Stockhouse continues to feature excerpts from Thom Calandra's novel, the story of a newsletter writer, peripatetic financiers and a global chase for capital during the market "melt up."

The following is the final excerpt from Calandra’s novel “Pablo by Numbers.” To read the first excerpt click here

To read the second excerpt click here

To read the third excerpt click here

By Thom Calandra

Copyright © 2007, Thom Calandra

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR

After Picasso had earned eternal fame, the artist found he could scrawl drawings, using a pencil, strokes of lipstick on a tablecloth, charcoal across a torn paper bag even, in return for meals ... and other favors.

Sheiks

Not that our sly priest Mr. Freedman didn't slip up once in a while, due to the size of his head and his contempt, an elegant fury at times, for those who were not listening. We were on our way back to South Africa from Europe, or maybe it was to Ghana. Anyway, the stopover was Dubai, and as always, those statuesque twin towers, our airborne hostesses, floated in and out of our Gulfstream vuh- room (as Manny Drinkwater tongued it, poking fun at Freedman's Swiss-German-whatever-it-was accent that turned room into womb, or was it rhume?). Those Amazons, just wow, they were beaming, always beaming, such a pleasure to have aboard when you're consigned to smell the rank odors of a dozen or so masticating men eating their way across the planet, and the gorgeous sisters were serving Uppercase Man's classic breakfast smoothies packed with Brazilian berries of one type or another to our morning-after collection of said fund managers who were taking yet another freebie trip across Freedman's shine zones. The ground stop in UAE land, Abu Dhabi to be specific, which is Doobie's commercial satellite and just 50 or 60 miles up the freeway at 120 MPH, Daimlering it like all the other sheiks and shysters on that immaculate carpet ride of a road, our half-day touchdown in the desert was for a quick midday meeting with the representatives of some Arab investment trust worth, oh who knows, $100 billion, mebbe more, I kid thee not. This was Aboo-oooh, a banking center where all the ME's petro-cash checked in to lubricate, diversify away from oil -- into stuff like real estate, hotels, airlines, Tokyo and Paris amusement parks, exotic paper instruments that sunk their teeth into complex fiscal hedges ... and yeh, metals.

So, we cut to the regal and pillowed chaise that these sheiks all had in their offices and conference rooms, furnished thusly I suppose as a cushion for their enormous rear ends, which even a blind man could sense beneath those flowing silk robes. We're sitting at some monumental glass table in some Abu Dhabi scraper, and Freedman is doing his thing that he does so well, preaching, haranguing, enticing, making these Arabs from Aboo feel like if they don't hit the INVEST NOW BUTTON in the next 15 minutes, they'll have to pay twice as much for the privilege of owning a piece of the rocks the miner was staking in various corners of the world. In Freedman's world, I call this non-buyer's remorse: his over-arching ability to make ordinarily sage gatekeepers of vast sand dunes of cash suffer remorse, to make these marks believe they would be punished in this life, and in the next, if they passed on the figs and dates the promoting miner was passing around the table. An artist, really.

So Freedman is powering his point via wireless laptops sitting in front of each of these robed money managers. It's noon, and the sun outside is blazing. So is Freedman inside. Freeon is prospecting, displaying geological surveys and blown-up images showing cylinders of mineralized samples his diamond-head drill bits were resurrecting to the surface of the earth in Ghana, South Africa, Morocco, China, Australia. It's all there: the percentages of copper and gold and nickel and cobalt these hunks of brittle rock contained, the landscape of volcanoclastic terrain, pictures of the vertical drill-holes and various mines' surface outcrops ... even snapshots of gap-toothed miners scraping rock, lugging bizarre contraptions that looked like snow shovels inlaid with shiny ball bearings and tipped, each prong, with barbed wire, but all twisted and thrusting, like a middle finger thrown in your face when you were taking the bus to high school and you'd just missed the ride, the dunces in the back leering out the window at you, taunting: FUCK OFF COCK FACE YOU LOSER.

Und then, it happens. Freedman starts twitching, jerking his neck, raising his voice even louder than his usual over-decibeled levels. One of the sheiks, it seems, has turned away from The Presentation. The large fellow is muttering something, no doubt using the mobile plugged into his ear to place an order of curried camel burgers for this Aboo harem 40 or 50 stories above the desert. Freeon freezes, stops breathing even, then lets out a sigh, and his tin man torso shudders. He inhales deeply, points to the robed one and screams, He iz not liz-nink! Duh-row heem out!

Silence. You could have heard a prune pit falling, before it landed on the carpet. One of Freedman's young male assistants -- he's traveling without leased goons today -- rises from the table and walks over to the offending one, who appears to be oblivious to the hubble-bubble and is still whispering into his chest and fingering, I guess, the volume pad on the cell phone he has beneath his robe. Our man's flunky, some MBA intern hoping to learn the rope tricks of Freedman's brand of high finance, he taps the robed one on the shoulder and asks the poor sod to leave the room. There's a kind of commotion, I don't know what to call it, grumbling and gulping in Arabic, several of the other sheiks shifting their rumps in their seats and so on, and the non-listener leaves the conference room, briskly, still fingering his mobile under the robe. Even Manny Drinkwater our butch boy, our own charismatic Rumpus, shifts in his seat. He realizes his arching enema, Mr. Freedman, has crossed the line of decorum with this ejection. Freedman, natch, barely skips a beat in his silk-suited hard-rock case for cash. The high priest of finance continues his pitch, and after some back-room dealing between the chic-less sheiks and Freedman's accountant, the meeting is over. The Aboo-Doobies are in.

Hurtling back toward the airport in a convoy of German sedans, Freedman gets a ring on his mobile. The trustees are inviting us all to dinner back in Dubai. To celebrate their fresh stake in the new enterprise, the Abu Dhabi investors have booked a room at some fabulous Lebanese restaurant. Freedman, he who eats alone, winces. He'd like to hump it back to his G5, using the night to reach to his next stop, a fledgling project in some shanty town deep in the Ghana countryside. But he accepts, having no choice as dealmaker but to toast the deal, praise Allah, B'shmillah and so on.

  The restaurant that evening, just along Dubai's man-made marina, is packed with people, many of them in robes and some, like us, in western garb, polo shirts, some of Freedman's hangers-on even wearing golf pants or khaki shorts. Dubai easily could have been Hawaii for them, or the Caymans. They were making money, it was warm outside and they were about to eat yet another fine meal on the house: Arabic flat breads, some of them as crimson red from the durum wheat they love over there in the ME; a mezze of assorted appetizers, like onion pancakes, an artillery of olives, handsomely stuffed grape leaves, eggplant dips and so on; lamb and more lamb and massive fish the size of an emperor, pulled from the Red Sea; and about a ton of pine nuts and apricots, pumpkin seeds and mint leaves and gorgeously sculpted tomatoes. And everything tinged with the sweetest lemons I'd ever tasted. Meringue for the soul.

Besides his support crew of an accountant, a Dutch geologist who studied at the Colorado School of Mines and sported precisely manicured fingertips, two or three interns just out of biz school, a world-weary pilot who usually tagged along to dinner, those lovely twin towers (who usually did not tag along to dinner and don't ask me why), and one or two flunks I never did suss out what they actually did in this circumnavigating carnival, Freedman on this particular air-to-road show had aboard a tiny Chinese man from Hong Kong who ran money for some Kowloon hotel tycoon, an Australian lad from Perth who managed a natural resources fund and said he had never taken a geology course in his life, a couple of portly Brits, one with a thumbnail as long as a surfboard he said he used to pling classical guitar but which he also used for picking his teeth, and the other an older Manchester man (almost but not quite a senior sid with breath that smelled like oats mixed with goat cheese), and a gaggle of genuinely upbeat Canadians blessed with perpetual grins, including Manny D., who was riding Freedman's coattails, attempting to hook fresh investors into a couple digs the raconteur Rump had going in South America, first and foremost on the paper marquee, Dee-Dee's Marca Pola in the Colombian Marmato range.

Once again, to cut to the chaise, whose velvet plush is what we again all were sitting on, for the second time in a day, placed as we were on both sides of a long, splendid wooden table, buffed and polished and rubbed down with aromatic oils, so you could almost see yourself in the veneer as you wolfed down this super supper: We dined cheek to cheek on the restaurant's outdoor balcony, except for Freedman, who in keeping with his custard nibbled on some pumpkin seeds and toasted his robed hosts with lusciously thick red wines from the Stollenbosch in South Africa. We sucked on water pipes. We drank mint tea. We lusted after the belly dancers. We drooled when the baklava dessert was placed before us, all nuts and layered pastry crust, almost floating in a lemon-honey syrup that had me shaking, the smell of it. I'd found yet another nectar of the gods, and it didn't even have vodka in it, or Chateau d'Yquem.

Even the shamed sheik, the poor fellow who'd found his cell phone more interesting than Freeon's power pitch that afternoon, even his ample robe seemed to be growing in size at our tables. He has redeemed himself somehow, he's back in the deal, rump at the table, and he is smiling sweetly.
 

Late that night, on the jet, after the twin towers had pillowed our heads and blanketed our torsos and we'd lifted off, it starts. A Gulfstream V, I should tell you, has but two bathrooms, one dainty mirrored one at the rear and one tiny one up front, that one for the twin attendants and pilot. One of the Brits starts the run, and within 20 or 30 minutes, we as well could have been on a stinking mackerel fishing boat whipped by 30-knot winds in a Newfoundland tempest. The rear WC has become a trench of stink and stew. The craft's Immodium tablets are gobbled up, to no avail. Moi, between the retching and the diarrhea, I truly believed I would die before we reached Ghana, which was a six-hour or eight-hour flight. Even the pilot goes on automatic for a few hours there and locks himself into the front toilet.

The twin towers, who were in perfectly fine health, try to be helpful, serving bubbly water and Pepsodent, but they were in over their 6-foot-tall heads. I think they gave up on all of us when our Manny bolts to the back, crashes through the WC door and plops down, leaving the door ajar. I heard what I thought was a sonic boom, and I swear the plane lost 20 or 30 feet of altitude. The Rump, our yeasty dough ball of chat, lived up to his name, poor Manuel. Manny was still a major producer, even in the loo. Only one passenger, besides our resident flight attendants, sat back in his leather cocoon and watched it all, even got our twin sisters to whip up a smoothie spiced delicately with fresh dates and figs. Freedman that iceberg was somehow immune. He ate alone, after all.

Later, much later, Pablo Sir Postal on one of our therapy rides across the mountain, he hears this story and tells me what happened was plain as the rutted fire road we were spoking. Our band of moochers was poisoned, reckons Pobbie, but that much I already figured. Payback most putrid for Freedman's rude behavior in Aboo. Even sheiks own some face, right? But Pablo knew more than a postman, as was his custard. He asks if I ever saw Mohammed Sheik Shangra-Lee or whatever his name was take out a cell phone or indicate he was talking to someone else. Well, OK, so not actually, no, no cell phone in sight. So? "Roberto, cell phone? Sheet you guys think he calling for PEEE-za? He doing heez Islam thing, praying to heez Allah," Pablo says as we gulp our way up toward the East Peak of Mount Tamalpais. "Hombre, he had beads in heez robes for counting prayers. No cell phone. He turning to face heez mecca. Seem sala beem, 'Berto."

Yeh, well, if we were muzzled by those Muslims, poisoned by our patrons, it was the lemon sauce on the pastries did it. That or the almonds.

Freedman still got his money. He still ate alone. So what if a few of the hangers-on, including Manny, got intestinally gutted for 48 hours. The message to my scrubs ... and I had a globe full of 'em who kept paying their $10 a month for my own brand of poison: Buy Freedman now -- tickers on request via e-mail please -- and get rich off his metals. I could have added: Or the promise of his metals. The sad truth of it was, all of my loyal Melt-Up midgets out there, they were, each and every hard-up, wide-eyed, faithful subscriber of mine, dey ver LIS-nink ... with their grotesque Mickey Mouse ears. I now carried Immodium wherever I flew, and I couldn't have been happier.

 Copyright © 2007, Thom Calandra

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR

“Pablo by Numbers” is a work of fiction. All characters in the novel are the work of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to people living or dead.

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