Paul Erdman - The Billion Dollar Sure Thing

Rosen, unknowingly, had hit upon Kellermann’s weak spot: he had given his word.

“Agreed, Mr. Rosen. I shall proceed.”

“Fine. The funds will be coming by cable from the First National in Nassau. If you don’t have them by nine tomorrow morning, call me up. I’m at the Baur au Lac, Room 718. In any case I’ll be keeping in touch the next few days.”

And that was that. Now Beirut. He placed the call and then undressed and stepped into the shower.

The shower dribbled, like most European showers. Probably because, when you come right down to it, these birds over here still have an aversion toward water—at least too much of it at one time. That’s why the bidets, probably. And the looks of horror when you order some ice water in Paris on a scorching hot summer day. At least the towels were big. Huge in fact. The phone rang. In the bathroom.

Why not? thought Stanley Rosen and picked up the dainty pink receiver.

“Your call to Beirut, sir. You did place one, didn’t you?”

“That’s right. I’ll hang on.”

A minute went by and Rosen still hung. Onto a pink telephone, in the bathroom of a Swiss hotel, calling an Arab, to talk about buying gold and selling the dollar, by the millions. It had been a long way from New Jersey.

But, he thought, it was time to drop New Jersey, and Miami, and Las Vegas, and the rest of it. Very, very slowly and very, very carefully. Because in the investment business there is no such thing as lasting success. There were merely high points—and then nothing. That’s the lesson the go-go boys in the fund business, the hot-shots in the brokerage game, the hot-wind artists in the savings and loan industry would never learn. So after three or maybe five years, they ended up on the same pavement they started from. There is a very definite cycle to success in any business. Rosen was convinced of this. It was obvious to any fool in industry. From the transistor to the colour TV to fast-back car to miniskirts. They started as an innovation, soared to unbelievable heights within a short time, and ended up overproduced, market-saturated, and ordinary. As time progressed, the life cycles were becoming shorter and shorter and shorter, from sensational birth to ignominious commonplaceness. The same was true with ideas in the financial business. Growth, hot new issues, performance—the gospel of a bright new generation, the obvious solution, the modern way of life—if one expected to live for three years. Capital preservation, yield, interest—the new philosophy of a new permanent approach to investments. Life expectancy: two years. International diversification, natural resources, ecology—the magic formula for the next well-spring to eternal financial success. Interest span: eighteen months. The problem was, as Stanley so well knew, you had to sell the clients on something. And no sooner were they sold, the something was passé. But if you did not sell them, somebody else right in the middle of the current product cycle would, and no more clients. A rat race.

Stanley had, with the rest of them, tried them all on. Now he was down to gold, devaluations, tax havens. Arabs. Perhaps the shortest life cycle of all. And for what?

And then there was the even bigger problem. Jersey, Miami, Vegas, and all that.

Maybe the answer was so simple it might work. Just cut out. Move to Switzerland, Bermuda, even London. With maybe $30 or $35 million there could be no doubt that he would be accepted, maybe not by the people right at the top of the heap, but still accepted by most people for what he represented: money and brains. Then he would manage just a very few clients—to keep his hand in. All offshore. No more monkey business.

Stanley Rosen had reached that ominous stage of almost forty-five years of age; the point of no return. What he wanted to find above all other things was something that had totally passed him by thus far: a period of real happiness and simple contentment. He had first really sensed that such an unbelievable goal might still be achievable not so very long ago. In August he’d spent three weeks doing absolutely nothing on the island of Sardinia, with a young girl of twenty-four from Norway. They had met at the Copenhagen airport and had taken the same taxi into town. They had dinner outside in the Tivoli. Corny, but fun. Then five days later, off into the blue together. Totally unplanned. To Sardinia. The Calle di Volpe. A hotel built for no more than sixty guests; Frenchmen, Belgians, Swiss, British, Italians, Germans. All well to do. Some even titled. Clubby. But they had accepted Stanley. They had asked his advice. They had invited him onto their yachts for a supper. And nobody had asked him for a loan. He had even accepted the invitation of a pair from Brussels to drop in on them at home afterwards. It turned out he was in the Cabinet. Yet Stanley Rosen was accepted as an old friend, a guest of honour. Sure. Rosen knew that they knew. That he had a great deal of money. But somehow, almost like sleight of hand, it was never mentioned. He knew that they knew he was an American “primitive.” But they seemed to regard this as merely curious; his Jersey accent as rather cute; his mannerisms as “natural.” Rosen was no fool. But he knew that here was a world that he must eventually pay for on the open market. He knew that the question of price would inevitably come up. But it would be worth it. Then the crude pigs from Chicago, the show girls from Las Vegas, their drunken brawls in Nassau, the nit-picking little Jews from Jersey: all this could be buried and forgotten, just as his parents had buried their memories of their ghetto in Poland. Through the simple process of emigration across the Atlantic. Thank God he had his divorce well behind him. For with her, her ghastly makeup, her shrill voice, her girlfriends, her canasta parties, the whole idea would have been absurd. But with somebody like that girl from Bergen, with a clientele in the Near East, with the credentials of a stunning success during the Great Dollar devaluation, it was possible.

The pink telephone finally came alive again.

“ Hallo , hallo , qui est là ?” came the voice.

“This is Stanley Rosen calling from Switzerland, I would like to—”

“ Hallo , hallo. Je ne parle pas Anglais , Monsieur .”

“Oh my God,” came Stanley Rosen’s reply. He clicked the receiver rather frantically, hoping to hell that the connection would not be broken.

“Operator, operator,” he yelled.

Nothing. And then more than nothing. The other end hung up. So did Stanley. “Son of a bitch,” cursed Stanley Rosen.

Well, nothing to be done. It would take at least two or three hours to get through again. Forget about it until later.

The phone rang again.

“This is the operator, Mr. Rosen. Was your call to Beirut satisfactory? It was rather short.”

“Yes, operator. Perfectly satisfactory. Thank you.”

No sense in making an absolute ass of himself. This was certainly one thing he had to correct and quickly. A quick course in French and perhaps one in German. Mr. Stanley Rosen would soon be as European as Grace Kelly.

Shower completed, Stanley decided to take a nap. He was satisfied, satisfied with the future now that the biggest action of his lifetime was underway.

HISTORIANS who later reconstructed these happenings during this first week of November determined that the real action started around two-fifteen on that Wednesday afternoon. The dollar was hit by the biggest wave of selling thus far experienced in the twentieth century. It dropped 3 percent in value within a matter of two hours against every major currency in Western Europe, led by the Swiss franc. Around three o’clock it looked as if a recovery might occur, but then came the news of the afternoon gold fixing. The price jumped $4.10 in one session. It meant that the gold pools in both Zurich and London were unable to cope with the sudden burst of demand for the metal. After that, the situation of the dollar worsened by the minute.