Within thirty seconds, Baenhaker’s heart was beating rhythmically once more.
By five o’clock that afternoon, the only gold that Alex Rocq’s clients possessed was what they had stashed away under their beds and in their teeth. They no longer had any on paper at Globalex. Some, particularly Joel Simes of Country and Provincial, disagreed strongly with Rocq’s advice to sell, and the Baron was among the most vociferous. ‘You just want to unload, and go off home early to start humping again,’ he yelled down the phone.
‘Relax, Harry; I’ve had a word with our soft commodities department: we’re putting you deep into latex.’
By 5.15 the price of gold had not moved for an hour and ten minutes. At 5.25, it dropped one dollar. It fell another two dollars at 5.35. Rocq stayed glued to his Reuter-System screen. The London market had closed, but, if he wanted to, he could have watched prices move all night. New York, five hours behind London, was in full swing. When New York closed, Chicago, which was an hour behind New York, would still be open; when that closed, it would be morning in Hong Kong, and that would be opening. When that closed, it would be morning in England, and London would be opening.
Rocq did not stay through the night, but left the office at 7.30 that evening; by the time he got up from his desk, the price of gold had dropped twelve dollars.
It was raining as he eased the Porsche out of the meter bay, and down Mincing Lane, and he drove slowly, thinking hard. Elleck had not given him advice, he had given him instructions, and he had been pretty damned sure of himself. Elleck was Jewish; he gave a lot of money to Israel. Maybe someone was paying him back a small favour; it was possible. But he was puzzled. If Elleck had inside information, he would have known the raid was going to happen, so he would have known when to buy — but how could he have known when to sell? What kind of information could Elleck have obtained that made him know when to sell? Something was making the price of gold drop, and drop hard. There was one thing that was always certain to make it drop, and that was massive selling: but it would have taken far more selling than he had been doing for his clients — even though he had sold a substantial amount, it could not on its own have had any significant effect on the market. There were a lot more sellers besides himself — there had to be — but how did Elleck know? Was it merely a hunch, the result of years of experience, of reading the signals, or was there a lot more to it than he knew? He had the certain feeling that whatever it was, it was not merely Sir Monty Elleck’s hunch.
Rocq switched on the stereo, and punched in the old Elton John tape. The music took him back to the seventies, and he began to feel nostalgic, and a little sad. He thought about his twenty-first birthday: a lot had happened in the decade since then. He’d married Pauline, buried his parents, almost gone bankrupt, divorced Pauline. Memories of his parents came flooding back to him, and he felt sad, as he always did when he thought about them. His father, Anton Rocquinitiskichieov who had struggled through his life with two massive handicaps — one being his name, the other his lack of money. His father was Polish and had come to England in 1938 to flee Hitler, and had met and married Rocq’s mother, an English nurse, in 1940. She was not a strong woman and it was over a decade, and many miscarriages, later that Alex Rocquinitiskichieov was born. When he was fifteen, his mother contracted a rare kidney disease. To remain alive, she needed to be kept on a kidney machine. The hospital in South London, where they lived, did not have enough money for a kidney machine; nor did her husband. Alex, although in the midst of preparing for exams, did a newspaper round before school in the morning, and then worked a night shift, six days a week, in a glucose factory after school finished in the evening. His father, a tailor, also worked around the clock. Three weeks before they had saved up the fifteen per cent deposit the hire purchase company wanted for the machine, his mother died.
Four years later, his father, then aged sixty-two, suffered a series of heart attacks. The doctors told Alex that his father’s heart arteries were damaged beyond repair; he needed a major operation in which healthy arteries would be grafted from his legs onto his heart arteries. If the operation succeeded, he would be able to return to a normal existence; without the operation he had only months, at the most, to live. Because of long waiting lists, the operation could not be performed on anyone over the age of sixty, on the National Health. If his father was to have the operation, he would have to have it privately. The estimated cost was £7,000.
Rocq and his father simply did not have that amount of money. His father had always rented his premises and the flat above, where they lived, and had never been able to amass any money. Although now working as a runner on the London Stock Exchange, Rocq again took an evening job, this time, in a bottling factory. He worked a night shift during the week, and a double shift during the weekends. Before he had even the first five hundred pounds saved up, his father had another heart attack, and within three days had died.
Rocq remembered as he had watched his father’s coffin slowly lowered into the ground; he remembered the sadness and the bitterness that he had felt. The only two people he had ever loved in the world, the only family he had ever had were dead because there had been no money to save them. He stood and he made a vow: never again, as long as he lived, would he allow himself to be in a position whereby he could not afford the money to save the life of someone he loved.
He knew he had made the right decision going into stockbroking, but he equally knew that if he was to get anywhere in that field, he was going to have to plan carefully the way he could get to climb each rung. The first thing that he did was drop fifteen letters from his name. Although he felt sad in some ways to be severing what he now felt was his only link with his past, at the same time, he felt as though he had suddenly been cut free from a pair of handcuffs. When, to his surprise, and pleasure, his workmates stopped referring to him as ‘the Polack’ and began referring to him as ‘Alex Rocq’ he knew that although he had by no means arrived, he was, at last, on his way.
Memories of the afternoon’s hectic activity came flooding back to him, interrupting his thoughts. He tried to ignore them, but they were persistent; his work was never far from his mind, as it never is with any metal broker. With violent fluctuations liable to happen at any moment of the twenty-four hour day, they can never completely switch off. Most of them quit broking and move into management before they reach forty; either that or into the intensive care unit of the nearest cardiac department. There was no such thing as an unscheduled morning off — everything needed to be planned and catered for. He’d gambled this morning, and lost; but, he decided, Amanda was an exceptional bird, and worth all the stick he’d received in the office. It had been a good weekend, a damned good weekend staying with his friends in Berkshire, and it was the first time since he had started going out with her that Amanda had actually gone a whole two days without mentioning that damned name, Baenhaker.
What the hell she had seen in him, he did not know. It certainly wasn’t in his pock-marked face — not that he had ever met Baenhaker, nor seen his photograph — he just imagined him as having a pock-marked face. ‘A nasty little piece of work,’ was how Rocq had summed him up.
‘You’re just saying that because you’re jealous of him,’ she said.