Питер Джеймс - Billionaire

Also heading for the chateau was Jimmy Culundis; he was walking down the gangway of his private DC-8 at Bordeaux airport. It had had to land there, as it was too big for private airstrips, even the mighty one in the Viscomte’s back garden. Culundis walked to the terminal building to complete customs formalities before completing his journey in the chauffeur driven Citroen Pallas the Viscomte had sent.

Lasserre greeted Nicole Varasay, his current residential playmate, with a peck on both cheeks; she was wearing a slip, and seated at the dressing table in his vast bedroom, putting on her make-up. Her long dark hair tumbled around her white shoulders, and the Viscomte slid his hands inside her bra and caressed her breasts.

‘Who is the Englishman who is coming tonight, chéri ?’ she asked.

‘He is someone very important. I want you to be specially nice to him.’ He whispered into her ear, and she giggled a long wicked giggle.

Lasserre dressed for dinner, taking care to keep his backside well out of Nicole’s sight. She was still putting on her make-up as he pulled on his dark green smoking jacket. ‘I have some work I must do for a few minutes in my study; I will see you when you are ready, downstairs.’

‘I won’t be long,’ she said.

‘Try not to be, it would be nice for you to be down when they arrive.’

‘Two minutes,’ she said, tossing her hair back away from her face.

The Viscomte walked down the carpet that ran along the centre of the stone floor of the long corridor. There were lights at intervals down the corridor, and each light that he passed threw a long shadow of himself in front of him. These weren’t the only shadows, he reflected, sadly. There was, right now, a shadow cast over the whole of Chateau Lasserre, the whole estate. The shadow was called François Mitterand. Mitterand had decided that Viscomte Lasserre had too damned much money and too damned much land, and he was going to do something about it. It was nothing personal against Lasserre; the two had never met, and it wasn’t only Lasserre; it was many Frenchmen, both noble and nouveau riche , all with the one thing in common: wealth. Since his election to office, the French President had set about doing one of the things he had put in his election manifesto: soaking the rich. He was doing it well, too damned well, thought Lasserre, as he descended the massive staircase. Viscomte Lasserre right now was badly in need of money; the land tax Mitterand had imposed was crippling him. Before that, the estate ran at a small profit. From the wine and the farming, the costs of the racing stables, the parkland and the chateau itself were met. Sure, he owned the massive Lasserre group of companies — the munitions and aircraft industry — but now there were punitive taxes on the proceeds of sales of shares; it was not a good time to sell and, besides, how long could he keep the estate going by selling shares before the shares began to run out? Several years, without doubt, but he was a businessman. His interest was in making money, adding to his pile, not diminishing it. No; he needed additional income, a lot of it, and preferably well out of the clutches of Mitterand and his tax collectors. He was close to getting it. After tonight’s meeting, he hoped he would be closer still; closer possibly to being the richest man in France.

‘That must be it down there, Sir Monty,’ shouted out Elleck’s private pilot, Ex-RAF Wing Commander Hopkins. Elleck looked up from his De Beers Gold Report; lounging back in the large seat in the centre of the plane, it was difficult for him to see out in any direction without stretching himself, and right now he needed all the relaxation he could get, for he had a feeling it was going to be a long and taxing night.

‘Good man,’ he said, trusting to his pilot’s judgement to put them down on Lasserre’s runway and not the middle of a housing estate.

Elleck liked his trips alone; he was fond of Laura, his wife, but her presence always seemed to restrict him, to remind him of his age, to prevent him thinking at times as lucidly as he needed to. Without her, when he travelled, he always felt a spirit of adventure. He never thought about the reasons too hard; he just supposed it was that when she wasn’t there and the opportunities came up to get laid, he could take them — not that they did come up that often, and not nearly as often as he would have liked. He turned his mind to Viscomte Lasserre. He was wondering why it was that the Viscomte, one of his oldest and best clients, had invited him to dinner.

As the plane began its landing descent, he started checking his clothes. His patent leather shoes still looked spotless, and his trousers looked fine. He tightened his bow tie. He had dressed for dinner before he had left the office in London. Chateau Lasserre was 400 miles from London; in this plane, with its cruising speed of 315 knots, including the stop at Le Havre to clear French customs and immigration, it had taken them less than an hour and a half to get here.

The flight was the first opportunity he had had to think clearly at all during this particular Monday, which had been the most hectic he could ever remember. The whole world was bailing out of coffee and the coffee market, at around midday, had completely collapsed. On Friday, at the close of trading for the week, three-month coffee futures stood at £1,004 a ton. By mid-afternoon today, you couldn’t give it away. It was listed at a shade over £500 a ton, but there weren’t many takers even at that price.

Elleck was busy doing mathematics in his head. Millions of pounds had been wiped off the net wealth of Globalex’s clientele, which meant they would have less money to invest in the future and therefore there would be less trading and less commissions for Globalex. The crash of coffee had produced nervousness in other soft commodities — sugar, cocoa and almost all the others had dropped sharply. Business in some metals had picked up a bit as a result, as some investors turned to them for security, but mostly the investors were liquidating their positions to cover their coffee margin calls.

Elleck turned his mind to the people who would be the hardest hit: the small investors, the private punters, heavily exposed on their margins. Coffee had closed on Friday night at £1,004; it had begun trading on Monday morning at £400, a drop of £604, before rising slightly and levelling out at just over £500. People who had bought on margin at around about the thousand mark — where coffee had been for some time — would have about £100 invested for every ton. With a drop of £500 in the price, it meant that when the time came for them to pay the balance of the £1,000 purchase price, they would have paid out £1,000 for coffee that they could sell for only £500 — and they would therefore have lost £500 for each ton. In common with other commodity broking firms, Elleck could not let Globalex be on the hook for this difference; so when a commodity dropped substantially in price, the investors in that commodity were required to increase their margin to cover the position. It was known as a ‘margin call.’

The first job Elleck had done this morning was to check the margin positions of all Globalex’s clients. He had noticed, to his surprise, that Alex Rocq held over 1,000 tons on margin. Even at ten per cent of the price, that was a lot of money he had invested — over £100,000. Elleck did not like his employees playing the markets, and particularly not through their own firm; if they wanted to invest, they were supposed to go elsewhere, although that rule was not strictly enforced. One hundred thousand pounds was a lot of money for a fellow of Rocq’s age to have invested, and £1 million was an incredible amount to be on the hook for in just one commodity. Elleck had a feeling, just from looking at the figures, that Rocq was playing with fire.