The market maker (4 page)

"Can I speak with Martin Beldecos?" said a female American voice.

I hadn't heard of him. I looked around. Nearly everyone had gone home, with the exception of Ricardo, Pedro, and Isabel. She was deeply involved in a telephone conversation of her own, and Ricardo and Pedro were too far away to ask.

"Er, he's not here at the moment," I said. "Can I give him a message tomorrow?"

"Yes, it's Donald Winters's assistant here, from United Bank of Canada in Nassau. I have a fax I need to send Mr. Beldecos. Can you give me his fax number?"

"Hold on a sec," 1 said. There was a fax machine a

few steps away. I checked the number and gave it to the ;

woman. She thanked me and hung up. ;

I dug out the internal telephone list and looked up j

BELDECOS, MARTIN 6417. That was my extension! No '

wonder the phone call came through to me. He must ;

have been the previous occupant of my desk. i

The fax machine behind me spluttered into life. I

I walked over to the machine and took the single i

sheet back to my desk. It was addressed to Martin !

Beldecos at Dekker Ward on United Bank of Canada i

Nassau Branch fax paper. The message was short and j

simple. I

Following your inquiry, we have been unable to identify ; the beneficial owner of International Trading and Trans- \ port (Panama). We transferred funds from their account \ with us to Dekker Trust's account at Chalmet et Cie's Cay- \ man Islands branch under the instructions of Mr. Tony \ Hempel, a Miami-based lawyer who is the Company Sec- j retary of International Trading and Transport. \

The fax was signed by Donald Winters, Vice President, j "Isabel?" j

She had just put down the phone. "Yes?" \

"I've just got this fax for Martin Beldecos. Where

does he sit?" i

Isabel didn't answer me straightaway. She tensed, ;

and drew in her breath.

"He used to sit right where you are," she replied ^

eventually, in a monotone.

"He left, did he?" I could tell something was wrong '

with Martin Beldecos's departure. " Was he fired? " I

She shook her head. "No. No, he wasn't. He was j

killed." !

I stiffened in my chair. "How? " i

"He was murdered. In Caracas. Thieves broke into his hotel room while he was asleep. He must have woken and surprised them. They knifed him."

"Jesus! When was this?"

"About three weeks ago."

"Oh," I said, shivering. It was an eerie feeling to know that the last occupant of this desk, this chair, was now dead.

I wanted to ask her more, but she seemed reluctant to talk, and I didn't want to risk saying the wrong thing.

"OK, um, so what shall I do with this?"

"ITl take it," she said.

I handed her the sheet of paper. She glanced at it, paused, frowning for a few seconds, scribbled something on it, and put it in an out tray on a nearby desk. Then she shuffled the papers in front of her, stuffed some of them into a briefcase, and put on her jacket.

"Good night," she said.

"Good night. See you tomorrow."

She left me alone, sitting in a dead man's chair behind a dead man's desk.

3

I was in the office by seven the next morning. I was glad of the bike ride. If I was going to be stuck inside all day, I would need the fresh air. Ricardo was there when I arrived. If he hadn't been wearing a different shirt, I would have sworn he had spent the night at his desk.

I smiled at Isabel as she came in. She gave me a quick smile and a''Hi."

I dumped my jacket over my chair, grabbed a cup of coffee, and walked over to Jamie's desk. He was chatting to Dave, the big trader from Romford.

"Morning," said Dave. "So we didn't wipe you out on your first day?"

"I'm still here."

"What time did you leave last night?" asked Jamie.

"About eleven."

"A good first day's work. Let me guess, Ricardo was still here when you left?"

I nodded. There was a pause as we took in our early-n\oming dose of caffeine.

"I heard about Martin Beldecos," I said. "Isabel told me last night."

"Bad news, that," said Dave. "Very bad news."

"Isabel said he was murdered."

''That's right/' said Jamie. "I heard the police in Caracas have caught the men who did it."

"That's not all I heard," said Dave, lowering his voice.

Jamie and I looked at him expectantly.

"Yeah, there's a rumor that it wasn't just a hotel burglary gone wrong. Miguel was down there last week. The word is it was a contract killing. One of the drug gangs."

"A contract killing?" said Jamie in astonishment. "On Martin Beldecos? Martin Beldecos the compliance officer with the glasses and the receding hairline? What, was he trying to grab the paper-clip franchise for South America?"

"That's what Mig said!" Dave protested defiantly. "You know he knows people down there—"

We were interrupted by the sharp clapping of hands. "It's seven-fifteen, companerosV called Ricardo. The room was silent as we all clustered around him.

The morning meeting made a bit more sense than it had the day before. The market was spooked on the Venezuelan news; prices were off five points. But people down there in the know held the view that the breakdown of talks with the IMF was just posturing by their aged president. This information we decided to keep to ourselves until we had taken advantage of the lower prices to quietly pick up a few Venezuelan bonds for our own books. Then we would tell the world.

The meeting ended, and Jamie and I walked back to his desk.

Dave's words were still on my mind. "Do you think this guy Beldecos was murdered by a contract killer?" I asked him.

Jamie snorted. "Of course not. Dave has a vivid

imagination. And despite the slicked back hair and the Italian suits, Miguel is just an old gossip. The poor guy was killed by hotel burglars.'' He shuddered. ''It could happen to any one of us, that's the really scary thing. Now let's get on with it."

I wanted to ask Jamie more about Martin Beldecos, but like Isabel, he seemed reluctant to talk. And I didn't want to seem too morbid; after all, I didn't even know the guy. So I let it drop.

The trading day began.

There was a lot of activity that morning. I listened to the murmur of a dozen different conversations, some in English, some in Spanish, the sharp cries of people telling their colleagues to pick up their line, the regular crackle of prices from the brokers' loudspeakers on the trading desk, and of course the staccato conversation of customers on the phone. But it wasn't just the humans who made a noise, the machines did also. A range of whirs, hums, and occasional grinding clanks emanated from the different computers and screens. And underneath it all was the low, almost imperceptible murmur of the great building itself. It took concentration and practice to separate all these sounds, and to tune in and out of the frequencies as you skipped from conversation to conversation.

Except they weren't conversations. They were information transactions. As brief as they could be while still being unambiguous.

"Hey, Pedro! Where'd you do Argy pars to discos?"

"Fifty-six and a half on the pars and sixty-seven and three-eighths on the discos!"

"He says he can get a quarter away on the discos!"

"Shit. OK, I'll give him them at a quarter."

"You'd do ten by eleven?"

"Yep."

"You're done!"

And so the bonds flew around the little square of desks, and from there to different comers of the globe: Tokyo, Zurich, Bahrain, Edinburgh, New York, Bermuda, Buenos Aires. We even did a trade with the investment bank ten floors below us. Hundreds of millions of dollars flowed in and out of Dekker Ward's accounts throughout that day. But when it was all totted up it would show that a few hundred thousand more flowed in than flowed out.

I was beginning to understand what was going on. The skill in investing in these markets lay in assessing and comparing risk. Was Brazil riskier than Mexico? If so, how much riskier? If Mexico yielded 10.25%, should Brazil vield 11.25%? Or 11.50%? Or more? How would this relationship change in the future?

My attention was caught by a large man in a light gray double-breasted suit who was standing by Ri-cardo's desk, going through some figures with him. I hadn't seen him before.

"Who's that?" I asked Jamie.

"Can't you guess?"

I looked at him more closely. He could be the same age as Ricardo, perhaps a bit younger. But he was bulkier, with a heavier face.

"It's not his brother, is it?"

"Yep. Eduardo Ross."

"Does he work at Dekker?"

"He certainly does."

"What does he do?"

"Nobody knows exactly. Except Ricardo. Odd jobs, special projects, stuff Ricardo wouldn't trust with anyone else. He's responsible for Dekker Trust, for example."

"What is this Dekker Trust?" I asked.

"It's our sister company in the Cayman Islands. It's where we put stuff that we don't want the authorities here to see."

"That sounds a bit dodgy."

Jamie laughed. "It's not really. We have many clients who are quite shy. They're not criminals or anything; Ricardo's very careful not to deal with anyone who smells of organized crime or corruption. But they might be involved in legitimate offshore trading, tax avoidance, foreign currency activities, and so on. They expect us to maintain absolute confidence in their activities, and Dekker Trust allows us to do that."

"I see," I said doubtfully. "And is this operation owned by Dekker Ward?"

"No," said Jamie. "Or at least not a hundred percent. Chalmet the Swiss bank owns a big chunk, I think Dekker Ward does own some, and the rest is owned by the employee trusts."

"Employee trusts?"

"Didn't Ricardo tell you about them?"

I shook my head. Jamie paused for a second and then lowered his voice. "That's how you get to make real money here. Ricardo lets some of the employees invest part of their bonus in these trusts. They're run out of the Cayman Islands, or at least that's where they're booked. The management decisions are actually taken by Ricardo. Their returns are spectacular. I mean, a hundred percent a year isn't uncoimnon."

"Whew! How does he do that?"

"With what he knows? It's easy. He uses every trick in the book. Leverage, options, warrants, you name it."

"Is it legal?"

"Of course it is. But it's better if it's done offshore.

Discreetly. We wouldn't like the regulators looking for holes, even though there aren't any/'

"And how big are these funds?"

"That, my friend, is the biggest secret of them all." Jamie lowered his voice to a whisper. "But I reckon they have to be more than five hundred million dollars."

It took a moment to sink in. "And that's all owned by people in this room?"

Jamie smiled. "Most of it. Obviously our guys in Miami and the Cayman Islands have some of it. But I would guess at least half of it is Ricardo's."

I suddenly realized that I was surrounded by one of the richest groups of men and women in the world.

If I stuck around, I would get some of that too.

"Eduardo administers this?" I asked.

"Ricardo needs someone he trusts to do that kind of thing. And he trusts Eduardo more than any of us. Oh, yes, and he's also responsible for checking out new employees."

"What do you mean, checking out new employees?"

"Oh, you know, looking for drugs, bad debts, gambling habits, homosexuality, socialist leanings, mental instability, criminal record."

"You're joking!"

"No. It's true."

I was shocked. "So he checked me out?"

"Must have. Or at least he will have got a firm of investigators to do it."

"But why didn't you tell me?"

Jamie winced, then gave me one of his broadest, most winning smiles. "Because I knew if I told you, you wouldn't apply for the job. Besides, I've told you now."

"You jerk," I said. Jamie laughed, but I didn't think it was funny.

"Oh, come on, Nick," Jamie said. "We've all been

through it. And you're probably the cleanest guy in the

room."

''Apart from the mortgage/' I muttered. . "Which you were sensible enough to tell Ricardo about at your interview. What are you worried about? He's not going to tell anyone else."

I still wasn't happy.

"Look out, here he comes," Jamie hissed.

Eduardo strolled over to Jamie's desk. The other salesmen acknowledged him with smiles and greetings. Even I could tell their friendliness was false.

He held out his hand to me, a smile on his full lips. "Nick Elliot? I'm Eduardo Ross. Good to have you on the team." His voice was as deep as Ricardo's, but his accent was a mixture of North and South American, with the emphasis on the south.

I stood up and shook his hand awkwardly. "Thank you."

"Jamie, do you m^ind if I borrow him for a moment?"

"Not at all," Jamie replied, flashing his smile at Eduardo. Eduardo flashed one just as wide back.

"Good. Come to my office."

With a panicky glance toward Jamie, I followed Eduardo into an office in one comer of the trading room. The windows were smoky from the outside, which was why I hadn't noticed him before. On the inside, there was a clear view of the trading floor. I could easily see Jamie picking up the phone to coax his customers to buy a few more bonds.

It was a large opulent office. There were a couple of cream leather sofas, the walls were paneled in a polished blond wood, and on one of them hung a photograph of a red Ferrari, adorned by its tanned and muscled owner and two raven-haired beauties. Eduardo seated himself behind a huge desk that seemed untroubled by

the usual clutter of day-today work. CK^er his shoulder ]

I caught a breathtaking view of the City of London to |

the west. i

Eduardo followed my eyes and grinned. ''Not a bad i view, eh? You know you can see Windsor Castle on a

good day?" i

"Spectacular," I agreed. ]

"Take a seat." Eduardo opened a humidor in front of ]