Strange, thinks Bernie. Jay isn’t ticked off. I call him at five and say I’ll drop by his place in an hour, then don’t show up until seven-thirty and he’s not even curious about why I’m late. This is very unJay-like behavior. The country’s foremost financial poet is almost never this forgiving.
Jay’s place is only a few blocks from mine but tells a very different Center City story. Irving Street is in the middle of the medical district, securely anchored by huge and well-heeled institutions like Jefferson Hospital, with the spaces between these urban leviathans kept tidy by the real estate aspirations of upwardly mobile lemmings like MarySue Lamont. A few blocks west of this neighborhood, starting at Broad Street and culminating at Rittenhouse Square, you find another well tended area, this one made almost glitzy by a run of upscale shops, recently built high rise apartments and hotels, and restaurants like the one where I was feted by the late Mr. Hamish. Between these two patches of relative plenty, however, is an as-yet unredeemed section of town that easily meets the standard definition of urban seedy.
Jay lives illegally here in an old commercial structure. His building is surrounded by Chinese restaurants that serve take-out through bullet proof portals, by no-name video stores specializing in the hardest hard core porn, and by book stores that endure only because their owners are too pig-headed to retire.
As a freelance intellectual whose interests include municipal finance, I naturally understand why neighborhoods like Jay’s have yet to be gentrified. It’s Philadelphia’s skewed taxes. Philly has the highest tax rates of any American city. Higher than New York. Higher than L.A. or Atlanta. Infinitely worse, its tax structure penalizes small entrepreneurs while subsidizing flashy show projects that don’t pay local taxes for decades and often don’t pay them ever.
The result, not suprisingly, is that the wonderful start-ups and small enterprises that have so revitalized cities like Seattle and Boston don’t fill the economic niches in Philadelphia. It’s a situation that drives urban planners crazy. But it’s a craziness that also provides cubby holes for a financial poet like Jay Lombardi and for a guy like me whose life is permanently set on cruise control. People who couldn’t afford to live in a big city that wasn’t a development also-ran. A place that doesn’t attract a flood of ambitious and successful people, the kind who drive up living costs.
This is the real Philadelphia story. What makes Philly one of the world’s perrennial second-tier cities. A city where has-beens, never-wases, and didn’t-bother-to-tries can still survive among their peers.
Jay’s building is the poster child for everything that causes Philadelphia boosters to despair while allowing the economically marginalized to continue their marginal existences. It’s owned by Philadelphia’s most notorious real estate slimball, Arvin Pollock, who prospers by buying once viable properties and letting them rot.
Anywhere else, letting property rot loses money for property owners. In Center City Philadelphia it’s a sure road to riches.
Old Arvin gets endless citations for these properties that he contests in courts
that never get around to issuing enforcement orders because he is a major contributor to the campaigns of every elected city official. These contributions also guarentee favorable tax assessments on his properties and lax collection of these assessments. As a final hedge, he gives generously to a score of Israel-based charities, ensuring that anyone who criticizes his activities too harshly is branded an anti-Semite by leading members of the city’s large and influential Jewish community.
Alvin is thus left in peace while his Center City properties disintergrate. Until owners of nearby properties are so desperate to remove the consequences of his management style from their immediate vicinities that they pay huge premiums to buy what he has contrived to despoil.
In a way, Alvin and I are soul mates. The main difference being that
he makes big bucks from his ruinous large-scale operations while I merely lower the value of my own immediate surroundings as an offshoot of a personal lifestyle.
I ring Jay’s downstairs bell in the coded way that lets him know a friend is doing the ringing. There’s no functioning intercom here and coded rings are the only way to get a buzz back. Nobody who works or lives in this building, legally or illegally, would help you enter otherwise. It’s not the kind of place that encourages walk-ins.
I enter a vestibule that reeks of piss. The smell permeates the whole building but gets stronger the closer you get to the elevator. The stench in the elevator itself is so rank that no one has attempted to ride the thing in a decade. Certainly not the inspector from the city’s Licensing & Inspections Department who has affixed his signature to the inspection certificate on the wall beside the street level elevator door.
Walking up the three flights to Jay’s floor is akin to joining a supply convey passing through downtown Baghdad. Every turn hints at danger. Derelicts sometimes sleep on a landing after a tenant has been fooled into ringing them in. Stray animals have been known to set up light housekeeping in these same spaces. Vermin, some species of which have yet to be classified, crawl or slither over the steps, stopping as you approach as if to calculate whether to challenge your passage.
The building tenants occasionally encountered on these staircases are wraith-like folk who appear to have borrowed an associate’s suit in order to walk the streets, and who stare at you in ways that make you suspect they don’t get enough protein and are willing to supplement their diets in ways you don’t wish to contemplate.
Jay’s third floor office-cum-residence is at the end of a long hallway that could be used as a set for a movie about Russia’s old Lubyanka prison. The paint on its walls is peeling off in curlicues that seem to wriggle in the uncertain light coming from low voltage overhead bulbs. The half-dozen grilled windows on one side of this hallway provide visitors with an excellent view of an adjacent building’s grilled window works. The hallway’s floor is a ridged pastiche of old linoleum, older wood peeking out from under this linoleum, and a few unnaturally black patches that could be holes leading to the second floor or small entrances to the deepest recesses of hell.
On the side of the hallway, away from the grilled windows, are a number of doors that open to what the building management calls office suites. Jay has advised his few visitors never to loiter in front of any of these portals, and under no circumstances to knock or try to peer through their mail slots.
But who needs such a warning in a place like this? You pick up smells going by these doors that could make you want to ride the elevator. You hear sounds that could be the soundtrack for a snuff movie. Every door bears vaguely mercantile lettering identifying tenants as international traders or importer-exporters or so-and-so associates. But if a tentacle were to suddenly snake out from under one of them, a prudent person would just throw it a peanut and keep walking.
Jay must have been looking at this hallway through a peephole. Before I even knock the poet opens his own metal sheeted door and flashes a big smile.
“Come on in, big guy,” he says with enough bonhomie to make one wonder if he’s worked up a sideline selling low-end life insurance. “Rolling Rock’s in the fridge. Pop a can. Take a load off.”
Jay’s end-of-the-hallway office suite is eight feet wide and twelve feet deep. It has a window that faces out on the street, directly across from a theater that’s currently showing “Lady Muff Dragons” and “Cum College Coeds On Holiday.” There’s also a dorm-sized refrigerator, a hot plate and a toaster on a dinette table, two unmatched chairs, some street-rescued bric-a-brac, and a thousand-year-old Motorola television with built in radio. The only other furnishing of note is the sofa-bed on which I sit as Jay pulls up one of the unmatched dinette chairs. Oh yes, there’s also a toilet and wash basin behind a screen. Jay showers at friends’ houses or does without.
“You know about my problem,” I begin.
It’s not a good idea to engage Jay in introductory small talk. With polymaths you have to keep the great brain focused on the issue at hand. Fortunately, in this instance, Jay’s focus and mine are the same—Myron Hamish. Though we are coming at this recently deceased subject from very different directions.
“The cops were grilling me about Hamish all afternoon.”
“About the music man,” says Jay, exuding attentiveness.
“Right. That’s what I’m hoping you can tell me. About the music Myron was working with in that nut house where he worked.”
“Nut house?”
“Bernstein’s.”
Jay leaps out of his chair. He starts pacing back and forth in front of the sofa where I’m sitting, moving his hands up and down like he’s sending smoke signals with a blanket.
“I gotta get in there, Bernie. I gotta get in. You gotta get me in. You gotta.”
“In where?”
“Bernstein’s. Bernstein Financial. These are my people. They don’t know it yet but they will. Yes they will.”
“Your people?”
Jay affects the withering look usually reserved for the ignorati who think that
Walt Whitman was the guy who founded the chocolate sampler company. “What’s to understand? I’m a poet. A financial poet. The country’s foremost, the country’s only, full-time financial poet.”
“Oh...Yeah...Sure.” It’s finally coming into view. His angle. His hope. The reason he’s so anxious to share.
“You get me into Bernstein’s, Bernie, you give me a chance to tell someone in authority over there that I can describe the permutations and perambulations of financial markets in a truly unique and distinctive way, and I am yours for life, good buddy. I will be your encyclopedia. Your window washer. Your hand maiden. Body and soul.”
In truth, I don’t get many offers like this. Nor, in truth, would I want to. So I merely assure Jay that if and when I ever again meet with someone in authority at Bernstein’s, I will absolutely and positively advance his cause.
Jay claps his hands like a kindergartner, blows me a kiss and again takes his
seat. “So, what do you want to know?”
Few people are more self-deluded and more vulnerable than those who have been telling themselves and others for years that they don’t give a rat’s ass about success and recognition, and then suddenly sense a chance to realize both. This wonderful wacko financial poet has somehow gotten it into his head that a corporate giant is actually a place where his kind of creative intelligence is going to be honored, a proposition about as likely as a belief that personal integrity is the key to rising to the top in national politics.
I now clearly see Jay’s in-head linkages. Myron Hamish made it big at Bernstein Financial doing something with music. So why can’t Jay Lombardi do the same with his financial poetry?
Jay is of course overlooking the crucial difference between Myron and
himself. What Myron did with music somehow made a lot of Bernstein viewers and subscribers think it helped them make money, and thus brought new viewers and subscribers into his employer’s fold. Jay’s financial poetry is nothing but pure wit and wisdom in verse. Who the hell is going to pay for that?
Before I can start asking questions about composing the market, which is what Myron was supposed to be doing, my poet-advisor’s enthusiasm again gets the better of him. “Tell me about the parrots,” says Jay.
“You know about the parrots?”
“Of course. Everyone’s heard of the Bernstein parrots.”
In fact, I hadn’t heard about them before visiting the Bernstein Building. But as a certified building visitor I can now provide first-hand observations
“They have these big cages on every floor where they keep a lot of birds. Different sizes and colors. I guess they’re all parrots. Kind of mini-aviaries. Weird.”
“Not weird, Bernie. Classy. A unique corporate showpiece. I’ve heard they even collect the guano, bag it, sell it as fertilizer. Give the money to environmental groups. Classy. I gotta get into this place. I can immortalize these people.”
“Sure, Jay. Absolutely. Now about Myron’s music. I need background about Myron’s music.”
With some effort the poet calms himself and does his best to look serious. As if he’s actually as concerned about a friend’s unfortunate interface with the local constabulary as he is ecstatic about what my predicament might portend for his own career. He now proceeds with a short but instructive lecture about Myron’s market music and why gaining control over this music could be important enough to provoke a murder.
On my way home I go over the story I told Ryman and Smith about my last meeting with Myron in the Bernstein Building, and tie that together with what I’ve just learned from Jay.
That get-together with Myron convinced me that my old Boston employer was indeed in personal danger. After getting a quick tour of the domain Myron
controlled within the Bernstein organization, a domain that included a huge studio where musicians supposedly compose various financial markets, I was half led into a small storage closet.
“Why are we talking in here?” I asked.
“Don’t ask,” was the answer, and I didn’t really have to. I’d spotted the odd ceiling indentations during my brief tour, the kind of indentations where pinhole cameras lurk.
It was in this confined storage space, amid boxed office supplies and a few
shiny new tubas, with both of us standing for lack of chairs, that Myron’s spelled out his fears. “Someone’s wants me dead, Bernie.”
Now why would that be, I wondered? Nice chap like you. “Who,” I said.
“I think one of the Fab Four.”
“The Beatles? One of the Beatles wants you dead?”
“No, peckerhead. Not the Beatles. We call the top brass around here, Bernstein’s top execs, the Fab Four. Ron Pinkman. Kyle Wells. Clarisa Thomas. Malcolm Eggers. The Fab Four.”
“I don’t like being called a peckerhead, Myron. I really don’t.”
In this closet-sized room, me towering over him, Myron Hamish reconsidered his choice of words.
“Hey, old buddy. I’m sorry. You know me, Bernie. I sometimes shoot my mouth off. Let it slide, OK? I’ll make it right by you.”
No, you won’t make it right by me, I thought. You paid me a couple of bills and bought me a nice lunch. I owe you ten more minutes of listening. Then we’re square and I’m gone.
“So why does one of these nasty Fab Four people want you dead?”
“They want my department. They want to take it over. They know it’s a gold mine and that as part of one of their own little empires it would probably lead to running this whole enterprise when the Mitch-man ascends to City Hall. They figure anyone can run this operation, which is pure bullshit. Composing the market musically is very subtle stuff. It needs a fine hand. My hand. The hand that built this department. I found the composers. I brought in the clients. I developed an audience. I...”
“Right, Myron. You’re the music man. So you’re getting threats. Call the cops.”
“I can’t. They’re not exactly, not precisely, threats I’m getting. Just little things
that hint more than they outright threaten. Like emails that come my way from one of the open servers we have all over the building saying it’s time to pick up my chips and move on.”
“Maybe your boss, the Mitch-man, is trying to tell you something.”
Myron shakes his head. “Not his way. Not the Bernstein way.”
I was confused by what I’d heard so far. “So someone wants you to leave your present job. So you’re getting spammed from someone in the building who doesn’t like you and wants you out. Big deal. Sounds to me like business as usual.”
“It’s more than that, Bernie. There’s voice messages on my answering machine when I get home. I’m getting junk mail from outfits that sell burial insurance because someone’s put me on their mailing lists. Some of my composers are asking what would happen to them if I should suddenly disappear, as if someone’s planted that idea in their heads. Little things. Lots of little things. Nothing that’s exactly a threat. But I feel the threat. I feel it.”
“And you want me to do what? Talk to your composers? Find out whose putting ideas in their heads? Maybe have a chat with the Fab Four?”
“No, no. I’ve already quizzed the people who work for me with no results. And there’s no way in hell you can approach any of the Fab Four. What I want...” he seemed to have some difficulty finding the right words to express what he wished to convey. Then: “What I want is for us to hang out together. Be together a lot. A guy your size, seen with me all the time, it might keep away someone who wants to do me
dirty.”
“Hang out with you at work, too?”
“Sure. I could get you a job here. My personal assistant. You wouldn’t even have to get me coffee in the morning.” He smiled shyly at his little jest.
The thought of being Myron Hamish’s shadow during and after working hours was about as appealing to me as mud wrestling with Mike Tyson.
“Let me think it over,” I said. I made my excuses and left.
And that, I figured, was that. I’d heard Myron out and thought that squared us. I didn’t return any of his phone messages in the following days. Then today I get pulled in by the police after Myron got himself murdered.
I told all this to Ryman and Smith at my interrogation. Everything, that is, except Myron’s suspicion about the Fab Four. It wasn’t that I wanted to keep these people out of trouble. It was just my way of making things a bit harder for a couple of cops that were riding my butt harder than necessary. Something in the back of my mind, maybe instinct, also made me think this particular nugget of information might prove personally valuable.
Now the explanation of market music I just got from Jay has given me a pretty good idea why a former Boston real estate hustler who happened to be a music affecionado became such a hot shot in financial circles.
“You know the difference between technical and fundamental analysis,” Jay asked when he finally deigned to clue me in on the matter that had brought me to his place for a visit? The dumb expression he got in reponse made it clear I didn’t. So he knew he had to keep things simple.
“Fundamental analysis of a stock, Bernie, looks at how well the company that issues the stock is doing. It’s sales. Its profits. Its new products. The people who run the company. Got that?”
“Got it.”
“Good. Technical analysis of stocks looks at...” Jay paused as if contemplating how much of a dumbing down would be necessary...”doesn’t look at things like sales and profits, doesn’t consider the intrinsic worth of a company. Instead, it just looks at a stock’s past performance, its high and low prices, in search of patterns that might tell an investor how the stock will be priced in the future. Did you follow that?”
“I guess. Doesn’t make sense, though. How can you predict where a stock’s price is headed if you don’t look at how well the company that issued the stock is doing?”
“I’m not talking sense here, Bernie. I’m talking technical analysis. You want me to continue of not?
“Sorry.”
“No problem. What technical analysts have always looked for, since this market magic started to be used about a hundred years ago...”
“Magic is right. More like astrology.”
“Bernie.
“Sorry.”
“No more interruptions. Technical analysts look for patterns. Like a...what’s a popular one...like a head and shoulder pattern. They see a stock at the highest peak of the head in this pattern, and they figure it’s gonna go down the other side of the head, then down further along a line resembling a shoulder. And they invest
accordingly.”
“Do stock prices actually behave that way?”
“Sometimes they do,” Jay answered. “Sometimes they don’t.”
“So why does anyone listen to analysts who are wrong as often as they’re right?”
“Because most investors are fucking imbeciles. That’s why. And the only thing that can save them is my poetry. Now you wanna hear about your dead friend Myron’s gig or don’t you?”
I did. Jay went on to explain that a few years ago Myron, who somehow had gotten himself a brokerage license after migrating to Philly from Boston, approached people at Bernstein’s and told them he had a musical way of doing technical analysis. He said he could work with musicians who converted the past price movements of stocks and their trading volumes into musicial notation, make this ‘music’ listenable by adding free style jazz riffs, then compose these movements into the future.
Myron’s sales pitch, as Jay explained it, came across as almost plausible. If a musician has a natural feel for a particular musical idiom, say rock and roll, he can sometimes ‘play ahead’ a few bars of a song after hearing the previous bars of that song because the idiom follows rules that the musician understands. If you buy this way of thinking it makes sense that after composing, say, the previous eight or ten bars of a stock’s own music, which represent its recent price movements, some musicians with a special ‘feel’ could compose the next two bars, which when transposed back to a price chart would tell you where the stock was headed in the immediate future.
Myron guzzied up this theory with a few odds and ends. Such as the fact that some scientists believe that the audial sense is more deeply rooted in people than the visual sense. And the observation that a surprising number of technical analysts are also musically trained, suggesting they only think they’re seeing future stock patterns on charts when they are actually hearing these patterns on a sub-conscious level.
This explanation made me wince. “Wacko,” I said. “Why should stock prices follow patterns that are utterly divorced from the underlying behavior of the company that ssued the stock? If a company just announced its going bankrupt, will its share price go up just because some analyst who looks at a chart or listens to a tune thinks it will go up.”
“Why not?” said Jay. “Happens all the time. Enough people buy into a theory, any theory, it becomes fact.”
“It’s wacko, Jay. Wacko. Doesn’t anyone notice that these people are wrong as often as they’re right about the direction a stock is headed?”
“Let’s just say, Bernie, that their batting average is no worse than your typical fundamental analyst. The real stroke of genius with Myron was that he found the perfect medium for this shtick. A financial broadcaster. People wake up every morning and hear IBM or GM played on a synthesizer, and they think they’re ready to invest their money a little more wisely. Fund managers use Hamish musical analytics to justify their stock buying and selling. It’s a great cover-your-asser. Your poor dead friend even made a packet for his company recording CDs for market professionals. My favorite is ‘S&P 100—1998.’ It’s got a great harmonica solo. Wanna hear it?”
So here I am. Walking home. Understanding lots of things about dead Myron’s business and the reason for his murder. But at a total loss about how to proceed with this knowledge. A situation that was about to change dramatically.
