Darke Mission (2 page)

Just as JJ was studying the sweeping second hand on his IWC Top Gun Miramar ceramic pilot's watch on his left wrist, almost mesmerised by its metronome movement, a gaunt fellow stepped gingerly into his office.

“Mr Darke, may I come in?”

“You can call me JJ, Yves-Jacques, most folk do. I thought you had until tomorrow night to work on the game theoretic Greek problem, or is this a different matter?”

“No Sir. I've spent most of the morning on the Greek game tree and thought my observations were about ready for you,” said Yves-Jacques. “Fathead, I mean Toby, told me it was important.”

He seemed confident enough, thought JJ. Only twenty-four years old, thick dark hair, about 5ft 9in tall, slim and dressed in that Eurotrash manner that tends to irk American investment bankers. Yves-Jacques's English was excellent even though his French accent came barrelling through. He looked a bit like a thin version of Henri Leconte, the legendary French tennis player.

“Tell me Yves-Jacques, have you ever heard of the Norman Tebbit test?” asked JJ stoically.

“No.”

“OK,” said JJ not offering any explanation. “Let's say we're at Murrayfield and Scotland are playing France in a match that matters in the Six Nations Championship. You and I are sitting together and you're surrounded by patriotic Scots, singing ‘Flower of Scotland' and generally abusing the French, albeit in the friendliest possible way. France scores a match winning try. Do you leap off your seat like a demented Breton screaming ‘vive la France', or, mindful of your surroundings, do you clap politely and commiserate with the downfallen Scots – which in case you had forgotten includes your boss seated next to you who determines your bonus, even your continued employment?”

The young French man studied JJ's face for clues as to how he should answer. JJ was impassive, neither his eyes nor his facial expressions gave anything away. He had no tells, as poker professionals would call it, the Scotsman's early training took care of all that.

Devoid of hints, Yves-Jacques blurted out, “I would leap off my seat like a demented Breton, though strictly speaking I'm from Paris, so I guess I would leap like a demented Parisien.”

JJ waited for a few seconds before responding, making Yves-Jacques a little edgy but not for so long as to make him too uncomfortable. Finally “Good,” said JJ. “You and I are going to get on fine. Now let's go through the game tree and see if we need to change the firm's portfolio or not.”

With that, JJ and Yves-Jacques moved to the round, wooden meeting table in JJ's office and both men put their minds to the probabilities and improbabilities of the Greek drama. For the next two hours this modern Auld Alliance between the Scot and Frenchman worked away together, calculations, dynamic model simulations, brainstorming and finally a decision tree that they both thought was the most probable outturn for Greece. There was to be a vote in the Greek Parliament in two weeks covering further austerity cuts, the bailout terms and the need for more time to meet the financial targets set out by the EU and the IMF. On the lenders side the main protagonist was Chancellor Merkel of Germany. In the midst of the Greek unravelling in 2012, Greek protesters often hoisted flags with either a Swastika or Merkel's face with a Hitlerian moustache on it. She wasn't popular down Athens way. The Greeks needed tough love and none of the indigenous politicians were fully up for it. JJ and Yves-Jacques concluded, with a subjective 70% probability, that the Greek government could not afford to deviate from the fiscal hair shirt path set out by the EU, i.e. Germany, and the IMF. The decision was to hold the Greek bonds for now.

After that, JJ had had enough for the day. There was nothing much else going on in the markets, at least as far as MAM was concerned. He could do the New York call from home and H.R. had postponed the meeting regarding the leaver till tomorrow. Feeling tired after all that thinking, he decided to leave his car at the office and take a taxi home. His son, Cyrus, didn't have any after school clubs as it was school holidays, so maybe they could have a
Mario Kart
challenge. Once Cyrus had passed the age of six, JJ rarely let him win easily at games, electronic, athletic or otherwise. He wasn't cruel about it but Cyrus was a sensitive boy and JJ knew that the real world could be a harsh place for sensitive kids so he wanted to ease his son into understanding that he couldn't win at everything he tried. As it happens
Mario Kart
was now just about the only Wii game that JJ still had any chance of beating Cyrus at. From the age of nine, the kid would toast him at all the other games,
Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Wii Sports Resort, Skylanders Swap Force
, you name it and Cyrus would win at it. He often taunted his dad with ‘Loser, Loser' while making the L letter with his forefinger and thumb and sticking it in front of his forehead. That made JJ smile. The boy's computer skills had grown and grown.

Cyrus's fourteenth birthday was coming up in a few months and gadgets and games were top of his wish list. JJ had promised him a smartphone, feeling totally amazed that he'd managed to fend off that request for as long as he had. While he was still thinking about his son, JJ spotted a traditional black cab on St. James's Street and hailed it. He preferred these cabs to the newer multi-person vehicle ones. In those ones you'd rattle around like a gob-stopper in a tin can if you were on your own. While it took JJ under fifteen minutes to get from the King's Road to St. James's Square early in the morning, it was normally five to ten minutes longer on the way back. The back end of Buckingham Palace Road was like a building site and once you were in Victoria there were always buses galore nose to tail and often traversing several lanes. The King's Road never stopped. People walked onto the zebra crossings, fell onto them, ran across them, cycled over them. There were too many people and that was that.

The cab pulled up outside JJ's house in Markham Square. Although all modernised inside, the shell of most of the larger houses on the Square were built in the mid-1830s. Strictly speaking it's a Regency terrace rather than a square because the fourth side of ‘the square' is the King's Road itself with only a set of wrought iron railings on it.

Markham Square has an interesting history. It was built on a field which was part of Box Farm in 1836. The farm was owned by a Pulham Markham Evans, hence the name of the square, and the nearby street and place. For the more eclectic, it is the square where barrister Mark Saunders was shot dead by police a few years ago after the lawyer decided to fire bullets across the square willy-nilly into neighbours' houses. A former supermodel of Wonderbra fame has a house on the east side and some folk believe Ian Fleming had it as the location of James Bond's flat in London. Those folk were wrong; 007's flat was meant to be in Wellington Square.

JJ's five storey creamy white exterior house was on the east side. In the basement he had it set out as a personal gym near the front of the house and an open space training area for martial arts towards the paved garden at the rear. Though not with the intensity that he used to, JJ still trained with one-on-one instructors for both Krav Maga and Jeet Kune Do, twice per week. The ground floor had a modern kitchen and dining area with a small sitting room near the Square end. While meals were being prepared, cooked or heated he and Cyrus could sit together, have a chat or watch TV. It was hard to get that intersecting Venn diagram moment when he and Cyrus could watch an equally enjoyable programme on TV. Tennis would do the trick, as would some music channels but football or motor racing wasn't really to Cyrus's liking. Perhaps oddly for a boy who was so tech savvy, Cyrus was an avid fan of the
Antiques Roadshow
or indeed any show about antiques wheeling and dealing especially involving auctions. When he was six JJ took him to an antiques fair in Chelsea's Old Town Hall to get a present for his mum. He spotted Mark Tracy, well known TV antiques personality, the minute he walked in. Mark was very nice to him and he was impressed, or convincingly pretended to be, that Cyrus had negotiated down the price of a 1940s porcelain fawn figure from £35 to £25. That was the last present Cyrus was able to give his mum before her fatal accident.

The top two floors of the house were bedrooms. Cyrus's was on the top level. His room was full of the paraphernalia that young teenage boys have, mainly books, games, irreverent wall posters, manky clothes all over the floor and the like. He could play the flute, which was a very difficult wind instrument to master, all about the shape of the lips rather than how hard you could blow. JJ had hoped Cyrus would take to the flute playing of Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull à la ‘Living with the Past' but the boy preferred the music of Jeanne Baxtresser. He said it calmed him down if he had a bad day at school or if he lost to one of his pals at some computer game or other. Cyrus was competitive, but selectively so.

JJ's bedroom and sizeable en-suite bathroom was below Cyrus's. This had the strategic advantage to check out any nocturnal movement of the boy. Cyrus had never snuck out of the house at night. He may have wanted to but he had become ever closer to his dad and knew JJ, as the sole parent, would freak out if he didn't know where his son was. JJ wasn't over protective given the situation he found himself in but he was above average security conscious and virtually on permanent high alert as far as Cyrus's safety and well-being was concerned. From JJ's viewpoint there were too many committed and opportunistic assholes around in any big city or even small town in the world for any caring parent not to try to know where their kids were. In
About a Boy
starring Hugh Grant, the kid Marcus, played by Nicholas Hoult, realised that both parent and child needed backup. Cyrus knew he had his dad as number one backup, then Gilian his nanny. The rest of his family was in Scotland which was too far away for instantaneous response if needed. Cyrus knew that JJ had no backup. His dad was an only child and he had very few friends as far as he could tell. In a few years' time Cyrus would be his backup. He loved his dad very much.

JJ's bedroom was much the same as he and Eloise had designed it. Loads of built in wardrobe space, theoretically meant to be allocated half and half but turned out to be four fifths, one fifth in favour of his wife. A super king size bed, wall mounted TV, loads of photos of them and Cyrus and modern furniture. While Eloise's clothes and shoes were no longer there, it was nearly eight years since she had died; JJ hadn't the heart to change anything around much. The room wasn't effeminate, but it had memories, the vast majority of which were good.

JJ came in through the heavy duty wooden front door. When they had bought the house Cyrus asked if the door could be painted Chelsea blue. His mum and dad said fine, but asked why since he wasn't a Chelsea supporter or even any kind of football fan. Cyrus said that when Chelsea were playing at home loads of Blues supporters were often milling around, mainly at the Pizza Express or Starbucks on the King's Road, but some would occasionally be seen wandering up and down the Square, either killing time before the match or being a bit worse for wear after a few beers when the match had ended. Cyrus reckoned that if his door was Chelsea blue it was much less likely to have anything thrown at it or graffitied on it. When asked what about the away team's supporters Cyrus said that they tend to come in coaches directly to Stamford Bridge or the nearest tube station to the match at Fulham Broadway. The probability of a wandering Gooner or Tooner was very low. The boy may not know diddley-squat about football but he sure had a clear view of the logistics of supporters' travelling habits. Anyway, Cyrus's favourite colour was blue so it was a no brainer, the door was Chelsea blue, and in the many years of living there, no graffiti, no rotten eggs and no one peeing down the outside stairs.

“Cyrus, are you in?”

“Yes, Dad, I'm in the living room,” Cyrus called back.

“OK, I'll be up in a minute. Do you want a drink or a snack?”

“Thanks Dad, a juice and a packet of curlies would be good,” came the reply.

JJ took an orange juice from the fridge in the kitchen and a packet of organic tomato and cheese puffs from the snack shelf – curlies to the cool dude teenager – and made his way up the narrow, steep but well carpeted stairs.

“Here you go,” said JJ as he placed the juice and curlies on the desk where Cyrus was staring at his computer screen like only teenagers can do, his wavy locks flopping over his forehead and ears. “What are you up to, zombie boy?” quipped JJ.

“I'm researching some stuff for a science project at school,” Cyrus replied but didn't avert his eyes from the screen to acknowledge his dad, his juice or even his favourite snack.

“Good job I know you love me,” said JJ, wishing he would have been granted one of Cyrus's engagingly warm smiles.

“Of course I love you Dad. I'll be done in a few minutes. Do you fancy a game on the Wii or has all that high-falutin' financial stuff shrunk your game brain even further?” asked Cyrus.

“I'll take you on kiddo and it doesn't even have to be
Mario Kart
. I'm in the zone tonight, I can tell.”

“Yeah, the twilight zone, big daddy. We can play something you've got a fighting chance at. How about virtual tennis or ten pin bowling, you've won at those on the odd occasion.”

It was mid-December, so JJ thought he'd keep it real, or as real as a virtual game can get, by opting for ten pin bowling. “I'm just going to check my BlackBerry for emails and prices, Cyrus, but give me a shout when you're ready and be prepared for a strike and spare tsunami young man. By the way, where's Gil?” enquired JJ.

“She said she had to go out for some messages, but would be back in about twenty minutes to cook us dinner.”

Although Cyrus was not born in Scotland he had picked up quite a few Scotticisms as he grew up. The word
messages
was a case in point. When JJ first arrived in London, he shared a house in Southfields with four other guys who all worked for the same company as him. They were English to a man and he was the only one who had not gone to Oxford or Cambridge University. It was a low cost rental and they had to look after themselves. Every evening after work, JJ would casually mention to his fellow housemates that he was popping out for a few messages. After about a week of this one of the guys, Tim, a portly but pleasant fellow from Peterborough, said, “JJ, every bleedin' night you go out for messages, you can't have people wanting to contact you every single night, what's the scoop?”