The Namedropper Page 8

  ‘I talked personally with Dan,’ said the woman. ‘Our understanding is acceptable as far as he’s concerned. But he stressed it’s only an initial tranche.’

  ‘What if I’m not found to be responsible for the marriage collapse?’

  ‘Again, roughly as we thought. An American judge would have discretion but we’re not denying that you slept with Alyce Appleton. It comes down to whether or not you – or rather Dan – can satisfy the judge you’re not a marriage wrecker. Dan thinks he can, on our exchanges so far.’

  ‘So £55,000 might be sufficient?’

  ‘Initial was the word Dan used,’ insisted Lesley. ‘How long the hearing lasts – as far as you are concerned – will again depend upon the judge’s view of your personal responsibility and culpability. I think at this stage Dan’s going to try to argue you out of the case at the beginning, in chambers if possible. But if the judge, who hasn’t been selected yet, won’t agree that schedule and wants to hear the actual divorce evidence first, you’ll go to the back of the queue. In that event, it could last the month, maybe longer.’

  ‘If I made the initial deposit £75,000 I would have some living and travelling money too, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘I’m not sure that would come within the acceptible provisions of the arrangement.’

  ‘Can you ask?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What about publicity?’ asked Jordan, inevitably coming to his overriding concern.

  Lesley Corbin extended her hands, palm upwards, in a ‘who knows?’ gesture. ‘If you’re dismissed from the case before it starts, in a chambers hearing, Dan doubts there’ll be any: you’re no more than a name. Dan hasn’t got as far as any detailed exchange papers, to discover if any other men are being cited, as well as you. Or, if there are, whether they’re contesting the allegations as well. Whether or not there is any publicity is really dependent upon Appleton and the sort of case his side intends. And what the judge permits.’

  ‘So we’re not much further forward?’

  ‘The main purpose of this meeting is to fix when you can go out for your first meeting in New York,’ announced Lesley.

  ‘As soon as possible, to get it all over as quickly as I can,’ said Jordan at once. ‘I thought I’d made that clear!’

  ‘I needed to check with your first,’ she said, detecting the irritation in Jordan’s voice. ‘Give me a day.’

  ‘I’ll fly out on Saturday, give myself Sunday to get over the jet lag and see Dan on Monday.’ That gave him the rest of the week to check Hans Crescent, get at least £75,000 from the new Leadenhall Street bank and hand it over to Lesley Corbin.

  ‘That sounds good. I’ll check with Dan. Fix a time for Monday.’

  ‘Tell me about Preston,’ demanded Jordan.

  Lesley went to the pile on her left. ‘Your blood pressure’s 160 over 90, which he says is too high. And your cholesterol level is 7: it should be well under 4. You should get treatment for both, according to him. On the plus side, you’re not HIV positive. Nor are you suffering any sexual disease.’ She looked up expectantly. ‘And he’s invoked medico/legal consultation rates and put in a bill for £1,550.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘That’s in line with what’s charged by medical experts for legal cases. He’s claiming he should have been told by me: got a price agreed.’

  ‘He’s a robbing, conning bastard!’ said Jordan, the hypocrisy never occurring to him. ‘He wasn’t asked and didn’t need to carry out such an examination!’

  ‘It does appear you’ve got some medical problems you should get treated, however. I’ll argue with him about the fee, of course: get it reduced.’

  ‘Reduced a hell of a lot,’ insisted Jordan.

  ‘And here’s the photographs,’ she said, offering an envelope across the desk.

  Jordan had always kept any type of identifying document to an absolute minimum and in his judgement these photos approached a dangerous level of identification. His immediate decision was very definitely to stick with the pictures in his current passport, of which he still had a substantial supply, which were already three years old and would hopefully misrepresent him further when it needed renewal in another seven years. If he were dismissed from the American case he’d do whatever he could to get Beckwith to recover these current images for him to destroy. The short, schoolboy-cut, sandy blond hair, normally so easy to gel into a different style for various identities, here was too recognizable, and the contact lenses he’d uncomfortably used to accentuate the blueness of his eyes were too blue, making him starrey-eyed, He didn’t, either, consider he’d sufficiently distorted his mouth by sucking back his top and bottom lip, as he had in his previous photographs.

  ‘I think they could have been better,’ criticised the lawyer.

  So do I, better at disguising my features, thought Jordan. ‘Did you ask Dan why photographs were necessary?’

  ‘We left it for you to ask him yourself,’ she reminded. ‘As I said, it’s got to be for comparison against photographs of you and Alyce in France.’

  ‘I would have thought my being in court was a good enough comparison.’

  ‘Prior exchange of documents,’ Lesley said.

  ‘I need to hand over the £75,000 deposit.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ she agreed.

  ‘I’ll have it ready by Friday.’

  Lesley Corbin looked at her open diary, on the far left of the desk. ‘Three thirty?’

  ‘Three thirty’s fine.’

  ‘What are you going to do about the blood pressure and the cholesterol?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You sure that’s wise?’

  ‘Believing anything that that bastard says isn’t wise.’

  ‘Anything else – any uncertainty – still on your mind?’

  ‘If I think of anything I’ll mention it on Friday.’

  There were, in fact, more uncertainties on Jordan’s mind, more than he could count and most of which he couldn’t talk about to Lesley Corbin. Or anybody else. He was straightjacketed: by frustration and impotence and … and by no longer being in charge of himself and whatever was happening to him. He wanted immediately – now – to hit back. Fight back. Cause Alfred Jerome fucking Appleton as much and as many problems as Alfred Jerome Appleton was causing him. No, Jordan contradicted himself at once. More problems. Far more. He wanted to fuck Appleton in every way but physically, far worse and far more painfully than he’d ever been screwed before. Worse, even, than the retribution he exacted against the man who’d stolen his own company and in effect destroyed his marriage. Abruptly – anxiously – Jordan wanted to see a photograph of the man: ingrain every line and feature of his face, of everything about the man, as he ingrained every detail about his victims before embarking upon another identity-stealing operation.

  For the first time since being overwhelmed by so much he didn’t understand and couldn’t control, Harvey Jordan smiled, decisions clearing in his otherwise cluttered mind. He didn’t understand everything and couldn’t anticipate how anything could or would turn out. Not yet. But he would eventually, as he always did. And when he did – as soon as he did – Alfred Jerome Appleton would learn what an implacable, unrelenting enemy he’d made.

  What about Alyce Louise Appleton? came the abrupt, prodding question. Jordan couldn’t believe – didn’t want to believe – that Alyce was the promiscuous part of some conspiracy. Jordan, a professional himself, was sure he would have recognized it: picked up the alarm-sounding clue, which he hadn’t. But he couldn’t be sure, he accepted, objectively. He had to keep an open – but not a vindictive, revengeful – mind until he got to New York and learned a great deal more.

  Which he would. He’d search and probe and discover everything, and when he had he’d reach his own verdict and exact his own punishment upon everyone who’d decided Harvey Jordan was a ripe, easy-to-pluck victim.

  It had taken a long time – too long – for him to flesh out the decision. Now that he had he felt
encouraged, confident, sure he could win, whatever it took. That night Harvey Jordan won slightly over £11,000 and finished the evening feeling even more confident. Alert as he permanently was, he didn’t pick out anyone, either inside or outside the casino, whom he suspected of watching him, either. Maybe he had been paranoid after all.

  Ten

  There’d been the familiar quickening of his hearbeat upon landing at JFK, going through the airport formalities and choosing the Triboro bridge route in preference to the tunnel to get into Manhattan; there was never an alternative to entering New York above ground to see the snaggle-toothed skyline sketched out before him as he crossed the East River. But today Harvey Jordan felt different from how he had felt before. On this trip – hopefully – he was going to regain some control of and over his life, his anonymity, instead of being jerked constantly around at the end of someone else’s demanding, manipulating strings. Dear God, how much he wanted that! He guessed he was wishing too much too soon, but he couldn’t prevent himself hoping.

  Jordan believed he’d finished the week ahead, which was where he always had to be: ahead, choosing the moves and the routes instead of following those where others tried to lead him. He’d ducked and dived for more than two hours after his last meeting with Lesley to reach Hans Crescent, where he found two bank documents from Royston and Jones that needed his immediate signature and, believing he remained unwatched after so much evasion, carried them at once to Leadenhall Street to hand-deliver them and to have any further correspondence held until his return from America. Then he’d crossed from the administration to the securities division to collect, in full, the £75,000 advance to which the American lawyer had agreed. He hadn’t been able to fit all of it into the Marylebone safe so he’d taken the overflow with him to gamble that night in a much more downmarket, but conveniently myopic, casino in Tottenham Court Road and added £3,200 to what he was increasingly regarding as a war chest. When he’d delivered the £75,000 to Lesley Corbin she said she wished she was coming to New York with him and fleetingly Jordan wished she were, too, although his current entrapment had driven even the remotest thought of personal relationships out of his mind, more so than he usually felt when he was working. He considered himself to be working now, as hard – harder even – as he had had to before in order to rebuild his first destroyed life. He’d asked Lesley why she didn’t come some other time, because this looked like the first of several trips and she’d said maybe, if she could gain access to the court when the actual hearings began to experience an American court in action and Jordan regretted his glib responses, not having initially believed she was serious. He regretted, too, talking to her about the man in the car outside the Mayfair club because he hadn’t had the slightest suspicion in the Tottenham Court Road casino or anywhere else – certainly not on the outward flight to America – that he was being watched and feared now he’d made himself look stupid. Having restored his pride, Harvey Jordan hated making himself look stupid.

  Jordan’s triple-glazed suite at the Carlyle was further distanced from the donkey-bray wail of emergency sirens by being back from East 76th Street and, although he didn’t then feel tired, having fitfully dozed in his first-class sleeper-bed during the last BA flight of the day out of London, Jordan went directly to bed after an omelette from room service, not having eaten on the plane. He was determined against any overhanging jet lag during his Monday meeting with Daniel Beckwith. Despite his noise precautions Jordan slept badly, sub-consciously always aware of where he was. And why.

  Since the stomach-lurching letter from Brinkmeyer, Hartley and Bernstein he’d actually thought little of Alyce Appleton, beyond her ever present name. But in a dream-cluttered half sleep his mind perfectly pictured her hunched over the official-looking papers in the Carlton lounge in Cannes and again, in the bikini wisp that had made it necessary for him to briefly remain in the sea, off the He St Marguerite, and most vividly of all of her lounged naked, languorously offering herself, on the bed of their tower suite at the St Tropez hotel. She’d said something to him then, something he couldn’t now remember but wanted to because he thought it was important and therefore something that he should recall. Jordan finally awoke, completely, still trying to recollect the remark she’d made. But couldn’t.

  Daniel Beckwith was a towering, hard-bodied man well over six feet tall whose blond hair Jordan guessed to be longer than Lesley Corbin’s. A thrown-aside tie lay on top of a carelessly discarded jacket puddled in a side chair to expose on the lawyer a check shirt more at home on the ranch than a lawyer’s office; the large, three-pinned oval buckle of the man’s embossed leather belt was actually centred with the head of an animal, a bison maybe, and Jordan wondered if there were stables somewhere in the building for the lawyer’s horse. The man was halfway across the office as Jordan entered, hand already outstretched in greeting. Jordan tensed expectantly and just managed to avoid a wince at the knuckle-cracking shake.

  ‘Good of you to come, Harv: very good. Got a lot talk about.’

  ‘After speaking tc Lesley and you I didn’t think I had much of a choice,’ said Jordan, taking the chair to which the lawyer gestured. Jordan thought there was a tinge of an unidentifiable accent in the laid-back, measured voice. Jordan’s right hand actually ached.

  ‘There was a choice and you made the right one,’ assured Beckwith. ‘You want to toss your coat, make yourself comfortable, go right ahead.’ He jabbed an intercom key, declared, ‘When you’re ready, Suzie.’ And clicked off before there was any response from the other end. He smiled a perfectly sculpted, white-toothed smile and said, ‘Coffee, to help you stay awake after your trip over. Drink it all the time myself.’

  ‘I’m OK with my jacket. Coffee would be good, though.’ Jordan had begun work immediately after the bad night at the Carlyle, walking the length of Wall Street to identify conveniently grouped banks for what he intended in the immediate future – and avoided any alcohol – and isolating three possible short-lease apartments. His favourite was on West 72nd Street. Despite the exertion he’d slept badly again and been awake since five so he welcomed the coffee, which arrived on a tray with two mugs and a pot holding at least two pints. The titian haired girl whom Jordan guessed to be Suzie wore a clinging red sweater and a tight cream skirt to display pert breasts and rounded slim hips to their best and obvious advantages. She said ‘Hi’ to Jordan as she passed on her way out.

  Beckwith said, ‘We keep Suzie on the payroll as a warning to clients what they’re allowed to think but not do.’

  Jordan heard the girl laugh behind him at what he guessed to be a well rehearsed joke, wondering if it didn’t constitute sexual harassment. He smiled because he knew he was expected to and accepted the coffee the lawyer poured, mildly impatient at the irrelevance. Or was it irrelevant? he asked himself, remembering the American’s warning against losing his temper.

  Beckwith patted the dossier on his desk with a heavy hand and said, ‘Got all your stuff. And Lesley tells me she’s set up an escrow account with the deposit.’

  ‘I don’t understand how you can move that much cash without fulfilling some financial regulations.’ Jordan hadn’t expected to talk about money so soon but was glad the lawyer had introduced it early on. As always it remained one of the foremost questions in his mind, the more so after his bank identification the previous afternoon.

  ‘There are regulations and they will be fulfilled,’ guaranteed Beckwith. ‘And we’re not transferring it all at once. I draw upon it, as and when it’s necessary, supported by a federal bank agreement to prove to your English authorities that it’s a bone fide, government agreed exchange for legal purposes upon the sworn oath of Lesley’s firm and my own. All expenditure and receipts have to be exchanged between the Fed and your Bank of England. But it’s between firms, not individuals. So your name never appears. It’s covered by multinational trade legislation but we qualify under it. And there’s nothing in the legislation requiring duplication with your Inland Revenue and our
IRS. I guess there will be one day, when the loophole’s discovered, but at the moment you’re lucky we can utilize it.’

  ‘I’m glad it exists for the moment. And that I can draw on it. I’d like an initial cash advance of $25,000.

  The lawyer frowned. ‘That much?’

  ‘I’m thinking of some working trips to Atlantic City. Maybe Las Vegas even.’

  He’d carried just short of $10,000 into the country and wished it could have been more, although the immediate intention didn’t include casinos.

  ‘OK,’ agreed Beckwith reluctantly.

  ‘Let’s hope my luck holds.’ Jordan was sure that in addition to it preventing any discrepancy between his income tax submission and the money he was making available here was Beckwith’s need to ensure he could afford to pay for his defence. Jordan made a mental note to check the scheme when his current problems were finally over. There might be an advantage he could use, although he couldn’t at that moment imagine what it might be.

  ‘You’ve got to depend more upon me than upon luck,’ warned the lawyer.

  ‘I know that,’ accepted Jordan. ‘I can’t believe how I’ve come to be caught up in all this.’

  ‘People can’t – or don’t – until it happens to them.’

  ‘Can we cut to the chase, right now?’ urged Jordan, finally giving way to his impatience. ‘You know from Lesley how it happened: my side of the story. What are my chances of being dismissed the action?’

  Beckwith laughed at the question, pouring more coffee. ‘There are too many things I still have to hear and learn and question before I could even begin to answer that. And even after I do hear and learn and question, I don’t think I’d like to try an answer, even then. At this point I haven’t had the individual statements of claim from Alfred Appleton’s side, specifying the grounds for those claims against you. Or what I need from Alyce Appleton’s lawyers. This meeting is for us to get to know each other, maybe exchange a few thoughts. We’ve got a long way to go.’