Raf knows Isaac might be right, but at the same time he feels certain, as certain as he’s ever felt of anything, that right now Cherish is in the back of a white van, or somewhere even worse, with Theo. He thinks of her in a dark room, in front of a camera, motionless and naked and very clean.
‘Still, congratulations on finding a girl who will spend an evening just sitting in your flat getting wasted with you for fun,’ adds Isaac. ‘They are the best kind.’
‘Anything else whatsoever?’ says the guy in the suit. ‘So far this has been, once again, a total bloody waste of time. My fault, I suppose. Fool me once, and so on.’
‘She left this note.’ Raf passes it over.
‘Do you know what this means?’
‘No. But read the top. She must have needed me to keep it safe.’
The guy sighs. ‘So this piece of paper is the only concrete asset you have to show me? This is truly all you have?’
‘Yeah.’
He folds it up. ‘I’ll have to keep it, of course. I’ll get it translated by one of our analysts.’
‘No,’ says Raf. ‘I need it back.’
The guy looks at the note, looks at the front door, looks at Raf — then he jumps to his feet and tries to make a getaway.
‘Hey!’ shouts Isaac. And that’s when his flatmate, without even looking up from her knitting, sticks out her slender right leg, and the guy topples forward and smacks his nose on the brass rim of the peephole in the front door.
‘Oh, wow, Hiromi!’ says Isaac. ‘Wow! Cheers, darling!’ With help from Raf, who now feels guilty for assuming that Isaac didn’t know the names of his flatmates, he hauls the guy back to the sofa. ‘Let’s tie the cunt up.’
‘No, that absolutely, absolutely won’t be necessary,’ says the guy. He hands over the note and then finds a paper napkin in his pocket to wipe a trickle of blood from his upper lip. And he does look defeated, sitting there with a red postmark stamped on the bridge of his nose. So instead Raf and Isaac just stand over him.
‘Who are you really?’ says Raf.
‘My full name is Mark Edmund Fourpetal.’
‘Do you really work for MI6 or whatever?’
‘MI6?’ Fourpetal laughs. ‘No. Quite a long way from MI6. I’m in PR.’
‘What do you know about the white vans?’
‘Not much. They’re kidnapping Burmese men, as I told you last time. I don’t know why. But they have something to do with my former employer. An American firm called Lacebark.’
‘Lacebark are a mining company,’ says Raf.
‘Yes, but they’re vertically integrated. Everything’s in-house now. Including corporate security.’
‘And they’re chasing you?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Outside McDonald’s. That van. You were scared.’
Fourpetal nods. ‘Yes. Do you know Burckhardt’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy?’ He gestures at himself. ‘?“What a man of uncommon gifts and high position can be made by the passion of fear is here shown with what may be called a mathematical completeness.”?’
Fourpetal explains that it’s not as if he’d dreamed since boyhood of getting a job in the mining industry. In the school playground when he was eight or nine they’d often pretended to fight the Battle of Orgreave and nobody ever wanted to be the miners. But he hadn’t had any choice. After eleven years in financial PR, Fourpetal had developed a reputation as ‘the most craven, two-faced, back-stabbing little wank stain that’s ever sat in a fucking swivel chair’, in the invigoratingly candid words of one former colleague after a night out in a strip club near Liverpool Street. And you couldn’t build that sort of brand overnight.
In fact, by a certain metric, he could trace his downfall all the way back to his first job after university, when he found himself working alongside a chinless Northern boy called Drummers who seemed quite likely to get promoted above him in the near future because he spent about ninety hours a week in the office. One day, Fourpetal took Drummers aside and told him that if he really wanted to get himself noticed he should offer their boss a few lines of good coke next time they were all in a bar. Drummers thanked him warmly for the advice, unaware that their boss had taken against drugs with an almost cultic fury ever since an overdose at a New Year’s Eve party had left his horsy niece with permanent brain damage. Soon afterwards, Drummers left the firm. Unfortunately, he did not leave the industry. Instead, he dragged himself, mangled and frostbitten, from the ravine and eight years later was recruited to a senior position at the company where Fourpetal now worked. On his first day, he called Fourpetal into his office and explained that in the next round of recession-related redundancies the company was going to have to wave goodbye to five trainees, two receptionists, and one account manager. That account manager was, of course, Fourpetal. Drummers said this with an expression of such tremulant ecstasy that Fourpetal genuinely wondered if he might have been masturbating under his desk.
Afterwards, looking for another job, Fourpetal found that Drummers wasn’t the only one with a Fourpetal story. Everyone, evidently, had a Fourpetal story. Sometimes even Fourpetal himself wasn’t sure quite how he’d found the time to fuck over that many people in little more than a decade. Nonetheless, he knew his reputation was unfair. Like a valet who beats his wife every night in loyal imitation of his master, the London financial PR industry had hurried to adopt the special ruthlessness of the investment banks it serviced even though it had none of the same salary incentives. Fourpetal didn’t believe for a second he was worse than all the others. Rather, he had become a scapegoat, and that was why every door in London had been shut in his face. For a while he thought about going to America, but he knew that in a recession he’d never find a company to sponsor him for an employment visa. And he didn’t like the sound of Hong Kong or Doha. So he decided he’d just have to move out of financial PR into a sector where nobody knew him. The other advantage would be that he wouldn’t so often find himself in meetings with people he remembered from boarding school.
He applied for about twenty jobs, hoping to find a company that wouldn’t check his references too closely. In the interview with Lacebark Mining, he had expected to talk about copper and gems, but in fact they asked him how much he knew about EBB’s work for Kazakhstan or Poxham Toller’s work for Zimbabwe, so he bluffed his way through that instead. And in his first week, he discovered he wasn’t really going to be doing European PR for Lacebark. He was going to be doing European PR for Burma.
In the past, the Burmese regime itself had employed several different agencies, but no one would work for them any more because they always reneged on their fees. Lacebark was willing to step in, however, because it was getting more and more awkward for the company and its investors that the landlord of its Gandayaw mine was basically perceived as a more bumbling version of Nazi Germany. A coordinated media and lobbying strategy could punch a few big airholes in the tight lid of their trading conditions. The atmosphere in the corporate communications department in London was strange, because you were obliged to make the occasional wry joke about Burma’s mad generals, otherwise you seemed like a pushover, but you weren’t supposed to bring up the 1988 massacres or the arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi, otherwise you got a lot of resentful looks. And of course you had to remember to say ‘Myanmar’ instead of ‘Burma’ (although for some reason never ‘Myanmarese’). Fourpetal’s first assignment was to find a human-rights organisation working in south-east Asia that would take a grant from Lacebark and then put out a press release about it, which took longer than it was probably worth.