Harlequin

by Morris West

  ‘It’s over, Paul. I’m very lucky. I’m glad for Julie. I want to get out of this place as soon as I can. They tell me it’s a slow convalescence. Can you hold the fort a while longer?’

  ‘Of course. But I have to bother you with some business. Do you feel up to it?’

  ‘Sure. Go ahead.’

  ‘This is bad news, George.’

  He grinned and shrugged. ‘Tell me the worst and I’m still a lucky man.’

  I told him. He heard me out in silence, eyes closed, head sunk on his chest, hands placid in his lap. When I had finished, he questioned me, calmly.

  ‘How was it done, Paul?’

  ‘It’s all in the report. We’ll need an expert to check out the details, because a wide variety of transactions is involved; but the method is essentially simple. You bribe a programmer to feed fraudulent instructions into the computer. Unless they are cancelled, the computer acts on them from now till doomsday…You know how we operate in the market. We buy and sell in block for groups of clients and allocate holdings, proceeds and charges afterwards. Our computer was programmed to make a false charge on transactions and pay the proceeds to a coded account in the Union Bank at Zurich. That account belongs to you.’

  ‘I’ve never had an account with the Union Bank in my life.’

  ‘The report states your signature is on the opening documents and on the cheques.’

  ‘You mean the account’s been operated?’

  ‘It’s been cleaned out.’

  ‘By forgery!’

  ‘We’ll have to prove that and identify the forger. We’ll also have to find who corrupted the computers for all our branches, and who paid to have it done.’

  ‘Why didn’t we pick up the discrepancy ourselves?’

  ‘Because we all take the computer for granted. So long as daily transactions tally, we don’t question it; and we’ve got such a wide variety of operations, only the accountants and auditors take any notice of the final figures.’

  ‘It’s madness, Paul! To have me robbing my own company…I don’t understand it.’

  ‘Somebody wanted to make you a clay pigeon. I think it’s Basil Yanko.’

  ‘If that’s true, we can get rid of him and buy other services.’

  ‘The hell we can I Have you forgotten how long it takes to install and train operators for one system?…Besides, this is just a warning – the first blackmail note.’

  ‘It’s still a criminal act.’

  ‘If we can prove it. Also we’ve got to cover the bank for the missing funds. I need your instructions on that. For the moment, Karl Kruger and I are standing surety, but, as I told you, Karl wants his pound of flesh.’

  ‘Let him have it, Paul.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll need power-of-attorney over your assets, at least until you’re able to travel and act for yourself. That’s a risk, too. You may not want to take it.’

  ‘I have to trust someone, Paul. If not you, who else is there?’

  ‘So we fight Basil Yanko.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  I gaped at him in disbelief.

  He gave me a wan, rueful smile. ‘Don’t look so shocked, Paul. I’ve just walked to the edge of the world and back. I know how little luggage a man needs. I have to tell you I’m not sure I want to hold Harlequin et Cie. I wouldn’t want Basil Yanko to have it; but I wouldn’t balk at selling it to Karl Kruger. It’s a tidy solution. It takes care of Julie and the boy. It lets me out of the rat-race.’

  ‘If you sell in these circumstances, you’re acting under duress.’

  ‘That’s one side of the coin.’

  ‘Then I’ll show you the other. If you back down, the bastards win. Because they win, they try again – and not every victim walks away as lucky as George Harlequin.’

  Suddenly he was grey and sweating. I felt like a criminal for pressing him so hard. I helped him into bed, bathed his face and waited until the faint colour came back into his pinched cheeks. The only words I could find to say were banal and pitiful.

  ‘It was too much. I’m sorry, George. Whatever you decide, we’re still friends.’

  He clamped a thin hand on my wrist and pleaded with me. ‘I’ll tell you a secret, Paul. It’s hard to wrestle with the dark angel, because he doesn’t want you to fight. All he asks you to do is rest and sleep. It’s very tempting just to close your eyes and let go. Don’t damn me yet. Give me a little time…’

  ‘We don’t have too much, George.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell Julie?’

  ‘Not yet. We’ve been having a few personal problems lately.’

  ‘Would you like me to stay awhile?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m very tired. Come and see me tomorrow with Julie.’

  It was still early. I did not care to go back to the hotel with its plastic starlets and greying agents. I wanted to be anonymous, free to talk mundane things: the cost of beefsteak, the hackie’s bellyache and how the girls weren’t what they used to be. I like low life. It’s simpler to live and there are more friends to share it with you. I pulled into a bar on the Strip, dim and almost deserted. I ordered a bourbon, bought a beer for the house and settled down to half an hour of laconic lament with the barman.

  We had just sorted out the Middle East and were starting on the scandals of the Administration when the telephone rang.

  The barman answered it and then turned to me. ‘Your name Paul Desmond?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘New York on the line.’

  ‘New York?’

  ‘That’s what the man said. You wanna take the call?’

  He shoved the receiver at me and I said stupidly:

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘Mr Desmond? This is Basil Yanko. I called to welcome you to the United States.’

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘We’re an efficient organisation, Mr Desmond. Do you have any news for me?’

  ‘Advice, Mr Yanko. Don’t invade my privacy.’

  He laughed cheerlessly.

  ‘Is there any service we can offer you during your visit?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Well, have a pleasant stay. We’ll keep in touch. Au revoir, Mr Desmond.’

  I put down the receiver and went back to my bourbon.

  The barman eyed me shrewdly. ‘Bad news?’

  ‘I backed a loser.’

  ‘Too bad, You can’t win ’em all. Another shot?’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I nursed it morosely while he told me, at length and in detail, how, the night he got divorced, he pulled a jackpot in Las Vegas and had himself – oh, brother! – the best lay in twenty years with a show-girl out of a job.

  His good fortune encouraged me so much I decided to call my friend and client, Francis Xavier Mendoza, who lives in Brentwood. He is Old California – the tar-pits, mission bells, the swallows of Capistrano, all this and more. He is a minor miracle: a Castilian gentleman untainted by the vulgarity of the Coast. He has three sons and a beautiful daughter. He goes to Mass on Sundays and Holy days, grows some of the best wine in the Napa Valley and, in his spare time, labours to translate the poems of Antonio Machado into English. In Californian politics, he is a kind of chameleon, always present, always potent, but never easy to identify.

  When I told him I needed to see him, he gave me an old-fashioned welcome.

  ‘My house is your house. Come now, if not sooner!’

  Forty minutes later, relaxed in his garden, I put the question to him. ‘What can you tell me about Basil Yanko and Creative Systems Incorporated?’

  He wrinkled his eagle’s beak in distaste. ‘That one? A brute, but a powerful brute. Half the big enterprises on the Coast use his services and lick his boots when they pay his bill. Me, I wouldn’t bathe in the same ocean with him.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘Legally, nothing. I have to say that. He gives the best computer service in the country – systems, pro
grammes, security, the full card. He’s a wonder-boy. But once he’s in, you can’t get him out. He controls your systems, so he knows every move you make. One sign of weakness, and he’s camped in the President’s office. He did it to three friends of mine and one enemy, who couldn’t have deserved him more. Why do you ask, Paul?’

  ‘We use him, too. We think he’s doctored our records.’

  ‘Ay de mi! That’s bad.’

  ‘Has he done the same to anyone here?’

  ‘There are rumours, but no proof.’

  ‘Could we find proof if we dug for it?’

  ‘In California today? Not a hope. For God’s sake! The President is discredited, Congress is afraid, the people are demoralised. I doubt I could name twenty men in this town who haven’t been bought by someone. I couldn’t name ten who would face a public audit of their affairs.’

  ‘That’s a sad verdict.’

  ‘Sad and sinister. I can find you an assassin sooner than an honest man or a brave one. I know He threw out his arms in a gesture of despair. ‘… I exaggerate, I always do. I’m like Diogenes scowling from his barrel. But these are our times. When you live on credit, as we Americans do, you can always be squeezed. When you climb the corporation ladder, you’re afraid of the man above and the one below. That’s Yanko’s power. He knows everyone’s secrets. What he doesn’t know, he can invent, feed into the record and present as gospel whenever he chooses.’

  ‘How do you beat him, then?’

  ‘Only one way. You live in his world. You fox him in the shadows – for years maybe – until one day you force him into the light and fight him down. However, if you play that game, you need strong nerves. And when you dine out, you always sit with your face to the door and your back to a solid brick wall…I give you good advice. Remember it. I’ll check around. If I hear anything useful, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘You’re a Christian gent, Francis.’

  ‘No merit of mine. I had a mother – God rest her – who boxed my ears and taught me manners. Now, let me offer you a sherry. It’s my best and I’m very proud of it.’

  He poured the liquor with pride and made the toast: health, money and love and time to enjoy all three. As I drank to it, I had the eerie feeling that Basil Yanko was looking over my shoulder, grinning like a deathshead at the irony.

  Years ago, when I was in Tokyo, peddling iron-ore that was still in the ground and spending my commission before I earned it, I made friends with Kiyoshi Kawai, dean of Japanese printmakers. He was an old man then, but brimful of sap and visions. Whenever I felt miserable – which was often – I would go to his studio and sit for hours watching him cut the blocks and mix the colours and scold his apprentices if the definitions were a hair’s-breadth short of perfection.

  When Kiyoshi was low – which was a rare, but cataclysmic event – he would cart me off to a transvestite club in Shinjuku, where the boys were dressed as geisha and the few girls were got up like the seven samurai. They fluttered round the master while he sketched them. They poured him endless cups of sake while he improvised haiku and transcribed them in his beautiful brush strokes. I found it an unnerving experience, because after a long session of sake and Kirin beer, it was hard to tell the boys from the girls – and I had to get the old man home before he started signing banknotes and handing them around as souvenirs.

  It was on one of these excursions that he gave me his recipe for a good life. When he was sober, I had him inscribe it in Kanji characters; and wherever I hang the scroll is home to me. The inscription reads: ‘Never mix colours when the west wind is blowing and never make love with a fox-faced woman.’ It’s a hard saying to explain at midnight; so I set it down as a prologue to the record of a very bad day.

  It began with a series of small disasters. I woke early and went to the pool for a swim, slipped on the wet tiles and wrenched my ankle. Then the smog rolled down and in five minutes I was blear-eyed and sneezing. At eight, Suzanne called from Geneva. I gave her the good news of Harlequin’s recovery and she responded with a despatch from the home-front. Our branch managers were unnerved by my cable. They were suddenly worried over their clients’ interests and their own necks. Would I please clarify instructions? Since I couldn’t clarify the alphabet without Harlequin’s authorities in my pocket, I dictated a soothing message telling them their president was alive and well and would soon be holding their hands again. Further instructions would follow in forty-eight hours – at least I hoped they would. To cap it all, Juliette telephoned and begged me to join her for breakfast. She was fretful because baby Paul was down with chicken-pox and the damn-fool nurse had celebrated the event in a hundred word telegram written in Switzerdeutsch and mutilated in transit. She had other things on her mind as well; and I was elected Father Confessor.

  ‘Paul, we’ve been friends a long time. We don’t have secrets.’

  ‘We do, my girl, because we can’t live without ’em. Start again.’

  ‘Now you’re being mean.’

  ‘So I’m bad-tempered and horrible and it’s not my day. What’s the next item?’

  ‘I’m worried about George.’

  ‘George and you, or just George?’

  ‘Just George.’

  ‘Yesterday you were talking about a second honeymoon. What’s happened to change your mind?’

  ‘He told me last night he was thinking of selling Harlequin et Cie.’

  ‘Did he tell you why, or to whom?’

  ‘No…I thought you would know.’

  ‘Listen, Julie, let’s not play games. I love you both dearly; but I’m in business with your husband, and I don’t tell tales outside the boardroom.’

  ‘So he has talked about it.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘And to hell with you, too, Paul Desmond.’

  ‘I’m on my way, lover.’

  ‘No, please! Wait!…I’m sorry. I’m acting like a bitch. But truly, I am worried. George is changed. You don’t understand how much.’

  ‘For God’s sake! He’s had a long siege of illness. He’s remote. He’s depressed. That’s normal. You don’t expect him to be dancing fandangos, do you?’

  ‘Why does he want to sell the business?’

  ‘Maybe he wants to take his profit, invest the money and sail round the world. Why not?’

  ‘What would he be without it?’

  ‘A happy man?’

  ‘Or another rich idler.’

  ‘In all the years of our friendship, I’ve never known him idle.’

  ‘An amateur then, not committed to anything.’

  ‘He’s committed to you.’

  ‘Is he? I often wonder.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Julie. I’m just an old bachelor with itchy feet.’

  ‘Paul, I hate you when you grin and shuffle away from an argument.’

  ‘What do you want me to do? You’re a grown-up married lady. You know the words and the music. Sing ’em to George.’

  ‘I’d be out of tune.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. You just don’t want to make up your mind.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Whether to cut George Harlequin down to boy-size – or grow up to woman-size yourself.’

  ‘Don’t you know why?’

  ‘I don’t want to know. It’s your affair, not mine…Harlequin wants us both at the hospital this afternoon. I’ll pick you up at three.’

  I left her sitting over the cold coffee and went out to walk in the garden. I was angry with her, with myself, with Harlequin and the whole dyspeptic world. I needed a marital crisis as much as I needed a third leg. If we couldn’t produce a policy within forty-eight hours, we might have a palace revolution on our hands. Worse than all, Harlequin – the man apt to all occasions – seemed to be falling apart. Three people had sensed a weakness in him and set out to exploit it: Basil Yanko, Karl Kruger, his own wife. I was the only one who didn’t see it. Was I the one-eyed wonder, king in the country of the blind; or was I dumb Paul, oafish and b
edazzled by the splendour of a pinchbeck prince? I had to know, if only to retain my own self-respect.

  Then, because I was angry, and because when I’m angry I get bull-headed, I decided to start my own private war. I called the New York office of Creative Systems Incorporated and asked to speak with Basil Yanko. I had to identify myself to four people before he came on the line, bland as butter.

  ‘Mr Desmond, this is a pleasure. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I’ll be in New York the day after tomorrow. I’d like to confer with the man who prepared our report.’

  ‘It’s not a man, it’s a woman. Her name is Hallstrom…Valerie Hallstrom.’

  ‘I’d still like to meet her. Afterwards, I’d like to talk with you.’

  ‘Excellent. Would you care to suggest a time?’

  ‘I’ve made no reservations yet. Why don’t I call you when I arrive?’

  ‘Do that, by all means. Have you conveyed my offer to Mr Harlequin?’

  ‘Yes. He’s considering it. I expect to have his decision later today.’

  ‘Good! How is he?’

  ‘Reduced, but recovering.’

  ‘I’m glad. Give him my best wishes.’

  ‘I’ll do that. Until we meet then…’

  I had no idea what I would say to him on that day or any day, but at least I had put a burr under his tail and I hoped it would keep him scratching for a little while. I went back to my room and called the hotel stenographer. When she arrived, we sat out by the pool and settled down to draft authorities and assignments to be executed by George Harlequin. It was a fiddling stop-and-go business but it kept me busy until noon when I strolled round to the bar for a pre-lunch cocktail.

  The barman greeted me by name and pointed to a man seated alone in the window angle. ‘That gentleman, sir. He came in just a moment ago and was asking for you.’

  He was young, no more than thirty, dressed in a jersey suit of Italian cut. He stood up as I approached and introduced himself, respectfully. ‘Mr Desmond? I’m happy to know you, sir. I’m Alex Duggan, Creative Systems Incorporated. Our New York office asked me to deliver an urgent message. I telephoned your suite. You weren’t there. I thought I would try the bar. Won’t you sit down?’