No Place in the Sun (27 page)

‘Ok, call me tomorrow morning, have good trip home. I look forward to we do much business.’

The little fat man headed for the escalators, and Tom made his way up to the street. He was faced with a multitude of exits from the station, and he took the nearest stairs and emerged into the bright sunshine. He looked around to get his bearings; he could see familiar buildings across the other side of the square but the streets were busy and there were no crossings for pedestrians, nothing for it but to go back down and take another exit. This time he was successful and he headed back to the hotel.

He sat in the lobby and pored over the drawings and price lists; this project was going to be simple enough to sell; it was straightforward and easy for punters to understand, and the fact that it was near a metro station would be a plus for buyers back home that had no idea of local nuances around property values. It would be easy to pitch the area as ‘up and coming.’ Maybe he could give the area a new name for marketing purposes; the ‘revival quarter’ sounded about right, maybe they would try that.

The prices were great though; a real surprise. Quite a lot of the apartments were priced at forty thousand euros; he reckoned that they could add thirty thousand on top of that and sell them at seventy, maybe slightly less, maybe sixty eight or nine. A brand new apartment beside a metro stop, in the Revival Quarter, for sixty nine thousand euros; who could resist that? Not the buyers who were spending twenty grand over the odds for the back section of an already overpriced Montana Fea.

The waitress brought him his drink and he left it on the table while he went over to the Concierge to check on the airport minibus. The older man who had spoken to him the night before was on duty.

‘Good afternoon, sir. I hope that your day went well.’

‘Yes indeed, thank you. Can you ask the airport minibus company to collect me?’

‘You are supposed to call them the day before you need them, to reserve, but don’t worry, I will call them and arrange, it is not a problem.’

The man made a phone call and spoke in Hungarian; it seemed as if he was arguing politely, and eventually he put down the phone and smiled.

‘That is fine, sir; they will be here at four o’clock. Is there anything else we can help you with?’

‘No thanks, that’s all. No, wait a minute, can I ask you a general question?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Are you from Budapest, from the city?’

‘Yes, sir. I have spent all my life here, and my family before me.’

‘Which part of the city do you live in?’

‘In the fourteenth, sir, at the end of the metro line, do you know it?’

‘Yes, I have an idea where you mean. Do you know the eighth district at all?’

‘Yes, of course.’ He leaned closer to Tom and dropped his voice. ‘Not so nice, sir, many cigány, gypsy people, they live there.’

‘Just a minute.’ Tom went back to the table and picked up the drawings that Amir had given him. He pointed to the street name on the bottom of the drawing; ‘do you know this street?’

‘Yes, sir. I know of it, it is close to the metro stop.’

‘Yes, that’s it. Are there many gypsies in that area?’

‘Yes, sir. That area is where all the cigány live.’

‘So, would you buy an apartment there?’

The old man smiled. ‘I am not a rich man, sir; I could not buy an apartment anywhere. But if I understand your question correctly, in theory, no, I would not buy an apartment in this place. I believe that most Hungarian persons would avoid this area, sir, that is my opinion only, you understand.’

‘Thank you very much for letting me have your views on it, I appreciate that very much.’

‘Not at all, sir. I am glad to be of help.’

The minibus got him to the airport in plenty of time and the check-in formalities were smooth and efficient; he had an hour and a half to wait for the flight so he went to the business lounge and poured himself a drink, retiring to a quiet table with his papers and a calculator. A germ of an idea was beginning to form in his mind; it was a very exciting thought, but he would have to turn it over a bit in his head, to think it through some more and test it against a lot of counter arguments before he would mention it to Tania.

The more he thought abut it, the more he was convinced that it would work. He wrote lines of figures on the pages of the pad, and made the calculations over and over. He poured another drink from the cabinet and called Tania.

‘Well? How did you get on with the Israeli?’

‘He’s a bit crazy, but he knows what he’s doing as far as I can tell. Good project, a bit basic but ok. It’s in a crappy area though.’

‘So what’s new?’ She laughed loudly. ‘I’m sure you can write a few newspaper articles that will move it up the social scale.’

‘Just thinking about that.’ Tom looked at the pad where he had crossed out ‘Revival Quarter’ and written ‘Renaissance District.’

‘The possibilities are there, I’m happy enough with the overall project and I think we can go with it.’

‘How many apartments? Enough to give it a big marketing push?’

Tom looked at the sheets again. ‘A hundred and four apartments and two commercial units, but he’s keeping the commercial and the front penthouses himself, so a hundred and two for us. I’ve agreed a fully exclusive deal with him, nobody else will have it, here or anywhere else.’

‘What kind of commission is he offering, three percent?’

‘No, we make our own, base price plus whatever we put on top. Good possibility for margin I would say, better than you mentioned.’ He was conscious of other people in the lounge; a couple had sat down close to him and you never knew who was listening. ‘I have an idea to really make it fly, can’t discuss it now but I’ll talk to you in the morning.’

‘You have my interest, Tom, I can’t wait. I gather that there are people there, call me tonight if you like, or call round to the house, I’ll have the bed warm.’

‘Talk to you tomorrow, Tania. Goodbye.’

The receptionist in the lounge touched him on the arm. ‘Sir, your flight is closing, gate twenty seven please; it is just beside us here.’

Tom hadn’t noticed the time passing; he gathered his stuff and headed for the gate. He was excited at his plan; he had a feeling that he had just come up with a scheme to make him very rich indeed. It would make crazy Tania even richer, but that didn’t matter; a rising tide would lift all boats.

‘Sit down, lover, tell me your news.’ As usual, Tania looked very chirpy for this early in the morning. She sat behind her desk with a paper cup of coffee in her hand; she was wearing a white linen suit that looked on the one hand very businesslike but which showed off her attributes to the full. ‘You didn’t call around last night; I was waiting for your ring.’

‘Slipped into something comfortable, had you? Damn, I missed out on that.’ Tom was in a good humour himself; he had worked on his figures on the plane and again when he got home, and he knew that he had a winner, something to blow away the opposition and make Scorpio the biggest player in the overseas market. He took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and put them on the desk.

‘First of all, let me tell you about Amir Mamzer.’ He went on to tell her all about the eccentric Israeli and his penchant for cakes and cigarettes.

She laughed at the story of the fuck museum. ‘Must have been an interesting trip, there seems to be a lot of crazy people in this business. So what about the project, does it look anyway ok?’

‘Yes, the project is fine; it’s a plain apartment building, but fine for our purposes.’ Tom unfolded the plans for each floor and the elevation drawings; Tania took a quick look and moved on to the crucial issue.

‘What about our margin, how much will we make on it?’

Tom selected one sheet of figures and turned it to face Tania. ‘The column on the left is the apartment number, then the size, and the third one is the price; I converted it to euro for simplicity.’

‘Forty grand? That’s bloody cheap. How much can we sell them for?’

‘See the fourth column; I added thirty grand more or less, to everything, pro rata with the more expensive ones.’

Tania gave a low whistle. ‘Can we push it that far? Bloody hell, we’ll make a killing on this if it sells anyway quickly.’

‘Sunspots are selling nothing under a hundred grand in the city centre, so why wouldn’t people think that this is good value? I mean, most people couldn’t even find Budapest on a map, let alone differentiate between the districts. This street is almost on a metro line, only about ten minutes from the city centre, and it’s in the Renaissance Quarter as well.’

‘She laughed at Tom’s marketing language. ‘Renaissance Quarter, it has a nice ring to it, so is this the idea you couldn’t talk to me about on the phone?’

Tom shook his head. ‘Look at the last column; it’s the full price plus ten percent. That’s what we’ll be selling them for. A forty grand unit will be marked up to seventy grand, and then pushed up another ten percent to seventy seven thousand, but we’ll only be getting the seventy grand.’

Tania looked puzzled. ‘You’ve lost me at this stage, what’s the extra ten percent for?’

Tom sat back in his chair and smiled’ ‘It’s the guaranteed rent, five percent a year for the first two years, we’ll give them back their own money for two years, minus a letting fee of course.’

‘So we will guarantee the rent, in the case that tenants don’t pay, is that it?’

‘No, there won’t be any tenants; that’s the whole point. We just add the rent to the price, makes the whole project a real winner in the eyes of the punters. Nobody can compete with a project with guaranteed returns, we’ll sell it in a weekend, I’m sure of it.’

Tania sat back and smiled. ‘It took a devious bastard to come up with that one, why didn’t I think of it before you? Tom, you’re a genius, I don’t mind admitting it. I wonder can we do this anywhere else? Maybe in Spain?’

‘No, I don’t think we need to do it in Spain, most buyers are buying there either for their own use or to flip when the places are built; according to Walter, the people enquiring about Budapest are looking for investment for the future, buy to let and that kind of thing. Most of them are small time, amateurs just re-mortgaging their homes here and ploughing the surplus into something in a foreign city.’

‘Maybe we can do it again in Budapest when we sell this one.’

‘It’s possible, but I reckon that Amir Mamzer won’t be too excited at us doubling the price of his project, and I can’t see him coming in that cheap next time around. I won’t tell him anything until I have a contract signed, but that should be today, I’m emailing him our standard contract with a few additions this morning and I’ll get it back by courier tomorrow.’

‘He’ll hit the roof, will he?’

‘Probably, but I’d drop him a sweetener in the form of the administration on the guaranteed rents, let him keep the handling fee in return for running the ‘rental office.’ Maybe we could let him keep any rent he manages to collect as well during the two years.’

‘So we’ll hold on to the ‘rent’ and pay it back to the buyers in a couple of years when the job is built?’

‘Yes, but I think maybe we could vest the rental guarantee in another company, one with no assets preferably. Maybe we could set one up in Hungary or something, in case we decide to default on the rental part of the deal when the time comes. I haven’t thought that end of it through fully yet.’

‘But you will, no doubt. Well done on all that, Tom, I suppose you have the articles written for the Sunday papers as well.’

‘Yes, wrote them on the plane last night, just have to finish them off. Thinking of sending Murtagh to Budapest for a couple of days, get a front page spread from him.’

‘Send him somewhere else, maybe Paris or somewhere, we don’t want him sniffing around Budapest’s Renaissance Quarter, he might get a shock.’ She laughed loudly at the idea.

‘Good idea, boss, you’re not just a pretty face.’

‘And a stunning figure; don’t forget that bit.’

‘Hard to forget something so obvious.’

She was smiling smugly. ‘I did something about Simpson while you were away.’

‘I hope you didn’t do anything silly, he’s just an irritant really; he’s no real threat to us. What did you do?’

‘I heard that a lot of his customers were taxi drivers so I decided to take a small initiative.’

‘Do I really want to hear this?’

‘I sent Andrew off for a few hours to take taxis in and out to the airport, he must have been out there three or four times.’

‘What on earth for?’ Tom was puzzled at her strategy.

‘You know how gossipy taxi drivers are. He pretended to be going and coming to a flight to Spain, told all the drivers that he used to work for Simpson and that he left because the stuff he was selling was rubbish.’

‘Nice one.’

‘The taxi men are always gossiping at the ranks and over the radios, so I reckon that the story will spread like wildfire.’

‘But apart from hurting Simpson, how does that help us?’

‘I’m holding a special evening next Monday that will be confined to taxi drivers. The taxi firms are going to put it out on their radios, and we will sell a section of Montana Fea that will be reduced in price especially for them.’