’s a dealer I worked with on the managed-care deal, and I was a fool ever to have had anything to do with him. Where do I start? He’s a big man, tough, works out, prone to arrogance, vain, vacuous with a . . . a volcanic stupidity.”
“What do you mean, ‘a volcanic stupidity’?”
“It’s generally dormant, but it erupts under pressure. He is the kind of man who wants you to think that he’s got people on six other lines waiting when you’re talking to him on the phone. He wants you to think he’s surrounded by screens, receiving information from all over the country, from all over the world, and transmitting it to clients, tapping frantically but purposefully on his keyboard like a percussionist, or else that he’s having seamless conversations through a headset with an attached microphone, like an air traffic controller, calling the money in to land, guiding it, making money for you even as he inhales. He wears ostentatiously expensive suits and too much aftershave. He drives some impractical smart-ass foreign car and talks about it. He’s proud of his car. He doesn’t understand the inanity of having pride in a car. He thinks women like him and, because he is so utterly convinced of this, some of them always do.”
“What women?”
“Oh, I don’t know, the women in the office. I’ve heard his wife is beautiful in a classy way. By rights she should be a plastic bimbo. I’ve never met her, so I can’t say. But, you see, everybody likes him and he knows they do and that only makes it worse.”
“Do you think you’re a little jealous of him?”
“Jealous! He’s a buffoon. I don’t want to be like him. Look, Alex, he is one of those people who makes huge sums of money off other people’s backs.”
“Off your back?”
“Aren’t you ashamed to charge for such facile analysis?”
“Dennis, you stop me if I’m characterizing the situation incorrectly. Analysts, who do the research, are on a fixed salary while the dealers, who sell the results of this research to investors, are on a salary plus a commission.”
“Yes.”
“But you knew this was the way it worked when you started. Dealers make more money than analysts. Despite that, you didn’t ever want to be a dealer.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“So why do you hate them?”
“I don’t hate them. I hate him. I know you’ll say hate is a stupid word.”
“Do you think it’s a stupid word, or do you think I’m going to tell you it’s a stupid word?”
“I think questions like that are stupid. I don’t know how any remotely intelligent person can think questions like that can be beneficial to somebody’s mental health, and I fucking hate it when you ask them. You charge for this. It’s unbelievable.”
“Tell me about you and Joe Geraghty. What happened?”
“Joe Geraghty sold things, chiefly himself. He was a dealer. His job was to sell whatever we recommended and, I have to admit, he was good at it. His figures were good, sometimes very good. He’d worked his way up as, I suppose, I had, but our methods were different, our modus operandi . . . What’s the plural of that? You’re the Latin scholar.”
“I don’t know. You were saying, you went about things in different ways.”
“Most people are optimists when it comes to investing. Joe Geraghty made a name for himself by playing on that. He talked things up infectiously and got people to buy more, and more often. He was better at it than many of his competitors both inside and outside the firm.
“You see, people, investors in the market, spend ninety percent of whatever mental effort they expend on their portfolio looking at the buy side of the story. It goes against the grain, for most people anyway, to put much thought into the selling side—what to sell, when to sell, for how much—it’s not as appealing. And it’s easier for the dealer to bring someone along for a buy than it is to bring him along for a sell. For a start, the investor has to already own the stock. And on top of that the dealer is more reluctant to push him to sell than to buy because it will feel as though the dealer’s telling him, “You’ve made a mistake. You’ve done something wrong.” Nobody likes saying that to the hand that feeds you, especially when the truth is that you don’t know your ass from your head and are just mouthing the advice of someone you don’t fully trust anyway, knowing, feeling somewhere between your heart and your hypothalamus, that the whole endeavor is always and everywhere largely speculative. It’s gambling. And if the dealer does stick his neck out and convince the investor to sell the stock, there’s always the chance that the investor will want a second opinion.”
“Is that bad?”
“Sure. Even if a second dealer confirms the first dealer’s recommendation, the investor will most likely sell then and there through the second dealer. The first dealer loses the commission and is forgotten by the investor only to be remembered if he made the wrong call.”
“What does all this have to do with you and Joe Geraghty?”
“Because we were opposites we made a good team. It got to be that we acted de facto as a kind of team. He fell into the habit of listening to me, even when I recommended holding or selling. Because of me he would frequently recommend holding, selling, or not buying. If it worked in his clients’ favor, it made him look particularly good, wise, and knowledgeable. As a result, when he told them to buy something, they really listened. He could get people to pour buckets of money into something simply because he refused to get excited about every stock.”
“You said you were opposites. In what way?”
“In practically every way. He was forever talking, trying to promote himself by letting people know how much he knew, or thought he knew. I tried to survive by saying as little as possible because you can get it right for the wrong reasons too, you know. To some extent as an analyst, especially when you start, you have to wing it. It’s the worst thing you can do but sometimes, to be frank, you just have to. You’re under such pressure to come up with ideas. And it’s not only when you’re starting out.
“In the beginning you’re out of breath every day just trying to keep them from realizing how superficial your knowledge is of anything anyone is talking about. How many stocks do you think anyone can properly cover, anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guess.”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Well, what do you think?”
“Dennis, it’s not my area. I’d be guessing.”
“I’m asking you to guess.”
“I don’t know—fifty, a hundred?”
“A hundred! Are you out of your mind? I’m talking about knowing a company inside out. You have to work hard for a long time to know ten, twelve at most. I’ve seen kids come in raw, straight out of business school, the print on their M.B.A.’s still wet. They put everything into certain boxes, do a Porter framework on everything, and walk around their workstations like they’re some kind of guru.”
“Does it matter that I don’t know who Porter is?”
“Not in the least. He’s a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School . . . and that’s just at the beginning. Sooner or later, if you’re still there, you realize that you have to get rated because being unrated means your position is tenuous and your salary is pathetic. You need to be making a lot of money. So you keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, read their research if you possibly can, watch the surveys. You lie awake at night and worry about other analysts getting to your contacts when you’re on vacation or when you’re at home with the flu.”
“But you said it takes lots of time and effort to know even ten or twelve stocks.”
“Yes, and I also said you can get it right for the wrong reasons. Someone, without knowing anything, could get lucky, all while you weren’t there. You’d be forgotten. When you’re unrated, you go to meetings and look up to the rated analysts above you. You don’t know how they do it. The boss calls them by their names but he doesn’t know yours. You realize you have to make con
tacts and you have to get rated.
“Then when you are rated, you work on trying to improve your rating or else on just maintaining your current ranking. You lose sleep. You get used to not sleeping. When you go to meetings as a rated analyst, everyone is looking to you for answers, for recommendations. The boss knows your name now, and the unrated nameless guys watch him make small talk with you before the meeting starts. They’re trying to listen. They’re trying to catch crumbs falling from your plate. They want your ranking. You see a thick band tightening around their temples, pulling at their eyes, making them smile in that way that reminds both you and them that we cannot, none of us, ever relax.”
“This must take its toll on your relationships, on your personal lives?”
“If you’re referring to my marriage, sure, I was leaving early and coming home late, but Patricia . . . she was never going to be faithful, no matter what I did for a living. It was not the sex . . . well, not only. She needs what she misperceives as the reassurance, the reinvigoration of her self-esteem, that comes with each new conquest. She needs it like so many men do. I think that at some level she knows that the lust of a stranger won’t ever cure her of her fear of rejection, that no number of men will ever erase the feeling of being unloved by her parents, particularly her mother. But she forgets it just long enough to take the bait, every time.”
“You sound as if you’ve forgiven her.”
“You think so? I’m nowhere near finished.”
“And what about Joe Geraghty?”
“Oh, that’s clever, Alex. Touché. What the hell are you trying to suggest?”
“I wasn’t suggesting anything. I’m just asking questions—”
“Look, what they have in common, all they have in common, is betrayal, their betrayal of me.”
“I’ve heard it said betrayal and trust come from the same place. It’s just a question of which gets there first. What do you think?”
“Oh, what sort of shit is that?”
“Well, in order for someone to be betrayed, he must first trust or at least rely on the betrayer.”
“Doctor, if you’ll give me the antidepressants, I’ll leave now and you can masturbate for the rest of my session without me in the room.”
“Dennis, what happened with you and Joe Geraghty?”
“We needed each other . . . or thought we did. I told you, he’d sometimes rely on what was often really just a recommendation hewn from the depths of my uncertainty. Based on what I’d tell him he’d frequently get his clients to do things which were, at least in the short term, not in his best interests. For example, he’d get them to hold and there’s no commission in that. When it eventually paid off, his clients thought he was God and he started to think of me not just as a rated analyst but as his lucky analyst.”
“What made him take your advice even when it wasn’t in his short-term interest to? Was it that he could see that it would pay off in the long run?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why do you think?”
“I really don’t know. I think . . . I think maybe . . . he just trusted me.”
“You said before that you needed each other.”
“Our skills complemented each other’s, or we thought they did. And then, for one brief shining moment, our contacts complemented each other as well. Our contacts needed each other. It was a perfect match. Everyone was going to come out of it with a lot of money. By the way, everything I say in here is confidential, right?”
“Of course.”
“Not that any of it isn’t already known by anyone who is interested, I suppose . . . Joe Geraghty was the dealer of choice to one of the wealthiest men in the country while I, after years of talking and listening to a certain entrepreneur, was uniquely placed to assist that entrepreneur. My value to him was contingent on my relationship with Joe Geraghty. The way it was to work . . . I may as well mention their names. You’d work it out anyway.”
“Dennis, you’d be shocked to know how little I know about the world of the stock market, but you can say anything you like in here. I’m not permitted to repeat it, even if I understand it.”
“Oh, you’ll understand it, too well for my liking . . . It was widely known by anyone who cared that the government wanted to introduce legislation to make U.S.-style managed-care agreements legally enforceable. I know you know what that means.”
“Better than most.”
“Now, at that time, as you’d also know, the declared intention of the opposition, which was ideologically opposed to this, was to block the legislation in the Senate. My contact, the entrepreneur I was close to, was Sid Graeme. Don’t look surprised. I know you’re not. Sid is, among other things, the chairman and majority shareholder of the health-insurance company Health National. He also even then owned a number of private hospitals.
“Sid had been told in confidence by somebody in the opposition that, despite declared party policy, there was, in fact, majority support for the government’s mooted managed-care bill in the opposition parliamentary party room. Knowing that private hospitals, which weren’t doing too well, would become extremely profitable with managed care, Sid wanted Health National to buy up as many private hospitals as possible. To fund the purchase he planned a massive share issue by Health National.
“Sid’s problem was that he couldn’t publicize either Health National’s intention to purchase the hospitals—”
“Why not?”
“Because it would’ve immediately raised the price of the hospitals.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Nor did he want to publicly signal the impending policy repudiation by the opposition parliamentary caucus and alert the large majority in the party’s extraparliamentary membership hostile to managed care in time for them to preempt the about-face. What he really needed was for it to be known that someone really big, somebody renowned for their commercial sagacity and huge wealth, had invested heavily in the share issue. That’s where Joe came in. You can guess who his contact was. He was the dealer of choice for Donald Sheere. If he could get Sheere to take up a sizeable part of the offer, the price would skyrocket and every man and his dog would want in.”
“Hmm, I suppose so. It’s obvious I don’t play the market.”
“Plenty of psychiatrists do, Alex. I’ve known a few.”
“Yet you chose to come to me.”
“It was her idea. She spoke very highly of you.”
“You say that as though you have considerable regard for her, her opinion anyway.”
“Don’t speculate about me and her. I don’t know. I suppose it’s the managed-care thing, the coincidence of it. As I’ve said, what are the chances of that?”
“But you’ve also said this is not about gambling. That’s not why you’re here.”
“You’re determined, aren’t you, Alex? Determined to have me a sexually frustrated Catholic with a gambling problem, in need of confession?”
“What went wrong with the deal? The opposition did let the legislation through. We have managed care now. Couldn’t you get Sheere to invest?”
“It wasn’t up to me to get Sheere to invest. That was Joe’s job.”
“And he failed you. Is that the betrayal?”
“This is testing you, isn’t it, Alex? You’re having trouble remaining objective, aren’t you?”
“No, I don’t think so. Why do you say that?”
“Because this whole topic seems to make you . . . jumpy. You’re quick to interrupt. It’s as though you want me to hurry up, as though you want this topic over and done with.”
“I’m sorry if I’m giving you that impression. You should feel free to talk about whatever you like. Go ahead.”
6. “Joe and I got the firm to underwrite the share issue. It was me, really.”
“What does that mean? Is that like a form of insurance?”
“Yes, you can think of it that way. It means that in the event that the share issue is undersubscribed, the firm undertakes to mak
e up the shortfall.”
“That sounds very risky.”
“Well, it shouldn’t have been. After a little legwork, Joe eventually sold Sid Graeme’s idea to Sheere, who bought in well and everyone was happy.”
“I think I can see where this is going.”
“Oh, you might think you can, but you only see the beginning. Sheere got wind of your letter to the paper warning of an about-face on managed care by the opposition.”
“What do you mean, ‘got wind of’? You mean he read it in the paper?”
“I’m sure he read it in the paper on the Saturday morning, but he knew about it on the Friday night.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. He knew about it in advance and he called Joe late that night to tell him to sell out of Health National, completely. Told him to sell it all first thing Monday.”
“Because of my letter? I don’t get it.”
“He thought there was a risk, a high risk, that the disclosure would precipitate sufficient fury in the opposition rank and file to force the caucus to back off from their intention to support the bill.”
“But they did pass the legislation. That letter, all the letters, all the protests, were . . . futile. We have managed care to care for us now.”
“They did pass the legislation but not then. They had to wait a while for the fuss to die down, for it to be replaced by something else the talk-show callers could get their teeth into. Illegal immigrants, I think it was, something or other. Who the hell remembers? Whatever it was, when Sheere called Joe that Friday night with those instructions it meant, with one phone call, that we were finished. Sheere would sell. The firm would have to make up the difference, and we’d bear the brunt of it. We’d be gone within the week.”
“But what about your track record?”
“That would be a matter of history, part of an anecdote for people to tell each other over lunch, if it was remembered at all. Press ‘Control Alt Delete.’ ”
“Sorry?”
“It’s what they say when you’re iced, when you’re terminated. ‘Control’ plus ‘Alt’ plus ‘Delete,’ like on a computer.”