Chapter Sixteen
The office of the Prophetic Edge. I found a parking spot in a side street and walked to it, in a 1970s square stucco building in the back streets of Camberwell, just a ten-minute drive from Box Hill. It was odd. I had known Grant so well in his BC days, and this was apparently the center of his activities, yet I had never been here.
I walked up a couple of flights of stairs, past the offices of an architect and a financial planner, and entered. There was no reception area, and no receptionist; just one long windowless room.
Inside were two rows of about twenty desks, with a computer screen on each desk - along with piles of books and papers - and men of all ages hunched in front of almost every screen, the whole lot jammed into an area that seemed not much larger than my living room. The scene was reminiscent of the lines of slaves on a galley ship. The stained blue carpet looked to be one of those cheap but sturdy “renovator specials” that doesn’t get worn even if you play a game of rugby football on it. Boxes of Prophetic Edge software were stacked up against the walls.
An Englishman named Tom Traherne was the new boss of the company. When he heard I was investigating Grant’s death he had expressed himself willing to meet me. From the doorway I called out his name, and was welcomed by a tall, silver-haired man whose girth spoke of someone not hesitant about using his expense account. He rose from a desk in the far corner, squeezed his way past the men at their desks and extended a lean arm. He was wearing a cream-colored suit that suggested he had dropped in from a rubber plantation in colonial Malaya.
“Who did it?” he asked in a stage whisper.
“Grant? The police don’t seem to have a clue. I’m not getting very far either.”
He shrugged his shoulder. “My theory is he owed money. He was involved in a lot of deals. Things go wrong. Bam.” He slapped his hands together. “Someone gets unhappy.”
“After he came out of prison Grant seemed to be giving away a lot of money.”
“There you are. Where did it all come from? He was borrowing it.”
Borrowing money to give away? But I decided not to get into an argument.
I looked around again. I had expected a giant dealing room, full of young traders with braces waving their arms and speaking on two phones simultaneously. Just like on TV. But this place was more like a dungeon.
“How did you get on with the surfer?” asked Tom.
“Matt? He was a nice guy.”
“Yes. He’s a nice guy. A nice guy.” Tom seemed to be speaking with clenched teeth.
“He’s our Director of Fun, isn’t he?” called out the man at the nearest desk, not even looking up from his screen. He had a long black beard and oily hair and was wearing corduroys and a heavy lumberjack jacket.
“Help you much?” asked Tom.
“Unfortunately not. He didn’t know any more than anyone else about what might have happened. Is he here?”
“Doesn’t seem to be, no. Probably shooting the rapids at Mt Buller. Or snowboarding at Port Anglesea. Or the other way round. He’s into that sort of thing.” His thin English lips curled in apparent disgust. Then he looked at me expectantly.
Once more I found myself in unfamiliar territory. I needed to reconnoiter.
“These guys are all traders?” I asked. “All buying and selling?”
“Everyone except Ryan here,” said Tom, slapping the back of the man with the beard and corduroys. “I think he’s playing Starcraft. No, now that I look again it is actually a share price chart. Matey, you’re either going to make a million on that one or lose your wife and children.”
“It’s BHP Billiton,” said the trader without looking up, but apparently speaking to me. “Candlestick chart. Daily. Major-league volatility. Look at these moving averages.” He pressed a command on the keyboard and a pair of long snaking yellow lines appeared on the screen. “When this line here intersects this one, preferably on double volume, we’re in action. Break-out. Could happen tomorrow.”
It was hard for me to comprehend that Grant had been so involved in such an arcane world. He was a hands-on guy. A man of action. I couldn’t imagine him sitting here scrutinizing wiggly lines on a screen. Perhaps it showed how little I understood him.
“How did you get into all this?” I asked Tom.
“Oh no!” shouted another trader. “The Tom Traherne life story. Where are the violins? Soft focus lens?”
“Get lost, creep,” said Tom. He started walking up and down the narrow rows, as if he were an overseer with a whip. “I was a fund manager,” he said. “One of the best. Any of these creeps here will vouch for that. I was only twenty-five. Fresh out of the Guards. And there I was in Hong Kong running my own line of funds. They were all the top performers.”
“Tell him what the best investment was in Hong Kong at that time,” shouted one of the traders, to a chorus of laughter. They had clearly heard this story many times. Tom grabbed a piece of paper from the nearest desk, wrapped it in a ball and tossed it at the man.
“You know what was one of the world’s best investments in those days? A Hong Kong apartment. I could have tripled my money in a couple of years. I was right on the spot. Hong Kong shares weren’t too bad either. But of course I had to put my money in gilts and British blue chips. Missed out on one of the world’s great property booms.”
He took a stray newspaper and rolled it up, then resumed his stroll around the room, banging the newspaper on the desks of the traders. I was still stranded by the door.
“Then when I was thirty-five I got this great offer to come down here to Melbourne and start up a new operation with one of the big insurance companies. A new range of high-growth funds for the masses. Using international methods, whatever they were meant to be. My wife jumped at the chance. She was a lovely English gel, very horses and all that. Not enough of that in Honkers. That was 1987. You remember what happened in 1987?”
I thought hard. I seemed to recall that it was one of our worst periods. The Indonesian military had succeeded in wiping out much of the resistance. They’d burnt our crops. Thousands of Timorese were suffering from malnutrition. Many were dying of starvation.
Tom pointed with his rolled-up newspaper to the screen of one of the traders. “Look at this chart,” he said to no one in particular. I squeezed through and took a glance at a whole lot of squiggles. “Classic double bottom. But volume’s still low. This rally here…” He pointed to a slight up-tick in the graph. “Sucker rally. A lot of stale bulls being dragged in. Trying to bottom fish. Wait a week. Then it could rocket. You could do a lot worse than piling in with your superannuation.”
I couldn’t help wondering if he was making fun of me. “What happened in 1987?” I asked.
“The stock market crashed. I’d arrived, set up my funds and done my roadshows of all the financial advisers. Me, the great white hope of Australian fund management, and then the whole lot went down the gurgler. No one wanted growth funds after that. If they wanted shares at all they had to be companies that actually made a bit of money. So the funds limped along for a number of years, until I switched jobs and having learned my lesson got into blue chip funds. Solid as a rock. They did okay. And then along came the dot-commers.”
“The dot-commers?”
“The internet creeps. They took over the market. Suddenly kids who aren’t old enough to vote are setting up companies and then coming round to me with their brokers and demanding that I stuff my funds with their shares. It was like Sovereign Hill all over again, and everyone’s finding million-carat gold nuggets and I’m the guy who’s handing out the shovels. My wife and I had a place in Toorak. The place next door was even better than ours. Lovely old English home. Owner dies and his kids put it up for sale, right? Some dot-com creep who sells suntan lotion or something on the internet comes along and buys it for about two million. Then he pulls it down and builds some monstrosity that looks like a jumbo jet sticking out of the ground. Rooms just for his daughters’ pets. That kind of place.”
Tom stopped walking. He pointed to an old man with a shock of white hair, two desks away, bent over his computer.
“Look at him,” he said. “That’s Manny. Refugee from Poland. Arrived at Port Melbourne as a teenager after the war with about fifty cents in his pocket, or half a crown or whatever. Never talks about his past, but it must have been pretty bad. Seems he lost all his family in the Holocaust. He worked in factories and bought a house. Opened a cake shop in St Kilda. Bought a block of flats. Then another and another. Retired when he was sixty. Never married. No relatives. Lives by himself and spends all his time trading the markets. Comes to Camberwell from St Kilda by the tram.”
He peered at the old man’s screen. “Oz Minerals? Manny, what are you doing? That’s a young man’s stock.”
The old man grunted in reply. He was making a flurry of calculations on a notepad. A couple of sandwiches, one half-eaten, nestled inside a brown paper bag. I gazed at him, and a dreadful thought flashed through my mind. It was like those television commercials for financial planning that show you meeting yourself twenty years later. Was this me, I wondered, in a couple of decades, a lonely old man hunched over a computer, concerned only about money, tormented by my past, living on sandwiches from a brown paper bag?
Tom continued where he had left off, once more banging his rolled-up newspaper on the walls and desks: “I started losing clients. Financial planners who’d given me big chunks of funds were taking out their money. They said the clients were complaining that there was a party going on and they weren’t invited. So they were going to start managing their own money. They didn’t want stocks with profits or long-term potential. They just wanted stocks that were going up. I started losing a pile of business. I’ll tell you something matey: the professors always said that the greater the flow of information the more efficient the market. Well the internet has brought about the most efficient flow of information in the history of the universe, and the market’s never been more distorted. Even the newspapers have given up trying to report it. They just tell you how much Bill Gates’s wealth went up or down that day.”
Tom was an Englishman, but somehow he had absorbed the Australian penchant to celebrate failure. It amazed me that grown men in Australia like Tom and Rohan could so happily tell strangers about their faults and all that had gone wrong in their lives. Coming to Australia was sometimes like arriving at a non-stop Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. I recalled that the Anzac Day war commemoration was looming. That too struck me as one giant celebration of failure and humiliation. It celebrated Australia’s greatest military defeat.
Tom wasn’t finished. “So when your friend and mine Grant Stonelea got sent to chokey and I was offered the job running this outfit I didn’t have to think for long. I was already one of the Prophets. A chance to get in on the action. If all these teenagers used to make millions just from being in the right place at the right time, then a guy like me who has actually worked for a living and knows something about the market ought to be able to clean up. So I spend the day trading the markets. And managing our software products.” He leaned against a wall, banging the newspaper into his hand.
“I heard that Grant gave you the business free.”
Tom spluttered. “Free?” He swept an arm around. “You want it? You can have it free, too. Yes, he gave it to me and the staff, free, but the only value in the place is the brains of me and the others. The software doesn’t bring in much.”
I was still confused. “Look,” I said. “I still don’t really understand what The Prophetic Edge is.”
“This is it matey,” said Tom, sweeping his arm over the office, like a magician spreading fairy dust. Then he saw my puzzled face. “We make software. Software for stock market traders. To tell them when to buy and sell. It’s what everyone here is using right now. Grant originally devised it. He was a bright lad. Though he wasn’t too clever getting into smuggling immigrants. But he was always after something new. Always taking things to the edge. You sometimes wondered if he didn’t half want to get caught. A kind of a death wish thing. Anyway, we make software, but mainly we trade the markets. We’ve turned this place into a one-stop shop for day traders. They pay us a fee and a commission and they get to use our computers and our software and all our online data facilities. Get a bit of companionship as well.” He pointed at the lonely figure of Manny, squinting into his computer and scribbling on his notepad. “Take Manny, for instance. He’s really into the companionship bit big-time.” He smiled at his joke.
“And the Prophets?”
“The same people, basically. Instead of meeting at the pub we now meet here. Sit on each other’s laps. We used to be quite a force. That was in Grant’s day. When stocks were moving. We’d get together and take some quite aggressive positions. But those days are past. The Prophets aren’t much of a force any more.”
I was disappointed. Rohan had told me this was the center of some kind of terrorist activity. But Melissa’s “boys with toys” put-down seemed more accurate.
“Grant was pretty involved with Indonesia,” I said. “Was there a connection with the Prophetic Edge?”
“Look, Grant had his finger in so many pies. This was his main business, but he was doing so many things. I used to meet him at the pub when the Prophets were active. He’d talk about his trips to Indonesia. He had a lot of Indonesian friends. But I don’t know of any connection with this business.”
“Never mentioned the Dili Tigers?”
Tom looked thoughtful. “Dili? That’s East Timor isn’t it? What are the Dili Tigers? I don’t remember Grant talking about that.”
So why had Rohan told me that the Prophetic Edge was the key. The thought flashed through my brain that he might be trying to put me off the scent. Having learned all he needed from me.
“When did you last see Grant?” I asked.
“Oh, we talked a few times after he got out of the clink. About the business. And of course he wanted to convert me from my pagan ways. Wasting his time there, that’s for sure.”
“But nothing about Indonesia?”
Tom appeared not to have heard me. He was engrossed in another trader’s screen. But then abruptly he turned to me, his face hard.
“Don’t you think maybe all that Christian stuff was a bit of a front? A dramatic prison conversion, and then spending half your life telling the world about it. Like the robbers who try to get themselves noticed at the shops and petrol station to try to establish an alibi. He had a brilliant alibi. ‘Look at me. I’m a new man.’ Then he can spend the other half of his life back in his old ways. I can tell you that Grant was involved with a lot of shady people, and I doubt that it stopped when he got out of prison.”
“No,” I shouted, surprising myself with my own vehemence. It wasn’t possible. Was it?
“Oh, he might have had a bit of a change,” conceded Tom, apparently reading my thoughts. “A spot of time in prison can do that to anyone. But all this holy roller Christian stuff.” He raised both hands in the air and waggled his fingers, like Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer. This was apparently his image of Christians. “No, matey. I don’t think so. Someone’s pulling the wool over your eyes big-time.”
He turned back to the screen for an instant, but then he looked me in the eye. “Think about it, matey” he said, menace in his voice. “Really think about it.”