The Stars’ Tennis Balls (25 page)

‘Here,’ said Cosima, taking the bottle, ‘it helps if you
twist
the cork, like so. When will you be back?’

‘My plans are uncertain. ‘Tell me, Gunther. Do you happen to have any contacts in Geneva who might be useful to me?’

‘You have more to sell? If you do, believe me I would be happy to take any surplus off your hands.’

‘No, no. I may need another passport, that’s all.’

‘You should see my friend Nikki,’ said Gunther, scribbling a number on a card. ‘He’s a Russian, but nothing happens in Geneva without his permission.’

‘Thank you.’ Ned took the card and handed Gunther a glass.
‘Prosit.’

‘Prosit.’

Cosima was inclined to be tearful as she left with her father. ‘I will never see you again,’ she sniffed, clinging to Ned’s jacket.

‘Nonsense. You have been a wonderful friend to me, of course we shall see each other again. I do not forget friends. I will call for you one day.’

‘Come, my dear,’ said Gunther from the doorway. ‘Goodbye, Karl, Paul, whatever your name is. If you do happen across another consignment – ‘

‘You will be the first to know,’ Ned assured him.

He closed the door and leaned against it.

Outside in the corridor he heard Gunther hiss to his daughter. ‘A mental patient, you mark my words.’

‘Daddy, he’s the sanest man either of us has ever met and you know it.’

‘He can’t even open a champagne bottle!’

‘And what proof of lunacy is that? You can’t open a pickle jar.’

‘Who else could get hold of medical grade stuff like that? It all fits, I tell you.’

They continued arguing as they went around the corner towards the lifts.

Ned smiled and looked at the room and the parcels around it. He had a great deal of packing to do.

Ned walked into the hall of the Banque Cotter Cantonaise and smiled at the expensively pearled female cashier.

‘I wonder if I might see the manager about my account?’ It was all very well for Babe to write down numbers and passwords, but how did one actually go about the business of withdrawing money from a Swiss bank? Ned was entirely prepared to be disappointed. He imagined a smooth-faced bank official staring at him with supercilious contempt.

‘This account was opened thirty years ago, sir. It cannot be yours.’

‘I … it was my father’s.’

‘We have no instructions from him. Do you have papers, sir? Accreditation of any kind?’

In his mind, the striped-trousered official would press a bell under his desk and Ned would be tossed onto the pavement or even sent to gaol for attempted fraud. Or perhaps the British had got there first and left word with the bank.

‘Sir, this account was closed down many years ago. Our security officer will now escort you to the British Consulate.’

Maybe the whole thing had all been a figment of Babe’s imagination.

In the event things proved much simpler.

The cashier passed him a form and he filled in the account number. There was no space for passwords. She took the form, looked briefly down at it and, with the bang of an electric lock, disappeared into a room behind the guichet. Within a very short space of time a spruce young man, close enough to the striped-trousered official of Ned’s imagination to make him smile, came through into the banking hall.

‘How do you do, sir?’ he said in English, extending a hand. ‘Pierre Gossard. Would you like to come through?’

Ned found himself in an expensively furnished office whose main features were a Louis Quinze desk and two matching chairs. Gossard sat down behind the desk and pointed to one of the chairs.

‘Just one or two formalities,’ he said, tapping into the keyboard of a desktop computer which was perched incongruously on the heavily ornamented desk. ‘Perhaps you would be good enough to write for me the opening password phrase?’

He passed over a compliment slip and Ned wrote down ‘Simon Says’ and handed the slip across the desk to Gossard who glanced at it briefly, looked at his computer screen and nodded. He passed the paper back to Ned.

‘And the secondary phrase?’

Ned wrote ‘This is a stick-up’ and passed it over again. Gossard smiled thinly and pushed the compliment slip into a small metal box.

‘Security paper,’ he explained. ‘It is no more. Well, everything seems to be satisfactory, my dear sir. How may I help you?’

‘Well, firstly I’d like to know how much is in my account.’

‘Mm-hm …‘ Gossard typed at the computer. ‘You understand that since the account is linked to leading share indices on the European bourses I can only give you the balance as from close of trading on Friday. Quite a substantial sum has accrued over the past thirty years.’

Ned nodded as if talk of share indices, bourses and substantial sums was a matter of everyday conversation to him. Gossard wrote a figure down on a fresh compliment slip and handed it to Ned who looked down.

‘That’s in Swiss Francs?’ he said gulping slightly.

‘Just so,’ said Gossard.

Ned swallowed again and did a rapid calculation in his head. Roughly two and half francs to a pound. Good heavens.

‘As for what I would like to do with the account,’ he said as naturally as he could manage. ‘I should like a little time to think. Perhaps we can meet again on Friday? You don’t need anything else from me, I take it?’

‘No indeed, sir. Since your account is as old as it is, it does not fall under new disclosure rules. But it is not old enough to qualify for inspection under the recent Jewish reparation schemes.’

‘Excellent,’ said Ned. ‘Friday morning, eleven o’clock?’

‘I shall look forward to seeing you, sir.

Ned was still trembling when he reached his suite at the Hotel D’Angleterre. He sat on the balcony sipping coffee and looking out over the lake. He watched a rainbow shimmering in the spray of the fountain.

Staring into the rainbow, Ned wept.

‘Oh, Babe. Why aren’t you here with me?’

He looked down at a hotel notepad on which he had jotted a set of numbers.

‘It is indeed a substantial sum,’ he whispered to himself, the tears dropping down onto the paper. ‘Even with the price of a cup of coffee being what it is today, three hundred and twenty-four million pounds is still a substantial sum. Oh, Babe, there is such a thing as Justice. Truly there is.

Simon Cotter arrived in England by private plane in the autumn of 1999. His reputation for financial adventuring preceded him.

There was not an. ambitious young person in Europe who did not want to catch the attention of this remarkable buccaneer. No one rode the dot.com bubble harder, funding young, energetic and ambitious dreamers whose ventures, when floated on the European technology exchanges, made opening valuations that caused the eyes of seasoned traders to pop. Some said that the swollen, iridescent membrane of e-commerce would soon burst, but for the moment no one was soaring higher than Simon Cotter of CotterDotCom. The doomsayers insisted that the balloon was given its stratospheric lift by hot air and that the world was growing giddy with altitude sickness. The faithful maintained that the venture was fired by a true spirit of innovation and enterprise and would last beyond the lifetime of the sceptics.

Cotter was not yet forty, but the gossip had it that he owned twenty-five million for every year of his life. A website tracked his estimated fortune against the fluctuation of the markets, one day in October it showed him earning four million pounds sterling in just eight hours of trading. The Man of the Millennium had arrived and, to the excitement of the British press, he was about to make his home in England, the land – some claimed – of his birth.

He was unmarried and said to exude a magnetic appeal that had men and women alike gasping and moaning with admiration. Cynics asserted that a dead sea-slug with that kind of money and power would radiate charisma and sex-appeal. That isn’t necessarily so, it was pointed out to them – look at Bill Gates. Not all that is gold, glitters.

That no one knew where Simon Cotter had come from with such indecent speed added greatly to his mystery. One moment the world was Cotter free, the next he was bigger than Harry Potter. Poems were written on that very subject, taking advantage of the happy accident of the rhyme.

The man was rumoured to be able to speak nine languages and play an unbeatable game of backgammon. The French believed that he was French, but the Germans, Italians and Austrians also claimed him for their own. The Swiss pointed to his head offices outside Geneva, not five kilometres from where the World Wide Web itself had been devised and declared Cotter to be Swisser than a yodel. Others tapped the sides of their noses and whispered gravely about the Russian mafia, Colombian cartels and other dark and dangerous corners of the world. Geneva might be the birthplace of the World Wide Web, they said, but it was also the world’s financial laundromat. Where there’s brass, there’s muck, they said. It can’t last, they said. It’s brightest just before the dusk, they said. Wiser heads were silent and disdained to take any notice of the mutter in the gutter. Talk it was that pushed prices up and talk that pulled them down again. Any fool could talk. Prattle and tattle were cheap and getting cheaper. What was this telephony revolution, with its faxes, pagers, cellular and satellite phones, email, intranets and real-time video-conferencing but a cheap and faster way to chatter and gossip and jabber? If it was more than that, then it could keep for the moment. Give us time to think, they said. We who wait on the platform may arrive later than those that jump aboard the speeding train, but we’ve a better chance of a good seat and a restful journey. We get there in the end, sounder in wind and limb. Only bandwagons are to be jumped upon, and bandwagons always crash at the first dangerous corner.

Cotter too kept his own counsel. His spokesmen would announce with great puff and pizzazz the latest bright young venture that CDC was funding and he might from time to time attend the launch of a favoured new dot.com enterprise in person, but the Robespierre of the Digital Revolution himself gave no interviews and threw out no theories for the world to chew over and tear apart. With his dark hair, his beard and the sunglasses that never left his face, the press had other nicknames for him too. The CyberSaviour they called him and the Jesus of Cool.

When he did, uncharacteristically, reveal to a London financial journalist at one of his company launches in Lausanne that he would soon be coming home, England sighed with pleasure and pride. He was immediately offered tickets to the Dome for Millennial Eve, the membership of four clubs, accounts with a dozen tailors and the opportunity to be interviewed on Channel Four by Chris Evans. This last offer he turned down.

‘I’m really so uninteresting,’ he emailed to the producer. ‘You’d be much better off with somebody else. Believe me, I’d only bore you.’

He was not believed and the crush of press waiting to meet him at Heathrow would have gratified a pop star.

Amongst the Britons who watched the footage and listened to the comment and analysis that spilled out in the media over the next few weeks were many who sat down immediately to compose letters to him, explaining their ideas for world-beating new internet sites or simply begging for money, employment or a charitable donation.

The reactions of three different individuals are of particular interest, however.

Ashley Barson-Garland MP, QC, had recently won the curious Commons lottery that gives the right to backbenchers to try and push their own Private Member’s Bill through parliament. Barson-Garland had been very keen to sponsor new legislation that would prove his party’s commitment to the family. He knew that in the next election, whenever it came, each party would attempt to represent itself as the true champion of Family Values. He believed that, since his party was almost certain to lose that election, he could do himself a great deal of good by making a name for himself as the Tories’ most prominent spokesman for the Family Agenda. When the dust of defeat had settled and the present leader had gone, as go he must, the Tories would look to someone like Ashley to lead them to victory in 2005, which he had for so long marked down as the year that would see him installed in Downing Street.

The Bill he had drafted called for the strictest laws yet on the control of the internet. All British Service Providers would be held accountable in law for any unseemly traffic that passed through their pipelines. Barson-Garland called for an all-embracing firewall to be built around the island to keep the British family safe from the ‘tide of filth’ that threatened to ‘engulf’ the ‘young and vulnerable’ and other ‘at-risk members of the community’. (He had long ago overcome any scruples about using clichés. They worked. For some extraordinary reason, they worked and only a fool would consider himself above their use.) Under the terms of his proposed Internet Service Providers Act, an independent agency would be set up arid given the right to sweep all email randomly, much as police had the right to point speedguns at road traffic. Anyone who opposed such legislation might regard themselves as a friend of liberty, but Barson-Garland would demonstrate that in reality they were nothing less than enemies of the Family. Only those with suspect agendas or something to hide could possibly object to the purification of cyberspace. Ordinary, decent, law-abiding citizens would welcome such a move.

He did not expect his Bill to be passed into law, Private Members’ Bills almost always failed, but it was a way to plant a (patriotic) flag in the territory of family and to ‘force the agenda’. The Labour government already attempted to prove its family credentials by talking of family tax credits, child income allowances and other mechanisms that provoked yawns even from those who benefited directly from them. With his Bill, Barson-Garland had staked a claim that would force New Labour to play or pay. If they opposed him, he could make great political capital of their folly.

The middle-class tabloids were already on his side. Ashley Barson-Garland’s Great National Firewall appealed to the ‘instincts’ (as they preferred to call bigotry and prejudice) of the ‘vast majority’ who worried about ‘bogus’ asylum-seekers and ‘rampant’ Euro federalism. What was the internet after all, but backdoor cultural immigration of the most pernicious kind? Children
(children
for heaven’s sake!) were at the mercy of homosexual propagandists, anti-capitalist rioters, drug dealers and perverts. Thank God a man like Ashley Barson-Garland was standing up to all this. His Internet Service Providers Bill, all in all, ‘pressed the right buttons’ and ‘sent the right signals’.

This evening, this hero of ordinary decent law-abiding citizens was watching a BBC special on the ‘Dot Coin Phenomenon’ chiefly in order to see how much of what he had said in an interview to the producers of the programme had been cut, mangled in meaning or entirely omitted. When footage of Simon Cotter appeared he laughed contemptuously at the accompanying hyperbolic journalese, but his ears pricked up at the reports that Cotter was coming home to England. He opened his laptop, keyed in his password and made an instant note in his journal.

Like Winston Churchill, I find that sometimes it is enough just to read or hear ‘patriotism’ ‘England’ or ‘home’ for tears to spring to my eyes. I believe that ‘senile lability’ is the phrase for it. In my case it seems to have come early. What a turnaround … as a teenager, my prick used to twitch and leak at the mere sight of words like ‘youth’ and ‘boy’. In middle age ‘family’, ‘hearth’ and ‘country’ are the words that jump from the page and it is my eyes that do the twitching and leaking. Different symptoms of the same sickness, no doubt…

This Simon Cotter interests me. He has not nailed his colours to the mast. He thrives on enterprise and must perforce be a natural Tory, for all his hippy-happy appearance. Now that the glamour of New Labour is wearing thin he must be caught and cultivated. It is probable that he will instinctively see my bill as a threat. If I ask to see him however … suggest that I value his input, am anxious to consult all interested parties, canvas all views, hear all opinions, weigh all options, include not exclude, etc. etc., he may be flattered into some sort of cooperation. What a catch he would be.

Ashley closed the lid and looked up at the television screen once more. His Private Member’s Bill was being discussed. Some lank-haired millionaire yob in a tee-shirt was accusing Barson-Garland of trying to create a sterilised intranet that would cut Britain off from the rest of the world.

‘Cyberspace is like a giant city,’ the scrofulous oaf insisted in vowels that made Ashley wince and an intonation that rose at the end of every sentence as if everything this poltroon said were a question. ‘Along with the shopping centres, galleries, museums and libraries, it’s got its slums and red-light districts. Sure. That’s true in Amsterdam, New York, Paris, Berlin and London. It’s not true in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia or Montgomery, Alabama. Where would we rather live, London or Riyadh? Amsterdam or Alabama? Think about it, yeah? Wherever there’s freedom, you’ll find sex, drugs and rock and roll. The internet’s no different.’

Ashley snorted with derision. ‘And wherever there are sex, drugs and rock and roll,’ he said, ‘you will find desolated communities, dysfunctional families and moral wastelands befouled by gibbering nonentities like you.’

He was pleased with that and added it to his diary entry for the day.

Rufus Cade let himself into the flat and flopped onto a sofa.

‘I’m getting too fucking old for this,’ he told himself with a heavy sigh.

He could see the answering machine light flashing and ignored it. Probably Jo, Jane or Julie moaning about money. Why couldn’t he have married a girl whose name didn’t begin with a J? Just for once in his life at least. Given it a try. Lucy at the office, she was a good girl. A good girl and a damned good shag and all. Zoл too. And Dawn.
They
didn’t threaten him with court orders and solicitor’s letters. They called him ‘Roofy’ and teased him about his weight. In his next life he’d run a mile before speaking to any Js. Whining bitches the lot of them. School fees, health insurance, holidays. Every child, he thought furiously as he tapped out the last of his coke onto the glass-topped coffee table, every last sodding child has to have work done on their fucking teeth. Some bastard in Soho has decided that braces are now cool and there isn’t a teenager in the land without expensive multi-coloured metalwork wired across their front fucking snappers. Bollocks to the lot of them.

He picked up a newspaper. A new-laid pubescent dot.com millionaire grinned out from the front page, acne flaring.

‘Cunts,’ muttered Rufus. ‘How the fuck do they do it?’ Rufus had sent Michael Jackson, Madonna, Marilyn Monroe and the Prince of Wales to the launch of another new e-commerce company (e-tailers they called themselves now, ho, fucking ho) at the Business Design Centre just the week before. For some reason the people behind the launch – CotterDotCom, who bloody else? – had asked Rufus to turn up too, which had annoyed and puzzled him. He had better things to do than watch Madonna spilling wine and Michael Jackson having his hair pulled by drunken journalists. Why the hell did they want him there? He could hardly argue with them. Who pays the piper calls the tune and all that, and CDC paid better than anyone. Most people thought his agency was already over the hill (too eighties, sweetie, so
vieux chapeau)
which meant that the imprimatur of a hot shop like CDC took on special value. Rufus would have jumped naked through fiery hoops if they’d demanded it.

He had stood like a fat lemon watching his models move around the room with drinks and canapés. He listened to a presentation that bored and irritated him and he got drunk. Mind you, he did score, so it wasn’t entirely a wasted morning. Come to think of it, he reminded himself, checking his watch, John should be here soon.

Weirdest thing. Just coming out of the cubicle after a nice toot and there’s this big fat old guy combing his hair in the mirror.

– Got some more if you want it.

– More what? Unlikely he would be law, but better safe than sorry.

– If you’re not interested, no worries. Very pure, very cheap. Try a line.

The guy hands me a wrap, just like that. Incredible. And fuck me, was it ever wild gear. Whooh! Nearly blows my fucking head off.