The Marketmaker

19

The next couple of days were a relief. Zico called back within half an hour with the correct answer to Luís’s question — Lulu. He made threats about how Isabel would die if fifty million dollars wasn’t paid by the end of the week, but Luís didn’t believe him and neither did I. We were just glad that the process had begun which would lead eventually to Isabel’s release.

We sat round the breakfast table with Nelson. Luís was almost smiling.

‘Now we have to discuss tactics,’ Nelson said. He was wearing a particularly bright purple shirt. Tufts of grey chest hair peeked through its open neck. He spoke carefully and rapidly, very much in control. He had proved himself to us with his suspicion of the hoax ransom demand; it was becoming easier to trust him.

‘OK,’ said Luís.

‘We must decide how much you are prepared to pay for Isabel.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ Luís protested. ‘The answer is everything.’

‘No, that’s not the answer,’ said Nelson. ‘Remember, this is a commercial transaction. The answer is the lowest amount you can get away with. Look, the kidnappers can’t know exactly how much money you have. We will come to a point where we have to say this is our final offer. Then, provided the kidnappers believe us, they will hand over your daughter.’

Luís took a deep breath. ‘OK.’

‘Good. Now, how much do you think you could get your hands on? In cash.’

Suddenly I felt awkward. Here I was about to hear all about the personal business of a man I hardly knew, in fact the owner of a rival bank to my employer. I began to stand up. ‘Perhaps I should leave you to it...’

Luís held up his hand. ‘No. Stay. Please.’

I paused. He meant it. Nelson nodded. ‘OK,’ I said, and sat down.

‘I can probably raise up to five million dollars,’ said Luís. ‘Maybe a little more. But it will mean talking to some of my colleagues. I’ll have to borrow money.’

‘Good,’ said Nelson. ‘I’d hope to get away with a lot less than that.’ He pulled out his notebook and biro. ‘We should think about some numbers. The average settlement at the moment in Rio is about two hundred thousand dollars. But I think they know how wealthy you are, or at least they can make a good guess. The first demand was high.’

‘I can’t pay fifty million,’ said Luís.

‘Nor will they expect you to. Another rule of thumb is that the final settlement is about one tenth of the initial sum offered. In this case that’s five million dollars. But that’s still too high for the market in Rio right now.’

‘I could pay it if necessary. Somehow.’

Nelson held up his hand. ‘No. I think two million should be fine. You should be able to claim a million back from Dekker’s insurers anyway, although you will probably have to put up the cash to start with.’

‘Perhaps Dekker could provide it?’ I suggested.

Luís’s eyes narrowed for an instant. ‘No, thank you. I don’t want to borrow money from Ricardo Ross.’

The speed of his reaction surprised me, but in a way I was pleased to see that he could still think shrewdly.

Nelson and Luís argued back and forth on the target figure, and eventually settled for three million dollars.

‘OK. We have a number,’ said Nelson. ‘We can’t expect to come to an agreement of the price too quickly. We have to let the kidnappers string things out a bit, feel that they’ve had a proper negotiation. Otherwise they won’t believe three million is our final offer.’

Luís opened his mouth to protest.

‘Offering more money won’t get Isabel released any faster, believe me.’

Luís saw the logic and nodded.

‘I suggest we start off with a million dollars, then move it up in half-million chunks until we get to two million. Then we need to raise our offer in ever smaller amounts so that it seems as though each rise is a struggle. We will aim to stop the negotiations just short of three million.’

It seems a long way to come down from fifty million to one million,’ said Luís doubtfully.

‘Believe me, one million is a big first offer for a kidnapping.’

We believed him. Zico called on Thursday night. He treated Luís’s offer of one million dollars with derision. He said he knew that Luís owned Banco Horizonte. Luís explained that he only owned part of it, and that he couldn’t sell his stake. He performed well. He sounded cool at the beginning, and then as the conversation went on he displayed more tension. His assertion that he couldn’t raise more than a million sounded credible to me.

I listened to the tape played back. Although I couldn’t understand what was said, I was fascinated by Zico’s voice. Calm, measured, cold, intelligent. The compulsory threats to Isabel had none of the mindless violence of the first hoax caller. But the coldness was menacing in its own way. Zico wouldn’t kill Isabel unless it suited him. But if it suited him...

The police came. They took the tape of the conversation away for analysis of Zico’s voice. They had traced the call to a mobile phone somewhere in a crowded shopping street in the northern zone. Mobile phones were common in Rio. The land-line system was so bad that its citizens had been driven to using them instead. And they were virtually impossible to trace.

A dozen policemen were searching the Tijuca forest but so far they had found nothing.

Maria fussed over both Luís and me. She seemed to be taking it well, until she would suddenly run from the room, trying to hold back tears. Cordelia would come round for a couple of hours every day, but she found the waiting stressful. She had become withdrawn, a different person from the tough woman I had met at the children’s shelter. She had stopped going there. Just for the time being, she said.

I stayed at Luís’s apartment during the day, and my hotel at night. A couple of times I went out for walks through the wealthy streets of Ipanema. It was good to get out into the world, to see people shopping at the expensive boutiques, to wander past the up-market stalls selling flowers or rugs or Indian jewellery. Ipanema was a forest of luxury apartment buildings crammed together between the beach and the lagoon. Every now and then an old colonial-style building squatted among them, but old by Ipanema’s standards probably meant less than fifty years. I found a pleasant bar in one of these and stopped for a beer. I had read somewhere that ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ had been written by a man who hung out in a bar somewhere round here, watching the local talent go by. There were indeed many young, tanned and lovely girls who walked past. But they just reminded me of Isabel.

I tried to imagine where she was, what kind of state she was in. Was she well fed? Was she allowed to wash? It was hard for us here, it must be harder for her there. But she was a strong woman mentally. If anyone could cope with an ordeal like that, she could.

I shouldn’t have left her alone. I shouldn’t have left her alone!

I avoided Ipanema beach. After the kidnap, I had forgotten my stabbing there. I wanted it to stay forgotten. My fears of money-laundering and concerns about Dekker were pushed to the back of my mind. I just wanted Isabel to be freed.

I spoke to Ricardo regularly, keeping him informed of the progress of negotiations. It was comforting to hear Ricardo’s calm voice every day. He seemed impressed with Nelson as a negotiator. He was happy to continue footing the bill for the hotel. He had spoken to Luís, who had made a firm request that I be allowed to stay.

I spoke to Jamie, too. He was sympathetic. He said the whole office was in shock. But life had to go on. In particular, selling the Mexico deal had to go on. It wasn’t going well, and there were still a lot of bonds on Dekker’s books. The situation in Mexico itself was looking rocky: people were beginning to ask questions about whether the government would be able to refinance its borrowings that were maturing this year.

I didn’t care.

The police came again. They had fitted Zico’s voice to two previous recordings they had taken of kidnappers. In both cases the victims had been treated well and eventually released. This lifted Luís’s spirits. And mine.

But the waiting began to weigh heavily on us. It had been only four days since Isabel had been kidnapped, but it seemed much longer. Nelson warned us to be prepared for a long wait. These cases took weeks, sometimes months to resolve, not days. Nonetheless every time the phone rang, Luís, Cordelia and I thought it would bring an agreement for Isabel’s release. Of course it didn’t.

At Cordelia’s suggestion, we went up to Luís’s fazenda near Petrópolis for the weekend. It was what the family usually did, and she felt a change of scene would be good for Luís. He was worried that Zico wouldn’t be able to get in touch with us, but she pointed out that if he called the apartment and someone gave him the number in Petrópolis, he could hardly object.

Luís picked me up from the hotel late Friday afternoon. His chauffeur took us to the compact Santos Dumont airport in the centre of the city. I was surprised, Petrópolis was only forty kilometres away, no one had explained we would be flying. Luís was distracted as he led me through the airport and into a little van that took us to a blue helicopter. It had five seats, and Cordelia and her husband were already waiting for us. I climbed in too, pretending that this was the most natural thing in the world. Within a couple of minutes the helicopter had eased itself into the air and we were scudding across Guanabara Bay.

Twenty minutes later we were up above the mountains. Below us roads and buildings wriggled like snakes through the folds of the hills. We descended so that the forest-clad mountainsides rose on either side. We burst round a corner and there, beneath a sheer rock-face, was a large white house surrounded by a lush garden dotted with trees and a lake. Behind the house was a patch of flat grass with a large white H painted on it.

The fazenda had been the focal point of a substantial coffee estate. Its rooms were large and cool. The furnishings were tasteful without being opulent: dark colonial Brazilian wood, oriental vases, French nineteenth-century paintings. It was a few degrees cooler than Rio, but it was still warm by my standards. Nevertheless a huge fire roared in the sitting room.

As soon as we arrived, Luís relaxed visibly. I could understand why Cordelia had insisted on it. It was his routine to come up here and unwind on a Friday evening; and unwind was what he needed to do now.

That evening the atmosphere was almost normal. Cordelia’s husband, Fernando, was good company. He was a lawyer who had a wry sense of humour, and an inability to take himself, or Brazil, too seriously. He doted on Cordelia, though.

We were laughing, actually laughing, at dinner, clustered round one end of a ridiculously long dining table, when the phone rang.

There was an extension in the dining room. We could tell from Luís’s reaction who it was. Luís was prepared. He acted distraught but in control. The conversation lasted less than two minutes. Zico said one million dollars was insulting. Luís said fifty million was absurd. Zico wouldn’t budge. Luís upped his offer to a million and a half. He wanted Zico to know that he understood the game, and he was playing.

Immediately afterwards, Luís called Nelson, who said he would be up the next day. Once again, he was encouraging. According to Nelson, everything was going to plan.

The next morning, Saturday, Luís showed me round the garden. It stretched up a gentle incline from the house for what seemed like half a mile, until it merged into a forest. It took my breath away. On either side and in front loomed large, absurdly shaped mountains, obviously with the same geological provenance as those that surrounded Rio. One had a sheer rock-face, the others were covered with trees on their lower slopes and meadows higher up. The garden itself was a valley of lawns, trees and shrubs, with a long lake down one side. The air was cool and clear, though a little damp, and filled with the sound of running water and birds squabbling. There were swans, both white and black, flamingos, exotic ducks and a variety of other types that I didn’t recognize.

‘It’s beautiful,’ I said.

‘It was designed by Burle Marx, a German who came here during the war. It is extraordinary. There are over two thousand species of plant in this garden. And it has seen some wonderful parties in its time.’

I glanced at Luís. He didn’t seem a great entertainer. He seemed a tall, lonely man, standing up well to adversity.

‘How long have you owned it?’

‘About five years.’

It must have cost serious money. I knew that Isabel came from a wealthy family, but I had no idea what that wealth translated to. It was strange to me to see a house and garden like this being used as a home. In England it would have been dotted with nice ladies in tweed skirts gently ushering visitors This Way.

Luís read my thoughts. ‘We didn’t always have money. Or, at least, I didn’t. I come from an old family, one of the quatrocentonas, the Portuguese families that came over to Brazil four hundred years ago. My great-grandfather had plantations in the state of São Paulo that were as big as some European countries. He had thirty thousand slaves. Then came emancipation. Then the collapse of coffee prices. Then the crash of ’twenty-nine. My grandfather wasn’t astute. My brother still runs the rump of the property, a small coffee plantation. But I left.’

There was a kerfuffle as a white swan tried to mount a black one. Luís laughed. ‘True Brazilians. You see!’

‘You came to Rio?’ I prompted.

‘Yes. I went to university there, and joined a big bank. I found money fascinating. For many years now Brazil’s financial system has been pretty complex. With inflation and interest rates at several thousand per cent a year, there were opportunities to make a lot of money. In nineteen eighty-six I decided to make some of that money for myself, and so I started Banco Horizonte. As you know, it’s now one of the biggest investment banks in Brazil, and in fact we’re beginning to think about expanding overseas. So that’s how I can afford all this.’

Luís made no attempt to hide his pride, and indeed he had a lot to be proud of. ‘But it’s a shame to build this up and see it die with me. We wanted a son, Vivian and I.’

‘Vivian was your wife?’

He nodded. He turned back and looked at the fazenda. ‘She never saw all this. All that I have created. Or perhaps she can see it now.’

‘There’s Isabel,’ I said.

Luís snorted. ‘Isabel! What chance have I of getting her to work for the bank? She’s far too stubborn. You heard her. My daughters! I suppose no father understands his daughters. But I just don’t know why Isabel and Cordelia won’t for once do something sensible. Maybe this episode will make them think again.’

‘It might. But I’m not sure that’s a good thing.’

He turned to look at me, listening closely.

‘They’re just like you, aren’t they? They want to go their own way. Do their own thing. The fact you disapprove just encourages them. I’m sure that’s true of Isabel.’

Luís gave a brief, dry laugh. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘That’s one of the reasons I like her.’

There was a pause. He studied me. ‘You are close, aren’t you? More than colleagues. More than friends?’

For a moment I panicked, imagining myself accused by an indignant Latin father of deflowering his daughter. But Luís’s gaze was warm, encouraging.

I nodded.

Luís turned to continue up the hill. ‘Bem,’ he muttered, I think. I couldn’t quite hear.

We decided to stay at the fazenda. It was tough on Nelson; he had to make the hour and a half drive up from Rio every day. But it was good for Luís, and good for me. We were optimistic. As long as we could put up with the waiting, Isabel would be free.

On Sunday night Cordelia and Fernando left for the city by helicopter. Zico called again. I listened in to the conversation. I heard what I thought were the words thirty million, and then a bit later Luís countering with two million. We were still a long way apart, but we were drawing ever closer. At this rate, one day in the next few weeks, Isabel would be released. I thought about returning to London. Things seemed to be on track, and there was little more that I could do to help. And there was a limit to how long I could stay.

We were beginning to get used to the slow tempo of the negotiations. But on Tuesday, day eight, all that changed.