Hatched (20 page)

“I’ll pass,” said Steve.

“Pass it is. Steve, I’ve got to go, where the fuck is Ted?”

They both looked around at an ever-fuller restaurant, but the chair waiting for Ted’s arrival was filled with his absence. Tom prepared to leave.

“Hold on,” said Tom. “If you are with me, then we do this now. Call Ted. Where are we going to meet?”

“I don’t know,” replied Steve. “How about here?”

“Right. Right. And Ted, I’ll call Ted,” said Tom.

They fell silent, feeling the weight of the moment.

Elizabeth dutifully brought the bill, and Tom smirked at Steve as he peeled five new $100 bills from his wallet and deposited them on the table. Steve knew that there was at least one too many in that pile, but he also knew that Tom liked the server. Tom always liked waitresses, and every other girl who was forced, for whatever reason, to stand in his presence. And Tom was clearly relishing in their little private joke. Peeling hundred dollar bills from a stack that was hatched in Fabergé Restaurant. Fitting. And enjoyable. Indeed, Tom and Steve both enjoyed the wealth they’d received and built up, forged in very different fashions. But Tom seemed to enjoy it for that reason alone, making Steve realize that Tom could probably have been happy with a very meager salary if properly directed towards pretty women. The dry cleaner woman, the bank teller woman, the bartender woman, the automobile mechanic woman, every woman is a captive audience when you go to them for a service, and that, it seemed, was all that Tom needed to keep him happy. It was his way to their hearts, and their hearts were the conduits to their warm bodies.

“Let’s build a better planet!” Tom and Steve, now standing and ready for departure, turned towards the sound of the familiar voice. Tina was stationed for them at the door, ready to see Steve off with a warm smile directed to stab at his formality, but instead she turned to greet a smiling, bearded man, the same one who had been in the bar earlier that evening with that young skater boy.

“Welcome to Fabergé Restaurant,” she paused. “Welcome back to Fabergé Restaurant!”

“Thanks!” Ted halted his movement towards his two friends in order to properly greet this gorgeous woman, who looked in every way like a Japanese doll. Tom and Steve approached him.

“Don’t let him in,” ordered Tom. Tina smiled and then looked over at Steve, forgetting whatever it was she had just been told.

“Where the fuck were you? We’ve had two bottles of port and half a kilo of caviar,” said Tom, matter-of-factly.

“Stand aside,” Ted continued his rapport with Tina. “The Oriental man over there is about to throw up.” It was one of those moments when the inappropriateness of previous conversations snuck into the current world and sounded insane. Particularly since Tina was clearly of “Oriental” heritage.

“Don’t worry about him,” said Steve, presumably transported back to those bitch-fests of long ago. “He’s Jewish and wouldn’t know the Orient from . . .” Steve paused too long. Rabid insults he could do, but in the face of this young, beautiful woman, he feared his own words.

“From what, Steve? Are you insulting this beautiful woman?”

It was Tina’s time to chime in. “Would you gentlemen like a table?”

This sounded a little odd since they’d just left theirs, but it did provide a solution to the conundrum of coming and going.

“A drink perhaps?” she continued. This seemed an excellent solution, rather than just returning to the table, now being cleared; they could just sit at the bar.

“I was just here,” declared Ted, moving towards the bar. “It’s perfect. Let’s go, I want to
not
build a better planet!” They moved back towards the bar, choosing an end where they could be seated and all face each other. Tina stayed back for a moment and observed them settling in.

“So where the fuck were you, an IBM staff party?” asked Tom.

“You talking about my dick again, Tom?” asked Ted, reaching for his groin. He was dressed as he’d been earlier that day when he’d met the skater kid, Jude, but he looked disheveled, worn out, messy.

“Were you at the Depletion Diary Event?” Steve asked, knowingly. This event had been widely advertised, and aimed to bring people to an awareness of the narrative of nature’s destruction by providing her with a kind of diary, in which each entry reminded the reader of Earth’s depleting resources.

“Anything like Anaïs Nin’s diaries?” Tom had shared a class in college called “Henry Miller’s Milieus,” and they’d all landed up reading passages from her diaries.

“More like building a better planet,” said Ted, rather seriously. “Like building a planet. Like,” he looked at Steve, “meeting the natives and converting them. You know, making them better.” The atmosphere, despite the growing stir of voices around them, as the number of tables occupied by Wall Street and others grew, increased. Ted reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded packet of papers. They were illustrated with graphs, interspersed with green-colored text.

“Making them better as in killing them?” asked Steve, rhetorically. Ted looked up at his two roommates.

“It’s good to see you guys!” his eyes sparkled, “Steve! Tom! Great to see you!” He looked calm, he looked to be in very familiar company, as, indeed, he was. He turned around. “Where did our goddess get to?” Tina was almost directly behind him but, unfortunately for him, slightly out of his range of vision.

“Can I serve you gentlemen something?” It was as though she’d removed her invisible cape and was now beside them, at their beck and call. “I was just about to get your server.” Tom and Steve looked at one another, knowingly.

Ted looked around, expecting to find Robbie, who had mysteriously abandoned his post. “I’ll get it for you,” said Tina, recognizing the question.

“In that case, I’ll have what you’re having!” Tina had heard that one before.

“It will be your choice this time,” she said, in a well-rehearsed and crowd-pleasing line.

Tom smiled. He wanted to say something about what Ted and Tina liked to have when they first wake up, but then thought better of it. He had already slept with two of Ted’s former lovers, and didn’t want to rekindle the sounds of him having sex with them, in the dormitory, to the admiration of all those in earshot of her moaning and yelling. This was yet another of the running jokes of the three of them, that both girls had been dead silent in the months they had dated and slept with Ted, but had turned into major screamers when in the arms of Tom.

“What were you guys drinking?” asked Ted. “It seems to have affected Steve’s complexion, but I’m willing to try it!” This was as politically correct as it was going to get, and it was in pure deference to Tina.

“Port,” replied Tina for both of them.

“A bottle then!” Trust Ted to up the ante. That bottle was probably worth $1,000.

“If he has another glass, he will embarrass Tina,” said Tom. “And I can’t stay very long.”

“Faggots,” said Ted. “Three glasses then. And do you have—”

“Eggs?” asked Tom.

“Do you have any eggs here?” asked Ted.

“I’ll bring you a menu,” said Tina, and thought it best to absolve herself of the conversation before any more port was consumed. She hoped that Steve might linger, might speak with her at some point, and she didn’t want him to enter the state that the three of them seemed to fear, with reason.

By the time Tina arrived with the menu, the three men were so lost in conversation that they barely acknowledged her. She silently placed them between Ted and Steve and melted into the background, as details of what sounded like a major investment were discussed. Tina was used to such dealings and imagined that more important transactions were undertaken at these tables than at any other boardroom in America.

Surprisingly, it was Ted who seemed to be leading the conversation, and Tom and Steve, previously garrulous, had turned quiet. It may have been the port, or the eggs, but more likely, it was that the discussion had turned to the other side of the stimulus project: Ted’s NTD.

NTD was a portfolio that contained major investments in neodymium, terbium, and dysprosium, rare earth metals that were crucial to the building, and maintaining, of computer hard drives and computer chips, as well as the very components, sneakily enough, that were central to the production of the new US treasury bills.

Counterfeiting cash, the real stimulus project, was only a way to garner attention, and thinking about it had produced wonderful conversations over the past thirty years. But they all knew that counterfeiting was an attention grabber, and that it was the NTD portfolio that was the ticket to the US Treasury and their ongoing negotiations with China for long-term rights. Ted’s plan had been to pool together a portion of his own resources and, moreover, the brunt of Tom’s in order to corner the market for rare earth metals, including rare earth elements, that is, the fifteen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium, as well as six platinum group elements. Nobody had paid much attention to this investment, because most rare earth metals are quite common in nature, and to date relatively inexpensive to procure: the secret was that they are seldom found in sufficient amounts to be extracted economically outside of certain regions of the world, most notably China.

With Tom’s enormous access to liquid funds, in addition to the buying power that he wielded through access to his own investment fund that boasted more than $100 billion, the overall percentage of raw materials they could control was staggering. That he trusted Ted with all of the negotiations was a sign of his having gone “all in,” and the gamble had paid off already, as he’d seen the value of that option portfolio more than double in three years. This in itself had made him a darling of the Wall Street set, an investor who had chosen to buy a solid commodity, rather than some speculative derivative or other complex tool, and had done brilliantly by it.

To own a significant portion of the market for a staple mineral had been tried before, most notably in the early 1970s, when Bunker Hunt and his brother started to amass huge amounts of silver. By the end of the decade, they had used the commodity options market in Chicago to quite literally corner the market, owning more silver bullion—on paper—than the total amount available in the marketplace. As the market responded to impending shortages, the Hunt Brothers benefitted massively—to the tune of $4 billion—with no end in sight. The problem was that they didn’t have a long-term plan for what to do with the 3,100,000 kg of silver on which they’d planned to exercise their options and, as was to be expected, the Chicago commodity regulators came down on them as the delivery date neared, causing a precipitous decline in the price of silver and, eventually, the bankruptcy of the brothers.

Subsequent regulation prohibited such transactions, in part by ensuring that larger amounts of cash outlay would be required in order to secure options for commodity purchases at a later date. But all of the new regulations had been set up with the Hunts in mind, that is, with regulations designed to prevent massive rises in the cost of major commodities (silver had risen by 1,000 percent in just a few years due to the Hunt scheme), and not by-products like rare earth elements. In other words, nothing was done that could prevent actions that didn’t look like speculation for short-term gain, and this, as it turned out, was the genius of Ted’s plan. He not only had the cash on hand to purchase a huge percentage of existing stocks of rare earth metals, but he also procured ownership of mining facilities abroad, most notably in China, by greasing the palms of the local government officials who owned control of their production. Since it all occurred in China, US regulators had no sense of what was happening, and since he had a rather rare ability with the Chinese language, he never had to employ meddling intermediaries to help with the negotiations.

To be fair, the success of this scheme wasn’t entirely attributable to Ted’s “genius,” but rather to his insistence upon investing in tangible and, preferably, earth-bound commodities. Always the Proudhon-inspired anarchist, Ted felt an affinity to the soil, the land, the very ground upon which houses and, moreover, homes are built. He couldn’t have imagined when he started on this quest that world demand for rare earth metals would be projected to exceed 195,000 tons by 2020 and 300,000 tons by 2025, as middle-class consumption habits explode in China, India, and Africa. Nobody could have imagined how important but little-known elements like cerium, lanthanum, europium, neodymium, terbium, yttrium, and dysprosium would be, just as no one foresaw the explosion of the instruments that use them, like smartphones, touchscreens, batteries, fuel cells, wind turbines, catalysts, and, the newest addition, plastic money.

It was also not the case that Ted was able to predict the role that China would play in producing these elements, this was simply a consequence of their having mass-produced them first, at a huge environmental cost, allowing other countries, including the US, South Africa, Canada, Australia, Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Malaysia, and Malawi to delay the messy mining process, and were now at least ten years away from developing viable extraction strategies. Once again, it wasn’t Ted’s foresight or Chinese know-how, but rather that many of the elements could be mined in places like Jiangxi with only a shovel, whereas rich deposits in Greenland or Northern Canada required huge investments and developing technologies to render them viable.

When they stood up to leave, the wheels were in motion. Ted would call in all of his impending options in the coming weeks, which would cause ripples, and then concern, and finally panic in the commodity market. At the same time, tons of raw materials accumulated for the production of paper money would be quietly transported to the warehouse that Steve had procured, years ago, in preparation, always rather timid, of this moment. There would be details to work out, most notably regarding the distribution of sufficient currency, sufficiently quickly, to make the headlines required for that long-anticipated meeting with the US Treasury.

For the moment, though, they were in the prep stages, and the production of the money had to take precedence over everything else, because it was that meal of cold cash that would begin the banquet. The bill was paid, almost as an afterthought, and the three men were barely speaking as they moved towards the exit of Fabergé Restaurant. In one moment of recollection, Ted caught Jude’s searching gaze and smiled, then pointed at him. Jude, unsure of what any of this meant, grinned, pointed back, and then regretted his gesture. Perhaps Ted would think he was trying to come on to him?