An impression of the daily life and routine of San Khay.
At 6.30 a.m. his alarm goes in his penthouse flat on the river by Victoria. If he has had romance the night before, he does not wake his sleeping partner, but walks across his white-carpeted floor to the bathroom, a thing all of mirrors and silver taps, so that, standing at any point in the room, he can see his own reflection, muscles and polished almond skin, reflected back at him. The tattoos that cover his entire body are done in deep black ink, and every six months he returns to a very special tattooist in Hong Kong, to make sure that any faded areas, around his buttocks or across his chest where they may have experienced strain, are kept up in full, ebony-coloured glory. The swirls of ink crawl around his ankles and across his toes, run round the back of his knees, spiral up his hips, curl lovingly around his belly button, sinking inside like some sort of strange root burrowing into earth, lash themselves across his back and chest, bend luxuriously down his arms and, at the wrist and neck, just below the collar line, fade gently, into nothing.
The men he takes home with him on Tuesdays and Fridays (his days for such affairs) often regard such extensive swirls of ink as kinky, but not unattractive. To the more considerate magician, such an embedding of symbols of magic into skin is as much dangerous as it is potentially rewarding. For this reason, San Khay usually keeps the ink hidden, studying his flesh all over only in the morning when he is sure he is alone in his bathroom.
In other men this relentless examination of themselves every morning would be vanity. For San Khay, the studying of his own naked form is the perusal of an investment: nine months of pain for his mother, twenty-three years of school fees at the best institutions in America, Asia and Europe for his father, and a subsequent fifteen-odd years of gym sessions, martial arts classes, dance lessons, organic food detox diets and nearly forty-eight hours of intense pain under that tattooist’s needle, every six months, for himself. San Khay wishes to be assured that his investment is being well maintained, since presumably he will be reliant on its dividends for the rest of his life.
He showers in the 360-degree power shower installed by his Spanish plumber Enrico to his special request, at the highest temperature allowable, until his skin is lit up red like the end of Rudolf’s nose on Christmas Eve. He then turns the shower down to its coldest temperature for a few seconds, and dries himself off with a neat white towel, fluffy as a bunny’s tail, before going into the kitchen to prepare breakfast.
Although he has three staff serving his needs – a chauffeur, a maid and a personal assistant, who live in the building and are on call at any hour of the day – San Khay makes his own breakfast, a bowl of nuts and fruit that all but clatter on their way through the gut, they are so unpleasantly healthy. He dresses in his wardrobe room, itself lined with mirrors, and again it is not vanity that leaves his reflection stretched out to infinity around him, but the monitoring of an impression. When San Khay goes to work, he is not merely selling his product, he is selling himself. He wears a black suit with polished black shoes and does up every button of his smart pink shirt, his only flash of colour, to hide every trace of ink on his skin. He combs his dark hair slicked back, but shaves only on Wednesday and Monday, since his beard grows at a snail’s pace anyway and he has very sensitive skin.
All this takes him no more than half an hour.
At 7 a.m. he leaves the penthouse. His chauffeur has his car – a long, black but otherwise anonymous Mercedes – waiting down in the car park. He seems to prefer it if his lover of the night does not wake before his departure, as that saves embarrassing goodbyes, but instead leaves orders with the maid, Sally, to make sure his companion has everything he wishes and is treated with the utmost courtesy, before he is shown out.
By 7.30 a.m. San Khay is at his desk, having beaten the early-morning traffic and everyone else in his office. New members of his company often attempt to beat San and turn up before he does, but find that more than a few weeks of working 7.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. in order to impress their boss, and be in before and out after his working hours, is beyond human endurance. The more courageous ask how he does it, but he merely smiles and assures them that he drinks a lot of water.
His office is in the heart of the City, in that area just off Bishopsgate where the giant glass towers of the megacorporations loom over the traditional guildhalls and converted old mansions of their lawyers and clerical providers. Certain names appear on every street corner as regularly as the Corporation of London bollards – Merrill Lynch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Morgan Stanley, the National Westminster, Saudi Arabia, Credit Suisse – the bankers of the City and their lawyers, compressed into a space no more than a mile wide, within easy walking distance of each other and their favourite sandwich bars for lunch.
The firm he works for is called Amiltech, and it is based on the 24th floor of a tower. Not “the Tower”, as Sinclair would probably hasten to point out were he not in critical condition with three bullets in his chest – this was not “the Tower”, merely a corporate subsidiary, a security firm that had floated its very special assets and been bought, absorbed into the ever-growing conglomeration of companies and interests headed by Robert James Bakker. During San’s average day, he will hold three meetings in his office, and perhaps another three outside, in locations as diverse as the café on the corner, or Pentonville Prison, depending on what he is looking for. On his official payroll are secretaries, lawyers, administrators, accountants, press secretaries, drivers, assistants and managers. On his unofficial payroll are fortune-tellers, prophets, seers, magicians, witches, wizards, voodoo-artists, murderers, thieves, criminals, a few judges, policemen, politicians and, so Sinclair recorded with “a rumour?” written in the margin, a member of the royal family.
When asked his job description, San Khay is very vague – but usually just ends up saying “securities”. Not merely insurance, he adds, but actual security. After all, he says, he is far more likely to make a profit from insurance premiums if he can absolutely guarantee that no harm will come to the client.
Needless to say, among his clients are other names that interest me:
Guy Lee, officially unemployed, wizard, benefactor of the arts, suspected of dabbling unhealthily in necromancy, vampirism and all the other much hyped, vaguely defined “dark arts”. He’s Bakker’s enforcer in the magical community and, after San Khay, next on my list of people to have a conversation with. Amiltech provided personal security for Mr Lee, at a very reasonable rate.
Harris Simmons, Bakker’s chief financial adviser. A poor and clumsy magician, from what Sinclair’s files suggested of him, whose chief talent in that area lay in his vast collection of magical artefacts and other items, including, so the rumours went, Nostradamus’s ashes (overrated), at least three contenders for the name of Excalibur, plus over seventeen possible candidates for the skull of King Arthur (pointless), several vials of fairy dust, and a tub of dragon blood (extracted from a pet lizard). He had also accumulated numerous protective items and enchantments whose precise nature was unclear to me, as it was to Sinclair, but which seemed to have Sinclair greatly concerned as to how easy it might or might not be to eliminate Harris Simmons. Amiltech provided security for Simmons’s personal vault, and Simmons churned out money for the Tower.
Dana Mikeda. Here, I was not prepared to speculate.
San Khay has little or no contact with these others, except for occasional brief meetings with Lee in the City, or the odd telephone conversation with Harris Simmons. Dana Mikeda, as far as he and most of the rest of the corporation are concerned, doesn’t exist, and probably for good reason.
At 12.30 precisely San leaves his office and goes to the gym. He works out until 1.30 to build appetite, then returns to his office, and has lunch at his desk. His lunch is a salad, sushi, and a bottle of green sludge that Sinclair swears is a kind of organic vegetable drink, and which we find interesting, in much the same way we are fascinated by the play of light across the shimmering shell of a dung beetle. All things we do not know interest us.
At 6 p.m. he has a one-hour dinner with members of his staff, in his office. The food is prepared by the catering unit three floors below. Rumour is he likes pine nuts, but I am not convinced that this isn’t detail gone mad in Sinclair’s notes. On Monday he dines with the finance department, on Tuesday with the executive managers, on Wednesday with the press office, on Thursday with the secretarial administrators and on Friday with the lawyers. They all turn up exactly on time, every week, without fail and without question.
Between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., he either works at his desk or, if need be, travels around the city to inspect his various interests and ensure the smooth managing of business. This business can be as diverse as double- checking the vault codes on a door, or commissioning an assassin and delivering the target details. Partially for this reason, I am almost entirely certain that San Khay took the pre-emptive step of sending a litterbug after me that first night in Dulwich, perhaps with the philosophical attitude of “if you want it done, do it hard and fast”. Perhaps for his arrogance, he is at the top of our list of people to see.
At 8.30 p.m. he stops work, unless there are unusual circumstances, and when his schedule does not require anything more he goes into the city, to one of the exclusive underground clubs where only the very rich dare enter, where he will buy champagne just for himself, and talk politely with the many young men and women of the City
