“With hedge-fund portfolio management, one has to keep up with evolving market strategies. It’s not a simple matter of being aware of arbitrage mechanics and leveraging assets using derivatives—it’s much more complex than that.”
I think that’s what the guy in the next seat said, although mostly it sounded like “blah, blah, blah, blah.” I gazed out the plane window, wishing I could open it, crawl out and drop onto the snow-covered mountains below. At least that would be a quick end. Listening to this guy was death by boredom, one meaningless sentence at a time. Since he couldn’t use his cell phone on the short flight from London to Barcelona, he had assumed that I would be riveted by his explanations of how he made vast amounts of money by, as far as I could tell, doing no work.
My mind drifted back to the last time I’d looked down on the Pyrenees. That had been in the summer; now it was Christmas Eve—winter and the thick snow made the mountain peaks look like the stiff icing that Mom put on the Christmas cake. Thoughts of Mom made me feel guilty about not being with family at Christmas, but I got over it fast.
Mom had been upset back in October when I had told her I’d been invited to spend Christmas with Laia and her family in Spain, but two things had happened to distract her. A week after I had announced my plans, I came home from school one afternoon and found Mom and her new friend Rod in the backyard, each balancing on one leg and waving their arms about. Mom had met Rod in September at tai chi classes. I hadn’t paid much attention at first; I was too busy thinking about Laia and worrying about getting through the first semester of grade twelve, but this was beginning to look serious.
“What are they doing?” I asked my twin brother, DJ, as we stood staring out the kitchen window.
“I think it’s Carry Tiger and Return to Mountain.”
“What?” I asked, looking at him.
DJ shrugged. “Or it might be Step Back and Repulse Monkey. I’m not too sure about all the posture names.”
“No. I mean, what’s he doing here?”
“Sorry,” DJ said with a grin. “I thought you recognized tai chi.”
“Were you born annoying, bro” I asked, “or did you have to practice?” My relationship with DJ had changed since our adventures last summer. His struggle up Kilimanjaro hadn’t taught him humility, but it had given him a sense of life being more difficult than he had assumed it to be. “What do you think about the relationship between Mom and Rod?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said thoughtfully. “She seems happier than she’s been since Grandpa died, but…” His voice trailed off.
“Yeah,” I agreed as Mom and Rod, in perfect unison, turned, drew their right feet across the grass and swept their arms wide.
“Stork Spreads Wings,” DJ said.
“But?” I pushed, ignoring the nugget of information about the tai chi move.
I stared out the window, thinking two things: how silly Mom and Rod looked, and how happy Mom looked.
“You know Mom and all the aunts are planning a Caribbean cruise over Christmas?” DJ said.
It took me a moment to realize he’d moved on from Rod and tai chi. “When did this happen?” I asked in shock.
“Couple of days ago.”
“And I was going to find out about it when?”
DJ shrugged. “I’ve been busy. So has Mom.”
“You could have texted me,” I said. DJ was better after Kilimanjaro, but he was still the overcontrolling big brother, even though he was older by only fifteen minutes. “Looks like you’re going to have a lonely Christmas with Mom and me both away.”
“Some of the cousins are talking about getting together at the cottage over the Christmas holidays.”
“Again, bro. When was I going to be informed?”
Once more, DJ shrugged. “You’re not going to be here. We thought it would be good to get together and tell stories about Grandpa and our adventures in the summer.”
“Okay, it was my idea, but most of them seem keen on it. It even looks like Bunny might be out of juvie over Christmas. Too bad you can’t be there, little brother.”
There it was again, the annoying big brother/little brother thing. “You know I’ve got my flights booked already,” I said. “Besides, let me think about this—ten days in sunny Spain with a beautiful girl versus a few days freezing and knee-deep in snow with you guys. It’s a tough decision, bro.”
“I just think Grandpa would have liked us all to get together. He was really into family.”
“He was,” I agreed, “but you’ve got to let go, DJ. Grandfather gave us different tasks in his will because he knew we were all different and that we needed to go our own ways—even if it didn’t all work out the way he planned,” I said, thinking of Bunny’s experience, which had led to jail time. “But my path leads to Spain this Christmas. So have fun at the cottage and text me if anything exciting happens, like it stops snowing.”
I’d probably been a bit harsh with DJ, but the family remark annoyed me. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only cousin who wouldn’t be at the cabin—Rennie was going to be on vacation in South America—but as Christmas approached, I felt a twinge of regret at missing the get-together. I got on well with my cousins, and we did have a lot in common. Besides, all the talk about the trip—how they were going to get up to the cottage in winter, what food to take, what they would do while they were there—made it real and made me feel left out. It sounded like it might actually be fun. Then I thought of Laia waiting for me at the Barcelona airport, and all my regrets vanished.
The time Laia and I had spent together discovering what Grandfather had done in 1938 had been special, but the two weeks after that had been amazing. We had traveled up and down the coast on our scooters, walking along beaches, swimming and hanging out in old villages away from the tourist crowds. We had even gone to Lloret de Mar to visit Elsie and Edna, the holidaymakers I had met on the plane out, and spent the evening in the disco in the Hotel Miramar. It had been a fun night, being entertained by a planeload of happy tourists from Wigan, but it was a relief the next day to head off along the rugged coast.
I had spent the last couple of days before my flight home back in Barcelona, where I had met Laia’s mother and heard stories about her great-grandmother, Maria, and the time when she had known Grandfather. It was the best holiday I had ever had, and I was thrilled when Laia texted me and said her mother had suggested I come for Christmas. She proposed that I spend Christmas in Barcelona and then we could go down to Seville to visit her father. I thought about it for all of five or ten seconds before I was online looking for cheap flights. I still had the thousand dollars I had saved to travel to Europe this summer, a couple of hundred from a few weeks’ work and almost another thousand from the money Grandfather had left me.
“Investment banking’s very interesting.” I glanced at the guy beside me, who was still talking. Apparently, nothing he said required a response from me. I guessed he was in his fifties or sixties, but it was hard to tell, and he certainly talked as if he were much younger. He could also probably afford the best in skin care. Even jammed into a tourist seat on a cramped plane, he still looked like he’d stepped out of a magazine ad—not a crease in his suit or a hair out of place and a toothy smile that almost blinded me. His suit probably cost as much as I was paying for this flight. I wondered why, if he was so successful, he wasn’t traveling in business class.
My mind began to wander. Maybe this guy wasn’t into hedges or whatever. Maybe his perfect looks were a cover. Perhaps he worked for the CIA or MI6 or the Russian secret service, whatever it was called these days. What better fake identity than someone who was completely self-involved and unbearably boring? No one would suspect he was really a superspy—a James Bond out to save the world from international terrorists.
I smiled at my meandering thoughts. My companion misread it. “So you see what opportunities there are for someone like yourself to get in on the ground floor of this business. I could put some good deals your way. No pressure.” He handed me a crisp embossed business card. “Name’s Chad.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said, stuffing the card into my pants pocket. “I’ll think about it.”
“Just give me a call when you make up your mind. Cell phone’s always on. Spending all your holiday in Barcelona?”
“At first. I’m meeting a friend there and then going down to Seville after Christmas,” I said, feeling strangely uncomfortable giving this guy any information about myself. “How about you?” I added before he could ask another question. “You staying in Barcelona?”
“I travel all over,” he said vaguely. “Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Granada this trip. You know what business is like.”
I didn’t, but I nodded as the plane touched down. “What kind of business do you do over Christmas?” I asked.
“This and that. Import/export. I’ll be doing a bit of real-estate work this trip. The markets never sleep. Seville’s a great town. You been there before?” I shook my head. “You going to the beach as well?” I shrugged, although Laia and I were planning on a few days at the coast. “Plenty of nice beaches along the south coast. Good places to pick up girls.” Chad winked broadly at me. He must have caught my expression because he hurriedly added, “Or maybe the friend you’re meeting in Barcelona is your girlfriend?” I nodded again. “Well,” Chad went on as we approached the terminal building, “the best of luck to you. And I mean it: give me a call.”
“Sure,” I said distractedly. I was looking out the window at the terminal building. Laia was waiting for me in there. This was going to be the best Christmas ever.