I, Said the Spy

by Derek Lambert

  Brossard said defensively: ‘I’ve never felt fitter.’ Mayard waved his cigar, managed to reach the ashtray before more ash fell. ‘I don’t deny that you look fit. But you know what they say, “Quit while you’re still in front.”’

  A disturbing thought occurred to Brossard. Did Mayard know? All this talk about retirement …. No, impossible. How could he?

  He said firmly: ‘I can assure you I have no intention of retiring for a long time to come.’

  Mayard shrugged.

  Brossard had promised to sell him the newspaper at a knock-down price when finally he did retire. Perhaps that was what he was hinting at. ‘But when I do,’ Brossard said, ‘I shall hand over the reins to you, as I promised.’

  ‘Just the reins?’

  ‘Everything. At the price we agreed.’

  Mayard seemed to relax. His cigar glowed brightly. ‘Do you want me to pay you in gold?’ He smiled; it was a joke. ‘Anything except roubles – or lire.’

  ‘Did they discuss gold at the last Bilderberg?’

  ‘I forget.’ Really, Mayard was getting impossible. But not for much longer. ‘And now, is there anything that won’t keep until tomorrow? I’ve got a heavy day ahead.’

  ‘Not a thing,’ Mayard said. ‘Please don’t let me detain you,’ as though he knew where Brossard was going. Or am I becoming too sensitive? Brossard wondered.

  He told the editor that he wanted to call Paul Kingdon in private, nodding perfunctorily as Mayard left the office. He picked up the telephone. Kingdon’s Cockney accent was very pronounced over the phone; Brossard was never quite sure whether it was deliberately exaggerated.

  ‘Good afternoon, Paul.’

  ‘Bon jour, Pierre. What can I do for you?’

  A lot, Brossard thought and said: ‘Nothing in particular. I shall be passing through London next week. I thought perhaps we could have lunch together.’

  ‘Of course. Do you have any news?’

  ‘About Bilderberg?’

  ‘It’s been a long time ….’

  Brossard, who believed in the psychology of keeping people waiting, said: ‘I told you to be patient.’

  ‘How patient, Pierre?’

  Brossard made soothing noises. He wondered if Kingdon intended to threaten him. Probably not: Kingdon’s star was in the descent. He could imagine how desperately he wanted an invitation. As far as he knew one was in the post ….

  Kingdon said: ‘I’m assuming that you will have some news by the time we meet.’

  You can assume what you wish, Brossard thought, saying: ‘Make it Wednesday.’

  A pause. ‘Rules – at twelve-thirty?’

  ‘That would suit me perfectly.’

  ‘All right, see you.’ The line went dead.

  When Brossard emerged from the Metro in Montmartre half an hour later, it was beginning to rain. The air smelled of wet dust and dead leaves. He stopped outside a grey, three-storey house squeezed in between a bookshop and a patisserie and rang the bell.

  A woman’s voice issued through the grille beside a window-box filled with geraniums. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Pierre.’

  ‘Pierre who?’

  ‘Pierre Darrieux,’ Brossard said humbly.

  ‘Ah, that Pierre. Come up, you bastard.’

  The red-haired girl in the black peignoir regarded him sternly when he shut the door behind him in the room curtained with red velvet drapes and furnished with quilted chairs and a big double-bed. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘On business, ma chere.’

  ‘You could have called me.’

  ‘I’m very sorry. I tried but you were out.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ said the girl. ‘You will have to be punished.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard,’ Brossard pleaded. He put three 500 franc notes on the table beside the bed.

  ‘The price has gone up,’ the girl said.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Two thousand.’

  It was ironic, Brossard thought, taking another note from his wallet, that in these circumstances he actually enjoyed being robbed. It was a kind of sexual foreplay; he wondered what his limit would be.

  ‘Now get undressed.’

  The girl went out of the room while Brossard stripped off his clothes. When she returned she was wearing black stockings, garter belt and stiletto-heeled shoes.

  ‘Now you will pay for your lack of consideration,’ she said, ‘Lie on the bed,’ reaching into the closet beside the bed.

  As the first stroke of the leather thong seared Pierre Brossard with delicious pain, he heard again the soft voice of Schapper the Gestapo officer: ‘Your hand please.’

  * * *

  At the same time that Pierre Brossard was enjoying his punishment, Hildegard Metz was sitting in her studio-apartment in St Germain des Prés typing a report.

  She had left the office almost immediately because she, like Mayard, knew that Brossard would not be conducting any more business that day.

  She was happy to be home. Away from Brossard, Away from Switzerland.

  The apartment on the top-floor of a dilapidated terrace house was small but personal, as though she assembled here the personality which she so conspicuously lacked outside it. One wall was lined with books and a coal fire burned in an old-fashioned grate. The few pieces of furniture clustered around the fire were old, not antique, a chaise-longue with a loose leg rested against a chest of drawers, and on the walls were a few paintings of Parisien scenes, rain-slicked streets mostly – the French, unlike the English, seemed to revel in their rainfall.

  Hildegard Metz liked rain, too. It isolated her in her room, exaggerated its cosiness. As she typed, rain began to tap on the skylight. She liked to think that an impoverished artist had once painted beneath the skylight; and found fame, or at least recognition.

  She finished her typing and slipped the report into a manilla envelope. On the mantelpiece an ornate gold clock chimed. Two-thirty. In fifteen minutes the shop-assistant from the bookshop, close to the Sorbonne, would call by to pick up the envelope.

  She went into the kitchen to make coffee. From the tiny window she could just see the spire of St Germain des Prés Church, the oldest in Paris.

  While she waited for the kettle to boil, she stared through the rain trickling down the window. She had one reservation about rain: it made you introspective. And your thoughts became dominated by one word. IF.

  If she hadn’t met a man named Karl Danzer she might still be Helga Keller, successful career woman in the male-dominated financial circles of Zurich. Or she might be married to some worthy banker with a rosy-cheeked nanny to look after her two children.

  If Karl Danzer hadn’t been shot dead she might never have spent two years in Moscow. (Karl, she knew, would only have wanted her to make fleeting visits.) Almost certainly, she would never have changed her name, her personality.

  If … The kettle whistled her back from the past. She made the coffee and went back into the little living-room. She took a record from its sleeve – Borodin’s Nocturne—placed it on the record-player and sat beside the fire staring into the glowing coals.

  Sharp at 2.45 the door-bell rang. She moved to the window and peered down into the street. She went downstairs and let the shop assistant into the building. She led him upstairs, re-boiled the kettle of water and made him coffee.

  The shop assistant was young, bearded, intense. She quite liked him but there was no spark between them. They talked in a desultory sort of way for a while. He left at 3 pm for an appointment at 3.45. With the same man, Shilkov, to whom Pierre Brossard had handed his report on the Cesme conference.

  Helga Keller stayed for ten minutes or so gazing into the fire; then Hildegard Metz fetched her umbrella and walked out into the rainswept streets.

  XII

  Sixty-five … 70 … 75 mph ….

  Paul Kingdon pressed his foot on the accelerator as he swung his powder-blue Ferrari out of the last of the roundabouts clustered to the south of London’
s Heathrow Airport and drove down the A 30.

  Speed always relieved his tensions. Bled them. And today there had been a surfeit of tensions. Disastrous annual profit figures, a harrowing discussion with George Prentice, the phone call from Brossard ….

  Why did Brossard want to meet him? Dossiers on the newcomers to Bilderberg? Well that could be arranged – Prentice had been working on all the possibilities. They had even installed an optical wiretrap in the house of a Swedish banker and televised him opening his own wall-safe!

  But am I among the newcomers?

  If not, Brossard could forget the confidential dossiers he wanted. The research wouldn’t be wasted: other Bilderbergers had sought background about their fellows. But he was the only member of the steering committee who had asked for information.

  And if I am to make a sensational come-back I need that invitation to the Château Saint-Pierre.

  80 mph ….

  Kingdon had considered bringing pressure to bear on Brossard. But ammunition was in short supply. Brossard was a mean man and therefore a careful man; he covered his tracks.

  The only weak spot in his defences appeared to be his sexual activities. Weak but not weak enough. If I could reach the source of Brossard’s masochism, Kingdon thought, then it might be different. It had to be guilt, of course, Discover the reason for Brossard’s guilt and you had him wriggling on a hook.

  A chilling thought occurred to Kingdon as he fractionally increased his speed. How much did Brossard know about the decline in the fortunes of the Kingdon Investment Corporation and its subsidiaries? No-one had so far seriously doubted their solvency: They were too big and brawling. But Brossard was a journalist, the owner of one of the most influential financial newspapers in the world —and he had that fat ferret Mayard working for him.

  Ostensibly, Kingdon Investments radiated good health. Just as many a tubercular patient looks like an advertisement for tonic wine. But a balance sheet reflects the past and not the future; much had changed since the Kingdon balance sheet had been struck.

  The disastrous investment (of investors’ money) into an area of the North Sea that contained no oil or gas …. The floating of tax avoidance schemes to save his lieutenants from crippling capital gains taxation …. The investigation by the London Sunday Times into his sanction busting activities in Rhodesia which, Kingdon feared, might extend into other operations. Happily, publication of that august and inquisitive journal had been stopped by an industrial dispute; but doubtless it would return.

  Meanwhile it only needed one hatchet-wielding journalist such as Midas, i.e. Pierre Brossard, or one aggressive creditor to expose the wasting disease behind Kingdon Investment’s buoyant figures. Kingdon had no feeling of guilt about the figures; everyone manipulated balance sheets. Good-will – that inspired euphemism for loss; fixed assets which were wonderfully reassuring except that they earned nothing ….

  Kingdon relaxed a little: the speed was fulfilling its therapy. The Sunday Times was out of action and he would have known if Midas had been on the warpath. As for the annual profit figures …. Well, for the time being he would stick to his original estimate – just over twice what the figures revealed – and go public.

  He was still the whizz-kid of the ’70s. Why not the ’80s as well? Big Business certainly wouldn’t knock him. He might not be Establishment but he was still a torchbearer for Capitalism; in an age when it was considered criminal by some to make a personal fortune, he actually made money for the masses. Or claimed to.

  Behind him in the gathering dusk came the sudden glare of headlights on full beam. Kingdon glanced into the driving mirror and the sudden spurt of confidence spent itself.

  He drew into the side of the road and waited while the white police car pulled in ahead of him.

  ‘ … travelling at a speed of eighty-miles-an-hour …. Is there anything you wish to say?’ One peak-capped policeman knelt beside the door while his colleague examined the road fund licence on the windscreen.

  ‘I didn’t know I was speeding.’

  The policeman wrote down this gem and said: ‘You should keep your eye on the speedometer, sir. Could I see your driving licence?’

  Kingdon slid the green licence in its plastic cover from his wallet and handed it to the policeman. In the other hand he held two £10 notes.

  The policeman eyed the notes. ‘I should put those away if I were you, sir, they might blow away in the wind.’

  Another of the incorruptibles: they were always the danger. Kingdon didn’t subscribe to the theory that everyone had his price; just the same he wondered how the policeman, young and ginger-haired, would have reacted to a bribe of £1,000.

  The policeman wrote down Kingdon’s name and address and told him that he would be reported for consideration for prosecution. ‘And watch the speedometer, sir, this isn’t Silverstone.’

  Kingdon continued his journey at 30 mph and turned into the Wentworth Estate, hidden behind barriers of laurel and rhododendron amid the salad-green fairways of the golf-course.

  He parked the Ferrari in the drive of his mock-Tudor mansion and walked round the gardens where, in the evenings, he liked to cool off after the day’s in-fighting. Another kind of therapy. The air was cool and the first frost of the year had rusted the blooms of the late roses and the chrysanthemums; a few brown oak leaves floated in the swimming pool.

  From beside the pool Kingdon surveyed the house in the dusk. Of all his homes this gave him most pleasure. It was tranquil and dignified and it had breeding – the quality Kingdon’s enemies found lacking in his character. It was, he told himself, the sort of property they would have bought if he hadn’t broken them first.

  He shivered. Therapy was doomed this evening.

  Did George Prentice have a therapy? Kingdon doubted whether he bothered. Prentice was imperturbable, inviolate. It seemed as though he had always been present, cynical, assured and wise. My anchor, Paul Kingdon thought.

  Only once, eight or nine years ago, had Prentice seemed unsettled. Kingdon never knew why; he only knew that, whatever it was – he couldn’t imagine Prentice having a personal crisis – he had come out of it more dispassionate than before.

  Kingdon knew little about his private life. A bachelor, like himself, with no desire for domestic permanency. Leave it at that. Kingdon harboured only one resentment against Prentice: he was always right.

  Like this morning when he had summoned Prentice to his office in the City to discuss the lamentably low annual profits, $16 million instead of the estimated $34 million.

  As he began to retrace his footsteps towards the house, heels crunching faintly on the soggy grass that was just beginning to freeze, Paul Kingdon brooded with admiration and anger on the man who had sat opposite him, dispensed advice – and revealed that he had been invited to the Château Saint-Pierre.

  * * *

  The offices of the Kingdon Investment Corporation occupied half a high-rise building. It was known as Kingdon House and it was uninspiring rather than ugly. Another slab of concrete.

  Only Kingdon’s office had style, and that was painstaking. Wilton carpet, mahogany cupboards, two double-barrelled Parker pistols (circa 1810) on one wall across the room from an oil-painting of some unidentified patriarch.

  The view, however, was spectacular. Especially this morning, with fragile autumn sunshine lighting the rooftops, spires, domes – and skyscrapers – of the Square Mile.

  ‘Well’—Kingdon impatiently tapped the leather-topped desk with a silver paper-knife—‘what do you think?’

  Prentice was gazing at the view. He was, Kingdon admitted, a handsome bastard. Looks that had once been donnish were now hawkish. If only he would take an interest in his clothes. How long, for God’s sake, had he been wearing that herring-bone sports jacket with the leather elbows?

  Prentice said: ‘A pity we can’t adjourn to a coffee shop. It’s that sort of day. The sunshine’s a hundred years old.’

  ‘No poetry for Christ’s sake,’ Kingdon
snapped. He filled a plastic cup with iced water from the dispenser, the only concession to the 20th century in the office. ‘I need your advice, George, your help.’

  Prentice stared at Kingdon. ‘First of all,’ he said, no poetry in his voice now, ‘you tell me what went wrong.’

  ‘You know bloody well what went wrong. Everything. We were among the pioneers in the offshore game. Others followed and improved. Anyone that leads gets left behind. Britain launched the Industrial Revolution. Look at Britain now.’

  ‘I think,’ Prentice said, ‘that you are over-simplifying the situation.’

  ‘The only way to keep ahead is to keep pioneering. New ventures. As you know we’re doing just that. We’re lending securities to brokers who’re short – charging fees of course – and we’re underwriting big financing operations through our banks.’

  ‘Could I put that last one a bit more bluntly?’

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘You’re using your clients’ cash to float bonds which you yourself are pushing.’

  Kingdon shrugged. ‘So what? The name of the game in this country is Unit Trusts. The customer’s got to have trust.’

  ‘And in the States it’s Mutual Funds. The customer should be mutually involved.’ Prentice lit a cigarette. ‘And now you’re into real estate in a big way, eh, Paul?’

  ‘In the States, yes. Why bring that up?’

  ‘Your customers will have to be very trusting in those ventures.’

  Kingdon undid the top button of his shirt, loosened his tie and put his feet on the desk. ‘I have their trust.’ ‘Swampland in the Bahamas? The name of this particular game is brokerage, isn’t it, Paul? You’re buying with mortgages but taking your brokerage fees on the total cost, i.e. if you buy the Eiffel Tower for ten million dollars and borrow the remaining thirty million you take five per cent of 40 million. Which is two million dollars for Paul Kingdon and associates.’

  ‘Not bad business, eh, George?’

  ‘It could be called exploitation,’ Prentice remarked. ‘But I’m sure you haven’t brought me here just to give you advice. No one does that. They merely seek approval of what they intend to do anyway. What do you intend doing, Paul?’