by Brian Martin
Those of us who knew him could not help but wonder. Belmont was careful, constantly aware. We all knew that he was a target: his past was unforgiving. He regarded himself as a sort of Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident killed by an umbrella stab on Waterloo Bridge. The ricin-tipped ferule ensured that Markov, as it were, met his Waterloo.
Our reservations about Belmont’s demise were justified. Some days later I heard from Willy in London that a deciphered message on the night of the railway accident listed Belmont as victim in a successful elimination exercise. It came as no shock. The opposition, whatever it was, was unrelentingly active and determined.
3
Belmont’s fate put us all on alert. Since he had gone, and later we realised that the enemy’s confidence was such that they could list him as victim before the dreadful event, we knew we were all vulnerable. It was necessary to be extremely careful. Whatever organisation it was, they knew their own capabilities, entertained no doubts about their effectiveness, and were quite clearly lethal. By contrast, even though I had the support of a major newspaper in a still powerful country, I knew I was hog-tied by red tape and bureaucratic accountability.
I was simply a journalist. The London Journal employed me and provided me with all sorts of cover and excuses for being in surprising places at odd times. My closest friend and confidant was Mark, an entrepreneurial investment manager, who worked in conjunction with an old friend of his: they settled spare cash funds of a number of influential clients in timely, advantageous investments. Mark cultivated his business intelligence sources. He knew people in the financial press, columnists and commentators on the stock market, analysts, traders and brokers. He was an assiduous luncher within the Square Mile and a participant in constant mobile telephone conversations and conference calls. He approached as closely as was possible to the dangerous edge of insider trading. He knew what was going on. His clients prospered. He knew much that was advantageous to me.
Although Mark was younger than me, I had known him for years and cared for him intensely. We had many of the same interests intellectually and the same sense of humour. He was easy to work with. We knew each other’s mind. We shared interests in ideas, social and political: we read and discussed Chomsky, Edward Said and the Hitchens brothers. We followed the progress of the contemporary novel and talked about poetry. Mark was a poet himself: he had no collection out but had published one or two poems in the Times Literary Supplement. Thus our interests coincided. I had first met him four or five years ago, at lunch in a restaurant, the Gay Hussar, with a crowd of friends. We had sat opposite each other, and, from the very first, conversation flowed. There was an immediate empathy. Our friendship was established. There was always an urgent need to communicate ideas. At a distance, when travelling, we kept in touch by email and phone. The constant cut and thrust of debate was an essential part of our intellectual survival: we both depended on it.
Mark was an elegant, somewhat unconventionally dressed Anglo–American. When we first met he must have been about twenty-eight. He had originated in Los Angeles, Culver City, the inspiration of an American father and English mother. His early years were spent on the East Coast, New York and Boston. Then his father split and his mother returned to England. Mark kept his contact with the States, returned there often, and was looked after by his father’s family, especially by his grandparents. He spoke with a traditional, well-educated English voice slightly softened by American accent and idiom. That, together with his good looks and gentle manners, proved fatally attractive in the sport of love, and a succession of women fell for him. During those days in Seville, just after Belmont’s death, I was glad Mark was not around. I should have feared his effect on Roxanne. I knew instinctively that she would have been attracted to him. More than at any other time, I could not have survived Mark’s competition. My renewed affair with Roxanne enabled me to come to terms with Belmont’s extinction. His death depressed me more than I had expected or realised. Thoughts of mortality made me gloomy. Roxanne saved me from myself, and her expert attentions in the practice of the art of love gave me consolation and pleasure. Together we recaptured the original thrill of our relationship. It was renewal, reawakening.
4
I had expected my three days back in Seville to be fun. I had looked forward to meeting Roxanne again although I could not have predicted that we were to take up where we had left off in our sexual life. I should have known. Her sexual voracity was always wild, exuberant. Why should she have changed? She was her old seductive self. She took the initiative: I responded. That was the nature, the balance of our relationship. What I had not foreseen was the shock of Belmont’s death, murder, assassination – I had difficulty giving his demise a name when speaking of it to colleagues and friends. The image of his mangled corpse that I had seen and identified in the hospital morgue simply haunted me. I had experienced that common feeling. That corpse was not Belmont. Where was the essence of the man? Where was that wearied, sad spirit, that dejected soul? Roxanne helped me; she distracted me, although sometimes in those brief moments of post-coital tristesse, I was more deeply depressed than I had ever been.
Back in London, I immediately contacted Mark. It was always good to hear him. As I have said, we enjoyed a remarkable empathy. I told him what had happened. I described Belmont’s body in the morgue. For me, it was a sort of exorcism. He listened with sympathetic attention and heard me out. He fulfilled the role of analyst. I hinted at my intimacies with Roxanne without revealing the details. Mark’s imagination was good enough to see what would have happened. There was some part of my life with Roxanne that I wanted kept from him. I was deeply suspicious of his rivalry. I nursed a suppressed knowledge inside myself that he would prove a threat to the stability of my very existence with Roxanne. I knew instinctively that he would revolt, surreptitiously, insidiously. His loyalty to me would vanish, his sincerity diminish, change, into deception. I should stand betrayed. Of course, when I considered all these thoughts objectively, I regarded them as nonsense. Rationale and objectivity have no chance against feeling and prejudice. As much as I loved Mark – and love is the right word: respect, admiration, regard, all do not go far enough to define what I felt – I was convinced that this was the one area where I could not trust him. It did not worry me unduly. I regarded it as usual. In affairs of the heart, everything is unpredictable, and the hunting ground is open to all comers. I had no illusions. I realised that if Mark were to be smitten by Roxanne, there was nothing to be done. It was best for me to keep them apart for my own peace of mind and the quality of my own love life.
Late one morning, Mark and I were walking slowly down Cheapside deep in conversation about T. S. Eliot’s view of London. Mark reminded me that Eliot had edited the Criterion from the end of one nervous breakdown to the beginning of another, or from the end of one world war to the beginning of another. We decided to go for a drink in one of the City’s champagne bars. The one we chose was subterranean, smart, modern, clean. We went down its steps and decided to sit at a table rather than stand at the bar. ‘Pelham Rigby! Good to see you. What are you doing here? I thought you were abroad.’ I had turned quickly at the sound of my name to identify the owner of the brash voice that had addressed me. I was conscious that others in the bar had heard my name and, as usual, I did not like the situation. I do not like my name. There is nothing wrong with my surname, I suppose, but Pelham is ridiculous. I sound like someone out of a Jane Austen novel. Some way back, generations in the past, relations on my mother’s side of the family were connected with a prime minister whose name was Pelham. My parents revived his name and gave it to me. I think it sounds awful and is extremely pretentious. At school I tried to change it and wanted everyone to call me Bill, from William, my second name, but no one would. They knew I was Pelham. The name was different. They all thought it a laugh, and so that is what they called me whether I liked it or not.
I did not want to meet anyone. What I needed to do was talk to Mark. That was my re
storative, the palliative for my pain. Belmont’s death hurt me. My time with Roxanne, although intensely enjoyable, was disturbing. I desperately needed to get over my Seville trip. I felt on edge, uncertain, extremely nervous, and I could not work out any really good reason why.
The person who hailed me was an old City acquaintance, a man I had known, never very well, for years. He was a banker for one of the ancient City houses and had worked overseas in Hong Kong and Jakarta. At times he had been useful to me in finding contacts who could help during those risky days when Hong Kong was given over to the Chinese government. I could never have been close to him. So far as I was concerned, he was alien. We had no common interests outside the professional world of finance and news information. You could never talk to him about art, literature or the condition of your soul. In conversation with Mark, the last thing I wanted was to meet this philistine. Yet there he was. The situation required quick footwork.
‘Charles, lovely to see you,’ I said. ‘Look I can’t chat at the moment. I’ve got some catching up to do with Mark here.’ Mark nodded to him but made no move to join in the exchange or shake his hand.
‘Of course. I’ll leave you two to it. But you were in Seville, weren’t you? Just for the record, you’ll want to know that the banking rumour is that there is big money, really big money, bound up in that Seville murder, if that’s what it was. Nobody in the City believes it was an accident.’
‘Charles, I’ll ring you later on. Sorry to be anti-social.’
He smiled and made a careless gesture, sat on a stool at the bar and started talking to the barman. Not a bad man after all, I thought, understanding and diplomatic. That must be why he has done so well in that revered, established firm of his.
‘Well,’ I said to Mark, ‘that’s interesting. What was Belmont up to? If Charles’s information is correct, this business is not going to be run-of-the-mill. If the banking world is involved directly there’s definitely something extremely fishy going on. It’s not the usual drugs or weapons scenario.’
‘How would Belmont have been involved? There would have to be something very personal about the business. Belmont was certainly not well off. It could figure. He was probably thinking of his retirement plans, pension and stuff. What was he doing in Seville anyway? Was he still working for our crowd?’
‘I think he certainly was but in a sort of desultory way. He knew what was going on by what he said to me and was still in touch with Willy. You’re probably right. Perhaps he was trying to sort out his finances for his later years. It’s very odd. Why bump off someone like that? Was it something from the past catching up with him? He couldn’t have been very harmful to anyone. The fuss that his murder makes is not worth its bother. There must be something more to his walking off the stage than a petty difference about a bit of cash. So, as Charles says, it’s got to be big money.’
Mark thought for a moment. ‘You must follow this up. Belmont must have been dabbling in something big.’
Charles had been joined by a couple of young men in suits and a smartly dressed woman aged about thirty: they looked like a cabaret act about to start a striptease. The group shifted to a table, sat down, and began a boisterous, jokey, conversation. I thought it not a good time to go back to Charles and enquire further about the fate of Belmont.
‘I’ll ring Charles later on this afternoon. He probably won’t mind talking on the phone. If it’s all a widely dispersed banking rumour, it doesn’t matter anyway. I’ll then ring you on your mobile.’
We sat there drinking a perfectly acceptable but ordinary Moët. The stairs that ascended to the pavement were flooded in sunshine. It was a brilliant day outside and I was beginning to regret not being in the open air. Mark felt the same and we decided to take a walk down towards the Bank of England.
5
Later that afternoon, I was in my office at the London Journal. I say my office, but it was everyone else’s as well. The whole of one vast floor was open plan. There must have been about forty desks spaced out on the floor. A number of us had created our own privacies. I surrounded myself with two filing cabinets on one side, bookcases on two others, and the fourth was window and wall. That was my office; and that was why I preferred to be away from it as much as possible. There was a constant ringing of telephones and a dull undertone of voices in conversation.
At around 4.30 I called Charles.
‘Charles. So, what’s the dirt on Belmont? How big is the big money you mentioned?’
‘Well, no one really knows. I told you it is rumour; but there is always something in a rumour. Apparently it has to do with the placing of funds into sources over here that are then available to political causes. The word is that there are a couple of million slushing. It’s thought Belmont was involved with the placing.’
‘What are the political causes? And why is Sevillian money, if that’s what it is, interested in what goes on here?’
‘There’s the mystery. No one knows. You’re a journalist. It’s your job to find out. Must rush. Client on the line.’
‘Thanks, Charles. Keep in touch,’ I said, conscious that the only times I sought Charles’s company was when I wanted to know something; and that I needed to remedy that if he were to continue being useful to me.
I immediately rang Mark and passed on what I had just been told. Mark was intrigued but sceptical. He said he would stay alert. If there was spare cash sluicing around the city, he would hear about it pretty swiftly. Our conversation, as always, quickly moved on. He asked me if I had seen the review in the Evening Standard of the latest film, just released, directed by an old friend, a contemporary of mine at university. The reviewer had given the film a rare five-star rating: it was a masterpiece, trés noir, highly atmospheric, stuffed with great actors, and the cinematography was stunningly arresting. My friend, the director, had his photograph on the front page: he was to be seen stepping out of a limousine in Leicester Square accompanied by his latest girlfriend, a young, sexy, elegant model. I wondered where I had gone wrong. I was sitting in that untidy, grubby area, amongst that regiment of desks, hacking out hundreds of words a day for a living. When I was not doing that I was leading a life of subterfuge and deception trying to find out things that dangerous criminals wanted kept quiet. I needed constantly to remind and convince myself that what I did was worthwhile; and, further, it was all for peanuts compared with the film director. I wondered if he ever felt that what he did was futile. Perhaps, in the end, sub specie aeternitatis, there was little difference between us. In the scales of eternity probably neither of us would add up to much.
I complained to Mark of how I felt. He dismissed my mood with a laugh, told me to stop brooding, to go out and buy the paper and read the review. I told him that I would do so and suggested that we might take in the movie one afternoon if things on the market and in the City were quiet. He agreed and thought that the following day might be suitable. His sources were predicting a quiet trading day, although you could never be certain. It was a bear market but at some time or other there would be surges, and eventually the beginning of a recovery. Then we should all have to be ready. Still, it was unlikely to happen tomorrow.
One of the stories I was covering was to do with corruption and fraud in one of the most significant and successful companies in the UK over the last twenty years. It was a familiar type of story. There had been false accounting and auditing procedures contrived by a national accountancy partnership in order to hide a crisis in profits. Three directors had recently sold personal holdings in the company just before a steep slide in the share price. Any financial journalist, or anyone with common sense come to that, would sniff the sweet smell of corruption. I was one of a number of journalists leading enquiries, much to the annoyance and chagrin of the company bosses and one or two politicians. There is never an important national company without its political connections. This one, because part of its concerns was with munitions and arms, was more close to the political centre than most.
At six o’clock I decided to leave the office. There was no point in holding on there. Anyone who knew anything about the City and finance had shut up shop. Since it was cocktail time and fond memories of Seville came flooding back, particularly those that had to do with Roxanne, I took my old briefcase, shoved in it a copy of a draft article, and caught the underground to Piccadilly Circus. It was time I saw the damage that the car bomb had caused.
I walked down Lower Regent Street. There at the bottom to the left, the great flag of the Institute of Directors headquarters flew and fluttered in Pall Mall. It had not been affected by the blast: it had given with the shock wave, floated, waved, as the force of the air currents, the tornado winds, had swept into it. No fragment of flying metal, no shrapnel, had torn or shredded it. In Waterloo Place itself, the tall figure of the golden Athena, goddess of wisdom, that stands guard outside the Athenaeum, was, like the statue of the Duke of York, pockmarked. Both stood wounded, but still stolidly defiant, Athena presiding over the entrance of the club, the Duke of York surveying magnificently St James’s Park from the top of his immense column.
It was clear that the immediate mess had been conjured away. The superficial damage remained. There were a couple of wide depressions, one in the pavement, another in the road. They should have been filled in with red concrete and become the London roses. In Sarajevo, the central streets and marketplace are filled with Sarajevo roses. Shell holes, mortar-bomb craters, and grenade depressions, all of which show the fanning marks of explosion, have been filled with red. They look like beautiful flowers and have been appropriately christened. Now in Sarajevo you walk, as it were, on rose petals.
