The Fireman (36 page)

‘It’s an ill wind, Mr Lai,’ said Kaufman.

‘I don’t follow you,’ said Lai, using a scrap of beef to wipe through the gravy and the yellow smear on his plate.

‘It was my problems in China that allowed you to buy into my company,’ said Kaufman, placing his knife and fork together and then dabbing his napkin on his lips.

‘You were very unfortunate, Mr Kaufman,’ said Lai. He stopped eating, too. Perhaps he’d lost his appetite.

‘And you were lucky. Very lucky,’ said Kaufman.

‘Oh, I think there was more than luck involved.’

‘I’m sure there was. I should have realized that the Chinese contracts fell into my lap too easily.’ Kaufman rested his arms on the table and toyed with the salt cellar as he talked. ‘I should have seen what was coming.’ A waiter unobtrusively removed our plates. I’d hardly touched mine, and now I was sitting in silence as the two adversaries squared off for battle.

Lai leant back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. ‘You were impatient,’ he said. ‘You saw the chance of a lifetime and you grabbed it with both hands.’

Another waiter arrived and handed out dessert menus. Kaufman ignored his but Lai idly flicked through it as he talked. ‘You weren’t to know it would go sour.’

‘But you did, Mr Lai?’

Lai smiled. ‘Of course. And now you must pay the price of your greed.’

‘So now we get down to it,’ said Kaufman. ‘What is it you want, Mr Lai?’

‘Oh,’ said Lai, looking up from his menu. ‘I rather think I will have the lemon meringue pie.’ He chuckled quietly at his own joke.

‘If it’s a fight you want, Mr Lai, you’ve got one. And I’ll take you apart, piece by piece,’ Kaufman said, and for the first time there was a note of menace in his voice.

Lai slowly placed his menu down in front of him, and waved the approaching waiter away. He smiled at Kaufman, showing teeth but no warmth. They’d forgotten I was there, their eyes were locked and their minds were focused on each other.

‘Oh, I don’t think there will be a fight, Mr Kaufman,’ he said, and leant forward, resting his elbows on the table. Kaufman looked at him quizzically.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mr Kaufman, I already have your company in the palm of my hand.’

Kaufman snorted with impatience. ‘Nine per cent won’t even get you a seat on the board,’ he said.

‘I don’t have nine per cent, Mr Kaufman.’

‘You have the shares that I placed with China,’ said Kaufman.

‘I have bought more.’

‘How many more?’ The eyelid was twitching now, and his breathing was heavier.

‘I now own twenty six per cent of your shares, Mr Kaufman.’

‘What is this, greenmail? You expect us to buy out your shareholding, is that it?’

‘Hardly, Mr Kaufman. Not the way your shares have been performing recently. They have been rising steadily and I doubt that you could afford to buy me out.’

‘So you want a seat on the board, is that it?’

‘No, Mr Kaufman, that’s not what we want.’

Kaufman picked up on that quickly, like a terrier pouncing on a rat. ‘We?’ he snapped.

‘My friends and I,’ said Lai.

‘Friends?’ asked Kaufman, his hands clenched around the salt cellar. ‘What friends?’

I knew the answer to that one. The recent buying orders for Kaufman’s shares had been coming in from San Francisco, Sydney, Toronto and London, the boys in the City Office had said, all places with their own Chinese communities, cities where Lai was sure to have friends and relatives who could buy shares in small batches without attracting attention. I was certain that Lai would have made sure that there was no way anyone could prove he was acting in concert with the other investors, and that to an outsider and, more importantly, to the regulatory authorities, it would seem to be totally unconnected buying.

‘Suffice it to say that as of today I control fifty four per cent of your company, Mr Kaufman.’

Kaufman’s eyes widened in disbelief, and he swallowed several times before he spoke.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I directly own twenty six per cent of your firm,’ said Lai. ‘The remaining twenty eight per cent are in the hands of people who are sympathetic to my aims.’

‘Your aims? What is it you want? My company?’

‘I already own your company, Mr Kaufman. On Monday morning I will announce to the London Stock Exchange that I am making a bid for the shares that I do not already own. My allies will announce at the same time that they are accepting my offer. You, I believe, personally control some twelve per cent and a further six per cent is held by a trust for your children.’ Lai smiled and held his palms up at shoulder level like a conjurer showing he had nothing up his sleeves. ‘I really don’t see how you can stop me.’

Kaufman’s teeth were clenched tightly and he was breathing heavily through his nose, his eyes tense with hatred and anger. The waiter reappeared at Lai’s shoulder and he ordered his lemon meringue pie.

‘Anything for you, Mr Kaufman?’ he asked, and when he did not reply Lai looked at me, eyebrows raised.

‘Just coffee,’ I said, and when I heard my voice I realized that I hadn’t spoken for a full ten minutes and that my mouth was dry with anticipation.

‘Three coffees,’ said Lai, ordering for Kaufman.

‘I built that company from nothing, Mr Lai. It’s mine, it’s part of me. I won’t let you take it from me.’

‘You cannot stop me, Mr Kaufman.’

‘It’s my company, you won’t be able to run it without me. And I’ll never work for you.’

‘I don’t intend to run your company, Mr Kaufman. I sincerely hope that by this time next year there will be no trace of Kaufman Industries left.’

‘What?’

‘I shall be breaking your company into its component parts one by one. As soon as I have full control of the group China will announce it is reinstating all the projects it has so recently cancelled. Then I shall begin selling off the company piece by piece. Most are already promised to my friends. You have built up a world-wide empire, Mr Kaufman, and I have friends around the world. I am going to dismember your company, and it will be as if you never existed. No one will remember Kaufman Industries or you. You will not even be history.’

His dessert arrived then, along with the coffees. Lai cut into his pie with the edge of his fork and delicately tasted it. ‘Delicious,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘You really should try some, Mr Kaufman.’

‘Why?’ asked Kaufman quietly. ‘Why?’

I thought Lai was going to joke again, but he looked coldly at his adversary and rested his fork carefully on the plate. The time for joking was past and I watched with morbid fascination as Lai moved in for the kill, like a snake mesmerizing a rabbit.

‘Why? You want to know why, Mr Kaufman?’ He nodded slowly. ‘Very well, I shall tell you.’

He paused, on the surface he was as unruffled as a stagnant pool but I knew how much Sally had meant to him and he was fighting to control his anger, but his voice when it came was level, flat and emotionless.

‘You, Mr Kaufman, are a greedy man.’ He made it sound like a schoolboy insult. ‘Your mining operation in Ningbo was a sound investment, it was generating perfectly reasonable profits and showed every sign of continuing to do so. But you decided that you wanted more.’

Kaufman leant back in his chair and sighed deeply, lowering his head onto his chest and frowning as he studied Lai. Lai looked at me, and I picked up the story. I’d done the digging and so I wanted to tell it. But as I spoke, Kaufman looked only at Lai.

‘The deal you had with Peking was that you would pay them a proportion of the value of the diamonds that you mined,’ I said. ‘Diamonds were examined in Ningbo before being flown to Hong Kong by two valuers acting for the authorities. Their job was to check on your production, value the diamonds and send back a monthly report to Peking. But the arrangement wasn’t good enough for you, was it? You wanted more. The initial surveyor’s report suggested that most of the stones would be small, industrial quality diamonds, but when you started finding more and more large stones you began to resent the percentage you had to pay to China. So you began to hide the good stones from the valuers and showed them only the low-grade industrial diamonds.

Then just before the diamonds were put on the plane you replaced the big stones.’

Still Kaufman refused to look at me.

‘You couldn’t release those diamonds onto the open market because that would have depressed prices and people would start to wonder where the new supply was coming from. Am I right so far?’

Kaufman said nothing, I guess he wasn’t used to being lectured and he just stared broodingly at Lai from under half lowered lids. He was gripping the silver salt cellar with one hand and his knuckles shone white. Lai smiled thinly, acknowledging his adversary’s discomfort, relishing it.

‘So you stockpiled the diamonds, and after a year or so began releasing them in small batches through the Hong Kong bourse,’ I continued. ‘But again your greed got the better of you, you wanted too much, too soon and the price began to move. And it began to go down at a time when a miners’ strike in South Africa should have sent the price soaring. Dealers started to talk and a young girl reporter writing an advertising feature on the diamond exchange listened. And then she went to Zhejiang to see for herself what sort of diamonds you were coming up with. All she had to do then was run a cross check with the authorities in Peking and she’d find that you were short-changing them to the tune of millions of dollars a year. What did she do, Kaufman? Type the story into the
Post
’s computer where somebody read it and tipped you off? Or did she telephone you to see if you knew what was going on?’

Kaufman still didn’t reply. His lips were clamped together, locking in anything he might have wanted to say. He looked like a trapped wild cat trying to work out which way to jump.

‘Whatever, you had her killed,’ Lai broke in. ‘And when you killed her you killed a part of me.’ I nodded in agreement. ‘She was my sister,’ I said, but Kaufman didn’t even look at me. As far as he was concerned I didn’t exist, it was between Lai and him and I wanted to shake him and force him to face me, to admit that I was there.

‘It was an accident,’ Kaufman said quietly, talking to Lai.

‘She was thrown through a window fifteen floors above the street, Mr Kaufman. How was that an accident?’

‘They were supposed to keep her quiet, that was all.’

‘And how were you going to buy her silence? With money?’ Lai smiled, his eyes sad and soulful as a sick spaniel’s. ‘She had all the money she could ever want, Mr Kaufman. She could never have me but she knew I would give her everything else.’

‘Sally couldn’t be bought,’ I said, to both of them. To Kaufman because I wanted him to know she was a reporter, and that the story would have meant everything, and to Lai because I wanted him to know that even he could not buy my sister and then the car and the flat flashed into my mind and I realized that maybe he could. But still I was ignored like a young child sitting at a table with squabbling adults.

‘But as far as you were concerned, she knew too much,’ Lai pressed.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Kaufman, exasperated.

‘I understand perfectly,’ said Lai.

Kaufman snorted, and banged his hand down on the table, hard enough to rattle the vase and its carnations sitting dead centre. He glared at Lai.

‘It wasn’t what she knew, it was what she planned to do,’ said Kaufman.

‘She was a reporter, she was working on a story,’ I said.

‘Oh really?’ said Kaufman. ‘Is that what you think? That your precious sister was in pursuit of the truth. It’s a pity you weren’t in my office when the little bitch rang me up.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Lai, beating me to the question.

‘She tried to blackmail me,’ said Kaufman. He sounded more confident now, he straightened his back and looked down his nose at Lai, the look of a man who thought he had right on his side.

‘She phoned me in London. Asked me a lot of leading questions about the mine, about the diamonds and about the financial arrangements. As you can imagine, I was not exactly truthful in my replies. I admit I had a lot to hide.’

He paused, as if planning what to say next. ‘Then she told me she already had the story. It was already written, it was ready to be published.’

‘And?’ asked Lai.

‘And she asked if I wanted to buy it. Exclusively.’

‘Balls,’ I shouted, loud enough to turn heads.

‘For half a million pounds I could have exclusive rights to the story. And it was up to me whether or not it ever appeared in print.’

‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t have done that.’

He looked at me coldly. ‘You have my word,’ he said. ‘I am telling the truth. Your sister was a blackmailer.’

‘And so you had her killed?’ said Lai.

‘No,’ said Kaufman. ‘I have contact with some of the less savoury elements in Hong Kong. I arranged for them to go round and speak to her, to persuade her to drop her price. To accept a more reasonable amount. I swear to you that I did not want her killed.’

‘Sally did not need money,’ said Lai.

‘Maybe she didn’t need it, but you can take it from me she wanted it,’ said Kaufman.

Lai shook his head in emphatic denial, but I felt a terrible coldness spreading through my belly, the numbing realization that maybe, just maybe, he was telling the truth.

‘Why did she die?’ I asked. ‘If the heavies you sent were only to frighten her, why did she die?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why they went to see her at the pool instead of at her flat. I suppose they thought she would be more vulnerable, on her own, at night. The way I heard it they switched off the lights and she started screaming before they even had a chance to talk to her. She got out of the water and started running. She was hysterical.’