He explained what he needed. Richard listened and then, when Jimmy had finished, he said, ‘How much money are we talking about?’
Jimmy told him.
The skin tightened on Richard’s face. He lifted his glass and drank almost half of what was in it. Behind him, and seemingly in response to this sudden intake of alcohol, the man in the paper hat slid sideways off his stool. The woman stared at him for a moment, then laughed a deep, inhaled laugh.
‘Obviously you don’t have to give it to me all at once,’ Jimmy said. ‘It can appear in instalments, if that makes it easier. A bit here, a bit there.’ He paused. ‘It’s only paper, remember.’
Richard looked up, a sudden belligerence lowering his eyebrows, drawing his chin forwards. ‘Where’s the money going?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
Richard didn’t take his eyes off Jimmy’s face.
‘It’s not going to me, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Jimmy smiled wistfully into his drink. ‘If only. No, it’s just a problem I’ve inherited.’
A silence fell between them, but Jimmy had the feeling Richard believed him.
At last, and with a faint sardonic smile, Richard said, ‘How soon would you need,’ and he paused, ‘the first instalment?’
On Monday, at eleven in the morning, Richard called. Jimmy thought he was going to say that he had changed his mind, that he couldn’t possibly involve himself in something so dubious, and in an attempt to postpone his own disappointment he told Richard how ill he had been on Friday night. For lunch that day he had eaten roast teal on a bed of Puy lentils, he said, and then, if he remembered rightly, he had drunk Guinness with Richard, at least five pints. Suddenly, towards midnight, he felt as if his stomach was alive inside him, whole somehow, like a trapped animal. He seemed to have spent most of the weekend in his bathroom, bent over the toilet bowl.
‘I thought teal was a colour.’ Richard was laughing.
‘It was,’ Jimmy said. ‘I won’t describe it to you.’
‘Listen,’ and Richard scarcely paused, ‘that paperwork you asked me for, I’m having it biked over. It should be with you by midday.’
Strategically, Jimmy thought it would be a mistake to sound too relieved, or too grateful. Instead, he simply told Richard that he was seeing Connor for lunch, which allowed Richard the room to draw his own conclusions. At the end of the phone-call it was Richard who thanked Jimmy rather than the other way round.
In the restaurant that lunchtime Jimmy studied the menu for less than a minute, then ordered a Caesar salad and a bottle of mineral water. It was all he could face. Also, it would fix him in Connor’s mind as one of a new breed of marketing executives; the clean-living image was bound to appeal to Connor, who had spent most of the last decade in Southern California.
As Jimmy’s decaffeinated cappuccino arrived, he began to tell Connor about the meeting with Richard and the subsequent delivery. The American had been looking out across the restaurant floor, thinking he had recognised someone, an old colleague, but now his head turned back towards Jimmy, turned slowly, remorselessly, which gave Jimmy the feeling that he was at the planetarium, observing the movement of a celestial body.
‘You solved it already?’ Connor said.
‘I think so.’
Connor wanted to know how.
‘I told him you were thinking of moving the account. I told him I’d try and talk you out of it. If that was what he wanted.’
‘You blamed me?’
A bubble of fear rose through Jimmy as he wondered if he’d gone too far. ‘It seemed the obvious thing to do.’ He paused. ‘It seemed believable. Your reputation …’
‘Yes. I can see that.’
Jimmy reached into his jacket pocket and took out an envelope. He handed it to Connor, who prised the seal open with his big, blunt fingers. Connor lifted out the invoice and unfolded it.
‘Twenty-five thousand,’ Jimmy said.
‘Well,’ said Connor, smiling, ‘it’s a start.’
Synchro
For the launch of Kwench! ECSC UK hired the top floor of a five-star hotel in Kensington, complete with roof garden, swimming-pool and a panoramic view of the city. It had been Jimmy’s idea to have the water in the pool dyed orange, but Connor had thought of the synchronised swimmers, a stroke of genius which, in Jimmy’s opinion, proved the American was worth every penny of his reputedly enormous salary. An orange swimming-pool, it was memorable in itself — but then, while the champagne was being served, nineteen girls stepped out on to the terrace, dressed in tight-fitting orange hats and sleek blue one-piece bathing-costumes. In single file, they marched towards the deep end, their heads thrown proudly back, their toes pointing. They climbed down into the water and, accompanied by the soundtrack from the first Kwench! TV/cinema commercial, they began to run through various routines, their movements graceful, intricate, and perfectly orchestrated. Every now and then, observing a music cue, perhaps, or following some logic of their own, the girls broke out of the patterns they were creating and formed the word KWENCH! on the surface of the pool. The first time this happened, there was an involuntary gasp from the crowd, and then delighted laughter and a small, spontaneous burst of applause.
‘Seems to be going pretty well.’
Jimmy turned to see Raleigh Connor standing beside him. Connor was wearing a short-sleeved sports shirt and a pair of casual trousers. His forearms, which were thick and tanned, reminded Jimmy of cold roast chicken.
‘It couldn’t be going better,’ Jimmy said.
During the thirteen-week run-up to the launch he had been surprised by the smoothness of the operation. Their only real worry had been that the advertising spend might be seen to be too meagre (of course, if you counted the cost of Project Secretary, it wasn’t meagre at all), but Jimmy managed to take that worry and turn it to the company’s advantage. In a daring presentation to the sales force at the end of January, he had stressed the product’s secret formula, a cocktail of natural ingredients that would enhance the lives of all consumers, and he had claimed that its unique character would be reflected in the marketing, part of which would be subterranean, invisible — a mystery promotion. In reality, of course, no such promotion existed. It was just a smoke-screen — a sort of double-bluff, in fact — but the sales force went away happy, believing they could create excitement on the strength of what he had said, and the off-trade order figures for the following month showed that his strategy had worked. People sometimes argued that marketing was damage limitation, the art of preventing things from going wrong. If that was the case, then ECSC UK’s marketing of Kwench! had been exemplary.
‘It looks so effortless, doesn’t it,’ Connor said, and, as he spoke, the girls sprang up out of the water, their bodies vertical and seemingly suspended for a moment in mid-air. ‘You have to watch what’s happening below the surface, though. You have to see the work they’re putting in.’ Moving closer to Jimmy, he pointed down into the pool. Jimmy saw the girls’ hands rotating frantically.
Connor shook his head, impressed. ‘They say it’s like running the four hundred metres without breathing.’
‘You don’t notice it, do you,’ Jimmy said. ‘I mean, you’re not supposed to.’
They might have been discussing their own clandestine schemes, Jimmy thought, and, judging by the smile on Connor’s face, he thought so too. During the past few weeks they had developed a peculiar affinity, a kind of understanding; at times they seemed to be able to communicate in code. Connor gripped him briefly by the upper arm, sealing something, and then withdrew into the crowd.