Isabel was a slight, dark-haired woman of about thirty. She was half sitting on a desk, sipping a cup of coffee. ‘Jesus, I don’t know. My guy in the housing authority really wants to do it. And I think his boss wants to do it too. But his boss’s boss?’ Her voice was low and husky, and she spoke with a slow, relaxed drawl. Her English was good, with a slightly nasal accent, which I would recognize later as Brazilian.
‘Can you fix it?’
‘I’m a carioca. Rio’s my home town. Of course I can fix it.’ The corners of her mouth twitched. ‘I just don’t know if I can fix it this century, that’s all.’
Ricardo smiled. ‘I’m sure you can, Isabel. But I’m happy to go down there with you if you need me. I could talk to Oswaldo Bocci. Get him to run a few favourable stories. Maybe a piece about how this is the best chance Rio has to begin to do something about the favelas. He owes us after that deal we did for him last year.’
‘The local press are positive already,’ said Isabel, flicking a strand of dark hair out of her eyes. ‘And I’d like to leave Oswaldo out of it unless we’re really desperate. I’m flying down there on Wednesday night. I hope I can sort things out then. If that doesn’t work, maybe you should call him.’
‘Well, good luck,’ said Ricardo. ‘Presumably, we can apply this model to other cities?’
‘Oh, yes. We should be able to use it everywhere. Certainly in Brazil. As soon as we’ve closed the Rio deal, I’m going to talk to São Paulo and Salvador. But this structure should work anywhere in Latin America where there are people living in shanty-towns, which is everywhere. We need World Development Fund support for each deal, but they seem to think it’s a good use of their funds.’
‘Would it work in Romford?’ It was Miguel, the tall Argentine aristocrat.
‘Oi, you leave Romford alone!’ protested a burly young man with a loud tie and very short hair. His name was Dave, I remembered.
‘Perhaps you’re right. It’s a lost cause.’
‘Thank you for that suggestion, Miguel,’ said Ricardo. ‘In fact you’d be a good choice to open our Essex rep office. But, seriously, this is a flagship deal. Once we’ve closed it, I want the rest of you on the road looking for more. Now, Carlos?’
Carlos’s rumblings about a possible deal for the United Mexican States passed me by. My eyes were still on Isabel. She wasn’t exactly good-looking. Her nose was a bit too long, her mouth a bit too wide. Her clothes were nothing special, blue shortish skirt, cream blouse, black shoes, and her hair hung, untamed, around her face. But there was something about her that was very feminine, sexy. Maybe it was her voice, or the way she held herself. Or it could have been her eyes, large, deep brown, almost liquid, half hidden under long lashes. Just then they darted towards me, and caught my stare. The corners of her mouth twitched again, and I hastily switched my gaze to Carlos.
‘Did you understand all that?’ asked Jamie, when it was over.
‘Some of it. I have a lot of questions. There’s a lot to learn.’
‘Like how to stare at Isabel and stop your mouth from dropping open at the same time,’ said Jamie.
‘Was it that obvious?’
‘Don’t worry, we’ve all done it. You get used to her after a while.’
‘There’s something about her. I don’t know what it is.’
‘She’s as sexy as hell, that’s what it is. But I wouldn’t make it too obvious. She bites.’
‘Really? She looks friendly enough to me.’
‘Well, don’t touch. Don’t even look. Trust me.’
I shrugged, and sat at Jamie’s desk. I had never seen a fully equipped dealing desk before, and Dekker’s were state-of-the-art. Jamie explained it all to me. There were five screens, which provided news, prices and analysis in a range of different colours. Jamie seemed to have an unpleasant predilection for pink. To add to the clutter was a phone board with thirty lines, a fan, a Spanish — English dictionary, two volumes of the Bankers’ Almanac, and a small silver rugby ball commemorating an Argentine sevens tournament. The whole was framed in a collage of yellow Post-it stickers and topped with a haphazard scattering of paper.
‘OK, let me tell you the basics,’ said Jamie, after he had shown me how to get the rugby commentary up on the Bloomberg information service. ‘All the guys on this half of the square,’ he gestured with his arm, ‘are sales people. Our job is to talk to customers, give them information, find out what they want to do, and then buy and sell bonds from them. These people,’ he pointed to the other half of the square of dealing desks, ‘are the traders. They make markets in hundreds of different bonds. So when one of our customers wants to buy or sell something, we ask one of the traders for a price. He gives us a bid and offer. We reflect that to the customer, who will either sell at the bid price or buy at the offer price. In theory, the bid/offer spread should be profit for us.’
I nodded. So far, so clear.
‘The other way we make money is through new issues. See those people there?’ He pointed to some of the desks outside the square. I noticed that Isabel was at one of them reading through a sheaf of documents. Jamie followed my eyes and coughed. ‘Of course you do. They’re known as Capital Markets. Their job is to talk to potential borrowers and put together a bond issue that raises money for them at the lowest rate. Which, by the way, is usually pretty high. Investors aren’t going to take on the risk that one of these countries defaults again without demanding a decent return.’
Jamie spent the next couple of hours explaining how Dekker functioned. I listened closely, turning over each new piece of information in my mind, seeing how it fitted in with what I had heard before, using it to try to anticipate what he had yet to tell me.
I listened in to his calls through a second phone plugged into his desk, as he spoke to his customers. These turned out to be a wide range of different types of institution: a small French bank, a British merchant bank, a Dutch insurance company, an American hedge fund.
He talked about Venezuela and the IMF negotiations. He exchanged rumours on a future Mexican deal. He talked about football and what was on television the night before. He bought and sold millions of dollars of bonds, always selling at a price slightly higher than he was buying. Many of these trades were recorded as ‘DT’ and then a number. Jamie explained that these were numbered accounts at the firm’s Dekker Trust affiliate in the Cayman Islands.
Lunch was an exotic goat’s cheese and salad sandwich, and a Coke brought round by a kid in overalls carrying a big tray. There was no need to leave the desk. No time, either.
Conversations moved with the time zones, picking up Brazil late morning, the rest of the continent and New York in the afternoon, California in the evening. In fact, the pace quickened as the day wore on: many of the other players in the market operated out of New York or Miami. Our day lengthened to incorporate theirs. Much of all this was in Spanish, and I couldn’t understand it. I would have to learn Spanish.
At about six o’clock I went to see Charlotte and her team in Research, and returned to my desk with an armful of reports. The political and economic analysis was excellent. I was particularly impressed with the quick and dirty notes marked ‘For Internal Distribution Only’. These made heavy use of informal sources: local bankers, government officials, traders in New York. I read deeper and deeper, fascinated.
Isabel’s desk was next to mine. She seemed to be constantly busy, reading through the piles of papers next to her, tapping out notes on her computer, or going over documents on the phone in what I assumed was Portuguese. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help my eyes drifting over towards her every now and then. Her face was partly obscured by strands of dark hair as she worked. Occasionally she would pause, bite her lower lip and stare ahead into space. She was delectable. Even when I wasn’t looking at her, I could just catch the scent of her perfume in the air, or hear her voice on the phone. Concentrate!