Maelstrom

I couldn't take my eyes off of him. The Ted Burton Suit. The round glasses. Short neat beard. Cool focused demeanour. Back arched, head leaning to one side. His hand swished feverishly at something on his table. The only thing that interrupted my intense gaze was a draft of cold Manhattan air that rushed into the shop when the door opened. A group of tourists had finished exploring Hudson Yards and were ready to refuel. A vibration from my pocket sent shockwaves of anxiety through me. I pushed my thoughts away. Cold sweat held onto to my forehead. A reminder. I resumed my post at the glass wash. The man checked his watch, a simple timepiece with a brown strap and gold face. He cradled his coffee cup for a moment. It seemed like he was in a rush and also had all the time in the world. I hated him in that moment.

A vibration again. I look at the screen stealthily behind a tower of mugs and see messages, voicemails, and more messages. I reply ‘Leave me ALONE!’, and the message bounces back. The room isn’t big enough, I needed some space, and I felt trapped. Trapped in this job, trapped in this shop, trapped in my life. I have to start emptying the bin to get another glimpse of him. This time he’s people watching, his eyes don’t land anywhere in particular it seems. The back of his head moves periodically like a sentry. I stumbled out of the shop and tripped up on a dip in the concrete floor of alley. I fell on the bin bag which tore and leaked stale coffee and heat treated cream on my uniform. In a moment of rage I pounded the bag against the side of dumpster with my foot until catharsis eluded me. Despair lingered when I realised my phone had gotten caught in the fall. The screen felt like it echoed my life, fractured. A weight hung around my neck and legs, what was the point.

The coffee shop was empty when I returned. I cleared some space around the wash area and did a double take as I realised that my subject had vanished. I wandered over to his table; I never cleared tables, even when asked nicely. There was a small black leather notebook. It was unassuming and lay beside a napkin that had one word written in neat handwriting with tall flourishes, it read ‘maelstrom’. The coffee cup lay abandoned at the side of the table, the hallmark of a table that has been vacated by its owner. Was this what the bearded man had been working on? The handwriting alone was meticulous so it was natural to assume it was a diary. Was he a writer? Was he preparing for a job interview? I had to know.

Every moment from when I first slid the black notebook into the palm of my hands was spent wondering. I managed to auto-pilot my way through 30 excruciating minutes to my safe haven, the break out room. Free to go on my break, I was out of the clutches of the shift supervisor. We called her the ‘Eye of Sauron’. I found the darkest corner of the room, the ceiling low, beanbags huddled together. The bag moulded to the shape of my body and rustled, and I opened the notebook. Charming, no name. That familiar handwriting made a grand entrance about 20 pages deep. It looked like some sort of address book or contact list. Initials like ‘HIS’, ‘MCD’, ‘AA’ appeared with what looked like short numbers. I turned over page after blank page, when I nearly flicked past it. Some login details were scribbled in the top right hand corner, there was that word again ‘maelstrom’ and another ‘Winter2020’. I was baffled that older people still wrote their details down like this in notebooks and revelled in the benefits of Face ID and ‘remember my password’ for a moment. The next page showed what looked like a budget breakdown or rough statement of expenses, then I saw it. $20,000.00, mind racing, the scanning of text. I looked for any mention of Visa, Chase Bank, American Express. There must be some clue of where this money was kept. My screen was holding itself together, ‘Unknown Number’ flashed up on my screen again and I quickly declined the call. There wasn’t much to be excited about in life at this point, here was a chance to get myself out of a bad situation, and if I had to dig through a notebook to help myself to some money then so be it.

I found a mention of a website through some pages further along the notebook. iTrade.com. Sometimes it was written in the margin, sometimes it was jotted down in the corners, tucked away like breadcrumbs for me to find. I put the book down and moved on. Surely this man hadn’t put his account details and the site that he used in the same place. I imagined this man on the subway riding to work, fumbling the seat next to him to discover he’d made a huge mistake. The panic, he must have felt. Panic. What if he remembered to call the coffee shop? It was now or never. I landed on iTrade.com which asked if I was logging into a Brokerage account or a Savings account. I leant the notebook open on my knee as if it was my companion, carefully reading the login details I’d already memorised, I typed and clicked login.

10 minutes remained of my break, the familiar roasted chocolate and burnt coffee fragrances sailed past the break-out room door and down the narrow corridor. The Safari page refreshed and presented me with some kind of dashboard. Show me the money. The suit, maybe this guy was Wall Street? One of the widgets displays one trade in a graph with a green incline to indicate a healthy surplus of funds. I had decided I was already an expert. The information I absorbed from the notebook and the handy hints and tips on the dashboard swirled around to produce a cocktail of finance knowledge. Then I saw what I was after, ‘$20,000.00 available in cash account’, B-I-N-G-O. Anything was possible now. The mistakes of the past seemed behind me on the horizon, and the possibilities for the future bubbled up to the surface. My hands were clammy, for the first time not out of fear, but out of ecstasy. I imagined what I could do with the money. Imagined? Hell, I had already spent half of it. A painful reminder of the past sobered me up and reminded me how little this money meant in the grand scheme of things. A flutter, a serotonin rush, and then you’ve gone bust.

This wasn’t my money, yet. I covered the broad strokes of the account, made sure it was populated with my bank details, name, and address. I did get a name of my mystery man though, Malcolm Jennings. Definitely Wall Street. Malcolm’s account had been commandeered for a better purpose. Who knows how he had come into this money, money laundering, some tax avoidance scheme. I felt secure. 5 minutes left of my break now. I turned back to my prized possession, the notebook. There was one last page which detailed out a ‘trade to end all trades’. Research collected by my new friend Malcolm showed that there would be a window of opportunity to buy a stock for a propulsion company under the stock name ‘JET’, and that this opportunity could yield a 6 digit sum. Malcolm’s handwriting had been scrawled in every line. Calculations and tables backed up the tale of the meteoric rise of this company, its founder a notorious CEO for his aggressive growth in the market. I looked at the graph on the dashboard with the one and only trade Malcolm had executed on this account, it had succeeded in creating a windfall of cash, which after taxes and broker fees landed in his account at the figure I gawked at. The stock traded was ‘JET’ and was completed less than a month ago.

A pre-programmed option margin trade was saved in drafts ready to execute the instructions carefully woven together by Malcolm. All it needed was a push. I could leverage the money in Malcolm’s account to buy even more stock by borrowing against the funds available in the account. I was convinced I worked on Wall Street at this point, it’s amazing how much Google can teach you. More stocks meant a greater cash windfall when the ‘JET’ stock surged again. I thought about all the mistakes I made in the past, all the hurt I had caused, a life I had ruined. This was a way to wipe the slate clean. A voice told me to quit whilst I was ahead. To back out now and drain Malcolm of his funds, this was his fault after all. My finger hovered over the cash out button. I felt lighter on my feet when I was back at the wash station. I had made it back late from my break without the eye noticing, it seemed the stars were aligning for me. A notification hummed against my leg whilst I rushed through cleaning up some trays over 2 hours. Soon I’d be out of this dump I thought. Brad, one of the baristas, told me that a customer had urinated on the toilet floor and asked me to mop it up. I counted money in my head on the way down the corridor to the customer toilet. I contemplated the mess in front of me when I heard that voice.

‘You didn’t recognise me this morning, did you?’ it was Malcolm, but not the stranger I enjoyed observing. Malcolm, the brother of my ex-girlfriend in the Ted Burton suit.

‘W-w-what are you doing here?’

‘It’s funny, a margin on a stock can be your best friend or your worst enemy. It can change your life, then in a moment turn ugly and take everything you ever loved away. You love money, Mike, that’s why you were okay spending all of my sisters on gambling. Only experienced traders use Margins, Mike.’ I struggled to find any words, my tongue felt dry and swollen. Malcolm laughed.

‘It’s okay, don’t talk, it’s easier this way. See, I’m just the messenger. I knew you were greedy, but taking that black notebook and using it to take someone’s money, I wasn’t shocked. Kate said it would never work, but I said you are a rat. It was a test, and you failed. Check your phone’.

Through the cracked screen I could see piles of notifications. An unknown number with a text ‘I’M COMING’, followed by another ‘CAN’T IGNORE FOREVER’. The next pile of texts were from iTrade, ‘Margin Call’, ‘Funds required’. A text from my bank which advised ‘there was a lack of funds to process a payment’. I felt vomit in my throat.

Malcolm looked at me with cold eyes and continued ‘trading on a strangers stock account, pretty much like picking up a credit card you found on the sidewalk and expecting to pay for dinner with it. See when you borrow for a trade and the stock plummets suddenly, like when a CEO is fired, the brokerage reserves the right to sell the stock at a loss and take back the loaned money immediately’. Penny dropped. I changed the bank account details to mine. I had just been paid, the rent was due and I was already behind. The last text from the bank read my account name and listed the funds available as $0.00.

Malcom pushed me hard so that I landed in the pool of piss on the floor.

‘Oh that’s right, I can’t forget to do up my zipper. You thought you were a steady ship out at calm sea, well, then along came a Maelstrom’.