Free Moral Hazard by Kate Jennings Page A

down here, as did the head of Emerging Markets, which earned them points with the rest of us. Rumor had it that Horace had once eaten in the cafeteria and pronounced the food excellent. It was also rumored that he’d noticed someone picking through the lettuce at the salad bar for the best bits and remarked that such behavior was a sign that Niedecker was not what it used to be.
    “Friend of yours?” asked Richard, an owlish fellow who could be counted on to be amusing about the antics of Chuck, Bart, and Hanny. A Niedecker lifer, he had married his high-school sweetheart and still lived in the same Long Island town where he grew up.
    “Not exactly. We meet outside on ciggie breaks. He talks, I listen. He’s got interesting views.” I tracked Mike as he went through the routine of pouncing on a table before anyone else claimed it. He was unkempt, stooped.
    “Have you heard what he said at the last executive meeting?”
    “What?”
    “Traders are maggots on the meat of capitalism.”
    I stopped hacking at the gray beef on my plate and poked instead at a clump of watery string beans. “Golly. Why’d he say that?”
    “He was arguing against some proprietary trading strategy and getting nowhere. Lost it, I guess.” Proprietary trading, the name given to the in-house hedge fund activities of Wall Street banks, is a hot potato because, as with regular hedge funds, big money could be made—or thrown to the winds. Shareholders prefer steady fee-based earnings.
    “What was the reaction?”
    “Oh, I think they’re used to it. These guys know each other pretty well. He’s an odd duck, though. Good at his job, so they put up with his idiosyncrasies. Like Hanny.”
    Several weeks later, Chuck invited me to dine upstairs. As it happened, Mike again walked by, this time with the head of Private Banking, a tubby, disdainful Latin American. Jack Spratt and his wife. Mike nodded in Chuck’s direction and then in mine.
    “You know him?” asked Chuck. Casual. Ostensibly paying more attention to shaking out his napkin than his question.
    I shrugged. “I interviewed him for a speech.”
    “Hmmm,” he responded, imparting layers of corporate meaning with that one sound. “Bright guy. A quant’s quant.” He took a moment to enjoy his witticism. Chuck and Mike weren’t buddies—Chuck was a Republican Party operative until he followed the money to Niedecker—but they had recently shared a fiftieth-birthday celebration on the executive floor; it had been my job to come up with jokes for the toasts.
    “I hear he’s been getting up noses.”
    Chuck grinned. “Yes. He has.” Pause. “You’ve heard about that?”
    “Just the bare outlines.” As if anything of interest didn’t make its way down through the ranks fleshed out,
replete
, with detail. Trickle-down gossip was much more efficient than trickle-down economics.
    “Oh, he gets carried away sometimes. Probably going through a midlife crisis,” said Chuck. Large smile, eyes periscoping the room. Chuck should know. He was divorcing his wife not for someone younger, blonder, and more adoring, as was usually the case, but for a sharp-tongued woman who’d had at least one facelift. Certain sections of the cafeteria had been humming like a high-tension wire with this news for months.
    “How’re things working out with Horace?”
Loaded
question.
    “Fine.”
    “Cath, I know you are astute. But be careful. Complex character. Horace can’t always, ah, be taken at his word.”
Sheesh.
This was awkward. Like many people of charm, Horace was given to making promises. Anything to have you feel warmly about him at that moment. Promises that were not so much broken as allowed to slip from his mind as if they had never been made in the first place. But Chuck was that way inclined himself; his promises exited his mind backward, like tottering geishas.
    “Uh-huh.”
    Chuck knew next to nothing about me, much less my capacity for astuteness, although he had been told I was