INNOCENT EMPLOYMENTS

Four gainfully employed, unattached finance types, improbably named after statesmen--Acheson, Eden, Jobert, Rusk--meet at a New York cocktail party. For reasons never really made clear, they all decide to take six-month sabbaticals, competing in the money game against one another for their own accounts. So the quartet proceeds to pursue big bucks through Brussels, Geneva, London, and Paris, as well as petrodollar outposts in the Mideast. Currency-trading expert Jobert seeks to depress the French franc by putting a false story on a news service's wire. Commodities whiz Acheson engineers a soybean coup using inside information from the Common Market's agricultural secretariat. Securities analyst Jacqueline Eden, the obligatory (and sensual) woman, is hired by a cabal of right-wing Spaniards who seek capital appreciation to finance a counterrevolution. And banker Rusk dickers with an Arab princeling bent on taking over a U.S.-based shipping firm and comes up with his million-dollar idea: seagoing brothels catering to the crews of offshore drilling rigs. Neither plausible nor engagingly tongue-in-cheek--more like an episode of Fantasy Island tricked up for the Wall Street Journal crowd.