Final Option

know already.”
     
    The Board of Trade was deserted on a Sunday, the art deco lobby of polished marble presided over by one bored security guard who took my name without raising his head from the sports page. I took the elevator, its doors emblazoned with bronze sheaves of wheat, to the fourteenth floor.
    If futures are a game, then it is the Clearing Corporation that makes it possible for the game to be played. Futures contracts are traded face-to-face in a system called open outcry. Traders literally scream to each other across the crowded trading pit, communicating their intentions to buy or sell by a combination of shouting and hand signals, like bookies at an English racetrack. Silos of wheat, boxcars of cattle, hundreds of thousands of dollars all change hands in a split second, often acknowledged by no more than a single word or gesture. There is no time to consider whether the person on the other side of the trade has the money or the actual commodity to complete the transaction.
    The Clearing Corporation makes the question of creditworthiness irrelevant to those on the floor by inserting itself in the middle of every transaction. Acting as a sort of central bank, the clearinghouse buys simultaneously from the seller and sells to the buyer. The clearinghouse, by necessity, keeps track of every trade and requires clearing members of the exchange to maintain capital reserves in proportion to the risks assumed in the market.
    The head of the Clearing Corporation was a man named Kent Rush. His office was a masterpiece of authority designed to instill confidence in the unwary and convey a sense of unimpeachable integrity, especially to those harboring suspicions that his job, when you came right down to it, was to preside over a glorified gambling den. His desk was even flanked by flags, just like in the Oval Office. Off to one side was a discreet private door for times when escape might serve better than confrontation.
    Kent shook my hand, and Ricky Sullivan, the chairman of the exchange, nodded in greeting from his seat on the couch. He was on the phone, rolling calls, breaking the news of Bart Hexter’s death, trolling for rumors that might link the murdered trader to trouble. Rush motioned me into a chair and handed me the most up-to-date listing of Hexter’s personal holdings. The paper was still warm from its passage through the laser printer.
    I had barely begun looking through it when Carl Savage arrived. Savage was a transplanted Texan in his mid-thirties. He was broad-shouldered and bull-necked, and the wide planes of his face were smooth below small, steel blue eyes that were hooded with caution. He wore his dark hair long, slicked back from his forehead into a ponytail that brushed his belt in back.
    Hexter’s chief of trading operations shook hands all around, accepting murmured condolences before settling down to the task of reviewing the positions his boss had been holding over the weekend. Ricky Sullivan joined us, and we went through them trade by trade, the three men slipping easily into the jargon of the pits. Hexter was big in January wheat, trading the crush in soybeans, and naked short in deutschemarks.
    I tried to force myself to follow their discussion, but I found myself seized by an overpowering fatigue, very similar to the vast sleepiness that used to overcome me in geometry class. It struck me still, whenever I was forced into any extensive discussion of accounting. Over time I’d trained myself to feign an alert interest, but my heart was never going to be in the numbers.
    Even if the details made my eyes glaze, the big picture that emerged was reassuring—Bart Hexter’s holdings were large and complex, but there was nothing in his trades that set off alarm bells of suspicion. Kent Rush, after much analysis, pronounced the dead man’s reserves to be adequate relative to his exposure in the markets, and we all breathed a sigh of relief.
    When the subject turned to the liquidation of Hexter’s trading accounts I sprang to life. I knew that the exchange would insist that all of Bart Hexter’s holdings be sold as soon as possible. Such liquidation was a policy of the exchange. But Bart Hexter was no hundred-grand-a-year scalper. In several commodities Hexter held such large positions that selling them too quickly might dramatically destabilize prices in those commodities. There, too, was the real possibility that Hexter was offsetting some of his futures positions with