Matters of Honor (31 page)

That Hubert, as he immediately asked me to call him, was a ringer for Gert Fröbe was certain, except that, unlike Goldfinger in the movie, Hubert had a full head of blond hair cut in an old-fashioned military brush. It stood up so straight that I decided he must use a wax pomade. The effect when his face turned red, not a rare occurrence, was striking. So long as Bond didn’t bait him, Goldfinger was possessed of a backslapping and backstabbing kind of politeness. Hubert’s was mechanical and very efficient. He introduced me to Gilberte, his unicorn tapestry countess, and then marched me from guest to guest explaining to each, in identical terms, that, in addition to being the renowned American author of many novels, I was Henry’s college roommate and his friend. The almost invariable response to my literary activities of these elegant figures, most of whom had titles that Hubert pronounced as distinctly as their double- or triple-barreled names, was a well-bred smile and a promise to be on the lookout for my new novel. Gilberte, however, sounded sincere when she said that my most recent novel had appealed to her no less than to Corinne, the wife of Etienne, who was also at the party. I knew that Corinne was a real fan of my work; she had been writing to me for years in her lovely English astute letters about it.

If Henry or Hubert had been naive enough to think that my literary achievements would impress the Sainte-Terre guests, I disappointed them. Indeed, that may have been true of Henry; he had been hopelessly starry-eyed about my minor celebrity for too many years. As for Hubert, it suddenly occurred to me that he was just cunning enough to have concocted the invitation for the precise purpose of showing Henry that his own weight might be greater than mine in the context of this sort of high-society occasion, and that, having become a man of the world under Hubert’s tutelage, he need not let himself be impressed by me quite so much. That theory fit with Hubert’s words as he was beginning to parade me through his salon. Not only had Henry become his principal adviser, he told me, but in time he planned to dispute my claim to being his best friend. I was amused and answered that, in my long experience with Henry, there had never been only one claimant to that position; he would have to deal with at least two other contenders. Good, he said, giving my elbow a squeeze. I will enjoy the fight. I have never won a prize only to share it.

If my impact as a novelist on Hubert’s guests was imperceptible, the same could not be said of the aura of power and importance with which Hubert had invested Henry. The way men whom Hubert introduced as his partners perked up at the mention of my long-standing connection with Henry was striking proof. It made me imagine a like alertness that the ancestors of these Walloon nobles would have displayed finding themselves in the presence of a close ally of one of the king’s favorites. I knew just enough about powerful businessmen’s patterns of speech to understand that when Hubert said partner he was using that word as an honorific, an accolade reserved for his high-ranking employees and certain investors in his businesses. One such “partner,” who did not appear to feel the same frisson of delight at meeting me as his colleagues, was Jacques Blondet, head of the Paris bank, whom Henry had mentioned. Blondet examined me quizzically and assured me that he had read every word I had written—looking for clues, clues: revelation of personality. We should find a moment to talk, he said. Perhaps over a Cognac after dinner. I bowed slightly without comment. When he left me, I drifted over to Corinne and stayed at her side until we were called to dinner. I had expected to be placed on Gilberte’s right. That I should be between Corinne and Gilberte was a pleasant surprise. I began to look forward to our conversation. However, we were not able to exchange more than a few words before conversation at the table became general and very animated, the subject being the Camp David agreements that Sadat and Begin had just signed. Perhaps out of regard for Henry, perhaps out of admiration for Sadat, if any anti-Semites were present at this gathering of Belgium’s ruling class, they held their tongues.

After dessert, at a signal from Gilberte, the ladies rose and followed her to the sitting room. The men were shepherded by Hubert into the library. Disliking the smell of cigars, I found an armchair near an open window and settled down to drink my coffee. I thought about the ease with which Henry had handled himself in this setting, manifestly enjoying the world into which Hubert had brought him. Or into which he had made his way. He had not changed physically—I thought that of my college classmates he had changed the least—and in other respects, except for having become over the ten years since he was made a partner almost terrifyingly adroit and competent, he was still the old Henry who had been my friend for almost thirty years. He wanted to be in charge and he was, and it little mattered that in this particular setting the power derived from Hubert. His position was the fruit of his own efforts and his own merit; the intervention of the van Dammes,
mère et fils,
had given him a leg up, but no more than that. The one big failure was in his relationship with Margot. They were both stuck in quicksand.

My train of thought was interrupted by Jacques Blondet, who pulled up a chair next to me and, without preliminaries, said that he imagined that I knew Henry better than anyone. He waited for an answer, and, seeing that I wasn’t about to offer one, he added that he was forcing me to make a statement that could be thought of as lacking in modesty. For him, it was a conclusion supported by clear evidence: an acquaintance going back so many years, one that had included Henry’s late parents, and the general sense that I stood by Henry’s side and always had. He paused again, as though to give me time to make a statement, and then told me that in his experience with Hubert de Sainte-Terre, which went back to when Hubert’s father died and Hubert took over the business, no one had gained Hubert’s confidence so completely, not even he, Jacques, although he had gone to work for the old Comte de Sainte-Terre directly after finishing his studies—he was a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris—or had as good a grasp of the structure and dynamics of the Sainte-Terre businesses. It was in his opinion a virtuoso performance.

I liked Monsieur Blondet less the more he spoke, but I said that Henry indeed was unusually intelligent and hardworking, as well as loyal as a friend.

Characteristics you and he share, Blondet observed. Then he told me that sometimes these invaluable traits engendered a certain lack of measure in pursuing the objectives of the client, who is also the adviser’s friend. Do you see what I mean? he asked.

I shook my head.

I’ll give you an example, he said. A skilled and very tough negotiator may quite correctly decide not to pick every bit of flesh from an adversary’s carcass. Why? Because he is careful of his reputation. He’d rather lose a few points that he knows aren’t essential than acquire a reputation for ruthlessness. Is that putting his own interest ahead of the client’s? Perhaps, but if he has obtained for the client substantially all that the client needs, there is no harm, and there may be a benefit to the client as well. The adviser’s reputation for ruthlessness might begin to stick to the client, and that is something to be avoided. But once the adviser loses the detachment that should allow him to make this sort of calculation, he will insist on having the last bit of flesh and the last drop of blood. Do you now see what I mean?

More or less, I said.

Less zeal, said Blondet, less zeal. If only you would whisper those two little words into our friend Henry’s ear.

Are you suggesting that Henry pushes too hard on Hubert’s behalf?

You’ve put it very well.

Then I think you should tell him so, I replied. If I were to speak to him about it, I would have to tell him what you have told me, and he would want to know why you haven’t spoken to him yourself, and I would have to tell him that I don’t know.

A fair point, said Blondet, a fair point. In any case, I am very happy that we have talked.

XXX

M
Y FRIENDSHIP
with the Japanese writer and sojourns in Kyoto came to an abrupt end. I returned to New York sooner than had been my custom. During the summer, Tom collapsed on the tennis court at the Standishes’ playing singles as Edie and I watched. I got him to the Pittsfield hospital and then to the Mass General in Boston. After three weeks in a coma he was dead. Thus disappeared the one older friend on whose advice and affection I had always counted. After Dr. Kalman retired, I began seeing a new analyst in Manhattan, who like his predecessor seemed willing to put up with my erratic schedule, but I thought that in this time of grief I should stay near him and plunge into work. The company of George and Edie was another reason for making East Seventieth Street again my principal abode, with occasional long weekends in Lenox. Although I had followed my plan and acquired a small apartment in Paris, nothing drew me there. I couldn’t even say that I missed Henry, because his visits to New York were frequent, and he always made time to see me over dinner or lunch. In fact, he came to the city a couple of months after Tom’s death. I hadn’t written to him about it, and he had missed the obituary in
The New York Times,
which the
Herald Tribune
hadn’t reprinted. When I told him about it over dinner he cried. He regained his self-possession quickly and talked about how amusing Tom had been in the old days at the house, regaling us with his Carolingian and Merovingian anecdotes. A short time later, I learned that Henry had made a sizable contribution to the scholarship fund established in Tom’s memory for which I had provided the seed money.

That he was doing very well as a lawyer was evident from what he told me about Hubert de Sainte-Terre’s businesses, his air of contented prosperity, and George Standish’s occasional slightly envious asides. What I knew about his personal life was limited by his reticence and my absence from Paris. I did know that he continued to live on rue de Rivoli and that, in the company of Hubert and Gilberte and their instructor, he had become a proficient skier. George thought that he must have bought a house in some French province. That was the gossip at the Paris office, in which curiosity was mixed with mild vexation because he hadn’t said a word about it to anyone. All the same, the weekends when he was presumed to be at his hideaway were immediately noticed. Instead of the telephone number of one of the Sainte-Terre residences or of a hotel in London or Venice, he would leave in his absence memorandum only a telephone number—always the same—in Tours, with none of the other usual information. The office had on occasion tried to reach him at that number. An answering service picked up and offered to take the message, disclaiming any knowledge of the whereabouts of the subscriber. Usually, Henry called back within minutes. I found this intriguing. It seemed to me that if he were living with some woman George and I would know it. Whether he and Margot were having an affair was a question that occurred to me more than once, and perhaps it was conducted at that hideaway, but he had volunteered no information, and I drew no conclusions from the sadness with which he talked of the Hornung parents. By one of those meaningless but painful coincidences, Mr. Hornung died in the same week as Tom; from his obituary I learned that Mrs. Hornung had preceded him by less than a year. I wrote to Margot at once, offering my condolences on both losses. She wrote two sentences in reply, or perhaps rebuke, to the effect that the loyalty of her friends had sustained her.

Q
UITE APART
from Henry and Margot, Paris was once again on my mind two years later, principally because of the election in May that had carried François Mitterrand to the Élysée. The change of political direction to him after Giscard was in neat contrast to the one recently effected in our country, with the defeat of Jimmy Carter by Ronald Reagan. Taken together, they illustrated my thesis that we lived in an Age of Un-Reason. I had not much liked Giscard’s regime or the class he represented. But Mitterrand troubled me because of the skullduggery in the
affaire de l’Observatoire
and also for a subsidiary reason that I kept to myself: the appalling condition of his teeth: I had the opportunity to inspect them from up close a few years earlier at a small dinner given by the French consul general in New York. Would I have thought much better of him had he something resembling President Reagan’s porcelain choppers? I can’t say. But I followed with more than usual vigilance
The New York Times
’s spotty coverage of France. I even subscribed to the airmail edition of
Le Point.
It was thus that, among a number of articles dealing with the program adopted by the Left, I came across the controversy concerning Banque de l’Occident, the French bank controlled by Hubert de Sainte-Terre, which had been scheduled for the first wave of nationalizations. Jacques Blondet was taking every opportunity to make public his conviction that having the state as owner would lead to the ruin of a bank like l’Occident that did most of its business outside of France. Non-French banks and clients would shun it; they wouldn’t tolerate having the French state stick its nose into their transactions. This position was echoed by Hubert more pungently and with equal vigor. The attacks by French government spokesmen and left-leaning journalists—in these instances one could hardly distinguish French reporters from editorialists—against the forces of international capital were equally energetic. With other privately owned French banks as well as the most important industrial firms under the same nationalization threat, it was easy to gain the impression that the French bourgeoisie, foreseeing a new reign of terror, had decided to emigrate, London and New York being the refuges of choice. I was not in the habit of making transatlantic calls. Nonetheless, I telephoned Henry to ask him what was going on—not so much in general as in relation to Hubert’s bank and to him. He was in a meeting and his secretary told me he would be in touch as soon as he was free.

Hah! he said when he called back, what’s going on is that Monsieur le comte and his Figaro Blondet want to stop the French state in its tracks. They want to derail the nationalization of l’Occident. So they have asked—or, to be more precise, ordered—me to figure out how to do it, and one or the other is on the telephone just about every hour to check on my progress. I wonder what dreadful punishment awaits me if there is no solution or if I can’t find it. There are things that were done in Rome to slaves if the
dominus
caught them screwing up: mutilation for a broken plate, whipping for spilled wine, etc., etc. Perhaps there is a similar custom handed down by the Sainte-Terres from father to son since the Crusades that applies to clerks in their service.

But do you think there is no solution? I asked.

Of course there is one, he said, I have it. It came to me a couple of days ago, on the way home from the office. I was turning the problem over in my mind as I walked, and bingo, I had it. I am quite sure it works. There’s even a nice tax angle that looks very promising.

And have you told them?

Not yet. I want to put the scheme out of my head for a few days and then look at it again with a cold eye. And there is another reason: I think they will love my idea, but, even if it works as well as I believe, it’s political poison. So I also have to figure out how to show them that I have found what they wanted while counseling them that for the sake of their own self-interest they must abstain from using it.

Afterward, as we were talking about politics in France and at home, he asked abruptly whether I would come to Paris. He wanted to have a real friend at his side at this time as he faced the most difficult legal and moral issues of his career. There had been occasions in the past when I thought I had abandoned him in a moment of need, each of which I later regretted. I didn’t want to repeat the mistake. I was hard at work on a novel, but it seemed to me that if I opened my apartment I would be able to work in Paris. I told him that I’d be over in a couple of days. First thing in the morning, I called George at the office and told him what I was doing.

H
ENRY AND
I had dinner the day I arrived, and right away he said, I am now sure that I know how to do it, and I am equally sure that I can’t let it be done. The only unknown is how the firm will feel about my taking that position—telling a client like Hubert that you know how to solve his problem but don’t want to use the solution—and how on earth I am going to get Hubert and that madman Blondet to stay put. Blondet, you know, has been squealing like a stuck pig all over town, as though anyone gave a damn about what he thinks. He’s a
polytechnicien,
like a lot of the top guys in the government, and they all say
tu
to each other if they’re not in the least intimate, like dukes in Balzac. Anyway, he’s been to see the important bureaucrats to lay out his case, and they’ve all told him to stuff it—or whatever one French
fonctionnaire
says to another. What do you think I should do about my problem?

I said that for the moment I didn’t know enough to have an opinion. I wasn’t even sure I understood why he was in a quandary. Fair enough, Henry said. I was hoping to spare you the arcana; I couldn’t make them comprehensible without a blackboard anyway. The essential facts. One: most of the value of l’Occident is in the non-French businesses, which, with a couple of negligible exceptions, are owned by a Dutch company owned by the French bank, and not by the French bank directly. I’ll call that Dutch company Dutch Occident. Two: Hubert de Sainte-Terre personally or through the Banque de Sainte-Terre, of which he is the majority shareholder, owns fifty-five percent of Banque de l’Occident. He has been buying additional shares as rapidly as market conditions permitted. Three: the French government has announced a price for the purpose of the nationalization, that is to say the price at which the shareholders of l’Occident will be forced to sell their shares to the state, that is much too low, no more than one-half to two-thirds of the real value. He paused and asked whether I was following him so far.

I nodded. All right, he said, now he was moving to the basic legal rules. One: under the nationalization law, the French state has the power to force all shareholders, including foreign shareholders, to sell at the price it set, subject, of course, to litigation of fair value before French courts. Two: there is a loophole. The state didn’t make it illegal for a French company on the nationalization list to sell its assets and, in particular, its foreign assets just ahead of the nationalization.

Here I want to open parentheses, Henry said. Only an imbecile would buy the French business—that is to say, the French bank and all its French assets including shares in its foreign businesses—he’d be throwing money out of the window because once he came to own the French bank he’d be in the same mess as the current shareholders. The state would be able to force him to sell the bank. He would have gotten exactly nowhere.

Here he announced that he was closing parentheses and would tell me rule three: the directors of the French bank have a duty to act in the best interest of the shareholders. More concretely, if the directors have a choice between two transactions, they must choose the one that gets more money to the shareholders or face having to pay damages. That’s pretty much the same as the American rule, he added, with some important differences that don’t matter here.

He asked again whether I had followed him, and once more I nodded helplessly.

This isn’t simple stuff, said Henry, but now I will show you the solution to Hubert’s problem, which I am quite sure the government won’t be able to defeat by any legal measure. Are you sure you want to hear it?

I said I couldn’t wait.

Here it is, he said. Banque de Sainte-Terre and Hubert and possibly some friends organize a Dutch company, which we will call Dutch Sainte-Terre—it should be a Dutch company for tax reasons I won’t get into because they’d really bore you. Hubert’s gang gives their Dutch company access to enough cash to buy from Banque de l’Occident its subsidiary Dutch Occident, which I’m sure you remember is the company that owns most of the non-French business of l’Occident. The offer goes before the board of directors of l’Occident. Obviously the directors who were appointed by the Sainte-Terre interests approve it. But the beauty of my scheme is that the independent directors are forced to vote for it too or abstain, once it has been pointed out to them that if they vote against the sale they will be liable for huge damages. Why?

Why indeed?

Simple: because Dutch Sainte-Terre will be paying the real value, and not the low-ball share price that can be derived from the government’s offer for all of l’Occident. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Brilliant! I said, and I really meant it.

Airtight. It’s a shame that I can’t recommend it to Hubert.

Now you’ve lost me. Why in heaven’s name can’t you? I asked.

Because it would be very dangerous. Hubert, the Sainte-Terre bank, Blondet too, not that he matters, would be pariahs in France until the Socialists are voted out of power and who knows when that day will come. The government will use every trick in the book to hound them. Yes, as a legal matter, the Socialists won’t be able to undo the transaction, but, as for doing business in France, or anything else that the current government might have a say in, they can forget it. Theoretically they could tough it out, but only if they aren’t spooked by the government’s antics and if they are resigned to not doing deals in France that require the government’s consent—tacit or official. The truth is that most deals of any size do.

So what can you do, Henry?

He said he would like to explain his scheme—and the interesting tax advantages that he hadn’t described to me—to Hubert and, if Hubert wished, to Blondet as well. If they use their heads, Henry said, they will see the dangers and let l’Occident be nationalized. But these guys are greedy. They’ve gotten themselves to believe that they don’t scare easily so they may want to go for it, regardless of the consequences. In that case, I would lay out enough of my reasoning and research to enable them to hire another lawyer—preferably a Dutch lawyer—to take my scheme and carry it out. I’ve have done my part, he said. Anyone normally competent can execute the rest.