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Most of the twenty people in Rocq’s office were, like Rocq, account executives; their job was to act for the clients of Globalex, buying and selling for them according to their clients’ instructions and, equally, advising and keeping their clients up to date on all conditions which might affect the commodities that interested them. Six of the brokers were girls, two of them Japanese. At the head of the oval console was a fiery red-headed girl order clerk who was firing questions out across the console in a broad cockney accent and firing answers back down the telephone receiver that she brandished about as if it were a dagger.

There was a hub of activity, the likes of which Rocq couldn’t remember seeing for a very long time. After-lunch lethargy, combined with the generally quiet state of trade at the present time, normally made early afternoons the dullest of times, but today was different. Every desk except his own was attended, and all the brokers were talking earnestly into both their telephones at once, taking new calls and writing down instructions and orders furiously.

Lester Barrow, a short fat man in his late forties — an old age for this high-pressure job — immensely cheerful in spite of two near-fatal heart attacks in the last three years, turned to Rocq as he entered. ‘Here comes Early Bird.’

Rocq grinned a short, rather pained grin.

‘Been carving yourself some fat worms?’ Barrow’s chirpy voice cut through the general hum of action.

‘I’ve been to the dentist all morning,’ lied Rocq. It was an old trick he had learned many years before: if you have to make up an excuse, make up one that evokes sympathy. Not, he knew, that it would cut much ice in here. He was well aware that none of the people in here knew the meaning of the word ‘sympathy’; they didn’t know the meaning of any word that wasn’t in the Dow Jones Index. The pressure of the work gave them little time to know anything else. In spite of the activity there was a feeling in the office of a lull before a storm. It happened frequently at this time in the afternoon, with many of the large exchanges in the world closed, and everyone waiting for the New York markets to open.

Communications play a vital part in an international broker’s job. The London offices of Globalex were the central hub in a highly sophisticated network of telephones, telex and computer links, that cost Globalex over £100,000 a month in electricity and call charges alone. There were direct links to the offices in Zurich, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Chicago and New York, as well as direct telephone lines to every major client throughout the world. Modern communications had reduced the entire world to one large trading floor and, with changes in technology occurring almost daily, international commodity broking was a fiendishly expensive game to stay in.

In order to keep overheads in line with the volume of trading, the account executives received a modest basic income of £10,000, with their opportunity to earn large sums coming from a direct percentage of the brokerage fees Globalex charged its clients for every order, whether it was buy or sell. It was not uncommon for a Globalex account executive to earn two to three times his basic salary in a good trading year.

All commodities are traded in minimum units called ‘lots’. A ‘lot’ of gold is one hundred ounces, for example. At $498 an ounce, one ‘lot’ of gold was worth $49,800. The brokerage Globalex charged on one lot of gold was $25.00 and the account executive’s share of that was $6.25. It needed a great many lots to pay the phone bills for the office and the American Express bills of the account executives, but at $833 a ton for copper, $7,856 a ton for tin, $404 a ton for lead, $526 a ton for zinc, $653 a ton for aluminium, $2,880 a ton for nickel, $197 an ounce for platinum, $4.23 an ounce for silver, and $498 an ounce for gold, it did not take many lots for a deal to get up into the one hundred thousands — or Long Ones, as Gary Slivitz, who sat next to Rocq, called them — the millions, or Big Ones as Slivitz called them, and even, on occasions, the Wide Ones, which were billions.

‘What did you say?’

Rocq wasn’t quite sure whether Barrow was talking to him or to whoever was at the end of the telephone receiver he was holding in his left hand. Reading Rocq’s mind, Barrow lifted the telephone away from his ear.

‘Been to the dentist.’

‘How much did you sell him?’

Rocq decided Barrow probably wasn’t joking: Barrow, like most here, lived, ate and breathed metals. Anything that existed beyond the revolving door of 88 Mincing Lane and outside of the portals of Plantation House, just across the road, which housed the London Metal Exchange and the Gold Futures Market, as far as Lester Barrow was concerned existed for the sole purpose of buying and selling metals through Globalex and, where possible, through the able personage of Lester Barrow himself. The New York light lit up on Barrow’s Dealer Board; he hit a button and grabbed the second receiver. Almost immediately, now holding telephones to both ears with one hand, he began to write with the other hand.

Rocq took his seat, between Gary Slivitz, who appeared to be playing his Dealer Board as if it were a space invaders machine, and the permanently miserable Henry Mozer, who was performing the deft art of writing with one end of a pencil whilst picking his ear with the other end. ‘What the heck’s going on, Henry?’ Rocq asked.

Mozer pulled the pencil out and turned to him: ‘Where the hell have you been — down a hole in the ground?’

‘I’ve been to the dentist.’ Rocq deliberately grimaced as he spoke.

Almost every light was flashing on Rocq’s Dealer Board.

‘What did you say?’

‘I’ve got a frozen mouth — can’t talk properly.’

‘What you been doing?’ shouted Slivitz. ‘Kissing polar bears?’

Rocq decided to abandon his excuse for not turning up to the office until two. He was unpopular enough as it was. The past two years had been lean years for most metal brokers, but he, completely by luck, had tumbled into half a dozen of the best accounts Globalex had ever had: Sa’ad Al Rahir, a bored, thirty-seven-year-old Kuwaiti who played the metal exchange through Alex the way most people play a roulette wheel, and who would think nothing of buying and selling three or four hundred thousand pounds worth of whatever metal particularly took his fancy in a single week. Louis Khylji, the immaculate Iranian food snob and wine connoisseur, who daily gambled with more than just petty cash from the many hundreds of millions his late father had removed from the Ayatollah’s claws. Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh, the playboy son of Sheik Quozzohok, Emir of Amnah, the tiny oil-rich state which had seized independence from the United Arab Emirates. Baron Harry Mellic, the Canadian son of an immigrant Hungarian lumberjack, who had arrived in Canada in 1938, prospered, and bought a thousand acre lumberyard in the Yukon. It wasn’t a bad investment in its own right, but Baron Harry Mellic’s father, Joseph Zgdwimellik never did rue the day he allowed Rio Tinto Zinc to come and do a spot of test drilling; it turned out his lumberyard was perched slap on top of the then third-largest uranium bed ever discovered. When the old man died, his son, Harry, decided that a shorter name and a smart title would befit the inheritor of one and a half billion Canadian dollars very nicely. There was Joel Syme of the Country and Provincial Investment Trust, who had a portfolio in his charge of some £160 million and turned a good percentage over, annually, in metals, through Alex Rocq. And there was Dunstan Ngwan, the Nigerian who had made vast fortunes out of buying up out-of-date drugs and selling them to the hospitals of emergent Third-World nations. Ngwan rarely turned over less than £1 million a month through Globalex, via Alex Rocq.

The picking up of all these clients had, in the first instance, been just luck. There was a rotation system among the brokers for new enquiries, and each of the above had arrived on Rocq’s due dates. This had been assisted not a little by Rocq’s generous gifts to the switchboard operator. His skill, however, had been to hang on to them. He had done so not so much by his ability to produce results, which were only just above average, but far more by his ability at getting them laid, which apart from money was the only interest they all had in common. Sa’ad Al Rahir liked seventeen-year-old schoolgirls. Louis Khylji liked black men and yellow women. Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh liked blonde women; whilst looks mattered, his main interest was quantity. On his, fortunately for Alex, infrequent trips to London, he liked to have at least ten girls fixed up, all together. His favourite passion was his own particular version of Blind-man’s-buff: he would be led, blindfolded, into a room full of naked blondes, grope his way around them, seize one and make passionate love to her then and there. Afterwards, he would try to guess her name. If he got it wrong, he would be led out, and play the game again. This would go on until either he got the right girl or he collapsed with exhaustion. As for the other three, Baron Harry Mellic was a rubber freak, Joel Symes liked being beaten, and Dunstan Ngwan seemed to like anything.