A Week in December (31 page)

Veals, however, was intrigued by her. She was like a market he had yet to crack, and he wanted to know her risk - her yield, her beta and her delta. She suffered his attentions over the weekend without encouraging him; she made it clear that she thought NYMEX a vulgar place to work. Veals agreed, but the difference was that the vulgarity was what he liked: it went with money, drive and profit. He asked Vanessa out to dinner in Manhattan and took her to that week's hot place in SoHo, but could see at once that the post-industrial decor and zingy fusion food were not to her taste. Next time, they went to a French restaurant with fluttering waiters and velvet-covered banquettes, on Park and 80th, not far from the Met, and Vanessa thawed, a fraction.

Although he had exercised his libido from time to time in London, joining in at strip clubs and stag parties, taking his turn with occasional female City staff who seemed to have made up their minds to work their way through every member of certain trading teams (Brenda-the-overnight-lender: dear God), Veals was not interested in women. He did the deed, as they called it, to stop his colleagues gossiping and because he thought it might be good, in some undefined way, for his health. His heart was never in it. He had nothing to say to these painted creatures, and anyway he found it hard to hear in noisy bars in Moorgate and London Wall. He watched with some respect as fellow traders unfolded bricks of twenties, bellowing inanities with champagne breath into the faces of their prey, but personally found the dividend of carnal pleasure a brief and poor return for the hours of tedium he'd invested.

Vanessa Whiteway was different. She was good-looking enough, Veals thought, that other men would envy and respect him: slim, with shoulder-length chestnut hair, large blue eyes, and no hint of cellulite beside the Long Island pool in her black one-piece. She drank vodka with lime and mint and smoked a packet a day; she had a private income from her American industrialist father that would be enough for there to be no irritation over dress allowances or occasional women-only holidays if she wanted them. Veals calculated that even if in cash terms she would be expensive to run, the maintenance of Vanessa would in other ways be low: she wouldn't sap his energy; he wouldn't find himself in the position he'd seen with a lot of promising traders: having to spend so much time servicing or reassuring his wife that it would take his mind off making money.

At lunchtime, John Veals made a rare sortie across town. He had arranged to meet Peter Reynolds, an investment manager with Shields DeWitt, the Vatican, not because he had anything in common with the unbearably upright Reynolds, but because he wanted to see if any rumours were circulating among the Barolo and the PS35 plates of pasta at Saggiorato's, a few yards from the back end of the Burlington Arcade.

'Are you going to the HOPE bash tonight, John?' asked Reynolds, cracking a breadstick.

Hope was the nickname of an acronym: Hedge funds for Old-Age Pensioners. No one seemed to remember the organisation's real name, but it financed a charity evening in which the richest people in financial services competed with one another to raise money in loud open auctions, with an emphasis on helping foundations for old people. In 2005, they had taken over Tate Modern and raised PS18 million.

'I did my usual deal,' said Veals. 'Took three tables at double the going rate on the grounds that I didn't have to fill the seats or go to the event.'

'That's the spirit, John.'

'No, that's the cash.'

'I see Dougie Moon's at his usual table.'

'Yes,' said Veals. 'Wouldn't you hate to be a money broker? Like being a fucking speed-dating bureau or the teaser for a stallion, always trying to manoeuvre someone into position to shaft someone else.'

'Plus you have to entertain every lunch and every dinner. I don't know why he doesn't go somewhere else occasionally.'

'I suppose it's so people know where to find him. Mind you,' said Veals, picking over a bite of crab and taglioni, 'he does seem to get people into bed with one another.'

'Bit of a plonker all the same.'

'Total,' said Veals.

Nevertheless, it was next to Dougie Moon's noisy table that he allowed himself to linger on his way to the cloakroom after lunch. He could tell from the volume of the conversation and from the colour of Moon's face that he would be in expansive mood, but feigned surprise when Moon greeted him. Among Moon's lunch companions was a Frenchman called Guy Desplechin who had worked for an American bank in Paris, where, so far as Veals could see, his main job seemed to be advising his colleagues on how they could tastefully part with some of their bonus dollars on houses, art and wine. He certainly had little head for finance, as Veals had discovered when Desplechin came to try to sell him his bank's services as a prime broker.

As they stood, raffle tickets in hand, waiting for their coats, Desplechin gripped Veals's arm and whispered that he had some information so new and so searingly hot that he'd have to tell him outside. Veals said goodbye to Peter Reynolds and Dougie Moon and sauntered with Desplechin to the corner of Cork Street, where he found himself pushed up against a shop window with the Frenchman's face close to his.

'Swear on your children's lives.'

'Yeah, yeah, Guy. Whatever.'

'No, no, John. Say "I swear on the lives of my wife and children."'

'I swear on the lives of my wife and children.'

"'That I will not tell a soul what I am about to hear or where I heard it."'

'All that. What is it?'

'No. Say it, John.'

'That I will not tell a soul what I am about to hear or where I heard it.'

Desplechin put his lips to John Veals's ear. 'First New York have agreed to buy Allied Royal. The chief execs dined together two days ago. It's a perfect fit.'

Veals nodded. 'Interesting.' He began to walk away.

'Remember the oath.'

'Sure.'

'And ...' Desplechin had to raise his voice to reach the departing Veals. 'We can do business! Call me! Lunch!'

Without turning round, Veals raised a hand in affirmation. He was almost smiling. God, some fucking people.

In Pfaffikon, Victoria Gilpin's fingers were going rapidly over the keys in her stealthy style. She was finding it hard to keep up with the volume of trades that Kieran Duffy was putting on.

Duffy didn't know what Veals had done and would never ask, but the shape of the ARB graph had a familiar look: it was the initially gentle but then accelerating rise that went with a well-based rumour. Duffy could picture something being said or written in London, exaggerated later in New York, then calmed but basically accepted by the soberer heads of Asia. The market across the world had convinced itself that Allied Royal shares were going up; a move to buy, orderly at first, was by three o'clock beginning to look like a frenzy.

Duffy knew that he and Veals couldn't be the only people who'd noticed a marginally sick edge to ARB over the last nine months or so; but as the price rose Duffy could sense that many fellow bears had lost their nerve. It was a short squeeze: a question of buy now while you still can.

He waited till about three o'clock before putting on the bulk of his own trade.

'Steady as we go, Victoria,' Duffy said, trying to conceal how much he was enjoying himself. 'Tell Simone to bring me some tea, will you?'

With the puts and the calls bought and sold, it was time to put on the commodity leg of the trade. It was delicate in Duffy's opinion, and a little risky, but it was clever; it was the sort of thing that made working for John Veals tolerable.

In 2001, Allied Royal had bought the 'African assets' of a French colonial bank fallen on hard times, and this, together with its own historic presence in the region, meant that ARB effectively financed two thirds of the cocoa crop.

'Well, that much is GCSE geography,' Veals had said. 'The good bit is this. The warehouse which stores the cocoa before it flogs it on to the chocolate people in the West, they have to borrow money to buy the stuff from the farmers. And who do they borrow from?'

'ARB.'

'You got it. A hole in one, as Godley would probably say. Twat. But it gets better. ARB has the whole market sewn up from the seed in the earth to the paper export docket. There's a network of financial relationships among thousands of not only farmers, but agents, brokers, shippers, insurers across the whole of Africa. No bank or group of banks, even the World Bank, could replace it overnight.'

'So no one can buy the crop,' said Duffy.

'Yes. So the price of what's already in the warehouse goes through the roof. This is not just Belgian chocolate, this is the last fucking Belgian chocolate you'll eat for six months.'

Duffy sipped the milkless tea Simone had brought him. What he fancied was trading with some MIT-trained geeks who believed in 'rational markets' and relied on fancy formulae to back them up. If one price - cocoa, coffee, whatever - went what they called 'off campus', these guys would buy or sell enough of it until it obeyed the rules of their formula again. It was what Veals called the Long Term Fallacy - a reference to the beliefs espoused by Nobel prize-winning economists that had caused a single hedge fund, Long Term Capital, to blow a trillion-dollar debt-hole in the American economy. The next generation seemed not to have learned the lesson.

'Bring on the geeks, Victoria!' called out Duffy, rubbing his hands together.

There would be public recriminations when the world saw others profiting while African farmers watched their crop rot in the earth; but such attention would focus on the regulated futures markets, rather than the twilit world in which Duffy was trading. It was great, just great, that hedge funds were not regulated. The legal counterparty to the trade was not even High Level Capital, but its prime broker - the American investment bank in London.

It was true, Duffy thought as he hung up the phone to New York, that several million Africans would go hungry, but that was nothing to do with him; it was the fault of an imminent banking failure at Allied Royal.

He scrawled details of the trade on to a ticket and called out to Victoria. Back at her desk, it took her some moments to decipher Duffy's writing before she carefully booked the trade and pressed 'Send'.

II

In the summer of 2006, Salim asked Hassan if he would like to go on a study trip that the Muslim Youth Coalition had organised to visit Pakistan. He would meet like-minded people and do some 'training'. Hassan was suspicious, and didn't know how he could swing it past his parents; even they had not suggested he return 'home' to find a wife, but seemed content that he would marry someone English. He declined the offer, not without a qualm, and Salim accepted his refusal with equanimity.

Six months later, Salim put a further request to him: to meet the Special Vanguard Force. 'The others who are going have all trained in Pakistan or Somalia, but you're such a clear thinker, Hass, that I want you to go anyway. You're brainy. Don't be alarmed. It's nothing specific. We're just looking for the leaders of tomorrow. People who understand the territorial challenge.'

Salim gave his most Baloo the Bear-like grin. The Vanguard Force was the penultimate tread on the escalator and Hassan was intrigued by the way it carried an English not an Arabic name; attendance involved no flight to Karachi, no long journey to the hills, but a simple train trip of less than three hours to Bradford from King's Cross. 'Territorial' was an interesting word, too.

In a bare room above a bingo hall off Lumb Lane, Hassan heard the speech that, together with the British invasion of Iraq, made him believe he was ready to act for his beliefs. It came not from a cleric or rabble-rouser but from a junior welfare officer in the town council with a soft voice and a friendly look in his eyes. First they said a prayer, then, as his audience of twelve young men sat cross-legged, politely passing round fruit juice and biscuits, the man, who gave his name as Ali, set to work.

'Brothers. May I begin by welcoming you. The Vanguard Force will not detain you long. You'll go back to your homes the day after tomorrow. All of you bar one, I know, have already received some training overseas. The message I would like you to take home is this. That life is simple.'

Hassan looked round and saw the surprise on the faces of the others. Presumably in Pakistan they had been lectured by frothing bigots and paramilitaries; they had not expected to encounter at this late stage someone who spoke in the cadences of a university lecturer.

So often in the last three years Hassan had felt torn between the rhetoric of purity that came from the mosque and the subversive laughter that came from daily life in a self-mocking country. It was like an enfilade of machine-gun fire: on one side the passion and the grandeur of Islam with its insistent, emotional speakers, loud and inspiring in his ears; and on the other side, the crawling minutes of his every day in a country that could never take itself seriously. He logically believed, he spiritually believed, and he had a young man's thirst for action; on the other hand, he was a Kilmarnock supporter.

What inspired and comforted him that evening when Ali spoke was that the tensions disappeared. All seemed inevitably unified: Hassan could be a
Toad
-reading 'unillusioned' Briton who had taken the trouble to understand the truth of human life and was now prepared to act upon it. Ali made final sense of it all.

'Do you ever imagine what an educated
kafir
thinks when he lies down to sleep?' Ali asked. 'Let me tell you. He wonders how it can be that of all creatures in the world, he alone, a man, is cursed with consciousness. He loves his children dearly. He yearns for the flesh of women - or of men. He'll try to do well in his life tomorrow. He is not, in so many ways, a wicked man. But he faces this contradiction. He knows his story is futile, because the end is already written. He will die, and all his love will come to nothing. He will not be there to see his children live. It's pure pain, it's a tragedy for him. And his
kafir
books and plays explore almost nothing but this brutal contradiction.