Black Friday Page 20

  The scene on Threadneedle, near the Bank of London, was nearly as bleak and without hope as bombed-out Wall Street in New York.

  With its forty-button, telephone-computer consoles, the Crisis Room at No. 13 Wall was beginning to resemble the Starship Enterprise more than the traditional Chippendale feel and look of the Street. Nonetheless, the thirty or so police, Army, and financial experts in the room had absolutely no idea what they were supposed to accomplish next.

  The Western economic system seemed to be crashing to a disastrous halt. Not one of them had a reasonable clue why.

  And still there was only maddening silence from Green Band.

  Chapter 60

  CARROLL AND CATTLIN DILLON sat on an old floral couch in his Manhattan apartment. A Beethoven concerto played on the tape deck.

  Once again, they were waiting for Green Band. There was nothing to do but wait.

  “I think I have to turn in,” Caitlin finally said in a half-asleep whisper. She hunched forward and kissed Carroll’s forehead. “Get a few hours, anyway.”

  Carroll raised his wristwatch to his face. “What a party pooper. No sense of adventure. It’s only two-thirty.”

  “People from Ohio go to bed at nine-thirty, ten o’clock. The Lima Holiday Inn restaurant is filled at five-thirty. Closed down by eight.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a sophisticated New Yorker now. We party until two or three on weekdays here.”

  Caitlin kissed Carroll again and the idle talk stopped. He was amazed at how comfortable he was with her. Watching someone you cared about almost being killed seemed to accelerate the courting process.

  “Is anything the matter? You look sad? Tell me…” Her eyes were digging for more, more to understand who Carroll really was.

  “I’m not quite ready for bed yet. I’m overtired I guess. I’ll be in soon. You go ahead.”

  Caitlin leaned in closer and kissed Carroll again. She smelled so wholesome and nice. She had the softest lips he could imagine.

  “Do you want me to stay with you?” She whispered one more time.

  Carroll shook his head.

  Caitlin left the living room, sleepily huddled in the cocoon of a blanket.

  Carroll stood up from the couch. He started to pace back and forth past the darkly reflective parlor windows. His body was feeling all wrong: wired, incandescent.

  He looked inside an old antique blanket chest he’d bought years back in central Pennsylvania. His mind was wandering into odd places, weird time zones …

  He wondered if Caitlin liked kids much…

  Jesus, he was so incredibly wired. So uptight tonight.

  Finally, he did it though. The worst thing under the circumstances—the absolute worst.

  On the anniversary.

  Nora’s death three years before.

  December 14.

  First, Carroll gathered together old photographs. He found most of the photos in a cluttered, bottom shelf inside a glass-enclosed book cabinet.

  Next, he pulled a wicker chair up close beside one of the tall windows facing onto the lights of Riverside Drive and the river.

  Carroll stared down at the West Side Highway, the peacefully quiet Boat Basin.

  He was letting the present go all fuzzy and blurred.

  He stood up again.

  He dealt three tapes off the stacks on either side of the stereo. One was 52nd Street, Billy Joel self-consciously holding a trumpet on the cover. The second was mainstream country and western, I Believe In Love by somebody called Don Williams. The third was Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibbs’ Guilty.

  Carroll switched on the stereo and the speakers immediately hummed. He felt the power surge through the soles of his bare feet. He turned the volume way down.

  He’d never been a big Barbra Streisand fan, but there were two songs he wanted to hear on this album: “Woman in Love,” and “Promises.” Out in the world, a moving van rumbled along Riverside Drive.

  He kept an old framed picture of Nora, hidden away face down in the bottom of the bookcase.

  He slid it out now. He propped the photo on the arm of the couch.

  For a long, pensive moment, he stared at Nora sitting there in a hospital-issue wheelchair. Anniversary of her death. Pain still sharp and fresh as yesterday.

  He could remember exactly when the snapshot had been taken. After they’d operated. After the surgeons had failed to remove her malignant tumor.

  In the wheelchair photo, Nora was wearing a simple yellow-flowered sundress, a knitted blue cardigan sweater. She had on a pair of crazy high-topped sneakers which became her trademark as an invalid.

  Nora was smiling radiantly in the picture. Not once to his knowledge had she completely broken down during the illness, not once had she felt sorry for herself. She’d been thirty-one years, old when they’d found the tumor. She’d had to watch her blond hair fall out from the chemotherapy treatments; then she’d had to adapt to life in the iron clutches of her wheelchair. Nora had somehow accepted that she wasn’t going to see her children grow up, or anything else the two of them had laughed and dreamed about, and always taken for granted.

  Why couldn’t he finally accept her death?

  Why couldn’t he ever accept the way life was apparently supposed to be?

  Arch Carroll stopped and listened closely to Barbra Streisand singing.

  The song “Promises” made him remember the stretch when he’d visited Nora every night, night after night at New York Hospital. After the hospital visits, Carroll would eat at Galahanty’s Bar up the hill on First Avenue. A burger, soggy home fries, draft beer that tasted the way swamp gas smells. The beginning of his drinking problems.

  The two Streisand songs had been favorites on Galahanty’s jukebox.

  They always made him think of Nora—all alone back at that scary, skyscraper hospital.

  Sitting in the bar, he always wanted to go back—at ten, eleven o’clock—to talk with her just a little bit more; to steep with her, to hold Nora tight against the gathering night inside her New York hospital room. To squeeze every possible moment out of the time they had left together…

  The worst, the very truest line for him in “Promises” finally came….

  Tears slowly rolled down his cheeks. The pain inside was like a rock solid column that extended from the center of his chest all the way into his forehead. The sadness, the inconsolable grief was for Nora, though, not for himself: the unfairness of what had happened to her.

  Carroll began to hold himself fiercely tight, squeezing hard with both arms.

  When would this feeling please stop? The past three years had been unbearable. When would it please fucking stop?

  He always had the insane urge—to break glass.

  Just to punch out glass.

  Caitlin, meanwhile, stood immobile, perfectly silent in the darkened apartment hallway.

  She couldn’t catch hold of her breath, couldn’t even swallow right then. She had wandered back from the bedroom when she’d heard noises. Faint strains of music…

  She’d found Carroll like this. So sad to watch.

  She walked back to the bedroom. She huddled deep down into the body-warm covers and sheets.

  Lying there alone, Caitlin bit down hard on her lower lip. She understood and felt so much more about Carroll— clearly, in an instant. Maybe she understood more than she wanted to.

  She wanted to hold him right now, only she was afraid to go and ask. Caitlin was afraid to intrude.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been alone in the big silent bedroom overlooking the river.

  The phone on the bedstand began to ring.

  It was 3:30.

  He didn’t pick up outside. Where was Carroll now?

  She waited, four, five rings, and he still didn’t pick up.

  Caitlin finally grabbed for the receiver.

  A very excited voice was on the phone line. A man was talking, before she had a chance to say a word.

  “Arch, sorry to wake you. This is
Walter Trentkamp. I’m down at No. 13 right now. The Stock Exchange in Sydney just opened. There’s a massive panic! You’d better come now. It’s all going to crash!”

  Chapter 61

  “WHAT’S HAPPENING, ARCH, I think, is a disorderly, almost a riotous Market condition. Everybody desperately wants to sell. Except there’s a corresponding lack of buyers,” Caitlin said.

  “What exactly does that mean?” Carroll asked.

  ‘It means the bottom line price of stocks and bonds has to plummet dramatically…. The crash that’s apparently coming could last a few hours, days, or drag on for years.”

  “Years?”

  “Back in sixty-three, on the day Kennedy was assassinated, the Market collapsed and was shut down early. The next day it recovered. But it wasn’t until after World War Two that the Market recovered from the crash of 1929!”

  Carroll and Caitlin Dillon were hurrying across the immense marble lobby of the World Trade Center.

  It was here, on the ground floor and mezzanine, that the fiduciary nerve center of the banks and trust companies had been established after the bombings on Wall Street.

  The escalator stairs to the mezzanine were frozen to a stop. An impromptu sign over a red arrow said FINANCIAL SECTION, and pointed straight up.

  Carroll and Caitlin started to jog up the oddly motionless metal stairs. It was just past 4:00 A.M.

  “This looks a little more organized than Number thirteen. Not much though,” Carroll observed.

  Red and blue intercom wires were strung up everywhere, hung like Christmas decorations over the escalators and fire exit stairways. Open radio channels connecting uptown offices with the Financial Center squawked and chattered endlessly.

  Even at that time in the morning, the hum and buzz of electronic noise was unrelenting.

  Out a row of high, vaulted windows, Carroll and Caitlin could see a black Bell Army helicopter landing. Limos and other official cars were discharging somber-looking men carrying business briefcases.

  A crash coming this morning?

  Another Black Friday?

  “What happened? What’s causing the worldwide panic?” Carroll wanted to know as he and Caitlin entered a cavernous marble hallway with no visible way out.

  Caitlin rubbed her arms warm as she walked. The glass doors to the outside were constantly opening, and the building was cold as a meat freezer.

  “None of the usual safeguards in the systems are working. Not enough fail-safe devices were ever built in for a situation like this. Academic economists have been warning the New York Stock Exchange for years. Every MBA candidate in the country knows that something like this could happen.”

  Carroll finally pushed open heavy pine doors into a huge, disturbingly frantic business conference room: a miniature Stock Exchange almost. Brokers on complex NYTECH telephone consoles, analysts with IBM desktop computers, were talking all at once.

  The room was absolutely jammed with frenetic, shadowy figures, many of whom were shouting into phone receivers which they managed to cradle, in a practiced defiance of gravity, between jaw and shoulder.

  Carroll had the impression of madness, a bedlam: what this place reminded him of, give or take some modern ac-couterments, was a print he’d once seen of a Massachusetts insane asylum in the late 1800s.

  Unconditional orders were being issued to sell, at the very best price possible. Jobs and business relationships were being routinely threatened over the long distance telephones.

  Jay Fairchild, tall, jowly, bald as an infant, lumbered forward out of a clique of gray suits to meet Caitlin and Carroll. Fairchild was an Undersecretary of the Treasury, a man who’d come to rely regularly on Caitlin’s judgments, her usually astute, almost uncanny hunches about the market.

  “Jay, what the hell has happened tonight? Who started it? Where did it start?” It was Caitlin’s turn to appear confused for a change.

  The Undersecretary of the Treasury’s eyes had the animation of glass beads.

  “Just about every nightmare scenario you or I have ever imagined has come true tonight,” Fairchild finally said.

  “At the end of the day yesterday, out in Chicago, metal skyrocketed way up. A ton of futures, coffee, sugar, flopped badly. Bank of America and First National began calling in their loans.”

  Caitlin couldn’t hold back her anger at that news. “Those unbelievable shits! Morons. The commodity people out of Chicago won’t listen to anybody, Arch. There have been all sorts of speculative excesses on the options market long before this.”

  “None of that is the real problem right now, though,” Jay Fairchild said. “The crash is being precipitated by the goddamn banks! … The banks are almost completely responsible. Let’s wander back to the lobby. You’ll see what I mean. It’s worse than it looks up here. It’s quite sad, really.”

  Chapter 62

  FBI AGENTS AND hardnosed-looking New York City police officers were screening the credentials of everyone trying to get into the conference room on the ground floor level.

  Carroll knew the FBI guys, so they walked right in.

  Once inside, the thundering noise and activity was double what Carroll and Caitlin had witnessed and heard upstairs.

  It was still only 4:30 A.M., but a nightmarish fear had taken firm hold—you could see it on every face inside the overcrowded room.

  “There’s another factor contributing to the current disaster,” Jay Fairchild said. “The real possibility of a worldwide crash, rather than an isolated one in the U.S. This time, the whole bloody world could go up.”

  Everyone they passed in the conference room appeared hopelessly grave. The scene was something like a general alarm on a Navy warship.

  Caitlin said, “Seven days of brokerage transactions are now unresolved. The bankers are competing, they’re actually competing to see who can take the most clear-cut, absolutely amoral advantage of the chaos!”

  Carroll didn’t understand some of what was being said, but he grasped enough. When you misappropriate people’s money, a lot of small investors’ money given to you on trust, he figured you were a criminal.

  Call him naive and old-fashioned, but that was how he felt.

  “It sounds to me like nobody’s protecting the ordinary investor right now.”

  Jay Fairchild nodded. “Nobody is. The big banks are all busy maneuvering for the oil billions. They could give a damn about the poor bastard out there with a hundred shares of Polaroid or AT and T.”

  “Arch, Arab oil money is the name of the game. Arab money is almost always conservatively managed. Since last Friday they’ve been trying to move out of the U.S. Treasury Bills. Into gold. Into other precious metals. The banks are shamelessly scrambling for the huge Arab fees. They’re like rats on a ship, bailing out of the dollar—rushing into sterling, the yen, the Swiss franc, all the more stable currencies … Chase, Manufacturers, Bank of America, they’re making small fortunes right now.” Caitlin’s lips were tight and her jaw clenched as she spoke.

  The three of them stood by helplessly watching the Stock Market crash gain a momentum of its own.

  Reports from, London, Paris, Bonn, and Geneva came rushing in.

  Men in white shirtsleeves and loosened neckties took turns calling out the more substantial Telex quotes for the benefit of beleaguered clerks who reported them into a massive central computer.

  Phibro Solomon bought at 12½ Down 22.

  General Electric bought at 35 Down 31.

  IBM bought at 80½ Down 40.

  By 11:30 on the morning of December 14, most U.S. banks, including every savings and loan, had been closed.

  The Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Pacific and Midwest exchanges had all been officially shut down.

  Chapter 63

  AT NOON, AN elderly man made his way toward the hub of action at the front of the World Trade Center Crisis Room.

  Many of the young brokers and bankers didn’t recognize Anton Birnbaum. Those who did regarded him with sharp, uneasy glances.
/>
  Birnbaum looked more like an ancient New York City pawnbroker than one of the world’s acknowledged financial geniuses, a man with a reputation that had been unblemished over all his years in business.

  President Justin Kearney had arrived by helicopter from Washington less than thirty minutes before. The President warmly greeted the Financier, speaking with deference and respect.

  ‘It’s awfully good to see you again, Anton. Especially now.” The President spoke formally, as he might to a visiting foreign dignitary.

  Kearney and Anton Birnbaum disappeared inside a small private office, the door of which was guarded by the Secret Service.

  “It’s good to be seen out in the world, Mr. President. I don’t get out so much anymore. Mr. President, if I might be allowed to speak first, I have an idea you might wish to consider…

  “I have just gotten off the phone with two gentlemen you’ve possibly never heard of. It’s worth repeating both conversations. One man is from Milwaukee, a Mr. Clyde Miller. The other man resides in Nashville, Tennessee— Mr. Louis Lavine.”

  Anton Birnbaum said all this in a slow, deliberate style which made each word seem vitally important.

  “Mr. Miller is the CEO for a large brewing company. Mr. Lavine is Treasurer for the State of Tennessee…. I have just convinced Mr. Miller to buy five hundred thousand shares of General Motors stock, which is right now at forty-seven. He will buy the General Motors stock, and keep buying it until the price goes back to sixty-seven. He is prepared to invest up to two hundred million dollars.

  “I’ve asked Mr. Louis Lavine in Tennessee to buy NCR stock which is now at nineteen, and continue to buy it until the price moves up to thirty. He’s prepared to commit up to seventy-five million dollars for the purchase.”

  Birnbaum then went on to explain to the President why the plan he’d conceived could work.

  “I only hope that the courage of these two gentlemen will actually turn the direction of this catastrophe. I pray it will restore some necessary optimism. Mr. President, I have a belief that it will…