Billionaire

  Thoughts of Amanda’s body came vividly back to him: her streaked hair cascading like a fringed curtain across her nipples as she sat on top of him in the bed.

  ‘Good morning Mr Baenhaker.’

  Her long slim legs and thighs, with the blaze of gold between them.

  ‘Just going to take a quick look and see how we’re getting on.’

  The sheet and blankets were whipped back, and Baenhaker came out of his day dream to discover the surgeon, and attendant Nurse McDonald, staring down at him with faintly bemused expressions as he lay in the bed, hand firmly clenched around his poker-hard organ which protruded from the fly of his pyjama bottoms.

  It was some time on Friday that Baenhaker had decided that Nurse McDonald was extremely pretty. Between then and today, he had put in a considerable amount of effort at drawing her attention and chatting her up. By the time she had gone off duty the previous night, Baenhaker was certain that he had someone who would succumb to his charms, if not in some dark corner of the hospital, then at least in the comfort of his Earls Court flat after his release. But the expression on her face as she stood now above him dispelled all of that with the tartness of a lavatory air-freshener spray. The expression on her face told him she thought he was a nasty little pervert.

  The surgeon examined the stitches, then nodded. Nurse McDonald pulled back the sheet and blanket with as much grace as if she were putting the lid on a dustbin full of empty sardine cans.

  ‘Healing very nicely,’ said the surgeon. ‘Should have you out of here within a few days now.’ The pair of them turned to walk off, then the surgeon stopped, and leaned over to Baenhaker and whispered confidentially into his ear: ‘Don’t do that sort of thing in here old chap – it embarrasses everyone. If you have to, go and do it in the lavatory.’ Then he strode off in Nurse McDonald’s wake.

  Baenhaker’s face took several minutes to lose its bright red flush. He sat and glared around the ward, and then began to scrape his teeth with the nail of his little finger. An elderly orderly marched into the ward and came up to his bed. ‘Mr Baenhaker?’

  He nodded.

  ‘There’s a telephone call for you outside – you can take it in Sister’s office.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Baenhaker followed him out through the ward to the small cubicle with a chair and a telephone from which Sister conducted her empire. He shut the door, and picked up the receiver. ‘Hallo?’

  The crackling and faint sound of heavy breathing told him it was an overseas call. ‘Danny?’ It was the voice of General Ephraim.

  Baenhaker was feeling very fed up with his chief since Ephraim’s visit, and in light of his present mood, he had no difficulty in adopting a sullen voice: ‘Yes.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to the senior registrar of your hospital. He thinks you’re pretty well okay now.’

  ‘What the fuck does he know?’

  ‘He’s had the reports from the surgeon. I have some urgent business for you: I want you to discharge yourself, and report to the office at nine o’clock tomorrow.’

  ‘I don’t know if they’ll let me.’

  ‘In British hospitals you can discharge yourself.’

  ‘What about my injuries?’

  ‘I’ve told you – they’re better.’

  ‘How the fuck do you know? You’re two thousand miles away.’

  ‘I’ll talk to you at nine.’ The line went dead. The head of the Mossad had rung off.

  Baenhaker put the receiver back down; as he walked back to his ward, his leg twinged like crazy right down along the scar line, and his chest still hurt like hell every time he breathed deeply. He was angry, very angry, but he knew that it didn’t matter how angry he got, nor how fed up he got: he could get as angry, or fed up, or anything else that he liked. The only one thing he could not do was disobey the General’s instructions.

  The taxi dropped him outside the crumbling Earls Court terraced building, where he lived, shortly after 2.00. It was drizzling hard, and he pushed his way out of it through the door and into the dark corridor with its smell of musty carpets and curry. He had no idea who in the building ate curry, but from the smell that pervaded it all the days of the year, either someone was running a clandestine take-away, or else they were addicted to the stuff.

  An appalling stench hit him halfway down the corridor of the top floor, the fourth, which grew stronger with every step he took nearer his own flat. He put the key in and opened the door – it was the stench of rotting meat. He went to the kitchen and pulled open the fridge door; he gagged, and nearly threw up. The fridge had packed up, and the four steaks and two pints of milk were hopping about inside it.

  Baenhaker had been at a party the previous winter, and there was a woman there who claimed she had psychic powers. He had let her read his palm. She’d predicted a lot of bad news for the future; so depressed had she been by what she had seen in his hand, that she had burst into tears. That hadn’t made Baenhaker feel too terrific either. When, on the New Year’s Eve, he had tripped over and smashed his bedroom mirror, he had begun to feel that, possibly, the mad woman had been right; things didn’t look too good.

  As was his habit whenever he returned to the apartment, regardless of whether he had been out for half an hour, a weekend or, like now, several weeks, he checked each room carefully and methodically. Today, he had forgotten how gloomy the flat looked in daylight, particularly on a wet day. He’d only ever had enough money for the basics of apartment life, and several of the major items had come from second-hand shops. The exceptions were the 21'' Sony colour television, his JVC video-recorder – he was addicted to movies and this was his one real luxury – and his Walther PP automatic pistol, together with some £30,000 worth of the most sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment available in the world. Both the gun and the surveillance equipment were still in their places in the hollowed-out headboard of his bed.

  He picked up from the bedside table the large framed photograph of Amanda, wearing a hardhat, surrounded by rubble and smiling cheekily. He slipped the photograph out of its frame, seized it between his two hands as if to rip it in half, then relented and pushed it out of sight into a drawer. He sat down on the bed, still unmade from the Saturday when he had set off to drive down to Bristol, and felt sad and desolate. He thought back about those months he had spent with Amanda, and then tried to stop thinking about them because they hurt too much.

  They had met when a high-rise office building in Camden Town had been gutted by fire. Baenhaker’s cover role in England was as an insurance loss adjuster for Eisenbar-Goldschmidt, a major Israeli reinsurance company. He had been sent ostensibly to investigate the damage and advise Eisenbar-Goldschmidt on any potential salvage items. The real reason for his presence in the gutted shell was because one floor had been occupied by a large Israeli import-export company. The Mossad wanted to know whether there was any Arab sabotage involved, as part of a plan of international sabotage against Israeli firms, and was interested in a direct report from its own personnel, whom it trusted, and not from the British Police, in whom it had doubts – the same doubts as it had about every other organization in the world that did not openly and unequivocally proclaim and prove itself to be pro-Israeli.

  Amanda had been in the shell as part of the team of architects and designers which had been commissioned for the re-building. He went over to the drawer, pulled out the photograph once more, looked at it, then put it back. For eighteen months they had got on brilliantly and then, as suddenly as the flame had started, it died.

  The last two occasions they had had dinner, she had lost interest in what he had to say, and no longer seemed to care about anything he had done. Then that weekend they were supposed to go away to Scotland, she had rung him on the Thursday to say she had to go to an architects’ conference in Cologne. He stood up suddenly, and marched over to the window. He opened it and breathed in deep gulps of the air, then put his hands on the sill and s
tared down into the basement at the dustbins. He remembered now. It came flooding back: Amanda in the Porsche on the motorway: the hell she had been to an architects’ conference in Cologne.

  He stared out of the window for a long time, watching the drizzle. He tried to remember more about the accident, but nothing else came.

  Baenhaker was conscious that he had little money. If he were paid by Eisenbar-Goldschmidt as a loss adjuster, he would have had a damned good salary and a decent car; but he wasn’t. He was paid by the Mossad out of the Israeli Defence budget. The Mossad was always short of money, and those who bore the brunt of the shortage were the employees. Baenhaker had thought of quitting on a number of occasions, but a sense of duty, a deep-rooted desire to see Israel survive, and a belief that he was an indispensable part of that survival kept him in his job.

  He had asked Amanda often whether it bothered her that he had little money, could not afford to have a smart car and take her to smart restaurants; she had always replied that it didn’t. But he had noticed that the lifestyle of the rich seemed to lure her. Having seen her in that Porsche, he knew how she must have finally swallowed the hook deep down inside her. She had been to see him twice in hospital. The first time she had held his hand and looked tearful. The second time she had brought him chocolates, forgetting that he hated chocolates, and stayed for five minutes. A voice deep inside him said, ‘Forget her.’ He was trying, he knew. Damned hard.

  20

  After the telex from Theo Barbiero-Ruche had been placed on his desk, Rocq sat and stared at it in silence for a long time. The last of the lunchtime alcohol was wearing away, and he had a strong desire to go out, buy a bottle and keep on drinking. He was emerging into full, clear reality, and he wasn’t sure that was a condition he wanted to be in. Right now, he needed oblivion, and he needed it for a good long time. He tried to bury himself in work, but after two half-hearted phone calls he knew it was no good. He looked at his watch: it was five to five, and already one or two people in the office had started to pack up for the day. His intercom buzzed and he picked up the receiver.

  ‘Mr Rocq?’

  It was Sir Monty Elleck’s private secretary.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sir Monty wonders if you could spare him a moment upstairs in his office?’

  Rocq thought frantically for a moment. He had a damned good idea what Elleck wanted to see him about: the small matter of a few hundred thousand pounds of margin. He wanted to stay well out of Elleck’s way until he could get hold of some money, but he realized he was going to have no chance of avoiding him unless he went sick, and he knew that he could not afford to go sick; he needed to watch the price of coffee twenty-four hours a day, until it had dropped sufficiently to see him out of trouble. He couldn’t take the risk of missing the drop. He had instructed Barbiero-Ruche to buy back, if it went below £327, but if it looked like plummeting well below that, he wanted to be able to cancel that instruction and hold out for even more. Reluctantly, he got up from his desk and made his way up to Elleck’s office.

  He was surprised to find Elleck in an uncharacteristically jovial mood. He came out from behind his desk to greet him with a firm handshake, ushered him into a pink chair, and asked him what he would like to drink. He then went and poured two hefty Scotches, added some Malvern water, brought the glasses over, gave one to Alex, and seated himself in a lemon yellow chair next to him.

  ‘So how are you, Alex?’

  ‘Fine, thank you, Sir Monty.’

  ‘Good, good. Business all right?’

  ‘Reasonable, thank you, sir.’

  ‘I hear you had a car accident at the weekend. No one hurt, I hope?’

  ‘No, sir. My car was parked and a lorry hit it.’

  ‘I am sorry to hear that. Badly damaged?’

  ‘Smashed to pieces; a write-off.’

  ‘Very unfortunate. A Porsche wasn’t it? Expensive motor car.’

  Rocq nodded.

  ‘I presume the insurance will cover it?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Probably take several months though, knowing them.’

  ‘Impossible people, insurance companies. Will you get another one in the meantime?’

  ‘I think I’ll have to wait until I get the insurance money – I don’t want to borrow the money at current interest rates.’

  ‘Of course not, they are very punitive. Still, Alex, it must be very inconvenient not to have a car?’

  ‘It is – I’m going to have to rent one at the weekends.’

  Elleck took a sip of his drink, then handed Rocq a box of Romeo & Juliet coronas. Rocq took one, and Elleck helped himself. ‘Not very satisfactory, renting. Very expensive. I think it would be better, Alex, if you went and bought yourself another Porsche. Put it on the Company – you can arrange it tomorrow through the accounts department. I will tell them in the morning. Then you can reimburse us with whatever you eventually get from the insurance.’

  Rocq was glad his chair had arms; they prevented him from falling out of it. Less than six months before, Elleck had virtually thrown him out of this same office for asking for a financial contribution towards the last Porsche. ‘Filthy Nazi toys,’ Elleck had yelled. ‘This firm has never bought a foreign car, and over my dead body it never will.’ Rocq studied his boss carefully: he was very definitely anything but dead.

  ‘Thank you, sir; that’s extremely generous – extremely generous.’ He was nearly shaking with excitement. ‘They are – rather expensive, sir – you do – er – know the price?’

  ‘I am not familiar with car prices – how much are they?’

  ‘The one I have cost £32,000 – on the road – I might be able to save a bit by taking the radio out of the last one.’

  Elleck blanched visibly at the sum of money. ‘I didn’t realize they cost – er – quite that much. However, no problem, Alex, no problem at all – and you needn’t worry about any interest – you just go ahead and sort it out tomorrow.’

  ‘Thank you, sir, thank you very much indeed.’

  ‘Don’t mention it; let me fill your glass up.’

  Elleck walked over to the drinks cupboard, and poured Rocq nearly a half tumbler of Chivas Regal from the Steuben cut-glass decanter. ‘Now, Alex – I don’t like to pry into the business affairs of my employees – none of them. What you all do with your own money is your own affair. We do have a rule that you must not trade privately through any section of this company – but,’ he handed the tumbler to Rocq, ‘we’ve never enforced that rule too strictly. However, as a result of this coffee business, I have had to scrutinize our books very carefully – to make sure we’re not on the hook for anyone to any of the clearing houses – and during my scrutiny, I couldn’t help noticing your own coffee position: you bought 1,000 tons – 200 lots – at £1,022 a ton on ten per cent margin. As you know, it has now dropped to just over £420 a ton, and under our rules you are required to cover that position – which means you’re paying out, on top of your original margin of £102,000, approximately a further £400,000. I understand you have given instructions to James Rice to liquidate your position as quickly as possible – but as buyers are on the thin side, it is unlikely to rise significantly between now and then. It would seem this is more or less the amount you are going to have to pay up.’ He looked quizzically at Rocq.

  Rocq stared him straight in the eye, then took a large pull on his tumbler; he needed enough drink for courage, but not too much that he would lose what little concentration he had remaining. Then he carefully cut away the end of his Havana with his index finger nail. He nodded, slowly. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You have this money readily available, I presume?’ Rocq pulled out his gold Dunhill and lit the cigar, slowly, deliberately, rolling the tip over and over in the flame, sucking gently, sucking deeply, caressing and nursing the end into an even bright red glow. The smoke tasted sweet, reassuring, rich and beautiful. He took one large mouthful, let the smoke curl up for a few moments from his bottom lip, then blew it hard, straight o
ut in front of him; he swivelled his head, looked Elleck briefly in the face, then stared down at Elleck’s exquisitely polished Manolo Blahnick crocodile shoes. ‘No, Sir Monty, I haven’t.’

  ‘Nor the £512,000 you need to wire to your friend in Milan?’

  A chill went through Rocq. Nobody had actually spelled out the enormity of the mess he was in before. The chill subsided, and he was left with a damp mixture of frustration and despair. He lifted his eyes up to meet Elleck’s: ‘No, I don’t have that either.’

  ‘How about forty pence for your tube fare home?’ Elleck’s tone had suddenly become warmer again. He grinned, and Elleck grinned back.

  ‘I think I can just about run to that,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Elleck, ‘that’s a start!’

  Rocq picked up his glass for another sip; to his slight surprise, he discovered it was empty.

  ‘Drop more?’ asked Elleck.

  ‘Just a drop,’ said Rocq, conscious that he was beginning to slur his words, and fighting hard to try and feel sober again.

  Elleck marched back over to the drinks cabinet. He did not speak until he had brought Rocq’s refilled glass and sat down again. ‘Alex,’ he said, ‘I like to think of my firm as a family. All my employees are one big family. If anyone is ever in trouble, and it is within my power to help them, then I will always do so.’ He paused, and lifted his tumbler: ‘Your health.’

  Rocq lifted his and they both drank. Then Elleck continued:

  ‘Now, you seem to be in a lot of trouble. The sums of money you owe are fantastic – in anybody’s terms – almost £1 million altogether. Everyone dreams of being a millionaire. Even today, with all the inflation we have had over the years, to be a millionaire is still to achieve a magical status. You are thirty-one and you owe a million pounds. You owe more perhaps than one man in a hundred thousand will ever make in his entire lifetime.

  ‘You are a bright fellow. You have enthusiasm, youth, ability, no doubt. I don’t know – maybe, also, you have rich relatives – but if you don’t, you will need an awful lot of hard work, and luck, to ever pay even a portion of that sort of money back. It will be a millstone around your neck that you could carry for all your life. Instead of earning money to enjoy, you would be earning it to pay back the bank.’