Joe Burkes Last Stand | Page 9

in Hawaii; it cannot be
owned or sealed off. He bought a few aloha shirts and spent days at the
university, the main library downtown, the shopping center, and
occasionally, Waikiki. In a month he had a tan, and his pidgin had
come back. Kate had learned to talk on the island; she spoke pidgin
from deep down. Joe's pidgin was only half way there. If the locals are
in doubt, they will ask anything in order to hear you speak--in a few
words they know how long you've been around. Joe didn't mind the test.

Usually he got points for trying.
Kate wanted him to visit during the holidays, but he decided against it.
He was just getting used to the island and he didn't feel like traveling.
The day after Christmas, he was at the Moana leaning back with a beer
and thinking about Sperandeo's book on stock trading when someone
asked, "Caffe Ladro?" The woman he'd seen in Seattle was standing a
few feet away, looking at his T-shirt.
"Ah, Moira." he said, standing up. She was trying to place him.
"Winifred," she said.
"I saw you in The Elliot Bay Book Company," he said. "Last month.
Moira was a guess."
"Oh, yes . . . something funny . . . you had a projection."
"Very funny," Joe said. "Winifred, my name is Joe, Joe Burke. Why
not come sit? Talk story . . . "
"I've given up on men," she said to someone listening in the banyan.
"Very sensible," Joe said.
She hesitated and sat. "I love this tree," she said, placing her sun
glasses on the table between them.
"Didn't someone write about it? Or under it?" he offered.
"Stevenson," she said. "Or was it Mark Twain?" Her eyes were
intensely brown with radiating streaks of garnet.
"It's a literary banyan," Joe said.
"So, what brings you to Hawaii?"
"I used to live here," Joe said. "I stopped computer programming, and I
stopped being married--again. It seemed natural to come back."

"Hawaii gets to you," she said. Winifred lived in Manoa. She was a
photographer. Joe would have bet that she was some kind of artist; he
found them wherever he went. Her sister lived on Queen Anne Hill in
Seattle, close to Kate and the Caffe Ladro. Her father, Arthur Soule,
was a professor, retired in Vermont.
"Lot of Soules on the Maine coast," Joe said. "And a Coffin clan. The
line is: 'For every Soule, there's a Coffin."'
"So my father has told me."
"Win, Winifred . . . what do you prefer to be called?"
"Either works. 'Winny' is what horses do. My father sometimes calls
me Freddy."
"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