The Marketmaker

by Michael Ridpath

  Luís sighed, and rubbed his temples. ‘OK’ He nodded.

  I slept in the guest room at Luís’s apartment that night. Or, rather, I didn’t sleep, but I lay down under some covers and let my brain tumble.

  The kidnappers called at nine the next morning. Luís told them he couldn’t raise the cash that day, he would need more time. He also asked them to tell him the name of Isabel’s favourite teddy bear when she was a girl. I could hear the abusive threats down the phone at this.

  Luís was white when he put the receiver down. ‘They said that if we don’t drop off the money at two o’clock tomorrow morning, Isabel will die. They won’t wait another day.’

  I began to think that I had given him the wrong advice.

  Only Nelson was unconcerned. ‘If they have her, we will hear back from them soon,’ he assured us.

  ‘But what about the two o’clock deadline?’

  ‘Ignore it. They can’t be serious.’

  But we didn’t hear back from them all day.

  I stayed the night again. Luís seemed to want me there with him when the deadline passed, and I was happy to oblige. We were both up and awake at two o’clock. Of course the phone didn’t ring. We exchanged grim glances as the kidnappers’ deadline ticked away.

  The waiting was beginning to take its toll. Both Luís and I were suffering from lack of sleep, although by now I was so exhausted that at last I could begin to doze for short periods. Luís just walked around, looking gaunt. And it was only day three. Cordelia had gone home the day before, but insisted that we call her with any news. By Wednesday night we had still heard nothing. Nelson had returned to his own home that afternoon, with instructions to be contacted if anything happened.

  Supper was an omelette and salad. Luís didn’t eat much of his. During the last few days he had managed to keep his outward composure, apart from the show of tension with Nelson just after the kidnappers had given their first demand. Then, suddenly, as the two of us sat in silence round the dinner table, his lip quivered, and he put his head in his hands. He began to sob.

  I watched in silence. Tentatively I stretched out a hand and touched his sleeve.

  ‘She’s dead,’ he said.

  ‘No, she isn’t. Maybe they’ll call later.’

  ‘Why should they? It was a simple question. All they had to do was ask her and call me back. They said if I didn’t pay them by two last night she’d die. And she’s dead.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s a hoax. Maybe they aren’t the real kidnappers.’

  ‘How can that be? We’ve been through that. Nobody else knows.’

  We had been through that. Then a thought struck me.

  ‘Why did they call me at the hotel?’

  ‘They followed you from there,’ Luís said. ‘They knew you were staying there.’

  ‘Yes, but they could have got your number from Isabel. Why didn’t they?’

  Luís was silent for a moment. He brightened. And then his face clouded over. ‘Unless she’s dead. Then she couldn’t tell them.’

  ‘Luís, there’s no reason for them to kill her!’ My brain, which had been turning somersaults for the last three days, suddenly settled. ‘I know! It was the taxi driver. He saw the kidnap and drove off. He must have told some friends about it, and tried his luck at a ransom demand.’

  Luís listened.

  ‘I’ll call Nelson and see what he thinks.’

  But before I could reach the phone, it rang. I froze. Luís grabbed it.

  I picked up the second earphone Nelson had attached. It was a different voice. Younger, calmer. Luís spoke for about two minutes. I couldn’t understand what was said, but Luís smiled as he put the phone down.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It was another man. He said his name was Zico. He says he has Isabel. He wants a ransom. I asked the teddy bear question, and he didn’t seem concerned. He said he would call back with the answer.’

  I felt a surge of relief. So the first voice had been a hoax. I much preferred Zico’s voice. He sounded calmer, more rational.

  ‘Zico? Isn’t that the name of a soccer player?’

  ‘Yes,’ Luís smiled grimly. ‘He was brilliant. He used to play for Flamengo. My club.’

  ‘How much does he want?’

  Luís frowned. ‘Fifty million dollars.’

  ‘Fifty million! Christ! Have you got that much?’

  ‘Technically my stake in Horizonte may be worth that much, but there’s no way I could get at it without selling the bank, which would be difficult. No, impossible.’

  ‘Still, it’s a start,’ I said.

  Luís smiled. ‘Yes. It’s a start.’

  19

  The next couple of days were a relief. Zico called back within half an hour with the correct answer to Luís’s question – Lulu. He made threats about how Isabel would die if fifty million dollars wasn’t paid by the end of the week, but Luís didn’t believe him and neither did I. We were just glad that the process had begun which would lead eventually to Isabel’s release.

  We sat round the breakfast table with Nelson. Luís was almost smiling.

  ‘Now we have to discuss tactics,’ Nelson said. He was wearing a particularly bright purple shirt. Tufts of grey chest hair peeked through its open neck. He spoke carefully and rapidly, very much in control. He had proved himself to us with his suspicion of the hoax ransom demand; it was becoming easier to trust him.

  ‘OK,’ said Luís.

  ‘We must decide how much you are prepared to pay for Isabel.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ Luís protested. ‘The answer is everything.’

  ‘No, that’s not the answer,’ said Nelson. ‘Remember, this is a commercial transaction. The answer is the lowest amount you can get away with. Look, the kidnappers can’t know exactly how much money you have. We will come to a point where we have to say this is our final offer. Then, provided the kidnappers believe us, they will hand over your daughter.’

  Luís took a deep breath. ‘OK.’

  ‘Good. Now, how much do you think you could get your hands on? In cash.’

  Suddenly I felt awkward. Here I was about to hear all about the personal business of a man I hardly knew, in fact the owner of a rival bank to my employer. I began to stand up. ‘Perhaps I should leave you to it…’

  Luís held up his hand. ‘No. Stay. Please.’

  I paused. He meant it. Nelson nodded. ‘OK,’ I said, and sat down.

  ‘I can probably raise up to five million dollars,’ said Luís. ‘Maybe a little more. But it will mean talking to some of my colleagues. I’ll have to borrow money.’

  ‘Good,’ said Nelson. ‘I’d hope to get away with a lot less than that.’ He pulled out his notebook and biro. ‘We should think about some numbers. The average settlement at the moment in Rio is about two hundred thousand dollars. But I think they know how wealthy you are, or at least they can make a good guess. The first demand was high.’

  ‘I can’t pay fifty million,’ said Luís.

  ‘Nor will they expect you to. Another rule of thumb is that the final settlement is about one tenth of the initial sum offered. In this case that’s five million dollars. But that’s still too high for the market in Rio right now.’

  ‘I could pay it if necessary. Somehow.’

  Nelson held up his hand. ‘No. I think two million should be fine. You should be able to claim a million back from Dekker’s insurers anyway, although you will probably have to put up the cash to start with.’

  ‘Perhaps Dekker could provide it?’ I suggested.

  Luís’s eyes narrowed for an instant. ‘No, thank you. I don’t want to borrow money from Ricardo Ross.’

  The speed of his reaction surprised me, but in a way I was pleased to see that he could still think shrewdly.

  Nelson and Luís argued back and forth on the target figure, and eventually settled for three million dollars.

  ‘OK. We have a number,’ said Nelson. ‘We can’t expect to come to an agreement of the pric
e too quickly. We have to let the kidnappers string things out a bit, feel that they’ve had a proper negotiation. Otherwise they won’t believe three million is our final offer.’

  Luís opened his mouth to protest.

  ‘Offering more money won’t get Isabel released any faster, believe me.’

  Luís saw the logic and nodded.

  ‘I suggest we start off with a million dollars, then move it up in half-million chunks until we get to two million. Then we need to raise our offer in ever smaller amounts so that it seems as though each rise is a struggle. We will aim to stop the negotiations just short of three million.’

  It seems a long way to come down from fifty million to one million,’ said Luís doubtfully.

  ‘Believe me, one million is a big first offer for a kidnapping.’

  We believed him. Zico called on Thursday night. He treated Luís’s offer of one million dollars with derision. He said he knew that Luís owned Banco Horizonte. Luís explained that he only owned part of it, and that he couldn’t sell his stake. He performed well. He sounded cool at the beginning, and then as the conversation went on he displayed more tension. His assertion that he couldn’t raise more than a million sounded credible to me.

  I listened to the tape played back. Although I couldn’t understand what was said, I was fascinated by Zico’s voice. Calm, measured, cold, intelligent. The compulsory threats to Isabel had none of the mindless violence of the first hoax caller. But the coldness was menacing in its own way. Zico wouldn’t kill Isabel unless it suited him. But if it suited him …

  The police came. They took the tape of the conversation away for analysis of Zico’s voice. They had traced the call to a mobile phone somewhere in a crowded shopping street in the northern zone. Mobile phones were common in Rio. The land-line system was so bad that its citizens had been driven to using them instead. And they were virtually impossible to trace.

  A dozen policemen were searching the Tijuca forest but so far they had found nothing.

  Maria fussed over both Luís and me. She seemed to be taking it well, until she would suddenly run from the room, trying to hold back tears. Cordelia would come round for a couple of hours every day, but she found the waiting stressful. She had become withdrawn, a different person from the tough woman I had met at the children’s shelter. She had stopped going there. Just for the time being, she said.

  I stayed at Luís’s apartment during the day, and my hotel at night. A couple of times I went out for walks through the wealthy streets of Ipanema. It was good to get out into the world, to see people shopping at the expensive boutiques, to wander past the up-market stalls selling flowers or rugs or Indian jewellery. Ipanema was a forest of luxury apartment buildings crammed together between the beach and the lagoon. Every now and then an old colonial-style building squatted among them, but old by Ipanema’s standards probably meant less than fifty years. I found a pleasant bar in one of these and stopped for a beer. I had read somewhere that ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ had been written by a man who hung out in a bar somewhere round here, watching the local talent go by. There were indeed many young, tanned and lovely girls who walked past. But they just reminded me of Isabel.

  I tried to imagine where she was, what kind of state she was in. Was she well fed? Was she allowed to wash? It was hard for us here, it must be harder for her there. But she was a strong woman mentally. If anyone could cope with an ordeal like that, she could.

  I shouldn’t have left her alone. I shouldn’t have left her alone!

  I avoided Ipanema beach. After the kidnap, I had forgotten my stabbing there. I wanted it to stay forgotten. My fears of money-laundering and concerns about Dekker were pushed to the back of my mind. I just wanted Isabel to be freed.

  I spoke to Ricardo regularly, keeping him informed of the progress of negotiations. It was comforting to hear Ricardo’s calm voice every day. He seemed impressed with Nelson as a negotiator. He was happy to continue footing the bill for the hotel. He had spoken to Luís, who had made a firm request that I be allowed to stay.

  I spoke to Jamie, too. He was sympathetic. He said the whole office was in shock. But life had to go on. In particular, selling the Mexico deal had to go on. It wasn’t going well, and there were still a lot of bonds on Dekker’s books. The situation in Mexico itself was looking rocky: people were beginning to ask questions about whether the government would be able to refinance its borrowings that were maturing this year.

  I didn’t care.

  The police came again. They had fitted Zico’s voice to two previous recordings they had taken of kidnappers. In both cases the victims had been treated well and eventually released. This lifted Luís’s spirits. And mine.

  But the waiting began to weigh heavily on us. It had been only four days since Isabel had been kidnapped, but it seemed much longer. Nelson warned us to be prepared for a long wait. These cases took weeks, sometimes months to resolve, not days. Nonetheless every time the phone rang, Luís, Cordelia and I thought it would bring an agreement for Isabel’s release. Of course it didn’t.

  At Cordelia’s suggestion, we went up to Luís’s fazenda near Petrópolis for the weekend. It was what the family usually did, and she felt a change of scene would be good for Luís. He was worried that Zico wouldn’t be able to get in touch with us, but she pointed out that if he called the apartment and someone gave him the number in Petrópolis, he could hardly object.

  Luís picked me up from the hotel late Friday afternoon. His chauffeur took us to the compact Santos Dumont airport in the centre of the city. I was surprised, Petrópolis was only forty kilometres away, no one had explained we would be flying. Luís was distracted as he led me through the airport and into a little van that took us to a blue helicopter. It had five seats, and Cordelia and her husband were already waiting for us. I climbed in too, pretending that this was the most natural thing in the world. Within a couple of minutes the helicopter had eased itself into the air and we were scudding across Guanabara Bay.

  *

  Twenty minutes later we were up above the mountains. Below us roads and buildings wriggled like snakes through the folds of the hills. We descended so that the forest-clad mountainsides rose on either side. We burst round a corner and there, beneath a sheer rock-face, was a large white house surrounded by a lush garden dotted with trees and a lake. Behind the house was a patch of flat grass with a large white H painted on it.

  The fazenda had been the focal point of a substantial coffee estate. Its rooms were large and cool. The furnishings were tasteful without being opulent: dark colonial Brazilian wood, oriental vases, French nineteenth-century paintings. It was a few degrees cooler than Rio, but it was still warm by my standards. Nevertheless a huge fire roared in the sitting room.

  As soon as we arrived, Luís relaxed visibly. I could understand why Cordelia had insisted on it. It was his routine to come up here and unwind on a Friday evening; and unwind was what he needed to do now.

  That evening the atmosphere was almost normal. Cordelia’s husband, Fernando, was good company. He was a lawyer who had a wry sense of humour, and an inability to take himself, or Brazil, too seriously. He doted on Cordelia, though.

  We were laughing, actually laughing, at dinner, clustered round one end of a ridiculously long dining table, when the phone rang.

  There was an extension in the dining room. We could tell from Luís’s reaction who it was. Luís was prepared. He acted distraught but in control. The conversation lasted less than two minutes. Zico said one million dollars was insulting. Luís said fifty million was absurd. Zico wouldn’t budge. Luís upped his offer to a million and a half. He wanted Zico to know that he understood the game, and he was playing.

  Immediately afterwards, Luís called Nelson, who said he would be up the next day. Once again, he was encouraging. According to Nelson, everything was going to plan.

  The next morning, Saturday, Luís showed me round the garden. It stretched up a gentle incline from the house for what seemed like half a mil
e, until it merged into a forest. It took my breath away. On either side and in front loomed large, absurdly shaped mountains, obviously with the same geological provenance as those that surrounded Rio. One had a sheer rock-face, the others were covered with trees on their lower slopes and meadows higher up. The garden itself was a valley of lawns, trees and shrubs, with a long lake down one side. The air was cool and clear, though a little damp, and filled with the sound of running water and birds squabbling. There were swans, both white and black, flamingos, exotic ducks and a variety of other types that I didn’t recognize.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

  ‘It was designed by Burle Marx, a German who came here during the war. It is extraordinary. There are over two thousand species of plant in this garden. And it has seen some wonderful parties in its time.’

  I glanced at Luís. He didn’t seem a great entertainer. He seemed a tall, lonely man, standing up well to adversity.

  ‘How long have you owned it?’

  ‘About five years.’

  It must have cost serious money. I knew that Isabel came from a wealthy family, but I had no idea what that wealth translated to. It was strange to me to see a house and garden like this being used as a home. In England it would have been dotted with nice ladies in tweed skirts gently ushering visitors This Way.

  Luís read my thoughts. ‘We didn’t always have money. Or, at least, I didn’t. I come from an old family, one of the quatrocentonas, the Portuguese families that came over to Brazil four hundred years ago. My great-grandfather had plantations in the state of São Paulo that were as big as some European countries. He had thirty thousand slaves. Then came emancipation. Then the collapse of coffee prices. Then the crash of ’twenty-nine. My grandfather wasn’t astute. My brother still runs the rump of the property, a small coffee plantation. But I left.’

  There was a kerfuffle as a white swan tried to mount a black one. Luís laughed. ‘True Brazilians. You see!’

  ‘You came to Rio?’ I prompted.

  ‘Yes. I went to university there, and joined a big bank. I found money fascinating. For many years now Brazil’s financial system has been pretty complex. With inflation and interest rates at several thousand per cent a year, there were opportunities to make a lot of money. In nineteen eighty-six I decided to make some of that money for myself, and so I started Banco Horizonte. As you know, it’s now one of the biggest investment banks in Brazil, and in fact we’re beginning to think about expanding overseas. So that’s how I can afford all this.’