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important they’re only referred to by their initials or an account number.
    Serge has only been up there once, the day he was interviewed for his job. It was more a seduction than an interview: Chicken’s offer – ‘cutting-edge research; opportunity to apply your skills in a dynamic international environment; money, lots of it, more than you’ll know what to do with’ – against the lonely satisfaction of his still-unfinished PhD, the monk-like cell in a medieval college, the miserable £9k bursary.
    While he hesitated, Chicken had jabbed his finger at the FATCA logo on a company report – a globe encircled with the words AUDACES FORTUNA IUVAT .
    ‘You’re a scholar, Free. Know what that means? Fortune favours the bold.’
    Then he’d reached out, gripped Serge’s hand, and shaken it up and down like a killer dog trying to break the neck of some little creature it’s just caught.
    Most days Chicken takes a stroll along the trading floor, walking with a slight wide-legged roll, like he’s got a permanent hard-on. Or he drops into the morning meetings, just to spread a bit more testosterone around. You can smell it on the air, or maybe it’s just his aftershave, a pungent musky smell that brings up in Serge’s mind a faint whiff of his childhood.
    He pauses by Serge’s desk, leaning to examine his screens. ‘All right, Freebie?’
    ‘All good, Chief Ken.’
    ‘Freebie’ is Serge’s nickname at FATCA. Everyone here has a nickname (apart from Maroushka, which is already a nickname for something ordinary, like Mary). It’s meant to foster an informal and creative atmosphere. Ken Porter thinks his own nickname is Chief Ken, but it didn’t take long for some wag on the trading floor to abbreviate it to Chi-Ken, and from thence to Chicken. Despite his nickname, he’s undoubtedly the top dog in the pack, and you have to feel some admiration for a guy who’s made it so big-time, and wears the suits to prove it.
    ‘I see your ABS fund is coming in at just over two million, Freebie.’
    The ABS is an algorithm-based investment strategy which Serge created in March to capitalise on the downward spiral in the US housing market, when the whole international banking system was thrown into turmoil by the uncertainty surrounding their multibillion investments in US sub-prime. But where there’s uncertainty, there’s risk: and risk is the godfather of serious money. And this year he’s been making it in shedloads for FATCA.
    ‘That’s what we want; the best and brightest of your generation working for us.’ Chicken grasps his hand and pumps up and down.
    Serge glows, winces and tries to maintain eye contact, all at the same time. Out of the hundreds of employees at FATCA, it’s kind of cool that Chicken has noticed his contribution. Suddenly Chicken drops his hand. The smile freezes over, the teeth are still bared.
    ‘I need to know how you got your information, Freebie.’
    ‘I didn’t have information.’ A rush of alarm. ‘I … er … worked out a better way of hedging the risk so we could boost the yield. It’s … it’s an extension of Itoˉ’s Lemma.’ He is gratified to see a glimmer of respect light up in the bright doggy eyes.
    ‘The Lemma, eh?’
    Chicken, he guesses, is somewhat out of his depth with the new maths. He belongs to the previous generation of bankers – the barrow boys, as they were called – hard, hungry men who were recruited in droves into City jobs in the late 1980s to replace the bowler-hatted toffs whose gentlemanly protocol was thought to be too fuzzy for the post-Big Bang trading conditions. What you needed to make money in that newly deregulated environment were aggression and cunning, and Chief Ken has bucketloads of those. But nowadays, the newest intake to the City tend to be geeky people, maths and physics nerds like himself, who were initially a tad uncomfortable in the purlieus of money, though it’s surprising how quickly you can get used to eighty plus k a