by Peter James
In theory, if the United States of America were wiped out, or taken over by the Soviet Union, the mighty dollar bill could become a meaningless document overnight. The only Americans, however rich they might be in theory, who could buy anything at all elsewhere in the world, would be the ones that had gold. Gold is the only currency that is universal – that everyone, everywhere, will always accept, just as they did long before paper money was ever invented to save gold being lugged about; when the going in the world starts to look bad, it is gold that everyone wants to buy.
There is, in fact, surprisingly little gold in the world; all the gold that has ever been mined would fit easily inside a cube fifty-seven foot by fifty-seven foot by fifty-seven foot – the size of a not particularly large house. The illusion that there is more comes from the amount of gold plated articles there are around, and the fact that gold is extremely malleable: from a single ounce, fifty miles of gold wire can be produced.
In spite of this small amount of gold, an enormous volume is traded in the world money markets each day; many times all the gold in the world changes hands, on paper, in the course of each year. In times of international tension, the public traditionally begin to horde, the speculators stop selling, and a shortage is created. With the addition of a vast amount of extra buyers, there is only one way the price at such times can go: up.
Rocq had a not dissimilar conversation to his terse one with the Baron, with the five other members of his ‘A’ team, interrupted by earfuls of abuse from a good thirty of his lesser clients. A number of the accounts he had were discretionary accounts – he had full power to buy and sell as he thought fit, within the individual budgets – and normally these clients left him to get on with it. But not today.
The loudest earful of all that Rocq received was from his smallest punter, Sidney Chilterley. He telephoned Rocq, instructing him to buy one ounce of gold when it was at $517, and then telephoned him and ordered him to sell it when it reached $520, making himself a gross profit of $3 – a net profit, after brokerage, of $2.75, and a commission of $0.03 for Rocq. Rocq was so fed up with him that he didn’t bother to remind him that the minimum handling charge for any single transaction was $10, thus rendering Chilterley’s net profit of $2.75 into a net loss situation of $7.25. Before Chilterley had bought the gold, his account with Globalex had stood at $7,002 exactly. It now stood at $6,994.75 – exactly $5.25 below the minimum required to maintain an account at Globalex. Rocq looked forward, to turning down Chilterley’s next order until he had received a cheque to rectify the inadequacy of his account. Chilterley was part of an unsuccessful experiment at Globalex to develop a business out of small punters.
For a few moments the lights on his switchboard stopped flashing. Rocq opened the Yellow Pages directory, thumbed through it, and then dialled the number of an Interflora florist. ‘I want to send ten pounds worth of cut flowers to the following person: Amanda Lowell, Garbutt, Garbutt and Garbutt, 292A Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge. Message: “Missing you madly, are you free for dinner?”.’
He hung up. Slivitz looked at him. ‘Another satisfied customer?’
‘What do you do with yours at night, Slivitz? Stick it out the window and try and screw the world?’
Slivitz’s phone rang before he could reply. He glared at Rocq as he answered it.
‘You sure picked a good morning to play truant,’ said Henry Mozer.
‘Unfortunately, Henry,’ said Rocq, ‘the Israelis forgot to tell me their plans.’
4
It was strange, the atmosphere in the office that afternoon of the day of the second Osirak attack, thought Rocq. A curious mixture of jubilations. The Jewish element among the staff was ecstatic over yet another positive blow being struck by the Israelis. The non-Jewish were overjoyed to have some action in the markets; all bad news was good, so far as they were concerned, for bad news meant movement of prices, and movement of prices meant buying and selling for their clients, and buying and selling meant commissions. When bad news was good news at the same time, so much the better. The only really bad news for a commodity broker was no news.
The only person in the office who didn’t become the least bit flippant as the afternoon wore on was Clive Kettle. Kettle didn’t know how to be flippant; no one had ever told him. From the age of eight onwards, he had turned up each day at school clutching a Financial Times, a black briefcase and a rolled-up umbrella. Whilst his contemporaries read Enid Blyton and Biggles, he ploughed through the Wall Street Journal. His classmates spent their free time on games fields, in parks, in cinemas, playing and romping. He spent the free hours of his childhood having meetings with bank managers, discussing the investments and acquisitions on which his pocket money was spent. Throughout his entire life, to the twenty-seven-year-old he was today, he had one desire and one desire only, and that was to be a successful businessman. So far he had not succeeded. His main problem was that he took everything so seriously that he could never make a decision. When a metal began to rise in price, he did not want to buy, because he knew it might drop again. When it began to go down, he was reluctant to sell, in case it went up again. Many of the clients he had acquired over the past five years had left him. When they had first started with him, they backed him, thinking he was an infant prodigy, the original whizz kid; five years on, with a performance twenty per cent below the Dow Jones, they were coming, one by one, to the reluctant conclusion that he was an idiot. He replaced his phone on its hook, and proclaimed loudly, to no one in particular, ‘I don’t know what you are all looking so happy about – this could be the start of the Third World War.’
‘Sooner the better,’ said Slivitz, ‘with the amount of gold I’ve just poured into my clients’ troughs. A good international nuke war would send gold through the roof.’ Then his face dropped. ‘But I don’t suppose it will happen,’ he said, gloomily.
‘Gold up two more dollars,’ shouted a voice from the far side of the console.
Rocq was nervous. Gold was now $522; it had been climbing steadily. The pattern was such that he knew he had to stay in for a while longer, and shelve the plan he had made to start unloading when the price reached $523 – an increase of $25. He wanted a cigarette badly, but he had quit two months ago, and he wanted to stay quit. He wondered whether he might be more sensible to stick to that plan, but having caused his clients to miss out earlier in the day, he needed at least to regain some of their favour by taking them right to the end of the rise. His phone rang. ‘Rocq,’ he said, answering it.
There was a crackle, then the quiet voice of Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh of Umm Al Amnah. ‘How is it going, Alex?’
Rocq was relieved that he had called; the prince was in very deep, and now he could pass the buck to him. ‘Still rising – just jumped two more dollars – my hunch is that we’re near the top, unless there’s going to be any retaliation by the Iraqis. What do you want to do?’
‘Up to you, Alex.’
Rocq cursed; that wasn’t the answer he wanted.
‘I’d be inclined to sell pretty soon.’
‘Five more dollars, then sell,’ said the prince.
‘Okay – but it might not go.’
‘Chance it.’
‘Okay.’ Rocq hung up, and breathed a little; he was off the hook on that one. The light on Tor 2 flashed.
‘Hallo, Harry,’ he said to Baron Mellic. ‘Still got your hair on?’
‘No – I scratched it all out thinking about that two hundred and fifty thousand bucks you cost me.’
‘Well – I’ve made it up for you – gold’s five hundred and twenty-two and we’re still in the game.’
‘So who’s doing me favours? We’re thirteen up and we should be twenty-four.’
‘Harry – if I hadn’t let you down this morning, I’d have taken you out at five hundred and ten, and saved myself the ulcers waiting here, watching every second to see if it starts to move back down.’
‘You’re full of shit.’
‘Damned right –
and I haven’t dared leave my chair to go to the bathroom all afternoon. I think it’s time to sell.’
‘No. You can sweat it out a little more. I expect at least five thirty, Alex, and if it goes more, I want more. I don’t want to read tomorrow’s papers and discover gold went five fifty and you closed me out at five thirty-one – and all because of a complaint with your bowels.’
‘I didn’t know Rubber Weekly carried the gold prices.’
‘Just keep bouncing, Alex, will yah?’ The Baron hung up. Rocq’s intercom light began flashing and he picked it up. The voice down the other end didn’t need any introduction; it was Sir Monty Elleck, the chairman of Globalex:
‘Come up and see me right away, Alex, please,’ he said, curtly.
‘Yes, sir.’
Rocq scribbled some buying and selling instructions down on his pad and handed them to Boadicea, the nickname they had given to the flame-haired girl order clerk. She looked disdainfully at the scrawl on the pad. ‘’Ere, Alex,’ she said, in her thick East End accent. ‘You oughter spend some of your million pound bleedin’ commission on learning how to write.’
‘I’ll do a deal with you – you learn how to speak and I’ll learn how to write. Maybe we could go to college together.’
A ball of paper hit him in the nape of his neck as he walked out of the door; he sincerely hoped it wasn’t his list of instructions.
Sir Monty Elleck was not only the chairman of Globalex; he owned the company lock, stock and barrel. He was also the managing director, presiding over a board which met once a year for one hour. Of the eleven other directors on the board, only two had any practical knowledge of the commodity business. All eleven men had been selected by Elleck because of their high ranks, some by birth, some by merit, that made them in a position to be able to recommend and introduce new clients from the pick of the nation’s wealthy and successful. The board comprised one duke, two earls, four knights, three self-made multi-millionaire heads of international public companies, and the shadow Secretary for Trade and Industry. All of them received handsome introductory fees from every new client they introduced, together with a percentage of Globalex’s brokerage fees on all their subsequent transactions; although they never knew it, Elleck screwed them all blind on this part of the deal.
Sir Monty had come a long way since his grandfather, Baruch Elleckstein, a Lithuanian immigrant to England, had sold his first hundredweight of pig-iron from a barrow in Leadenhall Street. The physical distance had not been far – 88 Mincing Lane was a mere couple of hundred yards from the spot in Leadenhall Street – but the financial distance was vast. It was Elleck’s father who had realized there were easier ways to make money out of metal than humping around hand-carts loaded with the stuff, and it was he who founded Globalex, anglicized the family name, and put the Elleck family on the motorway to fortune. Seventeen years ago, whilst plugging-in a Kenwood food mixer for his wife, in the kitchen of their Mayfair flat, Joseph Elleck had inadvertently allowed his index finger and thumb to slide too far around the plug, and they had made contact with the negative and positive pins at the exact moment of insertion. When his wife came into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, she found no life in either her husband or the Kenwood mixer.
It would have been of little consolation to her to have known that the wiring to the socket into which Joseph Elleck had inserted the plug had been manufactured by a firm which bought all its copper wire through Globalex.
Monty Elleck was Joseph’s only son, and he succeeded immediately to the throne, taking to his job with great zeal. During the next decade, he opened branch offices throughout the world, and made one Prime Minister of Great Britain a £500,000 profit in less than six months, for which he received his knighthood. He was married to an overweight wife, who spent her time waddling around whichever of the Elleck residences – either in St John’s Wood, Gloucestershire, Gstaad, Sardinia, or Miami – took her fancy. He had an underweight son, who, as a result of a congenital mental defect, was attempting to start a kibbutz in the Shetland Isles, and two plump daughters whose main ambitions in life appeared to be to become fatter than their mother.
Elleck had coined the advertising slogan for Globalex: ‘At Globalex, we make you richer whilst you’re just dreaming about it.’ And it was his proud boast to all potential new clients that ‘We have offices in every time zone in the world. Wherever in the world you are sleeping, Globalex is awake somewhere else, making you money.’
Sir Monty Elleck was not only good at making money, reflected Rocq, as he walked up to the sixth floor of 88 Mincing Lane, he was equally talented at spending it. The change in atmosphere from the fourth floor was similar to that of walking from economy into first class in an aeroplane. There was nothing dramatically different, but there were subtle changes, creating a most definite aura; for instance, thought Rocq, anyone much below six foot tall would have greatly benefited from a pair of stilts, which would have enabled them to see over the top of the pile of the carpet. It was when you got nearer to Elleck’s office itself that things began to change appreciably. Suddenly, the walls became oak panelled, and hung with paintings; anyone who did not know much about art but could read signatures would learn that gentlemen by the names of Gainsborough, Titian, Reynolds, Claude, Constable, Vermeer and Hals had been responsible for these paintings – originals, all.
Money dripped off the walls like running water; each time Rocq walked down here, he had the same feeling of awe, envy, and lust for money. Just in those twenty feet of corridor, he had walked past more money than almost any ordinary human being was ever going to have in a lifetime – even if he or she won the football pools every week for a year.
Elleck’s office looked like the boudoir of a successful whore – probably because it was his wife who had been responsible for the decorating. It was a curious blend of Louis XIV, Louis XVI, Robert Adam, Thomas Chippendale, the Bauhaus, and Harrods. The walls were lemon yellow, and pastel pink, with gilded friezes. The carpet was cerise, and sprinkled with Persian rugs.
Elleck’s secretary of seventeen years – and his father’s secretary before that – Miss Jane Wells, ushered Rocq in and then left, closing the door behind her.
Elleck sat in the middle of the room, behind an ornate carved mahogany desk that looked like a dressing table, on a mountainous chair which looked as if it had been stolen from an African tribal chieftain; it was so thickly upholstered that even with several inches shaved off its legs, Elleck’s short legs were still suspended above the ground.
The diminutive chairman of Globalex spoke in a high-pitched voice and as he spoke, his face always moved with a combination of nervous energy and nervous twitches that were so intense, it was always quite impossible for anyone opposite him to tell in which direction he was looking at any given time. His head was almost completely bald, but he had massive bushy eyebrows, and when he screwed up his forehead tightly, which he did every five seconds, the eyebrows shot almost to the dome of his head.
‘Good afternoon, Alex, sit down.’ He waved his pudgy fingers expansively about; Rocq cast his eyes around the room, noticing a pair of pink Victorian love-seats, a saffron chesterfield, and a small lime green armchair over by the window. There was no chair close to the desk. Rocq decided on the lime green armchair, and sat down.
Elleck never bothered with formalities – he went straight in: ‘This Israeli raid, Alex – it’s pushed quite a few metals up.’
Rocq nodded. ‘Particularly gold, Sir Monty.’
‘And silver, zinc, lead and copper.’ The Chairman proceeded to reel off from memory the current market buying and selling price of all the major metals. Rocq nodded his agreement to the prices.
‘You must be pleased to see life in the market,’ said Elleck.
‘It has been quiet recently.’
‘You still got that car of yours?’ There was disapproval in the Chairman’s voice. Although Alex qualified for a company car, the Chairman strictly forbade buying foreign; if employees wanted fore
ign cars, they had to buy them with their own money.
‘Yes, Sir Monty.’
‘Why don’t you buy something British? You know we would buy it for you.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Sir Monty, but there is no British car that I want.’
The Chairman shrugged, and looked at his watch. ‘It is now four-twenty. At exactly four-thirty, I want you to start selling your gold. I want you to have unloaded your entire gold position by five o’clock. You have some big customers – I don’t want to see them upset.’
‘Personally, I think the price will climb several dollars higher.’ Rocq spoke with a trace of petulance and a trace of arrogance in his voice.
Elleck’s eyebrows shot to the top of his head and hung there like two large moths; he pursed his lips and made a sound not unlike a Wellington boot being extracted from a ditch of thick mud. ‘Would you like to assume personal responsibility for any losses incurred if the price does not rise?’
‘Of course not, no.’
‘You’ve made a good profit for your clients so far today?’
Rocq nodded.
‘You bought for all your clients at four hundred and ninety-eight, I trust?’
Rocq stared at him for a moment. He wasn’t sure what was coming next. ‘No, Sir Monty, I didn’t. I waited until five hundred and nine.’
‘Why?’ asked Elleck, politely; too politely.
‘I wanted to wait until there was a definite rising pattern.’
‘I see.’ Elleck still spoke very politely. ‘When the Israelis bombed Osirak in 1981, the world press called it the greatest single act of aggression since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Now the Israelis do the same again, which presumably makes this morning’s raid on Osirak the second greatest single act of aggression since Pearl Harbour; the entire world starts beating a path to its nearest bullion dealer, and you alone decide to sit tight?’