Grantchester Grind

25

Had Edgar Hartang had his dearest wish fulfilled he would have had Kudzuvine murdered. He might have included Schnabel, Feuchtwangler and Bolsover in the massacre for allowing Ross Skundler to get out of the building. Then again, he didn't find their advice to his liking. But he depended on them. They knew top much and Schnabel was laying it on the line.

'It seems they've got a sworn statement out of Karl Kudzuvine that doesn't leave much room for manoeuvre,' Schnabel told him.

'Like what? And who's to believe the bastard?'

'Like everything. And as to who's to believe him, I'd say just about everyone.'

'What he's got is say-so. Circumstantial,' said Hartang.

Schnabel shrugged. 'He's got corroboration from Skundler. From what we've seen from the Porterhouse lawyers, Kudzuvine had the schedule of various consignments and Skundler confirms them with payments.'

Behind the blue glasses Hartang's eyes had narrowed. 'You took a statement from Skundler? You did that?'

'No, no need. He's seen this coming and bought himself some insurance. Like copies of financial movements and transactions locked in a bank deposit. All we've seen are the copies.'

Hartang wiped his face with a handkerchief. 'Comes of helping people,' he said. 'The bastards. The bastards. So what do we do?'

'Depends,' said Schnabel. 'They aren't pressing criminal charges and they could. That's a hopeful sign. I mean you don't want to be standing trial at the Old Bailey or having the DEA investigating Stateside. At least I don't think you do.'

Hartang didn't.

'So they're dealing off the top of the deck,' Schnabel went on. 'They're not interested in your business dealings, they're only after compensation for the damage done.'

'How much?'

'Forty million.'

'Forty million?' squawked Hartang. 'Forty million is only? Where'd they get that figure from? Last time I heard, it was twenty.'

'Could be Kudzuvine,' said Schnabel. 'What he's given them. Could be he wants his cut. I don't know. I'm just reporting what their lawyers are saying.'

'Fucking blackmail,' shouted Hartang and knew he had been screwed. To make matters worse, Dos Passos was in London and still out for his blood over the loss of the consignment of Bogota Best. Now Schnabel was telling him he had better settle the Porterhouse claim out of court or face the unpleasant alternative of standing in the dock in the Old Bailey or even of being deported to the United States and standing trial under RICO.

'And I don't mean Puerto Rico,' Schnabel said. 'I heard a rumour that the FBI are interested. And the source is good.'

'How good?'

'Like Lord Tankerell,' Schnabel said. 'You've heard of him, Mr Hartang. Just happens to have been the Attorney General some years back.'

'Him? You call an ex-Attorney fucking General over here a good source? Those shysters can't barely spell their names they're so dumb.'

'Sure Don't have to spell what Karl K. and Ross Skundler signed their sworn names to,' said Schnabel. 'Just read it out and you'll go down twelve to twenty. Stateside more like ninety-nine and some. They've got a containment unit for RICOs, place called Marian. Real safe down there. No one gets you till the morticians are sent for.'

There was a long silence while Edgar Hartang digested this information and felt sick. 'What's with this Rico?' he asked.

'Racketeering and Incitement to Corruption Act. But you know that, Mr Hartang. Like tiny mesh for big fishes and you don't ever come out.'

Hartang said nothing. He was thinking of a way out.

'Another thing I have to advise. I wouldn't be thinking of taking a powder.'

'Powder? What the fuck you talking about, powder?'

'Like trying to leave the country. There's too much known about another sort of powder. Like the talcum you flew in from Venezuela June fifteenth 1987. Or the load shipped out of Ecuador to Miami November eleven '89. Like it's all here and no loopholes. So if you are thinking of Learing it some place, don't. Ross Skundler saw that situation coming and he bought himself some more life insurance. Like a miniature video in your bathroom so he knows who he's working for. Bald guy without glasses, uncircumcised, got a mole on his right shoulder, appendix scar, gives himself a hand job with pictures of little boys. You know anyone like that, Mr Hartang? Because if you do, you'd better pay your forty million and be thankful.'

'Forty million? Jesus.' He paused and looked venomously at the lawyer. 'Schnabel, just who are you working for? Me or fucking them?'

Schnabel sighed. It was always like this with mobsters. Consequences had to be spelt out for them when they were in deep shit. 'Mr Hartang,' he said patiently, 'I am working for myself and you have hired me to lay it on the line so you can make a rational choice. If you want me to feed you a weather report says it's going to be sunshine all day and every day for ever and ever and only rain nights, that's fine with me only I lose a valuable client whose doing all the time he's got left and I don't earn my regular fees when he's in trouble again. That is how it is. I just want you to make a rational decision is all. I've given you the information. You make a choice. I cannot do it for you.'

'You have,' said Hartang bitterly. 'Like forty fucking million and you call that a rational choice?'

'Matter of fact, no. I call it a necessity. Like of life.'

'Shit,' said Hartang, with his usual economy.

'And just one more thing, Mr Hartang,' said Schnabel. 'A minor matter but it's down in black and white. You ever been in Damascus, Syria? Khartoum, Sudan? That neck of the woods?'

A grunt from Hartang signified that he could have been.

'Ever had drinks with a guy called Carlos?'

'Of course I've had drinks with hundreds of guys called Carlos. I do business with South America. You think I can avoid having drinks with Carloses?'

'Just enquiring, Mr Hartang. Abu Nidal mean anything to you? Like you bank-rolled one or two of their operations for insurance in the Arab world? You got friends in mighty strange places but I don't think they'll help you in this situation.'

'So what exactly are you trying to tell me, Schnabel? Tell it like it is.'

'Like it is is this,' said Schnabel. 'You pay the forty million plus all costs, you buy yourself immunity in London. Money comes in and no one asks why. Bank of England is happy you're such a big investor in Britain. Chancellor of the Exchequer is in love with you because you pay some taxes and everyone loves you because you're respectable and have helped a Cambridge college out. Even Bolsover loves you, and that's difficult with what you've called him. You pay our fees and we all love you. Right?' He paused for a moment and then went on. 'But you take the talcum route and nobody is going to love you. British Government, the United States Attorney General and the FBI and of course the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Agency, but you knew that, didn't you, Mr Hartang? You've made enemies, and with friends like Carlos and Abu Nidal you could be in worse places than Marian, Illinois. There's some story going the rounds the Israelis have the idea you've been buying insurance with some bad guys, and a bomb explodes in Tel Aviv. With the video Ross Skundler took you can have all the plastic surgery in the world, and that includes a sex-change operation, and they're still going to get you. Mossad, Mr Hartang, Mossad.'

The sweat was pouring down Hartang's face now. He took another pill and Schnabel went on. 'Just a rumour of course and maybe there's no truth in it but if there is, I'd say you're in deeper shit than you know. I don't say it is but rumour has it that way. And if you don't believe me, you take a look out the window at the two cars out there, because one thing is as certain as death itself, those guys aren't Transworld groupies, you better believe me.'

By the time he left the building Schnabel felt good. 'He's paying,' he told Feuchtwangler and Bolsover when he got back to the office. 'Through the nose. Those two cars and the private heavies in them were a good idea of yours, Bolsover. I have to hand it to you. Put them down to the bastard's expenses.'

'What's all this about Skundler's video?' asked Feuchtwangler. 'First I heard of it.'

But Schnabel only smiled enigmatically and was thoughtful. 'Let's go some place for coffee,' he said. 'I think our own position needs considering.'

Feuchtwangler and Bolsover nodded. The same thought had crossed their minds. They went out into the street and took a taxi.

'The point we've got to bear in mind is that we are dealing with a man who's lost all sense of reality,' said Schnabel.

'Genius tends to,' said Feuchtwangler. 'And financially, that's what he is. He's got more money than sense and he's lost what little sense he ever possessed. He has become a no-hoper and a loner.'

'Precisely my point. And the investigation of his affairs isn't going to stop with him. He's involving us. All right, we merely represent him legally but the shit about to hit the fan is likely to cover us too. I think we are going to have to start our own negotiations with certain influential authorities ourselves.'

'He'll kill us if he finds out,' said Bolsover.

Schnabel shook his head. 'He isn't going to find out, and he's going to be too scared to think at all clearly.'

'In short we are going to trade. I take it that is your proposition,' said Feuchtwangler.

'We are going to cover ourselves and, if my conversations with Lord Tankerell are anything to go by, and I think they are, the situation can be contained without too much trouble. Which is what I told Hartang just now.'

'You old fox, you've started negotiations already,' Bolsover said.

But Schnabel only smiled enigmatically again.

There was hardly a flicker of a smile on the Praelector's face when Mr Retter and Mr Wyve brought him the news. 'Forty million pounds? Are you absolutely sure? It's quite extraordinary. Transworld Television must be coining it.'

'I think you could almost literally put it like that,' said Mr Wyve, 'and Edgar Hartang is, without any qualifications, filthy rich.'

'And to think that it all comes from television programmes about whales and dolphins,' said the Praelector. 'I saw the most interesting programme the other day about bears in Alaska. They wade out into rivers and catch leaping salmon. One would not think a bear had so much quickness of eye and hand. Or should I say paw? Most remarkable. But then so many wonders of nature depend on something approaching brilliance in the most unexpected places. I once read Darwin, and while I found it hard going, I think I learnt what he meant by the survival of the species.'

'That,' said Mr Retter as they walked solemnly but with joy in their hearts across the Fellows' Garden, 'that is a quite remarkable old gentleman. I use the word in its best sense. Did you notice how tactfully he had forgotten everything that madman Kudzuvine had said onto the tape recorder. And he read both affidavits most carefully too and yet he has put all the filth out of his mind. It has been a privilege to have worked with him.'

Mr Wyve agreed most heartily. He had been impressed by the story about the bears catching salmon in the swiftest-flowing rivers. The unspoken comparison had been a nice one. 'I don't think the Praelector and his ilk could possibly come into the category of a species that needs protecting,' he said. 'As you so rightly say, it has been a privilege to watch an old educated mind at work.'

'Until these last few days I would have questioned your use of the word "educated". Now I don't,' Mr Retter agreed.

The Praelector was worried. It was of course nice to know that the College had been rescued from bankruptcy but there were still problems ahead. The Bursar was in Fulbourn Mental Hospital, and the Praelector felt strangely sorry for him. After all the Bursar had inadvertently been responsible for the forty million pounds and, while the Praelector couldn't be said to like the man, the Bursar had done his best to keep Porterhouse solvent and would keep it so now that it had adequate funds.

In the afternoon the Praelector sent for a taxi and had himself driven out to the hospital to see the Bursar.

'He has recovered from the effects of whatever drug he had taken but all the same I have my doubts about discharging him quite so soon,' the psychiatric doctor in charge of detoxification told him. 'He is still extremely anxious and suffers quite severe episodes of depression. He seems to have an obsession about the oddest menagerie of animals.'

'Let me guess what they are,' the Praelector said. 'Pigs, turtles, baby octopuses, sharks, and possibly piranhas. Am I by any chance right?'

The doctor looked at him in astonishment. 'How on earth did you know?' he asked.

But the Praelector's discretion prevented him from telling. As Bursar I am afraid he has been under the most fearful strain about our finances. Porterhouse, as you must surely know, is not a rich college and the poor chap felt responsible for our problems. But all that is past and thanks to his magnificent efforts we are quite solvent again.'

'But why are his obsessions centred on pigs and turtles and-'

'Simple,' said the Praelector. At our annual Founder's Feast we do tend to do ourselves very well and sometimes a little too exotically. I don't know if you realize the cost of genuine turtles these days. And sharks are by no means cheap and of course we always have a wild boar. It was all too much for the Bursar.'

'I'm not in the least surprised,' said the doctor. 'I cannot think of a more breathtakingly indigestible menu. And you really have piranhas too?'

'Only as a savoury at the end of the meal. Served on toast with a slice of lemon they make a very fine digestive. If you'd feel like accepting an invitation one of these days…'

But the doctor excused himself and hurried away. The Praelector went into the Bursar's room, where he found him studying an immigration form for New Zealand. 'You're not seriously thinking of leaving us, are you?' he asked. 'At the very moment of your greatest achievement? Besides, they tell me it is an exceedingly dull country.'

'That's why I'm going there,' said the Bursar. 'I'd go somewhere even duller if I could think of it.'

'But my dear Bursar, you can be as dull as ditchwater in College. And besides, it is precisely now that we have forty million pounds from Transworld due to us that we need your expertise.'

'Like a hole in the head,' said the Bursar bitterly. The anti-depressants he was on had slowed his thinking. 'I…Did you say forty million pounds?'

The Praelector nodded. 'I did. Mr Hartang has very generously doubled the amount of compensation in return for a promise that there be no publicity. He has for his own good reasons undergone what I believe is known as a change of heart.'

'I don't believe it,' said the Bursar. 'He hasn't got a heart. He's got a beating bank vault. And even if he had, what about that bloody man Kudzuvine? If he is stall in the Master's Lodge, there is no way I am coming back to Porterhouse.'

The Praelector smiled benignly at him and patted his shoulder. 'I give you my word of honour that Mr Kudzuvine is no longer with us,' he said. 'He is immersed in-'

'The Bermuda Triangle tubewise. Don't tell me,' squawked the Bursar.

'I was going to say in a totally different occupation and one in which he can exercise his talents to the full and find complete satisfaction.'

'Like he's killing things,' said the Bursar.

But the Praelector was not to be drawn. 'He is engaged in work that is utterly removed from anything he has done previously,' he said. 'You will never see or hear from him again. And no, he is not dead. He is very much alive and, I am told, happy. Now then, I have a taxi waiting…'

The Bursar was finally convinced. Something quite astonishing must have happened to the College finances for the Praelector to keep a taxi waiting with the meter running all this time. 'You've really been very good to me,' he said emotionally as they went down the corridor and out into the open air. 'I don't know what I should have done without you.'

'I'm sure you would have done just as well,' said the Praelector, 'but I really don't think you'd have found life in New Zealand to your taste. All that lamb.'

The Bursar agreed. He'd gone off lamb.