Billionaire

  He sat back in the taxi and pulled down the window to let in some air. He felt under pressure at the moment, great pressure, and he knew he must try to relax. He thought about the nuclear mines that had been discovered in a fishing dhow in the Persian Gulf; a good job had been done by the Omanis in keeping that quiet. Rumour was circulating in United States Intelligence and in the intelligence networks of the other countries which had learned of the incident that the Israelis were, in some way, involved in it. He knew that this was rubbish, but it had not been easy to convince his superiors. The Israeli Prime Minister had given him a thoroughly unpleasant grilling, and he wasn’t sure at the end of it that the Prime Minister was really convinced of his innocence or, indeed, of Israel’s innocence in the whole affair. Then there had been all the extra work resulting from the second attack on Osirak, monitoring and reporting on world reaction.

  Ephraim was at an age when many men had retired; but what, he wondered, did they retire to? To tend their gardens? Peaceful gardens? Not in Israel, he knew. A peaceful garden was one you could look out at and know it would be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, and in ten years’ time, and in one hundred years’ time. Not in Israel. You could not, he knew, look at anything in Israel and believe it was going to be there even until tomorrow.

  Ephraim emerged from the elevator on the sixth floor of 88 Mincing Lane and was ushered straight into the office of the Chairman, Chief Executive and one hundred per cent owner of Globalex. The diminutive Lithuanian and the bulky Israeli hugged each other warmly. ‘Issy, you look terrific, terrific!’ said Elleck.

  ‘And you look as successful as ever, Monty.’

  ‘Come, sit.’ Elleck ushered him into an ornate armchair, and then went to his drinks cabinet. ‘Chivas and ice? Still your favourite?’

  ‘Just a small one – don’t go mad with the bottle.’

  ‘It’s so good to see you – how can I keep my hand steady?’

  There was a bond between the two men, a bond that went back a long way, to the summer in Germany of 1944, to the concentration camp Auschwitz – to a day when a Nazi soldier had been taunting Elleck, calling him a ‘fat Jewish bubble’, and pricking at his stomach with a bayonet. They were in the open, digging a mass grave for several hundred of their companions and probably, within a short while, for themselves, too; there was no one else around. Elleck was yelling abuse back at the soldier, who was fast becoming increasingly violent. At any moment, Ephraim knew, the soldier was liable to pull his trigger. The Nazi never heard Ephraim, who had been a thousand times better trained than he; before the Nazi’s eyes had even picked up Ephraim’s advancing shadow, his windpipe had been shattered like an old china vase.

  Ephraim and Elleck had fled, and made the cover of the woods. They knew they had no chance of getting any distance, and instead searched for an ideal hiding place. Under the roots of an oak tree they found a natural hollow and, by excavating it a bit more, they were both able to fit into it. They spent every day for the next five months jammed in their tiny hollow, frequently hearing soldiers walk close by or even directly overhead. At night, they foraged for anything they could eat, from berries to dead animals, although they had to eat everything raw; even if they had had matches, they would never have dared to use them. They were able to get all the water they required from a stream a short distance away. It was not until two months after Germany surrendered that they came out of hiding, and then it was only because Elleck had contracted double pneumonia, and Ephraim had gone, in the night, to a farmhouse to try to get help. It was there that he was told that the war had been over for eight weeks.

  It wasn’t until halfway through their grilled soles at their corner table at Le Poulbot, that their talk turned to business. Elleck swirled his glass of ’71 Montrachet around in his hand, took a large sip, put a forkful of sole in his mouth, took another large sip, and allowed the king of white burgundies and the prince of fish to mingle together in the company of a motley assortment of enzymes in the dank and stagnant void between his fat and greasy cheeks. After a while, he swallowed.

  ‘How did – er – everything work out?’ asked Ephraim.

  Elleck looked nervously around, and then leaned forward: ‘Issy, you did wonderful. Wonderful.’ He shook his head. ‘The timing – the timing was so good.’ He lifted his glass up to him. ‘You’re a good boy, Issy, one hell of a good boy.’

  Ephraim grinned. ‘And you’re a terrible rogue, Monty. It doesn’t matter which hole in the ground you are in, you’ll always end up on top of the pile, won’t you?’

  ‘With a little help from my friends.’ He grinned back. ‘Did you do what I said, Issy? Did you make plenty?’

  Ephraim shook his head. ‘You know I’m not interested in that. I advised the go-ahead for Osirak because you needed a favour, and because of what you promised my country if we were successful. I did not do it to make money for myself, and I wouldn’t want any of it. My country needs money badly, my people around the world need money, money for their struggle. How much money are we going to make from the raid on Osirak?’

  ‘Who else knows about it?’

  ‘Who else? Do you think I am crazy? If the Knesset found out my true reasons, that I advised my country to bomb Iraq’s nuclear power station not because there was a danger that they were using it to manufacture plutonium for nuclear bombs, but so that our act of aggression would for a few hours send a nervous twitch around the money markets of the world, banging up the price of gold, so that you could make a killing, and bail your company out of the financial crisis you told me you had coming; if the Knesset found that out, what the hell do you think they would say? Eh? You think I’m going to go around shouting my mouth off about it? No way, Monty. I did what I did for two reasons: Firstly, when you and I were down that hole, right in those first days we were there, we made a pact; you remember? We said that if we ever got out, and survived, if either of us, at any time, ever, during the rest of our lives, was in trouble, needed help, the other would go to the ends of the earth to help him. Well, Monty, I’ve just done that now, and I tell you, Monty, the strain is killing me.’

  Elleck nodded slowly. ‘I’m sure.’

  ‘And the second reason,’ continued Ephraim, ‘is the ten per cent you said you would pay to whichever Jewish groups in the world I told you. Well – I have that list here.’ Ephraim pulled an envelope from his pocket, and passed it across the table.

  Elleck stared him in the face. ‘There’s a problem, Issy. Everything went according to plan, except for two things I had not worked out properly. Firstly, as I did not want to let anyone in on what was happening, I had to buy the gold myself. I think I must be getting rusty up in my big office – it’s a long time since I have done any dealing myself. I had forgotten how difficult it can be to buy large amounts of gold quickly without attracting a great deal of attention. So I did not buy nearly as much as I had hoped. Secondly, the world is getting used to short, sharp acts of aggression. I thought gold would have jumped fifty, possibly even seventy-five – possibly more still – maybe up to $100 an ounce . . .’ He shook his head, finished the last mouthful of sole and took another large sip of wine. ‘But it didn’t. It only went twenty-four. If I had managed to buy all the gold I wanted – which I could have done if you had held off another month, like I had asked you – I would have been okay, even on a $24 rise.’

  ‘But –’ Ephraim cut in, ‘you told me how wonderful the timing was, how perfectly it all went.’

  ‘What was wonderful was the timing of the information – the way you got the information through to me. Because of what you told me, I knew exactly when to sell. I was also able to advise my clients, and that has made them very happy. But in terms of my firm making money, Issy, we just didn’t make enough.’

  ‘But you must have made some?’

  ‘Sure we have bailed ourselves out of a lot of problems – but I still have a long way to go.’

  ‘So how much are you going to be able to give to
the names on that list?’ Ephraim was starting to sound uneasy.

  Elleck stared at him for a long time, then stared down at the ground. He spoke quietly: ‘Issy,’ he said, ‘you know me: If I possibly could, you know that I would, but . . .’

  The head of the Mossad was in a fury when he arrived back at the Intercontinental Hotel. He had declined Elleck’s invitation to dinner and by doing so had terminated, as far as he was concerned, the oldest and deepest friendship he would ever know in his lifetime.

  He was more than a little startled when the reception clerk handed him, along with his room key, a package from the pigeon hole above it. No name was on the fat buff envelope, about ten inches long and eight across, just the room number. His mind raced for a moment; no one knew he was staying here, not even Elleck. He never stayed in the same hotel for more than one night, and he used different hotels each time he came to London.

  ‘You sure this is for me?’ he asked.

  ‘It was delivered about half an hour ago, sir.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Motorcycle messenger. Don’t ask me which firm – there’s hundreds of them.’

  Ephraim nodded, took the envelope and walked to the cashier’s desk. ‘Please make my bill up, I have a change of schedule and I’m leaving right away.’ He sent a bell-hop up for his bag. As he would not now be having dinner with Elleck, there was no reason for him to stay in London anyway. He wanted to have a brief meeting with his chief of UK operatives and then, he decided, he would fly on to Paris this evening, instead of in the morning as he had originally planned.

  The envelope worried him greatly. Maybe, he thought, it was for a previous occupant of the room, but he wouldn’t have put a large bet on it. It worried him because he did not know what it contained, and it worried him because someone had been able to discover his whereabouts. He climbed into a taxi, sat down, and began to examine the envelope carefully.

  After some minutes he decided, with not a great deal of confidence, that the contents of the envelope were not of a nature that would liberally scatter him and the taxi around the two hundred yards or so of Knightsbridge that surrounded them, and carefully slit it open with the top of his pen. It contained an RCA videocassette. A label was stuck to it, which read: ‘MEET ME AT THE MORGUE – starring I. Ephraim.’

  He looked at the label, at first in disbelief, then with a grin on his face and then in terror, and he began to shake uncontrollably. There was a note also stuck to the cassette, which he tore off and opened. The note said: ‘You are to be in the bar of L’Hermitage Hotel in La Baule, Brittany, at midday, Saturday. You are to come alone. If anyone accompanies you, or follows you, or if you do not turn up, then one of these will be delivered to every press agency in the world at nine o’clock on Monday morning.’

  The note was typed, by an electric typewriter with a plastic ribbon. The paper was a sheet of thin white A4 that could have been bought in any stationery shop in the world. Ephraim studied everything for some clue. There was none. His shaking got worse, and he felt his head become unbearably hot. He jerked the side window down, stuck his head out of the moving taxi, and was violently sick.

  11

  Jimmy Culundis, the Greek international arms dealer, lay back in the massive bath tub that was sunk into the floor of the huge bathroom and felt very relaxed. He was in the finest luxury money could buy, from a bath with a built-in temperature control system that maintained the bath water at whatever temperature the occupant selected, to the gold-plated taps, to the expensive soaps, to the climate-controlled room walled in marble and smoked-glass mirrors. It wasn’t unlike the bathroom he had in his house in Geneva, he decided. Nor unlike his villa in Greece; nor unlike his apartment in Paris.

  Culundis was in a guest suite in Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh’s private quarters, on the sixty-fifth floor of the Royal Palace in Tunquit, the capital of Umm Al Amnah. It was Friday night, and his private DC-8 had landed him at the country’s airport less than one hour earlier. He ran the soap down his flabby stomach, then, for a moment tensing his muscles, he raised his pelvis up out of the water, and carefully soaped every part of his long, limp phallus, a part of his body of which he was particularly fond and proud – the only part, in fact. He soaped around his scrotum, the inside of his thighs and his thatch of pubic hair, and then dunked everything back into the water. Then he slid his right hand under the water, gripped his phallus, and lifted it up, so that the top of it poked out of the water like a periscope.

  Then, pretending it was a periscope, he turned it, first to the right, then to the left; then he stretched it up out of the water, as far as it would go in its limp state, bent it forward like a hosepipe, and started making the sound of machine-gun fire.

  Suddenly, he became aware that he was no longer alone in the room; someone was looking at him. He lifted his eyes upwards. He saw a blonde girl, in a thin white dress that was virtually transparent and had a slit from the navel to the ground; she was smiling at him, and had an amused twinkle in her eyes.

  ‘Abby said you might like someone to scrub your back.’ She leaned forward, and the dress parted completely over her white, slightly tanned thighs. The Greek’s eyes bulged, and he decided that either Prince Abr Qu’Ih Missh had curious taste in the way he liked his housemaids to dress, or else the country of Umm Al Amnah was suffering from an acute shortage of ladies’ underwear. Her eyes moved from his, to a spot further down the bathwater. He looked down there too, and then went even redder. His phallus was standing bolt upright, several inches out of the water and, this time, completely unsupported by his hand.

  An hour later, Culundis and Prince Missh stepped out of the express elevator onto the ninety-fifth floor of the Royal Palace, the dining quarters of Sheik Hyyad bin Bakkrah al Quozzohok, thirty-seventh Emir of Amnah, the Prince’s father. Missh had changed out of the expensive T-shirt he had been wearing earlier in the day into a cobalt-blue djellabah and traditional head-dress; he was, as was customary in his father’s quarters, barefoot. Culundis was in a cream silk Nina Ricci suit, a bright yellow silk shirt and a green-and orange striped satin silk tie. On Missh’s tactful suggestion, he too was barefooted, and not looking totally at ease about being so, in spite of having spent his entire childhood in that state. They stepped out of the elevator into a small marble hall, in the centre of which was a huge arch, with armed guards in djellabas standing on either side. They walked through the arch into a large windowless ante-room. The room was dark, with light provided by a few open candles; the walls were hung with tapestries, which could scarcely be seen, and the marble floor was covered in a magnificent Persian rug. A servant immediately brought them a tray with two cups, each containing thick sweet coffee. Culundis frowned in disappointment at not getting an alcoholic drink, then remembered the blonde and felt better. The sweet smell of roasting meat filled the room. As they drank their coffee, Missh pointed out to Culundis the history of the family that was depicted in the tapestries; Culundis grunted politely, and wondered if it would be rude for him to light a cigar. He peered through the gloom and the works of art that had taken scores of women hundreds of years to complete and decided, quietly to himself, that once you had seen one damned Arab wandering around the desert, you had seen them all.

  A servant walked in from the next room, which was again connected by a huge archway, stood in the centre of the archway, and bowed slowly.

  ‘Come,’ said Missh, ‘my Father is ready to receive us for dinner.’ The two men walked through into a much larger, but not much brighter-lit room.

  ‘How come there aren’t any windows?’ Culundis whispered.

  ‘My father does not like anything to distract from the food and the company. Elsewhere in his quarters, there are many windows.’

  The floor on one side of the room was bare marble. The floor on the other side had thick carpeting and was richly scattered with cushions; seated in the midst, on an enormous pile of cushions, Culundis could make out a frail-looking old man, very thin, with long bony arms
and long bony legs that protruded from his robes.

  Missh went up to his father, bowed down, and the two embraced each other; then Missh stood back and bade Culundis walk forward. ‘Father, you remember Mr Culundis?’

  Culundis stood awkwardly; Missh hadn’t briefed him on what to do. The Emir opened his bony arms, and Culundis leaned down and received a short, cold embrace. The Emir bade Culundis sit, as with all guests, in the place of honour on his right, and his son to the left.

  ‘It is an honour to be here once again, your Highness,’ said Culundis. ‘You look well.’ The Emir nodded politely, and stared fixedly ahead. Culundis soon saw why. The food was arriving. Eight servants staggered in holding a massive cauldron that was about four feet wide, although only about two and a half feet high; there was a thick rim of rice, from the centre of which rose a pyramid of dissected mutton, topped with four sheep heads, from which the tongues curled outwards. Two more servants followed with a huge steaming pitcher, from which they poured a gravy sauce containing the offal over the pyramid.

  The Emir leaned forward, plucked the tongue from one head, turned to Culundis on his right, and proffered it. Culundis took it, nodded graciously, looked at it, and took a small nibble. There were only two things which he absolutely loathed to eat; one was apricots, the other was tongue.

  Culundis watched the Emir lean forward, cut some strips of meat off a shoulder, make a small ball with some rice, lay the strips around the outside of the ball, and place the whole assembly in his mouth. Whilst his attention was diverted, Culundis slipped the rest of his tongue into his jacket pocket with one hand whilst pretending to push it into his mouth with the other; the Emir, chewing slowly, turned to look at his son’s guest. Culundis made large, slow, chewing motions with his mouth, and the Emir looked satisfied that his guest was content.