Banker

OCTOBER

Gordon was back at work with his faintly trembling left hand usually out of sight and unnoticeable.
During periods of activity, as on the day at Ascot, he seemed to forget to camouflage, but at other times he had taken to sitting forwards in a hunched way over his desk with his hand anchored down between his thighs. I thought it a pity. I thought the tremor so slight that none of the others would have remarked on it, either aloud or to themselves, but to Gordon it was clearly a burden.
Not that it seemed to have affected his work. He had come back in July with determination, thanked me briskly in the presence of the others for my stop-gapping and taken all major decisions off my desk and back to his.
John asked him, also in the hearing of Alec, Rupert and myself, to make it clear to us that it was he, John, who was the official next-in-line to Gordon, if the need should occur again. He pointed out that he was older and had worked much longer in the bank than I had. Tim, he said, shouldn’t be jumping the queue.
Gordon eyed him blandly and said that if the need arose no doubt the chairman would take every factor into consideration. John made bitter and audible remarks under his breath about favouritism and unfair privilege, and Alec told him ironically to find a merchant bank where there wasn’t a nephew or some such on the force.
‘Be your age,’ he said. ‘Of course they want the next generation to join the family business. Why shouldn’t they? It’s natural.’ But John was unplacated, and didn’t see that his acid grudge against me was wasting a lot of his time. I seemed to be continually in his thoughts. He gave me truly vicious looks across the room and took every opportunity to sneer and denigrate. Messages never got passed on, and clients were given the impression that I was incompetent and only employed out of family charity. Occasionally on the telephone people refused to do business with me, saying they wanted John, and once a caller said straight out, ‘Are you that playboy they’re shoving ahead over better men’s heads?’
John’s gripe was basically understandable: in his place I’d have been cynical myself. Gordon did nothing to curb the escalating hate campaign and Alec found it funny. I thought long and hard about what to do and decided simply to work harder. I’d see it was very difficult for John to make his allegations stick.
His aggression showed in his body, which was roundedly muscular and looked the wrong shape for a city suit. Of moderate height, he wore his wiry brown hair very short so that it bristled above his collar, and his voice was loud, as if he thought volume equated authority: and so it might have done in schoolroom or on barrack square, instead of on a civilised patch of carpet.
He had come into banking via business school with high ambitions and good persuasive skills. I sometimes thought he would have made an excellent export salesman, but that wasn’t the life he wanted. Alec said that John got his kicks from saying ‘I am a merchant banker’ to pretty girls and preening himself in their admiration.
Alec was a wicked fellow, really, and a shooter of perceptive arrows.
There came a day in October when three whirlwind things happened more or less simultaneously. The cartoonist telephoned; What’s Going On Where It Shouldn’t landed with a thud throughout the City; and Uncle Freddie descended on Ekaterin’s for a tour of inspection.
To begin with the three events were unconnected, but by the end of the day, entwined.
I heard the cartoonist’s rapid opening remarks with a sinking heart. ‘I’ve engaged three extra animators and I need five more,’ he said. ‘Ten isn’t nearly enough. I’ve worked out the amount of increased loan needed to pay them all.’
‘Wait,’ I said.
He went right on. ‘I also need more space, of course, but luckily that’s no problem, as there’s an empty warehouse next to this place. I’ve signed a lease for it and told them you’ll be advancing the money, and of course more furniture, more materials…’
‘Stop,’ I said distractedly, ‘You can’t.’
‘What? I can’t what?’ He sounded, of all things, bewildered.
‘You can’t just keep on borrowing. You’ve a limit. You can’t go beyond it. Look for heaven’s sake come over here quickly and we’ll see what can be undone.’
‘But you said,’ his voice said plaintively, ‘that you’d want to finance later expansion. That’s what I’m doing. Expanding.’
I thought wildly that I’d be licking stamps for a living as soon as Henry heard. Dear God…
‘Listen,’ the cartoonist was saying, ‘we all worked like hell and finished one whole film. Twelve minutes long, dubbed with music and sound effects, everything, titles, the lot. And we did some rough-cuts of three others, no music, no frills, but enough… and I’ve sold them.’
‘You’ve what?’
‘Sold them.’ He laughed with excitement. ‘It’s solid, I promise you. That agent you sent me to, he’s fixed the sale and the contract. All I have to do is sign. It’s a major firm that’s handling them, and I get a big perpetual royalty. World-wide distribution, that’s what they’re talking about, and the BBC are taking them. But we’ve got to make twenty films in a year from now, not seven like I meant. Twenty! And if the public like them, that’s just the start. Oh heck, I can’t believe it. But to do twenty in the time I need a lot more money. Is it all right? I mean… I was so sure…’
‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘It’s all right. Bring the contract when you’ve signed it, and new figures, and we’ll work things out.’
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks, Tim Ekaterin, God bless your darling bank.’
I put the receiver down feebly and ran a hand over my head and down the back of my neck.
‘Trouble?’ Gordon asked, watching.
‘Well no, not exactly…’ A laugh like the cartoonist’s rose in my throat. ‘I backed a winner. I think perhaps I backed a bloody geyser.’ The laugh broke out aloud. ‘Did you ever do that?’
‘Ah yes,’ Gordon nodded, ‘Of course.’
I told him about the cartoonist and showed him the original set of drawings, which were still stowed in my desk: and when he looked through them, he laughed.
‘Wasn’t that application on my desk,’ he said, wrinkling his forehead in an effort to remember, ‘just before I was away?’
I thought back. ‘Yes, it probably was.’
He nodded. ‘I’d decided to turn it down.’
‘Had you?’
‘Mm. Isn’t he too young, or something?’
‘That sort of talent strikes at birth.’
He gave me a brief assessing look and handed the drawings back. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good luck to him.’
The news that Uncle Freddie had been spotted in the building rippled through every department and stiffened a good many slouching backbones. Uncle Freddie was given to growling out devastatingly accurate judgements of people in their hearing, and it was not only I who’d found the bank more peaceful (if perhaps also more complacent) when he retired.
He was known as ‘Mr Fred’ as opposed to ‘Mr Mark’ (grandfather) and ‘Mr Paul’, the founder. No one ever called me ‘Mr Tim’; sign of the changing times. If true to form Uncle Freddie would spend the morning in Investment Management, where he himself had worked all his office life, and after lunch in the boardroom would put at least his head into Corporate Finance, to be civil, and end with a march through Banking. On the way, by some telepathic process of his own, he would learn what moved in the bank’s collective mind; sniff, as he nad put it, the prevailing scent on the wind.
He had already arrived when the copies of What’s Going On hit the fan.
Alec as usual slipped out to the local paper shop at about the time they were delivered there and returned with the six copies which the bank officially sanctioned. No one in the City could afford not to know about What Was Going On on their own doorstep.
Alec shunted around delivering one copy to each floor and keeping ours to himself to read first, a perk he said he deserved.
‘Your uncle,’ he reported on his return, ‘is beating the shit out of poor Ted Lorrimer in Investments for failing to sell Winkler Consolidated when even a squint-eyed baboon could see it was overstretched in its Central American operation, and a neck sticking out asking for the comprehensive chop.’
Gordon chuckled mildly at the verbatim reporting, and Alec sat at his desk and opened the paper. Normal office life continued for perhaps five more minutes before Alec shot to his feet as if he’d been stung.’
‘Jes-us Christ,’ he said.
‘What is it?’
‘Our leaker is at it again.’
‘What?’ Gordon said.
‘You’d better read it.’ He took the paper across to Gordon whose preliminary face of foreboding turned slowly to anger.
‘It’s disgraceful,’ Gordon said. He made as if to pass the paper to me, but John, on his feet, as good as snatched it out of his hand.
‘I should come first,’ he said forcefully, and took the paper over to his own desk, sitting down methodically and spreading the paper open on the flat surface to read. Gordon watched him impassively and I said nothing to provoke. When John at his leisure had finished, showing little reaction but a tightened mouth, it was to Rupert he gave the paper, and Rupert, who read it with small gasps and widening eyes, who brought it eventually to me.
‘It’s bad,’ Gordon said.
‘So I gather.’ I lolled back in my chair and lifted the offending column to eye level. Under a heading of ‘Dinky Dirty Doings’ it said:
It is perhaps not well known to readers that in many a merchant bank two thirds of the annual profits come from interest on loans. Investment and Trust management and Corporate Finance departments are the public faces and glamour machines of these very private banks. Their investments (of other people’s money) in the Stock market and their entrepreneurial role in mergers and takeovers earn the spotlight year by year in the City Pages.
Below stairs, so to speak, lies the tail that wags the dog, the secretive Banking department which quietly lends from its own deep coffers and rakes in vast profits in the shape of interest at rates they can set to suit themselves.
These rates are not necessarily high.
Who in Paul Ekaterin Ltd has been effectively lending to himself small fortunes from these coffers at FIVE per cent? Who in Paul Ekaterin Ltd has set up private companies which are NOT carrying on the business for which the money has ostensibly been lent? Who has not declared that these companies are his?
The man-in-the-street (poor slob) would be delighted to get unlimited cash from Paul Ekaterin Ltd at five per cent so that he could invest it in something else for more.
Don’t Bankers have a fun time?

I looked up from the damaging page and across at Alec, and he was, predictably, grinning.
‘I wonder who’s had his hand in the cookie jar,’ he said.
‘And who caught it there,’ I asked.
‘Wow, yes.’
Gordon said bleakly, ‘This is very serious.’
‘If you believe it,’ I said.
‘But this paper…’ he began.
‘Yeah,’ I interrupted. ‘It had a dig at us before, remember? Way back in May. Remember the flap everyone got into?’
‘I was at home… with ‘flu’.’
‘Oh, yes. Well, the furore went on here for ages and no one came up with any answers. This column today is just as unspecific. So… supposing all it’s designed to do is stir up trouble for the bank? Who’s got it in for us? To what raving nut have we for instance refused a loan?’
Alec was regarding me with exaggerated wonder. ‘Here we have Sherlock Holmes to the rescue,’ he said admiringly. ‘Now we can all go out to lunch.’
Gordon however said thoughtfully, ‘It’s perfectly possible, though, to set up a company and lend it money. All it would take would be paperwork. I could do it myself. So could anyone here, I suppose, up to his authorised ceiling, if he thought he could get away with it.’
John nodded. ‘It’s ridiculous of Tim and Alec to make a joke of this,’ he said importantly. ‘The very reputation of the bank is at stake.’
Gordon frowned, stood up, took the paper off my desk, and went along to see his almost-equal in the room facing St Paul’s. Spreading consternation, I thought; bringing out cold sweats from palpitating banking hearts.
I ran a mental eye over everyone in the whole department who could possibly have had enough power along with the opportunity, from Val Fisher all the way down to myself; and there were twelve, perhaps, who could theoretically have done it.
But… not Rupert, with his sad mind still grieving, because he wouldn’t have had the appetite or energy for fraud.
Not Alec, surely; because I liked him.
Not John: too self-regarding.
Not Val, not Gordon, unthinkable. Not myself.
That left the people along in the other pasture, and I didn’t know them well enough to judge. Maybe one of them did believe that a strong fiddle on the side was worth the ruin of discovery, but all of us were already generously paid, perhaps for the very reason that temptations would be more likely to be resisted if we weren’t scratching around for the money for the gas.
Gordon didn’t return. The morning limped down to lunch-time, when John bustled off announcing he was seeing a client, and Alec encouraged Rupert to go out with him for a pie and pint. I’d taken to working through lunch because of the quietness, and I was still there alone at two o’clock when Peter, Henry’s assistant, came and asked me to go up to the top floor, because I was wanted.
Uncle Freddie, I thought. Uncle Freddie’s read the rag and will be exploding like a warhead. In some way he’ll make it out to be my fault. With a gusty sigh I left my desk and took the lift to face the old warrior with whom I had never in my life felt easy.
He was waiting in the top floor hallway, talking to Henry. Both of them at six foot three over-topped me by three inches. Life would never have been as ominous, I thought, if Uncle Freddie had been small.
‘Tim,’ Henry said when he saw me, ‘Go along to the small conference room, will you?’
I nodded and made my way to the room next to the boardroom where four or five chairs surrounded a square polished table. A copy of What’s Going On lay there, already dog-eared from many thumbs.
‘Now Tim’, said my uncle, coming into the room behind me, ‘do you know what all this is about?’
I shook my head and said ‘No.’
My uncle growled in his throat and sat down, waving Henry and myself to seats. Henry might be chairman, might indeed in office terms have been Uncle Freddie’s boss, but the white-haired old tyrant still personally owned the leasehold of the building itself and from long habit treated everyone in it as guests.
Henry absently fingered the newspaper. ‘What do you think?’ he said to me. ‘Who… do you think?’
‘It might not be anyone.’
He half smiled. ‘A stirrer?’
‘Mm. Not a single concrete detail. Same as last time.’
‘Last time,’ Henry said, ‘I asked the paper’s editor where he got his information from. Never reveal sources, he said. Useless asking again.’
‘Undisclosed sources,’ Uncle Freddie said, ‘never trust them.’
Henry said, ‘Gordon says you can find out, Tim, how many concerns, if any, are borrowing from us at five per cent. There can’t be many. A few from when interest rates were low. The few who got us in the past to agree to a long-term fixed rate.’ The few, though he didn’t say so, from before his time, before he put an end to such unprofitable straitjackets. ‘If there are more recent ones among them, could you spot them?’
‘I’ll look,’ I said.
We both knew it would take days rather than hours and might produce no results. The fraud, if it existed, could have been going on for a decade. For half a century. Successful frauds tended to go on and on unnoticed, until some one tripped over them by accident. It might almost be easier to find out who had done the tripping, and why he’d told the paper instead of the bank.
‘Anyway,’ Henry said, ‘that isn’t primarily why we asked you up here.’
‘No,’ said my uncle, grunting. ‘Time you were a director.’
I thought: I didn’t hear that right.
‘Er… what?’ I said.
‘A director. A director,’ he said impatiently. ‘Fellow who sits on the board. Never heard of them, I suppose.’
I looked at Henry, who was smiling and nodding.
‘But,’ I said, ‘so soon…’
‘Don’t you want to, then?’ demanded my uncle.
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Good. Don’t let me down. I’ve had my eye on you since you were eight.’
I must have looked as surprised as I felt.
‘You told me then,’ he said, ‘how much you had saved, and how much you would have if you went on saving a pound a month at four per cent compound interest for forty years, by which time you would be very old. I wrote down your figures and worked them out, and you were right.’
‘It’s only a formula,’ I said.
‘Oh sure. You could do it now in a drugged sleep. But at eight? You’d inherited the gift, all right. You were just robbed of the inclination.’ He nodded heavily. ‘Look at your father. My little brother. Got drunk nicely, never a mean thought, but hardly there when the brains were handed out. Look at the way he indulged your mother, letting her gamble like that. Look at the life he gave you. All pleasure, regardless of cost. I despaired of you at times. Thought you’d been ruined. But I knew the gift was there somewhere, might still be dormart, might grow if forced. So there you are, I was right.’
I was pretty well speechless.
‘We all agree,’ Henry said. ‘The whole board was unanimous at our meeting this morning that it’s time another Ekaterin took his proper place.’
I thought of John, and of the intensity of rage my promotion would bring forth.
‘Would you,’ I said slowly, ‘have given me a directorship if my name had been Joe Bloggs?’
Henry levelly said, ‘Probably not this very day. But soon, I promise you, yes. You’re almost thirty-three, after all, and I was on the board here at thirty-four.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Rest assured,’ Henry said. ‘You’ve earned it.’ He stood up and formally shook hands. ‘Your appointment officially starts as of the first of November, a week today. We will welcome you then to a short meeting in the boardroom, and afterwards to lunch.’
They must both have seen the depth of my pleasure, and they themselves looked satisfied. Hallelujah, I thought, I’ve made it. I’ve got there… I’ve barely started.
Gordon went down with me in the lift, also smiling.
‘They’ve all been dithering about it on and off for months,’ he said. ‘Ever since you took over from me when I was ill, and did OK. Anyway I told them this morning about your news from the cartoonist. Some of them said it was just lucky. I told them you’d now been lucky too often for it to be a coincidence. So there you are.’
‘I can’t thank you…’
‘It’s your own doing.’
‘John will have a fit.’
‘You’ve coped all right so far with his envy.’
‘I don’t like it, though,’ I said.
‘Who would? Silly man, he’s doing his career no good.’
Gordon straightaway told everyone in the office, and John went white and walked rigidly out of the room.
I went diffidently a week later to the induction and to the first lunch with the board, and then in a few days, as one does, I got used to the change of company and to the higher level of information. In the departments one heard about the decisions that had been made: in the dining room one heard the decisions being reached. ‘Our daily board meeting,’ Henry said. ‘So much easier this way when everyone can simply say what they think without anyone taking notes.’
There were usually from ten to fifteen directors at lunch, although at a pinch the elongated oval table could accommodate the full complement of twenty-three. People would vanish at any moment to answer telephone calls, and to deal. Dealing, the buying and selling of stocks, took urgent precedence over food.
The food itself was no great feast, though perfectly presented. ‘Always lamb on Wednesdays,’ Gordon said at the buffet table as he took a couple from a row of trimmed lean cutlets. ‘Some sort of chicken on Tuesdays, beef Wellington most Thursdays. Henry never eats the crust.’ Each day there was a clear soup before and fruit and cheese after. Alcohol if one chose, but most of them didn’t. No one should deal in millions whose brain wanted to sleep, Henry said, drinking Malvern water steadily. Quite a change, all of it, from a rough-hewn sandwich at my desk.
They were all polite about my failure to discover ‘paper’ companies to whom the bank had been lending at five per cent, although Val and Henry, I knew, shared my own view that the report originated from malice and not from fact.
I had spent several days in the extra-wide office at the back of our floor, where the more mechanical parts of the banking operation were carried on. There in the huge expanse (grey carpet, this time) were row upon row of long desks whose tops were packed with telephones, adding machines and above all computers.
From there went out our own interest cheques to the depositors who had lent us money for us to lend to things like ‘Home-made Heaven cakes’ and ‘Water Purification’ plants in Norfolk. Into there came the interest paid to us by cakes and water and cartoonists and ten thousand such. Machines clattered, phone bells rang, people hurried about.
Many of the people working there were girls, and it had often puzzled me why there were so few women among the managers. Gordon said it was because few women wanted to commit their whole lives to making money and John (in the days when he was speaking to me) said with typical contempt that it was because they preferred to spend it. In any case, there were no female managers in Banking, and none at all on the Board.
Despite that, my best helper in the fraud search proved to be a curvy redhead called Patty who had taken the What’s Going On article as a personal affront, as had many of her colleagues.
‘No one could do that under our noses,’ she protested.
‘I’m afraid they could. You know they could. No one could blame any of you for not spotting it.’
‘Well… where do we start?’
‘With all the borrowers paying a fixed rate of five per cent. Or perhaps four per cent, or five point seven five, or six or seven. Who knows if five is right?’
She looked at me frustratedly with wide amber eyes. ‘But we haven’t got them sorted like that.’
Sorted, she meant, on the computer. Each loan transaction would have its own agreement, which in itself could originally range from one single slip of paper to a contract of fifty pages, and each agreement should say at what rate the loan interest was to be levied, such as two above the current accepted base. There were thousands of such agreements typed onto and stored on computer discs. One could retrieve any one transaction by its identifying number, or alphabetically, or by the dates of commencement, or full term, or by the date when the next interest payment was due, but if you asked the computer who was paying at what per cent you’d get a blank screen and the microchip version of a raspberry.
‘You can’t sort them out by rates,’ she said. ‘The rates go up and down like see-saws.’
‘But there must still be some loans being charged interest at a fixed rate.’
‘Well, yes.’
‘So when you punch in the new interest rate the computer adjusts the interest due on almost all the loans but doesn’t touch those with a fixed rate.’
‘I suppose that’s right.’
‘So somewhere in the computer there must be a code which tells it when not to adjust the rates.’
She smiled sweetly and told me to be patient, and half a day later produced a cheerful-looking computer-programmer to whom the problem was explained.
‘Yeah, there’s a code,’ he said. ‘I put it there myself. What you want, then, is a programme that will print out all the loans which have the code attached. That right?’
We nodded. He worked on paper for half an hour with a much-chewed pencil and then typed rapidly onto the computer, pressing buttons and being pleased with the results.
‘You leave this programme on here,’ he said, ‘then feed in the discs, and you’ll get the results on that line-printer over there. And I’ve written it all out for you tidily in pencil, in case someone switches off your machine. Then just type it all in again, and you’re back in business.’
We thanked him and he went away whistling, the aristocrat among ants.
The line-printer clattered away on and off for hours as we fed through the whole library of discs, and it finally produced a list of about a hundred of the ten-digit numbers used to identify an account.
‘Now,’ Patty said undaunted, ‘do you want a complete print-out of all the original agreements for those loans?’
‘I’m afraid so, yes.’
‘Hang around.’
It took two days even with her help to check through all the resulting paper and by the end I couldn’t spot any companies there that had no known physical existence, though short of actually tramping to all the addresses and making an on-the-spot enquiry, one couldn’t be sure.
Henry, however, was against the expenditure of time. ‘We’ll just be more vigilant,’ he said. ‘Design some more safeguards, more tracking devices. Could you do that, Tim?’
‘I could, with that programmer’s help.’
‘Right. Get on with it. Let us know.’
I wondered aloud to Patty whether someone in her own department, not one of the managers, could set up such a fraud, but once she’d got over her instinctive indignation she shook her head.
‘Who would bother? It would be much simpler – in fact it’s almost dead easy – to feed in a mythical firm who has lent us money, and to whom we are paying interest. Then the computer goes on sending out interest cheques for ever, and all the crook has to do is cash them.’
Henry, however, said we had already taken advice on that one, and the ‘easy’ route had been plugged by systematic checks by the auditors.
The paper-induced rumpus again gradually died down and became undiscussed if not forgotten. Life in our plot went on much as before with Rupert slowly recovering, Alec making jokes and Gordon stuffing his left hand anywhere out of sight. John continued to suffer from his obsession, not speaking to me, not looking at me if he could help it, and apparently telling clients outright that my promotion was a sham.
‘Cosmetic of course,’ Alec reported him of saying on the telephone. ‘Makes the notepaper heading look impressive. Means nothing in real terms, you know. Get through to me, I’ll see you right.’
‘He said all that?’ I asked.
‘Word for word.’ Alec grinned. ‘Go and bop him on the nose.’
I shook my head however and wondered if I should get myself transferred along to the St Paul’s-facing office. I didn’t want to go, but it looked as if John wouldn’t recover his balance unless I did. If I tried to get John himself transferred, would it make things that much worse?
I was gradually aware that Gordon, and behind him Henry, were not going to help, their thought being that I was a big boy now and should be able to resolve it myself. It was a freedom which brought responsibility, as all freedoms do, and I had to consider that for the bank’s sake John needed to be a sensible member of the team.
I thought he should see a psychiatrist. I got Alec to say it to him lightly as a joke, out of my hearing (‘what you need, old pal, is a friendly shrink’), but to John his own anger appeared rational, not a matter for treatment.
I tried saying to him straight, ‘Look, John, I know how you feel. I know you think my promotion isn’t fair. Well, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but either way I can’t help it. You’ll be a lot better off if you just face things and forget it. You’re good at your job, we all know it, but you’re doing yourself no favours with all this bellyaching. So shut up, accept that life’s bloody, and let’s lend some money.’
It was a homily that fell on a closed mind, and in the end it was some redecorating which came to the rescue. For a week while painters re-whitened our walls the five of us in the fountain-facing office squeezed into the other one, desks jammed together in every corner,’ phone calls made with palms pressed to ears against the noise and even normally placid tempers itching to snap. Overcrowd the human race, I thought, and you always got a fight. In distance lay peace.
Anyway, I used the time to do some surreptitious persuasion and shuffling, so that when we returned to our own patch both John and Rupert stayed behind. The two oldest men from the St Paul’s office came with Gordon, Alec and myself, and Gordon’s almost-equal obligingly told John that it was great to be working again with a younger team of bright energetic brains.