The Predator Read online

  The worst of course, was Rudy Moss. Rudy, on a bad day, could make the rest of the class retch. The worst day was when Sidney Stahl came to talk to them.

  Stahl had just acceded to the post of Chairman of Bloomfield Weiss. He was a tiny man, with a gruff voice, bright red braces and a huge cigar, which he cheerfully smoked while talking to the group. Chris found him inspiring. He was clearly a doer; he had little time for bullshit. When he said that he didn't care who you were or where you came from as long as you made money for the firm, Chris believed him. He had just finished his speech about how Bloomfield Weiss could only remain the best firm on the Street if it was the most nimble, when he asked for questions. Chris groaned inwardly as Rudy Moss put up his hand.

  'Mr Stahl, Rudy Moss.'

  'What have you got, Rudy?'

  'Yes, Mr Stahl. I was listening to what you were saying and wondering what skill set provides the core competencies that give us the edge against so many new entrants?'

  Stahl just looked at him, taking a long pull on his cigar. Rudy smiled hopefully. Stahl smoked. Rudy reddened slightly. Stahl didn't move. Sixty trainees squirmed.

  Rudy cracked first. 'I mean, the oligopoly among the major bulge-bracket firms is breaking down, barriers to entry in our business are lower, and we're going to have to survive by relying on our core competencies. I was just wondering what you would say those are?'

  Stahl's eyes gleamed. So did the end of his cigar.

  'Son, I'll tell you how we'll survive. Most of you kids are gonna make me money. A lotta money. I'll keep you. Some of you kids are gonna bullshit me. You're outta here. Now, which are you gonna be, Rudy?'

  Smiles broke out all round. 'I'll make you money, sir,' squeaked Rudy.

  'Good. Now, any more questions?'

  Funnily enough, there weren't any.

  3

  The Bond Math exam was in the fourth week of the programme. It was one of the most important tests of the whole course – George Calhoun had made sure they all understood that. Chris worked until nine o'clock revising for it, but by then he felt his tired brain had had enough. He felt like calling Tamara in London, but he had woken her up once before at two in the morning and it wasn't a good idea. He decided to ask the other two out for a quick beer at the Irish bar on First Avenue that they had taken to frequenting. He needed to unwind before bed.

  He knocked on Duncan's door. No reply. He knocked again.

  'Come in.'

  Duncan was lying on his bed staring at the ceiling. His desk looked like a bombsite, covered in notes and open textbooks.

  'You're not doing any good here,' Chris said. 'Let's get a beer.'

  'I . . . no, I mean . . . Oh, Jesus . . .' Duncan stuttered, and to Chris's amazement, he began to sob.

  'What's up, Duncan?'

  'What do you bloody well think is up? It's this fucking exam.'

  'It's only a test.'

  'It's not a test. It's my whole career. It will all be over tomorrow. They'll ship me back to London and I'll be behind a till at Barclays.'

  Chris sat on his bed. Duncan's cheeks were red. His hands covered his eyes, but a single tear escaped and ran down his cheek.

  'No you won't,' Chris said gently. 'You've done the work. You'll pass the exam.'

  'Bollocks, Chris. I don't know a bloody thing. My mind's a total blank.' He sobbed again and sniffed. 'I've never failed an exam before.'

  'And you won't now,' Chris said. 'Look, you've got this totally out of proportion. All they're trying to do is check whether you know how to work out bond and option prices. It's no big deal. The bastards are just trying to pile on the pressure to see whether you'll crack.'

  Well, I'm cracking,' sniffed Duncan.

  'Of course you're not,' said Chris. 'Now sit at this desk and we'll go through everything you don't understand until you get it right.'

  They sat there for over two hours, as Chris tried to explain concepts that had only dawned on him the week before. He was patient, and his calmness did eventually work its way through to Duncan. By midnight Duncan could finally price a simple option. That would have to be enough.

  As he left Duncan, Chris was exhausted. He was heading for bed when he heard music coming from the door to Ian's room. He put his head in. Ian was sitting in an armchair, a half-empty bottle of whisky beside him, smoking a cigarette and listening to UB40.

  'I've just been with Duncan,' Chris said. 'He's panicking about tomorrow.'

  'That boy worries too much,' said Ian.

  'He has a point, though. I took him through a lot of the option theory. He'll be lucky to pass.'

  Ian shrugged. 'Some people will fail tomorrow, and there's really nothing you or I can do to help them.'

  Chris stared at Ian. That wasn't true. He wanted Duncan to make it, and he had done his best to help him. He hoped it would be enough.

  'Will you be all right?' Chris asked. It would be hard for Ian to hide his innumeracy in a test devoted to bond calculations.

  Ian looked up and smiled thinly. 'Me? Oh, I'll be fine.' He refilled his glass with whisky and stared at the wall somewhere to the right of Chris's head. Chris left him to it.

  Duncan passed, and so did Ian, but only by the narrowest of margins. To his surprise, Chris did rather well. But the big excitement was the exposure of two trainees cheating. Abby Hollis caught Roger Masden showing his paper to Denny Engel, the ex-football player. They were both marched out of the classroom, and no one saw them that afternoon. Neither did they appear the next day. Before class, George Calhoun gave the rest of the trainees a lecture about Bloomfield Weiss's high standards and how they would all be expected to meet them. He warned everyone to pay close attention to the ethics course that would be taught the following month. He didn't once mention Roger and Denny by name.

  But everyone else did. The fate of the two trainees was the sole topic of conversation all day, taking some of the pressure off the four poor unfortunates who had failed the exam.

  'There go the first two,' said Duncan at lunch in the cafeteria.

  'It's pathetic,' said Ian. 'Complete hypocrisy. Bloomfield Weiss should be the last people to complain about cheating. They're notorious for it. I saw them ripping off their customers left and right when I was in London.'

  'They're overreacting,' said Alex. 'It must have something to do with the Phoenix Prosperity investigation last year.'

  The year before, Dick Waigel, an employee of Bloomfield Weiss, had been arrested and charged with operating a complicated scam involving offshore trusts and a bankrupt Savings and Loan in Arizona. The press had been bad.

  'And remember those guys in equity sales who were caught supplying cocaine to their customers?' said Duncan. 'Let's face it, our employer does not have the purest of reputations.'

  'Which is why Calhoun is making such a fuss,' said Eric. 'It's all part of his strategy of making the programme much tougher than it needs to be. By demanding high standards and putting pressure on us, he'll make the firm a better place.'

  'That may be true,' said Alex. 'But I hear it's pissing some people off.'

  'Good,' said Duncan.

  'Why?' Chris asked Alex.

  'The firm spent a lot of money hiring those two guys. Roger's smart, and you can bet there are some people on the trading floor who'll be disappointed not to have a pro footballer buddy to go drinking with. Bloomfield Weiss is full of guys who'd have done the same in their situation. They'd fit right in. It was dumb to fire them.'

  'All you have to do is explain that to Calhoun,' said Duncan.

  As they made their way back to class, Duncan pulled Chris to one side. 'By the way,' he said. 'Thanks for the help. I would never have passed if you hadn't picked me up the night before.'

  Chris smiled. 'You'd do the same for me, mate.'

  Spring did arrive eventually. One day they were wrapped up in their new city overcoats, leaning against a bitter wind that whipped round the tall buildings, and the next the sun was out, the trees were bursting with blossom, and th
e park turned green. The tempo of the programme slowed after the Bond Math exam and they were even given a couple of afternoons off. A number of non-Americans started a Saturday soccer game on the large lawn in the centre of the park. The three Brits were regular participants. Duncan was a good sportsman, well coordinated, and even in a pick-up game a tireless runner. It was a noisy event, Faisal, the Saudi, and a couple of Brazilians made sure of that, and it was fun. Eric and Alex also played, as did Lenka and Latasha James. Latasha was good; she had played soccer at college. Lenka wasn't, but no one complained. The men were queuing up to pass her the ball and then tackle her.

  After one game, Lenka and Latasha persuaded Duncan, Chris, Ian and Alex to join them for a trip to Zabar's, a delicatessen on the West Side. They bought several carrier bags of goodies: breads, pâtés, cheeses and an exotic fruit salad. Lenka became quite excited by the food she recognized from home and insisted that they load up with some Hungarian salami and pickles: lots and lots of pickles. She was also fascinated by Zabar's collection of dried mushrooms; she claimed that all Czechs were mushroom experts and she had spent most of her childhood scrambling through forests looking for them. Eventually the others pulled her away, stopped off in a wine shop round the corner to pick up some bottles and sauntered back towards the park. They walked slowly, enjoying the spring sunshine and watching the joggers, roller-bladers, cyclists, lovers and loonies that thronged New York's playground. As they passed under the statue of King Jagiello riding his horse and waving two swords over his head, Lenka paused.

  'Isn't it nice to see one of your kings in the middle of the big city?' she asked Chris. 'It's as though he has ridden here directly from the Middle Ages.'

  'One of my kings?' said Chris.

  'Oh, come on. The man who beat the Teutonic Order at the Battle of Tannenberg? Don't tell me you have no Polish left in you at all?'

  Chris smiled. 'You're right. My grandfather would be standing here saluting him. But my father would be looking the other way. I suppose I just take the easy way out and pretend I'm English.'

  'I thought Poles were the most nationalistic people on the planet,' said Lenka.

  'My grandfather is,' said Chris. 'That's my mother's father. He escaped to England in nineteen thirty-nine. He was a fighter pilot, a hero. He fought in the Battle of Britain. He'd give his life for Poland, as he has told me on many occasions. But my father didn't believe in any of that. He was a socialist. Not a communist, but a true socialist. He believed that nationalism divided people. He didn't like kings. I'm sure he wouldn't have approved of this one.'

  'What was he doing in Britain if he was a socialist?'

  'He hated Stalinism. And Britain didn't seem a bad place to go. It was nineteen sixty-six and the Labour Party had just won the election. He thought Harold Wilson was a better socialist than the Soviet apparatchiks in Warsaw. He was a chess player, an international master. He defected at a chess tournament in Bournemouth. He had cousins in Yorkshire, he moved up there, met my mother, and here I am.'

  'I bet her father didn't think much of him.'

  'You're absolutely right.' The rift between Chris's mother's family and his father had upset him as a boy. In fact, the whole Polish community in Halifax seemed suspicious of his father. Although he had defected, he was from the new regime, and therefore not quite to be trusted. He didn't even go to church on Sunday. Even though he was young, Chris had felt this mistrust and had resented it.

  'You talk about your father in the past tense?'

  Chris sighed. 'He died when I was ten.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Don't be. It was a long time ago.'

  'I'm still sorry.' She smiled. 'Well, I think it's wonderful that there's a Slav hero here. Maybe they'll put up a statue to Vaclav Havel one day.'

  'Now that would be good.'

  They found an empty patch of ground near the small boat pond. They broke open the wine, ate, drank, and whiled away the afternoon. Lenka had bought far too many pickles for them all to eat, so Duncan and Alex started throwing them at her, and soon a pickle fight began. It was all quite childish, and Chris didn't have the energy to join in, but it was good to see everyone forgetting about being investment bankers for a while. Chris lay down on the grass and stared up at the blue sky, edged with the tall buildings of Fifth Avenue. He felt the pressures of the programme lifting away from him. It was actually quite nice in New York, he decided.

  The wine made him sleepy, and he closed his eyes. He was disturbed by a drop of water on his face. Then another. The sun was still shining, but an inky black cloud had placed itself over their corner of the park. It opened, and they scurried around, gathering up the remains of the picnic. Latasha, Eric and Alex managed to jump into the only empty cab on Fifth Avenue, but Chris, Ian, Duncan and Lenka hurried back to the shelter of their apartment, Duncan shielding Lenka from the downpour with his coat.

  When they arrived, soaked through, Chris made some tea. Lenka had a shower first, and borrowed some of Duncan's dry clothes to change into. Then Chris and Ian took their turns in the shower. Somehow, in all the toing and froing, Duncan and Lenka slipped away by themselves to go off for a drink somewhere.

  Chris and Ian exchanged glances as the door slammed behind them.

  'What do you think?' said Chris.

  'No way,' said Ian. 'She's out of his league.'

  'He's quite good-looking,' Chris said, 'in that giant puppy kind of way.'

  Duncan wasn't classically handsome, but he had a large, freckled face with curly red hair, blue eyes, and a winning smile that seemed to say, 'be my friend'. Chris had seen it working on some of the women at Bloomfield Weiss in London. He could imagine Lenka preferring it to, say, the clean-cut good looks of Eric.

  'She's much older than him. She's got to be twenty-five at least,' protested Ian.

  'That's not much older,' said Chris. 'You fancy her, don't you?'

  Ian shrugged. 'Not really,' he tried to say casually. 'She looks OK, I suppose.'

  Chris laughed. 'Poor woman. To have the whole class drooling over her.'

  'She loves it,' said Ian.

  'You're probably right.'

  Duncan returned to the apartment at about half past eleven that evening. Chris and Ian just happened to be still awake.

  'Well?' said Chris.

  Duncan pulled a beer out of the fridge and leapt on to the sofa, resting his legs on the armrest. 'She's gorgeous,' he said, grinning.

  'And?' Chris asked.

  Duncan opened his beer and took a swig. 'We'll see.'

  4

  'Carla, have you been listening to anything I have been saying over the last two weeks?'

  'Yes, Mr Professor, I have.'

  Waldern was in a bad mood. He had laid into Ian at the start of the class, but Ian had stood up to him well. So Waldern had turned on Carla Morelli, an easier victim.

  'Then you should be able to tell me what a repo is.'

  'OK, OK,' Carla said. She swallowed. The rest of the class waited. Waldern's beard was thrust forward, his eyes boring into her. There was silence for several seconds.

  Carla mumbled something.

  Waldern put his hand up to his ear. 'I can't hear you.'

  'I'm sorry,' said Carla, her voice cracking. 'I'm sorry,' she said, her voice louder. 'A repo is when the client gives a bond he does not have to Bloomfield Weiss.'

  'Gives a bond he does not have? What does that mean?' Waldern said, looking round the class in incredulity. 'How can you give someone something you don't have? And in finance no one gives anybody anything. They buy, sell, lend, borrow.' He was pacing up and down now, enjoying himself. 'Market participants make money, they invest money, they never give it away.'

  Carla reddened. Chris felt sorry for her. Lenka had told him how Carla was finding things very tough. She had had to fire the nanny who was looking after her child, and was at her wits' end trying to find a replacement. She only understood fifty per cent of what was said in class, and needed to refer constantly to a dicti
onary when going through the evening's reading.

  'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I try again. A repo is when the client sells a bond he does not have short –'

  'No, no, no, no, no!' Waldern's lips pursed in frustration. 'Now I'll ask you my question again. Have you been listening to a word I have been saying over the last two weeks?'

  'I have, Mr Professor,' said Carla, her lip trembling. 'But for me it is difficult. My English is not so good.'

  'I will not accept that,' said Waldern. 'This is an American bank. If you want to be a professional here, you have to speak English well enough to understand the concepts. It's a precondition of coming on the training programme. Now, what is a repo?'

  Carla sniffed. She opened her mouth. A tear ran down her cheek.

  'A repo is a sale and repurchase agreement,' said a voice from the other side of the room. The class turned round to look. It was Lenka. 'One counterparty sells a bond to another counterparty, and agrees to buy it back at a specified future date at a specified price.'

  Waldern glowered at Lenka. 'I was asking Carla here. Please don't interrupt me.' He turned back to Carla, whose cheeks were glistening with tears. 'Now, Carla, why would anyone want to enter into a repo?'

  Before Carla could speak, Lenka had answered. 'It's a cheap way of borrowing money to finance a holding of bonds. The repo rate is usually lower than money-market rates.'

  Waldern spun round. 'I asked you not to interrupt me. I want Carla here to answer my questions.'

  'You can see she's in no fit state to answer your questions. So I'll do it for her,' said Lenka. 'What else would you like to know?'

  'I am trying to make a point,' Waldern muttered through gritted teeth. 'The point that I expect my students to listen to what I say in class.'