Noda's action was growing too rich for his blood, I knew we were in the big time. It took a lot to impress a pro like him.
The thing was getting scary, but it was still perfectly legal. Let me summarize roughly what had happened over the three weeks since I had decided to play along with Matsuo Noda. First were the physical arrangements. To accommodate my new calling, I'd enlarged my operating space—the back room of the brownstone's parlor floor, looking out over the garden— into a makeshift brokerage office complete with a multi-lined telephone and quote services from S-tron and Telerate. I'd also installed a direct tie-line to the T-bill pit of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, ditto the Note and Bond action at the Chicago Board of Trade. And because of all the computer hardware, I had to move Emma's desk out into the parlor. Consequently she could no longer listen in on my calls, which she did not take kindly. However, I was no longer forced to listen in on hers. I figure that sort of made us even.
In addition, I'd set up accounts at every futures brokerage house in the land, both coasts, to spread out the orders. We were moving a lot of contracts, and the big-time outfits like Salomon Brothers were scrambling to make a market for us. Once again, therefore, nagging questions began to arise. Anybody who'd thought about it for more than a minute would have realized you can't make a play like Noda's without being noticed. There's no bigger rumor mill than the financial arena. The very idea of shorting the bond market to the tune of billions and remaining obscure and anonymous for any length of time was absurd. After all, there're two sides to every bet. But since I was supposed to be fronting his move specifically to throw sand in everybody's eyes, all this attention presented something of a quandary. Although we were trying to keep the lid on, buying small batches of Treasuries even as we were shorting them, the price was softening and margin calls were starting to loom on the horizon. None of this made any sense. Noda wasn't hedging or even speculating in the normal sense; he was playing a giant game of cat and mouse with the markets. This told me once again he wasn't showing all the cards in his hand. He had something major, and unexpected, in the pipeline.
Which brought forth the next insight: Matsuo Noda didn't hire me merely because he wanted some innocent-seeming outsider to do his bidding in the futures market; any number of players in this town could have handled that action as well or better. No, he'd sucked me into his operation for some entirely different purpose, at the moment known only to him.
But what? More to the point, why?
Welcome to Friday, and my rather disturbed life. Want to know what really disturbed me the most? Seeing my new employer on CNN's Prime News, standing there right next to the Emperor of Japan. Seemed as though I wasn't the only one now under Noda's spell. All of a sudden my mild-mannered client had become a world-class Japanese mover and shaker. And that made me very nervous.
Needing a little perspective, I decided to invite down Dr. William J. Henderson, respected thinker and booze hound. As it happened, he had a little time to kill that Friday before his "late date" with some advertising exec who was flying in from an assignment on the coast. Since three weeks had gone by since our talk up at Martell's, it seemed like a good occasion to get together and compare notes.
True to his word, he had formally resigned from the President's Council of Economic Advisers, though he'd reluctantly agreed to serve as a forecasting consultant for Wharton Econometrics. He'd also caused some unsettling rumors in the world markets by putting on some very heavy "straddles" in December gold futures and oil. He called it insurance, predicting he'd be covered no matter what happened. Looked at another way, though, Bill Henderson was quietly shifting out of paper money and into commodities. And when Henderson started hedging, you knew the weather forecast was unsettled to stormy.
It turned out he'd also uncovered a few stray elements of what might well be a much bigger game. Nothing solid at that point, but enough to stir him up.
"Know who runs that outfit you've taken on as a client?" He leaned back in one of the leather chairs in the upstairs parlor, new pair of Gucci's glistening, and sampled his third drink. "Guy by the name of Matsuo Noda."