A Twist in the Tale Page 5

  “My Head of State has requested that I visit your bank with a rather unusual request,” he began. Not a flicker of surprise appeared on the face of the chairman or his young assistant. “He has honored me with the task of discovering which Nigerian citizens hold numbered accounts with your bank.”

  On learning this piece of information only the chairman’s lips moved. “I am not at liberty to disclose—”

  “Allow me to put my case,” said the Minister, raising a white palm. “First, let me assure you that I come with the absolute authority of my government.” Without another word, Ignatius extracted an envelope from his inside pocket with a flourish. He handed it to the chairman who removed the letter inside and read it slowly.

  Once he had finished reading, the banker cleared his throat. “This document, I fear, sir, carries no validity in my country.” He replaced it in the envelope and handed it back to Ignatius. “I am, of course,” continued the chairman, “not for one moment doubting that you have the full backing of your Head of State, as both a Minister and an Ambassador, but that does not change the bank’s rule of confidentiality in such matters. There are no circumstances in which we would release the names of any of our account holders without their authority. I’m sorry to be of so little help, but those are, and will always remain, the bank rules.” The chairman rose to his feet, as he considered the meeting was now at an end; but he had not bargained for Clean Sweep Ignatius.

  “My Head of State,” said Ignatius, softening his tone perceptibly, “has authorized me to approach your bank as the intermediary for all future transactions between my country and Switzerland.”

  “We are flattered by your confidence in us, Minister,” replied the chairman, who remained standing. “However, I feel sure that you will understand that it cannot alter our attitude to our customers’ confidentiality.”

  Ignatius remained unperturbed.

  “Then I am sorry to inform you, Mr. Gerber, that our Ambassador in Bern will be instructed to make an official communiqué to the Swiss Foreign Office about the lack of cooperation your bank has shown concerning requests for information about our nationals.” He waited for his words to sink in. “You could avoid such embarrassment, of course, by simply letting me know the names of my countrymen who hold accounts with Gerber et Cie and the amounts involved. I can assure you we would not reveal the source of our information.”

  “You are most welcome to lodge such a communiqué, sir, and I feel sure that our Minister will explain to your Ambassador in the most courteous of diplomatic language that the Foreign Ministry does not have the authority under Swiss law to demand such disclosures.”

  “If that is the case, I shall instruct my own Ministry of Trade to halt all future dealings in Nigeria with any Swiss nationals until these names are revealed.”

  “That is your privilege, Minister,” replied the chairman, unmoved.

  “And we may also have to reconsider every contract currently being negotiated by your countrymen in Nigeria. And in addition I shall personally see to it that no penalty clauses are honored.”

  “Would you not consider such action a little precipitate?”

  “Let me assure you, Mr. Gerber, that I would not lose one moment of sleep over such a decision,” said Ignatius. “Even if my efforts to discover those names were to bring your country to its knees I would not be moved.”

  “So be it, Minister,” replied the chairman. “However, it still does not alter the policy or the attitude of this bank to confidentiality.”

  “If that remains the case, sir, this very day I shall give instructions to our Ambassador to close our Embassy in Bern and I shall declare your Ambassador in Lagos persona non grata.”

  For the first time the chairman raised his eyebrows.

  “Furthermore,” continued Ignatius, “I will hold a conference in London which will leave the world’s press in no doubt of my Head of State’s displeasure with the conduct of this bank. After such publicity I feel confident you will find that many of your customers would prefer to close their accounts, while others who have in the past considered you a safe haven may find it necessary to look elsewhere.”

  The Minister waited but still the chairman did not respond.

  “Then you leave me no choice,” said Ignatius, rising from his seat.

  The chairman stretched out his hand, assuming that at last the Minister was leaving, only to watch with horror as Ignatius placed a hand in his jacket pocket and removed a small pistol. The two Swiss bankers froze as the Nigerian Minister of Finance stepped forward and pressed the muzzle against the chairman’s temple.

  “I need those names, Mr. Gerber, and by now you must realize I will stop at nothing. If you don’t supply them immediately I’m going to blow your brains out. Do you understand?”

  The chairman gave a slight nod, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead. “And he will be next,” said Ignatius, gesturing toward the young assistant, who stood speechless and paralyzed a few paces away.

  “Get me the names of every Nigerian who holds an account in this bank,” Ignatius said quietly, looking toward the young man, “or I’ll blow your chairman’s brains all over his soft pile carpet. Immediately, do you hear me?” Ignatius added sharply.

  The young man looked toward the chairman, who was now trembling but said quite clearly, “Non, Pierre, jamais.”

  “D’accord,” replied the assistant in a whisper.

  “You can’t say I didn’t give you every chance.” Ignatius pulled back the hammer. The sweat was now pouring down the chairman’s face and the young man had to turn his eyes away as he waited in terror for the pistol shot.

  “Excellent,” said Ignatius, as he removed the gun from the chairman’s head and returned to his seat. Both the bankers were still trembling and quite unable to speak.

  The Minister picked up the battered briefcase by the side of his chair and placed it on the glass table in front of him. He pressed back the clasps and the lid flicked up.

  The two bankers stared down at the neatly packed rows of hundred-dollar bills. Every inch of the briefcase had been taken up. The chairman quickly estimated that it probably amounted to around five million dollars.

  “I wonder, sir,” said Ignatius, “how I go about opening an account with your bank?”

  A LA CARTE

  ARTHUR HAPGOOD WAS demobbed on November 3, 1946. Within a month he was back at his old workplace on the shop floor of the Triumph factory on the outskirts of Coventry.

  The five years spent in the Sherwood Foresters, four of them as a quartermaster seconded to a tank regiment, only underlined Arthur’s likely postwar fate, despite having hoped to find more rewarding work once the skirmishes were over. However, on returning to England he quickly discovered that in a “land fit for heroes” jobs were not that easy to come by, and although he did not want to go back to the work he had done for five years before war had been declared, that of fitting wheels on cars, he reluctantly, after six weeks on the dole, went to see his former works’ manager at Triumph.

  “The job’s yours if you want it, Arthur,” the works’ manager assured him.

  “And the future?”

  “The car’s no longer a toy for the eccentric rich or even just a necessity for the businessman,” the works’ manager replied. “In fact,” he continued, “management are preparing for the ‘two-car family.’”

  “So they’ll need even more wheels to be put on cars,” said Arthur forlornly.

  “That’s the ticket.”

  Arthur signed on within the hour and it was only a matter of days before he was back into his old routine. After all, he often reminded his wife, it didn’t take a degree in engineering to screw four knobs onto a wheel a hundred times a shift.

  Arthur soon accepted the fact that he would have to settle for second best However, second best was not what he planned for his son.

  * * *

  Mark had celebrated his fifth birthday before his father had even set eyes on him, but from the mo
ment Arthur returned home he lavished everything he could on the boy.

  * * *

  Arthur was determined that Mark was not going to end up working on the shop floor of a car factory for the rest of his life. He put in hours of overtime to earn enough money to ensure that the boy could have extra tuition in math, general science and English. He felt well-rewarded when the boy passed his eleven-plus and won a place at King Henry VIII Grammar School, and that pride did not fetter when Mark went on to pass five O-levels and two years later added two A-levels.

  Arthur tried not to show his disappointment when, on Mark’s eighteenth birthday, the boy informed him that he did not want to go to university.

  “What kind of career are you hoping to take up then, lad?” Arthur inquired.

  “I’ve filled in an application form to join you on the shop floor just as soon as I leave school.”

  “But why would you—”

  “Why not? Most of my friends who’re leaving this term have already been accepted by Triumph, and they can’t wait to get started.”

  “You must be out of your mind.”

  “Come off it, Dad. The pay’s good and you’ve shown that there’s always plenty of extra money to be picked up with overtime. And I don’t mind hard work.”

  “Do you imagine I spent all those years making sure you got a first-class education just to let you end up like me, putting wheels on cars for the rest of your life?” Arthur shouted.

  “That’s not the whole job and you know it, Dad.”

  “You go there over my dead body,” said his father. “I don’t care what your friends end up doing, I only care about you. You could be a solicitor, an accountant, an army officer, even a schoolmaster. Why should you want to end up at a car factory?”

  “It’s better paid than schoolmastering for a start,” said Mark. “My French master once told me that he wasn’t as well off as you.”

  “That’s not the point, lad—”

  “The point is, Dad, I can’t be expected to spend the rest of my life doing a job I don’t enjoy just to satisfy one of your fantasies.”

  “But I’m not going to allow you to waste the rest of your life,” said Arthur, getting up from the breakfast table. “The first thing I’m going to do when I get in to work this morning is see that your application is turned down.”

  “That isn’t fair, Dad. I have the right to—”

  But his father had already left the room, and did not utter another word to the boy before leaving for the factory.

  For over a week father and son didn’t speak to each other. It was Mark’s mother who was left to come up with the compromise. Mark could apply for any job that met with his father’s approval and as long as he completed a year at that job he could, if he still wanted to, reapply to work at the factory. His father for his part would not then put any obstacle in his son’s way.

  Arthur nodded. Mark also reluctantly agreed to the compromise.

  “But only if you complete the full year,” Arthur warned him solemnly.

  During those last days of the summer holiday Arthur came up with several suggestions for Mark to consider, but the boy showed no enthusiasm for any of them. Mark’s mother became quite anxious that her son would end up with no job at all until, while helping her slice potatoes for dinner one night, Mark confided to his mother that he thought hotel management seemed the least unattractive proposition he had considered so far.

  “At least you’d have a roof over your head and be regularly fed,” his mother said.

  “Bet they don’t cook as well as you, Mum,” said Mark as he placed the sliced potatoes on the top of the Lancashire hot-pot. “Still, it’s only a year.”

  During the next month Mark attended several interviews at hotels around the country but they all sensed his lack of enthusiasm. But when his father discovered that his old company sergeant was head porter at the Savoy, Arthur started to pull a few strings.

  “If the boy’s any good,” Arthur’s old comrade-in-arms assured him over a pint, “he could end up as a head porter, even a hotel manager.” Arthur seemed well satisfied, even though Mark was still assuring his friends that he would be joining them a year to the day.

  On September 1, 1959, Arthur and Mark Hapgood traveled together by bus to Coventry station. Arthur shook hands with the boy and promised him, “Your mother and I will make sure it’s a special Christmas this year when they give you your first leave. And don’t worry, you’ll be in good hands with ‘Sarge.’ He’ll teach you a thing or two. Just remember to keep your nose clean.”

  Mark said nothing and gave his father a thin smile as he boarded the train. “You’ll never regret it…” were the last words Mark heard him say as the train pulled out of the station.

  * * *

  Mark regretted it from the moment he set foot in the hotel.

  As a junior porter his day started at six in the morning and ended at six in the evening. He was entitled to a fifteen-minute midmorning break, a forty-five-minute lunch break and another fifteen-minute break around midafternoon. After the first month had passed he could not recall when he had been granted all three breaks on the same day, and he quickly learned that there was no one to whom he could protest. His duties consisted of carrying guests’ cases up to their rooms, then lugging them back down again the moment they wanted to leave. With an average of three hundred people staying in the hotel each night the process was endless. The pay turned out to be half what his friends were getting back home, and as he had to hand over all his tips to Sergeant Crann the head porter, however much overtime Mark put in, he never saw an extra penny. On the only occasion he dared to mention it to the head porter he was met with the words, “Your time will come, lad.”

  It did not worry Mark that his uniform didn’t fit or that his room was six foot by six foot and overlooked Charing Cross Station, or even that he didn’t get a share of the tips; but it did worry him there there was nothing he could do to please the head porter—however clean he kept his nose.

  Sergeant Crann, who considered the Savoy nothing more than an extension of his old platoon, didn’t have a lot of time for young men under his command who hadn’t done their national service.

  “But I wasn’t eligible to do national service,” insisted Mark. “No one born after 1939 was called up.”

  “I’m not interested in excuses, lad.”

  “It’s not an excuse, Sarge. It’s the truth.”

  “And don’t call me ‘Sarge.’ I’m ‘Sergeant Crann’ to you, and don’t you forget it.”

  “Yes, Sergeant Crann.”

  At the end of each day Mark would return to his little box-room with its small bed, smaller chair and tiny chest of drawers to collapse exhausted. The only picture in the room—of the Laughing Cavalier—was on a calendar that hung above Mark’s bed. The date of September 1, 1960, was circled in red to remind him when he would be allowed to rejoin his friends on the factory floor. Each night before falling asleep he would cross out the offending day like a prisoner making scratch marks on a wall.

  At Christmas Mark returned home for a four-day break, and when his mother saw the general state of the boy she tried to talk his father into allowing their only son to give up the job early, but Arthur remained implacable.

  “We made an agreement. I can’t be expected to get him a job at the factory if he isn’t responsible enough to keep to his part of a bargain.”

  During that short holiday Mark waited for his friends outside the factory gate until their shift had ended and listened to their stories of weekends spent watching football, drinking at the pub and dancing to Elvis Presley. They all sympathized with his problem and looked forward to him joining them in September. “It’s only a few more months,” one of them reminded him cheerfully.

  Far too quickly, Mark was on the journey back to London, where he continued unwillingly to hump cases up and down the hotel corridors for month after month.

  * * *

  Once the English rain had subsided the usu
al influx of American tourists began. Mark liked the Americans, who treated him as an equal and often tipped him a shilling when others would have given him only sixpence. But whatever the amount Mark received Sergeant Crann would still pocket it with the inevitable, “Your time will come, lad.”

  One such American for whom Mark ran around diligently every day during his fortnight’s stay ended up presenting the boy with a ten-bob note as he left the front entrance of the hotel.

  Mark said, “Thank you, sir,” and turned round to see Sergeant Crann standing in his path.

  “Hand it over,” demanded Crann as soon as the American visitor was well out of earshot.

  “I was going to the moment I saw you,” said Mark, passing the note to his superior.

  “Not thinking of pocketing what’s rightfully mine, was you?”

  “No, I wasn’t,” said Mark. “Though God knows I earned it.”

  “Your time will come, lad,” said Sergeant Crann without much thought.

  “Not while someone as mean as you is in charge,” replied Mark sharply.

  “What was that you said, lad?” asked the head porter, veering round.

  “You heard me the first time, Sarge.”

  The clip across the ear took Mark by surprise.

  “You, lad, have just lost your job. Nobody, but nobody, talks to me like that.” Sergeant Crann turned and set off smartly in the direction of the manager’s office.

  The hotel manager, Gerald Drummond, listened to the head porter’s version of events before asking Mark to report to his office immediately. “You realize I have been left with no choice but to sack you,” were his first words once the door was closed.

  Mark looked up at the tall, elegant man in his long, black coat, white collar and black tie. “Am I allowed to tell you what actually happened, sir?” he asked.

  Mr. Drummond nodded, then listened without interruption as Mark gave his version of what had taken place that morning, and also disclosed the agreement he had entered into with his father. “Please allow me to complete my final ten weeks,” Mark ended, “or my father will only say I haven’t kept to my end of our bargain.”