Sweet Dreams

London, Friday, 14 April 1995

‘Christ, I wish it would clear up,’ Robbie Smith muttered to himself as he slowly stubbed out a Marlboro and then ran a hand through his close-cropped, black hair. He looked warily at the mound of cigarette butts in the ashtray on his desk. If he didn’t cut down soon his squash game would really begin to suffer. And so would his domestic life. Julia had begun to mount a serious campaign against his smoking since he turned forty-two.

Putting thoughts of impending domestic strife to the back of his mind, Robbie swung around lazily in his chair at the head of Clyde and Clyde’s sugar-trading desk, twiddling a pair of reading glasses in his right hand. He had acquired them six months ago and was still not used to the idea of having to wear them. Another all too visible sign of his increasing years. Still pondering the possibility of old age without cigarettes, Robbie stopped his chair revolving and faced the floor to ceiling plate-glass window behind his desk. He looked out despondently at the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral wreathed in the April drizzle that had been falling all day. As he looked at the massive building, another squall of rain blew in and the dome melted momentarily like a phantom in the wash of a leaden sky.

Behind Robbie, flickering television monitors, green computer screens and hi-tech phones hung from the ceiling and jostled for space on the desks. For the moment it was blissfully quiet. In forty-five minutes the New York sugar futures market would open. By the time this happened, the Clyde and Clyde sugar-trading desk and the typical City mix of London wide boys, Essex girls, double-barrelled pin stripers and bright, middle-class graduates working in the surrounding room the size of a football pitch would be throbbing with activity.

Deals would be struck from as far afield as Brazil and Australia through conversations in a babble of languages. The operations desks would be equally hectic arranging freight, insurance, financing, foreign exchange and all the other backup facilities that supported the sugar trading itself.

In the midst of all this hectic activity, Robbie, who fell into the bright middle-class graduate category, would sit quietly in his position at the head of the sugar-trading desk in the heart of the football pitch listening to the trading, calculating and evaluating everything that was going on. He hardly ever picked up the phone. When he did he normally sounded offhand and remote, quoting facts and figures in a clipped but lazy way and then reverting as soon as he could to his favourite listening and calculating mode. His way of working could go on for hours. Robbie would sift through one side of conversations and look at screens. His analytical mind naturally reduced all of life into percentages and probabilities. Suddenly, but extremely quietly, he would give a curt instruction. On a good day, this might even be accompanied by a few words of explanation. ‘Go long – the Cubans must be as tight as hell. The market has to go up. We’ll squeeze the shit out of them.’

Based on brief commands like this, the trading might of Clyde and Clyde would run, tack and jibe through the sugar world in a way that usually left the competition way behind the finishing line – and out of the money. And being out of the money in the sugar market could have serious financial consequences.

The market was notorious for having vicious price movements. Robbie still remembered with a chill the way it had moved in the early seventies, soon after he had joined Clyde and Clyde from Edinburgh. He thought he was joining a relatively sedate blue-chip City institution. During three days of chaos, albeit acting as a ‘gofer’, he had became a battle-scarred member of the sugar-trading fraternity. The economics are simple and were explained to him on his first day in the company by Bill who headed operations.

‘It’s quite simple, laddie – not a bit like those highfalutin’ economic theories you learned at that egghead institution of yours. This is the real world.’

‘Okay, Bill, try me – I’ll m-m-make a b-b-big effort to come down to the r-r-real world, since it’s the real world that’s now pp-paying me.’

At the time Robbie had cursed at the bloody stutter that always came out when he least wanted it to. For years he had worked at speech lessons and had all but overcome the impediment. And then suddenly, without announcement, it came back. It normally chose to do this when he was tense or under pressure – both times when it was least wanted. As the young Robbie looked earnestly at Bill he went red. The hardened Bill took pity on the lad. He didn’t sound like one of those toffee-nosed types that turned up in the trading room because they were connected to Sir someone or other.

‘All right, laddie, I’ll explain it to you. But ’ang on tight, it’s pretty complicated,’ he added mockingly. ‘Although the world sugar crop’s large – normally more than one ’undred million tonnes – most of the stuff’s consumed in the country that produced it.’ He looked at Robbie to make sure he was keeping up. Robbie realised that, as far as Bill was concerned, having the ability to get into University was as much of a hindrance as a help when it came to understanding ‘real things’. Robbie also began to understand that the Bills of the world, with their London accents and funny, traditional old ways, knew one hell of a lot. And if he wanted to get on quickly in Clyde and Clyde he had better start learning from them.

Bill continued, having satisfied himself that Robbie was indeed following. ‘Most of the stuff that’s available for export is covered by G-to-G agreements.’

Robbie raised his hand slightly as though back at school and looked quizzically at Bill.

‘My God, they really don’t teach you blokes anything, do they! I’m glad I left school when I was sixteen! To answer your question, Government to Government,’ he added with a smile and then continued, ‘this means that the amount of sugar actually left in any one year to be traded on the world market is a small percentage of total production – normally less than twenty percent.’

‘Twenty million tonnes,’ muttered Robbie without thinking.

Bill stopped his explanation. ‘There you go, I knew there was a brain lurking in there somewhere!’ He continued, ‘The result is like doubling ’n redoubling at cards. This gearing-up business can be pretty frightenin’ – the effect on the market of a small increase or decrease in the amount of sugar available for export or needed for import can be bloody amazin’.’ Bill paused a little and then added for an encore, ‘’N as if that weren’t bad enough, the commodity-fund buggers, who just love price movements, are always hovering around the sugar futures markets waiting to take a position and make a quick turn. So now you’ve got it.’

Robbie nodded quietly at Bill as he thought all this information through. Bill decided that he was beginning to like this new lad. He was much better than the normal snotty, arrogant ones. And the poor bastard with a stutter too. Bill decided then and there to continue his training course in ‘real things’ over the coming months. There was something about this lad that told him he could go places.

A few months later that year, the ‘big one’ came. When the sugar market really moved there wasn’t a market in the world that could equal it for sheer speed and volatility. Prices rocketed up and plummeted down with breath-taking viciousness. Robbie lived thought these gyrations under the protection of Clyde and Clyde traders and Bill. He looked and learned. He saw the stress that the head trader was under as he took minute-by-minute decisions that could make or lose millions of pounds. At these times, the man was like a God. And now, twenty years later, Robbie Smith was the same God.

No one knew just how intelligent Robbie was, but it was generally agreed that he must be a genius. It was no good trying to discuss or rationalise with him when he was directing the trading desk. The man simply operated on a different, and higher, level than anyone around. He just processed facts and figures and, when he found a fit or a gap, drew a conclusion or slotted in a missing piece. To him, this was the most obvious thing in the world. Over a beer after work he would be quite happy to explain in a cryptic fashion why he had taken a particular decision, if indeed he could remember why. At the time, however, you just did what he said and assumed that the head sugar-trading director of Clyde and Clyde was right. Which he inevitably was.

In his own way, Robbie tried to hand on knowledge in the same way that Bill had to him. This was the least he could do. It was the promise he had made to Bill as he sat by the tough old man’s bedside while he paid the ultimate penalty for chain-smoking Capstan full-strength cigarettes from the age of fourteen.

It had never really struck Robbie that he was exceptionally intelligent. He just knew that he could see things that other people missed. He had first noticed this when he had scored straight As on leaving school and had been awarded a place at Edinburgh to read Spanish and Russian. Some time later, Robbie had discovered that at the time there had been a bit of a scene and an investigation into the examination procedures at the school. The examination board had been suspicious that Robbie had obtained prior access to the papers given the almost perfect score he had achieved.

For Robert Smith, the grammar-school boy from Twickenham, Edinburgh came as quite a shock. Semi-detached life with his civil-servant father and retired-teacher mother had not really prepared him for the variety of distractions that were available to him at university. For two years he threw himself into a whirl of social and sporting activity with a minimum of work thrown in. By the start of the third year, however, Robbie had met the Physics student who was to become his wife and he settled down to a somewhat steadier lifestyle.

For those who had to work and were neither following a profession nor aiming to become an academic, a job in the City with an exclusive merchant bank or brokerage house was the most sought-after option. As Robbie did the milk round of possible employers he saw sugar broking as a rather more exciting and glamorous option than merchant banking and set his sights on Clyde and Clyde. After three interviews, Robbie received an offer based both on his squash blue and on his ability to speak Russian, since at the time the USSR was a major market for Clyde and Clyde. In the way of large organisations, Robbie had had little opportunity to use his Russian either then or since, although he had kept up a regular squash game.

Within a few months of Robbie joining, it became obvious to the senior members of the sugar desk, as it had to Bill, that ‘the new lad’ was different. He had been given the normal greenhorn job of monitoring Clyde and Clyde’s European sugar trading. Unlike the others that had suffered before him, Robbie had grasped the intricacies of the pricing of EEC sugar. He mastered the complicated mixture of restitutions, levies and green currencies and devised a system to finesse the tender system. This guaranteed Clyde and Clyde a large fixed profit on each transaction that they did.

Robbie was given more and more demanding tasks. He mastered each problem in an incredibly short time. He normally also managed to modify the system in such a way that Clyde and Clyde benefited handsomely from the alteration and everyone wondered why they had not made the changes earlier.

Robbie quickly made his way up through the organisation. Following some resignations, firings and retirements, he found himself holding the position of sugar-trading director at the age of forty-one.

Along the way he had married Julia, fathered four children and bought a spacious detached house in Surrey. From the outside looking in, Robbie was a golden boy with a lifestyle that would be the envy of most.

Although he knew that this assessment was more or less true, Robbie was still impatient. He could feel the pressure from others below him who, like him, had been recruited for their raw intelligence. As Robbie sat looking over St. Paul’s savouring the Dover sole he had just eaten at Wheelers, which had been washed down with a good bottle of Chablis, he contemplated the fact that he was beginning to get old for his job. What he needed was the one massively profitable transaction. Something that would inject enough cash into his offshore bonus account to allow him to retire gracefully, and yet still educate four children and enjoy the financially secure lifestyle that he had become used to.

Robbie’s calculations were rudely interrupted by the ringing of his private line. As he swung round and prepared to do battle with the first call of the afternoon, Robbie recognised James Fang’s voice on the end of the line.

‘Hi, Robbie, how are you?’ said the cultured but foreign voice. ‘What’s going on in your part of the world?’

Robert Smith settled back in his chair as his brain started whirring. For Fang to call up from what was, from the sound of it, a mobile phone, something must be happening. The problem with Fang was that you never knew what. He never called to discuss the time of day. There was always an ulterior motive. It could be something as petty as wanting tickets to the latest London show. Or, more interestingly, a major sugar deal. Better to play one’s cards carefully. For Robbie, the key question in his mind was the impact the earlier than normal monsoon rain was going to have on the crop in Thailand and China.

‘James, great to hear from you. What’s the weather like?’ responded Robbie, leaving it up to Fang whether he chose to discuss crop estimates or holidays in the tropics.

‘Great, if you happen to be a duck,’ responded James.

It was going to be crop estimates.

‘When are we going to see you here?’ replied Robbie, deliberately avoiding any specifics and putting the ball back in Fang’s court.

‘Probably sooner than you think,’ replied James.

Robbie sat back in his seat and tried to make out details on the warship’s superstructure. Best to play dumb.

‘That’s nice. Why?’ said Robbie, shifting gear.

‘Hmmmm… You may well ask.’

‘Yeees.’

‘It’s our favourite country,’ said James, having been forced to make the opening move.

‘You surprise me,’ admitted Robbie. ‘I thought the old man had it all sorted out.’

‘So did he,’ continued James. ‘Unfortunately, God, whichever one you chose, wasn’t in agreement.’

Robbie studied St. Paul’s Dome through the drizzle. He fixed his mind on the crop estimates of a country on the other side of the Equator yet only a mobile phone call away. According to the latest statistics he had, the domestic crop was coming along fine and Indonesia was headed towards self-sufficiency. Any shortfall was supposed to be covered neatly by the Fangs, either through legitimate imports or smuggling. Either way the sugar was supplied by Robbie.

James’s call meant something must be happening. There was no way the crop could have suddenly jumped so that they could export. It must be a shortfall that was greater than already planned. The question was how much. Or, more appropriately, how much Fang was going to admit to.

‘That’s the trouble with gods. They are above reading crop estimates. How much are we talking about?’ replied Robbie.

There was a pause while James weighed up the pros and cons of being accurate. If James told Robbie his best guess of the real figure, then the latter would immediately ramp up the market. If James held back with the truth, then Robbie would have every right to stitch him up later in the game. Better to play the Indonesian card.

‘Difficult to tell, you know; you never get the truth from our favourite country until it’s too late.’

Robbie nodded in agreement but said nothing.

‘Probably about 500,’ finished James.

Robbie swung round in his chair and tried to keep his voice neutral, ‘Above the shortfall we have already planned?’

James paused. ‘Yes.’

‘Christ.’ An unplanned shortfall in Indonesia of over half a million tonnes would have a dramatic effect on prices.

‘My sentiments entirely – even though I don’t believe in him. You had better get down here. I don’t want to discuss this too much over the phone. You never know.’

‘Okay, I’ll get the evening flight and see you tomorrow. Can you make the normal bookings?’

After a few more pleasantries Robbie hung up and swung round to look at the Dome. If that bugger Fang was admitting to a 500,000 tonne additional shortfall, the figure could probably be doubled. And if Indonesia was having a crop failure of this size then the same could probably be said of Thailand.

Robbie swung back in his chair. There was something about the look on Robbie’s face that stopped the sugar desk in its tracks.

‘Go long!’ he barked. ‘As l-l-long as you can and as quickly as you can without moving the p-p-price against us. We are going to squeeze the hell out of it.’

If he played it right, this could be the retirement deal he was looking for. And even if it wasn’t a trip to Asia would give him a chance to escape from this bloody foul weather.