by Martin Roth
Chapter Twelve
Matt the Surfer was a stock market day trader, operating out of his home, his girlfriend’s flat, his Ford pickup, the Prophetic Edge office and any other venue that seemed appropriate at the time. He was surprisingly relaxed about meeting me. “I’ll see you lunchtime at the stock exchange coffee shop, yeah,” he’d said in a soft monotone when I called and mentioned I was investigating Grant’s death.
He was a balloon-faced young man, perhaps around twenty-eight, with blonde hair tied at the back in a ponytail. He hadn’t shaved for several days. He was wearing grey cargo shorts and a thick cotton shirt in black and red Melbourne Demons football club colors. He was sitting at a small table, drinking cappuccino from a tall glass, eating a croissant, reading the Australian Financial Review, pushing commands into a black pager-looking device and shouting something over a bright purple Nokia cell phone. All pretty much simultaneously, or so it seemed.
He finished placing an order of some kind over the phone.
“Matt?” I asked. “Johnny Ravine.” I squeezed myself into a chair at his table. The small coffee shop was bustling with the lunchtime crowd. I was one of the few not clutching a cell phone.
“G’day.” He checked some numbers on his pager, then held it out for me to inspect. “State of the art. BlackBerry Storm. Gives me every stock and index. Want to check the Dow Jones future? Watch.”
With his stubby fingers he pressed in more numbers. Some figures appeared on a screen that seemed about the size of a large postage stamp. The whole unit fitted in the palm of his hand.
“Do you take it surfing?” I asked.
He grinned. “I love surfing. Yeah. Have you heard? Must have. I spend most of the summer surfing. The rest of the year trading. Yeah, it’s a real temptation to carry this in my baggies. Pull it out when I’m on my board getting barreled. Check a few prices. Phone through an order. They shouldn’t make all these gadgets so small. They’re spoiling us.”
He sipped at his coffee. “Want a chart?” he asked. Some more commands, and a chart flashed up: a jagged line snaking across the screen.
“Local market’s falling,” said Matt. “New York was down overnight, but the Nikkei’s up. Gotta be quick to catch the bottom. Then stretch back and wait ‘til it heads up again.”
“How many days does that take?”
“Coupla minutes. Sometimes less.” Abruptly he picked up his phone and pressed a button. “A hundred June SPI long at fifteen-point-five,” he shouted. “Damned connection.” He banged his phone on the table. “You got that?” He put the phone back on the table and looked again at his miniature screen. “It’s moving,” he cried, then he started whispering. “Go. Go. Go.”
I watched in bewilderment. I knew as much about finance as I did about French gourmet cooking.
He started stroking the device with his fingers, massaging it.
“The trend is your friend,” he chanted. “The trend is your friend.” He held it out to me to watch. “It’s touching sixteen.” His eyes were wide and his big happy mouth hung open. “Sixteen-point-five.”
He grabbed his left wrist with his right hand and held tight. “Don’t get greedy, Matt,” he whispered. “Don’t get greedy.” Then with his right hand he thwacked the back of his left hand. “Wait,” he cried. “Wait. Bang.” He picked up the phone again and pressed a button. He rattled off a command. Then he placed it back on the table.
He stretched back and took a long draft of his coffee, followed by a big bite of his croissant.
“It’s pure Zen,” he said.
“What is?”
“Me and my BlackBerry. We’re one.”
“Is this what you do all day?”
“More or less.”
“It looks like you’ve just bought and sold something.”
“Yeah. The index future. It’s better if you can catch it at the opening. When it’s defining a bottom. Sometimes it doesn’t, and then...” He slapped his hands together. “Kabam.”
“What happens?”
“Deep doo-doo.”
“Did you just make some money?”
“Yeah. But only a couple of hundred. Not a lot. You have to preserve your capital. If it turns when you’re not expecting it, well...whoosh.”
“Deep doo-doo?”
“Worse than that. Yeah.” He started tearing out an article from his newspaper.
I thought back to my years as a freedom fighter. Often, on the run from the enemy, we found ourselves forced into unfamiliar territory. It then became necessary to engage in some hasty reconnaissance of our environment before we could initiate any kind of counter-action. That seemed the appropriate strategy now.
“Matt, I’ve never had any success with money. What’s it all about?”
“You mean, how do you make money?”
“How come some people find it easy and others don’t?”
Matt moved from overdrive into cruise control. He leaned back in his chair again and placed his hands in his lap.
It’s all about guilt,” he said.
“Guilt?”
“Yeah. Everyone’s full of guilt. They’re guilty about making money. So deep inside they set up barriers that stop them being successful. Of course they think they want money. Everyone’s greedy. But they’re also frightened of losing it. Guilt, fear and greed. That’s what drives us all. Think about your own circumstances. You’ll see what I mean.”
I thought about myself. I had faced death dozens of times. I feared nothing. Even Pastor Thomas didn’t really make me scared or guilty - just nervous, because he always seemed to know what I was thinking. And I wasn’t greedy, except for a new life in Australia, and to find my father.
“What about a kind of numb bitterness?” I muttered, but Matt didn’t seem to hear.
“Some people reckon it’s love,” he said. “Makes the world go round, and all that. But once you’re in my business, trading, you know it’s mainly fear and greed. So when you recognize that, you’ve taken the first step to managing your life. And then you have to understand that our society fills you with guilt. So getting rid of all your guilt is the real key to being free.”
“And rich.”
“Same thing, really.”
I wasn’t sure that I followed. Matt was either a mystic who was way ahead of his time or he was a bit loopy. I couldn’t be sure which, and in any case I wanted to move on to the real point of my visit. “Matt, a journalist mate of mine Rohan Gillbit told me to talk to you. You used to work with Grant, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, he was my boss for a while. At the Prophetic Edge. I worked with him on software development. Then I quit, and set myself up as a trader. One of the Prophets. Grant taught me a lot about trading.”
“Shares and things?”
“Anything that moves.”
“Tell me about the Prophets.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “We’re just a bunch of independent traders. Yeah. But we’re all connected with the Prophetic Edge. It’s a kind of base. We like to buy and sell and make money. We swap ideas and work out what the market is going to do next. That sort of thing.”
“That’s all? Why are you the Prophets?”
He looked genuinely puzzled. “Don’t know really. It’s just a name I guess. For a bit of fun. We decided to call ourselves something, and that’s what we chose. I guess it came from the company name. There’s about twenty of us. We meet together now and again, though not as much recently.”
“What happened recently?”
“The market tanked. Big time. Doesn’t mean you can’t still make money. But really we’re all waiting for the next boom.”
I gazed through the coffee shop front window. Lunchtime visitors were milling around giant screens next to the stock exchange foyer, watching lights flash the latest share prices. Glass lifts whizzed people up and down the building. It looked like a scene from a Japanese sci-fi manga. “Matt, when did you hear that Grant had been killed?”
“Coupla days a
go. Someone phoned with the news. It was a real shock. He was my boss. Did I tell you that? Who did it?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. You know he had a lot of dealings with Indonesia?”
“He was back and forth all the time. Big mistake. Got him locked up.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“After he got out of prison. Yeah. He was in the office a few times, but then I heard he’d chucked it. Got rid of the business.”
“So you didn’t see him again?”
He held up his coffee cup and ordered a refill. “Just once more, I think. He phoned me out of the blue. Wanted a chat. We had coffee together. Like I’m doing with you.”
“What sort of things did you talk about?”
“He’d started going to church. He kept talking about all these Christian things. Fair enough. Different folks, different strokes and all that. He asked if I had any problems. If he’d been a good boss. If there was anything bad he’d done to me. About the Bible and Jesus. Christian stuff. Actually, yeah, he did say something funny.”
“He did? Yes? What?”
“He asked me if I could forgive him, like for treating me badly when he was my boss.”
“Forgive him?”
“Yeah. I mean, weird. If I didn’t think he was a good boss I wouldn’t have hung around. But he’d become a Christian, so I guess he needed forgiving. So I told him I forgave him. Easy as that. He left with a smile on his face. Some people are easily satisfied.”
I paused, then asked casually: “Did he mention the Dili Tigers?”
“Are they one of those new Asian listings?”
“Listings?”
“Yeah. On the stock market. Those new Asian companies that list on the Aussie market.”
“It’s not a stock. It’s...it’s a kind of gang. A group. A group of people in Indonesia.”
“Nope. Nothing about that.”
The answer was nonchalantly given, but appeared sincere. Matt seemed as pure and honest and direct as a Coolangatta curler. I had nothing more to ask. Never mind. I was still hoping to meet the new boss of the Prophetic Edge.
And I had set up another visit. I hadn’t told Rohan about this man. But I felt that if anyone knew what was going on it was Papa Guzman. Perhaps he could solve the mystery.