No Place in the Sun (9 page)

He brought his breakfast out on to the balcony and rifled through one of the Irish Sunday papers; they were very expensive here but it was good to catch up on the news from home. Nothing new from the home front really, just the usual parochial stuff. When you looked at it, a lot of the so-called news was just quotes from politicians who were saying nothing new, it all seemed a bit irrelevant from this distance. The property pages showed an increasing amount of expensive houses that seemed to be getting smaller and smaller as their prices climbed steadily; it was great to be away from it in a lot of ways.

He folded the papers and poured another cup of tea. The sun was hot but his terrace faced West and was shaded in the mornings. He never tired of the view from his breakfast table; this morning the air was exceptionally clear and he could see the rock of Gibraltar to the West, counterpointed by the blue shadow of the Rif mountains just across the Straits in Morocco.

Three weeks gone. He stretched back and admired the deep brown colour on his arms and legs; he had been working on his tan and now he didn’t look like a tourist, more like one of the expat workers in the area’s tourist trade. Time I was looking at doing something other than lying on a sun lounger, he mused.

It was hard to know what to do; the local English language newspaper had lots of small adverts looking for staff, but most of them were for bar and catering staff, a euphemism for pot wallopers and kitchen porters, and he wasn’t prepared to go there. Not yet, anyway.

A two-line ad caught his eye in the middle of a page. A car dealership was looking for an English-speaking salesman; he called the number and got an answering machine that advised calling to the garage during office hours. It was in Calahonda, not too far away if he remembered rightly. He shaved and put on his suit, might as well make the right impression from the outset.

The Owner was apologetic. ‘Terribly sorry to have put you to the trouble, we filled that job last week but I forgot to cancel the advert. Really sorry, Senor, I apologise very much.’

Tom was annoyed, a morning wasted. Sure, he hadn’t been doing anything anyway, but it was a bit of a pain coming all the way to Calahonda when the bloody job was gone. He was warm in the suit, and the car was parked a half a mile away, no parking anywhere near the bloody garage. He slung his jacket over his shoulder and started to walk back to the car park.

‘Hello, sir, would you like to enter a free draw for a camcorder?’ The girl was attractive, slim and blonde, neatly dressed and in her early twenties.

Tom wondered what the scam might be; nobody gave you anything for nothing. Normally he would walk on, but the girl’s smile was open and warm and she didn’t look too hard-bitten. If she was a crook, she didn’t look it.

‘How are you? Now why would a beautiful woman want to give me a present of a free ticket in a draw?’ A bit of flattery might drop her guard and find out the truth faster than an antagonistic approach.

‘It’s a genuine offer, we are promoting some property in this area and we are giving tickets in a limited draw to anyone who views the project. We also give a free bottle of wine to anyone who attends a presentation about the project, no strings attached, just goodwill by the promoters.’

Tom still had doubts, but she seemed to be respectable enough. She proffered a brochure showing a very nice looking apartment complex with landscaped gardens with palm trees and a huge swimming pool. It looked good, but he was curious.

‘So, what’s the catch, are you one of those timeshare outfits?’

‘Absolutely not, this is a respectable company with thousands of satisfied clients. We run a holiday club, a club made up of property owners who benefit from cheap flights and low cost holidays when they swap their properties with other members worldwide. I’m Kathy, by the way.’ She sounded like she might be Dutch, maybe German, but her English was perfect.

Tom still wasn’t sure about the setup, but it seemed less threatening than he had first thought. ‘Ok, give me a free ticket, maybe I’ll win the camcorder and take pictures of you for all the model agencies.’ No harm in laying it on a bit thick, it might get results.

The girl never stopped smiling. ‘You must come to view the project, it’s not far away. I have a car.’

‘I have a car too, it’s just down by the beach car park; I’ll follow you.’

She was persistent. ‘It’s too easy to lose someone on the way, come on with me and I’ll drop you back here after. Don’t worry, I won’t bite you or try to take advantage of you.’

Tom was wary. ‘I might give it a miss this time, catch you another time maybe.’

Her face fell; the smile still there but forced. ‘Please, I need you to go there or I don’t get paid, there’s no catch, it will just take only half an hour to walk around and look at the place, you don’t have to buy it or anything. Please.’ She was pleading now.

Tom felt sorry for her, he had been there a few times, trying to make a sale and losing it at the last minute. She was an amateur though, he never dropped his guard or resorted to pleading; you could never get a sale that way. You had to keep the pretence up all the time, to make the customer want what was on offer.

‘Ok, I’ll go and look, but I’m not buying anything, not today anyway.’

She kept up the patter all the way to the development, which turned out to be a lot farther away than he had expected. The road passed through a narrow underpass below the motorway and left the built-up area behind, winding is way uphill through a dry and barren landscape until they arrived at a recently built apartment block with the bare concrete shells of three other blocks just behind it. There was no sign of any building work going on around the other buildings, just half-used pallets of materials and piles of rubble and soil with weeds growing out of them. Tom was not too impressed, but he made no comment and followed Kathy into the foyer of the completed building. Two young men, dressed in standard salesman uniforms of black trousers teamed with white shirt and tie, jumped to attention when they saw the newcomer arrive.

The nearest of the young men stretched out his hand. ‘Good morning, I’m Timothy.’ This one was English, North of England, maybe Manchester. Sounded like a character from Coronation Street. Tom shook the proffered hand. ‘Tom, I’m here to collect a camcorder.’

‘Oh yes, very good.’ The salesman smiled nervously, not sure whether or not he should laugh at Tom’s joke; he got straight down to business.

‘We’d like to show you the complex, and to explain how you can be a part of Pueblo Alto Blanco. First I need a few details.’ He clipped a pad to a clipboard and clicked a pen, ‘Name?’

Tom gave him as few details as he could, skipping things like telephone number on the excuse that he didn’t have one yet. Timothy was persistent, ‘do you have a home phone number maybe, or an email address?’

‘Just moved house’ Tom wasn’t giving too much away. ‘I still have to organise all that stuff.’

Reluctantly, Timothy closed the clipboard and showed Tom around the complex. The apartments were attractive enough, marble floors and small balconies, and good enough views down the hill towards the sea, which could barely be seen in the distance. ‘Not sea views as such, we prefer to describe it as ‘sea glimpses’, but the important thing is the build quality, and of course the prices.’

‘So, how much is one of these, then?’ Tom was still trying to figure out the setup; it wasn’t a timeshare, Kathy had assured him that it wasn’t, so what was the score here?

Timothy seemed reluctant to get down to the details, there was more to see. They left the show apartment and he led Tom to a large room off the lobby, where a scale model of the entire complex took up most of the centre of the room. Four blocks were planned, as well as a large swimming pool; it looked much better on the model than it did if you looked outside.

‘Impressive.’ Tom wondered why only one block was finished. ‘When will it all look like this?’

‘Just two years from now, all units will be ready then, but if you get in now you only pay the launch price, it will go up when the whole lot is done.’ Timothy seemed happier now that he was back on a learned-off sales pitch. Tom could read this fellow like a book; not a salesman, he reckoned, just learned how to sell this project and nothing more. I’d lose him in a minute in a yard full of cars, or a shed full of washing machines for that matter.

‘So, let’s cut to the chase then.’ Tom was in control of the situation and he knew it. ‘What’s the deal, how much are the apartments? Spill the spiel, Timothy.’

Timothy stammered and stumbled his way through the sales pitch. ‘It’s, you know, a club, that is you share into the ownership, just use the place when you want and let others pay for the other weeks you don’t need, very good way to own a home in the sun for very little money.’

‘So, how much? Give me a figure in euros, bottom line etc.’

Timothy was still evasive. ‘Depends on how long you think you’d need it for every year, and what time of the year.’

Tom smiled to himself. Useless salesman if I ever saw one, bottom of the barrel stuff. So it is a timeshare racket, just dressed up as a club, probably to keep it legal. Fucking scam artists.

‘Well, Timothy, if you can’t tell me the price, I have to be out of here.’

‘It’s not that simple, it depends on various factors.’

Tom was losing patience with this idiot. ‘A figure, Timothy, how much? Cut the waffle and give me a figure. Ok, let me make it easy, how much would it cost me to have this place for the first week in July every year from now till kingdom come?’

Timothy brightened and looked at a spreadsheet in his folder. ‘Well, for a north-facing apartment, one bedroom, it would only cost you twelve thousand euros, including furniture and everything, down to the last knife and fork.’

‘And how much for the last week in January?’

Timothy rifled through his folder again. Tom remembered Kevin’s advice on the ‘bible’ back in City Auto, ‘you need to know it by heart where it refers to any car in the yard, no point in looking it up when you’re in the middle of a sale. You need it in your head.’ This guy wasn’t a salesman, he was just a puppet who had learned a few lines off by heart, wouldn’t cut it in the real world.

‘That would be six thousand, very little when you think of the price of hotels, you would spend that in a couple of years, this is a great way to invest for the future and save yourself thousands as well. And of course you can always sell your membership at any time.’

Tom made a few calculations in his head. ‘So, average price is about nine grand a week, more or less?’

‘That’s about right, yes.’

‘So, nine grand a week, that’s near enough four hundred and seventy grand a year if you took every week?’

‘Yes, I guess so.’ Timothy wasn’t clear where this was heading.

‘Four hundred and seventy grand for an apartment that’s worth what, seventy or eighty grand on a good day? I’d want to be nuts, wouldn’t I?’

Timothy seemed to know that he was losing this battle, but he struggled on. ‘Yes, but if you join this club you can swap your week for a week in any of our affiliate resorts anywhere in the world, and you get peace of mind, you know....’ His voice trailed off, he knew he had lost this one somewhere along the way.

Tom headed out to the lobby, Kathy was dropping off a middle-aged couple at the front door and he waved to her and made a steering wheel motion with his hands. She held up both hands, fingers spread, he would have to wait another ten minutes to get a lift back to the coast.

Timothy was still vainly trying to get him to listen to some more of the sales pitch. ‘If you would like to view a presentation in the conference room, we will send you on your way with a bottle of wine, it’s only ten minutes.....‘

An older man emerged from the conference room. Tom looked him over; he exuded an air of confidence and seemed to be in charge. In his forties, Tom reckoned, about six foot tall, solidly built with a tight haircut, looked like he might have been a rugby player.

The newcomer extended a hand to Tom; ‘I’m Alan, MD of Pueblo Alto Blanco Holiday Club, thank you for coming along today.’ His grip was strong and his smile seemed genuine, nothing like the two salesmen who were now descending on the bewildered looking couple in the lobby.

Tom recognised a fellow salesman; this fellow had closed a few deals in his time. It was time to stop messing around and get out of here. ‘I’m not interested in your offer, or in this project, but my thanks to your colleague for showing it to me.’

Alan’s smile never faltered, but he seemed to also recognise something in Tom that meant that this would be a wasted effort. ‘I’m sorry you don’t have time to view our presentation; I’ll have Kathy drop you back to Calahonda.’

The young woman said little on the way back to the town. Tom tried to extract some information from her on the way but nothing much was forthcoming, she seemed to have clammed up completely and the friendly smile had disappeared. He wondered at the whole set-up, hard to see how anyone would buy what was on offer, maybe it was a credit card scam or something. He was glad to get back to his car and head for Puerto Banus.