Trading Reality

by Michael Ridpath

  The pecking order had been made clear during the introduction. ‘The big honcho from Tokyo’ was the smallest and oldest. A squat man with closely cropped grey hair, he seemed permanently on the verge of sleep as he watched the proceedings from heavily hooded eyes. He didn’t speak any English. He was referred to as Mr Akama.

  His deputy was much younger, probably in his thirties. His name was Yoshiki Ishida, but we could call him Yoshi. He spoke in a flawless American accent. He explained that he had a master’s degree from MIT and had just spent three years with Onada Industries’ US subsidiary in California. He was now General Manager of Onada Industries pie in London. He was clearly intelligent, very intelligent. He did all the talking, and occasionally spoke rapidly and deferentially to his boss, who would give a curt response, and resume his semi-sleeping position.

  The other two Japanese didn’t say anything, and were quickly forgotten.

  David and I were on the other side of the table. I left all the talking to him.

  He was good. He spoke with respect and without any of the condescension with which some westerners address the Japanese. They took out the draft contracts and began working through them.

  I have to admit I was intimidated. I had come across the Japanese before in the bond markets. I had always dismissed them as the dumb guys with all the money and none of the sense. Someone has to buy at the top and sell at the bottom for the rest of us to make an honest buck, and more often than not it was the Japanese.

  But these men were different. Onada Industries was a medium-sized Japanese electronics company, and as such was bigger than any British company in the same sector. The Japanese reputation in electronics was formidable. It was difficult to believe that once they got their teeth into virtual reality, a company like Onada wouldn’t swat the likes of FairSystems to one side.

  And we were just about to give away the code for FairSim 1 to these people.

  But what did I know? A twenty-eight-year-old whose experience of virtual reality was measured in weeks rather than years. David knew much more than me about this sort of stuff. And Onada would not be happy if we tried to change the terms of the contract now. They could be a powerful enemy.

  Yet I had always had faith in my own judgement. It had seen me through many difficult situations at Harrison Brothers. I remembered my first few months as a trader. I was working for Gus, at thirty an old man of the markets who was a legend in his own lunchtime. We were trading ‘perpetuals’, or ‘perps’. These were extraordinary bonds that never matured. Apparently, this didn’t matter, since investors could always sell the bonds if they wanted to. Hundreds of millions of these bonds were traded every day, and they were treated as the next best thing to cash.

  This bothered me. It seemed to me that all this only made sense if someone else was always around to buy the bonds. What if the market for perps disappeared? Then you would be stuck with these things for ever.

  I explained my concerns to Gus. He explained to me that I was an ignorant trainee, and went off to lunch.

  Well, the price of these perps began to slide, bit by bit. Gus thought this was great. Perps were cheap; ship ’em in, shag!

  One afternoon, he rang the office from the White Horse to say that he was going to take the afternoon off. I was worried, the perps were falling again, and we were getting hit with bonds. ‘Ship ’em in,’ he slurred. ‘The market will bounce in the morning.’

  Well, I didn’t. I sold every perp we had, the market crashed off a point and never recovered. Gus went crazy and wanted me fired. I was moved up to settlements instead. But a week later, it became clear that perps were just that, perpetuals. Gus was gone, and Bob Forrester gave me his job.

  Since then I had trusted no one’s judgement but my own. I took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m not comfortable with this,’ I said, pointing to the offending clause.

  They were the first words I had spoken during the meeting. Yoshi’s eyes darted towards me. David looked at me furiously. Mr Akama’s lids moved up perceptibly. I wondered if he truly didn’t understand any English.

  ‘I’m afraid FairSystems will not be able to release the code for FairSim 1,’ I went on. ‘Can I suggest instead a similar approach to the one we use with our other partners, where we work with them on the design of each application?’

  Subtle this was not. David’s jaw dropped. He was too stunned to say anything. I felt almost sorry for him. He had had his legs taken out from under him by a boss who was five years his junior in front of his major client. Tough. I just couldn’t let the contract go ahead. And he shouldn’t have tried to bulldozer it through.

  Yoshi stared at me for several seconds, his cheeks slowly reddening. Then he turned to Mr Akama, and spoke rapidly to him. Mr Akama was now well and truly awake. He spoke fast and angrily, darting black looks my way as he spoke. Yoshi couldn’t get a word in, but simply nodded his head, barking ‘hai’ at regular intervals.

  Finally the tirade stopped. Yoshi turned towards us. He took a few seconds to calm himself down. ‘Mr Akama would like to thank you for your time,’ he said, with extreme politeness. ‘Unfortunately, Mr Akama feels that these negotiations are unlikely to reach a conclusion that is acceptable to both parties. I hope you will excuse us, we will have to hurry to catch our airplane.’

  The Japanese all stood up, bowed with varying degrees of inclination, and we escorted them out to the black stretch Mercedes that had driven them to the factory from Edinburgh.

  ‘What the fuck was all that about?’ shouted David, as soon as the limousine had turned safely out of the car park. ‘I thought we’d agreed we’d go ahead. Onada would have been our biggest customer. That deal could have been worth two million dollars a year!’

  ‘If we give away FairSim 1, we give away the company,’ I said calmly. ‘And we didn’t agree anything.’

  ‘If we don’t give them FairSim 1, they don’t do the deal!’ shouted David in exasperation. ‘I’ve spent six months working on that deal! Six months down the drain!’

  ‘They’ll be back. If they want to launch a virtual reality entertainment system, which they do, they’ll be back. They have nowhere else to go.’

  ‘Like hell they will!’ shouted David. ‘You’ve just screwed up the best deal this company’s ever had!’ He stormed off back into the factory.

  I looked around. A couple of engineers had heard us. The receptionist looked on, open-mouthed. I had no doubt that details of our argument would be all round the factory before the day was out.

  What would Richard have done, I wondered, as I walked back up to my office.

  I suddenly had a thought. ‘Did Richard keep a file on Onada Industries?’ I asked Susan.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. Within thirty seconds it was on my desk. I looked through the last few documents in the file. There was a draft of the contract dated 17 March, just over a month before Richard had died. I looked for clause 4(a) which referred to FairSim 1. There it was, heavily scored out in black pen, and NO was scrawled next to it in Richard’s writing. Then there was a brief fax from Onada Industries that said that since FairSystems would not agree to clause 4(a) as drafted, all discussions would be terminated.

  I was shocked. As soon as Richard had died, David had reopened negotiations with Onada, reinserting a vital clause that Richard had explicitly rejected.

  Suddenly, I didn’t feel so sorry about humiliating him.

  15

  The sun shone brightly on Richard’s funeral. The minister was more than happy for his church to be used for the event. It turned out that Richard had even been an occasional visitor on Sundays, something that had surprised me. The service was simple and meaningful, no long eulogies. Looking out to sea, I thought this was the right place to lay Richard, and the right way.

  I had finally prevailed upon the procurator fiscal to release Richard’s body. He had insisted that Richard should be buried in case any future defence lawyer might want the body exhumed for further examination. The thought of that eve
ntuality was unpleasant, but at least it was good to know that he was no longer lying in the mortuary.

  I hadn’t made a big fuss about the funeral, but there were about fifty people there. I recognised most of them. David, Rachel, Willie, Susan and half a dozen others represented Fair-Systems. Jim Robertson was there, and Sergeant Cochrane. Walter Sorenson had been able to organise a trip to Britain to coincide with the funeral. Thankfully, Karen had flown up as well; it was good to have her with me.

  But one person grabbed all my attention. I tried to ignore him through the service so that I could devote my thoughts to Richard and his memory. Afterwards, there was no escaping him.

  My father.

  I was shocked to see how much he had changed. His hair had thinned, gone greyer. There was a slight stoop. His face was creased with wrinkles. And he looked tired and pale.

  Clinging to his arm was a woman. She was in her mid-thirties, slight, and just as pale as he, although she had dark hair and dark eyes. She looked familiar. With a shock, I realised that she reminded me of photographs I had seen of my mother when I was very young.

  I wanted to avoid him. Not out of spite. I just couldn’t trust myself to keep my temper with him, and I didn’t want to start an argument over Richard’s grave. But I couldn’t ignore him completely at my brother’s funeral. So I took Karen by the arm, and led her over to where he and his wife were talking to Sorenson.

  Sorenson saw me coming and approached me. I introduced him to Karen.

  ‘We’ve met,’ he said. ‘Last time was at a Harrison Brothers’ conference at Boca Raton. Do you remember?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Karen. ‘Nice to see you again.’

  ‘And you,’ he said smiling at her. ‘Well, I’ll drop in to FairSystms this afternoon, Mark, if you’ll be around?’

  ‘I will be,’ I said. ‘See you then.’ He walked off.

  ‘Perhaps I’ll join him,’ Karen said, tactfully. ‘Leave you to it.’

  I nodded, and turned to my father.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ I waited for a word, a reproach, some stiff small talk.

  Instead, his chin shook, and he put his head in his hands, sobbing deeply. The woman next to him looked at me quickly with a mixture of confusion and embarrassment, detached herself from my father’s arm, and drifted off towards Sorenson and Karen. We stood there for several minutes while the other mourners departed.

  I put my arm round him. Finally, he straightened up and said, ‘I loved him. I loved both of you.’

  I felt a turmoil of emotions, sorrow for Richard’s death, sympathy for my father’s grief, guilt that I had ignored him, memories of that other funeral eight years before, but still, underlying it all, anger.

  ‘Come back to Richard’s house for some tea,’ I said.

  Dad looked round and caught the eye of his wife ten yards away, watching him. She nodded and smiled weakly. She pointed to the gate of the churchyard. ‘OK,’ he said, and walked back to the house.

  The kitchen was warm and cosy. I put the kettle on. Dad looked frail and worn, sitting on the chair at the kitchen table. The air of authority about him that I remembered had mostly disappeared. We had so much to say to each other, and so little desire to say it.

  ‘I came up to see Richard a couple of times last year,’ my father said. I raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t known that. ‘There’s some interesting birdlife in these parts. It’s an important landfall for migrants, and occasionally you can get some very rare sightings. We even saw a bee-eater once by the cliffs to the east of here.’ He sighed. ‘He loved this place. He told me it gave him a chance to think. He was a great thinker,’ my father chuckled. No mean intellect himself, he had always said that Richard had the better brain.

  My father continued. ‘When he first left Edinburgh to set up FairSystems, I was disappointed. Richard could have been a great scientist. But when I talked to him about the company last year, I began to appreciate why he’d done it, and even to admire him for it.’

  I listened in silence.

  ‘In science, big breakthroughs are made and problems are solved through a lengthy process of publication in scientific journals and peer review.’ Dad’s words had become precise again, professorial. ‘The problem Richard was addressing couldn’t be solved in that manner. He wanted to be the man responsible for introducing virtual reality into the very fabric of society. That’s not just a problem of electronics and software design. It’s a problem of management, of marketing, of product development, of strategy, and of finance. And that makes it harder. Richard thought he was nearly there. One more year . . .’

  I knew Richard had done great things technically. But I had a financial training, and the thing about finance is that everything can be quantified. The famous bottom line. Measured financially, I was not at all sure how successful Richard’s company would prove to be.

  My father turned to me. ‘We have to see it through, Mark, for his sake.’

  I stood up and went over to the window. A fishing boat was manœuvring its way into the harbour. ‘It would make more sense to sell,’ I said.

  ‘More financial sense perhaps. But Richard didn’t want to sell out.’

  ‘I know. But believe me, FairSystems is only just hanging on. We might not have a choice.’

  ‘Well, do what you can.’

  ‘I will, Dad.’

  ‘Thank you.’ My father sipped his tea. Neither of us said anything.

  He cleared his throat. ‘About your mother . . .’

  I held up my hand. ‘No Dad. Not now. Maybe not even some other time.’

  He gave me a quick nervous smile. He pushed his tea to one side, and stood up to leave.

  ‘Are you going straight back down to Oxford?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re having lunch with Walter. Then we’re catching the plane back to Heathrow this afternoon.’

  I could have invited him to stay, but I really didn’t want to. And his wife was waiting outside. I was relieved that I had avoided her.

  He stood by the door. ‘I’m glad we talked today.’

  ‘So am I.’

  Did I mean it? I didn’t know.

  He left. A couple of minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was Karen. She looked sombre, but her eyes were dry.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asked, putting her arms round me.

  ‘I feel like shit.’

  ‘How was your father?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. He’s obviously upset about Richard. He’s also worried about selling FairSystems.’ I stared at the floor for a minute or so. Karen kept quiet, her arms still round my neck.

  ‘It was strange seeing him. It felt good at first. But then I think about what he did to my mother . . .’ I just managed to control the emotion that was churning in my chest. I put my hand on her waist. ‘I feel so alone, Karen. With Richard gone, my mother dead, and my father . . . impossible to talk to.’

  ‘You could try to talk to him.’

  ‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘I can’t do that. That would be letting my mother down.’

  Karen didn’t say anything, but just put her head on my shoulder.

  ‘Do you really have to go back this afternoon?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Sorry. But it was hard enough to get today off. I’ve definitely got to be at work first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, disappointed.

  Sorenson arrived at my office at about half past three. Karen had eaten some soup with me for lunch, and I had dropped her off at the airport before driving back to Glenrothes. The emotional strain of the morning was still with me.

  Sorenson was strong, and full of breezy good humour. Richard’s funeral was behind him. ‘How are things going here?’

  ‘We’re struggling on,’ I said. ‘I think I’m getting to grips with what’s going on pretty well. But I had a bit of a run-in with David yesterday.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  I told him about the disastrous meeting with Onada.

  ‘That sounds
strange,’ said Sorenson. ‘You were right to stop the deal going ahead, but it’s a shame it had to be done in front of the Japanese. I can’t think why Baker would want to give away the code.’

  ‘He thinks it’s a good trade. He says we could make two million from the deal. But I checked the files. Richard specifically threw out that clause in March.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Sorenson, thoughtfully. ‘How has Baker been performing otherwise?’

  ‘I’d have to say he’s done very well,’ I said. ‘There’s been very little fallout from Richard’s death. He’s put together a great customer list very professionally. He works hard and gets results.’

  ‘Well, do your best to patch things up. We can’t afford to lose him right now.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Have the police got anywhere with Richard’s murder?’

  ‘No. Though they’ve asked plenty of questions.’

  ‘I know,’ said Sorenson. ‘They even got the FBI in Chicago to check that I really was speaking there that day. And they’ve asked my stockbroker for my trading records. Of course they didn’t find anything.’ He got up to leave. ‘You’re doing well. Keep it up. And call me or send me an e-mail if you need any help.’

  I pulled out a grey suit the next morning, one with a thin blue stripe. I hesitated, and held it up to the light. After a moment, I stuffed it back in the wardrobe, and put on some cotton trousers and a thick casual shirt instead. I just didn’t want to look like David Baker.

  I didn’t leave home until eight thirty, and didn’t get to Glenrothes until just after nine. I enjoyed the drive through the rolling East Fife countryside. How many times had Richard driven along this road in the morning? What radio station did he listen to on the way? Did he wonder, as I did, about the people who lived in the large gloomy house a couple of miles outside St Monans? Or did he just concentrate on FairSystems and its problems?

  The funeral had made me feel a little better about him. It had acted as a focal point for my grief, and the grief of all those there. If I wanted to think about him, I now had somewhere to go. Just that knowledge blunted the pain.