‘Una cervetha grande,’ he was getting used to the lingo, pronouncing the ‘s’ as a ‘th’, a kind of a lisp. The problem was, it never seemed to come out the same way as if a Spanish person said it. The barmaid smiled at him, he wasn’t sure if she was being friendly or if she was amused at his pronunciation. He took a swallow from the beer and waited for his change.
‘Grassy arse.’ Hard to tell if that was a real Spanish accent or if she was taking the piss. He turned away from the bar and bumped into the big Englishman.
‘Hello mate.’ The big fellow didn’t quite recognise him, maybe thought he had seen him somewhere, but couldn’t put a name on him.
Tom was still curious about the setup in Pueblo Alto Blanco; he wanted to find out more about it, and down here in the port he was on home ground and could ask questions in safety.
‘We met at your office a couple of weeks ago. Your young lady Kathy brought me up to look at your project.’
‘Oh Kathy, nice girl, not with us any more unfortunately. I remember you now; you weren’t interested. It happens sometimes; not for everybody and all that.’
‘I’m still not sure what you are selling.’ Tom tried to keep it friendly. ‘I would say one thing though, I’m a salesman myself, all my life really, and the guys you have up there wouldn’t recognise an opening if they fell through it. Wouldn’t have made it anywhere I ever worked anyway.’
Alan stood back and looked Tom up and down. ‘Let me guess, cars mostly I’d say, maybe insurance now and again?’
Tom laughed. ‘More or less on the button. Cars, electrical goods, a while selling mortgages, that sort of thing.’
‘And you love it; love the excitement of getting one over the line?’
‘Yes, of course, nothing like the buzz of scoring a difficult one especially. You know yourself.’
The Englishman clapped him on the shoulder. ‘You’re one of us, mate; let me get you a beer. Here, Carley, give us two more beers there, love; proper cold ones, darling.’
‘Coming up, amigoth.’ Jesus, a bloody Aussie, she was taking the piss all the time.
‘Let’s get out of the noise; it’s bedlam in here, not as bad outside.’ The big fellow led the way through the crowd to the outside tables where the sound was several decibels lower.
Four rounds of beer later and Tom was getting the picture. Alan Merchant was a salesman too. He had started his working life on his father’s barrow in London’s East End, selling everything from slightly imperfect shirts to tins of fruit that were dented and damaged. In his teens he had stumbled across the ‘Dutch Auction’ stroke; along with a mate of his, they had milked hundreds of pounds from people by selling them bundles of household and electrical goods, usually at several times the true value of the items. The law had moved quickly to cover the legal loophole that allowed these scams to proliferate, and Alan had progressed to selling double glazing in council estates where tenants had just bought out their homes from local authorities and where lenders were rushing to lend money to these new property owners.
‘I wasn’t long figuring out that I could make more by providing the finance for the windows than the windows themselves.’
‘So you started selling loans?’ Tom was getting the picture of how Alan operated.
‘I suppose you’d call it moneylending; basically I borrowed money and lent it on at a profit, and I had a few guys collecting the repayments every week at the doors.’
‘Is that legal in England?’
‘Not really, but it goes on in every council estate and nobody passes any mind. My mistake was in moving it up the scale.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I opened an office in one of the big estates, it was an empty corner shop that I bought cheap, and I ran the loans business from there. Had it done up like a bank, it looked brilliant. It was great for a while, a real buzz on Fridays when the collectors were coming and going with the money.’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘I suppose ego if I’m honest. I just couldn’t resist putting a sign that said ‘Merchant Banking’ up over the shop; it was quite a feeling when I was still only twenty two to think that I owned my own bank.’
‘I think I know how you might have felt, but wasn’t that pushing your luck a bit?’
‘Looking back, I should have known that I was asking for trouble. Someone complained and I ended up in court for running an unlicensed bank. No way was I paying that big a fine, mate, so I moved to Spain. Best move I ever made; great place to live, nice climate, cheap beer, chicks coming out of the woodwork. What about yourself, same story?’
‘Not quite, but a few similarities. Kicked out of school at seventeen for running a bookie operation, had a big falling out with my dad over that and moved out of home. Worked in sales here and there, ended up in car sales for the last year.
‘So are you back in touch with your parents then?’
‘No, my dad and I don’t get on. My mother died about fifteen years ago; I was only ten. Looking back, I’d say I probably started to go off the rails a bit after that. My older brother is an engineer and he’s in business with my dad, they’re builders. I never went back, don’t intend to.’
‘You should keep in touch with your dad, family is important. My dad passed away a couple of years ago but I bring my old mum out to Spain every winter, she loves it here.’
‘You don’t know my old man, he wouldn’t approve of my career choices. We never really got on anyway, but the day I packed in my education, that was the end of it for him. No, we agree to differ.’
‘So how did you end up in Spain?’
‘Had a small brush with the law, not really my doing, the guy I worked for was a bit bent. Decided to come out here for a while to let things settle a bit.’
‘Always the other fellow that’s bent.’ Alan laughed. ‘But you were happy to take the few quid even if you had your doubts. Am I right?’
Tom smiled, he was right of course, it was obvious all along that Kevin was dealing in bent certs, and he had just ignored the fact as long as the money was rolling in.
‘Up to a point, yes, you’re right.’
‘None of us is as clean as we might like to think, believe me. We all do what it takes for a bit of easy pickings. So, do you want to make yourself some serious money?’
CHAPTER FOUR
It was good to be going to work again, even if it wasn’t clear what the job entailed and how exactly this outfit actually made money. Tom decided to play it by ear, to see what the story was and not to get too involved if the thing was dangerous or blatantly illegal. It would pass a few days anyway; maybe give him an insight into the world of work in Spain. The very least it would do might be to pay the bills for this week, bring in a few quid to counteract the non-stop outgoings. Spain wasn’t too expensive a place to live, but you needed to have an income long term.
Alan took a look at him when he walked into the conference room. ‘You look the part anyway, Tom; you suit up well. Question is, can you deliver the goods, mate?’
‘I just need some background on the nuts and bolts of the operation, and then I can make a few sales no problem. The key to anything like this is to know it off by heart, not to be looking in a file for answers in the middle of a sale.’ Tom had learned some good lessons from Kevin in the car sales business.
‘Pull up a chair and have a look at this stuff.’ Alan had several red folders on the desk, and he pulled some single spreadsheet pages out of each and slid them across the desk to Tom. ‘What we do is to sell timeshares, but we never describe it as that.’
‘I partly guessed as much. Timeshare has got a lot of bad press, hasn’t it?’
‘It’s not just that, they brought in some laws a while back that have cramped our style a bit. Nowadays you have you give a cooling off period to buyers, let them change their minds for a couple of days afterwards.
‘That makes it hard to make a sale stick then?’
‘It does, but we figured a way round it
, I’ll tell you about that in a minute.’
‘Sorry to have interrupted you, go on about the project.’
‘Ok, we take a building project like this, one that isn’t selling too well, and we do a deal with the developer to sell the place for him, but on a shared ownership basis. Actually we dealt with the receiver on this one, the banks had moved in before we could rescue the original guy. We break each apartment into fifty two weeks, hold back the best apartments until the end, and sell individual weeks for each apartment.’
That was more or less as Tom had figured it; it was a timeshare but just dressed up as something different. ‘But what about the le-gals, how do you get around that?’
‘That’s the easy bit, we break up the sale. By law we can sell up to thirty six months as a holiday contract with no cooling off period, then we sell the rest as an open ended contract for the balance. We take the deposit on the short contract, so it’s non-refundable, and if they want to cancel the long contract they lose the short one and their money as well. Beware the small print!’ He sat back and smiled. Of course we never call it timeshare, we call it fractional ownership.’
Tom was amazed at the simplicity of it; you had to hand it to these guys. ‘So you keep it just barely legal. Lambs to the slaughter, I suppose you could say.’
‘We’re selling dreams, Tom, extracting a few quid from people who can’t afford to buy a holiday home in the sun. This way, they get to be able to say to their friends that they have a place in Spain, somewhere that they go to every year.’
‘And do they ever get what they pay for?’ Tom had a momentary vision of hundreds of disappointed buyers lined up outside the gate of Pueblo Alto Blanco, while Alan and his crew disappeared down the road in a cloud of dust.
‘Usually, yes. The beauty of it though is that we are only the selling agents, we have a contract with the project owner that means that the onus is on him to finish off the place and deliver the apartments to the buyers. Usually the developers are so glad to find someone to sell places like this that they don’t look at the small print too closely.’
‘So the punters could lose their money?’
‘I suppose in theory they could, but we pay a good price for these apartments, and there is always enough in the kitty for the builder to be paid. I wouldn’t worry about it; life’s too bloody short to be worrying.’
‘But you must make a good bit on it too. What do you pay in commission for a sale?’
Alan smiled. ‘Doesn’t take you long to get to the point, mate; I can see we are going to get on. I’ll give you five hundred quid for every sale as soon as the punter has swiped their credit card. How does that sound to you? Now you’re really interested, aren’t you?’
Tom was surprised at the level of commission; this was serious money. In theory, you could do three or four sales a day; even more maybe, you could do a lot more if you got a run of good clients.
A lot of pickings around here, he mused. ‘I’m interested all right, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’
‘Good stuff, Tom, I need a couple of good salesmen on this job, the ones I have aren’t great. They still make a lot of money though; Timothy made five grand last week for instance.’
‘So how much of it is sold so far?’ Tom had the impression that very few weeks had been sold.
‘Around a third of it, believe it or not. All in the second and third blocks; we have marked this first block as sold although it isn’t sold yet, if the shit hits the fan we don’t want people turning up to claim their apartments.’
Tom was amazed. So you’ve sold a third of the apartments, for all weeks?’
‘Yes, more or less, we usually manage to do a clean sweep for all fifty two weeks for each unit, we raise and lower the price to suit, if all the August stuff is flying off the plans for instance we might push the price up a bit, maybe drop a few quid off a January week.’
‘But how do you do that, surely if you quote someone a price and then one of their friends comes along and you have changed the price....?’
‘We can tweak it a bit, charge more for south facing, or west facing, or whatever we decide really. It works anyway, don’t worry about the finer points; I’ll look after that side of things. You just sell the stuff and leave the detail to me.’
‘So how about the girls that work on the streets, bringing in the clients? Who pays them?’
‘I pay them twenty euro for every client, that includes a couple or someone on their own, whether we get a sale from them or not. As long as we are converting at least half them into sales, we are doing ok.’
‘And what percentage of them turn into sales?’ Tom was getting interested in the detail.
Alan pulled out a printout from another folder. ‘As of last month, fifty eight percent, but that’s been dragged down the last couple of weeks with bad conversion rate by those two outside. Do you think you can do better?’
‘If Timothy can do the kind of level you say he’s doing, I know I can do a lot better.’ Tom was getting excited about the prospect of earning a lot of money. ‘Just load me and point me at the enemy.’
The woman liked the place, but her husband was less sure. ‘I’m not too happy about some things, I’ve heard a lot about timeshares and how they can go wrong, we saw a programme on the telly once about gangs ripping people off.’
Tom drew himself up to his full height. ‘I can assure you sir that this is not one of these crooked timeshare operations. This is a very reputable holiday club with thousands of satisfied members; we wouldn’t be able to stay in business if there was a shadow of suspicion about how we operate.’
The man apologised. ‘I’m sorry, no offence intended, you just can’t be too careful these days.’
‘Of course, no offence taken, but you can understand that we are very proud of our reputation.’ Tom didn’t want to push him too hard, just enough to keep him on the back foot.
‘If there are so many satisfied customers, can we talk to some of them, get an idea of how it worked out for them?’ The woman was still a bit unsure.
Tom had his standard answer ready; this was going to be easy. ‘I’m afraid we have an obligation to our clients not to divulge any of their details to anyone, standard Spanish law on data protection and all that.’
The man nodded agreement. ‘Yes, of course.’ He looked at his wife. ‘That’s true, dear, I see it at work nowadays, you can’t be too careful about data, can’t leave it lying around you know.’
Tom sensed an opening, time to push for a close. ‘I can show you some emails from clients, but their details are blanked out.’ He produced a bundle of print-outs of emails that he had written himself a few weeks earlier, all of them thanking the staff at Pueblo Alto Blanco for their help.
The couple were warming to the idea, time to tap the ball towards the net. Just one good straight kick, the ball was rolling towards the line and the keeper was distracted for the moment.
‘Look, if you find in a year or two that you want to change your mind, you can always sell on your membership and get at least what you paid for it, probably a lot more, and in the meantime you and your family will have had some great holidays for nothing. You can’t lose.’
The woman looked at her husband, the game was nearly over. ‘It would be nice right enough, our own place in Spain, we always dreamt of it didn’t we, dear?’
The man turned to Tom with a pleading look in his eye. ‘We can’t really afford this to go wrong, we don’t have much money. Are you sure it’s ok, that we’re getting good value? Are you sure we will be able to sell it again if we need to get our hands on the money?’
Tom tried not to let his feelings show on his face. The man was right to be worried, these timeshares were impossible to resell, worth very little at the end of the day, and it was hard not to feel sorry for the punters at a time like this. It wasn’t too bad with the pushy ones, they deserved what was coming to them, but an old couple like this who asked you out straight, that was harder. His instinct was to
take them aside, to tell them to put their money away and go back to their hotel and forget the whole deal. Still, his job was to sell, and anyway there was another five hundred quid ready to drop into the bucket if this sale went through. He put his arm around the man’s shoulders.
‘Nothing to worry about, sir, this is a respectable company with hundreds of satisfied clients. Your money is safe.’
‘Well, if you say so.’
‘If you come this way we can arrange the few formalities.’ They followed him meekly to the desk in the small office.
He shoots, he scores! Walter would love this place, he thought to himself. Five sales today, two and a half grand in the pot and the day isn’t over yet. I love this fucking country.
Alan double-parked out front of Mesa Bella; the elderly head-waiter took the car keys and showed them to a quiet table on the raised area at the far end of the restaurant.
‘I like this place, never got a bad meal here yet, one of the best places on the coast.’
Tom liked the look of it, good atmosphere and decor, with a cosy noisy background of clattering plates and the laughter of happy diners.
‘Well, lad, I have to hand it to you, you can surely do the business. I’m sorry now I offered you so much money; you’re making more than I am nowadays.’
‘Hardly true, I know what you are making, about ten times what I make, but that’s life.’
‘I got overheads, costs, expenses.’ Alan was smiling broadly; they both knew that he was making a lot of money, but Tom wasn’t complaining either.
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