The Business

by Iain Banks

  I pulled my hand away and put it behind my back to wipe it. 'In a fight I'm a southpaw, Prince. How nice to see you again. Welcome back to Blysecrag.'

  'Thank you. It is like coming home.' Suvinder Dzung was a marginally tubby but light-footed fellow of a little more than average height with glisteningly smooth dark olive skin and a rakish, perfectly black moustache, which matched his glossily waved and exquisitely sculpted hair. Educated at Eton, he spoke without a trace of a sub-continental accent unless he was profoundly drunk, and when in England dressed in Savile Row's conservative best. His major affectation, apart from being a bit of a show-off on the dance floor, was his collection of gold rings, which glittered with emeralds, rubies and diamonds.

  'Come in, come in, come in, old chap!' Uncle Freddy said, still apparently addressing a triumvirate of princes and waving his shepherd's crook so enthusiastically that it nearly felled the Prince's private secretary, a small, pale, beady-eyed fellow called B. K. Bousande, who was standing at the Prince's side holding a briefcase. 'Oops! Sorry, BK!' Uncle Freddy laughed. 'This way, Prince, we have your usual suite.'

  'My dearest Kate,' Suvinder Dzung said, bowing to me and winking as he turned to go. 'See you later, alligator.'

  I laughed. 'In a while, Cayman Isler.'

  He looked confused.

  'Well, thank God we didn't put much money into Russia!' Uncle Freddy exclaimed. He passed the port to me and picked up his cigar from the ashtray, pulling on it and rolling the smoke round his mouth. 'What a fucking débâcle!'

  'I was under the impression we put quite a lot of money into Russia,' Mr Hazleton said, from the other side of the table, opposite me. He watched as I poured myself a small measure. I had permitted myself a relatively unphallic Guantanamo cigar along with my coffee.

  The evening's fun was barely begun: we had been promised the run of the casino later, where we would each be given a stack of chips, plus there would be dancing. So far there had been no mention of anything as vulgar as our buying Suvinder Dzung's country off him. I handed the port to the Prince.

  There were eleven of us around a small dining-table in a modest room set off Blysecrag's cavernous main dining room. We had been many more for dinner, our fellow diners having included our titled photographer, a television presenter, a couple of Italian opera singers — one soprano, one tenor — a French cardinal, a USAF general, a pair of boyish pop stars I'd heard of but didn't recognise plus an older rock singer I did, an American conductor, a cabinet minister, a fashionable young black poet, a couple of lords, one duke and two dons; one from Oxford and one from Chicago.

  After pudding, we had excused ourselves to talk business, taking the Prince with us, though as I say not much business had actually been talked so far. All this to impress Suvinder. I wondered if we weren't appearing a little desperate. Maybe we were anticipating problems during the negotiating sessions, which would start tomorrow.

  There were a few of our own junior people present, too, lurking quietly in the background, plus a couple of the Prince's servants, and — standing with his feet spread and his hands clasped in the shadows behind his boss — the taut and bulky presence of Mr Walker, Hazleton's chief of security.

  'Well, we did,' Uncle Freddy told Hazleton, 'depending on what you call a lot of money, but the point is we put in a lot less than most people and a hell of a lot less than a few. Proportionately, we're ahead when the pain's shared out.'

  'How comforting.' Mr Hazleton was a very tall, very imposing man with a broad, tanned, slightly pock-marked face under a lot of white hair, which was as millimetrically controlled as Uncle Freddy's was wildly abandoned. He had a deep voice and an accent that seemed to originate somewhere between Kensington and Alabama. When I'd first met him he'd sounded like an archetypal smooth English toff (as opposed to Uncle F's batty variety), but, like me, he'd lived in the States for the last ten years or so and had picked up some of the local intonation. This gave him an accent that was either quite charming or made him sound like an English actor trying to sound like somebody from the Deep South, depending on your prejudices.

  Hazleton was cradling a crystal bowl of Bunnahabhain in one large, walnut hand and pulling on a cigar the size of a stick of dynamite.

  I've always found it hard to look at Level Ones like Hazleton without automatically multiplying the image they presented to me by their wealth, as though all their money, possessions and stock options acted like giant mirrors, proliferating them across any given social space like opposing mirrors in a lift. These days, we were getting close to being able to assume that anyone at Level One was a billionaire; not quite in the same financially stratospheric league represented by Bill Gates or the Sultan of Brunei, but not far off it; maybe a factor of ten away.

  The only other Level One exec present was Madame Tchassot, a small, brittle-looking lady of about sixty who sported tiny glasses and wore her unfeasibly black hair in a tight bun. She had a thin, pinched face and was chain-smoking Dunhills.

  Besides Uncle Freddy there were five other second level people, including the recently promoted Adrian Poudenhaut, Hazleton's protégé and main man in Europe. He was a tall but podgy Englishman with a mid-Atlantic accent who until I'd come along had been the youngest person to make it to Level Three. We'd never got on, though Uncle Freddy had a soft spot for him because he was another petrol head and so always got a tour of the car collection when he came to Blysecrag. He was rumoured to have some sort of thing going with Madame Tchassot, though nobody was sure, and as she rarely left Switzerland and he was often at Hazleton's side in the States, it could only have been pretty sporadic. Personally I found the very idea of the two of them bumping uglies profoundly unsettling.

  The other Level Twos were M. M. Abillah, a small, mostly silent seventy-year-old Moroccan, Christophe Tieschler, a merry-looking German geezer of extravagant and seemingly self-satisfied plumpness, and Jesus Becerrea, an aristocratic-looking Portuguese with darkly hooded eyes.

  There was only one other Level Three there: Stephen Buzetski, a sandy-haired, rangy-limbed guy with freckles, crinkly eyes, a few years older than me, whom I loved, and whom I'd loved from the first moment I'd set eyes on him, and who knew this, and who was obviously and genuinely flattered and embarrassed by this in equal measure, and who was so intolerably perfect and nice and lovable that he wouldn't cheat on his wife, to whom he wasn't even all that happily married, just faithful, the bastard.

  'They do say the Russians need a strong man; their tsars, their Stalin,' Suvinder Dzung put in, letting one of his servants pour his port while he undid his bow-tie and unbuttoned his dinner jacket. The Prince wore a dark purple cummerbund secured by golden clasps. He was given to sticking both thumbs into the broad belt and stretching it against his belly. I wondered if he was trying to twang it; maybe he didn't know a good cummerbund doesn't twang. 'Perhaps,' the Prince said, 'they need another one.'

  'What they might get, Prince, is the Communists back,' Hazleton drawled. 'If I didn't think Yeltsin was just an alcoholic clown I could believe he was secretly a Communist himself, supposed to appear to attempt capitalism but then make such a God-awful mess of it that the Brezhnev days look like a golden age in comparison and the Marxist-Leninists like saviours.'

  'Ms Telman,' Madame Tchassot said suddenly in her sharp little voice, 'I understand you visited Russia recently. Have you any thoughts on the matter?'

  I blew out some smoke. I'd intended to keep my head down for the rest of the after-dinner discussion, having earlier revealed myself to all as a dangerous radical. I'd contrasted, unfavourably, the West's reaction to a bunch of the already very rich getting caught out in their hedge-fund speculations with that of the response to the unfolding catastrophe caused by Hurricane Mitch. In one case a rescue fund of several billion US dollars was put together within a few days; in the other a couple of million had eventually been pledged as long as there was no dangerous talk about a debt moratorium or even — perish the thought — a total write-off.

  'Yes,
I was,' I said. 'But I was there to look at a few interesting technologies rather than at their society as a whole.'

  'What's happened,' Adrian Poudenhaut said, 'is that the Russians have created their own form of capitalism in the image of what was portrayed to them as the reality of the West by the old Soviet Union's propaganda machine. They were informed that there was nothing but gangsterism, gross and endemic corruption, naked profiteering, a vast, starving, utterly exploited underclass and a tiny number of rapacious, vicious capitalist crooks who were entirely above the law. Of course, even at its most laissez-faire the West was never remotely like that, but that's what the Russians have now created for themselves.'

  'You mean Radio Free Europe didn't convince them how sweet life here in the West really was?' Hazleton said, with a smile.

  'Maybe it did,' Poudenhaut conceded. 'Maybe most thought it was diametrically equivalent propaganda and took an average.'

  'The Soviets never slandered the West like that,' I said.

  'No?' Poudenhaut said. 'I've seen the old films. Looked like it to me.'

  'Very old, and not representative, then. The point is that the Russians don't really have capitalism at all right now. People don't pay their taxes, so the state can't pay its employees; the majority of people exist through self-sufficiency and bartering. And there's negligible accumulation of capital, reinvestment and development because all the money's siphoned off to Swiss banks, including ours. So what they actually have is barbarism.'

  'I'm not saying many Russians believed life in the West was as awful as it was sometimes portrayed,' Poudenhaut said. 'There's just a nice symmetry to the fact that it's the caricature they're in the process of copying, not the reality. I don't think they understand it themselves.'

  'Whereas you obviously do,' I suggested.

  'Anything we could do?' Hazleton asked me.

  'To profit us or to help them?' I asked.

  'Well, preferably both.'

  I thought. 'We'd probably be doing civilisation in general a favour if we had — ' (here I mentioned a fairly well-known Russian politician) ' — killed.'

  Poudenhaut snorted with laughter. Hazleton's blue eyes partially disappeared; a fine network of lines appeared at the corners of his eyes. 'I have a feeling we may have had some sort of dealings with the gentleman already,' he said. 'He has his moments of slapstick, too, I'll grant, but he might not be quite as black as he's painted.'

  I raised my eyebrows and smiled. One of the other gentlemen cleared his throat, somewhere down the table.

  By my side, the Prince sneezed. A servant appeared flourishing a handkerchief.

  'You think he is as black as he's painted, Ms Telman?' Hazleton said easily.

  'I have this very odd feeling,' I said, 'that somebody like me - though probably male,' I added, with a general smile, just catching the concerned-looking gaze of Stephen Buzetski, 'was sitting here nearly seventy years ago saying the same sort of thing about Germany and a faintly comical small-time politician called Adolf Hitler.' It was really only at about this point that it struck me quite how outspoken I was being. I had to remind myself — a little late, perhaps — quite how powerful the people in this room were. Adrian Poudenhaut laughed again, then saw that Hazleton was looking very levelly and seriously at me, and stopped.

  'That's quite a comparison to make, Ms Telman,' Hazleton said.

  'Hitler?' Uncle Freddy said suddenly, as though waking up. 'Did you say Hitler, dear girl?' I was suddenly aware that just about everybody in the room was looking at me. Herr Tieschler was politely studying his cigar.

  'Perhaps the trouble is you never can tell,' Stephen Buzetski said reasonably. 'Maybe if somebody had shot Hitler seventy years ago somebody else would have taken his place and things would have worked out much the same. It depends whether you believe in the primacy of individuals or social forces, I guess.' He shrugged.

  'I sincerely hope I'm completely wrong,' I admitted. 'I imagine I probably am. But right now Russia is the sort of place that makes thinking along such lines seem quite natural.'

  'Hitler was a strong man,' M. M. Abillah pointed out.

  'He made the cattle trucks run on time,' I agreed.

  'The man was an evil genius and no mistake,' the Prince informed us, 'but Germany was in a sorry mess when he took over, was it not?' Suvinder Dzung looked at Herr Tieschler as though for support, but was ignored.

  'Oh, yes,' I said. 'It was left in a far better state after a hundred divisions of the Red Army had paid a visit and a succession of thousand-bomber raids had stopped by.'

  'Well, now—' began Stephen Buzetski.

  'Do you really think it is our business to go around having politicians shot, Ms Telman?' asked Jesus Becerrea, raising his voice to shout down Stephen.

  'No,' I said. I looked at Hazleton, whom I knew had made a lot of money for himself and us in both Central and South America over the years. 'I'm sure that would never even cross our minds.'

  'Or if it did we would swiftly dismiss it, Ms Telman,' Hazleton said with a steely smile, 'because acting upon such a thought would make us bad people, would it not?'

  Was I being ganged up on? I was certainly being invited to keep deepening the hole I seemed already to be digging for myself.

  'It might make us no better than everybody else,' I said, then looked at Uncle Freddy, blinking furiously beneath his cloud of white hair to my left. 'However, proportionately — to quote Mr Ferrindonald — we might hope to be ahead when the pain's shared out.'

  'Pain can be a good thing,' Poudenhaut said.

  'Relatively,' I said. 'In evolutionary terms, it's better to feel pain and rest up than to carry on walking and hunting on an injured leg, say. But —'

  'But it's about discipline, isn't it?' Poudenhaut said.

  'Is it?'

  'Pain teaches you a lesson.'

  'It's one way. There are others.'

  'Sometimes there is no alternative.'

  'Really?' I widened my eyes. 'Gosh.'

  'It's like a child,' he explained patiently. 'You can argue with it and get nowhere, or you can just administer a short, sharp smack, and it's all cleared up. That applies to parents with children, schools…any relationship where one half knows what's best for the other half.'

  'I see, Mr Poudenhaut,' I said. 'And do you beat your other half? I mean, do you beat your own children?'

  'I don't beat them,' Poudenhaut said, with a laugh. 'I give them the occasional slap.' He looked round the others. 'Every family has a naughty stick, doesn't it?'

  'Were you beaten as a child, Adrian?' I asked.

  He smiled. 'Quite a lot, at school, actually.' He lowered his head a little as he looked round again, as though quietly proud of this proof he'd obviously been a bit of a lad. 'It never did me any harm.'

  'My God,' I said, sitting back. 'You mean you'd have been like this anyway?'

  'You don't have any children, do you, Kate?' he said, oblivious.

  'Indeed not,' I agreed.

  'So you —'

  'So I don't really know what I'm talking about, I suppose,' I said breezily. 'Though I do seem to recall being a child.'

  'I guess we all need to be taught a lesson,' Stephen Buzetski said casually, reaching for a large onyx ashtray and grinding out his cigar. 'I think I need to be taught that gamblin' don't pay.' He looked towards a rather slumped Uncle Freddy and grinned. 'That casino of yours open yet, sir?'

  'Casino!' Uncle Freddy said, sitting upright again. 'What a splendid idea!'

  'Just fuck me, Stephen.'

  'It wouldn't be right, Kate.'

  'Then just let me fuck you. You won't have to do a thing. I'll do it all. It'll be fabulous, dreamlike. You can pretend it never happened.'

  'That wouldn't be right either.'

  'It would be right. It would be very right. Trust me, it would be the rightest, sweetest, nicest thing that's ever happened to either of us. I know this. I do. I feel it in my water. You can trust me. Just let me.'

  'Kate, I m
ade a promise. I took these vows.'

  'So? So does everybody. They cheat.'

  'I know people cheat.'

  'Everybody cheats.'

  'No, they don't.'

  'Every man does.'

  'They do not.'

  'Everyone I've met does. Or would, if I let them.'

  'That's you. You're just so enticing.'

  'Except to you.'

  'No, to me too.'

  'But you can resist.'

  'I'm afraid so.'

  We were standing in the darkness by the stone wall at one end of the mile-long reflecting lake; the house lay behind us. Uncle Freddy had had the newly renovated gas flare-path lit for the first time that night; Suvinder Dzung had been allowed to ignite it, and a small plaque to this effect had been unveiled, to the Prince's obvious delight. Gas burbled with a comical farting noise from a hundred different patches of water. Flames burned above, detached torches on a wide obsidian floor fifteen hundred metres long. The converging florettes of yellow flame receded into the distance, becoming tiny, stitching the night.

  If you looked closely you could see the little blue cones of pilot lights hissing away at the end of thin copper pipes, sticking out above the water in the middle of each darkly bubbling source of fire.

  I had gambled in the casino (I was gambling now, though with no real hope of winning). I had talked to various people — I had even made some sort of peace with Adrian Poudenhaut — I had put off Suvinder Dzung as politely but firmly as possible when he'd tried to get me to come to his room, I had stood on the terrace with everybody else to watch fireworks crack and splash across the night skies above the valley, casually shooing off the straying right ring-encrusted hand of the Prince as he came to stand by me and tried to fondle my bum. Elsewhere in the main house there were rooms you could go to for drugs, and apparently there was one where there was some sort of live sex show going on, which might turn into an orgy later, depending on demand.