The market maker

by Ridpath, Michael

  "Yeah. That's his nickname. It comes from when he

  was about the only person in the world who made markets in Latin American debt. Now everyone trades the stuff, but he gets the credit for developing the market into what it is today."

  ''Well, I was impressed. But I suppose I expected that. What surprised me was how approachable he is. I mean, it would be wrong to say he was just an ordinary guy, because he clearly isn't, but he seemed to treat me like a real person."

  "That's not so strange," said Kate.

  "I don't know. I suppose you think that someone that powerful would treat someone like me like dirt. He's used to dealing with presidents of countries, not unemployed academics."

  "That's part of his secret," said Jamie. "He makes you feel special whoever you are. Whether you're the finance minister of Mexico or the coffee boy."

  "Well, at least you can keep the flat now," said Kate, glancing round the small living room. It was pleasant enough, and looked out through some French windows onto a little garden. But it was tiny. My whole flat was tiny. There was scarcely enough room for all my books, let alone human beings as well. I didn't know how Joanna and I had managed to spend so much on such little space. Sure, the location was good, just a few minutes walk from Primrose Hill in North London, but even so. Six years later the market had still not climbed back to the level it had been when we'd bought the property. Sometimes I doubted whether it ever would.

  "Yes, I'm glad," I said. "I've grown quite attached to the place. I would have hated to lose it to the building society." I was looking forward to writing to Mr. Norris to inform him of my change of fortune.

  "Joanna might not have had much of a financial brain, but she had good taste," said Jamie.

  ''She was awful!'' said Kate. "She was never good enough for you, Nick. And the way she left you with this place!"

  I smiled at Kate. The subject of Joanna never failed to get her going. And I probably had been taken advantage of. Our relationship had survived my two years in Russia, and when I'd returned we'd decided to buy a house together. It would be a good investment. Joanna, with her two years' experience in a merchant bank, was the financial brains behind the purchase, and she had found the flat. When, three years later, we'd split up and she had gone off to New York with an American investment banker, she had let me have her half and all the furniture in return for giving me the mortgage obligation as well. It had seemed like a good deal at the time, especially since she had put up all of the original equity, but my salary had never proved up to the task.

  Or at least not until now.

  Kate shivered. "It's freezing in here. Can't you put the heating on?"

  "Er, no," I said. "It's OK. The old woman upstairs keeps her flat at eighty degrees. Some of that seeps down."

  "Heat rises," said Jamie dryly.

  Kate paused a moment, looking embarrassed. I found there were often moments like this with my more affluent friends. To them paying bills was an admirustrative inconvenience rather than a financial problem that never quite got solved, only postponed. Then she brightened. "Oh, come on. You can afford it now. You can make this a tropical paradise all summer, if you want."

  "That's true," I said. The real problem was that the boiler had broken in February. I could still get hot water, but no heating. It would cost eight hundred pounds to fix it. It had been a cold winter, and was still a chilly

  spring. But Kate was right, I could get a new boiler now. And fix the damp patch in the kitchen. And maybe buy some new shoes.

  I was fed up with my life of near poverty. Being a poor undergraduate was fine. Being a poor postgraduate was OK. But I was approaching thirty and I still couldn't afford to go on a decent vacation, buy a car, or even fix the bloody boiler.

  Jamie was obviously following my thoughts. "Life's going to change, you know," he said.

  "That was the general idea."

  "It's hard work at Dekker. I wouldn't say that Ri-cardo wants you twenty-four hours a day. He just settles for that part of the day when you're awake."

  "Huh!" Kate snorted.

  I glanced at her, just long enough to acknowledge what she had said. At least I was single. There would be no one to miss me. "I can work hard, you know that."

  "Mmm. But we'll see what you're like at seven in the morning."

  I laughed. "I've often wondered what the world looks like that early. Now I suppose I'll find out."

  "And you'll have to give up rugby," said Jamie.

  "Do you think so? Surely I'll be able to manage something. I might miss a few training sessions, but the team needs me." I was the star number eight of the School of Russian Studies rugby team. They'd be in big trouble without me.

  "No way," said Jamie. "I used to play a bit when I was at Gumey Kroheim, but when I went to Dekker I had to give it all up. It's the traveling that kills it. You have to leave at weekends with next to no notice. No team will put up with that for long."

  I caught Kate's eye. It wasn't just rugby teams that suffered. "That's a pity," I said. "I'll miss it."

  "I do," said Jamie. "I still keep fit, but it's not the same. I suppose I just have to get rid of my aggression in other ways."

  Jamie had been a very good player, better than me. He had played behind me in the Magdalen College team as scrum half. He was short and stocky with broad shoulders and strong legs, and he would shrug off tackles from men twice his size. Now, as he said, all that aggression was harnessed in the service of Dek-ker Ward.

  He drained his glass and picked up the champagne bottle. "Empty. Shall I nip out and get another? There's a shop just around tlie comer, isn't there? The table's booked for eight-thirty, so we've got another half hour."

  "I'll get it," I said.

  "No. It's on me. I'll be back in a minute." With that he put on his coat and let himself out.

  Kate and I sat in silence for a moment. She smiled at me. She's definitely getting more attractive as she gets older, I thought. She had always been pretty rather than beautiful, with short brown hair, a bright smile, and those big eyes. But as she had grown from a girl into a woman and a mother, she had changed. There was a softness and roundness to her, and since her son had been bom, an inner serenity that I could not help but find appealing.

  I had liked Kate from the moment I had first met her, jammed halfway up a staircase at a crowded party in the Cowley Road. We had bumped into each other occasionally after that, and I had introduced her to Jamie in our last term at Oxford. He had moved swiftly and decisively, and unusually for him the relationship had stuck. Three years later they had married, and a year after that Kate had had a son, my godchild. She had given up her job in a big City law firm to look after him.

  "How's Oliver?" I asked.

  "Oh, he's great. He keeps on asking when you're going to come and play Captain Avenger again with him."

  I smiled. "I was rather hoping the Captain would be out of fashion by now."

  "Not yet, I'm afraid."

  Kate took another sip of her champagne. "Are you sure you're doing the right thing, Nick?" she asked quietly.

  There was genuine concern in her voice. It alarmed me. Kate had common sense, lots of it. And she knew me well.

  "Yes," I said, with more confidence than I felt. "After all, Jamie's having a great time at Dekker, isn't he?"

  "Yes," she said flatly. "He is."

  2

  The cold air bit into my face as I coasted down the streets of North London. The sun hung low to the east, a pale fuzzy orb behind the remnants of the early-morning mist. It was so much better pedaling through London at six-thirty in the morning than at midday, although I was surprised at the number of cars on the streets even this early.

  I tried not to go too fast, although it was difficult when faced with the unaccustomed sight of a hundred yards of clear road. My bike, although it looked as though it had fallen one too many times off the back of a truck, could reach a healthy speed. I had bought it at a police auction a couple of years before, and had s
elected it for its combination of appearance and performance; it would be the last bicycle in any rack to be stolen. But this morning I wanted to take it easy, to avoid getting up too much of a sweat.

  I was wearing one of the three new suits I had bought with Ricardo's money. I had found it impossible to conceive of spending more than three hundred pounds on each one, and even that had been difficult. Two pairs of smart black shoes had cost sixty quid each, but I still had most of the five thousand pounds left, and I looked

  smarter than I had ever looked before in my life. I had even had my hair cut.

  I swung through the City, and onto Commercial Road. To the right and above me, I caught glimpses of the tall white tower of Canary Wharf. It rose up above the textile outlets and curry houses of Limehouse, a solid white block reaching into the mist. A single light seemed to be suspended several feet above it, blinking through the haze from the invisible roof. I would be up there soon, looking down on the rest of London. I wondered if I would be able to see the School of Russian Studies.

  I winced as I remembered my final meeting with Russell Church, the head of my department. He had been furious when Td told hin my plans to stop teaching. But until I had finished my Ph.D., still at least six months away, he couldn't promise me a permanent job, and even then it would be difficult. I worried that Yd let him down, but Yd had no choice. Things had to change.

  I felt better now, cycling down Westferry Road, the debris of the East End behind me. On either side was water, the Thames on one side in full flood, and the West India Dock on the other. In front was the gleaming Canary Wharf complex, with its giant tower protected by a thick wall of smaller but still substantial office buildings. Suddenly everything was in pristine condition, from the close-cut lawns and flower beds of West-ferry Circus to the newly painted blue cranes. To the left a driverless train whispered along the raised rail of the Docklands Light Railway into a station elevated fifty feet above the water.

  I rode past the security check and down into the underground garage, a comer of which was leased by Dekker Ward. I asked the attendant where I could put my bike, and he pointed at a cluster of motorcycles in-

  eluding a couple of gleaming Harley-Davidsons. The garage was already half-full with Mercedes, Porsches, and BMWs. I left my bike unlocked; somehow I thought it would be safe from theft among all this opulence.

  I climbed the stairs into the square at the foot of the tower. It, too, was pristine: lines of small trees fresh out of the nursery, a fountain splashing tidily in the center, neat low walls, benches of expensive wood. The tower stretched eight hundred feet up into the air in front of me, its roof still obscured by the mist and by steam billowing out of pipes near the top.

  Nervously, I made my way through the ultramodern atrium with its swank boutiques and into the brown marble lobby of One Canada Square. I entered the elevator alone and shot up forty stories.

  I waited in the Dekker reception area for Jamie, perching on the edge of a deep black leather sofa, under the occasional stare of a well-groomed blond receptionist. He was out in a minute, striding over, hand outstretched, grinning broadly. White rabbits cavorted on his tie. "You made it. I didn't think you would. Did you pedal all the way?"

  "I certainly did."

  He looked me up and down. "Nice suit. I hope you got rid of the old one. Mind you, you'd have to be careful how you dispose of it. Toxic waste and so on."

  "Tm keeping it. Sentimental value. Besides, it's probably the only genuine emerging-market suit here."

  Jamie laughed. His clothes weren't showy, but I knew he spent large amounts on them in Jermyn Street and its immediate neighborhood. I couldn't tell this by looking at them, but Jamie had assured me that the kind of people he dealt with could. According to him, it was a necessary expenditure.

  "Well, if you do insist on cycling in. Til show you the

  health club later on. You'll be able to take a shower there/'

  "No, I'll be OK/'

  "Nick. Trust me. You're a hotshot banker now. Take a shower. Now come through. Let me show you your desk."

  He led me through some double doors. After the dimly lit quiet of the reception area, the trading room hit me in a burst of sound, light, and movement.

  "Tin afraid your desk is on the outside," said Jamie as I tried to make sense of the activity in front of me.

  "The outside?"

  "Yes. Sorry, I'll explain. You see those desks there." He pointed to a group of about twenty dealing desks in the middle of the room arranged in a square, each facing outward. I saw Ricardo standing by one of them, talking to Pedro. Most of the others were manned. "That's the inside. It's where all the salesmen and traders sit. It's a good setup. We can all communicate with each other across the space in the center. These desks here"—he pointed to three lines of desks facing each edge of the square—"these are the outside. People sit here who don't need to be in the thick of things. Capital Markets people. Research, Admin, you."

  I looked suitably dismayed.

  "Don't worry. You can sit with me this week. You'll find out what's going on soon enough/'

  Just then there was the sound of hands clapping twice. It was Ricardo. "Ok, compancros, gather round. It's seven-fifteen."

  Everyone moved into the central space, looking at him expectantly. They were outwardly relaxed, but I could feel the tension as they prepared for the week's action. As Ricardo had promised, they came in all shapes and sizes, although the majority had a well-groomed

  Latin look to them. Many of them were smoking. I recognized most of the people who had interviewed me, including Pedro who, like a number of other men in the room, was wearing a cardigan. Apart from me, they were all jacketless. I tried to take my own off with as little movement as possible.

  ''Morning, everyone," Ricardo began. I could just make out the initials RMR embroidered in red on his crisply ironed blue-striped shirt. "I trust you all had a good weekend. Fd like to start by welcoming a new member to our team. Nick Elliot.''

  Everyone turned toward me. Fortunately, I had just wriggled out of my jacket. I smiled nervously. "Hallo," I said. There were smiles back, and murmurs of "good to have you on board." It was friendly. I appreciated it.

  "Nick speaks Russian and understands economics, and I know he's going to be a valuable member of our group," Ricardo continued. "He^s never worked for a financial firm before, so he hasn't had a chance to pick up any bad habits. I want you all to show him how Dekker does things.

  "Now, what's happening out there? Pedro?"

  Pedro Hattori spoke some gobbledygook about Bradys, euros, squeezes, Argy discos, and Flirbs. I tried to follow but floundered. Then an American called Harvey talked about the U.S. Federal Reserve policy on interest rates. This was more familiar territory, but then I lost it again when he started on Wis and five years on special. Charlotte Baxter, head of Research, was next. A tall American woman with long mousy-brown hair in her late thirties, she talked about the likelihood of discussions between the Venezuelan government and the International Monetary Fund breaking down again, and the implications this would have. I noticed Jamie was taking careful notes.

  Then Ricardo went around to each individual in the group. They exchanged gossip, information, impressions, hunches. Everyone was clear emd concise. And well informed. People didn't seem to me to be making political points or grabbing glory, presumably because Ricardo discouraged it. But they all watched closely for his reaction, and his occasional words of encouragement were lapped up.

  He came to the last of the group. "Isabel? How's the favela deal coming on?"

  Isabel was a slight, dark-haired woman of about thirty. She was half sitting on a desk, sipping a cup of coffee. "Jesus, I don't know. My guy in the housing authority really wants to do it. And I think his boss wants to do it too. But his boss's boss?" Her voice was low and husky, and she spoke with a slow, relaxed drawl. Her English was good, with a slightly nasal accent, which I would recognize later as Brazilian.

  "Can you fix it?"


  "I'm a carioca. Rio's my hometown. Of course I can fix it." The comers of her mouth twitched. "I just don't know if I can fix it this century, that's all."

  Ricardo smiled. "I'm sure you can, Isabel. But I'm happy to go down there with you if you need me. I could talk to Oswaldo Bocci. Get him to run a few favorable stories. Maybe a piece about how this is the best chance Rio has to begin to do something about the favelas. He owes us after that deal we did for him last year."

  "The local press are positive already," said Isabel, flicking a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. "And I'd like to leave Oswaldo out of it unless we're really desperate. I'm flying down there on Wednesday night. I hope I can sort things out then. If that doesn't work, maybe you should call him."

  "Well, good luck/' said Ricardo. ''Presumably, we can apply this model to other cities?"

  "Oh, yes. We should be able to use it everywhere. Certainly in Brazil. As soon as we've closed the Rio deal, I'm going to talk to Sao Paulo and Salvador. But this structure should work anywhere in Latin America where there are people living in shantytowns, which is everywhere. We need World Development Fund support for each deal, but they seem to think it's a good use of their funds."

  "Would it work in Romford?" It was Miguel, the tall Argentine aristocrat.

  "Oi, you leave Romford alone!" protested a burly young man with a loud tie and very short hair. His name was Dave, I remembered.

  "Perhaps you're right. It's a lost cause."

  "Thank you for that suggestion, Miguel," said Ricardo. "In fact you'd be a good choice to open our Essex rep office. But seriously. This is a flagship deal. Once we've closed it, I want the rest of you on the road looking for more. Now, Carlos?"

  Carlos's rumblings about a possible deal for the United Mexican States passed me by. My eyes were still on Isabel. She wasn't exactly good-looking. Her nose was a bit too long, her mouth a bit too wide. Her clothes were nothing special, blue shortish skirt, cream blouse, black shoes, and her hair hung, untamed, around her face. But there was something about her that was very feminine, sexy. Maybe it was her voice, or the way she held herself. Or it could have been her eyes, large, deep brown, almost liquid, half-hidden under long lashes. Just then they darted toward me and caught my stare. The comers of her mouth twitched again, and I hastily switched my gaze to Carlos.