Rigged (8 page)

D
avid came awake to the sound of classical music.

He was lying flat on his back with a piano on his chest and thick white tape over his eyes. Someone was repeatedly kicking him in the stomach, and he was pretty sure at least two other people were busily drilling holes in his skull.

Or at least that’s what it felt like. In actuality, when he finally managed to force open his stuck-together eyelids, he saw that he was lying in a hospital bed with an IV line in each arm and bandages covering most of his bare stomach. Bright fluorescent ceiling lights brought tears to his dry eyes, and he had to blink a few thousand times before he could barely make out the rest of the small private hospital room through the haze of his anesthesia hangover; the stark white walls with poorly placed artwork, the shelves that seemed to be lined with medical equipment, the TV hanging from a telescoping arm attached to the ceiling, the small, shuttered window with bars on the outside. He wasn’t sure what the bars were for, but the way his stomach felt, he was kind of glad jumping to his death wasn’t really a viable option. Of course, even without the bars, he would have had to
make it past Serena, who was standing at the edge of his bed, a concerned look on her face. She had something in her hands, a strange, tubelike device with a bag on one end made out of bright red plastic. David blinked again, wondering if his vision was still fucked up from the anesthesia, but he couldn’t quite make out what the object was.

“You’ve got some interesting work friends, David. They could have just sent flowers.”

Then David realized with a start that the thing Serena was holding was an enema. He looked past her, again taking in the small hospital room, and realized that his eyes had played tricks on him—that wasn’t art on the walls or medical devices on the shelves. Enemas, literally hundreds of them, were piled up in every corner of the small hospital room, covering the windowsill and the shelves, hanging from the walls like makeshift modern art.

David let his head fall back on the pillow. He almost had to laugh, even though it hurt to even think about laughing. His appendix bursts, he nearly dies on the way to the hospital—and some sick fuck fills his room with enemas? Scratch that, it had to have taken half a dozen people to outfit his room like this—and to do it all while he was in surgery, getting his abdomen suctioned out—Christ, whoever was behind this was really twisted.

“How do you know it was someone from work?” David finally managed, coughing out the words.

Serena walked around the side of the bed and held something over his head, so that he could see without moving from the pillow.

It was the black-and-white picture from above Harriet’s desk. David’s face had been disfigured by a note written across his forehead in bright red indelible ink:
WELCOME TO THE MERC.

Beneath the scrawl was a signature. It took David a few seconds to make a name out of the dramatic, swirling letters:
DOMINICK “THE DON” GALLO.

David tried to raise a hand to take the picture from her, but the IV line held him back. He was too weak to crumple the thing into
a ball anyway. He could hardly believe Gallo had done something so juvenile—but then, that seemed to be the culture of the traders. Giovanni had put the picture up on Harriet’s wall in the first place, after all. David decided he’d just have to write the enemas off as a form of hazing. Still, he was pretty sure it was going to be a story he’d have to live down for the rest of his time at the Merc. Keeling over in the middle of his first board meeting, then having his hospital room filled with enemas. He was only glad that his mother wasn’t there to see the practical joke. Though she and his father would certainly be there within the hour—Serena was going to have a hell of a job getting rid of the evidence before they arrived.

“I know,” Serena said, as if reading his mind. “I’ll get some orderlies to help me clear it out. David, are you sure that this job is really for you?”

David gritted his teeth. He was guessing that both his father and mother would be asking the same question when they arrived. Not only was the Merc obviously full of maniacs, but David was taking a pay cut to be there. And Giovanni, his hero—well, the man had gotten David to the hospital and had obviously called ahead, because one of the top surgeons in New York had been waiting when David arrived. The doctor had explained what was going on even as the anesthesiologist was putting him under—that he was about to have an emergency appendectomy, that they were lucky to have gotten to him in time. But it wasn’t Giovanni waiting in the hospital room for him when he woke up—it was Serena and Gallo’s enemas.

Mindful of the IV tubes, David reached for Serena’s hand. Her skin felt warm, and he could see the concern in the corners of her dark eyes.

“This could have happened anywhere. It was just bad luck—”

“I’m not talking about your appendix,” she said, shaking her dark curls. “David, this Gallo, and the traders, and even Giovanni. When you told me about them, I thought you were exaggerating. Now I see that you weren’t. If you had gotten sick at Merrill,
you think this would be the response? I feel like you’re taking a long step back.”

David gave her hand a little tug. She leaned forward so that he could touch her lips with his.

“I’ve got to at least give it a little more time,” he said.

The truth was, there was no way he was going to quit after two days. Because that’s exactly what Gallo and the other traders probably expected him to do. Even Reston, he guessed, wouldn’t have been that unhappy to see him go. To them, he was just Giovanni’s new kid. A pawn in the strange political battle between the board and the trading floor. A Harvard geek who’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and somehow ended up in the middle of a street fight.

Well, if that’s what they thought, they’d seriously underestimated him. They didn’t know anything about him, about how hard he’d worked to get there, about what his father had gone through—they didn’t know who David Russo really was, deep inside.

Through the pain, David grinned up at Serena, and she sighed, because she knew that look in his eyes. They didn’t know who David Russo was—but they were about to find out.

M
onday morning, 9:10
A.M.
, the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The trading floor was in full swing.

Bodies crashed into bodies as the Technicolored jackets jockeyed furiously for position. Outstretched hands grasped after the hailstorm of trading tickets, screaming voices erupting from painfully hoarse throats as the numbers on the great board above flashed upward, downward, side to side.
Crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, natural gas
—the four biggest energy commodities, rising and falling with the fate of the nations that produced and depended on them, while a thousand fanatical men in brightly colored jackets fought a veritable gang war in their wake.
Crude oil, gasoline, heating oil, natural gas
—the four commodities that propped up the modern world, deconstructed into bright red digital numbers to be digested and reacted to: buy, sell, buy, sell. Fortunes made and lost in the blink of an eye, the flutter of a little white piece of paper, the collision of one shoulder with another. The chaos of a real, true, physical market in the form of a pitched battle between real, true, physical market forces.

Gladiators at dawn,
David whispered to himself as he strolled through the back doors of the vast, football field–sized room and headed directly toward the trading pits. Deep down, he was terrified, but his eyes remained straight ahead, his face completely calm. He could still feel the stitches pulling at the skin of his abdomen, but the pain was gone, and with it any qualms he had entertained during his brief four-day recovery at home, swathed in the nearly suffocating realm of his overprotective mother and equally zealous girlfriend. This energy, this electricity in the air—it simply didn’t exist in any other business. This was where David belonged.

As he reached the edge of the trading pits, he saw the heads begin to turn. At first, the attention was fairly innocuous, curious eyes watching him as he strolled behind the traders. But then the attention became more focused, the eyes more narrowed. Traders grabbing one another and pointing, more heads turning, faces showing mixtures of emotions: confusion, surprise, and, of course, pure anger.

David braced himself as one of the traders suddenly separated himself from the throng and started toward him. David recognized the kid from his first day at the Merc—Michael Vitzioli, the oversized thug in the red-and-orange-striped jacket. He had a cherubic face and a childlike shock of dark brown hair, but fists the size of lamb shanks. At the moment they were cocked and rising, and David knew he had only minutes to defuse the situation. Except, David wasn’t there to defuse anything. He was there to make a statement.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Vitzi snarled as he kept coming forward. At least fifteen other traders were gathered close enough to hear. Most had momentarily forgotten about the great board up above and the never-ending rain of trading tickets.

David let Vitzi get to within a few feet before he responded.

“I’m learning about the oil business.”

Vitzi’s face reddened. He jabbed at David with a thick finger.

“No, I mean the badge. You think that’s funny?”

David glanced down at his own lapel. He had affixed the trading badge right in the center, where he’d seen the traders wearing theirs. He then looked over at Vitzi’s badge, which had the kid’s nickname in big block letters:
VITZI.

He shrugged. “Mr. Giovanni told me to choose a nickname, because that’s what you meatheads do down here. So I chose myself a nickname.”

Vitzi sputtered, trying to find words. David glanced down at his own trading badge again. The single word stared up at him:
DAGO.

“You know what that fucking means?” Vitzi half-shouted.

David knew exactly what it meant. In fact, David had debated with himself for a full hour whether he should go with “Dago” or the equally derogatory “Guinea.” He had settled on Dago because it just felt better rolling off the tongue.

“Look, man, of course I know what it means. This is a badge of honor to me. I’m a poor kid from Brooklyn with a dago mom and a dago dad, and I’m a proud goddamn dago too. So you can take it or leave it, I really don’t give a fuck.”

David could feel the tension rise around him as his little section of the trading floor suddenly went dead silent. He wondered if he had gone too far.
Well, fuck it,
he thought to himself. They weren’t going to remember him as the guy whose hospital room was filled with enemas after his appendix burst during a board meeting. They were going to remember him as the guy who demanded respect right from the beginning. Either that, or the guy who got his ass kicked all over the trading floor by a Neanderthal in a red-and-orange-striped jacket.

Vitzi glared at him for a good five seconds. Then, finally, something crazy happened. He grinned and reached forward with one of those lamb shanks and gave David a big paisan handshake.

“You’re all right, buddy. I nearly knocked your fuckin’ head off, but you’re all right.”

David’s heart was pounding as he accepted the handshake,
then separated himself from the thuggish trader. He shook a couple more hands, then quickly headed off the trading floor. As he reached the elevator that led up the spine of the building to the higher, more civilized floors, he detached the offending badge and shoved it deep into his back pocket. He doubted he’d ever have to wear it to work again.

T
EN MINUTES LATER,
he was still breathing hard as he took a seat on the massive antique leather couch that took up most of the back wall of Giovanni’s corner office. There was a cup of coffee on the glass table by his knees, next to a plate of pastries that seemed vaguely familiar, pricking at memories from his childhood excursions to the old-world Italian markets where his mother had done most of her shopping.

Giovanni pointed at the plate from behind his huge wooden desk on the other side of the long rectangular room, but David shook his head. Giovanni shrugged, going back to his phone call. He had been on the line when Harriet first ushered David into his office and hadn’t come up for air since. David was glad to have the free time to admire Giovanni’s office, which was decorated nearly floor to ceiling with one of the best collections of New York sports memorabilia David had ever seen outside of a museum.

The largest portion of the collection was housed in a glass shelving unit that spanned the length of the office’s enormous picture windows. David counted at least a dozen baseballs signed by various Yankee rosters, most notably one signed by the entire 1958 World Series team and another signed by the 1996 winning team. There were two Darryl Strawberry jerseys and three mitts signed by Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio himself. There were also basketballs signed by various incarnations of the Knicks, hockey sticks and pucks from a Rangers fan’s wet dream, and photos galore of Giovanni with various stars from at least three different generations, perhaps more. It was really an impressive gathering of ma
terial, and David could only imagine how much it was worth. Not that Giovanni would be selling it anytime soon; it was the kind of collection that a die-hard New Yorker took with him to the grave.

The more David learned about Giovanni, the more he was in awe of the man and what he’d accomplished. During his recovery from his appendix bomb, David had had a chance to refresh his knowledge of the man he’d come to work for—a sort of “eye on the prize” exercise he’d put himself through to erase the bad taste of Gallo’s prank with the enemas. Seeing this incredible sports collection—and knowing that, as a kid, Giovanni would sneak into Brooklyn Dodgers games because his parents, immigrants from the old country, couldn’t afford to buy him tickets to see his beloved team play—was inspiring. David knew that Giovanni had switched his allegiance to the Yankees around the same time he’d dropped out of high school to start a landscaping company with two cousins who’d been Yankee fans from the start. After he’d rolled his landscaping profits into his first real estate success—a run-down tenement building in Borough Park he revamped and sold back to the city for twice what he’d paid for it—he’d bought season tickets, and his true love affair with the championship team had begun. Now that his family—three sons, two daughters, and six grandchildren between them—had inherited his passion for the team, he’d exchanged the season tickets for a box, which alone was no doubt more expensive than the first home he’d shared with his wife of thirty-one years. Giovanni was a true American success story, and his chairmanship of the Merc was just one more exclamation point on a résumé that spanned half a century.

Another few minutes went by as David alternately eyed the sports paraphernalia and the Italian pastries; both seemed equally off-limits, the trappings of a world he hadn’t yet earned his way into. He contented himself with watching the seagulls dart and spin by the picture windows, flashes of glorious life in an otherwise characteristically gray sky.

Finally, Giovanni finished with his call and came around the
side of his desk. Instead of sitting across from David, he put a hip against the windowsill, palming the hilt of a Louisville Slugger miniature baseball bat that even from a distance David could see had been signed by none other than Mickey Mantle.

“Everyone’s talking about your exchange a few minutes ago on the trading floor.”

David raised his eyebrows. That was fast. Giovanni grinned.

“This place lives on stories, rumors, and innuendo. Interesting tactic, kid.
Dago.
Personally, I probably would have decked you. But it was smart thinking. That trading floor is a schoolyard, and you gotta play by schoolyard rules.”

David blushed, embarrassed that Giovanni knew about his trading badge, but thrilled that the man had complimented the thought behind it. And if Giovanni had heard the story, by now everyone in the building probably had too.

“Don’t worry about Gallo,” Giovanni continued, reading his mind. “He’s a pathetic dinosaur. It might surprise you to know that we’re about the same age. I know he seems three decades older—because while I’ve been swimming forward for the past fifty years, he’s been treading water in this lucrative swamp of his. He’s made a fortune in this place—and he doesn’t see any reason to let anything change. From dairy to potatoes to heating oil to crude, these guys were tucked away in their insulated little corner of Manhattan, and nobody was watching—they had it all to themselves. Getting to work at nine-thirty and leaving at two. If they didn’t have the NYMEX, they would be shining shoes. Gallo’s got to understand—things
are
changing, David. Fast. Which is why I hired you in the first place.”

David watched as Giovanni lifted the little baseball bat and twirled it in his hands.

“Anything I can do to help,” David said, though it had sounded much less lame when it was just a thought in his head. “I’ve been reading up on oil and the exchange nonstop since my appendix exploded—but I think it’s still going to take some time before I’m up to speed.”

Giovanni laughed. “It took me ten years to get up to speed. But it’s a different world now. And that’s my point—it’s the whole fucking world, not a little trading floor in a forgotten corner of New York. Oil is the biggest thing going, and it’s only getting bigger. The whole world is watching—and guys like Gallo are going to have to learn to adapt.”

Giovanni swung the bat in a low arc, nearly knocking a picture of George Steinbrenner off the glass shelves.

“Adapt to what?” David asked.

Giovanni winked at him. “That’s what you’re here to help figure out. How does this exchange fit into what’s going on in the rest of the world? What’s next? Automation? Expansion? Exchanges are springing up all over the place. Business is spreading. London, already big and growing every day. What’s next? Hong Kong? Tokyo? I don’t have a fucking clue. I’m an old guy in an old suit taking care of the other old guys in their old suits. But you and Reston, you’re the future, and you’re going to be my eyes and ears. Here at the Merc, and around the world.”

David’s heart was pounding again. A week ago he was looking forward to visiting old-age homes and calculating estate taxes; now Giovanni was talking about big issues, worldwide possibilities. He wasn’t sure, specifically, what his role was going to be, but he liked the sound of it so far. Sadly, more edification was going to have to wait, as Giovanni was suddenly pointing the baseball bat toward the door.

“Now get your dago ass out of here, so I can get some work done. Harriet has some crap for you to go over for a meeting with some Washington politicos I’m taking tomorrow morning, so don’t waste any more of your time getting into fights with the animals downstairs.”

David hurried toward the door. As he passed through, Giovanni shouted after him:

“And, kid, I’m glad you didn’t die at the board meeting. Would have been a lot of fucking paperwork to fill out.”