Empress Bianca

by Lady Colin Campbell

  Long before the world woke up to the existence of a new category of crook, and the Russian Mafia became a byword for unbelievable corruption and unimaginable wealth, Philippe Mahfud was the man these new billionaires banked with. Men such as the politician Yuri Vitsen, with his army of relations feathering their nests to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars apiece, or Boris Budokovsky, the businessman who shot from penury to billionaire status within two years, needed accommodating banks such as Banco Imperiale Geneva where they could safely ‘lodge’ their assets. So they beat a well-worn path to Philippe Mahfud’s office door at the Banco Imperiale Geneva, where the distinction between nominee and beneficial owners was negligible, and the difference between desirability of clients was measured purely in the size of the fortune to be banked. In Philippe, they had their ideal banker, for the idea of turning away billions of dollars of investors’ money for any reason at all, was truly incomprehensible to him. He felt it his duty as well as his right to accept all clients, irrespective of the source of their wealth. To him, it seemed perfectly ludicrous that morality should be mixed up with banking. ‘All dollar bills are green,’ ran Philippe’s philosophy, ‘irrespective of whose fingers have touched them.’

  Philippe nevertheless knew in his bones that he would not want to bring the game to a close until he had achieved his objective of selling Banco Imperiale Geneva for the highest price ever paid for a private bank. The problem there, of course, was that his health and the erratic state of the international financial community meant he could not be sure that he would actually be able to pull off this feat. Like many other outstandingly successful businessmen, Philippe was a gambler at heart, and, like all gamblers, he was transfixed not only by winning but by the prospect of losing. To people like him, victory without the possibility of loss was as dull as the idea of a woman without the scent of danger.

  Multiple Sclerosis, however, was not Bianca or the banking world. It was not a tiger he could ride, and by 1993 he was fighting a losing battle with it. His mobility was so seriously impaired that he had to move the headquarters of Banco Imperiale Geneva to his Andorra tax haven in the Pyrenees between France and Spain allowing him to commute easily by helicopter between L’Alexandrine and his office in the principality.

  Of course, there was never any prospect of moving from Geneva to Andorra without all the trappings that went with the billionaire lifestyle.

  Neither Philippe nor Bianca was one for self-sacrifice, so he bought a palatial, rose-coloured, eighteenth-century stucco villa a stone’s throw from the Presidential Palace, which he then turned into Banco Imperiale’s new headquarters. Commuting between L’Alexandrine and Andorra offered only a temporary solution, however. Philippe’s decline, exacerbated by his refusal to take his medication correctly, continued rapidly, and by 1994 he needed nurses in attendance around the clock. It was at this point that Bianca suggested turning the top two floors of the Banco Imperiale Building in Andorra into a home from which he could function. ‘My darling,’ she said sweetly, her tone warming Philippe’s heart as completely as it would have chilled her son Pedro’s, ‘I know you live and breathe work, and I would never want you to give up anything that brings you such pleasure, but we do have to consider your well-being. It makes more sense for us to live above the bank and for you to run the business from home than for you to commute to the office from L’Alexandrine.’

  Being a logical man, Philippe saw the sense of his wife’s suggestion and authorized her to turn the top two floors of the Banco Imperiale Building into an apartment for them to live in. Bianca promptly commissioned Valerian Rybar and Ion Antonescu to transform the place into an Andorran version of their New York apartment and their Geneva house. Refurbishment began within six weeks. The schedule of works was intended to last six months.

  Two weeks before the commission was completed, however, Bianca came home to L’Alexandrine from a luncheon party at Ruth Fargo Huron’s house with shattering news. ‘I sat beside the American ambassador,’ she informed Philippe, who was sitting, shakier than ever, like a wizened old man in a gilt Louis XVI armchair, his legs covered in a ranch mink blanket. ‘She informs me that there is trouble brewing in the US over money laundering. They’re going after the Nigerians and the Russians. All the bankers who have been assisting them to divert their national assets are going to be blacklisted unless they assist the American government in tracing their assets.’

  ‘This is serious,’ Philippe remarked. ‘I’ll be destroyed unless I provide them with assistance. But if I do, my clients will desert me in droves unless I can find a way to prevent them from finding out that I’ve cooperated. But you know what that damned Freedom of Information Act is like. They force you to sing, then they list you as a canary.’

  ‘What will you do?’ Bianca asked.

  ‘Get in touch with the Secretary of State and provide them with as much information as they need to keep off my back while cutting a deal with the authorities that will assure us anonymity.’

  ‘And if you don’t play ball?’

  ‘They’ll blacklist me, and there goes any chance of selling Banco Imperiale Geneva.’

  ‘I do wish you’d get yourself out of the line of fire,’ she said passionately. ‘The stress does your health no good, and, if I could take some of the heat for you, your enemies wouldn’t bother with me the way they would with you.’ For some time now, Bianca had been using Philippe’s increasing infirmity, and the wifely concern she expressed as a result of it, to lay the ground in the hope that he would use her as his trusted right hand so that she could become both the financial and a social queen bee.

  ‘That might be a solution further down the line, but it’s not the answer to our immediate problems,’ Philippe said, careful to leave open a door he had no real intention of using.

  ‘But surely there must be something I can do right now to help,’ replied the picture of wifely solicitude.

  ‘There is,’ her husband replied disappointingly. ‘Get in touch with Valerian and the architect. We’re going to need the best security system in the world just in case word leaks out that I’ve cooperated with the Americans. You know what they’re like. Between their open-government policy and their naïve insistence on always occupying the moral high ground, someone’s bound to find out. We’d better be prepared, or I’m a dead man.’

  ‘This has the potential to turn very nasty,’ said Bianca, sounding more worried than she actually felt.

  ‘You can say that again. But don’t worry, Gisele will find the best security advisors, and we’ll make sure they design an impenetrable defence system which doesn’t intrude on the homeliness of the place.

  Once the Russians and my Latin American friends find out that I’m providing the Americans with information about their financial activities, they’ll put out a contract on my life. You’ll be in danger too, Bianca. We’ve got to act right now. Security must be in place before the Russians get wind of any cooperation I give the Americans.’

  Faced with a new and unexpected problem, Bianca immediately saw the one benefit that would accrue should Philippe be liquidated. She would be free to achieve the desires and aspirations that Philippe had always thwarted. This glimpse of a bright new life quickened her pulse and made Bianca realize that widowhood had an attractive dimension, but it did not stop her from doing all she could to keep Philippe alive and as healthy as she could. She duly got in touch with Valerian and Ion and set about altering much of their handiwork to accommodate a bewilderingly sophisticated security system.

  Bianca was astonished at the speed with which one of the finest nongovernmental security systems in the world was put into place. Titanium shutters, which went up and down at the touch of a button in the control room, were created for the windows and doors of their apartment.

  Together with the reinforced steel that lined the floors and the roof of the apartment, the shutters could seal off each room within seconds, so that the whole apartment became impenetrable. Smoke alarms, sound se
nsors, cameras, surveillance and recording equipment covering every area of the apartment and the two access points from the bank downstairs were also installed. No one could either gain entry to the building or leave it without the consent of the guards, who materialized, like magic, from Israel.

  Heading the team of bodyguards was Erhud Blum, a retired senior operative of Mossad. He assembled nine of his former combatants into what he called the ‘finest security force in the whole world outside of Israel’.

  Thereafter, neither Philippe nor Bianca would ever spend another moment in the Andorra apartment without being observed except, of course, when they used their respective bathrooms. In deference to their need for privacy, these two rooms were the only ones which did not have surveillance equipment, but this lack was compensated for by the titanium doors which, when operated in conjunction with the shutters on the windows, sealed off both rooms. Access to them from the outside would therefore become impossible without the cooperation of the parties locked inside the bathrooms or of the head of the security team himself. Not even the nine operatives had the code that allowed the doors to be opened. Only Philippe, Bianca and Erhud Blum possessed this information.

  The security system in place, Bianca and Philippe then moved into the apartment that was henceforth to be their primary base. ‘What a relief it will be that we are no longer sitting ducks for the Russian Mafia and the Columbian drug barons,’ she said to him the first night they spent under their new Andorran roof, ‘and that we will never have to worry about security again.’

  Within weeks, however, Philippe noticed that this sentiment sat at odds with her conduct. In the last week alone, she had spent three days and two nights at a stretch at L’Alexandrine. ‘What’s up with you?’ he asked, having missed her. ‘Is Andorra our new home or isn’t it? Are you afraid of sleeping here with me, or is there another reason? You’re not worried we’re going to be shot in our bed, are you?’

  ‘My desire to be at L’Alexandrine has nothing whatever to do with fears of assassination,’ Bianca replied crisply. ‘Much as I love you and want to be with you, I can’t stay cooped up in a cage. L’Alexandrine is my home and always will be. I don’t mind sleeping in Andorra with you, but why should I stay here during the day while you’re working, when I can just as easily be at L’Alexandrine enjoying the benefits of those surroundings?’

  ‘But it’s a security risk for you to be there on a daily basis with only one bodyguard to protect you. What happens if the Russians or Colombians decide to kidnap you in order to get at me?’

  ‘Darling, you worry too much. The Russians and Colombians don’t know anything about the assistance you’re giving the Americans, and even if they do find out, they won’t be interested in little old me. It’s you they want. My one bodyguard is all I need. I’m not worried and I’d advise you not to worry about me either. Worry about yourself, because I don’t think I could survive if anything happened to you,’ she said lovingly, knowing that a kind word not only turns away wrath but also takes the wind out of a man’s sail.

  Although the sexual side of their marriage was long dead, the relationship still appeared to be strong. Philippe craved as much as ever his wife’s presence: her touch, her scent, the feel of her body next to his. From her point of view, however, the twitching which was an inevitable part of motor neurone disease meant that she could never get a good night’s sleep in bed with him. Now that the sexual side of their marriage was dead, Bianca failed to see why she should inconvenience herself, so for the last two years she had been sleeping with him less and less frequently and now used this move to stop sleeping with him altogether.

  Bianca, however, took care when vacating the marital bed to resort to the subterfuge of getting Philippe’s doctor to advise her to do so on the grounds that his movements were disturbing her sleep and affecting her health. ‘Dr Wiseman has suggested that I have my own bedroom near yours,’ she said to sweeten the pill of withdrawal, ‘but to show you that this is just a temporary change of habit, I won’t even get Valerian to do it up for me. I’ll use the main guest suite until things change and we can sleep together once again.’

  What this meant, in reality, was that Bianca had no intention of becoming apartment-bound by her invalid husband. Now that he was sliding towards total infirmity and death, Philippe’s pride prevented him from admitting that the woman he had so revered was capable of abandoning him under the guise of her health. It took a very different sort of man from Philippe to conclude that the oasis he had been drinking from was a mirage. Ferdie had been that sort of man; Philippe, and Bernardo before him, were not.

  And Bianca knew it.

  As Philippe’s health deteriorated, Bianca found it easier and easier to spend as much time away from him as she could engineer. Added to the boredom of being with the infirm, she had developed a real and sincere antipathy towards his condition. She had always despised ill health even more than she abhorred weakness, and she secretly feared catching Multiple Sclerosis, even though the doctors had assured her on countless occasions that it was non-communicable. Still she withdrew even more from Philippe, both physically and emotionally, and felt fully justified in protecting herself against this dreadful and incurable disease.

  By this time, Bianca had resumed the tenor of her life as it had been while Philippe was healthy. If one of her New York friends was having a dinner party that she wanted to attend, she would cross the Atlantic in the Lear and soak up the pleasures of Manhattan and the Fifth Avenue apartment. Her New York home remained one of the great loves of her life, on a par with L’Alexandrine and socializing, and she never returned to it or to the social scene without her heart skipping a beat of pleasurable anticipation. Paris also became a centre of activity now, and she frequently took the Lear there for some appointment with a friend, whether it was luncheon, a dinner party or one of those balls where the majority of the guests boasted monarchist names such as Bourbon-Parma, Lubomirski, and Polignac, and the inevitable guests of honour were the uncrowned queen and empress of France: Son Altesse Royale Madame La Comtesse de Paris and Son Altesse Imperiale La Princesse Napoleon. She never ceased to thrill at the old-world glamour and the magnificence of it all, and each time she saw an assemblage of the grandest of the grand, Bianca experienced an ecstatic rush of pleasure.

  For Philippe, this was an acutely painful period. As he had spent most of his life jumping through hoops to avoid the unpleasant realities of life, however, this facility rescued him from the recognition of what was going on in his marriage, even if it did not alleviate his loneliness and feelings of abandonment. His powers of reasoning remained sharp, and his business acumen was not affected by the progress of his condition. He was therefore still able to work on building up Banco Imperiale Geneva for takeover, albeit from the confines of the Andorra apartment. This quest for the deal to crown all deals occupied his days and nights and much of his thoughts, while Bianca drifted in and out of the apartment for a few hours every two or three days.

  Even that limited contact was a sacrifice for her, because she vehemently hated the sensation that she was walking into a prison as she entered the premises. And each time she left, she experienced the sense of release that comes with escaping from prison. There was something about enduring invalidity that made daily existence with Philippe seem like working her way through sludge. This feeling of enervation intensified rather than lessened over the months until she found herself thinking, as she walked into Philippe’s bedroom: ‘If only Philippe would die and release us both from the prison his illness has made of our lives.’

  Then in 1998, a few months after Bianca actively began wishing Philippe would die, Dr Wiseman, conscious that his patient’s condition had deteriorated to the point where his concentration was being affected, made a recommendation that would speed up Philippe’s demise. ‘Madame Mahfud,’ he said to Bianca on one of his monthly visits to Andorra, ‘you must prepare yourself for the possibility that your husband might become incompetent in the not too di
stant future.’

  ‘But he’s in the middle of preparing the biggest deal of his life,’ Bianca objected.

  ‘Then you’d better get him to speed up negotiations.’

  ‘What sort of time frame are we dealing with?’

  ‘It could be months, or it could be a year or two. The one thing your husband has on his side is his fine mind. I’d go as far as saying I’ve never had a more strong-minded patient than him. But even an act of will can’t keep a disease like this from encroaching upon the mental faculties once the powers of concentration start to go.’

  ‘Doctor, you know what husbands are like. The last person they listen to when the issue is their health is their wife. Why don’t you have a quiet word with Philippe?’ she suggested, smiling sweetly and acting rather more helpless than she actually was. ‘Tell him that he must prepare himself for a decrease in his mental powers and that he should aim to conclude any projects within months rather than years. Could you do that for me?’

  Dr Wiseman looked at her. She was, he felt, an astonishingly attractive woman. So feminine. So innocently coquettish. So concerned for her husband’s welfare. What red-blooded man could turn down a request made in such a winning manner?

  To ensure that Philippe would not detect any collusion between Dr Wiseman and herself, Bianca then left the apartment to shop in the tax-free haven of Andorra, while Dr Wiseman spoke to her husband.

  ‘Are you sure it’s the disease that’s affecting my concentration and not the drugs you prescribe?’ Philippe asked, clutching at straws.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Mahfud, but that’s the way Multiple Sclerosis progresses.’

  ‘I was hoping it was the drugs,’ he said, sounding like a vulnerable little boy.

  ‘If you have any major projects, I’d suggest winding them up within the next few months.’

  ‘A few months? How short time becomes when you face your own mortality,’ Philippe said, tears welling up in his eyes.