Billionaire

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.’

‘Sooner the better,’ said Slivitz, ‘with the amount of gold I’ve just poured into my clients’ troughs. A good international nuke war would send gold through the roof.’ Then his face dropped. ‘But I don’t suppose it will happen,’ he said, gloomily.

‘Gold up two more dollars,’ shouted a voice from the far side of the console.

Rocq was nervous. Gold was now $522; it had been climbing steadily. The pattern was such that he knew he had to stay in for a while longer, and shelve the plan he had made to start unloading when the price reached $523 — an increase of $25. He wanted a cigarette badly, but he had quit two months ago, and he wanted to stay quit. He wondered whether he might be more sensible to stick to that plan, but having caused his clients to miss out earlier in the day, he needed at least to regain some of their favour by taking them right to the end of the rise. His phone rang. ‘Rocq,’ he said, answering it.

There was a crackle, then the quiet voice of Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh of Umm Al Amnah. ‘How is it going, Alex?’

Rocq was relieved that he had called; the prince was in very deep, and now he could pass the buck to him. ‘Still rising — just jumped two more dollars — my hunch is that we’re near the top, unless there’s going to be any retaliation by the Iraqis. What do you want to do?’

‘Up to you, Alex.’

Rocq cursed; that wasn’t the answer he wanted.

‘I’d be inclined to sell pretty soon.’

‘Five more dollars, then sell,’ said the prince.

‘Okay — but it might not go.’

‘Chance it.’

‘Okay.’ Rocq hung up, and breathed a little; he was off the hook on that one. The light on Tor 2 flashed.

‘Hallo, Harry,’ he said to Baron Mellic. ‘Still got your hair on?’

‘No — I scratched it all out thinking about that two hundred and fifty thousand bucks you cost me.’

‘Well — I’ve made it up for you — gold’s five hundred and twenty-two and we’re still in the game.’

‘So who’s doing me favours? We’re thirteen up and we should be twenty-four.’

‘Harry — if I hadn’t let you down this morning, I’d have taken you out at five hundred and ten, and saved myself the ulcers waiting here, watching every second to see if it starts to move back down.’

‘You’re full of shit.’

‘Damned right — and I haven’t dared leave my chair to go to the bathroom all afternoon. I think it’s time to sell.’

‘No. You can sweat it out a little more. I expect at least five thirty, Alex, and if it goes more, I want more. I don’t want to read tomorrow’s papers and discover gold went five fifty and you closed me out at five thirty-one — and all because of a complaint with your bowels.’

‘I didn’t know Rubber Weekly carried the gold prices.’

‘Just keep bouncing, Alex, will yah?’ The Baron hung up. Rocq’s intercom light began flashing and he picked it up. The voice down the other end didn’t need any introduction; it was Sir Monty Elleck, the chairman of Globalex:

‘Come up and see me right away, Alex, please,’ he said, curtly.

‘Yes, sir.’

Rocq scribbled some buying and selling instructions down on his pad and handed them to Boadicea, the nickname they had given to the flame-haired girl order clerk. She looked disdainfully at the scrawl on the pad. ‘’Ere, Alex,’ she said, in her thick East End accent. ‘You oughter spend some of your million pound bleedin’ commission on learning how to write.’

‘I’ll do a deal with you — you learn how to speak and I’ll learn how to write. Maybe we could go to college together.’

A ball of paper hit him in the nape of his neck as he walked out of the door; he sincerely hoped it wasn’t his list of instructions.

Sir Monty Elleck was not only the chairman of Globalex; he owned the company lock, stock and barrel. He was also the managing director, presiding over a board which met once a year for one hour. Of the eleven other directors on the board, only two had any practical knowledge of the commodity business. All eleven men had been selected by Elleck because of their high ranks, some by birth, some by merit, that made them in a position to be able to recommend and introduce new clients from the pick of the nation’s wealthy and successful. The board comprised one duke, two earls, four knights, three self-made multi-millionaire heads of international public companies, and the shadow Secretary for Trade and Industry. All of them received handsome introductory fees from every new client they introduced, together with a percentage of Globalex’s brokerage fees on all their subsequent transactions; although they never knew it, Elleck screwed them all blind on this part of the deal.

Sir Monty had come a long way since his grandfather, Baruch Elleckstein, a Lithuanian immigrant to England, had sold his first hundredweight of pig-iron from a barrow in Leadenhall Street. The physical distance had not been far — 88 Mincing Lane was a mere couple of hundred yards from the spot in Leadenhall Street — but the financial distance was vast. It was Elleck’s father who had realized there were easier ways to make money out of metal than humping around hand-carts loaded with the stuff, and it was he who founded Globalex, anglicized the family name, and put the Elleck family on the motorway to fortune. Seventeen years ago, whilst plugging-in a Kenwood food mixer for his wife, in the kitchen of their Mayfair flat, Joseph Elleck had inadvertently allowed his index finger and thumb to slide too far around the plug, and they had made contact with the negative and positive pins at the exact moment of insertion. When his wife came into the kitchen fifteen minutes later, she found no life in either her husband or the Kenwood mixer.

It would have been of little consolation to her to have known that the wiring to the socket into which Joseph Elleck had inserted the plug had been manufactured by a firm which bought all its copper wire through Globalex.

Monty Elleck was Joseph’s only son, and he succeeded immediately to the throne, taking to his job with great zeal. During the next decade, he opened branch offices throughout the world, and made one Prime Minister of Great Britain a £500,000 profit in less than six months, for which he received his knighthood. He was married to an overweight wife, who spent her time waddling around whichever of the Elleck residences — either in St John’s Wood, Gloucestershire, Gstaad, Sardinia, or Miami — took her fancy. He had an underweight son, who, as a result of a congenital mental defect, was attempting to start a kibbutz in the Shetland Isles, and two plump daughters whose main ambitions in life appeared to be to become fatter than their mother.

Elleck had coined the advertising slogan for Globalex: ‘At Globalex, we make you richer whilst you’re just dreaming about it.’ And it was his proud boast to all potential new clients that ‘We have offices in every time zone in the world. Wherever in the world you are sleeping, Globalex is awake somewhere else, making you money.’

Sir Monty Elleck was not only good at making money, reflected Rocq, as he walked up to the sixth floor of 88 Mincing Lane, he was equally talented at spending it. The change in atmosphere from the fourth floor was similar to that of walking from economy into first class in an aeroplane. There was nothing dramatically different, but there were subtle changes, creating a most definite aura; for instance, thought Rocq, anyone much below six foot tall would have greatly benefited from a pair of stilts, which would have enabled them to see over the top of the pile of the carpet. It was when you got nearer to Elleck’s office itself that things began to change appreciably. Suddenly, the walls became oak panelled, and hung with paintings; anyone who did not know much about art but could read signatures would learn that gentlemen by the names of Gainsborough, Titian, Reynolds, Claude, Constable, Vermeer and Hals had been responsible for these paintings — originals, all.

Money dripped off the walls like running water; each time Rocq walked down here, he had the same feeling of awe, envy, and lust for money. Just in those twenty feet of corridor, he had walked past more money than almost any ordinary human being was ever going to have in a lifetime — even if he or she won the football pools every week for a year.

Elleck’s office looked like the boudoir of a successful whore — probably because it was his wife who had been responsible for the decorating. It was a curious blend of Louis XIV, Louis XVI, Robert Adam, Thomas Chippendale, the Bauhaus, and Harrods. The walls were lemon yellow, and pastel pink, with gilded friezes. The carpet was cerise, and sprinkled with Persian rugs.

Elleck’s secretary of seventeen years — and his father’s secretary before that — Miss Jane Wells, ushered Rocq in and then left, closing the door behind her.

Elleck sat in the middle of the room, behind an ornate carved mahogany desk that looked like a dressing table, on a mountainous chair which looked as if it had been stolen from an African tribal chieftain; it was so thickly upholstered that even with several inches shaved off its legs, Elleck’s short legs were still suspended above the ground.

The diminutive chairman of Globalex spoke in a high-pitched voice and as he spoke, his face always moved with a combination of nervous energy and nervous twitches that were so intense, it was always quite impossible for anyone opposite him to tell in which direction he was looking at any given time. His head was almost completely bald, but he had massive bushy eyebrows, and when he screwed up his forehead tightly, which he did every five seconds, the eyebrows shot almost to the dome of his head.

‘Good afternoon, Alex, sit down.’ He waved his pudgy fingers expansively about; Rocq cast his eyes around the room, noticing a pair of pink Victorian love-seats, a saffron chesterfield, and a small lime green armchair over by the window. There was no chair close to the desk. Rocq decided on the lime green armchair, and sat down.

Elleck never bothered with formalities — he went straight in: ‘This Israeli raid, Alex — it’s pushed quite a few metals up.’

Rocq nodded. ‘Particularly gold, Sir Monty.’

‘And silver, zinc, lead and copper.’ The Chairman proceeded to reel off from memory the current market buying and selling price of all the major metals. Rocq nodded his agreement to the prices.

‘You must be pleased to see life in the market,’ said Elleck.

‘It has been quiet recently.’

‘You still got that car of yours?’ There was disapproval in the Chairman’s voice. Although Alex qualified for a company car, the Chairman strictly forbade buying foreign; if employees wanted foreign cars, they had to buy them with their own money.

‘Yes, Sir Monty.’

‘Why don’t you buy something British? You know we would buy it for you.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Sir Monty, but there is no British car that I want.’

The Chairman shrugged, and looked at his watch. ‘It is now four-twenty. At exactly four-thirty, I want you to start selling your gold. I want you to have unloaded your entire gold position by five o’clock. You have some big customers — I don’t want to see them upset.’

‘Personally, I think the price will climb several dollars higher.’ Rocq spoke with a trace of petulance and a trace of arrogance in his voice.

Elleck’s eyebrows shot to the top of his head and hung there like two large moths; he pursed his lips and made a sound not unlike a Wellington boot being extracted from a ditch of thick mud. ‘Would you like to assume personal responsibility for any losses incurred if the price does not rise?’

‘Of course not, no.’

‘You’ve made a good profit for your clients so far today?’

Rocq nodded.

‘You bought for all your clients at four hundred and ninety-eight, I trust?’

Rocq stared at him for a moment. He wasn’t sure what was coming next. ‘No, Sir Monty, I didn’t. I waited until five hundred and nine.’

‘Why?’ asked Elleck, politely; too politely.

‘I wanted to wait until there was a definite rising pattern.’

‘I see.’ Elleck still spoke very politely. ‘When the Israelis bombed Osirak in 1981, the world press called it the greatest single act of aggression since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour. Now the Israelis do the same again, which presumably makes this morning’s raid on Osirak the second greatest single act of aggression since Pearl Harbour; the entire world starts beating a path to its nearest bullion dealer, and you alone decide to sit tight?’

‘I felt it was the right thing to do.’

The eyebrows sank down and rested on the bridge of his nose. Elleck was becoming less polite by the word. ‘You lost six of the biggest clients this firm ever had a ten dollar rise in gold, because you felt it was the right thing to do? And now you expect me to listen to your advice? You just get back down there, Alex Rocq, and at half past four, you start selling; any gold you have left in any client account by five o’clock, I am treating as your personal property and I am going to invoice you for it. Is that clear?’

‘Perfectly clear,’ said Rocq.

The chairman looked down at his desk, turned over some papers, nodded his head twice, and dismissed Rocq with a wave of his hand.

As Rocq walked down the corridor, he smarted with anger, although he knew that in view of what had happened, he had actually got off extremely lightly. He had been convinced that gold would continue to rise and would go several more dollars; he wondered why Elleck was so sure it would not, and why he was so insistent on the times. He was no prophet, thought Rocq, so what did he know? He was very interested to see what would happen to the price. Very interested indeed.

At exactly four-thirty, Daniel Baenhaker’s heart stopped beating. The surgeon at the operating table in Theatre 1 at the West Middlesex Hospital injected the heart with adrenalin; it beat again, for thirty seconds, and once more stopped. The surgeon, Harvey Johnstone-Keynes, shook his head, and looked at the clock on the wall; he was going to the theatre with his wife tonight, to see an Alan Ayckbourn play; she was mad as hell with him at the moment because, on the last two occasions when they had arranged to go, he had had to cancel out because of urgent operations. There was a danger of the same thing happening again now. If the man did die, it would solve an awful lot of problems, and with the condition he was in, the chances were, that even if he spent the next five hours operating, it would still be a waste of time; the guy had lost so much blood, he had absolutely no resistance left in him. Johnstone Keynes wanted to pull off his gloves, and say ‘That’s it.’ But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. ‘Calcium’ he said, instead, and began injecting the heart again.

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.

‘Nasty little Commie,’ he said.

‘He’s a bit left, but hardly a Communist.’

‘Well, I think insurance assessors are a very strange breed of people.’

‘I doubt that he thinks too highly of metal brokers. Come on, Alex, let’s not talk about him; you’ve won, haven’t you? Why be bitter about him? He didn’t try and take me away from you — I’d been going out with him seven months before I met you. What have you got to gripe about? He’s the one that’s doing the griping — and I can assure you, he is griping.’

‘Does he know who I am?’

‘No, he most certainly doesn’t, and I’m going to make sure he doesn’t find out.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s very strange. He has an almost vicious streak in him — I don’t know how to describe it, quite — it’s weird.’

‘Terrific.’

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ she smiled.

‘I’m not worried,’ he said.

Rocq remembered that conversation now. He stopped the Porsche at the red traffic lights at Westminster Bridge. On his left was a young man, about his age, in a shiny Mazda sports car. He was dressed flashily, and obviously thought highly of himself and his motor car, judging by the amount of bolt-on goodies attached to himself and to his vehicle. Rocq could see him out of the corner of his eye, attempting to study the Porsche and its occupant without giving any impression of envy. On Rocq’s right was a massive white Rolls Royce, with smoked-glass windows and a vast television aerial on the roof. It made him think of Elleck, and the vast empire he owned. Rocq was thirty-one now; he had, at the very most, another ten years of broking before he moved into management, and there was no opportunity to earn commission in management. For most brokers, management was a welcome release from the tension of broking — as well as paying better — but for Rocq it was different. His broking commission was far higher than he could ever earn in management.

He thought hard; it was something that was troubling him more and more just recently. For the past three years he had been lucky and done extremely well. He had paid good deposits on the flat in Redcliffe Square, the cottage in Clayton and the Porsche, but they all cost a lot of money; he had two mortgages plus the H.P. on the car and, in addition to that, the alimony to Pauline. He needed every penny of his income just to stay afloat, and he didn’t just want to stay afloat. He wanted to be rich, like Elleck, and he knew there was a gap that would take a bridge bigger than the Golden Gate of San Francisco to span between the likes of Sir Monty Elleck and himself, and if he was going to do something about spanning that gap, then he was going to have to get on with it and start now.

He took Amanda out to dinner to the Grenouille, and spent forty-five pounds on a bottle of 1957 Pouget. The wine smelt of stale tea, tasted of old dusters, and they both decided it was delicious and got very drunk on it.

He drove her to Tramp, and ordered a bottle of Krug and fresh orange juice. They sat back in the leather bench, in the far corner of the room, under the chandeliers and the soft lighting and the opulence, watching lazily as a particularly frenetic dance took place, and he put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her. ‘Happy?’

‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘And you?’

‘Very.’

‘Are you really?’ she quizzed.

‘Can’t hear you!’ The noise of the music made conversation, even at close quarters, a shouting match.

‘I said, are you really?’

‘Yes, I am.’

She looked at him. ‘What do you want most in life, Alex?’

‘Next to you, do you mean?’

She grinned, and nodded happily. ‘Do you want to be a millionaire?’

He was silent, for a long while, thinking. ‘No,’ he said, finally. ‘I don’t want to be a millionaire: I want to be a billionaire.’

She paused, reflecting; ‘You know, it’s funny,’ she said. ‘I really am not interested in money.’

‘You would be if you didn’t have any.’

She stubbed out her John Player Special. ‘Shall we make tracks?’

At four o’clock in the morning, a cheese-knife sliced through Rocq’s head; a few seconds later, it plunged through again. He opened his eyes and closed them; the alarm clock was ringing, and so was his front door bell. The cheese-knife sliced through his head once more. He put his hand out to switch off his alarm clock; a glass of water on his bedside table fell over, rolled off the edge, and fell onto the carpet.

‘Blast!’

There was a dull clank and a tin of Mazola cooking oil began disgorging its contents onto the already sodden objects on the table top.

‘Shit!’

The candle, which had still been burning, fell over, pouring hot wax over his hand. He fumbled further for the alarm clock, and then he remembered that he did not have an alarm clock. The bell persisted. His hand came to rest on a large plastic object; it clattered and fell into the rest of the mess with a thump; the bell stopped.

‘Telephone!’

He fumbled for the object he had just dropped, grasped it with some difficulty in his slippery fingers, and brought it to the side of his head.

‘Hallo?’ he mumbled, feebly.

‘Rocky! How are yah?’ The voice boomed down the telephone, like thunder.

‘Who’s that?’ Rocq knew full well who it was; it was easier to ask the question than to return the enthusiasm.

‘Theo! I’m in New York, and I’m with a gorgeous girl who wants to meet you. She’s gonna say hallo!’

The voice of a very drunk girl with a strong Californian accent, came down the phone: ‘Hi, Rocky, how are you?’

‘Fine, just fine,’ groaned Rocq.

‘Theo told me all about you; I feel like I’m talking to an old friend.’

‘Then do an old friend a favour, sweetheart, and let him get some sleep.’

‘Okay, Rocky, it’s been beautiful talking to you; you sound like a beautiful guy. Next time Theo comes over here, I’ll make sure he brings you with him. Nighty night!’

‘Grnight.’

‘It’s me, Theo, back now,’ boomed the thick Italian accent.

‘Did you say you’re in New York?’ Rocq mumbled to the Italian commodity broker and Globalex’s largest Italian client, not only in money, but also in girth; Theo Barbiero-Ruche was a good pair of cement shoes the wrong side of twenty stone. Barbiero-Ruche used Globalex for some of the many transactions he did not want the Italian Revenue to know about.

‘Got a horse running at Sandown, Thursday, thought I might come over.’

‘Nice of you to call me, you fucking fat wop. Do you know what time it is here?’

‘Do I know what is what? I can’t hear you too good.’

Amanda stirred and grunted.

‘Forget it,’ said Rocq. ‘Why don’t you stay the weekend — bring your friend.’

‘Okay! I bring her husband too!’ the Italian roared with laughter down the phone.

‘Thanks for calling, fat man. Call me when you get to England.’

‘Okay, Rocky. Hey? What you doing this evening? Going out with some broads?’

‘I’ve already had this evening — several hours ago.’

‘Ciao, Rocky.’

‘Bye, fat man.’

Rocq tried to hang up the phone, and missed. The receiver clattered to the floor; as he lunged after it, the entire telephone fell off the table.

‘Who was that?’

‘Bloody Italian client; been travelling the world for the last fifteen years and still hasn’t figured out the time zones yet.’

Amanda went straight back to sleep. The cheese-knife sliced through Rocq’s head once more; he lay there, wondering how long he could prolong getting up and going to the bathroom in search of some Paracetamol. He felt very wide awake, now. Elleck and the events of the afternoon came back into his mind. He thought about Elleck, in his palatial office, and thought about the wealth of the Elleck family, and he tried to compare it with his own wealth. The Ellecks had a house on the St John’s Wood side of Little Venice, overlooking the canal; they had a mansion and a couple of thousand acres of land near Stroud, in Gloucestershire. Their villa on the Costa Smeralda was permanently staffed, as were their Miami duplex and their Gstaad chalet, and these were just their private residences. There were, in addition, sumptuous and permanently staffed company apartments in Park Avenue in New York, in Chicago, in Hong Kong and in Zurich, as well as one hundred and thirty feet of company yacht. These small company perks were used by one employee only: Sir Monty Elleck. For transport, Elleck had a Mitsubishi Solitaire twin-engined plane, an Elvstrom helicopter, a bronze Rolls Royce Silver Spirit, a burgundy Mercedes 500 SEL, plus a fleet of lesser vehicles for purposes ranging from driving up the unmade tracks around his estate to negotiating parking meters outside Harrods.

He was worth, personally, Rocq guessed, at least £200 million. Rocq thought about how much money he could accumulate himself. He had made just over £50,000 during the past year, which he knew was because of the client list he had: if he lost any of these clients, his income would drop dramatically. But, assuming he could continue at this rate and even better, he figured that by the time he was forty, the most he could possibly have accumulated, assuming he saved assiduously and invested cautiously, would be, net after tax, in the region of £200,000 — approximately point nought one per cent of Elleck’s wealth. His last thoughts before he slid into an uneasy sleep were that if he was to become rich, really rich, anywhere near as rich as Sir Monty Elleck, then he was going to have to do what Elleck clearly seemed to do. He needed to get hold of inside information about what was going on: some inside information that would tell him when a commodity — any commodity, it didn’t matter which — was about to go through the roof, so that he could buy it, quietly, himself, and make a killing.