Once, as my eyes flicked up towards her, I saw her looking back at me.
‘You’re enthusiastic,’ she said, smiling.
‘I’ve got a lot to learn.’
‘It gets easier once you start actually doing it. Where did you come from? Before here?’
‘Until last week, I taught Russian.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Really. And what brings you to Dekker?’
‘I needed the job. And Jamie was good enough to introduce me. Why they took me on, I’m not quite sure.’
‘Are you a good friend of Jamie’s?’
‘Yes. Very good friends. I’ve known him for ten years.’
There the conversation ended. She turned back to her phone and picked it up. I wasn’t sure whether I had said something wrong.
And then my own phone rang.
It was the two consecutive rings of an external call. That was funny. I didn’t think I had given anyone my number yet.
I picked it up. ‘Dekker,’ I said, in my best imitation of the clipped tones I had heard around me all day.
‘Can I speak with Martin Beldecos?’ said a female American voice over an international line.
I hadn’t heard of him. I looked around. Nearly everyone had gone home, with the exception of Ricardo, Pedro and Isabel. She was deeply involved in a telephone conversation of her own, and Ricardo and Pedro were too far away to ask.
‘Er, he’s not here at the moment,’ I said. ‘Can I give him a message tomorrow?’
‘Yes, it’s Donald Winters’ assistant here, from United Bank of Canada in Nassau. I have a fax I need to send Mr Beldecos. Can you give me his fax number?’
‘Hold on a sec,’ I said. There was a fax machine a few steps away. I nipped over to it, checked the number, and gave it to the woman. She thanked me and hung up.
I dug out the internal telephone list, and looked up BELDECOS, MARTIN 6417. That was my extension! No wonder the phone call has come through to me. He must have been the previous occupant of my desk.
The fax machine behind me spluttered into life.
I walked over to the machine, and took the single sheet back to my desk. It was addressed to Martin Beldecos at Dekker Ward on United Bank of Canada Nassau Branch fax paper. The message was short and simple.
Following your inquiry, we have been unable to identify the beneficial owner of International Trading and Transport (Panama). We transferred funds from their account with us to Dekker Trust’s account at Chalmet et Cie’s Cayman Islands branch under the instructions of Mr Tony Hempel, a Miami-based lawyer who is the Company Secretary of International Trading and Transport.
The fax was signed by Donald Winters, Vice President. ‘Isabel?’
She had just put down the phone. ‘Yes?’
‘I’ve just got this fax for Martin Beldecos. Where does he sit?’
Isabel didn’t answer me straight away. She tensed, and drew in her breath.
‘He used to sit right where you are,’ she replied eventually, in a monotone.
‘He left, did he?’ I could tell something was wrong with Martin Beldecos’s departure. ‘Was he fired?’
She shook her head. ‘No. No, he wasn’t. He was killed.’
I exhaled. ‘How?’
‘He was murdered. In Caracas. Thieves broke into his hotel room while he was asleep. He must have woken and surprised them. They knifed him.’
‘Jesus! When was this?’
‘About three weeks ago.’
‘Oh.’ I shivered. It was an eerie feeling to know that the last occupant of this desk, this chair, was now dead.
I wanted to ask her more, but she seemed reluctant to talk, and I didn’t want to risk saying the wrong thing.
‘OK, um, so what shall I do with this?’
‘I’ll take it,’ she said.
I handed her the sheet of paper. She glanced at it, paused, frowning for a few seconds, scribbled something on it, and put it in an out-tray on a nearby desk. Then she shuffled the papers in front of her, stuffed some of them into a briefcase, and put on her jacket.
‘Good night,’ she said.
‘Good night. See you tomorrow.’
She left me alone, sitting in a dead man’s chair behind a dead man’s desk.
3
I was in the office by seven the next morning. I was glad of the bike ride. If I was going to be stuck inside all day, I would need the fresh air. Ricardo was there when I arrived. If he hadn’t been wearing a different shirt I would have sworn he had spent the night at his desk.
I smiled at Isabel as she came in. She gave me a quick smile and a ‘Hi’.
I dumped my jacket at my desk, grabbed a cup of coffee, and walked over to Jamie’s. He was chatting to Dave, the big trader from Romford.
‘Morning,’ said Dave. ‘So we didn’t wipe you out on your first day?’
‘I’m still here.’
‘What time did you leave last night?’ asked Jamie.
‘About eleven.’
‘A good first day’s work. Let me guess, Ricardo was still here when you left?’
I nodded. There was a pause as we took in our early-morning dose of caffeine.
‘I heard about Martin Beldecos,’ I said. ‘Isabel told me last night.’
‘Bad news, that,’ said Dave. ‘Very bad news.’
‘Isabel said he was murdered.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jamie. ‘I heard the police in Caracas have caught the men who did it.’
‘That’s not all I heard,’ said Dave, lowering his voice.
Jamie and I looked at him expectantly.
‘Yeah, there’s a rumour that it wasn’t just a hotel burglary gone wrong. Miguel was down there last week. The word is it was a contract killing. One of the drug gangs.’
‘A contract killing?’ said Jamie in astonishment. ‘On Martin Beldecos? Martin Beldecos, the compliance officer with the glasses and the receding hairline? What, was he trying to grab the paper-clip franchise for South America?’
‘That’s what Mig said!’ Dave protested defiantly. ‘You know he knows people down there—’
We were interrupted by the sharp clapping of hands. ‘It’s seven fifteen, compañeros!’ called Ricardo. The room was silent as we all clustered round him.
The morning meeting made a bit more sense than it had the day before. The market was spooked on the Venezuelan news: prices were off five points. But people down there in the know held the view that the breakdown of talks with the IMF was just posturing by their aged president. This information we decided to keep to ourselves until we had taken advantage of the lower prices to quietly pick up a few Venezuelan bonds for our own books. Then we would tell the world.
The meeting ended and Jamie and I walked back to his desk.
Dave’s words were still on my mind. ‘Do you think this guy Beldecos was murdered by a contract killer?’ I asked him.
Jamie snorted. ‘Of course not. Dave has a vivid imagination. And despite the slicked-back hair and the Italian suits, Miguel is just an old gossip. The poor guy was killed by hotel burglars.’ He shuddered. ‘It could happen to any one of us, that’s the really scary thing. Now, let’s get on with it.’
I wanted to ask Jamie more about Martin Beldecos but, like Isabel, he seemed reluctant to talk. And I didn’t want to seem too morbid; after all, I hadn’t even known the guy. So I let it drop.
The trading day began.
I listened. There was a lot of activity that morning. Activity translated into noise. Not necessarily volume of noise, more diversity. There was the murmur of a dozen different conversations, some in English, some in Spanish, the sharp cries of people telling their colleagues to pick up the phone, the regular crackle of prices from the brokers’ loudspeakers on the trading desk and, of course, the staccato conversation of customers on the phone. But it wasn’t just the humans who made a noise, the machines did. A range of whirs, hums and occasional grinding clanks emanated from the different computers and screens. And underneath it all was the low, almost imperceptible murmur of the great building itself. It took concentration and practice to separate all these sounds, and to tune in and out of the frequencies as you skipped from conversation to conversation.