On the Floor (6 page)

‘You know that Goldman's are putting a sales person out here in Hong Kong next month, Geraldine. One of their top producers, in fact. A major commitment to the region.' He positioned his Mont Blanc in a precise alignment with his notepad. ‘Apparently they think locally-based global coverage is exactly what I need.'

‘Yes. We should talk about that.'

‘We
are
talking about it, Geraldine.'

Of course we both knew that he could short-circuit the whole discussion with one call to the Grope and force the issue, but Felix prefers to amuse himself by toying with my feigned insouciance in the face of his smothering possession. It is control and its boundaries that keep him interested.

‘And what are Steiner's plans for their Hong Kong clients?'

‘You know we are totally committed. It's a question of—'

‘I must confess that I have noticed lately a certain lacklustre quality in your performance, Geraldine. Speaking frankly, I think you would find that Hong Kong is the kind of environment where you would flourish.' Felix raised a palm to silence my intervention. ‘And, of course, you wouldn't want the competition to steal a march on your business.'

‘Yup, another great trade with Felix Mann,' says the Grope and leans towards me. ‘And now we need to have a whole other conversation about him.'

I focus on the dead space between his eyes, tell myself this pulsing heart is just the booze and the lack of sleep. The intercom beeps. ‘I have Tokyo on the line,' Julie interrupts.

‘I said no calls,' he snaps.

‘Yamamato-san says it's urgent.'

‘God
dam
it.' The Grope slaps the desk.

‘And they need you upstairs before the morning meeting.'

He frowns, checks the clock and pushes back from his desk. ‘There's a very big opportunity coming your way, Geri. And we need to talk about it the minute I get back.'

He strides out of the office, leaving me sitting here staring at the TV and Saddam in his open-necked fatigues.

But this is no more than a temporary reprieve; all that's happened is I've bought a little extra time before I try to explain why I don't want to shift my ass to Hong Kong, for reasons that are not entirely clear because nothing is clear anymore, though some clarity might emerge if I applied myself to proactive thought instead of guzzling vodka and popping pills. Is Zanna right, is it really the vain hope of Stephen that makes me cling on to the non-life I have here? I am struck by the crazy thought that I should just ring him now, a desperate impulse to call and beg for his advice, but even if I could scale the 161-day ice wall of our silence,
what would I actually say? The fact is I wouldn't make it past Alison, she would happily call-screen me into oblivion on the private line that Stephen never answers.
Sorry, Geri, he's in a meeting
, she used say when I rang in from trips, in a way that made me certain he wasn't. If I said I'd call back, she'd say the meeting leads straight into another meeting and all the while, in my head, I'd be carefully de-beading the strand of pearls around her neck and forcing them down her throat. I'd picture her sitting there, wondering if she could get away with not telling Stephen I called and if she did, how she would barb-edit the message. The power of being on the spot when I was ten thousand miles away. Ever since that night in Grodz when she overheard me say to Stephen it would be like fucking a fish or something. But he would never sleep with Alison, even I could tell she would cling on like dog hair, it could never just be the one fuck. Otherwise they have the same genetic profile, an intimacy with horses and Klosters and top-ranked public schools.

Sell water to a duck, fuel to a fire, a cure to a dying man
, Stephen used to say to wind me up. Because he operates, of course, on a higher plane. Stephen makes history, not sales. He doesn't trade tickets, he delivers vision. Stephen raises the capital that bankrolls corporate ambition. He doesn't dance to the tune of the markets, he pioneers virgin territories, each new deal another chapter in the ongoing evolution of investment banking, another leap forward in mergers and acquisitions. He creates complex financial structures like a child dresses a doll in different outfits. In order to execute this important task, he had to organise it so he was born in the right hospital, went to the right prep school, bagged his Cambridge First and took his MBA at Harvard. Stephen has a direct line to the jugular while the rest of us suck on veins.

You have to have a nice speaking voice to work in Corporate Finance. You have to be able to hold your drink to work on the trading floor.

Behind me through the open door I hear the roar of another's day's business. Right now I should be warming up for the high point of my
sales day, my phone audience with Felix, but I cannot muster the enthusiasm. Kant's treatise lies unopened on my desk although Felix told me I was to apply myself as I was leaving his office on – when? Friday and a lifetime ago. But I have not applied myself one little jot and he will use this as further evidence of my accelerating decline. There is only one way down from the pinnacle of success and that is a nosedive into oblivion.

The fact is Felix could pull the plug on a whim and I have to guard against complacency.
Such an undisciplined mind
, he snapped some weeks back when I slurred through a critique of Kant's Formula of Autonomy.
Such laziness, Geraldine
. When the line went dead I could feel the cold rush of career disintegration in my ear, for this was a foretaste of what would happen if I managed to detonate our exclusive relationship. I would find his direct line on auto-divert to his secretary, the past five years would count for nothing, Anna-Li would no longer recognise my name and I would face a future cradling an empty dial tone, that sound you never want to hear: the windswept wail of a salesperson who has lost a client, like a child screaming for its mother.

Zanna is right: Felix owns me body and soul. He structures my day and my compensation curve, a steady upwards slope to last year's peak: $872,678.14 (Base compensation $150,000 + Discretionary bonus of $722,678.14, excluding unvested stock options). Felix is the reason why my numbers exist and the reason I get paid what I do. He knows I know this, but Felix handles bonus numbers with the distaste you reserve for other peoples' shit.
I trust events yesterday were to your satisfaction?
he commented on the morning after Comp Day in December.
Fine. Everything's just fine
, which is how I always respond, DESPITE the fact that I bet I still attract a chick discount, some sort of arbitrary but in-excess-of-30% female cut, based upon Steiner's assumption that my career longevity will not match the guys around me, that it will be short-circuited by the ticking of a biological clock that will one day catapult me off the trading floor and into a Bulthaup kitchen. But I let it lie, because, hey, what's fair? You're only as good as your last trade and since when was I a feminist anyway?

A shout goes up behind me, I turn my head as the Warrant desk erupts into frenzy, all the traders are on their feet and yelling down the phones. Already these glass walls, the whole floor, is bathed in soft focus, now that I may be forcibly removed from the place where life first took shape. Something in an inaccessible place that feels like my gut is telling me that I just don't want to leave. That I just don't want to take the next logical step in the career ladder that began with a chance encounter in my final year at UCD, when all I longed for was flight. But isn't this everything I came looking for and more? Isn't this the most spectacular success?

For ten years since he emerged from the mists of Cambridge, Felix Mann has carefully constructed his own legend. But I imagine a beginning, some moment where he raised a sudden head from his books and stared into a future of petty squabbling over journal articles, frantic whispering over professorships, the breathtaking irrelevance of a life's research that would only ever amount to a soundless drop in an indifferent lake. I see him standing up abruptly, the scrape of his chair reverberating down the corridors as he flings open the college doors and disappears into a bright light. Felix walked away in search of a real-world blood sport where he could beat others at their own game, the Philosophy post-grad with no formal business training who jacked in a brilliant academic career and unearthed a treasure trove of assets that would give him the opportunity to flex his outperforming muscle.

Ten years is a lifetime in this business, the stuff of folk memory.

The view from Felix's Hong Kong fortress on the 31st floor of Exchange Square Two is littered with the sprawling bodies of enthusiastic bankers who crash and burn at his door, offering third-hand information and a menu of redundant services. Felix has never needed any hand-holding or breathless sales patter, he doesn't believe that the hungry beaks can tell him anything he needs to know in order for his fund to make a rumoured and consistent in-excess-of 40% return. Before
me, he never spoke to a single sales person; execution only was always his policy, a non-partisan and strict division of non-Jap orders between the golden triangle of Morgan Stanley, Goldman's and Merrill's, with the occasional crumb dropped at the feet of the squawking competition whenever some deal inadvertently fell into their incompetent laps. Felix routed his orders straight through to the head trader of the relevant desk. He positioned himself as a reliable cornerstone in new issues, ruthlessly exploiting his barometer position in the pricing. You get Felix to commit to taking down 15% of a deal and you're home and dry.

So five years ago when I first announced to the rest of the desk that I was going to cold call the largest private fund in Asia, everyone sniggered at the idea of a rookie sales person thinking she might succeed where countless legendary big-hitters had rammed their heads on an unrelenting stone.

And when it worked, when I first had incoming from Felix Mann, they stood there gobsmacked, only to dismiss it later as the natural advantage of pussy.
No offence, Geri, but a bit of skirt will get you there every time
.

But I knew it was something else that had caught his attention.

It was 22 February 1986, some months after Cargo and Ed's demise and I was sucking wind on a virtually non-existent client base, when a blow-in from the New York office who was my temporary boss threw me a phone list one morning and said, ‘Go fish for clients in Asia, it's virgin territory.' So I flew out to Hong Kong to meet a bunch of smalltime institutions who liked free lunches but had little business to give. But my real target was Tom Castigliano, Steiner's dealmaker who had been based in Hong Kong for a couple of years, and had just succeeded in engineering a rare audience with Felix to discuss a complex restructuring for some Australian mining company. It took twenty-four hours of persistent pleading and ego-massaging flirtation over margaritas in
the Captain's Bar but Tom finally relented and agreed I could tag along to the meeting with Felix Mann – on the strict proviso that I would be a bag-carrier with no speaking role. Eleven minutes into the torturous permutations of the deal, when Felix told Tom to change a few parameters and rework the pricing, I forgot my promise and reflex second-guessed an answer before Tom had even started working it out on his bond calculator. Felix's eyes registered my presence for the first time. He leaned back in his chair, tapping his pen on a notepad and ran a few scenario analyses by me as a test, instructing Tom to check my numbers on his calculator. Then he stood up and said, ‘My, my. Quite the little performer.' Showing his yellow teeth. ‘Sadly, an obsolete talent these days,' he added and pointed at the HP10 before ushering us out of the room.

‘So what is it, like a photographic memory thing with numbers or what?' Tom asked later in the sinking lift.

‘It's just seeing connections. Order. Sequence,' I replied.

I wondered if he was pissed off that I'd stolen the show. But I have since understood that Tom is a visionary pragmatist who adapts to the prevailing landscape, knows there are always other thunders to steal and had already realised how useful I could be. So when the doors shuddered open onto the foyer, he turned the full glow of his fuck-me eyes onto my face and smiled, ‘You could make a killing card-counting in Vegas with a trick like that.'

But our unarticulated plans for sex were scuppered when I arrived back at the Mandarin to a message from Felix's secretary that he was expecting me for dinner that evening. I turned back to the street for a forty-five minute Dress Emergency, whipping through boutique rails of backless-strapless nothingness until I decided on the 500-dollar ambivalence of a forest-green silk suit. The faint flame and mandarin collar would tell Felix I hadn't gotten the wrong signal, hadn't confused him with the kind of client who spends his evening in a champagne drool down the front of your dress.

Felix's uniformed driver bowed and led me from the hotel lobby at
7 p.m. ‘Where are we going?' I asked the back of his shaved head but his peak cap didn't respond. I smoothed the careful folds of my skirt as the car glided away from Central, away from the elegant hotels and the clustered nightlife I knew, speeding down into the tenemented harbour hell of Wan chai. The car stopped in a side street and I looked through the darkened window down an alley where a dog nosed through a jumble of rotting garbage.

‘There must be some mistake,' I said when he opened the car door, my sandals hovering delicately just above ground.

‘Please, Miss Mowoy,' said the driver and pointed to an opening in the wall where shredded blue and red plastic strips dangled in the evening breeze.

Two men sat cross-legged and smoking on a low step, squinting impassively at my legs. On the opposite side of the street, a thin-limbed boy crouched on the ground, poking a gecko with his finger. A chicken came hurtling through an open door and stopped to shit by the boy. The car moved off and I pushed through the entrance, colliding with an elbow-height old woman who pinched my upper arm and pushed me towards the threshold of a room packed with smoking locals. There was a sudden lull in the chatter as they watched me make my way towards an empty table in the middle of the room and I sat down to a mutter and a sharp burst of laughter.