The Journeyman

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

© 2022 Sumless Treasuries Publishing

© 2022 Peter Babakitis

The Journeyman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Convention. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Babakitis, Peter

The Journeyman/Peter Babakitis. -1st trade pbk.ed.

Published by: Sumless Treasuries Publishing

ISBN-13: 979-8-9857079-0-8

The Journeyman

PETER BABAKITIS

Chapter 1

I was the numbers guy, until I wasn’t. When you’re halfway to the top in a financial organization, you’re the most vulnerable. Unlike the entry-level grunts, you’re given just enough rope to hang yourself, but not enough to get any kind of a foothold that isn’t transitory. So there are always those who use that as an opportunity to sabotage the competition- in this case the competition was me.

I had no illusions about camaraderie among this club of the financially predatory, but when the whole operation loses it’s moorings and starts snapping up some seemingly magical opportunities, inevitably people will get pissed off, jealous, self-righteous, or worse, and a plausible call from some rando can get you on the radar from the boys at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and before you know it, the question all around is if you can be turned.

From the first year that I was there, I was put under the management of Harvey Dennison, the senior partner in the firm which was technically a hedge fund, but only technically. He was ambitious, amoral, and a quintessential opportunist.

When it came to personal matters, he was fundamentally a man who had no self-awareness, oblivious to the fact that everyone from Agnes, his secretary, to the big boss Spencer thought of him as a cloying sycophant, and an ambitious prig. It didn’t bother me too much, as long as I kept my nose in the actuarial, I was able to skirt the confrontations that my colleagues liked to engage in.

Entirely self-absorbed in his career trajectory, Dennison calculated how much value you could bring to him in the short term, and adjust his relationship with you accordingly. He was like this with everyone; every week, he offered to bring back a granola bar to his assistant, paid $1.67 for it, and collected $2 from her every time.

Reptilian in his emotional logic, you could imagine him with a spreadsheet tabulating the value any of his relationships towards his advancement, presumably with rankings and little plusses and minuses in various columns. Which is how I imagine Dennison came up with the assignment that was intended to eliminate me from the field; an impossible ask, that would have saddled me with the responsibility for some very shady dealings. The details were somewhat complicated to show here, but the long and short of it is, If it worked, they would reap some tidy profits, if it didn’t, the rap would be squarely mine, and they could simply throw me under the bus.

So it was checkmate in their eyes, heads they win, tails I lose. I didn’t hold any grudges about it; I didn’t feel as though they’d singled me out, this was just what was expected in that world, and of course there wasn’t enough collective imagination in that whole operation to inspire much variation.

I had watched as they ran this play on numerous colleagues. Elliott from Treasuries got the rap for the Ponzi that was the San Diego toxic clean-up fund, Martin in underwriting took the hit for inflating the commercial real estate holdings in the 2008 debacle.

Jon Ewald got the sub-prime double-cross when they stuck him with their under-reporting of risk assessments on credit default swaps. They hunted on, sharklike, and they saw no reason to think that the feeding would ever come to an end; at least not for them.

They thought that they had it in the bag. Except they didn’t expect one thing- that I might be so jaded, so self-serving that I might blow the whistle on the whole thing. Of course that would mean blowing away my future with them and bracing myself for some blindingly expensive law suits, but the feds were onto them already.

They had been surveilling the board for years as I found out. Unbeknownst to them was that a major sting was brewing in the SEC, and by the time I went to them, they knew exactly what I was there to tell them- Good thing I did, or I might have been the next under the bus. I saw which way the wind was blowing and held up my whistle; I simply stepped in front of the parade with the flag, and down goes Dennison.

i

You may think that reporting your boss to the SEC and initiating an FBI inquiry would be a terrifying step across the line, but not this time. It was easy; I just went into the meeting with him that was supposed to be my review, through that grand mahogany door, and took my seat at that long, one-of-a-kind, hundred and seventy thousand dollar conference table, that stretched across the impressively huge boardroom, the imposing architecture of which reminded me of Italian fascism of the nineteen-thirties. I was ready. Dennison really had no clue.

As was his usual strategy, he got me alone in the boardroom, and made me wait, sitting next to him, as he took the head of the empty table, while he answered a few texts while I waited. When he was done, he turned and glared at me, as if to stare me down per some advice in an aggressive management psychology book, in an attempt to weaken my defenses. Authority for him was all about performative gestures and dramatic puffery, so he slipped into his usual routine. In other words, he was clueless as to what was about to happen.

This deal was supposed to be our flagship, he hissed. We lined up the Congress, our boys in the SEC, it cost us a lot. And you stopped it because it was ‘Illegal?’ He struggled as if he’d never heard the concept before.

No, I confessed, I stopped it because I wasn’t enjoying it. Not really a lie, but I thought I’d dangle it a bit for him to puzzle over for a moment. He of course had no idea that I had been informing on him and the crew to the feds for almost three months now.

They had a tip from a broker in Cleveland who had my name pegged to a transaction from the Ohio Water Company; fortunately I was just the clerk on that one; my nose was technically clean. But not so clean that I could get in the way of the SEC if they really wanted to put the screws on Dennison, and they really did.

There wasn’t enough time for me to have planned for a smooth exit, so I was faced with the imminent possibility of all of my future plans evaporating into a grim penury, and my too-steep mortgage on my newly constructed Bay Area bi-level propelled me into thinking and re-thinking my career. Hang time.

That attitude tends to scare people. Sorry Lawrence. You need to find a new career.

I had already cleared most of the stuff out of my desk, and turned over the evidence to the feds, so, yes, I knew my career with the firm was over; and I even had worked out options for leaving the country for a while. Once the street gets wind of you as someone who’s willing to scuttle the ship because of mere corruption, you’re radioactive.

There are a lot of customers out there for my skills who are just as corrupt as you guys, I reminded him. He seemed surprised to hear the word, as if it was in a foreign language, and it’s not one that I was even accustomed to using, since it requires the assumption of it’s opposite. Cor...rup..tion? What was corruption really, without the assumption of some benign, gentlemanly standard that everyone normally complies with?

Poor Dennison. The rug, so comfortably beneath his Bostonian brogues about to be so rudely pulled out from under him. He had no idea the white trucks were lining up in the alley, back by the service elevators, the exits on Sutter and Mason were being sealed, the intercoms disabled, and O’Connor from the FBI was right outside the boardroom door with the forensic agents, ready to haul the whole operation downtown.

Still, obliviously, he lectured me about how things work in this business, as if rehearsing a Toastmasters presentation, and I can’t say he was wrong.

Your clientele is about to dry up rather suddenly after this, Lawrence.

I appreciate your career advice, I said, but I’ll leave that judgement to the free market.

He used that phrase Free market so often, I knew that he would get the irony. But of course, humorless lizard that he was, he was not amused. He screwed up his face in a grimace of disbelief and condescension.

Good luck with that, Lawrence, he crooned. When you get too cynical, betrayal becomes…

The building alarm suddenly sounded, cutting him off. There were resonant percussive thuds echoing out in the hallway, and I knew that the floor was being sealed. The agents suddenly appeared in the hallway, with a lot of jingling of keys and the screech of walkie-talkies, and FBI Agent O’Connor burst through the sleek mahogany door of Dennison’s Architectural Digest-featured boardroom.

I finished Dennison’s thought:…Second nature.

O’Connor strode over to the long conference table like a Texas sheriff. He clearly had been through hundreds of these securities fraud arrests, and he read off the charges like a train conductor on a familiar route: Mr. Dennison, you are under arrest for violation of securities fraud law, Title 18 U.S.C. 1834…

The law had found it’s case. The dominos began to topple. Those conditions that everyone had always speculated about now reached the critical point at which the reaction takes place.

With the alarm blaring, and the thud of doors shutting, the feds burst into the office, and escorted me out; over my shoulder I could see them arresting Dennison, handcuffs clicking tight under the blue and gold Yale cufflinks that he liked to wear. As I descended the elevator the 37 floors to the lobby, the Muzak chirped up in an bouncy Vegas lounge-style instrumental cover of Britney Spears Oops, I Did It Again...

I walked across the lobby and glanced away from all the faces that I knew would eventually be affected by this betrayal of mine, and I did imagine their dismay and eventual anger. I though about how each face might exact their retribution if they caught on.

i

As the A-team were accommodated in the police vans with shiny new bracelets, they could see me among the officers with my wrists free, and I ducked around the corner and down the alley. As I wandered down the blocks to my car, I passed the Korean electronics store, and the news was playing on one of those big LCD screens. They were showing a live feed of the outside of the building where the executives at the firm were being packed into the vans, and carried off, and Dennison sliding in awkwardly with his hands cuffed together. I walked on into the night through the drizzle, with an unfamiliar sense of satisfaction.

It