On the Edge Page 2

  Calder was pouring out the dregs into his glass when he became aware of a presence swaying gently above the table.

  He looked up. It was Carr-Jones. Calder knew that Carr-Jones drank rarely, but when he did it went to his head. Quickly. Usually the model of self-discipline, he could lose control after a few glasses.

  ‘Have a good day, Zero?’

  ‘Not bad,’ Calder replied, responding to the nickname he had been given by some of the Bloomfield Weiss traders after a particularly successful manoeuvre involving zero-coupon bonds a couple of years before. He felt rather than saw Jen stiffening next to him. ‘You? It’s rare to see you guys celebrating.’

  ‘Perumal over there just closed a deal.’ Carr-Jones nodded towards a slight Indian with skin so dark it was almost black, beaming amongst the crowd of Carr-Jones’s traders. ‘It was an elephant. A great big enormous fucking elephant. With great big ears and a great big elephant dick that could fuck a … could fuck a … I don’t know what it could fucking fuck.’

  ‘That big, eh?’ Calder said.

  Carr-Jones ran the Derivatives Group. Derivatives are highly complicated financial instruments, the value of which is determined by formulae based on the movements of different financial markets. Carr-Jones’s group made huge profits from selling these derivatives to customers who didn’t really understand them. Even allowing for drunken exaggeration, a trade that big must have made Bloomfield Weiss some serious money. Ten million at least.

  Carr-Jones grinned and swayed, his normally pale cheeks flushed with two bright red spots. ‘You shouldn’t have left us, Jen,’ he said.

  Jen glared at him. ‘I’m very glad I did. No matter how big your elephant is.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re probably better off now. Bond trading suits your talents.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Jen snapped.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ Carr-Jones said, his expression one of mock innocence. ‘I was just agreeing with you, that’s all. And let’s face it, the numbers are less complex.’

  ‘I had no trouble with the numbers,’ Jen protested.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me! I’ve got a goddamned masters degree from MIT in statistics,’ Jen said. ‘You know that.’

  Calder raised his hand to calm her. ‘Leave her alone, Justin,’ he said reasonably. There was no point in getting into an argument with someone as drunk as Carr-Jones. ‘She’s doing a great job for me. She’ll make an excellent trader.’

  ‘So glad to hear it,’ said Carr-Jones. He tried to drink from his glass, but it was empty. He examined the bottles on the table between Calder and Jen. ‘You two having a nice time?’

  ‘Yes, thanks,’ said Calder, his patience wearing thin.

  ‘Are you shagging him, then?’ Carr-Jones asked Jen.

  ‘What?’said Jen in astonishment.

  ‘I said, are you shagging him? You are. You are, aren’t you? I said this job suited your talents.’ He grinned, as though pleased with a new discovery.

  Jen’s face reddened. ‘Where did you get that idea?’

  ‘Oh, people talk. Everyone knows.’

  ‘Knows what?’

  ‘About you and Zero. Hey, I’m not knocking it. Whatever works for you.’

  Jen opened her mouth to say something, then shut it again. With a hurried movement she pushed back her chair, clutched at her coat and bag and rushed from the table, eyes lowered, letting her straight black hair hang down to hide her distraught face.

  ‘Jen!’ Calder shouted as he tried to follow her. But he was wedged in behind the table and by the time he was on his feet she had left the bar.

  He turned to Carr-Jones. ‘What the hell was that all about?’

  Carr-Jones shrugged. ‘She’s too sensitive, that woman. Always was.’

  Calder grabbed Carr-Jones’s jacket and pulled him close. Carr-Jones tried to struggle, but Calder was bigger and much stronger. He lifted him almost off his feet. Carr-Jones’s eyes widened in alarm through his glasses.

  ‘I know you’re pissed out of your brain, but there was no call for that,’ Calder muttered through clenched teeth. ‘Tomorrow morning I want you to apologize to her, OK?’

  ‘But–’

  Calder pulled the trembling banker an inch closer to him. ‘I said, OK?’

  Carr-Jones nodded his head.

  ‘Now piss off out of here.’ Calder pushed Carr-Jones away, just as the bar’s manager arrived.

  ‘They’re leaving,’ Calder said, glaring meaningfully at Carr-Jones’s loyal posse of derivatives traders.

  They left.

  As Calder pulled out his credit card to settle the bill for five bottles of champagne, he thought back to Jen’s earlier question.

  Why was he still in this business?

  By the time Jen’s taxi reached her flat in Chelsea, she had calmed down. It had started to rain. The taxi stopped a yard from the kerb next to a huge puddle. She leapt it, and managed to reach the pavement with her shoes dry, only to have her pants drenched a moment later as a bus swept by. She took the ancient lift up to the sixth floor of her building and exchanged scowls with the old lady from the flat opposite, who she had learned from her mail was called Mrs Pinney. For a month Jen had tried to be neighbourly, but she had given up when the woman had physically flinched at her ‘Hi, Mrs Pinney, how are you today?’ and recoiled into her private lair, muttering something about manners. What was it about her that the woman objected to, Jen wondered. Was it that she was Chinese? Or American? Or just that she was friendly? Jen didn’t know. But she began to dislike Mrs Pinney. And as over the course of the winter she returned from work more and more frustrated, the dislike turned to something uncomfortably close to hatred.

  She let herself into her tiny flat. It was raining hard, the drops dancing angrily in the pool of yellow light spread across the narrow balcony outside her living-room window. As she drew the curtains, her cell phone beeped. It was a text message from her mother in the States telling her that Vivienne was appearing on one of the business cable TV channels at three thirty New York time, with her top three hot stock tips. Jen checked her watch, Eight thirty-three. She grabbed a tube of Pringles from the kitchen, and flipped on the TV set.

  There she was, Vivienne, her telegenic elder sister, an equities analyst at a major New York stockbroker who in recent months had begun to appear on television with her weekly stock picks. Jen watched as Vivienne praised the investment qualities of a manufacturer of plastic plumbing supplies. Admittedly there was something attractive about the way Vivienne spoke, Jen thought sourly; she appeared to know what she was talking about and to believe it. But she wasn’t smart. She wasn’t nearly as smart as Jen. Yet somehow that fact, which seemed so obvious to Jen, had always been lost on her parents. Vivienne should have been a weather girl – at least then her predictions would have come right occasionally.

  Justin Carr-Jones’s words came flooding back. How could he really think she was sleeping with Alex Calder? It’s true that she liked him: life was so much better now she was working for him rather than Carr-Jones. He was considerate, fair and he listened to what she had to say. Like Carr-Jones, he was very good at his job, but unlike Carr-Jones, he was willing to explain why. And she had to admit, he was kind of cute, with those calm, thoughtful blue-grey eyes, and that little V-shaped notch on his forehead. She couldn’t help noticing his lean supple body, which exuded a kind of controlled energy and strength that set him apart from the other sedentary slobs on the trading desk. But she prided herself on her professionalism. She would never sleep with the boss.

  It wasn’t the direct accusation itself that offended her, but all the assumptions that lay underneath it. That Jen could never be as smart as Carr-Jones’s other, male, traders. That the only reason that she had achieved as much as she had was because she looked good. That her principal asset to Bloomfield Weiss was the promise of sex that her very gender suggested. She remembered how just after she had joined his desk the previous year Ca
rr-Jones had asked her to accompany him taking some important clients out for the evening. When she met him in the lobby she was wearing a two-thousand-dollar Armani trouser suit. He had taken one look at her and told her to go home and change into a skirt, a short one, and join him and the clients at the restaurant. To her subsequent regret she had done as he had asked.

  Carr-Jones seemed to view all women this way. The only other female on his desk, a big English blonde called Tessa, had been happy to go along with this treatment, in fact she took advantage of it. But Jen just couldn’t. What made it worse was that Carr-Jones had just come back from a two-year stint in Tokyo where the Asian hostesses he had met while entertaining clients had clearly made an impression. Jen sometimes thought she was supposed to be his tame geisha. She had hoped that she had escaped when she had transferred to the Prop Desk, but Carr-Jones was only a few yards away, and his taunts still had the power to enflame her with indignation and shame.

  Vivienne laughed at her from a distance of three thousand miles. Jen flicked the switch on the remote, and dug out a CD. Rap. She used to hate that kind of music, but a few months after moving to London she had bought an album by Eminem, then another and then another. She liked to play it loud, letting the angry words wash over her.

  She didn’t like the woman she was becoming. Sour, angry, negative. So negative. With the exception of a female lawyer whom she had known at college and whose working life was as bad as her own, she had no friends in London. The weather was miserable, the nights were long, tradesmen never fixed what they said they were going to fix, work was a nightmare. She wanted to murder Mrs Pinney and the female radio presenter who seemed to find the daily forecasts of sodden gloom so amusing when she woke Jen up every morning. She couldn’t believe now that she had told Calder things had changed since she had started working for him. Who was she kidding? Just herself.

  She hadn’t always been like this. When she had joined Bloomfield Weiss in New York straight out of MIT she had been an enthusiastic optimist, determined to work hard and succeed, but equally determined to enjoy herself as she did so. She liked derivatives. She found great pleasure in breaking down the most complicated of transactions into their component parts and rebuilding them. And she was good at it too. Which is why she had been given a plum posting to London to work for Justin Carr-Jones, one of Bloomfield Weiss’s top producers.

  She shouldn’t have let Carr-Jones’s taunts get to her. He was drunk, he didn’t know what he was saying. He wasn’t even her boss any more. She knew what her parents would tell her: ignore it, Jen. If she worked hard, eventually things would come right for her. They had for her father, who had arrived in America in the 1970s from the People’s Republic of China as a graduate student in particle physics and was now one of the world’s foremost experts on microwave filter technology at Bell Labs. Or even Vivienne, who had overcome mediocre exam scores to pull down a salary of several hundred thousand a year on Wall Street. You didn’t complain. You put your head down and showed them who was best.

  But Jen wasn’t just Chinese, she was American. At the liberal-arts college she had attended in the wooded hills of western Massachusetts she had been taught that women had a right to be treated the same as men. More than that, they had a duty to demand that right. It wasn’t weak to complain, it was strong. Unless strong women stood up for themselves, men like Carr-Jones would take advantage of the weak.

  Dammit, she thought, what he was doing was wrong, it was as simple as that. She couldn’t let him get away with it.

  She should have listened to her parents. Then she might have lived to see them again.

  2

  Calder was sitting at his screens, processing information. The information was coming from many different sources. Four flat screens, each in turn broken into several windows containing broker’s prices (green on black), Excel spreadsheets (red and blue on grey), news from Bloomberg (orange on black), and Reuters (black on off-white), a trading blotter, an e-mail ‘in-tray’, a web-browser and real-time feeds of futures prices from exchanges on three continents. Numbers blinked and flashed, or even beeped as they changed. The occasional crackle and terse announcement came from two squawk boxes, one connected to the bond brokers Calder used most often and the other to Bloomfield Weiss’s trading desks dotted in half a dozen time zones around the world.

  In the RAF Calder had learned to process information quickly. In addition to the standard fast-jet flight instruments, the Tornado he had flown had a Head-Up Display that etched green numbers and lines on everything he looked at, a moving map, a terrain-following E-Scope and radar-warning equipment. Behind him had been a navigator constantly relaying information from his own array of gadgetry. And outside the cockpit images of land and sky flew by at five hundred miles an hour. Then he had learned how to sort through information and take decisions in less than a second. He had hours now, but the decisions were no easier.

  Homer Simpson grinned down on Calder as he watched and listened. A moronic, yellow, foam-rubber Homer, bearing the marks of the dozens of times he had been flung against walls and screens, trampled upon and, on one occasion, even bitten. Calder had never liked Homer Simpson. One morning he had come into work to find Homer staring down at him from behind the Bloomberg screen. He had ditched Homer in the nearest bin, only to find him back on his perch after lunch. He had left with Homer that night and dumped him in a skip over the road from the office. Still there next morning. He had even taken Homer back home with him and buried him in his own wheelie-bin, to no avail. It was clear that one of the other traders had bought a job lot of Homer Simpsons, and eventually Calder gave up trying to find out just how big that job lot was.

  Homer had no clue what was going on in the Italian government bond market, and neither did Calder. Someone was selling Italian government bonds. Selling them and selling them. Whoever it was was willing to take a lot of pain. Because whenever the market bounced back, they sold more. Calder was plugged into the rumour mill, and the rumour mill suggested that the seller was a man called Jean-Luc Martel, who managed a hedge fund from a remote hideaway in the Rocky Mountains. Whoever he was, he was building a massive position.

  Hedge funds were some of the most sophisticated players in the markets. They sold short as well as bought, and they played in any market they chose: bonds, equities, currencies, oil, pork-bellies, even weather. Many were tiny, many satisfied themselves by smoothing out market inefficiencies for small profits, but some took big bets in big size. Martel’s fund was one of these: he was selling hundreds of millions of euros of Italian government bonds he didn’t own in the hope that he would make money when the price fell and he could buy them back at a lower price.

  But this guy made no sense. The prices of Italian government bonds, known as BTPs, were already low, much lower than their French or German counterparts. True the Italian economy was suffering badly. The European Central Bank had been raising interest rates over the previous twelve months, spooked by the sudden strength of the French and German economies and fear of the inflation dragon waking up from its twenty-year slumber. Italy was struggling, it was in the middle of a recession, unemployment was rising sharply, the budget deficit was out of control and high interest rates were the last thing it needed.

  But there was nothing Italy could do. It was a member of the euro zone, its debt was denominated in the same currency as France, Germany and the others, its interest rates were set in Frankfurt by the ECB. There was no way out. A couple of maverick economists and a disgraced former finance minister had urged the Italian government to ditch the euro, but that was a fantasy. In fact Bloomfield Weiss had paid for numerous legal opinions at the time the euro was established that had proved it was a fantasy. The promise never to quit the euro had been enshrined in the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam and hence into European law, which took precedence over the laws of the individual member states. Italy was stuck with the euro and the euro with Italy.

  And as long as Italy remained in the euro zone
, its bonds shouldn’t trade far out of line with their French or German equivalents.

  The Prime Minister had just announced his resignation amidst a corruption scandal and the governing centre-right coalition had fallen apart. As a result there was an election looming in a month or so, and elections unsettled bond markets. But Italy was always having elections and Calder couldn’t see what was so special about this one.

  Calder stared at his screens. So BTPs looked cheap. Should he buy some more, and risk getting burned yet again? He felt a dull ache at the base of his spine. His old injury warning him. Be careful.

  He looked around for Jen, with the intention of posing the question rather than discovering the answer. She wasn’t in yet. He checked the big clock hanging beneath the Bloomfield Weiss logo on one side of the trading room. Nine thirty. That was late. For a dealing room, that was very late.

  ‘Matt? Heard anything from Jen?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Matt, who was tapping prices into his computer.

  ‘Nils?’

  The flabby Dane shook his head while still speaking on the phone. On a trading desk it was taken for granted that you could carry on at least three conversations at once.

  Calder frowned. Bugger Carr-Jones. After all Calder’s own gentle stroking of Jen’s ego, Carr-Jones had screwed the whole thing up in five minutes. Unless Jen could forget him, she was never going to be any use on Calder’s desk. Which would be a pity.

  Calder glanced across to the Derivatives Group, only a few desks away. Carr-Jones was standing with a telephone receiver close to his ear, calm, sober, cufflinks shining through pink shirtsleeves, tie fastened tight, trousers pleated and pressed. He still looked young, like a schoolboy, but one of those eighteen-year-old self-assured public-school prefects, not the product of the south-Wales comprehensive that Calder knew he had actually attended. By a quirk of dealing-room geography the derivatives desk was slightly apart from all the others, an impression of distance that the group tried to cultivate. They saw themselves as the elite of Bloomfield Weiss’s London office, the innovators, the financial engineers of the twenty-first century and, most importantly, the people who made the really big money.