Risk by C.K. Stead

Author:C.K. Stead [Stead, C.K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 Fiction / General
Publisher: Quercus

8

GOLDERS GREEN

Sam came back from Croatia bearing an envelope which he believed held the number of a Swiss bank account containing three million American dollars (and “some odds and ends”), and the code by which it could be accessed. It felt as if he was carrying a film noir suitcase full of banknotes. It wasn’t quite the same, but he was unsure how different it was apart from the fact that this was a suitcase which fitted easily in the pocket and was therefore not in much danger of theft or interception at the border. Was all that money sitting there waiting to be tapped? The account would remain in Reuben’s name. But what was to stop someone who had the code from opening a London account and emptying the Swiss one, perhaps slowly, bit by bit, into it? André Kraznahorkai had been glad to be rid of it—that much was clear. His obligation to his late friend had been acknowledged, his debt paid. Nothing had been said about where the money came from; and there was no clarity about where it should go.

It came back to Sam that he had once heard Reuben Leveson speak of Croatia as a place where there was—or had been—big money to be made out of armaments. As the Russians had withdrawn eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall whole arsenals were left. Dealers in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia bought them up, or simply took possession of them and sold them on—and there had been a time when Croatia, building an army to free itself from the Yugoslav Federation, had been a willing buyer. Sam remembered Reuben rubbing thumb and forefinger together and saying how much money had been made that way. This was connected in Sam’s mind with the much talked about refurbishment of a house in Notting Hill. Could arms sales have paid for that?

But the source was less what occupied his mind than what he should do next with the suitcase. To be in possession of it made him nervous; yet he was reluctant simply to be rid of it, especially because Hawkeye seemed, when Sam thought about him, such an unusual person, unconventional and rather appealing, and his instructions had been so unclear.

Reuben Leveson’s funeral service was held in the largest of the three red-brick chapels of the Golders Green crematorium with its solemn cloisters studded with memorial plaques and its spacious green garden sloping gently up a lawn-covered area bordered by trees bright with new leaf. Some of the men wore yarmulkes, others were bare-headed. Two young women, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old and obviously twins, handed out a little printed booklet at the door. Sam stood outside in the cloisters, flicking through its pages and waiting to recognize someone from the bank. There was a brief biography and pictures with explanatory captions—a very small Reuben with his sister on a stony beach “Near Whitstable” with the sea at their backs; a bar mitzvah studio photograph; the

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