Rigged by Ben Mezrich Read Free Book Online Page B

They’re going to haze the hell out of me until I prove myself. You went through this in the beginning too?”
    Reston laughed. “Hey, don’t lump me in with you, Harvard. I’m an Irish kid from Plano, Texas. I nearly flunked out of high school and got into college because I’m good at throwing a baseball. After college, I found out I was good at something else—trading. When I got the offer from the Merc, I’d never been out of Texas—but I hopped on a plane the next day.”
    David tried to imagine getting on that plane, heading off toward the unknown; it wasn’t that hard for him, considering that he’d done the same thing when he’d gone to England, crossing an ocean for the first time.
    “I met my wife on the flight to my first interview,” Reston said. “I became a trader and a New Yorker all in one week. I got my ass handed to me so many times by this place and this city, fuck, you have no idea.”
    “But you hung in there,” David said. He wasn’t just kissing ass, he was truly a bit unnerved by the chaos of the trading floor, and especially the character of the traders he’d seen. He hadn’t expected Ivy Leaguers, but he hadn’t expected a high school locker room either.
    “They have a saying here: from garbagemen to millionaires. Guys like me and Giovanni and Vitzi come to this place with nothing, scratching and clawing our way through the front door. And if we’re smart, if we’re lucky, if we’ve got the balls—we get rich beyond our wildest dreams.”
    David didn’t know if it was hyperbole or bravado, but if Giovanni was any indication, there had to be some truth to the saying. David had to admit that he liked the sound of it: garbagemen to millionaires.
    “Well, it won’t be the first place I’ve ever been where my education was a negative. That trading floor looked like my family reunion.”
    Maybe he’d have to revert to the person his parents had spenta hundred grand to get rid of—but David wasn’t going to give up as easily as the last Giovanni Kid.
    “Well, don’t throw away your gray matter just yet, boyo, because your office isn’t in the heart of the Merc.”
    The elevator came to a stop, and Reston pointed to the digital readout.
    “Fifteenth floor. This is where you work. The brain.”

Chapter 7
    T he first thing David noticed as he stepped out onto the fifteenth floor was that it was quiet. Wonderfully, soothingly quiet—such a stark contrast from the trading pits downstairs that it was hard to believe both were encased in the same fortresslike building. The second thing he noticed was that straight ahead, at the end of a long, carpeted hallway banked on either side by low cubicles, hung a picture of himself. Eye level, maybe a little crooked, directly above a glass desk behind which sat the woman he’d been picturing for an entire week. He hadn’t been that far off considering that he’d been working only from her voice. She was matronly but pretty, more curves than edges, with overflowing, reddish-brown hair barely controlled by what seemed to be a mix of hair spray, barrettes, and prayer. Though she was wearing a gray suit that looked expensive, her thick makeup and blood-red lipstick and nails told David that she had probably grown up on the same streets as his cousins—well, maybe not Brooklyn, but probably New Jersey. And if she was anything like David’s cousins, although she seemed sweet as sugar, she’d probably have no problem clawing your eyeballs out if you looked at her thewrong way. At the moment, she was all smiles, already up and out of her chair by the time David and Reston had made it halfway down the long carpeted hall.
    “Glad to see you survived the trading floor with all four limbs still attached,” she said by way of a greeting. Instead of a handshake, she offered David a manila envelope. “Here’s your employment package. Nothing too confusing in there, I promise, just a W-2 and a welcome letter. We like to keep things simple up