The Fireman

by Stephen Leather

  The second number was De Beers, and that made sense because she’d be asking questions about the strike, the miners’ walk-out described in the cuttings that Jenny had got for me in Hong Kong, how diamond production had been hit and how there were still no signs of the miners going back to work, despite two of the miners’ leaders being killed in mysterious, and violent, circumstances.

  The adrenaline was starting to flow and the hairs on the back of my neck were starting to stand on end because I could feel we were getting close, I felt as if I was on the trail with Sally, closing in for the kill. Except that when Sally had gone in she’d probably been her normal headstrong self and gone charging in without a second thought. I hit the seven digits and there was a pause and then the ringing tone. Six, seven times it rang and I was starting to think there was nobody there and then the receiver was picked up and a woman with a crisp upper-class accent said ‘Mr Kaufman’s office’ and then it all clicked into place like the jaws of a steel trap springing shut.

  ‘Mr Kaufman’s office,’ the voice repeated, this time with an impatient edge to it.

  Jenny looked at me and mouthed ‘What’s wrong?’ but I shook my head.

  ‘That is Warren Kaufman’s office isn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ said the voice. ‘Who’s calling, please?’

  ‘Is he there?’ I said.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s in a meeting at the moment. Can I get him to call you back?’

  ‘No, no, that’s all right. I’ll call back later. Thank you,’ I said, and put the phone down.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Jesus H. fucking Christ.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ said Jenny, reaching for my hand and holding it close to her chest. I told her.

  I told her that Sally had called my office but hadn’t spoken to me because she’d been trying to get Warren Kaufman’s number and had obviously found someone to give it to her. And I told her that the reason Sally hadn’t told me what was going on was because the man who was behind the diamond operation in China was the same man who owned the newspaper I worked for. And that explained a whole stack of worries that had been gnawing away at my insides. Like why she hadn’t called me. Why Bill had managed to track me down to my home. Yeah, the fact that Warren Kaufman was behind it explained a lot.

  ‘Are you sure it’s him?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘It was definitely his office, and other than De Beers and the diamond exchange his was the only UK number she called. You can see from the phone bill.’ I handed it to her. ‘She was on the line for twenty minutes so she must have given him a real grilling. And I reckon she told him more than she should have done. You know, fools rush in where angels fear to tread. She probably said she’d been to the mine in China, seen the security arrangements, and somehow she managed to trace the ownership of the mine to him.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I promised Lai I’d give him the name.’

  ‘You must be sure first.’

  ‘I am sure.’

  ‘Let me check it out first. It’ll be easier starting with Kaufman’s name and working backwards. Let me see if I can connect him to China. Just give me one day at Companies’ House.’

  I agreed, reluctantly because in my heart I was already sure, but I told her everything I knew about Kaufman and his company. She dressed while we were talking and fled the house.

  She phoned me in the office later that evening, her voice excited and her breath coming in short gasps.

  ‘God, you were right,’ she said. ‘One of Kaufman’s mining subsidiaries has an offshoot which has its head office in Panama, the same address as the company that’s involved in the mining joint venture. And I’ve rung one of my contacts in Beijing who says yes, Kaufman was there three years ago talking about exporting industrial diamonds. And I found out why Kaufman wanted to keep it all low key.’

  ‘Because he’s ripping them off to the tune of millions of pounds a year,’ I said.

  ‘No, there’s more to it than that. Both he and the Chinese wanted no publicity right from the start because he’s also in partnership with the Taiwanese in a computer manufacturing company in Taipei. Some of the equipment he’s making there has military applications and when Kaufman first started dealing with China there was a lot of tension between the two countries. They’re still technically at war and there was no way the Chinese could be seen to be dealing openly with a man who was such a good friend of Taiwan. So it suited everybody not to announce details of the mining venture.’

  ‘But I thought relations between the two were warmer now?’

  ‘Sure, but that’s a recent phenomenon, there’s no problem these days for companies doing business with both. But a few years ago it was a very different story.’

  ‘We’ve got him,’ I said, elated.

  ‘Yes, boy, we’ve got him. You can tell Lai, now. See you soon.’

  I phoned Lai at his hotel and we talked for the best part of an hour. I was all fired up to dish out the same treatment to Kaufman that Lai had given the triads in his factory. I wanted Kaufman to suffer. I wanted him to scream. And I wanted him dead.

  I know a better way to hurt him, Lai said. Trust me. We will have our revenge. He told me what he wanted to do, revenge Chinese-style.

  ‘We’ll do it your way,’ I said, when he’d finished.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  It was just four days after the funeral when it started. A couple of paragraphs on a left hand page of the Financial Times saying that a Kaufman Industries construction subsidiary had been awarded two prestigious hotel contracts, one in Shanghai and one in Peking. Jenny pointed it out to me over breakfast. I was getting used to having her around. Already her clothes were hanging next to mine in the wardrobe and her toothbrush seemed like it had always been in the bathroom. She’d taken two weeks’ holiday to stay with me and I wasn’t looking forward to the time when she’d have to go back to Hong Kong. Neither of us could work out what the significance of the hotel contracts was, but the following day the shares nudged up a couple of points.

  A week later the office was buzzing with the news that a group of the paper’s executives were flying to China to advise on the setting up of a new English language newspaper in Peking. The rumours hit fever pitch just before Kaufman called a press conference confirming the deal. Kaufman Industries was to build a newspaper publishing plant just outside the Chinese capital using state-of-the-art technology. In return for a US$40 million investment the British company would get free advertising space which it could then sell on to other companies. The paper was pitched at an initial circulation of five hundred thousand but Kaufman had also agreed to build another ten plants in provincial centres with pages transmitted across the country by satellite. Within five years sales were projected at nine million in a country that was eager to learn English and take its place in the modern world. Kaufman himself led the team that visited China and for several days our paper was filled with pictures of him, Kaufman at the Great Wall of China, Kaufman in the People’s Palace, Kaufman meeting top Chinese dignitaries. At the end of his four-day visit to the mainland the Chinese announced that Kaufman would be the main contractor in a new superhighway linking Peking to Guangzhou. But the revelation that really started the share prices soaring was that there would be no restrictions on foreign exchange, the Chinese would pay in American dollars.

  Kaufman was hailed as the man who had finally cracked the China market, one of the heavy Sundays ran a centre-spread profile on him and Tony Wilkins, one of our best feature writers, was seconded to ghostwrite a book by Kaufman on doing business behind the Bamboo Curtain.

  Jenny and I watched and waited, spectators unable to take part, not even knowing what Lai had planned. Jenny had extended her stay, using up her full quota of paid leave. When I asked her what would happen when her holiday entitlement ran out she just laughed and made a joke about unpaid holiday. I wanted to ask her to start looking for a job in London, maybe ask for a t
ransfer within her company, but I was frightened of showing her just how much I cared. Frightened of showing her how much I needed her.

  In the two weeks after Kaufman’s China visit it seemed as though the industrialist could do no wrong, contract after contract was signed, with more and more of his finances and management being committed to the mainland: a soft drinks bottling plant, a power station, several office blocks and a stake in a new container terminal. It looked as if Tony was going to have his work cut out for him.

  Kaufman became the darling of the Stock Exchange and in less than one month since I’d left Hong Kong the shares rocketed forty per cent. There was talk of the shares being listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, a sign of Kaufman’s faith in the colony and in China. According to the guys in the City office Kaufman was stretching himself a little too far, and there were market rumours that the group was planning a rights issue to raise more capital. Not that that was reckoned to be a bad thing now that Kaufman Industries had the support of China to what appeared to be an unprecedented extent and the big institutions were queuing up to grab a piece of the action. Their hopes proved to be stillborn when Kaufman called a press conference to announce that a Chinese investment bank was taking a nine per cent stake in his company. Admittedly they were paying a bargain basement price but it was evidence of a further strengthening of the links between the conglomerate and the mainland and the City lapped it up.

  I started to worry that Lai had been all talk, I couldn’t for the life of me see how he could be behind all these deals or how it would help us to get back at Kaufman when all that seemed to be happening was that he was going from strength to strength. Jenny told me not to worry, to trust Lai. The holiday problem had been solved, temporarily at least, because her company had agreed on a temporary attachment to their London office. I suppose they didn’t want to lose her, better to have her working for them in London than not at all. I still couldn’t get over how easily, how casually, she’d slid into my life and become a part of it. Losing her now would be like losing an arm or a leg.

  It was early September and I’d been on the wagon for six weeks when the shit hit the fan. Without warning and with the bare minimum of explanation the partners in all of Kaufman’s Chinese ventures began to pull out, one by one. The Chinese Government said they were cutting back on their spending on infrastructure, the highway and the power plant were being put on ice, and the newspaper project was scrapped despite Kaufman having committed several million dollars to the deal. The hotels were declared surplus to requirements as was the container terminal. Roland Harper, the paper’s dapper diplomatic correspondent, came in one afternoon bursting with the news that the Chinese were now making it unofficially known that Kaufman was about as welcome in China as an AIDS carrier with a nosebleed.

  ‘See,’ said Jenny. ‘I said you could trust him.’

  The bottom fell out of Kaufman Industries shares, and when the China-backed bank announced it was selling its nine per cent holding to a Hong Kong company for substantially less than they’d paid for it the news made the front of the Financial Times and, on the back page, one of the writers of the Lex column wrote an authoritative and totally wrong analysis of what was behind the change of heart and what it meant to the company. All the crap about gearing, price-earning ratios and Chinese hesitancy to open up fully to Western capitalism just didn’t apply. The company that now held a major stake in Kaufman Industries was Dennis Lai’s. He had Kaufman by the balls and he was starting to squeeze. The share price hit rock bottom the day before Lai bought into Kaufman Industries and then it started to climb again, slowly but steadily, putting on a couple of points each day. According to the City reporter who threw the stock market report together, buying orders were coming in from around the world: Toronto, Sydney, San Francisco, and London. Nothing big, nothing that passed the five per cent mark at which point the buyer would have to reveal himself, just steady acquisition of the group’s shares by a number of mystery buyers.

  The call came two months to the day after I’d left Hong Kong, two months during which I hadn’t touched a drop while I’d hungered for revenge and wondered time and time again what the hell Lai was up to and if he’d be able to pull it off, whatever it was. It was the white phone on Roger’s desk that rang, but he made no move to answer it. He was up to his eyes in an expense sheet, his most creative work of the week. The paper was making it harder though, there’d been a clampdown on all expenses, and they’d got shot of a number of casuals.

  ‘Nothing I can do, lads,’ Bill Hardwicke had told us. ‘Pressure’s coming right from the top this time, it’s not just a question of lying low until it blows over. This is serious – Kaufman’s in trouble and every part of his empire is coming in for some pretty drastic belt-tightening. We’re just going to have to grin and bear it.’

  In the good old days of Fleet Street it would have been a union matter and the NUJ heavies would have gone in and a couple of days of working to rule would have sorted the matter out, either that or they’d have lost a few million copies. But new technology, the new generation of newspaper barons and the high wages had taken the fight out of the unions so we just sat at our terminals and tried to be more creative, substituting taxi fares for hospital bills and signing each other’s restaurant receipts.

  The line from Hong Kong was clear as a bell, only the slight satellite delay giving any indication of the thousands of miles between us. His voice was flat and emotionless and he didn’t bother with small talk as if he was worried about the cost of the call.

  ‘I will be meeting him in the Grill Room of the Mandarin Hotel in three days’ time. Can you make it?’

  ‘Try and stop me,’ I replied.

  ‘Thursday, one o’clock,’ he said. ‘It might be better if you arrived slightly later, it might scare him off if he sees both of us waiting for him.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said. ‘God, I thought you’d never ring.’

  ‘You should have had more faith in me. And you should have realized that this is not something that can be rushed. I will see you on Thursday.’ He cut the line and I held the phone to my ear for several seconds as waves of relief, pleasure and excitement washed over me, an adrenaline kick that tightened my stomach and set the hairs on the back of my neck standing as straight as soldiers on a parade ground.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Roger.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘You’re grinning like a Cheshire cat. Rich relative just died?’

  I smiled at him and imagined pushing a lighted cigarette into his left eye. It made me feel better.

  ‘Here, sign this for me,’ and he threw over a blank receipt from one of the more upmarket wine bars on the Isle of Dogs. ‘That Kaufman is a bastard.’

  ‘Yeah, isn’t he just.’ I scrawled a spidery signature on the yellow slip and scribbled in a few numbers.

  ‘Fifty-six OK?’ I said.

  ‘That’ll do nicely,’ he said, and I handed it back. I hoped he didn’t look too closely at the signature because his sense of humour had nose-dived since they’d taken his car back. Seeing ‘M. Mouse’ might just drive him over the edge. I thought of pushing a broken bottle into his throat and I positively beamed at him.

  ‘I have to go to Hong Kong again.’

  ‘Not on our budget.’

  ‘I’ll take some days off. I’m owed enough.’

  ‘You’ll have to check with Hardwicke.’

  ‘Will do.’

  Bill just nodded and said sure, take as long as you want. He seemed to be frowning all the time now, and he looked older. The paper was in profit, with new technology you had to try really hard to lose money in publishing, but the parent company had pulled out most of its cash and saddled it with a hefty debt. He was having to make do with fewer reporters, a reduced wire service, and his travel budget had been cut to the bone.

  ‘Problems with the Hong Kong cops?’ he asked. His hair seemed greyer, too, what little he had left.

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p; ‘No, just a few loose ends to tie up.’

  ‘OK. Get back as soon as you can. You know how short-staffed we are.’

  ‘All hands to the pumps.’

  ‘With the rats queuing up to jump ship.’ Two of the paper’s feature writers had already handed in their notice and it was an open secret that another half dozen reporters were looking for other jobs. ‘I hear Roger is after a move.’

  ‘He’s been whispering into the phone a few times,’ I admitted. What the hell, I didn’t owe Roger any favours.

  ‘It’s to be expected,’ he said, stacking together the heap of page plans that forever seemed to be strewn across his desk. ‘This isn’t a particularly happy place at the moment.’

  ‘It’ll pass, Bill,’ I said. ‘Swings and roundabouts.’ He looked smaller, too. In all the years I’d known him I’d never seen him look so defeated, so hurt. The word around the office was that his son was dying of cancer, but he’d never mentioned it and it wasn’t the sort of thing you could bring up in normal conversation. Professionally we shared everything but on a personal level he was a virtual stranger. Hell, I didn’t even know his wife’s name.

  ‘Are you OK, Bill?’ I asked.

  He nodded and rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. ‘I’ve got a lot on my plate, at the moment,’ he said, and shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘If I can help …’ I didn’t finish the sentence because what the hell could I do? I left him with his page plans and whatever was troubling him.

  Roger was still filling in his expense sheet when I got back to his desk.

  ‘Bill says it’s OK,’ I told him.

  ‘So it’s OK.’ He didn’t look up. I took an axe and hacked off his head and watched it roll across the floor. ‘When are you going?’ he asked.