The Villiers Touch

Hastings hung up and dialed another number, trying to imagine the stares he might attract if, in fact, he kept his pecker up.

Gloria Sprague’s matronly voice spoke to him briskly: “Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Hastings’ office. May I help you?”

“That depends on what sort of help you’re offering,” Hastings said, deadpan.

“Oh, Mr. Hastings.” Brief, nervous, spinsterish laugh. “I’m glad you called. The papers on the National Packaging case just came up from the Justice Department. They have to have your signature before we can send them down to court.”

“How soon do they have to be signed?”

“Anytime today, but I wasn’t sure whether you pla

“Do I play hooky that often, Miss Sprague?”

“Oh, I didn’t mean-” she began quickly.

Hastings laughed at her and cut her off: “It’s all right, never mind. I’ll be up sometime this afternoon. In the meantime I want you to do a quick research job for me.”

“I’ve got my notebook-go ahead.” Her tone implied not only businesslike efficiency but a mild rebuke; Miss Sprague, after twenty years’ service as secretary to the bland civil servants who had preceded Hastings, had not quite learned how to cope with his quiet, sometimes wry brand of humor.

He said, “The subject is Northeast Consolidated Industries. I want a rundown on large-block trades within the past two weeks-identities of buyers and sellers. You’ll have to call some of the brokers, of course-let me know if any of them give you static.”

“Static?”

“Resistance, hesitation.”

“All right. How large is ‘large’?”

“Let’s say anything over five thousand shares. I’m going down on the floor myself this morning, so I’ll get some of the information direct from the specialist. What I want you to do is check through the larger brokers and find out if there’ve been any large trades negotiated privately, not through the Exchange. Got it?”

“Yes, sir. When will you want this?”

“Ten minutes will do.”

“All right, I’ll-ten minutes, did you say?”

“Just a little joke, Miss Sprague,” he said wearily. “Do it as quickly as you can, but don’t break your neck over it. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll see you this afternoon.” He rang off and went outside, a tall man in his late thirties with a lot of loose brown hair and a wide, blade-nosed Saxon face. His expression was the small, distracted frown of mild irony of a man looking for something he had lost. At the corner of New Street he waited in a crowd for the light to change, presenting a picture of easygoing indolence, of which he was sometimes acutely aware, particularly when it was spurious, as it was now, and had been since the break-up with Diane. It was sheer habit that coated his turmoil with a surface pose of relaxed self-confidence. The brows that hooded his eyes were thick and unruly, of a lighter shade than his hair; his skin was the sort of smooth light brown which would take a deep tan and hold it if he spent any time at all on the beach; he never did, abhorring crowds and being by nature a land animal. Big and limber, with flat shoulder muscles and a long, loose gait, he had an easy way of moving, a natural taken-for-granted grace, the result of genetic endowment more than conscious care.

He joined the New Yorker’s endless war against aggressive taxis trying to nose through the pedestrian crossflow, reached the far curb intact, and stood for a moment looking at the great gray tomb across the street-11 Wall Street, the hub of it all.

Standing here, he was alert to his awkward presence: a pariah in an alien land where a foreign tongue was spoken, the language of blocks and odd lots, margins and floats, puts and calls, dollars divided into eighths, hedge funds, mutual portfolios, letter stocks, bid and asked. He had come to it by an odd route; he had not pla

In the begi

Restless. You were restless, looking for action. You were in that frame of mind when you married Diane. It was a mistake from the start, but in those days you enjoyed challenges. Your own family was embedded as solidly in the social strata as hers, her money wouldn’t become a problem between you, but what you never counted on was her discontented ambition: her father’s wealth should have been a cushion, but to her it was a goad.

You quit private practice and you went to work for Jim Speed-fiery muckraker, stubborn digger, eminent exposer of corruption. That was where the challenge was. Doing Speed’s investigative work, unearthing the grit for the white papers on military-industrial collusion and Mafia labor corruption. It got Speed elected to Congress, and you spent those years ru

You didn’t know what you wanted to do then. You had dealt often with Quint’s SEC office. There were half a dozen good job offers, law firms and city jobs, but you didn’t see any promise of action in the rest of them. Maybe with Quint…

And so here you are, he thought, dour. If there was going to be any action, he would have to create it himself. Take up skydiving, maybe. Rob a bank.

Around him the street was still crowded, but the rush to get to work was nearly ended. The financial district’s working hours were earlier than those uptown; Wall Street was a city of its own, little known to midtown businessmen, bounded by Bowling Green to the south; the swift, filthy East River; Fulton Street (or perhaps Chambers Street, depending on your vintage) on the north; and on the west a mute anachronism: the cemetery of Trinity Church, where no human corpse had been buried in living memory, since Manhattan had long since run out of space for its dead.

By now the brokers, bankers, secretaries, corporation potentates and their entourages had long ago hurried into their offices. The streets still flowed with workers and late arrivals, rushing, as thick as pigeons in the Piazza San Marco. In offices looming all around, men would be swiveling toward Quotron tickers and watching their clocks, synchronizing like field generals preparing for battle. In these slow-ticking moments, all over the world, men and women would be drawing their telephones near-waiting, adrenalin flooding in anticipation, for the Market (very capital “M”) to open.

They waited keenly, in offices and homes and hotels, for the Magic Hour when they could dial their stockbrokers, ask “How’s Motors?”, talk about yesterday’s closing Dow-Jones, place buy or sell orders, discuss the weather or the day’s political news with brokers who only wanted to be let alone by the lonely phone callers so they could run their businesses.

All over the United States right now they would be converging into the funeral-parlor board rooms of Stock Exchange member firms: wise investors, ignorant speculators, compulsive gamblers, ticker-tape addicts, retired bored pensioners. In the Far West, to coincide with New York’s exchange hours, brokers’ offices would open as early as seven A.M. The customers would sit for the next five hours with faces studiously guarded against any show of feelings as they watched the boards tick over, watched the stock news chatter by like an endless freight train, pacing off the latest sale price, bid-and-asked, high, low, and close of all active listed stocks…