A man in his fifties with bushy eyebrows that would most certainly have grown together if not for frequent visits to the beauty parlor. Gray-green eyes stare directly at the camera, eyes that seemed not to be willing to shy away from anything. He had dark hair with a tint of red in it and a mouth curled in an ironic, almost cruel smile. He wore an open shirt, showing pale skin and a hairy chest.
Thomas taps another couple of keys and text shows up on another wall. “This is an interview only a few days old. James Hampton, CEO of Hampton Partners Ltd. has recently acquired another twenty percent of the stock of Benjamin Capital, making Hampton the majority shareholder. ‘I look forward to continuing the great collaboration with the leadership team at Benjamin’s,’ Mr. Hampton told us before he rushed into his chauffeured car.”
“Please find something less tabloid, Thomas!” Francis mock-moans.
During the next hour, they put together a rough outline of a man who is highly successful in the financial markets. But a man who seems to have come from nowhere. They can’t find any references to his youth, his schooling, and nothing about his private life or pictures older than ten years. James Hampton seems to be a man who sprung out, fully matured as a fifty-something investor.
Francis stretches, his long body spilling over the chair. “All right, we have enough to start with. Thomas, get a couple of the kids to dig deeper. There must be a story behind him. The internet is not that forgiving. And Jo, please come up with a plan for a more direct approach.”
Chapter 25
James decides the journalist’s handshake is unusually firm as he ushers her into his private office.
She looks around, taking in the masculine elegance of the room. Jo notes the wall of fame with photos of James shaking hands or laughing with titans of industry, political leaders, and even a rock star of stratospheric fame. She displays no emotion.
Not impressed, asks James to himself, or determined not to show that she is? He decides the former. He’s had her vetted, of course, and even though he himself has not encountered her before, her bylines are impressive, if rather few. She has interviewed some of the world’s financial leaders and top executives for the big twenty. A sense of pride steals through him, but he shuts it down immediately. Be cool!
“This your Danish office?”
James nods. “And my residence. I only have a few staff in Denmark, so it makes sense to combine office and home.”
She nods to a chair with a questioning glance.
“Yes, of course. Please!”
“Thank you.”
“Will you have coffee or tea?” He gestures toward the matching set of silver pots on the low table.
“Tea, please!”
The journalist lays out her iPhone, an Olympus voice recorder, and a note pad.
He smiles, “Well prepared, are we?”
“We always are,” she responds with a thin smile. “Are you ready?”
My God, thinks James, this is going to be a long afternoon. A long and boring afternoon.
“What has made you so successful?”
That is your opening question, he marvels. Sweep the field wide, why don’t you? Aloud he says, “I have been fortunate.” His hands spread apologetically, indicating that his success is none of his responsibility, just something that happened to him.
“And of course,” he continues, “there has been hard work and sleepless nights and some very, very good people around me.”
She looks irritated. I am being too glib for her, he thinks. She is too experienced to buy this shit.
She clears her throat. “Ahem, these very good people. Tell me about them.”
He does. He tells the same story he has told many times before. About Patrick, the young boy who literally camped outside his office until James had promised to give him a job. About Stella, who entered the company as a Girl Friday and today heads the financial department and acts as his official number two. He talks about the disillusioned Harwich, who went bust with a competing outfit, but today is the most loyal head of product development. He can talk for hours about his staff—his real and imagined staff. He can talk her tired.
“—All right, I get it,” she interrupts as he launches into the narrative of another one of his people. “Let’s change tracks. How exactly, I mean specifically and step-by-step, did you make your first mil? Not the hard work, not the people, but the business. What was it?”
“Ahr, Sarah—may I call you Sarah? Good. You see, the first million is not difficult like people imagine. Just a figure of speech nowadays. It’s left over from post-war thinking. The difficult thing is…” he holds up his left hand, counting on his fingers, “One: to hold onto that first million. Two: to make the second million. Three: to hold on to the second million. Repeat ad nauseam.” He knows that she knows that he is being sarcastic, and he knows she will punish him for it. But he can’t help himself.
“I see.” Her cold, blue eyes rest on him. “But still—easy, hard, figure of speech—how exactly did you make that first million? Or is that a trade secret? Or…something not to be known by the authorities?” She got him.
He can’t wriggle out of this one. He smiles with respect at her.
“It really was a break, Sarah, a lucky break. I happened to be in Stalingrad when a shipment of perishable goods got stuck due to lack of engine parts for the truck. Sounds crazy, I know, but that’s how it happened. I had friends in the industry and soon had the truck fixed. In the meantime, I had an opportunity to speak to the shipper and learn a bit about the trade. Just enough to whet my appetite. I was young, hungry, and had nothing else to do, so I convinced him that I could oversee his shipments to Europe in the future against a cut of the profit. He accepted. And that was—specifically and technically—how I made my first million.”
“Russian money! Were the mob involved?”
“Oh, no, this was back when Russia was still the Soviet Union and the idea of the Russian mob not even conceived.”
“The mob came later then?” she asked.
Fuck, she was a bit too aggressive, and way too sharp.
“The mob never came, Sarah.” He gave her his most solemn look.
“If you say so.” My God, she is frigid, he thinks.
“I do.”
“All right, what about the future? Where are Hampton Partners going?”
“Of course, Sarah, I cannot tell you our strategy. But I can reveal that we are looking with great interest into China and what is happening there. They seem to have grown from toddlers to mature grown-ups in a few years. It is exciting.”
“Scary, more like,” she mumbles.
He heard her but couldn’t resist: “Sorry?”
“Nothing. What has been the greatest challenge so far?” she asks without looking up.
James groans silently. He has a strong feeling that they are playing a game both of them detest. Nobody, not even an ambitious journalist, can be so uptight and disapproving of business. And nobody can be as sleek and glib as he is being. We are dancing, he thinks, and we will go on dancing till one of us drops.
Two hours later, the journalist reaches forward to the low table and switches off first the iPhone, then the voice recorder. James gets a glimpse of dark lace against white, soft skin. Nice to see there is a woman behind the controlled, uptight exterior, he smiles to himself. He is strangely disappointed that the interview is over, even though there had been none of the banter or humor that is usually part of non-confrontational interviews such as this one. He is not ready to accept that he failed to charm a woman. He usually charms women. And men too, for that matter.
He allows the journalist to collect her things and stand up before he gets up too. He allows her to set the pace. Her handshake is again cool and firm, and her gaze is direct yet gives nothing away. Bloody cool customer, he says to himself, with a sudden desire to get downstairs to the kitchen to a chilled glass of white wine.
“I’ll see you out,” he says and opens the door for her.
“There really is
no need,” she answers.
“Yes, there is,” he smiles at her back. “There is my need for politeness. Also, everybody else has left for the weekend, so I naturally need to make sure the premises are secure and free of industrial spies.” His joke falls flat to the ground.
He walks behind her along the corridor, down two sets of stairs. He notices that her legs are good, her posture erect, and her steps measured. She moves with the same deliberate control with which she conducted the interview. Yoga? Dance? Martial arts? He chuckles soundlessly. Martial arts, definitely! She is not the dancing type. Nor can he see her surrounded by incense and New Age music.
“Thank you once again for your time, James.” She nods at him, done with him. “I’ll mail you the article late Sunday. We want to run it early in the week.” She steps out the front door but then turns around, her eyes boring into his, “Of course, I don’t expect you to desire any changes, except if I have misunderstood factual things. Which I doubt.” She is gone before he has time to answer.
Chapter 26
The women never stood a chance. An evidently professional team enters noiselessly in the darkest hour before dawn. Once inside, the team immediately splits into three groups. Two team members—later it was impossible for the women to identify whether the intruders were male or female—went to the sleeping quarters of Mrs. Scott-Wren and Ms. Nielsen. Two went noiselessly up the stairs to where Camilla slept her lightly drugged sleep.
She is woken brutally by a hand pressing something foul into her mouth and nostrils. Her body panics, arms and legs flying, but other hands are holding her down. Then darkness.
When she comes around, she is lying on a hard surface with a smelly, scratchy blanket covering her body. The room she is in is lit up by images, moving and still, on the walls—flickering, horrible footage in black and white of people in striped pajamas. Gaunt bodies, hollow cheeks, eye sockets deep and dark. Desperation is drawn like faded tattoos on their faces. Their hands grip barbed wires. They are long, slowly moving lines of skeletons. She can almost hear the shuffle of hundreds of feet on the hard, frozen ground.
There is no soundtrack, just these awful images on one wall and the old, flickering film on the other wall. The light from the film reveals a large room of timber walls. Camilla can’t see any windows, but she does notice a single door set at the far end of the room. She can make out massive bunkbeds closer to her, with three levels to each bed. She is even on one of the top bunk beds, naked underneath the smelly blanket.
A sense of shame and helplessness overwhelms her. What is this? Oh, God, help!
Horror steals into her veins. Her body is cold and her mind frozen in terror. This cannot be happening. She closes her eyes, shutting out the horrible pictures, but they are now on the inside of her eyelids. She tries desperately to convince herself she is dreaming. That whatever this is, it cannot be anything but a bad dream. But her mind has already been subdued by weeks of inactivity and introspection, by the shock she still hasn’t recovered from. And most of all, her mind is hazy from being drugged for weeks without her knowledge—in the best of intentions—so as not to endanger herself by allowing her to go back to her own life before the scandal has blown over.
With this combination, Camilla’s mind is much too weak to fight this new reality that is closing in on her, and she adapts herself with minimum resistance. Her mind is already that of the prisoner. In such a short time that she has been in this strange place, she has already given up her independent dignity as a modern woman.
Loud march music suddenly bursts the stillness. The sound is so unexpected and violently loud that she lets out an involuntary scream. A woman’s barking voice interrupts her thoughts and makes her sit bolt upright, hitting her head hard against the ceiling.
“GET UP! NOW!”
A well-shaped woman is standing in the open door. Behind her, Camilla can make out a barbed wire fence silhouetted against a clear morning sky. The woman is wearing a gray uniform jacket and skirt, a belt tight around her waist, a Nazi insignia on the lapels, and tall, shiny boots. A beret sits jauntily on her blonde, wavy hair. Her figure is so trim and neat as if she has just stepped out from the dressmaker’s studio. She is armed too, a pistol by her side and a black braided whip, which she slowly caresses in her hands.
“MOVE IT, LAZY BITCH!” The shout lashes Camilla’s senses as brutally as had the woman used her whip. The woman stalks into the room, her heels ominously clacking on the floor. And before Camilla realizes what is going on, searing pain flames across her shins. Her body reacts promptly by jumping from the bed to the floor, but her mind lingers behind in a kind of wonder of why this is at all conceivable. She reaches up for the blanket to cover her nakedness, but the woman hisses, “Get dressed!” pointing to a pile of clothes on the lowest bunk. Camilla stares at them in disbelief. The clothes are striped in white and gray: the prison garb of the concentration camps from the Second World War, the very concentration camps that are depicted in the images on the wall. And the exact same striped pajamas. Her mind bolts.
The pajamas are rough against her skin and just as smelly as the blanket. The woman points with her whip to the lower bunk bed where shoes are placed underneath. Camilla puts her bare feet in the rough wooden clogs that are much too big for her. The woman turns around sharply, and Camilla meekly follows her out of the room.
The sky is clear and tauntingly blue. It’s a reminder of freedom now lost. And it’s a stark contrast to the muddy ground contained by fences of barbed wire. There seems to be no one else like her, no other prisoner, as she already thinks of herself. But when she steps out through the door, two more female guards position themselves on either side of her. One is blonde and slim, the other dark and stocky. Their faces are expressionless and hard.
Only now does she manage to summon enough energy to protest. Somehow, the presence of the two guards awakens her natural authority.
“A mistake has been—” But before she is able to continue, searing pain flames across the back of her knees.
She cries out in shock and outrage, “Stop! What—”
Another slash of the whip hits the back of her legs. This time on her thighs. Again, she cries out, as the pain is terrible.
The guard in front of her turns around and says in a normal voice, “It will be so much worse if you don’t do as we tell you.”
The hatred in her face is so strong that Camilla involuntary takes a step back, upon which the two guards at her side simultaneously grab her arms and frog-march her forward. Why do they hate me so? She wonders but wisely keeps her mouth shut.
The ground is muddy and slippery under her feet. Once she stumbles because her left clogs get stuck in the mud, but she is held up by the arms of the female guards. They arrive at the edge of a steep mud cliff. Some trees are almost horizontal, and their roots exposed. The next mudslide will rip out their final hold on the soil, and they will plummet into the bottom. Camilla stares disbelievingly down. The ground is perhaps twenty meters below them, strewn with boulders of different sizes.
Is this it? Are they going to push her over the edge and watch as her body plunges and smashes on the large rocks at the bottom? Oh, God, is she going to die here?
But, no. It would seem not. The dark-haired guard now turns and faces Camilla with a smirk before she descends a narrow wooden staircase without a railing. The other guard indicates with her whip that Camilla should follow. She does. The steps are slippery too and hard to negotiate in the wooden clogs. She tries to put down her feet with deliberation, but all three guards start shouting at her to move faster.
Once at the bottom, they give her a gray canvas sling to put on her back and tell her to start carrying up boulders. She stares disbelievingly at the guards. She feels a stinging, sharp pain across her back. So, she attempts to pick up the nearest stone, but it is way beyond her capacity. She receives another smarting lash across her back, and she tries again. But there is no way she can lift that stone. The head guard points to a smalle
r stone, and with all her might, Camilla manages to lift the stone and put it into the sling.
“Up!” the head guard yells and points to the top of the stairs. “Up! UP! You lousy whore!”
Camilla stars the ascent. Her back hurts like fire where the heavy stone is rubbing against the whiplashes. Tears fall down her face.
They allow her a short break in the middle of the day and give her a chunk of moldy bread and some water in a dirty cup.
There are no thoughts in her mind. All her mental attention is focused on her body. On lifting, carrying, stepping. One step at a time. One moment at a time. Then, suddenly, she is back in the barrack. Films and images flicker in the dark, lighting up the bare wall. Somehow, she made it through the day. She falls gratefully into a deep sleep.
Every day is the same. In the morning, she gets a thin porridge. In the middle of the day, a chunk of bread, and at night, something between soup and stew, greasy, but never more than one kind of vegetable; carrot, potato, onion—and bits of sinewy, fatty meat nobody would feed to their dog. After a few days, she eats it all. Early, before the sun comes up, she is marched to the edge of the cliff and put to work for more than twelve hours with a couple of short breaks. Stone after stone she carries up the narrow wooden staircase until her legs are wobbly and her mind is numb.
She loses track of the days, but some days after she has arrived, she is woken during the night by probing fingers in surgical gloves—searching her innermost, secret places. But Camilla is by this time in another place altogether. She is animal, prisoner, survivor. She cares about food and rest, and about being beaten to death. Anything else, any intentionally humiliating and intimidating experience, is nothing to her by now.
Nothing like hunger and fear to remove our civilization. After the first week, her thoughts turn to despair, and she becomes a working machine, an organism, a dumb animal. By sheer effort, every night she forces herself to remember who she is…was! Her former job, her responsibilities, the respect with which she was treated. Every night in the darkness, she summons her mental powers and visits her past self with a feeling like homesickness, like a fugitive might visit his homeland in his mind. But she is losing track of herself. She is fading, and fast.
Game of Revenge Page 10
