at it and before long you’ll have your nice house in Long Island, your German sports car and your decent sized yacht. Your kids will go to the right schools, your wife will be invited to the right parties, and you will no longer keep in touch with your pals from college who got better grades than you but who made the life-destroying error of opting for a career in engineering or civic service.
Life as a Wall Street trader can be very sweet. And that, of course, is why the students were there.
Matthew looked around. Sophie was sitting diagonally in front of him. He caught her eye and smiled at her. She smiled back. It hadn’t been his imagination. She was still gorgeous, with her perfect figure and a complexion so nice you wanted to sing to it. Matthew definitely wanted to get to know her.
A tall blond Californian barged along the row of seats and sat down next to Matthew.
‘Mind if I sit here? My name’s Scott Petersen. Nice to meet you.’
Scott Petersen was an inch or two taller than Matthew, an inch or two broader and maybe an inch or two better looking. Matthew disliked him at once.
‘Hi. Matthew Gradley.’
They shook hands.
‘From England, right?’
‘Right.’
‘At least that’s easy,’ said Petersen, looking round the room. ‘We’ve got twenty-two North Americans, same number of Europeans, then maybe fifteen or twenty from everywhere else. Mostly Pacific Rim, I guess, but I bumped into a couple of South Americans earlier and I know there’s a Russian and some kind of Middle Eastern oil princess.’
Matthew nudged his neighbour. Down the row to Matthew’s right came a plump dark-skinned girl, her hair piled up and fastened with a couple of heavy gold clips. Gold glittered and clunked at her fingers, wrist and neck. She walked looking straight ahead, her heavy-set face impassive.
‘That’s her,’ whispered Petersen. ‘I’ve heard she only just managed to graduate from college and her English is none too good either. But her family controls oil reserves worth tens of billions of dollars and –’
Petersen shrugged. He understood it, but he didn’t like it. At Madison merit is the only way to get ahead, but merit comes in different shapes, and the podgy figure of the oil princess was one of them. Matthew turned to her.
‘How do you do,’ he said. ‘Matthew Gradley.’
‘Yes. How do you do,’ replied the girl in a heavy accent. ‘Fareshti Al Shahrani –’
Anything further she had intended to say was interrupted as the entrance door opened and a man strode across to the podium. The students fell silent. The man was Dan Kramer, the Lion of Wall Street.
The old-fashioned walnut podium concealed a battery of switches controlling the sound system, lights, blinds, screens, projectors – everything. But Kramer stood away from the podium. He hadn’t any slides, and his voice needed no amplification. He was not a large man, but with a mane of dusty blond hair bristling round a granite face, he didn’t need to be large to be awe-inspiring. When Time magazine had done a cover story on Kramer entitled ‘The Lion of Wall Street’, the nickname became permanent. When he was calm, he looked fierce. When he was angry, he was terrifying. Today Kramer was not angry, but he was emphatic.
‘My name is Daniel Kramer. I am the Chairman and Chief Executive of Madison. I would like to welcome you all to this training programme today.’
He grinned, but his smile cheered no one. It showed too many teeth and lasted a few seconds too long.
‘You succeeded in obtaining a job here because the people who interviewed you believed that you have what it takes. We try hard to be right because it’s a waste of our time being wrong. But we do get it wrong, about one time in three. When we screw up, we say sorry and ask you to leave. We don’t want you to have a nasty life, but we want you to lead it outside of this organisation.
‘Those of you who remain with us will sometimes wonder if you made the right choice. The work is hard, the pressure is relentless. Each time you think you’ve mastered a task, we will increase your responsibilities, demand more from you. You will meet every challenge or you will leave the firm. If you continue to succeed, you will earn sums of money that are unimaginable to all but a tiny fraction of the population. You will also have the satisfaction of knowing that you’ve made it in one of the world’s most demanding workplaces. So much for your rewards.
‘More important to me are the rewards for the firm. I am sometimes asked to define our strategy. That’s easy. In every country where we operate, we recruit the best. Once we’ve recruited them, we retain them. Then we just get on with our jobs, as best we can. That’s it. The rewards for the firm will follow.’
Kramer continued to prowl to and fro across the floor of the amphitheatre.
‘Are there any questions?’
Coming from him, this wasn’t a question. It was a joke. Nobody asked a question, nobody ever had since Kramer started giving these speeches. He smiled once more. Too many teeth again and the smile lasted long after the light had vanished. Without another word, the Lion of Wall Street stalked from the room.
Matthew knew beforehand that Kramer wasn’t exactly a touchy-feely kind of guy. And Matthew didn’t just cope with competition; he thrived on it. All the same, Kramer was genuinely menacing, and Matthew’s mouth felt dry. He glanced downwards and across to where Sophie was sitting. She looked completely composed. She wasn’t licking her lips, or shifting in her seat, or fiddling with her pencils, or doing any of the other things that the other students were doing. She just looked beautiful and desirable. Matthew forgot Kramer.
He opened his folder and took out a card which he’d bought that morning. He scrawled something inside, scribbled Sophie’s name on the envelope, and tossed it accurately on to her desk.
She looked round to see where it had come from and sent Matthew a polite smile. She opened the envelope and read the card. She smiled, not politely this time, and sent Matthew a look, which meant ‘Yes’. With a bit of luck it even meant, ‘Yes, please, I’d be delighted’.
The inscription inside the card was brief. It ran: ‘Dear Mrs Gradley, as today is the first day of our honeymoon, perhaps you would care to dine with me this evening? Eight at The Riverside. Your loving husband, Mr Gradley.’
11
Hank Daggert, the Chief Executive of Tominto Oil, didn’t care too much for the mother country. He liked some things, of course. He liked Maggie Thatcher, the flexible labour market and North Sea Oil. But the list of things he didn’t like was much longer. He disliked the Queen, trade unions, New Labour, John Lennon, unarmed policemen, the BBC, hot tea, warm beer, and cold rooms. He didn’t like the bunch of old Etonians who were helping him buy Aberdeen Drilling but he hadn’t much choice. He was buying a British company and he figured that picking Coburg’s, the biggest independent British bank, was the best way to succeed. All the same, Daggert listened to Piers St George Hanbury with growing irritation.
‘You’re telling me there was a time bomb in that data room all along?’
‘Yes. We believe you should reduce your bid by ten million pounds or insist that the seller insures you against
