NATHANIEL’S ARISTO BADLAD
One thing that intrigues me about the English is the emphasis they place on position: their class consciousness, if you like. They seem at times positively obsessed with status – where a person lives, and works, and where they went to school, and of course the English middle class goes quite bananas when it meets a member of the aristocracy. Lords are prized targets, and ambitious social climbers hunt them much as farmers pursue fat rabbits, with a great deal of energy, and enormous enthusiasm.
However hunters sometimes ensnare themselves in their own traps. A woman called Christine Young bought me lunch the other day. She is rich – her husband is high in a City merchant bank and has any number of directorships – she has a big house on the other side of Beaconsfield, out towards Penn, and she wants to get on in the world. She entertains lavishly, and holds glittering summer garden parties. Rumour has it that she would like to write ‘Lady’ in front of her name. But recently a member of our local elite set her husband up for the cleaners.
Chris took me to a posh little pub out in the Chilterns, a couple of miles from Aylesbury, and poured out her heart over a really tasty plateful of chicken salad topped with slivers of goats’ cheese and a nice drop of Chablis. Her shout, of course.
‘Jerry has buggered him.’ For a moment she seemed close to tears. I guess major impending financial loss coupled with total public humiliation make a bitter combination.
I was sympathetic, and wondered whether she would run to a second bottle. We malefactors like our wine, and we never inebriate. Breathalysers tend to fragment when we blow into them.
She went on to pack her story out in sad little bursts, but I knew most of it already. Everyone was tattling about Harry: he was set fair to become the laughing stock of the county. Well, Chris and Harry together, because Jerry had set them both up in spades.
His title had blinded them. Jerry Arlington, Viscount Arlington to lesser folk, is our local aristo badlad, and a bastard into the bargain. He likes to dabble in shady ventures, and has hocked himself up to his eyeballs. Technology is all the rage, so Jerry has been out with the frontrunners, promoting some dodgy dotcom for all he is worth. Something to do with broadband. Jerry has been trumpeting that it will send Microsoft sliding. Big numbers, big promises. Big names have queued to jump on his bandwagon.
I tried warning Chris a couple of times, because I have known Jerry for a long time. He still owes me a couple from a game of poker, back in the Eighties. But Chris is one of those girls who always knows better. Tough, but a poor judge of character.
Jerry began by snowing the Youngs in style. He dined them at Arlington Hall, and sold Harry a small stake on the strength of it. He took Harry shooting and then they all lunched at the House of Lords. That was before Debby Arlington found him screwing the cook, a nice, plump little Frenchwoman. I think she would have cut up rough enough had she caught him bonking her maid. She went ballistic when she found him in bed with her dinner lady.
Debby moved out, and Jerry stayed with Harry and Chris for a while. He brought no end of glamour with him – Chris found herself with lords to the left of her, lords to the right of her, and aristos all the way round her table. Once Jerry even drummed up a duke. Chris swept him a curtsey, and called him ‘Your grace’. He told her to call him Johnny, and she blushed to the roots of her highlights.
Then Jerry made it up with Debby – I think she missed being the local queen bee – they found themselves a new cook, and Jerry moved back to Arlington Hall. He began working on Harry with a vengeance. Harry bought more shares in the dodgy dotcom, and persuaded his fellow bank directors to sanction a big loan.
Everything went absolutely swimmingly for a while. Harry joined the dodgy dotcom board, Harry’s bank stumped up even more readies. But then things began to crumble. Nobody expected the dotcom to make any money: bluesky businesses never do, for their first year or two. But nasty rumours began to float round the City. People whispered that Jerry was fronting for a bunch of mafiosi, and the shares went into freefall. Harry’s broker told him that Jerry had long since dumped all his stock. Yes, Harry and his bank were now the holders.
The great and the good began calling for Harry’s scalp, and he aged about ten years in a month. Chris came to me for help. We have known each other for a long time: she worked for a while as a model, charging a high price. Harry never cottoned on, and course she went very straight once she had his ring on her finger.
‘We went exotic, Nathaniel.’ She shook her head sadly.
‘You were out of your depth.’
She nodded. ‘We were.’
‘Harry wants his money back?’
‘And the rest.’
‘Where has it gone?’
‘Harry reckons Jerry has spirited it away to an account in Switzerland, where no-one can touch it.’
‘Does he know where?’
She shook her head again. ‘That’s why I’m buying you lunch.’ She began to cry, and I waved for a fresh bottle. Strong emotions demand powerful palliatives, and she was paying.
She sipped at a fresh glass, her face working with emotion, and then she opened her handbag, something smart from Gucci. She took out an envelope, plain manilla but bulky, and laid it on the table between us.
I turned it over in my fingers. I am much too much a gentleman to count out an advance under a woman’s nose, but I knew it would be sufficient. ‘You want him wrapped up?’
Chris stared at me, and for a moment her eyes were chips of blue ice. ‘We want to go back to the start line.’ But she also touched her forefinger to her throat, and drew it slowly sideways.
I nodded. I also thought Jerry was just about due for his cards. I have done a couple of small jobs for him, people who stood in his way, and I have given good value. But he has always treated me like a hired hand, and a mutual acquaintance told me that once he referred to me as a dago. I passed it by, because I had not heard it personally. I would have wiped him, had he said it to my face.
I drove home to think about it. Flash conmen tend to possess sensitive antennae, and Jerry was riding high. I had to think of a way to trap him. I had to design a trap with no possible exit.
It took a good deal of thinking, but finally I got my trap right. I was due to spend a few days at my chateau in France, where I am on first-name terms with all the best hobnobs. I go fishing with a Duke, and we never say grace, and I dine with any number of Vicomtes and Marquises. Nobody minds my looking a little latin over there, it comes with the décor. I hint at Italian blood, touched with Spanish, and mention an Inca ancestor or two.
I have seen men occasionly cross themselves at my passage, just as Spaniards used to cross themselves on seeing men write left-handed. I have been told by a princess from one of Italy’s oldest families that I am devilishly handsome. I have sometimes winced at the crossings, but I invariably smile when I am flattered.
Anyway I lunched with a couple of hobnobs, and one had a bright idea. He is a banker, but as grand as they come - way out of Harry’s league. Clovis suggested a counterbid.
‘We’ll bring in some Ricains’ – he used the slang term for Yanks – ‘and bid for stock just a little way short of the last closing price before Jerry jumped ship.’
I was doubtful. ‘He’ll smell a rat.’
Clovis put his finger to his nose. He is a wily old bird; some say he has hellish connections, somewhere deep in his past. We get on very well together. ‘No, Nathaniel. He’ll see a chance to get back where he got off, and a free ride ahead of him. He is a greedy man.’
The hobnobs know Jerry, and do not much care for him. He stayed at my chateau, once. It was a matter of doing a deal, but the French would not wear it. Jerry played his English card much too hard. I am told he called a mandarin from the Quai d’Orsay a ‘frog’ to his face. The deal died there and then.
I told Chris, Chris put me together with Harry. We lunched at the Belvedere, out on the balcony, because every wall in the City has ears. Harry was doubtful at first, but then he clutched at the concept like a drowning banker clutching at a floating mandate.
‘We’re stuffed with the stock, Nathaniel, we’ll have to spread it around first.’
I beamed. We were drinking Sancerre with our halibut, a nice little drop, and Harry was paying. ‘The French have it in hand.’
He began to perk up. ‘Can they do it?’
‘Five banks will take it off you in tranches on repo.’
‘Climbing the ladder?’
I winked. My hobnobs had put together a very smart deal. The five banks would each take a smallish slice of the dodgy dotcom at a low price, and then publicly buy a bigger slice at Jerry’s exit level, providing Harry’s bank guaranteed them. Harry’s bank would cut money, but not nearly as much as if nothing happened at all, and the deal would take Harry clean off his personal hook.
He frowned. ‘They’ll be acting in concert.’
‘They’ll be fronting for Yanks.’
A gleam of greed shone in his eyes. ‘Could the dotcom be worth something?’
I shook my head firmly. Bankers are always on the make. ‘Forget it, Harry. It’s a plot to shaft Jerry.’ I also laid my hand out flat on the table, palm upwards.
Harry’s eyes narrowed. ‘I thought Chris had paid you?’
I shook my head again. ‘Chris paid a deposit.’
He scowled. ‘How much do you want?’
‘One percent of the biz, valued at the first French price.’
He took a deep breath. ‘You’ll make more than a million, if you pull it off.’
I beamed. ‘That’s why I’m doing it.’
So Jerry was shafted.
The French banks took their tranches off Harry, and the dotcom began to climb skywards. Word began to spread: there was talk of a deal with the Yanks, the Nips, and even the Cossacks. The dodgy dotcom suddenly regained respectability, and everyone had to have a piece of the action. Jerry and his backers bought back in on a grand scale.
They bought from the French, of course, and ownership ran full circle. The hobnobs saved Harry’s bacon, and then baled out. The dodgy dotcom fell flat on its face, and thundering herds of exiting holders quite squashed it to death.
However that still left me with some unfinished business, because I owed Chris for her envelope. I tried hunting Jerry down, but he vanished from the face of the earth. Debby shrugged when I called at Arlington Hall, and shrugged again when I gave her a love look. She made a good bonk, but she had no idea at all where I might find her husband.
I asked around, and around, until I found myself travelling in circles – I could afford to invest a little time in my hunting, because my one percent cleaned me well into seven figures. Then Clovis called me from France, so I flew over to see him.
‘He’s feeding the fishes,’ he told me as we lunched on lobster salad at the Flora Danica on the Champs Elysees. We both smiled – Clovis has a neat way with words. It seemed that some Sicilian gentlemen waylaid Jerry on his way home from a taut meeting with his bankers – nobody could touch Arlington Hall and its contents because the Arlington Trust stood in the way, and the City was fuming.
The Sicilians knew they had been fleeced, and were not prepared to stand by and take it idly. They holed Jerry up in a house somewhere in West London and tried talking to him for a week; seemingly he lost his teeth, then his toes, his fingers and finally his eyes. He just told them there was nothing he could do. They grew fed up in the end, and sliced and diced him.
I flew home and told Chris, I felt I had short-changed her. But she seemed happy just to hear the details of his ending. ‘I wish I’d been there’, she said ruefully, waving away any thought of repayment. ‘He’s gone, and that’s all I wanted.’
I hear the Youngs have been pencilled in for the next Honours List. Something to do with services to the public. Maybe the powers-that-be are thinking of Jerry. Lord Nathaniel would have sounded even better.