The Marketmaker

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘The outside?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry, I’ll explain. You see those desks there?’ He pointed to a group of about twenty dealing desks in the middle of the room arranged in a square, each facing outwards. I saw Ricardo standing by one of them, talking on the phone, and most of the others were manned. ‘That’s the inside. It’s where all the salesmen and traders sit. It’s a good set-up. We can all communicate with each other across the space in the centre. These desks here,’ he pointed to three lines of desks facing each edge of the square, ‘these are the outside. People sit here who don’t need to be in the thick of things, Capital Markets people, Research, Admin, you.’

  I looked suitably dismayed.

  ‘Don’t worry. You can sit with me this week. You’ll find out what’s going on soon enough.’

  Just then there was the sound of hands clapping twice. It was Ricardo. ‘OK, compañeros, gather round. It’s seven fifteen.’

  Ricardo leaned against the back of his chair, and faced into the square of desks. Everyone moved into the central space. I glanced at them. They were all looking at him expectantly, outwardly relaxed, but I could feel the tension as they prepared for the week’s action. As Ricardo had promised, they came in all shapes and sizes, although the majority had a well-groomed Latin look to them. Many of them were smoking. I recognized most of the people who had interviewed me, including Pedro who was sitting, perhaps symbolically, immediately to the right of Ricardo. Like a number of other men in the room, he was wearing a cardigan. Apart from me, they were all jacketless. I tried to take my own off with as little movement as possible.

  ‘Morning, everyone,’ Ricardo began. He stood up straight in his crisply ironed blue-striped shirt. I could just make out the initials RMR embroidered in red on his chest. ‘I trust you all had a good weekend. I’d like to start by welcoming a new member to our team. Nick Elliot.’

  Everyone turned towards me. Fortunately, I had just wriggled out of my jacket. I smiled nervously. ‘Hallo,’ I said.

  There were smiles back, and murmurs of ‘Good to have you on board.’ It was friendly. I appreciated it.

  ‘Nick speaks Russian and understands economics, and I know he’s going to be a valuable member of our group,’ Ricardo continued. ‘He’s never worked for a financial firm before, so he hasn’t had a chance to pick up any bad habits. I want you all to show him how Dekker do things. Now, what’s happening out there? Pedro?’

  Pedro Hattori spoke some gobbledygook about Bradys, euros, squeezes, Argy discos and Flirbs. I tried to follow, but floundered. Then an American called Harvey talked about the US Federal Reserve policy on interest rates. This was more familiar territory, but then I lost it again when he started on WIs and five years on special. Charlotte Baxter, head of Research, was next. She was a tall American woman with long mousy-brown hair in her late thirties. I had been impressed by her when I had first met her at my interview. She talked about the likelihood of discussions between the Venezuelan government and the International Monetary Fund breaking down again, and the implications this would have. Though I knew little about the subject, I could see it was good stuff. Jamie took careful notes.

  Then Ricardo went round each individual in the group. They were exchanging gossip, information, impressions, hunches. Everyone was clear and concise. And well informed. People didn’t seem to me to be making political points or grabbing glory, presumably because Ricardo discouraged it. But they all watched closely for his reaction, and his occasional words of encouragement were lapped up.

  He came to the last of the group. ‘Isabel? How’s the favela deal coming on?’

  Isabel was a slight, dark-haired woman of about thirty. She was half sitting on a desk, sipping a cup of coffee. ‘Jesus, I don’t know. My guy in the housing authority really wants to do it. And I think his boss wants to do it too. But his boss’s boss?’ Her voice was low and husky, and she spoke with a slow, relaxed drawl. Her English was good, with a slightly nasal accent, which I would recognize later as Brazilian.

  ‘Can you fix it?’

  ‘I’m a carioca. Rio’s my home town. Of course I can fix it.’ The corners of her mouth twitched. ‘I just don’t know if I can fix it this century, that’s all.’

  Ricardo smiled. ‘I’m sure you can, Isabel. But I’m happy to go down there with you if you need me. I could talk to Oswaldo Bocci. Get him to run a few favourable stories. Maybe a piece about how this is the best chance Rio has to begin to do something about the favelas. He owes us after that deal we did for him last year.’

  ‘The local press are positive already,’ said Isabel, flicking a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. ‘And I’d like to leave Oswaldo out of it unless we’re really desperate. I’m flying down there on Wednesday night. I hope I can sort things out then. If that doesn’t work, maybe you should call him.’

  ‘Well, good luck,’ said Ricardo. ‘Presumably, we can apply this model to other cities?’

  ‘Oh, yes. We should be able to use it everywhere. Certainly in Brazil. As soon as we’ve closed the Rio deal, I’m going to talk to São Paulo and Salvador. But this structure should work anywhere in Latin America where there are people living in shanty-towns, which is everywhere. We need World Development Fund support for each deal, but they seem to think it’s a good use of their funds.’

  ‘Would it work in Romford?’ It was Miguel, the tall Argentine aristocrat.

  ‘Oi, you leave Romford alone!’ protested a burly young man with a loud tie and very short hair. His name was Dave, I remembered.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right. It’s a lost cause.’

  ‘Thank you for that suggestion, Miguel,’ said Ricardo. ‘In fact you’d be a good choice to open our Essex rep office. But, seriously, this is a flagship deal. Once we’ve closed it, I want the rest of you on the road looking for more. Now, Carlos?’

  Carlos’s rumblings about a possible deal for the United Mexican States passed me by. My eyes were still on Isabel. She wasn’t exactly good-looking. Her nose was a bit too long, her mouth a bit too wide. Her clothes were nothing special, blue shortish skirt, cream blouse, black shoes, and her hair hung, untamed, around her face. But there was something about her that was very feminine, sexy. Maybe it was her voice, or the way she held herself. Or it could have been her eyes, large, deep brown, almost liquid, half hidden under long lashes. Just then they darted towards me, and caught my stare. The corners of her mouth twitched again, and I hastily switched my gaze to Carlos.

  ‘Did you understand all that?’ asked Jamie, when it was over.

  ‘Some of it. I have a lot of questions. There’s a lot to learn.’

  ‘Like how to stare at Isabel and stop your mouth from dropping open at the same time,’ said Jamie.

  ‘Was it that obvious?’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ve all done it. You get used to her after a while.’

  ‘There’s something about her. I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘She’s as sexy as hell, that’s what it is. But I wouldn’t make it too obvious. She bites.’

  ‘Really? She looks friendly enough to me.’

  ‘Well, don’t touch. Don’t even look. Trust me.’

  I shrugged, and sat at Jamie’s desk. I had never seen a fully equipped dealing desk before, and Dekker’s were state-of-the-art. Jamie explained it all to me. There were five screens, which provided news, prices and analysis in a range of different colours. Jamie seemed to have an unpleasant predilection for pink. To add to the clutter was a phone board with thirty lines, a fan, a Spanish–English dictionary, two volumes of the Bankers’ Almanac, and a small silver rugby ball commemorating an Argentine sevens tournament. The whole was framed in a collage of yellow Post-it stickers and topped with a haphazard scattering of paper.

  ‘OK, let me tell you the basics,’ said Jamie, after he had shown me how to get the rugby commentary up on the Bloomberg information service. ‘All the guys on this half of the square,’ he gestured with his arm, ‘are sales people. Our job is to talk to customers,
give them information, find out what they want to do, and then buy and sell bonds from them. These people,’ he pointed to the other half of the square of dealing desks, ‘are the traders. They make markets in hundreds of different bonds. So when one of our customers wants to buy or sell something, we ask one of the traders for a price. He gives us a bid and offer. We reflect that to the customer, who will either sell at the bid price or buy at the offer price. In theory, the bid/offer spread should be profit for us.’

  I nodded. So far, so clear.

  ‘The other way we make money is through new issues. See those people there?’ He pointed to some of the desks outside the square. I noticed that Isabel was at one of them reading through a sheaf of documents. Jamie followed my eyes and coughed. ‘Of course you do. They’re known as Capital Markets. Their job is to talk to potential borrowers and put together a bond issue that raises money for them at the lowest rate. Which, by the way, is usually pretty high. Investors aren’t going to take on the risk that one of these countries defaults again without demanding a decent return.’

  Jamie spent the next couple of hours explaining how Dekker functioned. I listened closely, turning over each new piece of information in my mind, seeing how it fitted in with what I had heard before, using it to try to anticipate what he had yet to tell me.

  I listened in to his calls through a second phone plugged into his desk, as he spoke to his customers. These turned out to be a wide range of different types of institution: a small French bank, a British merchant bank, a Dutch insurance company, an American hedge fund.

  He talked about Venezuela and the IMF negotiations. He exchanged rumours on a future Mexican deal. He talked about football and what was on television the night before. He bought and sold millions of dollars of bonds, always selling at a price slightly higher than he was buying. Many of these trades were recorded as ‘DT’ and then a number. Jamie explained that these were numbered accounts at the firm’s Dekker Trust affiliate in the Cayman Islands.

  Lunch was an exotic goat’s cheese and salad sandwich, and a Coke brought round by a kid in overalls carrying a big tray. There was no need to leave the desk. No time, either.

  Conversations moved with the time zones, picking up Brazil late morning, the rest of the continent and New York in the afternoon, California in the evening. In fact, the pace quickened as the day wore on: many of the other players in the market operated out of New York or Miami. Our day lengthened to incorporate theirs. Much of all this was in Spanish, and I couldn’t understand it. I would have to learn Spanish.

  At about six o’clock I went to see Charlotte and her team in Research, and returned to my desk with an armful of reports. The political and economic analysis was excellent. I was particularly impressed with the quick and dirty notes marked ‘For Internal Distribution Only’. These made heavy use of informal sources: local bankers, government officials, traders in New York. I read deeper and deeper, fascinated.

  Isabel’s desk was next to mine. She seemed to be constantly busy, reading through the piles of papers next to her, tapping out notes on her computer, or going over documents on the phone in what I assumed was Portuguese. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help my eyes drifting over towards her every now and then. Her face was partly obscured by strands of dark hair as she worked. Occasionally she would pause, bite her lower lip and stare ahead into space. She was delectable. Even when I wasn’t looking at her, I could just catch the scent of her perfume in the air, or hear her voice on the phone. Concentrate!

  Once, as my eyes flicked up towards her, I saw her looking back at me.

  ‘You’re enthusiastic,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘I’ve got a lot to learn.’

  ‘It gets easier once you start actually doing it. Where did you come from? Before here?’

  ‘Until last week, I taught Russian.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘Really. And what brings you to Dekker?’

  ‘I needed the job. And Jamie was good enough to introduce me. Why they took me on, I’m not quite sure.’

  ‘Are you a good friend of Jamie’s?’

  ‘Yes. Very good friends. I’ve known him for ten years.’

  There the conversation ended. She turned back to her phone and picked it up. I wasn’t sure whether I had said something wrong.

  And then my own phone rang.

  It was the two consecutive rings of an external call. That was funny. I didn’t think I had given anyone my number yet.

  I picked it up. ‘Dekker,’ I said, in my best imitation of the clipped tones I had heard around me all day.

  ‘Can I speak with Martin Beldecos?’ said a female American voice over an international line.

  I hadn’t heard of him. I looked around. Nearly everyone had gone home, with the exception of Ricardo, Pedro and Isabel. She was deeply involved in a telephone conversation of her own, and Ricardo and Pedro were too far away to ask.

  ‘Er, he’s not here at the moment,’ I said. ‘Can I give him a message tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, it’s Donald Winters’ assistant here, from United Bank of Canada in Nassau. I have a fax I need to send Mr Beldecos. Can you give me his fax number?’

  ‘Hold on a sec,’ I said. There was a fax machine a few steps away. I nipped over to it, checked the number, and gave it to the woman. She thanked me and hung up.

  I dug out the internal telephone list, and looked up BELDECOS, MARTIN 6417. That was my extension! No wonder the phone call has come through to me. He must have been the previous occupant of my desk.

  The fax machine behind me spluttered into life.

  I walked over to the machine, and took the single sheet back to my desk. It was addressed to Martin Beldecos at Dekker Ward on United Bank of Canada Nassau Branch fax paper. The message was short and simple.

  Following your inquiry, we have been unable to identify the beneficial owner of International Trading and Transport (Panama). We transferred funds from their account with us to Dekker Trust’s account at Chalmet et Cie’s Cayman Islands branch under the instructions of Mr Tony Hempel, a Miami-based lawyer who is the Company Secretary of International Trading and Transport.

  The fax was signed by Donald Winters, Vice President. ‘Isabel?’

  She had just put down the phone. ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’ve just got this fax for Martin Beldecos. Where does he sit?’

  Isabel didn’t answer me straight away. She tensed, and drew in her breath.

  ‘He used to sit right where you are,’ she replied eventually, in a monotone.

  ‘He left, did he?’ I could tell something was wrong with Martin Beldecos’s departure. ‘Was he fired?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. No, he wasn’t. He was killed.’

  I exhaled. ‘How?’

  ‘He was murdered. In Caracas. Thieves broke into his hotel room while he was asleep. He must have woken and surprised them. They knifed him.’

  ‘Jesus! When was this?’

  ‘About three weeks ago.’

  ‘Oh.’ I shivered. It was an eerie feeling to know that the last occupant of this desk, this chair, was now dead.

  I wanted to ask her more, but she seemed reluctant to talk, and I didn’t want to risk saying the wrong thing.

  ‘OK, um, so what shall I do with this?’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ she said.

  I handed her the sheet of paper. She glanced at it, paused, frowning for a few seconds, scribbled something on it, and put it in an out-tray on a nearby desk. Then she shuffled the papers in front of her, stuffed some of them into a briefcase, and put on her jacket.

  ‘Good night,’ she said.

  ‘Good night. See you tomorrow.’

  She left me alone, sitting in a dead man’s chair behind a dead man’s desk.

  3

  I was in the office by seven the next morning. I was glad of the bike ride. If I was going to be stuck inside all day, I would need the fresh air. Ricardo was there when I arrived. If he hadn’t been wearing a different shirt I would ha
ve sworn he had spent the night at his desk.

  I smiled at Isabel as she came in. She gave me a quick smile and a ‘Hi’.

  I dumped my jacket at my desk, grabbed a cup of coffee, and walked over to Jamie’s. He was chatting to Dave, the big trader from Romford.

  ‘Morning,’ said Dave. ‘So we didn’t wipe you out on your first day?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘What time did you leave last night?’ asked Jamie.

  ‘About eleven.’

  ‘A good first day’s work. Let me guess, Ricardo was still here when you left?’

  I nodded. There was a pause as we took in our early-morning dose of caffeine.

  ‘I heard about Martin Beldecos,’ I said. ‘Isabel told me last night.’

  ‘Bad news, that,’ said Dave. ‘Very bad news.’

  ‘Isabel said he was murdered.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jamie. ‘I heard the police in Caracas have caught the men who did it.’

  ‘That’s not all I heard,’ said Dave, lowering his voice.

  Jamie and I looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Yeah, there’s a rumour that it wasn’t just a hotel burglary gone wrong. Miguel was down there last week. The word is it was a contract killing. One of the drug gangs.’

  ‘A contract killing?’ said Jamie in astonishment. ‘On Martin Beldecos? Martin Beldecos, the compliance officer with the glasses and the receding hairline? What, was he trying to grab the paper-clip franchise for South America?’

  ‘That’s what Mig said!’ Dave protested defiantly. ‘You know he knows people down there – ’

  We were interrupted by the sharp clapping of hands. ‘It’s seven fifteen, compañeros!’ called Ricardo. The room was silent as we all clustered round him.

  The morning meeting made a bit more sense than it had the day before. The market was spooked on the Venezuelan news: prices were off five points. But people down there in the know held the view that the breakdown of talks with the IMF was just posturing by their aged president. This information we decided to keep to ourselves until we had taken advantage of the lower prices to quietly pick up a few Venezuelan bonds for our own books. Then we would tell the world.