Authors: Nathan Erez
Elijah looked at Gabi but said nothing. To him, they were all speculators and gamblers, and he couldn’t understand why Gabi would want to defend them. Gabi continued to expound on the importance of those investors.
Finally, Elijah asked him, “By the way, do you personally invest in futures?”
“Oh, no! I don’t even have enough funds to invest in many more certain ventures. However, I must admit that if a client asks me, I would invest in futures on his behalf. I suppose that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”
Gabi pushed a button and called out, “Rina, could you bring us something to drink?”
Rina, dressed in tight-fitting jeans that left very little to the imagination, came in and took their order: two cappuccinos and croissants.
“What point is that?” asked Elijah, surprised.
“The point, Eli, in case you’ve forgotten, is the Luria Company.”
“So I am to take it,” said Elijah, “that that company invests in futures.”
“That has to be the understatement of the year. Luria was by far the biggest player in the field. It had become a legend, until it suddenly dropped right off the radar.”
“Are you telling me that it no longer exists? I don’t understand...”
“Eli, let’s stop playing games here. I’ll give you a brief review of what I know about Luria and then you will tell me what you know. Is it a deal?”
Elijah nodded, although he had no intention of keeping his part of the bargain.
Gabi smoothed down his remaining hair, and Elijah smiled.
“The company was established in the mid-eighties. In the nineties, when everyone started taking an interest in it, they realized that in the eighties alone it had earned over a billion dollars, all of which was available in cash. What infuriated everyone was that it had done so totally within the law and absolutely aboveboard. The process it had used could be seen easily and clearly. Its original capitalization was about two or three million dollars, and all it did was buy and sell futures. It might buy sugar and sell gold, buy gold and sell diamonds, unload cocoa and buy wheat.
“All these were small transactions in terms of the market - maybe two- or three-million-dollar deals, sometimes even smaller. It didn’t even have its own offices. Instead, it worked with a number of small agents in various locations worldwide. We have no idea how many such agents there were and where they were located. Luria never took out a bank loan, and as a result was never subjected to an in-depth investigation.”
“So what went wrong?”
“The truth is that, had there not been computers, no one would ever have even taken an interest in Luria. However, at the beginning of the nineties the company bought two supercomputers in the United States. At the same time it ordered highly sophisticated, state-of-the-art encryption tools, the best the market had to offer. At that time, the only ones who needed such computers and encryption tools were members of the defense establishment, and anyone desiring to export either of these from the United States would need a specific export license issued by the Defense Department. It soon became known that these items had been shipped without any such authorization. Purely by chance, some of these components were found in a shipment sent to Luria, and everything came crashing down.”
“Where were the computers meant to go?”
“That is a question to which there is no clear answer. Some people claim that the computers were meant to go to St. Kitts, which was where the company had been incorporated. Others say that they were destined for Spain, and there are even those who say they were being sent to Israel.”
“To Israel?”
“Yes. The computers were impounded without a struggle. Luria lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and simply seems to have disappeared. The Defense Department did not complain, because the amount that Luria paid in fines was way beyond what it had expected to get. Had Luria gone to court it would have stood quite a good chance of having the fine reduced substantially, because it could have used the computers in the United States or sold them within that country. The press had a field day, and there were all sorts of hypotheses as to why the company acted as it did, but Luria remained silent. There was no press release, no authorized spokesperson, not even the venting of a disgruntled employee. Nothing.
Nada
.”
“One second,” said Elijah. “Isn’t it possible to find out who signed the incorporation papers and who the directors were?”
Gabi smiled forgivingly. “Elijah, between the two of us, do you know St. Kitts? Do you even know where it is?”
“Well, not exactly,” Elijah
admitted
.
“St. Kitts is one of a series of islands, whose total population is about thirty thousand people. There’s no income tax there, because so many companies are incorporated there.”
“And where does Gabriel Moldovan fit into the picture?”
“About three months before the company collapsed, in 1992, I happened to be at the office of Joshua Abadi, an investment adviser from a competing investment house. He left the room for a while, and I was in the room by myself. I saw an open envelope on the table and looked inside. It contained an order to buy five million dollars’ worth of Japanese yen at a date three months hence and to sell them at noon exactly forty-one days later. The risk was enormous, as the five million dollars were only meant as security on a figure fifteen times as large, seventy-five million dollars. I had to replace the paper in the envelope immediately, so I couldn’t read all the details. You have to understand that in the futures market, prices change from hour to hour and often from minute to minute. The most sophisticated computers in the world can only provide investors with marginal help. Investment counselors change their recommendations on the spot, and here we are, finding out about someone asking for an investment three months in the future? Has someone gone crazy here? The order was on Luria stationery!
“When Abadi returned, I tried in every way possible to get him to talk about the contents of that envelope. On the envelope there was a picture of a lighthouse. If I remember correctly, it was white with silver print. I asked him jokingly if he was suddenly involved in shipping companies. He said, ‘No way! That’s a personal letter from a relative in Spain.’ From that point on, I followed what Luria was doing. I kept tabs on that particular transaction, and found that on it alone Luria had made twelve million dollars. I went nuts. There was no possible way to forecast changes like those of the yen that far in the future. Two days before the buy date, the Japanese government fell after a major scandal. The yen took a nosedive. Three weeks before the sell date, the yen began climbing, reaching its highest value an hour before the scheduled sell time. After that, it started dropping. There’s never been a case like that in the history of the stock market...”
Norman!
Thought Elijah to himself.
How come I didn’t realize it? A man who can read people’s thoughts, who can forecast events and foresee the different possibilities, why shouldn’t he be able to use these same powers in the world of finance?
Suddenly, another thought occurred to Elijah. It was on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t quite formulate it. Gabi’s voice receded into the background, and he appeared to be some alien creature whose lips were moving, with a hand that every so often pushed back its hair from its forehead. What was the thought? What was the thought? Elijah did everything possible to retrieve it, but without success. It irked him, like a pebble stuck in his shoe. There was another man he knew, who could foresee where to invest. The man had made millions. Who was that man, darn it? Where had he met him? Or had he just read about him? Or was it a movie he had once seen? He decided that his search through his mind was fruitless at that time, and decided he’d come back to it after the meeting.
Now he suddenly saw that Gabi was silent and was looking at him. Was he waiting for an answer? In order not to appear to have lost the thread of their conversation, he went on the offensive.
“OK. We agreed that you would tell me everything you know about Luria. What else is there that you haven’t told me yet?”
“Nothing,” replied Gabi.
“Gabi, I want the truth. I have no doubt that after what you saw, you spied on Abadi.”
“I guess I should tell you about that as well. But heaven help you if you repeat so much as a word of what I tell you to anyone. It appears to me that Luria Investments has not really vanished. It simply changed its name and is now known as Cordoba Investments. OK, I’ve come clean. Now it’s your turn. What can you tell me about Luria Investments?”
“Actually, it’s a very simple story,” said Elijah, playing for time. He was able to spot a red flag whenever a person says, “it’s really simple,” or “trust me,” or “to tell you the truth,” and knew that you should be all the more suspicious of what that person has just told you. However, he could not think of a better opening. He realized that whatever he said from that point on Gabi would regard with suspicion, but he felt he had no choice.
“As part of my work, every so often I have to deal with ancient manuscripts. By their nature, in most cases these manuscripts are owned by extremely wealthy people. Who else can afford a medieval Italian handwritten Megillah scroll with gold-leaf adornments? However, these people are not able to judge the authenticity of these manuscripts, and that’s where we come in. In short, I did someone a very big favor, and by doing so I saved him a fortune and he really likes me. He gave me a big tip, and he suggested I invest it in Luria Investments. And now I have just realized that I helped this guy so much, and his advice to me turns out to be worthless, as Luria Investments no longer exists.”
Elijah left the office, heard Rina mumbling something, and only after he was on the stairs did he realize that she had said goodbye to him in a very friendly manner, while he had left without even acknowledging her, treating her like nothing more than a piece of furniture. At that point it would have appeared silly of him to return and say goodbye to her, so he simply forgot the whole episode. He was totally engrossed in trying to decipher what made Norman tick, and tried - unsuccessfully, as he had to admit - to make sense of the man and his powers. Norman seemed far too intelligent to be a run-of-the-mill businessman. In Elijah’s world, businessmen were basically illiterate, knowing very little beyond a smattering of arithmetic. And the few that were not illiterate confined their reading to boring material like balance sheets, over which they could pose for hours. The first thing they did when they got the newspaper was to open it to the dreary financial pages, where they showed a sickening obsession for news of which communications company is merging with another.
Norman, on the other hand, read academic treatises for pleasure, and in fact had been one of the few who had read Elijah’s published articles. Norman was too good to be an ordinary businessman and Elijah assumed that he had to be one of the investors or even one of the owners of Luria Investments.
When he reached the street and had put some distance between himself and Moldovan, he finally remembered the name he had been seeking, the other man who had been able to predict what would happen in the future, the man who had predicted that land in Silicon Valley would be worth millions: he was the man mentioned in Odel Weiss’s article which Norman had noted in the list. The man’s name was John McDonald, and there had to be a tie of some kind between the two.
In 1516, about twenty-four years after the Jews had been expelled from Spain, Sultan Salim I, also known as Salim the Grim, took Jerusalem. It was a relatively easy conquest, because the remnants of the Mamluks, whom he had defeated near Aleppo in Syria, offered no resistance. Salim visited the Temple Mount, donated large sums of money to the Al-Aqsa mosque, and reduced the poll tax that was levied on Jews and Christians.
Scholars agree that Jerusalem flourished in the first century after the Ottoman conquest. Salim’s son, Suleiman the Magnificent, refurbished mosques, built marketplaces, repaired water conduits, excavated new water reservoirs, and set up a soup kitchen for the poor. The crowning glory of Suleiman’s work in Jerusalem was the building of a large wall, which encircled the city. In order to build the wall, Suleiman brought in the noted architect Mimar Sinan from Istanbul. It took years for the wall to be constructed, but it still stands to this day.
The Jews greeted the Turks enthusiastically. They had already learned from their coreligionists in Istanbul, Salonika, Izmir, and throughout the Ottoman Empire that the Turks treated the Jews fairly. Jewish historians note regretfully how different Jewish history would have been had the expulsion from Spain taken place after the Ottoman conquest of Jerusalem. Many of the Jews who had been expelled were afraid to go to Jerusalem under the Mamluks, but they would have had no such reservations under Ottoman rule and would have settled in the city joyfully.
The Ottoman conquest strengthened the region’s Jewish population and many Jews were drawn to it, primarily to Safed. Some of the greatest Kabbalists and Halakhic - Jewish law - geniuses were active in the country during that era, including the Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria, known as the
Ari
, and Rabbi Joseph Caro, author of the Code of Jewish Law, the
Shulhan Arukh
. There were even those who wished to restore the ancient institution of the Sanhedrin - the supreme Jewish court of law - but internal conflicts prevented the pursuit of this idea.
The Ottomans ruled Jerusalem for just over four centuries. From time to time, emissaries of the Turkish sultan would visit Jerusalem to impose order on the city, but their efforts were generally unsuccessful. This was primarily due to the vehement opposition of the local leaders. Ottoman rule in Jerusalem was characterized by a slow but steady decline in the control exercised by the central government. The Ottoman Empire finally came crashing down with the defeat of the Turks in World War I.