Billionaire

19

Jean-Luc Menton awoke with a start, sweating heavily, to a noise that sounded like a dog being sick — except that he didn’t have a dog. As his brain focussed on reality, he knew without opening his eyes that the noise was from his girlfriend, Valerie, who always slept on her stomach, and half-suffocated against the pillow.

He slid his hand out and picked up his Casio digital watch.

‘Merde,’ he informed himself. He put the watch back, picked up a pack of Gauloises, shook a cigarette out, put it into his mouth, lit it with his Bic lighter and inhaled deeply. Then, with the cigarette still in his mouth, he jumped out of bed, and began pulling on his clothes.

The grunting gagging noises stopped and were replaced by Valerie’s deep voice. ‘Quelle heure est-il?’

‘Dix heures et demi.’

He ran into the bathroom, put the cigarette in the soap tray, chucked some cold water on his face, dried it, then replaced the cigarette. He pulled on his jacket, picked up a couple of packets of chewing gum from the sidetable, mumbled ‘Au revoir, à toute à l’heure,’ and dashed out of the apartment.

Menton knew that the Viscomte did not like to be kept waiting, and he was already an hour late, with a thirty-minute drive ahead of him. As he walked down the stairs, he thought back hard on the interview he had had with the Israeli, General Ephraim, on the beach at La Baule. He had no doubt that Viscomte Lasserre would require a very detailed account of Ephraim’s reaction.

He left the small modern apartment beside the old U-boat pens at St Nazaire harbour, walked over to his green Alfasud, climbed in and started the engine. He rammed the gear lever into first, and accelerated fiercely away; almost immediately, he felt a sharp stabbing pain in the base of his head.

‘Tournez à droite,’ said the man with the Walther automatic, in the back seat.

Menton arrived two hours late for his meeting with the Viscomte. He didn’t mention anything about the interlude with the man with the Walther. He was too scared.

At 3.15 that Tuesday morning, the green phone on General Isser Ephraim’s desk buzzed sharply. Ephraim picked up the receiver. It was Chaim Weisz, head of French operations for the Mossad. Ephraim took the piece of chewing gum from his mouth and placed it in the ashtray.

‘This man,’ said Weisz, ‘Jean-Luc Menton. We have some information.’

Baenhaker was feeling horny. It was a feeling that had persisted continually for about a week, and almost everything he did to turn his mind away from sex invariably brought him straight back to the subject. He read the newspapers and found himself turning with avid attention to any article that hinted of rape or divorce. He tried three novels in succession, to discover limbs and organs entwined, after only a few pages, in each one. He tried the television, the radio, and then he would give up for a while and would luxuriate in ogling the nurses in the ward.

He was slightly ashamed with himself that during the course of the week his standards of who he did and did not fancy among the nurses had lowered considerably. Last Friday, he had decided that there were only two he fancied, and that the rest were extremely unattractive. By Saturday, four of them he decided were passable and by Sunday, six. It was now Tuesday morning, and he decided that even one of the elderly cleaning women didn’t look too bad.

He tried to figure out exactly for how long it was that he had been in here: he knew it was about three weeks, but he wanted to be more precise. The day of the accident was still a blank. He could remember only having gone to stay with a male friend at Bristol university that weekend, and playing chess much of the time; it was a game of chess that had caused him not to leave on the Sunday and stay over until the Monday; but he could not remember actually leaving.

Something, however, nagged him. He was deeply upset still over Amanda and somehow, he was sure in his mind, there was some connection between her and his accident. He tried to go back in his mind to that Monday, but there was nothing there.

‘Good morning Mr Baenhaker.’

Thoughts of Amanda’s body came vividly back to him: her streaked hair cascading like a fringed curtain across her nipples as she sat on top of him in the bed.

‘Good morning Mr Baenhaker.’

Her long slim legs and thighs, with the blaze of gold between them.

‘Just going to take a quick look and see how we’re getting on.’

The sheet and blankets were whipped back, and Baenhaker came out of his day dream to discover the surgeon, and attendant Nurse McDonald, staring down at him with faintly bemused expressions as he lay in the bed, hand firmly clenched around his poker-hard organ which protruded from the fly of his pyjama bottoms.

It was some time on Friday that Baenhaker had decided that Nurse McDonald was extremely pretty. Between then and today, he had put in a considerable amount of effort at drawing her attention and chatting her up. By the time she had gone off duty the previous night, Baenhaker was certain that he had someone who would succumb to his charms, if not in some dark corner of the hospital, then at least in the comfort of his Earls Court flat after his release. But the expression on her face as she stood now above him dispelled all of that with the tartness of a lavatory air-freshener spray. The expression on her face told him she thought he was a nasty little pervert.

The surgeon examined the stitches, then nodded. Nurse McDonald pulled back the sheet and blanket with as much grace as if she were putting the lid on a dustbin full of empty sardine cans.

‘Healing very nicely,’ said the surgeon. ‘Should have you out of here within a few days now.’ The pair of them turned to walk off, then the surgeon stopped, and leaned over to Baenhaker and whispered confidentially into his ear: ‘Don’t do that sort of thing in here old chap — it embarrasses everyone. If you have to, go and do it in the lavatory.’ Then he strode off in Nurse McDonald’s wake.

Baenhaker’s face took several minutes to lose its bright red flush. He sat and glared around the ward, and then began to scrape his teeth with the nail of his little finger. An elderly orderly marched into the ward and came up to his bed. ‘Mr Baenhaker?’

He nodded.

‘There’s a telephone call for you outside — you can take it in Sister’s office.’

‘Thank you.’ Baenhaker followed him out through the ward to the small cubicle with a chair and a telephone from which Sister conducted her empire. He shut the door, and picked up the receiver. ‘Hallo?’

The crackling and faint sound of heavy breathing told him it was an overseas call. ‘Danny?’ It was the voice of General Ephraim.

Baenhaker was feeling very fed up with his chief since Ephraim’s visit, and in light of his present mood, he had no difficulty in adopting a sullen voice: ‘Yes.’

‘How are you?’

‘All right.’

‘I’ve spoken to the senior registrar of your hospital. He thinks you’re pretty well okay now.’

‘What the fuck does he know?’

‘He’s had the reports from the surgeon. I have some urgent business for you: I want you to discharge yourself, and report to the office at nine o’clock tomorrow.’

‘I don’t know if they’ll let me.’

‘In British hospitals you can discharge yourself.’

‘What about my injuries?’

‘I’ve told you — they’re better.’

‘How the fuck do you know? You’re two thousand miles away.’

‘I’ll talk to you at nine.’ The line went dead. The head of the Mossad had rung off.

Baenhaker put the receiver back down; as he walked back to his ward, his leg twinged like crazy right down along the scar line, and his chest still hurt like hell every time he breathed deeply. He was angry, very angry, but he knew that it didn’t matter how angry he got, nor how fed up he got: he could get as angry, or fed up, or anything else that he liked. The only one thing he could not do was disobey the General’s instructions.

The taxi dropped him outside the crumbling Earls Court terraced building, where he lived, shortly after 2.00. It was drizzling hard, and he pushed his way out of it through the door and into the dark corridor with its smell of musty carpets and curry. He had no idea who in the building ate curry, but from the smell that pervaded it all the days of the year, either someone was running a clandestine take-away, or else they were addicted to the stuff.

An appalling stench hit him halfway down the corridor of the top floor, the fourth, which grew stronger with every step he took nearer his own flat. He put the key in and opened the door — it was the stench of rotting meat. He went to the kitchen and pulled open the fridge door; he gagged, and nearly threw up. The fridge had packed up, and the four steaks and two pints of milk were hopping about inside it.

Baenhaker had been at a party the previous winter, and there was a woman there who claimed she had psychic powers. He had let her read his palm. She’d predicted a lot of bad news for the future; so depressed had she been by what she had seen in his hand, that she had burst into tears. That hadn’t made Baenhaker feel too terrific either. When, on the New Year’s Eve, he had tripped over and smashed his bedroom mirror, he had begun to feel that, possibly, the mad woman had been right; things didn’t look too good.

As was his habit whenever he returned to the apartment, regardless of whether he had been out for half an hour, a weekend or, like now, several weeks, he checked each room carefully and methodically. Today, he had forgotten how gloomy the flat looked in daylight, particularly on a wet day. He’d only ever had enough money for the basics of apartment life, and several of the major items had come from second-hand shops. The exceptions were the 21'' Sony colour television, his JVC video-recorder — he was addicted to movies and this was his one real luxury — and his Walther PP automatic pistol, together with some £30,000 worth of the most sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment available in the world. Both the gun and the surveillance equipment were still in their places in the hollowed-out headboard of his bed.

He picked up from the bedside table the large framed photograph of Amanda, wearing a hardhat, surrounded by rubble and smiling cheekily. He slipped the photograph out of its frame, seized it between his two hands as if to rip it in half, then relented and pushed it out of sight into a drawer. He sat down on the bed, still unmade from the Saturday when he had set off to drive down to Bristol, and felt sad and desolate. He thought back about those months he had spent with Amanda, and then tried to stop thinking about them because they hurt too much.

They had met when a high-rise office building in Camden Town had been gutted by fire. Baenhaker’s cover role in England was as an insurance loss adjuster for Eisenbar-Goldschmidt, a major Israeli reinsurance company. He had been sent ostensibly to investigate the damage and advise Eisenbar-Goldschmidt on any potential salvage items. The real reason for his presence in the gutted shell was because one floor had been occupied by a large Israeli import-export company. The Mossad wanted to know whether there was any Arab sabotage involved, as part of a plan of international sabotage against Israeli firms, and was interested in a direct report from its own personnel, whom it trusted, and not from the British Police, in whom it had doubts — the same doubts as it had about every other organization in the world that did not openly and unequivocally proclaim and prove itself to be pro-Israeli.

Amanda had been in the shell as part of the team of architects and designers which had been commissioned for the re-building. He went over to the drawer, pulled out the photograph once more, looked at it, then put it back. For eighteen months they had got on brilliantly and then, as suddenly as the flame had started, it died.

The last two occasions they had had dinner, she had lost interest in what he had to say, and no longer seemed to care about anything he had done. Then that weekend they were supposed to go away to Scotland, she had rung him on the Thursday to say she had to go to an architects’ conference in Cologne. He stood up suddenly, and marched over to the window. He opened it and breathed in deep gulps of the air, then put his hands on the sill and stared down into the basement at the dustbins. He remembered now. It came flooding back: Amanda in the Porsche on the motorway: the hell she had been to an architects’ conference in Cologne.

He stared out of the window for a long time, watching the drizzle. He tried to remember more about the accident, but nothing else came.

Baenhaker was conscious that he had little money. If he were paid by Eisenbar-Goldschmidt as a loss adjuster, he would have had a damned good salary and a decent car; but he wasn’t. He was paid by the Mossad out of the Israeli Defence budget. The Mossad was always short of money, and those who bore the brunt of the shortage were the employees. Baenhaker had thought of quitting on a number of occasions, but a sense of duty, a deep-rooted desire to see Israel survive, and a belief that he was an indispensable part of that survival kept him in his job.

He had asked Amanda often whether it bothered her that he had little money, could not afford to have a smart car and take her to smart restaurants; she had always replied that it didn’t. But he had noticed that the lifestyle of the rich seemed to lure her. Having seen her in that Porsche, he knew how she must have finally swallowed the hook deep down inside her. She had been to see him twice in hospital. The first time she had held his hand and looked tearful. The second time she had brought him chocolates, forgetting that he hated chocolates, and stayed for five minutes. A voice deep inside him said, ‘Forget her.’ He was trying, he knew. Damned hard.