The New Collected Short Stories (80 page)

‘Why?’ asked Liam innocently.

‘We’re about to enter a boom period,’ said O’Donovan. ‘An ageing population with disposable incomes and an awareness of their own mortality are migrating here like
a flock of starlings searching for warmer climes.’

By the fifth Guinness, Liam had only one or two more questions left to ask. Not that it mattered, as O’Donovan was no longer capable of answering them.

The next morning, and every morning for the following week, Liam did not join Maggie on the overcrowded beaches but took the bus that was heading into Palma. He had some
serious research to carry out before he met up with Patrick O’Donovan again.

During the day, he made appointments with several estate agents to view apartments and other properties. What he was shown confirmed O’Donovan’s opinion – Majorca was about to
enter a period of rapid growth.

On the final morning of his holiday, having not once returned to the beach in the past ten days, even though his red Majorca skin had faded back to Irish white, Liam boarded the bus to Palma for
the last time.

Once he’d been dropped off in the city centre, he headed straight for the Paseo Maritimo and didn’t stop walking until he reached the offices of Patrick O’Donovan,
International Real Estate Co. He had only one more question to ask his fellow countryman. ‘Would you consider taking me on as a junior partner?’

‘Certainly not,’ said O’Donovan. ‘But I would consider taking you on as a partner.’

Maggie McBride flew back to Ireland,
virgo intacta,
while the tinker from Cork remained in Majorca.

Liam’s first year in Majorca didn’t turn out to be quite the bonanza his new partner had promised, despite his working night and day and making full use of the
skills he’d honed in Cork. While he spent most of his days in the office or showing clients around properties, O’Donovan spent more and more of his time in the Flanagan Arms, drinking
away the company’s dwindling profits.

By the end of his second year, Liam was considering returning to Ireland, which was experiencing its own economic boom, fuelled by massive grants from the European Union. And then, without
warning, the decision was taken out of his hands. O’Donovan failed to return to work after the pub had closed for the afternoon siesta. He’d dropped dead in the street a hundred yards
from the office.

Liam organized Patrick’s funeral, held a wake at the Flanagan Arms and was the last to leave the pub that night. By the time he crawled into bed at three in the morning, he’d made a
decision.

The first person he called after arriving at the office the next day was a sign-writer he’d found in the Yellow Pages. By twelve o’clock, the name above the door read ‘Casey
& Co, International Estate Agents’.

The second phone call Liam made was to Pepe Miro, a young man who worked for a rival company and had beaten him to several deals in the past two years. They agreed to meet in a tapas bar that
evening, and after another late night, during which a José Ferrer L. Rosado replaced Guinness, Liam was able to convince Pepe they would both be better off working together as partners.

A month later, a Spanish flag was raised beside the Irish one, and the sign-writer returned. When he left, the name above the door read, ‘Casey, Miro & Co.’ While Pepe handled
the natives, Liam took care of any foreign intruders; a genuine partnership.

The new company’s profits grew slowly to begin with, but at least the graph was now heading in the right direction. But it wasn’t until Pepe told his new partner about an old local
custom that their fortunes began to change.

Majorca is a small island with a large, fertile, central plain where vineyards, almond and olive trees thrive. Traditionally, when a Majorcan farmer dies, he leaves any property in the fertile
heartland to his eldest son, while any daughters end up with small pieces of craggy coastline. Liam’s Irish charm and good looks did no harm when he advised these daughters how they could
benefit from this chauvinistic injustice.

He purchased his first plot of land in 1991, from a middle-aged lady who was short of cash and boyfriends: a tiny strip of infertile coastline with uninterrupted views of the Mediterranean. A
bulldozer levelled the ground, and within a few weeks, after a bunch of itinerant workers had cleaned up the site, a developer purchased the plot for almost double Liam’s original outlay.

Liam bought his second piece of land from a grieving widow. It had splendid panoramic views all the way to Barcelona. Once again he flattened the plot, and this time he built a path wide enough
to allow a car to reach it from the main road. On this occasion he made an even larger return, which he used to build a small house on a piece of land Pepe had purchased from a lady who spoke only
Spanish. A year later they sold the property for triple their original investment.

By the time Liam had purchased their fourth piece of coastal land, which was large enough to divide into three plots, he realized he was no longer an estate agent but had unwittingly become a
property developer. While Pepe continued to woo an endless stream of Spanish daughters and widows, Liam converted their scraggy inheritances into saleable properties. As time went by and the
company’s profits increased, it became clear to Liam that the only obstacle preventing him from progressing at an even more rapid pace was a lack of capital. He decided to make one of his
rare trips back to Ireland.

The property manager of the Allied Irish Bank in Dublin – Liam avoided Cork – listened with interest to the proposals put forward by his fellow countryman, and eventually agreed to
advance him a hundred thousand pounds with which to purchase two new sites. When Liam delivered a profit of over 40 per cent the following year, the bank agreed to double its investment.

Liam closed his first million-pound deal in 1997, and his success might have continued unabated, if only he’d recalled his father’s sound advice.
While a wise man can spend all
day making a few bob, a foolish one can lose them in a few minutes.

On the evening of 31 December 1999, Liam and Pepe held a party for their friends and clients at the Palace Hotel in Palma to celebrate their good fortune. As they were now both
millionaires, they had every reason to look forward to the new millennium with confidence, especially as Pepe announced, just before the sun rose on 1 January 2000, that he had come across the deal
of a lifetime. Liam had to wait two more days before Pepe had recovered sufficiently to tell him the details.

A Majorcan from one of the oldest families on the island had recently died intestate. After some considerable legal wrangling, the court had decided that his wife was entitled to inherit his
entire estate – an area of land in Valldemossa that stretched for several kilometres, from the slopes of the Sierra de Tramuntana all the way down to the coast.

Liam spent a week in Dublin trying to convince the Allied Irish that it should put up the largest property loan in its history. Once the bank had agreed terms, which included personal guarantees
from both Liam and Pepe, something Liam’s tinker father would never have advised, he returned to Majorca and began to conduct negotiations with the widow. She finally agreed to sell her
two-thousand-hectare site for twenty-three million euros.

Within days, Liam had hired a leading architect from Barcelona, a highly respected surveyor from Madrid and a well-connected lawyer in Palma, and began to prepare the necessary documents to
ensure that outline planning permission would be granted by the local council. They divided the land into 360 individual plots that included roads with broad pavements, street lighting,
electricity, drainage and sewerage, an eighteen-hole golf course, a shopping centre, a cinema, eleven restaurants and a sports complex. Every home would have its own swimming pool, while some of
the larger plots would even have their own tennis courts. But the feature that made the development unique was that whichever house a customer purchased, from the top of the mountain all the way
down to the coast, they were guaranteed an uninterrupted view of the ocean.

Liam and Pepe both accepted that because of the huge amount of work involved with the project, it would be years before they could consider taking on any other commitments.

Liam had a large-scale model of the site built, and commissioned a documentary film maker to produce a twenty-minute promotional video entitled
Valldemossa Vision
. The Allied Irish Bank
clearly bought into this vision, and released an initial two point three million euros to Liam as a deposit on the land.

It was another year before Liam was ready to present his outline planning application to the Consell Insular de Mallorca. When Liam rose to make his speech to the Valldemossa council, every
elected member was seated in his place. He took them slowly through his master plan, and when his presentation came to an end, he called for questions.

If only to persuade people they haven’t fallen asleep, politicians always have well-prepared questions to hand. However, Liam’s experts had spent hours anticipating each and every
question they were asked, and others that hadn’t even been thought of. When Liam finally sat down, he was greeted by warm applause from both main political parties.

The governor of the Balearics rose to congratulate Liam and his team on a splendid and imaginative scheme, while the Mayor of Valldemossa enthusiastically assured his colleagues that the project
would undoubtedly attract wealthy residents, ensuring increased revenue for the council’s coffers for many years to come.

No one was surprised when, six weeks later, the Consell Insular de Mallorca granted outline planning permission to Casey, Miro & Co. for its Valldemossa project, which the mayor described to
the press as bold, imaginative and of civic importance. But Pepe had already warned Liam there was one more hurdle that had to be negotiated before they could return to the bank and ask for the
remaining twenty point seven million euros of their advance. It was still necessary for the Supreme Court in Madrid to rubber-stamp the whole project before the first bulldozer would be allowed on
the site, and the court was well known for rejecting projects at the last moment.

Three different sets of lawyers worked night and day in Madrid, Barcelona and Palma, and nine months later to everyone’s relief the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur.

The following day Liam flew to Dublin, where even more lawyers were working on the documentation that would allow him to be able to draw on a rolling fifty-million-euro loan. Building costs only
ever go in one direction.

Within minutes of the ink drying on the paper, four of the leading construction companies in Europe were driving their vehicles on to the site, followed by over a thousand workers who were
looking forward to being employed for the next ten years.

Liam had never taken a great deal of interest in Majorcan politics, and he made a point of not supporting either main party when it came to the local elections. He made it a
policy to donate exactly the same amount to the campaign funds of both the major parties so he could continue to deal with whichever one was in power.

Over the years, it had always been a close-run thing between the Partido Socialista Obrero Español and the Partido Popular, with power changing hands every few years. But to
everyone’s surprise, when the election result was announced from the town hall steps later that year, the Green Party had captured three seats and, more important, held the balance of power,
as the other two parties were evenly split with twenty-one seats each. Liam didn’t give the result a great deal of thought, even when the
Mallorca Daily Bulletin
informed its readers
that the Greens would join a coalition with whichever party was willing to support their ideological aims. The most important of which, as had been stated in their manifesto, was not to grant any
future planning permission in Valldemossa.

This suited Liam as it would cut out any further rivals, making his the last project to be approved by the Supreme Court in Madrid. But once the resolution had been passed in council, with the
backing of both main parties, the Greens, encouraged by their success, immediately announced that any projects currently underway should have their planning permission rescinded. This time Liam was
concerned, because his lawyers warned him that even if the Supreme Court eventually overruled the council’s decision, his project could be held up for years.

‘Every day we’re not working will cost us money,’ Liam warned Pepe. He realized that if the Greens were able to get either of the two main parties to support their proposal, he
and Pepe would be bankrupt within weeks.

When the council met to take a vote on the Greens’ resolution, Liam and his team sat nervously in the public gallery waiting to learn their fate. Passionate speeches were made from all
sides of the chamber, and even after the last councillor had offered his opinion, no one could be sure how the numbers would fall.

The chief clerk called for the vote, and for the first time that evening the chamber fell silent. A few minutes later the Mayor solemnly announced that the Greens’ proposal to rescind all
current planning permissions had been carried by twenty-three votes to twenty-two.

Liam had lost all his few bobs in a few minutes.

Every one of his workers immediately deserted the site. Unfinished houses were left without doors or windows, cranes stood unmanned and expensive equipment and materials were left to rust. By
the time Liam recalled his late father’s wise advice, it was too late to turn the clock back.

The company’s lawyers recommended an appeal. Liam reluctantly agreed, although, as they had pointed out to him, even if they were eventually able to overturn the council’s decision,
by then years would have passed and any possible profit would have been swallowed up by interest payments alone, not to mention lawyers’ fees.

The Allied Irish Bank quickly responded to the news from Valldemossa by placing an immediate stop order on all Liam’s accounts. They also issued a directive instructing
Casey, Miro & Co, and any of its associates, to repay the outstanding thirty-seven-million-euro loan at the first possible opportunity, although it must have known that neither Liam nor Pepe
could any longer afford the airfare to Dublin.