February 1996
Billy Dose dropped his token into the subway turnstile at Franklin Street. Inside he fell, half-asleep, onto a bench next to a man who really was asleep. It had been a long day, culminating in an interminable sales call on an exotic bird store.

The birds had flown overhead shrieking while he tried to sell the owners a website, a tricky business in the first place. It required raising their ambitions enough to think they needed a website, without raising their hopes too much about how it would look.

The bird people, for example, had wanted an animated merry-go-round, revolving to display eight different types of parrot. Once the contract was signed, Billy would have to inform that they could have one picture, one small motionless picture, in black-and-white. Anything else would take an eternity to download, even by the fastest 28.8 baud modems.
 
  

His employer was a small site-building company, too small to be fussy about its clientele. Billy's accounts were a diverse collection of people who did not know how to run a business.

There was the pub that closed on New Year's Eve, and the ice-cream shop that shut for summer vacation. There was the boutique catering to transvestites that refused to sell clothes to actual women. And there were the out-and-out fly-by-night operations, people who wanted to sell envelope-stuffing schemes, royal titles, and the World's Greatest Car Wax over the Internet.

He had to get out of sales before it killed him.

But what else could he do? He had started as a teenager, selling ice cream to children from a Good Humor truck. The side of the truck had pictures of 30 types of ice cream, precisely two of which were in stock. Every day, he would run out of humor long before he ran out of ice cream.

Billy put his head in his hands. A train pulled into the station, slowly, and then speeded up and left without stopping.

He was thirty years old, and he had only two job skills: he didn't look down on advertising, and he didn't look down on the Internet.
Lying on her back, Veda Bierce was looking at the ceiling. It was pink. The walls were pink, too, and so was the carpet. Everything at the Sloper Home for Unmarried Women was pink except the furniture, which was of the white-and-gold princess type little girls dreamed of and overindulgent parents bought.

There were no little girls at the Sloper Home. Veda, as far as she could tell, was the only woman under 35. But it had been the only place to live she could find on very short notice. In Manhattan's tight housing market, where some people scanned the obituaries for tips on vacancies, there was always space at the Sloper Home, a hulking, smoke-stained building taking up a quarter-block on Grammercy Park.

She had a roommate here, too, a pudgy girl named Sheila Levine who covered their shared bulletin board with magazine pictures of men in suits. Once upon a time, Sheila had explained, she'd cut out pictures of pop stars and athletes, but now her taste had matured.

It was Friday night, and Sheila was downstairs in the Sloper TV room with all the other girls who complained they could never meet anyone to date. Veda was lying in bed, looking at the ceiling.

She was in trouble again, this time at work. A boss had been hired, eventually, and had been quick to notice that she had failed to produce any audience-grabbing big stories for the site's big launch, which was less than a week away.

It was hard to find sexy financial news, particularly when she was so busy moving.

The boss had suggested more Silicon Alley stories, but most Silicon Alley stories were the same. Some kids worked on their ideas in a garret; when an idea was half-finished enough to sound promising, an investment banker would convince them to sell stock. All the stock would be bought at vainglorious prices by dentists and chiropractors who read Wired, and the kids - now wealthy, along with the investment banker - would never be heard from again, while continuing to work on their ideas in a garret.
  
Veda rolled over, face-down on the pink bedspread.

She missed Nicky, who was living somewhere with his policeman friend. Men weren't allowed upstairs at the Sloper Home, and Nicky had visited her once, just once, in the "beau room" downstairs. A sort of visitors parlor, it was painted pink, too, but souped up a little with pink-and-green flowered wallpaper. Nicky said it was like walking into a box of Tampax, and he wouldn't come back.

She sighed. Ideas for stories. Ideas for stories. There was nothing more frustrating than trying to come up with story ideas when you simply didn't have them.

Across the room, something caught her eye. On Sheila's bulletin board, among her men in suits, there was a blond man, sitting astride the corner of a desk. His lips were budded like a frosting flower.

Veda got up and examined the clipping more closely. It was the same tattered clipping she had seen....where had she seen it?....in Oysterette Postman's office, more than a year ago. Investment banker Richard Godersley, said the caption, predicts the Dow Average may someday surpass 5000.

Veda made a face. Why DID women like this guy? He looked like the cartoon prince in a Disney movie.

Still, Veda reflected, he was in finance, and she was badly in need of a financial news story. A sexy financial news story, and she was sure he would give her an interview if she asked. These days, every investment banker wanted the world to think they were heavily involved in high-tech.

There was no reason the site couldn't offer sexy financial news for women. These days, they smoked cigars too.

Security was tight at the Chase Manhattan Building, and because Veda didn't have any photo identification, or at least any photo identification with the name Veda Bierce on it, she had a great deal of difficulty being let upstairs to interview Richard Godersley.

After a great deal of negotiation, the guards were persuaded to accept her cafeteria pass from the Sloper Home, and Veda got onto the elevator. Richard Godersley's office was on the 54th Floor. The ride made her ears pop.

"Oh, you're here," said his secretary, perhaps thinking the troubles with security would have driven Veda away entirely. "He - he's not ready yet. Actually, he's in the men's room. Would you like to wait in his office?"

Veda consented. You could learn all sorts of interesting things by looking around people's empty offices.

As soon as she was through the door, however, she forgot about snooping. Richard Godersley's office had a huge picture window, floor-to-ceiling, and so high in the heavens that it was eye-to-eye with the spires of other skyscrapers. She could have reached out and touched them. Venturing close to the window, Veda looked down. Buildings that seemed gigantic from the street seemed from here like packages dropped on the sidewalk.

"Hello," said someone behind her.
 
  

Turning around, she saw the man from the photograph. In person, he was more rugged than the photo, as if he'd been sunburned too many times. His suit, cut to fit his athletic shoulders, gave him the appearance of a trained swimmer who had just suddenly gotten dressed. All along the nape of his neck were tiny golden curls.

"I'm Richard Godersley," he said, extending his hand.

His handshake had a little charge to it.

"Hello," said Veda.

"Would you like to sit down?" he asked.

She looked directly at him, pinching herself with her left hand as she shook with her right.

"Yes," she said.

He was the most beautiful man she'd ever seen. He looked like some kind of late 20th century deity, an Apollo of Wall Street, seated at the desk with the skyscraper peaks behind him.

"So, tell me about your technology investments," she said, trying to regain composure.

"Well, actually, I prefer the software sector," he said, sitting back in his chair. "I've been investing in software companies since I joined this firm three years ago. It was a sector we hadn't explored very much, and it seemed like a good way for the new guy at the firm to get noticed. I certainly wasn't going to get noticed doing another financial service merger deal."

"I wouldn't think you'd have any trouble getting noticed," she said.

He looked a little confused, but he laughed.

"All these young firms," she said. "How do you decide who gets financing, when they're ready?

"Well, if they return phone calls that's a good sign," he said. "And if they show up for appointments. Some of my colleagues are so eager to invest that they just throw money at anything high-tech. But I think these whiz-kids can't succeed in business without at least a modicum of organization and courtesy. I mean, I do let them put their feet on our furniture."

"With or without shoes?"

"Oh, I insist on shoes. "

He smiled. She almost expected his office chair would turn to gold around him.

"I have a question for you, now," he said. "About Silicon Alley. I get a sense of bumbling. Is it active deceit, or do people really not know what they're doing?"

"Well," she said, thinking for a moment, "I think a lot of people work in web businesses because they're bumblers. This is their second chance in life. They did a lot of other things beforehand; they just weren't very good at it."

"Is that true of you, too?" he said, smiling.

She smiled back.
 
  

When she got back to the office, there was someone new sitting in the desk beside her.

"What happened to Jason?" she asked.

"He's been fired," said the new guy. "They just did the first round of fact-checking today. You know that story about the software developer naming his new release after his favorite hooker?"

"Meunier Microsystems," she said. "I remember."

"It turned out to be his daughter."

"Oh," said Veda.

"I don't like him," said Nicky, when Veda told him about Richard Godersley.

She was telling him the story of the interview over a Cosmopolitan, a fashionable pink vodka drink. They were at a gay bar where Nicky's cop friend had insisted on meeting him. The cop friend had told him not to look at anyone else while waiting, a difficult assignment, since part of the decor involved well-built go-go boys actually showering on the bar.

"You haven't even met him," Veda said of Richard. "You can't not like him."

"He's an investment banker," said Nicky. "He doesn't create anything. He just moves money around. Wall Street sleight-of-hand."

"He's giving high-tech businesses funding when they need it," said Veda.

"He's a parasite," said Nicky, taking a big sip of vodka. "It's an agricultural fact. Whenever you have too much of a crop in one place, you get an abundance of pests that feed off that crop."

Veda looked up at the showering boys, who were having a shift change.

"I have no more money for drinks," said Nicky, winking at the bartender, who bought him one.

"Investment bankers," said Nicky.
 

Library of Congress Copyright TXu 875-975