On the Floor Read Online Free

Wednesday he nabbed me just as I was leaving for Heathrow to bag Felix’s order for the China Fire block and he tried to act all casual by taking out his golf club. ‘You never played?’ he asked, positioning his Eezee Putt against the glass wall. ‘I used to spend all summer down the country club when I was a kid.’ But I told him that golf wasn’t such a big thing for convent schoolgirls in Dublin. The Grope took his time lining up, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, wiggling his hips. When he flunked the first shot, he held the club aloft to squint down the shaft as if his error might reveal a problem in the alignment. ‘PING,’ he said admiringly, ‘you know the story, Geri?’ and I didn’t bother saying I’d heard it many times before. ‘Karsten Salheim,’ he continued, ‘a lowly mechanical engineer at General Motors designed and made the world’s best putter at his home in Riverroad, California. Just like Microsoft, it all started in a garage.’ He leaned dreamily on the club and stared at his glass cabinet where a Stars ’n’ Stripes stands guardover the trophies and deal tombstones, lending the display a faintly funereal air and I imagined the Grope’s embalmed body laid out among his spoils like a relic of the American Dream, preserved in this airless shrine to watch over the trading floor forever.
    â€˜Never too late to start,’ he offered me the Ping with an encouraging grin. ‘And it sure is a helluva day out with clients.’
    I shook my head. ‘Felix hates sport. He thinks it’s the pursuit of primitives,’ and this remark had the desired effect because the Grope kicked the Eezee Putt to one side, tucked the little furry glove over his club and stashed it back by the coat stand.
    â€˜I don’t know what you’re doing with Felix Mann, Geri,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to know. Just keep it up and don’t fuck it up.’
    It is six years and a lifetime ago since I first heard Felix Mann’s name and that was the same day the Grope threatened to rip out his fucking asshole. I’d been at Steiner’s for a few months and was with my old boss, Ed Karetsky, who liked to end an evening’s tequila slamming by climbing up on a bar stool to deliver Ivan Boesky’s famous speech to the Berkeley class of ’83:
Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself
. Ed had let me tag along to his meeting in the observer role of deaf and dumb graduate trainee, not realizing that by the end of that year he’d be breeding pugs in Illinois and – in an entirely unrelated but coincidental event – Boesky and the other 1980s corporate raiders would be behind bars.
    As soon as we walked into the Grope’s office, Ed clicked his fingers to indicate the wall space where I could disappear. He slung his leg across a corner of the conference table, oblivious to the stink of trouble in the air, the white lips of the two hotshots from Capital Markets at the table, the back of the Grope’s head framed in the window like a warning sign. Ed stretched the elastic of his business school smile and just kept on swimming out to sea.
Hey, guys, howya doing?
Like they really hadnothing better to do in the middle of a 200 million dollar stock placing for Cargo International than sit there and shoot the breeze, when upstairs Steiner’s client – the Cargo CEO – had popped in for an update on the deal only to find himself sitting in front of the screen watching his stock spiral down 15%.
    All because Felix Mann had decided to sell the shit out of Cargo.
    The Grope punctured the airspace in front of Ed with a sharp and steady finger.
Karetksy. What The Fuck Is Going ON?
Ed froze, forgot to paddle and his mouth filled with water, an Adam’s apple swallow jerked his tie knot