Counterattack by W. E. B. Griffin

Author:W. E. B. Griffin [Griffin, W. E. B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical - General, World War; 1939-1945, War & Military, General, United States, Historical, Men's Adventure, Fiction, Fiction - Men's Adventure, United States - History; Military - 20th century, United States - History, Marines
ISBN: 9780515104172
Publisher: Jove Books
Published: 1990-09-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

(One)

Office of the Chairman of the Board

Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation

San Francisco, California

16 January 1942

The ten-story Pacific & Far Eastern Shipping Corporation Building had been completed in March of 1934, six months before the death of Captain Ezekiel Pickering, who was then Chairman of the Board. There were a number of reasons why Captain Pickering had two years before, in 1932, ordered its construction, including, of course, the irrefutable argument that the corporation needed the office space.

But it was also Captain Pickering’s response to Black Tuesday, the stock market crash of October 1929, and the Depression that followed. Pacific & Far Eastern—which was to say Captain Pickering personally, for the corporation was privately held— was not hurt by the stock market crash. Captain Ezekiel Pickering was not in the market.

He had dabbled in stocks over the years, whenever there was cash he didn’t know what else to do with for the moment. But in late 1928 he had gotten out, against the best advice of his broker. He had had a gut feeling that there was something wrong with the market when, for example, he heard elevator operators and newsstand operators solemnly discussing the killings they had made.

The idea of the stock market was a good one. In his mind it was sort of a grocery store where one could go to shop around for small pieces of all sorts of companies, or to offer for sale your small shares of companies. Companies that you knew—and you knew who ran them, too. But the market had stopped being that. In Ezekiel Pickering’s mind, it had become a socially sanctioned crap game where the bettors put their money on companies they knew literally nothing about, except that the shares had gone up so many points in the last six months.

The people playing the market—and he thought “playing” was both an accurate description of what they were doing and symbolic—often had no idea what the company they were buying into made, or how well they did so. And they didn’t really understand that a thousand shares at thirty-three-and-a-quarter really meant thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty real dollars.

And it was worse than that: they weren’t even really playing craps with real money, they were buying on the margin, putting up a small fraction of the thirty-three thousand two hundred fifty and borrowing the rest.

Ezekiel Pickering had nothing against gambling. When he had been twenty-nine and First Mate of the tanker Pacific Courier, he had once walked out of a gaming house in Hong Kong with fifty thousand pounds sterling when the cards had come up right at chemin de fer. But he had walked into the Fitzhugh Club with four thousand dollars American that was his, not borrowed, and that he was prepared—indeed, almost expected—to lose. To his way of looking at it, the vast difference between his playing chemin de fer with his own cash money at the Fitzhugh Club and the elevator man in the Andrew Foster Hotel playing

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