It was the most popular party in the capital that night and the crowds overflowed into the corridors outside and downstairs in the lobby. Pike looked hopefully around but couldn’t see her. Shit, he thought. He didn’t like empty evenings. He could go back to the reception to try again. He looked at the packed stairways and elevators. What the hell! There was a clock near the elevators and he saw it was still not yet nine o’clock. It was worth a gamble. Wasn’t that what bankers and financiers did all the time?
It was impossible to sit and so he wandered round the foyer, staring at the people. Collectively, he supposed, these men controlled all the money available in the free world. Upon their yea or nay to a multi-billion loan depended the future of countries and through those countries of businesses and through those businesses the livelihoods of men and women who couldn’t conceive what a billion was. Pike wondered if the people swirling around him could, either. Sometimes he doubted it; sometimes he got the impression that these expensively dressed and expensively perfumed and expensively chauffeured bankers had forgotten the enormity of what they were supposed to be doing and had come instead to treat the whole thing like some exclusive global game of Monopoly, not realizing that, as in the game, the money they ended up with was no more than worthless paper. He was suddenly seized with the desire to stop any one of them and demand to know how many noughts there were in a billion.
He smiled when he saw her pushing her way enquiringly through the crowd, a satisfied expression. Some you win, some you lose, he thought. He usually won. She didn’t see him at once and he didn’t go forward, wanting to watch her. She was extremely beautiful but appeared unaware of it, unlike a lot of other women around her, and it added to her attractiveness. He decided she wore the tailored suit because she felt she had to and wondered what she looked like in something less formal. It was going to be enjoyable finding out. He attracted her attention at last, and at once there was the easy smile. The odd tooth didn’t detract from her beauty.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d wait,’ she said.
‘I said nine.’
‘It’s gone nine.’
‘I’m glad I waited.’
‘So am I,’ she said. She’d seen Burnham move away from the British group when he’d been aware of her leaving the reception and had used the stairs to avoid a confrontation in any of the elevators. The nervousness was making her feel physically sick.
He took her arm to lead her from the hotel, enjoying the physical contact. ‘What did you tell them you were going to do?’
‘Meet someone from the Federal Reserve Board.’ She’d told a man called Daniels, another supervisor. Would Burnham have found out by now?
‘How did you know I worked for the Federal Reserve?’
‘I asked around,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t a girl know about her escort?’
‘Yes,’ he said, enjoying her lightness. ‘A girl should.’ He’d chosen well, he decided.
The pavement was jammed with people waiting to be funnelled into their limousines. Pike took her arm again and propelled her up towards M Street. ‘I’ve got a car,’ he said.
It was a hired Mercury compact and when she saw it Jane said, ‘Thank goodness for a sensible-sized vehicle at last.’
‘We’re in the age of conservation,’ he said.
Although it was out of their way, Pike drove her down Connecticut Avenue to show her the White House. As they passed the hotel they had just left she indicated the crocodile of waiting limousines and said, ‘Our banking masters don’t seem to have reformed. Odd, isn’t it, that they should use vehicles like that when they, more than anybody else, were so affected by the oil crisis?’
‘I thought I was supposed to be the cynic,’ he said. ‘Anyway, there’s an oil glut now.’
‘That’s not cynicism,’ protested the girl. ‘That’s an objective observation. And the glut is only temporary.’
Pike looped Lafayette. Park and drove directly in front of the White House.
‘I don’t want to go on about the size of things,’ she said. ‘But that’s smaller than I thought it would be: I’d expected something more like a palace.’
‘We decided against royalty, remember?’
She turned in her seat, keeping the residence in view. ‘I still think it should be something grander.’
‘So have quite a few presidents,’ he said.
‘That’s cynical,’ said Jane. She was looking constantly around her and Pike misinterpreted her uncertainty for little-girl-on-an-outing excitement. With one thought came another. Surely she couldn’t be a virgin! No, he thought. No one was.
He asked her what sort of food she preferred and she told him to choose, so he decided upon French, managing to park almost directly outside the Chaumier restaurant at the very beginning of Georgetown. Without a reservation they had to wait. Pike arranged to return later and took her back out on to the street. They walked up towards the Constitution junction, stopping to watch the street musicians playing and then, at her insistence, going into the kite shop to buy a present to take back for a nephew. He reached for her hand and she let him take it, trying to make herself enjoy the evening. It wasn’t proving easy. She hoped he wasn’t going to prove tiresome. She supposed he could be forgiven for misunderstanding.
‘I’m told it’s like Chelsea, in London,’ he said, on their way back to the restaurant.
‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I think this is more fun.’
She ordered through him, but in French better than Pike’s and after the waiter left he said, ‘French education?’
‘Sorbonne after Cambridge,’ she said. ‘My family force-fed me education like a Strasburg goose.’
‘I’m intimidated,’ said Pike mockingly.
‘Don’t be.’
‘Why the Bank of England?’
‘I read economics, at both universities. The Sorbonne gave the impression that it was on an international level and the Bank seemed to believe it.’
‘Enjoy it?’
‘Sometimes I get the impression that my real function is a female figurehead, like those semi-naked carvings they used to have on the front of sailing ships.’
‘Now who’s being cynical!’ The thought of her being strapped back naked was interesting. He and Janet had tried bondage, like they had experimented with everything during their marriage.
‘I’ve been passed over in favour of a man three times in a year.’
‘Perhaps they were better qualified than you.’
‘They weren’t,’ she insisted, without conceit. She and Paul had been extraordinarily careful to keep their relationship from being discovered by anyone at the bank, but could he have blocked her promotion, just in case anyone suspected favouritism? She grew angry at the doubt. He wouldn’t have done a thing like that; she knew he wouldn’t.
‘I didn’t expect it to be this sort of an evening,’ said Pike, challenging a reaction. He wondered what she was going to be like in bed.
At once she relaxed. Impulsively she reached across the table, touching his hand apologetically.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Really sorry. I didn’t intend to go on like this; it’s those damned receptions.’
Pike frowned. ‘What have the receptions got to do with it?’
Stuck with her excuse, she said, ‘With everyone in the same place at the same time it’s easy to look around and realize how male-dominated everything is.’
‘That’s straight from a women’s liberation manual if ever I heard it!’ accused Pike.
She took her hand from his, holding it up in front of her to make a tiny barrier. ‘All right!’ she said. ‘I’ll stop! Not another word, I promise.’
During their hand-holding walk Pike had already detected a ring. With her finger visible between them he nodded towards it and said, ‘Is there a Mr Rosen?’
Her face clouded in momentary misunderstanding. She began, ‘My father …?’ and then stopped, shaking her head at him. ‘It’s a family ring,’ she said, offering it for
inspection. ‘The motto over the crest says something like ‘valour forever’, whatever that means.’
‘Why wear it on that finger?’
It had become a habit, when she was with Paul. Not a habit: her own private make-believe. The excuse ready, she said, ‘It was originally my grandmother’s and it’s the only finger it fits.’
‘I’ve never met anyone with a family crest and a motto to match before,’ said Pike. ‘I’m impressed, as well as intimidated.’
She laughed. ‘It’s a fading ancestry. Dead, in fact. My father never had a son, so the name can’t be carried on. And there wasn’t much to carry on anyway. He committed himself to a regiment in India and spent all his money educating my sister and me. Had to spend the last years of his life selling off family trinkets to survive. I feel guilty about it.’
‘Guilty?’
‘I didn’t really want to go to Cambridge. Or the Sorbonne. I wish he’d saved the money. He went broke for my sister and me.’
‘What do you want?’
To be a wife, thought Jane. ‘A career, I suppose,’ she said instead. ‘What about you?’
To prove myself always better than my father, thought Pike, in familiar secret admission. ‘Just to get the assessments right,’ he said. ‘That’s what I do, for the Federal Reserve: Eastern European political analysis.’ He smiled and said, ‘It sounds more dramatic than it is.’
‘Did you read politics?’
He nodded. ‘Business, too, at Harvard. And then there was the Chase Manhattan, where my father was before the IMF.’
‘I know about your father,’ she said.
‘Everyone knows about my father,’ said Pike. ‘Most successful chairman Chase Manhattan ever had, outstanding managing director of the IMF, philanthropist, art collector, financial guru of the television channels …’
‘Know what I think,’ she said, cutting him off.
‘What?’
‘You’re jealous.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said, irritated both by a repetition of her directness and the accuracy of the accusation.
‘What then?’ she persisted. ‘There’s an attitude. I know there is.’
How could he explain it to her without it sounding like an inferiority.
Which it wasn’t: he was sure it wasn’t. Why need he explain it anyway to someone he intended to sleep with and probably never see again.
‘There is,’ she said, pressing him.
‘Maybe it’s something like the way you feel,’ he said, running for cover. ‘A figurehead.’
‘I don’t see the comparison,’ she said.
Why the hell did everything become a debate with her! ‘There isn’t one, not absolutely,’ he admitted. He realized he was wallowing deeper and deeper, like someone trying to cross soft sand. It didn’t usually happen this way: never, in fact. He said, ‘I’m thirty-two years old. The guy I succeeded didn’t get his appointment until he was forty-five; the guy before him was fifty. Would I have got it if my name hadn’t been Thomas Hamilton Pike jun., scion of Thomas Hamilton Pike senior, whose whispers can be heard the length and breadth of Wall Street? Or got where I did at the Chase, before that?’
‘Probably not,’ she said realistically. ‘Why get a complex about it? The name and influence might have got you the job. But it won’t keep it for you, if you make a mistake.’
Which was the real fear, Pike admitted to himself. Of fouling up and everyone knowing it. Which was an inferiority complex. ‘I guess you’re right,’ he said.
‘You know I’m right,’ she insisted.
Neither wanted dessert, so Pike ordered coffee. Jane refused a liqueur.
‘I’ve enjoyed the evening,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
‘It hasn’t finished yet,’ he said, regretting at once that it sounded like a cliché. He’d been right, in what he said earlier; it wasn’t the sort of evening he’d expected at all. Altogether too heavy.
She wouldn’t be unfaithful to Paul, Jane decided. It was unthinkable that she would go to bed with a man after a two-hour acquaintanceship and a casual dinner, anyway, but even if they’d known each other longer she knew she wouldn’t have slept with him. Yet there was something convoluted about fidelity to a man married and making love to somebody else. She’d always supposed Paul still made love to his wife. Hoping to avoid any difficulty before it arose, she waved the crested ring in front of him and said, ‘What about Mrs Pike?’
‘There isn’t a Mrs Pike any more,’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ she blurted awkwardly. ‘I didn’t mean …’
‘It’s not a problem,’ assured Pike. ‘Her name was Janet Ambersom. Her father was chairman of Citibank when my father was at the Chase. Now Ambersom is chairman of the World Bank. They don’t lunch twice a week, like they used to in New York, but they still come down to the country house here in Farquier county and in the summer my family go up to Southampton for the sailing. The marriage was supposed to be the linking of dynasties.’
‘Supposed to be?’
‘No one took love into consideration,’ said Pike, the explanation well rehearsed by now. ‘Not even us. Her parents founded the Ambersom Gallery for Modern Art and Janet occupied herself being its director. One day at an exhibition she met a physics professor from the UCLA and fell in love with him …’ He smiled down into his coffee cup. ‘It was all rather like one of those schmaltzy stories in a women’s magazine.’ And made him sound entirely innocent of guilt, he thought.
‘It must have been unpleasant,’ she said.
He shook his head. ‘Bankers don’t allow unpleasantness,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen her for some time, because she lives in California now. But the divorce was quite amicable and the families remained friends; there wasn’t any reason why they shouldn’t.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of the families,’ she said. ‘I was thinking of you. And your wife. I’ve always thought it must be awful, to fall out of love with someone for whom you’ve cared: with whom you’ve known all the secrets.’
‘You’ve got to fall in love first,’ he said. ‘I told you we didn’t.
‘I have, she thought, and I’m as miserable as hell now, whatever might follow. She said, ‘Is that why you resent your father, because he forced you into a marriage?’
He smiled at her, refusing to get annoyed. ‘You certainly know how to keep a burr under a saddle blanket, don’t you?’ he said. ‘I don’t have any feeling against my father for what happened; for any of the parents. We could have said no.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
He said, ‘Maybe I imagined I was in love, at the time.’ No true, he thought. Maybe Janet had, but he hadn,’t ever. Which made Jane’s question more important. Why had he gone through with it? Because there might have been some advantage, he supposed; her father was already being spoken of as the nominee for the World Bank.
‘I wish love was like a cold or ‘flu,’ she said reflectively. ‘If you catch a cold or ‘flu your nose runs and gets red and you ache all over. The symptoms are there and you know what you’ve got. Why aren’t there symptoms to show you when you’ve got love?’
Was she encouraging him to make a move? He was unsure but decided it was worth pursuing. ‘Shall we go?’ he said.
When they emerged from the restaurant there was a moment of embarrassment.
‘Thank you,’ repeated Jane. ‘I’ve enjoyed the evening. It’s been very nice.’
‘Surely it’s not over yet.’ Pike gestured in the direction in which they had walked while they waited for their table to be prepared and said, ‘There’s a jazz club, Blues Alley: George Shearing is there. I thought we’d go.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But I’m not really a jazz fan.’
‘I don’t suppose George Shearing could be strictly regarded as jazz,’ he argued hopefully.
‘I should be getting back: we normally have an end-of-the-day meeting at the Jefferson.’ It sounded the sort of thing that might happen, she thought, content wi
th the lie.
Pike pointed across the road to the Four Seasons hotel. ‘I’m staying there,’ he persisted. ‘How about a nightcap?’
‘I really would like to go back to the Jefferson,’ she said with quiet insistence.
‘Sure,’ said Pike, conceding defeat. ‘I’ll run you back.’
‘That’s silly with your hotel directly opposite,’ said the girl. ‘I’ll take a cab: look, there’s dozens about.’
Before he could move Jane was hailing a taxi, gesturing it into the kerb and indicating the direction in which she wanted to go.
‘Thank you,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘It was a lovely evening.’
‘I enjoyed it too,’ said Pike mechanically. He kept the door open, watching her settle in the back of the vehicle. ‘Hope you get that promotion,’ he said.
He stood watching the car make its way back into the capital, deciding against going to the club by himself. He’d fucked it up, decided Pike, a man to whom failure as unimportant as a casual seduction mattered: completely fucked it up.
Lydia Kirov was expecting the call and ordered her car to be ready at the kerbside, so she was en route to the Kremlin within minutes of the brief telephone conversation with the Finance Minister. She made her usual impatient progress through the government offices. Vladimir Malik, as always, was standing ready to greet her.
‘Unanimous,’ he announced.
Lydia allowed herself the brief smile of satisfaction. ‘When?’
‘As soon as you decide the time is right.’
At this moment she had limitless power, Lydia realized. More than any other woman in the Soviet Union: probably more than most men, as well. ‘Now,’ she said.
‘You can call upon whatever assistance you require,’ said Malik. ‘Anything at all.’
Kremlin Conspiracy Page 3