*
On Monday, the market dropped off a precipice and didn’t find bottom. A large Dutch bank failed. The Chinese chose this moment to dump billions of dollars of currency reserves, and in every market from Singapore to London the bears contemplated the chaos and sharpened their claws.
At twelve-thirty, Charlie called Dearborne’s office and found he’d left for the country club. He looked at Megan through the glass wall of her office and gave her a nod. She typed in the correction, and millions of dollars of losing positions pulsed into the TPS computers on a silent electronic wave.
Not that it mattered. What had been catastrophic positions on Friday were turning into mountains of solid gold on Monday. By three o’clock, when the exchange closed, the S&Ps had dropped sixteen percent, Charlie was in the black, and he was standing on his desk, beating his chest and giving a Tarzan yell.
Selling short the S&Ps had made him a profit of $137,500,000, give or take a few hundred thousand. Added to this was the forty million he’d started with, and the ten million he’d made on the Eurodollar puts. This was a 370 percent profit in less than a week.
And on any large gain made for TPS, Charlie’s contract called for him to collect a bonus of seventeen percent. Seventeen percent of $147,500,000 ...
“I’m lord of the fucking jungle!” he shouted. “We’re all going to die rich!”
His people, the traders and salesmen, looked up from their screens, hesitated a moment, then began to applaud. As cheers began to ring out, Charlie looked up to Megan’s office, and he could see her eyes gazing levelly at him over the top of her monitor. He couldn’t tell whether the eyes were smiling or not.
By four o’clock, when the Merc closed in Chicago, Tarzan yells seemed inadequate to the situation. Instead he put on his phone headset and punched Megan’s number.
“Sod the proles,” he said when she answered. “Let your staff do the reconciliation. Come home with me tonight.”
“No guilt,” she whispered. The words sent a surge of desire up his spine.
“I’ll call the caterer,” he said.
*
“Welcome to the observation deck of the Gateway Arch of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial,” said Marcy Douglas. “On exiting, please step to your left and make your way up the stairs. If you are waiting for a tram, please wait for everyone to exit before taking your place.”
The latest group of tourists climbed from the south tram to the observation platform. Marcy noticed, among the usual ambling tourists, the parents and children and people with cameras, an elderly lady on the arm of a younger woman, a young Japanese couple in baseball caps, and a cluster of middle-aged people talking to one another in French.
The usual. Marcy evaded an impulse to look at her watch. She was on duty till ten o’clock and had many hours to go.
“Please stay on the yellow stairs,” she told the tourists.
Marcy was twenty-two years old and had worked for the Park Service for two years, since she’d given up on college. She was tall and thin and black, and kept her hair cut short and businesslike under her Smokey Bear hat. She was from rural Florida and loved the out-of-doors, and had hoped to work in one of the big national forests. Failing that perhaps in Jean Lafitte National Park— better known as the French Quarter of New Orleans— but those with seniority were lined up for those jobs, so she found herself working 630 feet above the St. Louis waterfront, shepherding tourists through the largest stainless steel sculpture in the world, the silver catenary curve of the Gateway Arch. The giant wedding ring that St. Louis had built to the scale of God’s finger.
The elderly woman put her hand on Marcy’s arm. “That was the most unpleasant elevator ride I’ve had in my life,” she said.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Marcy said. “I know they’re crowded.”
The huge arch couldn’t use regular elevators: it had special trams, trains of little cars, built to ride up the inside of the curve. Each car seated five, if the five were close friends, weren’t too large, and if none of them smelled bad.
“And the swaying,” the lady said. “I felt like I was going to get sick to my stomach.”
Marcy patted her hand. “You take as long as you need to catch your breath before going down.”
“Is there another way down?”
“You can take the stairs, ma’am, but there are over a thousand of them.” Marcy tried to look sympathetic. “I think the tram ride would be better for you.”
“Come along, Mother.” The old lady’s companion tugged gently at her arm. “The young lady has work to do.”
Marcy shuffled the line of waiting tourists into the trams and sent them to ground level. She could be in nature, she thought. She could be in Yosemite.
Or she could be in the French Quarter, sipping a planter’s punch in the Old Absinthe House.
“Why are the windows so small?” a little girl asked.
“A lot of people ask that question,” Marcy said. She didn’t know the answer.
Marcy stood with a couple of tourists for a photograph. She didn’t know why so many people wanted to take her picture, but many of them did.
The French people went from one window to the next in a group, comparing the view with a map they’d brought with them. She heard “Busch Stadium” and “Cathedrale de St. Louis.”
A lot of French people came to St. Louis, figuring that since the French had once owned the place, they’d find French culture here. Marcy figured they were usually disappointed.
The French men, she noticed, were casually dressed, but the women looked as if they were on a modeling assignment.
“My goodness!” The old lady clutched at her heart. “Is it swaying up here?”
Marcy smiled. She spent a lot of her shift smiling. It adds to your face value, her mother used to tell her.
“We sway a little bit when the wind picks up, yes,” she said. “But don’t worry— the Gateway Arch is built to withstand a tornado.”
“Pardon, please,” said one of the Japanese. “How do you get to the Botanikkogoden?”
It took two tries before Marcy realized that she was asking for guidance to the Botanical Gardens. She gave directions. Her colleague, Evan, had just brought another load of tourists up on the north tram and was urging people to stay on the yellow stairs.
One of the tourists was tilting his camera, trying to get a picture of the Casino Queen, the big gambling boat just pulling into its mooring across the river in East St. Louis. Revenues from the Casino Queen, Marcy knew, had rescued East St. Louis from being the poorest city in the United States, a position it had held for decades.
“How do you pronounce the name of the architect?” an anxious woman asked.
“I’m not very good at Finnish,” Marcy said, and then did her best to pronounce Eero Saarinen’s name.
“Why didn’t they get an American architect?” the woman demanded.