‘Except that Isabel is free. He’ll know that by now.’
‘Yes,’ said Luís, thoughtfully. ‘I expect he will.’
We were silent for a moment, each one of us thinking what Ricardo would do next. ‘Did you ask Francisco about him?’ Luís inquired eventually.
‘No, I didn’t. Francisco was pretty clever, really. He never admitted any involvement with the kidnapping himself, let alone the involvement of anyone else.’
‘And you just let him go?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I had promised him I would. And, besides, Nelson said it would get very messy with the authorities if we tried to get them to prosecute him.’
Luís sighed. ‘A shame, but I understand. One day I’ll make him pay.’
‘You’ll make Ricardo pay today,’ I said.
Luís chuckled. ‘Ah, yes.’
‘Have you decided how much to bid, Papai?’ Isabel asked.
‘Not yet,’ said Luís. ‘It depends on the strength of the market. We’ll decide just before the auction.’
‘When’s that?’
‘Five o’clock. At Dekker Ward’s office in the City.’
‘Can we come?’ Isabel asked. ‘We’ll keep out of the way.’
‘Of course,’ said Luís. ‘I want you to see this, whether it works or not. Come and meet us at Gurney Kroheim, when you are ready.’
Luís dropped us off at the Savoy. He had booked us into separate rooms, of course.
‘What time shall we meet?’ I asked Isabel. ‘Would you like a rest?’
Isabel smiled that wicked little smile that made my heart melt. She shook her head. ‘Say, two minutes?’
‘I’ll be there,’ I said.
It was an hour and a half before we left the Savoy for the City. We could have stayed there all day, but we didn’t want to miss Luís’s bid deliberations.
Gurney Kroheim’s offices were a hundred yards away from Dekker Ward’s, in the heart of the City. Their meeting room was more like Dekker’s than Bloomfield Weiss’s. A couple of baronets in top hats watched over the route to the room, but once there, the pictures were Victorian landscapes, originals subtly illuminated. The room gleamed with polished wood. But there was no chance of ever mistaking Gurney Kroheim’s offices for a country house. Most of the great and good of British industry had certainly visited here, but to do battle with each other, to eat and be eaten.
The room was crowded. Luís was sitting next to one of his partners, Sergio Prenzman, who had borne the brunt of the work of putting the bid together while Luís was distracted by Isabel’s kidnap. Next to him were two earnest associates who had spent night after night feeding numbers into computers. Also round the table were two Dutch bankers from KBN, a couple of lawyers, and a team of three from Gurney Kroheim, led by a director, Charles Scott-Liddell.
Luís introduced his daughter with pride, and me with thanks as the man who had secured her release. There were broad smiles all round. As well as working for Luís, it was clear that these City professionals liked him.
‘You’ve arrived at a good time,’ Luís said. ‘We’re just about to discuss the price.’
We sat at two empty chairs at the other end of the long board table. All eyes were turned to Luís.
‘So, Charles, what have we got?’
Scott-Liddell, every inch the smooth merchant banker, examined the sheets of figures in front of him.
‘Well, we’ve plugged today’s market prices for the bond portfolio into the model. As we suspected, it makes quite a difference. Using method one we get a valuation of sixty-three million pounds, and using method two...’ he paused as he flipped through the papers in front of him ‘... seventy-two million.’
Things had moved on from the twenty million that had been talked about the previous week. The market must have improved, I thought.
Sergio butted in. ‘I’m much happier with method one than method two. I don’t trust these discounted cash-flow valuations for a stockbroker. They make no sense to me.’
Luís smiled. ‘I know, Sergio. But an opportunity like this will only come once. If we can get Dekker Ward, Banco Horizonte will become the first truly international investment bank in Latin America. That has to be worth something. What did we say was the maximum we could afford?’
‘Seventy-five would be the limit,’ said Sergio. ‘Beyond that, our capital ratios would be stretched. You know how we’ve always kept a conservative balance sheet. But seventy-five million would be too much to pay for Dekker anyway.’
Luís stared at the numbers. Then he stood up and walked over to the window, looking down on the lunch-time London traffic.
With his back to the room he said, ‘We’ll bid eighty million pounds.’
31
The first person I saw as I followed Luís into the Dekker Ward boardroom was Sidney Stahl, perched on a chair, a cigar in his mouth. ‘Hi, guys!’ he croaked, with a grin. A gloating grin. He thinks he’ll beat us, I thought instantly. Behind him was Dwight Godfrey, who avoided my eyes.
We walked further into the room. Kerton rose from behind the table to greet us, some envelopes in front of him. I ignored him. My attention was grabbed by the man sitting next to him, legs crossed, calmly smoking a cigarette.
Ricardo.
Kerton was making introductions, and fussing over Isabel, but I wasn’t listening. What the hell was Ricardo doing here? Then I glanced quickly at the envelopes in front of Lord Kerton. There were three.
Ricardo was speaking to me. ‘Good afternoon, Nick, Luís,’ he said. And then, when he saw Isabel, ‘I’m so pleased to see you. I didn’t know you’d been released.’
I didn’t say anything. I just collapsed into a seat next to Luís.
There were a number of other people there: lawyers, advisers, that sort of thing. We’d brought a lot of them with us. But I didn’t really take them in. The only person in the room for me was Ricardo. Even though he was an interloper, he had the air of someone in complete control, not just of himself but of all of us in the room.
‘Thank you for coming in person,’ Lord Kerton said. ‘It seemed the best way to do this. Then you would at least know that you were both being treated fairly,’ he addressed this to Stahl and Luís. ‘This morning I received a call from Ricardo, asking if he could put a bid in for the firm. I couldn’t really refuse, so I invited him along.’
Of course I wasn’t surprised that Ricardo had found out about the auction. And it was just like him to take the initiative, and not sit idly by while his firm was sold underneath him. But it was still a shock to see him there, competing with us for Dekker.
‘I object!’ said Stahl. ‘I admit I was kinda surprised to see Ricardo here. But I thought he was just here to watch, not to bid.’
‘Well, Sid, he’s put together a bid of his own,’ Kerton said. ‘A sort of management buy-out, you could call it. Or I think you would term it a leveraged buy-out.’
Kerton pronounced leveraged the British way, lee-vraged, to irritate Stahl. He succeeded.
‘Well, I don’t like it. You change the ground rules on me and I’m outa here!’
‘I don’t think I mentioned how many participants there would be when I invited you to bid. You just assumed that there would be two. Well, there are three. If you wish to withdraw your bid or change it, you are free to do so.’
Damn! If Stahl changed his bid because he knew Ricardo was there, then it would only be upwards, and leave us with even less chance of victory. Lord Kerton was being quite canny.
Stahl thought for a moment. He pulled on his cigar, and coughed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Our bid stays as it is right there in that envelope. I’m not gonna let you ambush me into paying you more than I have to for this shit-heap.’