The Journeyman, page 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
© 2022 Sumless Treasuries Publishing
© 2022 Peter Babakitis
The Journeyman
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Babakitis, Peter
The Journeyman/Peter Babakitis. -1st trade pbk.ed.
Published by: Sumless Treasuries Publishing
ISBN-13: 979-8-9857079-0-8
The Journeyman
PETER BABAKITIS
Chapter 1
I was the numbers guy, until I wasn’t. When you’re halfway to the top in a financial organization, you’re the most vulnerable. Unlike the entry-level grunts, you’re given just enough rope to hang yourself, but not enough to get any kind of a foothold that isn’t transitory. So there are always those who use that as an opportunity to sabotage the competition- in this case the competition was me.
I had no illusions about camaraderie among this club of the financially predatory, but when the whole operation loses it’s moorings and starts snapping up some seemingly magical opportunities, inevitably people will get pissed off, jealous, self-righteous, or worse, and a plausible call from some rando can get you on the radar from the boys at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and before you know it, the question all around is if you can be turned.
From the first year that I was there, I was put under the management of Harvey Dennison, the senior partner in the firm which was technically a hedge fund, but only technically. He was ambitious, amoral, and a quintessential opportunist.
When it came to personal matters, he was fundamentally a man who had no self-awareness, oblivious to the fact that everyone from Agnes, his secretary, to the big boss Spencer thought of him as a cloying sycophant, and an ambitious prig. It didn’t bother me too much, as long as I kept my nose in the actuarial, I was able to skirt the confrontations that my colleagues liked to engage in.
Entirely self-absorbed in his career trajectory, Dennison calculated how much value you could bring to him in the short term, and adjust his relationship with you accordingly. He was like this with everyone; every week, he offered to bring back a granola bar to his assistant, paid $1.67 for it, and collected $2 from her every time.
Reptilian in his emotional logic, you could imagine him with a spreadsheet tabulating the value any of his relationships towards his advancement, presumably with rankings and little plusses and minuses in various columns. Which is how I imagine Dennison came up with the assignment that was intended to eliminate me from the field; an impossible ask, that would have saddled me with the responsibility for some very shady dealings. The details were somewhat complicated to show here, but the long and short of it is, If it worked, they would reap some tidy profits, if it didn’t, the rap would be squarely mine, and they could simply throw me under the bus.
So it was checkmate in their eyes, heads they win, tails I lose. I didn’t hold any grudges about it; I didn’t feel as though they’d singled me out, this was just what was expected in that world, and of course there wasn’t enough collective imagination in that whole operation to inspire much variation.
I had watched as they ran this play on numerous colleagues. Elliott from Treasuries got the rap for the Ponzi that was the San Diego toxic clean-up fund, Martin in underwriting took the hit for inflating the commercial real estate holdings in the 2008 debacle.
Jon Ewald got the sub-prime double-cross when they stuck him with their under-reporting of risk assessments on credit default swaps. They hunted on, sharklike, and they saw no reason to think that the feeding would ever come to an end; at least not for them.
They thought that they had it in the bag. Except they didn’t expect one thing- that I might be so jaded, so self-serving that I might blow the whistle on the whole thing. Of course that would mean blowing away my future with them and bracing myself for some blindingly expensive law suits, but the feds were onto them already.
They had been surveilling the board for years as I found out. Unbeknownst to them was that a major sting was brewing in the SEC, and by the time I went to them, they knew exactly what I was there to tell them- Good thing I did, or I might have been the next under the bus. I saw which way the wind was blowing and held up my whistle; I simply stepped in front of the parade with the flag, and down goes Dennison.
i
You may think that reporting your boss to the SEC and initiating an FBI inquiry would be a terrifying step across the line, but not this time. It was easy; I just went into the meeting with him that was supposed to be my review, through that grand mahogany door, and took my seat at that long, one-of-a-kind, hundred and seventy thousand dollar conference table, that stretched across the impressively huge boardroom, the imposing architecture of which reminded me of Italian fascism of the nineteen-thirties. I was ready. Dennison really had no clue.
As was his usual strategy, he got me alone in the boardroom, and made me wait, sitting next to him, as he took the head of the empty table, while he answered a few texts while I waited. When he was done, he turned and glared at me, as if to stare me down per some advice in an aggressive management psychology book, in an attempt to weaken my defenses. Authority for him was all about performative gestures and dramatic puffery, so he slipped into his usual routine. In other words, he was clueless as to what was about to happen.
“This deal was supposed to be our flagship,” he hissed. “We lined up the Congress, our boys in the SEC, it cost us a lot. And you stopped it because it was ‘Illegal?’” He struggled as if he’d never heard the concept before.
“No,” I confessed, “I stopped it because I wasn’t enjoying it.” Not really a lie, but I thought I’d dangle it a bit for him to puzzle over for a moment. He of course had no idea that I had been informing on him and the crew to the feds for almost three months now.
They had a tip from a broker in Cleveland who had my name pegged to a transaction from the Ohio Water Company; fortunately I was just the clerk on that one; my nose was technically clean. But not so clean that I could get in the way of the SEC if they really wanted to put the screws on Dennison, and they really did.
There wasn’t enough time for me to have planned for a smooth exit, so I was faced with the imminent possibility of all of my future plans evaporating into a grim penury, and my too-steep mortgage on my newly constructed Bay Area bi-level propelled me into thinking and re-thinking my career. Hang time.
“That attitude tends to scare people. Sorry Lawrence. You need to find a new career.”
I had already cleared most of the stuff out of my desk, and turned over the evidence to the feds, so, yes, I knew my career with the firm was over; and I even had worked out options for leaving the country for a while. Once the street gets wind of you as someone who’s willing to scuttle the ship because of mere corruption, you’re radioactive.
“There are a lot of customers out there for my skills who are just as corrupt as you guys,” I reminded him. He seemed surprised to hear the word, as if it was in a foreign language, and it’s not one that I was even accustomed to using, since it requires the assumption of it’s opposite. “Cor...rup..tion?” What was corruption really, without the assumption of some benign, gentlemanly standard that everyone normally complies with?
Poor Dennison. The rug, so comfortably beneath his Bostonian brogues about to be so rudely pulled out from under him. He had no idea the white trucks were lining up in the alley, back by the service elevators, the exits on Sutter and Mason were being sealed, the intercoms disabled, and O’Connor from the FBI was right outside the boardroom door with the forensic agents, ready to haul the whole operation downtown.
Still, obliviously, he lectured me about how things work in this business, as if rehearsing a Toastmasters presentation, and I can’t say he was wrong.
“Your clientele is about to dry up rather suddenly after this, Lawrence.”
“I appreciate your career advice,” I said, “but I’ll leave that judgement to the free market.”
He used that phrase “Free market” so often, I knew that he would get the irony. But of course, humorless lizard that he was, he was not amused. He screwed up his face in a grimace of disbelief and condescension.
“Good luck with that, Lawrence,” he crooned. “When you get too cynical, betrayal becomes…“
The building alarm suddenly sounded, cutting him off. There were resonant percussive thuds echoing out in the hallway, and I knew that the floor was being sealed. The agents suddenly appeared in the hallway, with a lot of jingling of keys and the screech of walkie-talkies, and FBI Agent O’Connor burst through the sleek mahogany door of Dennison’s Architectural Digest-featured boardroom.
I finished Dennison’s thought:“…Second nature.”
O’Connor strode over to the long conference table like a Texas sheriff. He clearly had been through hundreds of these securities
The law had found it’s case. The dominos began to topple. Those conditions that everyone had always speculated about now reached the critical point at which the reaction takes place.
With the alarm blaring, and the thud of doors shutting, the feds burst into the office, and escorted me out; over my shoulder I could see them arresting Dennison, handcuffs clicking tight under the blue and gold Yale cufflinks that he liked to wear. As I descended the elevator the 37 floors to the lobby, the Muzak chirped up in an bouncy Vegas lounge-style instrumental cover of Britney Spears “Oops, I Did It Again...”
I walked across the lobby and glanced away from all the faces that I knew would eventually be affected by this betrayal of mine, and I did imagine their dismay and eventual anger. I though about how each face might exact their retribution if they caught on.
i
As the A-team were accommodated in the police vans with shiny new bracelets, they could see me among the officers with my wrists free, and I ducked around the corner and down the alley. As I wandered down the blocks to my car, I passed the Korean electronics store, and the news was playing on one of those big LCD screens. They were showing a live feed of the outside of the building where the executives at the firm were being packed into the vans, and carried off, and Dennison sliding in awkwardly with his hands cuffed together. I walked on into the night through the drizzle, with an unfamiliar sense of satisfaction.
It should have been the end of it, but it was the beginning of something else again. Their grift, I was to learn, was small potatoes compared to what I was to discover when I entered the market as a freelance data thief; Dennison may be sorry for his hiatus from raking in lucre from the unsuspecting retirement fund, but what I was to find among the international clientele I was to fall in with was on another order entirely.
They were guilty, but I was out. Even though I was treated decently by the feds, I was still in an extended limbo, and I expected some level of bad blood from Dennison’s little club. I certainly didn’t care to have any more contact with that circle, so I just assumed I’d just go out and join one of the reputable firms, and it would have been a good story for a luncheon or Christmas party, how I foiled some crooked hedge fund managers.
But the long and short of it was that it made me an untouchable. I still hadn’t fully realized how out in the cold I was, like Alec Leamas in LeCarre’s book. No honor among these thieves.
So, slow learner that I am, I eventually learned my lesson. A good conscience was not a way to become popular among this crowd, which was vividly illustrated by the brick that had been thrown through the windshield of my car.
Chapter 2
I went out to do some grocery shopping, and when I returned to where I parked it, The windshield was a craggy hole and there the brick was on the seat, covered in shatterproof glass. So that was one repair I had to schedule. The dude at the shop was sympathetic; “Aw, man that sucks, why anyone wanna do this shit to your car, man? Not cool, man, prolly just some young troublemakers. I take care of it for you, man.”
I had a feeling it wasn’t just some young troublemakers, and although the shop had cleared out most of the pieces, one piece did embed itself in the sole of my shoe, and needed to be picked out; such was the stickiness of this grudge.
There were the court dates, the lawyers, statements that I had to sign, documents to identify, and the feds made sure that my betrayal was vivid and consequential, and their net was cast wide, so I wound up fingering more than just Dennison- I had no idea how many of these colleagues were enfranchised in the whole operation-practically everyone I worked with, and many more who I had never heard of, so, needless to say, I made a whole lot of enemies in one fell swoop.
The whole lot of them has some part in it, everyone from low level statisticians to upper management had a finger in that pie, and that was the secret to their success and how they managed to run that scam for so long. They might still have been operating like that under the radar for years if no one spoke up.
I suppose that’s how all such operations keep afloat; a grift manages to take hold in an environment of little scrutiny, and then others come along for the free ride, and soon you have a regular gravy train of quiet complicity.
It truly was a house of cards; one little gust and the whole thing went fifty-two pick-up. Fund managers and executive assistants alike felt the full weight of what it takes to mount a defense for the indefensible. To the untrained eye, it looked like business as usual, but the inner truth of it was ruin.
It’s a brotherhood like any crime operation, and disloyalty is emphatically discouraged. It became clear that anything I did would best be kept close to the vest. I scoured my online presences and emails, closed accounts and reopened others, trying not to skip a beat that would leave myself vulnerable.
After a while it seemed like those I ratted out were either too busy trying to keep out of jail, or on to more fruitful enterprises, so I charged on to try to manifest the next chapter in this crippled career of mine.
I laid low for a few months after that. Needless to say, being associated with the famous Sutter Street Raid, so luridly looped on Bloomberg and even the local KRON news, put me in a uniquely unhirable position; honest companies didn’t want to besmirch their reputations, crooked ones saw me as a rat.
I was in between worlds, and having a lot of time on my hands, the time filled up looking up from my business and noticing the world around me, and I wound up in this relationship with Rachel.
In recent years I was beginning to be of the view that relationships were more like a three-legged race at a carnival; both parties adjusting their rhythms to match, and consequently being worse at it than either would be on their own. In my case at the moment, I was on the sidelines of all such races, and in that state of idleness, I began to leave myself open to the kind of serendipity that can lead you to something better than you were looking for. And Rachel was definitely that.
I met her one day by chance while running errands in San Francisco’s financial district. The construction on my house was nearing the interior stage, and being interested in architectural options, I shopped for some books at Wm. Stout’s architectural bookstore on Montgomery street. I bought a few selections and slipped them into my backpack, and wandered past the galleries on Sutter towards the Civic Center.
i
It had rained that morning, but now the sun was peeking through the clouds. There was a crowd gathered in the Civic Center, and I heard the voice of a woman talking finance. She was speaking at a progressive rally for a group that was organizing to promote public banking.
In truth, I was only walking by; loitering, actually, around the City Hall Complex, where a rotating schedule of activists come to make their public appeals, and Rachel was particularly intense in her passion for changing the economic system. I had no such hope at all, having been too close to the epicenter for too long, but her enthusiasm and sincerity made her very attractive to me, whether I though it was hopeless or not.
It sounded like an interesting idea on the face of it; the banking functions of a community being assumed by the community itself, instead of relying on these enterprises we have now in which the very rich control the flow of money in society and skim a fat slice for themselves in the process, with which they can profit exponentially with every subsequent investment.
That would certainly eliminate the kind of shenanigans Dennison and his crew were able to make fountains of cash on. I listened, and the ideas were made sweeter by the impassioned feminine lilt with which she pronounced them.
My interest, however, as you may guess, was actually more prosaic. Her eyes flashed as she made her points, and her body leaned with each gesture. When it came down to it, she was drop-dead gorgeous, a fantastic body tightly packaged into the requisite black tights and college hoodie, and her cool blue eyes were the kind that always seem to be focused on the horizon, on the elusive ideal that remind one of the better angels of our nature, if such things exist.
