by Ian Fox
She jumped out of bed, washed her face, and brushed her teeth. Then she began warming up. I’ll tell him I need a few CDs and a CD player. I’ll go mad in here without music.
With the help of a chair, she performed a few exercises so that five minutes later she could feel her heart beating faster. Then she did twenty pushups. After turning onto her back, she began leg-lifts. The next fifteen minutes she dedicated to her stomach muscles and then stood up and did a few squats. After turning the computer screen off, she lifted it above her head a few times to exercise her shoulders. Lastly, she sat down and crossed her legs into a yoga position in order to do some breathing exercises. She began to feel immense energy and felt pleased with herself.
At nine o’clock she turned on the computer screen and began following the trading in specific shares. She was surprised to see that the value of some had gone up considerably while others had gone down. She then checked the exchange rate of the U.S. dollar against the Euro and looked at the European stock markets. Before she knew it, it was twelve o’clock, she had been so engrossed. She kept looking and soon found the right opportunity.
“John,” she said into the monitor, “can you hear me?”
He took his time. Thinking that she was calling him because she wanted to use the bathroom, he made her wait ten minutes before opening her door.
“Buy a hundred and fifty round lots of Sony shares, now!” she said confidently.
He stared at her for a while as if he could not recognize her.
She was wearing the elegant white linen pants and pink silk shirt that he had bought her. She was sitting in the chair demurely and her hair looked different. He also noticed that she had put some blusher on her cheeks.
“Yes, no problem, I’ll do it immediately,” he said, overjoyed. He skipped upstairs like a child, glad that she had finally started working.
But in spite of this, there was still tension between them. They hated one another and exchanged only the words that were necessary. They did not eat together. John brought her food down to her room three times a day and then left quickly. When she needed it, he accompanied her to the bathroom.
At first this suited her. She liked the fact that he wasn’t bothering her anymore and left her alone. In the afternoons, when she was not following the stock markets, she was deep in thought, devising various ways of escaping. Soon she became resigned to the fact that this would not be so easy. Perhaps I really will have to stay in this basement for two years or more, she thought in despair, perhaps even to the end of my life.
*
Mornings went quickly with all the tension involved in the buying and selling of shares. At first John watched television calmly, but after a few days he often went to Emely’s room in excitement and together they followed the movements in the value of shares, without speaking. The value of his capital depended on the shares he owned at each moment and this fluctuated from one second to another. He kept doing calculations in his head while biting his nails.
*
Emely knew that speculating with securities was a risky business and that you could expect anything, from high profits to shocking losses. She kept looking at her wristwatch, sitting calmly in front of the screen as if John was not there.
Chapter 8
_______________________
The value of John’s capital was slowly growing. Three weeks had passed since Emely had started trading and if John were to sell everything now, he would get two million, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, quite a profit, so he was more than pleased. Although he didn’t talk to Emely more than necessary and had to keep watching her to see whether she had any more violent thoughts, silently he was admiring her intelligence. What can she see in those charts? he often wondered.
Every day when trading closed, he left the room without a word, as if Emely was not there. And he never forgot to lock the door.
When he realized how easy it was to make money, he bought a few luxuries. To begin with, ten new items of clothing. He no longer went to shabby bars, but looked for more exclusive restaurants for the more discerning customer. In addition, he no longer picked prostitutes from the road but ordered them from a handy catalogue in his hotel. While he was thrusting into one of them, another caressed and kissed him, cooling him down with champagne. Perfectly satiated and drunk he returned home at two in the morning. Emely was always woken by the alarm announcing his arrival.
One day John suddenly thought in fear that this dream would one day stop. He had promised Emely to let her go and this thought horrified him. He waved it off and smiled, thinking, I’ll never let her go. He poured himself a glass of champagne and took a bite of toast with caviar. I saved her life and now she’s my property.
*
While John was spending his money and enjoying life, Emely was terribly bored in the late afternoons and evenings and missed human company, anyone. Sometimes she even wished at least John would talk to her. Even though she hated him, he was the only person she had contact with. She no longer feared him and sensed that he would leave her alone. Clearly that last failed sexual attempt had left deep scars in him.
*
When one day the trading had finished, she said, “John, whose idea was it to kidnap me, yours or Ronald’s?”
He looked at her, surprised at her direct question. “Ronald’s,” he said quietly.
“And you helped him without hesitation?” she asked.
With difficulty he took his eyes off the screen and stared into space. “Ronald is my older brother. I always thought he was much smarter and more capable than me. When I was a child he protected me against others and helped me in various ways.”
Emely listened with interest.
“He was nice to me, but at the same time humiliated me. ‘You may not be intelligent, but you’re lucky to have a smart older brother,’ he would often say. After graduation he went on to study economics while I got a job. I somehow resigned myself to the fact that college was not for me and that I wouldn’t be able to pass exams.”
Emely was surprised at this.
“After our father died, there was no doubt that Ronald was more than suitable to take over. I never envied him, I was pleased just to be able to help.”
“You should have been more persistent,” Emely told him.
“I can see that now, but then I thought differently. All my life I was never the clever one, he was. Irrespective of what he decided to do, I always followed and was loyal to him. Never ever did I doubt how smart he was.” Looking left, he quickly checked the last changes in the value of shares.
“And what do you think about him now?”
“It’s hard to say, but recently he has been annoying me. Whatever he does bothers me.”
The screen showed that trading hours were over. John leaned back on his chair and stretched. “It’s time for a nap.”
Chapter 9
_______________________
“What can I do for you?” Blake asked. It was 6:00 p.m. and Robert Miles, the journalist, was sitting in front of him. “What can I tell you today?” Blake was tired, but he knew that meetings with Miles were important.
The journalist had already helped Donnovan Corporation a great deal. While many newspapers were wondering in their articles about whether the company would survive at all, Robert Miles kept emphasizing the capabilities of the company’s executives and saying that Emely Donnovan had not been running things for some time. This was a lie, but a necessary one in such difficult times. All these articles were good promotion that would be stupid to reject. A month had passed since Emely’s disappearance and hopes about her return were gradually diminishing.
“I’d like to write a story about Emely Donnovan.”
“What, exactly?”
“A kind of a life story.”
Blake thought, It’s as if she is dead already.
Miles knew he had to change the theme of his articles or he’d lose the readers’ interest. Instead of continuing to write about the compan
y, he’d start describing Emely Donnovan and perhaps even turn her into a star. Yes, that was exactly what he wanted to do. Write a story about her success, in installments. In his dreams he could already see readers hardly able to wait for every new edition and buying up all the copies within a few hours. If her life happened not to have been interesting, he would make it such. After all, he was a capable journalist and writing was his job.
“Why not,” Crouse said. He pushed back his sleeve to look at his watch. He sighed, resigned to coming home at eight at the earliest. Good thing he didn’t have a wife or children. His thoughts strayed for a moment.
Three times he had nearly gotten married, but every time something happened at the last moment. The first fiancée ran off with someone else. The second one, he realized, was with him only for his money. And he didn’t love the third one at all, something he discerned right before the wedding. He had never fallen in love again and got used to the advantages of a single life. Sooner or later, everyone is alone, he often told himself jokingly. But he greatly missed having children. He was sorry he didn’t have a son or a daughter. Who would he leave all that money to when he died? Yes, he was thinking about his death already. When a person reached his age, it became inevitable. He always tried to chase these thoughts away, but sometimes they persisted and, merged with depression, they turned into a kind of nightmare.
The journalist suggested: “It’s best if we begin at the very beginning.”
Blake smiled faintly and said, “As far as she told me, she had some money left to her by her deceased mother, but there was very little. She could have bought a good car, but she chose not to spend the money. She got her first job in a small stockbroking company. The work interested her greatly and she spent long hours in the office. She began by working as a secretary ….”
*
“Emely, please draw up a contract with our new partner, Golden Enterprise.” Her boss was rubbing his hands with satisfaction, looking out of the window. “They’ll invest over eight hundred thousand dollars.”
Every time, Emely was astonished by the huge sums of money that individual companies were willing to invest into shares and bonds. She often tried to imagine how it would be to have that much money. She thought, At this particular moment, I’d buy Motors shares. The value is about to stop falling. Afterward they’ll grow for at least twenty days.
She took a sip of juice and adjusted a strand of long hair that was falling across her eyes. She kept dreaming: I’d also buy DDS bonds. They’re ridiculously cheap this week. Oh, if I had all that money…
“And call Mr. Milder to arrange a meeting for tomorrow at ten,” her boss told her, interrupting her thoughts.
“OK, but I want to remind you that you’re meeting the CEO of Walters & Walters at half past ten.”
“I know, I didn’t forget. I’ll get rid of Milder in a few minutes.” Putting his hand on the handle of the leather-padded door, he added. “And please, find me the invoices I mentioned yesterday.”
“Right.”
*
I’d also buy CW-2 bonds, investing at least a 10 percent share in them. She was familiar with it all. She always knew which securities were worth the most at any time. She had been a secretary for four years, but spent every spare minute with the stockbrokers. Oh, if only I could be in their place, she wished.
She looked over their shoulder, at the screen. “What does this window mean?” she’d ask.
“Those are average growth indexes,” one broker told her.
“And those diagrams?”
“They show the growth in the value of Julery Adams bonds.”
“How interesting!” She stored everything away in her head and never needed to ask the same question twice.
“Emely, back to your desk,” her boss told her sharply. “I’ve told you countless times that your place is next to my office and nowhere else.”
“Yes, I’m coming.”
She knew that she would again join the brokers at the first available opportunity. What she liked most were the days when her boss was not there. Then she pulled her chair closer to the nearest broker and spent hours sitting next to him while he explained to her the purpose of every individual transaction.
“See, these are worth buying today. I think they’ll go up tomorrow.”
Emely absorbed it and tried to learn as much as possible. She knew you could never know exactly what is most worth buying, but that was the main attraction of it all.
Stephan, next to whom she liked most to sit, told her, “You have to rely on your instinct. You’ve got to have a sixth sense, like animals do.”
She hoped she had it.
“You just have to learn how to use it.” He winked at her in a friendly way. “Sometimes I don’t know what to buy and what to sell and I often make mistakes. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is the result at the end of the month and especially at the end of the year. You must never allow momentary setbacks to get you down.”
She nodded like a schoolgirl. “Why don’t you buy more Motors Co. shares if you say that their value will grow by at least 20 percent in the next two months? I’d put more money into them.”
“You can never know for sure what will really happen, it’s all just conjecture. The best-laid plans may fail miserably the next day, turning things upside down. There’s a general rule that you never invest more than 20 percent of all the available money into one type of security.”
“Of course, I forgot that. But if it’s a solid company and the prognosis is good …”
“You learn with the years that the foundation of even the most solid of companies can turn to dust in a single moment. Remember the Ralington affair? Their shares were considered a very good investment. After they published their profits and dividends of around one hundred and fifty dollars per share, all the stockbroking companies wanted to grab as much stock as possible.” He looked at the diagrams on his screen for a moment. Then he closed a few windows and dedicated his attention to Emely again. “The CEO of that company boasted about his previous investments. He was even nominated for the Manager of the Month Award. And then only four weeks later, the supervisory board announced bankruptcy. Everyone was horrified. They wanted to sell Ralington shares and bonds, but sale was blocked and they could do nothing.”
“Yes, you’re right, that’s what happened,” Emely said.
“See, it’s not difficult, but you have to follow the rules.”
“Aha.”
“You’ve got to spread your money as widely as possible.”
Emely looked him in the eye, trying to remember it all. The information took root in her mind because it fascinated her. She would give anything to be given a chance. It was not that she didn’t like working as a secretary, but her work couldn’t compare to that of stockbrokers, whom she saw as the driving force of the company. They made a profit while she spent most of her time answering the phone and sealing envelopes. Their work was much more important than hers. That was why she enrolled at college. She didn’t want to spend her life sitting next to the director’s office.
Every morning she arose two hours before work, had a shower, and then studied thick books on economics. Although she was absorbed in the long paragraphs, she sometimes fell asleep. But she soon woke up again and continued with her studies. She was strict with herself, propelled forward by the desire to succeed in life.
“You do all your exams on time,” Sally, her roommate and best friend, said to her one evening. “How do you manage it when you spend all day at work?”
“It’s not true. Only last week I failed the statistics exam.” She was angry with herself for not having studied more. But at that time it was mayhem at work and she could never get home before nine.
“Oh come on, you’re a very hard worker. If you go on like this, you’ll soon be a fully fledged economist.”
Emely hoped Sally was right. Every time she ran out of energy she imagined working as a stockbroker and it gave her strength to go on.
“And what will you do once your studies are over?” Sally asked.
“I told you I’d like to be a stockbroker.”
“A stockbroker? How strange. Isn’t that a man’s job? What could possibly be interesting in doing that?”
“It’s true brokers don’t buy shoes and handbags in designer stores, which is something you’d love to do most, Sally,” Emely teased, “but I find what they do so interesting.”
“If that’s what you want. I just hope you’ve mentioned it at work, you know, about your wishing to become a stockbroker one day.”
Emely swallowed hard. She had not mentioned it to anyone, afraid that they’d laugh at her. All the brokers were men and experienced traders. And what was she? What did she have to recommend her? She would never reveal her wish to them.
“Yes, yes,” she said.
“Whatever, I’m sure you’ll land on your feet.”
But Emely was not so sure. Although they valued her work and kept praising her, she had a feeling they were pleased with her as a secretary and didn’t want her to become more.
When after the first year she took her grades to her boss, he praised her. “Wonderful, Emely, you really are a good girl. I knew you’d manage. When you finish all your exams, you’ll be able to become my business executive assistant.”
“Business executive assistant?” The words had echoed around Emely’s head. “How terrible. Why didn’t he say I could become a stockbroker? Executive assistant!” She kept repeating these words, horrified.