The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe Page B

again?” He was evidently with some other people. “Tottenham Park, Arnie. I’m on a kind of a terrace.”
    “Who’s playing?” Parch smiled, as if to show the plastic frog that this wasn’t a serious question.
    “Don’t get technical on me, Arnie. A lot of very nice young gentlemen in cable-knit sweaters and white flannel pants, is the best I can tell you.”
    Appreciative laughter broke out in the room, and Sherman felt his own lips bending into the somehow obligatory smile. He glanced about the room. Everyone was smiling and chuckling at the brown plastic speaker except for Rawlie, who had his eyes rolled up in the Oh Brother mode.
    Then Rawlie leaned over toward Sherman and said, in a noisy whisper: “Look at all these idiots grinning. They think the plastic box has eyes.”
    This didn’t strike Sherman as very funny, since he himself had been grinning. He was also afraid that Lopwitz’s loyal aide, Parch, would think he was Rawlie’s confederate in making sport of the maximum leader.
    “Well, everybody’s here, Gene,” Parch said to the box, “and so I’m gonna get George to fill you in on where we stand on the auction as of now.”
    Parch looked at George Connor and nodded and walked back to his chair, and Connor got up from his and walked over to the Adam cabinet and stared at the brown plastic box and said: “Gene? This is George.”
    “Yeah, hi, George,” said the frog. “Go ahead.”
    “Here’s the thing, Gene,” said Connor, standing in front of the Adam commode, unable to take his eyes off the plastic box, “it feels pretty good. The old twenties are trading at 8 percent. The traders are telling us they’ll come in on the new ones at 8.05, but we think they’re playing games with us. We think we’re gonna get action right down to 8. So here’s what I figure. We’ll scale in at 8.01, 8.02, 8.03, with the balance at 8.04. I’m ready to go 60 percent of the issue.”
    Which, translated, meant: he was proposing to buy $6 billion of the $10 billion in bonds offered in the auction, with the expectation of a profit of two thirty-seconds of a dollar—6¼¢—on every one hundred dollars put up. This was known as “two ticks.”
    Sherman couldn’t resist another look at Rawlie. He had a small, unpleasant smile on his face, and his gaze seemed to pass several degrees to the right of the Adam commode, toward the Hoboken docks. Rawlie’s presence was like a glass of ice water in the face. Sherman resented him all over again. He knew what was on his mind. Here was this outrageous arriviste, Lopwitz—Sherman knew Rawlie thought of him that way—trying to play the nob on the terrace of some British cricket club and at the same time conduct a meeting in New York to decide whether Pierce & Pierce was going to stake two billion, four billion, or six billion on a single government bond issue three hours from now. No doubt Lopwitz had his own audience on hand at the cricket club to watch this performance, as his great words bounced off a communications satellite somewhere up in the empyrean and hit Wall Street. Well, it wasn’t hard to find something laughable in it, but Lopwitz was, in truth, a Master of the Universe. Lopwitz was about forty-five years old. Sherman wanted nothing less seven years down the line, when he was forty-five. To be astride the Atlantic…with billions at stake! Rawlie could snigger…and sink into his kneecaps…but to think what Lopwitz now had in his grasp, to think what he made each year, just from Pierce & Pierce, which was at least $25 million, to think of the kind of life he led—and what Sherman thought of first was Lopwitz’s young wife, Snow White. That was what Rawlie called her. Hair as dark as ebony, lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow…She was Lopwitz’s fourth wife, French, a countess, apparently, no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, with an accent like Catherine Deneuve doing a bath-oil commercial. She was something…Sherman had met her at