by Tom Harper
‘How much?’
Ellie blinked. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘How much money?’
‘Based on recent rulings, the fines might run to several hundred million euros.’
‘And to make the problem go away?’
‘I don’t –’
Blanchard stood, uncoiling like a snake. ‘Thank you, Ellie. I think you have given us all the information we need.’ He ushered her out into the corridor. ‘You did very well. The board are hard men to impress.’
Did that mean she’d impressed them? It was hard to believe from those stony faces.
‘We will take the Talhouett project from here. We need you on another job now. You’ll find the files in your office.’
Ellie walked down the corridor and sank into her chair. New files had appeared like magic on her desk – even the sight of them made her sick. She’d spent most of the last forty-eight hours preparing her presentation and she was exhausted. At least it had allowed her to put off thinking about the other questions hammering at her mind.
Her phone rang. She stared at the glowing numbers written like runes under the plastic shell. Why do you think they let you use your phone for personal calls?
‘How did you get on?’
It was Delamere, the lawyer she’d met in the lift on her second day.
‘I survived – thanks to you.’ It was Delamere who’d taken her through the intricacies of European corporate law, hour after hour until her head swam. ‘I owe you.’
‘How about lunch?’
Ellie glanced at her laptop. Thirty-eight new messages – to add to the couple of hundred she’d barely read while she prepared her report. And those new files. She thought the pile might have got taller while she sat there, though of course it was impossible.
‘When was the last time you ate?’
She tried to think. ‘There was a pizza yesterday afternoon, I think …’
‘That does it. You’re coming with me.’
He took her to an old-fashioned inn down an alley off Cornhill. A shield hung over the door: a black vulture emblazoned on a red cross. Inside, a marble bust watched possessively over the heavy tables and upholstered chairs that looked as if they hadn’t been changed since the nineteenth century.
‘Boarding-school food, I’m afraid,’ said Delamere, and Ellie nodded as if she knew what they ate in boarding schools. She ordered fish and chips and a glass of water. Delamere ordered a steak and kidney pudding and a bottle of red wine. The waiter poured two glasses without asking.
‘Cheers.’ Delamere raised his glass. ‘Ellie Stanton. There aren’t many people who present to the board inside their first month here. Blanchard must see something pretty special in you.’
She blushed and sipped the wine, not wanting to look rude. ‘How long have you been with the bank?’
‘A year and a half. Halfway through my tour.’ He saw Ellie’s quizzical look. ‘No gold watches in this company. Monsalvat only hires on three-year contracts. Pay you a fortune then turf you out on your ear – or rather, into some plush job with one of the big boys. I assume Blanchard told you that?’
Ellie was pretty sure he hadn’t. She gave a vague smile.
‘So how are you finding it?’
‘Hard work. But rewarding,’ she added hastily, so as not to give a bad impression.
‘It’s hard all right.’ He wasn’t paying much attention. ‘Monsalvat’s a queer place. Rumour has it there’s a vault under the building stuffed full of treasure. You know, until the seventeenth-century goldsmiths acted as bankers? They had to have strong vaults anyway, so they offered them as secure storage for their customers. You took your gold cup or plate or whatever to the goldsmith, and he’d lock it up for you.’
‘You think it’s still there?’
‘Why not? The bank’s been rebuilt umpteen times, but the foundations go way back. It was built on the ruins of an old Templar lodge. Who knows what’s buried in the vaults?’
He raised his glass again, less steady this time. ‘To the de Morgon family, our illustrious founders.’
Ellie toasted them without enthusiasm.
‘You know about the de Morgons? They were Normans, probably been around since the Conquest. They keep a tight grip. You know Michel Saint-Lazare?’
‘I’ve heard the name.’
‘He owns Groupe Saint-Lazare, our client. Apparently he’s the umpteenth descendant of the original Saint-Lazare de Morgon – still has a stake in the bank.’
Their food arrived. Ellie picked at her fish, while Delamere sawed into his steak and kidney pudding.
‘I did my dissertation on the Normans. Scary people. They conquered Sicily before they conquered England, did you know that? There’s a theory that the Mafia grew out of their feudal structures. It’s just another racket.’ He speared a kidney on the tip of his knife and waved it at her. ‘You’ve got the king, the capo dei capi; his barons, who are like the captains, and then the knights and so forth who go around extorting protection money from the villagers so they can live high off the hog. The whole thing’s steeped in violence; every so often it breaks out into a full-fledged war.’
He grabbed the bottle of wine and topped up her glass. Ellie was alarmed to see that she’d drunk most of it while he talked.
They’re not what they seem. Ellie lowered her voice. ‘Do you think Monsalvat’s involved with the mob?’
‘God no – nothing so crass.’ Delamere’s face was flushed with the alcohol; he was speaking in an exaggerated whisper that only drew attention from the neighbouring diners. ‘It’s the attitude I’m talking about. Droit de seigneur, the right to rule.’
Ellie drank her wine and tried not to make eye contact.
‘We wear suits instead of suits of armour, and we go into battle with laptops instead of lances. But it’s the same mentality. In their minds, people like Blanchard are still riding around the countryside sacking and pillaging. You and me, we’re the squires. We run around fetching their armour, grooming the horses and sharpening the swords, and hope that one day we’ll get tapped on the shoulder.’
He gave a rueful smile. ‘Sorry. Shouldn’t drink in the middle of the day. Listen, what are you doing this evening?’
Ellie was so tired she almost missed the subtext. She tried to frame a considerate smile and fought back the nausea rising in her throat.
‘I’m afraid I have to call my boyfriend.’
But when she rang Doug that night, he didn’t answer. She left a message and waited for him to call back. An autumn gale was blowing through, howling around the heights of her tower like a pack of wolves. Rain pelted the windows and made a mess of the view. She worked through some e-mails and watched TV, but she couldn’t concentrate. At ten thirty, she tried again. Still no answer. There was a landline at the house which he never used: she dug out the number and tried that. It rang for what seemed an eternity. Then:
‘Hello?’
A woman’s voice, soft and fragile, as if interrupted in the middle of some private tragedy.
‘Is Doug there?’
‘I’ll just get him.’
A hundred questions boiled up inside her in the time it took Doug to come to the phone. She could hear murmured voices in the background, which quieted some of her questions and demanded others.
‘Ellie?’
‘Are you OK?’ She could tell from his voice he wasn’t.
‘Fine. I was going to call you as soon as the police left but they’re taking ages.’
Her heart took another lurch. ‘What–’
‘I’ve been burgled. They took my laptop, my phone, the telly. Turned the place upside down. Must have thought I had something valuable squirreled away. They found my passport, which is a real bugger. I was booked to go to France tomorrow.’
‘France?’ Ellie clutched the handset. She felt as if she’d dialled into a world she no longer recognised.
‘Something’s come up with that poem I told you about. There’s a manuscript in Paris I
want to look at.’
A voice in the background called something Ellie couldn’t make out.
‘They want me to sign the statement. I’d better go.’
‘Who answered the phone?’
‘Lucy. One of my students. She’d come round to drop off an essay and saw the broken window.’
I was one of your students, Ellie thought.
‘I have to go.’ More quietly, tinged with embarrassment: ‘I love you.’
‘I love you too.’
For the next month, the walls of Ellie’s world were rain and numbers. Numbers on paper, numbers on phones, numbers on screens as she worked and reworked the spreadsheets that Blanchard sent her. In the evenings, and in the pre-dawn darkness when she went to work, rain curtained off the windows through which she saw the world. It never seemed to stop. At night she dreamed of windows on screens and screens on windows, rivulets of numbers running down them and collecting in pools at the bottom. Sometimes she woke with tears on her face. In the 4 a.m. silence she imagined that the rain had drowned out all of London; that she, alone on the thirty-eighth floor, was the only person who had survived.
The weather put everyone on edge. Even Blanchard’s impeccable good manners stretched to breaking. He snapped at her for minor mistakes; her reports came back covered in red ink. When she stumbled out of her nightly taxi – she never walked any more – it was all she could do to take her supper out of its packaging and collapse into bed. At least she saw nothing more of the man from the towpath. She puzzled over his warning until it grew so old she dismissed it. She didn’t tell anyone, certainly not Doug. He didn’t need any more reason to distrust Monsalvat.
She began to dread their nightly phone calls. Whether it was the distance or the weather, they could never agree, grinding on each other like the wrong key in the wrong lock. Doug went to Paris on a new passport, but wouldn’t tell her what he’d found. Once, she heard a woman’s voice in the background and spent a long, furious night lying awake and wondering. When she asked Doug about it the next day, he said it had been a radio play and called her paranoid.
One Thursday in early November, Blanchard invited Ellie to lunch. Some of his good humour seemed to have returned: he told her she needed fattening up and pinched her cheek like a wicked uncle. To her surprise, when they stepped out the door his car was nowhere to be seen.
‘The restaurant is just around the corner. The exercise will do you good.’ He raised an umbrella and made a chivalrous gesture with his arm; Ellie took it and clung close, struggling to dodge puddles and keep pace with his long strides. Some children from a local school had put out a stuffed straw man on the pavement and were collecting for their bonfire. Ellie couldn’t imagine how they’d find anything dry enough to burn.
He took her to the Coq d’Argent, an exclusive restaurant on the top floor opposite the Bank of England, all walnut panelling and red leather chairs. Ellie ordered smoked ham with roasted figs; Blanchard asked for Marennes d’Oléron and something called Imperial Al Baeri. Ellie sneaked another look at the menu while he studied the wine list. Marennes were oysters; Imperial Al Baeri was caviar. Price: £118 for fifty grams.
She closed the menu and looked away to hide her shock. Beyond the windows the building tapered like the tip of a spear, supporting a roof garden which was as sodden as the rest of London. And sitting at a table by the windows overlooking it, a briefcase by his knee, a face she’d have been happy never to see again.
She almost grabbed Blanchard’s arm. ‘That man over there. I know him.’
‘It’s the City. Most of the men in this room, I have done deals with them.’ He sat back and let the waiter pour two glasses of champagne.
‘Pol Roger. Churchill’s favourite.’
‘His name’s Lechowski,’ Ellie bore on. ‘He was in Luxembourg doing due diligence on Talhouett.’
Blanchard looked amused. ‘Did he ask you to go to bed with him?’
That brought Ellie up short. She blushed crimson; she began to stammer a couple of different answers, but none would come out right. She took a long draught of the champagne to buy herself some time. Blanchard never took his eyes off her.
‘Lechowski has a reputation. In the world of investment banking, he’s known as “the letch”. You know, he once offered Christine Lafarge to give her his client’s complete defence strategy if she would sleep with him.’
The waiter had come back and was setting out the food. Ellie sat in awkward silence until the business of plates and napkins and cutlery was concluded. Blanchard paid him no attention.
‘What did she do?’
Blanchard squeezed lemon over his oyster, then picked up the shell and tipped it into his mouth. He licked his lips with a smile so carnal it made Ellie blush all over again.
‘Who knows? But next morning, Christine had the document and we completed the takeover.’
Across the room, Lechowski stood. His jaws mashed reflexively on a piece of gum. For a horrible moment, Ellie worried he’d seen her. But he was looking elsewhere, towards an older man with brusquely chopped white hair and a sharply etched face striding towards him. They shook hands; Lechowski gestured the older man to sit.
‘Who’s that?’
Blanchard suddenly seemed much more interested in Lechowski’s table. ‘His name is Lazarescu. He is a judge in Romania. He is in London for a conference.’
His dark eyes fixed Ellie, laying down a challenge. Choosing her words carefully, she said, ‘I thought we abandoned the Talhouett deal.’
Blanchard smiled, pleased. ‘The management of Groupe Saint-Lazare considered your presentation very carefully. Ultimately, they felt that Talhouett holdings is too important strategically to abandon the acquisition.’
He spread caviar on a piece of toast and popped it in his mouth. Ellie tried to count the little black globules and wondered how much each one cost.
‘This puts us in an awkward position. We know that the company is worth less than it appears, but our rivals do not. If we bid the correct value, we will lose.’
By the window, the briefcase had somehow migrated from Lechowski’s side of the table to the judge’s.
‘So you’re telling Lechowski?’
Blanchard swallowed another oyster, chased down with a mouthful of champagne. ‘Did they teach you the efficient market hypothesis on your course? In an ideal market the price of an asset will reflect all available information about its future prospects. All we are doing is correcting an inefficiency in the market.’
‘I thought market inefficiencies were where profits were made.’
Blanchard acknowledged the point. ‘It was a superb piece of work you did, Ellie. I know you do not want to see it thrown away to our enemies. But – c’est la guerre. Sometimes we must sacrifice a pawn to capture the king.’
Ellie wondered which she was.
‘Do you have plans for this evening?’
His question caught her off balance.
‘I have tickets to the opera and my client cancelled. Wagner – Tristan und Isolde. Do you know it?’
Ellie shook her head. Opera, like caviar, wasn’t on the menu much in Newport.
‘It is sublime. Perhaps the most shattering work of art ever created. The tenor who sang the first performance died two weeks afterwards. The composer was so afraid of its power he banned all further performances in his lifetime.’
‘It sounds dangerous.’
She only said it for lack of anything more intelligent to say. Blanchard took her seriously. ‘The music takes you across the threshold to another place – a place governed by obsession. That is to say, without boundaries. Sometimes it is difficult to return.’ He waved to get the waiter’s attention. ‘Of course, if you have other plans …’
She caught his glance, daring her, and held it. She was still angry about Lechowski. She didn’t even think she liked opera. But the thought of another evening alone in her tower, combing her e-mails while she waited for the inevitable squabble with Doug, filled her
with a sudden, palpable dread.
She drained her champagne. ‘What time does it start?’
Brenner Pass, Austria
Two men sat in a café at the rästhof on the autobahn, watching the trucks labour up the high pass. They called each other Harry and George, though they didn’t attach a lot of weight to those names. George was tall and lean and stooped, with a white beard and white hair that grew in woolly curls. Harry was shorter and wider, with tousled, sandy hair and a friendly face that always seemed to be apologising for something. At the moment he was studying the inside page of a three-day-old Italian newspaper. A handwritten translation had been taped next to one of the articles. It didn’t make it any easier to read.
‘Can they trace him back to us?’ Harry asked at last.
‘They won’t even try. Italian police get so many of these they probably class it as natural death.’
George grimaced. Both men knew there had been nothing natural in the way their friend had died. The newspaper detailed it with weary dispassion: the burns and broken bones, the minor amputations, the scars that had had time to form before he finally died.
‘We have to assume he gave them Mirabeau. God knows I would have.’
George sipped his coffee and made a face. ‘This whole operation was a mistake. All we’ve done is put them on the scent. Saint-Lazare won’t stop now until he’s pulled that company inside out.’
‘He has to buy it first.’
‘We’ll fight him.’ George tipped a second packet of sugar into his coffee. ‘Drexler might help; perhaps Koenig. We’ll give it everything we can.’
‘So will they.’
They sat in silence for a moment. On the autobahn, a truck crested the pass and gathered speed as it began the descent towards the Italian border.
‘What about Ellie Stanton?’
Harry studied his fingernails. ‘Difficult. They’re working her hard. Evenings she mostly spends in her apartment. Doesn’t even walk to work.’