A Twist in the Tale (7 page)

“If that is the
case, I shall instruct my own Ministry of Trade to halt all future dealings in
Nigeria with any Swiss nationals until these names are revealed.”

“That is your
privilege, Minister,” replied the chairman, unmoved.

“And we may
also have to reconsider every contract currently being negotiated by your
countrymen in Nigeria. And in addition I shall personally see to it that no
penalty clauses are
honoured
.”

“Would you not
consider such action a little precipitate?”

“Let me assure
you,
Mr
Gerber, that I would not lose one moment of sleep
over such a decision,” said Ignatius. “Even if my efforts to discover those
names were to bring your country to its knees I would not be moved.”

“So be it,
Minister,” replied the chairman.

“However, it
still does not alter the policy or the attitude of this bank to
confidentiality.”

“If that
remains the case, sir, this very day I shall give instructions to our
Ambassador to close our Embassy in Geneva and I shall declare your Ambassador
in Lagos
persona non
grata
.”

For the first
time the chairman raised his eyebrows.

“Furthermore,”
continued Ignatius, “I will hold a conference in London which will leave the
world’s press in no doubt of my Head of State’s displeasure with the conduct of
this bank. After such publicity I feel confident you will find that many of
your customers would prefer to close their accounts, while others who have in
the past considered you a safe haven may find it necessary to look elsewhere.”

The Minister
waited but still the chairman did not respond.

“Then you leave
me no choice,” said Ignatius, rising from his seat.

The chairman
stretched out his arm, assuming that at last the Minister was leaving, only to
watch with horror as Ignatius placed a hand in his jacket pocket and removed a
small pistol. The two Swiss bankers froze as the Nigerian Minister of Finance
stepped forward and pressed the muzzle against the chairman’s temple.

“I need those
names,
Mr
Gerber, and by now you must
realise
I will stop at nothing. If you don’t supply them
immediately I’m going to blow your brains out. Do you understand?”

The chairman
gave a slight nod, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. “And he will be
next,” said Ignatius, gesturing towards the young assistant, who stood
speechless and
paralysed
a few paces away.

“Get me the
names of every Nigerian who holds an account in this bank,” Ignatius said
quietly, looking towards the young man, “or I’ll blow your chairman’s brains
all over his soft pile carpet. Immediately, do you hear me?” he added sharply.

The young man
looked towards the chairman, who was now trembling but said quite clearly,
“
Non
, Pierre,
jamais
.”

“
D’accord
,”
replied the assistant in a whisper.

“You can’t say
I didn’t give you every chance.” Ignatius pulled back the hammer.

The sweat was
now pouring down the chairman’s face and the young man had to turn his eyes
away as he waited in terror for the pistol shot.

“Excellent,”
said Ignatius, as he removed the gun from the chairman’s head and returned to
his seat. Both the bankers were still trembling and quite unable to speak.

The Minister
picked up the battered briefcase by the side of his chair and placed it on the
glass table in front of him. He pressed back the clasps and the lid flicked up.

The two bankers
stared down at the neatly packed rows of hundred-dollar bills. Every inch of
the briefcase had been taken up. The chairman quickly estimated that it
probably amounted to around five million dollars.

“I wonder,
sir,” said Ignatius, “how I go about opening an account with your bank?”

A
RTHUR
Hapgood
was
demobbed
on November 3rd, 1946. Within a month he was back at his old workplace on the
shop-floor of the Triumph factory on the outskirts of Coventry.

The five years
spent in the Sherwood For-esters, four of them as a quartermaster seconded to a
tank regiment, only under-lined Arthur’s likely post-war fate, despite having
hoped to find more rewarding work once the war was over. However, on returning
to England he quickly discovered that in a “land fit for heroes” jobs were not
that easy to come by, and although he did not want to go back to the work he
had done for five years before war had been declared, that of fitting wheels on
cars, he reluctantly, after four weeks on the dole, went to see his former
works’ manager at Triumph.

“The job’s
yours if you want it, Arthur,” the works’ manager assured him.

“And the future?”

“The car’s no
longer a toy for the eccentric rich or even just a necessity for the
business-man,” the works’ manager replied. “In fact,” he continued, “management
are preparing for the ‘two-car family’.”

“So they’ll
need even more wheels to be put on cars,” said Arthur forlornly.

“That’s the
ticket.”

Arthur signed
on within the hour and it was only a matter of days before he was back into his
old routine. After all, he often reminded his wife, it didn’t take a degree in
engineering to screw four knobs on to a wheel a hundred times a shift.

Arthur soon
accepted the Act that he would have to settle for second best. However, second
best was not what he planned for his son.

Mark had
celebrated his fifth birthday before his father had even set eyes on him, but
from the moment Arthur returned home he lavished everything he could on the
boy.

Arthur was
determined that Mark was not going to end up working on the shop-floor of a car
factory for the rest of his life. He put in hours of overtime to earn enough
money to ensure that the boy could have extra tuition in
maths
,
general science and English. He felt well rewarded when the boy passed his
eleven-plus and won a place at King Henry VIII Grammar School, and that pride
did not falter when Mark went on to pass five O-levels and two years later
added two A-levels.

Arthur tried
not to show his disappointment when, on Mark’s eighteenth birthday, the boy
informed him that he did not want to go to university.

“What kind of
career arc you hoping to take up then, lad?” Arthur enquired.

“I’ve filled in
an application form to join you on the shop-floor just as soon as I leave
school.”

“But why would
you -”

“Why not?
Most of my friends who are leaving this term have
already been accepted by Triumph, and they can’t wait to get started.”

“You must be
out of your mind.”

“Come off it,
Dad. The pay’s good and you’ve shown that there’s always plenty of extra money
to be picked up with overtime.

And I don’t
mind hard work.”

“Do you think I
spent all those years making sure you got a first-class education just to let
you end up like me, putting wheels on cars for the rest of your life?” Arthur
shouted.

“That’s not the
whole job and you know it, Dad.”

“You go there
over my dead body,” said his father. “I don’t care what your friends end up
doing, I only care about you. You could be a solicitor, an accountant, an army
officer, even a schoolmaster. Why should you want to end up at a car factory?”

“It’s better
paid than
schoolmastering
for a start,” said Mark.
“My French master once told me that he wasn’t as well off as you.”

“That’s not the
point, lad-”

“The point is,
Dad, I can’t be expected to spend the rest of my life doing a job I don’t enjoy
just to satisfy one of your fantasies.”

“Well, I’m not
going to allow you to waste the rest of your life,” said Arthur, getting up
from the breakfast table. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get in to
work this morning is see that your application is turned down.”

“That isn’t
fair, Dad. I have the right to-”

But his father
had already left the room, and did not utter another word to the boy before
leaving for the factory.

For over a week
father and son didn’t speak to each other. It was Mark’s mother who was left to
come up with the compromise. Mark could apply for any job that met with his
father’s approval and as long as he completed a year at that job he could, if
he still wanted to, reapply to work at the factory. His father for his part
would not then put any obstacle in his son’s way.

Arthur nodded.
Mark also reluctantly agreed to the solution.

“But only if
you complete the full year,” Arthur warned solemnly.

During those
last days of the summer holiday Arthur came up with several suggestions for
Mark to consider, but the boy showed no enthusiasm for any of them. Mark’s
mother became quite anxious that her son would end up with no job at all until,
while helping her slice potatoes for dinner one night, Mark confided that he
thought hotel management seemed the least unattractive proposition he had
considered so far.

“At least you’d
have a roof over your head and be regularly fed,” his mother said.

“Bet they don’t
cook as well as you, Mum,” said Mark as he placed the sliced potatoes on the
top of the Lancashire hot-pot. “Still, it’s only a year.”

During the next
month Mark attended several interviews at hotels around the country without
success. It was then that his father discovered that his old company sergeant
was head porter at the Savoy: immediately Arthur started to pull a few strings.

“If the boy’s
any good,” Arthur’s old comrade-in-arms assured him over a pint, “he could end
up as a head porter, even a hotel manager.” Arthur seemed well satisfied, even
though Mark was still assuring his friends that he would be joining them a year
to the day.

On September I
st
, 1959, Arthur and Mark
Hapgood
travelled together by bus to Coventry station. Arthur shook hands with the boy
and promised him, “Your mother and I will make sure it’s a special Christmas
this year when they give you your first leave.

And don’t worry
– you’ll be in good hands with ‘Serge’. He’ll teach you a thing or two.

Just remember
to keep your nose clean.”

Mark said
nothing and returned a thin smile as he boarded the train. “You’ll never regret
it . . .” were the last words Mark heard his father say as the train pulled out
of the station.

Mark regretted
it from the moment he set foot in the hotel.

As a junior
porter he started his day at six in the morning and ended at six in the
evening. He was entitled to a fifteen-minute mid-morning break, a
forty-five-minute lunch break and another fifteen minute break around
mid-afternoon. After the first month had passed he could not recall when he had
been granted all three breaks on the same day, and he quickly learned that
there was no one to whom he could protest. His duties consisted of carrying
guests’ cases up to their rooms, then lugging them back down again the moment
they wanted to leave. With an average of three hundred people staying in the
hotel each night the process was endless.

The pay turned
out to be half what his friends were getting back home and as he had to hand
over all his tips to the head porter, however much overtime Mark put in, he
never saw an extra penny. On the only occasion he dared to mention it to the
head porter he was met with the words, “Your time will come, lad.”

It did not
worry Mark that his uniform didn’t fit or that his room was six foot by six
foot and overlooked
Charing
Cross Station, or even
that he didn’t get a share of the tips; but it did worry him that there was
nothing he could do to please the head porter-however clean he kept his nose.

Sergeant
Crann
, who considered
the Savoy
nor thing more than an extension of his old platoon, didn’t have a lot of time
for young men under his command who hadn’t done their national service.

“But I wasn’t
eligible
to do national service,”
insisted Mark. “No one born after 1939 was called up.”

“Don’t make
excuses, lad.”

“It’s not an
excuse,
Sarge
. It’s the truth.”

“And don’t call
me ‘Serge’. I’m ‘Sergeant
Crann
’ to you, and don’t
you forget it.”

“Yes, Sergeant
Crann
.”

At the end of
each day Mark would return to his little box-room with its small bed, small
chair and tiny chest of drawers, and collapse exhausted. The only picture in
the room – of the Laughing Cavalier was on the calendar that hung above Mark’s
bed. The date of September 1st, 1960, was circled in red to remind him when he
would be allowed to rejoin his friends at the factory back home. Each night before
falling asleep he would cross out the offending day like a prisoner making
scratch marks on a wall.

At Christmas
Mark returned home for a four-day break, and when his mother saw the general
state of the boy she tried to talk his father into allowing Mark to give up the
job early, but Arthur remained implacable.

“We made an
agreement. I can’t be expected to get him a job at the factory if he isn’t
responsible enough to keep to his part of a bargain.”

During the
holiday Mark waited for his friends outside the factory gate until their shift
had ended and listened to their stories of weekends spent watching football,
drinking at the pub and dancing to the
Everly
Brothers. They all
sympathised
with his problem and
looked forward to him joining them in September. “It’s only a few more months,”
one of them reminded him cheerfully.