Gold (7 page)

“Could he have held the news back?”

“He was the filing editor.”

Preston cleared his throat and adjusted his napkin. “So that was it,” he said. “They must have made a fortune.”

The waiter brought their salads, and then the wine Preston had ordered. Drew scanned the room, filled with dark-suited men in twos and threes. The bright pastels of the dining room’s decor contrasted with the gray, wet spectacle visible through the vaulted windows.

“I suppose I’ll have to find him,” said Drew, after they had eaten in silence for a bit.

“Not much to be done now, I should think,” said Preston.

Drew changed the subject. “Anything going on today?”

“Surprisingly enough, yes. There was considerable profit-taking just before the Fed press conference, but there’s been a strong demand and sufficient selling to meet it. Of course, that’s all spot, because the futures markets are closed, and the lack of a fixing has dampened trading.” Spot was the cash market for immediate delivery and consisted of dealers buying and selling over the phone. The futures market was trading in contracts for future delivery and took place on an exchange, like Comex or IMM.

Drew said nothing. He usually found silence more effective than questions for extracting information.

“Kuwait seems active,” Preston added, after a pause. “They’re spreading the orders around, but there seems to be a lot of activity emanating from there.”

“What’s next, do you think?”

Preston looked thoughtful, as though the obvious question had provoked him to a sudden new idea. “It’s amazing when you think about it,” he began. “Time and again in the past ten, twelve years we’ve seemed very near the brink. Every time we’ve pulled back.” He cut a bite from his slab of beef in quick, deft movements. “I think we will this time, too.”

“Markets will reopen tomorrow, then, none the worse for wear?”

“There’ll be the usual grumblings about better surveillance, tougher controls, and all that,” Preston said. “But I think life will go on just like before.” He sipped the wine. “After all, South Africa’s been on the brink for some time. This thing yesterday just caught the market at a wobbly moment.”

Wobbly, thought Drew to himself. When hasn’t the market been wobbly in recent years? He didn’t push the matter with Preston, who had already demonstrated a longer-term view than Drew had ever heard from him before.

When the bill came and Preston examined it closely, it reassured Drew that the gold trader took the figure so seriously. He sometimes feared that million-dollar deals cut off these market operators from the real world, where real people sweated and suffered for infinitesimal fractions of the amounts these dealers transacted.

Back at the office, Drew talked to Meg Hanrahan, the Geneva correspondent who had gone up to Basel to cover the central bankers’ meeting there. He could picture the pressroom in the futuristic headquarters of the Bank for International Settlements, which looked like a nuclear power plant and was known locally as the Tower of Basel. It was something of a glorified men’s club for the central bankers. The BIS, in fact, maintained a full-fledged sports club outside of Basel.

As usual, Meg recounted, the Europeans were balking at the Americans’ presumption that everything depended on stabilizing the dollar. The world had operated on a de facto dollar monetary system since World War II. Following the war, the United States accounted for more than half of all production in the non-Communist world. There didn’t seem to be any alternative to the dollar. But in the eighties, the U.S. share of the world economy shrank to less than a quarter, while Washington seemed increasingly irresponsible in the management of its financial affairs. Monetary conferences had developed a routine of plaintive, sometimes whining Europeans, with Americans cast in the role of the heavies.

Washington would get its way again, of course. Whatever the Europeans might think, four fifths of all world trade and finance was transacted in dollars, and nothing could work without a stable U.S. currency.

“How much are they putting in the kitty?” Drew asked his reporter.

“The Europeans are putting up the whole reserves of the EMF,” Meg said—the European Monetary Fund, with a good $50 billion in reserves. “The Fed will match it, and the Japanese will pitch in with twenty billion.” Would that be enough? “The understanding seems to be that the Fed will double its amount if necessary,” Meg continued, not waiting to be asked.

Quite a war chest. But they would need it if the market started to stampede again and the central banks intervened to smooth out trading.

“Will it be finished this evening?” Drew asked.

“Has to be. They want everything to open on time tomorrow,” replied the young woman. Her voice had the energy of controlled excitement; she was clearly enjoying herself.

“Give us a three-take backgrounder now—and keep on it,” he added superfluously. Meg would write her piece on the portable computer she took everywhere with her and transmit it over the phone into the agency’s main computer. Then the slotman could flash it around the world.

David Sangrat called. “I need to see you. My driver will pick you up at five,” he said, hanging up before Drew could respond.

Sangrat was one of those ubiquitous middlemen who populated international finance in the wake of the oil shock. His chief distinction was his longevity; a Lebanese Christian, he had proved more resilient than most in keeping up with the shifting fortunes of his Middle East clients.

He had not said please in making his request, but Drew would certainly go. He owed Sangrat too much over the years, and the Lebanese kept very accurate accounts. The older a journalist got, it seemed, the more obligations he accumulated.

Drew had always thought that journalism was a profession for young people. Cynicism was well known to be an occupational hazard, but it was not so well known that the first object of that cynicism was the profession itself. Drew had seen too many tired, bitter reporters to wish himself a lifelong career in journalism.

The responsibility and authority of his job as managing editor might have changed his attitude, but he was finding instead that it just brought a new dimension to his cynicism. Sun Belt Communications was a darling of the stock market. Tom Madison’s tight control of costs and his decentralized management had resulted in an almost uninterrupted chain of quarterly earnings increases. But an accountant like Madison was too calculating. He maintained the quality of his newspapers and agencies just high enough to keep market share, but there was no commitment to traditional journalistic values. SBC awarded generous bonuses to top managers for good performance, but performance was measured in terms of pennies saved. The goal was not a top-quality product but a higher number on the bottom line. Don’t look for the best reporters, look for the cheapest who can get the job done.

Drew was lucky. At thirty-eight, he had made the transition into editorial management. As a reporter he would have been facing a rapidly diminishing range of options as younger, cheaper people flooded the market.

Perhaps it was just as well, reflected Drew, as his thoughts came back in a circle. No one could work for an entire career scavenging for truth and keep his integrity. Drew recalled the French journalist who had told him with a Gallic wink that reporters spent the first half of their careers finding out what they didn’t know and the second half hiding what they knew only too well.

Truth was important to Drew, though. In some ways, it was his religion.

He had been very pious as a child, even zealous. His mother, despite her English and German extraction, was Roman Catholic and steadfastly adhered to her faith. She had insisted that Henry Dumesnil convert to the church before she consented to marry him. The young accountant was in love and cared little for the arid religion of his Huguenot forebears, so he readily agreed.

Drew, and later his brother, attended the Catholic school, dutifully conforming to the strictures of a paranoid church implanting bastions of Roman faith in a Protestant and secular America.

Drew took readily to the religious tutelage. Intelligent and impressionable, he shared his mother’s devotion and his father’s driving sense of rectitude. He accepted the special status of American Catholics in a hostile world and their mission to bring heretics and nonbelievers to the one, true church.

For that’s what they were taught, and it was easy to believe inside the sheltered environment of school, church, and home. Catholics in the middle America of that era occupied an intellectual ghetto as isolating as any walls.

Drew became an altar boy. The solemnity and the ritual of the Mass appealed to his imagination. His responsibility to carry the heavy Latin missal from one side of the altar to the other, to bring the cruets of wine and water to the priest, to ring the bell as the priest elevated the host and chalice that had become the body and blood of Christ the Savior—all this charged him with a sacred fervor.

He followed the ceremony carefully, reading the English version in his missal as the priest intoned the Latin text. Jesus was the Way, the Truth, and the Life. “The truth shall make you free,” the Savior told his apostles.

One summer Drew went to Mass every day. He also went to confession every week. The church was refreshingly cool after the hot buzz of a Saturday afternoon in summer. The confessional surrounded him with a comforting intimacy, which itself enticed the truth from him regarding his minor faults and grievances, including his tiny lies.

When he reached eighth grade—the highest level St. Jerome’s parish in Springfield, Iowa, could afford—Drew became chief altar boy, an appointment that enhanced his already palpable sense of responsibility for the sacred trust given to him.

The high point of the liturgical year, and the most challenging for altar boys, was the series of special ceremonies marking Holy Week, the commemoration of Christ’s passion and crucifixion that culminates in the celebration of his resurrection on Easter Sunday.

From the hours of practice and the careful attention given to all the complex details of the lengthy ceremonies, one moment always clung to Drew afterward. In the Good Friday ritual, the pastor and his assistant sang the Passion According to St. John, alternating parts during the dialogues to “play” various roles.

In what seemed to Drew at the time the most solemn stillness of the afternoon, the elderly pastor raised his thin voice to chant Pilate’s querulous question when confronted with Jesus’ claim to represent the truth:
Veritas quid est?
Truth, what is that?

The cynicism of Pilate’s question represented for Drew the rejection of all that was holy, even though it was necessary in order that Christ could fulfill his destiny and save mankind.

Drew never forgave Pilate or forgot his question. To seek the truth was right and holy; to sneer at it as Pilate did was to invite divine wrath.

Had he been free to make his own decisions, Drew would have gone directly to the seminary from eighth grade to study for the priesthood. But his parents wanted him to stay home through high school. In the secular world of Springfield High School, his childish piety yielded to the more immediate emotional concerns of adolescence.

Although timid, Drew possessed a quick wit and a quiet charm that made him popular. A series of ever more intense infatuations pushed thoughts of the priesthood farther back in his mind. One winter evening in his senior year in particular marked a turning point in his relationship with women and eradicated any desire for celibacy.

But Drew practiced his religion steadily, if more and more perfunctorily, through college.

It was in France that he lost his faith. It was not a dramatic event. Somehow, in that most Catholic of countries—where nearly everyone is baptized into the church but fewer than half the adults practice their religion—going to church became superfluous. Drew slipped into a comfortable agnosticism, shedding his religion like so many other notions from his past that now seemed to him callow and naive.

He realized later, though, that the strong moral sense instilled by his upbringing remained with him. And life for him had to have a deeper meaning than material success. It was not a crusading spirit, or a sense of mission, but a simple need to see more in life than creature comforts.

In the soul-searching that followed his rupture with Christine—three years ago, now—Drew came to see that his professional integrity had become the driving force in his life. All the religious fervor of childhood and the drive of adolescence became focused for him on the single objective of remaining true to his profession. That was his sacred trust.

~

At 5:01, Drew settled into the sleek leather seat in the back of the navy blue Rolls Royce. Samantha, the slim, finely chiseled Scottish girl who chauffeured Sangrat’s Rolls—among what other duties, Drew could not help but wonder—chatted demurely about the rain as the car glided effortlessly through the rush-hour traffic, across Mayfair to Sangrat’s office on Park Lane.

Sangrat rose to greet Drew when Samantha ushered him into the sitting room on the first floor of the renovated row house. Oily was the word in Drew’s mind as he shook hands with the roundish, balding Lebanese, whose brown eyes glistened shrewdly.

“Thank you for coming,” Sangrat said, with his unctuous smile. “Exciting times,” he said, offering Drew his own cigars, knowing they would be refused. The secretary brought tea. “Or would you prefer whiskey?” Sangrat offered. Drew, uncertain of how late he would be up tonight, opted for the tea.