Single & Single Page 2

  D’Emilio was wandering up the hillside and Winser would have liked to wander with him, arm in arm, chaps together, while he put right any false impression he might have given. But he was obliged to remain kneeling, his face twisted to the scalding sun. He pressed his eyes shut but the sun’s rays still bathed them in a yellow flood. He was kneeling but straining sideways and upright, and the pain that was entering his knees was the same pain that tore through his shoulders in alternating currents. He worried about his hair. He had never wished to dye it, he had only contempt for those who did. But when his barber persuaded him to try a rinse and see, Bunny had ordered him to persist. How do you think I feel, Alfred? Going around with an old man with milky hair for a husband?

  But my dear, my hair was that color when I married you!— Worse luck me, then, she had replied.

  I should have taken Tiger’s advice, set her up in a flat somewhere, Dolphin Square, the Barbican. I should have fired her as my secretary and kept her as my little friend without suffering the humiliation of being her husband. Don’t marry her, Winser, buy her! Cheaper in the long run, always is, Tiger had assured him—then given them both a week in Barbados for their honeymoon. He opened his eyes. He was wondering where his hat was, a snappy Panama he had bought in Istanbul for sixty dollars. He saw that his friend d’Emilio was wearing it, to the entertainment of the two dark-suited Turks. First they laughed together. Then they turned together and peered at Winser from their chosen place halfway up the hillside, as if he were a play. Sourly. Inter-rogatively. Spectators, not participants. Bunny, watching me make love to her. Having a nice time down there, are you? Well, get on with it, I’m tired. He glanced at the driver of the jeep that had driven him the last leg, from the foot of the mountain. The man’s got a kind face, he’ll save me. And a married daughter in Izmir.

  Kind face or not, the driver had gone to sleep. In the Turks’ hearse-black Land Rover, farther down the track, a second driver sat with his mouth open, gawping straight ahead of him, seeing nothing.

  “Hoban,” Winser said.

  A shadow fell across his eyes, and the sun by now was so high that whoever was casting it must be standing close to him. He felt sleepy. Good idea. Wake up somewhere else. Squinting downward through sweat-matted eyelashes he saw a pair of crocodile shoes protruding from elegant white ducks with turnups. He squinted higher and identified the black, inquiring features of Monsieur François, yet another of Hoban’s satraps. Monsieur François is our surveyor. He will be taking measurements of the proposed site, Hoban had announced at Istanbul airport, and Winser had foolishly granted the surveyor the same tepid smile that he had bestowed on Signor d’Emilio.

  One of the crocodile shoes shifted and in his drowsy state Winser wondered whether Monsieur François proposed to kick him with it, but evidently not. He was offering something obliquely to Winser’s face. A pocket tape recorder, Winser decided. The sweat in his eyes was making them smart. He wants me to speak words of reassurance to my loved ones for when they ransom me: Tiger, sir, this is Alfred Winser, the last of the Winsers, as you used to call me, and I want you to know I’m absolutely fine, nothing to worry about at all, everything ace. These are good people and they are looking after me superbly. I’ve learned to respect their cause, whatever it is, and when they release me, which they’ve promised to do any minute now, I shall speak out boldly for it in the forums of world opinion. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind, I’ve promised them that you will too, only they’re most concerned to have the benefit of your powers of persuasion . . .

  He’s holding it against my other cheek. He’s frowning at it. It’s not a tape recorder after all, it’s a thermometer. No it’s not, it’s for reading my pulse, making sure I’m not passing out. He’s putting it back in his pocket. He’s swinging up the hill to join the two German Turk undertakers and Signor d’Emilio in my Panama hat.

  Winser discovered that, in the strain of ruling out the unacceptable, he had wet himself. A clammy patch had formed in the left inside leg of the trousers of his tropical suit and there was nothing he could do to conceal it. He was in limbo, in terror. He was transposing himself to other places. He was sitting late at his desk at the office because he couldn’t stand another night of waiting up for Bunny to come home from her mother’s in a bad temper with her cheeks flushed. He was with a chubby friend he used to love in Chiswick, and she was tying him to the bed head with bits of dressing-gown girdle she kept in a top drawer. He was anywhere, absolutely anywhere, except here on this hilltop in hell. He was asleep but he went on kneeling, skewed upright and racked with pain. There must have been splinters of seashell or flint in the sand because he could feel points cutting into his kneecaps. Ancient pottery, he remembered. Roman pottery abounds on the hilltops, and the hills are said to contain gold. Only yesterday he had made this tantalizing selling point to Hoban’s retinue during his eloquent presentation of the Single investment blueprint in Dr. Mirsky’s office in Istanbul. Such touches of color were attractive to ignorant investors, particularly boorish Russians. Gold, Hoban! Treasure, Hoban! Ancient civilization! Think of the appeal! He had talked brilliantly, provocatively, a virtuoso performance. Even Mirsky, whom Winser secretly regarded as an upstart and a liability, had found it in him to applaud. “Your scheme is so legal, Alfred, it ought to be forbidden,” he had roared and, with a huge Polish laugh, slapped him so hard on the back that his knees nearly buckled.

  “Please. Before I shoot you, Mr. Winser, I am instructed to ask you couple of questions.”

  Winser made nothing of this. He didn’t hear it. He was dead.

  “You are friendly with Mr. Randy Massingham?” Hoban asked.

  “I know him.”

  “How friendly?”

  Which do they want? Winser was screaming to himself. Very friendly? Scarcely at all? Middling friendly? Hoban was repeating his question, yelling it insistently.

  “Describe, please, the exact degree of your friendship with Mr. Randy Massingham. Very clearly, please. Very loudly.”

  “I know him. I am his colleague. I do legal work for him. We are on formal, perfectly pleasant terms, but we are not intimate,” Winser mumbled, keeping his options open.

  “Louder, please.”

  Winser said some of it again, louder.

  “You are wearing a fashionable cricket tie, Mr. Winser. Describe to us what is represented by this tie, please.”

  “This isn’t a cricket tie!” Unexpectedly Winser had found his spirit. “Tiger’s the cricketer, not me! You’ve got the wrong man, you idiot!”

  “Testing,” Hoban said to someone up the hill.

  “Testing what?” Winser demanded gamely.

  Hoban was reading from a Gucci prayer book of maroon leather that he held open before his face, at an angle not to obstruct the barrel of the automatic.

  “Question,” he declaimed, festive as a town crier. “Who was responsible, please, for arrest at sea last week of SS Free Tallinn out of Odessa, bound for Liverpool?”

  “What do I know of shipping matters?” Winser demanded truculently, his courage still up. “We’re financial consultants, not shippers. Someone has money, they need advice, they come to Single’s. How they make the money is their affair. As long as they’re adult about it.”

  Adult to sting. Adult because Hoban was a pink piglet, hardly born. Adult because Mirsky was a bumptious Polish show-off, however many Doctors he put before his name. Doctor of where, anyway? Of what? Hoban again glanced up the hill, licked a finger and turned to the next page of his prayer book.

  “Question. Who provided informations to the Italian police authorities concerning a special convoy of trucks returning from Bosnia to Italy on March thirtieth this year, please?”

  “Trucks? What do I know of special trucks? As much as you know of cricket, that’s how much! Ask me to recite the names and dates of the kings of Sweden, you’d have more chance.”

  Why Sweden? he wondered. What had Sweden to do with anything? Why was he thinking of Swedish blondes,
deep white thighs, Swedish crispbread, pornographic films? Why was he living in Sweden when he was dying in Turkey? Never mind. His courage was still up there. Screw the little runt, gun or no gun. Hoban turned another page of his prayer book but Winser was ahead of him. Like Hoban, he was bellowing at the top of his voice: “I don’t know, you stupid idiot! Don’t ask me, do you hear?”—until an immense blow to the left side of his neck from Hoban’s foot sent him crashing to the ground. He had no sense of traveling, only of arriving. The sun went out; he saw the night and felt his head nestled against a friendly rock and knew that a piece of time had gone missing from his consciousness and it was not a piece he wanted back.

  Hoban, meanwhile, had resumed his reading: “Who implemented seizure in six countries simultaneously of all assets and shipping held directly or indirectly by First Flag Construction Company of Andorra and subsidiaries? Who provided information to international police authorities, please?”

  “What seizure? Where? When? Nothing has been seized! No one provided anything. You’re mad, Hoban! Barking mad. Do you hear me? Mad!”

  Winser was still recumbent but in his frenzy he was trying to writhe his way back onto his knees, kicking and twisting like a felled animal, struggling to wedge his heels under him, half rising, only to topple back again onto his side. Hoban was asking other questions but Winser refused to hear them—questions about commissions paid in vain, about supposedly friendly port officials who had proved unfriendly, about sums of money transferred to bank accounts days before the said accounts were seized. But Winser knew nothing of such matters.

  “It’s lies!” he shouted. “Single’s is a dependable and honest house. Our customers’ interests are paramount.”

  “Listen up, and kneel up,” Hoban ordered.

  And somehow Winser with his newfound dignity knelt up and listened up. Intently. And more intently still. As intently as if Tiger himself had been commanding his attention. Never in his life had he listened so vigorously, so diligently to the sweet background music of the universe as he did now, in his effort to blank out the one sound he absolutely declined to hear, which was Hoban’s grating American-Russian drone. He noted with delight a shrieking of gulls vying with the distant wail of a muezzin, a rustle of the sea as a breeze blew over it, a tink-tink of pleasure boats in the bay as they geared themselves for the season. He saw a girl from his early manhood, kneeling naked in a field of poppies, and was too scared, now as then, to reach a hand toward her. He adored with the terrified love that was welling in him all the tastes, touches and sounds of earth and heaven, as long as they weren’t Hoban’s awful voice booming out his death sentence.

  “We are calling this ‘exemplary punishment,’” Hoban was declaring, in a prepared statement from his prayer book.

  “Louder,” Monsieur François ordered laconically from up the hill, so Hoban said the sentence again.

  “Sure, it’s a vengeance killing too. Please. We would not be human if we did not exact vengeance. But also we intend this gesture will be interpreted as formal request for recompense.” Louder still. And clearer. “And we sincerely hope, Mr. Winser, that your friend Mr. Tiger Single, and the international police, will read this message and draw the appropriate conclusion.”

  Then he bawled out what Winser took to be the same message in Russian, for the benefit of those members of his audience whose English might not be up to the mark. Or was it Polish, for the greater edification of Dr. Mirsky?

  Winser, who had momentarily lost his power of speech, was now gradually recovering it, even if at first he was capable only of such half-made scraps as “out of your wits” and “judge and jury in one” and “Single not a house to mess with.” He was filthy, he was a mess of sweat and piss and mud. In his fight for the survival of his species he was wrestling with irrelevant erotic visions that belonged to some unlivable underlife, and his fall to the ground had left him coated in red dust. His locked arms were a martyrdom and he had to crane his head back to speak at all. But he managed. He held the line.

  His case was that, as previously stated, he was de facto and de jure immune. He was a lawyer, and the law was its own protection. He was a healer, not a destroyer, a passive facilitator of unlimited goodwill, the legal director and a board member of the House of Single, with offices in London’s West End; he was a husband and father who, despite a weakness for women and two unfortunate divorces, had kept the love of his children. He had a daughter who was even now embarking on a promising career on the stage. At the mention of his daughter he choked, though no one joined him in his grief.

  “Keep your voice up!” Monsieur François, the surveyor, advised from above him.

  Winser’s tears were making tracks in the dust on his cheeks, giving the impression of disintegrating makeup, but he kept going, he still held the line. He was a specialist in preemptive tax planning and investment, he said, rolling his head right back and screaming at the white sky. His specialties embraced offshore companies, trusts, havens and the tax shelters of all accommodating nations. He was not a marine lawyer as Dr. Mirsky claimed to be, not a dicey entrepreneur like Mirsky, not a gangster. He dealt in the art of the legitimate, in transferring informal assets to firmer ground. And to this he added a wild postscript regarding legal second passports, alternative citizenship and nonobligatory residency in more than a dozen climatically and fiscally attractive countries. But he was not—repeat, not, he insisted boldly—and never had been— involved in what he would call the methodologies of accumulating primary wealth. He remembered that Hoban had some kind of military past—or was it naval?

  “We’re boffins, Hoban, don’t you see? Backroom boys! Planners! Strategists! You’re the men of action, not us! You and Mirsky, if you want, since you seem to be so hugger-mugger with him!”

  No one applauded. No one said Amen. But no one stopped him either, and their silence convinced him that they were listening. The gulls had ceased their clamor. Across the bay it could have been siesta time. Hoban was looking at his watch again. It was becoming a fidget with him: to keep both hands on the gun while he rolled his left wrist inward till the watch showed. He rolled it out again. A gold Rolex. What they all aspire to. Mirsky wears one too. Bold talking had given Winser his strength back. He took a breath and pulled what he imagined was a smile communicating reason. In a frenzy of companionability he began babbling tidbits from his presentation of the previous day in Istanbul.

  “It’s your land, Hoban! You own it. Six million dollars cash, you paid—dollar bills, pounds, deutsche marks, yen, francs—baskets, suitcases, trunks full, not a question asked! Remember? Who arranged that? We did! Sympathetic officials, tolerant politicians, people with influence—remember? Single’s fronted it all for you, washed your grubby money Ivory white! Overnight, remember? You heard what Mirsky said—so legal it ought to be forbidden. Well, it’s not. It’s legal!”

  No one said they remembered.

  Winser became breathless, and a little crazy. “Reputable private bank, Hoban—us—remember? Registered in Monaco, offers to buy your land lock, stock and barrel. Do you accept? No! You’ll take paper only, never cash! And our bank agrees to that. It agrees to everything, of course it does. Because we’re you, remember? We’re yourselves in another hat. We’re a bank but we’re using your money to buy your land! You can’t shoot yourselves! We’re you—we’re one.”

  Too shrill. He checked himself. Objective is the thing. Laid-back. Detached. Never oversell yourself. That’s Mirsky’s problem. Ten minutes of Mirsky’s patter and any self-respecting trader is halfway out the door.

  “Look at the numbers, Hoban! The beauty of it! Your own thriving holiday village—accounted any way you like! Look at the cleansing power once you start to invest! Twelve million for roads, drainage, power, lido, communal pool; ten for your rental cottages, hotels, casinos, restaurants and additional infrastructure—the merest child could get it up to thirty!”

  He was going to add, “Even you, Hoban,” but suppressed himself in time. Wer
e they hearing him? Perhaps he should speak louder. He roared. D’Emilio smiled. Of course! Loud is what d’Emilio likes! Well, I like it too! Loud is free. Loud is openness, legality, transparency! Loud is boys together, partners, being one! Loud is sharing hats!

  “You don’t even need tenants, Hoban—not for your cottages— not for your first year! Not real ones—ghost tenants for twelve straight months, imagine! Notional residents paying two million a week into shops, hotels, discos, restaurants and rented properties! The money straight out of your suitcases, through the company’s books, into legitimate European bank accounts! Generating an immaculate trading record for any future purchaser of the shares! And who’s the purchaser? You are! Who’s the seller? You are! You sell to yourself, you buy from yourself, up and up! And Single’s is there as honest broker, to see fair play, keep everything on course and aboveboard! We’re your friends, Hoban! We’re not fly-by-night Mirskys. We’re brothers in arms. Buddies! There when you need us. Even when the rub of the cloth goes against you, we’re still there”—quoting Tiger desperately.

  A burst of rain fell out of the clear heaven, laying the red dust, raising scents and drawing more lines on Winser’s clotted face. He saw d’Emilio step forward in their shared Panama and decided he had won his case and was about to be lifted to his feet, slapped on the back and awarded the congratulations of the court.

  But d’Emilio had other plans. He was draping a white raincoat over Hoban’s shoulders. Winser tried to faint but couldn’t. He was screaming, Why? Friends! Don’t! He was blabbering that he had never heard of the Free Tallinn, never met anyone from the international police authorities; his whole life had been spent avoiding them. D’Emilio was fitting something round Hoban’s head. Mother of God, a black cap. No, a ring of black cloth. No, a stocking, a black stocking. Oh God, oh Christ, oh Mother of Heaven and Earth, a black stocking to distort the features of my executioner!