Dave Hart Omnibus

by David Charters

  I assure him that these are minor teething problems, and the cultural fit will work itself out in no time. Germany and France have always been close, and are really a great natural match, aren’t they? I suggest he focuses more on fixing the press. Who is it, who is stirring up all this anti-German feeling?

  His next call is more serious.

  ‘Dave, your people ’ere are too aggressive. This cannot continue. My best people will leave. ’alf of them already believe the firm is to be closed to make way for the new American Embassy, and now this – it is too much.’

  ‘Talk to me, Jean-Marie. Tell me what happened.’

  He pauses, apparently flustered, collecting his thoughts. ‘It is Grubmann.’

  ‘You mean Werner? Isn’t he great? He’s a really good guy. I love him. And we’ve got lots like him. Thousands, in fact, and you’d be amazed how many are asking to be posted to Paris. This is so exciting.’

  There’s a long pause at the other end, and I have the feeling that LeGrand is imagining thousands of shaven headed Germans marching in step down the Champs-Elysées, square-jawed and grim-faced, repeating over and over in strong, guttural accents: ‘Ve are from Grossbank and ve are here to help you.’

  ‘Dave – Werner has proposed that we sell the corporate art collection.’

  There’s a long silence. He probably thinks I have to pick myself up from the floor after such a bombshell.

  ‘Not only that. He thinks we must sell the wine cellar too.’

  Wow. Werner doesn’t mess around. Go in hard, and go for the jugular. Never forget, these guys invaded Russia.

  ‘Great, I think those are both really good ideas. I’ve heard you’ve got some real treasures on the walls there. And more in the cellars. Worth millions. We could make a real killing. Think of the bonus pool, Jean-Marie.’

  I think I hear a gasp down the telephone, followed by an even longer silence.

  ‘Jean-Marie – are you there?’

  ‘Click. Brrrrr…’

  Gotcha.

  Now it’s only a matter of time.

  * * *

  THE PROBLEM with real life, is that things all happen at once. Just as I’m reaching the end game with my invasion of France, I’m brought down to earth with a bump. I’ve just hired a very expensive Head of Diversity for the Human Resources department in London, called Melissa Myers.

  Melissa is a gorgeous mid-thirties brunette with a legal background and a fabulous figure with a sexy, hip-swinging walk that blows me away. She was previously at Prince’s, but as soon as I saw her I knew that I had to have her, so I doubled her money and gave her a three-year guarantee. Her role at Grossbank will be to ensure that all minorities in the workplace, but in particular women employees, are treated with appropriate dignity and respect at all levels of the organisation.

  Today is her first day and I’m bending her over my desk – the blinds are closed and the little red ‘Do not disturb’ light is on over the door – and I’m trying her out from behind. Just as I’m about to explode, the door bursts open and Two Livers storms in. She’s furious.

  ‘Dave – get that thing off your penis and take a look at this.’

  Beneath me, Melissa gasps, tenses, and I have a sudden fear of her going into spasm, clamping me tightly inside her and locking us together. I have client meetings today and even I couldn’t do them like this.

  Most men would panic. I smile. ‘Have you two met? Melissa, this is Laura MacKay, Head of Corporates. Two Livers, this is Melissa…’

  Two Livers ignores her. ‘Dave, cut the crap and look at this.’

  She tosses a piece of paper on the desk next to the brunette, who is disengaging, mercifully allowing me to slide free, and pulls her skirt down, tries to straighten her hair and struggles to find something to say, but then realises that Two Livers and I are both ignoring her and takes flight from my office without saying a word. I turn away from Two Livers, remove my condom and zip myself up, then toss it in the bin under the desk. There are two others there already – it’s been a busy morning.

  The paper is a Court Order, from the local sheriff’s court in Banffshire, where Sally Mills is living.

  ‘Compliance and Legal formally took receipt of it, but when they saw what it was they brought it to me. Dave, Sally Mills and her husband are saying you’ve been harassing her. And now the court are ordering you to have no further contact, direct or indirect. She’s a married woman and wants to stay that way.’

  Damn. I flop down into my chair and pick up the Court Order again to read it through. ‘Harassment – what do they mean, harassment? I haven’t been harassing her.’

  Two Livers takes a seat opposite me. ‘So what have you been doing?’

  I shrug nonchalantly, but knowing that I won’t get away with lying. ‘I’ve been sending flowers.’

  ‘How often?’

  I shrug again. ‘From time to time.’

  ‘How often?’

  I get up and start to pace around the office. I hate it when she interrogates me. ‘Every day.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘That’s right. Every day. I wanted to keep the memory of me fresh in her mind.’

  ‘No wonder she feels harassed. Have you been doing anything else?’

  ‘Gifts.’

  ‘Gifts? What kind of gifts?’

  I wave my hands helplessly. ‘You know the sort of thing – Tiffany, Bulgari, Chanel… the kind of things I imagined a woman wouldn’t necessarily find in Banffshire.’

  ‘What were they worth, these gifts?’

  ‘Don’t ask me – I didn’t count. I expensed them.’

  ‘But you must know roughly.’

  ‘Roughly? Oh, roughly… hundreds…’

  ‘Hundreds?’

  ‘…of thousands… More than a teacher makes, anyway.’

  ‘Jesus, Dave – you sent her flowers every day, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of gifts?’

  ‘All of which she returned.’

  ‘She returned them? What kind of whacko is she? Was there anything else?’

  ‘Not really. Well, except for the plane.’

  ‘The plane?’

  ‘I hired a plane.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To circle round her house with a sky sign.’

  ‘A sky sign? Dave, are you mad?’

  I nod. ‘Madly in love, yes.’

  ‘What did the sign say?’

  ‘Oh, nothing very original. Sally I love you, Sally our love will never die, stuff like that. I heard it got into the local papers.’

  ‘You really are insane. No wonder she’s feeling harassed.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Draw a line, Dave. The past is the past. The moment’s gone.’ She gets up and stands close to me. I can smell her scent, and feel a stirring from the unfinished business she interrupted. I glance at my watch. My next meeting is in twenty minutes, but I don’t care if I’m late. ‘Oh, all right…’

  * * *

  I LOVE the Square Mile. It’s seven a.m. and I’m walking down Threadneedle Street, bodyguards on either side of me to part the crowds of pin stripes hurrying to their workstations. Take a deep breath and what can you smell? Money. It’s hanging in the air so thickly you can almost taste it. At times like this the City of London has to be the best place on earth.

  I spent last night with Anya from Helsinki, a twenty-two year old student hoping one day to become an architect – yeah, right – and Anne from Sussex, an actress who’s between jobs – yeah, yeah. What they had in common, apart from working for the same escort agency and being great in bed, is a passably similar name. I’m finding it harder to remember their names these days, so my new approach is to call up girls with names that sound similar, or at least start with the same letter.

  Do you think I’m wrong to pay for sex? Don’t kid yourself. We all pay for sex. One way or another. It’s just that I do it on my own terms, and I try to stay in control.

  I’m running fifteen minutes later th
an planned. Tom got stuck in traffic, so I got out and walked. According to the radio some American banker called Hurst tried to end it all by jumping off Blackfriars Bridge. Loser couldn’t even get that right, and the river police had to fish him out, causing hold-ups all the way along the Embankment. His name rings a bell, but I can’t quite place it. They said on the radio he’d sent an email to his boss, who had recently given him notice to quit, claiming his life was in ruins, he’d lost all his friends, everyone had it in for him, and he just couldn’t take it anymore. Damned inconsiderate to hold up the early morning traffic.

  I’m about to enter the bank, when my mobile phone goes off. It’s Jean-Marie LeGrand. He’s finally had it with the Germans. It didn’t take as long as I thought. The French never did have much stomach for a fight. I call Maria to change my plans and get a private jet organised to take me to Paris. It’s show time.

  * * *

  I’M MARCHING down the corridor towards LeGrand’s office. Werner and his team are flanking me, and yes, they do all march in step. Is this a natural German instinct? It’s kind of scary, and makes me walk faster, which in turn makes them speed up, until we are all hurtling down the corridor, throw open the doors, storm past the secretaries in the outer office and burst in on LeGrand, who leaps up from his desk, speechless with fear and surprise. I smile.

  ‘Jean-Marie – how good to see you.’ I hold out my hand, but he makes no move to shake it.

  ‘Dave – please ask your colleagues to leave my office immediately.’

  I turn to Werner and the team and nod to them to leave. Werner doesn’t quite click his heels, but we can all tell that that’s what he wants to do. He does what I suppose he imagines is an impression of someone smiling and nods towards LeGrand, who steps back from the desk to avoid a wave of deadly, toxic halitosis. It was Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote that hell is other people. In Paris, it’s more specific than that. Hell is Werner Grubmann – Christ, he’s done a great job.

  When the team have left, I sit down. ‘What is it, Jean-Marie?’

  He looks beaten. ‘Dave, this strategic co-operation between SFP and Grossbank has been a catastrophe.’

  ‘Really? I thought it was going rather well. We have people queuing up to come over here.’

  He shakes his head and stares at the blotter on his desk. ‘You ’ave to understand, Dave. We are a proud people with a great past.’ Yeah, right. I do the jokes around here. ‘Dave, it ’as not worked at all. And we cannot continue. I ’ave ’ad representations from the Finance Ministry, and from the regulatory authorities.’

  ‘What sort of representations, Jean-Marie?’

  ‘There are certain people… people who are very senior in the administration… people who prefer not to see SFP fall under the influence of a foreign bank.’

  ‘Really? Why on earth is that?’

  He gives me a short, sharp look, checking to see if I’m taking the piss. ‘These people ’ave great influence. And they ’ave decided that there should be a merger between SFP and the Banque du Nord. It will be announced shortly. Both boards will sign today. Grossbank’s shares in SFP will be acquired by Banque du Nord for a substantial premium, but our co-operation must end.’

  I sit back, amazed. ‘No – are you saying that someone high up in the government, in the French Establishment, has leant on Banque du Nord to buy out SFP just to keep the Germans away? And they’re paying for the privilege? You must be kidding. I thought the French wanted nothing more than to be in bed with the Germans.’

  He squirms and I try not to grin. It’s the French way. Yes, they are open to foreigners coming into their markets, but only on their terms. Sure, they’d love to be in bed with the Germans, but guess who’d be biting the pillow and who’d be wearing the condom. It’s their patch and they call the shots, and who can blame them for that? Certainly not Grossbank’s shareholders. A quick back of the envelope calculation in the car on the way to the airport shows us looking at half a billion euros profit. I might even give Werner a bonus.

  * * *

  I’M BACK in London. The fact is that while it was fun to have a go at the French, and we made an enormous profit, I’m genuinely minded to take over another firm.

  This is not to say that when banks buy one another, it’s necessarily good news for shareholders or the firms themselves. In fact when investment banks buy one another, it’s usually the most wasteful, shareholder value-destroying exercise seen in the corporate world.

  The investment bankers themselves do well out of it, getting fat payouts, lock-ins, guarantees and early vestings of share-incentive schemes – getting rich, in other words – but within a couple of years it usually becomes apparent that there were no synergies, that the best people have left anyway, and the acquirer wasted its money. Fortunately by then the people who took the decisions will have moved on to other firms or retired to their yachts and their places in the sun.

  In my particular case, I have a different reason to contemplate taking over another firm. The firm I have in mind is Bartons. We all have our demons to slay, and many of mine come from the years I spent working for Rory, my fair-haired, blue-eyed boy wonder of a boss at Bartons, and Sir Oliver Barton, the Chairman and controlling family shareholder. Without the fear and insecurity ingrained into me at Bartons, I could be a well-balanced human being. Well, almost.

  So today I’m meeting Sir Oliver for lunch at the City of London Club. Sir Oliver doesn’t actually give a shit about me. He probably doesn’t even remember me from when I was at Bartons, though he has certainly heard about me since. He greets me in the bar of the Club like a long-lost friend, all smiles and bonhomie and two-handed handshakes.

  The reason Sir Oliver is meeting me has nothing to do with Dave Hart, and everything to do with the Grossbank Panzer Division parked outside, engines idling, crews wondering where we’re going next. Are we off to invade Poland, or France, or Bartons?

  I love my Panzer Division. In an ideal world, everyone would have one. Luckily we don’t have an ideal world. In the real world, I have a Panzer Division and Sir Oliver doesn’t.

  The deal is done remarkably easily. A hundred and fifty years of British banking history are carved up before dessert. Sir Oliver wants out. So do the rest of the family. In the investment banking world, Bartons is neither fish nor fowl: too big to be a niche player, nimbly moving from one opportunity to another, and too small to compete with the big boys, like the Americans whose operations are underpinned by their hugely profitable domestic businesses, or the Europeans with their massive balance sheets.

  And there’s another reason: Bartons own the freehold of their building near Liverpool Street Station. It’s a ten storey building built in the early eighties, and is exactly the kind of prime real estate that the Corporation of London would love to see re-developed into, say, a modern, landscape defining, thirty storey tower.

  Forget struggling, low quality earnings from corporate finance and stock broking, with high overhead employees demanding ever greater bonuses. Think instead demolition and re-development. No Parisian scare stories here. This is the real deal. When Sir Oliver and I shake hands over coffee, I agree that he and the family keep a share of the profits from the re-development of the site. He agrees that I get to press the plunger.

  The way these deals work is that the Big Guys – in this case Sir Oliver and myself – agree the headline terms, and then ‘our people’ – the little people, the lawyers and the accountants – get to make it happen. Making it happen in this case will take several months, but I’m nothing if not impatient, and I have one task that can’t wait several days, let alone several months. After lunch, I return with Sir Oliver to his office and he summons Rory.

  It takes Rory all of five minutes to come bounding up to the tenth floor, tail wagging with puppy-like eagerness to please. I stand facing out over the City, as the door opens and Rory enters.

  ‘Sir Oliver – I understand you wanted to see me.’

  Sir Oliver is seated at his enormous p
ower desk, staring idly at some screens off to one side. He nods distractedly. ‘There’s someone I wanted you to meet. Your prospective new boss.’

  On cue, I turn to Rory and smile. It’s a moment to treasure. He’s frozen, standing in the centre of the room, immaculate in his Savile Row suit and Hermes tie. As he sees me, the smile fades from his face.

  ‘D – Dave…’

  ‘Rory.’ My smile broadens, and I advance towards him, hand outstretched. We shake hands in the middle of Sir Oliver’s office, and I’m delighted to note that his handshake is weak and clammy. I lean forward so my face is close to his. ‘It’s been a while. How are you?’

  He swallows and looks to Sir Oliver for some explanation. ‘I’m well, thank you. Sir Oliver, did you say my new boss?’ His voice seems to have risen a couple of octaves.

  Sir Oliver is still looking at numbers on one of the screens by his desk, or at least pretending to. ‘Yes. But owner might be a better term. Grossbank are buying Bartons. Dave will be in charge.’

  Rory stares at me, a mixture of disbelief, fear and hatred playing across his features. I smile. The vampire has returned.

  * * *

  THE SILVER Fox is chatting amiably to some City reporters in the large conference room at Bartons. I spent many unhappy hours here, squirming nervously while Rory or Sir Oliver or other members of senior management lectured us on the latest round of imminent job cuts, the new expenses policy for members of the firm not senior enough to sit on the Management Committee, or the decision to merge different parts of the business to achieve greater synergy, for which read cost – i.e. people – savings.

  Today is different. Today the Bartons conference room is covered in the Grossbank livery. Our logos are everywhere, and Bartons’ have been airbrushed out.

  The room is filling up nicely, as the big business story of the day is about to unfold. The last independent British investment bank is being bought by the Germans. Eight weeks have passed since Sir Oliver and I had lunch and the little people from Team Xerox have been working hard. This morning the official announcements went out, a collective gasp of horror came from the trading floor at Bartons, while high fives were exchanged on the floor at Grossbank, followed by an influx of phone calls to their opposite numbers at Bartons from our traders, explaining how many sugars they take in their coffee, and would they please say after me, ‘Grossbank rocks’.