Authors: Ned Beauman
‘Outside McDonald’s. That van. You were scared.’
Fourpetal nods. ‘Yes. Do you know Burckhardt’s
The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy
?’ He gestures at himself. ‘?“What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be made by the passion of fear is here shown with what may be called a mathematical completeness.”?’
Fourpetal explains that it’s not as if he’d dreamed since boyhood of getting a job in the mining industry. In the school playground when he was eight or nine they’d often pretended to fight the Battle of Orgreave and nobody ever wanted to be the miners. But he hadn’t had any choice. After eleven years in financial PR, Fourpetal had developed a reputation as ‘the most craven, two-faced, back-stabbing little wank stain that’s ever sat in a fucking swivel chair’, in the invigoratingly candid words of one former colleague after a night out in a strip club near Liverpool Street. And you couldn’t build that sort of brand overnight.
In fact, by a certain metric, he could trace his downfall all the way back to his first job after university, when he found himself working alongside a chinless Northern boy called Drummers who seemed quite likely to get promoted above him in the near future because he spent about ninety hours a week in the office. One day, Fourpetal took Drummers aside and told him that if he really wanted to get himself noticed he should offer their boss a few lines of good coke next time they were all in a bar. Drummers thanked him warmly for the advice, unaware that their boss had taken against drugs with an almost cultic fury ever since an overdose at a New Year’s Eve party had left his horsy niece with permanent brain damage. Soon afterwards, Drummers left the firm. Unfortunately, he did not leave the industry. Instead, he dragged himself, mangled and frostbitten, from the ravine and eight years later was recruited to a senior position at the company where Fourpetal now worked. On his first day, he called Fourpetal into his office and explained that in the next round of recession-related redundancies the company was going to have to wave goodbye to five trainees, two receptionists, and one account manager. That account manager was, of course, Fourpetal. Drummers said this with an expression of such tremulant ecstasy that Fourpetal genuinely wondered if he might have been masturbating under his desk.
Afterwards, looking for another job, Fourpetal found that Drummers wasn’t the only one with a Fourpetal story. Everyone, evidently, had a Fourpetal story. Sometimes even Fourpetal himself wasn’t sure quite how he’d found the time to fuck over that many people in little more than a decade. Nonetheless, he knew his reputation was unfair. Like a valet who beats his wife every night in loyal imitation of his master, the London financial PR industry had hurried to adopt the special ruthlessness of the investment banks it serviced even though it had none of the same salary incentives. Fourpetal didn’t believe for a second he was worse than all the others. Rather, he had become a scapegoat, and that was why every door in London had been shut in his face. For a while he thought about going to America, but he knew that in a recession he’d never find a company to sponsor him for an employment visa. And he didn’t like the sound of Hong Kong or Doha. So he decided he’d just have to move out of financial PR into a sector where nobody knew him. The other advantage would be that he wouldn’t so often find himself in meetings with people he remembered from boarding school.
He applied for about twenty jobs, hoping to find a company that wouldn’t check his references too closely. In the interview with Lacebark Mining, he had expected to talk about copper and gems, but in fact they asked him how much he knew about EBB’s work for Kazakhstan or Poxham Toller’s work for Zimbabwe, so he bluffed his way through that instead. And in his first week, he discovered he wasn’t really going to be doing European PR for Lacebark. He was going to be doing European PR for Burma.
In the past, the Burmese regime itself had employed several different agencies, but no one would work for them any more because they always reneged on their fees. Lacebark was willing to step in, however, because it was getting more and more awkward for the company and its investors that the landlord of its Gandayaw mine was basically perceived as a more bumbling version of Nazi Germany. A coordinated media and lobbying strategy could punch a few big airholes in the tight lid of their trading conditions. The atmosphere in the corporate communications department in London was strange, because you were obliged to make the occasional wry joke about Burma’s mad generals, otherwise you seemed like a pushover, but you weren’t supposed to bring up the 1988 massacres or the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, otherwise you got a lot of resentful looks. And of course you had to remember to say ‘Myanmar’ instead of ‘Burma’ (although for some reason never ‘Myanmarese’). Fourpetal’s first assignment was to find a human-rights organisation working in south-east Asia that would take a grant from Lacebark and then put out a press release about it, which took longer than it was probably worth.
One drizzly afternoon at the beginning of April, Fourpetal came back from lunch and slumped down at his desk, feeling as if all these greasy plastics that nuzzled him day after day – the grey acrylonitrile of his mouse pad, the blue polypropylene of his telephone earpiece, the black polyurethane of his (legendary) swivel chair – might as well just be stitched together into a gimp suit into which he could be zipped up for good. That morning, he’d emailed an executive called Jim Pankhead, who worked at Lacebark’s headquarters in North Carolina, to see if he had the latest draft of the statement Lacebark was going to make about the environmental impact of its operations in Burma. Just as Fourpetal roused his computer, an email arrived from Pankhead with the aphasic subject line ‘FW: Fw: Re:’. The environmental statement was attached, but Fourpetal also noticed that Pankhead had forgotten to delete the body of the email, which contained a long series of previous messages in the usual reverse chronological order. Pankhead and another colleague at Lacebark had been using Hotmail addresses to correspond; ever since Enron, Fourpetal knew, senior executives at a lot of American companies had moved to private email accounts for anything remotely indiscreet, just in case the Department of Justice came along one day to confiscate the corporate servers. Towards the end of their email conversation, Pankhead had asked the other executive to send him the environmental statement, and the other executive had sent it to him at his Hotmail address, so Pankhead had forwarded it to himself at his Lacebark address, and from there he’d just now passed it on to Fourpetal. After completing this uncomplex forensic reconstruction, Fourpetal scanned the conversation down to the bottom, where he found a medium-length email from Pankhead to the other executive squashed against a rampart of > signs:
I covered for you like a pro today, buddy – thank me later. The theme of the meeting was, obviously, what the fuck went wrong at Gandayaw? We had Bezant on a video link from London. He seemed like a meathead but he used to run half of Cantabrian which is apparently a big deal. He said Sweet wanted to blame it all on the cyclone but really he was botching everything way before Nargis and we should have fired him sooner. Also said he could assure us that in another few months he’d have the stable door securely nailed shut (except he didn’t put it like that).
Anyway, the cripple in Chiang Mai is asking for two million dollars to keep his mouth shut, which is hilarious. CFIUS are ruling on the bond deal with Xujiabang in August, and if they read in the NYT that we supposedly tortured the wives of a bunch of guys trying to start a union, the whole thing is going to fall apart, or, worse, subpoenas are going to start pounding us like Predator drones. Then Xujiabang back out, the world finds out we can’t service our debts next year, and we all get fucked in the eye sockets. The cripple would be asking for a hundred mil if he understood what he had. So, yes, we’re going to pay him.
As for the other thing, Bezant claims it’s under control. Harenberg keeps saying it’s ten times more important than the Xujiabang deal, which is ridiculous, but that’s Harenberg. No clue why Nollic trusts him with anything. OK, enough of that: still in for that fundraiser this weekend?
Fourpetal wasn’t all that surprised by Pankhead’s blunder because he had recently made a similar one himself: an ex-girlfriend of his friend Rich had written Rich a plaintive email about how the previous night she’d had to trudge all the way across Battersea Bridge at 4 a.m. in the rain with no pants on under her dress after bolting in tears from an imminent one-night stand because even five weeks after their split the thought of having sex with anyone else but him was still too upsetting, and Rich had forwarded it to Fourpetal with a few uncharitable comments, and Fourpetal had replied with a few more uncharitable comments, and Rich had replied with an unrelated YouTube video about a panda, and Fourpetal had forwarded the panda video to eleven people who he thought might appreciate it, including, as it happened, the ex-girlfriend in question, whose maudlin anecdote was still there at the bottom of the circular. It could happen to anyone. So to Fourpetal, a veteran, the next move was clear. But then he realised that the next move after that was clear, too, and the next move after that, and the next move after that. In fact, as soon as he read Pankhead’s email, a plan had come all at once into his head, a magnificent spontaneous birth, detailed and comprehensive and with appendices and footnotes.
Part one: he played
Minesweeper
for a few minutes and then wrote back to Pankhead, ‘Hi Jim, so sorry to pester you again but I really do need that enviro statement ASAP. Or if you’ve already sent it, many apologies – we’ve been having some trouble with our servers over here so a lot is getting lost.’ Almost instantly, he got a second email with the statement attached, but this time with nothing else below the subject line. Fourpetal judged from the speed of the reply that Pankhead must have realised his error and had been staring at his inbox in paralytic horror the entire time. Later that afternoon, he phoned Pankhead at his office and kept him on the phone with boring questions for as long as he could, because that seemed like the exact opposite of how he would naturally be inclined to behave if he’d read Pankhead’s email and was now wondering what to do about it.
Part two: he phoned a guy he knew who worked upstairs in management, and told him that he was about to give a background briefing to a sympathetic
Independent
journalist about the challenges Lacebark faced as an ethical company in an unethical industry. Which of Lacebark’s competitors would have the most to gain if it failed? Which executives held the real power at those companies? Which of those executives were known for sanctioning dirty tricks?
Part three: the next morning, before he left for work, he created an anonymous Gmail address of his own and emailed Donald Flory, the Senior Vice-President and General Counsel of Kernon Whitmire Copper and Gold Incorporated. ‘I work at Lacebark Mining. I have information relating to the Gandayaw Concession and the Xujiabang bond deal which could cripple or destroy the company if released. In exchange I want a job with you in New York – undemanding, high paid, lots of exotic foreign travel – and ninety thousand shares of Kernon Whitmire stock transferred to an offshore trust in my name. Are you interested?’
‘we are always happy to exchange ideas with like-minded professionals at other companies,’ Flory replied that afternoon, not from his Kernon Whitmire address but from yet another private account. ‘are you based in nc?’ he asked, meaning North Carolina.
‘No, but I’m flying there in a couple of weeks for a conference. Also on the way back I have an overnight layover in Newark.’
‘let me know your hotel booking in newark. someone will come to your room.’
At eleven o’clock on the night of the layover, Fourpetal stood at the window drinking whisky from the minibar and thinking about all the models he’d probably fuck in his new loft on the Lower East Side. From this distance there was something about the flat amber glare of the airport that strangled your sense of perspective, so that the jets looked like hatchbacks trundling around a supermarket car park, and farther on east all the towers of Manhattan cowered beneath the monstrous gantry cranes of Port Newark. This deal was top secret so perhaps they wouldn’t come until about midnight, he thought, lying down on the bed and turning on CNN. But midnight arrived, and then one, and then two, and there was still no knock at the door. At three, now pretty drunk, he turned on his laptop and wrote an email to Donald Flory: ‘Noones here what the fuck is going on. Im flying back to Londn in four hours.’ Then, wondering for the first time if he might have made some sort of serious error, he Googled Donald Flory again, and on a news website he found a picture of Flory at a recent press conference. He was shaking hands with Yangmin Gao, the jowly chairman of Xujiabang Copper and Gold.
Xujiabang Copper and Gold now owned a forty-one per cent stake in Kernon Whitmire.
It wasn’t even hard to find. It was in the second page of Google results. Before he sent the email to Flory, Fourpetal had only bothered to look at the first page. For the first time in his life, Fourpetal wished he actually read
The Economist
instead of just telling people he did.
So that was why nobody had come to the room. Flory must have decided that he had more to gain by warning his friends in China that some opportunist was proposing to wreck their bond deal with Lacebark than he did by making a tawdry deal with that opportunist. In fact, he must have thought Fourpetal was a total imbecile for choosing Kernon Whitmire instead of some other corporate rival who had no connection with Xujiabang. Fourpetal was still trying to think through the implications of all this when he dozed off in his clothes.