Moroccan Traffic (46 page)

Morgan said, ‘You bloody woman.’

Sir Bernard Emerson sent a glance round us all, ending with Johnson. Emerson said, ‘I don’t want you if your mind has gone fragile. If it hasn’t, get on with it. This bit is your job, not mine. And for Jesus’ sake, think what you’re doing.’ He measured Johnson up and down once and took a sharp breath, but let it go without speaking. He was rather pale. He said, ‘You know where to find me,’ and without another word, walked from the room.

Johnson stood as if thinking. Mo and I looked at each other. ‘What a pleasure,’ said my mother, inspecting her knitting, ‘to move beyond barrier-ridden middle-management hierarchies and into the intellectual freemasonry of the privileged classes! So what is the problem, we ask ourselves? A serious difference, we perceive, which Sir Bernard must find a means to resolve. He acts, Mr. Johnson. He isolates you psychologically. He rouses Mo to resentment. He encourages a personal bonding between you. He thinks, when Mr. Johnson has fewer chemicals in him, that there is a very good chance you will both do as he wishes. He is right. You listen to words, you learn nothing.’

Mo’s mouth opened. Johnson, startled out of his trauma, sat down on a handy chair and stared at her. Morgan said, ‘Doris? How did you dream up that theory?’

My mother shrugged with her face. ‘I follow Sir Emerson’s reasoning. Am I right?’

‘No,’ said Morgan. ‘Johnson’s resigning.’

My mother glanced at Johnson out of the tops of her eyes. She said, ‘Ah, yes. What man worth the name would do otherwise? He is an able fellow, this Emerson Professor St Bernard.’

‘Professor Sir Bernard,’ I said.

‘So shortly he will overcome his pride and place his dilemma before you, and you will do what he wants. He needs you, Mr. Johnson, but he needs a lever to control you with. Or a little carrot. You know the girl is on holiday in Madeira? She flew there on an unplanned vacation just after the Sir left to come here.’

‘What girl?’ Morgan asked.

Johnson came to something near life. ‘Shall I have hysterics now, or wait until after lunch? Doris, you are the daughter of the mother of whores, and translate that into Arabic if you like.’ He laid down the papers and tried to smooth them. ‘Who told you to come in and break it up? Rita, I bet.’

‘Instinct,’ said my mother.

Johnson looked at her. ‘I knew it,’ he said. ‘You’re into ESP and you’ve probably got a direct fax to Delphi. Do you mind if I ask you? What country do you really belong to?’

I’d always wondered. I needn’t have. ‘I am an Ealing,’ said my mother. ‘Once, of course, I was Turkish. Then Arab countries elsewhere, until I met Wendy’s father.’

‘He was Ealing too?’ Morgan said.

‘Always,’ she said. ‘But always merry, always good-humoured, always with the spirit to try something new, win or not, lose or not. And liking fat women.’

‘We all have rotten taste,’ Morgan said. Fortunately, she knows when he is joking. They eyed one another, then she turned back to Johnson.

‘So now you will go, and take some pills, and do whatever Henry has told you to do that you have not done; and in a while we shall meet here to eat, and you and Morgan will decide what to do. It is the consensus.’

‘You don’t have a quorum,’ Johnson said.

‘Come on, pal,’ said Morgan, advancing. ‘It’s not a democracy, it’s a bloody dictatorship.’

‘Well, I didn’t vote for it,’ said Johnson, with some irritation. He got up, watched by my mother’s large, circled eyes, and strolled out, followed by Morgan. She looked complacent. I knew that look. I suppose she had reason. Whatever she had done, Johnson had temporarily re-opened for business.

This, the meeting called by my mother, was the last that I went to in Morocco. Of the four I had already attended, the most impressively equipped, I suppose, had been the one which took place in the kasbah. For this, the final agenda, they let us return to the room we had used in the morning.

For a working lunch it was late, the fault being as much mine as Johnson’s. Dispatched to my room, I fell soundly asleep for the second time, and woke feeling both saner and hungrier. Johnson, when I overtook him in the gardens, looked as if he too had slept, judging by his shirt and jacket. How I ever imagined him in uniform, I didn’t know. Walking to the meeting, he laid an apologetic group of fingers round my shoulders. ‘What an awful morning. Poor Wendy. Operas on every side.’

You learn when you are being trusted, and when you are intended not to ask questions. I said, ‘Everyone was tired. I was. You look better.’

‘There was room for improvement,’ he said. ‘Come on. Your mother will be waiting. A groaning board, and a groaning Morgan and lots and lots of alcohol, and there are still maybe futures out there waiting for somebody.’

We passed the pool on the way, and a redheaded water-wheel that turned into Rita, holding her nose. Johnson raised a hand and so did she: then her hand was replaced by her feet. He said, ‘No, she’s not coming. Only the victims.’

Only, as before, Morgan, my mother and me, sitting round a table; pushing out a raft into the wreckage of what used to be our career patterns. And Johnson. I wondered if he considered himself, too, a victim. I thought it unlikely.

Morgan, his hair down from a swim, greeted us with very few words and looked as if he’d been thinking. I couldn’t see any stickers. My mother, unchanged in any respect, trod up and down the buffet table with a cigarette on her lip, dispensing prawns and salad and jellied titbits as once Rita had, at another board.

Johnson, swiping the wine bottle, said, ‘This is going to be short, because I am very shortly going to get plastered. Mohammed Morgan, you are about to be hauled out of Kingsley’s whether you have the slightest desire to be hauled out or not. You can cut your throat, buy Manchester United or run a tea and wad stall if you want. What you can’t do is take your squad and start again on your own. Or you can, but only on certain terms, which I am empowered to put before you.’

He stopped to refill his glass. I hadn’t even got my first glassful yet. Morgan said, ‘In English. I want it in bloody English.’

‘You’ll get it,’ said Johnson. ‘So. Proposition. Government helps you finance a buyout of your hardware design squad, and compensates for the loss of your earn-out. You get a 25,000 square-foot start-up workshop in England; build your own pre- production units and keep, license, or sell to your original equipment manufacturers as heretofore. The
sine quae nix
: a bowler hat on the board and first refusal of every new project, no matter who or what you bloody think you are making it for. End of proposition. They’d have done it this way in the first place, except that they thought everyone thought you made washing machines. So what about it? Yes, forget it or maybe?’

‘I might give it a whirl,’ was Morgan’s reply. He threw it down like a platter of cat food.

‘Whether I’m around or not?’

‘Whether you’re around or not.’

We had all, I think, expected an argument. Johnson himself waited a moment. Then he said, ‘I see. I’ll tell Emerson. Good.’

‘Good?’ Morgan said. ‘Didn’t you notice the wit?
Give it a whirl?
Wait, my boy, till you’ve seen my fighting Jacuzzis, my missile-tube hairdryers, my limpet rollers with Semtex. Should we all go home, now you’ve got what you want? Or could you be persuaded – or, what’s your name, darling Jay? – could you be troubled to tell us what’s going to happen to Kingsley’s and its entire international work force?’

He picked up his fork and attacked the mound of food my mother had just shoved in front of him. Johnson, leaning over, audibly stabbed a prawn on the same plate and lifted it, causing Morgan’s eyes to lift also.

‘Come on, Mo,’ he said. ‘I’m playing it as straight as I can. The truth about Kingsley’s is that without you they’re sunk, but they were going that way in any case. They’ll have to be independently audited, and the nominees nitted out of the register. They’re over-borrowed. Kingsley and his accountant suppressed that and more. It’s a classic third-generation disaster: charming Chairman with public presence and a taste for high life, but nothing but average competence. The firm will be wound up or sold. Not your doing: it would have come, anyway.’

‘I put him down as big scale,’ Morgan said. He looked at me, and then back to Johnson. ‘He had style. He was bloody attractive.’ He said abruptly, ‘My God, I loused it up for all of you. What will happen to Rita?’

It was a strange submission, and what had brought it about, I couldn’t fathom. If Johnson did, he gave no sign. Only his manner, I thought, relaxed for reasons other than alcohol.

‘Troon will drown one of these days,’ he observed, ‘but is otherwise fine. So is MCG, if it’s survived a week without her and Rolly. Now I’m out of the cupboard, I might as well get myself on the board. You might want to poke your nose in. Kingsley put a crimp in her suppliers, but we’ll soon get all that sorted out. It’s really a very good firm. Otherwise the greedies wouldn’t have wanted them.’

‘Pymm and the Arabs,’ Morgan said, returning a little to normality. ‘So what about the Lord of the Kasbah? You made a cock-up of that bomb. They’re having to rebuild half Morocco.’

‘You do it next time,’ Johnson said. He began, for the first time, to eat. ‘It was a punk bomb with punk timing, but we did get everyone out. The village remains the world centre for goat cheese in oil cans. Chahid’s in jail, and will languish there roughly for ever. Algeria, Canada, ex Foreign Legion; a fraudulent accountant before that. Except for the hard men he fell in with, Pymm might have stayed a role-playing mutt on the take. As it was, Sullivan caught up with him. We couldn’t prevent it, but thanks to Wendy, we do know his principals, and we’ve also skewered the Arabs. Every name goes on file, and will save us all sorts of grief in the future. And one day, if we’re blessed, we’ll get an order from somewhere to waste them.’

‘We?’ my mother said, smoking and eating.

‘Extended Editorial,’ said Johnson shortly. She rose comfortably and refilled his glass.

‘Extended New Flipping Testament,’ said Morgan. ‘Father, Son and Microchip of the Old Rolling Stone if I read the signs correctly. Doris is right. Once you get back into your skull, you’re not going to leave Emerson. And you’re going to make bloody sure that I don’t.’

‘Mo?’ said my mother.

‘Yes?’

‘You are stating the obvious. So what about the late Daniel Oppenheim?’ It was funny: that was what I had wanted to ask. And what about Muriel Oppenheim, I wanted to add, who had married her boss and ran the private side of his life to such perfection?

‘Muriel needn’t know,’ Johnson said. ‘Only that he died in the landslide.’ He paused. He said, ‘If he’d lived, they’d have put him away on a drugs charge.’ It was probably true. It exonerated Emerson, at least, from that murder.

Morgan said, ‘You partnered Oppenheim, but you didn’t spot anything?’

Johnson gazed at his empty glass, and then at my mother, who was rolling a fag. ‘Not at first. As it happens, I didn’t much like him. It shouldn’t matter, but sometimes it does. You lean over backwards.’

He didn’t mention Muriel. I thought I understood. Whatever he’d been, he hadn’t been jealous.

He said, ‘Oppenheim was the best man for the job; I’d no right to blame Emerson. You know what happened. The MOD had come to its senses and noticed that you were pure bloody dynamite. I was to become your best buddy, while Daniel found out how to unbundle you. We needed real figures, and the bomb scare was to get us those, among other things. Of course, he had them already from Kingsley. He was silly to set off the bomb, and Sullivan was crazy to kill the safe-breaker, but it took me a while to cotton on.’

‘You do this all the time?’ Morgan said.

‘Yes,’ said Johnson. ‘I get some real bastards for buddies. And of course, to forestall your next question, the figures were a great personal help in the MCG battle. Or would have been, if correct.’

My mother had begun to cut up tart like an astrologer. Then she refilled Johnson’s glass, much more slowly. When you want her, she behaves like a waitress. I said, ‘Then why filch the figures I had at the airport? A counter-check against Mr. Oppenheim?’

‘And against you and me,’ said my mother. ‘That’s what they do in the movies.’ Morgan rose pointedly and fetched his own bottle.

‘The cinema,’ Johnson said, ‘has a lot to answer for.’ He said it quite well, but I had a feeling he would be talking French soon, and that my mother would be the last to be astonished.

Morgan’s eyes narrowed. He said, ‘You freaking? I’ve got a question to ask before this meeting closes, and so has Wendy, and we both want an answer. Remember the special figures we got out for Emerson? The genuine, abysmal Kingsley position?’ He waited.
‘Johnson!’

‘This is a recording. Speak,’ Johnson said, ‘
après le beep sonore.’
He wasn’t all that drunk.

I said, ‘Mr. Morgan wants to know about that Fax that came to the kasbah. It had the same figures in it.’

‘And it nearly did for us,’ Morgan said.

‘But it didn’t,’ said Johnson. ‘
Le Jamesbonderie.’

Morgan began to articulate faster, if not necessarily more clearly. He said, ‘Will you damned well own up? No one could have sent that Fax unless you told them where and how and what names to use. Where did it come from?’

I knew. Morgan had never seen the satellite direct-dial telephone on
Dolly.
I sat back and let Johnson admit it all. Then Morgan exploded.

‘You’ve got a
Fax
on that bloody gent’s water-toy? You faxed the kasbah number to Lenny, and he faxed back that Goddamned death notice?
And
the lie at the end about the Government taking me over?’

‘I should think that was Emerson,’ Johnson said. ‘Lenny liked you.’

‘It made me expendable!’ Morgan exclaimed.

‘Also Sir Robert,’ said my mother, stacking priceless dishes prior, I suppose, to taking them somewhere and washing them. ‘To place you in such danger, what was Sir Emerson’s object?’

‘Buggering up my personal relationships,’ Johnson said. He got up as well, a shade uncertainly, and walked to the windows for the purpose of delivering a statement to the scenery.