Jake's 8 (2 page)

"Mr. Gibb, Fred Grey is a dolt and while I don’t like to make decisions based on the actions of another, his firing you says to me that I should hire you."

"Thank you," I said.

"You are smart and while you have that problem of people trusting you, I trust you."

"Before accepting, I’d like to ask you a few questions," I said.

He raised his left hand as if to quiet me.

"I don’t like questions," he said. "Start working for me. If you don’t like it, you quit. I back up my decisions. You’ll get full medical and two weeks vacation and I’ll start you at one hundred and twenty thousand a year."

I had to pull my chin off the floor.

"Close your mouth," Mr. Gibb. "You’ll start today if that’s alright."

If you find a man starving in the desert and put him in front of a five-star dinner he’s not

going to sit down politely, place the napkin in his lap, keep his elbows off the table and wait to be served. He’s going to jump into the grub up to his armpits. I held out my hand and we shook on it.

I counted on working like a dog, but the defining characteristic of my first three months at the ‘Offices of Prescott Carmichael’ was boredom. He was a man of habits. He had two meetings a day. The first at ten and the second at two. He did not lunch. Mrs. Johnson showed me around the office and how to organize his day. It was no great shakes. I had it down in nothing flat.

For each meeting, I printed out and reviewed the client’s portfolio holdings and performance figures. I checked their tax position to see if we could do some tax-loss harvesting. If they were over the age of seventy-and-a-half, I made sure we had them on track to take their required minimum distribution. I listed their beneficiaries and checked when their legal documents—will, trusts, and powers-of-attorney—were last updated.

The client, or clients, sat on a leather couch while Mr. Carmichael and I sat opposite a low coffee table in leather wingback chairs. I sat to Mr. Carmichael’s right. I kept a yellow pad ready for notes. Mr. Carmichael had nothing but his presence.

And like I said, it was boring. Aside from some preliminary chat about a to-do that Mr. Carmichael thought needed addressed, such as a small re-positioning of the portfolio or a problem the client brought in, such as a divorce, the talk was on nothing important. Just Mr. Carmichael and the client chatting the hour away. They talked about the client’s career and their kids and their grandkids and often the oldsters talked about their dog. Always with their damned dogs. Nothing important; nothing consequential.

"Mr. Carmichael?" I asked one day after a client hit the sidewalk. "I don’t mean to be rude, but you spoke of nothing at all during that meeting."

"Didn’t we?" he asked. "It was nothing to you. To them, it is their life. That’s everything to them."

"Aren’t they smart enough to ask questions? These are not small time investors."

"No, Mr. Gibb. They’re not stupid. They’re smart enough to trust me is all. They trust me to do the right thing. I bring them in here to assure them of that fact and the easiest way to do that is let them tell me about their life and for me to care about what they are saying."

"Did I mention one thing about myself?" he asked.

"No," I said.

"That’s because I was listening. That is the first step to trust—the journey to trust isn’t a long trip, so listening is a big component."

That’s the way it went. When I started with ‘The Offices of Prescott Carmichael,’ I assumed the one-hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year indentured me to around-the-clock work. Nope. Not so much as a phone call after hours. I got to the office at nine and when I wasn’t in a meeting with Mr. Carmichael, I was preparing for the next day’s meeting and as the bell rang in New York closing the market, Mr. Carmichael was out the door, followed by Mrs. Johnson and trailed by myself. This was easy money. This was really big, easy money.

Then one Saturday night at eleven-fifteen I got a call. I was straddling a stool at Japp’s next to a pretty blonde who sported the most delightfully upturned nose that I had ever seen. It was almost cute enough to distract me from her ample cleavage. Almost.

Caller ID said it was Mr. Carmichael’s cell. Seeing how this was the first time he’d rang outside of our nine to four regime, I excused myself from the pretty blonde with the delightfully upturned nose and ample cleavage and walked into the street to take the call in relative quiet.

"Mr. Gibb," he said. "I’ll need you to meet me at Eight Eleven E. Fourth Street. There’s a man at the door with the Christian name of Frank. Tell Frank you’re with me and Messrs. Turner and Bloom. I have a client service issue we need to address tonight."

I looked mournfully through Japp’s window to Ms. Upturned Nose with Ample Cleavage. I then thought of that one hundred and twenty thousand a year.

"I’m dressed casual," I said. "Jeans and a sports coat. That okay?"

"That will be fine."

I walked back into Japp’s and laid down two twenties and asked Ms. Upturned Nose and Ample Cleavage to have a few on me—I’d be back as soon as possible. I sensed four guys ready to pounce, so I didn’t hold out any hope she’d be pining the night away for yours truly. I hit the street again and hoofed it down to Fourth.

The man with the Christian name of Frank let me in the building then instructed me to take an elevator to the top floor. The elevator was one of those old-fashioned cage deals that must have been installed when Mr. Otis was still alive. I pulled the door shut and pushed ten. With a jar that reminded me of a broken down roller coaster, I was lifted to the tenth floor where Mr. Carmichael and two gentlemen stood.

"Welcome to the Lodge of the Brotherhood of the Spoon Club," Mr. Carmichael said through the elevator gate.

I pulled back the gate and stepped out into the early 1900s. There was a tall ceiling and flowered wallpaper and a well worn carpet holding up heavy furniture that looked to be hewn from some ancient tree. Overly elaborate vases sat on mahogany tables overstuffed with fresh flowers. Sit in this room for twenty years and art deco might finally come along and say "Hello, Joe, what d’ya know."

Mr. Carmichael introduced me to the two mid- to late-life stiffs. I knew their names and knew they weren’t on Mr. Carmichael’s client roster. The men dripped wealth like they had just showered in it. They both looked nervous, however. I kept my mouth shut. It’s not good to yap around a wealthy man with a case of the nerves, and worse to yap around two of them.

I followed the three men from the anteroom the elevator dumped me into, through a stunted hallway and into an even older looking dining room. A large table sat in the middle with twelve high back chairs surrounding it. Opposite the door we just came through was another door into the kitchen. Every piece of the room looked handcrafted in the Old World. The only problem was in the middle of the table. A section of about four inches by eight inches of it was inset. It looked to have been covered by glass. I say looked to have been because the table and the inset were covered in a mess of shards.

"As you can see," said the man introduced to me as Mr. Gregory Turner, "the spoon was kept under glass in the middle of the table. Someone simply shattered the glass and took it. I assume there’s a financial loss. I have no idea what a collector would pay for something like that. But it’s the touchstone of our brotherhood. That’s the real loss."

I’d never met Mr. Turner before, but I knew his son from serving my four-year sentence at The City Day School. He’d made his fortune through inheritance. He’d worked briefly but having quickly learned how hard it is to make a buck, he promptly stopped trying. He spent his time funding art exhibits and galleries and various charities that allowed him to wear tuxedos and feel good about himself and not touch too many sick people. I remember his son being a real turd.

The second man was five foot four and weighed a hundred and twenty tops. He had to be in his seventies but looked to be in his fifties, and he scared the hell out of me. Matthew Bloom made Cincinnati his home, but he could make his influence felt in New York, London and Honk Kong. You could say he had settled on being a big fish in a small pond, but even in Manhattan, he’d still make a splash. Matthew Bloom was a venture capitalist. Strike that. He was more than a V.C.—he was one of the original corporate raiders. At one time, his name was mentioned along side of Boesky, Kekorian and Milkin. Starting in the late seventies he bought companies, busted them up and sold them off. There’s the ghost of a factory haunting the West Wide that was once home to a company with three hundred employees that he "invested in." It’s been empty some thirty odd years. There’s another of his ghost factories on the East Side and one north of town and many more spread out across America. He was a financial titan. And he didn’t say a word.

"Tell me the story, Mr. Turner," Mr. Carmichael said.

"There isn’t much of a story," he said. "We had our semi-annual dinner tonight. After we ate, we sat smoking and talking while the help cleaned up. Brother Bloom and I stayed behind after the other ten brothers left. I’m the Junior Warden of the lodge which means I hold the only key to the dining room. I get to wait around until everyone has left, then I lock up. Brother Bloom is the Senior Warden. His job is to make sure I lock up. It may sound silly, but it’s our tradition.

"All the staff and brothers had left by ten o’clock," he went on. "We shut the door and made sure it was locked. We walked down the hall, I called the elevator and Brother Bloom remembered he had forgotten his gloves. I handed him the key and he went back to the dining room. A couple of minutes later, he called out saying that the spoon had been stolen."

"You are sure it was there when you closed up?" Mr. Carmichael asked.

"We’re both certain of it," he answered. "We would have noticed smashed glass on the table. We hadn’t left the room all night. We would have seen someone smash it. We would have seen the spoon missing."

"And you’ve done a search of the dining room and kitchen?"

"Yes. We have spent an hour searching both. We even searched each other. Then I called you. The thief had maybe two minutes to grab the spoon and escape after we left the first time. But he couldn’t have. Even if he could get in, he would have had to have passed both of us to get out."

"You can’t open these windows?" Mr. Carmichael asked.

"None of them. They’re sealed," answered Turner.

"There were no windows in the hall," Mr. Carmichael said under his breath to himself. "Could you please show me the kitchen?"

We took a tour of the small kitchen. I’ve had girlfriends with bigger closets. It was blisteringly hot. Unlike the rest of the rooms of the Lodge, everything was modern. There were stainless steel and copper pots hanging about, a blender, a food processor, a mixer, a microwave and an oven—one of those professional stainless-steel gas numbers with eight burners on top with eight controls reading low to high spread across the front, separated by the dial for the oven that ranged from two hundred degrees to self-clean. Mr. Carmichael examined each machine and drawer. I did the same trying not to appear useless.

"Anything you can contribute is appreciated," Mr. Turner said to Mr. Carmichael. "I can’t imagine how I’m going to break this to our brothers and Matt and I would prefer to keep the police out of it. I don’t want a bunch of white shirts tromping through our lodge."

So there we were at midnight on a Saturday. Mr. Matthew Bloom, Mr. Gregory Turner, Mr. Prescott Carmichael and me looking at an empty hole in a table where there once was a spoon.

Let me stop here and turn the clock ba
ck two hundred and thirty some odd years. Here’s the story Mr. Carmichael told me after we’d put that Saturday night, Brotherhood of the Spoon business behind us.

It’s the winter of 1777. A farm boy is trying hard to look like a soldier, but he’s having a hard go of it. His boots are soleless, his pants are torn and his coat is a rag. Everything is wet; the ground, his tent, his food, his body, his clothes and his soul. He’s convinced that he is slowly freezing to death. He addressed letters to his mother from Valley Forge, but he no longer writes her now. What is there to tell her, but things to make her worry? And if he wrote something that didn’t worry her, it would be a lie.

The soldier couldn’t sleep. He heard the watch change and decided to unwedge himself from his two tent mates. They both grumbled at him for the loss of the body heat he took with him. He stoked the embers of their fire and got a blaze going. He was hungry. They had tried to make a broth the night before and it helped a little. It was full of bones they’d managed to save and roots they had gathered. One of them had produced a rancid piece of bacon for flavor. He picked up the pot. The broth had frozen. He hung it over the fire and then blew into the flames.

At last the broth melted and began to steam. The farm-boy-turned-soldier tasted it. It was disgusting but warm. He tried some more.

"Do you mind if I share your fire?" a voice asked from the dark. The farm-boy-turned-soldier had no interest in sharing his meal but agreed with a grumble. The man stepped from the darkness into the firelight wearing the uniform of a major general. The farm boy rose.

"General Washington, sir."

"Sit, son. Stay close to your fire."

The farm boy sat back onto his log and George Washington sat with him.