For the Love of Money

by Bill Whiting

  He was still in the chair as dusk arrived, and a spectacular multi-coloured light show began to emerge from the island. All the tall buildings across the harbour twinkled, as thousands of windows illuminated. Many skyscrapers were also washed by coloured floodlights, which slowly changed from one colour of the rainbow to the next. Many famous brand names beamed out from the bright signage on the rooftops. It was hypnotic.

  The hotel room window took the form of a giant Hong Kong postcard. King wallowed in the visual feast, and in such sublime and supreme luxury; under a gentle cool breeze from the air conditioning, and with a warm inner glow from the whisky, he felt cocooned in contentment.

  He sat there until three in the morning. He knew this was an important turning point in his life, and not just another of those memorable, but fleeting moments. Finally he rose, undressed, and sank into the embrace of the crisp bed linen – and slept the sleep of the saved.

  But the next morning, reality was quick to intrude. Christ, he thought, what have I done with the company credit card? He lay in bed wondering if he had not only burned a bridge behind him, but those in front too. He felt panic and his heart was pounding. No, he thought, I’ll just tell them I used it in error, after my flight to Taipei was cancelled because of a typhoon. I meant to use my own card. No problem. I’ll pay it back. Yeah, that’s it.

  He packed his clean, pressed and immaculately folded clothes into Norman, and headed to the airport for his scheduled flight to London. As he paused for a smoke before entering the terminal, he looked wistfully at an airline poster advertising the joys of Thailand. Then he sighed deeply and entered the building, mumbling to Norman, “Bangkok for some lucky bastards. Back to Bermondsey for us poor sods.”

  Ninety minutes later, King entered the door of the Boeing 747. He’d done this maybe hundreds of times, but had never turned left before. He entered the First-Class cabin and a steward said, “Hello, Mr King, may I take your bag and hang your jacket?”

  Two hours later – after downing a five-course gourmet meal, served on fine bone china, and almost two bottles of Chablis Premier Cru – King sat back in his seat. It was a space six times larger than the one to which he was accustomed on flights; and he listened as the pilot’s voice rang out: “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, this is your flight captain again. You’ll be pleased to hear that we are currently on time, and with a tail wind assisting us, we expect to be landing in Bangkok around twenty past eight; fifteen minutes earlier than scheduled.”

  This time King knew he had blown it. He had no business in Bangkok and no business to be flying there first class, especially not when it was paid for using the company card. Some fear and guilt hung over him, as he and Norman left the airport customs hall in Bangkok and entered arrivals. There, he spotted his name in bold letters on a card held by a smart Thai in a white naval-style suit with a peaked cap.

  “I’m Mr King,” he told him.

  “Welcome to Bangkok, Sir!” the man responded dutifully. “Your car is waiting.”

  As he sat with Norman in the back of a white Mercedes, heading down the main highway into the city, King thought that booking the limousine was a particularly unnecessary indulgence. On the other hand, it was just an incidental expense when set in the broader context of an executive suite at Bangkok’s famous and fabulous Regal Star Hotel. As the car swept up to the hotel entrance, he checked to ensure that his mobile phone was switched off. He didn’t want any contact with his head office, and had messaged them earlier to say that he had lost the phone. Norman was taken from him at the hotel door, and then a delightful Thai girl placed a garland of orchids round his neck. And then he began the second most magical evening of his life.

  An hour later – while taking an exhilarating trip down the Chao Phraya River as the sole passenger in a long-tailed open boat with a massive Chevrolet engine – King thought that tomorrow he would take in the colourful floating market and the Grand Palace of Wat Phra Kaew, before heading home to face the music. But that evening, at least, he was still free to sit and stare into the night. And this time he gazed at the sparkling moonlight reflecting on the river, which bordered the hotel’s magnificent outdoor restaurant. He then wallowed once again in a luxurious suite, a suite often occupied by movie stars when filming in Thailand. Kings, queens, princes, famous artists and writers, presidents of great states, leaders of global corporations and pop stars, sports stars and celebrities of every description had all stayed in this room. And now, he mused, Bill King and Norman were staying there too.

  “Tonight, Norman,” King slurred while downing a large slug of Scotch, “we bask in balmy Bangkok – for tomorrow, London looms.”

  And twenty hours later, as the 747 approached South Eastern Europe, King stared out of the window and reflected anxiously on his apparently lunatic binge. There was no doubt about it, he now loved money. Indeed, without money, he knew he was just a number on a plane, just one of hundreds of sheep sitting upright in the back. With money, he would have a name, and he’d be one of six wolves lying down in the front.

  But perhaps, he thought, the old adage was true: money always brings worry. Maybe, as the Buddhist monks in Thailand had discovered, true happiness only comes after all possessions are discarded and inner peace is sought? And one thing for sure, King was now a worried man as the plane cruised over the Austrian Alps, just ninety minutes away from London. Then the speaker crackled, and the Swiss pilot announced: “Ladies and gentlemen, we shall shortly be starting our descent into Zurich, where we expect to land in twenty minutes.”

  Two and a half hours later, the SAB electric train, with King and Norman on board a first-class compartment, climbed three thousand feet towards the Alpine village of Grindelwald. As the train halted, King made the short walk from the station to the Grande Eiger Hotel.

  After his stays in Hong Kong and Bangkok, King was now well into ‘rooms with a view’. The best hotels in the world offer the best views in the world, and the Grande Eiger was no exception.

  King’s suite on the third floor opened onto a spacious balcony. And there in front of him, looking close enough to be touched, was the famous – and indeed notorious – North Face of the Eiger. The mountain’s rugged grey rock rose thirteen thousand feet to a snow-covered summit, and King’s neck was stretched back as he took it all in. Two other snow-capped peaks were close by: the Monch and the Jungfraujoch, which had the highest railway station in Europe. The panorama was spectacular and awe-inspiringly beautiful and, once again, King felt that he was looking at something too good to be real. But real it was, and he raised a glass of complimentary champagne and said, “Cheers, Norman – and yodel-hey-hee-hee!”

  Later, he decided to have dinner in the hotel restaurant and was seated by the window. At the next table, there sat a well-dressed middle-aged man, who occasionally lifted a pair of binoculars and looked through the window towards the Eiger.

  “Fascinating, isn’t it?” King said to his neighbour.

  “Sure is,” he replied in an American accent. “It looks gorgeous, and very quiet and peaceful from here. But that’s a mile-high son-of-a-bitch pile of treacherous rock. The first nine men who tried to climb it all died, and a lot more have died since. One guy was hanging up there on a rope for a year – frozen solid.”

  “You a mountaineer then?” King asked.

  “Nope,” he replied. “Not the type at all. I’m just here for a couple of days, kinda like it here. But there’s a team up on the mountain now. They’re bivouacked just close to a place they call the Traverse of the Gods. They’ll move on to the summit in the morning. Here, can you see a light there?”

  King took the binoculars offered to him and asked, “Who are they then? Do you know?”

  “Two Japanese, two Swiss and one American,” he replied, “and not just any American. He’s one of the richest men in the world.”

  King was intrigued. “Who’s that then?” he asked eagerly.


  “Richard Tilman,” he answered. “He founded Rummage, the computer software business, all part of Screenscene Inc now. He’s a genius geek and owns fifty-five per cent of a company worth eighty billion dollars. But he’s a bit of a fruitcake. If he ain’t climbing, he’s ballooning or racing cars. That guy lives dangerously. Care for a coffee in the lounge?” he then asked.

  King nodded and smiled. “My name’s King, by the way… Bill King.” They shook hands as the American announced his name as Tom Schept.

  “So what do you do, Tom?” King asked over coffee.

  “I used to be in merchant banking – Wall Street,” he answered. “But now, mostly I just buy and sell stocks and manage my own investment portfolio. I don’t really need to, but it gives me a buzz, and anyway, I figure I can look after my money better than anyone else.”

  “How do you know what’s best to buy and sell?” King quizzed.

  “I’ve got a small team of analysts on my payroll – good guys,” Schept replied. “People give me good information and I pay them good money for it. Most people work very hard for a tiny fraction of the money I make.”

  “Mmm,” King responded, “don’t you… you know… think life’s a bit unfair?”

  “Money and markets have no ethics or morality,” Schept said. “It’s a Darwinian world.”

  “Good point,” King answered. “You’re either a wolf or a sheep.”

  After another hour chatting in the bar, King went to bed, feeling in good form, after drinking half a bottle of conscience-cleansing Scotch.

  He woke early next morning and heard dozens of Japanese tourists heading for the mountain railway station. The tickets for the amazing tunnelled journey high up to the Jungfraujoch were pricey, but nothing like as pricey as the personal helicopter King had booked to take himself to the glacier. After paying £300, courtesy of his corporate card, King boarded the helicopter in the grounds of the hotel, sat next to the pilot and put on ear phones. The helicopter lifted off and then sped towards the Eiger, where it began a zig-zag ascent, a few hundred yards away from the face.

  After around ten minutes, and at about seven thousand feet, the pilot nudged King and pointed to the mountain. “Climbers,” the pilot said. King looked out and saw four men in a roped line on a steep ice field. From the hotel, the ice field had looked small and patchy. This close it looked massive and dense. The helicopter then rounded the sharp eastern slope of the Eiger and rose further up to the glacial valley, where it finally landed.

  “Five minutes here,” the pilot told him, as King stepped out onto the snow. He put sunglasses on to combat the fierce glare, took out his camera, and asked the pilot if he would take a picture of him next to the helicopter. Moments later, they boarded again and began the descent into Grindelwald. As they flew down, the pilot again slowed as the climbers came into view. Then he noticed grey specks tumbling from the mountain above the ice field. The pilot had seen it too and arrested the helicopter’s descent.

  King lifted his camera again, pointed it towards the climbers and clicked. Then more and bigger grey specks appeared. And after moments it was clear that tons of loose rock were sliding down into the path of the climbers. King just kept clicking. After thirty or so seconds, the scene began to clear. But there was no sign of the climbers, and still no sign as the pilot continued to circle.

  Recovering from surprise, King felt into his pocket and pulled out Tom Schept’s card. He read the mobile number and tapped it into his phone.

  “Schept here,” he heard, almost immediately after the ring tone sounded.

  “Tom,” King shouted, “it’s Bill King here. We met last night. Have you got Screenscene stocks?”

  “Yeah, why?” he answered.

  “I just saw Richard Tilman fall off the mountain,” King hollered.

  “Thanks,” he heard – and then the phone went dead.

  Three days later, King was sitting in a business class seat on a flight from Zurich to London. He was now ready to face the music at home, but he was smiling as he gazed down at the French coastline.

  In his pocket was a bank draft for fifty thousand US dollars, given to him by a grateful Tom Schept. No doubt Schept had made fifty times that amount by frantically selling and forward-buying Screenscene stock. Thanks to King, Schept was the first dealer in the world to know that the genius behind Screenscene was dead. King had made another hundred thousand dollars selling his photographs of the tragedy to an American syndicated news network. They were blurred images, but there was no bigger story in America that week.

  King considered there was a lot of truth in the adage that money begets money. He’d spent a few days amongst money and he’d made the equivalent of three years’ salary. It was enough to pay the bloated company credit card bill King had piled up. And it was enough too for him to be able to tell the company to “fuck off.”

  And now he had tasted the good life, King intended to gobble up more.

  SIX

  As King was flying back to London, Jamie Miller was heading to an important meeting at a hotel in London’s Park Lane.

  Although his attempt to lose his agency’s advertising account was a complete failure, the assault and misogynous remarks towards Jenny Wilson’s person had proved very productive and beneficial. It was indeed fortunate that Miller and Jenny had secretly agreed beforehand to stage the incident, should it be needed.

  The firm had little option but to fire Miller after Jenny made a formal complaint. Miller, however, claimed that making lewd and suggestive comments was an endemic activity at the agency and part and parcel of its sexist culture – and he knew there was considerable truth in this. He therefore said he would resist his dismissal and fight the case at a tribunal. The agency was sure it would win any such action, but also knew the hearing would be widely reported and plastered through the tabloid newspapers. Miller’s ‘nice tits’ comment would be ripe for journalists, because the agency was well-known for promoting its leading brand, the racy Flimsy-Bra, and its famous slogan, ‘Lots of lift – but looks like No Bra’.

  So, as Miller and Jenny had calculated, Jenny was quietly placated with a generous undisclosed sum, and Miller received a £150,000 pay-off. And with that in his pocket, he resolved to make himself a serious fortune.

  But, after several weeks’ racking his brains, he had made little progress. He soon discovered that, while he’d spent twenty-five years working for companies at the cutting edge of marketing, starting a new business on his own was an altogether more difficult challenge. He’d tossed around a dozen or so new business ideas, but each in turn had failed to withstand more than a day’s cold scrutiny. And finally, he decided that inventing a new business wasn’t his forte. Instead, he needed to buy into something which was already up and running. And, after scouring the ‘Business Opportunities’ in the press and online, he finally found one.

  A financial stakeholder was being sought by a company in Hampshire. Its business was The New Forest District Chronicle, a weekly newspaper which was distributed freely to some hundred thousand homes and which made its modest money from advertising. Miller was attracted, because he felt the media business was a world with which he was familiar. He knew advertising and he knew the art of communication. And he knew the business would benefit greatly from the expansion and promotion of its fledgling online presence. So he was in confident mood as he entered the hotel, looking for Ashu Khan, the owner of the Chronicle. He spotted an Asian-looking man by the reception desk and walked over to him.

  “Mr Khan?” he said.

  “Yes, you’re Miller then?” he answered in a friendly tone. “Let’s get some coffee.”

  They ordered coffee and walked to a quiet corner of the hotel bar and sat down.

  “Tell me, Mr Miller,” Khan said, “why are you interested in the Chronicle?”

  “Well, it’s a little late in life,” Miller explained, “but I want
a new start. I’ve been a salaried man working for others all my career. Now I want a business I can run and one in which I’ve got an equity stake. Frankly, I want to make money, Mr Khan.”

  “That’s fine,” Khan said, “but buying equity takes money and running a newspaper takes skill. Do you have them?”

  “I’ve got money,” Miller responded, “and we shall have to see whether it’s enough. But I’ve spent my life in the advertising business and I’m a professional writer, so I’m not entirely green.”

  Khan looked sceptical. “Knowing advertising and knowing how to write doesn’t mean knowing how to run a business. That’s altogether different,” he said. “And anyway, the most creative advertisement you’ll find in the Chronicle is a list of houses for sale. As for creative writing – well, there’s always the annual general meeting of the Cosworth Pigeon Fanciers’ Club to get your teeth into.”

  Miller felt somewhat derided and began to take a dislike to Khan. He was there to invest his own money as a shareholder and not be interviewed for another salaried position.

  “Well, do you want to sell a stake or not?” Miller asked sharply.

  “Hold on, Mr Miller,” Khan answered, “you’re too easily offended. Selling a stake in my business is the easy part. Getting investment isn’t my problem. Getting someone to run the business well is my problem. I need someone who can run it well, and who will work damned hard to make it grow. People with a personal stake in a business work a whole lot harder than salaried people – and that’s the only reason I’m selling a stake in it.”

  “Why can’t you run it then?” Miller asked. “Isn’t that what you’re doing now?”

  “Perhaps I should explain,” Khan said. “I’m a wealthy man and look, I’m fat too. But I wasn’t always like that. Many years ago in Pakistan I learned what it means to be poor. Being poor is not about having very few possessions, Mr Miller. It’s about being hungry, hungry every day, and being grateful for scraps found in garbage tips.”