"What more do you want?"
Richardson considered the question. "Well, just when did David say this—during the beef or the apple pie?"
"Is that important?" Freisler's forehead crinkled again. "But obviously it is. ... Well, I will try to recall. ... It was, I think, before the pie, Mr. Richardson."
"Very good, Professor. Now—what happened next?"
"Next?" Freisler paused, his face heavy with concentration.
He was beginning to take the game in earnest at last. "Next it dummy2
was Mr. Howard who spoke."
"The oilman."
"He is in the oil business, yes."
Richardson nodded encouragingly. There was nothing odd about David entertaining oilmen; in his Middle Eastern days he had been as thick as thieves with some of them and he was not a man to jettison good contacts. In fact it was agreed in the Department that half the secret of his success lay in his ability to hold on to them.
"What did he have to say?"
"He disagreed with me. He said—"
"Confined? Don't you believe it, man—you're just plain old-fashioned unpopular. You've been right too many times, and you've said 'I told you so' afterwards. People don't love you for that, David —not in any business."
"Yes. And then?"
"David just grunted. And Lady Deacon asked him how he had won his reputation for foretelling the future so accurately—a silly question, but he couldn't very well grunt at her—"
"All I do is extrapolate on the past and the present, Helen. It isn't too difficult if you have enough accurate information.
The trouble is we seldom have enough to do the job properly, so most of the time I'm just guessing like everyone else.
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Nobody sees into the future. I'm not an astrologer."
"How unromantic!"
"There was a little silence then—what you call an awkward silence, I think. So I took the liberty of pointing out that Adolf Hitler had his astrologer who had not done him very much good. But then Sir Laurie Deacon reminded us that the astrologer Theogenes foretold that young Octavius would succeed Julius Caesar—Octavius went to see him incognito and Theogenes threw himself at his feet—and what had David and I to say to that?"
"And what did you reply to that?"
"I said that Theogenes was no fool and that he would have made it his business to know who Caesar's heir was. And David said—"
"I agree with Theodore—there's always an unromantic reason somewhere. I remember how the news of the blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Irgun back in
'46 came in to London two hours before it happened. One of the big agencies got a flash, and then an hour later it was cancelled. And then an hour later the place was blown apart.
But it wasn't a case of second sight. It was simply that the agency's man was an undercover agent for the Irgun and he knew what was going to happen. Only his friends postponed the job and they forgot to tell him. And the moral of that is that we very seldom know what's actually going on under our dummy2
noses in the present, never mind the future."
"Jolly good, Professor. And what happened next?"
"Ach! Next. . . . Is it you are wanting what we ate now, or what we were saying?"
"Both, for choice."
"So! Well—we ate and we talked . . . after David tells his story of the King David Hotel—yes—comes the housekeeper from the kitchen—"
"Mrs. Clark."
"Mrs. Clark, that is right. She comes with the pudding in a deep dish and the thick cream, and as David's wife serves it she says to Sir Laurie Deacon, 'This is specially for you, Laurie, although it is David's favourite too.' It is made with apples—" Freisler wrinkled his nose in disgust "—and cloves, which spoil the apples for me ... and then the oilman Howard says—"
"I know a character who's got his own private line into the future."
David said: "I take it you mean your boss, Narva."
"Oh—you can laugh, David. But Eugenio Narva is one hell of a smooth operator. And then some."
"I never doubted it. He has remarkable flair for doing the right thing—and not doing the wrong one."
Deacon said: "You mean, like pulling out of Libya when he dummy2
did? That certainly was nicely judged—remarkable is the right word for it. I wish we had done the same."
Faith Audley said: "He got out just before Colonel Gaddafi's coup?"
"Not just before, my dear. Well before would be more accurate, eh Howard?"
"He pulled out sure enough. But that isn't what I meant by the future—I think Gaddafi was as much of a surprise to him as it was to everyone else—"
David Audley said: "Not to me it wasn't."
"Okay—not to you, David. But he didn't have you on his payroll. What I mean is that he got out of Libya because he wanted his ready money for something else."
"The North Sea."
"Right—you're on the button, David. The North Sea . . .
which is a long, long way from the sands of the desert, I can tell you."
Faith Audley said: "I didn't know there were any Italian companies drilling in the North Sea."
"There aren't. Narva didn't go into the exploitation business, he went into the equipment side. He pulled me out of the desert because I cut my teeth on offshore work, I suppose, and I knew roughly what he wanted."
"And what did he want?"
"A middle-man's finger in all the pies that were going—rigs—
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he ordered two of them straight off—and all the paraphernalia that went with 'em. And manpower too—he put all the best men he could lay his hands on under the longest contracts they'd put their crosses on. Technical whizz kids, divers, the lot. What he could get he got. I know, because I spent his money like water."
"And there's profit in this?"
"Faith honey, that's where the money is at the moment. Or where it's going, anyway. You only have to compare the development and production costs. ... I guess it takes a production investment of $100 per barrel a day in the Middle East. But in the North Sea it's going to work out at anything from twenty to seventy times as much —it takes a million pounds just for one exploration well, and that's if the weather's nice and kind. Which it darn well isn't most of the times I've seen it."
Deacon said: "What you're saying, Howard, is that at the moment more money is going into the North Sea than is coming out of it. But that's common knowledge—everyone knew it was going to be a devil to develop. If it wasn't for the political stability of the area compared with the Middle East there'd be a good deal less enthusiasm than there is now, I tell you."
"Sure—everyone knew it was going to be tough. What they didn't know was whether it'ud be profitable."
"Oil exploration's always a gamble. But ever since the Groningen strike—"
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"That's just it: Groningen was a gas field, apart from being safe on land. That's where most of the hopes were—in the gas."
"But they knew oil could be there."
"Hell, of course they did. The gas comes from the carboniferous layers under the sandstone in the Permian rock
—sorry, Faith, I'm going technological now, damn it, aren't I!"
"Geological, anyway. But do carry on, Ian. We're all fascinated."
"So says every good hostess! But I will go on all the same.
You see, you do get oil in the older carboniferous layers onshore, but precious little of it, and drilling in the southern sector early on seemed to bear that out—in the end there was plenty of gas, but precious little oil."
"But they went on looking for it all the same."
"That's because they're oilmen. A good oilman's rather like a gold miner—the next hole's bound to be the end of the rainbow, he always thinks. And yet look at the timing: Groningen was in '58. It wasn't until '65 that Phillips and Shell-Esso and one or two others got the courage to take out licences in Scottish waters.