Carver

21

The All England Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon, London

The second Monday of Wimbledon is regarded by many tennis lovers as the best day of the whole tournament. Weather permitting, the last sixteen in both the ladies’ and men’s competitions all play, so there are top seeds on court all day long. Sadly, not all of them are worth watching.

The opening match on Centre Court featured the women’s world number one, a sturdy-thighed Swede who had spent the past ten days wandering around Wimbledon Village in her time off without once being recognized. Five minutes and three games into the first set, with half the seats still waiting to be filled by ticket-holders who were more interested in finishing their lunch, she was already flattening a patently inferior Bulgarian. The Bulgarian, however, was winning the decibel battle. As her grunts and shrieks echoed around London SW19, Zorn turned to his guests and said, ‘If I want to hear a noise like that I’ll go rent some lesbian porn.’ He took out his phone and went online to the BBC’s Wimbledon home page. To Zorn’s delight a match on Court Two had been done and dusted as quickly as this one was likely to be. ‘OK, Come with me. I’ve got something better.’

Zorn was entertaining two investors and their partners as his guests today. One was Carlos Castizo, the heir to a Colombian drug-cartel fortune, who, like a Latin American Michael Corleone, was engaged in giving his family’s enterprises a sheen of legitimate respectability. The other was Mort Lockheimer, the former head of asset-backed bond trading at a now-defunct Wall Street bank. Lockheimer’s trades, specifically the vast sums he had wagered and then lost on subprime mortgage bonds — in the mistaken belief that property prices could only go up — were arguably the single biggest factor in his former employer’s demise. He had thereby cost thousands of bank workers their jobs and left shareholders with nothing, but, by a great stroke of good fortune, Lockheimer had actually left the bank about three months before his entire portfolio was revealed to be a ten-billion-dollar liability, rather than the great asset he had claimed, taking a golden parachute of more than a hundred million dollars with him. He had now spent all of that, and more than twice as much again — all of it borrowed — on buying into Zorn Global.

For Lockheimer, this was a win-win deal. He was absolutely certain that Zorn was going to make him a fortune. But more than that, to be an investor in Zorn Global was to be a member of a very exclusive club, one that was talked about with admiration and envy in the smartest, richest circles. Mort Lockheimer had attracted a great deal of negative publicity in the months after his losses on subprime trades were written about in a host of blogs, newspaper articles and even books on the financial crisis. He’d been made to look like a crook. Even worse, he’d looked like an idiot. His wife Charlene and daughters Chelsey and Alissa had been humiliated, and had retaliated by heaping vast amounts of acrid, bitter shit on him. Now he looked like a hero again, or less of a schmuck, at any rate.

Be that as it may, though, Charlene was not happy about Zorn’s change of plan. ‘What the fuck is he talking about?’ she hissed in Lockheimer’s ear. ‘I want to sit on Centre Court. Tell him we ain’t moving.’

‘You tell him,’ Lockheimer countered. ‘That guy’s gonna make us more money than we’ve seen in our whole fuckin’ lives. If he wants to go sit someplace else, that’s what we do. And if he asks you to blow him, just get on your knees and start sucking.’

‘Screw you, asshole,’ Charlene glowered. But even though she was simmering with resentment, she picked up her bag and followed her husband up the steps to the exit. And when Zorn asked her how she was, she put on her broadest, most plastic smile and said, ‘Just great!’

To anyone watching Zorn — and someone was — he appeared far more entertained watching the squabbles — for Castizo’s twenty-two-year-old mistress was no happier to be moving than Lockheimer’s fortysomething wife — than the abysmal tennis being served up on court. It was as if he was confirming in his own mind just how desperate these already wealthy individuals were to give him large amounts of their money. Messing around with their day was as good a way as any to test the depths of their greed. And of course, unlike his guests, Zorn did have a genuine interest in tennis. He’d actually come to Wimbledon for the sport.

Accompanied by Ahmad Razzaq, Zorn led the way out of Centre Court and through all the people trying to get on to Wimbledon’s so-called Tea Lawn — in actual fact the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s staff car park, dolled up for the fortnight with a bandstand and tables with green and purple striped parasols. There was more muttering from both sets of guests, which only intensified as a posse of uniformed security guards barged their way past, stepping on the toes of one of the women’s Louboutin sandals as they went, escorting a dark, thickset, heavily stubbled player.

‘That’s Hernandez, the number nine seed,’ said Zorn, as the black uniforms and white tennis clothes were swallowed up by the crowd. ‘Tough guy, plays real hard, never gives up on a ball. But he’s up against Arana, and I say the kid wins it in four.’

The path towards Number Two Court narrowed, cramming spectators making their way there even more tightly together. The court was a plain concrete bowl, whose only concession to show court glamour was its padded seats. There were no celebrities to be spotted, no royal box to gawp at. Zorn could not have cared less. Oscar Hernandez was the established player, but Quinton Arana was a nineteen-year-old qualifier on a mission. The son of a blue-collar family from a Pennsylvania mining town, he’d already taken two seeded scalps in the first week, and he was gunning for a third. Zorn watched a couple of ultra-competitive rallies, filled with fizzing ground strokes, applauded both players as they chased down seemingly lost causes, gave a loud, ‘Yeah!’ of delight, and declared, ‘Now this is what I call tennis!’