Autumn Maze. Jon Cleary
‘All three of them have. She’s just done better than the others.’
They came out into the sunlight; the earlier clouds had disappeared. Three or four smokers, the new lepers, stood near the entrance, snatching a few puffs of cancer before they went back to their non-smoking offices; butts lay about them like scraps of fossilized lung. That, of course, was the impression of Malone, a non-smoker.
He paused, looking across at the lunchtime crowd moving towards the cafés along the Quay. Along the waterfront itself parents with children, tourist groups and loafers drifted with slow movements, as if responding to the harbour’s gentle tide. Buskers sang or played instruments; with the recession, busking had become a new form of self-employment. Malone remembered stories his father had told him of the Depression: Con Malone had sung in the streets, ‘Mother Mchree’ torn limb from limb by a tuneless baritone. The Good Old Days: they were coming back, dark as ever. But at least here the sun shone, nobody starved, there was music instead of machine-gun fire. Europe was crumbling, Russia was falling apart, the Serbs and the Croats and the Muslims of Bosnia were making their own hell.
Malone crossed the road, Clements hurrying to catch up with him, and dropped a dollar in the violin-case of a young girl playing some country-and-western number. He looked at Clements, who reluctantly took out a fifty-cent piece and dropped it in the violin-case. ‘I hate that sorta music,’ he said as they walked away. ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘I’m having lunch first. Or luncheon. Over a meat pie, you can tell me whether you think someone in the family killed young Sweden. Or had him killed.’
‘And what about Frank Minto and the stiff stolen from the morgue?’
‘You’ve just spoiled lunch.’
3
At Casement & Co., Stockbrokers, the general manager was not available. ‘He’s up at the Futures Exchange, that’s in Grosvenor Street.’
‘Did you know Rob Sweden?’ said Malone.
The pretty girl, an Indian, behind the reception desk closed her big dark eyes for a moment, opened them again, then nodded. ‘We’re all—’ She gestured with a graceful hand, looked for a moment as if she might weep. Then she recovered: ‘Yes, I knew him.’
‘Did you ever meet him outside the office?’
‘You mean, did I go out with him?’ Her father had been a Bombay lawyer; but she was more direct. Circumlocution never got you anywhere with Australians, they didn’t understand the uses of it. ‘No, he never went out with any of the girls from the office. He was – discreet? – that way. He always treated us politely. No, you know, harassment.’
‘A gentleman?’
‘Oh yes. They’re scarce today.’ She sounded as if she might show them her bruises.
‘Not amongst us older types,’ said Malone, thanked her and he and Clements left.
The Futures Exchange was hidden behind the facade of a building that belonged to another age, when a future had no value to anyone but the person whose dream it was. The building had been gutted and turned into a temple owned and run by the money-changers: Jesus Christ would never have got past the security guards at the entrance.
Malone and Clements, being police and not messiahs, were admitted. They found Jim Ondelli, Casement’s general manager, in the ten-year-bond pit. He was in his early forties, thin-faced and curly-haired, his trader’s vest of purple-and-pink stripes worn over what looked to Malone like a very expensive shirt. He handed his clipboard to a younger man, a mere boy, and came towards Malone and Clements.
‘You’re from the police? They rang me from the office.’
Malone introduced himself and Clements. ‘Is this a good time to talk?’
‘Oh sure, no worries. The bond market, especially the ten-year-one, is pretty slack at the moment, everyone’s waiting to see what the Japanese are going to do. What can I do for you? I mean about Rob Sweden. Poor bugger.’
It was like being in an aviary; or, as Clements, a chauvinist, would have described it, at a women’s luncheon party. Chatter chipped the air, shouts bounced like invisible rubber balls. Ondelli led the two detectives under a balcony where, somehow, the noise was less overwhelming.
‘Are you doing what young Sweden did?’
‘Yeah. He was one of our traders, not the best but good enough. He might’ve developed, I dunno. I tried him on several of the pits, they all handle a different commodity. He wasn’t quite quick enough for the really volatile pit, say the share-index one over there.’
‘Was that why you transferred him to the bank?’
‘That was his own idea, not mine.’
‘What would he have earned?’ said Clements, a punter.
‘Here? It varied. He’d have earned less at the bank. The clerks here, the young ones hoping to be traders, they’re usually on around forty thousand a year. A trader like Rob would get sixty to a hundred thousand, depending on how good he is. The “gun” trader – that kid over there, for instance—’ Ondelli pointed to the share-index pit, where a group of traders, most of them young, stood in a semi-circle facing another young man in a green-and-white jacket. ‘That kid is as good as anyone on the floor. He’s with—’ He named one of the major banks. ‘He has the money to play with. When he bids, the others jump in – that’s why they’re watching him as if he’s some sort of orchestra leader. He’d be on a hundred and fifty thousand, probably plus bonuses.’
The two detectives looked at each other and Ondelli grinned. ‘It’s bloody obscene, is that what you’re thinking?’
In these times, yes. But all Malone said was, ‘We’re in the wrong game.’
Ondelli went on, ‘This is, in effect, no more than a gambling den, a legitimate one. It has its uses, though. It can guarantee a price for a farmer, for instance, for his produce, say six months down the track. It can protect him against a poor harvest or a glut harvest – up to a point, that is. We can do nothing about the low prices right now for wool and wheat. As for the rest of it—’ He shrugged. ‘It’s gambling, a casino.’
‘How much money passes through here each day?’ Clements, the bookies’ friend, was hooked: this was one form of gambling he had never examined. It also opened up the possibility that, somewhere on this crowded, noisy floor, lay the reason for Rob Sweden’s murder.
‘The transactions? We’re the ninth largest futures exchange in the world. We handle about seventy thousand transactions a day, about thirty billion dollars’ worth.’
The two detectives, feeling more poverty stricken by the moment, looked at each other again. Then Malone said, ‘What would the largest do?’
‘That’s the Chicago Board of Trade. It does a million transactions a day. There’s also the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Between them they do just on sixty-five trillion dollars a year in contracts. That’s sixty times the value of all the shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange.’
Malone looked at Clements. ‘You going to leave the bookies and try your luck here? He’s the scourge of the bookies,’ he explained to Ondelli.
‘Can anyone make money on the side here?’ asked Clements.
‘You mean trade for themselves? No, that’s a no-no. The Exchange is very strict on that. Rob Sweden wouldn’t have been into that.’
‘What about scams?’ Ondelli frowned as if offended and Clements added, ‘I’m not suggesting young Sweden was in any scam. But can they work them?’
‘Sure,’ Ondelli admitted. ‘Any business where money is traded, there’s always the opportunity for a scam. Cornering the market in something, for instance. That’s been tried everywhere. The Japanese invented the first futures market, in Osaka back in 1650, and