by Blake Banner
I frowned at her. “I am not armed, Sheila, but I am investing over a million dollars in this foundation and I expect my word to be enough. If I am going to be held as a liar and a criminal you can turn that Rolls Royce around and have it take me back home.”
“No! Absolutely not necessary! Come on, let’s go inside and I’ll introduce you to Charles.”
She took my arm and I let her guide me to the front door. The precedent had been set, and if I ever needed to enter that house with a weapon, I could do so without being frisked.
Through the door, in a spacious modern hall with huge, redwood rafters, a butler in a white jacket took my coat. Sheila linked her arm through mine and led me down a short flight of three broad, open-plan steps into a vast area with a walk-in fireplace, oxblood leather sofas and armchairs. Persian rugs were strewn on the floor and a redwood dining table the size of a small aircraft carrier stood to one side. It was set with white linen napkins, silver cutlery, fine, hand-cut Irish crystal and silver candelabras which were all enhanced by the irregular shape and high polish of the wood. On the left, sliding glass doors led onto a lawn and swimming pool.
I was no expert, but on the walls I was pretty sure I saw two Picassos, a Chagall and a couple of other paintings I could not identify. The room was also dotted with bronzes and sculptures that, to my uneducated eye, looked valuable.
Charles Cavendish was standing in front of the fire, in a white tuxedo and black pants, holding a glass of whiskey with two rocks gently diluting what had probably been a fine single malt.
Sheila spoke as we descended the steps.
“Charles, this is Harry Bauer, whom I was telling you about.”
His smile was what you’d call genial and he advanced across the room with his right hand stretched out.
“Harry, good to meet you. I get a lot of people coming to me with projects,” he paused to take my hand and pump it, “but few are as interesting or as well thought out as yours.”
He transferred his hand to my shoulder and guided me toward a chair.
“I can tell you that I am a bit of a recluse and I don’t often invite people to my house, but I was real interested to meet you. What’ll you drink?”
I had already returned his genial smile. Now I said, “Scotch, thanks,” and Sheila hurried to the drinks tray to pour it. She seemed to know her way around.
I sat in a large chesterfield beside the fire and Sheila, after placing a huge, cut crystal glass beside me, sat herself on the sofa. Cavendish stayed standing on the far side of the flames, watching me.
“Harry,” he said again, “I confess I am very curious. I have my finger pretty much on the pulse of things. I have eyes and ears just about everywhere that counts, but I have never heard you mentioned. You seem to have come out of left field…”
He paused. I glanced at Sheila and smiled, then turned my attention to Cavendish. “Is that a question, Charles?”
He didn’t falter. “Yes.”
“I guess, like you, I am something of a recluse. I have what you might call a checkered past that some might disapprove of, so I try to keep a low profile.”
“I see.” He sipped. “Anything I need to know about?”
I shrugged. “That’s a question for you and your attorneys. Any moderately competent private investigator can dig up the records. I was with the British SAS for eight years. I was not dishonorably discharged, but neither was I honorably discharged. I was asked to leave, and I did.”
“You were asked to leave?”
“Yeah, this bit is not a matter of public record, but neither am I that ashamed of it that I need to hide it. We were on an operation in Helmand Province, in the mountains. We captured a man who had been responsible for the massacre of an entire village. He had raped the women and the children, murdered parents in front of their kids, and the kids in front of the parents. We had witnessed the whole thing, but had been powerless to intervene and stop it.”
He nodded. “The SAS operates in small groups of four, if I am not mistaken.”
“That’s right. If we had had more firepower, maybe we could have done something. But all we had were our assault rifles, sidearms… There must have been a hundred or so of these animals, and they were well armed with heavy machine guns and grenade launchers. All we could do was watch and make a video and photographic record of what went down.”
He was frowning. “But you caught this man, and he was brought to justice. So why were you asked to leave? I don’t understand.”
I took a sip and felt the warm burn in my gut.
“We caught him in a cave in the Sulaiman Mountains. Through the grapevine we had heard that, in exchange for valuable intelligence, he was to be given immunity, a home, a new identity and a pension for the rest of his life. I wanted to execute the bastard right there, in the cave. The other guys in the team were undecided. At the last minute the CIA showed up and took him away, and informed my commanding officer that I had been about to murder Mohammed Ben-Amini, their prize. So the brass politely asked me to leave.”[2]
He pursed his lips and nodded. “You’re a man of conscience.”
I smiled. “I don’t know. Self-description always smacks a bit of narcissism. I was angry and disgusted by what I was forced to witness, and I still have trouble sleeping at night. The fact is that what I did was illegal, and what I wanted to do was very illegal. The Regiment was right to do what it did, and I was lucky to get off that light. So I try to keep a low profile, and do what I do through other people whose past is not as checkered as mine.” I gestured at him. “People like you.”
“That’s admirably honest of you.”
I glanced at Sheila and smiled at her. “If we are going to work together on this project,” I turned back to Cavendish, “I figure the least I can do is come clean about anything that has the potential to embarrass you in the future. I hope this isn’t a deal breaker.”
He laughed. “Not at all, not at all. In the first place, I can assure you I have had to work with people in the past who make what you did sound positively saintly, and in the second place I have a lot of sympathy with you. I think, in those circumstances, I would probably have done the same.”
I offered him a lopsided smile and tried to inject sincerity into it, while remembering that this was the man who had supplied the chemical agent phosVX—to that very Mohammed Ben-Amini—which he had used in turn to massacre the entire population of the village of Belandhawa, men, women and children, only a few months earlier.
“Thanks,” I said, “I appreciate that.”
He raised his eyebrows suddenly, as though awakening from a dream. “So! This extraordinary project of yours. From what Sheila has been telling me, this model, if we can make it happen, could have an extraordinary impact on local, micro economies. Tell me about it. Exactly what is your vision here?”
I took a deep breath, swirled my whisky around and took a pull. As I set the glass down on the arm of the chair, I said the first thing that came into my mind.
“I guess I drew on my experience as a special ops operative. Two things are imperative when you are a small group of four behind enemy lines. You have to be independent, and you have to be self-sufficient. The two are not the same, but they are intimately linked. You cannot be truly independent unless you are self-sufficient; and you cannot become self-sufficient, unless you are independent. They won’t let you.” I paused to sip my Scotch. “These people who are ignorant, hungry, infirm, dying, what they need is to become independent and self-sufficient. So the question becomes, not how can we feed and educate them? The question becomes, how can we teach them to create independent, self-sufficient micro economies?” I shrugged. “The answer is simple, we help them to build one, and let them learn from doing it themselves.”
Seven
He was quiet, swirling his whisky in his glass. After a moment he said, “Extraordinary. However, that simple phrase, ‘We build one,’ hides a multitude of questions, technical details, challenges and obstacles.�
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He sipped and I said, “Sure.”
He swallowed and wasted no time in getting to the point.
“I mean, what are we talking about here? Are we establishing a socialist economy based on cooperatives? Or are we inducting them into a capitalist model of free trade and enterprise? Are we going to help them to set up companies that seek to make a profit, or are we going to encourage them to reinvest their profits cooperatively into the community?”
I had been nodding while he spoke. “My view is an unpopular one. There is a lot wrong with free market, capitalist democracy, but so far I am not aware of anything that works better. In my experience, when you start centralizing power, whether it be in Soviets, cooperatives, socialist states, capitalist super states—or supra states—or multinational corporations, people start losing their humanity and things start going wrong. My feeling is, keep it small, keep it human, and limit central control to the absolute minimum.”
“So, bringing it right down to basics…?”
“Companies. Private companies. We help them to set up private companies that can operate locally or grow, but which they control.”
His smile grew.
“I knew I liked you, Harry, from the first moment Sheila told me about you. Your ideas and feelings are perfectly in line with my own. But I have to say, my vision has always been limited to one school, where it was needed, one water purifier where it was needed, one hospital. It had never occurred to me to create an entire, integrated system…in which each unit helped support the others.” He gave a small laugh. “Of course, there has always been the issue of funding. You do appreciate that what you are proposing will not be cheap.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “I am aware of that. It all has to be costed, and I am hoping that you have the experience—and the team—to take care of that.”
“Oh, certainly.” His face said he was only too happy to do that. “We can take care of all that and present you with a fully researched and costed project. And, um…”
He made a question with his face.
“My contribution? I’ve been discussing that with Shauna Cooper of Angels Fund Raisers in Westwood. I am prepared to put up a million dollars, up front, as a contribution to the project.”
He blinked a few times. “Good Lord. You have that kind of disposable cash?”
I looked at Sheila, wondering how she would take what I was about to say.
“A man with my skills and my background can make a lot of money, fairly quickly, if he uses his brains. It’s all legal. You don’t need to worry about that.”
Sheila spoke for the first time. “That’s a relief!”
She laughed and I smiled.
“But I’m aware it’s not enough, not by a long shot. So I am organizing a very substantial fundraising event at Griffith Park. It will be billed as Hollywood Hands Around the World Day. It’s not really one event, it’s a whole collection of events, starting at about nine in the morning and continuing throughout the day until after midnight. A gymkhana, an open-air concert, a celebrity soccer match, home-baked stalls, barbeques…” I made an “on and on” gesture. “Hell, a farmer’s market! Why not? They’re dreaming up more possibilities as we speak. Most can run concurrently during the day, and those events will be open to the general public. In the evening there will be an invitation-only cocktail party for the great and the good, followed by a gala dinner for the even greater and better, at which you will give a short speech introducing either Leonardo DiCaprio or Al Gore, and they will give a longer speech encouraging everyone to write big, fat checks for the project. The event will be held, possibly, at Griffith Park. Obviously Angels’ PR department will be feeding this to the media. It should attract a lot of money.”
He had been standing all of this time, now he lowered himself into a chair. “That’s extraordinary, Harry. You don’t waste time, do you?”
“If you want to get things done, you have to act.”
The door had opened behind me and the butler had stepped in. He approached Cavendish on silent feet.
“Dinner is ready, sir. Shall I serve it now?”
“Yes! Yes indeed, Brown. I think we are all ready.”
He sat at the head, with me on his right and Sheila opposite me on his left. A cute maid in a blue uniform with a white lace apron and cap served us a salmon mousse with Spencer Gulf king prawns and avocado, while her friend, also cute in a similar uniform, served us with an ice-cold white Muga.
I nodded my head at one of the Picassos. “Is that an original Pablo Picasso?”
He smiled. “My insurance company wants me to put it in a vault somewhere, don’t they, Sheila?” He turned and smiled at her, like it was a private joke between them. “But I ask them, what is the point of owning a genuine Picasso, if you are never going to look at it? There is also the Chagall, which I love, and I have a Degas, a Mondrian.” He gave a self-satisfied chuckle. “I guess I am building quite a collection. And then there are the bronzes and the carvings. I have a couple of Bugatti, a Bonnard, a wonderful collection of three figures by Giacometti. There are others. I have a display room. Some other day I’ll take you to see them.”
I nodded. “That would be something. But I have to say I’m with your insurers. My mind goes automatically to security. Your collection must be worth millions. It wouldn’t be hard for a pro to raid this house and make off with your stuff.”
He laughed out loud, then wagged his finger as he stuffed his face with a dry biscuit covered in salmon mousse.
“It’s deceptive, Harry. Tell him, Sheila.”
She sipped her wine. “Oh, security is pretty tight, Harry. There is electronic surveillance throughout the house…”
I laughed. “Except the bathrooms, I hope!”
She laughed. “Except the bathrooms. All the entrances are covered by at least three cameras. Access can only be granted from the control room which is located in the cellar, and anyone attempting to scale the walls will find that not only has he been filmed in triplicate, but that film has been automatically relayed to the police. Plus, his presence on the wall will have triggered the alarm and the automatic lockdown of all the doors and windows in the house. Not only that, four Rottweilers patrol the pool and the lawn and the gardens around the house at night, as well as the garage entrance and the front garden, along with four armed men all of whom trained either with the SEALs, Delta or the Marines. Six more men guard the inside of the house.”
I had been listening carefully, working my way through the salmon and the avocado. When she had finished I drained my glass.
“I stand corrected. This is quite a fortress you have here, Charles. I am impressed.”
He nodded vigorously. “Oh yes! You might, just, get in.” He leered at me. “But your chances of getting out in one piece are very slim indeed.”
“I think I’ll just wait and hope that you invite me again someday.”
He leaned across the table and patted my arm.
“Be assured that I will.”
The first course finished, the cute French maids came and removed our plates and the white wine. They came back a little later with a roasted duck that smelled of cinnamon and allspice, and had roasted plums sitting around it. There were also dishes of buttered broccoli, small Vichy carrots and roasted potatoes.
Sheila continued with the white Muga, while Cavendish and I had a red Gran Reserva from the same bodega.
When we had been served, as I was cutting into a tender thigh, I said, “Charles, I want to ask you a favor.” I looked up at him. “And I really hope you’ll say yes.”
“Ask, by all means.”
“I’d like you to come to Griffith Park with me, to view the site. I am very hands-on, and I get things done fast and well, but that’s because I get involved. This is a major event, and I am going to put a lot of money into it, so I have to make sure things are done just right, according to the way I have envisioned them. It would be a big help for me, if you would come along, view the site with me and hel
p me imagine it—visualize it.” I held my hand in front of my face, like I was looking at my thoughts in my grip. “Help me see it and make it happen.”
He dabbed his mouth with his napkin and sighed.
“I have to tell you, Harry. I very rarely go out in public. You may have noticed that I am very security conscious.”
“Yes, I’d noticed. Nevertheless, I would appreciate it if you would make an exception. This is a unique opportunity, and it has to be right.” I sighed. “I’m a New Yorker. The eight years I wasn’t in New York I was in London, which in many ways is a kind of sister city and the people have a similar kind of mentality. California, Californians…” I sighed, shook my head and laughed. “It’s a whole different ball game out here. You,” I pointed at him, “You will have the insight, the touch, the California feel, which I just haven’t got.”
The hook was baited and dangling in front of him. He was necessary, uniquely special, and his ego was itching to bite. He turned to Sheila. “What do you think, my dear?”
“I think he is absolutely right, Charles.” She gave her pretty laugh and turned to me. “Please don’t take offence, but you are anything but Californian. You are very intense, a little dark, and California is all about light, sunshine and magic.”
I clicked my fingers and pointed at her. “See? That’s what I am talking about, light, sunshine and magic.”
She turned back to Cavendish. “And you have all of that.”
He grew a couple of inches and produced a big Cheshire grin. He stretched out his hand toward Sheila, milking the situation for all he could get.
“Take Sheila! She’d love to go!”
“I have already told Sheila I want her on board for exactly that. But you, Charles, you have a wealth of experience, insight—wisdom, damn it! And there is no substitute for that. I want you there, looking the place over, giving me your thoughts and your vision! Nobody can do that for you.”
I figured he was immune to most things, but I was seeing firsthand he was not immune to flattery. He laughed, spread his arms wide and yielded joyfully to his own ego.
