A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (2 page)

"The hedge fund?" The finance minister was still in Spanish. "You work for them?"

Gabriel didn't answer the question. This was the plan, to imply that he worked for them but stop short of stating the fact directly. It was important that the minister know that the stakes for Bolivia were real; until now, few hedge funds had ventured near countries as backward and unstable as Bolivia. But it was also important that the minister see that the Calloway Group wanted to be discreet about their interest. "I'm just asking to take a look at the Article Four report," he said. "It'd be completely off the record. It's all just deep background for a long piece I'm researching."

The minister let out a weary sigh. "Does Fiona know whom you work for?"

"Fiona knows that I am a consultant." Gabriel paused again, in case the insinuation wasn't clear. "If you have another opinion, that's your business." Gabriel wondered if this was going well. It was hard to tell.

"Why would I share a classified document with a hedge fund that has a reputation for vampirism?"

"Excuse me?" Gabriel said. "I think you've misunderstood me."

"I was with Morgan Stanley in 2001, and I remember Calloway. They'd nudge a price until it triggered a short spike. They'd milk the spike on the upside, and back down again on the fall to equilibrium. They were like feral animals during the Argentina crisis: went from a hundred percent long to a hundred percent short in seconds on a rumor that they themselves probably started. They may have done well, but we all found the strategy sleazy. There was no vision, no philosophy, except to play as fast and dirty as possible."

"If they were interested in Bolivian industry, it'd be a very different thing," Gabriel said.

"Right. They'd be looking at multinationals with significant exposure to Bolivian commodities, gas, I suppose, in the face of this unusual election?"

Gabriel hesitated. The purpose of his cover was now clear to him. Based solely on his hint that he worked for Calloway, the minister had triangulated a very accurate reading of Calloway's investment strategy in Bolivia. With a tiny intimation, Gabriel had exposed everything Priya had wanted to keep under wraps. "I'm not going to speculate on what they would do here."

"Right, right." The minister cleared his throat. "I'm surprised they sent you. Are you sure you didn't go to the wrong country? Brazil is a little to the right."

"You don't want to show me the Article Four, I take it."

"You are at the bottom of the list of people I would show that report to." His voice was hoarse. He sounded wrecked. He sounded exhausted.

Eager to backpedal, Gabriel said, "I'm just a writer looking for material."

"And I'm Ronald McDonald. But you don't need to worry. I won't tell anyone."

Gabriel felt a great relief hearing that.

The minister said, "I don't want to repel you people any more than I want to throw the door open to you. It's hard for me to imagine, but I do hope that people like your boss will eventually see the wealth available here to foreign investors. It is a very rich country if you are prepared to commit for the long term." His voice had been lifting there at the end, and he caught himself, shut it down. He sighed. He must have known he was talking to the wrong person.

"I understand," Gabriel said. He didn't know what to say.

"Anything else?" the minister said.

"No. Thank you for your time," he said. Gabriel could hear that the minister was in traffic. Riding in a limousine through the squalor, probably. It had to be hard.

"Fine. Don't call this number again." The minister hung up.

Fiona answered the door in her white terry-cloth bathrobe, BlackBerry at her ear. She winked hello and slammed the door behind him. Gabriel sat down on the sofa, kicked his feet up on the coffee table. Fiona shimmied out of the robe and flung it onto the bed. She peeked around the curtain at the city. "I know," she said into the phone, "that's what I was saying, but we can always pad it if we're still short." Fiona had been the South America correspondent for the
Journal
since Gabriel was a freshman at Claremont High. And she was proud, he supposed, of her body—rightfully so.

He took his laptop out of its bag and checked his e-mail. Nothing. It was Friday, and he was supposed to turn in his report tomorrow. When she finished her conversation, Fiona chucked her BlackBerry onto the sofa. "Tell me, Gabriel, why are you still wearing clothes?"

"I've been gassed out of my hotel again," he said, not looking up from the screen.

She lit a cigarette and flopped on the sofa beside him. "That's the advantage of a five-star hotel: airtight windows." She smiled. It was a joke. Sort of. Hotel Presidente boasted that it was the highest five-star hotel in the world, and though its elevation wasn't in dispute, the five-star status seemed, to the foreign press who stayed there, a hilarious example of Bolivian pride in the face of meager circumstances.

Hotel Gloria, across the street, had a three-star rating but cost half as much, without much discernible difference in quality. Calloway would have paid for whatever hotel Gabriel wanted, but Hotel Gloria was modest enough to help him maintain his cover. So went his thinking. The décor of both the Gloria and the Presidente must have seemed terribly modern when they were decorated in the 1970s—all pumpkin shag carpets, cucumber walls, clunky chandeliers, and lots of tawny glass. It was a look that would have read hip and ironic in New York, and Gabriel was probably the only foreigner who found its sincerity in Bolivia refreshing. Unlike the others, he believed that the management of the hotels knew perfectly well how outmoded their décor was. It wasn't any funnier than the fact that their roads were falling apart. It just made an easier target.

"What do you have planned for the day?" Fiona asked. Little puffs of smoke staggered out of her mouth as she spoke.

"I'm meeting the IMF's resident representative at three."

"Grayson! I'm meeting him at one." She put her cigarette back in the ashtray. She had ordered scrambled eggs for breakfast, and the plate sat, untouched, on the coffee table. "I'm having lunch with him. You better not scoop me!" She flashed a lupine grin, and he understood that it had been a joke: he could
never
scoop her. Not that it mattered, really. "Well, Gabriel," she said, "I've got forty-five minutes before I have to go meet him, so I suggest you undress."

"I was just wondering if you have the vice president's number," he said.

"No luck with the finance minister?"

"No luck with him."

"Well, I can't give out the vice president's number."

He nodded, started typing. She made a little show of checking her watch. "Look," she said, "there are protests in Sopocachi today, and traffic will be awful, so if we're not going to fuck right now, I should get dressed."

He looked up at her, blankly as possible, and, feigning befuddlement, said, "Right, um ... I just—" He gestured vaguely toward the screen.

She smiled, barely. Stubbed out her cigarette. "Ouch," she said.

"No, no, it's not—" he began, but he didn't finish because she waved him off. It was a funny trick, a special talent of hers, to come across simultaneously as mocking and genuinely hurt.

Gabriel believed that Fiona's caustic streak was a big part of why she was still single; that, and the bizarre nudity. In the six days since they'd shared a taxi from the airport to downtown La Paz, she had been naked at least half the time he saw her. She wrote dispatches naked, ate room service naked, watched television and conducted conference calls naked. She had a hearty appetite for sex and fucked vigorously, as if it were an aerobic routine and he were a piece of equipment in her gym. At climax her volt-blue eyes squinted and her nostrils flared. When she smoked afterward, he could sometimes see her heart flexing in her rib cage. With Fiona, he was often aware that she was a living being, that her body was a strange thing, a sack full of organs and bones and fluids, everything in shades of pink and ivory and aubergine.

She lit a new cigarette, stood up, and went over to her suitcase, which was splayed on the floor. "What should I wear to lunch?" she said. "I've heard Grayson's a dreamboat."

"Buck-naked seems to work pretty well for you," Gabriel said. "Maybe you should show up in the buff?" Then, unable to resist, he added, "It'd simplify the exchange."

She didn't bother answering. She picked up a gray skirt and a pair of vintage oxblood heels, sat on the edge of the bed, and started to dress, her cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, smoke rising into her eyes. He put his computer away and stood up.

"You leaving?" she said from the side of her mouth, squinting at him through the smoke. She pulled on the skirt, zipped it at the side. She was not going to wear underwear, apparently.

"Yeah, I'll see you after."

"Do me a favor: bring your libido."

Two months earlier, a young and overly eager fact checker at
Investors Business International
had forwarded the e-mail about the opening at the Calloway Group to Gabriel. Edmund, the fact checker in question, was ambitious in the way that young men often were when they'd just arrived in New York after doing well at a university where doing well was just the thing to do. So Gabriel's first thought was that Edmund was angling to replace him by revealing a tempting route out; it was a cynical theory, though probably true. He read the posting anyway:

TO
:
[email protected]
FROM
:
[email protected]
SUBJECT
: Fwd: Calloway posting...

Regional Political Analyst (Latin America)

The Calloway Group seeks a full-time contractor as a political analyst for the Latin America region. Responsibilities include making regular trips to Latin America, interviewing corporate and political leaders, writing reports and briefs on a range of financial issues in the region. Areas of investigation include: individual corporate, sector/regional, commodities, macro, forex.

A successful candidate will be eager to spend six months or more per year abroad.

REQUIREMENTS
:

• Minimum 3 years' experience as a fi nancial journalist and/or analyst
  
• Fluency in Spanish
  
• Experience working in South America with political and business leaders
  
• Willingness to spend weeks/months at a time abroad
  
• Degree in economics (with macro, BOP, and quantitative analysis)
  

COMPENSATION
:

• $19,500 / month (6-month renewable contract)
  
• No min. investment for personal accounts in the Calloway Group's products
  
• Full health/dental, including international coverage
  
• Per diem while traveling
  
• Substantial bonuses (based on performance)
  

Sitting there on the screen like that, so innocuously, the number seemed to lack proper emphasis: $19,500 a month? Could it be? It seemed absurd that such a thing could be possible. Some quick arithmetic and he saw that it would be $234,000 per year.

It entered his consciousness like something illicit, like the offer of no-strings-attached sex from the attractive girlfriend of an acquaintance: the instinct was to start explaining his interest, how this was the girlfriend of an acquaintance, and not of a close
friend.

Once he'd processed the notion of the money, he scanned back up to the job description itself and was surprised to find that, on paper at least, he was qualified. So he sent in his résumé and some clippings. He wanted to forget about the position altogether, but he found it hard to shake the impression it'd made. The infatuation was as base as it was predictable. It was irrefutable, a deeply embedded thing. The hunger was in his design.

He didn't expect to hear back, but two days later he got an e-mail from an Oscar Velazquez, requesting that he come in for an interview with Priya Singh, the fund manager.

Calloway was a relatively small hedge fund, with about $1.5 billion pre-leveraged capital. Unlike many small funds, which had lower hurdles to entry, Calloway required each investor to pony up at least $2 million, though most of them had considerably more than that on the line. Until a few years ago, it had been run by a small group of quants and a single fund manager, Priya. Very little of the work took place outside of the office. But an increasing number of competing funds were able to nearly match their returns at lower fees, so Priya began hiring analysts to go out into the world and investigate her murkier leads firsthand. Whether or not she paid any attention at all to what the analysts said, their mere existence helped justify Calloway's fees.

The protesters were still outside the IMF's offices when Gabriel arrived. The leader had a bullhorn, but his words were lost in the fuzzy distortion, and the crowd looked befuddled. Meanwhile, peddlers bent under burdens twice their size hurried up and down the steep road, unconcerned. That high in the Andes, humans evolved huge torsos to accommodate their giant lungs and powerful hearts; they needed to have short and strong limbs, for better circulation while hiking. Their skin was hardened against the sun. A stout man in a tobacco-colored suit cut for 1971, wearing an era-appropriate haircut, sideburns included, stood nearby, watching; he was eating a sandwich, one foot on a young man's shoeshine box. The filthy shoe shiner sat on the pavement bent over the boot in question, his black ski mask pulled over his face. The uniform of
lustrabotas
(Bolivian shoe-shine boys), the ski masks ostensibly hid their identities, since the job was deemed lowly, but also served as a sign of solidarity among the boys.

The IMF's offices were in a tall peach-colored building across from the Alliance Française in Sopocachi. The building was also home to the offices of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Needless to say, security was heavy; Gabriel had to leave his passport at the front desk. The guard who escorted him up used a keycard to illuminate the ninth-floor button.

Up there, a female receptionist informed Gabriel that Grayson was still out to lunch. She led the way back to Grayson's office and told Gabriel to wait. There were two leather armchairs and a coffee table. There was nothing very fancy and nothing very cheap; it was intended to suggest honest middle-class values. Gabriel perused bookshelves full of outdated World Bank and IMF reports on assorted aspects of the Bolivian economy. There were no pictures of family or friends. No plants. Gabriel glanced around the papers on the desk and saw nothing clearly identified as the Article IV report. He wasn't going to dig around.