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  “Yeah, but I thought, y’know, with him up at school and all, and she’s got that old heap for traveling—Anyway, somebody said it might be available, and I thought….”

  “Hey, do me a favor, Alan, will you?”

  “Sure, Ed, whaddya need?”

  “Don’t ask him about the car, OK?”

  “OK—But why? Why shouldn’t I ask him?”

  “Why? ‘Cause the dumb bastard’ll give it to you if you ask him, that’s why.”

  “Yeah, he’s like that, isn’t he? He gives all kinds of shit away. Hey, I even remember him buying Jim Willis new tires for his pickup right after graduation, and … yeah, he even bought some new clothes for creepy Eugene back in twelfth grade—Remember Eugene, with those filthy khaki pants he never changed out of?”

  “Eugene Everhardt you’re asking? Sure I remember. He lives just down the block from Lizzie, you know. I see him every once in a while out on the street. So … Bennie bought him clothes, you’re saying? That I don’t remember specifically. But it’s not that big a shock either; Bennie did stuff for everybody. And shit, Eugene definitely needed new threads, although if Bennie bought him some, I don’t remember old Eugene ever wearing them. I think … yeah, come to think of it, I think that last time I saw him, a couple of months or so ago, he still had those raggedy-ass, grungy pants on.”

  “Well Ben bought him new stuff; that I remember distinctly. He brought a big bundle of nice new clothes to him in school; had it in his locker and gave it to Eugene quietly, so nobody could see, and…. Anyway, why is Ben like that, Eddie? You know him better than anybody, so—What’s the scoop with that?”

  “Lizzie—she’s the scoop. You know how they say misery loves company? You know that hackneyed phrase?”

  “Sure. So?”

  “Well, happiness loves company too, I guess. Benny is just about the happiest, most satisfied guy in the world. He’s been that way ever since he’s been with Liz. And it’s like he wants the whole world to be happy along with him. So he gives shit away—You get it now? So don’t ask him about the car. And anyway, it’s a junker in the first place. Bennie bought it—Didn’t you ever hear how Bennie bought it?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Whaddya mean, how he bought it?”

  “It was a piece of shit, man. He bought it as salvage and fixed it up himself. He didn’t know beans about cars, but he bought a book and scrounged up the parts—You know Bennie—Once he puts his mind to something, he does it like a pro.”

  “He sure does,” said Alan with a look of awestruck wonderment on his face. They were all in awe of Ben, even Eddie who had lived with the awe and wonder on a daily basis since the age of ten. “Lucky we’ve got him,” offered Alan. “Where would we have been if Ben Atherton hadn’t been around?”

  Alan was right, of course. Lucky as hell, the lot of them. For Ben was in a class apart from everybody else they knew conceived of mortal man. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! This big-brained Ben Atherton—Man!—The guy was a wonder of wonders when it came to plain old smarts—But more specifically, more productively—turned out he was an absolute phenomenon when it came to picking stocks. And not just stocks alone, mind you, no indeed. For he had got the kids’ investments spread out into all other manner of moneymaking avenues as well: Futures, commodities, everything that could generate a hefty profit, and do it on the quick.

  The preface to the story was a Coastal Jersey legend, just about. Tenth grade—six months or so before the time that Ben had happened onto Liz. Mr. Disner’s civics class: He was a good teacher, long, tall Mr. Disner was; and when the class made it to the section on US economics, he gave the topic life by having the students play around with stocks.

  Made-up money—‘Disner Dollars’, the kiddies called them: Each student got a thousand Disner Dollars as a phony nest egg: Pick your stocks and see how well you do. A third of the class gained a little, two-thirds lost—probability fell a little short of the median there, as it all-too-often does….

  Until the numbers got to Ben, that is. He was where the probability tables really came into their own and made up for the not-so-prosperous residual two-thirds. Ben won—And big! So big, so inordinately BIG—HUGE—VAST!—that Mr. Disner grabbed him after class and asked him how the holy (expletive) the guy had done so well—Umm, you know, whether it was maybe due to his dad being an accountant and all.… Well, shrugged Mr. Disner hopefully, that is, whether Mister Atherton senior might maybe know some secret little tricks of the trade relative to investments that he might see fit to pass along to.….

  But no; Ralph Atherton, Benny’s dad, was a pretty good accountant, truth be told, but a not-so-great investor when it came to picking stocks. He never made a lot of dough beyond his modest salary and minimal extra perks. Benny didn’t acquire his investing skills from the agnate side of the X-Y chromosomal pair. Where exactly it had lodged in the genetic code was moot. Wherever, however, Ben was a flaming wonder at investing anyway, not too different from a neonatal chess phenomenon who checkmates all the pros, or some tiny baby Mozart clambering up to the piano and plunking out sonatas at the daunting age of two. Ben was just like that and maybe more-so—unbeknownst to anyone, including himself—until that civics section and Mr. Disner’s pedagogic genius brought his propensity for profit to light.

  So that was it, then: Wherever the damn thing came from—well, there the damn thing was. That high-school class had blindly stumbled on a golden goose just ready for the plucking—So why in the world not go ahead and pluck it? Why not cash those gilded feathers in for a profit?—A negotiable profit in genuine dollars this time?

  Which is precisely what the youngsters did—or rather that’s what Ben did. Half the class manned up and opted in, the other half stayed out, regretting their reluctance thereafter to their dying days. The half that ventured in went out and raised a little capital: The girls baked cookies, the boys washed cars. They paid the high school janitor a crumpled pair of twenties to lend the kids a hose and leave the water on—A carwash would look a lot more like a legitimately charitable function if the patrons thought it was officially sanctioned by the school, Ben thought. Within a month, they piled up pretty near two thousand bucks in capitalistic seed crop. And Ben Atherton, boy wonder, boy-Croesus, went to work. Old pal Eddie Parker was a member of the opt-in group—a veritable workhorse with the hose and sponge, as the auto washing proved—Plus, Ed’s uncle was a broker, fortuitously enough: Sure he’d take the project on—Why not? A broker gets commissions on the trades whether they turn out bad for the guy who antes up the cash or good.

  And lots of trades there were. Scads. Daily, weekly; hourly sometimes. Ben was on the phone and in the brokerage very early and very late each business day. His schoolwork didn’t interfere—Hell, he was getting straight ‘A’s anyway; he always did, always had. How much extra effort did it take to read his father’s Wall Street Journal every morning splayed out on the table next to the box of Cheerios and low-fat milk?

  “Everything’s in there, Eddie—absolutely everything you need to know. Read every article on every page—even the ads. Everything essential gets printed in the Journal every single day.” Ben spoke and Eddie tried to take it in; he read with gusto every weekday morning front to back, as told to do—But nobody other than Ben ever totally caught on.

  And so the kids got rich, relatively speaking. A million-three and change over four years, split fifteen ways—Ben would never take more than his fifteenth share despite the other kids’ offering and urging: What more could you do with it anyway? Eighty-something grand apiece to pay in full for Ben’s salvage-built Corvette, and Lizzie’s ratty yellow Mustang—Oh, and there was Eddie’s gambling money too, all-too-quickly lost, and his stipend for the pretty show girls on the boardwalk—a more productive investment satisfaction-wise, as those exotic girls turned out to be.

  As for the other partners in the venture, those intermittent big-buck windfalls paid a few of their tuitions too, for Kenny Harper and Tom Krajewski when college came ar
ound. And the kids who weren’t bound for college—they had seed money for other things—A bump shop for Jim Hetherington, the hot dog joint that Tom and Andy Joiner opened right across the Avenue from the school.

  Free money, easy money—effortless, really—though Ben liked the process way more than the proceeds therefrom. It was nothing but a mental game to him, like learning to fix his classy cheapo car. He cared much less for the income than any of his happy partners did. For—way, way more precious than the income ever was or ever could have been—he had his fondest wish of all … in darling Liz.

  Liz… Liz…. When Eddie barged into the room and let his profit-taking bubbles effervesce, Benny had his arm around Liz, as always. And when Eddie shook his head in diffidence and admiration, Liz nestled into Benny’s shoulder the way she always did, the way she always had these wondrous six years past. He was happy. She was happy. He would be home next weekend, or she would take the drive to Philly in her Ford; they’d make their plans by Friday night. A week’s parting was the minimal hiatus they were gathering for, there in her comfy little home—That was what they must have thought.

  Outside the window looking in that night was our disheveled boy from down the block, a painfully shy boy, much ridiculed and teased, who dressed in filthy slacks and rarely spoke to anyone. In school, before the class of ’82 went off their separate ways—off to college or someplace local to find a proper paying job—many of the meaner sort had bullied him, made fun of him. Ben hadn’t, nor had Lizzie; they’d been invariably, exceptionally kind.

  But their kindnesses and courtesies didn’t really matter in the end. Eugene Everhardt bore a deep-set grievance against all the world and all that gleaned a drop of joy therefrom. And that deep-set grievance would explode in tragedy that final fatal fearful Sunday night.

  It was a night that would change Ben forever. Maybe it helped to make him what he finally became. Maybe it helped to make him more than he had ever hoped to be. But one thing was for sure: It took from him the one and only girl he never ceased to love. Back then, he thought he’d never see that one and only girl again.

  Ah, but in a weird and wondrous way—for once, and only once, in his financially inimitable life—Ben Atherton, the awesome genius, the money-mental wonder …

  was absolutely wrong.

  2

  “Hey, Bennie! Bennie—LOOK!”

  Eddie was psyched. Eddie was so excited he was trembling. He wasn’t in arrears—far from it—He wasn’t joyous. He wasn’t effervescent. His days of gaming debt and youthful effervescence were over long ago; they’d never come again.

  But psyched he was, assuredly: You could see it in those big, wide, bulging, reddened eyes, the florid face, the shuffling bodily rush.

  These days Eddie didn’t get as all-out purple-faced excited as he’d done back in his youth. Oh, maybe once in a while on the private jet to London, say, with a gin and tonic in his hand, and his fly unzipped, and some aspiring Hollywood starlet kneeling down in front of him (Don’t tell Mrs. Parker, though): Maybe then he’d get his face to flush and his eyes to bulge the way they had in former times when he and Ben were back in school.

  But now? No, now he was a calmer sort of fellow in his middle years—practically sedate, you’d have to say. Lots of money does that for a man. Age does it just as well, I guess, though money calms a person way more efficiently and in much less time: The really rich are really pretty calm, you see. Forty million in investments, plus the real estate and corporate stock and all, and it gives the antsiest of fellows reassurance, instills more confidence than the diffidence he’d shown in former days. So whether it was wealth alone or the simple mellowing crust of maturation, or maybe an amalgam of the two—In any case, Eddie was a way, way calmer sort of fellow in his mid-life years than he’d been back in his youth.

  Well, usually he was. Generally he was—But you sure couldn’t call him perfectly calm today!

  No, today—today he was—well, for him, at least, the guy was pretty flat-out frantic, as he brushed right past Ben’s goalie-of-a-secretary Cindy in the antechamber and straight into the enormous office of the Company founder and CEO, bolted wholesale into the room, where Ben sat at his desk incredulously glancing up, and hit Ed with the inevitable question:

  “Jesus, Eddie! What the hell is…?”

  Ben posed this uncompleted inquiry because it was evident that something pretty damn significant was … well … up. After all, this was hardly the ideal time for getting interrupted: Ben had that meeting with the Braverman people a little after noon—which Eddie quite obviously knew—And it was getting toward eleven now. And, you know, it takes some time for preparation. And if a potential big-bucks buyer isn’t totally prepared on a mega-million-dollar deal like this, why the sellers can just about eat him alive, checkbook, moneybags and all; and so….

  But Braverman Corp meeting be damned, there was Eddie, all crimson in the face, and he was obviously psyched about something. Psyched—feverishly psyched! And on the rare occasions when this generally placid guy got psyched these later days—let alone feverishly—you couldn’t hope to brush him off; hell no. You simply had to bite your tongue and listen to him vent. And so Ben set the research papers neatly on his desk, glanced at the zillion-dollar Patek Philippe on his wrist, shook his head, took his half-frame reading glasses off and set them deftly on the papers, met Eddie’s gaze with a minimum of genuine interest, and queried:

  “Well, Eddie? OK, go ahead, shoot, I’ll bite. Spit it out and make it quick. I’ve got that meeting with the Braverman team at twelve-fifteen, so….”

  So Eddie finally coughed at least a prefatory statement out, as Ben had asked his pal to do. It had taken Ed quite a little while to catch his breath and get his trembling hands to slow their rhythm of vibrato—Whew!

  “Forget the goddamn Braverman bullshit, Benny Boy,” Eddie blurted out in double time. “It’s peanuts, pal; it’s nickel-dime, penny-ante crap. This one is BIG; this one is the mother lode. I just came across the friggin’ thing sittin’ on my desk this morning—MAN!—and … and—look, we gotta jump on it. Now—Right now. Today—before anybody else muscles in. Look—Just look it over for a minute and you’ll see what I mean. Here, check it out right now, Ben; read the first two pages; just shuffle through a second, pal, and then….”

  Eddie went to set the folder on Ben’s desk, but Ben waved a hand to hold him off.

  “Not now, Eddie. Please. I’ve got this whole stack of numbers to go through, and it’s just about eleven already, and….”

  “Yes now, right now. Hey, have I ever steered you wrong when I was sure about an offering? Have I?”

  Had he? All right, so maybe he had. Sure he had. That pharmaceutical fiasco six months back—Man! They’d lost a pile of cash on that one—twenty million, maybe more. But Eddie hadn’t been as all-out hyped about the lethal diet drug as he seemed to be about this proposal, whatever the hell it was. And the last time he was sure, the last time he was red-in-the-face trembling like this, they’d closed that ultra-profitable coup on Claxon Corp. Publishing and made a massive mint; and so….

  “OK, look,” Ben offered, nodding. “You got two minutes and not a second more. Run it by me quick—two minutes maximum—and then I’ve got to get back to these figures. Really. If you can lay it out clean and simple in a couple of minutes flat, go ahead, otherwise….”

  “Sure, Ben, sure. Two minutes is all I’m asking here; I know you’re pressed. Just listen to the concept, and if you like what I tell you—which you will, I guarantee—I’ll go ahead and make the call and get our tootsies in the door, OK?”

  “OK already, fine—So what’s your fabulous brainstorm this time, Eddie? Plastics?”

  “No, not plastics, for Chrissakes, Bennie. Plastics—shit! Hey, this thing is gonna be bigger than any plastics you ever saw—Hell, it’ll be bigger even than Facebook, I swear—We dropped the pop-up bigtime by not jumping in on Facebook early on, remember? So this time let’s not screw up, OK?”

&nbs
p; Bennie shrugged and shook his head. Facebook—DAMN! The memory of missing out on Facebook when they’d had the chance gave Ben an agonizing twinge.

  “OK,” continued Ed. “so here’s the thing:”

  The thing, eh? Ben glanced down at his watch again and pursed his lips. OK, two minutes—maximum—for the ‘thing’ and then….

  Ben reclined his swivel chair, picking up the glasses he had just set down and slipping the metal temple-piece between his lips. There was about five percent of his attention available to Eddie just then—a twentieth at the max—and the other nineteen twentieths percolating over Braverman’s figures and the quickest way to get the greedy bastards down to a palatable price, leaving AthCorp a decent profit. Ben knew commercial values, the present and potential worth of any marketable company up for bidding anywhere in the universe, practically to the cent or pound or yen; his mind scoped out the capitalist marketplace the way an eagle scans terrain for prey—Not that he looked the part of a financier, however, for Ben was still a photogenic type of guy for a fellow in his middle-fifties: more like the beach set than the desk set, frankly, with his copious head of hair, still fractionally gray; still lean and scaphoid at the belly; still bright-of-eye and wrinkleless-of-face. Ben was a pretty nifty fifty-five with the chronologic meter running; of that there could be little doubt.

  Now Eddie, on the other hand—Associate Chairman Eddie, Head of Market Research for the Atherton Group, who was an exact contemporary of Ben’s—Eddie looked as though he could have been Ben’s older brother or uncle, or … not quite old enough in appearance to be a youthful-looking dad, but not that far a stretch.

  But getting back to Ben again and to the action of the hour, the Braverman deal had got his eyes to redden up a bit from lack of sleep, and those pouches underneath his lower lids these past few days: Today, this morning, Ben looked a trifle wearier than the norm, a little less his youthful self. Tired, antsy; and therefore five percent of his attention span was about the upper limit of what he could spare for Eddie’s new pet project—whatever the hell it might turn out to be. And about that new pet project Eddie blurted out—and blurted really fast, so as to cram the words together making Ben miss a considerable number of them in the flurried verbal spate: