Sons of Fortune

“The Adoration of the Magi, Tintoretto.”

“No.”

“Bellini, Mother and Child?”

“No, they still reside at the Vatican.”

Su Ling went silent for a moment as the stewardess asked them to fasten their seatbelts. “Caravaggio?”

“Very good. I left her in the Pitti Palace on the right-hand wall of the third-floor gallery. She promised she would be faithful until I returned.”

“And there she will remain, because such a lover would cost you more than $400 a month, and if you’re still hoping to go into politics, you won’t even be able to afford the frame.”

“I won’t be going into politics until I can afford the whole gallery,” Nat assured his wife.

Annie began to appreciate why the British could be so dismissive about American tourists who somehow managed to cover London, Oxford, Blenheim and Stratford in three days. It didn’t help when she observed busloads of tourists descending on the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, take their seats, and then leave during the intermission, to be replaced by another busload of her countrymen. Annie wouldn’t have thought it possible, if she hadn’t returned after the intermission to find the two rows in front of her full of people with familiar accents whom she had never seen before. She wondered if those who attended the second act told those who watched the first act what had happened to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or was that busload already on its way back to London?

Annie felt less guilty after they’d spent a leisurely ten days in Scotland. They enjoyed being in Edinburgh for the Festival, where they could choose between Marlowe and Mozart, or Pinter and Orton. However, for both of them, the highlight of the trip was the long drive up and down the two coastlines. The scenery was so breathtaking they thought there could be no more beautiful landscape on earth.

In Edinburgh, they tried to trace the Gates and the Davenport lineage, but all they ended up with was a large colored chart of the clans, and a skirt made in the garish Davenport tartan, which Annie doubted she would ever wear again once they were back in the States.

Fletcher fell asleep within minutes of their plane taking off from Edinburgh for New York. When he woke, the sun that he’d seen dip on one side of the cabin still hadn’t risen on the other. As they began their descent into JFK—Annie couldn’t get used to it not being called Idlewilde—all Annie could think about was being reunited with Lucy, while Fletcher anxiously looked forward to his first day with Alexander Dupont & Bell.

When Nat and Su Ling returned from Rome, they were also exhausted, but the change of plans could not have been more worthwhile. Su Ling had relaxed more and more as each day passed; in fact during the second week, neither of them even mentioned Korea. They agreed on their flight home to tell Su Ling’s mother that they had honeymooned in Italy. Only Tom would be puzzled.

While Su Ling slept, Nat once again studied the currency market in the International Herald Tribune and London’s Financial Times. The trend continued unabated, a dip, a slight recovery, followed by another dip, but the long-term graph was only going one way for the yen, and in the opposite direction from the dollar. This was also true for the yen against the mark, the pound and the lira, and Nat decided to continue researching which of the exchange rates had the greatest disparity. Just as soon as they were back in Boston he would talk to Tom’s father, and use the currency department at Russell’s Bank rather than reveal his ideas to someone he didn’t know.

Nat glanced across at his sleeping wife, grateful for her suggestion that he make exchange rates the subject of his final-year thesis at business school. His time at Harvard would pass all too quickly, and he realized that he could not put off a decision that would affect both their futures. They had already discussed the three possible options: he could look for a job in Boston so that Su Ling could remain at Harvard, but as she had pointed out, that would limit his horizons. He could take up Mr. Russell’s offer and join Tom at a large bank in a small town, but that would seriously curtail his future prospects. Or he could apply for a job on Wall Street and find out if he could survive in the big league.

Su Ling wasn’t in any doubt which of the three options he should pursue, and although they had some time to consider their future, she was already talking to her contacts at Columbia.

25

Looking back on his final year at Harvard, Nat had had few regrets.

Only hours after touching down at Logan International, he’d phoned Tom’s father to share his currency ideas. Mr. Russell pointed out that the sums he wished to deal in were too small for any foreign exchange counter to handle. Nat was disappointed until Mr. Russell suggested that the bank put up a thousand-dollar loan, and asked that he and Tom might be allowed to invest a thousand dollars each.

This became Nat’s first currency fund.

When Joe Stein heard about the project, another thousand appeared on the same day. Within a month, the fund had grown to $10,000. Nat told Su Ling that he was more worried about losing the investors’ money than his own. By the end of the term, the Cartwright Fund had grown to $14,000, and Nat had made a clear profit of $726.

“But you could still lose it all,” Su Ling reminded him.

“True, but now the fund is more substantial there’s less chance of a severe loss. Even if the trend suddenly reverses, I could hedge my position by selling ahead, and so keep the losses to a minimum.”

“But doesn’t this take a great deal of your time, when you should be writing your thesis?” Su Ling asked.

“It only takes about fifteen minutes a day,” said Nat. “I check the Japanese market at six each morning and the closing prices in New York at six every night, and as long as there isn’t a run against me for several days in a row, I have nothing to do except reinvest the capital each month.”

“It’s obscene,” said Su Ling.

“But what’s wrong with using my skill, knowledge and an ounce of enterprise?” Nat inquired.

“Because you earn more working fifteen minutes a day than I can hope to pick up in a year as a senior researcher at Columbia University—in fact, it may be more than my supervisor earns.”

“Your supervisor will still be in place this time next year, whatever happens to the market. That’s free enterprise. The downside is that I can lose everything.”

Nat didn’t tell his wife that he thought the British economist Maynard Keynes had once remarked, A shrewd man ought to be able to make a fortune before breakfast, so that he can do a proper job during the rest of the day. He knew how strongly his wife felt about what she called easy money, so he only talked about his investments whenever she raised the subject. He certainly didn’t let her know that Mr. Russell felt the time had come to consider leverage.