Michael Ridpath - Free To Trade

It was a relief to get out of the country. I had spent two days looking over my shoulder everywhere I went. Not knowing whether my apprehension was justified hadn't helped at all. As soon as I got on the plane, I felt a huge weight lift from my shoulders. Somehow I doubted that Joe would track me down in New York.

I was glad that Cathy and Cash were not on the plane. They were following more or less the same itinerary I was. They were spending a couple of days at their head office in New York first, then moving on to Phoenix for the conference, and finally joining their clients for a visit to the Tahiti. Cash, especially, I was not looking forward to meeting. It was hard enough to think of him as responsible for the Tremont Capital fraud. What bothered me even more was the question of whether he was involved in Debbie's death. I was still no nearer finding out who had killed her. I wasn't even sure why she had been killed.

It was going to be difficult to talk to Cash on this trip, but I was going to have to do it. I had lots of questions to ask him, and I would have to be subtle. I also needed to find out what I could about Dick Waigel, and look for some trace of Tremont Capital at Bloomfield Weiss's New York office. I was due to spend the whole of my first day there, and Cash had fixed up a lot of people for me to meet, so I was hopeful that I would find something out. I was still not exactly sure how.

Despite this, the task excited me. It was a challenge with a lot at stake; twenty million dollars and De Jong & Co.'s reputation. Hamilton was going to meet me for dinner in New York on his way back from the Netherlands Antilles. I would make sure I had something to tell him.

My arrival in New York was just as intimidating as always. Although it was half past seven local time when I left the airport, it was after midnight according to my own biological clock. Not the right time to deal with the stress of New York's welcome.

As I emerged from the terminal, I beat off a chauffeur who offered to give me a lift in his boss's limousine for a hundred dollars. I grabbed a yellow taxi. The driver, whose name according to the licence pinned to his dashboard was Diran Gregorian, did not seem to speak English. He didn't even acknowledge the words 'Westbury Hotel'. But he started his taxi and drove off towards the city at full speed.

Fortunately his headlong flight was hindered by the Long Island traffic jams. We crossed the Triboro Bridge with New York's skyline welcoming us on the left. I tried to pick out as many of the buildings as I could. Most prominent was the Empire State Building, incomplete without the figure of King Kong clambering up it. In front was the smaller and more elegant Chrysler Building, whose peak rose like a minaret, calling the faithful money-makers to their desks each morning. I picked out the Citicorp Building, the top right-hand corner of its roof cleanly sliced off, and in the distance the green rectangular slab of the UN jutting out into the East River. Other lesser structures clustered round these in the middle of Manhattan Island. Then, to the left stretched a plain of the low, brown tenements of Soho, the East Village, and the Bowery, until the huge twin peaks of the World Trade Center dwarfed the Wall Street office blocks surrounding them downtown. My pulse quickened despite my fatigue. Amongst all those buildings were lights, noise, traffic and people. Millions of people working and playing. They beckoned even the tiredest traveller to join them.

We finally made it to the hotel. I threw down my bag without bothering to unpack it, and flopped into bed. I fell asleep immediately.

I wasn't due at Bloomfield Weiss until ten o'clock, so I could linger over the excellent Westbury breakfast. One of the great pleasures of being away from the office was the opportunity to have a long, leisurely breakfast, instead of cramming down a stale bun at my desk at half past seven in the morning. The Westbury is Manhattan's 'English' hotel. I had been booked in there because it was the hotel Hamilton usually stayed in when he was in New York. It had elegance without opulence. A tapestry in the foyer, Regency furniture and nineteenth-century landscapes could almost persuade you that you were in an English country hotel and not in an eight-storey block of stone in the middle of Manhattan.

Finally sated, I caught a taxi, Haitian driver this time, and bucketed down to Wall Street, a local French-language radio station blaring in my ears.

I was a few minutes early, so I asked the taxi-driver to drop me off at the top of Wall Street so I could walk the last few blocks to Bloomfield Weiss's offices. Walking down Wall Street was like descending into a canyon, with huge walls shooting up on both sides. Although it was a sunny day, the giant buildings threw the street into shadow, and at this time of morning it still felt cool. Halfway down the street I turned left and then right, down narrower streets, the buildings coming ever closer together, the shadows ever deeper. Finally I came to a fifty-storey black tower, which looked more sinister than those surrounding it. The words 'Bloomfield Weiss' were printed in small gold lettering above the entrance.

I had been told to go up to the forty-fifth floor and ask for Lloyd Harbin, the head of high yield bond sales. I waited in the reception area for a couple of minutes before he came round to get me. He was of average height, but had a very compact frame. His shoulders were broad and his neck bulged with muscle. He strode across the room, hand outstretched and voice booming, 'Hi Paul, how are you? Lloyd Harbin.'

I was prepared for the iron handshake. I had learned at school that if you pushed your hand hard into the joint between thumb and forefinger of your adversary, it was impossible for him to grip your hand tightly. I had developed this technique so that it was not obvious, but was still very effective against the American marine types. It momentarily put Lloyd Harbin off his stride.

But Lloyd was not going to be disconcerted by a young wimp of a Brit and recovered himself in a moment. 'Have you seen a Wall Street trading floor before?' he asked.

I shook my head.

'Well, come and see ours then.'

I followed him through some grey double doors. Bloomfield Weiss's trading floor was not quite the largest on Wall Street and certainly not the most modern, but it was the most active. Stretching out on all sides were hundreds of dealing desks. Large electronic boards proclaimed the latest news, stock prices and the time all round the world. Milling around the desks were an army of men in regulation Brooks Brothers white shirts, interspersed with a few women, mostly wearing tight dresses, lots of make-up and elaborate hair-dos. Trading floors are still male-dominated, the women were nearly all assistants and secretaries.

The floor was alive with the urgent buzz of voices, passing information, arguing, abusing, ordering. Standing on the edge of that room, I found myself in the throbbing heart of capitalist America, the place from where all the money was pumped around the system.

'Here, come over to my desk, and I will show you our operation,' Lloyd said.

I followed him through the trading room, picking my way through the jumble of wayward chairs, papers and rubbish bins. Lloyd's desk was in the middle of a close-knit group of men in white shirts. I felt conspicuous as the only man in the room wearing a jacket, and so took it off. I still felt conspicuous as the only man in the room with a striped shirt, but there was nothing I could do about that.

Lloyd pointed out the two groups of people involved in trading junk bonds, the salesmen and the traders. It was the salesmen's job to talk to clients and try to persuade them to buy or sell bonds. It was the traders' job to determine at what price these bonds would be bought or sold. The traders were responsible for managing the bond positions owned by the firm. Traders bought and sold either from clients or from other traders at other brokers, collectively known as 'the Street'. It was generally much more profitable to trade with clients, and it was only by talking to clients that the traders could get the information on what was going on in the market, which was so important to running a profitable position. Thus the salesmen needed the traders and the traders needed the salesmen. However, this symbiotic relationship had its rough side.