Trader Jack -The Story of Jack Miner (The Story of Jack Miner Series) (28 page)

'So what's wrong with that?'

'Nothing, provided you don't owe them anything. You told me that Stan gave you fifty thousand for helping him make money on gold shares. That was a gift, but psychologically you feel that you owe him. It's a sort of debt. Wealthy people do that sort of thing. But generally there's some form of payback.'

'They're not those sort of people, Pearl.'

'Maybe, maybe not. Leila called you Sean. Don't you find it odd?'

'It was your fault. Your coke sniffing brought back memories of her son.'

'Yes. But she genuinely thought that you were Sean. Remember when we were with them at the restaurant? How she behaved?'

'Yes. She was a little strange.'

'And now she calls you Sean? Thinks you're her son.'

'So?'

'The exhibition. The latest work. Very different from her earlier pieces. They looked incomplete.'

'I thought that you were too high to notice.'

'I noticed. What's happening to her, Jack?'

'Dunno, I'm not a doctor.'

'You're just not prepared to admit it, Jack. It happened to my aunt. Steady deterioration. Alzheimer's.'

'You want me to cut them out now? When she's ill?'

'No. It's going to get a lot worse for Stan. You can remain friends. I just don't think that you should owe him. He'll want you to be there continuously. Why should you be there when it doesn't suit you? You're not his family.'

'But that's what friends are for.'

'Up to a point,' she sighed. 'Now let's sit down and write a letter. Do you have your chequebook on you?'

'Yes it's in my jacket.'

It was then that I did something that I have regretted to this very day. I wrote out a cheque for 75K, made it out to Stanley Slimcop and placed it in an envelope. Pearl virtually dictated the letter:

Dear Stan and Rena,

Thanks for yesterday. I really appreciate all the help you gave me when I first came to London. Please accept this cheque for £75,000.

Best regards

Jack.

When I posted the letter the next day, I instantly regretted it. I never received a reply.

16 -
A PRIZE SUCKER

The
Daily Mail
feature caused the market to focus its attention on me. Maffie, Ruff and I reluctantly decided that I would have to respond. We decided that the best way to put the record straight was to offer
Bloomberg
an interview. John Spittlefields,
Bloomberg's
commodities correspondent, was a reporter who wrote stories without any bias.

Maffie gave me practice sessions, drilling me on how to come up with the right replies: 'Be smart, cheerful and cool, regardless of the questions. Watch the politicians on TV. They rarely get ruffled.'

Soon after Spittlefields' piece was on the wires, newspapers, radio and TV stations pestered me for interviews. That made me feel seriously important. Jack Miner, who hadn't even finished school, in front of the cameras defending hedge funds and explaining that the Brazilian frost was to blame for soaring coffee prices. Saying that poverty-stricken South American and African farmers deserved higher prices. Wow!

Not long afterwards, when the coffee market and media were off the boil, Maffie and I were relaxing in a Costa coffee shop. A lined and crumpled man with a white beard walked in.

'Are you Jack Miner?' the man asked.

'That's me.'

'Israel McTavish, special correspondent of
The Wall Street Journal,
he said. 'I'm writing a feature on the coffee market. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?'

'Israel? . . . McTavish?' queried Maffie, a bit perplexed.

'My father was a Scottish Methodist and my mother Jewish,' said McTavish, smiling and pulling up a chair. 'Call me Issie. And you?'

'I'm Maffie.'

'Do you work with Jack?'

'Yes.'

'Could you please give me your full name?' he asked politely, taking out his notebook.

'Themba Shaka Mafuta,' Maffie replied warily.

'Are you from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa? I was there last year to write a feature on the Zulu wars,' said McTavish looking interested. 'Shaka? You're not from the same family are you?'

'Maffie's a descendant of Shaka. She knows all about his military tactics. Applies them to the markets,' I blurted out.

'So you were also involved in the coffee market,' said McTavish, latching on to a new story angle.

Maffie glared at me and shook her head, but it was too late. Issie McTavish, the veteran reporter, knew he was on to something. He wasn't going to let go. He looked me up and down. Self-conscious about a spot, I put my hand over my cheek and sat up straight. He noticed my reaction immediately.

'How old are you Jack? Seventeen, eighteen?'

'What about you? Seventy, eighty,' I retorted cheekily.

McTavish laughed: 'Close. Old enough to be your grandfather. I'm semi-retired, but I still enjoy doing my bit for the paper.'

'What's the story?' I asked. 'Isn't coffee old news?'

'I've been writing about commodities for years. From what they tell me, you guys ran a pretty sophisticated operation. It wasn't only you, Jack, was it?'

I shrugged my shoulders. McTavish laughed again.

'Are you trying to tell me that you did it on your own? They tell me that you were playing the options market. That requires experience and knowledge. I don't think your school taught you much about options.'

Maffie and I looked at each other and said nothing.

'You don't need to know that stuff to trade,' I snapped. 'So what if Maffie helped me? All organisations brainstorm.'

McTavish smiled and Maffie sighed. She had gathered that it was one of McTavish's tactics to rile people he interviewed. If they lost their cool, there was a good chance that they would forget themselves and divulge more information.

'I've spoken to a lot of people. This is what I think happened,' said McTavish. 'Someone told you that a frost in Brazil was likely. You knew that some hedge funds had sold coffee short and had to buy back their positions. You used Shaka's battle strategies to corner them.'

'Our Brazilian friends could have been wrong. We didn't deliberately squeeze the bears,' I insisted. 'We just went along for the ride.'

Maffie looked at the ceiling in despair.

McTavish laughed: 'Thanks! You've confirmed my sources. Good to meet you.'

He finished his coffee and walked out.

'What was all that about?' I asked.

'You gifted him the full story, or most of it, you idiot.'

The following week, Maffie brought in a
Wall Street Journal.
The headline on the front page was: 'Zulu battle plan traps Russian bears'. The subheading underneath was: 'Shaka helps Jack corner coffee giants.' By and large, McTavish had the whole story. His only mistake was that he didn't identify Krishna as the options whiz.

The article had a paragraph and a quote that disturbed me: 'Veruschka and Borodino funds are estimated to have lost more than $4 billion in the coffee market.'

'Yes, Jack has climbed to the top of the beanstalk, but beware of the giant,' said Igor Hellvosovitch, of Veruschka. 'One wrong step and all the way down.'

That quote unnerved me for a day or so, but I soon decided that it was pointless to be worried about the Russians. The Yapolovitch murder was now history. Moreover, my profile was now so high that they would be reluctant to take revenge. We had beaten the Russian bears fair and square. If they were financing the Colombian drug barons, it was good that they lost all that money.

To make the front page of the
WSJ
was really something. I was now on the celebrity party circuit. Pearl and I went from event to event and pictures of us appeared in
Hello!
and
OK!
magazines. I read them when my hairdresser put highlights in my hair.

Pearl was full of fun when we were at parties, but as the weeks passed by she seemed to become bored with me. The experience with the Slimcops had shaken me up and I was now completely off drugs. I was lucky because I had experimented with very little, so it was easy to withdraw. Unfortunately she was hooked. Her mood changes from hyper elation to gloom became more frequent.

It was late October and we were in New York furnishing my new apartment. I was searching for a credit card in a drawer when I found some coke and pot and confronted her: 'Pearl, you promised me that you would stop.'

'Give them to me, Jack!'

'No way, Pearl,' I insisted and went to the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. She was livid.

'Who do you think you are? All you've done is make money. It's because of me that you're a celeb. You were a nobody before.'

'I'm just trying to help. This stuff is doing you no good.'

'That's for me to decide. Not you.'

'I care for you Pearl. I love you. I've been reading up on coke. You need more and more to give you the same kick. It's dangerous stuff. It damages your heart. You mix it with booze. That's lethal.'

'OK, OK, I'll stop, I promise you. But you can't stop me smoking pot. That's not addictive,' she said, taking a cigarette out of a pack and lighting it.

I grabbed it and stubbed it out.

'Not in this place, Pearl. You know the rules. How many times have I asked you to give up smoking?'  'Nicotine's addictive. Not weed.'

'From what I read about pot, it's psychologically addictive. People need counselling to get off it. A London psychiatrist researched the stuff and found that if you took cannabis at age eighteen, there was a sixty per cent probability that you would become psychotic.'

'So you think I'm a psycho? You know what? I'm embarrassed to go out with you,' she retorted sneering. 'I'm nearly twenty five and you're not even eighteen.'

'We've talked about this before, Pearl. Who cares what people think? So long as we're happy. That's what counts.'

'Jack there's no future in it. Your age all over the newspapers. My friends and clients sniggering as soon as we turn our backs. Pearl the cradle snatcher! Toyboy Jack.'

'I'm not a toyboy. Women over forty go for toyboys. You're only in your twenties. The age difference is nothing.'

'Oh yeah? It might be great for you, but not for me.'

'Thanks, Pearl. Thanks a lot,' I said raising my voice. 'Remember when we first met. It was you who approached me. We never worried about our age difference before. It was just us. Our business. Now it's public and it's your fault. It was you who contacted the
Mail,
not me!'

'It was my jo . . .'

'Your job! What do you mean? Did you publicise me to help you get more clients? Get you more invitations? Stan Slimcop warned me about you. Thanks to you, Stan and Leila are no longer my friends. They're good, genuine people. Always there to help me. Thanks Pearl, thanks a lot.'

'You have to take responsibility for your own actions, Jack. I just advised you.'

'Advised me? Is that what you call it? You virtually wrote the letter. Got out the chequebook! I'm still trying to work out why you had it in for Stan. Maybe because you realised that he saw through you. Would turn me against you.'

'You're being mean to me. I think we should cool it Jack,' said Pearl, her eyes now tearful. 'I am fond of you, but it's now time for you go out with girls your own age.'

I didn't reply. Just put on my trainers and running vest and took off for Central Park, through Strawberry Fields, past the lake, fountains, statues of dogs and around the reservoir. Running, walking, running and walking again. Not as fit as I used to be. Too good a life. Sweating and exhausted, I lay down, closed my eyes and before I knew it, I was fast asleep. When I returned, it was nearly dark. The apartment was empty. Pearl had packed up and left.

*   *   *

After the long weekend in New York and the lonely flight back home, I arrived at the office late. It was empty, so I went to the meeting room. Rob Hastings from Scotland was addressing the whole staff, but Ruffish and Maffie weren't there.

'Good morning, what's going on?' I asked.

'Ruff and Maffie have eloped, Jack!' said Bess giggling. 'Who would have thought?'

At last it made sense. They always left the office late. Maffie and I went out a lot, but it had always been platonic. She had told me that she preferred older men, but Ruff? Surely not him! He was far older than her. Married for years. A son and daughter at university. I looked at the others in the room. I guessed that they were thinking the same.

'Where are they, Rob?' I asked.

'Somewhere on the west coast of South Africa,' said Hastings. 'Ruff phoned me early last week and told me that they were going.'

'Why didn't they tell us? They could have at least said goodbye,' I mumbled, feeling hurt. I had thought that Maffie was my best friend.

'They wanted to keep it secret. I'm sure they will contact you when the time is right,' said Hastings.

'Who's going to run Hastings & Ruffish?'

'Ruff found a buyer for the business. We . . . Hastings & Murray are selling.'

'I thought that the business was going well,' I said. 'Ruff told me that he was going to open my fund to outside investors.'

'We've decided to concentrate on our business in Scotland. Hastings & Murray are now managing $20 billion. We prefer to invest conservatively for our clients.'

'Where do we go from here?' asked Krishna.

'You will all be paid good bonuses,' said Hastings. 'Hastings & Ruffish is a small, but profitable hedge fund business. I think you're good managers. You can join Hastings & Murray in Edinburgh, or you can remain in London.'

'Who's buying the firm?' asked Tong.

'Ruff put out feelers in the past year. He got a good price from LeashTrade Inc., a hedge fund business in New York.'