‘Hi, Alex, how are you?’
‘Busy.’
‘You hear the one about the Russian in New York, wants a broker?’
‘Fuck or knit?’
‘Yeah, you heard it.’
‘You hear about the three old men discussing their wives?’
‘One’s losing his taste, the other his memory?’
‘Yes.’ Having exhausted their latest supply of jokes, they got down to business.
‘September’s $514/$516.’
‘Buy me three hundred and twenty Seps at the market.’
‘Wow — who’s that for?’
‘Mind your own business. Work it gently — it’s for one of my big ones, and he’s already not too happy. If you get a good execution, I’ll look after you.’
‘Okay, Alex. Take it as done.’
‘Good lad.’
Rocq hung up, then called Baron Mellic back, confirmed to him that he had bought the gold and advised him that he was transferring $1.6 million from his deposit account at Globalex to pay for the ten per cent margin. Mellic grunted, and hung up.
Rocq thought for a moment about the easy life of the super-rich; about how true it was, the expression that ‘money makes money’. The Baron hadn’t had to do a thing; just pick up a telephone and state an amount. One ton was the amount he had stated: thirty-two thousand ounces at $515 an ounce. Sixteen million dollars’ worth of gold. If it rose another $15, that would be a cool $480,000 profit, and the Baron wouldn’t have had to stump up one cent above the money he already had on deposit and earning him interest at Globalex. Long before the September delivery date, when the balance of the sixteen million would be due, the gold price would have peaked out and begun to slide back down; before the slide happened, Rocq would have closed out the Baron’s entire position and credited his account with the profit.
He could understand the Baron being angry at his inefficiency in being out of the office at the time of such a crisis. He knew he should really have an assistant, but he preferred to carry the whole can himself. Like many account executives, he kept the identity of his clients a closely-guarded secret. He started to tap on his calculator keyboard. If he had bought within minutes of the news of the attack, he could have got in right at the bottom — $8, $9, maybe even $10 earlier, and added a quarter of a million to the Baron’s bundle.
Gold is one commodity that is almost certain to rise whenever there is trouble in the world. It always retains an attraction to the individual investor because behind every paper currency in the world are the gold reserves the paper represents, and there is an inherent mistrust in the value of the paper. Governments can make the paper money of their countries worthless overnight — it has happened many times in the past, Vietnam being one of the most recent examples of paper money becoming one hundred per cent worthless. If the banks of the country of which the currency was issued would not give credit for the paper, then the banks of no other country would. There is little use in being a millionaire if it is all in a currency which can no longer buy anything. No government would ever make gold worthless, because someone, somewhere, would always be willing to accept it in return for food, goods, shelter or services. It is an international marker and holds its value against all other currencies.
In theory, if the United States of America were wiped out, or taken over by the Soviet Union, the mighty dollar bill could become a meaningless document overnight. The only Americans, however rich they might be in theory, who could buy anything at all elsewhere in the world, would be the ones that had gold. Gold is the only currency that is universal — that everyone, everywhere, will always accept, just as they did long before paper money was ever invented to save gold being lugged about; when the going in the world starts to look bad, it is gold that everyone wants to buy.
There is, in fact, surprisingly little gold in the world; all the gold that has ever been mined would fit easily inside a cube fifty-seven foot by fifty-seven foot by fifty-seven foot — the size of a not particularly large house. The illusion that there is more comes from the amount of gold plated articles there are around, and the fact that gold is extremely malleable: from a single ounce, fifty miles of gold wire can be produced.
In spite of this small amount of gold, an enormous volume is traded in the world money markets each day; many times all the gold in the world changes hands, on paper, in the course of each year. In times of international tension, the public traditionally begin to horde, the speculators stop selling, and a shortage is created. With the addition of a vast amount of extra buyers, there is only one way the price at such times can go: up.
Rocq had a not dissimilar conversation to his terse one with the Baron, with the five other members of his ‘A’ team, interrupted by earfuls of abuse from a good thirty of his lesser clients. A number of the accounts he had were discretionary accounts — he had full power to buy and sell as he thought fit, within the individual budgets — and normally these clients left him to get on with it. But not today.
The loudest earful of all that Rocq received was from his smallest punter, Sidney Chilterley. He telephoned Rocq, instructing him to buy one ounce of gold when it was at $517, and then telephoned him and ordered him to sell it when it reached $520, making himself a gross profit of $3 — a net profit, after brokerage, of $2.75, and a commission of $0.03 for Rocq. Rocq was so fed up with him that he didn’t bother to remind him that the minimum handling charge for any single transaction was $10, thus rendering Chilterley’s net profit of $2.75 into a net loss situation of $7.25. Before Chilterley had bought the gold, his account with Globalex had stood at $7,002 exactly. It now stood at $6,994.75 — exactly $5.25 below the minimum required to maintain an account at Globalex. Rocq looked forward, to turning down Chilterley’s next order until he had received a cheque to rectify the inadequacy of his account. Chilterley was part of an unsuccessful experiment at Globalex to develop a business out of small punters.
For a few moments the lights on his switchboard stopped flashing. Rocq opened the Yellow Pages directory, thumbed through it, and then dialled the number of an Interflora florist. ‘I want to send ten pounds worth of cut flowers to the following person: Amanda Lowell, Garbutt, Garbutt and Garbutt, 292A Hans Crescent, Knightsbridge. Message: “Missing you madly, are you free for dinner?”.’
He hung up. Slivitz looked at him. ‘Another satisfied customer?’
‘What do you do with yours at night, Slivitz? Stick it out the window and try and screw the world?’
Slivitz’s phone rang before he could reply. He glared at Rocq as he answered it.
‘You sure picked a good morning to play truant,’ said Henry Mozer.
‘Unfortunately, Henry,’ said Rocq, ‘the Israelis forgot to tell me their plans.’
4
It was strange, the atmosphere in the office that afternoon of the day of the second Osirak attack, thought Rocq. A curious mixture of jubilations. The Jewish element among the staff was ecstatic over yet another positive blow being struck by the Israelis. The non-Jewish were overjoyed to have some action in the markets; all bad news was good, so far as they were concerned, for bad news meant movement of prices, and movement of prices meant buying and selling for their clients, and buying and selling meant commissions. When bad news was good news at the same time, so much the better. The only really bad news for a commodity broker was no news.
The only person in the office who didn’t become the least bit flippant as the afternoon wore on was Clive Kettle. Kettle didn’t know how to be flippant; no one had ever told him. From the age of eight onwards, he had turned up each day at school clutching a Financial Times, a black briefcase and a rolled-up umbrella. Whilst his contemporaries read Enid Blyton and Biggles, he ploughed through the Wall Street Journal. His classmates spent their free time on games fields, in parks, in cinemas, playing and romping. He spent the free hours of his childhood having meetings with bank managers, discussing the investments and acquisitions on which his pocket money was spent. Throughout his entire life, to the twenty-seven-year-old he was today, he had one desire and one desire only, and that was to be a successful businessman. So far he had not succeeded. His main problem was that he took everything so seriously that he could never make a decision. When a metal began to rise in price, he did not want to buy, because he knew it might drop again. When it began to go down, he was reluctant to sell, in case it went up again. Many of the clients he had acquired over the past five years had left him. When they had first started with him, they backed him, thinking he was an infant prodigy, the original whizz kid; five years on, with a performance twenty per cent below the Dow Jones, they were coming, one by one, to the reluctant conclusion that he was an idiot. He replaced his phone on its hook, and proclaimed loudly, to no one in particular, ‘I don’t know what you are all looking so happy about — this could be the start of the Third World War.’