Citizen. Charlie Brooks

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СКАЧАТЬ spooned up the last scrapings of his favourite hangover cure: a lemon sorbet heavily laced with Italian bitters. His predatory eyes flicked between the guy he was talking to on the next stool, a Bolivian gigolo named Ramon, and the entrance. Nico had long cultivated the habit of noting every new arrival at the beach bar. The males were quickly assessed in terms of their influence or wealth; the females for any hint of availability; and both for their vulnerabilities, for the most advantageous angles of attack.

      It was how Nico lived, how he funded the Jensen and the five-star hotels and vintage champagnes which were the keynotes of his life. With no capital or inherited standing in the world, he might superficially be bracketed with a pique-assiette like Ramon. Yet he stood apart from the hangers-on of his acquaintance, the gigolos, barflies and male models that infested the Riviera. For one thing, he looked different. With his puny physique and polecat face, he had to get by without the standard obvious good looks of those to whom freeloading came easy. Minus that confident jaw, lacking those soulful eyes, Nico compensated by growing a neat beard, wearing designer shades and working considerably harder, and with deeper insight, to access the playboy yachts, private tables and penthouse party circuits that all of them depended on. Nico would have it no other way. He was not, he considered, a Ramon, an expendable accessory, a pawn. He was a player. And he was clever.

      His quick brain had even taken him to Harvard. The public Parisian school system prepared him well, but his father, proprietor of a modest food shop in the French capital’s 6ème Arrondissement, could never have afforded college in America. So Nico won a scholarship and took himself across the Atlantic to learn all about the drug habits and compulsive spending of the East Coast Preppy, the Texas Oilboy and the Jewish Princess. With this preliminary social research under his belt, Nico set forth.

      He’d been recruited by Reitchel-Litvinoff, the trouble-shooting New York tax accountants, who found many uses for his chameleon social skills, undoubted numeracy and ability to bluff in six languages—including both American and British. For half a decade he shimmied from country to country on behalf of clients anxious to keep their wealth out of the clutches of the taxman. Whenever it was necessary to sidestep the electronic banking system, Nico was on hand. Here he picked up bearer bonds, title-deeds and attaché cases filled with large denomination bills. There he made discreet trades, deposits in numbered offshore accounts and deliveries at the clients’ Swiss chalets and Mustique beach houses.

      Yet he featured nowhere in Reitchel-Litvinoff’s employment register. He was paid in cash, or in kind, and was impregnably deniable if things went wrong. Finally things did. The IRS picked Nico up on its radar, and suddenly the United States was an exclusion zone. Within a few days, his contact at Reitchel-Litvinoff no longer returned Nico’s increasingly desperate calls.

      So he had landed, like a hopeful turtle, on the Côte d’Azur, and set about foraging for deals and new contacts. It was a perfect habitat for him. Where rich people took their pleasure they also did business, and Nico found the Riviera a natural base from which to haunt the pleasure domes of Europe. Shopping in Rue de Rivoli and New Bond Street, golf at the K Club, opera at La Scala and going ‘Banco’ at Monte Carlo’s baccarat tables. He convinced himself that he really was one of the high rollers. His skill in manipulating currency for other people frequently came in handy; often that currency was narcotic, equally often erotic; and so he negotiated his way through life, with money enough to pull on a hand-made Italian suit and drive a hand-made English car.

      Ramon was half way through some story which involved one of the most beautiful girls in the world falling in love with his body. All of his stories were in this vein, and Nico was only half listening. His attention was caught by a party of Russians, who had clearly just come ashore from a private yacht. They were a couple of girls, chic and silkyblonde, a shiny-suited aide-de-camp and some kind of minder, all bossed by a thickset man with short grizzled hair and a pock-marked face. Apparently unable to speak more than a few words of French, the boss called for blinis and lemon vodka by jabbing the menu with a blunt forefinger. His hands looked like they’d spent most of their lives working on a pipeline in Siberia.

      When the food arrived he ignored the little pancakes and shovelled quantities of caviar and sour cream directly into his mouth. Nico could hear his fellow countryman growling comments about the bar staff’s inability to speak Russian. From his accent and behaviour, Nico knew this was no White Russian émigré like himself. The man had emerged from Moscow in the Soviet era, and clearly not in a state of poverty.

      The Bolivian was still droning on.

      ‘Di was becoming a nuisance. She was obsessed with me. And Pam didn’t like it. Pam was driving me crazy too. She just couldn’t get enough of me and that loser of a boyfriend was always on the phone. She’s got no brain, you know. I can’t stick these girls with no brain, I don’t care who they are.’

      Nico produced a thin smile, nodded in agreement, slid from the stool and patted Ramon lightly on the shoulder.

      ‘Back in a minute, Ramon,’ he said.

      Then he crossed to the Russians’ table, bowing slightly from the waist as the boss-man turned to him. ‘I wonder if I might be of service to a fellow countryman,’ Nico said smoothly.

       3

      Sam’s family lived in a cottage within the confines of a stud farm. It was among the most prosperous in the area. This was not one of the thousands of rackety micro-studs that litter the Irish hinterland, the kind of small farm where, just for the love and romance of it, a couple of mares would share the grass and the outbuildings with a dairy herd or a couple of breeding sows. The enterprise Sam’s father worked for was owned by rich people in Dublin. They expected the stud’s progeny to be the best, and to win Grade One races from Ascot and Longchamp to Happy Valley and Churchill Downs. And to generate big returns from yearling sales. The stud itself was a demesne of beautifully maintained, white-railed paddocks, shaded by huge chestnut trees and linked via a network of sandy bridleways to various functional and fanatically well ordered buildings: the boxes, covering sheds, tack-rooms and feed stores.

      His father Pat, the stud groom, was a wiry countryman with a broken nose that whistled when he exerted himself. He had no intention of this being a summer holiday for his nephew. He expected Tipper to make himself useful; sweeping out barns and stables and feeding horses. It was all new to the boy. The first week felt like a lot like hard work, but as soon as he was allowed to get off the end of a broom and handle the horses Tipper began to enjoy himself.

      A couple of weeks into his stay, Tipper came in for his tea and found Sam alone.

      ‘Where’s your Da and Ma gone to?’ he asked.

      ‘Gone off in a hurry to Dublin.’

      ‘What for?’

      Sam shrugged. ‘Don’t know. They didn’t say.’

      Tipper found out why later in the evening. The stud manager, a remote figure called Mr Power, whom the boys rarely spoke to, sent word for Tipper to come up to the house.

      ‘I have something to tell you,’ he said in an unnaturally hollow voice when Tipper presented himself. ‘It’s about your mother.’

      ‘Oh, right! What about her? Is she okay?’

      Without immediately replying, Mr Power ushered Tipper into the hall of his house, a large gloomy space hung with racing prints and photographs of horses. He carefully shut the door behind the boy, then turned to face him. Tipper felt uncomfortable in this strange environment.

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