Sunday was a hard day for someone like Adam Miller who was really only interested in ' 'killings.' ' Financial killings, that is . On Sunday , potential investors were with their families, or making love, or sleeping off Saturday night .

On Sunday Adam Miller often had to postpone his efforts to sell shares in Olympus, which was a sports arena in Tampa, Florida; or in Hercules, a company that manufactured a salve which was guaranteed to prolong erections and which was wrapped in a plain brown paper carton.

Or American Student Marketing, which had just been formed and as yet had no products. There was little for Adam to do on a typical Sunday except to play with his son, Byron Miller.

So, on Sunday , if the weather was good , Byron's father often took him to Central Park in Manhattan to feed the pigeons. While in firms, reverent tones. His entire life was dedicated to money.

Years later, Byron realized that money gave his father his only satisfying insight into the meaning of life. If spoke of safety, of fulfillment, of joy. It gave Adam Miller a feeling of completeness.

There was much Byron chose to forget about his father but not the Sunday excursions to and from Central Park.

On the way back to Brooklyn , they usually got off the subway at the Wall Street stop.

There they passed through the heavy iron turnstile and trudged up the narrow, dirty steps of the IRT station to the street.

They stood on the sidewalk, Byron's small hand clasped in his father's larger one, with their backs to Trinity Church ---Trinity Church was not a place where money was made ----and lingered for a moment to take in the view.

It always gave them an overwhelming feeling of arrival as though this place were truly home.

Walking through the silent, nearly deserted streets was a time of dreams for Byron.

He listened, rapt, while Adam held forth on how fortunes had been made and lost in the stock market. When they stopped before the locked entrance to the New York Stock Exchange at Il Wall Street.

They smiled with both pleasure and amazement. This was really the place . Every time they saw it it was like the first time.

"Byron , behind those doors is the greatest gambling house in the world."

Adam Miller said. An old , wise child, Byron wanted for his father to continue his standard litany. "

Believe me, there's more betting done in there than at every racetrack and casino in the world.

" After a pause , he would declare, more to himself than Byron, " Someday I'll get lucky and beat the odds, " Adam Miller's view of the stock market was hardly conventional wisdom.

Looking back, Byron had concluded that it was one of the few astute perceptions his father ever had.

Then they would walk slowly back to the IRT station opposite Trinity Church, pause for a last look at the long shadows along Wall Street cast by the setting sun, and marvel at the golden glow on the windows of the buildings facing west.

Reluctantly, they would retrace their steps down the narrow, dirty stairs to the subway and make the rest of the trip back to Brooklyn, where Sara Miller, Byron's mother, had dinner waiting.

Sometimes Byron wondered what his life might have been like if his father had been another kind of man. Would he have made all his millions? Would he have known Cameron Hightower?

Wall Street, the short, narrow street in lower Manhathan running east from Broadway to the East River, is a place where stocks and bonds worth billions of dollars change hands daily. The neighbor- hood is distinguished by glittering skydcrapers set back on handsome plazas and by other smaller offices buildings, vintage 1920 or earlier. It is known to insiders as the Street. By and large, there is nothing exceptional about the look of the Street or the people who work on the Street. Nothing to suggest it's concentration of wealth and power that make it the financial capital of the United States and therefore of the world. But the Street is more than a small geographic area. It is a state of mind. A dream street to the hundred million Americans who have stake in a pension plan or a mutual fund which they count on to help them when they retire. It is the place where " the public" more than 47 million Americans who buy and sell stocks in their own name-----------express their hopes, fears, greed, and all too often their naivete. It is this naivete that is responsible for the Wall Street axiom " The public is always wrong."

Herbert Coz watched the bulbs that make up the dot matrices of the four huge digital clocks overlooking the main trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The numbers changed: 3:49 became 4:00. A bell sounded. The trading day was over. Within a single heartbeat, everyone on the floor turned to look at their video screens. The words they were waiting for appeared. The Dow Jones 30 Industrial Average Closing Price-------2405. The Dow had closed over 2,400; a Himalayan peak! April 6, 1987, was an historic day on the New York Stock Exchange.

The response was electrifying. Streamers of ticker tape were hurled across the floor. Flights of paper airplanes arched through the air. A few enterprising floor traders had stored rolls of toilet paper just for the occasion. They now threw them toward the ceiling. As they sailed skyward they unrolled, leaving ghostlike trails in their wake. Bald men with swollen stomachs threatening to burst their trading jackets capered about, each dancing to his own personal rhythm, slapping one another on the back, congratulating everyone in sight. No distinctions were made. Senior parners in charge of floor trading shook hands with page boys. Or girls. Specialists kissed one another like French diplomats. Five floor traders did a commendable buck- and-wing. A page girl stood on her hands. Somewhere, someone played a bugle. Someone else pounded a drum. Suddenly, a second cheer, as loud as the first, echoed through the high- ceilinged room. New words and numbers had appeared on the trading post screens. Number of Shares Traded__302,469,000. A second flurry of ticker tape, more toilet paper, and another round of paper planes were launched. The applause and stamping grew louder. Bravo for 300 million!

Long before the celebration had even started to wind down, word flashed around the world. Television and radio financial writers were chuming out copy to be read by local and network anchormen. It had been a memorable day on the Street. For the first time since 1792--- the year twenty--four merchants and brokers set up their first trading booth under an elm tree at 68 Wall Street----the Dow Jones industrial average had closed at over two thousand. And there was another first. More than 300 million shares traded. Computer--proggrammed buying triggered massive purchases of stock by the funds. The executable public, galvanized into action by the morning surge in the Dow, then went on a wild buying spree in the afternoon. They were buying for their future. For their childrens future. Their grandchildrens.

The public cherished the myth of investment. Insiders like Herbert Coz did not. To coz the stock market was the oldest permanent crap game in the world. Like any professional gambler.

He counted his profits' minute by minute; and when the market turned against him, he cut his losses and ran.

Coz was standing along amid the riot that swirled around him, quietly clapping his hands, when he was joined by another floor trader. Both men were unknown to TV and radio commentators.

They would never be mentioned in news reports. The public would never know they existed. But they certainly did; and in the world of Wall Street, each was a force to be reckoned with. The impact of their meeting could be awesome.

" Big day, Coz, " Tom Ucciarde commented in a carefully neutral voice. They'd been standing side by side for several minutes, and this was his first remark.

Herbert Coz did not appear to hear it, but his silence was not offensive. He was known to be a quiet man. Besides, there is a comradeship between men who have had a hand in making history and are now contemplating the results of their actions.

Tom Ucciarde was a big man----taller than Coz by a head and had the confident gentleness of a big man. His face was heavy, with a fleshy nose and slightly sagging jowls. His dark hair was slicked back to cover a growing bald spot. Despite the surgeon general's warnings, he remained a heavy smoker.

One could only wonder what the cost of maintaining a tightly controlled voice and careful movements was to this natural typeA. His voice always sounded like a breathy whisper coming from somewhere deep in his chest.

"A very big day," he repeated pleasantly.

"Yes," Herbert Coz agreed. He was a little hobgoblin of a man with thick, light eyebrows, a deeply lined face, and flicked-up horns of sandy hair mixed with gray that seemed to want to fly off his head and made his ears appear pointed.

"A lot of action." He glanced at Ucciarde and then away.

" Six to seven billion dollars' worth of action."

" Yes." Coz agreed again. He had placed himself strategically where he was confident the big man would find him; having been found, he intended to co-operate fully.

" Could be a new platform for the bull market."

Ucciarde gazed down at the small man, his head cocked to one side, and for an instant he appeared to be a child studying an insect under a microscope.

" My theory exactly." He smiled, trying to indicate that he shared Coz's conclusions. " Of course, if someone assassinates the President? Or IBM goes belly-up ?"

Coz had his answer ready. "I wouldn't place any bets on the President. But IBM?" He shook his head, " Nothing to worry about at IBM."

He fussed with the knot in his tie while Ucciarde watched, " Could be another three-hundred-million-share day tomorrow. Full steam ahead."