“Mr. Davenport, you do like to give a girl a lot of notice, don’t you?”
“What are you up to?” asked Su Ling as she leaned across to watch her husband checking over a column of figures on the financial pages of the Asian Business News.
“Studying currency movements over the past year,” Nat replied.
“Is that how Japan fits into the equation?” inquired Su Ling.
“Sure is,” said Nat, “because the yen is the only major currency in the past ten years that has consistently risen in value against the dollar, and several economists are predicting that the trend will continue for the foreseeable future. They claim the yen is still massively undervalued. If the experts are correct, and you’re right about Japan’s expanding role in new technology, then I think I’ve identified a good investment in an uncertain world.”
“Is this to be the subject of your business school thesis?”
“No, however that’s not a bad idea,” said Nat. “I was thinking of making a small currency investment and if I prove to be right, I’ll notch it up a few dollars each month.”
“A bit of a risk, isn’t it?”
“If you hope to make a profit, there’s bound to be a certain amount of risk involved. The secret is to eliminate the elements that add to that risk.” Su Ling didn’t look convinced. “I’ll tell you what I have in mind,” said Nat. “I’m currently earning $400 a month as a captain in the army. If I sell those dollars a year in advance for yen at today’s rate, then convert them back in twelve months’ time, and if the dollar-yen exchange rate continues as it has done for the past seven years, I should make an annual profit of around $400 to $500.”
“And if it goes the other way?” said Su Ling.
“But it hasn’t for the past seven years.”
“But if it did?”
“I’d lose around $400, or a month’s salary.”
“I’d rather have a guaranteed paycheck each month.”
“You can never create capital on earned income,” said Nat. “Most people live well beyond their means, and their only form of savings ends up as life insurance or bonds, both of which can be decimated by inflation. Ask my father.”
“But what do we need all this money for?” asked Su Ling.
“For my lovers,” said Nat.
“And where are all these lovers?”
“Most of them are in Italy, but there are a few others hanging around in the world’s major capitals.”
“So that’s why we’re going to Venice?”
“And Florence, Milan and Rome. When I left them, many were in the nude, and one of the things I most liked about them is they don’t age, other than to crack a little if they’re exposed to too much sunlight.”
“Lucky women,” said Su Ling. “And do you have a favorite?”
“No, I’m fairly promiscuous, though if I were forced to choose, I confess there is a lady in Florence who resides in a small palace, whom I adore, and am longing to meet up with again.”
“Is she a virgin, by any chance?” inquired Su Ling.
“You’re bright,” said Nat.
“Goes by the name of Maria?”
“You’ve found me out, although there are a lot of Marias in Italy.”
“The Adoration of the Magi, Tintoretto.”
“No.”
“Bellini, Mother and Child?”
“No, they still reside at the Vatican.”
Su Ling went silent for a moment as the stewardess asked them to fasten their seatbelts. “Caravaggio?”
“Very good. I left her in the Pitti Palace on the right-hand wall of the third-floor gallery. She promised she would be faithful until I returned.”
“And there she will remain, because such a lover would cost you more than $400 a month, and if you’re still hoping to go into politics, you won’t even be able to afford the frame.”
“I won’t be going into politics until I can afford the whole gallery,” Nat assured his wife.
Annie began to appreciate why the British could be so dismissive about American tourists who somehow managed to cover London, Oxford, Blenheim and Stratford in three days. It didn’t help when she observed busloads of tourists descending on the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, take their seats, and then leave during the intermission, to be replaced by another busload of her countrymen. Annie wouldn’t have thought it possible, if she hadn’t returned after the intermission to find the two rows in front of her full of people with familiar accents whom she had never seen before. She wondered if those who attended the second act told those who watched the first act what had happened to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or was that busload already on its way back to London?
Annie felt less guilty after they’d spent a leisurely ten days in Scotland. They enjoyed being in Edinburgh for the Festival, where they could choose between Marlowe and Mozart, or Pinter and Orton. However, for both of them, the highlight of the trip was the long drive up and down the two coastlines. The scenery was so breathtaking they thought there could be no more beautiful landscape on earth.
In Edinburgh, they tried to trace the Gates and the Davenport lineage, but all they ended up with was a large colored chart of the clans, and a skirt made in the garish Davenport tartan, which Annie doubted she would ever wear again once they were back in the States.
Fletcher fell asleep within minutes of their plane taking off from Edinburgh for New York. When he woke, the sun that he’d seen dip on one side of the cabin still hadn’t risen on the other. As they began their descent into JFK—Annie couldn’t get used to it not being called Idlewilde—all Annie could think about was being reunited with Lucy, while Fletcher anxiously looked forward to his first day with Alexander Dupont & Bell.
When Nat and Su Ling returned from Rome, they were also exhausted, but the change of plans could not have been more worthwhile. Su Ling had relaxed more and more as each day passed; in fact during the second week, neither of them even mentioned Korea. They agreed on their flight home to tell Su Ling’s mother that they had honeymooned in Italy. Only Tom would be puzzled.
While Su Ling slept, Nat once again studied the currency market in the International Herald Tribune and London’s Financial Times. The trend continued unabated, a dip, a slight recovery, followed by another dip, but the long-term graph was only going one way for the yen, and in the opposite direction from the dollar. This was also true for the yen against the mark, the pound and the lira, and Nat decided to continue researching which of the exchange rates had the greatest disparity. Just as soon as they were back in Boston he would talk to Tom’s father, and use the currency department at Russell’s Bank rather than reveal his ideas to someone he didn’t know.
Nat glanced across at his sleeping wife, grateful for her suggestion that he make exchange rates the subject of his final-year thesis at business school. His time at Harvard would pass all too quickly, and he realized that he could not put off a decision that would affect both their futures. They had already discussed the three possible options: he could look for a job in Boston so that Su Ling could remain at Harvard, but as she had pointed out, that would limit his horizons. He could take up Mr. Russell’s offer and join Tom at a large bank in a small town, but that would seriously curtail his future prospects. Or he could apply for a job on Wall Street and find out if he could survive in the big league.
Su Ling wasn’t in any doubt which of the three options he should pursue, and although they had some time to consider their future, she was already talking to her contacts at Columbia.
25
Looking back on his final year at Harvard, Nat had had few regrets.
Only hours after touching down at Logan International, he’d phoned Tom’s father to share his currency ideas. Mr. Russell pointed out that the sums he wished to deal in were too small for any foreign exchange counter to handle. Nat was disappointed until Mr. Russell suggested that the bank put up a thousand-dollar loan, and asked that he and Tom might be allowed to invest a thousand dollars each.
This became Nat’s first currency fund.
When Joe Stein heard about the project, another thousand appeared on the same day. Within a month, the fund had grown to $10,000. Nat told Su Ling that he was more worried about losing the investors’ money than his own. By the end of the term, the Cartwright Fund had grown to $14,000, and Nat had made a clear profit of $726.
“But you could still lose it all,” Su Ling reminded him.
“True, but now the fund is more substantial there’s less chance of a severe loss. Even if the trend suddenly reverses, I could hedge my position by selling ahead, and so keep the losses to a minimum.”
“But doesn’t this take a great deal of your time, when you should be writing your thesis?” Su Ling asked.
“It only takes about fifteen minutes a day,” said Nat. “I check the Japanese market at six each morning and the closing prices in New York at six every night, and as long as there isn’t a run against me for several days in a row, I have nothing to do except reinvest the capital each month.”
“It’s obscene,” said Su Ling.
“But what’s wrong with using my skill, knowledge and an ounce of enterprise?” Nat inquired.
“Because you earn more working fifteen minutes a day than I can hope to pick up in a year as a senior researcher at Columbia University—in fact, it may be more than my supervisor earns.”
“Your supervisor will still be in place this time next year, whatever happens to the market. That’s free enterprise. The downside is that I can lose everything.”
Nat didn’t tell his wife that he thought the British economist Maynard Keynes had once remarked, A shrewd man ought to be able to make a fortune before breakfast, so that he can do a proper job during the rest of the day. He knew how strongly his wife felt about what she called easy money, so he only talked about his investments whenever she raised the subject. He certainly didn’t let her know that Mr. Russell felt the time had come to consider leverage.
Nat felt no guilt when it came to spending fifteen minutes a day managing his mini-fund, as he doubted if there was any student in his class studying more diligently. In fact the only real break he took from work was to run for an hour every afternoon, and the highlight of his year came when, wearing a Harvard vest, he crossed the finishing line in first place in the meet against UConn.
After several interviews in New York Nat received a plethora of offers from financial institutions, but there were only two he took seriously. In reputation and size there was nothing to choose between them, but once he’d met Arnie Freeman, who headed the currency desk at Morgan’s, he was quite happy to sign up there and then. Arnie had a gift for making fourteen hours a day on Wall Street sound like fun.
Nat wondered what else could happen that year, until Su Ling asked how much profit the Cartwright Fund had accumulated.
“Around forty thousand dollars,” said Nat.
“And your share?”
“Twenty percent. So what are you planning to spend it on?”
“Our first child,” she replied.
Looking back on his first year with Alexander Dupont & Bell, Fletcher also had few regrets. He’d no idea what his responsibilities would be, but first-year associates were not known as “pack horses” for nothing. He quickly found out that his principal responsibility was to make sure that whatever case Matt Cunliffe was working on, he never needed to look beyond his desk for any relevant documents or case histories. It had only taken Fletcher a matter of days to discover that any idea of nonstop appearances in glamorous court cases defending innocent women accused of murder was the stuff of television dramas. Most of his work was painstaking and meticulous and more often than not rewarded by plea bargaining before a trial date had even been set.
Fletcher also discovered that it wasn’t until you became a partner that you started earning “the big bucks” and got to go home in the daylight. Despite this, Matt did lighten his workload by not insisting on a thirty-minute lunch break, which allowed him to play squash twice a week with Jimmy.
Although Fletcher took work home on the train, he tried whenever possible to spend an hour in the evening with his daughter. His father frequently reminded him that once those early years had passed, he wouldn’t be able to rewind the reel marked “important moments in Lucy’s childhood.”
Lucy’s first birthday party was the noisiest event outside a football stadium that Fletcher had ever attended. Annie had made so many friends in the neighborhood that he found his home full of young children who seemed to all want to laugh or cry at the same time. Fletcher marveled at how calmly Annie handled spilled ice cream, chocolate cake trodden into the carpet, a bottle of milk poured over her dress, without the familiar smile ever leaving her face. When the last brat had finally departed, Fletcher was exhausted, but all Annie said was, “I think that went just fine.”
Fletcher continued to see a lot of Jimmy, who, thanks to his father—his own words—had landed a job with a small but well-respected law practice on Lexington Avenue. His hours were almost as bad as Fletcher’s, but the responsibility of fatherhood seemed to have given him a new incentive, which only increased when Joanna gave birth to a second child. Fletcher marveled how successful their marriage was, remembering the age gap and academic disparity. But it seemed to make no difference, because the couple simply adored each other and were the envy of many of their contemporaries who had already filed for divorce. When Fletcher heard the news of Jimmy’s second child, he hoped it wouldn’t be long before Annie followed suit; he so envied Jimmy having a son. He often thought about Harry Robert.
Because of his workload, Fletcher made few new friends, with the exception of Logan Fitzgerald, who had joined the firm on the same day. They would often compare notes over lunch, and have a drink together before Fletcher caught his train home in the evening. Soon the tall, fair-haired Irishman was being invited back to Ridgewood to meet Annie’s unmarried girlfriends. Although Fletcher accepted that Logan and he were rivals, it didn’t appear to harm their friendship; in fact, if anything, it seemed to make the bond between them even stronger. Both had their minor triumphs and setbacks during the first year, and no one in the firm seemed willing to offer an opinion on which of them would become a partner first.
Over a drink one evening, Fletcher and Logan agreed they were now full-fledged members of the firm. In a few weeks’ time a new brace of trainees would appear and they would progress from pack horses to yearlings. They had both studied with interest the CVs of all those who made the short list.
“What do you think of the applicants?” asked Fletcher, trying not to sound superior.
“Not bad,” said Logan, as he ordered Fletcher his usual light beer, “with one exception—that guy from Stanford, I couldn’t work out how he even got on the shortlist.”
“I’m told he’s Bill Alexander’s nephew.”
“Well, that’s a good enough reason to put him on the shortlist, but not to offer him a job, so I don’t expect we’ll ever see him again. Come to think of it,” said Logan, “I can’t even remember his name.”
Nat was the youngest in a team of three at Morgan’s. His immediate boss was Steven Ginsberg, who was twenty-eight, and his number two, Adrian Kenwright, had just celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday. Between them, they controlled a fund of over a million dollars.
As the currency markets open in Tokyo just as most civilized Americans are going to bed, and close in Los Angeles when the sun no longer shines on the American continent, one of the team had to be on call to cover every hour of the night or day. In fact the only occasion Steven allowed Nat to take an afternoon off was to watch Su Ling receiving her doctorate at Harvard, and even then he had to leave the celebration party so he could take an urgent phone call and explain why the Italian lira was going south.
“They could have a Communist government by this time next week,” said Nat, “so start switching into Swiss francs,” he added. “And get rid of any pesetas or sterling we have on our books, because they both have
left-wing governments, and will be the next to feel the strain.”
“And the deutschmark?”
“Hold on to the mark, because the currency will remain undervalued as long as the Berlin Wall is in place.”
Although the two senior members of the team had a great deal more financial experience than Nat, and were willing to work just as hard, they both acknowledged that because of his political antennae Nat could read a market more quickly than anyone else they had ever worked with—or against.
The day everyone sold the dollar and went into pounds, Nat immediately sold the pound on the forward market. For eight days it looked as if he might have lost the bank a fortune and his colleagues rushed past him quickly in the corridor without looking him in the eye. A month later, seven other banks were offering him a job and a considerable rise in salary. Nat received a bonus check for eight thousand dollars at the end of the year, and decided the time had come to go in search of a mistress.
He didn’t tell Su Ling about the bonus, or the mistress, as she had recently received a pay raise of ninety dollars a month. As for the mistress, he’d had his eye on one particular lady he passed on the street corner every morning as he went to work. And she was still reposing there in the window when he returned to their flat in SoHo every evening. As each day passed, he gave the lady soaking in a bath more than a casual glance, and finally decided to ask her price.
“Six thousand five hundred dollars,” the gallery owner informed him, “and if I may say so, sir, you have an excellent eye because not only is it a magnificent picture, but you will also have made a shrewd investment.” Nat was quickly coming to the conclusion that art dealers were nothing more than used-car salesmen dressed in Brooks Brothers suits.
“Bonnard is greatly undervalued compared to his contemporaries Renoir, Monet and Matisse,” continued the dealer, “and I predict his prices will soar in the near future.” Nat didn’t care about Bonnard’s prices, because he was a lover not a pimp.
Sons of Fortune Page 23
