trillion dollars of assets was controlled from Geneva, of which Hoffmann Investment Technologies handled a mere one per cent; of that one per cent his personal stake was less than one tenth. Viewed in proportion, why should she be so outraged by a billion? Dollars, euros, francs – these were the units in which he measured the success or failure of his experiment, just as at CERN he had used teraelectronvolts, nanoseconds and microjoules. However, there was one great difference between the two, he was obliged to concede; a problem he had never fully confronted or solved. You couldn’t buy anything with a nanosecond or a microjoule, whereas money was a sort of toxic by-product of his research. Sometimes he felt it was poisoning him inch by inch, just like Marie Curie had been killed by radiation.
At first he had ignored his wealth, either rolling it over into the company or parking it on deposit. But he hated the thought of becoming an eccentric like Etienne Mussard, twisted into misanthropy by the pressure of his own good fortune. So recently he had copied Quarry and tried spending it. But that had led directly to the overdecorated mansion in Cologny, stuffed with expensive collections of books and antiques he did not need but which required layers of security to protect: a sort of pharaoh’s burial chamber for the living. The final option he supposed would be to give it away – Gabrielle would approve of that, at least – but even philanthropy could corrupt: to distribute hundreds of millions of dollars responsibly would be a full-time job. Occasionally he had a fantasy that his surplus profits might be converted into paper money and incinerated round-the-clock, just as an oil refinery burned off excess gas – blue and yellow flames lighting up the Geneva night sky.
The Mercedes began to cross the river.
He did not like to think of Gabrielle wandering the streets alone. It was her impulsiveness that worried him. Once angered, she was capable of anything. She might disappear for a few days, fly back to her mother in England, have her head filled with nonsense. You know what? Forget it. It’s over. What did she mean by that? What was over? The exhibition? Her career as an artist? Their conversation? Their marriage? Panic welled inside him again. Life without her would be a vacuum: unsurvivable. He rested the edge of his forehead on the cold glass, and for a vertiginous moment, looking down into the lightless, turbid water, imagined himself sucked into nothingness, like a passenger whipped out through the fuselage of a ruptured aircraft miles above the earth.
They turned on to the Quai du Mont-Blanc. The city, crouched around the dark pool of its lake, looked low and sombre, hewn from the same grey rock as the distant Jura. There was none of the vulgar glass-and-steel animal exuberance of Manhattan or the City of London: their skyscrapers would rise and they would crash, booms and busts would come and go, but crafty Geneva, with its head down, would endure for ever. The Hotel Beau-Rivage, nicely positioned near the mid-point of the wide tree-lined boulevard, embodied these values in bricks and stone. Nothing exciting had happened here since 1898, when the Empress of Austria, leaving the hotel after lunch, had been stabbed to death by an Italian anarchist. One fact about her murder had always stuck in Hoffmann’s mind: she had been unaware of her injury until her corset was removed, by which time she had almost bled to death internally. In Geneva, even the assassinations were discreet.
The Mercedes pulled up on the opposite side of the road, and Paccard, his hand raised imperiously to stop the traffic, escorted Hoffmann across the pedestrian crossing, up the steps and into the faux-Habsburg grandeur of the interior. If the concierge felt any private alarm at Hoffmann’s appearance, he allowed no flicker of it to show on his smiling face as he took over from Paccard and led le cher docteur up the stairs to the dining room.
The atmosphere beyond the tall doors was that of a nineteenth-century salon: paintings, antiques, gilt chairs, gold swag curtains; the Empress herself would have felt at home. Quarry had reserved a long table by the French windows and was sitting with his back to the lake view, keeping an eye on the entrance. He had a napkin tucked into his collar, gentleman’s-club style, but when Hoffmann appeared, he quickly pulled it out and dropped it on his chair. He moved to intercept his partner in the middle of the room.
‘Professor,’ he said cheerfully for the others to hear, and then, more quietly, drawing him slightly apart, ‘where the bloody hell have you been?’
Hoffmann started to answer but Quarry interrupted him without listening. He was fired up, eyes gleaming, closing the deal.
‘Okay, never mind. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is it looks as though they’re in – most of them, anyway – and my hunch is for closer to a billion than seven-fifty. So all I need from you now, please, maestro, is sixty minutes of technical reassurance. Preferably with minimal aggression, if you think you can manage that.’ He gestured towards the table. ‘Come and join us. You’ve missed the grenouille de Vallorbe, but the filet mignon de veau should be divine.’
Hoffmann didn’t move. He said suspiciously, ‘Did you just buy up all Gabrielle’s artwork?’
‘What?’ Quarry halted, turned, squinted at him, perplexed.
‘Someone just bought up her entire collection using an account set up in my name. She thought it might be you.’
‘I haven’t even seen it! And why would I have an account in your name? That’s bloody illegal, for a start.’ He glanced over his shoulder at the clients, then back at Hoffmann. He looked utterly mystified. ‘You know what? Could we talk about this later?’
‘So you’re absolutely sure you didn’t buy it? Not even as a joke? Just tell me if you did.’
‘It’s not my kind of humour, old man. Sorry.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’ Hoffmann’s gaze swept jaggedly around the room: the clients, the waiters, the two exits, the high windows and the balcony beyond. ‘Someone’s really after me, Hugo. Out to destroy me bit by bit. It’s actually starting to bug me.’
‘Well yes, I can see that, Alexi. How’s your head?’
Hoffmann put his hand to his scalp and ran his fingers over the hard, alien lumps of the stitches. He had a throbbing headache, he realised. ‘It’s started hurting again.’
‘Okay,’ said Quarry slowly. In other circumstances, Hoffmann would have found his English stiff upper lip in the face of potential disaster amusing. ‘So what are you saying here? Are you saying perhaps you ought to go back to the hospital?’
‘No. I’ll just sit down.’
‘And eat something, maybe?’ said Quarry hopefully. ‘You haven’t eaten all day, have you? No wonder you’re feeling peculiar.’ He took Hoffmann by the arm and led him towards the table. ‘Now you sit here opposite me, where I can keep an eye on you, and perhaps we can all change places later on. Good news out of Wall Street, incidentally,’ he added, sotto voce. ‘Looks like the Dow’s going to open well down.’
Hoffmann found himself being helped by a waiter into a seat between the Parisian lawyer Francois de Gombart-Tonnelle, and Etienne Mussard. Quarry was flanked by their respective partners, Elmira Gulzhan and Clarisse Mussard. The Chinese had been left to fend for themselves at one end of the table; the American bankers, Klein and Easterbrook, were at the other. In between were Herxheimer, Mould, Lukasinski and various lawyers and advisers exuding the natural bonhomie of men charging hourly fees while simultaneously enjoying a free meal. A heavy linen napkin was shaken out and spread over Hoffmann’s lap. He was offered a choice of white or red wine by the sommelier – a 2006 Louis Jadot Montrachet Grand Cru or a 1995 Latour – but refused both. He asked for still water.
De Gombart-Tonnelle said, ‘We were just discussing tax rates, Alex.’ He broke off a tiny piece of bread roll with his long fingers, and slipped it into his mouth. ‘We were saying that Europe seems to be going the way of the old Soviet Union. France forty per cent, Germany forty-five per cent, Spain forty-seven per cent, the UK fifty per cent-’
‘Fifty per cent!’ cut in Quarry. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m as patriotic as the next chap, but do I really want to go into a fifty-fifty partnership with Her Majesty’s Government? I think not.’
‘There is no democracy any more,’ said Elmira Gulzhan. ‘The state is in control as never before. All our freedoms are disappearing and no one seems to care. That’s what I find so depressing about this century.’
De Gombart-Tonnelle was still going on: ‘… even Geneva is forty-four per cent.’
‘Don’t tell me you guys pay forty-four per cent,’ said Iain Mould.
Quarry smiled, as if he had been asked a question by a child. ‘Theoretically you have to pay forty-four on salary. But if you take your income as dividend and your business is overseas-registered, then four fifths of your dividends are legally tax-free. So you only pay the forty-four on the one fifth. Hence a marginal top rate of eight- point-eight per cent. Isn’t that right, Amschel?’
Herxheimer, who lived in Zermatt but by some feat of teleportation was actually based in Guernsey, agreed that it was indeed so.
