Дик Фрэнсис - Banker

‘You can’t just keep on borrowing. You’ve a limit. You can’t go beyond it. Look for heaven’s sake come over here quickly and we’ll see what can be undone.’

‘But you said,’ his voice said plaintively, ‘that you’d want to finance later expansion. That’s what I’m doing. Expanding.’

I thought wildly that I’d be licking stamps for a living as soon as Henry heard. Dear God ...

‘ Listen ,’ the cartoonist was saying, ‘we all worked like hell and finished one whole film. Twelve minutes long, dubbed with music and sound effects, everything, titles, the lot. And we did some rough-cuts of three others, no music, no frills, but enough... and I’ve sold them.’

‘You’ve what?’

‘Sold them.’ He laughed with excitement. ‘It’s solid, I promise you. That agent you sent me to, he’s fixed the sale and the contract. All I have to do is sign. It’s a major firm that’s handling them, and I get a big perpetual royalty. World-wide distribution, that’s what they’re talking about, and the BBC are taking them. But we’ve got to make twenty films in a year from now, not seven like I meant. Twenty! And if the public like them, that’s just the start. Oh heck, I can’t believe it. But to do twenty in the time I need a lot more money. Is it all right? I mean... I was so sure...’

‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘It’s all right. Bring the contract when you’ve signed it, and new figures, and we’ll work things out.’

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Tim Ekaterin, God bless your darling bank.’

I put the receiver down feebly and ran a hand over my head and down the back of my neck.

‘Trouble?’ Gordon asked, watching.

‘Well no, not exactly...’ A laugh like the cartoonist’s rose in my throat. ‘I backed a winner. I think perhaps I backed a bloody geyser.’ The laugh broke out aloud. ‘Did you ever do that?’

‘Ah yes,’ Gordon nodded, ‘Of course.’

I told him about the cartoonist and showed him the original set of drawings, which were still stowed in my desk: and when he looked through them, he laughed.

‘Wasn’t that application on my desk,’ he said, wrinkling his forehead in an effort to remember, ‘just before I was away?’

I thought back. ‘Yes, it probably was.’

He nodded. ‘I’d decided to turn it down.’

‘Had you?’

‘Mm. Isn’t he too young, or something?’

‘That sort of talent strikes at birth.’

He gave me a brief assessing look and handed the drawings back. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good luck to him.’

The news that Uncle Freddie had been spotted in the building rippled through every department and stiffened a good many slouching backbones. Uncle Freddie was given to growling out devastatingly accurate judgements of people in their hearing, and it was not only I who’d found the bank more peaceful (if perhaps also more complacent) when he retired.

He was known as ‘Mr Fred’ as opposed to ‘Mr Mark’ (grandfather) and ‘Mr Paul’, the founder. No one ever called me ‘Mr Tim’; sign of the changing times. If true to form Uncle Freddie would spend the morning in Investment Management, where he himself had worked all his office life, and after lunch in the boardroom would put at least his head into Corporate Finance, to be civil, and end with a march through Banking. On the way, by some telepathic process of his own, he would learn what moved in the bank’s collective mind; sniff, as he had put it, the prevailing scent on the wind.

He had already arrived when the copies of What’s Going On hit the fan.

Alec as usual slipped out to the local paper shop at about the time they were delivered there and returned with the six copies which the bank officially sanctioned. No one in the City could afford not to know about What Was Going On on their own doorstep.

Alec shunted around delivering one copy to each floor and keeping ours to himself to read first, a perk he said he deserved.

‘Your uncle,’ he reported on his return, ‘is beating the shit out of poor Ted Lorrimer in Investments for failing to sell Winkler Consolidated when even a squint-eyed baboon could see it was overstretched in its Central American operation, and a neck sticking out asking for the comprehensive chop.’

Gordon chuckled mildly at the verbatim reporting, and Alec sat at his desk and opened the paper. Normal office life continued for perhaps five more minutes before Alec shot to his feet as if he’d been stung.’

‘Jes-us Christ,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Our leaker is at it again.’

‘What?’ Gordon said.

‘You’d better read it.’ He took the paper across to Gordon whose preliminary face of foreboding turned slowly to anger.

‘It’s disgraceful,’ Gordon said. He made as if to pass the paper to me, but John, on his feet, as good as snatched it out of his hand.

‘I should come first,’ he said forcefully, and took the paper over to his own desk, sitting down methodically and spreading the paper open on the flat surface to read. Gordon watched him impassively and I said nothing to provoke. When John at his leisure had finished, showing little reaction but a tightened mouth, it was to Rupert he gave the paper, and Rupert, who read it with small gasps and widening eyes, who brought it eventually to me.

‘It’s bad,’ Gordon said.

‘So I gather.’ I lolled back in my chair and lifted the offending column to eye level. Under a heading of ‘Dinky Dirty Doings’ it said:

It is perhaps not well known to readers that in many a merchant bank two thirds of the annual profits come from interest on loans. Investment and Trust management and Corporate Finance departments are the public faces and glamour machines of these very private banks. Their investments (of other people’s money) in the Stock market and their entrepreneurial role in mergers and takeovers earn the spotlight year by year in the City Pages .

Below stairs, so to speak, lies the tail that wags the dog, the secretive Banking department which quietly lends from its own deep coffers and rakes in vast profits in the shape of interest at rates they can set to suit themselves .

These rates are not necessarily high .

Who in Paul Ekaterin Ltd has been effectively lending to himself small fortunes from these coffers at FIVE per cent? Who in Paul Ekaterin Ltd has set up private companies which are NOT carrying on the business for which the money has ostensibly been lent? Who has not declared that these companies are his?

The man-in-the-street (poor slob) would be delighted to get unlimited cash from Paul Ekaterin Ltd at five per cent so that he could invest it in something else for more .

Don’t Bankers have a fun time?

I looked up from the damaging page and across at Alec, and he was, predictably, grinning.

‘I wonder who’s had his hand in the cookie jar,’ he said.

‘And who caught it there,’ I asked.

‘Wow, yes.’

Gordon said bleakly, ‘This is very serious.’

‘If you believe it,’ I said.

‘But this paper...’ he began.

‘Yeah,’ I interrupted. ‘It had a dig at us before, remember? Way back in May. Remember the flap everyone got into?’

‘I was at home... with ‘flu’.’

‘Oh, yes. Well, the furore went on here for ages and no one came up with any answers. This column today is just as unspecific. So... supposing all it’s designed to do is stir up trouble for the bank? Who’s got it in for us? To what raving nut have we for instance refused a loan?’

Alec was regarding me with exaggerated wonder. ‘Here we have Sherlock Holmes to the rescue,’ he said admiringly. ‘Now we can all go out to lunch.’