Most of the Euro Brokers Inc. staff escaped death two years ago after a hijacked Boeing 767 slammed into the south tower of the World Trade Center just six floors below where they were settling in for another trading day.
Most, but not all.
Sixty-one of the estimated 250 employees who were in the office died in that terrorist attack two years ago, their lives now commemorated on a memorial wall in the brokerage firm's new downtown office.
Across Manhattan on Thursday morning, business will come to a standstill as people remember the horrific events of two years ago and mourn loved ones, friends and colleagues.
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Euro Brokers' executive vice-president Brian Clark said the harrowing experience has created an incredible bond within the company, even as the scar tissue begins to cover the raw emotional wounds.
Last year, at the first anniversary, the company sponsored a luncheon for employees and the families of victims after a wrenching ceremony at Ground Zero.
Wreckage was still being hauled out of the gaping wound.
This year, however, the anniversary will be a more subdued affair.
There will be a gathering and a moment of silence at the infamous hour on Thursday, but no speeches and no families.
"In all of this, from the day of the event to right now, everybody's story is different; everybody handles it differently," Mr. Clark said in an interview in his 19th-floor office, just a few blocks from the WTC site.
"But as near as you can generalize, the first year was traumatic and chaotic; the first anniversary was exceedingly sad, with people wanting to draw comfort from one another.
"And I sense this year there's more of an introspection, people wanting to try to handle this themselves . . .. In some respects, people want to move on.'' In its business operations, Euro Broker, a division of the publicly traded Maxcor Financial Group Inc., came through the tragedy intact, suffering only a week-long interruption before regrouping in borrowed quarters and resuming business.
Mr. Clark said the company had learned from the Y2K scare 21 months before the attack and had moved backup copies of all trading slips and other critical information off premises each evening.
It even derived some perverse benefit from the destruction of its corporate offices, using the insurance to equip itself with new-generation computers and modern servers that are just as powerful but a 10th of the size of those that powered its WTC operation.
In fact, it's now larger than it was two years ago and has solidified its position as a major player in interdealer transactions of emerging market bonds, interest rate derivatives and money market products.
It has more than 300 employees in New York, compared with 280 on Sept.11 two years ago, and its parent, Maxcor, posted a record after-tax profit of $4.54-million (U.S.) last quarter.
Six months ago, the firm moved into new headquarters at One Seaport Plaza, 62,000 square feet occupying two floors that were sublet from Prudential Securities, a key client of Euro Brokers, which had also made space available to it within a week of the attacks.
But the human cost could not be recouped. Searing memories continue to haunt the survivors. They not only lost friends and colleagues, but they had to cope with the inevitable existential questions: Why did they survive and not a colleague who perhaps sat at the next desk? Why would anyone target innocent men and women? What was the appropriate response, both as an individual and as a country?
In addition to his job as executive vice-president, Mr. Clark is president of the Euro Brokers Relief Fund, a separately incorporated, non-profit company that has raised $4.5-million for the relief of those 61 Euro Brokers families that lost loved ones in the attack.
He has had contributions from employees, from customers, and notably in the cutthroat business of bond trading, from competitors.
So far, the fund has disbursed $3-million to those families, covering education costs, medical needs and supplementing basic living expenses.
For Mr. Clark, a Toronto boy who joined the fledgling Bay Street company in 1970 and moved with it to New York in 1973, providing relief to families is therapeutic.
"I feel like I'm doing something," he said.
The 56-year-old executive can now usually -- although not always -- recount the events of that day without losing his composure.
How he was sitting at his desk on "a normal blue-sky day" when the first plane struck the north tower with an enormous explosion.
How he grabbed his whistle and flashlight -- he was a floor fire marshal -- and began to get people out of the building.
How the voice on the loudspeaker reassured people that their building was secure and told them not to evacuate. (Many did anyway, and in doing so, saved their lives and the lives of others behind them.) How he was talking to a now-deceased co-worker, Bobby Call, when the second plane slammed into their building a few floors below. The gut-wrenching feeling as the building swayed and seemed ready to collapse.
The quick realization that they were under a terrorist attack.
His effort to leave the floor -- blindly making the right choice in choosing stairway A for his descent. (There were no survivors from stairways B or C.)
A call for help from a man on the 81st floor, which led him away from his co-workers just as they made the fatal decision to reverse course after a woman told them of fire below.
His dash for safety across a debris-strewn Liberty St., up to Trinity Church where, from the churchyard, he watched the south tower -- his home for 27 years -- simply collapse in a heap.
His call to his wife, Dianne, assuring her he was safe.
And most vivid -- his dream of a few nights later when co-worker Jose Marrero, whom he had last seen in a stairway heading up to help someone in distress, visited him dressed in a white shirt and smiled, providing him silent assurances of divine providence.
"I have known from that instant that Jose is fine; that all of my co-workers are fine; that I'm fine; that you are fine, and there was just the huge release and building of confidence that things are okay; that despite that tragedy, that horror, God's plan, whatever it is, will unfold as it should," Mr. Clark said.
Quickly getting back to business and building the company just seemed like part of that plan.