The Marketmaker

by Michael Ridpath

  Thirty thousand a year, with maybe much more to follow? Or nothing?

  I recalled the letter I had received the week before from Mr K.R. Norris at my building society. If I didn’t meet the arrears on my mortgage payments within thirty days, then they would repossess my flat.

  It was a simple decision. I shook his hand. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I’ll see you at seven on Monday morning,’ said Ricardo.

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said, and made for the door.

  ‘Oh, just one more thing.’

  I turned. Ricardo glanced at my suit. Polish. One hundred per cent polyester. I tried not to wear it unless I absolutely had to.

  ‘How many suits do you have?’

  ‘Er. One.’

  Ricardo pulled out a cheque book, and wrote in it with a slim fountain pen. He tore off the cheque, folded it and gave it to me. ‘Use this to buy some clothes. Pay me back whenever you can.’

  I put the cheque in my pocket, and Ricardo showed me out of the little meeting room to the lifts. I caught Jamie’s eye as I left, and he gave me a broad grin.

  As the lift sped the forty floors down to earth, I opened the cheque and studied it. It was large with an intricate pattern in green, and it was drawn on Ricardo’s personal account at a bank I had never heard of. The words were elegantly penned in black ink. Pay Nicholas Elliot five thousand pounds only.

  ‘Congratulations, Nick!’

  Kate looked up at me with her big hazel eyes, and took a gulp of champagne. She and Jamie had come round to my flat to celebrate.

  ‘Don’t congratulate me, congratulate your husband. You wouldn’t believe what lies he told Ricardo.’

  ‘Just doing what comes naturally.’ Jamie smiled his broad white smile. ‘No, I knew what I was doing. Ricardo’s looking for someone just like you. And I know you won’t let him down.’ He laughed. ‘You’d better not. Or it won’t be just you looking for a job.’

  ‘Well, thanks anyway, Jamie.’

  ‘It’ll be good to work together. Just like those Hemmings tutorials, do you remember?’

  ‘I hope for Dekker’s sake you know more about the markets than you knew about Plato.’

  ‘It’s just the same. Shadows on the wall of a cave. You’ll soon discover that.’

  Jamie and I had been good friends ever since we had found ourselves tutorial partners in our first term at Oxford. We were different. Jamie approached university more energetically than me, throwing himself into a series of different indulgences: playing rugby, drinking, smart parties, scruffy parties, affected ennui. The one thing he did consistently was chase women. This he was good at, with his twinkling blue eyes, and his broad infectious grin, which he used to reward anyone who paid him attention. I followed him at an amused distance through most of these activities. I was less successful with women than he, being tall, dark-haired, unremarkable and a little shy. But we had fun together. And after university the friendship had broadened and deepened.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re going to become a banker!’ exclaimed Kate. ‘Especially after all the grief you’ve given Jamie.’

  ‘I know. Shocking, isn’t it?’

  ‘So when are you getting the BMW? And you’ll need a mobile phone. And some braces.’

  ‘Hold on, Kate, one step at a time,’ said Jamie. ‘Do you have any pinstripe underwear, Nick?’

  ‘Does Ricardo wear pinstripe underwear?’ Kate asked him.

  ‘How the hell would I know?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, it’s just all you people at Dekker are so close …’

  ‘I shall wear my M & S Y-fronts with pride,’ I said.

  We drank our champagne. I was in good spirits, excited. I was feeling more and more sure I had made the right decision.

  ‘So, what did you think of the Marketmaker?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘The Marketmaker? Who’s that? Ricardo?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s his nickname. It comes from when he was about the only person in the world who made markets in Latin American debt. Now everyone trades the stuff, but he gets the credit for developing the market into what it is today.’

  ‘Well, I was impressed. But I suppose I expected that. What surprised me was how approachable he is. I mean, it would be wrong to say he was just an ordinary guy, because he clearly isn’t, but he seemed to treat me like a real person.’

  ‘That’s not so strange,’ said Kate.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose you think that someone that powerful would treat someone like me like dirt. He’s used to dealing with presidents of countries, not unemployed academics.’

  ‘That’s part of his secret,’ said Jamie. ‘He makes you feel special whoever you are. Whether you’re the finance minister of Mexico or the coffee boy.’

  ‘Well, at least you can keep the flat now,’ said Kate, glancing round the small living room. It was pleasant enough, and looked out through some french windows on to a little garden. But it was tiny. My whole flat was tiny. There was scarcely enough room for all my books, let alone human beings as well. I didn’t know how Joanna and I had managed to spend so much on such little space. Sure, the location was good, just a few minutes’ walk from Primrose Hill in North London, but even so. Six years later the market had still not climbed back to the level it had been when we’d bought the property. Sometimes I doubted whether it ever would.

  ‘Yes, I’m glad,’ I said. ‘I’ve grown quite attached to the place. I would have hated to lose it to the building society.’ I was looking forward to writing to Mr Norris to inform him of my change of fortune.

  ‘Joanna might not have had much of a financial brain, but she had good taste,’ said Jamie.

  ‘She was awful!’ said Kate. ‘She was never good enough for you, Nick. And the way she left you with this place!’

  I smiled at Kate. The subject of Joanna never failed to get her going. And I probably had been taken advantage of. Our relationship had survived my two years in Russia, and when I’d returned we’d decided to buy a house together. It would be a good investment. Joanna, with her two years’ experience in a merchant bank, was the financial brains behind the purchase, and she had found the flat. When, three years later, we’d split up and she had gone off to New York with an American investment banker, she had let me have her half and all the furniture in return for giving me the mortgage obligation as well. It had seemed like a good deal at the time, especially since she had put up all of the original equity, but my salary had never proved up to the task.

  Or at least not until now.

  Kate shivered. ‘It’s freezing in here. Can’t you put the heating on?’

  ‘Er, no,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. The old woman upstairs keeps her flat at eighty degrees. Some of that seeps down.’

  ‘Heat rises,’ said Jamie drily.

  Kate paused a moment, looking embarrassed. I found there were often moments like this with my more affluent friends. Paying bills, to them, was an administrative inconvenience rather than a financial problem that never quite got solved, only postponed. Then she brightened. ‘Oh, come on. You can afford it now. You can make this a tropical paradise all summer, if you want.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I said. The real problem was that the boiler had broken in February. I could still get hot water, but no heating. It would cost eight hundred pounds to fix it. It had been a cold winter, and was still a chilly spring. But Kate was right, I could get a new boiler now. And sort out the damp patch in the kitchen. And maybe buy some new shoes.

  I was fed up with my life of near-poverty. Being a poor undergraduate was fine. Being a poor postgraduate was OK. But I was approaching thirty and I still couldn’t afford to go on a decent holiday, buy a car, or even fix the bloody boiler. Hell, one of my students who had scraped a poor second last year, had landed himself a job for eighteen thousand a year as a consultant, five thousand more than I earned. And he was only twenty-two!

  Jamie was obviously following my thoughts. ‘Life’s going to change, you know,’ he said.

&nbs
p; ‘That was the general idea.’

  ‘It’s hard work at Dekker. I wouldn’t say that Ricardo wants you twenty-four hours a day. He just settles for that part of the day when you’re awake.’

  ‘Huh!’ Kate snorted.

  I glanced at her, just long enough to acknowledge what she had said. At least I was single. There would be no one to miss me. ‘I can work hard, you know that.’

  ‘Mmm. But we’ll see what you’re like at seven in the morning.’

  I laughed. ‘I’ve often wondered what the world looks like that early. Now I suppose I’ll find out.’

  ‘And you’ll have to give up rugby,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Do you think so? Surely I’ll be able to manage something. I might miss a few training sessions, but the team needs me.’ I was the star number eight of the School of Russian Studies rugby team. They’d be in big trouble without me.

  ‘No way,’ said Jamie. ‘I used to play a bit when I was at Gurney Kroheim, but when I went to Dekker I had to give it all up. It’s the travelling that kills it. You have to leave at weekends with next to no notice. No team will put up with that for long.’

  I caught Kate’s eye. It wasn’t just rugby teams that suffered. ‘That’s a pity,’ I said. ‘I’ll miss it.’

  ‘I do,’ said Jamie. ‘I still manage to keep fit, but it’s not the same. I suppose I just have to get rid of my aggression in other ways.’

  Jamie had been a very good player, better than me. He had played behind me in the Magdalen College team as scrum half. He was short and stocky with broad shoulders, and strong legs, and he would shrug off tackles from men twice his size. He was a fearless tackler, too. I’ll never forget the time I saw him up-end the All Blacks’ number eight as he came charging round the side of the scrum. He had played some games for the university team, and if he hadn’t been so distracted by the other temptations of university life, he could have earned his blue. Now, as he said, all that aggression was harnessed in the service of Dekker Ward.

  He drained his glass, and picked up the champagne bottle. ‘Empty. Shall I nip out and get another? There’s an off-licence just round the corner, isn’t there? The table’s booked for eight thirty, so we’ve got another half-hour.’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I said.

  ‘No. It’s on me. I’ll be back in a minute.’ With that he put on his coat and let himself out.

  Kate and I sat in silence for a moment. She smiled at me. She’s definitely getting more attractive as she gets older, I thought. She had always been pretty, rather than beautiful, with short brown hair, a bright smile, and those big eyes. But as she had grown from a girl into a woman and a mother, she had changed. There was a softness and roundness to her and, since her son had been born, an inner serenity that I could not help but find appealing.

  I had liked Kate from when I had first met her, jammed half-way up a staircase at a crowded party in the Cowley Road. We had bumped into each other occasionally after that, and I had introduced her to Jamie in our last term at Oxford. He had moved swiftly and decisively, and unusually for him the relationship had stuck. Three years later they had married, and a year after that Kate had had a son, my godchild. She had given up her job in a big City firm of solicitors to look after him.

  ‘How’s Oliver?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he’s great. He keeps on asking when you’re going to come and play Captain Avenger again with him.’

  I smiled. ‘I was rather hoping the Captain would be out of fashion by now.’

  ‘Not yet, I’m afraid.’

  Kate took another sip of her champagne.

  ‘Are you sure you’re doing the right thing, Nick?’ she asked quietly.

  There was genuine concern in her voice. It alarmed me. Kate had common sense, lots of it. And she knew me well.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, with more confidence than I felt. ‘After all, Jamie’s having a great time at Dekker, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said flatly. ‘He is.’

  2

  The air bit fresh and cold into my face as I coasted down the streets of Islington. It was so much better pedalling through London at six thirty in the morning than at midday, although I was surprised at the number of cars on the streets even this early.

  The sun hung low to the east, a pale fuzzy orb behind the remnants of the early-morning mist. Young trees thrust bravely up out of the cracked pavements, brandishing their budding branches at the tall lines of buildings frowning down upon them. Daffodils added splashes of colour to the scraps of green which occasionally fought their way into the urban landscape. Sometimes, during a rare lull in traffic noise, I could even hear a bird shrilly proclaiming his ownership of a scruffy bush or tree.

  I tried not to go too fast, although it was difficult when faced with the unaccustomed sight of a hundred yards of clear road. My bike, although it looked as if it had fallen one too many times off the back of a lorry, could reach a healthy speed. I had bought it at a police auction a couple of years before, and had selected it for its combination of appearance and performance: it would be the last bicycle in any rack to be stolen. But this morning I wanted to take it easy, to avoid getting up too much of a sweat.

  I was wearing one of the three new suits I had bought with Ricardo’s money. I had found it impossible to conceive of spending more than three hundred pounds on each one, and even that had been difficult. Two pairs of smart black shoes had cost sixty quid each, but I still had most of the five thousand pounds left, and I looked smarter than I had ever looked before in my life. I had even had my hair cut.

  I swung through the City, and on to Commercial Road. To the right and above me, I caught glimpses of the tall white tower of Canary Wharf. It rose up above the textile outlets and curry-houses of Limehouse, a solid white block reaching into the mist. A single light seemed to be suspended several feet above it, blinking through the haze from the invisible roof. I would be up there soon, looking down on the rest of London. I wondered if I would be able to see the School of Russian Studies.

  I winced as I remembered my final meeting with Russell Church, the head of my department. He had been furious when I’d told him my plans to stop teaching. But until I had finished my Ph.D., still at least six months away, he couldn’t promise me a permanent job, and even then it would be difficult. I worried that I’d let him down, but I’d had no choice. Things had to change.

  I felt better now, cycling down Westferry Road, the debris of the East End behind me. On either side was water, the Thames on one side in full flood, and the West India Dock on the other. In front was the gleaming Canary Wharf complex, with its giant tower protected by a thick wall of smaller, but still substantial, office buildings. Suddenly everything was in pristine condition, from the close-cut lawns and flower-beds of Westferry Circus to the newly painted blue cranes, which stood like heavy artillery pieces guarding the approaches to the wharf. To the left a driverless train whispered along the raised rail of the Docklands Light Railway into a station elevated fifty feet above the water.

  I rode past the security check, and down into the underground car park, a corner of which was leased by Dekker Ward. I asked the attendant where I could put my bike, and he pointed to a cluster of motorcycles: a Harley-Davidson and three BMWs. The car park was weird. It was shared with a big investment bank, and it was already half full of investment bankers’ cars. They were nearly all German – Mercedes, Porsche and BMW. When pushed together like this, they displayed a stunning lack of imagination, alleviated only by a black, low-slung Corvette, and a bright red Ferrari Testarossa. I left my bike unlocked; somehow I thought it would be safe from theft, a shard of broken glass among these opulent jewels.

  I climbed the stairs into the square at the foot of the tower. It, too, was pristine: lines of small trees fresh out of the nursery, a fountain playing tidily in the centre, neat low walls, benches of expensive wood. The tower stretched eight hundred feet up into the air in front of me, its roof still obscured by the mist and by steam billowing out of pipes n
ear the top. Even at this hour there were quite a few people about. They trickled out of the railway-station entrance, out of underground car parks, and out of a procession of taxis, and headed to the squat bulky buildings at the corners of the square or, like me, into the central complex of Canary Wharf itself.

  Nervously, I made my way through the ultra-modern atrium with its 1980s shops – Blazer, the City Organiser, Birleys, a sushi bar – and into the brown marble lobby of One Canada Square. I entered a lift alone and shot upwards forty storeys until I reached Dekker’s floor.

  I waited in the reception area for Jamie, perching on the edge of a deep black leather sofa, under the occasional stare of a well-groomed blonde receptionist. He was out in a minute, striding over, hand outstretched, grinning broadly. White rabbits cavorted on his tie. ‘You made it. I didn’t think you would. Did you pedal all the way?’

  ‘I certainly did.’

  He looked me up and down. ‘Nice suit. I hope you’ve got rid of the old one. Mind you, you’d have to be careful how you dispose of it. Toxic waste and so on.’

  ‘I’m keeping it. Sentimental value. Besides, it’s probably the only genuine emerging-market suit here.’

  Jamie laughed. His clothes weren’t showy, but I knew he spent large amounts on them in Jermyn Street and its immediate neighbourhood. I couldn’t tell this by looking at them, but Jamie had assured me that the kind of people he dealt with could. According to him, it was a necessary expenditure.

  ‘Well, if you do insist on cycling in, I’ll show you the health club later on. You’ll be able to take a shower there.’

  ‘No, I’ll be OK.’

  ‘Nick. Trust me. You’re a hotshot banker now. Take a shower. Now, come through. Let me show you your desk.’

  He led me through some double doors. After the dimly lit quiet of the reception area, the trading room hit me in a burst of sound, light and movement.

  ‘I’m afraid your desk is on the outside,’ said Jamie, as my eyes tried to make sense of the activity in front of me.