THE BROKER

BY KARO HÄMÄLÄINEN

Fabianinkatu

Translated by Jill G. Timbers

The man is standing in the rain. He lets the raindrops hammer his head and soak his hair and his numbingly expensive suit.

He could wait for a taxi under the shelter or indoors, where the wind, whipped into a storm gale, wouldn’t slash at his chin, cheeks, and nose, but he does not want to turn anywhere for help. He doesn’t want help, nor shelter. He has to cope on his own. He has to be alone.

He’s lost several million, but in truth he’s lost more than that.

Gains and losses are part of stock trading—the gains should just be greater than the losses. This loss has been more money than any earlier gain, but he can handle that. Being taken is the hard part for him to swallow. He’s the one who’s used to outwitting the others, not the one who has to pay the bill.

He has lost everything, and he wants to get wet. He wants to walk home on the asphalt strewn with yellow leaves. He wants to be blinded by the xenon lights of cars that appear from nowhere in the rain, to let the wetness soak into his clothes and glue his hair to his skull. For he wants to think about what there is when there is nothing.

 

I

He stood in front of the granite wall of the Helsinki Stock Exchange building and felt old. Yesterday, or twenty-five years ago, he had strode briskly through the glass doors, leaving the others behind both with his steps up the staircase and with his decisions in the trading hall on the second floor.

He exerted himself to keep his posture erect and he had learned to raise his chin, because small things like a gaze fastened on the ground spoke louder than words in shaping the image of a person’s vigor.

He could do nothing about the fact that his face resembled sand after a downpour. When they’d taken pictures of him for his seventieth-birthday interview in the Helsingin Sanomat, the newspaper’s photographer had arranged the lights so that the furrows cast deep shadows on his face. In the pictures he looked like old Samuel Beckett, just as the photographer had wanted. He looked like what Ernest Hemingway would have liked to look like.

After that he had refused to be photographed, even at family celebrations. Not because he was ashamed of his wrinkles, but because a less skilled photographer would not be able to take such rugged shots. The series of photos, to which he had bought the rights, showed a man who had weathered wind and hail.

Harsh conditions had made him tough, and even though the harshness of the conditions was not in his case the result of natural forces but rather of the capriciousness of market forces, his background gave him a strength you can only obtain through living.

The man wore a refined everyday suit, dark gray with pale gray pinstripes. It was the work of one of the city’s rare tailors who through the years had always adjusted measurements by eye—added a few millimeters to the waist and back seam, tucked a bit somewhere else. He had noticed it when he sometimes tried on the old suits that still hung in his closet like skeletons of times past: the suit he had worn to receive an honorary doctorate from the school of economics, the suit in which he had celebrated the ten million marks he’d made off the Metsä-Serla warrant.

Blue he had never liked, even though it was favored by the patriotic. His fatherland was money, which knows no color.

When he stared at himself in the window of the clothing store on the ground floor of the hundred-year-old granite building, he saw a man who looked like him: someone pleased with himself, dignified, respected, someone who enjoyed company and could still captivate a small group, but who drew back the moment people appeared whom he did not know.

He looked, in fact, too thriving, considering that someone had tried to kill him earlier that morning.

He was Ransu Grundström; Rafael, in official documents. The nickname was unusual for one his age and brought to mind the children’s TV puppet dog—everywhere in Finland except this neighborhood. At the Helsinki Stock Exchange, Ransu meant nothing but Grundström, the legendary securities dealer who founded the brokerage that ruled the Finnish stock exchange business in the 1980s and early 1990s.

R. Grundström Brokerage was famous for its bold maneuvers, both on behalf of its clients and for its own benefit. Some years Grundström brokered more trades than even the securities trading units of the traditional commercial banks Kansallis-Osake-Pankki and Suomen Yhdyspankki. This lead position meant that Ransu had all the information that moved within Helsinki. No one dared enter the game without first asking his view or without informing him. Anyone who overlooked the rule discovered he had lost money, because R. Grundström Brokerage would attack the markets aggressively and force their opponent to operate the way they wanted. That is what Ransu did if he felt that someone intended to move on his own, or against Ransu’s interests.

He had conducted bruising battles and driven his smaller competitors into bankruptcy. He had recruited the sharpest brokers to his firm, and no one had ever declined. Along with success, he offered merit-based pay, which was very unusual in a Finland accustomed to fixed monthly wages and as close to the Soviet Union as a country that called itself “Western” could be.

“Good morning, Ransu!”

Mr. Lauri Rosendahl, CEO of the Helsinki Stock Exchange, waited, holding the door open. Grundström stepped inside and the CEO hastened to open the second door.

They briefly discussed the situation with the US housing markets, and the previous night’s PMI that had caused US markets to drop. The fall had continued in Asia, the CEO reported, as he checked the real-time Nikkei score on his iPhone. The anticipated index futures indicated that Helsinki would open to a fall as well when the first trades were made after ten a.m.

When Ransu Grundström had stepped through the outer door of this same building every day thirty years ago, brokers had not talked about index futures but about companies whose shares they sold to each other and bought from each other at two-person desks in the great trading hall on the second floor, rather than sending bulk orders electronically to a data center somewhere in Sweden based on what had happened in US and Asian markets.

Nowadays the stock exchange building was a hollow place. Trading had gone electronic by the early 1990s. The company running the stock exchange had first ended up under Swedish ownership and most recently been sold to the world’s largest exchange operator, NASDAQ, known best as the quotation market for hot IT and biotech companies. Ownership of the pale gray granite fortress designed by Lars Sonck had been parked at a foundation.

NASDAQ’s Finnish office did not need many employees or square feet. The old stock exchange hall that had once doubled as a meeting room for the city council now served occasionally as a seminar space, and the rooms on the Fabianinkatu side had been turned into offices.

Grundström had leased one of these for himself. Not because he needed office space—he was retired and traded only occasionally, for the sheer love of it. On the upper level of his two-story home in Kaivopuisto Park he had a fully equipped office with a broad view of the sea. Here, on the other side of narrow Fabianinkatu Street, there was a ramp to the Nordea building’s parking garage, and that ramp, along with one side of the building, formed the main view out the window. Nonetheless, Grundström had made his offer the moment he heard that space was being freed up from stock exchange use, and he had agreed to renovations at his own expense, without trying to negotiate a lower rent.

The location was practical, between Esplanade and Aleksanterinkatu, a block from the main market square and a short walk from his home. Most important, there was an indoor stairway he could use to get from the office to the Bourse Club where Grundström made a habit of lunching. The lordly, conservative atmosphere of the exclusive club felt cozy to him. He might laugh at some details, but at the same time he took pleasure in the fact that modernization had not yet reached quite everywhere.

Here he could live amid the days of his own greatness. For it could not be denied: his greatness was history, visible as affluence, independence, and prestige, but it had been at least ten years since he had been a feared market force. Nor was there need to deny it. Disregarding facts was one sure way to lower your chances on the markets.

The massive walls of the granite fortress sheltered Grundström from the winds of change that whipped wildly past and caused the stock markets to plunge and soar with abandon. The once radical daredevil had become a conservative whose thoughts frequently escaped to the intense trading of shares of now-forgotten and repeatedly merged companies.

Ransu Grundström shut himself into his office, which had no nameplate on the door. He spread the Financial Times on the dark-stained conference table from the building’s original furnishings and skimmed the pages without paying much attention, looking at the headlines and pictures. There was so much information that you couldn’t gather, analyze, and manage it all. The present time operated with different logic than the 1980s, when information was limited and you could make money simply by concentrating.

After reading the paper he went to freshen up in the bathroom, which sported unnecessarily modern furnishings. A family-owned investment firm that had made its fortune in faucets controlled the office next door, and its CEO was one of Grundström’s regular lunch companions. The man had managed to convince somebody that a soft stream of water and the latest design in faucets were essential for the hundred-year-old building.

Grundström looked at himself in the mirror. He tugged the left sleeve of his suit jacket. He brushed some black polish onto his pant leg. He used a little soap to scrub the polish off his hands, enough but not too much.

At eleven thirty there was a knock on his office door.

Grundström did not have any employees. What would he do with them? He was a stockbroker and he was used to taking care of his own mundane tasks. He accepted advice and help, but he was perfectly capable of carrying his own newspaper and opening the door if someone knocked on it. He picked up coffee from the club or the Aschan Café on the next block.

On the balcony corridor that circled the inner courtyard stood a tall man. He was at the ideal age, career-wise—about thirty-five—an age when one has enough experience behind him but still hungers for success, unlike fifty-year-olds who are beginning to secure their positions and don’t dare take risks. Grundström had not met this man before, though he had heard much about him.

Grundström had wanted to meet the man in person. But he did not invite him in.

 

II

Jarkko Aalto was among the most talented of his generation when it came to making money on the stock and derivatives markets. He had downed many liters of flavored mineral water in head hunters’ conference rooms, listening to the offers their clients would make him. Then with great indifference he would say, at the end of the discussions, that he was content with his current job in the markets unit of the largest bank in the Nordic countries. The merit pay was good, advancement opportunities were available, and he had enough money at his disposal.

But when an invitation arrived from Ransu Grundström, Aalto cleared space on his calendar by moving a breakfast meeting earlier and rescheduling a lunch. And thus it was that on each side of the threshold stood the toughest gambler of the Helsinki finance world, then and now.

“Have you eaten?” Grundström asked. Without waiting for a reply, he stepped out the door and started toward the staircase. Aalto strode beside him.

They climbed up two floors to the Bourse Club. Aalto always left his top shirt button open, but on the stairs he pulled from the breast pocket of his suit a shiny salmon-pink tie and fixed it loosely around his neck. Several loaner ties in different patterns hung from a hook in the men’s room of the club where ties were required, but turning to one of those would have signaled poor preparation. One factor in Aalto’s success was that he always thought through upcoming situations in advance: It was likely that they would lunch at the club, just as it was likely that the German investor who had bought UPM-Kymmene shares the day before would buy more today. With each, he’d place his bets accordingly.

They sat down at a table which Aalto guessed was Grundström’s regular spot. Food selection was not difficult. They were both men who knew what they wanted, and they knew that the purpose of the lunch was not the food. They would barely notice the dishes that appeared before them.

“Do you know,” Ransu Grundström said, once the waiter had filled their glasses with sparkling mineral water, “someone tried to kill me this morning.”

The language of financial centers was generally filled with dramatic metaphors. Life and death were small words, used the way teenage girls discuss their infatuations. But Aalto quickly realized that Grundström was not speaking metaphorically.

“A man, just one man, grabbed me under the arms from behind as I left home. On Laivasillankatu, on the park side of the street.”

Aalto knew that Grundström lived in one of Helsinki’s finest areas, near the house, now a museum, of Field Marshal Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, who had led the Finnish armed forces in World War II. Aalto would sometimes take international customers to that museum. Residences there cost more than in Manhattan.

“From behind some bushes, in the shadows, out of nowhere,” Grundström recalled. “The streetlight is out right there.” He explained that he had consistently supported a so-called night-watchman state. “All sorts of useless income transfers—cost-free university education, government pensions, lavish social security, free school lunches. Nowadays I could even accept some of that, if society would only take care of security. There should be a night watchman.”

“You got away without injury.”

“The bum wanted money. I tossed some bills as far as I could. He ran after them. I escaped down the hill.”

Aalto listened to the former stock exchange czar’s tale with fork and knife frozen and wondered if he was expected to show empathy. “It’s good to have money with you,” he said.

“It makes life-and-death choices easier,” Grundström replied. “I saw the flash of a knife blade. He held it against my throat. It was this close.” He showed a tiny space between his thumb and forefinger.

This sentence was followed by a considerably longer pause, which emphasized Grundström’s shock; Aalto did not want to interrupt the moment, even though arrogance and flagrant disregard for convention were among the characteristics he cultivated. His indifference to propriety often annoyed his superiors, but they never said anything. One does not let go of a money machine nor even irritate it. He annoyed his superiors most of all by earning more than them.

There was a reason for Aalto’s unusually respectful comportment. This man who bowed to no one admired only one person other than himself in the world of investments: Ransu Grundström.

Some ten years earlier a guest lecturer at the school of economics had gotten carried away telling stories of the wild stock exchange of the 1980s—not yet restrained by the Securities Market Act—in which the custom of the land was like that of doping in endurance sports. These stories often included the name Ransu Grundström. Aalto had known immediately that he wanted to hear more about that legendary stockbroker. He maneuvered himself to chat with the guest speaker after the lecture and was able to hear more about this broker who operated with a smuggler’s morals—the secretive czar of the stock exchange.

He got hold of books on the history of the stock exchange and commercial banks, where he found Grundström in the indexes. With a disciple’s dedication he drank up Grundström’s intellectual world. He was not interested in Omaha ukulele players, old softies worshipped by the whole investment world. He was interested in the scruples-free stockbroker who had made his own fortune by sufficiently honest means.

* * *

Grundström said that he certainly did not want to bore a busy young man with chitchat about such a commonplace matter as death—people died all the time. He wanted to talk about these markets that were so different than they used to be.

“The computer screen is full of data and more keeps pouring in faster than you can see. Index decimals flash past. How do you make money anymore?” Grundström asked.

The clever quips Aalto used to entertain his well-to-do guests on the streets beside Nice’s beaches and in the bistros on the slopes of Alpine ski resorts would not cut it now. He had asked some older colleagues who knew Grundström about the man’s personality and was told that he had no interest in empty talk. The only topic that really spoke to him was money.

“The market hasn’t changed. It just looks different.”

“Everything happens at lightning speed.”

“It’s wrong to think that speed is the decisive factor,” Aalto said. “Whoever is fastest is fastest, but the stock exchange is not a hundred-yard dash. What interests me is who makes the most money.”

Grundström laughed and declared that he had no reason to feel otherwise.

“You can make a little money, quickly. If you make a little money, you need to do it often. You have to hammer out trades all the time, with big capital. If you’re lucky, in a day you’ll make the operational expenses and a little more. If you’re not lucky, you lose a lot.”

“Probably quite a lot.”

“A goddamn lot. No point trying for tiny profits with a million shares. Only with tens or hundreds of millions does it start to be felt. And if something goes wrong then, it’s really felt. You have 90 percent leverage and the company posts a profit warning . . . No. Fast trading is a game of chance, and the odds are with the casino. It’s a bit like the retail trade: big turnover, lots of capital, low coverage, small margins. Differentiation factors, scarce. Who would want to be the Tesco or the Walmart of the brokerage business? Who wants to fight with robots?”

Aalto noted with satisfaction that his words were sinking in. He spoke only the truth, but deliberately painted an incorrect picture. He was not lying, just adapting what he said to suit the listener.

Grundström listened to him carefully, seemingly ready to buy his story.

“I’m old-fashioned,” the young man continued. “On the markets you can make a little money or a lot of money. I’m interested in the latter.”

“How do you do it?”

“By buying stock that’s going up before others do, or selling whatever’s about to drop.” So as not to sound unintentionally flippant, he hastened to add that he had his ways of sniffing out which would go up and down, and that, with the right information, you could improve the ratios. “The market’s still the same in that way too. Information is power that turns to money.”

“Back in the good old days when Wärtsilä was getting orders,” said Grundström, “the directors swaggered about on cruises or dining at the Savoy. To make money you just needed to know the right people and use a little power of deduction. Nowadays they send out stock bulletins from every store and new office. Information has become worthless. Everyone has it.”

“Information has become a scarce commodity. That’s why it’s even more valuable than before,” Aalto declared.

“Is it enough for making money?”

“No. It’s not enough. Fortunately, you don’t need information,” Jarkko Aalto explained, watching Grundström’s pupils. “I don’t look for truth but for market movement. Communists shout that the markets are headless. Indeed they are! I completely agree! Fundaments are reflected in prices slowly. That may be enough for a holder who wants to become prosperous. But if you want to get rich—if you don’t want to make just one fortune but rather multiple fortunes—that pace is far too leisurely.

“Truth-seeking is Greek philosophy. Fine. Lovely!” he went on. “In recent years we’ve seen that the Greek tradition is perhaps not the most optimal in terms of managing financial matters. That’s why I’m with the pragmatists: truth pays! More essential than a company’s true value is its price movement. I’m not interested in how a company’s doing. I’m not even interested in what the company’s doing. I am only interested in how I can make money with the company’s stock.”

Inferring from his nods that Grundström was still listening with interest, Aalto continued the presentation which he had practiced in front of a mirror to get just the right facial expressions and emphasis to bolster his message.

“Okay. Some ways are easier and some are harder. The easiest are index changes. Derivatives are constructed on indexes. Index funds invest according to the indexes. They have to buy a company due to rise on the index and sell off slips being kicked off the index. Simple: buy the companies rising on the index before the index changes.”

“Twice a year, at most four times a year. The rest of the time, just twiddle your thumbs?” said Grundström.

Aalto cleared his throat. “Of course, more advanced ways also exist.”

“Such as?”

“I slaughter the algorithms that are based on technical analysis,” Aalto said. “I watch what they do and once I’ve learned, I do the same thing before them.”

He took as an example the moving average—even an old man would understand that. Users of technical analysis peered at stock trends. When a stock came up from below to break the running average curve calculated from the previous thirty days’ quotes, the technical analysis set raced to buy it. Of course, the thirty-day average did not work anymore. You needed more complex methods to make money, methods that Aalto could illuminate a little, should Grundström express interest.

“I look at appropriate stocks that are close to the curve and I buy them. And one can always help break the curve a bit, if necessary.”

Grundström gave a laugh. “Pump and dump. If that still works, the market really is the same as it was.”

“That’s forbidden,” Aalto said. He allowed his cheeks to twitch.

Pump and dump was the classic method for manipulating rates. The stockbroker would begin buying lots of one specific stock and its rate would rise under the buying pressure. He would pump up the rate by buying more and more, skillfully timing his purchases. Bit by bit the other investors would become interested in the rising stock and start buying. Once the rate rose high enough, the original pumper switched from buyer to seller. He dumped his shares and raked in the profits.

Aalto knew that Grundström had used this method with great success. The giant of the 1970s and ’80s stock exchange had benefited from his reputation. When people in the Helsinki Stock Exchange trading hall noticed that R. Grundström Brokerage was buying stock, those at the desks of other banks and brokerage firms believed that Ransu knew something they didn’t. Sometimes this was true: yield data had reached Grundström or he had heard of some factory fire and was reacting to it.

Sometimes there was no reason for the purchases. But the others did not dare not to follow Ransu’s moves. Grundström was able to make money with and without information.

Aalto moved his glass and placed his phone between the plates. He opened an app and the screen filled immediately with an impressive number of price graphs, which he showed Grundström.

“Here are a few attractive objects on the Helsinki exchange right now,” he said, explaining to the former stock exchange czar the meaning of the abbreviations along the edge of the screen.

“Dull ones,” Grundström remarked. “Doesn’t it work for Fintec?”

“You like Fintec.”

“Fintec is one of the companies I’ve made the most on. It was always a good security. It was traded a lot but not too much. It was easy to bring others along with that one.”

Aalto typed in the Fintec ticker symbol and brought up the company’s price curve. He had forgotten how little Fintec shares cost these days and how little they were traded. It had been a hot item in the IT bubble at the start of the millennium, its market value ten times its current value. One month Aalto had doubled his student loan payment thanks to Fintec’s high rate in the fall of 1999.

The program did not show Fintec shares as particularly strong. Moreover, the share trading was so low that Fintec in no way belonged among the stocks he traded. A professional game required sufficient liquidity, market depth.

But if the old man wanted him to demonstrate his skills on precisely that ticket, the security dear to his heart, Aalto could do so.

“The traditional method won’t work here, but that’s no problem,” Aalto said. “Actually, technically speaking, Fintec shares can turn into extremely desirable objects in a moment. If it just breaks this curve heading down from above, the others will start selling, and then . . .”

Grundström waited. “Does that work?” he finally asked.

“You doubt it?”

“I always doubt.”

“Would you like me to actually do it?”

The waiter set down steaming dishes before them. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes, with brown gravy and colorful vegetables.

“Yes. In fact, I would,” Grundström said. He bent toward Aalto. “As you see, I am already an old man.”

And then Grundström said exactly what Aalto had wanted to hear.

 

III

The fierce October wind whistled from the north, from the university area, and bit his ankles through his thin socks. Wind collected in the narrow Fabianinkatu passage, whipping candy wrappers, receipts, and leaves into the air.

Jarkko Aalto pushed his hands into the front pockets of his coat. Gloves did not suit his style.

He was about to make the trade of his life. On the sacrifice side, he would cause the rates for Fintec stock to drop, and along the way earn several grand. The reward would be becoming the chief shareholder of R. Grundström Brokerage.

Moreover, under astoundingly good terms.

He almost felt as if he were swindling the old man, who must still be a little disoriented. Evidently the morning mugging had shaken Grundström and caused him to think about life’s impermanence, and that was probably why the man wanted a successor for his company, fast. Without bothering about the terms.

It was a situation where the seller wanted to sell. An exceptionally good time to buy.

Aalto had learned not to feel empathy. He did his job and nothing more: maximized his investments’ yield. If he had to choose, first came personal benefit, then employer’s and clients’ benefit. He had no need to think about anyone else’s benefit. He did not need to care what happened to the others or how they felt. He represented his bosses. Other interest groups had their own representatives. It was important to choose good advocates if one wanted to survive in this game.

It was not his responsibility to think about secondary things like human suffering. He was not even allowed to do that, if he wanted to fulfill his social obligation. If he started to get sentimental, the markets wouldn’t work efficiently and wouldn’t price the future right; instead, vague human considerations would distort the prices. He was a pureblood, straightforward market fundamentalist who did not care what others thought of him.

No. Actually, he did care what others thought of him. Jarkko Aalto wanted everyone to think he was the market tough, the Ransu Grundström and Gordon Gekko of today.

He had more than enough money. He thirsted for fame. He salivated for immaterial symbolic values.

He had suspected the reason for Grundström’s invitation to meet. Insight derived from intuition based on careful research was his most important capital. Even so, the directness of their conversation had startled him. He had expected the first meeting to involve probing, testing, getting a feel for one another, but Grundström had surprised him by saying that he hoped Aalto would rise to continue his work at R. Grundström Brokerage.

Grundström was selling, he was buying, and both ought to feign reluctance in order to obtain the most propitious terms. But Grundström had not even tried. Once he demonstrated to Grundström that he could carry the market, they’d conclude the deal: he would buy Ransu Grundström’s stake at a remarkably low price and agree not to sell the company or change its name for the next ten years.

It’s true that you have to be realistic: R. Grundström Brokerage no longer gleamed quite as brightly. Nevertheless, it still performed and scattered money to its shareholders. Some of the ownership had moved to the directors whom Grundström had taken on as partners, though he had kept a clear controlling interest for himself. R. Grundström Brokerage was one of the desirable merge partners when the small agencies and property management companies clustered in the blocks around Aleksanterinkatu Street planned for the sector’s future. There was no doubt that Grundström had received lucrative offers.

But Grundström had chosen him as his successor. Aalto had never in all his career received more flattering praise. Merit awards of a couple million paled in comparison.

Ignoring the icy wind, he dug out his phone and pulled up the Fintec data page. The company’s market value barely exceeded a billion euros. Big investors hadn’t turned on their machines to trade for something so small. He would easily get the rate moving with a small number of shares, and once the market movement was seen, enough investors would join in. He could manipulate small investors into selling by using a few of his aliases and dropping negative hints on the Kauppalehti chat page about Fintec’s big service contract with the Swedish government.

As he walked from Fabianinkatu toward Esplanade, Aalto put some Fintec shares up for sale from his own portfolio. He didn’t have any Fintec, but that wasn’t a problem. Never had been. He would just buy them back at a lower price before the closing bell.

Brokers were of course absolutely forbidden to short-sell their own portfolios. He should have notified the compliance officer of his sale, and he should not have closed his position before three months at the very least.

Those rules were for losers. He had managed his own investments the whole time through a controlling interest company he’d registered in Luxembourg. He had neglected to report it to the internal regulators, and no journalist had the means to untangle the company’s background. It wasn’t wrong. The Luxembourg investment firm merely put him in the same position Ransu Grundström and his colleagues had occupied in the 1980s.

His phone jingled that his e-mail program synchronization was complete. The sale confirmation mails had arrived.

Aalto strode across the street to Esplanade Park and sat down on a bench. There were some empty ones: Helsinki at freezing point and spitting rain did not entice people to linger outdoors. He opened his e-mails. The highest purchase bid was surprisingly strong. He had only gotten it to move three cents with his sales.

Well, the first set of sales had been an unusually small one. He had just used it to test the market traction.

Fintec was a tricky stock in that he could only operate on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. The ticket did not really trade on other markets. Usually, with the bigger companies, Aalto took advantage of simultaneous quotations on the virtual exchanges. Finnish companies’ markets were noticeably thinner on the virtual exchanges than on the Helsinki Stock Exchange, which meant that getting the rates to move there took a lot less capital.

Aalto sold a second batch, twice the size of the first, at the highest bid. The technical sell signal was thirteen cents away, which meant a price shift of over 8 percent for the stock, but he didn’t need to reach that. Just as long as the others joined in. That would be enough to show Ransu Grundström that he was able to steer the market just as Grundström had done thirty years ago.

Fintec’s price still moved only a cent. He checked the completed sales: he was the only seller; Nordea, Evli, and Nordnet were the buyers.

Usually with a stock like this, the sale of several hundred thousand shares would spur more movement. Aalto was puzzled, but maybe old orders had piled up, since Fintec’s rate had stayed unusually stable. Moreover, 1.5 euros was a comfortably exact sum per order. That’s why there was more demand than was in any way warranted.

His phone had buzzed a meeting reminder ten minutes ago, but he had muted it. He could go late and enter without apology. That was his custom.

He wanted to concentrate on Fintec, because after this, the rules of his old job would matter little.

Aalto put the next batch up for sale. By now the cold had started to numb his fingers and the strength of the stock price caused some unease, but he brushed away both the physical and psychological discomforts.

 

IV

The umbrella was totally useless. The wind whipped the water at a forty-five-degree angle and would have inverted the umbrella in an instant, so I strode across Tehtaankatu with the closed umbrella in my hand and got wetter with each step. I was wet from the water pouring from the skies, and wet from the splash of a car plowing over a puddle on the uneven cobblestones. Water streamed from my dark all-season coat even before I had walked the short distance from the Kaivopuisto streetcar stop to Itäinen Puistotie. Water sloshed in my shoes.

The late-October rain had continued unbroken for three days now. It would stop on the weekend, if the predicted cold front reached Fennoscandia and changed the stuff falling from the sky from water to snow. A five-month November would commence, in which the slush from efforts to salt away the snow would be interrupted only by a few bright days of frost, which in turn would transform the streets into bad skating rinks.

I couldn’t do anything about the weather. My forefathers had selected this peninsula for their home. I could have moved somewhere and supported myself as a freelancer, but I was trapped by the language. In other countries they spoke noticeably poorer Finnish than in Helsinki, even though Helsinki’s current speech patterns, with the eternal contractions and mangled vowels, were not a pretty thing, either.

And then there was the fact that the people I knew lived here. Among them Ransu Grundström, who had invited me for a visit. I always accepted his invitations with pleasure, because Ransu was a sharp old guy, and even though his unbeatable contact network had thinned and drifted away from the burning issues of the day, he often knew things that were useful to me in my work as a journalist.

Helsinki’s bank circles had been buzzing all that rainy day about the stockbroker considered the most talented—in other words, the greediest—of his generation, Jarkko Aalto, and his surprising resignation. I expected to learn more about it from Ransu.

I asked the servant who opened the door to take my outer clothes to the bathroom to dry. He kindly handed me a soft plush towel, traditional Reino slippers, and dry socks, which I exchanged for my soaking wet ones. My feet got warm right away and I began to feel a little better.

Ransu Grundström was waiting in the living room, where seamark lights sliced at intervals through the grayness outside the full-wall window. A birch fire in the hearth cast a warmth that made the flue hum softly and steadily.

Ransu was clearly in splendid spirits. He asked his servant to bring us both glasses of cognac for a start, “from the bottle that looks like an aftershave bottle.”

I asked if we had something special to celebrate.

Ransu smiled. “Fintec is treating us to these drinks.”

“You were involved in that too?”

IT company Fintec’s share price had soared two days earlier when an American competitor had made an extravagant offer to buy out the company’s shares. The premium had increased almost 70 percent from the previous day’s closing quote.

“It’s good to be part of something like that,” Ransu said, and there was no doubt he had known of the plans before they were made public.

The unspoken agreement between us was that whatever Ransu told me directly—or at least, directly enough—about his own activities would never become public through me. On the other hand, if he hid something from me and I found out some other way, I did not hesitate to hit him full force on the front page. After I had exposed Ransu’s fuzzy Nokia trades, which led to a police investigation, he had not kept secrets from me, he had just been mysterious. I had demonstrated my toughness and he, his.

“I happened to obtain a large number of them a few hours before the buyout offer was announced,” Ransu said.

“Poor seller.”

“He suffered from his own greed.”

“Do you know who was selling? Did you make a block trade?” I probed.

“Perfectly ordinary trading. I submitted purchase instructions through three brokers and let the slips fall into my lap. Someone had a sudden strong urge to sell.”

“You’re not telling the whole story.”

“Correct. I can’t tell the whole thing because if I did it would make someone look ridiculous. That’s not what I want. I don’t embarrass. I don’t humiliate.”

“You take the money.”

“True. That’s my handicap.”

We ate prime rib sandwiches with mineral water and had another round of cognac. We chatted about this and that, politics, finance, music—Ransu had an opening-night ticket to the National Opera where they’d just started performances of Verdi’s La forza del destino. When I thought it was appropriate, I asked if he knew anything about Jarkko Aalto’s unexpected resignation.

“If there’s no new job waiting, it’s a firing dressed up as voluntary,” said Ransu.

I told him I had talked with Aalto by phone a few hours earlier. Aalto said the non-compete clause prevented him from disclosing his plans.

“Not the best time for a gardening holiday,” Ransu snorted.

It was true that in the banking sector people usually resigned in March or April, after the previous year’s bonuses were paid, if the departure was of their own volition.

“You evidently don’t like Aalto.”

“I do, I do! I’ve actually met him only once, but I am grateful to him for a great deal. He’s a man of the present.”

I asked Ransu to elaborate.

“Nowadays profits come fast and losses even faster,” he stated.

More than that I could not extract from Ransu, but he had expressed his opinion with such conviction that there had to be information behind it. This was how I had learned to work with him. Once I had spoken with him, it was always easier to find out more from other sources. I’d make a few calls the next day and be able to write my own scoop about Jarkko Aalto’s firing.

When I left, the servant asked if I wanted a taxi. I declined—it was only a short walk to the streetcar stop, and the rain wasn’t coming down as hard as when I arrived.

I pointed out that Ransu still walked from here to the city center to work.

“This is a good place for walking. The city does an admirable job taking care of the area. It’s always safe to move about here,” he said.

I waited, because even though I had one foot out the door, it was clear that Ransu wanted to say something.

“Yes?”