by Wilbur Smith
I've got to be in London on Tuesday. Don't spoil it all, now/she
murmured sleepily.
And then we're launching Sea Witch on the 7th April. I'm not listening/
she whispered. I've got my fingers in my ears. Will you launch her - I
mean break the bottle of bubbly and bless her? I've just taken my
fingers out again. Jules would love it. Nicholas, I cannot spend my
life commuting across the Atlantic, not even for you. I've got work to
do. Peter will be there, I'll work that as a bribe. 'That's unfair
pressure, she protested.
Will you come?
You know I will, you sexy bastard. I wouldn't miss it for all the
world. She moved across the quilt and found his ear with her lips. I
am honoured. Both of you are sea witches/ Nick told her.
And you are my warlock. Sea witch and warlock/he chuckled. 'Together we
will work miracles. Look, I know it's terribly forward of me, but
seeing that we are both wide awake, and it's only two o'clock in the
morning I would be super ultra-grateful if you could work one of your
little miracles for me right now., It will be a great pleasure/ Nick
told her.
Nicholas was early, he saw as he came out of the American Consulate and
glanced at his Rolex, so he moderated his pace across the Place de la
Concorde, despite the gentle misty rain that settled in minute droplets
on the shoulders of his trench coat, Lazarus was at the rendezvous ahead
of him, standing under one of the statues in the corner of the square
closest to the French Naval headquarters.
He was heavily muffled against the cold, dressed all in sombre blue with
a long cashmere scarf wound around his throat and a dark blue hat pulled
down so low as to conceal the pale smooth bulge of his forehead, Let's
find a warm place/Nick suggested, without greeting the little man.
No, said Lazarus, looking up at him through the thick distorting lenses
of his spectacles. Let us walk. And he led the way through the
underpass on to the promenade above the embankment of the Seine, and set
off in the direction of the Petit Palais.
In the middle of such an inclement afternoon they were the only
strollers, and they walked in silence three or four hundred yards while
Lazarus satisfied himself absolutely of this, and while he adjusted his
mincing little steps to Nick's stride. It was like taking
Toulouse-Lautrec for a stroll, Nick smiled to himself . Even when
Lazarus began speaking, he kept glancing back over his shoulder, and
once when two bearded Algerian students in combat jackets overtook them,
he let them get well ahead before he went on.
You know there will be nothing in writing? he piped.
I have a recorder in my pocket, Nick assured him.
Very well, you are entitled to that. Thank you, murmured Nick dryly.
Lazarus paused, it was almost as though a new reel was being fitted into
the computer, and when he began talking again, his voice had a different
timbre, a monotonous almost electronic tone, as though he was indeed an
automaton.
First, there was a recital of share movements in the thirty-three
companies which make up the Christy Marine complex, every movement in
the previous eighteen months.
The little man reeled them off steadily, as though he were actually
reading from the share registers of the companies. He must have had
access, Nicholas realized, to achieve such accuracy. He had the date,
the number of the shares, the transferor and transferee, even the
transfer of shares in Ocean Salvage and Towage to Nicholas himself, and
the reciprocal transfer of Christy Marine stock, was faithfully
detailed, confirming the accuracy of Lazarus other information. It was
all an impressive exhibition of total knowledge and total recall, but
much too complicated for Nicholas to make any sense of it. He would
have to study it carefully. All that he would hazard was that somebody
was putting up a smoke-screen.
Lazarus stopped on the corner of the Champs Elyses and the rue de la
Boetie. Nicholas glanced down at him and saw his shapeless blob of a
nose was an unhealthy purplish pink in the cold, and that his breathing
had coarsened and laboured with the exertion of walking. Nick realized
suddenly that the little man was probably asthmatic, and as if to
confirm this, he took a little silver and turquoise pill-box from his
pocket and slipped a single pink capsule into his mouth before leading
Nicholas into the foyer of a movie house and buying two tickets.
It was a porno movie, a French version of Deep Throat entitled Gorge
Profonde. The print was scratched and the French dubbing was out of
synchronization. The cinema was almost empty, so they found two seats
in isolation at the rear of the stalls.
Lazarus stared unblinkingly at the screen, as he began the second part
of his report. This was a detailed breakdown of cash movements within
the Christy Marine Group, and Nick was again amazed at the man's
penetration.
He drew a verbal picture of the assemblage of enormous sums of money,
marshalled and channelled into orderly flows by a master tactician. The
genius of Duncan Alexander was as clearly identifiable as that
flourishing signature with the flamboyant A and X which Nicholas had
seen him dash off with studied panache. Then suddenly the cash-flow was
not so steady and untroubled, there were eddies and breaks, little gaps
and inconsistencies that nagged at Nicholas like the false chimes of a
broken clock.
Lazarus finished this section of his report with a brief summation of
the Group's cash and credit position as at a date four days previously
and Nicholas realized that the doubts were justified. Duncan had run the
Group out along a knife-edge.
Nicholas sat hunched down in the threadbare velvet seat, both hands
thrust into the pockets of his trenchcoat, watching the incredible feats
of Miss Lovelace on the screen, without really seeing them, while beside
him Lazar-us took an aerosol can from his pocket, screwed a nozzle on to
it and noisily sprayed a fine mist down his own throat. It seemed to
relieve him almost immediately.
Insurance and marine underwriting of vessels owned by the Christy Marine
Group of companies. He began again with names and figures and dates,
and Nicholas picked up his own trend. Duncan was using hi aptive
company, London and European Insurance and Banking, to lead the risk on
all his vessels, and then he was reinsuring in the marketplace,
spreading part of the risk, but carrying a whacking deductible himself,
the principle of self-insurance that Nicholas had opposed so vigorously,
and which had rebounded so seriously upon Duncan's head with the salvage
of Golden Adventurer.
The last of the vessels in Lazarus recital was Golden Dawn, and Nicholas
shifted restlessly in his seat at the mention of the name, and almost
immediately he realized that something strange was taking place.
Christy Marine did not apply for a Lloyd's survey of this vessel.
Nicholas knew that already. But she has been rated first class by the
continental surveyors. It was a much easier rating to obtain, and
consequently less acceptable than the prestigious at Lloyd's.
Lazarus went on, lowering his voice slightly as another patron entered
the almost deserted cinema and took a seat two rows in front of them.
,And insurance has been effected outside Lloyd's. The risk was led by
London and European Insurance. Again, Duncan was self-insuring,
Nicholas noted grimly, but not all of it. And further lines were
written by - Lazarus listed the other companies which carried a part of
the risk, with whom Duncan had re-insured. But it was all too thin, too
nebulous. Again, only careful study of the figures would enable
Nicholas to analyse what Duncan was doing, how much was real insurance
and how much was bluff to convince his financiers that the risk was
truly covered, and their investment protected, Some of the names of the
re-insurers were familiar, they had been on the list of transferees who
had taken stock positions in Christy Marine.
Is Duncan buying insurance with capital? Nicholas pondered. Was he
buying at desperate prices. He must have cover, of course. Without
insurance the finance houses, the banks and st'tutons which had loaned
the money to Christy Marine to build the monstrous tanker would dig in
against Duncan. His own shareholders would raise such hell - No, Duncan
Alexander had to have cover, even if it was paper only, without
substance, a mere incestuous circle, a snake eating itself tail first.
Oh, but the trail was so cleverly confused, so carefully swept and tied
up, only Nicholas knowledge of Christy Marine made him suspicious, and
might take a team of investigators years to unravel the tortured
tapestry of deceit. In the first it had occurred to Nicholas that the
easiest way to stop Duncan Alexander was to leak his freshly gleaned
suspicions to Duncan's major creditors, to those who had financed the
building of Golden Dawn, But he realized that this was not enough.
There were no hard facts, it was all inference and innuendo.
By the time the facts could be exhumed and laid out in all their
putrefaction for autopsy, Golden Dawn would be on the high seas,
carrying a million tons of crude. Duncan might have won sufficient time
to make his profit and sell out to some completely uncontrollable Greek
or Chinaman, as he had boasted he would do. It would not be so simple
to stop Duncan Alexander, it was folly to have believed that for one
moment. Even if his creditors were made aware of the flimsy insurance
cover over Golden Dawn, were they too deeply in already? Would they not
then accept the risks, spreading them where they could, and simply twist
the financial rope a little tighter around Duncan's throat. No, it was
not the way to stop him, Duncan had to be forced to remodify the giant
tanker's hull, forced to make her an acceptable moral risk, forced to
accept the standard Nicholas had originally stipulated for the vessel.
Lazar-us had finished the insurance portion of his report and he stood
up abruptly, just as Miss Lovelace was about to attempt the impossible.
With relief, Nick followed him down the aisle and into the chill of a
Parisian evening, and they breathed the fumes that the teeming city
exhaled as Lazarus led him back eastwards through the Arrondissement
with those little dancing steps, while he recited the details of the
charters of all Christy Marine's vessels, the charterer, the rates, the
dates of expiry of contract; and Nicholas recognized most of them,
contracts that he himself had negotiated, or those that had been renewed
on expiry with minor alterations to the terms. He was relying on the
recorder in his pocket, listening only with the surface layer of his
mind, pondering all he had heard so far from this extraordinary little
man - so that when it came he almost did not realize what he was
hearing.
n 10th January Christy Marine entered a contract of carriage with Orient
Amex. The tenure is ten years. The vessel to be employed is the Golden
Dawn, The rate is 10 cents US per hundred ton miles with a minimum
annual guaranteed usage Of 75,000 nautical miles. Nicholas registered
the trigger word Golden Dawn and then he assimilated it all.
The price, ten cents per hundred miles, that was wrong, high, much too
high, ridiculously high in this depressed market. Then the name, Orient
Amex - what was there about it that jarred his memory?
He stopped dead, and a following pedestrian bumped him, Nicholas
shouldered him aside thoughtlessly and stood thinking, ransacking his
mind for buried items of information. Lazarus had stopped also and was
waiting patiently, and now Nicholas laid a hand on the little man's
shoulder.
I need a drink. He drew him into a brasserie which was thick with steam
from the coffee machine and the smoke of Caporal and Disque Bleu, and
sat him at a tiny table by the window overlooking the sidewalk.
Primly, Lazarus asked for a Vittel water and sipped it with an air of
virtue, while Nicholas poured soda into his whisky.
Orient Amex/ Nicholas asked, as soon as the waiter had left. Tell me
about it. That is outside my original terms of reference/ Lazarus
demurred delicately.
Charge me for it/ Nicholas invited, and Lazarus paused as the computer
reels clicked in his mind, then he began to speak.
Orient Amex is an American-registered company, with an capital of
twenty-five million shares at a par value of ten dollars - Lazarus
recited the dry statistics.
The company is presently undertaking substantial dryland exploration in
Western Australia and Ethiopia, and offshore exploration within the
territorial waters of Norway and Chile. It has erected a refinery at
Galveston in Texas to operate under the new atomic catalyst cracking
process, first employed at its pilot plant on the same site.
The plant is projected for initial operation in June this year, and full
production in five years. It was all vaguely familiar to Nicholas, the
names, the process of cracking the low-value high-carbon molecules,
breaking up the carbon atoms and reassembling them in volatile
low-carbon molecules of high value.
The company operates producing wells in Texas, and in the Santa Barbara
offshore field, in Southern Nigeria, and has proven crude reserves in
the El Barras field of Kuwait, which will be utilized by the new
cracking plant in Galveston. Good God/ Nicholas stared at him. The El
Barras field but it's cadmium-contaminated it's been condemned by The El
Barras field is a high cadmium field, naturally enriched with the
catalyst necessary for the new process. What are the cadmium elements?
Nicholas demanded.
The western area of the El Barras field has sampled at 2,000 parts per
million, and the north and eastern anticline have sampled as high as
42,000 parts per million. Lazarus recited the figures pedantically. The
American and Nigerian crudes will be blended with the El Barras crudes
during the revolutionary cracking process. It is projected that the
yield of low-c
arbon volatiles will be increased from 40% % by this
process, making it five to eight times more to 85 profitable, and
extending the life of the world's known resenies of crude petroleum by
between ten and fifteen years. As he listened, Nicholas had a vivid
mental image of the stylus in Samantha's laboratory recording the death
throes of a cadmium-poisoned clam, Lazarus was talking on
dispassionately. During the cracking process, the cadmium sulphide will
be reduced to its pure metallic, non-toxic form, and will be a valuable
by-product, reducing the costs of refining. Nicholas shook his head in
disbelief, and he spoke aloud.
Duncan is going to do it. Across two oceans a million tons at a time,
in that vulnerable jerry-built monster of his, Duncan is going to do
what no other ship-owner has ever dared to do - he's going to carry the
cad-rich crudes of El Barras! From the balcony windows of his suite in
the Ritz, Nicholas could look out across the Place Vendome at the column
in the centre of the square with its spiral has-relief made from the
Russian and Austrian guns and commemorating the little Corsicans feats
of arms against those two nations. While he studied the column and
waited for his connection, he did a quick calculation and realized that
it would be three o'clock in the morning on the eastern seaboard of
North America. At least he would find her at home.
Then he smiled to himself. If she wasn't at home, he'd want to know the
reason why.
The telephone rang and he picked it up without turning away from the
window.
There was a confused mumbling and Nicholas asked, Who is this? 'It's Sam
Silver - what's the time? Who is it? Good God/ it's three o'clock.
What do you want?
Tell that other guy to put his pants on and go home.
Nicholas! There was a joyous squeal, followed immediately by a crash
and clatter that made Nicholas wince and lift the receiver well away
from his ear.
Oh damn it to hell, I've knocked the table over. Nicholas, are you
there? Speak to me, for God's sake! I love you. Say that again,
please. Where are you?
Paris. I love you. Oh/her tone drooped miserably. You sound so close.
I thought -'Then she rallied gamely. I love you too - how's himself? On
the dole. j Who is she? Welfare He Dole is unemployment insurance - w
sought the American equivalent. I mean he is temporarily unemployed.