He looked like he wanted to say something else, but the closing doors cut him off. He didn’t try to stop them this time.
By the time the lift reached the fifth floor, Ellie had recovered enough composure to believe she wouldn’t start sobbing at the first colleague she saw. Idiot, she told herself. Of course you’re not like them.
She still needed another minute before she faced Blanchard. She crossed the empty hall and leaned against the windowsill. The building stood around a central courtyard, like a school or a prison: from the internal window, she could look right down into it. A dove preened itself on the rooftop opposite.
It made her realise something. Pushing her nose against the glass to see down, she counted the floors of the bank. Ground, first, second, third, fourth, fifth — but when she looked up, there was only a flat roof.
No sixth floor.
She shook her head to clear the confusion. An old place like this has plenty to hide. She found a tissue in her bag and dabbed her eyes, just to make sure no rogue tears had crept out to betray her. Then she went to find Blanchard.
Blanchard was out. He’d left a note on her desk apologising: a cream notecard with the bank’s crest stamped into it. His handwriting was a quaint, Victorian cursive that slanted across the page in spidery lines. The paper had absorbed his scent: when Ellie picked it up to read it she caught a breath of something floral, and a darker, bitter note underneath. Overnight, the stack of files on her desk had grown several inches higher.
She tapped her passcode into the laptop and opened it. Locked, the seam between the lid and the body was all but invisible. There was no brand or manufacturer’s mark on the anthracite-black shell — only the smudges of her own finger-prints. She opened the e-mail program, the way Destrier had shown her.
93 new messages.
But I only just started. Apart from Blanchard, she didn’t recognise any of the senders.
The door blew open without a knock. A man in a blue suit and a pink shirt barged through and deposited three more inch-thick files on the front of her desk. His eyes were puffy, his cheeks raw-veined from drink. His hair was parted down the middle and swept back, clustered into fronds by the gel.
‘Lockthwaite,’ he barked. ‘I need two copies of each by lunchtime.’
Without elaborating, he spun on his heel and walked out.
Ellie stared at what he’d left, at the wall of folders already barricading her desk, then back to her computer screen.
99 new messages.
She felt the blood rising in her cheeks again. Calm down, she told herself. But her pulse only raced faster. Think.
The photocopier had its own room down the corridor. It didn’t seem to be on; Ellie wasted several vital minutes trying to open it, until she noticed the slot just under the rim. She slid her card in. Red lights flashed on the console; a green glow seeped out from under the lid as the machine growled into life, like a dragon woken in its cave.
Whoever put the file together hadn’t meant it to be copied. Most of the papers were stapled together; many were irregular sizes, small notes or flimsy carbons that blew off the copier if Ellie so much as breathed. She had her laptop balanced on the edge of the machine to work on her e-mails, but it was impossible. The copier devoured the paper and spat it out faster than she could keep feeding it. After twenty minutes she’d hardly dented the first file, while rereading the same paragraph of the same e-mail three times over.
‘What are you doing here?’
Blanchard stood in the doorway. He had a cigar in his mouth; a small mound of ash at his feet suggested he’d been watching her for some moments. He looked angry.
‘Who told you to do this?’
‘I think his name was Lockthwaite.’
‘Sachervell. Lockthwaite is the client. Can’t you read?’ Blanchard pointed to the label on the front of the folder. He swept it up one-handed and stormed out of the room. By the time Ellie had grabbed her laptop and followed, he was in an office halfway down the corridor delivering a furious lecture about the proper use of resources. Ellie hung back. A minute later, Blanchard reappeared.
‘Come with me.’
Through the open door, she saw the man whose name wasn’t Lockthwaite standing behind his desk. His face had grown several shades redder. He shot her a murderous look as she passed.
Blanchard marched her to the lift.
‘Many things have changed in our profession, but some unenlightened attitudes persist. They will make things difficult for you; they will see you are a woman and assume you must be a secretary. They are conditioned to think that way: you cannot change it, any more than the mouse can charm a cat. So you must resist them. Force them to accept that they cannot dictate to you. Power is the only language they understand.’
They’d come out in the lobby. Blanchard’s car sat waiting outside.
‘We’re late for the meeting.’ He saw Ellie’s blank look and gave an exasperated click of his tongue. ‘Didn’t you read your e-mails?’
Once, the city had been called the Gibraltar of northern Europe. From the moment in the dark ages when Count Siegfried built his castle on the cliffs above two dizzy ravines, eight centuries of human ingenuity had made it impregnable. Now most of the walls were gone; tourists manned what was left. The city’s best defences were the invisible ramparts that protected its banks, complex laws and absolute discretion, hoarding the riches safe inside.
But the ravines remained. Pleasure parks filled the bottom, while traffic thundered overhead across the high Romanesque spans of the Viaduc and the Pont Adolphe. Which was where, on a wet evening in early September, two men walked and argued.
One was a tall man, in a long black coat and a black homburg hat that, even in Luxembourg, was at least forty years out of date. It cast a deep shadow over his face. The other was shorter and rounder, in a shapeless blue mackintosh that did nothing for his figure. He had no hat, and had forgotten his umbrella. The rain slicked his hair against his scalp and ran down the side of his nose like sweat.
‘Why did you change the meeting?’ the tall man asked.
Lemmy Maartens wiped water from his eyes. He was trembling.
‘I thought I was being followed.’
The tall man glanced up and down the long pavement. They were walking with the flow of traffic, so that the headlights of the passing cars only shone on their backs. A hundred metres back a man was straggling behind them, his face hunched over a sodden map. He wore a white plastic poncho, the sort that tourists buy if they get caught out by the weather. It made him look like a ghost. About twenty metres ahead, a homeless man sat on a piece of cardboard wrapped in a blanket. Otherwise, the bridge was empty.
Lemmy gestured to the man with the map. ‘Do you think he’s watching us?’
‘Don’t worry about him.’ The tall man quickened his pace. Lemmy glanced over his shoulder again, almost as if he was expecting someone.
‘What did you find?’
The question was urgent, verging on desperate. Lemmy, a keen student of human weakness, saw his opportunity.
‘The money first.’
The tall man didn’t try to argue. He pulled a packet from inside his coat and passed it to Lemmy. A brown envelope — Jesus, Lemmy thought, these people had no imagination. He rubbed it between finger and thumb, feeling the thickness of the wad inside.
As a rule, Lemmy preferred electronic transfers. With the Internet, he could conjure money in and out of sight in seconds. Cash was more substantial. But for this amount, it was worth the effort.
They’d come to within a couple of metres of the homeless man. Lemmy stopped and tore open the envelope. If he felt any shame counting so much money in front of a man whose entire wealth sat in a Styrofoam cup by his feet, he didn’t show it.