On the Edge

by Michael Ridpath

  So they stopped. Nils looked very nervous. Calder seemed unconcerned. At that moment he didn’t care if he dropped the whole lot. Still the sellers came. The bonds gapped down to a price of fifty-five. Calder was sitting on a loss of nearly six million euros. He bought another twenty million.

  Tarek hovered again. ‘Can you come into my office, Zero?’

  Calder followed him.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ said Tarek, as Calder shut the door behind him. ‘I told you not to buy any more.’

  ‘I’m putting on a bloody good trade.’

  ‘No you’re not. You’re winging it.’

  ‘Nils has done the work.’

  ‘Since when have you bought a hundred million euros of toxic waste without doing the work yourself?’

  ‘It’s OK. I feel good about this one. I’m backing Nils’s judgement. What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me? I’ve taken risks this big before.’

  ‘No, Zero, I don’t trust you. Not today. I told you not to buy any more and you ignored me. You could lose forty points on this kind of trade if it goes wrong. That’s forty million bucks. Now I’m telling you I want your exposure down to fifty million by tomorrow night.’

  ‘Tarek? What is this? You’ve never second guessed me before.’

  ‘Well, I’m second guessing you now.’ Tarek held Calder’s glare, his kind brown eyes looking almost sorrowful.

  It was the sorrow that persuaded Calder. He was losing control and Tarek knew it. He took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ he said.

  Tarek looked at Calder long and hard. ‘It’s Jen, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re angry about what’s happened to her.’

  ‘You bet I’m angry,’ said Calder.

  ‘It’s affecting your judgement.’

  Calder shrugged and turned on his heel. He paused at the door. ‘Why won’t you stand up for her? You know she’s being stitched up.’

  ‘If I were you, Zero, I’d let her go.’

  ‘I’m not going to.’

  The look of sorrow remained in Tarek’s eyes. ‘You’re a great trader,’ he said. ‘Usually. But you’re a disaster at politics. You’re way out of your depth on this one, and I’m not sure I can help you. Believe me, Jen’s going down. Don’t let her take you with her. Because she will, you know.’

  12

  The little girl squealed delightedly as Uncle Yuri reared up underneath her. She was a princess and he was a demented dragon who had saved her from the good but very boring Prince Vladimir. She loved the way her grandfather liked to turn the old fairy stories on their head.

  She grabbed his short hair in her tiny fists and told him to lie down. Uncle Yuri immediately sunk to his knees and rolled over, tickling her in the process. She giggled uncontrollably.

  ‘Stop all that noise in there!’ came a cry from the kitchen. It was the little girl’s grandmother, Uncle Yuri’s wife. ‘You’re overexciting the child.’

  Uncle Yuri got to his knees, and held his finger to his lips. The girl instantly became silent, dropping her guard, whereupon Uncle Yuri began tickling her again.

  Uncle Yuri was not really an uncle. He couldn’t be. He had no brothers and sisters, at least none that he knew of, for he had been brought up in an orphanage. People had begun to call him ‘uncle’ when he reached his thirties. He had a way with children. They instinctively warmed to him and he to them. He had a quiet calmness about him that made them feel safe with him. He was a little under middle height with unremarkable features, thinning hair, which was still dark, a small moustache and mild eyes. He lived with his wife of thirty years in the Crimean town of Yalta, in a smart but not ostentatious bungalow overlooking the Black Sea. So far they had three grandchildren. Uncle Yuri was hopeful that his own five children would produce many more.

  His first memories had been of the orphanage, one of the hell-holes of the Soviet system, run by a sadist named Sergei Tartarov. Little Yuri had no idea who his parents were. He and the other inmates had been bullied and abused since before he could remember. So he had developed his own method of survival. Merging into the background, avoiding trouble, but, if it came to him, being absolutely ruthless. In November 1964, at the age of fifteen, he left the orphanage. By Christmas, Sergei Tartarov was dead, his naked, mutilated body found in a nearby wood.

  ‘Yuri! Sasha!’ came the angry cry from the kitchen, but it was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone. Still panting, Uncle Yuri picked it up.

  ‘Uncle? It’s Myshko.’

  ‘Myshko! How good to hear from you.’ Uncle Yuri had known Mykhailo Bodinchuk since the latter was a sixteen-year-old spending summers at the family dacha on the Black Sea coast. They had struck up a friendship that had lasted seventeen years, and had been cemented when, at the age of twenty-three, young Mykhailo had decided it would further his interests if his wealthy ex-KGB father were to be permanently retired from the family business, and had turned to Uncle Yuri for help. Although still only thirty-three, Bodinchuk was now one of the wealthiest men in the Ukraine: he owned a couple of banks, and a number of privatized industries including a thriving arms-manufacturing business. He was also Uncle Yuri’s favourite client. He, too, could be absolutely ruthless, but only when necessary. Uncle Yuri had grown heartily sick of the sadistic love of violence for violence’s sake that characterized so many of his customers.

  ‘I was just playing with Sasha,’ Uncle Yuri said, explaining his breathlessness.

  ‘And how’s little Tatiana?’

  ‘An angel. She smiled for the first time last week.’

  ‘I’m sure she will be a beautiful girl, Uncle. I can’t wait to see pictures of her.’

  ‘She will, just like Katya, her mother.’ Katya was Uncle Yuri’s eldest and favourite daughter.

  ‘I am sorry to take you away from your grandchildren, but I have a little job for you. It is a tricky one, but I am sure you will have no difficulty. You know how I keep only the most important assignments for you. This one will involve travelling to London …’

  It was a perfect day for flying. There had been a hard frost overnight, and it had taken a while for Calder to remove the ice crystals from the red wings of his Pitts Special biplane. But now he was four thousand feet above the Suffolk countryside, he appreciated it. The sky was a deep clear blue, and from this altitude he could see at least thirty miles in each direction. London was marked by a brown murky haze far off to the south, to the north was Thetford Forest and the large US Air Force bases of Lakenheath and Mildenhall, and to the west the city of Cambridge, where he had first learned to fly in the University Air Squadron. Below, the farmland was still brushed with frost, and fingers of mist lingered in shallow valleys. In this sunshine all that would be burned off in a couple of hours, he reckoned.

  He glanced around to make sure he was still alone in the sky. Then he lowered the nose, building up speed and energy for the manoeuvre. He pulled back on the stick, hauling the nose out of the dive and feeling the g-force pull him down into his seat. The aircraft soared to the vertical, speed decreasing, and when the top wing was in line with the horizon, he nudged the stick forward and to the right. The horizon revolved slowly, and with a touch of right rudder, the Pitts rolled off the top.

  It wasn’t quite perfect, but it was fun. Jerry, his occasional instructor, would have been impressed. Calder wasn’t able to fly often enough to polish his aerobatic skills; he always seemed to be just a little rusty. But he could fly only at weekends, and then only when the weather obliged.

  Since his days at Cambridge, Calder had been hooked on flying. He was a natural. He had joined the RAF eagerly, and then done his damnedest to make sure that he made it through the selection process to fly fast jets. He had trained on Hawks at RAF Valley on Anglesey, darting between the Welsh mountains making dummy runs on dams and bridges, learning to fly and to fight at high speed. Then, as a ‘baby-budgie’, he had been transferred to Cottesmore in Rutland for conversion training on the Tornado GR.1. A ye
ar at Marham flying Tornados at five hundred miles an hour a few hundred feet above the ground, and then it had all been brought to an end in that valley in Wales.

  He closed the throttle, raised the nose of the Pitts, and as the wings buffeted with the first hint of a stall, pressed his left foot steadily all the way down to the floor. The nose fell and the world started to spin. After several rotations and a loss of a couple of thousand feet he recovered, now safely beneath the Stansted-controlled airspace for his route home.

  ‘OK, Zero,’

  Calder followed his boss through the trading room to his office. It was bonus day, the tensest day of the year, the day when life in the City was most removed from the real world. Although this time of year had always brought him good news, Calder hated it. For traders and salesmen at the big investment banks the monthly pay slip is only a part of their remuneration; their bonus can be several times their annual salary. For the last few years Calder’s bonuses had been measured in hundreds of thousands of pounds. In the boom times of the late nineties top traders often pulled down millions, but that was rarer now, and Calder had been too junior to earn that much. Despite all this undeserved largesse, bonus time was traditionally a period of temper tantrums, whining, sulking and empty threats to quit and join the competition. The sound of one of his colleagues complaining that he had been ‘ripped off’ by a quarter of a million-pound bonus produced a queasy feeling in Calder’s stomach. None of them was worth that much, he knew.

  This was the first year he had been in charge of his own desk, and he would have to tell his troops what their pay was. Whatever the figure, he knew Matt would be pleased and Nils would complain. He was worried that they would give Jen zero, but she had worked hard for him and she deserved something.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Tarek, grabbing for his beads. He managed to take his own seat without allowing his eyes to move anywhere near Calder. This was going to be bad. Perhaps Tarek knew he’d be unhappy if they tried to stiff Jen.

  Tarek took four white envelopes out of his drawer, hesitated and passed one of them over to Calder, still avoiding his eye.

  Calder opened it, his eyes darting over the text and latching on to the figures in the centre of the one-paragraph letter.

  £5,000.

  Five thousand pounds! At first Calder couldn’t understand it. He quickly checked the name at the top, and scanned the paragraph. There was no doubt about it. Bloomfield Weiss were pleased to provide him with an annual bonus of five thousand pounds.

  Tarek’s beads clacked noisily.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Tarek sighed, and for the first time looked up. ‘I’m sorry, Zero. Really sorry. Until yesterday, we had a much larger figure in mind. But, after extensive discussion, we’ve reduced it.’

  ‘Discussion with who?’

  Tarek shrugged.

  ‘Bibby?’

  Tarek remained motionless, his stillness assent.

  ‘Why?’ Calder asked. ‘Last year the Prop Desk made forty-two million bucks, and for most of that time I was in charge. I know we’ve had a bad start to this year, but that shouldn’t matter.’

  ‘Actually, there is a reason,’ said Tarek. ‘And I’m sure you know very well what it is.’

  ‘Jen. But how can you take my bonus away over that?’

  ‘The feeling is that Jen’s actions reflect very badly on Bloomfield Weiss and that as her manager you could have done much more to prevent the situation getting out of hand.’

  ‘That’s total crap and you know it!’

  Tarek stared at Calder, pain in his large brown eyes.

  ‘So you want me to go back to my desk and call a head-hunter? Is that really what you want?’

  ‘No,’ said Tarek. ‘Not at all. You’re a very valuable member of the team and I desperately want to keep you. Which is why we will be prepared to grant you a guaranteed bonus of four hundred thousand pounds next year, in addition to whatever you earn as a result of this year’s trading.’

  Calder raised his eyebrows. ‘Provided?’

  Tarek nodded. ‘Provided the situation with Jen is resolved satisfactorily.’

  ‘So I get four hundred thousand if I drop Jen, and five thousand if I support her?’

  Tarek nodded.

  ‘That stinks.’

  ‘It does,’ Tarek said.

  ‘So why did you stand for it?’

  ‘I fought it,’ Tarek said. ‘But you’ve got a lot of powerful people against you. Benton Davis and, more importantly, Simon Bibby in New York.’

  ‘And Justin Carr-Jones.’

  Tarek shrugged.

  ‘I can’t believe you let that jerk run rings round you.’

  Tarek said nothing as he fiddled with his beads. Then he looked up. ‘Actually, this is all wrong. What happened to Jen, what’s happening to you, your bonus. This isn’t the kind of thing I want to be involved with. Not the reason I’m doing this job.’

  ‘Then why–’

  Tarek lifted his hand. ‘Listen to me, Zero. I thought long and hard about resigning last night. Not threatening to resign, really resigning. In the end I decided not to. I’ll tell you why. Things like this happen at Bloomfield Weiss, and at every other investment bank. As you rise higher in the organization, you come across them more and more frequently. Now, people like you and me can try to stop them, we should try to stop them, but if we fail we shouldn’t just quit – run away and leave the store to the likes of Carr-Jones. We should stay and try to make a difference next time.

  ‘I want you here: I need you here. This will all blow over, and once it does you can do a vital job for us. If you have as good a year this year as I think you will, you’ve got a shot at a seven-figure bonus. Stick with it, Zero.’

  Calder shook his head. ‘What about the others?’

  Tarek pushed the three other envelopes across his desk to Calder and handed over a slip of paper with two names written on it. Nils got two hundred thousand, Matt one hundred and fifty. That should satisfy them, although Nils would probably mount a token protest.

  ‘And Jen?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Calder turned the pages of the book in front of him, trying to concentrate. It was John Keegan’s The First World War. He had been fascinated by military history since his days at university and still read it whenever he had the time, which was not nearly often enough. In every war, great generals were faced with the dilemma of which to choose: boldness or caution, opportunism or planning, seizing the initiative or careful preparation. Fortune favoured the brave and damned the foolhardy: it was only with hindsight that it was clear which was which. Normally he enjoyed reading Keegan and he had hoped that the horrors of Flanders would take his mind away from the lesser horrors of Bloomfield Weiss. But they hadn’t.

  His first impulse after leaving Tarek’s office was to storm out of the trading room, or at least to ring one of the many head-hunters who called him regularly. But he restrained himself. He had been at Bloomfield Weiss for seven years. Most of that time he had enjoyed himself, and he was very good at his job. So he had kept his cool, told Nils and Matt the news, deflected Nils’s moaning, and even managed a stilted two-minute phone conversation with Jen. She wasn’t surprised about the bonus, or lack of it. She sounded down, which didn’t surprise him. She also sounded as if she wanted to get him off the phone as quickly as possible.

  His anger had simmered gently during the day, and he had busied himself to try to take his mind off it. But now he was home he couldn’t hide from it any longer.

  He had always hated corporate politics, he had never been any good at it, and now he was getting shafted. The powers that be at Bloomfield Weiss had given him a simple choice: nearly half a million pounds if he went along with what they wanted, nothing if he didn’t. It was a bribe, plain and simple. But Calder had no inclination to take it, even though Jen’s case seemed to be a lost cause. He didn’t need the money. How much money did a single male actually need? He already had a p
erfectly pleasant flat on which the mortgage was paid off, a car that he loved and the Pitts Special for tootling around in on sunny weekends. Nearly half of his bonuses he gave to the tax man and most of the rest he saved. He didn’t need the four hundred thousand.

  He was more worried about his job. He loved trading. After he had left the RAF, he had feared the years of desk-bound tedium that seemed to stretch before him, but actually he found life at Bloomfield Weiss almost as stimulating. He thrived on the feeling of managing a huge bond position, watching the market move against him and then move his way. With the adrenaline coursing through his veins, the total concentration, his mind racing through the possibilities, his mouth dry with the fear of what might go wrong, he felt alive again. Risking millions, he got almost the same buzz as he had felt hurling his body around the sky at five hundred miles an hour. Almost.

  All traders were focused on their bonuses. It was their score card, a measure of how good or bad they were at their job. Most traders in his position would have felt honour-bound to quit. But he didn’t. That would be to admit defeat, admit that he had been outmanoeuvred by Carr-Jones. Tarek hadn’t been lying to him when he had said there were seven-figure bonuses in his future. He would stay, do his bit for Jen, take the political flak and come out fighting the other side.

  He thought of what his father would say. Or Nicky. Nicky.

  God, he missed her. She understood him, and although she didn’t like part of what she understood – his love of betting millions on the whim of the market – she had always been on his side. Until two months ago.

  He wanted to talk to her about all this. He trusted her instincts even where they were different from his own. She would be able to put things in some kind of perspective. With her, he could get through whatever Carr-Jones threw at him.

  He glanced over to the phone. He wanted to call her, but was there any point? A brush-off, however polite, would just make him feel worse.

  He had to try. He dialled her number. The phone rang. Four rings. Five. Six. Then there was a hiss as a recorded message kicked in. Calder dithered. Perhaps he should leave a message. What should he say?