Research (19 page)

‘It’s probably good you didn’t go and see Phil,’ said Don. ‘The last time we spoke he was very bitter about what had
happened. He told me he would never have bought that house in Tourrettes if he’d had any idea that you were going to close the
atelier
. I think you’d have got a poor reception.’

‘Yes, I know. That’s what Munns said in the
Daily Mail
. How much did it cost, anyway?’

‘The house? About a million euros. Which was pretty much all he had saved. I haven’t seen the place myself. But I understand he’s had to take a local job, as a waiter, to help with the maintenance.’

‘That’s too bad. But what about the redundo money I gave him?’

‘Most of that went to pay the builders for the swimming pool he’d had built.’

‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

Don shrugged. ‘It’s not your fault, John. No one asked him to buy that house. Or install a pool. Frankly, a freelance writer should know better than to buy anything like that. What did Robert Benchley say? The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘Is that it, then? The sum total of the strange things that have happened to you while you were in Geneva?’

‘You think I’m paranoid, don’t you?’

‘I can see why you think there might be a connection. If someone was trying to scam the Mechanism fund then it might be useful to have Bob Mechanic – or even someone who looked like Bob Mechanic – out of the way. One way or the other.’

‘But actually that’s just the half of it,’ I said.

Don smiled. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a shaggy dog around here, is there?’

‘Not so much as a bloody campfire,’ I admitted. ‘This is all on the level, unfortunately.’

‘And what you’re going to tell me now – this also happened in Geneva? Is that right?’

I nodded. ‘There’s a club in the Calvin district of Geneva called the Baroque, popular with Middle Eastern types. I don’t know why I went there. Yes, I do: Mechanic said that there were always plenty of beautiful girls in the Baroque. They have these girls called ambassadors, although for what, I’m not quite sure, since they never seem to want to negotiate anything, if you know what I mean. There was one girl called Dominique who worked there who had a body from your best wet dream: not so much an hourglass figure as a twenty-four-hourglass figure. Anyway, it must have been about two or three in the morning and there was a guy on the next table who seemed to have gathered quite a crowd of girls around him, which was hardly surprising given the size of the bottle of champagne on his table. He seemed to be Indian or Pakistani – I wasn’t quite sure, at the time – and he was accompanied by a couple of bodyguards. Anyway, he was having a good time – a better time than me – and I was just about to call it a night when he put his feet up on the table and I noticed his shoes. The heels of his white loafers were encrusted with diamonds, Don. And if that wasn’t bad enough he seemed to be looking not at the girls, who were all very pretty, but straight at me.’

I paused, assuming that Don would realize why this was significant. He didn’t.

‘Don’t you remember? The character of the arms dealer, Dr Shakil Malik Sharif, in
Ten Soldiers Wisely Led
? He had diamond-encrusted crocodile leather shoes, too. They were especially made for him by Amedeo Testoni at three million dollars a pair.’

Don shrugged. ‘So?’

‘Maybe I never told you, old sport, but Dr Shakil Malik Sharif was based on a real guy – someone who people told me about when I was doing my research in Islamabad. You know how it is with me and research. I like to make things as accurate as possible. I become my characters. If my characters are involved in a dodgy arms deal then you can bet your bottom dollar that I was involved in one myself. And I was. With this guy’s representative in Islamabad. Now this was a man I never met myself but whose reputation went before him like a troop of Janissaries. His name was Dr Haji Ahmad Wali Khan, and he’s a major player in international arms trading. The South Asian press call him King Khan while the Western media refer to him rather less affectionately as Doctor Death. He owns a company called gunCO which deals in everything from gold-plated handguns to ballistic missiles. I remember when the book was published my Pakistani source – a useful fellow named Shehzad who works at the Serena Hotel in Islamabad – rang me up and said that Khan had recognized the portrait of himself in my book and was none too pleased by it. Or by me. And there he was now, sitting at the next fucking table, and giving me the bad eye.’

‘How do you know it was the same guy? Perhaps Aldo were having a sale of diamond-encrusted shoes that week.’

‘I asked Mehdi, the club manager, and he confirmed that it was Dr Khan and that he was celebrating a major deal with the new government of a flea-bitten, fucked-up somewhere. Not that Khan only deals with governments. It’s said he deals with everyone from Somali pirates to Al-Qaeda Al-Shabaab. That man would sell a gun to Anders Breivik.’

‘Please tell me you got up and left,’ said Don.

‘Of course I did. The only thing is that to book a table at the Baroque you have to give your name and address and
mobile number, right? So it’s quite possible that if Khan did recognize me, he could easily have persuaded the club to give him my address here in Collonge-Bellerive.’ I shrugged. ‘Which must have been what happened, because a couple of days later I went out to the wheely bin on the other side of the front gate here to put a bag of trash in it and inside, lying on top of the other trash bags, was a copy of my book.’

‘You mean,
Ten Soldiers Wisely Led
?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah. A critic.’

‘Critics I can handle. Even that cunt of a woman who used to work for VVL who described me in
The Times
as a cancer on the face of publishing. What was her name?’

‘Helen Channing-Smith.’

‘Exactly. No, people like that I can take. That’s the game we’re in, after all. Someone doesn’t like your stuff, that’s fine. You read critics, it can make you strong. And my book in the garbage, I can deal with that shit, too. Only someone had given my book the Richard Ford treatment. There was a bullet through it.’

‘I remember,’ said Don. ‘That was Alice Hoffman’s book, wasn’t it? After she gave him a lousy review for
The Sportswriter
in the
New York Times
, he shot her book with a 38 and sent it to her in the mail.’

‘It doesn’t matter whose fucking book it was,’ I said. ‘It’s the bullet hole that matters. And by the way this was bigger than a 38. This was a rifle bullet. Maybe even a Barratt 50-calibre. It went straight through the first letter “O” in my fucking surname. Like a scene from
Winchester ’73
.’

‘And you think that might have been this arms dealer fellow with the diamond-encrusted loafers – Dr Haji Khan?’

‘Don’t you?’

Don shrugged. ‘Maybe. Yes, probably I do. Then again, shooting a book – your book – it’s not like he shot you, is it? It seems to me that if he wanted you dead, he’d have had some hit man shoot you when you went to the gate to put out the trash. Instead of which he told you – rather stylishly, it seems to me – exactly what he thought of you and your book. I mean, hasn’t every writer wanted to do something like that to a critic? I know I have. I always rather admired Richard Ford for doing that.’

‘I thought maybe you’d be a little more sympathetic. You did write
Ten Soldiers Wisely Led
, in case you’d forgotten.’

‘Yes, but your name is on the cover.’

‘Thanks, old sport.’

‘You know, it has to be said, John, yours is an interesting life. In a Chinese curse sort of way. Much more interesting than mine. If it wasn’t for you the most interesting thing in my life would be my daily newspaper.’

‘To that extent, you’re a typical writer, Don. Being boring is an essential prerequisite to getting any writing done. Whenever I meet creative writing classes I always tell them the same thing: don’t think that to be a writer you have to be like Ernest Hemingway. If you want to write a book don’t do anything, don’t go anywhere, don’t talk to anyone, don’t tell anyone you’re writing a book, just stay home with a pencil and paper. Thanks to my interesting life I may never write again.’

‘I can’t see that happening.’

‘I’m glad you think so.’

‘At the very least you should get a fascinating memoir out of this story. Like Jeffrey Archer. He managed to publish three volumes of his prison diaries. They were the funniest books I’ve read in a long time. Made me laugh, anyway.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘My God, John, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Russian gangsters. Pakistani arms dealers. Boiler-room scammers. Wannabe
femmes fatales
. Friends in the French DGSE. To say nothing about all of the people Mike Munns identified as your enemies when he wrote that piece of poison for the
Daily Mail
. Disgruntled publishers and agents and ghost-writers. Irish republicans.’ He frowned. ‘Do tell me if there’s anyone I’ve left out, John.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean, old sport.’

‘I need to think about everything you’ve told me, John. I can’t imagine more plot for plot’s sake outside of a novel by Agatha Christie. You’ve got a whole Orient Express of likely suspects there. I’ll have to spend some time with my own little grey cells before I can suggest your best course of action. Until then I’d like a cognac. Ever since I sat down I’ve been wondering what some of that bottle of old Hine on the drinks tray tastes like.’

I got up and fetched a bottle of cognac and a couple of brandy glasses off the silver tray by the mantelpiece.

‘You’ve a good eye, Don. This is a 1928. And I’m going to have to leave Mechanic several hundred euros when I leave because I’ve already had a couple of glasses of it myself.’

‘From what you’ve told me it sounds like you needed it. So. Let’s talk about this again over a decent breakfast. And I don’t mean a bowl of fucking Alpen.’

We both laughed; for a while we’d both worked on the Weetabix advertising account writing commercials for muesli.

‘It’s not the tastiest hamster food for nothing,’ I said, bowdlerizing the slogan we’d helped to devise.

Don laughed some more. ‘That’s the thing I never get
about
Mad Men
,’ he said. ‘They take all that shit so seriously. We never did. Did we?’

‘Never.’ Still shaking my head, I handed Don a glass of Mechanic’s best cognac and then toasted him. ‘Thanks, Don. You know, I really appreciate you coming here. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.’

‘You already thanked me.’

‘So, I’m thanking you again. If I ever manage to clear my name you won’t find me ungrateful.’

‘All right, but promise me one thing: if you do decide to write a prison diary, don’t for Christ’s sake say that I used to work on the Weetabix account. Come to think of it, don’t mention any of the advertising accounts I used to work on. That kind of shit can follow you around. Remember Salman Rushdie and his naughty but nice cream cakes and his fucking Aero chocolate bars? Of course you do. Everyone does. The poor bastard. Forget the Ayatollah Khomeini and his bloody fatwa,
that
’s the sort of stuff that can really harm us. Crummy advertising slogans stay with a writer like a dose of herpes.’

In the morning I worked hard in the gym as though trying to punish myself for my earlier crimes and misdemeanours; after all, there were so many; Colette, me going on the lam, me going to the Baroque – what was I thinking of, looking for girls at my age? – me alienating the very people who ought to have been most on my side: Hereward, Bat, Munns, Stakenborg, French – I was spoiled for choice; and severe punishment was what I most deserved. A heart attack after forty minutes on the running machine might have solved all of my problems. And, after I’d checked into a posh Swiss hospital and kept the police and an extradition to Monaco nicely at bay for several more weeks without compromising my own legal defence, I could have engaged a team of private detectives to find Colette Laurent, not to mention some forensic evidence that might even clear me.

Heart attacks were on my mind again when I surveyed the breakfast that Don had cooked in Mechanic’s dauntingly minimalist kitchen: eggs, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, tomatoes, fried bread, buttered toast and plenty of hot coffee.

‘Jesus, Don, you weren’t kidding about breakfast, were you? I haven’t seen so much cholesterol since I left fucking Yorkshire. Do you eat like this in Putney?’

‘Sometimes. At weekends. When I’m on my own. Which
is pretty much all the time, these days. Women don’t go in much for the full English any more. Not the ones I know. Not that I know very many. Since Jenny walked out that whole area of my life seems to have been closed down pretty comprehensively.’

‘Perhaps I should have married you instead of Orla. She couldn’t abide the smell of fried food, even when it was what I most wanted in the world. You’d think – her being a Mick – that she’d have liked the smell of a good fry-up.’

‘That and the stink of a fucking petrol bomb,’ observed Don.

‘You old racist, you.’ I grinned. ‘But entirely bloody accurate, of course. She used to cheer when she saw nationalists on the telly throwing Molotov cocktails at the security forces. Can you believe it?’

‘Yes,’ said Don. ‘I can.’

I sat down in front of a generously heaped plate and inhaled happily.

‘Jenny was just the same – about a fry-up,’ said Don. ‘She said the smell of frying bacon and eggs stuck to her hair and to her clothes.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that she had many good clothes. But that’s one of the reasons she left me, I think. To get herself a better wardrobe.’ He sat down and started to eat his own breakfast. ‘Anyway, we ought to have a good meal inside us, when we get on the road.’

‘Are we going somewhere? Geneva’s not exactly a tourist city, old sport. The Ron Jeremy memorial fountain just shoots its load all day and the Rolex factory isn’t much fun unless you’re going to buy a watch. I’d buy you one myself – as a thank you – but I figure the money you brought from London is going to have to last me an unfeasibly long time.’