Burgess meant Jenny Fuller, as he knew damn well. Banks managed a smile, remembering what happened the last time those two met. “St. Corona,” he said. “You were saying?”
Burgess pouted. “You’re no fun. Know who the president is?”
“What is this, bloody ‘Mastermind’? Martin Churchill. Now, if you’ve got something to tell me, get it off your chest and let me go home. It’s been a long day.”
“Back to that lovely wife of yours, eh? Sandra, isn’t it? All right, all right. St. Corona is a republic, and you’re right, Martin Churchill is president for life. Good name for the job, don’t you think?”
“I’ve read about him.”
“Yes, well, the poor sod’s a bit beleaguered these days, what with the opposition parties raking up the muck and the independence and liberation movements going from strength to strength.” He sighed. “I don’t know. It seems people just don’t believe in a good old benevolent dictatorship anymore.”
“Benevolent, my arse,” said Banks. “He’s been bleeding the country dry for ten years and now they’re closing in on him. What am I supposed to do, cry?”
Burgess glared at Banks through squinting eyes. “Still the bloody pinko, huh? Still the limp-wristed, knee-jerking liberal?” He sighed. “Somehow, Banks, I hadn’t expected you to change. That’s partly why I’m here. Anyway, whatever you or I might think about it, the powers that be decided it was a good idea to have a stable government in that part of the world, someone we could trust. Of course, it doesn’t seem quite so important now, with the Russkies swapping their rusty old atomic warheads for turnips, but other threats exist. Anyway, Britain, France, Canada, the States and a few others pumped millions into St. Corona over the years, so you can estimate how important it is to us.”
Banks listened intently. There could be no rushing Burgess; he would get where he was going in his own sweet time.
“Churchill’s finished,” Burgess went on with a sweeping hand gesture. “It’s just a matter of time. Weeks… months. He knows it. We know it. The only thing now is for him to get out alive with his family while he still can and take up life in exile.”
“And he wants to come here?”
Burgess looked around at the chess players and The Headrow. “Well, I don’t think he’s got the north of England in mind specifically, but you’re on the right track. Maybe a nice little retirement villa in Devon or Cornwall, the English Riviera. Somewhere where the weather’s nice. Cultivate his herbaceous borders. Live out his days in the contemplation of nature. Prepare himself for the life hereafter. Make his peace with the Almighty. That kind of thing. Somewhere he won’t do any more harm.” Burgess lit another little cigar and spat out a flake of loose tobacco. “The Yanks have said no, but then they’ve got a good record of turning their backs on their mates. The French are dithering and jabbering and waving their arms about, as usual. They’d probably sneak him in the back door like the good little hypocrites they are, if they had any real incentive left. And the Canadians… well, they’re just too fucking moral for their own good. The bottom line, Banks, is that there’s a lot of pressure on our government to take him in, as quietly as possible, of course.”
“Sneak him in the back door, you mean, like the hypocritical French?”
“If you like.”
“His human rights record is appalling,” Banks said. “The infant mortality rate in St. Corona is over fifteen percent, for a start. Life expectancy isn’t much more than fifty for a man and sixty for a woman.”
“Oh, dear, dear. You’ve been reading The Guardian again, haven’t you, Banks?”
“And other papers. The story’s the same.”
“Well, you should know better than to believe all you read in the papers, shouldn’t you?” Burgess looked around conspiratorially and lowered his voice. Nobody seemed in the least bit interested in them. Laughter and fragments of conversation filled the air. “Have you ever wondered,” he said, “why women always seem to have a higher life expectancy rate than men? Don’t they have as many bad habits as we do? Maybe they just don’t work as hard, don’t suffer as much stress? Maybe it’s all that slimming and aerobics, eh? Maybe there’s something in it.
“Anyway, back to Mr. Churchill’s predicament. And this is classified, by the way. There are some people in power who want him here, who feel we owe him, and there are some who don’t, who feel he’s a low-life scumbag and deserves to die as slowly and painfully as possible.” As usual, Burgess liked to show off his American slang. He went to the States often, on “courses.”
“Oh, come off it,” said Banks. “If they want him here it’s not out of any sense of duty, it’s because he’s got something they want, or because he’s got something on them.”
Burgess scratched his cheek. “Cynic,” he said. “But you’re partly right. He’s not a nice man. As far as I can gather he’s a glutton, a boor, a murderer and a rapist, sodomy preferred. But that’s not the issue at all. The problem is that we educated him, made him what he is. Eton and Cambridge. He read law there. Did you know that? He went through school and university with a lot of important people, Banks. Cabinet ministers, bankers, power brokers, backroom boys. You know how people can behave indiscreetly when they’re young? Do things they wouldn’t want to come back and haunt them when they’re in the public eye? And we’re talking about people who have the power to loosen the government purse strings now and then, whenever St. Corona asks for more aid. And rumor has it that he’s also got quite a nice little savings account that won’t do our economy any harm at all.”
“Let me guess,” said Banks. “Laundered money?”
Burgess raised his eyebrows. “Well, of course. Which brings me to the murder of Keith Rothwell. You are senior field investigator, I understand?”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I thought I’d better deal with you in person. I know you, Banks. You’re still a pinko liberal, as you’ve proved time and time again. In fact, as soon as they told me you were on the case, I thought, ‘Oh, fuck we’re in trouble.’ You’ve no respect for the venerable institutions of government, or for the necessity of secrecy in some of their workings. You’ve got no respect for tradition and you don’t give a toss about preserving the natural order of things. You probably don’t even stand up for ‘God Save the Queen.’ In short, you’re a bloody bolshie troublemaker and a menace to national security.”
Banks smiled. “Thanks for the compliment,” he said. “But I wouldn’t go quite that far.”
Burgess grinned. “Maybe I exaggerate. But you get my point?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Good. That’s why I’m going to tell you something very, very important and very, very secret, and I’m going to trust you with it. We’ve been keeping an eye on the St. Corona situation, and anything that could possibly have to do with Martin Churchill gets flagged. Now, we just got a report from your Fraud Squad late yesterday evening that they found something on Keith Rothwell’s computer that indicates he may have been laundering money for Martin Churchill. Lots of trips to the Channel Islands and the Caribbean. Some very dodgy bank accounts. Some very dodgy banks, too, for that matter. Anyway, there’s a pattern and a time period that matches exactly the sort of thing we’ve been looking for. We’ve known this was going on for some time, but until now we hadn’t a clue who was doing it. There’s no proof it was Rothwell, yet – the Fraud Squad still has a lot of work to do, chasing down transactions and what have you – but if I’m right, then we’re talking about a lot of money. Something in the region of thirty or forty million pounds over three or four years. Mostly money that was originally provided as aid by leading western nations. It’s the same kind of thing Baby Doc did in Haiti.”
“And you think this might have something to do with Rothwell’s murder?”