Flash Crash Page 4

But even though David had eventually fulfilled his mother’s dream with his job at Montgomery Noyes, he didn’t actually want to live in the city. Or maybe he secretly did. Either way, Marina definitely did not. She cracked the whip and always had, practically since the day they’d met. Marina had saved his life multiple times throughout the years, and he was quite sure that she wasn’t done. David was a dreamer. He didn’t spend his time thinking about what was. He pondered what could be. He would throw himself into ideas that were doomed from the start and lose weeks chasing them like Don Quixote. Marina was the opposite. She was pragmatic. She was a doer. She often knew, from the very beginning, what the right thing to do was and the wrong. And in life, instinct sometimes worked out better than high-mindedness. The first time they’d met each other was during a school trip. She had drawn a picture of a sheep and a lion and had put her name over the lion and his over the sheep. He had realized later that he’d loved her ever since.

  All these years later, it wasn’t lost on David that Marina was the reason why he was still in Bensonhurst this morning. She felt strongly that Bensonhurst was where Mikey should grow up. That’s where they’d both been raised, and they’d turned out great. They’d found each other. They could afford a large four-bedroom townhouse. And instead of relying on public education, they were able to send Mikey to the Catholic school at the top of the hill that each had idolized from afar when they were kids.

  ■

  Although David’s skills were less relevant in Bensonhurst than in the big city, he could still be put to work on the weekends. For example, he could crack through multiple layers of user authentication in pursuit of a specific cartoon for his son. Piracy is bad, but a son’s joy is better.

  David worked the computer while he ruffled Mikey’s hair. He loaded a custom keygen algorithm he’d written. He ran it. The computer began to parse through hundreds of thousands of username and password options.

  “Is there chocolate in them?” Mikey asked about the pancakes.

  “Huh? No. Have a seat, little man.” Distracted, David turned back to his computer. He’d finally cracked it. He quickly loaded an episode of Samurai Cat. The show began to play on the laptop, which he spun around for Mikey to watch.

  “Tada,” David said.

  “That is so, so awesome,” Mikey responded. “Thanks, Daddy.”

  David threw a plate down on the table. A napkin. Fork. He poured a small glass of orange juice and then finally paused to fully observe his son’s chosen outfit for the morning. “Hey. You probably don’t need to wear your towel until you’re wet,” he said.

  “I was just pretending to be strong,” Mikey pointed to the computer screen. “Like him.”

  David realized that Mikey was dressed exactly like the cartoon superhero Samurai Cat, using his towel as if it were the Cat’s black ninja kimono. David unwrapped the towel from Mikey. He folded it up.

  “Nobody’s mean to you at the pool, right?” David asked.

  “Not really, Daddy.”

  “Good. Just remember. When you’re a guy like us, who can’t use his fists”—David tapped his head—“use your noggin instead.”

  Then the pancakes started burning. David raced back to the frying pan, lifting up the completely charred pancakes.

  “I don’t want a burnt pancake. And I want chocolate in it too!” Mikey exclaimed in the logically illogical manner that only an eight-year-old can muster.

  “That’s not good for you,” David said.

  “Mommy lets me have it,” Mikey replied.

  “Well, Mommy’s not awake. It’s her morning off—from you. And if anyone deserves it, she does,” David said as he placed the pancakes in front of Mikey, who began to go to town. He snarfed down food amid laughs. David allowed himself just a brief respite to watch his kid enjoy life. The result of two decades of Herculean effort was to watch one’s son as he spilled orange juice and pieces of pancake all over his torso and the kitchen table.

  “Seems like Daddy is going to be cleaning up the kitchen for the whole rest of the morning,” a woman’s voice cast over the two of them. David turned around to see that Marina Belov was no longer sleeping. A pragmatic brunette who didn’t wear makeup, she was prettier without it. Marina held up a clean shirt for Mikey. “And you better get ready, because Cat is going to be here any moment,” she said.

  David grabbed the shirt from Marina, who was wiping Mikey’s face with a towel. They tag teamed to clean up Mikey, a daily occurrence and one that would pass all too soon.

  “Mikey? One more thing—your medicine,” David reminded him.

  “Fine. Only a little pinch?” Mikey said.

  “For only the bravest little man.”

  David pulled a small insulin syringe from the fridge. He lifted up Mikey’s shirt, lightly touching the injector to Mikey’s skin, an inch above the beltline. David had become quite experienced with the device by now, and so had Mikey, because it was required for survival. David and Marina should have noticed when he was three years old and started to fall into longer and longer naps. But they didn’t. It took until Mikey had his first seizure, and they rushed him to the hospital, for him to be diagnosed as a child diabetic by an increasingly grim series of specialists. The Belov household quickly learned to worship the gun—the insulin gun.

  As David injected three units of insulin hormone into Mikey’s abdomen, he heard a loud honking noise emanating from outside. David and Marina turned and peered through the window to see a van out front being driven by Cat Zhadanov, with two more kids in the backseat. Cat was a wild woman with a heart of gold and the wife of David’s friend Vlad. The kids were close, and so were the women, originally because of the men. Although David and Vlad didn’t see each other as much as they used to, they would always be bound by the place where they grew up together. With a kiss on the forehead from Marina, Mikey raced down the steps towards Cat’s van.

  “Hey, Mikey?” David asked.

  Mikey turned back to his dad.

  “Got Froggie with you?”

  Mikey smiled and held up a small bright-green plastic frog on a keychain strapped to his backpack—the Froggie Finder. He pressed the Froggie’s nose and it flashed yellow-green.

  “Love you, little man,” Marina said.

  David and Marina stood together and watched the car drive off.

  “I wish I could go with him,” David said.

  “Let him live a little,” Marina replied.

  Marina rested her head on David’s shoulder for a moment, until their peace was interrupted by the chirping of two cell phones. Marina and David simultaneously pulled phones out of their respective pockets. They’d each received the same notification message from the Froggie Finder iPhone app: “User1: Location is the intersection of 14th. Ave. and . . .” A green dot tracked Mikey’s exact location. In addition to being a cute little toy, the Froggie was also a GPS tracking device for a child.

  “This is so ridiculous,” Marina said.

  “Look. I just want to be able to know where he is . . .” David replied before trailing off.

  “I know where he is. He’s at the pool,” she said.

  “Humor me.”

  “That’s what I do. Because I know it comes from a good place.” Marina continued, “When do you have to go in?”

  David glanced at his watch. “About an hour,” he said. Marina cocked her head in disappointment.

  “It’s life,” he said.

  “It’s work.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Doesn’t have to be.”

  “I’ll clean up,” he added.

  “Don’t. I can think of a way to spend the time. While the house is free . . .” she smiled at him and allowed a brief, lascivious grin to escape her thin lips.

  “I don’t know. I need to get ready . . . take a shower,” David meandered.

  Marina pulled David in and kissed him. “That’s such an amazing coincidence, because so do I,” she said.

  David grinned. He kissed her back. They
continued to make out as Marina eagerly guided David inside, both of their phones’ Froggie apps chirping on the counter with Mikey’s new coordinates. Work could wait on Sundays—for an hour.

  FIVE

  PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE SPIT ACROSS the blank screen. As intended, David was back in the Montgomery offices and tapping away on an endless chain of machine code. Even though it was Sunday afternoon, a quarter of the floor was there. Such was the nature of the old-school hierarchy at the firm. If one wasn’t striving to work harder and longer than everyone else, then rest assured human resources would find a replacement who happily would. Even though the bank had survived the financial crisis by going lean, it had not necessarily become smarter in the process. Face time was still a crucial business axiom. Through the windows to the trading floor, David could see Howard yelling into a phone and gesticulating wildly. If Howard was in on a Sunday, there was a simple rule: You better be there on Sunday, too. All of the warm bodies that stood below Howard on the firm’s status pyramid would present themselves. It never mattered what the actual work to be done was, nor indeed the reason that Howard was there. He might be checking golf scores or browsing Etsy, looking for a gift for his niece. It was not relevant. If a banker wasn’t giving birth, on a planned vacation, so hungover that movement was literally impossible, or already on the way out? Then they were in. And the only legitimate excuse out of the preceding four was obviously the rip-roaringly drunk one. There existed a certain pride about the hours at Montgomery Noyes—an insane pride, perhaps, but a pride nonetheless. Their competitors were trying out casual Friday policies and prohibiting consecutive Sunday workdays, but Montgomery would go nouveau over its dead body.

  A bit later in the afternoon, David noticed as Tyler Stanton arrived in the quant section, bedraggled, pulling a suitcase along with him.

  “Vegas?” David asked.

  “AC.”

  “You up?”

  “Never gamble like me,” Tyler replied.

  “That’s why I like liquidity. Supply and demand in the open market. You can never lose it all. For every trade, there’s a counter trade,” David said.

  “Spoken like a true quant.” Tyler grinned. “I’m going to the gym. Need to take a shower before the wifey sees me, and make sure the other wifey,” Tyler mumbled and nodded at Howard, “registers the presence of my pretty face.” With that, he disappeared down a hallway towards the elevators.

  A few moments afterwards, the sandwich guy pushed his cart through the office. Another mark of excellence within the corporate sphere was a lunch man on full benefits. Montgomery’s sandwich man was named Hank, and he had mastered the art of unobtrusive small talk mixed with a sticky order memory. Those were his only two jobs. Hank knew very well that hell would be unleashed on the sandwich man who forgot what Howard’s “usual” was, but he went above and beyond that by remembering practically every single employee’s preferred order.

  “’Sup, my man? Roast beef and provo with a dash of honey mustard?” Hank asked David.

  “You got it, Hank. Hey. It’s game day. Why aren’t you at Meadowlands?” David inquired in his perpetually collegial tone.

  “Had to sell the tix. Old lady told me to. You know how it is . . . Happy wife, happy life, right?” Hank said.

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  Hank handed David a sandwich from his cart. “Nah, it ain’t nothing like that. Respect the proverb, my man.”

  “I do and will.” David smiled back at him. Hank was a stand-up guy. Maybe the only good one. He came in seven days a week, except for the few weekends out of the year when he was at a football game. But unlike the rest of them, Hank didn’t show up out of misplaced obligation. He was paid hourly, after all.

  David turned back to his computer. He continued to tap along on the program he was working on, when the booming voice of Howard Bergensen careened over the top of his head. David turned and was shocked to find Bergensen, the old lion himself, standing beside his desk.

  “May sixth. Two thousand and ten. What happened?” Howard asked David.

  David rotated in his chair. While he prepared to answer, all that ran through his head were questions. Why was Howard Bergensen all the way over in the quant section? Talking to him, of all people?

  “Uh, Mr. Bergensen . . . Well, that was the Flash Crash. Dow Jones average plummeted a thousand points in five minutes and—”

  “It was caused by the computers, right?” Howard asked.

  “Frankly, there’s a number of highly plausible options. There’s the fat-finger concern. A random guy at a hedge fund enters the wrong trade size into his software, types in an extra zero or two, and suddenly the market is swamped with more sell orders than statistically possible. Spoofing is also an option—when false orders are entered in bulk through the system to try to fish out other counterparties’ strategies. Or it could all be as simple as a small programming error inside the exchange’s matching system,” David responded, realizing that he was already losing Howard.

  “So what you’re saying is . . . Yes?” Howard asked.

  “Precisely, sir. Exactly. The computers. An error within a trading algorithm, most likely.”

  “It’s the wild west in there.” Howard pointed towards the server room and its server blades. “We used to trade in the pits on luck, spit and a handshake,” he said.

  “Now it’s just luck?”

  “No. Now a bunch of black boxes fight each other for supremacy while we sit around with our thumbs up our asses,” Howard replied. “Goodbye.” Howard sauntered past David and turned a corner.

  David was left with a befuddled expression across his face that matched his mind’s conclusions. He racked his brain. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Howard in the quant section before, much less staring David dead in the eye. The more he thought about it, the more sure he became. Howard Bergensen did not know him from a sheet of paper. Howard Bergensen did not know his name. The entire interaction was bizarre. But perhaps it was positive. Maybe this was what the path out of the back office looked like. It started with Howard opening up the door a crack. Sure, he’d have to bust his ass off. But maybe it all ended with David trading—David with a full account size—David beating Rick and Peter at their own games. David shook his head. Davyd, stop daydreaming.

  ■

  David stood in the elevator, finally heading out for the day. The elevator door opened up a floor below and Tyler entered, freshly washed from the gym.

  “Howard came through,” David told him.

  “Where?” Tyler responded absentmindedly.

  “My desk.”

  “Huh? You talked to Howard?”

  “I guess so. I mean, really he just sort of . . . wandered past me. While speaking,” David said.

  “Did you tell him the desk is doing good, dude?”

  “Uh . . . No, I didn’t,” David stuttered.

  “I got one word for you: Politics,” Tyler replied.

  “Right. I know that.”

  “Howard only cares about leveraging gold this month. He thinks the commodity collapse is way oversold and the time for rebound is now. It’s all the guy will talk about in staff, and it’ll probably be offshore raw next month, and that’s the point. He doesn’t give one tit except what makes him money, because it’s money that gives him his house on the Egg and his Lürssen yacht and his fucking red-haired Tibetan Mastiff.” Tyler gesticulated wildly as he ranted. “It’s money that bestows upon Howard the title of the ultimate baller in our universe. So you tell him about our profit, and then you shut the fuck up. Get it?”

  “Yea, Tyler. I get it,” David said.

  Neither man uttered another word as the elevator descended to the lobby. David didn’t like the way Tyler spoke to him and never had. Maybe that’s just because Tyler was his boss. Perhaps it was the way he dressed, like the T-shirt he had on, which had likely cost more than a week’s worth of groceries for David’s family. Or maybe it was the fact that Tyler went to Vegas all the time without his wif
e. It even could have been because he led the quant section, but didn’t know how to program a single line of code himself. Tyler was just like the rest of them, which meant he was the opposite of David. Born and bred to a superb family, having attended an acceptable higher-learning institution and pledged the correct fraternity, Tyler just happened to have raised his hand at the right time during a fortunate lecture and had volunteered to take a desk no one wanted. Within three years he was telling all the programmers in the firm what to do. At least that’s how David perceived it. Because Tyler had navigated life so well, David had to tell him that he “got it.” And he did. Those were the rules. They weren’t written down, but they were sacrosanct.

  After the elevator arrived on the bottom floor and the doors opened, David and Tyler exited silently and hurtled in opposite directions.

  SIX

  THE PUNCHING BAG TOOK it hard. David pounded out the sand-filled leather—left, right, jab, hook, short straight. The large bag swung around in an unwieldy oval, almost knocking David down. The power of randomness could sometimes be quite awesome. David tripped backwards.

  Not often, but sometimes David liked to show up at the boxing gym in Bensonhurst and take it out on the dumb bag that weighed the same as he did. He was a little irked at Tyler—right hit—and Howard. What the hell was that guy doing? Was he taunting him? Leftie. David ducked around as the bag swung toward him and into the gym’s owner, Vlad Zhadanov. A robust man with tattoos spanning fifty percent of his body, all the way up the back of his neck, Vlad was Cat’s husband and David’s friend since childhood. Vlad grabbed the bag with two hands and pushed it back towards David.

  “You’re slapping the shit out of it! Come on, I know you got more than that! Give it all you got. Give it all!” Vlad yelled at him.

  If there was one truth about their friendship, it was that Vlad had always been able to motivate David. Sometimes Vlad could be a bully. He was impossible to defeat physically. If you punched Vlad, he was largely impervious. He would simply wind up and hit you again when you weren’t looking—just like the bag itself. But Vlad’s words were often just as powerful.