The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe Page A

had met Bernard Levy only once, when he made the original presentation. They had been conferring on the telephone for months…but electric doughnut? Cynicism was such a cowardly form of superiority. That was Rawlie’s great weakness. Rawlie cashed his checks. He wasn’t too cynical to do that. If he wanted to belly up because he couldn’t deal with his wife, that was his sad problem.
    As Sherman dialed and waited for Bernard Levy to come on the line, the rousing sound of the greed storm closed in about him once again. From the desk right in front of his, a tall bug-eyed fellow (Yale ’77): “Thirty-one bid January eighty-eights—”
    From a desk somewhere behind him: “I’m short seventy million ten-year!”
    From he knew not where: “They got their fucking buying shoes on!”
    “I’m in the box!”
    “—long 125—”
    “—a million four-years from Midland—”
    “Who’s fucking around with the W-Is?”
    “I tell you, I’m in the box!”
    “—bid 80½—”
    “—buy ’em at 6-plus—”
    “—pick up 2½ basis points—”
    “Forget it! It’s nut-cutting time!”
     
    At ten o’clock, Sherman, Rawlie, and five others convened in the conference room of Eugene Lopwitz’s suite of offices to decide on Pierce & Pierce’s strategy for the main event of the day in the bond markets, which was a U.S. Treasury auction of 10 billion bonds maturing in twenty years. It was a measure of the importance of the bond business to Pierce & Pierce that Lopwitz’s offices opened right out into the bond trading room.
    The conference room had no conference table. It looked like the lounge in the English hotel for the Yanks where they serve tea. It was full of small antique tables and cabinets. They were so old, brittle, and highly polished, you got the feeling that if you flicked one of them hard with your middle finger, it would shatter. At the same time, a wall of plate glass shoved a view of the Hudson River and the rotting piers of New Jersey into your face.
    Sherman sat in a George II armchair. Rawlie sat next to him, in an old chair with a back shaped like a shield. In other antique or antiqued chairs, with Sheraton and Chippendale side tables beside them, were the head government trader, George Connor, who was two years younger than Sherman; his deputy, Vic Scaasi, who was only twenty-eight; the chief market analyst, Paul Feiffer; and Arnold Parch, the executive vice president, who was Lopwitz’s first lieutenant.
    Everyone in the room sat in a classic chair and stared at a small brown plastic speaker on top of a cabinet. The cabinet was a 220-year-old Adam bowfront, from the period when the brothers Adam liked to paint pictures and ornate borders on wooden furniture. On the center panel was an oval-shaped painting of a Greek maiden sitting in a dell or grotto in which lacy leaves receded fuzzily in deepening shades of green into a dusky teal sky. The thing had cost an astonishing amount of money. The plastic speaker was the size of a bedside clock radio. Everyone stared at it, waiting for the voice of Gene Lopwitz. Lopwitz was in London, where it was now 4:00 P.M. He would preside over this meeting by telephone.
    An indistinct noise came out of the speaker. It might have been a voice and it might have been an airplane. Arnold Parch rose from his armchair and approached the Adam cabinet and looked at the plastic speaker and said, “Gene, can you hear me all right?”
    He looked imploringly at the plastic speaker, without taking his eyes off it, as if in fact it were Gene Lopwitz, transformed, the way princes are transformed into frogs in fairy tales. For a moment the plastic frog said nothing. Then it spoke.
    “Yeah, I can hear you, Arnie. There was a lotta cheering going on.” Lopwitz’s voice sounded as if it were coming from out of a storm drain, but you could hear it.
    “Where are you, Gene?” asked Parch.
    “I’m at a cricket match.” Then less clearly: “What’s the name a this place