Aifric Campbell was born in Ireland and grew up in Dublin. She spent thirteen years as an investment banker in London and now lives in Sussex. She teaches at Imperial College. Her previous two novels, The Semantics of Murder and The Loss Adjustor, are also published by Serpent’s Tail.
Praise for The Loss Adjustor
‘Aifric Campbell is one of my favourite Irish novelists and I love this book. It’s written with seriousness, lightness, intelligence and insight, but most of all with great beauty and presence’ Joseph O’Connor
‘Sexy, sad, riven with longing, The Loss Adjustor confirms a talent of unusual promise’ Nicholas Shakespeare
‘Campbell allows her disturbing story to seep out slowly and to deliver unnerving punches in this extremely well-paced novel’ Mslexia
‘So full of beautiful writing that even the insurance industry comes to life. From its beguiling first sentence – “I was born in a place that presumed departure” – to its simple, humane ending, it is beautiful to read. Aifric Campbell’s language is rich and exact, never flowering into too much; she is concise without being dry, her characters painted in deft, tight strokes’ Suzanne Harrington, Irish Examiner
‘Clear-eyed, lyrical… Campbell manages to infuse the cool, lucid language of the narrator with some truly luminous descriptions of place and emotion… a book that demands to be taken seriously, both because of its ambitions and the beauty of its writing’ Catherine Heaney, Irish Times
‘Aifric Campbell’s absorbing second novel celebrates friendship past and present and the enduring hope of redemption’ Waterstone’s Books Quarterly
‘Campbell writes with lambent precision… a mesmerising study of a woman clinging to the knotted cord of adolescence, uncertain whether to go backwards or forwards’ John O’Connell, Guardian
‘Campbell’s style is lyrical, revealing sharp, important truths with mesmerising intensity as Caro begins to embrace a future that is rich with possibility, hope and reconciliation’ Eithne Farry, Daily Mail
‘The imagery is evocative, the narrative well-paced and there is a genuine sense of sympathy with the main character. Thought-provoking’ Scotsman
‘The flawless depiction of a life destroyed by the devastating loss of a loved one is testament to her skill as a writer’ Jennifer Ryan, Sunday Independent
‘Campbell’s eloquent prose is both beautiful and compelling, making The Loss Adjustor a haunting and gripping novel’ Ulster Tatler
‘A powerful and thought-provoking book… the real beauty lies in her elegant and evocative prose’ Sunday Business Post
‘The Loss Adjustor is a beautifully written, lyrical exploration of loss and grief. Campbell’s skill as a writer, however, ensures that although this is a sad story, the overall effect is far from depressing’ Canberra Times
A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the
British Library on request
The right of Aifric Campbell to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988
Copyright © 2012 Aifric Campbell
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real
persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.
First published in 2012 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
website: www.serpentstail.com
ISBN 978 1 84668 808 9
eISBN 978 1 84765 801 2
Designed and typeset by sue@lambledesign.demon.co.uk
Printed by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Women in the money-making world,
Climbing to the top,
Women in pin-striped suits,
Clutching briefcases, hurrying,
Going up in lifts
With set jaws and anxious faces…
Surely when they entered
This daily madness,
We might have hoped that they would somehow
Do more to transmute
Its vast encompassing sadness.
Anthony Cronin
HERE’S HOW IT GOES, the moment of my becoming:
The call comes in at 16:09, while we’re already winding down. The London market’s just closed so the trading floor is quiet and the only shouting is what’s spilling out of the squawk box from New York.
First thing I notice is a flurry on the Block Desk, a change in tempo, like the rumble of approaching thunder. Then the Grope strides out of his glass tower, his jawbone set like stone, the way it always is when something big is going down. And it’s like a tom-tom alert has gone out, faces are bobbing up behind the rows of monitors as a Mexican wave of heads rolls right across the floor from South East Asia to the US desk.
Rob stands up at his pitch directly opposite me, slaps the receiver in his palm like he’s testing a cosh. Al rises from the chair beside me and the big fat research report on waste management that he keeps telling us is the Industry of the Future. And then I’m standing too, the skirt amongst men.
The Grope stops at the Block Desk where Skippy Dolan is on his feet with the phone clamped to his ear. His elbow sticks out at a right angle so you can see the sweat circle darken his blue armpit. And I’m thinking it looks bad, Skippy standing there leaking like that, he’s the only Yank on the floor who doesn’t wear a white shirt with a vest underneath to mop up the juice. The Grope leans into the Reuters screen and we’re all craning our necks like prairie dogs, trying to see whose vitals he is checking.
‘I’m guessing it’s Fido on the line,’ says Al. ‘Skippy said he’s getting real tight with them.’
And Skippy is ranting into the phone, nodding his strawberry meathead as if he’s in spasm, as if he can’t stop. His free hand chops the air space in front of him into big empty pieces and after 352 days in this job I can read all the signs: Skippy’s client is a seller in size who wants out NOW. And I can tell from the way he’s bent double and winding the phone cord around his neck, that if we don’t pull the trigger soon, Skippy’s client will trade away.
‘Let me call Felix Mann.’ My voice is very loud and very clear. The Grope snaps round. Heads swivel. Rob turns to face me with a flopped jaw. Al is sucking wind through his teeth.
The Grope hoovers up the space between us and leans across Rob’s desk to fix me with that killer stare.
‘Felix Mann is the only one who can do this,’ I say, the receiver smooth and warm in my hand like a favourite toy.
You make your own luck. You pick your moments and this is mine.
‘Two minutes,’ Skippy squeals, air-slicing his throat. ‘Or my man takes his business to Goldman’s.’
‘OK, Geri, let’s smile and dial,’ says the Grope, all soft and dangerous. And then he tells me what Skippy’s got to show.
It is midnight in Hong Kong but Felix answers on the first ring.
‘Cemco,’ I say. ‘I have a seller in size.’
I hear his fingers flutter across the keyboard. Picture his pale face spotlit in the darkened office, the harbour lights twinkling behind the black glass.
‘I’ve got 56 million shares on offer at 224.’
Al is a still life beside me. The Grope and Rob like a tableau on the other side of the monitors. And behind them an audience is assembling to witness my circus animal performance. The truth is I have no fucking clue what Felix thinks of Cemco. Or the price. Or anything. But I know that he’s the only one who can do this right here, right now.
‘And I’ve got one minute,’ I tell Felix. Skippy is in panicked silence, his fingers counting down the seconds to expiry.
There is a lurch in my chest like a part of my lung has just collapsed. The tickers whizz green across the black tape and I reach out to touch my Reuters like a sacred stone. In the corner of my eye I see Al’s finger tapping his desk, he is keeping time with Skippy’s countdown as I hurtle towards my own funeral.
‘Geri,’ the Grope’s voice hits me like a blow to the temple.
‘Felix,’ I say. ‘We’re out of time.’
There’s a crackling on the line and I imagine my voice sinking undersea, picture starfish gliding dumbly over the transcontinental cable, a scuttle of claws across the silent floor. Al stops tapping the desk and the faithless audience leans in to get a better view of Geri Molloy choking on the slime of reckless ambition.
Felix’s voice shoots to the surface and into my ear.
‘He’ll pay 223 for the lot,’ I look up into the Grope’s blinkless stare. Skippy holds three frantic fingers in the air. The Grope nods quick and tight and I raise my trembling thumb level with his head and say loudly, so everyone can hear: ‘You’re done, Felix, 56 million Cemco sold to you at 223.’ And Skippy is thumping into his phone now, he’s spinning round and unravelling the coil, waving the blue ticket above his head. ‘Thank you, Felix.’ I kill the line, write out a pick ticket and slam it in the timestamp. It is 16:21 on 5 March 1986 and everyone is gawping like I just became someone else.
‘’Kin-ell, Geri,’ roars Rob and a hoot goes up. Skippy lunges across the monitors and my palm is burning from a machine gun of high fives.
Then the Grope is beside me showing the full set of white teeth. His hand lands hard and heavy on my shoulder like it has never done before. He lets it linger for a moment while he looks down at me, differently somehow, like I’m not the person he thought I was. For I am now reborn and in my hand is a piece of living history: the biggest ticket ever written on Steiner’s trading floor.
This was how I became a legend in my own lifetime.
This was the Big Fucking Ticket that made me everything I am.
AND FOR A LONG, LONG TIME after the Big Fucking Ticket, things had all the appearance of being on an upward trend. I met Stephen and fell in love, the ’87 Crash came and went, stock markets kept roaring ahead and I was coining it at Steiner’s. So who could have guessed just how much trouble lay down the road? Who could have known that Stephen would dump me in Venice four years later, Felix Mann would be forcing my relocation to Hong Kong and I’d be lying here on the floor at 5:17 a.m. with an empty bottle of Absolut, watching a million troops line up in a desert theatre of war?
For a while I chose to believe that things just snuck up when I wasn’t paying attention, but I’ve since figured out that this downward trend started exactly 737 days ago. It was 1988 and all through that summer I’d been dreaming about Kit Kats. The whole country was in meltdown about the nation’s favourite chocolate bar being gobbled up by the Swiss and Stephen was working flat-out on the takeover bid, so I barely saw him.
‘You know it’s the ultimate compromise,’ I told him one December morning in Kensington Gardens. ‘The Kit Kat is the bar you buy when you can’t decide what you really want.’ Rex ducked his head encouragingly, a twist of red tinsel around his collar and a slimy tennis ball in his mouth. I slipped my arm through Stephen’s. He was wearing that navy pea coat and the mohair was tipped with frost.
‘STAY,’ he raised a hand but Rex lolloped off towards the Round Pond. ‘I don’t know why you even have a dog when you can’t be bothered to train him,’ he muttered and crunched away across the frozen grass. And I was struck by how easily my arm had given up its position, like a leaf falling on seasonal cue, as if this surrender was preordained and nature was ushering in the future of singledom that has since come to pass.
That moment was an early warning signal, like a bell tinkling faintly in thick fog to warn of rocks ahead. So the end, when it finally came 181 days ago, was surprising not for the event, but for what Zanna still calls my disproportionate reaction. I did not struggle or cry out. I let Stephen sneak off at dawn without a word, for how can you cling on to what isn’t there? I packed my bag and flew back home to crouch cross-legged and hyperventilating in my sleepless bed as if each lung was a dying animal panting in my hands.
Zanna diagnosed a ‘viral grief’, which she had seen before, since Manhattan is years ahead of London in matters of the heart. So she marched me over to Finsbury Circus and into the consulting rooms of her private doctor who cradled her hand in both of his as if he might kiss it. ‘Geri needs to sleep and she needs to chill,’ Zanna announced, while I sat mute in a creaking Chesterfield. The doctor nodded gravely behind his outsize desk and took my blood pressure and I left with scrips for Valium and Mogadon. ‘Look around you,’ said Zanna as we stood on the steps outside. City workers streamed past on the pavement below us, shouldering their jackets in the August heat. ‘And remember who you are,’ she turned to face me. ‘You are Geri Molloy, the biggest producer on the trading floor. You are the girl who bagged the elephant and this is nothing more than a temporary setback.’
Zanna’s prognosis was largely correct, although I seem to have discovered some kind of biochemical resistance to sleeping pills which means I still average only 3.4 hours a night. But I am holding my own in some quantifiable ways. I am still doing 25 million dollars of business a month with Felix. I am still the number one call to Steiner’s biggest client. I have partially recovered my sense of humour. And my emotional lapses are mostly private although Zanna told me last night at Zafferano’s that they are leaking into the public domain.
‘You look—’ she scanned me up and down, considering a range of possibilities, ‘dismantled.’
‘I only just got back from Hong Kong yesterday.’
‘You don’t look good at all.’
‘I think I just need to eat,’ I tugged at my sagging waistband.
‘What you need is to cut down on this,’ she tapped a scarlet nail on the side of my empty glass. ‘A good night’s sleep would help,’ I rattled the ice cubes. But Zanna refuses to indulge my chronic insomnia, as if starving it of oxygen might make it cease to exist. I suspect she thinks I am either some sort of pharmaceutical mutant or guilty of gross exaggeration, so I have driven my debilitating frailty underground since I can’t anyway account for my nocturnal horrors or the suspicion that some small rodent is scurrying round inside my chest, its sharp claws palpitating the raw muscle of my heart.
‘You absolutely have to take that job in Hong Kong,’ said Zanna, batting the waitress away before I had a chance to order another drink. ‘Felix Mann is your meal ticket and it would be career suicide to turn it down, Geri.’
‘But I don’t want to go.’
‘You’ve got the biggest hedge fund in Asia eating out of your hand and he wants you out there where he is. In Hong Kong. Every other sales person on the Street would be chewing their arm off for this opportunity.’
‘I can do the job just as well from London.’
‘Well, your number one client doesn’t think so. And Felix calls the shots. You told me yourself that your competition is shipping out to Hong Kong – Merrill’s, Morgan Stanley, Goldman’s – they’re all putting salespeople out there just to cover him.’
Zanna tucked a shiny blonde strand behind her ear and leant forward, elbows planted wide on the tabletop, staring straight at me across knitted fingers. I stopped prodding the polenta and lowered my fork.
‘I know why you don’t want to go,’ she said and I recognised her look as the precursor to uncomfortable revelations about the state of a balance sheet or, in this case, the state of my heart. I have seen her assume this position in a boardroom, telling Steiner’s clients that their multi-million dollar investment is a dog and they should ditch the stock fast before it blows up in their face. Unlike many other analysts, Zanna is happy to nail her true colours to the mast when necessary and she never shies away from delivering the tough sound bite that will send you reeling.
‘You don’t want to move to Hong Kong because of Stephen.’
‘Not true,’ I croaked but I couldn’t offer any evidence to support this plaintive denial or any convincing reason for resisting what is clearly the logical career move.
‘Oh, Geri,’ she shook her head sadly, ‘if you lose Felix Mann’s business you’re history.’ And Zanna slid her hands wide on the tabletop like she was clearing space – for what? For the wreckage I am becoming?
‘You don’t know how weird he is.’
‘What do you care how weird your client is if you’re getting all his business? For Christ’s sake, Geri, he’s not asking you to marry him. He doesn’t even expect you to sleep with him. Apparently.’
At a table across the way a woman idly skimmed her fingertip around the edge of a wine glass while the man opposite her gesticulated in full and earnest flow. Zanna sighed, loud enough to be heard above the swishing of waitresses and plate clearance and the sudden clanking in my head like an empty tin can being kicked around the walls of my skull.
‘Anyway, you won’t have a choice because the Grope will make you go. Do you really think your boss is going to let you put all that order flow at risk?’
‘Felix did say he might call him.’
Zanna checked her watch and signalled for the bill. Her Sunday night rule is bed by ten except in exceptional circumstances, which this was clearly not.
‘Now, Geri,’ she leaned back in the chair, ‘repeat after me.’ And I had to return her smile because this is Zanna’s old trick and I’m always happy to play along since I’ve discovered it is curiously therapeutic to be led by the nose.
‘Repeat after me: I will move on.’
‘I will move on.’
‘I will give up on history.’
‘I will give up on history.’
‘I will go to Hong Kong.’
‘Why does everybody think I should go?’
‘Because everyone wants the best for you,’ she shrugged. ‘And you are letting things slip. Look, I’m just saying the hard stuff, the things that other people won’t say. One day you will thank me for all my good advice.’ She laid a cool hand on mine, gave it a little squeeze. ‘I am your most effective friend.’
Zanna may well be right about the slippage since it’s never great to wake up at 5:17 a.m. and find your torso on the floor, your legs up on the couch and the dog staring down at you with that look of creased sadness that is always so unbearable, even though I know it’s not sadness at all, just a jowly looseness around his golden snout. ‘Good boy.’ I ruffle Rex’s neck fur and he pricks up his ears as if he hears someone coming. I still catch him watching the door at night, the times that Stephen used to come by after a late meeting. Sometime Rex whimpers in his sleep, a weighted comfort on my legs. Perhaps he is in a dream remembering how Stephen used to throw the tennis ball for him with the straightarmed bowl of a cricketer and he’d scrabble on take-off like a cartoon dog, barrelling down the grassy slope, leaping awkwardly in the air on the bounce, tongue lolling, a little foam around his jaw. For it was Stephen who first introduced Rex to the art of retrieval – a skill that should have been instinctive for his breed – though he preferred to fetch within a tantalizing five-foot radius and dance over the ball, a habit that Stephen, who is intimate with the attributes of good gun-dogs, always took to be an indicator of shoddy genetics. Lately I notice Rex has begun to drop the ball directly by my feet as if he has suddenly decided to demonstrate his compliance, in case it was his stubbornness that drove Stephen away, like the difficult child who suspects he may be the cause of parental separation. Or maybe he is urging me to tell Stephen, as if this transformation in Rex’s skill might bring him back again and give us all another chance. He’s even taken to keeping the ball in his bed at night, as if to be sure he is fully prepared for the return that Stephen is never going to make.
The alarm bleeps in the bedroom and Rex nudges my chin with his nose. I turn my head sideways and this sudden movement unleashes a shooting pain in my right temple which I recognise as the cumulative effects of dehydration, jet lag, insomnia, malnutrition and the contents of the empty bottle on the floor beside me. The clock on the stereo says 05:22 and I feel I could lie here forever, like a car stuck in the ditch, wheels spinning with no rescue in sight. And I think: maybe this is burnout, maybe my life story as investment banker is morphing into a shabby decline and fall, a blazing star in the moments before it crashes to earth. So I lie here for a while scratching Rex’s head but in the end it’s his persistent whining that makes me get up and take him around Pembroke Square even though his walker will be here in a couple of hours. I step out the front door and into a head spin, just make it across the street in time to throw up in the icy gutter. After that I feel well enough to stand shivering on the edge of the pavement under the yellow glow of the lamppost, watching a light snow dust the railings of the garden square, and it seems for a moment like I’ve stepped out of the wardrobe and into Narnia. I’m half-expecting Rex to turn into a faun as he trots down the hushed street when I think, you know Geri, it’s time to pull yourself together, get a grip and some perspective, because it only takes one thread to start unravelling in your life and the next thing you know the whole jumper is gone. So I go back inside and take some Nurofen, some happy pills and a shower. Then I square up to the mirror, tell my pale reflection that I am in fact going to work, that I might as well just chin butt the day, get it over with and take what’s coming. ‘Because you are Geri Molloy and you have the City at your feet. It’s time to take the wheel and put your foot back on the gas.’
AND I AM MAKING PROGRESS NOW, moving forwards, doing 70 along a dark and deserted Embankment with the window open to a sobering sleet spatter and the radio spilling its urgent war cry out across the black river. A defeated French voice breathes softly into the broadcast: The time to act has come after we did everything we could to avoid it. No sign, I tell you none, has come from Iraq. And that was the French Prime Minister describing the failure of France’s last minute attempt to negotiate a peaceful solution to the crisis in the Gulf.
The lights on the corner of Queen Street are stuck on red and I inch a little over the white line. There is only one car diagonally opposite, coming north from Southwark Bridge and I want to screech madly forwards, but it would be insanity to draw attention to myself in this early morning desertion with a bucketful of vodka still pooled in my veins. Rain washes the empty streets and the radio keeps up its low volume war chatter. Answer me this? Would you pull out of your own house? Would you pull out of California? Kuwait is our territory and our province.
We are speeding toward the UN deadline expiry in three days’ time and it is just possible that the diversion of war in the Gulf might buy me enough time for this whole relocation idea to blow over. Maybe all hell will break loose next week with airports shut down, oil prices going through the roof and Felix will be so busy making money out of misery that he forgets the whole thing. By the time it’s over everyone could be dead, although Felix does seem unkillable, a post-apocalyptic spectre that will stalk the financial wastelands for all eternity.
Of course this entire mess is of my own making, since I am the luckiest girl in the City with the client that everyone else wants: the reclusive and unpredictable Felix Mann, the smartest guy on the planet. Poised on the peak of Hong Kong with his two billion stockpile of funds, Felix surveys the landscape of opportunity that crowds his global horizon. The rumoured rustle of his presence in the market can kick-start a lame stock and send it soaring to new heights, the whispered mention of his name can pierce the bubble of some chart topper, unleash a herd of ambulance chasers and a bloody plummet into oblivion. Felix is ready to pounce on anything that moves. His expert claws rip the meat from a whole range of financial instruments with an extraordinary ability to extract value from chaos. He stalks the battlefield carnage, picking at the bruised flesh of failed mergers and acquisitions, resuscitating dying deals. Wealth creation and wealth destruction, Geraldine. The most primitive of pleasures. Felix moves markets like Jesus walks on water.
‘So what the hell is it with this guy?’ snarled the Grope four years ago when he flew back from Hong Kong after Felix suddenly cancelled what was supposed to be their very first meeting: no reason, no excuse and no rescheduling. ‘Tell me what you know.’
‘Not much,’ I admitted, because the truth is that even after five years of coverage I have only an outline sketch of Felix’s identity: a nonspecific Home Counties accent, a wardrobe that reflects an impeccably British neutrality, no affectations or preferences, no family photos, no Ferraris airlifted in to burn off steam after a long day in the office, no appetite for showcase restaurants or vintage champagne, none of the usual trappings and accessories of Eighties’ Man. A telescope in his Peak-top apartment. A collection of old weapons and war photos in his office, otherwise a cold trail of personal clues.
‘I’m guessing Felix is thirty-something. Jacked in a Cambridge PhD and shipped out to Hong Kong years ago. No wife, no kids. Speaks Cantonese like a native. No one knows where the money comes from but the talk is it could be the Chinese government.’
‘And you’re the only one who can get past the gatekeeper. So what’s your secret, Geri?’
‘Kant.’
The Grope’s mouth flopped open.
‘No, Kant! As in Emmanuel. Felix has a thing for philosophy.’
‘Philosophy, huh?’ the Grope narrows his eyes. ‘What else?’
‘He likes to watch me eat weird Chinese food. Lizard skin, rabbit tendons, that sort of thing.’
Naturally the Grope suspects I am fucking Felix, or at the very least providing some sort of sordid sexual service and therefore putting Steiner’s order flow in jeopardy since I could be cast aside at any moment in favour of some sexual athlete. So every once in a while he hauls me off the trading floor and into his glass office to shoot the breeze, but I know he is really covertly checking me over for signs of wear and tear. Only last Wednesday he nabbed me just as I was leaving for Heathrow to bag Felix’s order for the China Fire block and he tried to act all casual by taking out his golf club. ‘You never played?’ he asked, positioning his Eezee Putt against the glass wall. ‘I used to spend all summer down the country club when I was a kid.’ But I told him that golf wasn’t such a big thing for convent schoolgirls in Dublin. The Grope took his time lining up, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, wiggling his hips. When he flunked the first shot, he held the club aloft to squint down the shaft as if his error might reveal a problem in the alignment. ‘PING,’ he said admiringly, ‘you know the story, Geri?’ and I didn’t bother saying I’d heard it many times before. ‘Karsten Salheim,’ he continued, ‘a lowly mechanical engineer at General Motors designed and made the world’s best putter at his home in Riverroad, California. Just like Microsoft, it all started in a garage.’ He leaned dreamily on the club and stared at his glass cabinet where a Stars ’n’ Stripes stands guard over the trophies and deal tombstones, lending the display a faintly funereal air and I imagined the Grope’s embalmed body laid out among his spoils like a relic of the American Dream, preserved in this airless shrine to watch over the trading floor forever.
‘Never too late to start,’ he offered me the Ping with an encouraging grin. ‘And it sure is a helluva day out with clients.’
I shook my head. ‘Felix hates sport. He thinks it’s the pursuit of primitives,’ and this remark had the desired effect because the Grope kicked the Eezee Putt to one side, tucked the little furry glove over his club and stashed it back by the coat stand.
‘I don’t know what you’re doing with Felix Mann, Geri,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to know. Just keep it up and don’t fuck it up.’
It is six years and a lifetime ago since I first heard Felix Mann’s name and that was the same day the Grope threatened to rip out his fucking asshole. I’d been at Steiner’s for a few months and was with my old boss, Ed Karetsky, who liked to end an evening’s tequila slamming by climbing up on a bar stool to deliver Ivan Boesky’s famous speech to the Berkeley class of ’83: Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself. Ed had let me tag along to his meeting in the observer role of deaf and dumb graduate trainee, not realizing that by the end of that year he’d be breeding pugs in Illinois and – in an entirely unrelated but coincidental event – Boesky and the other 1980s corporate raiders would be behind bars.
As soon as we walked into the Grope’s office, Ed clicked his fingers to indicate the wall space where I could disappear. He slung his leg across a corner of the conference table, oblivious to the stink of trouble in the air, the white lips of the two hotshots from Capital Markets at the table, the back of the Grope’s head framed in the window like a warning sign. Ed stretched the elastic of his business school smile and just kept on swimming out to sea. Hey, guys, howya doing? Like they really had nothing better to do in the middle of a 200 million dollar stock placing for Cargo International than sit there and shoot the breeze, when upstairs Steiner’s client – the Cargo CEO – had popped in for an update on the deal only to find himself sitting in front of the screen watching his stock spiral down 15%.
All because Felix Mann had decided to sell the shit out of Cargo.
The Grope punctured the airspace in front of Ed with a sharp and steady finger. Karetksy. What The Fuck Is Going ON? Ed froze, forgot to paddle and his mouth filled with water, an Adam’s apple swallow jerked his tie knot upwards and he said, Word on the street says Felix is taking a run at Cargo. That he’s short selling the stock all the way down. Though we can’t be sure it’s him. The Grope thumped his fist into the back of the chair. It’s got Felix Mann’s butt-fucking footprint all over it. So YOU need to talk to him. Ed chewed his cheek and muttered Thing is he…uh … still won’t take our call. He looked down at the familiar landscape of his shoes and the Grope stared at his bowed head as if from a great height, although it was really only a couple of inches. This Cargo deal is sinking like a stone so I don’t give a shit what you do, Karetsky, you STOP this guy. I timed Ed’s silence. After seven long seconds he nodded and mumbled Yes, which was all you really can say in a room where the knives are out. But the truth was Felix could sell Cargo’s stock right down to zero if he wanted and there was absolutely nothing Ed could do to stop him. In fact, there was nothing anyone could do to stop Felix doing anything because no one at Steiner’s had a relationship with him back then. And although this was ultimately the Grope’s failure since he was Head of Trading and Sales, he needed to pass that efficiently down the food chain.
A sudden sunburst blazed through the window and the Grope flexed his shoulders, his white shirt flared yellow, like the rippling hide of a slow-motion lion tearing into a felled antelope. The two guys from Capital Markets tensed like a pair of craning coyotes and the Grope said the thing about Felix’s asshole and I thought: well that’s fine, but how can you rip out someone’s asshole if you can’t even get them to return your calls?
I half-ran along the corridor to keep up with Ed, scrambling for some upbeat remarks, trying to make him forget I’d witnessed his public humiliation, but it was too late, I had lost his good will. He stopped dead in the centre of the corridor, leaned in so close I could smell his mouthwashed breath. Go play with the traffic, Geri, he snarled, I’ve got some real work to do and he slammed through the double doors, leaving me to reflect on an important lesson that I was lucky to learn so early on: shit travels downhill, don’t you ever forget it.
Cargo’s stock fell 21% that day and the company was forced to call off the deal. Two months later, irregularities were discovered in their financial accounts, the CEO resigned on the back of the announcement and the whole embarrassing mess snowballed into a very public media witch-hunt, with Steiner’s name written all over it. Felix had made an estimated eight million bucks buying back his stock and emerged from the rubble making a lot of smart guys look very stupid indeed. In the dash for cover and the ensuing whitewash, there was a rash of internal changes in the chain of command at Steiner’s. A handful of analysts and bankers were quietly scalped for falling asleep at the wheel. Ed was sacked for running a sales force that had failed to develop a relationship with one of the most important clients outside of the US. When they came for him he said I guess I should take my jacket, huh, in a final attempt at gallows humour. Watch your back, kiddo he said to me but I just nodded. The rest of the desk buried their heads in the phones, shrinking from the noxious odour of failure as if it might be contagious. The security guard stood waiting by the exit like the Grim Reaper and Ed slapped him on the shoulder and turned to face down the trading floor. I love you all, you fuckers he bellowed but no one said a word and Ed walked out the double doors and was swallowed by the great sea, as if he had never been.
There but for the grace of God, etcetera, said Al. God’s got nothing to do with it, Rob muttered. Karetsky was always a tosser.
The general consensus at Steiner’s is that the Cargo fall-out cost the Grope about two career years. It was his second stumble on the power trip, the first was when his classmate James ‘Moose’ Hanson Jr made it onto the Operating Committee in ’83 and the Grope didn’t. So it’s no surprise that the Cargo experience has left him with an allergic reaction to Felix Mann, like he doesn’t feel safe in the jungle knowing that Felix could be out there sunning himself on a rock, waiting for the Grope to come ambling across his path with a nice big juicy deal between his teeth. But I actually think that what really bugs the Grope more than anything, maybe even more than losing out to the Moose, is the fact that that the biggest swinging dick in the investor community just ignores him, just refuses to take his calls. Even though he knows that Felix does this to everyone, the Grope can’t bear the snub. Because he can’t be entirely sure that it’s not personal, that Felix isn’t still smirking up his sleeve.
Years later, when I felt we’d covered enough ground, I asked Felix how he’d known about Cargo’s slimy dealings. I was sitting opposite him on a rickety chair in some hole-in-the-wall Kowloon restaurant, battling with the beginnings of a predictable nausea. Felix leaned over the mound of tepid food that crowded the table between us and said: The purpose of being a selective listener is to hear more clearly. To listen to the right signal, to eliminate the background noise.
The streetlights cut out and flicker as I accelerate into the dark sweep of Lower Thames Street. Past the blackened stone of St Magnus the Martyr marooned in a cluster of office blocks, Christmas lights still bobbing gently on the leafless branches of the churchyard tree and I wonder what gruesome death Magnus suffered. If it was worse than Peter’s upside-down crucifixion, Catherine’s wheel or Sebastian slowly bleeding to death gazing wistfully up at the heavens, the angels’ chorus bellowing in his ears as he reached that zone where pain is nullified by sheer conviction, transfixed by a dazzling vision of God’s open arms and the promise of luxuriant expiry in His holy embrace.
I round Tower Hill and head up Minories. Pass a lone cab and a passenger head bent over an open FT, weakly illuminated by the backseat bulb. It is 06:31, not yet the half-light and I am doing record time, may even be first in, apart of course from Rob, who cannot be beaten. I crawl past his 911 at the front of the underground Porsche pack, then hang a sudden wrench on the wheel just to hear the tyres squeal. Twenty-two minutes exactly to the lift, which notches down my five-week running average to 24.2. I press 15 and the talking doll voice cuts through the silence. Of course it’s entirely possible that Felix has already put his demand to the Grope. Perhaps the small matter of my consent to relocation has been overruled and I’ll be met by a one-way ticket to Hong Kong as soon as I hit my desk. Or maybe the Grope has been suddenly recalled to New York for an urgent strategy session on how to get Steiner’s through a war and still make a profit. Maybe all those marathons have finally caught up with him and he has keeled over with a massive coronary, is at this very moment being rushed to the Chelsea and Westminster, his wife sobbing into a monogrammed handkerchief, I told him he should take it easy but he’s always been a very stubborn man. His left hand scrabbles weakly at his face and the paramedic lifts the fogged-up oxygen mask from his mouth. His wife leans closer, straining to catch the last words of a dying man barely audible above the siren and the engine roar and the Grope jerks his head a full inch off the trolley, expiring with a blue-lipped rasp: Send the bitch to Hong Kong!
THE LIFT DOORS GLIDE APART, I step out onto 15 and already I can feel the market pulse. On busy days you can hear the roar of the trading floor right here, a blurred wall of sound that hits you like a stun gun. Time decelerates to slow motion and I cover the twenty paces to the double doors like a drifting astronaut. There are guys who bless themselves on this spot each morning and once I saw Rob kneel down to kiss the carpet. For there is no place in the world quite like this and I pause for a moment at the gateway to heaven and hell, listening to the call of the wild, the stadium pre-match rumble, the sound of money being kicked around.
There are four parallel rows of screen-laden docking stations with a walkway loosely dividing Cash from Derivatives, thirty battery-hen slots in each row. A bank of wall-mounted clocks tells the time in every place that matters and right now we are between worlds: the Asian markets are closing, New York is fast asleep and Europe is waking up for business as risk is passed like a baton from one continent to the other in this twenty-four-hour relay. High up on the overhead TVs a muted Stealth bomber bisects one screen and, on another, a troupe of soldiers in berets and Ray-Bans trudge across a sandy plain. To my right the ticker tape runs last night’s closing stock prices above US Equities, a graveyard this time of day. The Grope’s glass office spans a half-width of the floor and, suspended from a coat hook, is the only visible sign that he is in: the green umbrella that doubles as a golf club in his rare frivolous moments.
In the dead centre of the floor Joe Palmer sits tipped back in his swivel with his feet up on the desk, studying the football pages of the Sun. Behind him on the Japanese warrant desk, fifteen traders maintain an uneasy silence while studying his body language for some clue to the day ahead. Twenty-eight years old and five foot six in his brogues, Joe has a tight, wiry body and the cadaverous complexion of the shift worker, his skin a dirty grey, his eyes always red-rimmed as if he is battling an allergy. He wears his trademark blue shirt and a West Ham tie in a lurid claret and blue. His nose is a little misaligned, the legacy of a punch up on the Metals Exchange when he was a new boy. This is apparently not noticeable when you look at him full face, which I have never had the opportunity to do, because Joe does not speak to anyone who is not involved in the Jap warrant business and Felix gives all his Jap orders to Nomura since they bring in all the hot new deals.
Joe and his army of traders are the most profitable on the Street and his own trading book is the most profitable on the floor by far – maybe 50 or 60 million bucks last year – and who knows how much squirrelled away in his personal trading account. The Grope treats Joe with the indulgence you would lavish on a favourite grandchild, tormented by the fear that he will be lured away by Nomura. But Joe seems to like it here, though according to Rob, all of this is second best because football is Joe’s real passion. He was signed by West Ham when he was a kid but a knee injury at seventeen cost him his future. Rob says one day Joe will buy a football club, that this is his dream, now that the first and real dream is forever denied him.
As I head towards my own window row, Joe chucks the paper in the bin, and stands up to begin a series of neck rolls. He has been here since 4 a.m. and already done his pre-market thinking. He has spoken to Tokyo and he will not speak to anyone on the floor until precisely 6:55. His traders shuffle and stretch and fidget with their keyboards, prowling back and forth to the water cooler, circling their positions like a pack of hungry hyenas. A heavy pall of smoke hangs over their Quick machines which I covet, mainly because the screens are so cute and compact and all the text, everything, is in Japanese. We are making millions out of this market without even one person on the floor being able to speak the language but, luckily for us, all the Japanese stocks have numerical codes so you know what’s going on even when you haven’t got a clue. The past five years has seen the Nikkei index more than triple and Joe and his team have been riding the wave of this bull market driven up by whispers of land banks, reclaimed marshlands out near Narita, minidisks, semiconductors and tiny mobile phones that the analysts predict will soon make our clunky Motorolas a thing of the past. I picture their warrants as little scraps of torch paper, magical promises that can evaporate like those fortune cookie wrappers that ignite and dissolve on the tongues of fire, the incantation of holy words like Sony and Canon and Toshiba and Kawasaki, those monoliths that emerged from the post-war carnage to raise billions of cheap dollars with low coupon debt in the financial nirvana of Japan and an expansion that seems unstoppable. Lately there is a whiff of things going bad out there with the banks teetering under their own weight, but whatever happens we still all believe that Joe will be the last one standing. He has traded the Nikkei all the way up and then last year he made a killing even as it screamed down 39%. And incredibly, despite being the biggest player in the warrant market, Joe has never set foot on Japanese soil. In fact, he’s never even been on a plane due to his pathological aversion to flying. This Christmas he treated his girlfriend to a Concorde trip to New York for a week’s shopping with her mum and her sister, put them all up in the Astor suite at the Plaza.
Of course it’s hard to sneer at someone’s phobias when they make so much money.
‘Nice of you to pop in,’ says Rob as I approach. He sits hunched over a printout of his trading positions, his foot tapping as he calculates the risk of the dawning day. He does not raise his head.
‘Nice to see you too,’ I park myself on the edge of his desk. Tapered strands of brown hair rest on his shirt collar in a slight kink and I lean in to check the label of his tie. Rob won last week’s tie king competition when he arrived with what looked like a vertical pattern of dollar signs made out of rope but was actually a column of naked girls snaking all the way up to his half-Windsor.
‘Grope’s looking for you big time,’ he says.
‘Any idea what he wanted?’
‘Not as such. Could just have been the fact that he expected you to be here already. Of course we’re only on the brink of a major war here, no pressing reason to come in at all.’ He lifts his head, smiles. ‘So how was Honkers? Bring me back any juicy orders from the Cat?’
‘Where’s the Grope now?’
‘Big war chat upstairs somewhere. He’ll be down for the morning meeting. But I wouldn’t be in a hurry to find him, he’s been a fucking animal.’
‘What’s all this?’ I point to the mini TV perched on top of the Reuters screen, wires trailing over his desk.
‘Got IT to set me up with a front row seat for all the action. Just look at this shit,’ he jerks a thumb at a shot of last night’s candlelight vigil in Trafalgar Square and a close up of a woman wearing a placard around her neck that reads:
‘Give peace a chance, my arse,’ he grunts. The screen shifts to a still of John Major and Rob turns up the volume. Teenage boys murdered in sight of their mothers and sisters, their bodies left on the street as garbage. Those who caution delay because they hate war must ask themselves: how much longer should the world stand by and risk these atrocities continuing?
‘So what’s the word from the Grope?’
‘The usual: Keep your head down, no fancy stuff, but stay in the flow. T + three days and counting. Neeeeoooooommmmpugggggghhhhhhhh,’ and his right-hand span cuts a descending dash through the airspace.
‘You making money?’
‘Kerfuckingching.’ He taps his printout, for Rob is our lucky charm, the trader whose stock only rises and all the juniors stay close as if his pixie dust could coat them. When he first arrived the Grope had figured him for the Jap Warrant desk so he shipped him out to Tokyo to take the pulse. Rob spent a night at a club in Roppongi where the girls put minicameras in their vaginas that projected up on a big screen, and which he said was about as sexy as watching open-heart surgery. But he didn’t plan on playing second fiddle to Joe; he wanted to stake out his own financial territory.