Polly Wins (standard:adventure, 4378 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Aug 06 2007	Views/Reads: 3215/2280	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Achieving success beyond your wildest dreams can be fulfilling -- and even erase the pain and regret of an unexpected volcanic eruption.

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and constructive things an artist could do with such a sum of money. 

After a while, she felt there was much more to learn about spending
money -- and making it grow.  When she asked him to teach her a few 
things, he handed her a library card.  She drew up her own course of 
study, and he saw her now and then over the next fifteen months.  Each 
time, it took only a few words to guide her. She read everything he 
suggested, interviewed expert business people he recommended and 
literally wallowed in the joy of all her new discoveries. One book, 
"How To Manipulate Investments " revealed how seventeen large 
stock-brokerage houses acted on economic opportunities, creating new 
income during recessions, and perpetually increasing the stability of 
their positions.  It gave her a thrill, and a brilliant idea -- an 
infallible procedure for gaining a seat on the Stock Exchange at an 
early age. After all, who could resist buying stocks from an 18-year 
old, chic, wealthy stockbroker? 

In the end, it became a drive, an obsession guiding and accelerating her
studies; it gave her a sense of grace and self-assurance that 
reinforced the confidence her family's friends already held in her as 
an artist.  Polly dreamed that she could master the attention of 
others, and re-create the joy of fulfillment in learning -- and in 
performing. 

She practiced and played the violin often, usually solo gigs, mostly for
pleasure, and for charity.  But this new insight into a much larger 
instrument, the investment game, promised a lifetime of thrills. 

And, like Einstein, she grew beyond the violin.  But she retained her
propriety, the authority and confidence it had given her over the 
years....as well as the temperament and independence that practice  
demanded.  You had to play well, to show who was master! 

In less than two years, Polly felt her schooling was complete.  She
ached to put it into practice, to earn her father's approval; to shine 
like a star among her peers. 

Graduation came to her in the form of a three-day camp-out that ended in
disaster.  Mount St. Helen's was an easy climb, and Dad knew all the 
best trails.  They talked incessantly.  At this moment, it was very 
easy to love him.  Her heart rejoiced, leaving her breathless. She lay 
back on the grass and he stopped, then stepped slowly over and sat 
beside her. 

"Do you know what I learned, Dad?" 

"I already know, love.  We have a lot in common, blood for blood." 

She thought about that a while before responding.  They crossed a small
bridge over a brook and stopped to gaze at the tumbling water.  
Fishtails flashed and she came up with the answer. 

"Do you remember, Dad, when Marcus and I used to spend so much time
practicing?" 

"Of course. You learned a lot, didn't you?" 

"Not everything," she responded in a lower voice, "he wasn't as good a
teacher as you." 

For three days, between the elemental acts of survival, her Dad
challenged her with queries on subjects she had never studied -- fields 
of human knowledge where she had had no experience.  Polly couldn't 
hide a twinge of disappointment when he asked her so many things she 
didn't yet know. It was demeaning, in a way, but she couldn't disavow 
the sincerity of his love.  Somehow, she managed to respond to each 
challenge. 

At first, she tried to deny knowledge of each new subject, but he
wouldn't hear of it, and insisted on an answer -- no matter how naive 
and ignorant.  After a while, he began to ask questions like: 

"When Yen and Marks drop and Pounds rise, what do you look for?"  The
answer wasn't in any textbook, but in experience -- or the lack of it.  
Polly would shoot back answers, and he would immediately turn them into 
questions.  Before long, she began to think her way out of tough 
questions with agility, fencing him for the hidden answers.  She took 
his advice: 

"When you lack experience," he told her, "you've got to take the risk. 
You may be wrong more often than you like, but you won't be wrong all 
the time.  That's the price of learning! -- and its rewards!" 

Challenge after challenge, hour after hour, she realized how to approach
each new situation in life by assessing its risks -- its potential for 
benefit, the danger of failure.  And in the next three days, she got a 
lot of practice.  Like the little violin, Polly and her father reveled 
in the joy of practice. 

They came on a small circular hot-spring, nestled deep in the woods,
beside a glacial stream. They spread the tent and sleeping bags. 
Unwatched, they stripped and gamboled, father and daughter, in the 
tepid water. It was after dark before they chose to climb back out.  
They talked long into the night.  Now and then the volcano gave a 
muffled little cough. Polly realized she already knew how to maximize 
benefits and minimize risks at the same time -- how to take action at 
every opportunity, and avoid the pitfalls. 

The conversation, that night, and the next, led her to see how this
strategy applied to many spheres of life, in many professions -- 
particularly to investment strategies.  She understood Dad's feeling: 
it was the greatest game to fill the soul while you were still alive. 

"We talked about ethics, you remember?" he asked? 

"Sure.  Of course.  Why?" 

"You have ten seconds to tell me the one thing I would willingly break
the code of ethics for." 

It was the toughest question of her life.  He added, 

"And if you don't answer, I'll fling you off this cliff!" He emphasized
it as if he meant it. 

But she knew at once, and shouted it aloud: 

"My Diploma!" 

He reached into a side pocket of his knapsack and drew out a cylinder
about the size of a stick of dynamite, wrapped in aluminum foil.  She 
peeled it open and drew off the waxed paper.  It was from the Stockholm 
School of Economics -- the acme of prestige. Incredible!  He had 
updated his original diploma and put it in her name.  On the back, he 
wrote, 

"By the power invested in me, I hereby do grant this document to the
above-named in certification of her degree as Doctor of Economics." 

Polly had just turned 19. 

On the path back down, they didn't rest so often.  She saw her father
fall twice, and the second time he hurt his leg.  Now, this time, she 
returned to him.  She helped him off with his pack.  He winced with 
pain. 

Beneath her feet she felt a tremor.  A cloud was slowly drifting
eastward from the volcano's brow, and a hump seemed to be rising on the 
north slope,  near its peak.  The ground trembled again. 

"Tell me", he said between groans, "What would you do if the market
caught you off guard and plunged?" 

She answered laughing, "I'd bail out early, you know that Dad!" 

"You said it, kid, you said it!" he cried.  "Go get help!  The car's
only a mile or so from here!" 

For an instant, she visualized herself abandoning her father and bailing
out.  But only for an instant.  He couldn't walk.  No shrubs or trees 
could be seen in any direction -- nothing to make a crutch with.  
Nothing to make a splint with.  The market was indeed falling. Polly 
hugged her father with an intensity neither had felt before, an 
intimacy that surpassed their earlier intimacy. Suddenly, fear and 
misgivings filled her. 

"I'll be right back for you, Dad, don't you worry," she told him, then
selected a few items from her pack and scrambled back to the car. It 
seemed as if she drove for hours until she found the Ranger station and 
told her story. 

The National Forest rangers did their best, but before they could launch
a rescue helicopter, Mt. St. Helens rumbled, puffed and blew its top 
with an ear-shattering thunderclap. The ranger station was well out of 
danger, but with a sinking stomach she could see the lava flow 
beginning, edging over into the shallow trough that became a glacial 
highway each winter.  That was the path they had come down.  Lava 
filled the trough and formed a glowing river, cascading over the rocks. 
Polly peered through the binoculars in horror.  Below the tree line, 
where her father lay, she saw a brief wisp of smoke go up. 

Numbed and shocked by her loss, she vowed to validate her father's
teaching and create an eternal monument to his love and his wisdom.  
Over a single week-end, she had boiled down all of her knowledge into a 
world philosophy. 

When her grief abated, that philosophy opened the doors to banks and
investment houses. Polly got her assignments from experienced 
stockbrokers, and in less than two years, they put her into a corner 
office. 

You know what a corner office is: two outside walls where nobody can
overhear your whispered conversation. 

In the new environment of Farrell and Bunche, Investments, Polly
appeared to be shy.  After a few weeks of refusing to join other 
workers, some of them began to think of her as secretive and 
short-tempered.  She flared up, especially, whenever somebody pried 
into her private affairs.  Her floor manager, Vincent Birchfield, was 
easiest to get along with: he was the fountain of opportunity.  
Birchfield was the Mayor's brother-in-law.  A fast graduate from Yale, 
he clawed his way up the ladder to a floor-manager's position in a mere 
three years.  The promise in Polly didn't escape him. 

They began to have lunch together when Vincent discovered how well Polly
had mastered the strategy of divesting.  It was as if she had magic 
insight to the precise moment for selling stocks en masse.  Even as she 
concentrated on this, her third eye was open to opportunities for 
quick-profit investments.  He tested her. 

Vincent began turning over one account after another to Polly.  She
bought and sold so deftly, the accounts grew like magic before his very 
eyes. Before long, he gave her a helper.  Commission after commission 
mounted up.  By the end of that year she was managing thirty portfolios 
and had three assistants.  She spent two hours after work on Mondays, 
training them how to take over for her.  Nevertheless, every Friday 
night she treated herself to Vincent's generous company; besides, he 
was a marvelously tender lover. 

Polly became so skilled at "trading up" that Vincent gave her a free
hand with half a hundred more  portfolios. 

"Just go ahead and buy," he would say to her, "I'll take care of letting
them know."  A little late, perhaps, but not enough to run afoul of the 
trading rules.  He and Polly enjoyed the mutual thrill of tripling a 
client's portfolio in a few hours by quick, clever trading; then 
notifying the client of his -- or her -- good fortune.  It always 
brought in more tips than commissions!  In over a hundred trades, 
Vincent watched Polly guess wrong only two times! 

The secret was her father's.  She found ways to compare the faults and
merits of a batch of stocks -- sometimes fifteen or twenty -- and 
rarely missed picking the one that would rise most over a short period 
of time.  It meant taking a lot of calculated risks on cheap issues.  
Each time a stock leaped by a few points, Polly's "gut feeling" told 
her exactly when to sell or trade for the best buy on another issue.  
She not only predicted trends -- she made them!  Her method bore the 
secret name: "One Only Goat", the biblical legend of the boy who traded 
up. 

Every trade meant a commission.  For her other investors, Polly bought
whatever shares her client ordered.  And with her commissions, she 
bought the same, on a smaller scale.  In another name.  In several 
other names.  Her clients were shrewd traders.  When they ordered her 
to sell, she sold their shares and her own.  As a result, her shares 
traded two and three times a day, as she would manipulate a client's 
"joint block" of stock together with her own.  In time, her portfolio 
grew to exceed that of many of her clients, and Polly was well on her 
way to becoming a wealthy, independent woman. 

She was certainly canny, churning two or three accounts at a time and
never making even one mistake.  The programmed trades, of course, 
created their own winning streak:  investing the combined assets of 
three hefty accounts into an issue always left it looking good, and 
that always attracted the attention of other brokers.  Many of them 
followed Polly's lead, investing until the price of the issue rose a 
few points, then began to fall back to normal.  Polly, of course, had 
sold out at the peak.  Her "winnings" were already growing on some 
other hot stock. 

Polly turned up an outside data source that picked a winner every time. 
Nobody know who this guy was, but when he came to visit, the two of 
them conversed for hours in stage whispers -- on the far side of her 
office, in the corner between the two outside windows.  Now and then, a 
name would leak out. Nobody guessed that Polly knew the secret of that 
outside office corner. 

It acted like a lens, focusing their talk across her office and into a
hidden microphone.  The speaker was in the corridor outside her office, 
behind a fire extinguisher.  Brokers who stopped to sip at the water 
cooler beside the fire extinguisher picked up the whispers of Polly and 
her paramour; they kissed and embraced, while they chattered about 
active new issues for investment.  The water cooler became a spa where 
brokers picked up hot investment tips amid the steamy love talk. There 
was no way for a broker to lose, unless s/he was hard of hearing. The 
eavesdroppers "overheard" which stocks Polly felt were ripe for 
investment.  They hurried back to their terminals -- and bought and 
bought! Their stocks went up. 

Naturally, all these transactions showed up instantly on Polly's own
screen....but she was already a step ahead of them, having bought 
heavily into these stocks only a few minutes before her whispering 
tryst with Marcus.  Her heavy investment drove the price up a point or 
so, of course, confirming her prediction. When the brokers in her 
office had shifted their portfolios to the hot issue, it would already 
be up five or ten points.  She sold at peak and made a killing; the 
other brokers had to ride the issue back down.  She never whispered 
when to sell. 

Her outstanding record of right guesses put Farrell and Bunche into the
spotlight. They earned a reputation as the brokerage firm with the 
greatest yield on capital invested for their clients. 

It was around this time that Vincent awarded Polly a two-tone
aquamarine-flamingo Rolls-Royce convertible to go with her two golden 
cocker spaniels.  She bought a luxury estate atop the Cascade mountain 
range and rented a convenient downtown penthouse for  "late nights at 
the office." 

Three times a week, after work, Polly crossed the street to the dance
studio.  She was a natural.  The old discipline was there: practice 
makes perfect form -- makes performance.  By the time Polly made her 
first million, she had learned over sixty different dances and had 
become a superb ballroom dancer.  Her partner, Arthur Culbertson, the 
dance instructor, was a gay pilot with connections in Boise, Salt Lake 
City, and Portland.  On these trips, she let him drive her aquamarine 
Rolls Royce, while she watched the TV in the back seat and carried on 
trades by radiotelephone. 

When they danced tangos and sambas for the nightclub crowds in Denver,
Reno, Las Vegas and San Francisco, he let her fly his ancient seaplane. 
They had a good act and a lot of laughs together. 

Polly was petite and glowed like a princess in her sequined leotards. 
Arthur was an Esquire front page come to life.  They were elegant on 
the dance floor.  It wasn't long before Polly began spending Fridays 
out of town. Soon it was every Friday.  Vincent felt that her intense 
pursuit of excellence through Dance was intimidating. 

At the office, she pursued ...not excellence, perhaps, but equality. 
She pursued equality with a passion.  His bigotry boiled to the 
surface.  Like any jilted lover, he made remarks to Polly that he later 
regretted. 

"Showing off with another man is going to get you in trouble one day,"
he told her. "You're on your way to the top," he continued, "and 
frankly, you've taken me up with you. I'm grateful as hell for it, but 
I don't want to give you up: you're a sure thing." 

So she was being used!  And he was jealous!  Polly strengthened her
resolve to boost her earnings -- if necessary without him! 

In addition to her salary, bonus and tips, Polly earned income from her
own investments, from commissions on her sales, from her loans to 
investors, from her bank savings, and from the tips that other brokers 
gave her in exchange for her lover's profitable whispers.  Polly 
introduced Vincent to Marcus, her musical young neighbor.  Marcus had 
just been appointed economic aide to the Governor and knew more of what 
was really going on than most business reporters. 

The old friendship blossomed.  Mark had become popular as a private
entertainer among a select group of the governor's friends. He brought 
Polly into the limelight of politics, where she picked up one account 
after another. Her portfolio grew to a staggering size. They began to 
perform every weekend at the Governor's estate. 

She had not played the violin that well in years!  Before long, she was
staying overnight and weekends at the Governor's house with Marcus.   
He spent holidays and vacations at her place: a custom-designed palace 
of fieldstone, glass and redwood, perched at the crest of a Cascade 
peak that caught the first glint of sunrise about ten minutes before 
everybody else.  They talked seriously about marriage. 

Naturally, her lover and her dance partner were miffed.  One day, Arthur
and Marcus had a shout-down in the hall.  It was a nasty scene for 
Polly, who was already growing distant from Vincent.  She stood to lose 
everything that had meaning in her life.  It made her panic. 

One Friday, Polly sent her helpers on errands and began a complex series
of trades; Vincent signed them as quickly as they were made.  By four 
p.m., she had closed out her own portfolio, converting every issue to 
cash.  And that cash was in a numbered Swiss account.  That day, Polly 
left early. Nobody noticed the string of transactions until the audit, 
about 3 a.m. Monday morning. 

When Vincent came in, he learned that Polly had managed to get away with
23 million dollars -- every red cent of it legally!  He was ready to 
burst with fury.  Where would be find 23 million dollars to plug the 
hole in his investment ship?  His career would be over. 

Vincent frantically called Polly, then telephoned everyone she knew.  No
trace of her. Arthur's seaplane was gone -- but Arthur wasn't. He and 
Marcus invaded Vincent's office demanding her warm body, dead or alive. 
There was a terrible row. 

Meanwhile, Polly swept off her flight-planned course by 156 degrees and
settled into a quiet Canadian country lake.  Her attaché case was 
sealed in plastic and sank to the bottom like a stone. She mailed the 
key to Switzerland. 

Polly spent a month in Zurich, a week in Geneva, a day in Chamonix, and
the next three years with her Aunt Bertha in Vienna.  On weekends, she 
bought carpets in Istanbul and attended the opera in Prague.  She 
danced in D1sseldorf and played violin solos in Salzburg and Budapest.  
Polly dined on the sacher torte of life and drank Munich's beer halls 
dry.  Her passionate performances won the attention of Europe's 
wealthiest handsome young men.  At the age of 23, what could be more 
important! 

*  *  *  *  * 

It would give me no greater pleasure than to relate that Interpol caught
up with Polly and extradited her to the United States, where she spent 
years in courtroom trials and more years in jail, suffered harrassment 
from her colleagues, contracted a foul disease and ended her life as a 
bag lady in the slums of Seattle. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

The SEC investigation following Polly's disappearance pointed an
accusing finger at Vincent.  He was indicted and drowned himself in his 
jail cell toilet.  The brokers who cashed in on Polly's tips kept mum.  
They quietly took early retirement, or dropped into an easy slot in 
some other brokerage firm.  Her hidden microphone was never discovered. 


Marcus became the State's youngest governor.  His frequent trips to
Europe led to a dynamic and successful foreign trade policy that 
brought prosperity to all his constituents.  Polly often met him at the 
airport, and turned over her portfolio of new accounts.  Arthur, of 
course,  inherited the two-tone aquamarine-flamingo Rolls-Royce 
convertible and bought a new seaplane with the contents of its glove 
compartment. 

Polly's life was full of joy, enriched by cultured, stimulating friends.
 Every day brought her new thrills, new challenges.  She lacked 
nothing.  In time, Polly amassed a sizable fortune from her 
performances.  She funded an archaeological expedition in Canada, but 
all they recovered was a locked, waterlogged attaché case with 
something heavy in it.  In later years, Polly endowed The Foundation 
for Peace and Progress through Music and Dance. European leaders of 
state sought out Polly's personal private advice on investments in 
North America. 

In short, Polly enjoyed the best of health, immense wealth, and lived
happily ever after, well into the twenty-first century. 

Seattle WA, Aug. 2007 Gerald X. Diamond Copyright 1990 


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