Майкл Ридпат - The Marketmaker

Go to Brazil. With Isabel. That seemed like quite an attractive idea. Perhaps the resignation could wait until I returned.

‘That is, if you’re OK with that,’ Ricardo said. ‘After what happened last time, I’d understand if you were a bit reluctant.’

I was nervous. But I’d be OK down there as long as I was careful. And, even though I was planning to resign, I didn’t want to show Ricardo, or myself for that matter, that I was a coward.

‘No, that’s fine. When do we go?’

‘Tonight.’

‘Tonight!’

‘What’s the matter? You had a lie-in this morning.’

He smiled and went back to his desk. I looked across to Isabel, who had been listening. ‘Is that OK with you?’ I said it without thinking. I suspected she had been distancing herself from me for the last week, and clearly she was not impressed with my participation in the previous night’s events.

But she smiled. ‘Of course it is. It makes a lot of sense. You know the details of the Rio deal, and Ricardo’s right, you know a lot more about the wonders of Mexico than I do.’

I caught the irony in her voice. ‘A fine investment opportunity,’ I said.

She gathered together a pile of paper on her desk and handed it to me. ‘Here, copy that. Read it. And I’ll see you at the Varig lounge at Heathrow, Terminal Three, at eight thirty. The flight leaves at ten. I’ll have the tickets.’

‘OK,’ I said, and toddled off to the photocopier.

Later, on my way out of the office, I stopped at Jamie’s desk.

‘I’m off. I’m going to Brazil tonight.’

‘Really?’ He frowned. ‘Be careful this time.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I will be.’

‘Are you going with Isabel?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, have fun.’ He grinned.

I was about to answer, ‘I will,’ but I stopped, confused. ‘We’ll see,’ I said in the end.

The plane began its descent to São Paulo. I looked out of the window at the second greatest metropolis on earth. Twenty million people live in Greater São Paulo. Low red-roofed houses sprawled as far as I could see. Sprouting out among them like the white shoots of early spring were hundreds, if not thousands, of skyscrapers. They were grouped in clumps, as if handfuls of seed had fallen together from the hand of a careless sower. On the horizon, between the brown and red of the city, and the blue of the sky, stretched a thick dark grey band of smog. As we descended, the landscape was broken up by a grey ribbon of river, and dozens of industrial sites. We passed low over a lake of the most extraordinary lime green. God had created Rio in a fit of inspired imagination, man had created São Paulo with a total lack of it.

São Paulo is the business and financial centre of Brazil. Paulistas are proud to compare their city with New York and, indeed, the long avenues flanked with skyscrapers did look impressively commercial. People in suits dashed back and forth, and the traffic moved urgently through the vast network of São Paulo’s highways. There was money to be made and work to be done and, although it was eighty-five degrees and humid, the paulistas would do it.

We met Humberto Alves’s equivalent in the São Paulo Finance Department. The paulistas had a different approach to dealing with favelas, which they called the Cingapura project. It was an idea that had supposedly been developed in Singapore, hence the name. It involved what they called ‘verticalization’. That meant tearing down the temporary structures and replacing them with modern high-rise hous-ing. It sounded to me more heavy-handed than the Rio project.

They were hot to trot. The Cingapura project had been under way now for several years, but the City was having problems finding the funds for more construction. Isabel’s ingenious trust idea was just the way to unlock the World Development Fund cash that was desperately needed to move on to the next stage. And now Rio’s deal had fallen through, São Paulo’s would be the first out in the market, which made the whole idea even more attractive.

It was a Friday, and we had meetings planned for that day and for Saturday, which showed how eager they were. As the day wore on, Isabel and I became progressively more excited as we realized that a deal might actually happen. Bloomfield Weiss were nowhere to be seen: after their humiliating withdrawal from the Rio deal, São Paulo wouldn’t take them seriously.

It was a hard day, but we worked well together. I had read the pile of documents Isabel had given me on the plane, through the night. I was well prepared, and we operated brilliantly as a team. I quickly got the hang of how her mind worked, and she treated me like a valuable partner. Although I had lost any loyalty to Dekker, I didn’t want to let Isabel down, and besides, her enthusiasm had infected me. I believed in what she was doing.

At last, at eight thirty, we finished, with a promise to be back in the municipal offices at nine the next morning. We flopped into a taxi, feeling both tired and excited at the same time.

‘Did you know that São Paulo has the best Japanese restaurants outside Japan?’ Isabel said.

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘Would you like to try one?’

‘Sure.’

She leaned forward to the taxi driver. ‘Liberdade.’

We were dropped off next to a bustling street market. The smell of spices and fried food mixed in the warm night air. Black, white and brown Brazilians mingled with the Japanese and Koreans. It was good to see people wandering around on foot after driving from place to place by car all the time. A statuesque black woman walked past with her little four-year-old son. She caught me looking at them. ‘Hey, how are you?’ she said in English, with a leer. Embarrassed at my innocence in not realizing that a mother and a hooker could be the same thing, I looked away.

Isabel led me down a street daubed with Japanese characters. Over one million Japanese are supposed to live in São Paulo. So do many people from the Middle East. I noticed a sign for Habib’s Fast Food, written in English and Japanese. Somehow it seemed typically Brazilian.

We came to a crooked wooden gateway, behind which was a tiny Japanese garden. Inside was a restaurant, divided into cosy booths. A large Japanese man was ostentatiously wielding huge knives. I winced as he twirled the blades round his hands, expecting at any moment to see a human finger added to the raw fish on the slab in front of him.

The place was bustling with Brazilians of all shades, but after a short wait we were squeezed into a tight booth for two and ordered beer.

‘Well, it looks like a favela deal is finally going to happen,’ said Isabel.

‘Yes. And so it should. You deserve it.’

‘Thank you. I like working with someone else on this. I normally do all this stuff by myself. But I think we make an excellent team.’

She smiled at me, an innocent smile of encouragement.

‘We do. It’s a shame I won’t be able to see it through with you.’

‘You won’t? Why not?’ I was pleased to see the disappointment in Isabel’s face. Actually, I was disappointed too.

‘I’m going to resign as soon as I get back to London.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘You know. We’ve talked about it before. I just can’t put up with Ricardo’s way of doing things.’

Isabel lowered her eyes. ‘I understand,’ she said.

A waitress came round for our order. After a minute’s consideration of the menu, I ordered tempura, and Isabel sushi.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘Finish my thesis, I suppose. Try to get a job.’

‘You don’t sound very optimistic.’

‘I’m not. I needed the job at Dekker. And the money. I won’t be able to sell the flat for as much as the mortgage. So I’ll have to let it, although I’ll be lucky to get enough to cover the mortgage payments. And there aren’t any jobs. But I must admit it will be good to get back to my thesis.’