Provender Gleed Read online

  The Columbine placed an arm across her cleavage, unhappy at the Harlequin's leering scrutiny.

  'What's the problem?' the Harlequin said. 'You shouldn't be ashamed. Tits like those. Should be proud. And anyway, it's not as if I haven't seen them before.'

  'It's different.'

  'If I remember rightly, you even wanked me off with them once.'

  'It's different,' the Columbine insisted. 'Things are different now.' Colour had come to her cheeks and she could not meet the Harlequin's gaze. 'I'm not your girlfriend any more.'

  'That could change.'

  'No, it couldn't.'

  The Harlequin let it lie, although his eyes said he didn't believe her. She was protesting too much. She still fancied him. Of course she did. Bloke like him? Strong? Worked out at the gym a lot? Smart? Committed? With a cause? Irresistible.

  'Listen,' he said, his voice softening, becoming almost gentle, 'you're going to do fine. I mean it. The plan's sound. You - you're intelligent, beautiful. You'll play your part just right. I have every confidence in you.'

  The Columbine looked up at him again. In spite of her better judgement, against her every instinct she had, she was consoled by his words. She wanted to believe in him. He had hurt her in the past. He could be cruel. But she was convinced that at heart he was good. She was sure she could trust him. And if he had confidence in her, there was no reason why she shouldn't have the same confidence too.

  'All right,' she said, and she took a deep breath which helped stiffen her resolve and which was also, from the Harlequin's point of view, a good thing because it resulted in a temporary increase in the ratio of exposed breast flesh to unexposed. 'All right,' she said again, exhaling. 'I'm fine. Everything's going to be fine.'

  She picked up a salver of drinks, the Harlequin did likewise, and together they exited the catering marquee, returning to Venice and the party.

  4

  Uncle Fortune - Fort for short - had elected to arrive at the ball this year by parachute.

  For him, in all sorts of ways, this was no mean feat. For one thing, Fortune was not of a naturally athletic build or disposition. He had the kind of figure that was most politely described as cuddly, the kind that, far from being aerodynamic, best lent itself to plummeting like a stone. For another thing, he was notoriously bibulous. He seldom did anything without alcohol in his veins (and that included eat breakfast).

  The parachute instructor he hired to teach him, however, was aware of his reputation and impressed on him the unwisdom of skydiving while under the influence of alcohol. One might, the instructor said, if one jumped drunk, make a careless mistake. An irrevocable mistake. Such as, for example, forget to pull one's ripcord.

  So it was a strange and novel experience for Fortune to embark on a potentially life-threatening enterprise without his customary cushion of inebriation. But he knuckled down and got on with it. First in tandem with the instructor, the two of them joined by a harness like Siamese twins, and then solo with the instructor alongside him, Fortune performed a series of jumps from his private dirigible at ever increasing altitudes. By the end of the course of lessons, he had become a proficient parachutist, able to hit a ten-foot roundel painted on the croquet lawn at the back of his manor house every time without fail. Apart from slightly spraining his ankle during one landing, he had not suffered any sort of injury and was proud of that.

  Now, on the night of the ball, shortly before nine p.m., his dirigible nosed across Dashlands at a height of two thousand feet with its running lights doused so that it was all but invisible - if spotted, it would in all likelihood be taken for a cloud. Below, the party site glowed bright, unmissable. Fortune strapped on his parachute pack, went through his final equipment checks, slid open the cabin door, bid farewell to his pilot, reflexively groped for his hip-flask, remembered he hadn't brought it, and threw himself out into the night.

  Everything went according to plan - almost. After a ten-second freefall Fortune yanked the ripcord, the parachute billowed open above him with the customary explosive snap, his harness constricted around him, not unpainfully, and for a while he swung dizzyingly to and fro. When things settled down, he grabbed the guide-rope handles and began steering. Venice loomed beneath his feet and the partygoers swelled from milling dots to identifiably human shapes. The Piazza San Marco was his goal, although landing in the Grand Canal remained a possibility - he hated the idea of a soaking but the stunt would be funnier and more memorable if he came down with a splash.

  Soon Fortune was low enough that he could even make out, or so he thought, his brother. He was about to yell out Prosper's name, and thus alert everyone to his imminent arrival, when a sudden crosswind caught him. In order to counter it he dipped one side of his parachute, but he could still feel himself being driven relentlessly and inexorably off-course, away from the piazza, towards the rooftops. The Campanile rushed up at him. Please, O Lord, don't let me die, was Fortune's brief, fervent prayer. Not like this. Not sober. Then he screwed his eyes tight shut and braced himself for impact and possible impalement.

  When he dared to open his eyes again, he found that he was dangling some thirty feet above the piazza's paving stones. A crowd had gathered beneath him and anxious voices were calling up, wanting to know if he was all right. He looked up and saw that his parachute had got hooked over the Golden Angel. He was suspended helplessly but harmlessly from the Campanile like some sort of novelty decoration.

  Fortune began to chuckle.

  When someone below informed him that a ladder was being fetched, he chuckled even more. 'Tell them to bring up a snifter of brandy while they're at it,' he called down.

  Ten minutes later, Fortune was safely on the ground and receiving applause from the assembled partygoers. The applause, as was often the case, had a note of sycophancy to it. Applause usually did when you were Family. Nonetheless he accepted it with a gracious nod, and then he hugged Prosper, kissed sister-in-law Cynthia lavishly on both cheeks, made a typical bachelor-uncle fuss of nieces Gratitude and Extravagance, and in no time had a bottle of claret in each hand and was well on his wassailing way to total inebriation.

  His costume, incidentally, was that of a devil. Red bodysuit, horns on his head, scarlet face-paint, short three-pronged pitchfork, and a fake goatee beard of hellish blackness.

  Uncle Fortune having arrived, Cynthia could not put it off any longer. Provender would be coming to the ball even if she had to grab him by the scruff of the neck and drag him here.

  She left the piazza. She threaded through the thoroughfares, the salizade, the canalside fondamente, till she reached the edge of Venice. Then she took off along a lamp-flanked path of crushed quartz that led towards the house. The party dwindled behind her, the sounds of conviviality fading, the shotgun reports from the Arsenale becoming nothing more than faint popcorn cracks. By the time she arrived at the house, all Cynthia could hear was the crunch of her own footfalls.

  Dashlands House invited her in through a square archway into a courtyard which gave onto another courtyard via another square archway which in turn gave onto yet another courtyard via yet another square archway. The last courtyard, the largest of the three, boasted a rectangular lily pond which butted up against the lofty, narrow windows of the largest drawing room. A broad, low loggia led to one of the house's two main entrances. Twin teak-panelled doors swung inward, affording access to a chamber that was as much atrium as entrance hall - cylindrical, capped with a conical ceiling made up of arcs of iridescent glass. Gold-patinaed sconces held candle-shaped bulbs which shed a buttery light over the marble floor and the cuboid table-and-chair set that occupied a space next to the passageway into the drawing room. A rising concrete staircase hugged the inmost half of the wall, complete with wrought-iron handrail. But the hall's dominant feature was the twenty-foot chryselephantine statue which stood dead centre.

  She was called Triumph and she held a pose that was part exaltation, part ecstasy, her legs together, her hips and breasts thrust forward
, her head thrown back, one arm stretched in front of her, the other upraised with its fingers knifing to the heavens, like a gymnast about to begin floor exercises. Her face was incongruously inexpressive, with blank eyes and placid mouth, but then it did not need to convey much when her body was talking so eloquently. She was, it seemed, on the verge of something, some vast and longed-for release. Solid and gleaming and chunky, she had lines like a locomotive, and she waited, she only ever waited, poised, ready to commence. Triumph.

  Depending on her mood, Cynthia could find the statue daunting, inspiring, oppressive, and, occasionally, vulgar. This evening, with certain matters weighing heavily on her mind, she thought Triumph looked silly and vain, an old tart in a posture too young for her, hoping for admiration. She passed around the statue and ascended the stairs, noting halfway up that Triumph's left shoulder bore a thick coating of dust. She would have a word with Carver about that.

  Nowhere on all the acres of land it occupied was Dashlands House more than three storeys tall. It spread, it sprawled, but even its highest roof apex was a mere thirty feet from ground-level. Contained within it, however, was any number of midways and mezzanines. Rare was the room that shared the exact same horizontal plane as another room, and rare the corridor that did not terminate in a short flight of steps. Some of the larger rooms were in themselves multi-tiered, with platforms and pits denoting various separate sections. Sometimes, to Cynthia, the place felt like an indoor obstacle course. It was impossible to walk through it at any speed because every dozen or so paces you were obliged to break stride and turn a corner or go up or down. Frank Lloyd Wright had had a hand in its design, but you could be forgiven for thinking Maurits Cornelis Escher hadn't also been somehow involved.

  Eventually she came to its northernmost wing. As she neared the door to Provender's suite of rooms, she heard the rattle of brass keyboard keys. Provender was at his videotyper, probably hammering out another entry in that journal of his. Cynthia tapped softly on the door with the rim of her mask, expecting that he would not hear this above the furious clatter he was making. He didn't, and so she opened the door uninvited, knowing that if Provender complained about the intrusion she would be able to tell him in all honesty that she had tried knocking.

  The blinds were drawn. All the lamps were switched off. The only illumination in the suite's main room came from the videotyper's screen, in front of which Provender sat hunched, staring fixedly into its small glowing oval. His brow was ploughed in concentration. His shaven head nodded as he typed. On the desktop beside him, the videotyper's operating unit whistled and droned in its brass housing. It was a Japanese make. In spite of the fact that the Gleeds owned several patents on British circuit-board technology, Provender insisted that the Japanese produced better machines and so purchased with money what everyone else in the Family could get for free. If medals were handed out for perversity, Provender would have a lapel-full.

  Cynthia did not step into the room yet. She stood in the doorway and studied her son, who remained oblivious to her presence. She saw a slender, well-proportioned nearly-twenty-five-year-old who until recently had sported a head of lustrous Cavalier curls but now wore just a down of shorn hair, like a velvety pelt. She saw a grown man. But she also saw the infant Provender had been, the chubby, babbling creature whom she had held and fed, fussed with and dandled, and watched over through many a wakeful night. She could not look at him and not think of the clear, unblinking eyes that used to gaze up at her while he was at suck and not remember the smell of his fine-downed scalp, rich and yeasty like baking bread. His gestures, his mannerisms, had all been there, ready-formed, and had changed little in adulthood. Provender was and ever would be her baby boy, and come what may, she adored him.

  But that didn't mean there weren't times when she thought he could do with a good hard smack.

  Cynthia gazed on Provender for a further minute or so, then loudly and fulsomely cleared her throat.

  5

  The question which needs to be addressed, wrote Provender, is whether extreme wealth is incompatible with an ethical life.

  No doubt there are many people for whom this question would seem otiose, even absurd. They would love to be in a position to ask themselves such a question. They would love to have that luxury.

  But for those of us who do have that luxury, and have an ounce of self-awareness, it is the only question worth asking. It is the question.

  For an answer, one might look back to the early years of the Gleeds, in the seventeenth century, when the family was not yet a Family.

  Rufus Alexander Gleed (b.1649-d.1707) was a merchant trader, and a successful one, specialising in the import of spices, particularly nutmeg, which was then gaining currency in European cuisine.

  He did well in a cutthroat business. British spice traders were in perpetual competition with the Dutch, and Indonesia and most of the Southern Seas had become a virtual battleground. Merchantmen raced one another to secure the latest crop, and clashes between ships of either country were not uncommon as they homed in on the same harbour, each hoping to be the first into port to secure the best bargains. Since most merchantmen were accompanied by a naval escort for protection, the skirmishes were known to cost vessels and lives.

  Neither the British nor the Dutch government was any too happy to keep supplying military support in this manner. It was a huge drain on their budgets and resources. Yet they continued to do so, grudgingly, because the national economic interest demanded it.

  Rufus Gleed's stroke of genius, if one can call it that, was to decide to bypass government involvement. He began employing privateers to escort his trading fleet. He took on the defence of his own ships as a business expense. He was even able to defray the outlay against tax. He made piracy in effect a tax write-off.

  His privateers, unhindered by rules of engagement, were fiercer and more aggressive than any Dutch naval captain. They would attack without provocation. They harried Dutch ships mercilessly. With them there was never any parley. They argued with the voice of the cannonade.

  From being merely successful, Rufus became unimaginably successful. His ruthlessness (and that of his privateers) paid off to such an extent that he began to consider himself eligible for Family status. In a latter written to a nephew in 1693, and now kept at Dashlands in the Gleed archives, he states his intention thus:

  'In that I am now among the richest men of Englande, and am blest with issue in the forme of three Sonnes and lately a Grand-sonne, it seems that it should be my purpose to raise myself and my progeny to the rank of Family; and this being so, to that end I have made Supplication to the Borgia de De'Medicis of Italy, who as the very first and original of the Families are endow'd with the Responsibility of bestowing or otherwise said Privilidge, and it is my full Expectation soon to be in receipt of Documents confirming their accession to my Desire...'

  However, not long after his 'Desire' became a reality, Rufus found himself in a direct conflict with a fellow spice trader, also recently Familied: Pieter van der Ebb. Van der Ebb had decided to adopt the same tactics as Rufus and furnish his fleet with a privateer bodyguard.

  What ensued was a protracted and violent spice war whose effects are still being felt to this day (its most trivial legacy may be found in certain Gleed forenames, including my own, embarrassing, never-to-be-mentioned-here middle name). Eastern Indonesia, and especially the tiny archipelago known as the Banda Islands, where most nutmeg is grown, saw an increasing incidence of bloodshed both on and off land. Down through the decades thousands of Bandanese were killed, caught in the crossfire between opposing groups of mercenaries employed by the Gleeds and the van der Ebbs. Several hundred Chinese immigrant workers met the same fate.

  The fighting was still going on even in the late 1800s, albeit sporadically. By then the van der Ebbs had, pardon the pun, ebbed in influence and power. As a result of a series of bad marriages and the premature deaths of a number of sickly offspring, more and more the van der Ebbs were finding thems
elves subsumed into the Kuczinski Family. Their name was dying out. The Kuczinskis were taking over their business interests and their lineage, and the van der Ebbs were shrinking to a rump. Over them fell the deepening shade of the Kuczinskis' rapidly expanding East European umbrella.

  Animosity toward the Gleeds, however, remained. The Kuczinskis subsumed that too. It entered into their bloodline and infected it, and has festered there ever since, bursting out at regular intervals and engulfing whole nations with its venom.

  It is also, undeniably, reciprocated. My father, for one, cannot mention the Kuczinski name without spitting.

  And this draws me to my point. There can surely be no Family which doesn't owe its fortune and status to the exploitation of others and the suffering of others. Somewhere in every Family's history there lies a heavy weight of guilt, never referred to, never expressed. We have built our empires on huge piles of nameless, forgotten corpses. We continue to sustain these empires in that way. We never admit it. It is too immense, too appalling a fact ever to be uttered.

  In the Gleeds' case, all we ever care to say - the official line, inculcated from birth - is that we started out earning our money from nutmeg.

  Such an innocent thing. Nutmeg. Everyone loves it. Everyone uses it. You put it in Béchamel sauce and mulled wine. Dopeheads say you can get high on it, although this is disputed. Its hallucinogenic properties are weak, if they exist at all. You have to ingest a hell of a lot to get a result, and more often than not that result is a bad case of vomiting follow by a cracking headache. I know this from experience. Never again.

  (Nutmeg also yields mace, a less innocent-sounding product, derived from the thin leathery tissue between the stone and pulp of the fruit. But mace, for all that by etymological accident it shares its name with a medieval weapon, is harmless. Merely another spice.)