The man sitting opposite him was short and round, with a puffy red face and small brown eyes. He had long since outgrown his suit and the fabric creased violently around his shoulders and across his arched back. His cracked black leather belt could not hide the fact that he wore his trousers with the top button undone.
“Bravo, Monsieur Reinaud!” Van Simson slapped the table in appreciation. “Quite so. The Knights Templar drained it in the eleventh century. Who would have thought then, that in the Middle Ages it would emerge at the epicenter of French political life? That aristocratic families would build their massive houses on its narrow streets so as to be near their King?”
Reinaud nodded awkwardly, as if unsure if he should say something. Van Simson put his glass down, stood up and crossed to the other side of the room so that Reinaud had to shuffle around in his chair to see him. He was wearing a blazer over dark gray flannel trousers, his white shirt open at the neck. He wore no socks, his bare feet clad in a pair of brown suede moccasins.
Four large windows had been set into the wall and in between each one was a different Chagall painting, each illuminated by a single recessed spotlight that made the colors glow as if the image had been projected onto the space, rather than merely hung there.
“Of course, over the years, most of those grand houses were carved up into apartments or shops or offices or simply knocked down,” Van Simson continued, gazing out the window at the courtyard below. “Why, this very house was a ramshackle assortment of restaurants, craft shops, and dance studios before I bought them all out and had the place reconverted.”
“Monsieur Van Simson, this is all very interesting, but I fail to understand how this is relevant to—”
“Have you seen this?” Van Simson walked over to the white architectural model that stood in a glass display case in the middle of the room. Reinaud heaved himself to his feet with a sigh and walked over.
“What is it?”
“Surely you recognize it?”
Reinaud frowned as he studied the layout of the streets. A shopping mall, a car park, office buildings, luxury apartments around an artificial lake. Suddenly, his eyes narrowed.
“Never! I’ve told you, I’ll never allow it!”
Van Simson smiled.
“Things change, Monsieur Reinaud. A swamp can grow to become the site of a royal palace; an aristocrat’s home can decay into a slum. It is time for this land to evolve. You’re only fooling yourself if you think you can stand in the way of progress.”
“No, you’re the one fooling yourself with your lawyers and accountants,” Reinaud fired back, taking a step closer to him. “There will be no sale. Not now, not ever.”
Van Simson sighed. Nodding slowly, he reached into his inside jacket pocket and drew out a large checkbook that he laid flat on the display case. Unscrewing the lid of a silver fountain pen, he looked up at Reinaud with a smile.
“You are a tough negotiator, Monsieur Reinaud, I’ll give you that. But come now, enough of this… ” He searched for the appropriate word. “… posturing. I have the planning permission. Everyone else has accepted my terms. My men have already broken ground on the first phase of this project. Yours is the only outstanding plot. How much do you want?”
“The price is not the issue,” Reinaud spluttered. “My family have lived on this land for six hundred years. My ancestors lie buried in its soil as I and my children and their children will one day. To us, this is more than just land. It’s our birthright. Our inheritance. Its spirit runs through our veins. It’s not a cell on a spreadsheet, not a footnote in your annual report. We will never sell it. I would rather die than see this… this monstrosity come into being.”
Van Simson’s smile faded, his face creasing and narrowing into a point, furrows of anger carved in neat, vertical lines across his cheeks. Under his blazer, he could sense his shirt beginning to stick to his back. He walked over to his desk, had another sip of his whiskey, the ice tinkling against the crystal.
Suddenly, he spun round and in one violent movement hurled the glass across the room as hard as he could. It shot through the air, whistling past Reinaud’s head, crashing into the wall. The heavy base smashed on impact, an exploding petal of glass shards. Just for a moment, as the light caught them, hundreds of tiny rainbows fluttered through the air before falling to the floor.
“That tumbler was one of a pair salvaged from the first-class lounge of the Titanic. The only ones to have survived. Your stubbornness has just cost me a hundred thousand dollars,” Van Simson hissed, advancing toward a now white-faced Reinaud. “You mean nothing to me, Reinaud.” He snapped his fingers. “Certainly less than that glass. Defy me and you will find out what it means to stand in my way. Now for the last time, what is your price?”
On the other side of the room, whiskey ran down the wall in dark rivulets, pooling amidst the shattered glass. Against the pale brown carpet, it looked like blood.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Tom made his way through the gravestones, the cracked and threadbare path snaking its way down the hill. In a couple of places the tarmac had worn away completely and here the surface of an earlier, cobbled path shone through, the stones brightly polished where generations of heavy-hearted feet had stumbled over them. He clutched a bunch of carnations to his side, bought from the florist outside the tube station.
There was a time when he could have recited from memory the names on most of the tombstones between the upper gate and his mother’s grave. They jutted out from the fleshy earth like teeth, some overlapping, others separated by wide gaps, decaying according to the seasons in the wind and the sun and the cold. Here and there plastic flowers leered from rain-filled jam jars. In the distance, the distinctive scepter of the BT Tower rose above the city’s concrete ooze.
The solid black marble slab nestled snugly in the grass, sheltered by the drooping branches of a willow and the tangled undergrowth that concealed the crumbling cemetery wall. The gilding that had been painted into the carved inscription still shone brightly and Tom ran his fingers over the letters, silently tracing her name. Remembering. She would have been sixty that day.
Rebecca Laura Kirk
née Duval
Everyone had told him at the time that it wasn’t his fault, that it was just one of those things. An accident, a terrible tragedy. Even the coroner had played it down, blaming mechanical failure, before suggesting that his mother had been at best reckless for letting a thirteen-year-old boy drive, even if it was just a short distance down a normally quiet road. For a moment he had almost believed them.
But the look in his father’s eyes at her funeral, the anger that had shone through the tears when he’d hugged him, convinced Tom that he, at least, thought otherwise. That if she had let him drive, then it was because Tom had begged and bawled until she had relented. That he had as good as killed her. When he was much older, he often wondered whether when his father had hugged him so tightly that day, he had really been trying to suffocate him.
Tom closed his eyes, subconsciously toying with the ivory chess piece key ring in his pocket that his father had given him a few weeks before he died. He breathed in deeply through his nose, finding the smell of freshly turned earth and cut grass comforting. It reminded him of long, lazy summer afternoons in the garden, before all that. Before he had been abandoned to his loneliness. And his guilt. Because after that day, his father had never hugged him again.
“There’s a bloody fortune in marble here.” A familiar voice broke into Tom’s thoughts. “I know a bloke who’d take all these off our hands.” An impossible voice. “He just splits the top layer off and reengraves ’em. Buyers never know the difference.” A voice that had no right being there.