Billionaire

by Peter James

  There was a hub of activity, the likes of which Rocq couldn’t remember seeing for a very long time. After-lunch lethargy, combined with the generally quiet state of trade at the present time, normally made early afternoons the dullest of times, but today was different. Every desk except his own was attended, and all the brokers were talking earnestly into both their telephones at once, taking new calls and writing down instructions and orders furiously.

  Lester Barrow, a short fat man in his late forties – an old age for this high-pressure job – immensely cheerful in spite of two near-fatal heart attacks in the last three years, turned to Rocq as he entered. ‘Here comes Early Bird.’

  Rocq grinned a short, rather pained grin.

  ‘Been carving yourself some fat worms?’ Barrow’s chirpy voice cut through the general hum of action.

  ‘I’ve been to the dentist all morning,’ lied Rocq. It was an old trick he had learned many years before: if you have to make up an excuse, make up one that evokes sympathy. Not, he knew, that it would cut much ice in here. He was well aware that none of the people in here knew the meaning of the word ‘sympathy’; they didn’t know the meaning of any word that wasn’t in the Dow Jones Index. The pressure of the work gave them little time to know anything else. In spite of the activity there was a feeling in the office of a lull before a storm. It happened frequently at this time in the afternoon, with many of the large exchanges in the world closed, and everyone waiting for the New York markets to open.

  Communications play a vital part in an international broker’s job. The London offices of Globalex were the central hub in a highly sophisticated network of telephones, telex and computer links, that cost Globalex over £100,000 a month in electricity and call charges alone. There were direct links to the offices in Zurich, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago and New York, as well as direct telephone lines to every major client throughout the world. Modern communications had reduced the entire world to one large trading floor and, with changes in technology occurring almost daily, international commodity broking was a fiendishly expensive game to stay in.

  In order to keep overheads in line with the volume of trading, the account executives received a modest basic income of £10,000, with their opportunity to earn large sums coming from a direct percentage of the brokerage fees Globalex charged its clients for every order, whether it was buy or sell. It was not uncommon for a Globalex account executive to earn two to three times his basic salary in a good trading year.

  All commodities are traded in minimum units called ‘lots’. A ‘lot’ of gold is one hundred ounces, for example. At $498 an ounce, one ‘lot’ of gold was worth $49,800. The brokerage Globalex charged on one lot of gold was $25.00 and the account executive’s share of that was $6.25. It needed a great many lots to pay the phone bills for the office and the American Express bills of the account executives, but at $833 a ton for copper, $7,856 a ton for tin, $404 a ton for lead, $526 a ton for zinc, $653 a ton for aluminium, $2,880 a ton for nickel, $197 an ounce for platinum, $4.23 an ounce for silver, and $498 an ounce for gold, it did not take many lots for a deal to get up into the one hundred thousands – or Long Ones, as Gary Slivitz, who sat next to Rocq, called them – the millions, or Big Ones as Slivitz called them, and even, on occasions, the Wide Ones, which were billions.

  ‘What did you say?’

  Rocq wasn’t quite sure whether Barrow was talking to him or to whoever was at the end of the telephone receiver he was holding in his left hand. Reading Rocq’s mind, Barrow lifted the telephone away from his ear.

  ‘Been to the dentist.’

  ‘How much did you sell him?’

  Rocq decided Barrow probably wasn’t joking: Barrow, like most here, lived, ate and breathed metals. Anything that existed beyond the revolving door of 88 Mincing Lane and outside of the portals of Plantation House, just across the road, which housed the London Metal Exchange and the Gold Futures Market, as far as Lester Barrow was concerned existed for the sole purpose of buying and selling metals through Globalex and, where possible, through the able personage of Lester Barrow himself. The New York light lit up on Barrow’s Dealer Board; he hit a button and grabbed the second receiver. Almost immediately, now holding telephones to both ears with one hand, he began to write with the other hand.

  Rocq took his seat, between Gary Slivitz, who appeared to be playing his Dealer Board as if it were a space invaders machine, and the permanently miserable Henry Mozer, who was performing the deft art of writing with one end of a pencil whilst picking his ear with the other end. ‘What the heck’s going on, Henry?’ Rocq asked.

  Mozer pulled the pencil out and turned to him: ‘Where the hell have you been – down a hole in the ground?’

  ‘I’ve been to the dentist.’ Rocq deliberately grimaced as he spoke.

  Almost every light was flashing on Rocq’s Dealer Board.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I’ve got a frozen mouth – can’t talk properly.’

  ‘What you been doing?’ shouted Slivitz. ‘Kissing polar bears?’

  Rocq decided to abandon his excuse for not turning up to the office until two. He was unpopular enough as it was. The past two years had been lean years for most metal brokers, but he, completely by luck, had tumbled into half a dozen of the best accounts Globalex had ever had: Sa’ad Al Rahir, a bored, thirty-seven-year-old Kuwaiti who played the metal exchange through Alex the way most people play a roulette wheel, and who would think nothing of buying and selling three or four hundred thousand pounds worth of whatever metal particularly took his fancy in a single week. Louis Khylji, the immaculate Iranian food snob and wine connoisseur, who daily gambled with more than just petty cash from the many hundreds of millions his late father had removed from the Ayatollah’s claws. Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh, the playboy son of Sheik Quozzohok, Emir of Amnah, the tiny oil-rich state which had seized independence from the United Arab Emirates. Baron Harry Mellic, the Canadian son of an immigrant Hungarian lumberjack, who had arrived in Canada in 1938, prospered, and bought a thousand acre lumberyard in the Yukon. It wasn’t a bad investment in its own right, but Baron Harry Mellic’s father, Joseph Zgdwimellik never did rue the day he allowed Rio Tinto Zinc to come and do a spot of test drilling; it turned out his lumberyard was perched slap on top of the then third-largest uranium bed ever discovered. When the old man died, his son, Harry, decided that a shorter name and a smart title would befit the inheritor of one and a half billion Canadian dollars very nicely. There was Joel Syme of the Country and Provincial Investment Trust, who had a portfolio in his charge of some £160 million and turned a good percentage over, annually, in metals, through Alex Rocq. And there was Dunstan Ngwan, the Nigerian who had made vast fortunes out of buying up out-of-date drugs and selling them to the hospitals of emergent Third-World nations. Ngwan rarely turned over less than £1 million a month through Globalex, via Alex Rocq.

  The picking up of all these clients had, in the first instance, been just luck. There was a rotation system among the brokers for new enquiries, and each of the above had arrived on Rocq’s due dates. This had been assisted not a little by Rocq’s generous gifts to the switchboard operator. His skill, however, had been to hang on to them. He had done so not so much by his ability to produce results, which were only just above average, but far more by his ability at getting them laid, which apart from money was the only interest they all had in common. Sa’ad Al Rahir liked seventeen-year-old schoolgirls. Louis Khylji liked black men and yellow women. Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh liked blonde women; whilst looks mattered, his main interest was quantity. On his, fortunately for Alex, infrequent trips to London, he liked to have at least ten girls fixed up, all together. His favourite passion was his own particular version of Blind-man’s-buff: he would be led, blindfolded, into a room full of naked blondes, grope his way around them, seize one and make passionate love to her then and there. Afterwards, he would try to guess her name. If he got it wrong, he would be led out, and play the game again. This would go on unti
l either he got the right girl or he collapsed with exhaustion. As for the other three, Baron Harry Mellic was a rubber freak, Joel Symes liked being beaten, and Dunstan Ngwan seemed to like anything.

  This little group Rocq termed his ‘A’ team. Below them, he had a hundred lesser clients, whom he ranked in diminishing order; at the bottom of the pile was Sidney Chilterley, whose account normally stood about $1 over the $7,000 minimum that was required to have an account at Globalex.

  During the past two years, the other brokers in this office had earned an average commission of £12,000 on top of their annual salaries of £10,000; the volume of Rocq’s ‘A’ team was such that he had netted an average income over the past two years of £105,000 a year. After tax and overheads, such as call-girls’ fees, which Globalex was not interested in splitting with him, he had stashed away some £53,000. By lucky investments, he had managed to turn that sum into £90,000, which he had sunk into down payments on a flat in Redcliffe Square in London, and a cottage in the village of Clayton, in Sussex.

  Whilst everyone else drove their company cars and worked a rigorous five-day week, he drove a £32,000 Porsche and spent two afternoons a week on the golf course. He might have been the blue-eyed boy of the board room, but in this office, where the legend ‘success is not everything – even your best friend must fail’ hung like the blade of a guillotine in the air, his lack of popularity was not altogether surprising.

  He looked at the battery of flashing lights, and then at the Reuter Monitor video screen, on which, by entering a code, at the tap of a button he could call up the price of any commodity on any market in the world, as well as foreign exchange rates, share prices, and a continuous update of all world news and general information.

  The Reuter Monitor system, apart from being connected to all the world’s commodity exchanges, receives data input from hundreds of banks, bullion dealers and brokerage houses who use the system as well. Rocq tapped a button for a read-out on the latest metal prices.

  ‘Bloody hell. Gold up nine dollars,’ he said. ‘Over the five-hundred. What happened? Did Moscow nuke Washington?’

  ‘Almost as good.’ Slivitz talked over the mouthpiece of his two telephones. ‘Remember in 1981 when the Israelis blew up Iraq’s nuclear power reactor at Osirak?’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Well they’ve just gone and done it again.’

  ‘Shit.’ Gold moved up another dollar. ‘When?’

  ‘’Bout three hours ago. Reckon you lost yourself about thirty-five clients since then. Moses has been going apeshit trying to find you.’

  Moses Rondell was Rocq’s direct boss; relationships between the two were not good at the best of times, ever since he had overheard Rocq’s description of him as having metal balls.

  ‘Reckon you’d better stop talking and start buying,’ said Mozer, ‘or else there isn’t going to be anything left for you to buy.’

  Rocq punched out the code for World News on the Reuter terminal. The green computer-typed words on the screen told him of the Israeli raid on Osirak, gave the Prime Minister of Israel’s reasons for this second attack, and gave the Iraqi Foreign Minister’s fury at this second outrage, and the destruction of their almost completely rebuilt reactor.

  Rocq next pushed a button on his switchboard marked Tor 2. It was virtually the only button that wasn’t flashing. It automatically dialled Baron Mellic’s home number in Toronto. The Baron did not have an office; he worked from a massive penthouse overlooking four motorway junctions on the outskirts of Toronto. Mellic Construction Corporation had built the fifty-seven storey apartment block on the top of which the penthouse was perched. Mellic had furnished the penthouse by going to the furniture floor of Downtown Eatons, one of Toronto’s largest department stores, and ordering the entire floor. To further amuse himself, he ordered all the fittings as well, including the signs and prices, and had the entire penthouse laid out as if it were the furniture floor of Eatons.

  Toronto was five hours behind London. It was only half past nine there, and Mellic was a late riser; maybe he hadn’t heard the news yet, hoped Rocq. He had.

  ‘What kept you? Were you delivering the missiles for Israel personally?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry.’

  ‘You’re sorry? I’m sorry too. How much have I lost while you’ve been humping some broad?’

  ‘Not a lot – and I haven’t been humping, I’ve been at the dentist.’ He paused. ‘Anyway – gold’s only gone ten bucks.’

  There was a noise from the other end of the telephone; to Rocq’s untrained but accurate ear, it was not unlike the sound of a Hungarian Baron scraping himself off the ceiling of a penthouse.

  ‘I tell you, my friend,’ said the Baron, ‘if I bought you a hooker for every hundred dollars you’ve lost me this morning, you could screw your ass off twenty-four hours a day for the rest of your life, and not get through half of them.’

  ‘There’s still time, Harry; better buy right now.’

  ‘Right now? Too late, you shmuck – it’s going to start going down.’

  ‘No – it’ll go fifteen – sixteen at least; if there’s any retaliation, then it’ll go through the roof. We could be on the brink of a major war – if that happens, it’ll be over the thousand mark by the end of the week.’

  ‘What’s September trading at?’

  ‘Spot’s $509. September’s trading at a $6.00 premium to Spot: $515.’

  ‘Gold closed at $498 on Friday. You said it had gone ten bucks – Spot should be $508, not $509.’

  ‘It just went up another buck while we were talking.’

  There was a pause while the Baron vented a mouthful of air into the receiver. ‘So you reckon Spot’s going to go to what? Twelve? Fifteen?’

  ‘I reckon at least fifteen, and probably a bit higher than that – if nothing more happens.’

  ‘Okay – buy me one ton. September.’

  Rocq whistled to himself. One ton. Thirty-two thousand ounces. Three hundred and twenty contracts. Globalex charged a commission of 25 cents an ounce on gold, and he got ten per cent of that. He tapped some figures out on his calculator. He had just made himself £444.

  ‘And you’d better sell out at the right time, you shmuck – don’t want you leaving me high and dry.’

  ‘You can rely on me, Harry.’

  ‘I’d rather rely on a fucking mongoose.’ The line went dead. Rocq paused to think for a moment. Thirty-two thousand ounces was a large amount of gold. The average total daily volume for London was only one hundred thousand ounces.

  He hit the button on his Dealer Board for the Globalex New York office. It answered immediately:

  ‘Steve Rausch, Globalex.’

  ‘What’s gold running September?’

  ‘Hi, Alex, how are you?’

  ‘Busy.’

  ‘You hear the one about the Russian in New York, wants a broker?’

  ‘Fuck or knit?’

  ‘Yeah, you heard it.’

  ‘You hear about the three old men discussing their wives?’

  ‘One’s losing his taste, the other his memory?’

  ‘Yes.’ Having exhausted their latest supply of jokes, they got down to business.

  ‘September’s $514/$516.’

  ‘Buy me three hundred and twenty Seps at the market.’

  ‘Wow – who’s that for?’

  ‘Mind your own business. Work it gently – it’s for one of my big ones, and he’s already not too happy. If you get a good execution, I’ll look after you.’

  ‘Okay, Alex. Take it as done.’

  ‘Good lad.’

  Rocq hung up, then called Baron Mellic back, confirmed to him that he had bought the gold and advised him that he was transferring $1.6 million from his deposit account at Globalex to pay for the ten per cent margin. Mellic grunted, and hung up.

  Rocq thought for a moment about the easy life of the super-rich; about how true it was, the expression that ‘money makes money’. The Baron hadn’t had to do
a thing; just pick up a telephone and state an amount. One ton was the amount he had stated: thirty-two thousand ounces at $515 an ounce. Sixteen million dollars’ worth of gold. If it rose another $15, that would be a cool $480,000 profit, and the Baron wouldn’t have had to stump up one cent above the money he already had on deposit and earning him interest at Globalex. Long before the September delivery date, when the balance of the sixteen million would be due, the gold price would have peaked out and begun to slide back down; before the slide happened, Rocq would have closed out the Baron’s entire position and credited his account with the profit.

  He could understand the Baron being angry at his inefficiency in being out of the office at the time of such a crisis. He knew he should really have an assistant, but he preferred to carry the whole can himself. Like many account executives, he kept the identity of his clients a closely-guarded secret. He started to tap on his calculator keyboard. If he had bought within minutes of the news of the attack, he could have got in right at the bottom – $8, $9, maybe even $10 earlier, and added a quarter of a million to the Baron’s bundle.

  Gold is one commodity that is almost certain to rise whenever there is trouble in the world. It always retains an attraction to the individual investor because behind every paper currency in the world are the gold reserves the paper represents, and there is an inherent mistrust in the value of the paper. Governments can make the paper money of their countries worthless overnight – it has happened many times in the past, Vietnam being one of the most recent examples of paper money becoming one hundred per cent worthless. If the banks of the country of which the currency was issued would not give credit for the paper, then the banks of no other country would. There is little use in being a millionaire if it is all in a currency which can no longer buy anything. No government would ever make gold worthless, because someone, somewhere, would always be willing to accept it in return for food, goods, shelter or services. It is an international marker and holds its value against all other currencies.