Spy Hook by Len Deighton

Author:Len Deighton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780007395361
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-03-06T16:41:04+00:00

Almost every seat was taken in First Class. Wide-awake young men, with well cut suits and large gold wristwatches, were shuffling papers that came from pigskin document cases, or tapping at tiny portable computers with hinged screens. Many of them declined the champagne and worked right through the meal service: reading reports, ticking at accounts and underlining bits of ‘projections’ with coloured markers.

The man in the next seat to mine was from the same mould but considerably less dedicated. Edwin Woosnam – ‘a Welsh name although I’ve never been there: can you believe it?’ – an overweight fellow with thick eyebrows, thin lips and the sort of nose they create from putty for amateur productions of Julius Caesar. My desire to catch up on lost sleep was frustrated by his friendliness.

He was, he told me, the senior partner of a ‘development company’ in Glasgow. His firm was building eight 600-room hotels in towns around the world and he told me all about it. ‘Outdoor pool, that’s important. The hotel owners need a picture on the brochure that makes it look like the weather is good enough for swimming all year round.’ Throaty chuckle and a quick sip of champagne. ‘Penthouses at the top, leisure centres in the basement and en-suite bathrooms throughout. Find a big cheap site – I mean really big – and after the hotel is up, shops and apartment blocks will follow. The neighbourhood is upgraded. You can’t go wrong on an investment like that. It’s like money in the bank. As long as the local labour is cheap, it doesn’t matter where you site the hotel, half these idiot tourists don’t even know which country they’re in.’

But otherwise Mr Woosnam proved a congenial companion, with an endless supply of stories. ‘…You can’t tell the Greeks anything. I showed this foreman – Popopopolis, or something, you know what those names are like – I showed him the schedule, and told him the eighth floor should be all complete by now. And he got angry. It was complete, he shouted. He shook his fist and waved his arms and went rushing along the girders, jumped through a doorway and fell all the way into the basement. Eight storeys! Killed of course. We had terrible trouble getting a new foreman at that time of year. Another month and it wouldn’t have mattered so much.’ He took a drink.

‘Ha ha ha. Some people just won’t listen. Perhaps you find that in your business too,’ said Woosnam, but before I could agree he was off again. ‘I was with one of our site surveyors in Bombay and he was laughing and making jokes about the way the Indians build their lashed-up wooden scaffolding. I told him that he’d be laughing on the other side of his face when he put up steel scaffolding and the heat of the sun twisted it into a corkscrew and his project collapsed. Bloody architects! They come straight from college, and they know it all. That’s the trouble nowadays.

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