Leaving the World (14 page)

‘Find out everything you can for me about Australian zinc futures,’ she said.

I did as ordered and had a report on her desk by midday. She read it in ten minutes, pronounced herself pleased with it, and then proceeded to school me in the business of following the movement of a currency – in this case, the euro versus the yen – and how to gauge the range of its current upper and lower limits. As always, Trish dazzled with her range of knowledge about everything – from German GDP figures to fluctuation in All-Nippon Airways shares. When she ordered me to work out a 7 percent commission from a $3.875 million trade and I didn’t have my calculator exactly to hand, the abuse was once again fast and robust.

‘Fucking idiot, you learn nothing, do you?’

I said nothing. I simply reached for the calculator (which happened to be on the adjoining terminal), tapped in the appropriate figures and informed her that the answer was $287,000.

‘Next time, don’t keep me waiting thirty seconds,’ she said.

I said nothing. I just got on with the next thing Trish asked me to do. Sometime during the course of the late morning I received an email from my father with his bank details, nothing more. No:
Dear Jane
. No:
I do appreciate this
. No:
I would like us to try to patch up things between us
. Just his account number, the IBAN and the SWIFT code for his bank. I called my bank and arranged for $10,000 to be sent to his account in Santiago by next-day transfer. Then I sent him an email:

I reread the email several times over, making certain that it had the desired effect – detached, cool, yet pointed. Knowing my dad, he’d choose to ignore it. Just as he’d choose never to thank me for this bail-out.

Five minutes after I sent this email, another one bounced back at me from him:

But Dad never got in touch with me after this. Five days after the money was transferred I called my bank who confirmed that, yes, the funds had been lodged in the designated account in Santiago. I sent him a follow-up email, asking him to confirm arrival of the money. No response. Five further days passed. I sent two more emails. Still no response. I called his apartment in Santiago and got an operator recording in Spanish. Ken Botros spoke the language fluently (‘cause I was stupid enough once to marry a “Rican”’). I asked him to listen to it.

‘The babe’s saying this number no longer works,’ he said. ‘Says it’s been cut off. Your dad must be elsewhere.’

Another week went by. I sent an email:

But I now knew that there would be no reply.

That same afternoon Trish was called into Brad’s office for a ten-minute meeting.

‘Keep an eye on things,’ she told me.

This directive terrified me, but I remained glued to the swirling numbers on the screen, trying to find order amidst this statistical bombardment. Literally a minute after she had left, a notice flashed up on the MSNBC screen:

A little alarm bell went off in my head. Trish had mentioned something to me earlier that morning about how Brad was in talks with a Mumbai-based financial consortium. They were trying to purchase a controlling interest in Nippon Tech – one of Japan’s leading manufacturers of optic fibers – and Brad was just waiting for the moment when another financial group started pursuing Nippon to stage a big move on them. ‘We want the Jap motherfuckers to shit curry,’ was the way she artfully put it, tossing out this information in typical rat-tat-tat Trish style. Then she grabbed a phone and started berating a currency dealer who’d let her down on an Aussie dollar move.

And now, three hours later, here was a flash news item in a corner of the MSNBC screen about Nippon Tech being pursued by . . .

I picked up the phone and punched in the number of Trish’s cell.

She answered on the first ring.

‘What?’ she barked.

‘Nippon Tech—’ I said.

‘What about them?’

‘Some Swiss group are making a move on them.’

‘You making this up?’

‘It was on the television.’

‘Holy fuck,’ she said, then hung up.

What happened next was the stuff of pure theater. Trish came racing back to her workstation, shouting orders at everyone in her path, the gist of which was: ‘The Jap motherfuckers are shitting Swiss cheese.’

Everyone on the floor seemed to understand the metaphoric significance of this comment as all the traders dived to the phones and began dealing like mad. Brad showed up a few moments later, all smiles.

‘We need to close this sucker by the sound of the bell on Wall Street,’ he shouted above the din. Then turning to me he said: ‘Good call, Jane.’

What was going on was a long-planned attack on Nippon Tech. Orchestrated by Freedom Mutual and financed by some very wealthy Indian and Russian plutocrats, Nippon Tech became the target of a leveraged buyout, in which Genfen – the Swiss consortium who were putting together that $7 billion offer – were outgunned at the last minute by Brad and Company.

‘This is General Patton territory,’ he bragged to me as the afternoon wore on. Through dense, precisely executed trading maneuvers, the Freedom Mutual team managed to drive Genfen’s stock price down, thereby creating uncertainty about their ability to pony up the $7 billion offer; in turn, opening up the way for the Mumbai consortium to snap up Nippon Tech for $7.1 billion.

In the midst of all this free-market frenzy, Brad disappeared into his office for three hours. When he emerged back on the floor, he called for silence. And then, with a showman’s flourish, he quietly said: ‘The deal is done. And Freedom Mutual is 142 million dollars richer this afternoon.’

The place erupted. Within five minutes three cases of chilled champagne were wheeled out by some caterers. And everyone seemed to be drinking a bottle by the neck.

‘I promise not to call you a cunt for at least three days,’ Trish told me after vanishing into the ladies for around ten minutes and then emerging with white crystal still adhering to both her nostrils.

‘I was just the messenger,’ I said.

‘No, you were fucking smart. Had you not seen that news flash—’

‘Someone else here would have.’

‘But you saw it first, and that’s what counts.’

Actually, this era of good feeling between myself and Trish lasted all of two days. When I was ten minutes late – due to a mechanical breakdown on the T – she threatened to fire me on the spot if I was ever tardy again. I simply apologized and assured her it was a one-off mistake. Then it was business as usual. The triumph of the leveraged buyout was quickly forgotten. At Freedom Mutual there was always more money to be made.

Months passed. I got on with my job. I was still under Trish’s direct control (no one at the company was allowed to start trading independently until after half a year minimum), but her abuse seemed to be directed at me only 25 percent of our working hours together and I took that to be a sign that I was making reasonable progress. I spoke with my mother on a regular bi-monthly basis. After being initially shocked about my change in career direction (‘Well, finance is the last place I ever expected to see you end up’), she told me that ‘making good money can’t be a bad thing . . . and I know your father’s so proud of you.’

‘Oh, have you heard from him recently?’

‘No, not recently. And you?’

‘Not for months.’

‘Maybe he’s on an extended business trip somewhere,’ Mom said.

‘Maybe that’s the truth,’ I said, not wanting to upset her but also not knowing the truth myself.

Until, that is, two days later. It was early afternoon and I was trying to gauge derivative futures (don’t ask). The phone rang on my desk. It was Brad. I immediately tensed, as Brad never called me.

‘Could you come to the boardroom straight away.’

The line went dead. I stood up and headed down the long corridor to the boardroom. I knocked on the door and heard Brad tell me to come in. As I walked inside the first thing I saw was the strain on Brad’s face – discomfort mixed with a look of real anger that he shot me as soon as I was within his field of vision. There were two men seated next to Brad at the boardroom table – one stocky, one thin. Bland features, bad suits, hard faces. They both regarded me with cold professional interest. In front of them were assorted open dossiers. Among the papers spread out on the table, I saw a file with my father’s photograph stapled to the left-hand corner.

‘This is Agent Ames from the FBI,’ Brad said, pointing to the thin man, ‘and Mr Fletcher, an investigating officer from the Securities and Exchange Commission. And they have been asking me a lot of questions about you for the past half an hour. Because it seems that you’ve helped your father flee from justice.’

‘I
what
?’ I said.

‘You sent him ten thousand dollars,’ Agent Ames said, ‘which allowed him to vanish from view.’

‘What’s he done?’ I asked.

Mr Fletcher pointed me into a chair.

‘Lots,’ he said.

O
VER THE NEXT
hour I learned a great deal about my father. I learned that, for the past five years, he had been living off a small pension that had been arranged for him by the regime of Augusto Pinochet. And the reason why the Chilean dictator’s cohorts had been slipping him the equivalent of $10,000 per annum?

‘Well, back in the seventies,’ Agent Ames told me, ‘before the coup took place, your father was well regarded within highly conservative circles in Chile: captains of industry, fellow mining guys, the military. The fact is – and I can mention this because it’s now declassified information – he was an operative for Langley—’

‘My father was a spook?’ I said, sounding far too shocked and far too loud.

‘The term Langley likes to use is “operative”, especially as, at first, he wasn’t a paid operative for the Agency. I’m sure you remember when your father was setting up that mine in Iquique . . .’

‘That was before I was born.’

‘Well, I’m sure your mother might have talked about him being away at the time.’

‘My father was always away, all the time.’

‘As you might remember – even from just a passing acquaintance with Chilean history – the government of Salvator Allende nationalized all the copper mines in 1969, your father’s included. At that point he was approached by the Agency – knowing that he was still active, business-wise, in Chile – asking him if he would supply them with information about anyone and everyone he was meeting in the country, as he had first-hand contact with the Allende regime. They had employed him to stay on for an additional twenty-four months as a consultant, advising them on how to run the mine.

‘As you can imagine, your father was an important conduit of information for Langley. He knew everyone in the Allende cabinet and was considered a “good” gringo. He came home to the States for a considerable amount of time in 1972. His cover had been blown when some secret-police types tortured a Chilean operative whom they caught trying to photograph top-secret documents on Soviet plans for military installations. Your father basically made it to Santiago Airport and onto the last flight out of the country around thirty minutes before Allende’s goons raided his apartment.

‘His mistress of that era – a certain Isabelle Fernandez – was the daughter of Allende’s Minister for Mines. She was also informing on him to Allende’s secret police. After the Pinochet coup her father fled to East Germany. It was not the most appealing of destinations, but it was a way of avoiding being “suicided” – the fate that befell Allende and so many of his comrades. Señorita Fernandez, on the other hand, found a different sort of escape route. Though it’s not documented, it’s been surmised that she met the same fate as so many of the thousands of “Disappeared” during that era. She was packed into a military plane with around a dozen other prisoners and heavily armed soldiers. The plane took off and headed in the direction of the Pacific Ocean. Once over water, the soldiers would open a hatch and systematically toss each prisoner out – from a height of around three thousand feet. Considering that they were a good hour’s flying time from Santiago, the chances of a body being washed up onshore were virtually non-existent. So there was no evidence of any malfeasance on the part of the junta. Dissidents were arrested, rounded up, and then –
splash
. They simply disappeared.

‘Now all this has only come to light in the past few years, when Chile’s new socialist president ordered that all the old records be opened up – those that weren’t shredded, that is. It’s taken a long time for their people to dig up the dirt, but around three weeks ago, they uncovered an interesting nugget of evidence: your father worked as a paid informer to the Pinochet regime.’

‘By “informer”,’ I said, ‘you mean—’

‘I mean exactly what is
meant
by the term “informer”. In the early weeks after the coup, your father returned to Chile and offered his services to the Pinochet regime. They hired him immediately as a consultant on the re-privatization of the mining industry. But they also asked him for names: names of people he’d met during his years as an advisor to Allende and Company. According to the documents found a few months ago, your father readily informed on people he knew to be leftists, dissidents and/or potential troublemakers for the dictatorship. One of them happened to be his ex-lover, Isabelle Fernandez.’

‘I don’t believe this . . .’