Appalling!
They passed by the golf course.
‘You’re an albino,’ he said.
‘Clever Finn.’
‘Not scared of burning? Because of – what do you call it—’
‘My pronounced melanin disorder and my light-sensitive eyes,’ she chanted the answer down at him. ‘Nope, not a problem. I wear highly filtered contact lenses.’
‘And your skin?’
‘How flattering,’ she said mockingly. ‘Finn O’Keefe is interested in my skin.’
‘Nonsense. I really am interested.’
‘Of course it’s entirely free of pigment. Without sun protection I’d go up in flames. So I use Moving Mirrors.’
‘Moving Mirrors?’
‘It’s a gel with microscopic mirrors that adjust themselves according to the heat of the sun. It means I can stay in the open for a few hours, but of course it shouldn’t become a habit. So, sporty guy, fancy a swim?’
After she’d spent most of the day accompanying guests from the heliport to the hotel and going back to wait for the next helicopter to arrive, back and forth, back and forth, Lynn Orley was surprised she hadn’t worn a groove in the ground ages ago.
Of course she’d done other things as well. Andrew Norrington, deputy head of security at Orley Enterprises, had turned the Isla de las Estrellas into the kind of high-security zone that made you think you were in the Hotel California: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave!’ Lynn’s own idea of security included protection, but not its visible display, while Norrington argued that you couldn’t hide the guards in the bushes like garden gnomes. She mentioned that it had been difficult enough to persuade the new arrivals against having their own bodyguards with them at all times, and referred to Oleg Rogachev, who had only reluctantly left at home the half-dozen heavies he usually arrived with, and pointed out that half of the service staff were highly trained sharpshooters. No one, when they were out jogging or playing golf, wanted to be constantly bumping into dark figures with the word Emergency practically stamped on their foreheads. Besides, she rather liked gun-toting gnomes who looked after you without tripping you up all the time.
After a stubborn battle Norrington had finally retrained his brigades and found ways of adapting them to their surroundings. Lynn knew she was making his life difficult, but he had to deal with it. Norrington was excellent at his job, highly organised and dependable, but he was also a victim of that infectious paranoia that gripped all bodyguards sooner or later.
‘Interesting,’ she said.
Beside her, Warren Locatelli snorted like a horse.
‘Yes, but you wanted to lower the price! My God, I lost it at that point. I said hang on. Hang on… ! Do you know exactly whom you’re dealing with here? Pimps! Monkey-brains! I didn’t just climb down from the trees, you get me? You don’t lure me out of the jungle with bananas. Either you play by my rules or I’ll…’
And so on and so forth.
Lynn nodded sympathetically as she walked the new arrivals to reception. Warren Locatelli was such a jerk! And Momoka Omura, that silly tart beside him, not one bit better. But as long as Julian thought it was important, she would have to pay attention even to a talking dung-beetle. You didn’t necessarily have to understand it to have a conversation with it. It was enough to react to tone, tempo and accompanying noises like grunts, growls or laughter. If the torrent of words raining down on you ended in merriment, then you joined in with the laughter. If it rattled down furiously, you were always on the safe side with an ‘Unbelievable!’ or a ‘No really?’ If the situation called for contextual understanding, you just listened. Mockery was legitimate, it was just important not to get caught out.
In Locatelli’s case autopilot was sufficient. As long as he wasn’t talking shop, his main topic of conversation was the state of his own awesomeness, and the fact that everyone else was a bunch of assholes. Or pimps and monkey-brains. Depending.
Who would arrive next?
Chuck and Aileen Donoghue.
Chucky, the hotel mogul. He was okay, even though he told terrible jokes. Aileen would probably turn to the kitchen first thing to see if they were cutting the meat thickly enough.
Aileen: ‘Chucky likes fat steaks! They’ve got to be fat.’
Chucky: ‘Yes, fat! What Europeans call steaks aren’t steaks at all. Hey, you know what I call European steaks? You want to know? You do? Okay – carpaccio!’
But Chuck was okay.
To Lynn’s regret, on Julian’s chessboard Locatelli was the queen, or at least a rook. He had managed to do something that had driven generations of physicists to despair, namely developing solar cells that converted over sixty per cent of sunlight into electricity. With those, and because he was also a brilliant businessman, Locatelli’s company Lightyears had become market leader in the solar energy sector and made its owner so rich that Forbes put him at number five among the world’s billionaires. Momoka Omura strutted indifferently along beside him, let her eye wander over the grounds and managed a grudging ‘nice’. Lynn imagined hitting her between the eyes with her clenched fists, but instead took her arm and complimented her on her hair.
‘I knew you’d like it,’ Momoka replied with the faintest of smiles.
No, it looks lousy, Lynn thought. Complete disaster.
‘Nice to have you both here,’ she said.
At the same time Evelyn Chambers, sunning herself on her sixth-floor terrace, was calling up her knowledge of Russian and pricking up her ears. She was the high-society seismographer. Every tremor, however small, registered as news value on her personal Richter scale, and there had just been a big one.
The Rogachevs were in the room next door. The terraces were separated by sound-absorbing barriers, but she could still hear Olympiada Rogacheva’s breathless sobs, now close by, now further away. She was obviously pacing back and forth on the sun-deck, clutching a full glass, as usual.
‘Why?’ she wailed. ‘Why again?’
Oleg Rogachev’s answer came dully and incomprehensibly from inside the room. Whatever he had said made Olympiada explode in a volcanic eruption.
‘You complete bastard!’ she yelled. ‘Right in front of my eyes!’ Muffled sounds, gasps. ‘You didn’t even bother to do it in secret!’
Rogachev stepped outside.
‘You want me to have secrets? Then fine.’
His voice was calm, uninterested and designed to bring the surrounding temperature down a few degrees. Evelyn pictured him in front of her. A middle-sized, inconspicuous man with thin, blond hair and a foxy face, eyes set in it like little icy mountain lakes. Evelyn had interviewed Oleg Alexeyevich Rogachev the previous year, shortly after he had become majority shareholder of the Daimler company, and met a polite, quiet businessman who had willingly answered all her questions while at the same time appearing as impenetrable as a piece of armour plating.
She recapitulated what she knew about Rogachev. His father had run a Soviet steel firm, which had been privatised as a consequence of Perestroika. The usual model at the time was to give the workers voucher share certificates. For a short time, the multicellular organism of the proletariat had assumed command, except that shares in a steel-works didn’t get families through the winter. So most workers had quickly been willing to turn their certificates into money, selling them to finance companies or their superiors, and receiving, on the eat-or-be-eaten principle, just a fraction of their actual value. Gradually the former state companies of the fragmented Soviet Union had fallen into the hands of investment firms and speculators. Old Rogachev had also turned up and bought enough of his workers’ share certificates to purchase the company himself, which brought him into the firing line of a competing Mafia clan, unfortunately in the literal sense of that phrase: two bullets hit him in the chest, a third drilled its way into his brain. The fourth had been intended for his son, but missed. Oleg, who had until that point been more inclined towards student distractions, had immediately interrupted his studies and established an allegiance against the murderers with a clan close to the government, that led to a shoot-out about which no further documentation was available. At this point Oleg was demonstrably living abroad, but after his return he was suddenly appointed chairman of the management committee and a welcome guest at the Kremlin.