A Week in December (25 page)

He dozed a bit, picturing Olya, naked in the hotel bathroom. She had that happy accident of a small ribcage and breasts that seemed disproportionately large: not in any freakish way, but just as though they belonged to her older sister. She was a little shy of them, he thought. She had dark, almost black hair, and naughty brown eyes; although her legs and hips were slim there was something not quite perfect about their proportions: they were touchingly, credibly flawed and when she took her clothes off he didn't feel that he was looking at a model but as though he'd surprised a fellow student in the changing rooms at university. Her English was as good as his, perhaps a little better, and she'd known who he was as soon as he went up and introduced himself at the club on Piccadilly. She worked in 'event management', though she was keen to move on, and Spike had agreed to make a few enquiries on her behalf at the club's headquarters. He wasn't sure what she'd done at home in the Ukraine, then in Moscow, before she came to London and she didn't seem to want to talk about it. Privately he thought it was a ridiculous idea to set such a girl loose among the old women who worked in merchandise and admin at the club; they'd just stare at her and wonder why she wasn't modelling. But maybe that was how you got started, he thought. Anyway, if it kept her happy, he'd ask around.

Spike dozed, and dreamed of Olya coming off the bench with ten minutes to go and scoring against Man U at Old Trafford. He didn't like it that all the other guys were staring at her, and she should have been in the club away kit, not topless.

He was awoken by Kenny Hawtrey knocking at the door.

'Wake up, sleeping beauties. Time to go to the ground.'

III

John Veals had also had a busy morning. He had a breakfast meeting with a man called Alan Wing, who worked for Vic Small at Greenview Alternative Investment Services. Veals's chosen meeting place was the Oasis Coffee Bar on the top section of Kennington Road, where it runs down from Lambeth North Tube station towards the Imperial War Museum. It was about as anonymous a stretch of road as you could find in central London: a straight strip of asphalt that joined nothing much to something else. The coffee wasn't even from an espresso machine but from a clouded glass jug, and tasted of acorns; Veals, who'd eaten at home, treated Wing to a toasted cheese and tomato sandwich from a sizzling waffle iron.

Wing handed over an A4 buff envelope that contained the fruit of two weeks' work. He had been following first the chief executive then, when the CEO had taken an unexpected flight to Madrid, the chairman of Allied Royal Bank. There were several photographs of the two men at work and in transit, accompanied by Wing's diary of events in which the chairman and chief executive were respectively Charlie and Eric. 'Charlie arrived for work at 7.42 by his usual car which was then parked in his reserved slot. He took the lift to the seventeenth floor. His PA was waiting. See attatched photo. Eric had breakfast meeting at Connaut Hotel with Unknown Lady (see pic). He ate kejeree, she ate bran flakes and orange juice.'

Alan Wing's photography was better than his spelling, and Veals could identify the Unknown Lady without too much trouble: she ran the bond department of one of the larger investment banks. The meeting could be for any number of reasons, but none of them suggested any particular cause for alarm to John Veals, even as he entered the most gut-wrenching hours of his trade.

What was worrying Veals was a strange, almost neurotic anxiety: suppose the rumour that he was about to start turned out to be true. He had weighed up the situation and decided that the way to boost the ARB share price was for people to believe that it was about to be taken over by First New York. If John Veals, in his bath at midnight, had concluded that such a marriage for ARB was highly credible, why would no one at either bank, people who were paid to think of little else, have concluded something similar? There would be something of Sod's Law, of almost unbelievable irony if this turned out to be the case; but in Veals's ever-turning calculations, the worst outcome was always the one on which to focus longest.

'All right. Keep at it,' he said. 'You have my mobile number. Call me if anything with the faintest whiff of the American comes up. Understand?'

Wing opened his mouth to let a piece of scalding tomato drop on to the plate. 'How do they get these things so hot?' he spluttered.

Veals flicked through the wad of yellow expenses sheets that accompanied the report. 'Don't like to go hungry, do you, Wing?'

'There was sometimes two of us. I couldn't be in two places at once.'

'I'll get the cash biked round later today. Here's something to keep you going.' He peeled six PS50 notes from a roll in his back pocket.

'Thanks, John.'

Veals stood up and looked down to where Wing was still scooping up the remains of the melted cheese. 'Well, get a fucking move on,' he said, and went out on to Kennington Road.

His next meeting was in a tennis club in Chelsea. Stewart Thackeray was a considerably more polished character than Alan Wing, though, in John Veals's view, stupider. He was a partner in an executive recruitment agency, whose offices were in Mayfair, but he was a keen tennis player and liked to mix sport with business among the potted palms of his club lounge overlooking the river.

A few pearls of sweat stood out on his forehead and receding hairline as he ordered fresh orange juice and sat back in the wickerwork chair.

'Sure you won't have anything, John? Not even a mineral water?'

'All right. Water.'

'Gosh. I think I'm getting too old for singles,' said Thackeray. 'Little bugger I just played, ten years younger, he ran down everything. I hit winner after winner and there'd be a scampering sound and the bloody ball came back again.'

'Did you win?'

'Just about. In the end.'

Veals, having done small talk, said, 'Right, Stewart. What did our friend have to say?'

Thackeray dabbed a towel against his forehead; although he'd showered and was in a suit ready to go to work, he couldn't turn off the sweat. 'Well, it was a fairly standard exit interview. He was mightily pissed off about being fired.'

'What did he do?'

'Shagged his secretary on the boardroom table.'

'Aren't you allowed to do that?'

'Not unless you're the Deputy Prime Minister.'

'I see.'

'No. I mean, Allied Royal is a proper, old-fashioned place. They have a rite of passage when you reach a certain level that you have to do this, you know, shag her on the table, but if you're caught in the act then that's it.'

'So he's pissed off with ARB.'

'Yup. It's not a great time to be looking for a job in that world. Not at his level. The situation may get better and--'

'It may get worse.'

'But in any event the climate's tense. All the big banks have toxic assets, and they haven't been quite candid about the extent of them.'

'You're teaching your fucking granny here, Stewart. But will he work for us as a consultant? Is he worth it?'

Thackeray drank some fresh orange juice and wiped the back of his hand over his lips. 'He knows a lot. He sat in on all the meetings when they took over the Spanish bank. You remember, the--'

'Yeah, yeah. So he knows all about that. What about ARB's underlying strengths and liabilities?'

'I believe so. You know, to some extent that's his pitch to future employers. He's had experience at a high level. He's selling himself as someone who's a calm head, a steady hand.'

'With a stack of inside dope.'

'Well obviously he can't work for a competitor for a hell of a long time. At least twelve months, I think.'

'But he could do some freelance.'

'You could ask him.'

'No I couldn't. I can't possibly be seen with him or anyone else from that bank.'

Thackeray raised an eyebrow.

'And you didn't hear that,' said Veals. 'Otherwise--'

'John, I never hear what you say. The acoustics in here are terrible.'

'You fucking bet. Otherwise--'

'Take it easy, John. It's been five years since we met. Five leak-proof, hermetically sealed years.'

Veals fiddled with his water glass. 'I just wish he'd shagged the secretary in the spring. I could have used him then. I think it's too late now.'

'I've never seen you like this before, John. You look really stressed.'

Veals took in a deep breath, then spoke through clenched teeth. 'I'm just covering all the options, Stewart. It's what I do. What I want you to do is this. Get this man back into your office this afternoon. Tell him you may have something. Get him interested. Then chat a bit more about ARB. Shoot the breeze. Now in this envelope I'm giving you there is one question I need to know the answer to. Make sure you ask him, then text me tonight on the number I gave you. Yes or no, that's all I need. It's belt and braces but I really want to have it. I'm shitting paving stones here.'

'Am I going to be able to work the question in?' said Thackeray.

'Of course you are. It's what you do. Old-boy chat. What did we pay you last time?'

'Twenty.'

'OK. Thirty.'

'I'll see what I can do.'

Outside, in a cold, deserted street near Chelsea Harbour, John Veals pulled out his blue cellphone, the one he used for intra-office calls, scrolled down to Martin Ryman's name and pressed the green icon.

'Martin? Meet me at the sushi conveyor belt in that Knightsbridge place at twelve noon. Don't expect to eat because you're going to Saggiorato's for lunch. Book for two. Take someone with you. Maybe Susanna Russell from HSBC. You like her, don't you? Pretty
and
clever: just your type. And ring Magnus Darke. Tell him you've got something for him. Arrange to meet tomorrow. Lunch. Anywhere. Throw money at it. One of those places with a psychotic chef who charges two hundred quid a head. Got it?'

Veals liked the sushi conveyor belt because it naturally threw strangers together. Although Ryman was on his 'office' phone list, he didn't actually come into Old Pye Street, and the fact that he was retained by John Veals as a consultant was known only to the pair of them; even Stephen Godley was unaware of the contract. In return for his large honorarium, and a small stake in the fund, Ryman had to drop everything when Veals called.

He was already sipping water at the chugging conveyor belt when Veals arrived at 11.55. Of the three people Veals had dealt with that morning, Ryman was immeasurably the classiest act: just as well, since he was being paid the most.

'Internet chat rooms,' said Veals. 'Know how to use them?'

'Yes, I think so. I'm going to take a bit of salmon here, John, just for appearance's sake.'

Veals knew this was a prompt for him to take some food too. One of the things he liked about Ryman was that he didn't waste words; another thing he liked was that Ryman wasn't frightened of him, not like Alan Wing or, beneath his tennis club bullshit, Stewart Thackeray.

'On your way to Saggiorato's,' Veals said, 'go to an Internet cafe. Get yourself half a dozen instant e-mail addresses. Get into a financial chat room. Pretend to be a nineteen-year-old waiter. Say, "I was waiting at a dinner party in Chelsea last night and I heard the head of First NY's London office talking about their decision to buy ARB. Their historical roots across much of the developing and former colonial world were the answer to First NY's aspirations as a truly 'global' bank ... blah blah."'

'First NY?' said Ryman, taking the purple-rimmed plastic cover off his sashimi.

'That's what I'm hearing, Martin. Then you go to a different Internet cafe this afternoon. Maybe you can do them all from the same one. You figure it out. Sign in as an amateur low-roller. You're an Australian physio who dabbles online between clients. Anything you like. You saw the waiter's posting. You make some comments. Seems a good fit. So now's a good time to buy ARB shares. Simple stuff. Tomorrow morning, see how it's going and if necessary do five or six more places. Then at lunchtime tomorrow, you drop it to Magnus Darke. Have you booked the table?'

'Yes. Darke bit my hand off. Said he's very short of material. You know, silly season, Christmas coming. We're going to a place run by that chub-faced TV chef. Darke's column is on Friday, so he can get in tomorrow fine. It's perfect timing for him.'

'Good. But today at lunch at Saggiorato's, have a word with Tony the barman. Give him this.' Veals passed two PS50 notes along the counter. 'You know Dougie Moon, the boring red-faced money broker, the guy who always sits in the window?'

'Yes, it's his canteen. I've never not seen him there.'

'Tell Tony to tell Moon in the strictest confidence that he saw our man at ARB having dinner in a private room with the chairman of First NY.'

Ryman licked his lips. He seemed less keen on this aspect of the plan; without the anonymity of the Internet, very little stood between him and the FSA - or the police. 'And then tomorrow. With Darke?'

'There was a tiny thing in the
FT
the other day about possible future bank mergers. Ask if he saw it. Talk about good fits. Remind him of Robert Fleming and the Chase Manhattan/J. P. Morgan sale: Old Empire and New America. Give him the reference of the chat room. Say there could be some corroboration there. Don't start a rumour, you can't do that, but point to what's already there. These journalists get most of their stuff off the Internet these days - they haven't got the time or the resources to do any research. Most of the paper's written by kids on work experience and they're just recycling one another's material via the Web. But tell Darke to be careful how he phrases it. He should just pass it off as a thought that occurred to him as he was looking back on a difficult year. "Doesn't it look a natural fit?" he might say. If the credit crisis gets worse there's going to be pressure on all the banks and it's natural that a lot of them will want to get extra security. Let him float it as a sort of positive, seasonal thing. Something good in your Christmas stocking. Got it?'

'Yes. I think he'll like it. It goes against the grain, against the doom and gloom. Good for the shareholders.'