I stare at him. He stares at me. “I am not, repeat not, writing those memos and I’m also not sure why you believe it’s your place to even say that.”
His second line flashes now and we look at the turret. It’s his fiancée. He hasn’t called a client yet or researched anything or initiated any sort of trade and it’s been weeks. He’s an expensive thing to look at. His face appears pained to not be answering her.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s for Cougar?”
“Cheetah. Stone, the largest account you now cover with me is called Cheetah.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
Those tranches of subprime mortgages I put together for Henry sparked a deluge of orders from Cheetah. I write orders for CMOs with a Cheetah account number on them several times per day. Marcus, Amy, and King all sit back in awe as I do less with the slow-moving stock market and more with this shiny new toy called subprime mortgage bonds.
Clarisse is seething with jealousy at my commission runs since they’re fatter than anyone else’s. Ballsbridge eavesdrops on me, trying to understand how I’m selling so much of this stuff. But Ballsbridge and Clarisse don’t have what I have, a counterpart on the bond desk who realizes that together we make a great team. Most bond traders would never share the work and wealth with someone like me, from a different department. My counterpart in fixed income is the goddess Kathryn Peterson, the most senior woman on the mortgage desk, who, up until now, hadn’t done one trade with Cheetah, and while I trade all day with Cheetah, I’d never traded a bond before.
A few weeks ago, I approached Kathryn and told her I could get her into that account if we split the commissions and that we would then not need to split them with Stone. She loved the idea and we launched our own partnership. I see her as the perfect way to push Simon back on this partnering thing. He never saw a two-woman partnership, hatched from a department he doesn’t run, coming.
Feagin Dixon didn’t invent this new mortgage vehicle, Goldman Sachs did, and we, like several other Wall Street firms, are in such a desperate race to catch up that Simon and King don’t care who sells this stuff, just get it done, and that’s why I’m allowed to sell something not even traded on my floor. In my opinion Henry is a visionary and Henry can’t get enough of them. Kathryn and I are happy to be his dealer of choice.
There is a group here at Feagin called the Fundamental Strategies Group. They’re supposed to evaluate the risk and profit potential of mortgage packages like the ones I sell to Henry. If I ask them to evaluate the risk of the products I sell, they will hand me a neat piece of paper with maybe ten or twenty bundles that would be a good fit for my client’s needs. Then I could go home and take my kids ice skating or feed them something not spawned by our microwave oven. But the problem with using this in-house group is that I don’t trust them. The Fundamental Strategies guys also advise our in-house traders, the King McPhersons of my world who have investment positions they want and don’t want. It’s easy for them to suggest their wannabe castoffs to me for my client to buy. That way Kathryn and I hand them their profit while they load Cheetah up with some junk Henry would probably take a loss on. The way to not get suckered by them is to do the work ourselves. Kathryn and I split the pile while I picture my upcoming evening replete with coffee, a calculator, a sex-starved husband, and children who refuse to go to sleep. Still, to me this seems like a good trade.
CHAPTER 23
Bond Girl
THE COLUMN OF papers stacked on my desk fan at their edges because Marcus Ballsbridge’s ball fan is tilted upward. A ball fan is a fan angled to cool a man’s private parts, an appliance apparently necessary when the owner is agitated, and Ballsy is agitated.
Naked Girl has limited movements today because her skirt seems sewn onto her body. Still, she shimmies herself into standing position so she can berate Marcus.
“The breeze from that damn fan gets up my skirt and makes me horrr-ny,” she practically yells. Heads lift from twenty feet in every direction.
“When you wear such a narrow skirt,” Ballsbridge retorts, “no air can possibly squeeze up there, honey. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Combine a wiggle dress with cold blowing air, Ballsy, and this girl is thinking of something more satisfying than balancing your stupid trades.”
Marcus and Tiffany seem locked in some sort of domestic spat. It’s like she isn’t able to distract the man of her choice anymore, so she tries to retaliate by not answering his ringing phone lines or dishing out sexy talk he doesn’t respond to.