PRELUDE

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?

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