True (2004)

by Cordy, Michael

  'It's genuine,' Helmut said, without hesitation. He told Trapani about Bacci's presentation and the trial he had arranged in Antibes. Then he tapped the folder. 'I had Max followed.'

  There was admiration in Trapani's dark eyes. 'You had your own son followed?'

  'I didn't know what the drug would make him do or say.' He opened the folder and showed the contents to Trapani. A video still showed Max and Isabella standing on a beach, eyes closed, caressing each other's faces. Isabella was tall and athletic, but she looked tiny beside Max in his black wetsuit. Another showed them dressed in jeans and T-shirts kissing passionately on the street. In another they were in a club, Max sitting in the corner, watching Isabella dancing in a group. The anxious expression on his face was so alien to Helmut he found it hard to recognize his son.

  'If you knew my son as I do you'd understand that these pictures speak volumes. Max never shows emotion -- let alone in public -- and he'd never even met the girl before.' He pointed to Stein's neat diary notes, which detailed Max's every moment from when he had arrived in Antibes. 'They were virtually inseparable.'

  'What does Max say about this?' said Trapani.

  Helmut remembered the curt message his son had left a few hours ago: 'It works. Have returned to my house in St Laurent-du-Var to get my head straight. Contact you in a few days.' He chuckled. 'He's convinced. So am I.'

  Trapani nodded slowly. 'How do you plan to exploit the drug?'

  'Your cousin wants to get it approved for use as a mainstream drug, like an emotional Viagra. He sees it as a cure for divorce, broken homes and unhappiness. He wants to spread love, banish loneliness, and be recognized for it.'

  Trapani smiled incredulously. 'And you? What do Kappel Privat-bank want to do with it?'

  Helmut lit a cigarette and took a long drag. He kept his face impassive. We always follow our clients' wishes.'

  Trapani stepped close to him and his mask of suave charm dissolved. 'Cut the crap, Helmut. My cousin might be a genius but he's also a fool. I'm not. I don't know what you're planning to do with his drug but I want a share of the profits. Don't forget, you're just a banker, Helmut. A little man who looks after big men's money. You're a servant to your clients' needs.' Trapahi jabbed him in the chest with a forefinger. 'And the Trapanis are among your oldest, most important clients. You serve me.'

  As he returned the Sicilian's black stare, Helmut remained silent, his cold blue eyes absorbing the heat of Trapani's anger.

  Trapani lowered his gaze first. 'So,' he said, 'what's my share?'

  Helmut didn't blink.

  'I demand forty per cent,' Trapani said.

  Silence.

  Trapani frowned and waited, raking his fingers through his hair. 'I'll accept a third. But that's final. Any less and I'll advise my cousin to pull out. I'll fund this project myself. You'll get nothing. I'll close my account and take my business elsewhere.'

  Helmut's smile did not reach his eyes.

  'So what do you say, Helmut? Do we have a deal?'

  Slowly Helmut shook his head.

  Trapani's jaw muscles clenched. 'What's your offer, then? What do I get from this?'

  'Nothing.' Helmut paused. 'Not even your life.'

  Trapani stepped back. "What the fuck are you talking about? He glanced over his shoulder and called to his bodyguards. When there was no reply he hurried back to the clearing. The car doors were open and both bodyguards lay sprawled on the blood-soaked earth, heads pushed back, eyes staring. Their throats had been slit from ear to ear. The driver sat in his seat, hands still on the wheel. He had been virtually decapitated. The windscreen was smeared with a translucent red glaze. Trapani stood rooted to the ground as though unable to process what he was seeing.

  Then Stein appeared from behind the trees, flanked by two of his silver-haired henchmen. Each looked as if he'd stepped out of a slaughterhouse. Stein's eyepatch, greying hair and business suit were slick with blood. In his right hand he held a Kukri: the razor-sharp curve of its gleaming steel was dull with blood. Stein smiled at Helmut: the satisfied smile of a job well done. Helmut nodded in acknowledgement. The bodies wouldn't be found for days. The Corsicans would deny the killings, but the corpses bore their signature.

  Stein stepped towards Trapani but Helmut stopped him. 'Stein, you and your men have excelled yourselves. Leave Marco to me.'

  As Helmut pulled the blade from the sheath on his ankle, Trapani's face grew deathly pale. He reached frantically for his gun but he was too ,slow. Helmut stepped forward and sliced the razor-sharp blade across his jugular. Trapani fell to his knees, clutching at his throat, trying to stem the blood spurting from the artery. A gurgling sound issued from his wound as if he was trying to speak -- or scream.

  Given the bank's precarious finances, Helmut was taking a gamble in eradicating a major client, but he calculated that control of the NiL drug would more than compensate for any loss of revenue caused by Trapani's departure. If he was to move the business to a new level he had to take risks, as Dieter Kappel had done before him.

  He knelt beside Trapani, oblivious of the blood, forcing the Sicilian to look into his eyes and register his face as the last he would see before oblivion claimed him. We weren't just bankers in the past, Marco,' he whispered, prodding the man's chest until Trapani toppled on to his back, twitching in his final death throes. Helmut tapped the black folder under his arm. 'And we won't just be bankers in the future.'

  THE SAME MORNING

  THERE WAS A KNOCK AT THE DOOR OF ISABELLA'S HOTEL BEDROOM.

  'You awake in there?'

  Isabella opened her eyes. There was a brief pause, then she heard Phoebe's voice again. 'Wakey, wakey. I know it's early, you two, but the yacht leaves at eight, and if you're late we'll sail to Monaco without you.'

  Isabella got out of the bed, put on a robe and opened the door.

  Phoebe looked at the crumpled bed. 'Where's Max? I thought--'

  'He's gone.'

  'Where?'

  'Said he had to get back to Zurich. Something urgent at work, apparently.'

  When?'

  'About five this morning.'

  Phoebe frowned. 'Are you seeing him again?'

  'Don't know. Probably not.'

  Phoebe sat beside her on the bed. What did the bastard do?'

  'Nothing.'

  'I don't understand. You both looked so smitten. Hit-by-a-thunderbolt stuff. What happened?'

  'I honestly don't know. It just changed.'

  Phoebe frowned again and put her arm around her friend. 'You okay, Izzy? How do you feel?'

  'I'm not sure.' And she wasn't. All she knew was that something strange and outside her control had happened, a subtle but irrevocable shift in the fabric of her life. For the last two days, right up to when she had fallen asleep last night, Max had become a part of her, like another limb. But this morning the intensity had evaporated. They had gone to bed as lovers and woken as strangers.

  She had even pretended to be asleep when he had crept out of her room. He had left a brief note, explaining that he had to return to Zurich, but made no mention of meeting again. She felt so different this morning from how she had felt last night that she was unsure whether to be upset or relieved. Mostly she felt foolish: in the cold light of day, the whole episode smacked of one of those ghastly holiday flings people had when they were on the rebound. Along with her passion for Max, her holiday mood had gone. She felt a sudden urge to return to Milan and throw herself into her work.

  Want to talk about it?' Phoebe asked.

  Isabella walked to the bathroom and took off her robe. 'No, I'm fine. It was just a holiday romance. No one was hurt.' But when she stepped into the shower and closed her eyes, she saw only his face.

  3 SEPTEMBER

  THE KAPPELCEMETERY WAS AT THE NORTHERN END OF THE SCHLOS Kappel estate on a raised plateau overlooking the large house and the glittering lake. In the distance Zurich stretched out like a toy town. As a child Max had always wondered why the dead needed such a prime
location with such sweeping views.

  Three days had passed since Antibes, and it was late afternoon when he returned to the Schloss. The air was cool, and the leaves were turning brown. As he walked up the path to the northern plateau he saw the first mausoleum's brass dome gleaming in the weak sunlight. Each housed a past leader of the Kappel dynasty. Some were constructed in marble and stone, others in granite, copper and brass. But all had been built with one objective in mind: to outlast the remains they contained.

  As a boy, whenever he came home from boarding-school in England, his father would take him round the mausoleums, making him memorize where each of his ancestors was buried. Then he had to walk the dark corridors of the Schloss, matching a portrait to its mausoleum, giving names and dates. The focal point of this exercise was always Dieter Kappel. Whenever Max had passed his portrait, his father had made him retell the story of how Dieter had led the family back from Italy and saved it from extinction. At times it seemed that his entire childhood had been one long lesson. At school he was taught the dates of each king and queen of England, tracing the royal family back a thousand years, and during his holidays he had to learn the dates and lineage of his own family, going back almost half as long.

  Max breathed in the mild air, automatically listing names and dates as he scanned the mausoleums. In the far corner, workmen in yellow hard hats toiled on the latest. His father had begun work on it as soon as he was diagnosed with cancer, and Max knew he was determined that it should outshine every other memorial to the dead -- past, present and future.

  Although it was incomplete, the twenty-foot cone of photosensitive glass was already a spectacular sight. In the sunlight it dazzled like a vast, brilliant gemstone, and for a moment Max forgot about Antibes and his raw, jumbled thoughts. Through the translucent glass shell he could see a large plinth. Like a modern pharaoh his father had arranged for his body to be preserved permanently for posterity. He had hired the German anatomist Gerhard Heyne to plastinate his body when he died, replacing all its Moods and fluids with resin. It would then stand fully clothed on the plinth, looking down for ever on his estate. It was Helmut's attempt to achieve bis own immortality.

  Max glanced behind him to a low, wide, modern building beside the Schloss. His father's temperature-controlled garage housed at least six cars. On the drive outside, a servant polished one of the racing-red Ferraris. He turned back to the glass mausoleum. For all the Kappel family's adherence to discretion, discipline and control, Max suspected that an exhibitionist streak ran through his father's veins: at heart Helmut was a frustrated showman.

  'Max, you're back,' his father called to him, from the grass verge below the crystal cone.

  Max noticed his father appeared different, younger: his haircut was shorter than usual and his light blue eyes were electric with excitement. He scrutinized Max and laid a hand on his shoulder. 'You look like you've been to hell and back. What was it like?'

  Max didn't know what to say. How could he explain to his father, who didn't believe in love, what it was like to be in its thrall? He couldn't explain it to himself. There had been sublime moments with Isabella Bacci, but his memory of them was overwhelmed bythesensory overload and raw vulnerability he still felt. His forty-eight hours with her had been the most intense of his life -certainly since his mother's death.

  It was one thing to dive and surrender to the euphoria of the deep. It was something else to take a drug that stirred feelings he hadn't previously been aware of into turmoil. The experience had threatened every certainty he relied on and he could feel panic welling inside him. He was afraid of nothing in the world but this had come from within himself, which unnerved him.

  The drug had made him feel. It had made him care. It had made him weak. He was glad to have returned to his normal self.

  His father gave the delighted smile of a teacher who has seen his pupil grasp a valuable lesson. 'I've always warned you about love, Max. Like Professor Bacci himself said, it's a genuine sickness, a plague. Even Plato called love a serious disease of the mind.'

  'Well, I'm cured now and I won't go through that again.'

  Helmut patted him on the back. 'That's why you should marry Delphine Chevalier.'

  'I guess.'

  His father's pale eyes lit up. 'So, this nature-identical love really works.'

  Helmut's excitement was infectious. 'Yes, Vater. All we have to do now is decide what we want to do with it.'

  'Excellent.'

  THE WARM GLOW OF LIMITLESS POSSIBILITY BURNED WITHIN Helmut Kappel. His heir had returned unscathed by the drug, but living proof of its power. Trapani had been silenced. And Joachim, with Comvec, would master Bacci's technology.

  'Do you know what this means, Max? The future of Kappel Privatbank is secure. It is exactly what we needed. Professor Bacci's preposterous love drug will save us.' He led Max down to the terrace and poured him a drink. 'The drug allows an individual to possess any person they desire. With it we can make anyone we choose fall helplessly, obsessively in love with anyone else. Our family may have risen above the need for love, but it's still the most powerful, insidious emotion. Think about it, Max! We have the power to grant a client the undying infatuation and devotion of whomever he desires. Not just sex but so-called true love -- for ever. So long as the client is willing to pay, he can possess anyone his heart desires. Anyone in the world.' He thought through the implications. 'But that's not all. We can even decide who he desires. We can control the entire market -- demand and supply.'

  'It's important that we keep the drug's existence secret,' said Max, 'especially from our clients. We can sell them its effects and benefits but never the drug itself. We must always administer it ourselves, covertly, without their knowledge.'

  Helmut nodded. 'As we've done consistently with poisons.'

  'Exactly. This plays to our strengths and also means we maintain complete control over the drug and its effects, allowing us to use it again and again.'

  Helmut scratched his chin. 'How do we convince clients that the drug works without telling them about it?'

  'By using emotional blackmail. We give each client a free trial -- an irresistible, addictive taste of the drug's benefits -- and once they're hooked we threaten to take it away. Unless they pay. A lot.'

  Helmut smiled. 'We could hold a blind auction. Make each client bid against himself.'

  'Yes,' agreed Max. 'We could invite them to a secluded controlled location, perhaps an exclusive alpine hotel like the one in Zermatt we booked a couple of years ago. You remember when we held a skiing weekend for select clients?'

  Helmut stood up and paced the terrace as Max reached for his laptop. 'We tell our target clients it's a loyalty weekend, a thank-you,' he said, 'and we inject each of them with the genetic profile of a pre-selected woman. We let their desire grow, men introduce the women. For two whole days their hearts' desires are sated and they gain a glimpse of heaven. Finally, when the trial period ends we explain that an auction is in play.' He was warming to the scheme. 'They won't know they haven't any competition. Our lovesick clients will bid whatever we demand to secure the love of their lives. The fear of losing the greatest happiness they've ever known will be too much to resist. And since they'll know nothing of our drug we can use it on other clients, again and again. We both know who the first clients should be.'

  As Max bent over the laptop and accessed the bank's client database, Helmut listed the names, 'Hudsucker, Corbasson, Lysenko, Nadolny. The bastards who snubbed our bicentennial celebrations and threaten to close their accounts. How much is each of them worth? In total -- not just the accounts they have with us.'

  Max checked their records. 'Each has assets in excess of one billon US dollars,' he said. 'Two in excess of three billion.'

  'Excellent. We'll punish them and take their money.'

  For the rest of the evening, and throughout the long cool night, Helmut sat on the terrace with his firstborn, drinking malt whisky and plotting how best to exploit the drug. They m
ade notes, researched the target clients, and argued over what had to be done. By the time the sun rose over the lake they had arrived at a strategy with which he was satisfied.

  At six thirty in the morning Helmut wiped his eyes. 'So we know what we want to do with Professor Bacci's drug, but what do we tell him?'

  Whatever he wants to hear,' said Max. 'I'll develop a dummy business plan that reflects his vision. He need never know what we're really going to do with the drug.'

  Helmut sipped his whisky. 'In that case I suggest we call a family meeting next week.'