Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 33
The final bill for the trip was going to be substantial. Quinn had planned for it and now he had to figure out a way to pay for it. It never occurred to him to leave it up to the Colonel. The New York weekend had cost what it had cost. It was worth it. Now the cost was his responsibility. It needed to be addressed.
You always pay for what you get.
He asked to talk to the Colonel on a Thursday evening, the one night of the week when his attention was available for household matters.
He laid it out: the credit card bill, the need to address it, the request for help finding work that was worth doing.
The Colonel listened with his usual calm attention.
After Quinn finished, he was quiet for a moment, looking into the middle distance with the expression of a man running calculations.
“Money,” he said finally. “You haven’t had the money education yet.”
“No, sir,” Quinn said. “It’s been on the list.”
He looked at Quinn. “Excellent, this is the perfect time. Now you have a reason to understand that money isn’t abstract.”
He picked up the phone.
Simon Falcutta’s office was on the fourteenth floor of a building on California Street.
The name on the wall was plain: FALCUTTA & ALLCOT. No descriptor, no tagline. Quinn guessed they figured the name was sufficient, which was telling information about the people behind the name.
After school, he had dropped the girls off at their respective homes, continued downtown, found parking, and walked down California Street, looking around with the alertness he maintained in new environments. He entered the office exactly at 4:30.
The lobby looked less like a corporate office and more like a quiet living room that had accidentally been dropped into a commercial building.
The receptionist, a woman with silver-streaked hair gathered into a soft bun, sat behind a dark oak desk that was nearly buried under a sprawling collection of framed photographs of children in soccer uniforms and baseball uniforms and babies in sun hats. She looked up as the heavy glass door clicked shut behind him. She was knitting on a big piece of dark green material, a sweater maybe, her needles clicking a steady, domestic rhythm that competed with the soft hum of the air conditioning.
“Hi, I’m Quinn Norman,” he said. “For Mr. Falcatta.”
She made a call. A brief exchange in a low voice.
“He’ll be right out, honey.” She gave him a mischievous wink and stage whispered, “His bark is worse than his bite. Pay no attention to his grouchiness.”
Simon Falcatta was seventy-five and looked like seventy-five. He was short and broadly built in the way of men who were once substantial and have reduced with age. He had white hair worn short and eyes that were dark and smart behind reading glasses that were perched on his nose.
He looked at Quinn for five seconds.
“You the Colonel’s boy?” he said.
“His nephew,” Quinn said.
“Huh.” He turned and walked back into the office. “Well, come on back.”
His partner, Brady Allcot, was sixty-eight, and where Simon was broad, Brady was thin; where Simon was loud, Brady was dry; where Simon expressed his opinions at volume, Brady expressed them with the sharpened precision of a man who has calibrated his cynicism over four decades of watching human beings make stupid mistakes because they were greedy.
He was at his desk when Simon brought Quinn in. He looked up from what he was reading with an alert expression.
He said, “You’re sixteen.”
“Yes, sir,” Quinn said.
“You need a job and an education as well, I hear.”
“Yes, sir.”
Brady Allcot looked at him for a moment. “Why?”
“I have a credit card I need to pay off. And I need to learn about money.”
Brady looked at Simon.
Simon said nothing. His expression communicated something in the language of two men who have worked together for forty years.
Brady looked back at Quinn. “Sit down.”
The job was what they called a general dogsbody, which was a term Quinn had to look up. He was to do what needs doing, which in an office of five people meant everything outside of their actual work and some things that weren’t peripheral at all.
He cleaned. He filed. He made coffee and learned that Simon had strong opinions about what it should taste like. Quinn quickly learned to brew it his way within the first week. He ran documents to and from other offices in the financial district, which gave him a working knowledge of the district by the first month.
He drove Simon and Brady to meetings and lunches. They let him sit in on some of them and quizzed him afterward on his impressions of the people involved. This was the part he had not expected. It told him that they trusted him and were taking his training seriously.
The office had three analysts: Issak, a thin man who had been with them for years; a Greek guy named Okafor who was twenty-eight and had the compressed concentration of a person who was smart and had found a place that finally challenged him; and Reeves, who was thirty-five, profoundly suspicious, and kept making phone call after phone call to find out who was screwing him.
Quinn cleaned their office. He also talked to them, or listened to them, which was the more accurate description. Surprisingly, they responded. He learned the markets in a patchwork kind of way that was different from the Colonel’s organized pedagogy, the information arriving and posing questions that he carefully wrote down to discuss on Thursday evenings when the two partners would sip whiskey, smoke cigars, and give him lectures.
He hadn’t expected this. The lectures had emerged in his third week when he’d been doing end-of-day filing. Simon had been at his desk and said, without preamble, “Come here.”
When Quinn went in, Simon showed him a chart of an investment vehicle over a twenty-year period. He asked, “What do you see?”
Quinn had looked at it and described the pattern he saw but had not yet fully interpreted it.
Simon had interpreted it for forty-five minutes, without notes, with the authority of a man who has lived inside this material for years and has developed convictions that fit observed facts.
Quinn had listened with the full quality he had learned at the Colonel’s dinner table and honed in the Canadian wilderness—the attention that received, filed, and questioned.
At the end, Simon said, “Same time next week. Read this before you come.” He handed Quinn a book.
Security Analysis. Graham and Dodd.
Quinn had read it in four days and come to the following Thursday with a notebook full of questions.
Simon had looked at the notebook. He had looked at Quinn. He called out, “Brady,” in the direction of the inner office.
Brady had come out with his coffee.
The Thursday evenings became a standing arrangement. The two old men and Quinn in the office after the analysts had gone, the city going dark outside the fourteenth-floor windows, the conversation running between two men who take money seriously as a subject of study rather than as an object of desire.
They had a mantra. He heard it from both of them in different registers, contexts, and framings, but it came back every time to the same thing:
Money is a tool. That’s all it is.
Simon said it with emphasis. “People confuse the tool for the purpose. A hammer doesn’t build a house. A person builds a house with a hammer. Money doesn’t make a life. You make a life with money if you understand what it’s for.” He pointed at Quinn with the directness of a man who has given up on indirection. “What’s it for?”
To read the complete story you need to be logged in:
Log In or
Register for a Free account
(Why register?)
* Allows you 3 stories to read in 24 hours.