"How about Mo?"
"No one calls me Mo."
"Excellent! I shall be the first." She had large features, a wide serious mouth that turned slightly up or down at the corners. Down in this case. "I thought of you as Moira," Joe explained, "mysterious Celt, born for the luck of the Burkes."
"Born to be bad," she said. "You can think of me any way you like, Joe Burke. I must be going. Bye." She twirled her sun glasses, smiled once, and left. He watched to see if she would swing her ass a little for his benefit, but she didn't. Her eyes stayed with him—large and sensitive, clear. She was nearly six feet tall and broad across the shoulders. Her hands were as big as his. Not the happiest of campers, he said to himself.
He went back to thinking about Victor Sperandeo's book. As a teen-ager, Trader Vic made a living playing cards in New York. Then he moved into the big casino on Wall Street. His book was straight exposition, written without pretense. Joe had read other books about the market. There were many different approaches and specialties: day trading, intermediate and long term investing, stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities. Sperandeo was someone he could relate to personally, a maverick.
There were other market gurus who made sense to him—John Train and Warren Buffett, especially. They espoused a long-term strategy: think before you buy, and then, once having bought, continue to buy on dips and hold unless the company changed fundamentally for the worse. Sperandeo was more of a trader. Joe was torn between the two approaches. Discount brokerages had just become available on the Internet; one could trade without having to actually live in New York. On line discussion groups argued about stocks 24 hours a day. He decided to buy a computer.
Three hours later Joe paid the cab fare and carried his new system up to the apartment, one box at a time. He had it working in an hour and went to bed pleased with himself.
The following day he opened an account with a service provider for Internet access. There was an e-mail message from Kate waiting at his old address in Maine. Joe had agreed to pay Kate's mechanic $30 a month to store the truck and had asked him to go over it, change the oil, and do whatever needed doing. Joe replied that the check would be in the mail and wished her a Happy New Year. The Internet is amazing, he thought. The message was in Maine; Kate was in Seattle; he was in Honolulu and could be anywhere.
"Damn, Batman, we're global!"
On impulse, he found a number listed for W. Soule and called her on the old fashioned telephone. After a recorded message and a beep, he said, "Mo, this is Joe Burke. I'm having adventures. Want to have lunch?" He left his number and hung up. When he returned from a walk, the red message light was blinking.