The Ego's Nest (Dave Hart 5) Read online

  Another mentioned the succession of lawsuits from female employees claiming sexual harassment that plagued me at Grossbank. As if history will give a damn about whines from the little people who won’t even merit a footnote.

  Yet another described me as having a naturally addictive personality. Well, yes, I’m addicted to pleasure. Isn’t everyone? It’s just that some of us do something about it.

  I felt a strange detachment from the things I read, as if they were written about someone else, which, in a sense, they were. But the memorial service was different.

  The memorial service was held at St Lawrence Jewry, the official church of the Corporation of London. Three hundred people attended. Three hundred! If you want a packed church, die young. The whole of the City establishment was there, presumably because for one hour, starting at eleven o’clock that Thursday morning, it was the place to be and to be seen. The greatest irony was that, like almost everyone there, I was – and still am – an atheist, but that minor detail shouldn’t get in the way of a good show.

  The reality in twenty-first century Britain is that money is the one true god. We all defer to it, and I suppose people realised I had a lot of it, so deserved respect. They had no idea quite how much.

  Looking at photos of those who attended, the people I worked with for years, my friends, my comrades in arms, I felt … nothing. I recognised people whose fortunes I had made with my decisions in the annual bonus round, with a move to Hong Kong or New York, a promotion, the authorisation for a particularly risky trade. And there were others there whom I had destroyed with a signature on a piece of paper or a click of my mouse to send an email. Sometimes they were the same people, with only an alarmingly short time between the two moments. It rarely had much to do with talent or hard work, or even that most fickle of mistresses in the Square Mile, actual success. When you play in the high-stakes room in the casino, you don’t complain when you win, and you shouldn’t when you lose, however random, arbitrary and utterly unfair it all seems.

  And then there was my ‘family’, that is to say my ex-wife, Wendy, and Samantha, the daughter I never bothered to know, but for whom I cleaned out Hamleys and the toy department at Harrods on countless occasions. She’s almost seven now, and what amazes me most of all is my complete absence of curiosity about her. She’s a stranger and I see no reason to change that. Does that make me a monster? Or just a realist? All I see is another appalling Chelsea teenager in the making, yah-yahing her way along the King’s Road, wearing the same awful skinny jeans, Ugg boots and hoodie and spending her time building up to the amazing moment when Rupert or Rodney, a handsome but vacuous, well bred but inbred twenty-three-year-old estate agent, who served in the Guards or the Cavalry, will ask her to be his bride: ‘Daddy, I’ve got wonderful news! I’m engaged. Rodney asked me to marry him!’ Yippee, squeal, jump up and down, put the hand out for the wedding, the honeymoon, the starter apartment near Sloane Square, the little BMW to run around town in, and eventually the private room in the Lindo Wing at St Mary’s Paddington as the babies pop out and then the school fees fund, and the whole self-perpetuating charade grinds on. Why can’t I get excited about it the way other fathers do? They do, don’t they? They always say they do.

  I’ve learnt that Wendy has engaged some expensive probate lawyers to fight about my estate. She had a shock when she learnt about my will. Apparently, she doesn’t see the funny side of my leaving everything to the Battersea Dogs’ Home and thinks she should have it instead – for Samantha’s sake, of course.

  There was one heart-rending moment, just one, when I flicked open The Times and saw a photo of Two Livers, radiant in a black dress – it looked like silk, by Chanel – with a matching black wide-brimmed hat with a veil, being supported by the Silver Fox, sombrely dressed in a dark suit and tie, leaving the service, visibly distressed.

  I carried that image round in my head for months, imagining her tears. What must she have thought? Would there forever be a gap in her life? She’s still in her thirties, her whole life ahead of her, but can there ever be someone like me again?

  Impossible. But it doesn’t stop me scrutinising the gossip columns and the announcement pages of the British press from afar, torturing myself that she’s decided to settle for second best and is about to announce her engagement to some unworthy, unrighteous moron who couldn’t possibly deserve her.

  Why do I miss her so much? Was it the sex? Well, that goes without saying. She was the only woman I ever met who knew without fail when to be a goddess – slow, languorous, divine in her sensuality – and when to be a porn star. She could do both, and did, but it wasn’t just that. There was something more. Was she my soulmate? Of course not. I don’t have a soul to mate with. But even so, it makes me think. She was the one woman who never bored me.

  With others, it could take as little as a few hours, sometimes minutes, before I was mentally yawning and checking out, sometimes literally looking over their shoulder to try to spot someone – anyone – more interesting. They say we can always forgive those who bore us, but never those whom we bore. I don’t know about that. If I was lucky it lasted weeks, even months, but that was rare. Even with my ex-wife. Especially with my ex-wife, which tells you just how ill-judged that relationship was. How many times was the sex just a form of displacement activity, a way of making time pass until I could do something more interesting, or at any rate lose myself someplace else, generally with chemical assistance? Probably most of the time. After the first thousand there’s really little new that any woman has to offer you. I know. I’m shallow. Profoundly shallow. Shallow all the way through and then some. And no doubt psychologically and emotionally inadequate. I think you have to be to make it in investment banking. Maybe self-awareness at least makes me honest. That would put a positive spin on it. But with Two Livers it really was different. With her I was the one who had to do the running to keep up. She made me raise my game, made me think and, in the end, made me better. Or, less bad.

  On reflection, being dead isn’t much fun at all. Even dead rich doesn’t help. This can’t go on. In the long run we’re all dust, so while we’re here we need to do things. Real things. Eventually hedonism becomes boring. We need to be stretched and tested. At least I do. All my life I’ve struggled – well, relatively – and now I’ve got the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, in fact a super-jum-bosized one, I see just how worthless it is. Not that I’d ever give it back. But I want other things more now. Things I haven’t got.

  I need a nest. Banal as it sounds, I realise it’s true. Or at least I think it is. Could I really settle down? Probably not for long. But with Two Livers there might be a chance.

  A memory comes to mind. It was a Saturday afternoon, a couple of years ago now, and I was spending a lazy day at Two Livers’ place in Mayfair. She had a giant-screen TV and I was flopped on a sofa watching a rugby international from Twickenham. England were kicking the arses of the Welsh. What happened next is as real today as it was when it happened, and I can still recall every detail.

  Two Livers comes in, wearing a skimpy tennis outfit.

  ‘How was your lesson?’ I ask.

  ‘Fab.’ She leans forward and kisses me. ‘I’m hot. I’m going to take a shower. Do you want a beer and a blow job first?’

  ‘Sure. Why not?’

  She disappears to the kitchen, where I hear the sound of a bottle top being removed, then comes back, hands me an ice-cold beer, kneels down, slips her top off and starts to unzip me.

  ‘Oh, and after the match I want to run through my thoughts on the Asia-Pac conference.’

  ‘The what … ?’ I look at her, puzzled.

  ‘The spring conference we’re organising with business leaders from across the region. You’re giving the keynote address. I’ve drafted your speech. You’re going to say some radical things. They won’t know what’s hit them.’

  ‘Radical? Oh … sure, great.’

  Maybe a similar sort of thing was happening in millions of rugby-
watching households up and down the country.

  Then there was my birthday. I think it was the same year. We had dinner by ourselves at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, still the best restaurant in London, and afterwards went to Mimi, off Berkeley Square, for a nightcap. Two Livers was wearing a vivid red ‘look at me’ cocktail dress by Zac Posen, with diamond cluster earrings by Graff, and predictably turned every head wherever we went. As did I, but only because they were all thinking, ‘Who is that guy and how come he won the lottery?’ That’s where we ‘bumped into’ Anne-Marie Chantalle, the stunning nearest thing the French have to an equivalent of Two Livers, but brunette, with smaller breasts than Two Livers’ perfect 34DDs and what the French call a ‘gamine’ air to her.

  She was sitting alone at the bar drinking a champagne cocktail, wearing an Emilio Pucci peasant-style lace-up top that she’d left invitingly open at the front to show she was bra-less underneath, with tight knee-length leather boots and bare, tanned legs that were begging me to run my hand up them to discover whether she’d dispensed with underwear altogether for the evening. Anne-Marie runs a small investment banking boutique in Paris, and I’d wanted to hire her – and much more – for years.

  There were squeals of ‘surprise’ from the two ladies, kisses on each cheek, more cocktails, then it was back to my apartment. I was in the kitchen opening another bottle – or was I scoring another sneaky line? – either way, when I came back into the living room the ladies were gone. I could hear them in the bedroom and quietly opened the door. They were naked, save for their jewellery – always a nice touch – and making out on my mega double bed. They looked up. Anne-Marie spoke first.

  ‘The birthday boy. Come on, Dave. Déshabille-toi.’

  What followed was one of the all-time great experiences of my life. So good, in fact, that I regretted the drink and the drugs, because I wanted to feel every second of it and imprint it on my memory forever. When they had finished with each other, they went to work on me. Together. But it was my birthday, and I suppose that Two Livers had simply organised the kind of treat that every girl does for her man on his birthday.

  It was a memorable day. And if I have a chance of getting her back, it has to be worth a shot.

  RETURNING FROM the dead is never straightforward.

  I’m in, of all places, an opium den, when I realise how I’m going to do it. Or maybe it’s because I’m there that I finally achieve clarity. Or something. Whatever it is, everything suddenly becomes clear.

  I’m lying on a pile of silk cushions, smiling half-wittedly at a beautiful Indonesian girl who is kneeling at my feet, her long hair tumbling down over her bare breasts, preparing me another pipe.

  She has amazingly detailed, elaborate tattoos over most of her back and arms, and I find them utterly tantalising. I’m not normally an admirer of tattoos, especially on women. And I particularly despise the tasteless, vulgar slag tags and tramp stamps that British women go in for – some idiotic phrase in Sanskrit or ancient Greek, or some other language their under-educated brains wouldn’t understand – located at the base of their back to remind you they’re slappers when you’re humping them from behind. Or worse still the twee ‘discreet’ little pictures that teenagers have somewhere on their bodies – flowers, dolphins or butterflies – normally hidden by clothing, so they can all show just how identically individual and daring and mysterious and sexy every single one of them is – in exactly the same way.

  This is different. This really is extraordinary. One could spend days exploring her body. Her skin is a work of art, and I could lose myself in it.

  I inhale deeply from the fresh pipe that she hands me. The feeling of relaxation is total. Nothing matters any more. It isn’t that I’ve forgotten everything; on the contrary, I can see it all perfectly clearly and I realise that none of it matters. Except perhaps one thing. The one thing I never conquered. Everything else I had, generally more than once, both good and bad. And it was all irrelevant compared to the one thing I never achieved. Happiness in love.

  Christ, this stuff is good. I had to try it because it was on my list and I’d never done it before. I’ve now tried it three times, and this is definitely the last, because it’s so good I’d happily surrender to it. You really don’t need to try this stuff. Trust me, I’ve done it for you.

  The girl moves her hand to my crotch.

  ‘Would you like me to make you comfortable?’

  ‘No. But thank you. You’re very kind.’ I decline as politely as I can, and just in case she’s offended, or might be missing out on a money-making opportunity, I reach into my pocket and pass her an enormous wad of notes.

  I’ve been on a kind of circuit: an international pleasure circuit. My money is stashed in thirty or more banks around the world: small private banks in Russia and Central Asia; discreet wealth managers from Monaco to Macao; commercial banks in places most people have never heard of, like Nauru, that well-known global financial centre located on a tiny island in the Pacific, where even today few questions are asked if the numbers are large enough.

  And I’ve been moving from place to place, sometimes in private jets, sometimes by luxury yacht, rarely coming into contact with the great unwashed whose money was needed to finance all this.

  There are hundreds of people like me, doing the circuit. Occasionally we glimpse each other, arriving and leaving from private islands, boarding helicopters or landing from inflatables on remote coral atolls. A few I recognise, most I don’t. Drug lords, Mafiosi, retired politicians and, of course, businessmen and ‘failed’ bankers. Even the occasional rock star whose albums I used to buy. People who made money that they would rather not see exposed to the police or the taxman, a whole class of super-rich ‘disappeared’ people, a number of them, like me, long since officially declared dead, but all of them using up time, wandering aimlessly and pleasurably, and waiting to die.

  Well, not me. Not any more. The great thing about opium is the way it shifts the gears in your brain. Obstacles, baggage and general clutter disappear before its easily smoothing logic.

  So now I know what I have to do.

  BANG BANG Lee is surprised to get my call.

  ‘Dave, is that you? No. Not Dave. You sounded like someone else. Let me think. Is it … ?’

  He’s forgotten. How could he? He’s forgotten my chosen alias.

  ‘It’s Freddie, Bang Bang. Your old friend, Fred the Bed. Do you remember me?’

  ‘Of course, Freddie. You just sounded like someone else. But I thought …’

  ‘You thought I’d decided to retire. Well, I had a change of heart. Now Freddie’s going to retire instead. Permanently. And I heard that Dave’s coming back. Think of him as the Comeback Kid. And he tells me he’s going to need some help from you and Rom, and some of your friends.’

  There’s a long pause at the other end of the line. He owes me big time, and deep down he is a man of honour. At least a kind of honour. But our deal is over, finished, and he never expected to hear from me again. In fact that was my side of the bargain. I imagine the cogs in his head whirring. He’s probably wondering whether it would be easier to make me disappear permanently, only to do it for real this time. On the other hand, the last time we worked together it was hardly boring. I need to dangle some bait.

  ‘Bang Bang, we have unfinished business.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean what we left on the table. We came away too soon. We never played the second-half.’

  ‘The second-half?’

  ‘Well … it’s not exactly half. It’s more than half.’

  ‘Da— I mean Freddie – are you saying that we could have made more than we already did? That there’s still more profit to take?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying. I’ve had time to reflect and it’s all clear to me now. We were fools.’ Fools who made billions. He’s probably thinking that kind of foolishness is perfectly acceptable.

  Silence. I wonder if we’ve
been cut off. ‘Bang Bang – are you there?’

  ‘I’m here. When you see Dave, tell him he has my full attention.’

  THE THING about people like Bang Bang and Rom is they can make things happen. Like the giant Russian Antonov aircraft that only just fits on the runway of the tiny Indonesian island where I’ve been put ashore.

  Nothing this size has ever landed here before. It’s a long-range cargo version, but its only cargo is an elaborate oversized caravan that’s been driven into the hold of the aircraft, the sort movie stars live in on location, and which redefines luxury and excess, full of leather and fur and gilt and general vulgarity. It’s for me and it’s full of champagne, caviar and blondes. Well, and a few brunettes. And a couple of Asian girls – as if I haven’t had enough – and a truly stunning black girl, who could be the first course of my in-flight entertainment. Even the president of the United States doesn’t get this on Air Force One. As far as I know. I’m sure if he did, we’d have heard about it.

  The only detail missing is Alessandro and the team from Duke’s to pour the martinis. That would have been the perfect touch, with a bar set up in the hold of the aircraft. But I can’t have everything – not yet. Anyway, it’s going to fly me halfway round the world, and I climb aboard with a spring in my step. I’m coming home.

  I THINK the girls must have been acting under instructions, because after a couple of hours I find myself yawning, glance suspiciously at the half-filled glass of champagne beside me, which doesn’t taste quite right, and drift off to sleep. They don’t wake me until we’re about an hour out from our destination, a disused military airfield in Kazakhstan. I’ve got a very important meeting with my business partners, and then I’m going to have a video conference with the Silver Fox, though he doesn’t know it yet.