by Sam Waite
I called Marie. She agreed to show me the other side of Paris, the side that had earned the appellation "The City of Light." While playing tourist, it occurred to me that in mid-winter, Paris was a lot like Alexandra—cold, hard and achingly beautiful.
I waited until my last day in France before I gave Marie the envelope that I had been keeping for her. We'd found a path to a narrow bank on the Seine and sat close to the river. The sun was low and it flecked silver highlights across the water. Marie tried to be cool as she broke the seal on the envelope, but there was an aura of anticipation. I think she knew what was inside. She just didn't know how much.
When she looked, she said something that sounded like an eagle screaming down the Grand Canyon. I had paid Gavizon, McNulty and Pascal their standard rates plus a bonus. What was left, I split down the middle with the young woman who had saved my life. It was a lot. Marie lunged at my neck and squeezed tight enough to hurt.
"Come on, Mick. I'll buy you a bottle of the best champagne in France." She grabbed my sleeve and tugged.
"What are you going to do with that?"
Her eyes and grin were wide, but she couldn't answer. I started to tell her to get away from Pascal, spend the money on an education, get a new career, but who was I to know what she wanted.
"You go ahead Marie. I'd like to just sit here for a while."
She gave the invitation another try. When I said, "No thanks," she made a disappointed face, but it didn't look genuine. She didn't skip as she left, but she came close.
A tour boat pulled into a dock not far from where I sat. I spent a few minutes daydreaming about stealing it and floating downriver, just to see where it took me. But then I figured that the trip would be boring. It would have been too much like my real life, which has never been blessed with planning.
Once I started putting things together after Sabine died, there was a matter that nagged me so badly it obscured things that I should have seen. The question was, after I helped clear Oddsson of Sabine's murder, why hadn't he sent me packing?
I would never know the real answer, but my best guess is that he saw me as an unknown quantity and therefore a potential danger. He couldn't be sure of what I knew or what I would do. He might have considered it safer to keep me in tow. Put me in his debt. Seduce me with his charm. If that wasn't enough, then with Alexandra's charm.
Maybe he simply saw me as a rube, whose presence made things more amusing. If I got out of hand, there was always Cervantes to take care of things. Perhaps that's what he had in mind all along. He was waiting for the right circumstance to get back at one of Sabine's lovers, who had insulted his ego.
I would grieve for Sabine a long time, less for what she had meant to me personally than for who she was. I'd never met anyone who embraced life so intensely.
I looked up river at a bridge adorned with grand statues, burnished by the sun. One was of a staunch young man.
He didn't have a halo, but he did have angel wings and a sword, and in his eye, a glint of vengeance.
Afterword
Tip of the hat to Bloomberg's Liam Vaughan and Gavin Finch for their work on The Bandit's Club: The Inside Story of How Banks Manipulated Libor and Foreign Exchange. (November 2015)
In November 2014, regulators in the United States, Britain and Switzerland fined some of the world's largest banks a combined $4.24 billion for rigging the currency market.
China's central bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan has long advocated a global currency to replace the dollar.
In 1965, Charles de Gaulle said, "Americans (can) get into debt...for free at the expense of other countries." In the same decade, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, coined the phrase "exorbitant privilege" to describe the role of the dollar as the global reserve currency. In 1971, France led a run on gold that forced Nixon to abandon the Bretton Woods accord.
America's trade deficit with Japan has no more significance than the deficit of one U.S. state with another. (Paraphrase from author's interview with then McKinsey managing director Ohmae Kenichi in 1991)
China's military budget increased by roughly 10 percent for 2015, largely for high-tech submarines and stealth aircraft. (BBC News)
About the Author
Sam Waite worked more than twenty-five years in Japan, including stocks editor at Bloomberg and communications specialist at McKinsey & Co. Before moving to Asia, he was editor in chief of a daily newspaper in Texas. As a Marine in the 1960's, he served one year each in Vietnam and Japan, where he began studying Japanese language. He went on to study Mandarin at Taiwan Normal University. While he was there, Kissinger visited Beijing, in July, 1971. It was traumatic for Taiwanese who feared they had been abandoned. On August 9 of that year Sam arrived in Tokyo on his way home. It was the day Nixon announced the U.S. would no longer guarantee the sale of gold at thirty-five dollars an ounce. Banks shut down currency trading, because no one knew what a dollar was worth vis a vis gold. No bank would exchange his dollars for yen. He had a plane ticket to the U.S., but needed yen to buy a monorail ticket to the airport. With only minutes to spare to get the last run that would let him catch his plane, a train station employee gave him from his own pocket enough yen coins to buy a ticket. Thus began the end of the Bretton Woods accord that had fixed currency exchange rates since 1945 and the start of his fascination with the global foreign exchange market.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Afterword
About the Author