Research

by Philip Kerr

  To give up and to disappear for ever, was that so bad? I had escaped from Monaco and the Monty police. Could I also now escape from myself?

  It was odd how my feet had almost vanished in the seductive water, as if, with a little more effort, the rest of me might also disappear underneath the icy surface. The water – from the Rhône glacier, and a thousand feet deep at the lake’s deepest point – was remarkably cold for a summer’s day and seemed to slowly anaesthetize my feet, so much so that I wondered how painless and easy it would be just to step off the jetty and into the lake, to swim away from the house and then perhaps, when I could swim no more, to let myself sink into the black depths to meet a quiet, cold and very private death. Something had broken in my soul – assuming I had a soul – and I wanted to fall asleep for a very long time. To escape from everything. To avoid that final, judicial moment when all that I had was taken away from me. The relentless, inductive truths offered by Don Irvine in the brisk, no-nonsense manner of a serving army officer were more than I could stand. Talking to him I felt like I was back before the headmaster at school. It was only too easy to see that this was how it was going to be from now on: cunts who were friends offering me advice, cunts who were policemen asking me questions, cunts who were lawyers and journalists and God knows who else commenting on my inadequacies as a husband, as a man, as a human being, and as a writer. It really didn’t bear thinking of.

  Then, a neighbour’s peacock called for help and it was as if my own soul had cried out in agony – or so I thought, but for only a moment; the next second I began to laugh at my own stupid conceit and loathsome self-pity; for wasn’t this the very kind of hackneyed, pathetic-fallacy bullshit scene I had banned from ever being written in my own novels?

  ‘You’re not Gerald Crich,’ I murmured. ‘Nor are you Oliver fucking Reed. And this is not Women in Love.’

  I collected my shoes and socks, stood up, and walked back to the house to order sushi and tell Don the next chapter of my story.

  CHAPTER 4

  After dinner from Uchitomi, and another bottle of Mechanic’s best white Burgundy, I ushered Don into the living room and hauled a fur throw over myself.

  ‘This place is never as warm as it ought to be,’ I said. ‘Even in summer. And smoke if you want. Bob likes a good cigar so I doubt he’ll object to you having another fag. Matter of fact I think I’ll have one myself. I really think a smoke might help.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Don, and offered me one from his cigarette case.

  I lit us both with a silver table lighter the size of Aladdin’s magic lamp and puffed happily for several seconds.

  ‘Orla would kill me if she saw me now,’ I said. ‘Smoking, I mean. She was a real fascist where smoking was concerned.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ said Don. ‘But that was probably just one of many reasons why she didn’t like me.’

  I didn’t contradict him. Don Irvine’s army service in Northern Ireland during the Troubles had made him persona non grata as far as Orla and her family were concerned; my old advertising colleague had done his best to avoid confrontation – he was the least confrontational person I’d ever met – but that was never easy with Irish nationalists, especially when they’d had a drop of the hard stuff. Frankly there wasn’t one of Orla’s murderous clan I wouldn’t cheerfully have punched on the nose.

  We smoked in silence for another moment before Don glanced around and shivered. ‘Christ, I don’t know how you can stand it here. On your own. Rattling around in a house as big as this. And I thought Cornwall was fucking quiet.’

  ‘You’ve still got your place down in Fowey? Mandalay, isn’t it?’

  ‘Manderley. The same as in Rebecca. And actually it’s in Polruan, which is on the other side of the estuary from Fowey.’

  I nodded, but really not giving a shit about the difference. Cornwall was just Cornwall to me: a care-in-the-community, backward, Go-Between sort of place – all right, that was Norfolk, but you get the picture – full of red-faced, cider-drinking, deliberate people. With my parents, I’d often visited Cornwall on holiday as a boy but I had no interest in ever visiting the county again. It wasn’t just the past that was a foreign country, it was Cornwall, too, where they were so independently-minded and did things so differently from anywhere else in England that it might as well have been fucking Hungary. Don being Don was suited to living there, I thought. Me, I’d have hated it.

  ‘It was a couple of weeks after terminating the atelier that I fetched up here,’ I said, beginning the next chapter of my story ‘You can imagine how that went. Telling Hereward and Bat that I was calling time on our heroic little enterprise. They were fit to be tied. Bat told me I’d ruined his life and destroyed the company. Which was nonsense, of course. People wind up successful rock bands all the time. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Guns N’ Roses. The Smiths. Bowie pulled the rug on the Spiders while they were on tour, at the peak of their success. This wasn’t any different from that.

  ‘Anyway, I came back to Monaco, collected some clothes and some papers, and my laptop, of course, and drove up here the very next day to start work writing the book. By myself. Not that Orla wanted to come. She’s always hated Switzerland and the Swiss. Which is why we had a ski chalet in Courchevel 1850 instead of Gstaad or St Moritz. Colette Laurent did want to come with me, however. But if she had I’d never have got any writing done. Plus she’d have been bored. That’s the thing about writing people just don’t understand. It’s about making yourself so bored that there’s nothing else to do except to write. You can’t do it when there are any distractions. At least that’s how it is for me. Colette would have been itching to go shopping in Geneva every day and that would have been distracting. So, I was determined to come and do it by myself – write, I mean – in the way I’d done when I first got started. On retreat. Like a monk. Without so much as a choirboy’s arse to divert my mind. Actually, I was really looking forward to it. I had a hollow craving for loneliness and self-sufficiency. I’d been here before of course, when I was writing the plot of The Geneva Convention. Mechanic had listened and he made a few suggestions and he was full of admiration for what I’d come up with. He made a few suggestions but he left me with the clear impression that he thought that the new kind of hedge fund I described to him might actually have worked. I mean he got the idea right away. Bob is nothing if not quick. In fact he’s quite devious and a natural plotter. Anyway, it’s a stand-alone thriller and you know the story. Of course you do. At one stage you thought you were going to write this book yourself.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Don, ‘it’s been a while since I read the seventy-page outline, John.’

  ‘Ninety-five,’ I said. ‘That outline was ninety-five. I expanded it quite a lot after you read it. I was going to make this one a bit more of a doorstop than some of the others. You know: airport-sized. Like Wilbur Smith when Wilbur Smith used to write the books himself.’

  ‘In which case perhaps it would be useful if you refreshed my memory. About the plot. It might be relevant. I do remember that it’s rather complicated. And a bit technical. But skip the algebra if you would. There’s no need to include the algorithm. I only just passed O-level maths.’

  ‘Oh, the algorithm is gone, old sport. No, I decided that was just too much for my readers to cope with. An equation in a thriller is about as welcome as a skid mark on a wedding dress. I learned that with Ten Soldiers Wisely Led when I put in all that stuff about how modern cryptographic software – and in particular the Hermetic Algorithm – is now regarded as a munition by the US government and subject to arms-trafficking export controls. You look on the Amazon reviews and that’s the bit they always complain about: not knowing what the fuck an algorithm is.’

  ‘I’m not sure I know myself.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ I took another of Don’s cigarettes and lit it. ‘So, to come back to the story of The Geneva Convention, Charles Colson is a hedgie who lives and works here in Geneva. He’s an alpha type: an orphan, and near-ge
nius – mildly Asperger’s, probably. His fund is called the Geneva Convention and it’s one of the most successful in the world, with forty billion dollars’ worth of assets under management. In spite of the name there’s nothing particularly benign or humanitarian about Colson’s Geneva Convention. It’s simply a large group of very wealthy people who share a common interest, which is to become even wealthier. Don’t they always?

  ‘Now, as you might expect, Charles is a ruthless investor and a bastard with several Geneva Convention subsidiary companies that lend money to some of the worst people in the world: dictators to start up joint-venture oil and mining companies, that kind of thing. He does business in North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, Paraguay, El Salvador and nearly all of the Stan countries. If you were looking for a model of the detestable capitalist you couldn’t do better than Charles Colson, which is why in the book the Guardian newspaper names him on their own version of the ST Rich List as the one of the top ten hate figures of the liberal left.

  ‘But Colson’s Geneva Convention is about to get even richer, after Colson acquires a company called Galatea Genomics run by two geneticists – Daniel Weinreich and William Williams. Weinreich, who deeply disapproves of Colson, disagrees with the board of Galatea and leaves the company. Then, with Williams’s help Colson constructs an innovative and highly confidential computer program that’s soon the basis of what the two men believe is nothing less than a new social science they now dub Phenomics.

  ‘Now, the big drawback of conventional economics of course is that it doesn’t act like a science at all, because human activity makes economic agents much too unpredictable. Put another way, Adam Smith was simply wrong because he believed that it was possible to make laws and rules for economies of the kind that Sir Isaac Newton had established for the universe. It just isn’t. Economies don’t behave like that with physical laws – with forces that act in a mechanistic and predictable way. If you’ve ever talked to three economists you’ll know what I’m talking about; they’ll all hold very different opinions about everything from unemployment to the price of eggs, which proves that economics really isn’t a science at all but a form of clairvoyance.

  ‘In my story Colson and Williams believe Phenomics remedies the defects of economics because the essence of the analysis is not the observation of rational laws that make economies easy to predict, but of the kind of human irrationality that makes economies impossible to predict – at least by the application of conventional economic principles. Crudely speaking, Phenomics purports to provide its inventors with a data-based method of making economics work as a true science. Without wanting to get too technical the Phenomics program is able to analyse companies as organisms with genetic codes that can be mapped, just like the DNA of a sheep or a human being. It’s Phenomics that provides Colson with an ensemble of observable characteristics displayed by a company; the program looks for company phenotypes, which is to say it attempts to identify the composite of a company’s observable characteristics and traits such as its morphology, heredity, development, business cycles, investment behaviour, products and personnel. Using an enormous amount of accumulated data the Phenomics program looks to predict those company phenotypes and the effect the company will have on the outside world – and, by extension, its chances of becoming a successful corporate organism.

  ‘Of course, this is fiction, and the beauty of this fiction is that since there are very few people who understand how hedge funds and their products actually work, this is the kind of story where the reader really does have to suspend disbelief. Especially my fucking readers. But after all that is the novelist’s job. Making people believe the unbelievable is no trick, it’s work. Damn right. So that when the Phenomics program makes the Geneva Convention the most successful hedge fund in the world, it doesn’t strain credibility too much.

  ‘Colson and Williams create a special tracking fund of 100 million dollars using Phenomics as the basis of its investment philosophy, and within just six months this shows a forty per cent return. Colson and Williams now proceed to sell Phenomics as the basis of modern investment to GC’s investors. And all goes smooth. Until it doesn’t. And of course this is where one says bollocks to Christopher Booker’s idea that there are seven basic plots. Frankly that just looked like rehashed Quiller-Couch, anyway. There is only one fucking plot in the whole of literature: in fiction nothing is what it ever seems to be. I mean everything comes down to that, right?

  ‘And this is where everything in the story gets turned upside down. In the book we’ve always known that Charles Colson has a skeleton in his closet; but now we discover that this is almost literally true. Charles once had an identical twin brother called James. As boys James and Charles had concluded that they could never live normal lives just as long as they were both alive. They did too many weird things to make people feel comfortable around them and decided that one of them should disappear. So they tossed for it and James lost; soon after that he vanished. Charles was even suspected of killing his twin. But a body was never found.

  ‘Now, using international criminal DNA databases, one of the people who worked for Galatea Genomics – Daniel Weinreich – has found out about the twin and traced him to Casuarina Prison in Western Australia, where he’s serving a sentence for a bank robbery he didn’t commit; he was framed by his brother Charles, to make sure he kept out of the way for ever. Weinreich and a bunch of people get together and spring James Colson, to take his brother’s place. They also kidnap Charles, take him to a motel in the outback, and then inform the police, who naturally assume they’ve caught his brother, James, who returns to Geneva with his liberators, where he assumes the place of his brother Charles; he starts to use the Geneva Convention money for good. Charles, locked up in Casuarina – which is the hardest prison in Oz – protests that he’s someone else; but of course, the prison officers assume he’s gone nuts and ignore him.

  ‘Of course, it’s the same story as The Man in the Iron Mask, in which the King’s musketeer, Aramis, substitutes the twin brother of Louis XIV, Philippe, for the king. This was always one of my favourite stories when I was a boy. And it’s long seemed to me that the founders and owners of modern hedge funds are the modern equivalent of the aristocracy and royalty that once ruled Europe.’

  Don nodded. ‘It’s a good story. Your novel, I mean. I always liked it.’

  ‘I wish to God I’d let you write it, Don, like you wanted to. Seems like everything’s gone wrong since I started this fucking project. The minute I got here, shit started to happen.’

  ‘Such as.’

  ‘The very first night in Geneva. It had turned a little chilly and so I borrowed Mechanic’s coat to walk into the village and have dinner at the Café des Marronniers. Just before I went out I caught sight of myself in the mirror in the hall and thought how like Bob Mechanic I looked wearing his overcoat. And that might have been funny except that between here and there someone fucking mugged me. They didn’t get much. Just a couple of hundred euros. Fortunately, I wasn’t wearing this watch.’

  I lifted my wrist to show Don the Hublot Caviar watch I was wearing. With a case made entirely of black diamonds which glistened in the light it did indeed look like a little pot of Beluga caviar.

  ‘Did you report it to the police?’ asked Don.

  ‘No. It was my own fault. It’s dark and very quiet around here at night and everyone in Geneva knows that people in Collonge-Bellerive have more money than sense. At the time I thought nothing about it. But then I got a call from Mechanic on his satellite phone warning me to be careful; he’d received an email from Keith Levin, the head of security at the Mechanism – that’s the name of Bob’s fund – advising him of the existence of a boiler-room company called Mechanism New Investment Capital that was offering discounted securities to UK investors. In other words these were scammers who were pretending to work for Bob Mechanic’s hedge fund. The head of security at the Mechanism thought it possible that the scammers were taking advantage of Bob
being in the Antarctic to operate the boiler-room scam. When Bob told me this I rang Keith and told him about the mugging and Keith said it was quite possible that these two events were connected; and that I shouldn’t go anywhere on foot while I remained in Geneva. After that I didn’t go out for several days. I had my head down and wrote the best part of ten thousand words. Good stuff, too. Not just dialogue – which is easier to write, of course – but narrative. It was the best writing I’d done since I first started. After a while I felt I’d earned myself a break. I’d thought about taking a trip down to Lyon to see Philip French. He was always inviting me to his house in Tourrettes-sur-Loup. Anyway I didn’t go. Besides, it was my wedding anniversary and I had to go back to Monaco.’

  ‘It’s probably good you didn’t go and see Phil,’ said Don. ‘The last time we spoke he was very bitter about what had happened. He told me he would never have bought that house in Tourrettes if he’d had any idea that you were going to close the atelier. I think you’d have got a poor reception.’

  ‘Yes, I know. That’s what Munns said in the Daily Mail. How much did it cost, anyway?’