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“What do you think he’s gonna do with the net?” asked the aspiring Bionic Woman.

I ran the possibilities through my mind. “I’m not really sure—Oh, shit, I know exactly what…”

All at once, faster than would seem possible, Danny ripped off his suit jacket, threw it on the floor, unbuttoned his shirtsleeve, pushed it up past his elbow, and plunged his hand into the fishbowl. His entire forearm was submerged. Then he began thrashing his arm in all directions, trying to catch an unsuspecting orange goldfish in the palm of his hand. His face was set in stone, with the look of a man possessed by pure evil.

A dozen young sales assistants seated close to the action jumped out of their seats and recoiled in horror at the very sight of Danny trying to capture the innocent goldfish.

“Oh…my…God,” said Janet. “He’s gonna kill it.”

Just then Danny’s eyes popped wide open and his jaw dropped down a good three inches. It was a face that so much as said, “Gotcha!” A split second later he yanked his arm out of the fishbowl, with the orange goldfish firmly in his grasp.

“He’s got it!” cried Janet, putting her fist to her mouth.

“Yeah, but the million-dollar question is, what’s he gonna do with it?” I paused for just an instant, then added, “But I’m willing to bet you a hundred to one on a thousand bucks that he eats it. Are we on?”

An instant reply: “A hundred to one? You’re on! He won’t do it! It’s too gross. I mean—”

Janet was cut off as Danny climbed on top of a desk and extended his arms out, as if he were Jesus Christ on the cross. He screamed, “This is what happens when you fuck with your pets on new-issue day!” As an afterthought, he added, “And no fucking bow ties in the boardroom! It’s fucking…ridiculous!”

Janet the welcher: “I want to cancel my bet right now!”

“Sorry, too late!”

“Come on! It’s not fair!”

“Neither is life, Janet.” I shrugged innocently. “You should know that.” And just like that, Danny opened up his mouth and dropped the orange goldfish down his gullet.

A hundred sales assistants let out a collective gasp, while ten times as many brokers began cheering in admiration—paying homage to Danny Porush, executioner of innocent marine life. Never one to miss an opportunity to ham it up, Danny responded with a formal bow, as if he were on a Broadway stage. Then he jumped off the desk into the arms of his admirers.

I started snickering at Janet. “Well, don’t worry about paying me. I’ll just take it out of your paycheck.”

“Don’t you fucking dare!” she hissed.

“Fine, you can owe me, then!” I smiled and winked. “Now go order the flowers and bring me some coffee. I gotta start this fucking day already.” With a bounce in my step and a smile on my face, I walked into my office and closed the door—ready to take on anything the world could toss at me.

CHAPTER 6

FREEZING REGULATORS

It was less than five minutes later, and I was sitting in my office, behind a desk fit for a dictator, in a chair as big as a throne. I cocked my head to the side and said to the room’s two other occupants, “Now let me get this straight: You guys want to bring a midget in here and toss his little ass around the boardroom?”

In unison, they nodded.

Sitting across from me, in an overstuffed oxblood leather club chair, was none other than Danny Porush. At this particular moment he seemed to be suffering no ill effects from his latest fishcapade and was now trying to sell me on his latest brainstorm, which was: to pay a midget five grand to come into the boardroom and be tossed around by brokers, in what would certainly be the first Midget Tossing Competition in Long Island history. And as odd as the whole thing sounded, I couldn’t help but be somewhat intrigued.

Danny shrugged his shoulders. “It’s not as crazy as it sounds. I mean, it’s not like we’re gonna toss the little bastard in any odd direction. The way I see it, we’d line up wrestling mats at the front of the boardroom and give the top-five brokers on the Madden deal two tosses each. We’d paint a bull’s-eye at one end of the mat and then put down some Velcro so the little bastard sticks. Then we pick a few of the hot sales assistants to hold up signs—like they’re judges at a diving competition. They can score based on throwing style, distance, degree of difficulty, all that sort of shit.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “Where are you gonna find a midget on such short notice?” I looked over at Andy Greene, the room’s third occupant. “What’s your opinion on this matter? You’re the firm’s lawyer; you must have somethingto say…no?”

Andy nodded sagely, as if he were measuring the appropriate legal response. He was an old and trusted friend, who’d recently been promoted to head of Stratton’s Corporate Finance Department. It was Andy’s job to sift through the dozens of business plans Stratton received each day and decide which, if any, were worth passing along to me. In essence, the Corporate Finance Department served as a manufacturing plant—providing finished goods in the form of shares and warrants in initial public offerings, or new issues, as the phrase went on Wall Street.

Andy was wearing the typical Stratton uniform—consisting of an immaculate Gilberto suit, white shirt, silk necktie, and, in his case, the worst toupee this side of the Iron Curtain. At this particular moment, it looked like someone had taken a withered donkey’s tail and slapped it onto his egg-shaped Jewish skull, poured shellac over it, stuck a cereal bowl over the shellac, and then placed a twenty-pound plate of depleted uranium over the cereal bowl and let it sit for a while. It was for this very reason that Andy’s official Stratton nickname was Wigwam.

“Well,” said Wigwam, “in terms of the insurance issues here, if we get a signed waiver from the midget, along with some sort of hold-harmless agreement, then I don’t think we have any liability if the midget were to break his neck. But we would need to take every precaution that a reasonable man would take, which is clearly the legal requirement in a situation like…”

Jesus! I wasn’t looking for a fucking legal analysis of this whole midget-tossing business—I just wanted to know if Wigwam thought it was good for broker morale! So I tuned out, keeping one eye on the green-diode numbers and letters that were skidding across the computer monitors on either side of my desk and the other eye on the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window that looked out into the boardroom.

Wigwam and I went all the way back to grade school. Back then he had this terrific head of the finest blond hair you’ve ever seen, as fine as corn silk, in fact. But, alas, by his seventeenth birthday his wonderful head of hair was a distant memory, barely thick enough for the dreaded male comb-over.

Faced with the impending doom of being bald as an eagle while still in high school, Andy decided to lock himself in his basement, smoke five thousand joints of cheap Mexican reefer, play video games, eat frozen Ellio’s pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and wait for Mother Nature, the bitch that she was, to play out her cruel joke on him.

He emerged from his basement three years later, a fifty-year-old ornery Jew with a few strands of hair, a prodigious potbelly, and a newfound personality that was a cross between the humdrum Eeyore, from Winnie the Pooh, and Henny Penny, who thought the sky was falling. Along the way, Andy managed to get caught cheating on his SATs, which forced him into exile to the little town of Fredonia in upstate New York, where students freeze to death in summer, at the local educational institution, Fredonia State University. But he did manage to negotiate his way through the rigorous academic demands of that fine institution and graduate five and a half years later—not one ounce smarter, yet a good deal frumpier. From there he finagled his way into some Mickey Mouse law school in Southern California—earning a diploma that held about as much legal weight as one you’d receive from a Cracker Jack box.