When the Siren Calls (26 page)

“It was an anniversary present from Kate,” said Andy, narrowing his gaze.

“Well, just so you know, last time I looked that particular model cost the same as a small family car. That is for a few ounces of pressed steel, weighing no more than one of the wheel nuts on your little hire car. And, by the way, the car comes with a clock too.”

Andy did not welcome the digression, but felt obliged to defend his wife’s generosity. “This watch has one of the finest Swiss movements. It is a masterpiece of craftsmanship.”

“You read that on the box I suppose?” said Jay. “The fact is that you are wearing that watch because it makes you feel good, not because it keeps good time. That is intangible value. That is why we have freshly squeezed orange juice, why we have Egyptian cotton sheets, and why we have brochures made with parchment paper, not toilet paper. Because we are selling a luxury product, just like your Hublex. Surely you can see that?”

Andy’s instincts conflicted as he stared down at the outrageously priced glistening steel on his wrist. On the one hand his decision to put Jay and his team on the spot had been vindicated; he now knew that Jay had been stringing him along for over a year, and that the operation was on a knife-edge. On the other hand perhaps they were about to turn the corner, as Jay was seeking to assure him. And for all his growing doubts about Jay’s methods, and possibly motives, he recognised that Jay knew his stuff, and that he could sell. If anyone could get him out of the hole that Jay had put him in then, ironically, that man was Jay. But somehow he was going to have to reconcile Jay’s practices with his own principles.

“Davide, I want a full financial picture on my desk in the morning, the numbers, or your next pay cheque will be your last. Apart from that, I think we’ve covered all we need to, unless there are any more questions?”

His eyes twinkled with morbid amusement as everyone looked down at their laps, far from keen to prolong the agony.

“There’s transport outside to take everyone to lunch; Jay and I will catch up with you after we’ve gone through a few things,” he announced.

“I will return to my duties, then,” said Gina. “I do not want to impose more on the discussions of such busy and important people.”

Andy put his hand on her arm, excited by the touch of her skin and encouraged by the submissive look in her eye. “You have earned your lunch like the rest of us, Gina. And I insist you join us.” Gina smiled, emanating humility and gratitude, while not knowing whether she, Mancini, or Jay should be most pleased. She hurried out with the rest of the chastened gathering a few steps behind.

As she disappeared across the courtyard, Jay turned to Andy.

“You had no need to dress Davide down like that; he’s only a book-keeper.”

Andy twitched but stood firm. “I can only take so much smoke and mirrors. I want to know exactly where I stand in the morning. And if I don’t get what I want…” His voiced trailed away.

Jay raised his hands in surrender. “The bottom line is like I said it. The sales coming through at the end of the month will see us right.”

“And until the end of the month?”

Jay offered his open palms. “We won’t be able to meet the payroll run without another cash injection. But from next month, we’ll be accumulating cash. You can start taking out instead of putting in.”

“How much of an injection?” asked Andy, bracing himself for bad news.

“A quarter of a million.”

“For fucks sake, Jay,” said Andy, throwing his head into his hands, “the business is supposed to keep me, not the other way round.” He raised his head and met Jay’s eyes. “Kate will go ape-shit.”

“Then don’t tell her,” said Jay with comradely mischief. “I said I’d sell us out of this mess and that’s what I’m doing. The Visconti sale alone will more than cover it.”

“Forever the pragmatist, hey?”

“It’s just business, Andy. You do what you have to do.”

The last sentence hung ominously in the air, blackening the sky as Andy’s spirits and expectations plummeted afresh.

“What does that mean exactly?” he asked. “I didn’t sign up to defraud anyone.”

“What it means is sailing close to the wind. I’ve got enough to contend with already with all the red tape these Italians keep winding me up in. For better or worse, we are in the timeshare world, and it isn’t a kid glove business.”

Andy pondered a while before responding, his mind dwelling on the human cost of Jay’s pragmatism, on the tearful face of Rosie Barker. “So Jay, let me see if I understood why people might be upset. We sell apartments in paradise to overseas buyers at a hugely inflated price on the promise that they’ll receive a generous guaranteed income, an income that knocks the socks off bank interest and more than covers any mortgage they take out. And our management company will take care of everything, so they don’t need to worry about anything?”

“Yes Andy. The same deal you’ll see in other major tourist developments. Like I said back in The Candle. It’s totally legit.”

“Except we have no intention of paying them a rental income. And we’re going to do a runner as soon as our coffers are full, leaving everyone high and dry, with apartments they can’t give away let alone sell.”

“That Andy, is most certainly not what the intention was. And it is intent that is what is important. Everything was well intended, we’ve just run into difficulties. It happens all the time in business, as you well know. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not a scam and, frankly, I resent the suggestion that it might be.”

“Then what is the future for the scheme now?”

“There isn’t one. It will be closed down, and replaced with another that does not rely on tour operator contracts. The guaranteed rental scheme is, or rather was, essentially a marketing device to attract investors and make sales. It was not necessarily viable in its own right.”

“In other words, a sort of ‘buy to let’ scam, then?”

“No, not a scam at all, as I said, everything was well intended.”

“Come off it,” snapped Andy. “You are not telling me the people buying this week are not being partly induced by a guaranteed rental scheme? It’s trumpeted in all the literature. That is deception.”

“First, none of us want to be in this situation. It has been forced upon us. Second, it is not deception. Yes, it may be manipulation; that I grant you, but manipulation is very different from deception.”

“Help me understand that, in case I ever need to explain it to a man in a blue uniform.”

“It is not semantics. Everyone in life is manipulating those around them all the time. Trying to get things done their way. You manipulate Kate and Kate manipulates you. Businesses and newspapers and governments are manipulating people en masse all the time. They just tell you that part of the story that they want you to know. They leave out the stuff that doesn’t fit with their agenda. It’s how things work. Some people are just better at it than others.”

“Sorry, Jay, I’m not buying it. There is such a thing as integrity. Or at least I thought there was.”

Jay mustered every ounce of sincerity within him, looking Andy squarely in the eye. “Maybe some of the people who bought here have been naïve. And whoever said gullibility was finite probably didn’t sell timeshare. But it is not our job to protect people from their own naivety. Our job is to run a business and make a profit.”

Andy nodded in silent resignation, his eyes gloomy with the thought of Kate’s wrath. “Let’s just make sure everything we do is legal; losing money is one thing, we don’t want to lose our liberty.”

Jay put his arm round Andy. “Come on, let’s have some lunch. Unless my eyes were deceiving me, there’s a young woman with hazel eyes and raven hair who will be mightily disappointed if you stand her up.”Thirty-one

Lucy kicked off her shoes and spread her long legs across the bench seat of the café at Gatwick’s North terminal, and settled down to wait for Tessa to come through arrivals. She was soon lost in her own world, like any literary genius in the throes of creation, as her imagination ran wild and her thumbs worked feverishly to keep up with it.

“Caught you,” said a familiar booming voice, as two hands slapped down on Lucy’s shoulders, startling her and causing her to guiltily snap her phone shut over the graphic text she had just composed.

“About time too,” she said with a smile, leisurely flipping her phone open again and reading over her masterpiece with satisfaction. “What do you think,” she asked, offering the screen to Tessa for her literary critique, as her friend settled herself in the seat opposite.

“Very good, very good,” said Tessa, marvelling at Lucy’s inventiveness and her capacity to dangle and tease through cyberspace. “I really think you are beginning to get the idea of this guy thing and how it works.”

“I suppose you mean that Jay thinks with his dick?”

Tess drew herself up on the seat to embark on her unique brand of moralising. “A standing cock has no conscience,” she declared, “and you proved that by getting him to commit to going to the wedding, which you could never have done otherwise.” The two middle-aged ladies on the neighbouring table tut tutted their disapproval before falling silent, eager it seemed to have their ears offended further by Tessa’s vulgarity.

Lucy hated to dampen the look of victory on her friend’s face but she could not pretend any more that all was going to plan. “But he’s trying to back out of it, Tess. I’m in danger of being no better off than before, except that in the process I have given him the shag of his life. So he wins again.”

Tessa scowled and drew herself even higher. “Wrong! He only wins if you let him. Let’s go over how it works one more time shall we?”

Lucy almost felt she should take notes at what was fast becoming a regular lecture. She settled instead for a look of attentiveness, one that she convinced herself was feigned but often proved all too real.

“Jay, like all bastards, will say anything he has to in order to get you to spread those thighs, or get you to swallow when you don’t want to,” Tessa continued.

Lucy suppressed a smile and said, “I know I don’t have to Tess, but I like to swallow.”

“Then, Lucy, you are an exception,” she replied, her voice growing higher as she tried to understand how one woman could be so perfectly constructed to satisfy male desire. “And Jay is one lucky fucker. But what you need to understand is that you need to make everything a negotiation. Swallowing is a big thing and you need to take advantage of that. There’s no way that Texan tart will still be doing it, if she ever did in the first place. She’ll be spitting it into a Kleenex, and only then on his fucking birthday.”

“Still, I think it may be a little late to make that aspect of our relationship negotiable,” said Lucy, twisting a strand of hair around a slender finger as last week’s lovemaking replayed itself behind her sparkling eyes.

“But it’s the wider point I’m making that you need to get your head around, instead of mooning over what you’ve been getting your mouth around,” continued Tessa, whose eyes were lit up by the chance to reiterate her principles.

“Jay has things that you want, and you have things that he wants. So what you did the other night was exactly right, and it worked. You held out giving him want he wanted, until he gave you what you wanted.”

Lucy dug her nails into the arm of the chair in frustration. “And as I said, now he wants to back out. He can’t leave Rusty over the weekend and he says that’s that.”

“Bullshit,” said Tessa, pounding her fist into her palm, “we know the bastard spends half his weekends in Tuscany anyway, so his wife’s needs on a Saturday afternoon are hardly his top priority, are they?”

“But if he won’t come to the wedding then there’s not really much I can do about it…”

Tessa shook her head vigorously, lashing her glossy ponytail like a whip. “The man has made a firm commitment, and you need to hold him to it. For fuck’s sake, girl, it’s damn near an issue of morality, and right is on your side. He’s made a promise, and he needs to stick to, it’s as simple as that.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “So I just tell him that, the morality bit, and he will realise that he’s in the wrong, and it will all be sorted? Sorry, Tess, but I don’t think so.”

“True,” she acknowledged, “telling an arsehole like Jay what he should or shouldn’t do is completely useless. You have two weapons you should be reaching for and neither of them involve common sense — the carrot and the stick.”

“The carrot and the stick?” Lucy echoed as she slumped back into the chair in preparation for a simile the length of a blockbuster.

“It works like this,” Tessa began, “think of the carrot as Jay’s dick.” Lucy could have written a book on phallic metaphors — her text earlier proved that — and she sat even straighter as her colleague continued with considerable gusto.

“That’s what you reached for the other night, and you got him to commit to being your escort at a wedding. Now all you need to do now is reach out those magic hands of yours for the stick.”

“And what is my stick?” asked Lucy.

Her friend let out a hint of a snort. “Some things you need to figure out for yourself. I can only help; I can’t tell you what you should be doing. But, if I were in your shoes, I’d be thinking about what it is that really scares Jay. Get him focused on consequences; the consequences if he doesn’t honour his solemn commitment to take you to this fucking wedding.”