We haven’t gotten an order from Weber yet, which worries me; everything that Tod told me about them worries me, that their trader, C.N. was having marriage troubles, to the fact that Weber, the portfolio manager, didn’t say a word. Ordinarily I would take that to mean that the fund was running into trouble, except for that fact that I was privileged to see at least half of Weber’s trades, and they were all winners. They were probably up 30 percent already, just in the first few months of the year. Weber was a well-known internet bull who had kept pressing his bullish bets throughout the duration of the bubble, even when others had begun to go the other way. He was rumored to be a billionaire already.

From my standpoint, Weber was a menace to the money management industry; I thought he was a Kool-Aid drinker who only knew how to make money in bull markets. He had spent the last two years making everyone look bad by buying options on the highest-beta stocks, making triple digit returns. He was now managing over $4 billion, and had closed his fund to new investors. But he was a recluse who rarely spoke to the press. He had been featured in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and just about every other financial publication—all without his consent. For the last two years, he was the hermit king of Wall Street. We were lucky, in the end, to have a relationship with him. This relationship was managed by a doofus from North Carolina and his assistant, the weird Siouxsie Sioux chick, who it seemed had a romantic relationship with my financials trader.

* * * *

“You want lunch?” Tod asks me.

“Not unless you’re buying.”

“Figures. What did you bring today? Tomato soup?”

“Nope, a can of beans.”

Tod laughs. “You brought Campbell’s pork and beans to Wall Street?”

“Forty cents a can. How much is your lunch going to cost, fifteen bucks?”

“You’re insane.”

“You’re insane. That’s three thousand bucks a year.”

“You make three thousand bucks a minute.”

“When I was growing up, that’s what my family used to make all year.”

New Girl is standing over us, in her black blouse and black skirt, with her black hair.

“Hey,” she says.

She is cuter than I remembered.

“C.N. says they are definitely going to play in the PALM spinoff.”

Tod is staring at the screens.

“Do you know what they are going to do?”

“No idea.”

“What do you think they are going to do?”

“Beats the shit out of me.”

It was odd hearing the cute New Girl swear like that, even odder, considering she let some attitude fly in front of the head of derivatives trading.

“Ok, great, thanks.” She does a volte-face and marches off.

Tod is staring at the screens.

I say to him, “You’re even more obvious when you don’t pay attention to her.”

“Dude, will you let it go?”

Tod looks upset. I will let it go.