The Sons of Adam (61 page)

‘To Mr Thomas Calloway, Pursuing to the invitation issued by the Secretariat of Fuel coming under the authorisation of the Ministry of Industry and Foreign Trade …’

Tom blinked. His eyes skipped down the telegram, trying to find the meat. Here it was. ‘We are delighted to inform you that your submission of tender relating to supply of lubrication products has been completely accepting, and hereby announce that …’

Tom paused, blinked, and read the sentence again.
Lubrication products?
He forced himself to read every syllable of the telegram. There was nothing about petroleum. Hold on. No. That wasn’t right. ‘Your offering of petroleum is thankfully not required.’
Not required?

Lyman Bard caught sight of his boss’s face. He became utterly still. The world was suddenly very quiet.

‘Bad news?’

Tom didn’t answer. Bard took the telegram and read it in silence. The English was horrendous, but its message was clear.

They’d lost.

They’d lost the contract to supply gasoline, fuel oil and kerosene, which between them accounted for more than ninety-nine per cent of the value of the contract. They’d won a trivial little deal to supply lubricants. The profits they’d make from the lubricants wouldn’t even cover their costs in making their bid.

But that wasn’t the worst of it.

The worst was this. The telegram stated that ‘Norgaard Petroleum will be required to be working closely with the below-named petroleum supply company: Alanto Oil.’ And there it was, in black and white. Tom had lost. Alan had won. It was the worst outcome in the entire world.

Tom sat like a statue at his desk. He knew this feeling. It was the oldest feeling in his life. It was Alan. It was the Montagues. It was Signal Hill. It was failure. The only difference was that this time there was someone to blame.

‘The bastard,’ he whispered. ‘The bloody bastard.’

The time: 9.12 a.m., London time.

Alan hadn’t gone to his office, but to the Italian Embassy in London. There had been some bureaucratic nonsense to delay them, but eventually he had got his hands on the precious news from Rome.

He’d won.

He’d won the contract to supply petroleum, kerosene, and fuel oil. It was a massive victory.

For a long time, Alanto had been a major oil producer, but a relative weakling in the matter of sales. Overnight that had changed. This one single contract had elevated Alanto into the very top tier of international oil companies. Alanto would be as strong in marketing as it always had been in production. A vast amount of work would be needed to consolidate the triumph. The profits from the contract would need to be reinvested to complete Alanto’s transformation. But Alan wasn’t worried about working hard. Right now, he wasn’t worried about anything at all.

George Reynolds was next to Alan as he glanced at the news and tucked the telegram nonchalantly into his top pocket.

‘Well?’ said Reynolds impatiently. ‘Well, laddie?’

‘Well what, George?’ answered Alan, as he began to saunter happily outside. ‘I told you we’d win, didn’t I?’

Later that day, 6.17 p.m., London time. More to the point, at a certain large white-fronted house in Chelsea, it was bath-time for the youngest member of the family.

As Polly splashed contentedly in the soapy water, Lottie made a determined effort to wash the bits of her that needed washing. Alan, just home from work, paused at the door. It was an outrage against the social order for a woman of Lottie’s wealth and breeding to supervise her children’s baths, but Lottie enjoyed doing it, and what she enjoyed, she did.

‘Daddy!’

Polly, a happy-go-lucky girl of nearly three, smiled up at her father.

‘Hello, Poll!’

He rumpled her hair and pretended to splash her. She shrieked. He took his hand away. ‘Again, again!’ she yelled. He pretended to splash her. She shrieked.

Alan smiled at his wife. ‘Hello.’

She smiled back. ‘Hello, my love.’

‘Again!’ yelled Polly.

‘It was today, wasn’t it?’ said Lottie.

Alan nodded.

‘Well?’ Polly had found a lump of pumice stone and was trying to work out if she could fit it into her nose. ‘No, darling,’ said Lottie, removing the stone and offering a sponge instead.

Alan found himself wanting Lottie’s full attention, but he realised he wasn’t going to get it. He waited for an interval in Polly’s quest for playthings.

‘We got it,’ he said. ‘We won.’

‘Oh, terrific. Well done.’

Polly’s next game was filling the sponge with water and squeezing it out over the floor. Lottie removed the sponge and tried to interest Polly in a model wooden oil tanker, carved by George Reynolds as a gift for young Tommy some years earlier.

‘You don’t sound very interested. This is the most important news for Alanto since we first struck oil.’

Lottie straightened up. ‘Really? And how interested are you in things that matter to me?’

‘Do you want to know how we won?’

‘I imagine you want to tell me.’

‘We found one of the rival oil companies had a spy in Rome.’

Despite herself, Lottie looked interested. ‘Don’t tell me you decided to start spying on them? How unlike you!’

‘No. At least not exactly. I let them spy on me. I was able to take advantage.’

By this time, Lottie was busying herself with Polly again and once again Alan felt cheated of his wife’s attention. At the same time he knew that her complaint was reasonable. When Lottie had news about the hospital, Alan had only ever responded in the same excessively cool way.

Polly continued to splash. Lottie continued to play with her and wash her.

After a while, Alan said, ‘This
is
big news for us, you know. I’m sorry I haven’t always been … I suppose I’ve been a bit of a beast to you at times over your hospital.’

Lottie sat up again. ‘Yes. You have.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Sorry as in sorry-but-you’re-going-to-continue-being-a-beast? Or sorry as in you’ve-seen-the-error-of-your-ways-and-have-learned-to-love-everything-about-my-beloved-hospital?’

Alan grimaced. ‘More like the first of those, probably.’

To his surprise, Lottie bent forwards and kissed him hard on the lips. ‘Either way, it’s an improvement, Mr Beast. So tell me, how did you catch your precious spy? Did you catch him flashing codes with a pocket mirror?’

‘Not exactly.’

Alan laughed. It had been simple enough.

Knowing the importance of the oil contract, Alan had been on his guard ever since arriving in Rome. Already when Marinelli had stepped out after him onto the balcony, Alan had been suspicious. Those suspicions had hardened when Marinelli had known everything about American aviators, but had failed to spot Alan’s errors in describing General Balbo as a Marshal, referring to ten seaplanes instead of fourteen, and six men dead instead of the five actually lost. And then, when Marinelli – who’d claimed never to have been in America – knew instantly what Alan meant by ‘not worth a plugged nickel’, Alan’s remaining doubts had vanished altogether.

From then on, it had been simple.

Alan had allowed himself to take up Marinelli’s offers of ‘help’. He had asked the Italian’s advice on pricing his bid. At two to three cents under Shell’s old prices, Marinelli had been happy. At four to five cents under, he’d been seriously worried. When Alan had suggested putting his bid in six cents under, the Italian was violently upset. It had been easy enough to guess from his reactions that his paymasters (whoever they were) were contemplating making a bid of five or six cents cheaper than Shell. So Alan had told him that he’d place a bid at three cents under, and had in fact placed his bid at seven cents under.

Even at what was fairly cut-throat pricing, Alanto had enough cheap oil to make a stunning profit with every barrel.

‘Papa! Papa!’

In the bath, Polly wriggled with annoyance.
She
was the centre of the universe, not oil, and she considered it about time her father gave her the adoration she so plainly deserved.

‘Now it’s time for
meeeeee
.’

Alan and Lottie found each other with their eyes. Their argument hadn’t disappeared by any means, but something had changed somehow. When Alan smiled, she returned his look, not just with her mouth but her eyes as well.

‘Papa!
Papa
!’

Alan moved across to the bathtub. Polly broke into a vast grin of delight. The adoration was about to begin.

‘In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful …’

They were in a small aircraft in the grip of a hefty crosswind, and the modern metal frame heaved and jolted with every gust. It was obviously impossible to kneel head to ground in the Muslim fashion, and the man next to Tom had to make do by knocking his head gently against his closed fist, as his left hand traced the lines of a prayer book open on his lap.

The plane lurched again and lost height at a stomach-losing pace.

Tom leaned to look out of the window. He saw the flat mud roofs of the old town of Tehran. He saw the desert beyond. He saw a handful of gardens, astonishingly lush and green in the surrounding dust. He saw a railway line, unfinished and unworked on, heading out into emptiness. Rebecca wanted him to confront his past, did she? Well, he was doing it now, though not in any way she knew about – or would approve of, if she did.

The plane lurched again.

The man next to Tom lost his place in the prayer book, and began again at the top. ‘In the name of Allah …’

Jeez, thought Tom, was it as bad as that? Down the back end of the plane someone must have dropped a basket of limes, because a couple of dozen of the small green fruits came bouncing down the central aisle, bombing the legs of the passengers and even, in a couple of cases, hurtling through the open door into the cockpit.

Jeez!
Tom wasn’t religious in the slightest. Any tendency he’d ever had in that direction had been more than completely crushed by the experience of war, but this plane ride was enough to bring out religion in a plateful of rice. Out of the window, a windswept runway was rising to meet them at astonishing speed. There was a brief flash of mud-coloured houses, a handful of robed figures and an oxcart, a sudden glimpse of telegraph wires moaning in the breeze – then touchdown, bumpy and far too fast, but touchdown, blessed touchdown, all the same.

Tom let out the breath he’d been holding in. For the first time in his life, he was in Persia, the country of his childhood dreams.

The package arrived express from New York.

Alan knew what it was and ripped it open. Thirty sheets of cheap stationery, unfastened, Galston’s nervous handwriting tilting down across the page. Names. Lists and lists of names: twenty-five to each page, times thirty pages, seven or eight hundred names in total. Each name: an English male, entry point Ellis Island, the year 1919 or 1920.

Abbott, Abrams, Ackerley, Adams, Adkins, Adshead …
Right on down through the alphabet to
Yarnton, Yaxley, Yeats, Young, Zimmer.

Next to each name, there were scribbled notes. The first name, for instance, read, ‘
ABBOTT
– James – 88 – 1.6.19 – Ks Cit, Ks – Majestic.’

The first two digits represented Galston’s precious dobs, though, annoyingly, only the year was given. Since most immigrants were in their twenties, there were a large number of names with their date of birth given as 1893.

The next three items represented date of entry, destination inside America, and vessel of disembarkation. Alan tried to think of a way he could use this information but came up short. As far as Alan could see, Tom could have arrived in Ellis Island anytime in 1919; he could have been bound for anywhere in America; and he could have arrived on any ship whatsoever. For all the enormous amount of work that Galston had put in, Alan guessed the information to be completely useless.

Which left names. Seven or eight hundred names, of which, at a guess, fifty or more would have a birth date in 1893. If Tom had altered his date of birth by even a year or two as well, then the list of possible names was even greater. But Alan had a better clue than that.