【正文】 door. Then I realized that it must be the front of the palace and that we fund raiser types had been let in like delivery boys, through the back. Anyway, the queen mother was headed our way. Behind her walked Jeeves, straight as a broom, clad in white tie and tails and carrying a silver tray. Following Jeeves, in procession, was a team of small, tubular dogs, called cis, that looked like large rats . The English think cis are cute. The British royals, I was later told, never go anywhere without them. A plete hush enveloped the Great Hall of St. James39。s now legendary ment that to succeed on the Salomon Brothers trading floor a person had to wake up each morning ready to bite the ass off a bear. That, I said, didn39。s degree in economics at the London School of Economics, when I received an invitation to dine with the queen mother. It came through a distant cousin of mine who, years before, and somewhat improbably, had married a German baron. Though I was not the sort of person regularly invited to dine at St. James39。t bound by the Meriwether code. Who knows? Maybe he didn39。re going to play for those kind of numbers, I39。s doing, and if not, how do I exploit his ignorance? If he bids high, is he bluffing, or does he actually hold a strong hand? Is he trying to induce me to make a foolish bid, or does he actually have four of a kind himself? Each player seeks weakness, predictability, and pattern in the others and seeks to avoid it in himself. The bond traders of Goldman, Sachs, First Boston, Man Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and other Wall Street firms all play some version of Liar39。s Poker a group of people梐 s few as two, as many as ten 梖 orm a circle. Each player holds a dollar bill close to his chest. The game is similar in spirit to the card game known as I Doubt It. Each player attempts to fool the others about the serial numbers printed on the face of his dollar bill. One trader begins by making a bid. He says, for example, Three sixes. He means that all told the serial numbers of the dollar bills held by every player, including himself, contain at least three sixes. Once the first bid has been made, the game moves clockwise in the circle. Let39。s Poker was the only way to go. The game had a powerful meaning for traders. People like John Meriwether believed that Liar39。s claim that she was once quite a dish. At times Gutfreund himself seemed to agree. He loved to trade. Compared with managing, trading was admirably direct. You made your bets and either you won or you lost. When you won, people 梐 ll the way up to the top of the firm 梐dmired you, envied you, and feared you, and with reason: You controlled the loot. When you managed a firm, well, sure you received your quota of envy, fear, and admiration. But for all the wrong reasons. Vou did not make the money for Salomon. You did not take risk. You were hostage to your producers. They took risk. They proved their superiority every day by handling risk better than the rest of the risktaking world. The money came from risk takers such as Meriwether, and whether it came or not was really beyond Gutfreund39。s Poker player. Meriwether cast a spell over the young traders who worked for him. His boys ranged in age from twentyfive to thirtytwo (he was about forty). Most of them had .39。s Poker champion of the Salomon Brothers trading floor. On the other hand, one thing you learn on a trading floor is that winners like Gutfreund always have some reason for what they do。s challenge this time was the size of the stake. Normally his bets didn39。s cigar droppings were longer and better formed than those of the average Salomon boss. I always assumed that he smoked a more expensive blend than the rest, purchased with a few of the $40 million he had cleared on the sale of Salomon Brothers in 1981 (or a few of the $3. 1 million he paid himself in 1986, more than any other Wall Street CEO). This day in 1986, however, Gutfreund did something strange. Instead of terrifying us all, he walked a straight line to the trading desk of John Meriwether, a member of the board of Salomon Inc. and also one of Salomon39。 Stoughton, all of whom gave guidance and paid on time. Also Robert Ducas and David Soskin for intelligent advice. Finally, he wishes to thank his parents, Diana and Tom Lewis. They are, of course, directly responsible for any errors, sins, or omissions herein. Liar39。 Liar39。m not holding my breath waiting for another windfall What happened was a rare and amazing glitch in the fairly predictable history of getting and spending. It should be said that I was, by the standards we use to measure ourselves, a success. I made a lot of money. I was told often by people who ran our firm that I would one day join them at the top. I would rather not make this boast early. But the reader needs to know that I have been given no reason to feel bitterly toward or estranged from my former employer. I set out to write this book only because I thought it would be better to tell the story than to go on living the story. 70 Preface Acknowledgments THE AUTHOR wishes to thank Michael Kinsley and The New Republic, Stephen Fay and Business, Starling Lawrence and W. W. Norton, Ion Trewin and Hodder amp。t need to. You felt him. The area around you began to convulse like an epileptic ward. People were pretending to be frantically busy and at the same time staring intently at a spot directly above your head. You felt a chill in your bones that I imagine belongs to the same class of intelligence as the nervous twitch of a small furry animal at the silent approach of a grizzly bear. An alarm shrieked in your head: Gutfreund! Gutfreund! Gutfreund! Often as not, our chairman just hovered quietly for a bit, then left. You might never have seen him. The only trace I found of him on two of these occasions was a turdlike ash on the floor beside my chair, left, I suppose, as a calli