Billionaire

13

The girl took careful aim, then slowly and deliberately squeezed the two halves of the plastic gun together. Eight ping-pong balls fired out in rapid succession and bounced hard off the naked backside of Viscomte Claude Louis Santenay Jarre du Charnevrau Ducarme de Louçelle de Lasserre. Trussed up in the corner of the room like a Christmas turkey, and with a gag tightly bound over and into his mouth, there was little the Viscomte could do other than to squirm. The girl picked up another gun, and fired again. The Viscomte began shaking with excitement, and she knew now he was ready. She signalled to the second girl. Seizing him by the arms and legs, they dragged him roughly across the floor and threw him face downwards onto the bed.

‘You pig bastard, you will suffer,’ one spat out viciously.

‘If you don’t get rid of your hard, we’ll break it off,’ said the other.

With four ropes they lashed his arms and legs tightly and firmly, so that he was pinned face down and quite unable to move. Both girls wore outfits that could hardly be described as conservative feminine attire. They were dressed in bras, panties and thigh-high leather boots; the centres of the bras and the panties had been cut away, and the contents beneath bulged through the holes.

One girl seized a cat-o-nine tails leather whip and cracked it down across the Viscomte’s backside. He whimpered loudly enough that it could be heard through the gag. The second marched round, and slapped him hard across the face, twice. The girl cracked the cat-o-nine tails again and then again, repeatedly, and red welts began to appear. The Viscomte started to shake again, shuddering and shaking uncontrollably, whilst one girl brought the whip relentlessly down, and the second slapped him across the face.

An hour later, the Viscomte, dressed in a Prince of Wales check suit, red paisley tie and Charles Jourdan shoes paid the two girls, tipped them generously on top and walked, with some apparent discomfort, out of the apartment, down the steps, and out into the mid-afternoon Limoges heat. He checked his watch; it was ten past five. He would have to hurry. He opened the door of his red Maserati Kyalami and lowered himself gingerly into the leather-covered driving seat; his backside was in agony; the girls had become over-zealous, he decided; he must speak to them next time, it really was hurting much more than he liked. He revved the engine hard and drove off aggressively, leaving a trail of rubber and blue smoke behind him. He headed towards the N21 Perigueux road out of the town.

As was normal, the Viscomte drove fast, flashing his lights and blasting slow-moving traffic out of his path with the car’s piercing air horns. As he drove, occasional important thoughts entered his mind, and he made mental notes that they must all be discussed later that evening.

He was a tall man with a handsome, if somewhat weak, face. He had fair hair with some silver streaks, thick eyebrows that hooded his crystal-clear blue eyes, a long straight nose and an almost feminine rosebud mouth. His skin was of a texture and colouring that exuded health, well-being and wealth; it was a skin that seems only to be found on the faces of aristocrats — the genuine articles, not the self-made first generations. He had been married three times and divorced three times, and had seven children, all living with their mothers; right now he was thoroughly enjoying his fourth bachelorhood. To those who didn’t know him well, he appeared a gentle man; he was soft spoken, deliberate but delicate in his movements, and always appeared deeply and passionately interested in anyone he happened to speak to — something he had learned from carefully studying the English Royal Family. Outwardly, he was the perfect, divinely-mannered image of everything that a French Viscomte should be.

Two hours out of Limoges and one hour past Perigueux, on the N89 Bordeaux road, the Maserati slowed down and turned sharply right into a narrow, straight, tree-lined lane. The Viscomte changed down into first, and flattened the accelerator; the car raced up the lane. At fifty-two miles per hour he changed to second, still keeping his foot flat on the floor, the tyres clenched to the grey ribbon of tarmac between the trees; at eighty he changed to third, and the car leapt over the 120 miles per hour, or, as he was interested in, the 200 kilometre mark; then he began to ease off. It always gave him a kick, hitting 200 kilometres on this straight stretch.

Within a few hundred metres, the trees gave way to wall; a massive wall, over twenty feet high, with broken glass and barbed wire along the top. The wall continued for three kilometres without break, and the car continued at high speed. Then it began to slow down, the right turn indicator started blinking, the Viscomte gave two long blasts on his air horns, and stopped in front of a massive wrought-iron gateway with an elegant beige stone lodge beside it.

A curtain inside the lodge parted and a pair of eyes looked out; the curtains dropped back and, after a few moments, the electrically-powered gates began to swing open. A portly man in his late fifties hurried out of the house and stood at the side of the drive, out of the way of the gates.

The Viscomte was home. He turned in through the gateway.

‘Bonsoir, Monsieur Le Viscomte,’ said Henri Taflé, the gatekeeper.

The Viscomte nodded. ‘Bonsoir, Taflé. Ça va?’

‘Oui, Monsieur Le Viscomte, ça va bien, merci.’

The Viscomte gave his gatekeeper an oily smile that was reserved exclusively for introductions to heads of state, conceding points when negotiating business, and for greeting his peasants on his estate, and drove off. Three hundred metres on, around the second bend in the driveway, the chateau itself came into view.

Chateau Lasserre is one of those French chateaux in which fairy tales are set. Although he had seen it come into view a million times as he had rounded this bend, it still rarely failed to fill him with a deep sense of satisfaction and, on more occasions than he could count, it had made many a girl throw aside any previous reservations she might have had about her date and decide, no matter what happened, no matter how she might feel about the Viscomte, that before she was driven back home she wanted to get laid, at least once, inside those simply stunning portals.

The chateau was awe-inspiring, and it was impossible to take it all in in one look. There were walls upon walls, turrets and towers topped with castellations, heaped one upon the other in a mixture of shimmering white stone and marble. The chateau was encircled by a deep moat; to the rear was a vast lake and, at the front, a drawbridge, complete with portcullis.

The estate was vast even by French standards, covering over seventeen thousand acres of land. Of these, a mere fifty-five were given over to the growing of grapes from which came the annual 38,000 bottles of one of France’s least inspired clarets. The rest was lush parkland for hunting, the village of Lasserre, a massive pig and sheep farm, and the Lasserre racing stables and stud farm.

Two hundred metres to the far side of the lake, well clear of the chateau and of any trees, was an 800 metre grass landing strip, complete with full landing lights on both sides. On a course that would take them directly down onto the eastern-most point of this landing strip in thirty-five minutes time were, at a height of 19,000 feet, Sir Monty Elleck and his pilot, in the Globalex Mitsubishi Solitaire twin-prop plane.

Also heading for the chateau was Jimmy Culundis; he was walking down the gangway of his private DC-8 at Bordeaux airport. It had had to land there, as it was too big for private airstrips, even the mighty one in the Viscomte’s back garden. Culundis walked to the terminal building to complete customs formalities before completing his journey in the chauffeur driven Citroen Pallas the Viscomte had sent.

Lasserre greeted Nicole Varasay, his current residential playmate, with a peck on both cheeks; she was wearing a slip, and seated at the dressing table in his vast bedroom, putting on her make-up. Her long dark hair tumbled around her white shoulders, and the Viscomte slid his hands inside her bra and caressed her breasts.

‘Who is the Englishman who is coming tonight, chéri?’ she asked.

‘He is someone very important. I want you to be specially nice to him.’ He whispered into her ear, and she giggled a long wicked giggle.

Lasserre dressed for dinner, taking care to keep his backside well out of Nicole’s sight. She was still putting on her make-up as he pulled on his dark green smoking jacket. ‘I have some work I must do for a few minutes in my study; I will see you when you are ready, downstairs.’

‘I won’t be long,’ she said.

‘Try not to be, it would be nice for you to be down when they arrive.’

‘Two minutes,’ she said, tossing her hair back away from her face.

The Viscomte walked down the carpet that ran along the centre of the stone floor of the long corridor. There were lights at intervals down the corridor, and each light that he passed threw a long shadow of himself in front of him. These weren’t the only shadows, he reflected, sadly. There was, right now, a shadow cast over the whole of Chateau Lasserre, the whole estate. The shadow was called François Mitterand. Mitterand had decided that Viscomte Lasserre had too damned much money and too damned much land, and he was going to do something about it. It was nothing personal against Lasserre; the two had never met, and it wasn’t only Lasserre; it was many Frenchmen, both noble and nouveau riche, all with the one thing in common: wealth. Since his election to office, the French President had set about doing one of the things he had put in his election manifesto: soaking the rich. He was doing it well, too damned well, thought Lasserre, as he descended the massive staircase. Viscomte Lasserre right now was badly in need of money; the land tax Mitterand had imposed was crippling him. Before that, the estate ran at a small profit. From the wine and the farming, the costs of the racing stables, the parkland and the chateau itself were met. Sure, he owned the massive Lasserre group of companies — the munitions and aircraft industry — but now there were punitive taxes on the proceeds of sales of shares; it was not a good time to sell and, besides, how long could he keep the estate going by selling shares before the shares began to run out? Several years, without doubt, but he was a businessman. His interest was in making money, adding to his pile, not diminishing it. No; he needed additional income, a lot of it, and preferably well out of the clutches of Mitterand and his tax collectors. He was close to getting it. After tonight’s meeting, he hoped he would be closer still; closer possibly to being the richest man in France.