Final Option

physicals, holding inventories of actual commodities to counter his position in the market or with offshore trades. I didn’t want to rush to liquidate completely until we had a chance to unearth warehouse receipts, trade confirmations, and other documents.
    In the end there was less haggling than I’d anticipated. I think that the relief of not discovering anything hideous in Hexter’s trades mellowed everyone. In the end we agreed to a five-day liquidation in everything but soybeans, where the sheer size of Hexter’s position made an eight-day schedule necessary.
     
    The offices of Hexter Commodities were wrapped in the abandoned silence of the weekend. The warren of cubbyholes that normally teemed with brokers and clerks was empty, the Quotron screens that circled the boardroom were blank. Savage unlocked the door to his office near the trading desks and cleared a chair for me. He pulled two scratched tumblers and a bottle of scotch from a bottom drawer. Without a word he filled them both and handed one to me. “To the dead,” he said, raising his glass in a toast. “May they rest in peace.” We touched glasses.
    I don’t usually drink before dinner on a Sunday, especially when I haven’t had breakfast, but I knocked mine back in one swallow. It had been that sort of day.
    “The police called my house before I left,” said Savage, refilling his glass. ‘They want to come here tomorrow, talk to me and the rest of the employees about Bart. I guess they’re trying to figure out who’d want to kill him.”
    “That’s their job,” I answered. “Do you have any ideas?”
    “No. The man was a bastard. On any given day I wouldn’t have trusted half the people who work here with a gun, myself included. But hell, in this business it doesn’t matter if you’re an asshole. As a matter of fact it probably helps. The only thing that matters is that you make money, and Bart made plenty of that.”
    “So everyone says. He put together one of the longest successful runs in the business. What was his secret?“
    “Now that’s something / would have killed for,” replied Savage with a rueful grin. “I don’t know what it was. Loretta, who heads our clearing operation, had a nickname for him. She called him Savant, as in idiot savant—you know, like in the movie RainMan. A person who’s retarded but has this one incredible talent, like being able to play the piano or speak Latin.”
    “Did she call him that to his face?”
    “Loretta? Shit, yeah. Loretta wasn’t afraid of Bart. What a frigging genius. The man hadn’t read a book since high school, didn’t give a fuck if the world was flat or round, couldn’t figure out how to use his computer no matter how many times we tried to teach him, but when it came to trading—anything that had to do with numbers—you couldn’t touch him.
    “You’ll see technical traders in the pits, guys who work for the big firms like CRT, studying their multicolored charts. Shit, Hexter used to do calculations like that in his head. He had a photographic memory for numbers. He never had to look up a phone number. If he dialed it once he knew it forever. He could multiply twelve digits in his head faster than you could turn on a calculator....”
    “And now that the master trader is dead?” I interjected.
    “You’re the lawyer. You tell me.”
    “What will the brokerage customers do when they hear about it?” I countered. The business of Hexter Commodities divided itself neatly into thirds. Thirty-three percent of the firm’s business was brokerage— trades made for individuals or companies that traded futures contracts much as some people traded stocks. Another third was an operation that cleared the trades of small traders, known as locals, who made their money gambling on small price movements. Hexter Commodities guaranteed and processed their trades, charging a flat fee for each transaction. The final third of the firm’s business consisted of trades made for Bart Hexter’s personal account. Once those positions were liquidated, the brokerage and clearing operations would represent the entire value of Hexter Commodities.
    “As soon as they hear he’s dead,” replied Savage, “ninety percent will move their accounts someplace else unless we give them a reason not to.”
    “What do you suggest?”
    “Who owns the company now?”
    “My understanding is that everything was left to the children. His son, Barton Jr., is executor.”
    “Barton