For Love and Money: A Novel of Stocks and Robbers by Leslie Glass

CHAPTER 1
 ANNIE CUSTER WORKED FOR A FORCE SO POWERFUL THAT
 NOTHING ON EARTH COULD CONTROL IT. Sometimes it acted
 like a perfect summer of endless sunny days with showers that came and
 went only before dawn. And sometimes it brought season after season of
 hurricanes with tornadoes and tidal waves that wreaked destruction
 everywhere. When times were good, the whole world wanted to get into the
 stock market and ride its highs to the top. When it turned bad, everyone
 wanted to run away and hide from its devastation. The funny thing about
 the stock market, though, was that anyone could take a vacation and miss
 the highs; but no one could escape the tsunami waves, the avalanches, the
 free-fall crashes. They affected everyone. Everywhere.
 God or the devil or nature itself, the stock market was the true dictator
 that ruled the earth. No one could conquer it forever, not its former
 chairman, who took too much pay, or anyone else. For better or worse,
 when it started to move in any direction it changed lives. On Monday,
 September 18, it was Annie Custer’s turn to get caught in the deadly
 currents.
 That day there was mixed feeling on Wall Street. The good news was that
 after the deluge of 9/11 and several years of market free fall, recovery of the
 Dow and NASDAQ finally seemed firmly on track. The bad news was that
 parts of the economy hadn’t followed suit. Turned out there couldn’t be
 such a thing as a jobless recovery, or a recovery of jobs in only one sector.
 From sea to shining sea, millions of people in many fields were still out of
 work and suffering.
 In the brokerage business, customers were still licking their wounds and
 regarding their brokers with suspicion for bad investment advice from years
 past as well as the financial irregularities that had surfaced in the fall of

giant companies and the toppling of dot-coms. Billions of dollars in paper
 gains had disappeared forever, and not without repercussions. Above all, the
 United States is a free and litigious country. Clients were suing their brokers
 left and right, placing the blame for all their woes squarely on them.
 Annie Custer’s old-line firm, Hall Stale, was taking a big hit. The firm
 had so many complaints to defend that there was a logjam of arbitrations
 looming years into the future. It was costing a lot of money to settle the
 legitimate cases, and costing even more to fight the clearly ridiculous ones.
 For Hall Stale—and the brokerage business in general—it was a lose–lose
 situation.
 In addition to the lawsuits, something else was making business difficult
 for brokers. New standards for consumer protection had cut commissions to
 pennies. Former million-dollar-a-year brokers were struggling to make six
 figures, and six-figure brokers were out of the game altogether. Offices
 were emptying, and people were without work of any kind. The climate was
 as uncomfortable for brokers as it had been decades ago in the early 1970s
 when all the small investment houses went out of business and thousands of
 people lost their jobs.
 That Monday morning, Annie was worrying about the usual subjects:
 money, her husband, her daughters. Money, her husband, her daughters.
 Money . . . husband . . . daughters. Every day it was the same thing. She had
 a greatly reduced income and the same old bills—and she was one of the
 lucky ones. Her husband had not died in the World Trade Center attack, her
 clients were still solvent, and she hadn’t been sued. All in all, she was an
 unusual person—and she’d worked hard. She’d never been just a stock
 jockey who pushed the stocks of whatever companies, bonds, or funds Hall
 Stale happened to be promoting at the moment. She was more than the
 money managers who specialized in different areas but never did the actual
 transactions. She logged in most of the trades for her clients herself—
 hundreds of thousands of them a year—and she didn’t rely solely on her
 assistant to do the scut work, either. She wasn’t above doing paperwork.
 She opened accounts, closed them, transferred money when people bought
 houses, and explained along the way.

For Love and Money: A Novel of Stocks and Robbers by Leslie Glass