by Wilbur Smith
‘I will obtain no pleasure by watching his face, offhand I can think of a thousand faces I'd rather watch.’ But in the end Nicholas had agreed, stipulating only that this time the meeting should be at a place of Nicholas choice, an unsubtle reminder of whose hand now held the whip.
James Teacher's rooms were in one of those picturesque, stone buildings in the Inns of Court covered with ivy, surrounded by small velvety lawns, bisected with paved walkways that connected the numerous blocks, the entire complex reeking with history and tradition and totally devoid of modern comforts. Its austerity was calculated to instil confidence in the clients.
Teacher's rooms were on the third floor. There was no elevator and the stairs were narrow, steep and dangerous. Duncan Alexander arrived slightly out of breath and flushed under his tan. Teacher's clerk surveyed him discouragingly from his cubicle.
‘Mr. who!’ he asked, cupping his hand to one ear. The clerk was a man as old, grey and picturesque as the building. He even affected a black alpaca suit, shiny and greenish with age, together with a butterfly collar and a black string tie like that last worn by Neville Chamberlain as he promised peace in our time.
‘Mr. who?’ and Duncan Alexander flushed deeper. He was not accustomed to having to repeat his name.
‘Do you have an appointment, Mr. Alexander?’ the clerk inquired frostily, and laboriously consulted his diary before at last waving Duncan Alexander through into the spartan waiting-room.
Nicholas kept him there exactly eight minutes, twice as long as he himself had waited in the board room of Christy Marine, and he stood by the small electric fire in the fireplace, not answering Duncan's brilliant smile as he entered.
James Teacher sat at his desk under the windows, out of the direct line of confrontation, like the umpire at Wimbledon, and Duncan Alexander barely glanced at him.
‘Congratulations, Nicholas,’ Duncan shook that magnificent head and the smile faded to a rueful grin. ‘You turned one up for the books, you truly did.’
‘Thank you, Duncan. However, I must warn you that today I have an impossible schedule to meet, I can give you only ten minutes.’ Nicholas glanced at his watch. ‘Fortunately I can imagine only one thing that you and I have to discuss. The tenth of next month, either a transfer to the Bermuda account of Ocean Salvage, or a guaranteed draft by registered airmail to Bach Wackie.’
Duncan held up his hand in mock protest. ‘Come now, Nicholas - the salvage money will be there, on the due date set by the Court.’
‘That's fine,’ Nicholas told him, still smiling. ‘I have no taste for another brawl in the debtors court.’
‘I wanted to remind you of something that old Arthur Christy once said’
‘Ah! of course, our mutual father-in-law.’ Nicholas said softly, and Duncan pretended not to hear; instead he went on unruffled.
‘He said, with Berg and Alexander I have put together one of the finest teams in the world of shipping. The old man was getting senile towards the end.’ Nicholas had still not smiled.
‘He was right, of course. We just never got into step. My God, Nicholas, can you imagine if we had been working together, instead of against each other. You the best salt and steel man in the business, and-‘
‘I I'm touched, Duncan, deeply touched by this new and gratifying esteem in which I find myself held.’
‘You rubbed my nose in it, Nicholas. Just as you said you would. And I'm the kind of man who learns by his mistakes, turning disaster to triumph is a trick of mine.’
'Play your trick now,’ Nicholas invited. ‘Let's see you turn six million dollars into a flock of butterflies.’
‘Six million dollars and Ocean Salvage would buy you back into Christy Marine. We'd be on equal terms.’
The surprise did not show on Nicholas, face, not a flicker of an eyelid, not even a tightening of the lips, but his mind raced to get ahead of the man.
‘Together we would be unstoppable. We would build Christy Marine into a giant that controlled the oceans, we'd diversify out into ocean oil exploration, chemical containers.’ The man had immense presence and charm, he was almost - but not quite - irresistible, his enthusiasm brimming and overflowing, his fire flaring and spreading to light the dingy room, and Nicholas studied him carefully, learning more about him every second.
‘Good God, Nicholas, you are the type of man who can conceive of a venture like the Golden Dawn or salvage a giant tanker in a sub-zero gale, and I am the man who can put together a billion dollars on a wink and whistle. Nothing could stand before us, there would be no frontiers we could not cross.’ He paused now and returned Nicholas scrutiny as boldly, studying the effect of his words. Nicholas lit the cheroot he was holding, but his eyes watched shrewdly through the fine blue veil of smoke.
‘I understand what you are thinking,’ Duncan went on, his voice dropping confidentially. ‘I know that you are stretched out, I know that you need those six big M's to keep Ocean Salvage floating. Christy Marine will guarantee Ocean Salvage outstandings, that's a minor detail. The important thing is us together, like old Arthur Christy saw it, Berg and Alexander.’ Nicholas took the cheroot from his mouth and inspected the tip briefly before he looked back at him.
‘Tell me, Duncan,’ the asked mildly, ‘in this great sharing you envisage, do we put our women into the kitty also?’ Duncan's mouth tightened, and the flesh wrinkled at the corners of his eyes.
‘Nicholas,’ he began, but Nicholas silenced him with a gesture.
‘You said that I need that six million badly, and you were right. I need three million of it for Ocean Salvage and the other three to stop you running that monster you have built. Even if I don't get it, I will still use it to stop you. I'll slap a garnishee order on you by ten minutes past nine on the morning of the eleventh. I told you I would fight you and Golden Dawn. The warning still stands.’
‘You are being petty,’ Duncan said. ‘I never expected to see you join the lunatic fringe.’
‘There are many things you do not know about me, Duncan. But, by God, you are going to learn - the hard way.’
Chantelle had chosen San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place when Nicholas had refused to go again to Eaton Square, He had learned that it was dangerous to be alone with her, but San Lorenzo was also a bad choice of meeting-ground.
It carried too many memories from the golden days. It had been a family ritual, Sunday lunch whenever they were in town. Chantelle, Peter and Nicholas laughing together at the corner table. Mara had given them the corner table again.
‘Will you have the osso bucco?’ Chantelle asked, peeping at him over the top of her menu.
Nicholas always had the osso bucco, and Peter always had the lasagne, it was part of the ritual, ‘I'm going to have a sole.’ Nicholas turned to the waiter who was hovering solicitously. ‘And we'll drink the house wine.’ Always the wine had been a Sancerre; Nicholas was deliberately down-grading the occasion by ordering the carafe.
‘It's good.’ Chantelle sipped it and then set the glass aside. ‘I spoke to Peter last night, he is in the san with flu, but he will be up today, and he sent you his love.’
‘Thank you,’ he spoke stiffly, stilted by the curious glances from some of the other tables where they had been recognized. The scandal would fly around London like the plague.
‘I want to take Peter to Bermuda with me for part of the Easter holidays,’ Nicholas told her.
‘I shall miss him - he's such a delight.’
Nicholas waited for the main course to be served before he asked bluntly, ‘What did you want to speak to me about?’
Chantelle leaned towards him, and her perfume was light and subtle and evocative.
‘Did you find out anything, Nicholas?’
‘No,’he thought to himself. 'That's not what she wants.’ It was the Persian in her blood, the love of secrecy, the intrigue. There was something else here.
‘I have learned nothing,’ he said. ‘If I had, I would have called you.’ His eyes bored into hers, green an
d hard and searching.
‘That is not what you wanted,’he told her flatly. She smiled and dropped her eyes from his.
‘No,’ she admitted, it wasn't.’
She had surprising breasts, they seemed small, but really they were too big for her dainty body. It was only their perfect proportions and the springy elasticity of the creamy flesh that created the illusion. She wore a flimsy silk blouse with a low lacy front, which exposed the deep cleft between them. Nicholas knew them so well, and he found himself staring at them now.
She looked up suddenly and caught his eyes, and the huge eyes slanted with a sly heart-stopping sexuality. Her lips pouted softly and she moistened them with the tip of her tongue.
Nick felt himself sway in his seat, it was a tell-tale mannerism of hers. That set of lips and movement of tongue were the heralds of her arousal, and instantly he felt the response of his own body, too powerful to deny, although he tried desperately.
‘What was it-‘ He did not hear the husk in his voice, but she did and recognized it as readily as he had the flicker of her tongue. She reached across the table and took his wrist, and she felt the leap of his pulse under her fingers.
‘Duncan wants you to come back into Christy Marine,’ she said. And so do I.’
‘Duncan sent you to me.’ And when she nodded, he asked, 'Why does he want me back? God knows what pains the two of you took to get rid of me.’ And he gently pulled his wrist from her fingers and dropped both hands into his lap.
‘I don't know why Duncan wants it. He says that he needs your expertise.’ She shrugged, and her breasts moved under the silk. He felt the tense ache of his groin, it confused his thinking. ‘It isn't the true reason, I'm sure of that. ‘But he wants you.’
‘Did he ask you to tell me that?’
‘Of course not.’ She fiddled with the stem of her glass; her fingers were long and perfectly tapered, the painted nails set upon them with the brilliance of butterflies’ wings. ‘It was to come from me alone.’
‘Why do you think he wants me?’
‘There are two possibilities that I can imagine.’ She surprised him sometimes with her almost masculine appraisal. That was what made her lapse so amazing; as he listened to her now, Nicholas wondered again how she could ever have let control of Christy Marine pass to Duncan Alexander - then he remembered what a wild and passionate creature she could be. ‘The first possibility is that Christy Marine owes you six million dollars, and he has thought up some scheme to avoid having to pay you Out.’
‘Yes,’ Nicholas nodded. ‘And the other possibility?’
‘There are strange and exciting rumours in the City about you and Ocean Salvage - they say that you are on the brink of something big. Something in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps Duncan wants a share of that.’
Nicholas blinked. The iceberg project was something between the Sheikhs and himself, then he remembered that others knew. Bernard Wackie in Bermuda, Samantha Silver, James Teacher - there had been a leak somewhere then.
‘And you? What are your reasons?’
‘I have two reasons, Nicholas,’ she answered. ‘I want control back from Duncan. I want the voting rights in my shares, and I want my rightful place on the Trust. I didn't know what I was doing, it was madness when I made Duncan my nominee. I want it back now, and I want you to get it for me.’
Nicholas smiled, a bitter wintry smile. ‘You're hiring yourself a gunman, just the way they do in the Western serials. Duncan and I alone on the deserted street, spurs clinking.’ The smile turned to a chuckle, but he was thinking hard, watching her - was she lying? It was almost impossible to tell, she was so mysterious and unfathomable. Then he saw tears well in the depths of those huge eyes, and he stopped laughing. Were the tears genuine, or all part of the intrigue?
‘You said you had two reasons.’ And now his voice was gentler. She did not answer immediately, but he could see her agitation, the rapid rise and fall of those lovely breasts under the silk, then she caught her breath with a little hiss of decision and she spoke so softly that he barely caught the words.
‘I want you back. That's the other reason, Nicholas.’ And he stared at her while she went on. ‘It was all part of the madness. I didn't realize what I was doing. But the madness is over now. Sweet merciful God, you'll never know how much I've missed you. You'll never know how I've suffered.’ She stopped and fluttered one small hand. ‘I'll make it up to you, Nicholas, I swear it to you. But Peter and I need you, we both need you desperately.’
He could not answer for a moment, she had taken him if by surprise and he felt his whole life shaken again and the separate parts of it tumbled like dice from the cup of chance.
‘There is no road back, Chantelle. We can only go forward.’
‘I always get what I want, Nicholas, you know that,’ she warned him.
‘Not this time, Chantelle.’ He shook his head, but he knew her words would wear away at him.
Duncan Alexander slumped on the luxurious calf-hide seat of the Rolls, and he spoke into the telephone extension that connected him directly with his office in Leadenhall Street.
‘Were you able to reach Kurt Streicher?’ he asked.
‘I'm sorry, Mr. Alexander. His office was unable to contact him. He is in Africa on a hunting safari. They did not know when to expect him back in Geneva.’
‘Thank you, Myrtle.’ Duncan's smile was completely lacking in humour. Streicher was suddenly one of the world's most industrious sportsmen - last week he had been skiing and was out of contact, this week he was in Africa slaughtering elephant, perhaps next week he would be chasing polar bears in the Arctic. And by then, it would be too late, of course.
Streicher was not alone. Since the salvage award on Golden Adventurer, so many of his financial contacts had become elusive, veritable will-o'-the-wisps skipping ahead of him with their cheque books firmly buttoned into their pockets.
‘I shall not be back at the office again today,’ he told his secretary. ‘Please have my pending tray sent round to Eaton Square. I will work on it tonight, and do you think you could get in an hour earlier tomorrow morning?’
‘Of course, Mr. Alexander.’
He replaced the handset and glanced out of the window. The Rolls was passing Regent's Park, heading in the direction of St John's Wood; three times in the last six months he had taken this route, and suddenly Duncan felt that hot scalding lump deep under his ribs, He straightened up in his seat but the pain persisted, and he sighed and opened the rosewood liquor cabinet, spilled a spoonful of the powder into a glass and topped it with soda-water.
He considered the turbid draught with distaste, then drank it at a gulp. It left an after-taste of peppermint on his tongue, but the relief was almost immediate. He felt the acid burn subside, and he belched softly.
He did not need a doctor to tell him that it was a duodenal ulcer, probably a whole bunch of them - or was that the correct collective noun, a tribe of ulcers, a convocation? He smiled again, and carefully combed his brazen waves of hair, watching himself in the mirror.
The strain did not show on his face, he was sure of that. The facade was intact, devoid of cracks. He had always had the strength, the courage to ride with his decisions. This had been a hard ride, however, the hardest of his life.
He closed his eyes briefly, and saw Golden Dawn standing on her ways. Like a mountain. The vision gave him strength, he felt it rising deep within him, welling up to fill his soul.
They thought of him only as a money-man, a paper man. There was no salt in his blood nor steel in his guts - that was what they said of him in the City. When he had ousted Berg from Christy Marine, they had shied off, watching him shrewdly, standing aside and waiting for him to show his guts, forcing him to live upon the fat of Christy Marine, devouring himself like a camel in the desert, running him thin.
‘The bastards,’ he thought, but it was without rancour. They had done merely what he would have done, they had played by the hard rules which Duncan knew and respected, an
d by those same rules, once he had shown his guts to be of steel, they would ply him with largesse. This was the testing time. It was so close now, two months still to live through - yet those sixty days seemed as daunting as the hard year through which he had lived already.
The stranding of Golden Adventurer had been a disaster. Her hull value had formed part of the collateral on which he had borrowed; the cash she generated with her luxury cruises was budgeted carefully to carry him through the dangerous times before Golden Dawn was launched. Now all that had altered drastically. The flow of cash had been switched off, and he had to find six million in real hard money - and find it before the 10th of the month. Today was the 6th, and time was running through his fingers like quicksilver.
If only he had been able to stall Berg. He felt a corrosive welling up of hatred again; if only he had been able to stall him. The bogus offer of partnership might have held him just long enough, but Berg had brushed it aside contemptuously. Duncan had been forced to scurry about in undignified haste, trying to pull together the money. Kurt Streicher was not the only one suddenly unavailable, it was strange how they could smell it on a man, he had the same gift of detecting vulnerability or weakness in others so he understood how it worked. It was almost as though the silver blotches showed on his hands and face and he walked the city pavements chanting the old leper's cry, ‘Unclean, Beware, Unclean.’
With so much at stake, it was a piddling amount, six million for two months, the insignificance of it was an insult, and he felt the tension in his belly muscles again and the rising hot acid sting of his digestive juices. He forced himself to relax, glancing again from the window to find that the Rolls was turning into the cul-de-sac of yellow-face brick apartments piled upon each other like hen-coops, angular and unimaginatively lower middle class.
He squared his shoulders and watched himself in the mirror, practising the smile. It was only six million, and for only two months, he reminded himself, as the Rolls slid to a halt before one of the anonymous buildings.
Duncan nodded to his chauffeur as he held the door open and handed Duncan the pigskin briefcase.