When Legal came into the Founder’s office after Labor Day, the Founder stood up to say ‘hi’, bent over the waste paper basket and hurled. Legal turned to leave the office.
‘It’s motion sickness’, the Founder said.
‘Did you go to another ayahuasca retreat’, Legal asked.
‘Could you close the blind, please?’
Legal reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of water. The Founder twisted the cap off, slugged some down and said, ‘You shouldn’t buy water in plastic. It is wasteful.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Sorry.’
The Founder’s face went from green to gray.
‘Remember when I used to date strippers’, the Founder asked. ‘After college but before I started the firm?’
‘The revolving door in our apartment? Where one woman would be arriving when another was leaving?’
‘I got motion sickness then, too.’
‘I think that was a more social disease.’
‘Clap is an imperative, not a noun.’
‘The suspense is killing me, man. What happened?’
The Founder looked like he had egg on a sheepish face. That surprised Legal. The Founder was shameless. He rarely looked embarrassed.
‘Another credit card got hacked’, the Founder said.
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake’, Legal said. ‘How long did you have this one?’
‘Three and a half days.’
‘What did the Comptroller do?’
‘I didn’t get any love.’
‘Did she, you know’, Legal said. He didn’t want to say ‘Hit you’, or mime a left hook. Nobody in the office understood why the Founder kept going back to the Comptroller after she beat him. Legal treated it as a matter between consenting adults. He hoped he would not read about EMTs finding the Founder limp in their bedroom and the Comptroller saying that she did not understand why he ran into the wall cheek-first.
‘She’s taking her meds now’, the Founder said.
‘And how long did you have the previous credit card before it was compromised?’
‘Two weeks.’
‘What was the scam this time?’
‘I tried to park in Yonkers.’
Legal suppressed a guffaw. ‘Dude’, he said. ‘That’s what you get for going to Yonkers.’
The Founder made a prissy face. ‘Yonkers is not a punchline’, he said. ‘They have revitalized the downtown and they have a well-respected paddling and rowing club.’
‘It’s next-to-the-biggest city in the country. Hah, hah.’
‘Knock it off.’
‘What happened?’
‘When I parked, I saw a sign that said that I could pay for parking using the machine or the mobile app’, the Founder said. ‘I couldn’t find the app on my phone, so I googled ‘Parkmobile.com’. Google took me to a website that requested my credit card info. The website assured me that it would not charge my card until I put in my parking time. Thirty seconds later, I got a fraud-alert text from the bank.’
‘Dude. The same thing happened in Boston last winter.’
‘But that was BOSTON!’
‘Whitey Bulger is dead, you know.’
‘God bless the man who killed him.’
‘And Stalin has Korea.’
‘God bless the woman who gave it to him.’
‘Reductio ad gonorrheam is not a valid rhetorical strategy.’
People began to arrive onto the trading floor and turn on their monitors. The clock at the midfield mark read New York 7:30, London 12:30, Mumbai 5:00, Newfoundland 8:47. Operations staff rubbed their eyes. The repo desk began the day’s misogynistic comments. Legal fidgeted.
‘But’, he said ‘What’s the real problem if your card gets hacked? I mean, it’s just a piece of plastic and some numbers. The bank zeroes out the fraudulent transactions.’
‘Each time I get a new card, I memorize the number. It’s a pain in the ass to do that every two weeks.’
‘Three days, in this case.’
‘Fuck you.’
An intern who worked for the Guelphs in charge of Midwest and Southern acquisitions brought in a large sack of Egg McMuffins and set it down near the desk-head’s monitor. When the Guelphs congregated around the sack, one of the Ghibellines who worked on the Northeast desk walked over and tried to join the scrum. A bunch of Guelphs shoved him and told him that his mother smelled of elderberries. The Ghibelline shoved back and said that the Guelphs’ fathers were hamsters. The Founder opened his office door and shouted to the guys, ‘Hey! Knock it off! We’re all on the same fucking team.’
The Guelphs and the Ghibellines stopped their shoving and looked toward the Founder. The Founder surveyed the troops and shouted, ‘When Joe Public needs clean, safe and affordable housing, who does he call?’
‘Dirt-LEASE’, the trading floor responded.
The Guelphs and the Ghibellines returned to their desks.
The Founder closed the door and turned back to Legal. ‘To memorize the numbers’, he continued, ‘I used to use the Hérigone system, where vowels are assigned an ‘s’ or a ‘z’ and digits from one thru nine are assigned a natural class of phonemes. ‘1’ is ‘t’ or ‘d’, ‘2’ is ‘n’, 3’ is ‘m’, ‘4’ is ‘r’, ‘5’ is ‘l’, ‘6’ is ‘sh’, ‘sh’ or ‘dzh’, ‘7’ is ‘k’ or ‘g’, ‘8’ is ‘k’ or ‘v’, and ‘9’ is ‘p’ or ‘b’. So, a sequence of, say, ‘7990 would be, say, ‘cab buzz’, or any other word or set of words in which the phonemes correspond to the applicable digits. Words that have mnemonic weight – profanity, violence, associations with early memories – are easiest to recall when you need them.’
Legal looked at the Founder and blinked. ‘You should go back to dating strippers’, he said. ‘I liked Brandi. Her daughter was a cute little girl. I understand she was in a gifted and talented program at her school.’
‘But I have found that, in the case of credit card numbers, the Hérigone system is cumbersome’, the Founder said. ‘A credit card number is sixteen digits. The first eight never change.’
‘Really’, Legal said.
‘Far as I can tell’, the Founder said.
‘So, what do you do?’
‘I break the remaining eight digits into four pairs. Each pair signifies a year in the twentieth century. It is easy to assign an image with mnemonic weight to any of those years. For example, ‘3381’ would be Hitler’s rise to power and the year I was kicked out of high school. Even you could do ‘4568’.’
Legal ignored the dig. ‘Do you use the credit card in the business’, he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You want the points.’
‘Correct. It is also useful to have everything in one bill. That allows me to allocate expenses at the end of the month.’
‘Do you give merchants who you work with in the business your credit card number to keep on file?
‘Yes.’
‘So, when a card is hacked, you need to contact each merchant and update your information?’
‘Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.’
‘Oh, man.’
CNBC switched from an advertisement for ED medicine to a scene of the Manufactured Housing trading pit in Elkhart. A stout older guy in jeans and suspenders flanked by a bunch of slick-looking business school graduates stood in front of the bell that overlooked the pit. Traders – ex football players, an ugly guy with male pattern baldness and a ponytail, an occasional woman – milled around the pit. One of the business school graduates helped the old guy lift a sledgehammer. At precisely 8:00 local time (11:13 Newfoundland time), the old guy brought the hammer down on the bell and the pits went wild. The phones on the desks outside the Founder’s office began to ring.
‘What were you buying when this card went pear-shape?’, Legal asked.
‘Flooring for Twenty-Seven Delta.’
‘You mean, Jim Holt’s old place in the park in central New York?’
‘Yes.’
‘The guy who walked around naked at home and shat wherever he stood?’
‘The very one.’
‘What’s going on with that home?’
‘Well, the good news is that the title got straightened out quickly. The home was bought for his mother by his grandmother. He moved in with his mother. His mother died. He died. His grandmother is still alive, but nobody in the family talks with her. A brother and a sister live in the park, but neither speak with him.’
‘Who found him?’
‘Another sister.’
‘So, who owned the home?’
‘Nobody knew. Jim didn’t have any kids. Neither the brother nor the sister wanted the home. I didn’t know if the grandmother had put it in the mother’s name and, if so, whether she had given it to Jim. I couldn’t track down the grandmother.’
‘What happened?’
‘The grandmother had bought the home from a local dealer. We have a good relationship with that dealer. He asked the manufacturer for a substitute MCO. He signed that over to us and we got a title.’
‘The Gordion knot was cut.’
‘There were other knots.’
A phone on the Founder’s desk rang. He said, ‘Thirty contracts, two and a half to the sell side’, and turned back to Legal. ‘The problem is’, he continued, ‘the stench in that place was overpowering. While Jim was alive, I couldn’t even stand in the doorway.’
‘Wow.’
‘Shepler’s cousin took on the rehab job at first. He removed the big stuff and started to clean the place. He ripped out the carpets, took out the sub-floor, put down a vapor barrier and new plywood. He was about to start painting when he injured himself on another job.’
‘Why was he working on another job?’
‘Because he was ducking my calls and missing deadlines.’
‘So, you got another guy to finish it?’
‘Yeah, but the new guy can’t get rid of the smell. He coated the place with Stain Killer, painted the walls and cleaned out the crawl-space, but it still stinks. Not as bad as before, but too much for someone to live in.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Hit it with an ozone machine and see if that works. If not, we have to start all over again. Rip out the new sheetrock, rip out the new sub-floor that Shepler’s cousin put in, find whatever it is that is still rotting underneath and rip that out. Once that’s done, start over. Paint above the main entrance Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate and put it on the market.’
‘Thinking about that cost makes me hyperventilate.’
Outside the Founder’s office, a Guelph from Operations and a Ghibelline from Accounting had squared off and were pushing each other by the shoulders, the way guys do when they want the other to start a fight. A bunch of guys had formed a circle around them, watching. The Founder stood up and walked to the door. ‘Hey!’ he shouted. The guys stopped what they were doing and looked up.
‘Knock it off’, the Founder shouted.
The guys looked at the ground.
‘You see that door’, the Founder asked the trading floor. He pointed toward the elevator. There was no door onto the trading floor.
‘When you walk in that door, you leave your differences outside’, the Founder continued.
One of the guys in the circle, a tallish guy who had played lacrosse at Skidmore, fidgeted. The Founder glared at him. The lacrosse player stopped fidgeting.
‘I don’t care what color you are on the outside. When you sweat, what do you sweat’, the Founder shouted.
‘Dirt’, the trading floor responded.
‘When you bleed, what color do you bleed?’
‘Burnt ochre.’
‘When Joe Public wants clean, safe and affordable housing, who does he call?’
‘Dirt-LEASE!’
‘Good.’ The Founder flicked the air with the back of his knuckles. ‘Now, go make us some money.’ The traders dispersed and settled down at their monitors.
When the Founder closed the door, Legal noticed that he did not look sick anymore. The Founder sat down, cracked his knuckles above his head, put his hands behind his neck, leaned back and put his feet on the desk.
‘I don’t think I can make my money back if I sell that home and rent the lot’, he said. ‘By the time we get the stink out, I will have spent sixty grand on it. To break even, I will need to start a new business that will earn revenue in addition to lot rent.’
Legal looked outside the office onto the trading floor. The political tectonics were dormant. A south Asian quant was telling a story that seemed to creep out a trader named Borenstein. A largish trader who had majored in sociology at Princeton was bloviating. One of the lacrosse players was paying a bet. It looked like a normal Tuesday.
‘I am looking for a business that can complement the manufactured housing business in a synergistic way’, the Founder continued.
‘How about a clap clinic’, Legal said.
The Founder’s eyes lit up. ‘Hey, man’, he said. ‘That’s a brilliant idea. That’s why I pay you the big bucks.’
‘You could install a revolving door.’
‘Have Brandi research the start-up cost. She is as good an analyst as she was a stripper.’
‘Should we take credit cards?’
‘Definitely.’