On the Floor Read Online Free Page B

years. It was his second stumble on the powertrip, the first was when his classmate James ‘Moose’ Hanson Jr made it onto the Operating Committee in ’83 and the Grope didn’t. So it’s no surprise that the Cargo experience has left him with an allergic reaction to Felix Mann, like he doesn’t feel safe in the jungle knowing that Felix could be out there sunning himself on a rock, waiting for the Grope to come ambling across his path with a nice big juicy deal between his teeth. But I actually think that what really bugs the Grope more than anything, maybe even more than losing out to the Moose, is the fact that that the biggest swinging dick in the investor community just ignores him, just refuses to take his calls. Even though he knows that Felix does this to everyone, the Grope can’t bear the snub. Because he can’t be entirely sure that it’s not personal, that Felix isn’t still smirking up his sleeve.
    Years later, when I felt we’d covered enough ground, I asked Felix how he’d known about Cargo’s slimy dealings. I was sitting opposite him on a rickety chair in some hole-in-the-wall Kowloon restaurant, battling with the beginnings of a predictable nausea. Felix leaned over the mound of tepid food that crowded the table between us and said:
The purpose of being a selective listener is to hear more clearly. To listen to the right signal, to eliminate the background noise
.
    The streetlights cut out and flicker as I accelerate into the dark sweep of Lower Thames Street. Past the blackened stone of St Magnus the Martyr marooned in a cluster of office blocks, Christmas lights still bobbing gently on the leafless branches of the churchyard tree and I wonder what gruesome death Magnus suffered. If it was worse than Peter’s upside-down crucifixion, Catherine’s wheel or Sebastian slowly bleeding to death gazing wistfully up at the heavens, the angels’ chorus bellowing in his ears as he reached that zone where pain is nullified by sheer conviction, transfixed by a dazzling vision of God’s open arms and the promise of luxuriant expiry in His holy embrace.
    I round Tower Hill and head up Minories. Pass a lone cab and apassenger head bent over an open
FT
, weakly illuminated by the backseat bulb. It is 06:31, not yet the half-light and I am doing record time, may even be first in, apart of course from Rob, who cannot be beaten. I crawl past his 911 at the front of the underground Porsche pack, then hang a sudden wrench on the wheel just to hear the tyres squeal. Twenty-two minutes exactly to the lift, which notches down my five-week running average to 24.2. I press 15 and the talking doll voice cuts through the silence. Of course it’s entirely possible that Felix has already put his demand to the Grope. Perhaps the small matter of my consent to relocation has been overruled and I’ll be met by a one-way ticket to Hong Kong as soon as I hit my desk. Or maybe the Grope has been suddenly recalled to New York for an urgent strategy session on how to get Steiner’s through a war and still make a profit. Maybe all those marathons have finally caught up with him and he has keeled over with a massive coronary, is at this very moment being rushed to the Chelsea and Westminster, his wife sobbing into a monogrammed handkerchief,
I told him he should take it easy but he’s always been a very stubborn man
. His left hand scrabbles weakly at his face and the paramedic lifts the fogged-up oxygen mask from his mouth. His wife leans closer, straining to catch the last words of a dying man barely audible above the siren and the engine roar and the Grope jerks his head a full inch off the trolley, expiring with a blue-lipped rasp:
Send the bitch to Hong Kong!

2
present value
monday 14 january 1991
06:38
london
    THE LIFT DOORS GLIDE APART , I step out onto 15 and already I can feel the market pulse. On busy days you can hear the roar of the trading floor right