The Money Makers (7 page)

Jean-François came back. He patted Matthew on the back.
‘Allez,’
he said, and gave a wink of support.

Matthew walked over to McAllister’s office. McAllister had taken advantage of the thirty second gap between Jean-François’s departure and Matthew’s arrival to take a call from his counterpart in the Paris office. The phone call blared from a speaker on McAllister’s desk. The subject of the conversation appeared to be how the French bond markets would react to a European summit being held the following day.

McAllister saw Matthew come in and signed him to sit. Privacy was unheard of on the trading floor. Conversations were yelled across the room. Phone calls were recorded. Pierre d’Avignon, on the phone to McAllister, wouldn’t raise an eyebrow if he knew that somebody else had just come in to sit in on his call. D’Avignon asked McAllister a question, something to do with the European summit.

‘An interesting question,’ said McAllister, in his strong Scots accent. ‘I’ll get our analyst here to do some research on that point and we’ll get back to you tomorrow.’

‘OK, but it needs to be tomorrow first thing, before the markets open.’

‘Aye. First thing tomorrow.’

‘And put one of your best guys on this, eh, Brian?’ said d’Avignon. ‘We’ve got five hundred million dollars’ worth of bonds on our books at the moment, and we don’t want to make a mess.’

‘Don’t worry. You’ll have the best.’

D’Avignon hung up. McAllister looked at Matthew.

‘Got that?’

‘You want me to do the research?’

McAllister nodded.

‘Yes. No problem/ croaked Matthew. He knew virtually nothing about the European summit which d’Avignon was on about, but if he screwed up, he could wave his job goodbye. His mouth turned dry.

‘Good. We’ll talk about your job after your conversation with d’Avignon tomorrow morning.’

Matthew was dismissed, but he continued to hold McAllister’s gaze. The Scotsman’s eyes were pale blue and piercing. It was like gazing into the eyes of God.

‘Thank you,’ said Matthew. ‘There’s just one thing I’d like to ask you.’ He paused. McAllister said nothing, waiting. God, he was intimidating. ‘I don’t want to finish my degree. The last few weeks have made me realise that I love trading. I don’t believe that completing my degree will make me a better trader. I want to work hard and I want to start now. I like Madison and I’d like to work here if I possibly can.’

Matthew paused to review the effect of his words, but McAllister’s face was as empty as granite. Matthew decided he might as well play his only trump card and drew a letter from his pocket. He gave it to the Scotsman.

‘I’ve been offered a job by Coburg’s. I don’t want to work there. I want to work here. I know as well as you do that Madison is going to wipe the floor with Coburg’s, and I want to be part of that. But above all I want to trade and I want to start now. And if that means I need to start at a second-rate firm, then I will.’

McAllister barely glanced at the photocopied letter in front of him. Matthew had pinched the letter from Zack’s flat the evening Josie smashed his coffee table. Except for a couple of initials and the name of the department, he’d hardly needed to alter it. ‘Dear Mr Gradley, We are pleased to be able to offer you a job as Assistant Manager in our Global Markets Department. We are keen that you should start with us directly, and I would ask you to confirm your start date with us as soon as possible.’ The letter continued with banalities. Matthew had photocopied the doctored original, then inspected it under a magnifying glass. He was confident that the changes were virtually undetectable.

McAllister tapped the letter lightly with his finger to indicate that Matthew should take it back.

‘Don’t write off Coburg’s,’ he said softly. ‘They’ve been around for more than two hundred years, twice as long as we have. We’ll be doing well to last that long ourselves.’

The interview was over.

11

George drove away from the little cluster of buildings. Once out of sight, he pulled out his
Financial Times
and put a line through another box. This was getting ridiculous. He’d try for another two weeks - three at most - then give it all up. Zack or Matthew could try to win their father’s fortune. He’d apply for a job stacking shelves. He’d make new friends, find new things to do. Maybe in time he’d go back to school and get some exam results and a proper job. He’d live the way most people lived. But for now he’d go on trying, just a little longer.

He looked back at his newspaper. Next on the list was Gissings, based in the village of Sawley Bridge up near Ilkley in Yorkshire. He phoned a number and was put through to somebody who put him through to somebody else. George explained his interest and asked if there were any documents he could have a look at. Yes, there were documents. Would he like them posted?

Yes, please, said George, but it wasn’t convenient to post them to his business address at present. Perhaps they could send them to the hotel he’d be staying at - The Devonshire Arms near Skipton. That was fine. They’d send the documents out right away. Did he want to make an appointment for a site visit now? No, that was fine, he’d look through the documents first.

George switched his phone off. He was headed north anyway to view some Scottish outfit, a long shot. He’d pass by the Devonshire Arms, apologise for changing his plans and pick up the documents from a mystified receptionist. He was getting good at doing that. Just like he was getting pretty good at keeping himself pretty much respectable while living mostly in a two-seater Lotus Esprit with an engine capacity bigger than its luggage hold.

He looked back at the ad. Gissings, eh? He didn’t feel hopeful, but he didn’t feel ready to stack shelves either. He drove off, wearily.

12

First step, gather information.

Matthew dug into the bank’s news database to get the dates of all European summits over the last ten years, then printed articles from Europe’s leading papers in the run-up to and aftermath of each summit. Then, switching to a new database, he collected bond market data around the key dates. Then, finally, he called up relevant research reports published by the major investment banks and printed about thirty reports of a few pages each. The database was charged at twenty-five dollars a sheet and he ran up a bill of a couple of thousand dollars in an hour and a half. It didn’t bother Matthew and it wouldn’t bother anyone else either.

When a single trade, even a small one, can easily win or lose five thousand dollars for the bank, cost control is a game reserved strictly for losers.

By this point it was four in the afternoon and Matthew had a vast pile of paper by his desk, of which he’d read almost nothing.

Matthew worked his way swiftly through the pile. Most of it was dross, but amidst the rubbish were diamonds scattered and he needed to find them. He skimmed document after document and built a shorter stack of those he thought important.

Then he started to crunch some numbers. He printed graphs. He looked at the markets for bonds, currencies and shares. He categorised the previous summits in a dozen different ways and reran his numbers searching for a pattern.

By eleven in the evening, Matthew knew what he wanted to say. He also knew how he was going to say it and prove it to an audience much more knowledgeable than himself.

He got more coffee and started to build a presentation.

His presentation had a dozen slides, five appendices containing sixty graphs and another two appendices with some of the most interesting statistics and research comments he’d unearthed. The whole document was around a hundred and twenty pages long. He stepped wearily over to the fax machine. It was one thirty in the morning. Matthew had been in the bank nigh on twenty-two hours.

He wrote out a cover page and punched d’Avignon’s number into the fax. It rang a couple of times and then started to pull the first page through the scanner. Matthew walked off to get another coffee. Something had gone wrong with the vending machine and the coffee tasted like metal. He drank it anyway.

When he came back, the fax had stopped. An error message slowly printed out. D’Avignon’s machine was out of paper. By the time anybody was in the office to refill it, it would be far too late to send the documents across. Damn. He tried a different number, of a machine he thought would be somewhere close to d’Avignon’s office. Five pages ticked their way slowly through. Then, the same result. Damn, damn, damn. It was now two o’clock, three o’clock Paris time.

Matthew considered his options briefly. They were few and far between. Matthew copied the presentation and dropped it on to McAllister’s desk with a scribbled note on the front cover. He walked downstairs and hailed a cab from the rank across the street.

‘Where you going, mate?’ asked the driver.

‘Paris,’ said Matthew, ‘rue de la Colonne.’

They made it to Paris in four hours flat, which would have been impossible but for the cabbie’s conviction that there was no speed limit on French autoroutes. Matthew kept silent about the difference between autoroutes and autobahns and snoozed in the back as the flat French countryside slipped past in the gathering dawn.

They entered Paris before rush hour and drew up outside Madison’s elegant Paris office. Matthew asked the driver to wait and dashed inside.

D’Avignon had arrived only shortly before. Mildly startled to see Matthew in person, he apologised for his empty fax machine and waved Matthew into a seat. Matthew handed over the presentation, d’Avignon called McAllister on the speaker phone, and the conference call began. Matthew led them through his work. He reckoned the discussion might last for twenty minutes all told and that he might speak for perhaps seven minutes of that. In the cab on the way across, he had run through his introduction a dozen times, until falling asleep somewhere after the turn-off to Lille.

Matthew felt confident of his conclusions. All the evidence seemed to confirm that after a few days of thinking that the end of the world had happened (or alternatively that the millennium had arrived early) the bond markets would turn their attention to something else. Matthew ran through the relevant data and summarised his conclusions. He spoke without interruption for six and a half minutes exactly. There were a couple of questions on points of detail, as McAllister and d’Avignon flipped through the charts and other material in the appendices. Neither trader challenged Matthew. After a brief discussion about how best to place the firm’s bets, d’Avignon rang off. He thanked Matthew for corning over and invited him unenthusiastically to tour the building. Matthew declined. D’Avignon looked relieved and dived off to take a call corning in from Milan. Matthew went downstairs to his waiting cab and they crept out of Paris in swelling traffic, heading north to Calais and London.

Back at his desk, Matthew carne in for a bit of stick.

‘Go to Paris for breakfast but don’t even bring me back a bloody croissant,’ complained Luigi. 1t’s a good job I tell Big Mac to fire you yesterday.’

‘Oui,
but it was an expensive breakfast,’ said Jean­François. ‘I don’t think the firm pays for taxi rides outside London, so I think you pay, no, Matthieu?’

‘I don’t know if I can afford to. Big Mac still hasn’t told me if I’ve got a job.’

Matthew glanced over towards McAllister’s office to see if this was a good time to interrupt. The door was closed, and the lights were off. Luigi followed Matthew’s glance.

‘Big Mac’s away on holiday, Matteo. He only carne in this morning for an hour or so. He’ll be back a week on Monday.’

Matthew had been too tired to be nervous earlier, but now that changed. Matthew stared at the empty office. It would be ten days before he got a decision. Ten days, and meantime he didn’t know if he was still in the running for his million or if he’d fallen at the first hurdle. Anxiety took its first long feed from Matthew’s stomach lining. He turned away unhappily, aimlessly. As he did so, a bagel crust flew through the air and struck him on the neck. Luigi.

‘How much longer you keep us waiting for cappuccino?’

Autumn 1998

Autumn in England, and nothing to report. Leaves are just starting to give up their greens in favour of a sickly yellow, which will soon give way to a matt and uninteresting brown. After this brief show of what is politely known as colour, the leaves will fall to make a slimy brown carpet beneath the bare trees and boys will fight for the shiniest conkers. Meanwhile, after a sodden August bank holiday, the usual parade of crying children and stationary traffic, the skies have turned an iron grey.

Bid farewell to the sun. It is 1 September 1998, and there are 1046 days to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline.

1

‘Good morning, sir.’

The red-coated doorman held the door open. Zack walked through with a shudder. In an age of automatic doors, revolving doors, doors you could just push through, Coburg’s had to employ some ancient flunkey in a red tail coat to do the job. That said it all. Coburg’s is one of Britain’s biggest merchant banks, but its glory days are long gone. The big American banks - Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Madison, Weinstein Lukes - bestride the globe, while Coburg’s, a village beauty in a world of supermodels, clings to its past and tries not to look.