Читать книгу The Money Makers - Harry Bingham - Страница 21

First step, gather information.

Matthew dug into the bank’s news database to get the dates of all European summits over the last ten years, then printed articles from Europe’s leading papers in the run-up to and aftermath of each summit. Then, switching to a new database, he collected bond market data around the key dates. Then, finally, he called up relevant research reports published by the major investment banks and printed about thirty reports of a few pages each. The database was charged at twenty-five dollars a sheet and he ran up a bill of a couple of thousand dollars in an hour and a half. It didn’t bother Matthew and it wouldn’t bother anyone else either. When a single trade, even a small one, can easily win or lose five thousand dollars for the bank, cost control is a game reserved strictly for losers.

By this point it was four in the afternoon and Matthew had a vast pile of paper by his desk, of which he’d read almost nothing.

Matthew worked his way swiftly through the pile. Most of it was dross, but amidst the rubbish were diamonds scattered and he needed to find them. He skimmed document after document and built a shorter stack of those he thought important.

Then he started to crunch some numbers. He printed graphs. He looked at the markets for bonds, currencies and shares. He categorised the previous summits in a dozen different ways and reran his numbers searching for a pattern.

By eleven in the evening, Matthew knew what he wanted to say. He also knew how he was going to say it and prove it to an audience much more knowledgeable than himself.

He got more coffee and started to build a presentation. His presentation had a dozen slides, five appendices containing sixty graphs and another two appendices with some of the most interesting statistics and research comments he’d unearthed. The whole document was around a hundred and twenty pages long. He stepped wearily over to the fax machine. It was one thirty in the morning. Matthew had been in the bank nigh on twenty-two hours.

He wrote out a cover page and punched d’Avignon’s number into the fax. It rang a couple of times and then started to pull the first page through the scanner. Matthew walked off to get another coffee. Something had gone wrong with the vending machine and the coffee tasted like metal. He drank it anyway.

When he came back, the fax had stopped. An error message slowly printed out. D’Avignon’s machine was out of paper. By the time anybody was in the office to refill it, it would be far too late to send the documents across. Damn. He tried a different number, of a machine he thought would be somewhere close to d’Avignon’s office. Five pages ticked their way slowly through. Then, the same result. Damn, damn, damn. It was now two o’clock, three o’clock Paris time.

Matthew considered his options briefly. They were few and far between. Matthew copied the presentation and dropped it on to McAllister’s desk with a scribbled note on the front cover. He walked downstairs and hailed a cab from the rank across the street.

‘Where you going, mate?’ asked the driver.

‘Paris,’ said Matthew, ‘rue de la Colonne.’

They made it to Paris in four hours flat, which would have been impossible but for the cabbie’s conviction that there was no speed limit on French autoroutes. Matthew kept silent about the difference between autoroutes and autobahns and snoozed in the back as the flat French countryside slipped past in the gathering dawn.

They entered Paris before rush hour and drew up outside Madison’s elegant Paris office. Matthew asked the driver to wait and dashed inside.

D’Avignon had arrived only shortly before. Mildly startled to see Matthew in person, he apologised for his empty fax machine and waved Matthew into a seat. Matthew handed over the presentation, d’Avignon called McAllister on the speaker phone, and the conference call began. Matthew led them through his work. He reckoned the discussion might last for twenty minutes all told and that he might speak for perhaps seven minutes of that. In the cab on the way across, he had run through his introduction a dozen times, until falling asleep somewhere after the turn-off to Lille.

Matthew felt confident of his conclusions. All the evidence seemed to confirm that after a few days of thinking that the end of the world had happened (or alternatively that the millennium had arrived early) the bond markets would turn their attention to something else. Matthew ran through the relevant data and summarised his conclusions. He spoke without interruption for six and a half minutes exactly. There were a couple of questions on points of detail, as McAllister and d’Avignon flipped through the charts and other material in the appendices. Neither trader challenged Matthew. After a brief discussion about how best to place the firm’s bets, d’Avignon rang off. He thanked Matthew for coming over and invited him unenthusiastically to tour the building. Matthew declined. D’Avignon looked relieved and dived off to take a call coming in from Milan. Matthew went downstairs to his waiting cab and they crept out of Paris in swelling traffic, heading north to Calais and London.

Back at his desk, Matthew came in for a bit of stick.

‘Go to Paris for breakfast but don’t even bring me back a bloody croissant,’ complained Luigi. ‘It’s a good job I tell Big Mac to fire you yesterday.’

‘Oui, but it was an expensive breakfast,’ said Jean-François. ‘I don’t think the firm pays for taxi rides outside London, so I think you pay, no, Matthieu?’

‘I don’t know if I can afford to. Big Mac still hasn’t told me if I’ve got a job.’

Matthew glanced over towards McAllister’s office to see if this was a good time to interrupt. The door was closed, and the lights were off. Luigi followed Matthew’s glance.

‘Big Mac’s away on holiday, Matteo. He only came in this morning for an hour or so. He’ll be back a week on Monday.’

Matthew had been too tired to be nervous earlier, but now that changed. Matthew stared at the empty office. It would be ten days before he got a decision. Ten days, and meantime he didn’t know if he was still in the running for his million or if he’d fallen at the first hurdle. Anxiety took its first long feed from Matthew’s stomach lining. He turned away unhappily, aimlessly. As he did so, a bagel crust flew through the air and struck him on the neck. Luigi.

‘How much longer you keep us waiting for cappuccino?’