Raindrop in the Ocean by Dobbs-Higginson Michael

Author:Dobbs-Higginson, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Eye Books
Published: 2017-05-08T07:08:31+00:00

6:

Running for My Life

It was the week before Christmas 1972, and the life I had painstakingly built for myself and my young family had fallen apart overnight, thanks to a Mr Schwartz. I had never set eyes on this man until twelve hours earlier, and now he was threatening to arrange for me to have an “accident” unless I signed everything I owned in Japan over to my partner. Unfortunately, I had to trust that he meant it, because Schwartz was not some small-time criminal or would-be gangster attempting to muscle in on our business. He was, he led me to believe, the head of the Tokyo CIA station, and he gave every impression that he was perfectly prepared to put his threat into action.

How different everything had seemed the previous evening, when I had been celebrating my good fortune in life with an English friend at a downtown restaurant. We had been living in Japan for five years. Marie-Thérèse spoke the language well and was as fascinated by the country and its culture as I was. We had a large rented home in Tokyo, as well as a beautiful country cabin which we had built for our small but growing family. We were already the proud parents of a strapping young toddler, Julien, and a few days earlier Marie-Thérèse had given birth to a baby daughter, Justine. My mother-in-law was over from France to help with the children, because I was up to my eyes in the biggest business venture of my career so far, which on paper would make me worth millions of dollars. I was permitting myself this celebratory night out because I reckoned I was allowed a moment of satisfaction.

Relations with my business partner Bob Strickland had had their ups and downs. Marie-Thérèse decided he was a bad lot on her first meeting, and she had not altered her opinion. He and I now had a number of arms to our business, some of them very profitable, others costing us money. But I had recently had a brainwave that would raise us into a new league.

Because Bob had a passion for fast cars, one of our businesses was a garage which carried out repair work on top-of-the-range vehicles. We did bespoke jobs, and had recently made a replica delivery tanker, the size of a Mini Cooper, for Mobil Oil to use for advertising purposes. Mobil was very pleased with the result and we now had good contacts in the company, including its number two man in Japan, because he was French and Marie-Thérèse knew his wife socially.

The company happened to have a petrol station on a major intersection, Akebanebashi, about ten blocks from our house. It was an ordinary petrol station, but the location was a highly strategic one and, to me, the site was ripe for redevelopment – not just at ground level, but above it. I went to see Mobil’s American executive called Lou Noto, who would later head the whole company worldwide and would steward its merger with Exxon.

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