Underlife by Robert Finn (different e readers txt) 📕

wasn’t arguing with his suggestion. He stood, finding that he was still hunched over — it just seemed too weird not to duck down a little bit, what with all the shooting — but he forced himself to straighten up. He touched Rachel’s shoulder, not exactly sure why, and give her the best smile he could manage, and then began moving towards the gaping door of the rear cab.

*

In that cramped driver’s cab, Kieran hadn’t had much time to think, but that was OK. He’d already done all the thinking he needed to do and made all the decisions he needed to make.

For Kieran, life had divided pretty neatly into two sections. There was his real life, the first one, where everything that happened was fairly normal — and occasionally exceptional — but it all tended to make about as much sense as anyone else’s. And then there was the second part that followed, which was like something Kafka might have come up with if he’d been hungover and in a rush. This second life seemed real enough, but it was strangely twisted and the logic of it often eluded him. Some of the events just seemed to have squirmed their way out of an acid trip and into reality. Not that anyone seemed to do acid any more. But in Kieran’s time it had been big.

He’d been pretty average as a child, though he was brighter than most, and he’d never had much time for rules. But he used his wits to get himself out of most trouble. He’d liked learning and he’d liked books. But he’d liked sex and drugs and rock’n’roll even more — though he’d always compartmentalised, and kept the two separate. And the former paid for the latter. His brains did the work, his body reaped the rewards — or at least felt the effects.

Even in his mid-teens he was insatiable when it came to new experiences, mixing with a much older crowd and often staying out all night. But no matter how much his leisure time was like something from the annals of the Hellfire Club he’d always made sure his studies didn’t suffer.

Towards the end of the Seventies he was at university, attending lectures during the day, and by night living a life that would have blown the minds of his college friends. He was dealing to pay for it all, which is how he knew only too well when the Seventies really came to an end and the Eighties began. Even if you didn’t know what year you were living in you could see the change in the way that the hash and the acid market dried up, and instead of selling tabs and bags of weed to hippies in Afghan coats he was selling a grand’s worth of coke at a time to guys his own age who wore suits that cost more than his car — and drove cars that cost more than his flat. They looked like junior executives but they lived like the Borgias and for a while he found himself starting to get jealous. He was severely tempted to swap dealing for trading. But then he came to his senses.

He was halfway through a PhD in Economics and one day he was talking to a friend about the North Sea oil boom. His friend was explaining how the best place to be in a boom was in the second-tier. If the boom was a gold rush, you sold picks and shovels and mules. If the boom was offshore oil you sold underwater welding equipment or chartered out helicopters. There was less competition, you could charge what you liked and you could probably survive a downturn if you were smart.

That really resonated with Kieran, particularly as he was watching the financial boom of the Eighties get started. He’d been feeling like he had his nose pressed up against the window watching the party from outside in the cold. Right before his eyes, Wall Street and the City were waking up to all sorts of possibilities. They were getting a fetish for high-risk sex with the money markets: leveraged acquisitions, asset stripping, and kinky new ways to securitise or play fast-and-loose with bond issues. Simultaneously the government was flogging off public infrastructure like peddlers on Oxford Street unloading nicked jewellery. It had all the hallmarks of a boom with all the possibilities that entailed.

Kieran quickly forgot about changing jobs; he was better placed exactly where he was, he just had to make a few changes. If anyone managed to pull off the perfect Eighties hat-trick and asset-strip a recently-privatised utility while financing the deal with junk bonds, Kieran wanted to be right there to make sure the adrenaline-crazed twenty-eight-year-old in question was afforded all the appropriate luxuries, comforts and indulgences his ego-less id could desire.

Understanding the markets helped Kieran be in the right place at the right time, and when his customers got rich, so did he. Financially at least, the Eighties were very good to Kieran. By 1988 he owned two clubs and a boutique hotel on the edge of the City, both with members-only areas and private rooms and lots of security. He owned a very prestigious executive dining service that would deliver chilled champagne and fresh Cornish oysters right to your corner office — or whatever else you wanted: the menu was extensive, expensive and typically included little cloisonné boxes of powdered crystals as a side-dish. He also owned two dance studios and a PR firm. Both were legit, but any girls from the dance studios who wanted to earn extra cash could work nights for the PR firm wearing hot pants and draping themselves over new cars or handing out leaflets, whatever was required of them. And if any of the girls needed even more extra cash they could graduate to the third tier of that particular business enterprise — what Kieran euphemistically called ‘executive hospitality’. It dovetailed beautifully with the other businesses, helped him make all the right contacts — and since Kieran’s grasp of finance and accounting exceeded that of anyone in the City of London police force or Special Branch, the chances of him being caught were slimmer than a dance-studio drop-out on a cocaine-only diet.

Kieran was meticulously careful to maintain genuinely profitable and legitimate front companies for all of his lucrative demi-monde ventures — though sometimes reality could outstrip even his most optimistic expectations. For a while his ultra-high-end lunch service threatened to make more money than the drug dealing it was designed to conceal. It was what Kieran’s lecturers would have called ‘negative price elasticity’: you put up your prices and that only increased the demand for your services because it made it clear to everyone on the sidelines that your clients were the real thing: vulgarly, profligately super-rich.

Logistically, financially and creatively the organisation he created was a roaring success. The one area he struggled in was security. In all other ways, every business was complementary to every other one: the girls, the clubs, the hotel, the drugs, the stratospherically priced dining service all overlapped; but security never seemed to fit. His clients wanted things easy, calm, hassle-free, low-key — but at the same time they wanted cast-iron, gold-plated security, so that no one — police, journalists or Kieran’s rival entrepreneurs — could interfere. It was a difficult balancing act. So over the years he hired bouncers, martial artists, ex-policemen, working policemen, ex-army officers, disgraced CIA officers, avaricious KGB agents and out-and-out thugs, and still he never quite felt he’d got that side of things covered.

The fact was that every now and again he would brush up against another crime organisation — usually one much older, larger and nastier than his — and there’d be trouble. Often you didn’t even know who you were dealing with; you just pulled back before you found out. He certainly didn’t want to go head-to-head with anyone. The last thing he needed was shoot-outs and tit-for-tat killings with the Mafia or the Triads or the Yakuza or salt-of-the-earth East End villains. By spending a large slice of his turnover on security, and by constantly innovating his way into new markets, he managed to avoid coming to the attention of any of the big players. As a result, by 1990 he was a very rich man.

But as the Eighties waned, so did he. The change — what his lecturers would have called his personal ‘inflection point’ — was marked by two events, two signs that his fortunes had shifted. One was tiny, the other less so. The larger of the two was still rather on the slight side and took the form of a tall, slim woman with pale skin wearing a beautifully tailored suit who crippled two of Kieran’s meatiest bouncers with an insouciance that was so total and so convincing that it actually made most of what she said to him afterwards seem plausible.

The second omen was far smaller. It was the virus Hepatitis B. Kieran had heard of it but he’d got the distinct impression it wasn’t that bad, which for many people it wasn’t. But in the years to follow he was to revise his initial view a number of times. To begin with, it took him a while to recognise that there was anything wrong with him, because all the symptoms — aches, persistent tiredness, nausea, headaches — were things he expected to feel anyway given the kinds of ‘hobbies’ he would pursue once he was done with the office for the day.

When he tried cutting back a little, taking a few nights off — even getting to bed before midnight on a couple of occasions — his health still didn’t improve, so he went to see a doctor. That was the start of a whole era of visiting doctors, sitting in expensive waiting rooms with good art on the walls, being addressed by attractive receptionists with immaculate manners who still managed to be just as unwelcoming as the stressed-out old bats he remembered from when he was a kid waiting to see the family GP.

Initially he was told it was alcohol poisoning or ‘substance abuse’ or chronic fatigue. Reluctantly he began to cut back even more on his recreations. As his symptoms got worse he mounted ever more drastic incursions into the land of healthy living. After one very memorable six-week period in a ‘celebrity retreat’, during which he consumed nothing more exciting and harmful than camomile tea, his Harley Street specialist eventually concluded he had a chronic viral infection.

It was around this time he had his visit from the tall, pale, insanely-dangerous woman in the grey Donna Karan pinstripe. She didn’t stay long, but she made him the most extraordinary proposal he had ever heard. She said she represented a group of people with pretty much unlimited reach and influence who, while they had no interest in working for a living, rather liked having money and power. She proposed that they take over the ownership of his business, though not its day-to-day running. He could remain in place, draw a handsome salary and give the lion’s share of the profits to them.

While he was not an aggressive man, he hadn’t grown wealthy living on the wrong side of the law by being soft. Whatever the truth of her claims, it didn’t do for people to think you were a pushover. He squared up to her, ready to put on a show of righteous anger — all the while hoping that whoever was supposed to be watching the door downstairs still had enough unbroken fingers to dial a telephone and call in some reinforcements. But astonishingly he found he couldn’t move, could hardly breathe. It was the first of many such surreal experiences, and while they never ceased to be troubling, he eventually began to