‘You authorised a big short on Procter and Gamble last night? Two million at sixty-two per share?’
‘So what?’
‘Gana is worried. He says our risk limit has been breached. He wants a meeting of the Risk Committee.’
‘Well, tell him to go talk to Hugo about it. And let me know about that account, will you?’
Hoffmann felt too tired to do any more. He buzzed Marie-Claude again and told her to make sure he was not disturbed for an hour. He turned off his mobile. Afterwards he lay on his sofa and tried to imagine who on earth would have gone to the trouble of stealing his name in order to buy him a rare volume of Victorian natural history using a Cayman Islands dollar account that he seemed to own. But the bizarreness of the conundrum defeated even him, and very soon he sank into sleep.
Inspector Leclerc knew that the chief of Geneva’s Police department, a stickler for punctuality, invariably arrived at police headquarters on the Boulevard Carl-Vogt at 9.00 sharp and that his first act of the day was always to read the summary of what had occurred in the canton overnight. Therefore when the telephone rang in his office at 9.08, he had a fair idea of who might be on the other end of the line.
A brisk voice said, ‘Jean-Philippe?’
‘Morning, Chief.’
‘This assault on the American banker, Hoffmann.’
‘Yes, Chief?’
‘Where are we on this?’
‘He’s discharged himself from the University Hospital. Forensics are at the house now. We’ve put out a detailed description. One of our men is watching the property. That’s about it.’
‘So he’s not seriously hurt?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘That’s something. What do you make of it?’
‘Bizarre. The house is a fortress but the intruder somehow just wandered in. He came prepared to restrain his victim, or victims, and it looks as though he handled knives while he was on the premises. But then he ended up just hitting Hoffmann on the head and running away. Nothing stolen. To be honest, I have a feeling Hoffmann isn’t telling us the full story, but I’m not sure whether that’s deliberate or he’s just confused.’
There was a short silence at the other end. Leclerc could hear someone moving around in the background.
‘Are you going off shift?’
‘Just about to leave, Chief.’
‘Do me a favour and pull a double, will you? I’ve already had the Minister of Finance’s office on the phone, wanting to know what’s happening. It would be good if you could see this one through.’
‘The Minister of Finance?’ repeated Leclerc in amazement. ‘Why’s he so interested?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual story, I expect. One law for the rich, another for the poor. Keep me up to speed on it, will you?’
After he had hung up, Leclerc let out a string of expletives under his breath. He plodded along the corridor to the coffee machine and got himself a cup of very black and unusually filthy espresso. His eyes felt gritty, his sinuses ached. I’m too old for this, he thought. It was not even as if there was anything much he could do: he had sent one of his juniors to interview the domestic staff. He went back to his office and called his wife and told her he wouldn’t be home until after lunch, then logged on to the internet to see if he could find out anything about Dr Alexander Hoffmann, physicist and hedge-fund manager. But to his surprise there was almost nothing – no entry in Wikipedia, no newspaper article and not one image available online. Yet the Minister of Finance himself was taking a personal interest in the matter.
What the hell was a hedge fund in any case? he wondered. He looked it up: ‘A private investment fund that may invest in a diverse range of assets and may employ a variety of investment strategies to maintain a hedged portfolio intended to protect the fund’s investors from downturns in the market while maximising returns on market upswings.’
None the wiser, he flicked back through his notes. Hoffmann had said in his interview that he had worked in the financial sector for the past eight years; for six years before that he had been employed on developing the Large Hadron Collider. As it happened, Leclerc knew a man, a former inspector in the police, who now worked in security at CERN. He gave him a call and fifteen minutes later he was at the wheel of his little Renault, driving slowly in the morning traffic, north-west past the airport, along the Route de Meyrin, through the drab industrial zone of Zimeysa.
Up ahead, framed by the distant mountains, CERN’s huge rust-coloured wooden globe seemed to rise out of the arable fields like a gigantic anachronism: a 1960s vision of what the future was supposed to look like. Leclerc parked opposite it and went into the main building. He gave his name and clipped his visitor’s badge to his windcheater. While he waited for his contact to collect him he studied the little exhibition in the reception area. Apparently sixteen hundred super-conducting magnets, each weighing nearly thirty tonnes, were housed in a twenty-seven-kilometre circular tunnel beneath his feet, shooting beams of particles around it so quickly that they completed the circuit eleven thousand times per second. The collisions of the beams at an energy of seven trillion electronvolts per proton were supposed to reveal the origins of the universe, discover extra dimensions and explain the nature of dark matter. None of it that Leclerc could discern seemed to have anything whatever to do with the financial markets.
Quarry’s invitees began to arrive just after ten, the first pair – a fifty-six-year-old Genevese, Etienne Mussard, and his younger sister Clarisse – turning up on a bus. ‘They’ll be early,’ Quarry had warned Hoffmann. ‘They’re always early for everything.’ Dowdily dressed, they were both unmarried and lived together in a small three- bedroomed apartment in the suburb of Lancy that they had inherited from their parents. They did not drive. They took no holidays. They rarely dined in restaurants. Quarry estimated M. Mussard’s personal wealth at approximately seven hundred million euros, and Mme Mussard’s at five hundred and fifty million. Their mother’s grandfather, Robert Fazy, had owned a private bank, which had been sold in the 1980s following a scandal involving Jewish assets seized by the Nazis and deposited with Fazy et Cie during the Second World War. They brought with them their family attorney, Dr Max-Albert Gallant, whose firm conveniently also handled the legal affairs of Hoffmann Investment Technologies. It was through Gallant that Quarry had managed to obtain an introduction to the Mussards. ‘They treat me like a son,’ said Quarry. ‘They’re unbelievably rude and do nothing but complain.’
This drab couple was followed closely by perhaps the most exotic of Hoffmann’s clients, Elmira Gulzhan, the thirty-eight-year-old daughter of the President of Azakhstan. Resident in Paris and a graduate of INSEAD in Fontainebleau, Elmira was responsible for administering the Gulzhan family holdings overseas, estimated by the CIA in 2009 to be worth approximately $19 billion. Quarry had contrived to meet her on a skiing party in Val d’Isere. The Gulzhans presently had $120 million invested in the hedge fund – a stake Quarry hoped to persuade her at least to double. He had also made friends on the slopes with her long-term lover, Francois de Gombart-Tonnelle, a Parisian lawyer, who was at her side today. She emerged from her bulletproof Mercedes wearing an emerald silk frock coat with matching head scarf draped lightly over her helmet of glossy black hair. Quarry was waiting in the lobby to greet her. ‘Be not fooled,’ he had warned Hoffmann. ‘She may look like she’s off to the races but she could hold down a job at Goldman any day of the week. And she can arrange for her daddy to have your fingernails torn out.’
Next to roll up, sharing a limousine from the Hotel President Wilson on the other side of the lake, were a couple of Americans who had flown over from New York especially for the presentation. Ezra Klein was chief analyst for the Winter Bay Trust, a $14 billion fund-of-funds which, in the words of its prospectus, ‘aims to flatten out risk while achieving high returns by investing in a diverse array of managed portfolios rather than individual bonds or equities’. Klein had a reputation for being super-bright, enhanced by his habit of talking at a rate of six words per second (he had once been timed surreptitiously by his bewildered subordinates), roughly twice as fast as normal human speech, and by the fact that every third word seemed to be an acronym or piece of financial jargon. ‘Ezra’s on the spectrum,’ said Quarry. ‘No wife, no kids, no sexual organs of any kind, as far as I can tell. Winter Bay could be good for another hundred million. We’ll have to see.’
Beside him, not even pretending to listen to Klein’s unintelligible jabber, was a bulky figure in his fifties in full Wall Street dress uniform of black three-piece suit and red-and-white striped tie. This was Bill Easterbrook of the US banking conglomerate AmCor. ‘You’ve met Bill before,’ Quarry had warned Hoffmann. ‘Remember him? He’s the dinosaur who looks as if he’s just stepped out of an Oliver Stone movie. Since you last saw him, he’s been spun off
