A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism

by Peter Mountford

  "You play poker?" Grayson said.

  "No, no, never." Gabriel shook his head. "I'm a numbers person. I like blackjack."

  "Really?" Grayson said, surprised. "You don't seem like a numbers person. You're so—what's the word?"

  "Daft?" Gabriel suggested.

  "Treacherous?" Fiona offered, ostensibly in jest.

  "Alert," Grayson said. "Alert to the human element. So I assumed you'd play poker."

  Fiona giggled and Grayson arrived at an expression midway between amused and offended. "Are you laughing at me?" he said.

  "No, she's laughing at me," Gabriel explained. "Anyway, even if she were laughing at you, you shouldn't feel too bad about it. She's often amused at the expense of men who sit beside her. It's part of her charm."

  From Fiona's look, Gabriel gathered that she hadn't liked that. She no longer wanted to continue playing. Fine. It was hers to direct. She thrust the focus back onto Gabriel. "How's it going with your girlfriend, by the way?"

  "She's in Sucre with Evo."

  "You're dating one of his staff?" Grayson said.

  Gabriel nodded. "His press attaché."

  "I met her," Grayson said. "What's her name?"

  "Lenka Villarobles."

  "Yes. A fascinating woman," Grayson said. "Very beautiful too."

  "Yes," Gabriel said. He resisted the temptation to glance at Fiona again. It was best to avoid anything that could be interpreted as gloating.

  Fiona was ready to move on anyway. "See, Gabriel?" she said. "It's like I said. In La Paz, everyone knows everyone. There are no secrets."

  "Are you keeping secrets, Gabriel?" Grayson said.

  Gabriel winked at him. "A few."

  "Anything I'd like to know?" Grayson said, quite earnestly.

  Gabriel shrugged and checked in with Fiona, not sure how best to proceed.

  "He's full of shit," she said and so resolved that question while also diminishing the brief allure Gabriel had summoned for himself.

  Grayson just shook his head, mildly confused but still enjoying the show they were putting on. He remained fiercely unflappable, a fountain of jolly curiosity. He was happy to watch, prod with the occasional question. It was, after all, a rough game, and he'd spent enough time playing to know that sitting on the bench was the best position one could hope for.

  Fiona was also done sparring. "Let's go," she said to Grayson.

  Grayson's glee dangled there as he stared at Gabriel for another moment. He rapped the table with his knuckles. "Well," he said, loitering, unwilling to let the moment go.

  Gabriel shrugged, not wanting to step in the way of Fiona's request.

  Sensing that Gabriel was deferring to Fiona, Grayson relinquished his interest, thrust out a hand. Gabriel shook it firmly. The eye contact came steady, appreciative. There was something different in Grayson in that moment; something had changed in the way he looked at Gabriel. The expression indicated respect, Gabriel realized, even admiration.

  "You should rethink poker," Grayson said. "I think you'd do well."

  "Oh, that's funny," Gabriel said, without really smiling. "Isn't it?" he said to Fiona dourly, harshly. He was overplaying and he knew it.

  "Okay," she said to Grayson, standing up. "Let's go."

  Gabriel watched the two of them walk to the elevators on the far side of the room. He might have stung her at their last meeting, but now it was different—the shame was mutual, it was just some swampy sadness between them, and it favored no one. That she'd somehow managed to care for him spoke not to any quality in him but to the extent that loneliness had perforated her life. He lit a cigarette as she and Grayson approached the elevator bank. He watched her push the button. She was talking. Grayson was lost in an assortment of rising and falling shades of hilarity. At last, Fiona glanced at Gabriel and he raised his cigarette in salute, winked at her. Seeing the cigarette, she smirked, barely, and then turned back to Grayson and continued with whatever she'd been saying. The moment was over. The elevator arrived and the two stepped inside, turned, and faced the open doors. She reached out and pushed the button. For a brief moment, no one did anything.

  Then the doors slid shut.

  Gabriel got up and went back to the blackjack table. He'd had enough already, but he sat down anyway. He pulled his wallet out and set it on the table, rapped the felt gently with his fingertips, beckoning fresh cards.

  11. Gambit

  Tuesday, December 27, 2005

  IT WOULD BE option number 6, after all. If it hadn't been decided the night before, it had certainly been decided by the time he awoke. It was ludicrous, but he couldn't think of a better way to play it.

  He could do option number 5, of course: just invest in the market in a straightforward way, tell Priya what he knew, disseminate the truth. That would be great if things played out well, but it wouldn't help him when and if—and the if seemed unduly optimistic—he was fired. Sudden dismissal by Priya, which had seemed a vague danger of the job, now felt imminent, nearly inevitable. It was the golden rule of investing that if you had the time, you had to play for the longer term, where gains compounded. In this case, there was no long term, so he did nothing for himself by nurturing a career that was irrevocably moribund. Accepting that his position at Calloway—and in the lucrative industry itself—would soon be gone, he needed to be especially aggressive in the short run. He had to maximize his winnings at every turn, even if that meant that his moves would be riskier. So went the logic. The deceitful and illegal option was the only option. He did not see another way. More to the point, he saw little to no chance that the plan would backfire.

  The plan would go like this:

  He would establish a short position, then spread a false rumor, and then, soon after (as soon as the rumor had gained traction, which might take a day or two), he would eliminate his position and begin backtracking. Within as little as twenty-four hours, he'd be telling everyone he knew that he had been mistaken. It had been a simple mistake. If all went according to plan (statement to retraction) the whole thing would be over in two days, at the most.

  The SEC wouldn't investigate because the money involved would be too small to raise concerns. Even if they did investigate, they could never mount a case. There would be no evidence. Then there was the question of jurisdiction: Gabriel would be a U.S. citizen in Bolivia circulating a false (and then subsequently true) rumor about a Bolivian political situation that affected a Brazilian company that was owned by a mining firm incorporated in Singapore and run by a Canadian. Crucially, because Gabriel planned to quickly correct his "mistake," it would be impossible to prove that he had intentionally committed fraud. Without testimony from Lenka—which she would never offer, not only because she loved him but also because if she did it would be damning to her too—there would be no way to prove that he hadn't made an honest mistake and then simply corrected it.

  In the meantime, Gabriel would ride the price of Santa Cruz. First, he'd ride the price down on a short sale, as the stock price plummeted. Then he'd close that short position at a profit, probably not quite as much as 100 percent, and then put everything toward a long position and ride the price back up. The price would likely spike above its starting point on a so-called short spike, triggered by automated buy orders set up by hedge funds to cover their own short positions. For Gabriel, the trip back up would be where he really cleaned up, doubling or tripling on his already near 100 percent gains. He would aim to sell out within the short spike.

  Finally, the price would settle somewhere near, if slightly above, where it currently stood. Even if the timing of his personal trades was somewhat off, he'd come away with gains measured in the hundreds of percents.

  Still, he hesitated. Prosecutable or not, it was securities fraud, a serious offense. It was white-collar crime to boot, which had especially unpleasant implications for Gabriel, the son of a liberal firebrand. The dapper uncle of clubfooted larceny, this kind of fraud was the domain of the sweaty and bespectacled accountant who sneaked
off to the Caymans with someone's grandma's retirement savings. The mascot of this sleazier side might be Dennis Kozlowski, ex-CEO of Tyco: florid, bald, a complexion of braised poultry. He wore the ill countenance of a Nazi captured by the GIs who'd been trying to pass himself off as a prisoner at the concentration camp he'd been guarding. So Gabriel hesitated. But he couldn't hesitate for long. The shelf life of his information was remarkably short, so if he planned to use it he needed to make his move now. He had to act that day. Indeed, he had to act that morning, before he went to the airport to pick up his mother.

  By the time the stock market opened, at nine thirty, he had made himself stop hesitating.

  He rode the elevator down to the second floor, entered the business center. He lit a cigarette while the computer booted up and reminded himself that he needed to buy some gum to hide the smell of cigarettes from his mother. Her flight arrived at 3:40 that afternoon.

  He tapped the cigarette, blew away the smoke that snaked in his direction. Icons appeared slowly on the screen. Outside, shafts of misty yellow light burst majestically through a carpet of clouds, shooting neat blotches of light onto the bare countryside. Once the computer was fully awake and had connected to the hotel's server, he opened his E-Trade account.

  He liquidated 92 percent of his portfolio within five minutes of the opening bell, which left him with a cash balance of $62,017.11. He guessed that if he played it right, he'd be able to turn that balance into something in the area of half a million dollars by the end of the following day. Peanuts to someone like Priya, but to Gabriel, enough to set him up for a while in New York after he was fired. Or, if he wanted to move to Bolivia, say, he could coast for the rest of his life without difficulty. Not that he was thinking, directly, about moving to Bolivia. But the idea had alit somewhere at the back of his mind, where daydreams spawned, and was settling in.

  Once he was ready to begin, he felt such a surge of anxiety that he thought he might vomit. His heart, that organ so often anointed with mysterious powers, envisioned as the seat of emotion, was quite clearly nothing other than a knot of muscle embedded in his chest cavity, pumping and sucking blood through a nest of tubes. It did this herky-jerky labor vigorously, steadily. Feeling it that morning, he knew that his blood pressure was up and that his heart was straining with its work.

  He picked up his phone and dialed E-Trade. The market had been open for ten minutes. He refreshed his browser and watched Santa Cruz's price dip two cents.

  An automated voice asked him to punch in his account number. Next, he was asked to provide his birthday, his Social Security number. He keyed through more questions until he arrived at the options desk. The phone rang twice before someone picked up.

  "Good morning, this is Tim Nester, may I ask whom I'm speaking to?"

  "Gabriel Francisco de Boya," he said. He stubbed out his cigarette. He refreshed his browser, and the price of Santa Cruz Gas lifted three cents. The spread was wide, because trading was still light.

  "Okay, let me pull up your account information," he said. Tim was probably Gabriel's age. Gabriel pictured a doughy guy with a crewcut. He pictured the office, some three-story building on the outskirts of Omaha. He saw something drab and awful, a slightly more deadening version of his former job at IBI. "How's your day?" Tim eventually said.

  "It's been pretty crazy already, actually." It occurred to Gabriel that E-Trade might be taping the conversation. He should act blasé.

  "Oh?" Tim said, seemingly just happy it was something different. "Where are you?"

  "Bolivia."

  "Bolivia? Wow."

  "What about you?"

  "We're in Atlanta." Tim sighed. "Sorry, it gets kind of slow this close to opening."

  "That's fine." Gabriel refreshed the browser. The buy price ticked up one cent, but the sell remained steady. He refreshed again. The buy ticked up another cent, the sell still didn't move. These were just the normal palpitations of a lightly traded stock. The direction was favorable to Gabriel, but negligibly so.

  The crime he was about to commit wasn't victimless, exactly, but Santa Cruz's shareholders—those who held on to their stock—would be unharmed, as would the employees. The only people hurt would be those who speculated against Santa Cruz Gas or other companies exposed to Bolivian natural gas based on the rumor Gabriel planned to circulate. The losers, for the most part, would be other hedge funds and a handful of adventurous day traders. On the whole, it was a pristine and lovely stratagem: he profited, it hurt other speculators, and it left the true investors in the company largely unaffected. Even the company's founder, Lloyd Pingree, would be unharmed (unless he sold out too, in which case he'd lose more than anyone). The perfection of the scheme lay in the fact that it was profiteering for Gabriel, but it was also a morality play, because those who lost the most would be those who bet against the future of Bolivia. So went the logic.

  Gabriel called Priya just after he'd opened his own short position. He said, "I have your answer on Santa Cruz Gas. It's not confirmed at this point, but I have it on good authority that he's going to sack all of the foreign companies at the same time, most likely in the first couple months of his term. So I'd short-sell Santa Cruz Gas. The news is probably going to hit this afternoon, or maybe tomorrow morning."

  "How do you know when the news will hit?" she said. The skepticism was not disguised. She was an expert appraiser of odds, if not of people. So while she might have trouble locating innuendo, she could spot bullshit from a mile off.

  "Well, I heard it from the finance minister—designate," he said, trying to make himself sound weary, not rattled. "Also, I gather that people were talking about it at the bar here where the journalists hang out, those people know—"

  She cut him off. "If I do this, you know that it's your ass on the line."

  "Yeah, I know." He said it quickly, to underscore his confidence. The fact that his ass was already on the line—that Oscar had phoned him to clarify the precariousness of his situation—was beside the point. This was a zero-sum gambit: if he gambled and won, he won big; if he gambled and lost, he lost big; but if he played it straight, he lost outright. Therefore he had no choice: he had to gamble.

  "I'll talk to you later," she said, and hung up.

  He went back up to his room. He could feel his heart flexing with mechanical efficiency. He hadn't felt that way since he'd shoplifted a Snickers from the Exxon on the corner of Foothill and Upland, in Claremont, when he was fourteen. He and Nico had each grabbed one candy bar. After, they leaned against a pinkish wall beside the nearby strip mall, chewing, dizzy with adrenaline. Now he felt the same as he stood in his room, on the verge of hyperventilating, staring at his bandaged face in the mirror above his desk.

  At ten thirty, he was back in the business center, where he fired off an e-mail to Edmund at IBI, who had taken over the Latin America desk:

  TO: Edmund_Samuelson@IBI.com

  FROM: gabo_de_boya@yahoo.com

  SUBJECT: Off the record

  Hi, Edmund,

  Hope you're well. I just had a tip, and Calloway is taking a position on the basis of this tip. Now, we don't know when the news will trickle out into the public, and Priya would rather not wait weeks before the move pays off, so I thought I'd let you know. If this turns out to be untrue, please let me know. As of now, I think it's true.

  Long story short: I've heard from two sources close to Evo that he intends to seize all of the foreign gas installations within his first year in offi ce. He'll offer them a chance to renegotiate their contracts, but he's talking about turning the Bolivian share of the profits from around 30% to around 72%. Anyone who doesn't cooperate will be booted out of the country.

  So, I just thought I'd give you a heads-up. Thanks for forwarding the e-mail about this job at Calloway, by the way. I love it.

  —Gabriel

  At the Lookout at noon, he ordered a pisco sour and went over to say hello to Craig, a midcareer reporter for the Associated Press.

  Half an hour l
ater, he went to a different table, said hello to Sandra, the cute, young Scottish woman from the Economist. She was freckled and thick, ginger-haired, bawdy as a roughneck. She was all glint, no glare.

  As he'd done with Craig, Gabriel told her that, regrettably, it all had to be completely off the record. "Oh, I love secrets," she'd breathed huskily. In a simpler era, Gabriel would have lingered to flirt with her, but these were not simple times.

  At three thirty on the dot Gabriel was downstairs again, tilting after two pisco sours. He glanced skyward but didn't see any silvery airplanes cruising toward the airport. Despite his mother's insistence that he not meet her at the airport, he knew that with his being newly and gruesomely injured, and with his Thanksgiving no-show hanging freshly in the air, to say nothing of the fact that he'd forced her to stay at a hotel one mile distant from his own, he needed to be there at that airport when she arrived. He could do that much, at least. Petulant italics were implied within the idea itself. So he'd go pick her up and escort her to her lodgings, safely outside the rings of orbits in his strange solar system.

  He'd have to tell her an updated lie. What he'd decided on was, like most good lies, a half degree from the truth. He'd tell her that he was writing freelance reports for a private equity firm. He'd say that he was working for Big Thunder, which was a teddy bear of a firm, despite its awkwardly macho name. Based out of Tahoe, it sought to replicate the returns of a frosty hedge fund like Calloway by buying direct stakes in startups through providing venture and angel capital. The group remained aggressive on tech, but it had also diversified into forward-looking green companies. Gabriel could tell her that he'd lied to everyone in Bolivia because he didn't want to tip them off to Big Thunder's Bolivian agenda. It was ecotourism, he'd say—and solar power; also, there was interest in finding a socially and environmentally responsible way of tapping the lithium in the salt flats for use in the batteries of electric cars. It was all very hush-hush, he'd say. Mostly, he'd keep it as vague as possible.