Dave Hart Omnibus

by David Charters

  I’ve always believed that it is easier to seek forgiveness than permission, and on that basis intend to try to change things radically from the start, taking advantage of my honeymoon period as Chairman to force things through before the Grossbank bureaucracy smothers me and the walls close in the way they do in all large organisations and ultimately institutionalise me.

  The first thing I’m going to change is the board. The only detail is that they don’t know it yet.

  The only board member I’ve really known, other than Herman, is an old guy called Biedermann. When I first joined the bank, Biedermann led the opposition to the future direction of the firm, saying the investment banking strategy would waste the legacy of the bank, ruin its good name and ultimately serve only to line the pockets of the hot-shot foreigners who would come in and fleece them.

  In principle, he was right, and I agreed with him, though I didn’t say so at the time. What he described is what investment bankers typically do to sleepy commercial banks. But I guess I just got lucky. Or at least I hired people who got lucky. It’s worked. And now Biedermann has retired, allegedly on grounds of ill health – presumably brought on by the prospect of calling me Chairman – and I’m left with a room full of ancient, fossilised strangers.

  They are all seated round the board table when I arrive, and I instinctively go to the far end of the room, where I used to sit when I had to present myself to get approval for whatever nonsense I wanted to do in London.

  Someone gives a meaningful cough, and I turn and see that they are all waiting for me to take my place at the head of the table.

  Christ, I’m in charge. How terrifying. But it’s also exhilarating. They nod respectfully and I nod back. I assume they all speak English, but just in case I keep nodding and give them all a friendly smile. It’s the last bit of friendly they’ll be seeing from me.

  An agenda and board pack were sent to me a week ago, but I didn’t bother to read them. I’ve got a different agenda in mind for today’s meeting.

  ‘Gentlemen, good morning.’

  A few of them pick up earpieces from the table and insert them in their ears. Are they really that geriatric? No, they just don’t speak English.

  ‘First, let me say how honoured I feel to be sitting here today, and how privileged to assume such a great office. I look forward to great times ahead for the bank and for its employees and clients around the world. And of course for its shareholders.’ Particularly those with senior management share option packages. ‘I want this board meeting – my first – to follow a slightly unusual agenda, and propose to disregard the normal business items.’

  This causes a stir. The fossils aren’t accustomed to change. Probably haven’t known change in decades – since they were alive in fact.

  ‘Today I want to focus on the community that is Grossbank.’ I hold my arms out wide to indicate how broad a community it is. ‘Our people.’

  A few of them are frowning, and one or two are tapping their earpieces and glancing at each other.

  ‘We need to show leadership to this great organisation.’ This at least they can relate to, and nod their heads in agreement. ‘We need to reflect the values we claim to espouse at the highest level of the firm.’ More nodding. ‘There’s only one way to lead, and that’s from the front. Or should I say the top?’ They’re relaxing again now, it looks as if this is just another of those bullshit corporate values speeches.

  I look down at some notes prepared for me by Paul Ryan. ‘Gentlemen, do you realise that there are over seventy thousand employees working for Grossbank worldwide?’

  They smile indulgently. The new kid is just getting his head around quite how big the firm is.

  ‘Or that we have one-hundred-and-six different nationalities working for us?’ They nod again. I take a deep breath and look around the room. ‘But only two around this table.’

  I’m expecting a long dramatic pause, but instead one of them pipes up.

  ‘Is zat correct? My grandfather was Sviss.’ It’s a fossil to my right, two places down, I think his name is Hagmann and he runs the bank’s business in Swabia.

  ‘Your grandfather?’

  He nods. Typical fucking Swabian. I take another deep breath.

  ‘Okay, Doktor Hagmann, that’s very helpful, thank you. Let’s say two and a half. I don’t really count the Swiss.’ I look at my notes again. ‘And the average age of our employees is thirty-five.’ I stare meaningfully around the table. ‘The average age in this board room is sixty-eight. It dropped significantly when I joined.’ Now they are looking perplexed. What is the new boy getting at? ‘And forty per cent of our employees are women. There are no women here.’ Unless… no, none of these is a woman.

  One of them laughs. ‘But are you suggesting we should put women on the board?’

  ‘Why not? Women are different.’ I should know. ‘They care. Granted, it can be a terrible weakness, but they do offer a different perspective.’

  Now they’re really tapping their earpieces, looking at each other, wondering what’s coming next. Is it as they feared, and they’ve appointed a nutcase to the board? Of course not. It’s far more serious than that. Do you remember the movie Alien, when the crew of a spaceship were stuck in space with a ferocious man-eating monster that had acid for blood? This is going to be worse than Alien. I’m going to get them to eat each other.

  ‘None of us gets out of here alive.’ This really rocks them and I put my hand up in case they panic and their pacemakers overload. ‘It’s a figure of speech. Gentlemen, we pass this way but once, and it’s our duty, our obligation, to make the world a better place for our passing. We’re doing that with the Grossbank Foundation, and we need to do it with the way this mighty firm is run. We need to set the tone at the top, and if that means self-sacrifice, then so be it.’

  Amazingly, they’re nodding their agreement. Honour, duty, self-sacrifice all play well with this generation of Germans. Which is why none of them is cut out for investment banking.

  ‘We need to bring down the average age of this board by twenty years, half the board should be women, and I want at least three more foreigners – don’t care if they come from Timbuktu, but I want them.’

  Stunned silence, then one of the fossils has a brainwave.

  ‘But… we are the continuity of this organisation, its collective memory. That is part of the function of the board.’

  It’s true. These guys provide decades worth of continuity. In fact collectively they provide centuries worth. But I’m not going to argue the toss with them.

  ‘Gentlemen, if I don’t get the changes I want, the fair, reasonable changes that will align the composition of the board with the people and interests it represents, and the modern society – the twenty-first century society – in which it operates, I will have to resign. This will be my first and last board meeting, and I will feel obliged to share with the world my reasons why. I was appointed to lead the board forward in the twenty-first century, not backwards in the nineteenth. Change is always challenging, but we must not be afraid. I’ve said enough, now I’m going to leave you to reflect on what I’ve said. I’ll be in my office.’

  There’s an eruption of angry, puzzled, anxious voices as I leave the board room. You might think they’d be outraged by my impertinence, that they’d be vying for the opportunity to vote me off the board and fire me, but if you think that you don’t know the average major corporate board. Rather than uniting against the common foe, these guys are going to devour each other. Decades of jealousy, rivalry, real and imagined slights will erupt in a vicious frenzy of in-fighting. Thirty years compressed into a couple of hours, unexpected, unscripted, just the raw savagery that only monumental, fossilised egos are capable of achieving.

  The key is that I said they didn’t all have to go, just some of them. If I went for the lot, they’d have taken me on. But just some? That’s different.

  As I leave the room, I have a spring in my step and a smile on my face. I reckon it’ll
take them at least an hour to accept the inevitable, maybe longer, which is plenty of time for me to get to know my new personal trainer who’ll be keeping me in shape when I’m in Frankfurt. Her name’s Eva and she’s blonde, well-built and athletic, as well as being very highly paid and extremely accommodating.

  * * *

  IN FACT it takes them nearly three hours, and Eva is in danger of wearing me out. But when I’m invited back into the board room they are the ones who look exhausted. They present me with a schedule of proposed retirements stretching out over the next twelve months. A few will go straight away and most of the remainder by year end. A couple of youngsters – which is to say late fifties, mere children by the standards of corporate Germany – will stay on for continuity and ‘tribal memory’ purposes. More of them could have stayed on, but I guess it got into one of those illogical and mutually destructive tit for tat debates. So much for grown men. And that’s it. They’ve raised the white flag.

  I love the taste of victory. Especially one that involves more or less total annihilation of the enemy. Within a few months I’ll have the most exotic, best-looking board in German banking history. Naturally I’ll appoint Two Livers and Paul Ryan to the board, but not Rory, and then I’ll set about putting together the new look team, at least three quarters of them stunning women. My harem. They may not know much about banking, but boy will they be hot.

  * * *

  THE BLACK dogs of boredom are circling again. I’m back in London and I’m worried that even my usual pastimes are no longer keeping me entertained. Do you know how tedious it gets, screwing beautiful women, snorting coke and chugging cocktails relentlessly, night after night? No? You’ll just have to trust me on that one.

  The highlight of my day was chairing a new internal think-tank that I’ve set up. I did it for Mike Hanlan’s librarian, whose real name is Caroline Connor. She’s six foot one, single, academically gifted, but terribly lonely. Normally I’d do something about that myself, but at that height she’s so much taller than me that I’d feel ridiculous. In case you didn’t know, we are not all the same height in bed – going head to toe with an Amazon like that would stretch even my ability.

  But I want to get her laid.

  So I’ve convened a new internal think-tank comprising junior and mid-ranking employees from all parts of the firm, to think the unthinkable. What exactly does that mean? God knows. If it was thinkable I could do it myself. So these Bright Young Things will get together regularly, including a series of off-site weekends in different locations around the world, and see what sparks fly.

  They are a highly elite group.

  Apart from Caroline Connor, all of them are men, hand-picked by me. All the guys are single, very bright, highly competitive, over six foot three inches tall, and by my reckoning, based on the photographs in their personnel files, good looking. If she were shorter, I’d do the job myself, but I’ve always believed that a job worth doing is worth delegating to someone competent.

  When she came into the meeting room, she almost swooned. She thought she’d died and gone to heaven. Forget dating agencies. Think Grossbank.

  Christ, I’m kind.

  But also bored. Maybe that’s why I was kind – I had time to play with. Tonight, I’m actually feeling so jaded that I haven’t yet decided who to call. I’ve been debating whether to go for Ilyana again or Breathless Beth. Or maybe both. Why choose? Compromise, as I always say, is the enemy of achievement.

  But perhaps neither – and anyway, they don’t have the same initials, and they’d probably realise when I got them mixed up.

  It’s ten o’clock, I’ve been killing time in the office, and I’m feeling so lost that I’m only now on my way out. The trading floor is relatively empty, just a few dealers on the late shift sorting out trades with New York, and the cleaning staff getting the place ready for tomorrow.

  As I pass one of the dealing desks, I see two cleaners sitting together at a workstation. They are young, black, probably late twenties or early thirties, full-bodied and large-breasted in a way that used to be called voluptuous. They look like a lot of the minimum wage migrant workers who somehow find their way into the City to perform menial tasks, their noses pressed against the glass while the rest of us are paid fortunes. They are wearing short, nylon one-piece uniforms and brightly coloured headscarves. One of them is crying.

  I really don’t care if people cry. It’s not as if I haven’t cried myself on occasion, especially in the early part of my career, normally around bonus time. But why do they have to cry in front of me? Why does everyone always feel the need to share their personal suffering? Keep it bottled up, for fuck’s sake. I pause and look at the two of them. The one who’s sobbing tries to stop, and they both stare up at me. They have beautiful brown eyes, skin that glows naturally, and perfectly pouting lips. I feel a vague stirring of unexpected interest.

  ‘What’s the problem, ladies?’

  They look at each other, uncertain what to say. The one who was crying pulls a tissue from her pocket to wipe her eyes.

  ‘Here.’ I pass her my bright yellow silk handkerchief from the breast pocket of my jacket, the one that perfectly matches my tie. She stares at it as if it’s gold, smoothing the material and looking up at me without actually using it to wipe her face. It probably cost more than she makes in a week.

  ‘I don’t mean to pry, but why were you crying?’ As I say this, I pull round a chair and sit beside them. I smile, trying to look friendly, as an interesting thought comes to me, and I imagine the three of us in bed, our bodies covered in oil, rolling over together, naked…

  ‘Please, boss…’ Perfect – a woman who knows how to address me. ‘Mary’s cousins are all dead. They all died, sir.’

  I look at the woman who was crying. I’m taken aback. ‘You lost your cousins? I’m so sorry. What happened?’

  She looks at me and her brown eyes are flashing with anger. She speaks with passion. ‘They were killed, sir. Four boys and two girls. Murdered by the gangs.’

  ‘Murdered? By the gangs? What gangs?’

  ‘The gangs come to our villages in the south of our country and do this to us. They come with guns and knives and we are so poor, we can do nothing to defend ourselves.’

  I’m stunned. For once I don’t know what to say. Even in Brixton this doesn’t happen. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘We are from Alambo, in the East of Africa.’

  Alambo. I vaguely recall it. There’s been some heavy shit going on. The trouble is, I can’t recall exactly what. Something to do with thousands of people homeless, or dying, or starving, or whatever. Like everyone else, when it comes to Africa I have compassion fatigue. I’m good at feeling sorry for myself, just not for anyone else. And besides, whenever the African Tragedy comes on the television news, I flick over to MTV or the Adult Channel.

  I’ve generally found in investment banking, the greater my ignorance on any given subject, the safer it is to stick to the old saying, ‘Less is more’.

  ‘I understand.’ They both look at me very directly, staring deep into my eyes. I’m not used to this kind of scrutiny, and in a way I kind of enjoy it. ‘What are you going to do?’

  This brings back the tears. Mary’s friend, whose name I still don’t know, puts her arm around her shoulders. ‘She needs to return, sir. For the funerals. For the family.’

  ‘Sure – you have to be there for your family and be supportive…’

  ‘But she cannot.’

  ‘She can’t? What do you mean? It’s a family funeral.’

  The friend shakes her head. ‘She cannot, because the money she earns here pays for her whole family – those that are left – it pays for them to live. And if she returned she might not have a job when she came back.’

  Now even I’m shocked. ‘Are you serious? Who do you work for? Who’s your boss?’

  Mary looks at me and seems to have a kind of fear in her eyes. ‘We work for Mister Skelton.’

  Skelton. I vaguely rec
all the name. He’s Head of Premises, way down the food chain, somewhere in the semi-darkness with the tadpoles and the plankton.

  ‘Please, boss – do you know Mister Skelton? Can you help?’

  Can I help? Of course I can fucking help. I’m Dave Hart. I can do anything. I lean forward, close enough to smell their scent, feel their breath, and when I speak, I whisper so they have to lean close. ‘You know the guys who run this place? The bosses?’

  They shrug uncertainly. ‘We’ve seen some of them.’

  ‘Well, I’m their boss. The Boss of bosses. And there’s someone I want you to meet.’

  I get out my cell phone, scroll down the numbers until I get to ‘S’, and dial the Silver Fox.

  * * *

  I LOVE it when a woman is grateful. I love it even more when two are. It’s four in the afternoon, and I’ve just arrived for the morning meeting with Two Livers and Paul Ryan. Nothing unusual in that. The early edition of the Evening News is on the conference room table. Two Livers kicks off.

  ‘Dave, you cannot be serious.’ She has the paper open on a full page spread about Grossbank paying for two cleaners to fly to Alambo in a private jet with a team of bodyguards. They’ve had relatives murdered, and now they are returning with funds to rebuild their village. Apparently it’s all down to me. The headline reads ‘Hart of kindness’.

  I try not to sound defensive. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘Cleaners? In a smoker? To Alambo?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘But Dave – the cost…’

  ‘You know what it’s costing?’

  ‘How much?’

  I smile triumphantly. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing. The bank’s paying. You didn’t think I was picking up the tab myself, did you?’

  They roll their eyes heavenwards.