The Predator

by Michael Ridpath

  'I'm going to Hartford to see Rudy bloody Moss a week on Monday.'

  'Why don't you come to dinner? I should be in New York that week, although the way things are going I can't guarantee it. You haven't met Cassie yet, have you?'

  'No. I'd like to do that. Thank you.'

  'Great. See you then.'

  Eric slipped away, and approached a group of three Italian-looking businessmen in the lobby. Another big deal.

  7

  'Bloomfield Weiss.'

  'Ian? It's Chris.'

  'Oh.'

  'Where are you making Eureka Telecom?'

  'Do you want to deal?'

  'No. Just a level.'

  'One tick.'

  Chris waited. He was expecting bad news, and he got it.

  'Eighty-eight to ninety.' Ian's voice was tense. Ready for an argument.

  Chris didn't give him one. 'Ian, we need to talk.'

  Ian sighed. 'After Friday, I don't think that's necessary, do you?'

  'It's about Lenka.'

  'We talked about Lenka.'

  'I went to her flat on Friday night. I saw her e-mails. Including one to you. And one to Marcus.'

  'To Marcus! What did it say?'

  'I don't think we should talk about that on the phone, do you? I'll see you in half an hour at Ponti's.'

  'But Chris, I've got to talk to my clients!'

  'No, Ian. You've got to talk to me.'

  This time it took Chris the full half hour to get there. The café was quiet at nine thirty on a Monday morning. Those who were going to work were already there, and it was too early for the loiterers to emerge. Ian was sitting at a table over a cappuccino and a cigarette, flirting with a striking six-foot tall waitress. His smile disappeared when he saw Chris. The waitress gave Chris a black look for interrupting them, and drifted off. Chris ignored her and sat down opposite Ian.

  'So, tell me about Marcus.'

  Ian took a long drag on his cigarette and carefully flicked the ash into an ashtray before replying. 'As you probably know, he's Alex's brother. He came to see Lenka about Alex's death.'

  'And what did she tell him?'

  'I don't know. You saw her e-mail to him. What did it say?' Ian couldn't hide his anxiety as he asked the question.

  'What do you think it said?'

  'I don't know! That's why I'm asking you!' Ian's impatience was growing.

  Chris paused for a moment, enjoying Ian's discomfort. 'It said that she had something important she wanted to tell him about Alex's death.'

  'But she didn't say what it was?'

  'No. She said she wanted to see Marcus in person to explain it.' As Chris said this, Ian relaxed. But only for a moment. 'There's a reply from Marcus. It says he'll phone her.'

  'And you don't know whether he did?'

  'No.'

  Ian's tension had returned.

  'There was also an e-mail from her to you saying she had to tell him about something. You begged her not to.'

  'That's right.'

  'What was it?'

  Ian thought for a moment. 'What really happened, of course. That Duncan hit Alex and he fell in the sea. That Duncan was responsible for his death.'

  'And why should this bother you? You don't care much about Duncan, do you?'

  'It's not that. We'd all get in trouble, wouldn't we? It was stupid of Lenka to even think of talking about it.'

  'Do you think that's why she was murdered?'

  Ian looked at him with derision. 'Of course not. Are you suggesting I killed her? I was sleeping with her, for God's sake!'

  'Ollie says that Lenka wouldn't take your calls for a couple of days before she died.'

  'That's true. I was angry about Marcus. She was angry with me. But there's nothing odd about that. You know Lenka. She could lose her temper pretty easily.'

  'Her funeral is on Wednesday. Are you coming?'

  Ian closed his eyes, and shook his head.

  'Why not?'

  'I can't get away,' Ian said wearily.

  Chris stood up with contempt in his voice. 'You weren't really much of a friend to her, were you?'

  Ian pursed his lips, anger flaring in his eyes. 'Fuck off, Chris,' he said.

  Chris was still angry when he got back to the office. There was something about Ian that made him lose his temper every time. He knew it was stupid: his only chance of getting out of that bloody Eureka Telecom position was to persuade Bloomfield Weiss to buy the bonds. Well, if he hadn't blown that on Friday, he definitely had now.

  But what was it that was getting to him?

  Obviously, the discovery of Ian's relationship with Lenka had rattled him more than he had realized. Could he be jealous, as Megan had hinted? Did he regret that Ian had succeeded where he hadn't dared to try?

  He tried to think about that objectively. He was pretty sure the answer was no. He was very fond of Lenka, but he had never thought of her sexually. Right from the beginning, when he was still going out with Tamara, he had placed her off limits and kept her there ever since. That was the secret of their friendship. Lenka liked men. All her other relationships with males had deteriorated into sex and then breakup. But not with Chris. They felt safe with each other, they trusted each other, they were very good friends.

  In which case, what was it about Ian that upset him so much? He had always assumed Lenka had torrid relationships with men, and although he had never known the details, he had accepted it as part of who she was: if anything, it made her more colourful. But to see Ian treating her as just another casual relationship, a hot babe to bonk for a few weeks, made him crazy. Why didn't Ian recognize that she was so much more than that? He wasn't even going to her funeral, for God's sake! And the way he had used their relationship so cynically to sell her the Eureka Telecom bonds disgusted Chris. He didn't believe for one moment that there was anything in the Radaphone rumour. It was just a product of Ian's imagination, aimed at dumping twenty-five million euros of a difficult position. That should be good for a few grand on his bonus at the end of the year.

  Could Ian have killed her to prevent her from telling Marcus about Duncan?

  Chris had to admit that the answer was probably not. It wouldn't make sense. Certainly, the police would cause trouble if they asked questions. But Eric was right; as long as all the witnesses on the boat stuck together, they would all be safe. The police couldn't prove anything. With a shiver, Chris realized that Ian could even try to cut a deal if he agreed to tell the police what really happened in return for immunity from prosecution. That would be bloody typical. Either way, Ian would survive.

  No. As much as he liked to think the contrary, Ian was probably not responsible for Lenka's death.

  Chris wished he could talk to Megan about all this. She would be able to add some objectivity. He wondered how she was getting on at Cambridge. Would she even have a telephone? He desperately wanted to call her.

  What about Duncan? Megan had suggested that he should find out a bit more about Duncan and Lenka's recent relationship. But before confronting him, there was someone else he wanted to talk to first.

  He looked up the number for United Arab International Bank, dialled it, and asked to speak to Phillippa Gemmel.

  'Securities Trading,' came the voice, bright and breezy.

  'Pippa? It's Chris Szczypiorski.'

  'Chris. How are you?' She wasn't rude, but she didn't sound exactly pleased to hear from him.

  'Look, Pippa, do you think we could meet for a few minutes after work? It won't take long. There's something I want to discuss with you.'

  'If Duncan wants to talk to me, he can speak to me himself,' Pippa said.

  'It's true, I do want to talk to you about Duncan. But he doesn't know I'm calling you. Please. It won't take long.'

  Pippa was silent for a moment. 'OK. But I'm leaving at five thirty. Can you meet me downstairs in the lobby?'

  'Fine. I'll see you there at half past five.'

  He hung up. Next, he pulled out the card of the Engl
ish-speaking Czech policeman who had interviewed him after the murder. Poručík Petr Karásek. Presumably, poručík was his rank. He dialled, and eventually got through to him. Chris asked whether he had made any progress.

  'We have had some success,' the policeman replied. His English was careful and clear. 'We found a woman who said she saw a man with a moustache running out of the street where Miss Němečková was killed. We showed her photographs and she identified a criminal we know here who uses a knife. He is Czech, but he works for the Ukrainian mafia. We arrested him. But there are problems. She was not sure of the identificationwhen we put him in a line, and he has a – what do you say? Ah, yes. Alibi, I think?'

  'Yes, alibi,' said Chris.

  'It may be false. We are still working on that line of inquiry.'

  'So you think the murderer is a local criminal?' Chris asked.

  'From the way he used the knife, we think he was a professional. Unfortunately, we do have some professional killers in Prague. It is likely it is one of them. Do you have any idea of a motive?'

  Chris knew that Karásek was thinking about Carpathian's investments. 'No,' he answered.

  'You are sure Miss Němečková had no business deals in the Czech Republic?'

  'We own two million euros of a CEZ bond and a lot of bonds issued by your government.' CEZ was the national electricity company, hardly likely to be the centre of an organized crime conspiracy. 'Besides that, we were planning to open an office in Prague, but I can't see why that would upset anyone. Have you spoken to Jan Pavlík?'

  'Yes, we have, but with no luck.' There was a pause. 'Have you any other ideas for us, Mr Szczypiorski?'

  Marcus and Alex was a can of worms that Chris didn't want to open at that moment.

  'No. Nothing'

  Karásek didn't sound surprised. 'OK. Thank you for keeping in contact. Goodbye.'

  Chris put down the phone. Nowhere. They were getting nowhere. Chris wasn't convinced by the identification. The more he thought about it, the more he suspected that the key to Lenka's murder lay in London, or possibly New York, rather than the Ukrainian mafia in Prague.

  He stared down at the papers in front of him. There was his portfolio, mocking him. If Amalgamated Veterans did want to withdraw their money, what would he liquidate?

  It would be next to impossible to sell the Eureka Telecom position to Bloomfield Weiss now that he had pissed off Ian so comprehensively. He checked the prices with other brokers. They were all floating around the Bloomfield Weiss level, apart from Leipziger Gurney Kroheim who were making the bonds ninety-one to ninety-two. But he knew he'd never be able to offload the whole ten million with them. The truth was Bloomfield Weiss were the market in these bonds, and Bloomfield Weiss didn't want to buy them.

  So what else could he sell?

  There were four other relatively small positions in junk bonds that Lenka had bought, plus a couple of better quality issuers like CEZ. All of them were good companies with good prospects. He considered his own large government bond position. This had moved against him following the wobble from Russia, but he was sure it would come back. Now was the wrong time to sell. It would be against all his principles to get rid of his good positions and be left with his bad one.

  Then there was the problem of valuation. The fund was revalued once a month, and the February reval was the following day. Technically, he might be able to get away with a price of eighty-eight for the twenty-five million euro position. But he knew that the real price, the price at which he could actually sell the bonds, was more like seventy. That was a seven and a half million loss. Chris winced. The investors would not like that one bit.

  But he would have to use that price. He knew what could happen if you didn't disclose your losses immediately, and he didn't want to find himself in a similar position again. Besides, allowing Rudy to sell out of the fund at a higher price would be unfair on the other investors who remained in. If Rudy was determined to sell, he would just have to take his loss and lump it. And Chris would have to pray that the fund survived the consequences.

  Chris leaned back in his chair and exhaled. This was getting all too familiar. A big position spinning out of control, taking everything else down with it. He could tell himself that it wasn't his fault of course, just like it hadn't been his fault last time. But he should face reality. He couldn't handle this kind of thing. Somehow, it always went wrong, and he could never figure out why.

  Perhaps trading really was like chess. People assumed that the secret to chess was the ability to plan precisely several moves ahead, just as they assumed that good traders were those who could calculate precisely what was going to happen next in the markets. But both chess and trading were much more imprecise than that. Good chess players developed a feel for a position. They would plan many moves ahead to achieve a position that they felt was strong: an unassailable knight, a bishop attacking the opponent's centre, a crushing pawn attack on the queen's side. For them, chess was as much an art as a science.

  Chris had been good at chess. His father had taught him young, and taught him well. He had never pushed him to work hard at it, but had shown a quiet satisfaction whenever Chris played well. Chris played for his school, he played for his club, he beat players several years older than himself. After his father died, he tried even harder, with some success. At eleven, he could beat the average adult club player. He won a junior county chess championship. People expected great things of him; everywhere he was compared to his father.

  And then, when he reached thirteen or fourteen, things changed. As he played in higher circles, his opponents improved. He lost matches. Once he even lost to a precocious twelve-year-old. He became even more competitive, he spent hours reading chess books, perfecting his openings, trying to understand the deeper subtleties of strategy, but none of this seemed to help. He lost to better players, and he didn't understand why. He came to realize that they had a better feel for a position than he did, that he could be pottering along quite happily through the game, while his opponent was consolidating a winning position that Chris hadn't even recognized. If his father had still been around, he might have explained what was going on. But his father wasn't around. It came to him that he was never going to be as good a player as his father. There would always be thousands of chess players better than him. The memory of his father's quiet smile of satisfaction as he made a good move, a memory that had sustained him through so many games in the years since his father's death, began to fade. It was no longer fun to play chess. He gave up.

  He had done similarly well as a trader. For a few years, while he was trading so successfully at Bloomfield Weiss, he had thought he'd sussed it. He developed a feel for a good position and a bad one. He knew when to buy more of a good position, to have the courage to be a pig, as George Soros would say, and when to cut a bad one. The profits rolled in, until that disastrous summer when, thanks to Herbie Exler, he had dropped six hundred million. Eventually, with Lenka's help, he had managed to tell himself that that really wasn't his fault, that it wouldn't happen again.

  And now it was happening again. Sure, he wasn't going to lose six hundred million dollars, but he could lose Carpathian's reputation, and with it its investors. And that mattered.

  Once again, none of this seemed to be his fault. But perhaps there was something he just couldn't see, something about how to deal with the people he worked with, that meant that he found himself in these disastrous positions. Lenka could have helped him. But Lenka, like his father, wasn't there.

  As he sat at his desk, he felt the icy fingers of panic slowly grip at his chest. He was afraid. Not just afraid of losing money on the Eureka Telecom position, or even of losing Carpathian, but afraid of losing the shreds of his self-esteem that he had fought so hard to regain. The market was battering him, and he was hurting.

  The phone rang. He picked it up.

  'Carpathian.'

  'Chris? It's Megan.'

  'Oh, hi. How are you?'

  'I'm fine. Wha
t about you? You sound sort of tense. Or do you traders always answer the phone like that?'

  'I suppose we do,' said Chris, although he was impressed and pleased that Megan had managed to pick up his mood. 'But it's true, I'm not having the world's greatest day.'

  'Are the markets going against you?' she asked.

  'You could say that,' said Chris. 'Never mind. How's Cambridge?'

  'Great. They've given me some really nice rooms in college in a building that must be three hundred years old. And I've met my supervisor and found the library. I'm really quite excited by it all.'

  'That's good.'

  'I was calling because I've booked a flight to Prague with Czech Airlines from Stansted Airport for Wednesday morning, coming back that night. I thought we could go together.'

  'That's a good idea. Give me the details. By the way, I think Duncan will be coming with us.'

  'OK,' said Megan, unenthusiastically.

  'Look at it this way, it'll give me a chance to find out what he was doing hanging around Lenka's place.'

  'I'd have thought that was pretty obvious,' Megan said disapprovingly. But she gave Chris the flight information.

  'By the way, I've worked out who Marcus is,' Chris said.

  'And?'

  'Alex's brother.'

  'Of course!'

  'I checked with Eric, who confirmed it. Apparently, Marcus tried to speak to him too, but Eric avoided him. And Eric told me to say "hi" to you, whatever that means.'

  'OK,' said Megan. 'How is he?'

  'Doing formidably well. He must be earning millions in bonuses.'

  'That doesn't surprise me,' said Megan. 'Well, I'd better go now.'

  'OK. Oh, Megan?'

  'Yes.'

  'Thanks for ringing. It has been a bad day, and it was very nice to hear from you.'

  'Good,' said Megan, and she was gone.

  Chris waited for ten minutes in the cool glass-clad atrium of United Arab International's office in Bishopsgate, watching suited bankers come and go. At last, Pippa emerged from the bank of lifts. She was a small woman with curly blonde hair and a bright smile. Quite pretty.

  Chris kissed her on the cheek. 'Let's go to Williams. It's close.'