But Saul Cohen inhabited the overshadowed little building next door. It was a dark, pleasant place, carved and ornamented, with aged woodwork and a brass-cage elevator that took him slowly but comfortably to the third floor. The office was small but homey and elegant-there was an elaborate Tabriz carpet swirling with vivid birds and animals, an Etruscan figurine on a wooden pedestal, and beyond a walnut rail fence with a swinging gate in it, an old man sitting at a huge antique desk in the corner.
Saul was the room’s only occupant; the secretary’s desk was unoccupied. There were tickers and a Quotron; phone wires were tangled on the old man’s cluttered desk.
Saul got up from his chair spryly. “Russ, my boy.” When the old man grinned, his eyes wrinkled up until they were almost shut. He walked forward to the rail, held the swing gate open, and shook hands. “How are you? Come and sit-come and sit.”
“I was hoping I’d catch you here this early. But if I’m taking up work time-”
“Nonsense. For you I make all the time you want. Sit.”
Saul Cohen was a crickety, bookish, gentle little man with a harsh simian face, tangled eyebrows, prominent nose, gray hair cropped close to the little round skull. His voice was rapid, scratchy, impatient. His expression, painted on indelibly, was that of a man who smelled something distasteful; it made his face seem a repository for the anguish of the ages. Hastings had never been able to look at that suffering face without seeing the old man as torment personified.
He took the proffered chair. “I need some wisdom.”
“That I don’t sell. Only stocks and bonds. I made a couple of good trades last week in your account and your father’s. Do you need cash? Is that why you come to me with such a long face? To ask me to sell your investments for cash?”
“Nothing like that.”
“I’m happy, then. But wisdom? The wisdom of a learned man cometh by opportunity of leisure: and he that hath little business shall become wise. Ecclesiasticus, thirty-eight: twenty-four. What can I tell you? I’m a businessman all my life. I’m seventy-six years of age, and I’m still working, only because what else do I know how to do? I never learned the wisdom of spending money, all I can do is play the game here. I own a seat that’s fifty years old, I bought it for a few thousand, and now it’s worth a small fortune-what can I tell you?”
“You can give me the impossible, Saul. A Wall Street education in one lesson.”
The old man smiled gently. He was a Wall Street gadfly, a keen-eyed gnome with a clever mind salted away behind his indulgent cracker-barrel philosophizing. He said, “Instant knowledge. What everybody wants nowadays. Ah, my young friend, you’ll never get that outright. But what you can get, if you’ve got the right brain, is two here and two there, to put together with the two you’ve already got, to make six. You’ve gone to work for the Securities and Exchange since I’ve seen you last.”
“That’s right. Word gets around, doesn’t it?”
“As I said, I keep in touch. Besides, I’ve known you since you were so young you’d be embarrassed to be reminded. I actually did bounce you on my knee. Naturally I’d be interested to follow your career.”
“Such as it is,” Hastings said, smiling. “My problem’s an odd one. I’ve picked up vague hints that something may be going on out of sight in the market. But I’m too new to this business to be sure of myself. The problem is-”
The old man held up a hand, palm out, and grinned, full of mischief. “We will wait to hear what the exact problem is. You come to me as a neophyte, and the opportunity to lecture is too great for me to pass up. I will tell you about this Street, and then you will ask your questions.” He settled back, steepling his fingers, with a deep breath and a manner that instantly identified him as an in-training long-distance talker. Hastings smiled fondly. Watching Hastings from the pained depths of his eyes, Saul Cohen said, “Do you read Freud? No? You should. Freud observed that Galileo removed the earth from the center of the universe; Darwin removed man’s uniqueness, and made him but a link in a chain; and Freud himself removed the illusion that a man is his own master. But most of us still cherish that illusion-and you see evidence of it here in Wall Street. Everybody thinks he can control his own destiny by working out a logical investment policy and making himself a millionaire overnight. They make a mistake, of course-they should read Freud. There’s no such thing as a logical man, there’s no such thing as a logical investment policy. The market isn’t any more logical than the men who make it. It operates out of greed, fear, rumors, hints, intuitions-and for your first lesson I can tell you that selecting investments by throwing darts at a list of stocks is the best method of beating the market. You see?”
Hastings began to smile, but Cohen shook a knobby finger at him. “I meant it seriously, young man-it’s quite true. It is a plain bare fact, beyond argument, that more people lose than win in the stock market. If you buy one share of every share listed, across the board, you’ll end up losing. To be specific, you’ll lose about seven and a half percent on your investment. Because in the end all we do in Wall Street is shift piles of manure from one corner of the barn to another, and we brokers charge a commission for the service of shifting it back and forth.”
“But facts like that don’t matter to the public. They see a stock start to shoot up, and they don’t own it, so they get greedy and they buy. Profit fever-they start to think of themselves as manly cannibals in this meat market. The fact is, they’re jackasses, following carrots on sticks. All you’ve got to do is keep them supplied with carrots.”
The old man’s face crinkled in an anguished smile, and he spread his hands in an ancient old-world gesture. “Guilt. In the old days society was work-oriented and success was a measure of denial, self-sacrifice, thrift, hard work, all virtues. Big money used to be the symbol of that kind of achievement-remember Horatio Alger? Wealth was a reward for courage and clean living and hard work. Now wealth is only a symbol of your ability in choosing an accountant smart enough to allow you to dodge taxes. Today money is a prize, not a reward. People play the market because they’ve learned you don’t need to work-you only need luck. They’re out to get something for nothing. They’re gamblers-and they feel guilty because deep down they know they ought to be leaning over a hot sledgehammer to justify all the money they’re trying to make. They’re hagridden with anxieties and guilt-and we’re back to Freud.”
He shook his head in pain. “The human race is the constant victim of congenital idiocy. I have pointed out for fifty years to my clients that a fool and his money rush in where angels disdain to tread-what is it after all but money? Money! Money is useless, literally and actually. If it wasn’t useless you couldn’t use it for money. You see? So money is an abstraction itself, but the stock market is an abstraction once removed-we don’t even work with money, we work with paper arithmetic. We print paper and call it stock, and hang it on the hook end of a line and see if anybody swallows it. Money? It’s not what you have that makes you rich nowadays-it’s what you owe.”
The old man took a breath and began to talk again, but one of his phones rang and he reached for it. Hastings sat still, amused and entertained. The old man’s surgical wit was a good counterpoint against his own feeling of dull lassitude; he enjoyed listening to Cohen’s darting rapier talk.
Cohen finished his phone conversation and turned back to him. “You want to learn about us-you want to learn what the stock market is. You can’t do that, you know-nobody can say what the stock market is. The only thing that can be described is what it was. The only way to anticipate the market is to know how all the people in it are going to behave, and no man alive can do that-oh, I know the big portfolio houses are using computers to analyze the market and make forecasts, but no computer can give an accurate answer on the basis of incomplete inputs, and who can program a computer with every vagary of human neurosis that may affect the market tomorrow? It can’t be done.”