Billionaire

33

There were two men who knew the answer to the riddle the ex-head of the Mossad could not solve, and both of them were happy men. One of them was Sheik Abr Qu’Ih Missh; the other was Alex Rocq. Three and a half thousand miles apart, they replaced their telephone receivers and calculated their respective gains.

Sheik Missh stared out of his sixty-sixth floor window in the Palace of Tunquit and smiled again: during the past week he had bought a fraction less than $2 billion worth of gold, all on margin, and all of it below $550 an ounce. Indeed, some of it he had bought below $500 an ounce. Fuelled by this buying, which had been spread into small parcels throughout the world by Theo Barbiero-Ruche and masterminded by Rocq, and fuelled equally by the rumours the influential Barbiero-Ruche had spread that there was to be a major Israeli-Arab conflict, Missh had used his nation’s entire reserves to buy in at the very bottom of one of the greatest rises in gold the world had ever seen. At $710, on Rocq’s advice, he had started to sell, using a different broker Rocq had arranged for him in Dubai. He had made a profit on the deal, he estimated, of some $6 billion, quite satisfactory enough for one week’s work, he decided.

But there was more than just the money, something which to him was far more important: he had managed to avoid what could have been a devastating blow to the international standing of his country. If Jimmy Culundis had had his way, the Persian Gulf would have been knee-deep in fishing dhows, all clearly registered in Umm Al Amnah and all carrying crews of Israeli sailors and cargoes of nuclear mines. Amnah would have been inextricably entwined and implicated in the conflict that would ensue between Israel and the rest of the world. It would have destroyed, for years, any chance of friendship with almost any country in the world, and friendships with other nations were something his tiny nation needed badly. Rocq’s warning had enabled him to sabotage Culundis’s plans extremely effectively: he had flung Culundis’s entire army out, arrested the entire force of 100 Israeli sailors, and set them adrift into the Gulf with a cargo of the mines and no identification other than their Israeli passports. Someone, somewhere, was going to be taught one hell of a lesson. He smiled.

Rocq sat at his desk, finding it hard to contain his excitement, harder still to keep his activities out of range of the telephoto ears of Mozer, Slivitz, and the rest of his office.

On a split commission with Theo Barbiero-Ruche, he calculated he had earned £380,000; he was out of the hole and into big money. The Toronto light on his switchboard lit up; Rocq picked up his phone, and pushed the button: the voice of the bouncing Baron Mellic boomed down the receiver.

‘Hey, Rocky — what did you do wrong?’

‘What do you mean?’ Rocq became worried.

‘You got something right for a change.’

‘And what a fucking waste to go and give it to you.’ A wave of relief swept Rocq. ‘You did it properly?’

‘You ever know me not to do anything properly?’

‘Only when you have a puncture.’

On Rocq’s advice, Missh had gone along with every penny he had, when gold was at its lowest. Knowing that when Missh sold, coupled with the no-show of the Lasserre-Culundis plot, the price of gold would cascade downwards, Rocq had advised the Baron to go short, with every penny he had, at the exact moment Missh issued his sell instructions. The Baron had gone short when gold was at $712 an ounce. The price was now $558. The Baron was not quite in the money league of the Emir of Amnah, but he had still netted some $120 million on the deal. Rocq’s half share of the commission, which he had split with a tame broker in Zurich, came to £500,000 — tax free, paid into the numbered Swiss account Monsieur Jean-Luis Vençeon, the Swiss avocat in Verbier, had kindly opened for him.

‘Up yours, Rocky — I’m off to go and spend some of my loot.’

‘Does that mean I ought to go long on rubber?’

‘Yeah — and you’d better hurry.’ The Baron hung up.

‘You talking to your bicycle repair man?’ said Slivitz.

‘If you want to stick your ears over here, for God’s sake clean them first, Slivitz — I’ve got wax all over my desk.’ Rocq dialled Amanda’s office. ‘Hallo, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I’m going to give you a special treat tonight: I’ll buy you dinner in any restaurant you like anywhere in the world. Pardon? What do you mean you had a big lunch? Yes, I’m sorry about Baenhaker too — you know I am: I thought it might cheer you up. Of course it would. Okay — right, leave it to me — what do you feel like most, Italian or French? Okay!’ Rocq hung up, then dialled International Directory Enquiries. ‘Hallo,’ he said, ‘I’d like the number of a restaurant in Paris — it’s called the Tour d’Agent.’ Thirty seconds later, he had the number. He thanked the operator and hung up. He pressed the button on the Reuter monitor: gold was at 553; Elleck still had not given him any sell order, which meant he was now in the hole for a cab fare’s change from a £500 million note.

‘That’s life, Monty,’ he said, to himself, smugly; you’re five hundred million down. I’m five hundred thousand up. Never forget, Monty, the old legend: “Be careful how you treat people when you’re on the way up — you never know who you’re going to need when you’re on the way down.”’

‘Talking to yourself?’ interrupted Slivitz.

‘It’s the only way to get any straight answers in this business, Slivitz.’

‘That’s about the only intelligent thing you ever said, Rocq.’

‘Tell you what, Slivitz, you know what I’m going to do today?’

‘No Rocq, what are you going to do today?’

‘I’m going to take you out and buy you one slap-up lunch.’

‘I don’t know what’s come over you Rocq! Two intelligent statements in one day.’

‘Keep pushing your luck, Slivitz, I’ve got a third on the way.’

By half past three, two extremely drunk metal brokers staggered out of the elevator at the fourth floor of 88, Mincing Lane. One was still ecstatic with joy; the other, inside his shell of alcohol, was trembling with fear from what he had learned over lunch.

Slivitz had a wife, three children and a large mortgage; it wasn’t cheerful news to discover that the firm into which he had put eleven years of his life, and ten per cent of his annual salary for a pension, was days away from going belly-up to the tune of half a billion pounds.

Rocq left the office early that day; by the time he returned, at eleven o’clock next morning, having been delayed on the shuttle from Paris, there wasn’t anyone in Globalex who didn’t know the news. As Globalex telephone operators spent most of their time chatting to different telephone exchanges around the world, by close of play on Friday, anyone who was anyone in commodities, throughout eight-tenths of the world, knew of Globalex’s problems. When Sir Monty Elleck received a phone call from Chicago to ask if it was true, followed by calls from Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Panama, Liechtenstein, Guernsey, Vienna, Berne, Rome and fourteen other of his international business chums, he knew it was time to have a chat with his local friendly bank manager. His only problem was that he was not quite sure what to say. He needn’t have bothered trying to say anything; as far as his bank manager was concerned, Sir Monty Elleck had contracted a bad case of leprosy.

Rocq breezed into his office, tired and hung over after having eaten much too rich a meal. He had been sick three times in the marble-floored bathroom of his suite at the Crillon in Paris. Lester Barrow did not chirp out his usual ‘Morning, early bird.’ There was no snide remark from Mozer or Slivitz; the whole place had all the cheer of the foyer of a crematorium. Rocq’s intercom buzzed: it was the switchboard.

‘Mr Rocq — a Mr Barbiero-Ruche has called you four times this morning.’

‘Thank you — I’ll call him now.’

‘Oh, wait a second — yes — he’s calling again now. Shall I put him through?’

‘Thank you.’

The Italian’s voice came on the line. He did not sound his normal ebullient self either. ‘Okay, Rocky — very clever, hey where’s this goddam Middle East War then?’

‘What war, fat man?’

‘Yeah — that’s right — what war?’

‘You can’t win them all, fat man. It didn’t happen.’

‘How you mean, it didn’t happen? You know how much money I put on that war happening?’

‘Nope.’

‘A lot, Rocky, one hell of a lot.’

‘So — how much commission did I make you on buying for Missh?’

‘Half a million bucks. You know how much you lost me on that war?’

‘No idea, fat man.’

‘Millions, that’s how much, millions.’ The Italian, thought Rocq, sounded sore. Really sore.

‘Let’s just call ourselves quits, fat man, hey? You tucked me up good and proper on that coffee — I just got a little revenge on you on the gold, okay? Now we’re even.’

‘You crazy bastard — you nearly put me to the wall just to get even?’

‘I don’t like wrong advice, fat man. I don’t know what the fuck you were up to, but boy, you got me in a mess.’

‘Are you blind and deaf?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Didn’t you read any newspapers today?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you know what happened to coffee?’

‘No, what happened to coffee?’

‘The World Health Organization? You didn’t hear? The whole business with the cancer — it was all a hoax. Three of the directors have been arrested — it was all a huge conspiracy to force down the price of coffee — they all went short for billions, then put out the rumour. It’s going up again, Rocky, going through the roof. There’s a bad coffee rust, early frost, just like I said; you put me to the wall on your goddam war, and now I’m making you millions on coffee.’

Rocq went white. ‘Theo, you fat jerk; I closed out my long coffee. I went short with you, remember?’

‘You what?’

‘I went short with you! Remember? Paid your goddam invoice. Twelve thousand fucking tons. What the hell’s the price now?’

‘Four hundred and forty-eight pounds and rising fast; what you sell short at?’

‘Four hundred and twenty-seven pounds.’

‘Holy shit, Rocky.’ There was a silence. Rocq could hear the sound of a calculator the other end. Rocq didn’t need a calculator; he knew how much he was down — almost to a penny, exactly half of the half a million he had just made.

‘Get me out of it, fat man. Get me long again, fast.’

‘It’s limit up, Rocky, and the sellers are running away. No chance of getting you out yet. Won’t be for several days; it’s going to go limit up each day for the next five days. I may be able to get you out at about 470 I reckon — somebody owes me a favour — and you’d better count yourself lucky if I do.’

Rocq did one more quick calculation: if the Italian could bail him out when it hit £540, he would have lost, to the penny, the entire profit he had made on the gold dealings.

‘Oh, shit!’ said Rocq, smashing his desk with his fist. ‘Oh shit!’

‘Is that a buy instruction?’ said Theo.

‘Yes it fucking is,’ said Rocq, hanging up with a force that nearly broke the telephone. He sat at his desk and stared at his blinking switchboard; although Milan was a thousand miles away, he swore he could hear the Italian laughing. And yet, he smiled to himself, there had been times in his life when he might have been a whole lot more upset than he was now. He had to admit that on the whole, he had not come out of it too damned badly.