"That was a dark moment in my history. After listening half the night to that air-head producer she put next to me, I was in mourning for the hearts and minds of America." He revolved back to the bar. "What're you drinking?"
"Something serious." I pointed toward the single malt. Laphroaig neat.
Just then Bill paused to watch as two women in bulky raincoats brushed past. They receded toward the other end of the bar, settled their coats across an empty stool, and ordered drinks. One was a youngish blonde, a bit nervous, having some tall, colored potion that looked as if it could use a cut of pineapple and a plastic monkey on the glass. But the other one, brunette, was a different story. Pained eyes, with a psychic armor that could only be called battle-weary New York. Joanna, all over again. Tanqueray martini. Straight up.
"Hot damn, sure is good to be back in this town." He was trying, without conspicuous success, to catch the younger woman's eye.
"Henderson, you're standing next to a man with some news that could well alarm you considerably."
"Like maybe this dump might run low on booze?"
"Not likely." I reached for my new drink. "I've got to make a decision, fast. So try to keep a clear head and see if you can help me out."
In my estimation Henderson was a phenomenon--sober or loaded. He'd emerged from the red clay hills somewhere in north Georgia, former football All-State ("I only did it for the pussy"), and ended up at Yale Law--where we shared an apartment for three whole years. By the time we'd finished our degrees, I figured I was ready to tackle real life, but Bill had hung in and gone for a Ph.D. in economics. Although his athlete's physique hadn't survived Yale--an early casualty of the single malt and the Dunhills--Henderson still had the delusion he was twenty-five. Easter before last he'd arrived at my place down in the islands with some leggy print model half his age and a case of Jack Daniel's Black. Did the redneck routine bamboozle the cautious hearts of his admiring ladies? Probably. Right under the radar.
All that notwithstanding, it was a commonly accepted fact that Bill was the sharpest private currency-trader on the East Coast. If tomorrow the dollar was about to dive, the guy who'd already sold it short tonight from Hong Kong to Zurich was invariably Henderson. That part of his life had been all over the papers the previous spring, after he got tapped for the President's Council of Economic Advisers. I guess some genius on the White House staff--urged on by that wily senator from New York, our mutual friend Jack O'Donnell--concluded the Council needed a pet "contrarian" on board for appearances, and Henderson looked to be a sufficiently pro-business prospect. Wrong. After a couple of interviews he was forbidden to make any more public statements. He'd failed to grasp that the national interest required fantasy forecasts just before elections. Bill may have been a master of subtlety when he was trading, but otherwise he tended to call a spade a spade, or worse.
"What's up?" He was about to punt with the blonde after one last try.
"Maybe you'd better go first." I took a sip, savoring the peaty aroma. Let Henderson decompress in his own good time, then sound him out on Noda's chilling proposition. "What are you doing here?"
"Call it modesty and discretion." He turned back.
These were not, as you might infer, the first descriptors that leapt to mind whenever I thought of Bill.
"Care to expand?"
He slid his hand across the bar, extracted another Dunhill from its red pack, and launched a disjointed monologue starting with the goddam traffic in D.C., then proceeding to ditto coming in from LaGuardia.
All this time his cigarette had been poised in readiness. Finally he flicked a sterling silver lighter, the old-fashioned kind, and watched the orange flame glisten off the mirror at our right. "So, old buddy, that's it. All the news that's fit to print. History will record this as the moment yours truly bailed out. I figure it like this. If I can't read the signals myself these days, what in hell am I doing giving advice? Time to hit the silk. Get back to making a living. Don't know how long this circus is going to last, but I figure we'd all better be saddled up and ready to ride, just in case."
As it happens, self-proclaimed ignorance was a crucial ingredient in Henderson's deliberate "country boy" camouflage, designed to disarm the city slickers. I estimated the professional dirt farmer next to me, Armani double-breasted and gold Piaget timepiece, was now worth about forty million, including a chunk of an offshore bank. Yet for it all, he still liked to come across as though he'd just moseyed in and wished somebody would help him through all this fine print.
"Don't bullshit me, Bill." I toyed with my drink. "What you're really saying is you couldn't get anybody else to agree with you."
"Have to admit there were a few trifling differences of opinion about the direction things are headed." He positioned his Dunhill in the ashtray and washed his throat with more Scotch. "You can't cover up the fundamentals with cosmetics. Things like a megabillion trade shortfall, a debt nobody can even count, and a dollar that don't know whether to fish or cut bait. Worst of all, we're still selling the suckers of the world more funny-colored paper than czarist Russia did. There ain't no quick fix for this one." He took another sip, then turned back. "But fuck it. Remember that old saying I used to have about being a lover, not a fighter. I always know when it's time to call in the huntin' dogs and piss on the fire. I'm back in town to stay. I got hold of my boys and they're coming in tomorrow to start getting everything out of mothballs. We're going back on-line."
As anybody who knew Bill was aware, he'd installed a massive computer bank in the converted "maid's quarters" of his Fifth Avenue apartment, hooked to the major futures exchanges and financial markets around the world. Running his operation on a moment-to-moment basis were a couple of young fireballs, his "Georgia Mafia," who did nothing but watch green numbers blink on a CRT screen and buy and sell all day. He and his boys talked a language that had very little to do with English-- jargon about comparing the "implied volatility" of options on this currency against the "theoretical volatility" for that one, etc. On any given day they were placing "straddles" on yen options, "butterfly spreads" on pound sterling futures, "reverse option hedges" on deutsche marks, and on and on. Half the time, Einstein couldn't have tracked what they were doing. Add to that, they leveraged the whole thing with breathtaking margins. To stay alive in Henderson's game, you had to be part oracle, part Jimmy the Greek. You also had to have ice water in your veins. It wasn't money to him, it was a video game where the points just happened to have dollar signs in front. The day I dropped in to watch, he was down two million by lunch, after which we casually strolled over to some shit-kicker place on Third Avenue for barbecued ribs and a beer, came back at three, and by happy-hour time he was ahead half a million. In the trade Henderson was part of the breed known as a shooter. Up a million here, down a million there--just your typical day in the salt mines. A week of that and I'd have had an ulcer the size of the San Andreas fault.
He liked to characterize his little trading operation as "a sideline to cover the rent." I happened to know what it really paid was the incidental costs of a lot of expensive ladies. Could be Bill's entertainment fund was in need of a transfusion.
"Back to business?" I asked. "Like the good old days?"
"Bright and early Monday morning. Got a strong hunch the
Ruskies'll be in the market buying dollars to cover their September shorts on Australian wheat futures. Might as well bid up the greenback and make the comrades work for their daily bread. Then round about eleven, I figure to unwind that and go long sterling, just before London central figures out what's happening, shits a brick, and has to hit the market for a few hundred million pounds to steady the boat."
Well, I thought, Henderson the Fearless hasn't lost his touch.
"Bill, I want to run a small scenario by you." I sipped at my drink. "Say somebody'd just told you he was taking a massive position in interest-rate futures? What would that suggest?"
"Tells me the man's getting nervous. If he was holding a lot of Treasury paper, for instance, he'd probably figured rates were about to head up and he didn't want to get creamed. See, if you're holding a bond that pays, say, eight percent, and all of a sudden interest rates scoot up to ten, the resale value of that instrument is gonna go down the sewer. But if you've already 'sold' it using a futures contract, whoever bought that contract is the one who's got to eat the loss. You're covered."
"I'm not talking about standard hedging." I was wondering how to approach the specifics. "Say somebody started selling a load of bond futures naked. Nothing underlying."