Chapter Eight
ADRIAN
London. September.
I wrote the paper myself, at night, at home, and I gave it to nobody to check.
That alone should have finished me. There is a woman on the fourteenth floor whose entire job is to make my papers survive contact with Michel Aubry, and she has done it for six years, and she is extremely good, and I did not send it to her, because if I had sent it to her she would have read it and come up to my office and asked me one question, and I did not have an answer to one question.
It ran to a page and a half.
Michel got it at ten twenty on the morning of the meeting. The meeting was at one.
He came up. Of course he came up. He came up with the paper folded backward in one hand and he stood in the door of my office and he did not sit down.
“Adrian.”
“Michel.”
“What is this.”
“It is on the agenda.”
“It is not on the agenda, it has been put on the agenda, by you, at twenty past eleven.” He came in. He put it on my desk and turned it around, which is a thing men do when they want you to look at your own handwriting. “Fifty eight million euros.”
“Fifty eight point two.”
“For a palace.”
“For a freehold.”
Michel Aubry is fifty eight years old and he has been the finance director of this company for nine of them and he is the only man in the building who is not frightened of me, and I have always liked him for it, and I was about to spend all of it.
“We are in a standstill,” he said. “We have two hundred and ten million of debt sitting under a subsidiary and a Dutch consortium buying our stock in the open market on Tuesdays, and you would like to spend fifty eight million euros on a ruin in Lombardy.”
“Yes.”
“Have you been in it?”
“No,” I said.
He looked at me for a while.
Then he picked up the paper and went downstairs to see whether anybody else in the building would say it out loud so that he did not have to.
The boardroom in Leadenhall Street has a window that looks at another window.
There were nine of us. Michel at the far end with two of his people.
Sarantos, who is seventy one and who was appointed by my grandfather and who has outlived everybody who could remove him.
Priya Nandra from treasury, who is the cleverest person in the company and who knows it and is right.
Colin Weekes, group risk, who has a stammer he has never let anybody help him with and who I have watched destroy three separate acquisitions with it, slowly, one clause at a time.
Two others. And my brother, on my left, with his arms folded, who had known about the paper since ten twenty five, because Michel had rung him from the lift.
I put it through in twenty six minutes.
Michel went first, because Michel always goes first, and he was fair, which was worse.
He did not attack it. He set it out. He put the acquisition against the covenant tests and the cash position and the standstill, and he did it in that dry French English of his, and when he had finished, the paper was dead on the table in front of everybody and nobody had raised their voice.
Then he said, “The finance function cannot recommend this.”
“Understood,” I said.
“I want that minuted.”
“It will be.”
Priya said, “May I ask a practical question.”
“Please.”
“What is it for?”
And I lied to her.
I want to be careful here. I have been lying about the lie for months, and the specific thing I did in that room was not a large lie, it was four small ones fitted together, which is how the real ones are made.
I said the group had no non marine asset of any scale, and that our entire collateral base was steel that floats, and that a ship can be arrested in a port by any creditor with a decent lawyer and a fax machine, and a listed sixteenth century interior in the middle of Milan cannot be arrested by anybody, ever, and that if we go into a fight for our lives in March I would rather be holding one thing in this world that a Dutch logistics group physically cannot take off us.
That is true. Every word of it is true.
Then Colin Weekes said, “And the h-hospitality use. Page two.”
“Long lease to an operator,” I said. “Post restoration.”
“Have there b-been approaches?”
“There have been approaches.”
There had been no approaches. There has never been an approach. I sat in a boardroom in Leadenhall Street with my hands folded on a table and I told a man with a stammer that there had been approaches, and he wrote it down, and my voice was completely steady, and I noticed it.
Behind the window, behind the other window, a man in a gray shirt sat down at his desk and took a sandwich out of a paper bag and began to unwrap it, and I watched him do it while I said the words.
It was ten past one.
“From whom?” Priya said.
“I am not going to name them in a minuted meeting.”
“Adrian.”
“Priya, I have run this business for six years and I have never once asked this committee to take a thing on trust.” I did not raise my voice. I have never had to raise my voice, and that is not a virtue, it is a symptom. “I am asking now.”
The room went the way a room goes.
Sarantos moved. He does it about twice a year. He put one hand flat on the table, and he is seventy one, and his hand is enormous, and he said, in the accent that has not moved since 1961:
“I have sat in this room for thirty eight years.”
“Yes.”
“I sat in it when your grandfather bought the Elefsina yard and I sat in it when your father sold half of it back at a loss and told us it was strategy.” He looked at me.
“I have listened to a great many men in this chair explain why the thing they wanted was also the thing the company needed. It is a remarkable coincidence and it has happened every time.”
Nobody said anything.
“That is not a business decision, Adrianos,” Sarantos said. “That is a man buying something.”
And there it was, on the table, in the open, from an old man who could not be sacked, and every person in that room heard it, and the sandwich went on being unwrapped behind two panes of glass.
I let it sit for about three seconds.
Then I put down the only thing I had.
“I will indemnify the group,” I said.
Michel said, “What?”
“I will personally indemnify the group against the full acquisition cost. Fifty eight point two million euros, plus stamp, plus the first phase of works, against my own assets, without limit, and I will sign it this week.” I looked down the table at him.
“If the Cassaro is worth nothing in March, it costs this company nothing. It costs me everything I have, and the shareholders lose not one euro, and Rotterdam gets a balance sheet with a palace on it that they did not pay for.”
Michel Aubry took his glasses off.
I have seen that man told, on a Sunday, that a vessel had gone down in the Bay of Biscay with cargo on it and no insurer, and he did not take his glasses off.
“Adrian,” he said. “That is your entire personal position.”
“Yes.”
“Every share you hold. The house. That is everything you have on this earth.”
“Yes.”
“For a building you have not been inside.”
“Yes,” I said.
One of Michel’s people got up and left the room, and I do not know his name, and he did not come back, and I was told afterward that he was physically sick in the corridor, and I have never been able to decide whether I believe that or whether it is simply the story the building wanted.
Priya Nandra sat back in her chair and looked at me for a long moment with an expression I did not care for at all, because it was not disapproval. It was the beginning of understanding.
“You are not asking us to approve an acquisition,” she said. “You are asking us to approve a gift.”
“I am asking you to approve a freehold at a fraction of replacement cost with no downside to the company whatsoever.”
“That is not what I said.”
“It is what I am asking,” I said.
We voted.
It is an advisory committee. It cannot stop me.
That is the joke at the bottom of the whole afternoon, and every person around that table knew it, and we did it anyway, because a chief executive who overrules a unanimous finance committee is a chief executive who has a date in his diary with the audit chair.
Michel against. Sarantos against. Priya against, and she said the word clearly, and she looked at me while she said it, which I respected. Weekes abstained, and took six seconds to do it. The two I have not named, against.
Which left my brother.
Theo unfolded his arms.
He put one hand on the table, and he raised it about ten centimeters, and I want to be accurate, because I have taken this apart more often than I have taken apart anything except a ballroom. He did not raise his hand to vote. He raised it to speak.
He had a question. It was on his face. He has had that face since he was six years old and it means he is about to say the thing that ends the argument, and he is almost always right, and he was going to ask me, in front of eight people, why.
And he looked at me.
I do not know what was on my face. I have never known. I sat in a boardroom in Leadenhall Street with a folded page from an architectural quarterly in the inside pocket of my jacket, against my chest, where it had been since June, and I looked at my younger brother, and I did not say one word.
Theo put his hand back down on the table.
Then he lifted it again, properly, all the way, and he said:
“For.”
The room made a small sound.
Sarantos turned in his chair and looked at him and did not bother to hide it. Michel wrote something down and then crossed it out.
“Carried,” I said, “on the chair’s casting vote, with the finance function’s objection minuted in full, and I would like the indemnity drafted by Friday.”
And that was it. Twenty six minutes.
They went out slowly, the way people do when they have watched something. Michel gathered his papers and did not look at me, and Priya said “Adrian” at the door, and did not follow it with anything, and left.
Theo stayed.
He stood at the end of the table and he squared the agenda papers, tapping them on the wood, once, twice, until the edges were true, and he put them down in front of my chair.
I waited.
I want it understood that I was ready. I had it.
I had the whole speech about collateral and arrest and Dutch balance sheets, and I had it in order, and I was going to give it to my brother and he was going to know it was a lie and I was going to give it to him anyway, and that was going to be the price, and I had decided to pay it.
He did not ask.
He looked at me for about as long as it takes to boil a kettle. Then he pushed his chair in, which he never does, and he said, “I will see you upstairs,” and he went out, and he shut the door behind him with the handle turned so that it would not make a sound.
I sat in the boardroom on my own.
Behind the window, behind the other window, the man in the gray shirt had finished the sandwich and folded the bag into a small square and put it in a drawer, which is what he does, which he has done every day for six years, and I have watched him do it more times than I have seen my own mother.
I took the page out of my jacket.
It was nine pages when it came, and I had cut one out of it with a pocket knife in this room in June, and it had been folded into eight since, and the crease had gone through her twice.
I flattened it on the table with the side of my hand.
A photograph, badly lit, taken from below. A scaffold in a crypt in Pavia. A woman thirty feet up with her back to the camera and her hand flat on a wall, and her head is turned away, and you cannot see her face at all.
You could not identify anybody from it. That is the truth. I have had the best people in Europe on this and I have paid them a great deal of money and no court, no investigator, no reasonable man on this earth would say that the photograph is evidence of anything.
I knew the hand.
I sat in a boardroom in London with fifty eight million euros of my own money on the table and I put one finger down on a photograph of a wrist, and outside the window a stranger closed a drawer.