Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

"Emma, how about bringing me that file in your left-hand desk drawer. The one marked 'Trust Account.'"

"The blue one?"

"Right. Amy's. You know it. You updated the thing about a month ago when I switched all her money out of stocks and into money-market funds." That move had been my one small attempt to ride Noda's horse in the direction I suspected it was headed.

"I remember." She glanced at me disdainfully. "I also remember you predicted interest rates were about to go up."

Which, she was tactful enough not to add, they hadn't. She also didn't mention she had greeted my market prognosis with open skepticism. As usual.

"Well, for what it's worth, I still think rates are headed up soon. And Emma…"

"What?" She was grimly digging through the files.

"Ever think about some gold stocks for your retirement investments? There're some mining issues I hear look good. Golden Sceptre, Golaith, Vanderbilt…"

"That's Amy's portfolio you wanted, correct?" She didn't miss a beat. "Right?"

She doted on Amy and always got very testy whenever I dabbled in the management of my daughter's little nest egg. It's galling to admit Emma's market instincts did at times seem superior to mine. John Maynard Keynes once said there's nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world. Maybe he was right: could be I was shackled by too much logical introspection. Never a problem for Emma. All I know is, if her daughter-in-law in Jersey phoned in (on my line) that she'd just baked a terrific cherry pie using "New Improved!" Crisco, Emma marched out and loaded up on Procter amp; Gamble. And the damn thing automatically went up ten points.

"Here it is." She placed it on my desk with a decidedly disapproving sniff.

"Thanks."

Dear Lord, I thought, stand by us sinners now and at the hour of our death. I went over it quickly with a hand calculator. About ninety-four thousand. Which I figured would pay for roughly a year and a half of college the way those already inflated costs were skyrocketing. But by the time Noda got finished with the dollar, it probably wouldn't cover a weekend seminar.

Maybe I couldn't save the U.S., but I was damned well going to get my daughter through school. With fear and trembling I started calling banks. Naturally I spread the action around town, BS'ing a lot of currency traders and bank FOREX (foreign exchange) departments in the process. I'd buy some pounds sterling, then… by the way, long as we're on the phone, Mort, I think I might need a few million yen in, oh, say about a month. Why don't we just save time and write some contracts now? Besides, bird in the hand, you know. Then I'd take those pounds I'd just acquired and use them to buy several million deutsche-mark forwards from the next dealer I knew.

How much did I go out, total? Remember, currency forwards run around a penny on the dollar, so I effectively "sold" something like ten million greenbacks, deliverable in one month, when I figured they'd be worth… it was hard even to imagine. Most likely zilch. Since I was flying blind. Amy's college fund bought everything. You name it, I went long. She ended up owning futures on Swiss francs, German marks, yen, lira, pounds sterling, Canadian dollars, even French francs. I was actually tempted, briefly, by the peso (well, she loved her trip to Mexico last summer), a sentimental gesture I sternly resisted.

By the time I'd finished it was four forty-five, meaning my new, ninth-grade owner of a United Nations basket of foreign currencies had just arrived home from her West Side private school. She always charged in at four-thirty. I called Joanna and asked to speak to my daughter. Jo's response to the sound of my voice was only slightly less fulsome than Donna Austen's. Finally Amy appeared at my ear.

"Dad, how come you're calling on the downstairs phone? You're supposed to always use the one in my room. Mom hates it when-"

"Sweetie, that line is in constant and uninterrupted engagement between the hours of four thirty-one and eight- fifteen. It's never possible to reach you there at this time."

"Okay, so what's up?"

"Nothing much. How about if you and I caught up on things a bit? What do you say to dinner tonight? Just the two of us? We might even consider a real grown-up meal for a change, no alfalfa sprouts."

"Where?" She was immediately on guard. What if she ended up confronted with a red-tinged steak, sliced off one of the living mammals of the earth?

"Anywhere. Someplace you've always wanted to go. My treat."

"Wow! Anywhere?"

"Your pick."

Long pause, then, "How about Windows on the World?"

"Sounds good." I guessed one of her school friends had just been. Meaning prestige was on the line. I was right.

"Sharon's dad took her there last weekend for her birthday and it sounded really neat. She said you can see everything. It's probably a lot nicer than Top of the Six's."

Where, in case you hadn't guessed, I'd taken her on her birthday.

"Food's standard, but I think we can piece together a spread that'll meet your guidelines. Will your mother let you go?" Joanna had total weekday custody, and she played it for all it was worth.

"She's got a big date tonight. That creepy real estate guy I told you about. The one with the new silver Saab he thinks is so hot."

"Don't tell me about it. And don't call your mother's friends creeps. I'm sure they're all very nice."

"Want to bet? This guy is total weirdness. But she'll let me go. No sweat. What time?"

When I was a youth, I don't remember young ladies using phrases such as "no sweat." Probably an imperfection of memory, one of many.

"Pick you up at seven-thirty sharp. Call me if there's a problem."

"Okay."

"And Amy…"

"Yeah."

"Uh, think about wearing an actual dress. Not one of those experimental East Village-"

"Daaad. I'm gonna look so straight. You'll see."

"Never doubted it for an instant."

That night I'd intended to explain that her college fund was currently being hedged via a comparatively unorthodox investment scenario. However, she was too busy marveling over the lights of Manhattan a hundred stories down to give me much time to talk.

What I really wanted to tell her but somehow didn't was that I'd had this spiritualist vision we'd been reincarnated as a couple of those crazy sheiks at Monte Carlo-when I'm the guy who never ventures past the quarter slots next to the door. It was as though I'd pillaged the hundred grand carefully hoarded for her future and spread it over a giant roulette play, stacking chips on every number on the board. Who knew where Dai Nippon's wheel would stop, but when it did, one of them had to pay off a hundred to one. Noda couldn't touch us. Right?

No sweat.

Tam was headed east in the black Nissan limo, listening to the talk. And thinking. Seated alongside was Kenji Asano, wearing a light tan suit and gold cufflinks, while the space opposite was occupied by two individuals who made her very uneasy. One was the instantly famous Matsuo Noda, the other his niece, talk-show economist Akira Mori. Noda was wearing a black three-piece banker's suit, the perfect accompaniment to his silver hair, and small wireless spectacles that magnified his penetrating eyes. Mori, in designer beige, looked as if she'd just stepped from the NHK studios, which in fact she had only a few hours earlier.

Three days had passed since Noda's Imperial press conference, four counting today, with this sudden trip being only the latest in a series of unexpected events. The major new twist: getting her interviews rolling was turning out to be a lot harder than it should have been. Before leaving New York, she'd arranged for a day with Dr. Noburu Matsugami of the Electrotechnical Institute at Tsukuba Science City to go over the latest progress of MITI's Advanced Robot Technology Project, now the world leader, the undisputed state of the art in robotics. Matsugami had even volunteered to supply introductions to the other MITI labs at Tsukuba. Everything was set.