Bank Page 3

  The Woman With The Scarf won’t back down either.

  “Look, I have seven very agitated lawyers upstairs, and if I don’t bring them their precious coffees soon—”

  “Not my business.”

  “Philanderer is looking our way,” Clyde mutters. “I think he’s spotted us.”

  Postal Boy begins to whimper.

  “Visual contact is now confirmed,” Clyde says.

  The Woman With The Scarf is still feuding with the barista: “Where do you get off giving me this attitude? Who exactly do you think you are? Last time I checked, you’re getting paid to make my insanely overpriced coffees.”

  Postal Boy’s whimpering escalates into a full-fledged moan.

  And suddenly the situation becomes unbearable: Postal Boy is about to wet himself, the Woman With The Scarf is losing it, and the Philanderer is now furrowing his forehead as if recollecting us from some distant dream. Do I know you guys? Yes indeed, you work in the office right next to mine!

  “Just order seven goddamn regular coffees and tell everybody upstairs the machines weren’t working right. What the fuck—it’s way too early in the day for this crap,” I growl.

  It’s a guttural, subconscious flipping out, loud enough for those nearby in the line to stop their conversations and gape at us. The Woman With The Scarf’s expression is aghast, now furious, brown eyes flashing with rage. I know she’s about to erupt and yet I can’t help thinking she looks pretty like that, teetering on the cusp of eruption.

  “What did you just say to me?”

  Her voice is soft yet unnerving, her gaze so intense I’m waiting for the lasers to shoot from her pupils and vaporize my head. I’d give my right pinkie to have her turn around and continue with her order.

  “Look—”

  “All I wanted”—her voice is slightly raspy now—“is to get the coffees on this list.”

  She taps the list in her hand repeatedly, poking a hole through it.

  “Seven coffees. Seven. I appreciate the fact you need your caffeine fix, I know this line is awfully long, but it’s not like I sat around upstairs trying to figure out, hmm, how can I make these coffees as ridiculously complex as possible? Hmm, let’s see how I can aggravate every single person around me.”

  My ears are burning. Not metaphorically speaking; they’re beet red and hot enough to fry an egg on.

  “I don’t even like coffee. It’s vile stuff. Turns your teeth brown, you know. Changes your body chemistry and all that.”

  “It’s not a big deal—”

  “Shhh. Let me finish. So I wait in this line for twenty minutes, twenty valuable minutes wasted when I could be upstairs doing all sorts of empowering work. Photocopying and shredding and highlighting conjunctive clauses in thousand-page documents filled with small-type legal jargonese. And then when I’m sent down to complete a task worthy of the hundreds of hours spent cramming away to pass the bar, when all I want is for somebody to be nice to me because I’m having a really bad day”—here her voice trembles—“oh god, this has been such a horrific morning, all I get is attitude from everybody around me.”

  She turns back to the barista. “Can you please make the coffees on this list? I know it’s not too hard; I’m sure you can figure them out. I’ll be back in five minutes. I’m just heading outside for a quick nervous breakdown.”

  She nods once, sternly, like a soldier receiving orders, then walks briskly toward the exit, her neck scarf flapping behind her. The rest of the line watches her departure, then resumes their idle chitchat.

  “You’re such an asshole,” the Defeated One says.

  “Yeah,” Clyde seconds.

  The barista picks up the Woman With The Scarf’s list and begins reciting the order. Everything is moving along as before.

  “Gentlemen.”

  The Philandering Managing Director has snuck up behind us. Postal Boy gasps audibly. Jesus, he must have witnessed the whole thing.

  “Whatever happened to her?”

  He’s not expecting anything in the way of an explanation. So he was distracted, didn’t see how it all started. He gazes out the window trying to catch sight of her, grinning lecherously.

  “Crazy broad, but she had a great set of—”

  He catches himself and chuckles. The Philanderer reaches into a pocket and retrieves his wallet, handing Clyde a fiver.

  “Order me a macchiato.”

  Then he’s back to the sixty-year-old secretary, making her blush and giggle like a girl in junior high. Except her giggling gives off the impression her heart may soon stop abruptly, that she’s going to keel over and collapse into the jars of biscotti.

  “You’ve got to hand it to him,” the Defeated One snorts. “He doesn’t discriminate against any of them. An egalitarian man-whore. Probably sees her menopause as a hurdle to overcome.”

  “It’s pretty anticlimactic,” Clyde remarks. “We’re expecting him to go apeshit and then that. ‘Order me a macchiato.’ All of Postal’s freaking out for nothing.”

  The Defeated One shrugs, “The Bank works in mysterious ways.”

  We’re up. Clyde orders a macchiato for the Philanderer and a Grande Americano for himself. The Defeated One and Postal Boy each get a Venti Bold. When it’s my turn to order, I shake my head.

  “Nothing.”

  The Defeated One grimaces at me. “Nothing? Why not? Don’t tell me you’re upset about that girl. She was just letting off some steam. Hates her job as much as you do.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” chimes in Clyde.

  He’s right; I am being ridiculous. Yet I can’t quash this feeling of—I’m not even sure what it is exactly. Mortification, I guess.

  “Stop being an ass. Here, drink this.”

  The Defeated One hands me a huge cup of coffee. I take a sip. There is a gospel choir breaking out in raucous hallelujahs somewhere. It’s better than the Coke from last night, even. My discomfort over the Woman With The Scarf dissolves in this sudden jolt of caffeine.

  So. Big deal.

  “Where were you? I came by your desk half an hour ago.”

  The Sycophant is seriously pissed. Somewhere within his tangled neurons lurks a memo to the Toad—our evil head of HR—waiting to be written, but frankly I don’t really care. I’ll care in five minutes, no question about that, but right now I’m floating on my caffeine high.

  “We need sixty booklets of the investor presentation for the Brazilian mining deal. Color copies, bound. Get an assistant to help you.”

  He’s referring to the Utterly Incompetent Assistant, a crotchety forty-something spinster who supports the M&A group. The Utterly Incompetent Assistant has a remarkably astute ability for screwing up the most perfunctory of tasks. Arranging a conference call, she’ll send out the wrong area code. Photocopying documents, she’ll print only one side of a double-sided document, but no matter, it will be for the wrong company anyway. The Utterly Incompetent Assistant should have been fired long ago, but incredibly, she’s managed to survive the corporate reshufflings following the tech-bubble burst and post-9/11 financial armageddon. We’re fairly certain she is sleeping with the Philandering Managing Director, which pretty much explains it.

  Binding is a remote possibility. Under heavy supervision it might work out. Quite naturally, she’s not at her desk. A quick perusal of the premises indicates the Philandering Managing Director is not in his office either, so there is a fairly good chance she’ll be MIA for a while now.

  Sixty booklets. Fifty pages each. It’s not the end of the world. I give myself an hour and a half.

  Murphy’s Law is in full effect at the Bank: When something can go wrong, it will always go wrong. A few general rules of thumb: If a printing job is required, then the printer will jam. Or be out of toner. Or stop functioning for no logical reason whatsoever. Binding machines and scanners and the Bloomberg terminals are just as temperamental.

  As most of our senior managers veer toward procrastination bordering on lunacy, changing crucial nu
mbers in a model five minutes before a pitch, it’s not unusual to see Postal Boy careening at breakneck speed between the copy room and the boardroom, or the Star genuflecting before the massive color printer capable of performing a myriad of tasks, stapling and sorting and banding together with other highly functional color printers in a bid to take over the world.

  Three hours later. The root of the delay: a missing toner. I spent an hour searching every cabinet in the copy room to no avail and half an hour ferreting out the Dirty Hippie Office Supply Manager, a lanky guy reeking of stale herbs, the only employee at the Bank permitted to wear tie-dye to work. Finally located him meditating on the Equity Capital Markets floor (always quiet this time of day), then spent another half hour rummaging through the same cabinets in the copy room, only to have the Dirty Hippie Office Supply Manager scratch his head, shrug, and promise he would put in an order by the end of the week. A few minutes I can’t account for; possibly I fell asleep standing up by the binding machines. Snapped out of my reverie when Clyde dropped by, hunting down a pad of Post-it Notes, and followed him back to the M&A department, where the Utterly Incompetent Assistant was at her desk. Asked if she knew where the toners were kept and stood there like a buffoon waiting for her to finish gossiping on the phone, probably to a widespread network of Utterly Incompetent Assistants gossiping into their respective phones throughout the downtown core, before she located the elusive toner beside the Flavia packets of phosphorescent green tea. Very hygienic. Heh, nobody drinks the vile stuff, anyway. The Utterly Incompetent Assistant waddled off, clucking her tongue, as if I were an absolute moron for not having checked there before.

  “What is this?” The Sycophant scowls, flipping through one of the booklets.

  “Investor presentation for the Brazilian mining deal. Sixty color copies, as you requested.”

  “The Brazilian mining deal? No, that’s been put off for another week now. Did I say the Brazilian mining deal before?”

  “Yes.”

  He gives me that feral stare, those beady little eyes squinting once, twice.

  “Are you certain? I’m confident that I asked you to print out the telecom presentation.”

  I’m not backing down.

  “No. The mining deal. I’m, uh, certain of it.”

  I’d like my voice to come across as condescending and impertinent, but it doesn’t; in truth, it’s quaking under my own fear of confrontation.

  “Well, either way, we’re going to require sixty bound copies of the telecom investor presentation. Color. Put them on my desk before you leave tonight.”

  Later that afternoon, I’m summoned to the Philandering Managing Director’s office. He has his shoes off, feet on the desk, and he is stretching out one of those Koosh balls. The office is a complete pigsty: stacks of paper strewn everywhere, a pizza box from lunch on the floor, a beat-up GQ magazine propped underneath his phone. This is the sort of mess you’d expect from a theoretical physicist’s office; it’s kind of ridiculous coming from the Philanderer. For one, we’re not even sure if he’s literate. At meetings he’ll flip through a pitch book and provide commentary on the color selections, the alignment of graphs and tables, as if formatting alone is of crucial significance. He is of the school of thought that the actual analysis doesn’t matter one bit; it’s all in the presentation.

  “So Clyde, how are you enjoying your first week on the job?”

  I’ve given up trying to convince the Philanderer that, no, I’m not Clyde, and secondly, that I’ve already been here two months. Apparently Postal Boy also goes by Clyde. A trio of Clydes. Not that it matters. The Philanderer doesn’t really see us as separate entities to begin with; we’re only this amorphous blob that manages to spit out whatever crazy analyses are required by the inner workings of the Bank.

  “It’s interesting.”

  “Good, good. It’s a rewarding industry once you’ve found your bearings. Is this what you’ve always wanted to do?”

  What a question. Would he really believe it if I quipped back, Yes, well, golly, I’ve always felt destined for this kind of existence, you know, lots of tedious work combined with intense sleep deprivation.

  “Yeah, uh, banking has always interested me.”

  “Good, good.”

  A bout of silence as the Philanderer struggles to recollect why he called me into his office in the first place.

  “The trucking deal. You know the one?”

  Trucking deal. Trucking deal. Hmmm. The deal that kept me here all night? The deal that has required the model from hell?

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “Good, good. Anyway, we need to adjust the comps.”

  “Ah, what sort of adjustment were you thinking?”

  “Hmmm . . .”

  He’s lost his train of thought. He whips the Koosh ball against the wall in frustration. Then his mouth twitches, and a dim light flickers on somewhere inside that head of his.

  “We’re going to require some European transportation conglomerates, get the Client thinking about consolidating some of the trucking industry in France and Germany.”

  This has to be the Philanderer’s own idea. Who else would propose selling an international expansion to a client who has never ventured outside North America? A cowboy from Texas who sees Europe as a wasteland of clogged toilets, funny accents, and people wolfing down frogs?

  “How many additional companies did you have in mind?”

  “Let’s say twenty. Yeah, twenty’s a nice, solid number.”

  Thirty minutes a comp. No, it’s European accounting, all the line items scrambled. Make that forty-five minutes. Damn Europe and its need to always be different; they deserve an ass-whipping for this.

  “What is the timing?”

  The Philanderer strokes his chin.

  “I’d like to see something by tomorrow morning.”

  Combined with the Sycophant’s binding mishap, it will be impossible to get everything done without pulling another all-nighter. I physically cannot do it. There is only one weapon remaining in the arsenal, a final bastion of hope—

  The Push Back.

  “I still need to put through some major changes to the model. Would it be all right if I had the comps done by early afternoon at the latest?”

  The Philanderer removes his feet from the desk. The smile replaced by a haughty sneer. It’s all over: He’s recognized the Push Back.

  “You’ll have them on my desk by no later than eight tomorrow morning. And include the backup.”

  The Philander studies my face, perhaps for the first time realizing that, no, I’m not Clyde.

  Fuck. I think I preferred the anonymity.

  Two

  Oh god, I’ve really got to pee. Pee real bad. Client has his eyes half closed; he’s not even paying attention. We’re holed up in a boardroom to run through the investor presentation for a Brazilian gold-mine merger. They begin presenting to the Street tomorrow and head off in a private jet for Boston and San Francisco next week. The Sycophant is scribbling furiously on a legal pad to my left. He is also surreptitiously glancing over to ensure I’m jotting down an identical set of notes.

  Across from him is the Ice Queen, another vice president, a blond beauty just shy of six feet and sleek like a panther. She wears a beige sweater that is perfectly hugging her breasts, and there’s a moist sheen to her lips from a touch of gloss, but despite this she’s an absolute bitch. Beside her is the Prodigal Son, her Aryan male equivalent and the other analyst staffed on this deal. You know how difficult it is for one guy to comment on how another guy is good-looking. It’s breaking an implicit rule of manliness, a sin against the testes. Suffice it to say it’s the first thing that would pop into anybody’s head when they saw him: Man, that’s a good-looking guy.

  To make matters worse, he is the son of a VIP at the Bank. I can’t remember his dad’s exact position in the hierarchy. Not that it matters; I’ll never cross paths with him, anyway. No question the Prodigal Father has some immaculate office
on the top floor, rare orchids from Thailand that get changed weekly, a private bathroom with gilded cherubs spewing water out of the taps.

  The Prodigal Son flashes me a dazzling smile, his teeth so white they’re almost blue, before sliding his pitch book across the table toward the Sycophant. The Sycophant picks it up and frowns, handing it over to me. On page 15 there is a subtotal circled, a column that doesn’t add up properly. I feel a sense of dread until I realize this is one of the slides the Prodigal Son put together. I throw him my most menacing glare, but he counters with an indifferent shrug. Pinning the blame on me, the bastard. Fortunately, page 15 comes and goes without the Client detecting the error.

  A sharp pang from my bladder—how much longer is this going to last? It’s been thirty minutes already; probably another hour at least. I can’t hold out that long. No fucking way. Damn the Defeated One for pressuring me into a Starbucks run right before a meeting with the Client.

  The marvelous Client is a tall man in a suit so shabby it could have been stitched together in five minutes by a sweatshop laborer. Not at all what you’d expect from a guy who stands to pocket a cool sixty million bucks from the merger. The Client is slumped in his seat, head tilted back; any second now he is going to start snoring. It’s actually pretty ridiculous. I mean, sure, all of this stuff is boring as hell, but that’s sixty million bucks we’re talking about. That’s like six hundred years of being me, sitting here in this infernal boardroom with a bladder the size of a turnip and a Venti Bold banging on the exit channel.

  “The Cu grade in the open-pit extension of the Alarmi main duct is very promising, and a concentration of 0.6 should yield our forecasts of 15,000 tonnes of Au byproduct before the end of the year . . .”

  Boring Engineering Guy, the head of the Client’s operations team, has been inundating us with industry jargon for the last fifteen minutes. It’s perfectly clear his technical diatribe is meant only for other Boring Engineering Guys, none of whom will be attending any of the investor presentations, and thus his feasibility report will get axed before it has seen the light of day. Nonetheless, he keeps rattling on without anybody stopping him. I’m not sure of the reason. Perhaps it’s for his ego preservation—let the Boring Engineering Guy bumble on about concentrates and smeltering because this is what he dreams about at night, and cutting him off would be like kicking a sad mongrel puppy.