Philip Kerr - Research

Then, a neighbour’s peacock called for help and it was as if my own soul had cried out in agony — or so I thought, but for only a moment; the next second I began to laugh at my own stupid conceit and loathsome self-pity; for wasn’t this the very kind of hackneyed, pathetic-fallacy bullshit scene I had banned from ever being written in my own novels?

‘You’re not Gerald Crich,’ I murmured. ‘Nor are you Oliver fucking Reed. And this is not Women in Love .’

I collected my shoes and socks, stood up, and walked back to the house to order sushi and tell Don the next chapter of my story.

After dinner from Uchitomi, and another bottle of Mechanic’s best white Burgundy, I ushered Don into the living room and hauled a fur throw over myself.

‘This place is never as warm as it ought to be,’ I said. ‘Even in summer. And smoke if you want. Bob likes a good cigar so I doubt he’ll object to you having another fag. Matter of fact I think I’ll have one myself. I really think a smoke might help.’

‘Sure,’ said Don, and offered me one from his cigarette case.

I lit us both with a silver table lighter the size of Aladdin’s magic lamp and puffed happily for several seconds.

‘Orla would kill me if she saw me now,’ I said. ‘Smoking, I mean. She was a real fascist where smoking was concerned.’

‘Don’t I know it,’ said Don. ‘But that was probably just one of many reasons why she didn’t like me.’

I didn’t contradict him. Don Irvine’s army service in Northern Ireland during the Troubles had made him persona non grata as far as Orla and her family were concerned; my old advertising colleague had done his best to avoid confrontation — he was the least confrontational person I’d ever met — but that was never easy with Irish nationalists, especially when they’d had a drop of the hard stuff. Frankly there wasn’t one of Orla’s murderous clan I wouldn’t cheerfully have punched on the nose.

We smoked in silence for another moment before Don glanced around and shivered. ‘Christ, I don’t know how you can stand it here. On your own. Rattling around in a house as big as this. And I thought Cornwall was fucking quiet.’

‘You’ve still got your place down in Fowey? Mandalay, isn’t it?’

‘Manderley. The same as in Rebecca . And actually it’s in Polruan, which is on the other side of the estuary from Fowey.’

I nodded, but really not giving a shit about the difference. Cornwall was just Cornwall to me: a care-in-the-community, backward, Go-Between sort of place — all right, that was Norfolk, but you get the picture — full of red-faced, cider-drinking, deliberate people. With my parents, I’d often visited Cornwall on holiday as a boy but I had no interest in ever visiting the county again. It wasn’t just the past that was a foreign country, it was Cornwall, too, where they were so independently-minded and did things so differently from anywhere else in England that it might as well have been fucking Hungary. Don being Don was suited to living there, I thought. Me, I’d have hated it.

‘It was a couple of weeks after terminating the atelier that I fetched up here,’ I said, beginning the next chapter of my story ‘You can imagine how that went. Telling Hereward and Bat that I was calling time on our heroic little enterprise. They were fit to be tied. Bat told me I’d ruined his life and destroyed the company. Which was nonsense, of course. People wind up successful rock bands all the time. The Beatles. Pink Floyd. Guns N’ Roses. The Smiths. Bowie pulled the rug on the Spiders while they were on tour, at the peak of their success. This wasn’t any different from that.

‘Anyway, I came back to Monaco, collected some clothes and some papers, and my laptop, of course, and drove up here the very next day to start work writing the book. By myself. Not that Orla wanted to come. She’s always hated Switzerland and the Swiss. Which is why we had a ski chalet in Courchevel 1850 instead of Gstaad or St Moritz. Colette Laurent did want to come with me, however. But if she had I’d never have got any writing done. Plus she’d have been bored. That’s the thing about writing people just don’t understand. It’s about making yourself so bored that there’s nothing else to do except to write. You can’t do it when there are any distractions. At least that’s how it is for me. Colette would have been itching to go shopping in Geneva every day and that would have been distracting. So, I was determined to come and do it by myself — write, I mean — in the way I’d done when I first got started. On retreat. Like a monk. Without so much as a choirboy’s arse to divert my mind. Actually, I was really looking forward to it. I had a hollow craving for loneliness and self-sufficiency. I’d been here before of course, when I was writing the plot of The Geneva Convention . Mechanic had listened and he made a few suggestions and he was full of admiration for what I’d come up with. He made a few suggestions but he left me with the clear impression that he thought that the new kind of hedge fund I described to him might actually have worked. I mean he got the idea right away. Bob is nothing if not quick. In fact he’s quite devious and a natural plotter. Anyway, it’s a stand-alone thriller and you know the story. Of course you do. At one stage you thought you were going to write this book yourself.’

‘Actually,’ said Don, ‘it’s been a while since I read the seventy-page outline, John.’

‘Ninety-five,’ I said. ‘That outline was ninety-five. I expanded it quite a lot after you read it. I was going to make this one a bit more of a doorstop than some of the others. You know: airport-sized. Like Wilbur Smith when Wilbur Smith used to write the books himself.’

‘In which case perhaps it would be useful if you refreshed my memory. About the plot. It might be relevant. I do remember that it’s rather complicated. And a bit technical. But skip the algebra if you would. There’s no need to include the algorithm. I only just passed O-level maths.’

‘Oh, the algorithm is gone, old sport. No, I decided that was just too much for my readers to cope with. An equation in a thriller is about as welcome as a skid mark on a wedding dress. I learned that with Ten Soldiers Wisely Led when I put in all that stuff about how modern cryptographic software — and in particular the Hermetic Algorithm — is now regarded as a munition by the US government and subject to arms-trafficking export controls. You look on the Amazon reviews and that’s the bit they always complain about: not knowing what the fuck an algorithm is.’

‘I’m not sure I know myself.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’ I took another of Don’s cigarettes and lit it. ‘So, to come back to the story of The Geneva Convention , Charles Colson is a hedgie who lives and works here in Geneva. He’s an alpha type: an orphan, and near-genius — mildly Asperger’s, probably. His fund is called the Geneva Convention and it’s one of the most successful in the world, with forty billion dollars’ worth of assets under management. In spite of the name there’s nothing particularly benign or humanitarian about Colson’s Geneva Convention. It’s simply a large group of very wealthy people who share a common interest, which is to become even wealthier. Don’t they always?

‘Now, as you might expect, Charles is a ruthless investor and a bastard with several Geneva Convention subsidiary companies that lend money to some of the worst people in the world: dictators to start up joint-venture oil and mining companies, that kind of thing. He does business in North Korea, Equatorial Guinea, Zimbabwe, Paraguay, El Salvador and nearly all of the Stan countries. If you were looking for a model of the detestable capitalist you couldn’t do better than Charles Colson, which is why in the book the Guardian newspaper names him on their own version of the ST Rich List as the one of the top ten hate figures of the liberal left.