A Week in December (30 page)

Tranter's final session with Farooq al-Rashid was a revision course of all that they had done thus far. A minicab, paid for by Knocker, picked him up from the station and dropped him off at eleven o'clock. Lucy, the Brazilian girl, opened the door and showed him down the passageway to Knocker's study.

The genial old fool rose up from behind his gigantic computer screen and held out his hand in greeting. Tranter felt glad that this was their last encounter. Mr al-Rashid may well have been a billionaire for all he knew, but he had very little feeling for books.

'How did you get on with
The Secret Agent
?' said Tranter.

Knocker frowned. 'It wasn't as exciting as I'd expected. I found it rather difficult to get through.'

'That's Conrad for you. You can take the Pole out of the Ukraine, but you can't expect him to write English.'

'Do you think Her Majesty will have read Conrad?'

'Probably not. Let's not stress about it. What about
A Maid's Revenge
?'

'Ah yes. Your friend Alfred Huntley Edgerton again. I preferred
Shropshire Towers
.'

'Yes, I suppose that's his
Sergeant Pepper
. And what did you make of "Fra Lippo Lippi"?'

'I liked it,' said Knocker. 'Was that right?'

'Yes, that's right. Some people think Browning's what you put in gravy, but I think he's the authentic voice of Victorian England.'

Lucy came in with some tea, apple juice and a box of dates. Tranter suspected that Knocker had looked at no more than a couple of pages of most of the books he'd recommended. He was far from certain that Knocker could actually read.

'All right,' said Tranter. 'Let's do a role play, shall we? I'll be the Queen.'

'Shall I go down on one knee?'

'You're not being knighted, are you?'

'No, I ... But I don't know how it'll be.'

'Have you read any good books lately, Mr al-Rashid?'

'Oh yes, Your Majesty. Very many. The winner of this year's Cafe Bravo prize was especially good, I thought.'

'Oh really? I thought it was typical subcontinental, sub-Rushdie, look-at-me-aren't-I-refreshing and tragically not copy-edited bollocks.'

'She probably won't say--'

'Not bollocks, probably. But what do you say to the rest?'

Knocker coughed. 'The vitality of the modern British novel owes a good deal to the way that it has been energised by writers from the former colonies who have brought a fresh eye and a multicultural sensibility to--'

'It sounds as though you're reciting it,' said Tranter.

'I thought you told me to learn it by heart.'

'I did. But you could make it sound a bit more, you know, spontaneous.'

'Shall I try it again?'

'No. Let's do some quick-fire opinions.'

They had been practising this exchange for some weeks; it involved Tranter royally saying 'D'you like
x
?' and Knocker coming back with a swift and polished reply.

'D'you like Hardy?'

'I find him over-determ ... determinas--'

'Deterministic.'

'Over-deterministic,' said Knocker, 'but one must admire his true feeling for his native Wessex countryside.'

They went through the classics, some foreigners and then came up to date with recent authors. It gave Tranter pleasure to see Knocker repeat his own dismissals.

He asked about a much-liked modern.

'Should learn the difference between "may" and "might" if she wants to be taken seriously,' said Knocker with confidence.

'Good.' Tranter next offered a venerated American.

'Prose so muscle-bound you need a forklift truck to turn the page. Is that right?'

'Spot on,' said Tranter, and dangled an African laureate.

'Hmm,' said Knocker confidently. 'Do you think he took a pledge at school never to use an adjective?'

The final part of the lesson was a recitation. Tranter had guessed that the Queen's favourite poet might be John Betjeman, and he had made Knocker learn a couple of his poems.

Knocker found it easier to remember the lines if he stood up and walked about.

"'From the geyser ventilators/Autumn winds are blowing down",' he began.

As he stood in the window, the light came through from the hills beyond, going up towards Epping Forest, illuminating the pale brown of his face and the dark pools of his concentrating eyes.

"'On a thousand business women/Having baths in Camden Town."'

As he watched Knocker's thick black eyebrows spliced with thin grey wires and saw the Adam's apple drag up in his throat, Tranter, for no reason, found himself suddenly thinking of where this man and his ancestors had come from - an agricultural valley in Pakistan, he presumed. He had an involuntary picture of bloody British partition; of religion and greed and the violence, over centuries; and of millions of the rural poor like the al-Rashids - bullied by Arab Muslims pushing east and by raiding Mongols forging south and west, then exploited by their own people.

"'Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,/Steam's escaping here and there,"' Knocker's voice went on, proud and even. "'Morning trains through Camden cutting/Shake the Crescent and the Square."'

Betjeman's words, and their thoughts for the businesswomen in their baths, had a strange effect on Tranter, as they issued through Farooq al-Rashid's mouth. The vision he had was no longer of the Mirpur Valley but of the city of London - of himself and this Pakistani illiterate as cells in a giant body, celebrated by the verse of a second-generation Dutch immigrant. What a pair of old frauds we are, he thought.

Tranter looked out at the long view and pictured Havering, then Epping to the north-west, then round to Edmonton, where a local stablemaster, Thomas Keats, had fathered a rumbustious boy called John; and south to Camden Town where in
Dombey and Son
Dickens had described the terrifying steam trains as they emerged snorting from the burrows of the old city while the cuttings were blasted out through Chalk Farm ...

"'Early nip of changeful autumn,"' Knocker went on, as though in a trance, "'Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,/At the back precarious bathrooms/ Jutting out from upper floors" ...'

... And the stone tenement steps that led to Orwell's flat in Canonbury where he was smoking himself to an early grave, the dreadful common at Clapham over which Greene had driven his narrow, loveless characters; and, more than this, the grimy streets of Lewisham and Catford that, so far as Tranter knew, still waited for a voice.

As Knocker's baritone with its Yorkshire vowels and Kashmiri consonants ('
v
aste pipes') came to an end, Tranter's vulpine features began to soften in the short December light.

He coughed and looked away. It was only a little light verse; but in his long bitterness he had almost forgotten what words - the stuff from which he'd made his life - could really do.

Through the morning John Veals stayed in his office with the door shut and his eye on the Allied Royal share price. Occasionally he would rest his gaze on Olya, as she smiled at him from the laptop on his side table. He tried to look at her for as long as possible in the hope that while his eyes were off the ARB screen the price would rise again. Steve Godley had the same theory with the Test match, which he kept going silently on a small television in the summer: if England desperately needed to take a wicket, he would leave the room; when England were batting, he could exercise seven-hour bladder control.

Olya, her knees for once drawn up demurely beneath her chin, cast her spell on ARB. The price rose through the morning, like an air mattress being gently inflated; and by eleven, Veals could see the beginnings of a surge. He wondered if the FSA could tell from his hard drive how much time he'd spent with the Allied Royal figures up on his screen; but even if they could reconstitute his viewing history, he'd done nothing wrong by merely watching.

He began to feel the mixture of emotions he had first experienced as a teenager: the elation of money coming his way, the self-congratulation that followed - because the gain was all down to his inspired decisions - and then the almost equal counteremotion of sickening anxiety: a fear that there was some aspect of the trade he hadn't covered, some twist that even he had not foreseen.

In many ways the happiest, most stress-free part of John Veals's career had been the first. He had fared badly at his uninspiring North London school, but his maths results had got him a place at what he called a 'greybrick' university to study law. He stood it for two years, then left to work as a stockbroker's clerk. It gave him a sense of the market, but the work bored him and he thought the fixed commission system antiquated. Then in 1982, when he was twenty-two, something much more congenial appeared in the City: the London International Financial Futures Exchange. He told his father, who, like his own father, ran a funeral parlour in Hendon, that he was throwing up his job as a Blue Button to go into futures trading. Morris Veals was appalled. John was only the third generation of the family to be British, and Morris was delighted to see him among the bowler hats of the Stock Exchange: that could be a job for life, and John's sons would go to private schools and Oxford. But John sidestepped his father when his uncle Harry, who ran the bookmaker's, said he knew an independent trader starting up at LIFFE after twenty years at Billingsgate; this man, said Harry, might need a runner.

'Is your nephew numerate?' the wet-fish salesman asked.

'Is he numerate?' said Harry. 'He could give you the square root of the next prime number they haven't yet discovered!'

LIFFE was rudimentary and slow, and not English, but based on the Chicago exchanges, and full of hard-faced Americans come to make a fast buck; but Veals loved it from the first day he spent there. The trader for whom he worked was called Jimmy Johnston; he was a Gentile, from a line of fishmongers, and was excited by the new challenge. Veals watched how Jimmy was able to keep a huge amount of shouted information in his head and never make mistakes when writing tickets. It was Veals's job, in his trainee yellow jacket, to run them back to the admin booth, where the input clerk would stamp them.

What Veals liked about it was the brashness. Where once the City had been equities, bonds and discount houses, here there were men in brightly coloured jackets trading new products with fat margins, making real money. American investment banks, which wanted access to the European time zone, began to move in and to hire trading teams. Their basic trade was to buy interest-rate options and futures on behalf of large clients who needed to hedge their exposure to interest-rate fluctuations - dull enough, thought Veals; but what he liked much more was the way that banks traded not just to service clients' needs but with their own money, as a bet.

After a year working for Jimmy Johnston, Veals was hired by one of the main American banks to execute trades for its clients. His ability to calculate at speed and the tightness of the spreads he offered brought him respect and a degree of fear on the floor of LIFFE. His salary from the bank was not large, but the bonus he earned in his first January pushed him over PS250,000 for the first time. After some research among the independent traders, or 'locals', he found a reliable clearing company who agreed to back him if he himself began to trade in dual capacity - both for his bank and as a local, on his own account.

Some of the red-jacketed locals were Rabelaisian figures, itching to square up to the might of the American banks. They arrived at 6.30, breakfasted in a Cannon Street tea bar on bacon sandwiches and started trading at eight. At eleven they went for a champagne break and if it had been a good day, some even went home there and then. Others were so in love with the system of open outcry, the clamour of trade, that they stayed till closing time at 4.30, come what may. Most of the traders were young men. The physical demands of rising in a house in Essex or Pinner at five o'clock and then to be in a merciless fight, on their feet, till 4.30 every day were too much for older people.

John Veals didn't mind getting up early to leave Highgate, where he'd bought a bachelor mews house with woodblock flooring and numerous electronic gadgets. He relished the challenge, physical, mental and financial; the hand signals and the head-and shouldertapping were second nature to the nephew of a bookie. He had more work than he could handle. Banks wishing to unwind a large position didn't want their recognisable trading teams in cherry and white striped blazers to start selling all at once so the price collapsed; instead, they called John Veals and asked him to unwind for them, softly, bit by bit, so no one knew for whom he was working. And of course, knowing that he had an order to sell 10,000 gilts on behalf of Allied Royal, for instance, it would have been insane not first to unload a few on his own 'local' account, before his ARB trade began to depress the price ...

He was playing with two decks of cards. Everyone did it, and it wasn't the traders' fault that it was so easy. The tickets were time-stamped and there were primitive video recordings in action, but they never seemed to catch anyone out; no one seemed quite sure whether it was even truly illegal. In any case, you'd have to be less than human, Veals thought, not to take a little personal profit up front before the bank paid you at the back end of the trade as well.

There was a nasty term for this, 'front-running', but since all the proprietary bank traders were doing it - using client information they had accidentally overheard from their colleagues - Veals was doing no more in his own mind than making sure he didn't lose the hard-won edge.

Then, as volumes started to take off, Veals saw a problem looming: regulation. In 1987 there came word that a plodding army of legislators was on its way; so when the bank asked if he would transfer to New York, where, at a much larger salary, he could lead their team at NYMEX, the mercantile exchange, it took him less than a minute to say yes. When regulation struck, John Veals headed for the airport.

It was in New York, at a weekend in Long Island, that he met Vanessa Whiteway. He was staying with Nicky Barbieri, a metal trader with a house overlooking the dunes in West Hampton, and there was an old-money barbeque party at a colonial mansion half a mile away that Nicky talked them into. Veals was twenty-eight and was earning, with bonus, into seven figures from the bank; he had bought an apartment on the Upper East Side to add to the mews he had let in Highgate. Vanessa was of Anglo-American family, but very much preferred the Anglo aspect after she'd been jilted by her American fiance. She had never been a warm person, but this reverse had given her a permafrost coating that even the most dedicated skirt chasers, such as Nicky Barbieri, found chilling.