She couldn’t believe she had missed the alarm call. Alana Dutton had asked the telephonist to ring her at seven, and now it was ten to eight, which meant that Max would have a head start. Her first meeting was due to start in ten minutes, before which she had to shower, dress and do something about her hair. At least she could dispense with breakfast; the multi-course supper in the old town had not concluded until two that morning. On business trips she was used to making do with four hours’ sleep. Clients expected elaborate meals, good wines, thick sauces, and the service in the crowded fish restaurant had been perversely slow, requiring a consolatory drinking session in the hotel bar afterwards. She made up while booting her laptop, downloaded the day’s emails while donning her trouser suit and slipped into the Negresco’s main conference room as soon as the break in the opening address allowed. Outside, through the opaque curtains, she could see tanned boys roller-skating in sunlight along the Boulevard des Anglaises as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ whispered Ross, her assistant, ‘you missed the Hong Kong delegate.’
‘Overslept.’
‘So I can see.’
‘You didn’t call me.’
‘You said you didn’t want me to, remember?’ Ross pulled her neckline straight at the back. Alana wondered how he always managed to appear so immaculate. Ross looked as though he spent the night in bubble-wrap, a treasured Ken-doll preserved by an obsessive collector. Some people handled corporate life so fluidly that they seemed to have no other existence. ‘Max was here fifteen minutes early.’
‘He always is.’
‘Maybe he sabotaged your alarm call.’
‘He wouldn’t do something like that, he’s a straight arrow.’ Everyone needed a business rival to keep them on their toes, but no one needed a rival like Max. Always on time, always one step ahead, always completely honest with his customers, always – damn it – three years younger. Wherever Alana went, Max was there first, wide and bright, buttering up the clients and tying up the deals. It wasn’t supposed to be an issue, but he was also a man, with the easy confidence of his sex, a former decathlon champion who still wanted to win at everything.
‘Daniel says he needs you to go to Frankfurt for the AngloCom presentation,’ whispered Ross.
‘You’re joking, I thought he was going to handle that himself. I’ve only just got here.’ Alana had arrived in Nice the previous evening for a three-day event. ‘Please, not Frankfurt again. I was there Tuesday.’
‘I’ve got your tickets.’ Ross handed her a thick white envelope. ‘You’re on the four o’clock.’
‘Why so late?’
‘You have to see Rafaella in Ventimiglia first. I’ve got you a ticket for the ten-twenty train.’
‘This is horrible, Ross, do you realise I’ve done five countries in under a week?’
‘It gets worse,’ her assistant replied. ‘Nice to Heathrow business class was full. You’re in economy.’ And Max would be in first class, no doubt. How did the son of a bitch do it?
Alana was evil-eyed by her client as she slipped back out of the room. Ross would check her out of the hotel, leaving her free to head for the station.
A thousand mobile phones bleeped with the same message as the packed Nice-Ventimiglia train passed across the Italian border and the networks changed. The meeting with Rafaella took twenty minutes – long enough to hear her late delivery complaints, long enough for her to tell Alana that she had signed a three-year deal with Max Harwood – and as she headed back toward the passenger-crazed station, Alana grew angry over her wasted journey. Max had obviously charmed the bitch so much that she could pull her territory-marking bullshit with Alana, and make her feel as if they were competing over a man.
On the boiling Ventimiglia platform she helped to hoist an old lady up the two-foot high step to the double-decked train. Behind them, lying against a wall, a young African woman was in labour. The police, used to standing around and singling out gypsies to check on their identification papers, had draped a red woollen blanket over her while they waited for transport to arrive.
Alana sank back into the seat and watched the stations flash by. The tiny resorts of Roquebrune, Cap d’Ail and Eze were separated by enticing bays of fierce sapphire sea. She longed to tear off her suit and join the bathers she saw floating far below in these still coves, but there was no time for such frivolities; there was never any time. The department refused to hire more staff because it had been a bad year; it was always a bad year. Her hours and workload had incrementally increased until she only managed to see her son every third weekend. Whenever she saw Dexter, she noticed that he was falling more and more under the influence of his newly-religious father. Dan had taken up Buddhism and was determined to share his enlightenment with anyone who would listen, but at least this time he was in the thrall of a user-friendly religion. She wondered how other people managed to keep it all together. What did they have that she didn’t have? Age on their side, she thought bitterly. A certain freshness. Max talked to every client as if it was his first day on the job. He had the kind of disturbing honesty you almost never saw anymore. And there was, it had to be said, the matter of the glass ceiling. She’d been smart and sharp and had risen through the ranks, but the jump into management had proven elusive, so here she remained, on the shop floor.
The Nice-Heathrow flight was full of red-faced English couples in striped shirts and ridiculous straw hats wrangling with check-in crew about luggage allowances. She sat with the other executives in a shadowed corner of the sunlit lounge, where they could jealously eye each other’s laptops, mobiles and Palm Pilots. She fought back a surge of jealousy as Max boarded ahead of the herd with a brushed-steel Vaio tucked beneath his arm. Tall and slim, wearing his suit as neatly as if he had been slotted into it, he was the kind of man who elicited responsive smiles from attendants. It was more than just good tailoring. Max drew attention without ever meaning to, just as Alana tried and failed. The eyes of hotel and airport staff slipped over her, writing her off as a faintly butch businesswoman with whom they wanted minimal contact. Lately, Max was becoming less of a rival, more of a nemesis.
The flight was shorter than the journey back from the airport. She would have loved to stay on in Nice, maybe drive along the coast to one of those permanently misty mountain villages surrounding Monaco, but the idea was inconceivable with so much work to catch up on. She had never found time to do it before; why did she think she’d be able to now? This wasn’t living, it was working in your sleep.
She pit-stopped at the office to file her report in person, swung by the flat for clothes and headed back to the airport before realising that she had failed to call Dexter to wish him good luck with his brace-fitting. It was too late to make amends; her mobile was switched off because she was already about to board another flight.
Alana arranged licences for homewares, the items everyone could live without: the vanilla room sprays, matt cream vases, citron-scented candles, silver picture frames and embroidered napiery that cluttered expensive shops throughout the world. It sounded pointless when she explained it to outsiders, not that she often bothered to, but when you added in the fairs and exhibitions, the fluctuating territories, the fashionable crazes that turned inefficient little factories into panicked and robotic corporate suppliers, it was a very big deal, and each country could be persuaded to stock the other’s goods. The urbanised Italians, French and Spanish had a flair for luxuries. The equivalent English items were artless and overpriced, cursed by generations of home-county conservatism and the loss of a manufacturing base. Alana was a vice-president of European territories, but the title meant little, and her opposite number was in the employ of her biggest competitor. Max was easily winning the battle for orders, sewing up each European territory as he passed through ahead of her.
It didn’t seem as if it was possible, but the events of the week gained speed. In the departure lounge at Schiphol, Alana watched a man of roughly her own age undergoing what appeared to be a fatal heart attack. He slumped in his seat and slid sideways, and no one would have noticed if he hadn’t dropped his drink on the floor. Whisky soaked into the man’s socks as the business lounge hostess vainly tried to set his body upright for the sake of decorum. Later that evening, from a hotel window in Birmingham, she saw the couple in the room across the courtyard having a fight, which they resolved by noisily making love. It seemed in those twelve hours of fast-changing scenes she witnessed every form of human behaviour, yet none of it touched her. Travel had thrown open the world, but reduced it to nothing more than a series of distant tableaux.
She was pleased when the office called to redirect her once more; a new project would at least end this passive observation. Her itinerary was checked and locked. The destinations blurred; she displaced her thoughts and stared from the glittering black windows of departure lounges, holding bays for the executives who kept The Continent, as it was once called, competitive.
The night was stormy; she was in Cologne or Berlin, one or the other, waiting to board a delayed flight to Amsterdam, when the sky broke with a bang. Alana remembered thinking she had flown through the worst of it when the plane bucked and dropped after its rough climb into the flaring night; then there was nothing but grey dead air. The weightless sensation lasted for the remainder of the flight. She landed in Holland, dazed and unable to think of anything except putting one foot before the other, getting through the next ten seconds. With a buzzing head she attended a meeting about scatter cushions in Bruges, flew to Gatwick but missed her son, took off again, landed again, but now the sense of keeping up and coping had come undone, as though the rhythm had faltered between what she saw and what she was doing, like soldiers breaking step or an orchestra losing its way in a difficult musical passage.
She no longer recalled her journeys as a linear parade of events, but as underlit Polaroids of an indistinct life: shelves of room colognes, boardroom tables, drivers holding signs that bore her misspelled name, club lounge wet bars, cocktails and canapés, order books, pens, endless counters of smiling women checking tickets against computer screens, arguments over napkin rings and candlesticks – none of it made sense. She held a meeting about leather placemats as though her life depended on it. The tableaux raced past in a garish blur of sights, sounds and moods.
She even forgot about Max, despite his name continuing to crop up in emails and trade magazines. At least, she forgot until the night of the International Soft Furnishing Awards, when Max picked up a lucite plaque honouring him as salesman of the year. Even that wouldn’t have been so bad, but Max had to stop by her table and smile condescendingly at her until she was forced to congratulate him.
She drank too much – she was angry, damn it – and found herself at the bar with other executives whose working lives had passed unrewarded and unhonoured that evening. Pretty soon a slanging match started, with Max Harwood as the object of pity and envy.
‘He fucks all his female clients,’ said Peter Olexa from the Milan office. ‘Then as soon as he’s got them to sign for three years, he’s gone.’
‘He never delegates, and he sets a pace no one else can keep up,’ complained Simon Carter-Phillips, an overweight also-ran from the Chelsea Emporium who looked about eighteen months away from his first heart attack. ‘He works so hard that he gives the rest of us a bad name.’ As they knocked back their scotches in agreement, Alana found it hard to be bitter. Christ, the man was good at his job, and everything else was just jealous bullshit. She wondered if he had been married.
On her way back to her room she passed Max’s door just as the man himself was entering. She wanted to say – actually, she wanted to ask Max how he had managed to top his personal best this season – but found herself becoming angry when he invited her in for a drink, because it wasn’t playing by the rules.
Quite what happened in the next few seconds remained a mystery to her for several weeks. Certainly, there was a scuffle that tumbled them into the room, and Max seemed to trip over the edge of the bed. He whacked his head on the corner of the minibar and fell face down so hard that Alana heard his septum crack. The blood that pooled around his head was as black and glossy as tar. Alana gingerly checked his pulse and found there was nothing, not the faintest beat. The blood in Max’s veins had simply stopped moving. They had all been drinking heavily – Alana had read somewhere that your blood vessels ruptured much more easily when there was alcohol in your system, so much so that a simple fall could kill you, and Max looked pretty much one hundred per cent dead.
She staggered back into the corridor, pulling the door shut behind her, but even in her confused state of mind was careful to wipe the handle clean of prints, just in case she’d touched it. The corridor was empty – it was nearly midnight – as she headed to her room on tiptoe and showered the bitter sweat from her body.
As much as she was sure that someone would find out what had happened, Alana felt equally convinced that no one could directly link her to the death scene. After all, the guy had fallen over and died in his own room. There was nothing to connect the two of them. They hadn’t shared a lift to the floor. There were no closed-circuit cameras in the hall. They hadn’t spoken since the awards ceremony earlier, and then they were seen to be on good terms. It hadn’t been her fault, for Christ’s sake, he had grabbed at her.
Even so, she didn’t sleep a wink all night.
Nobody noticed that Max had failed to appear for breakfast. He usually ate on the road and beat everyone to the airport. It took a few days for the rumours to start. At a conference in Berlin: ‘Have you heard about Max Harwood? He suffered a stroke after the Soft Furnishing Awards and died.’ In Paris: ‘Max had a massive heart attack. Too many hotel dinners. They’re looking for someone to take over his territories.’ In Amsterdam: ‘He’d been drinking, choked to death on something he ordered from room service. Just shows how the dumbest thing can bring a good man down.’
Alana applied for the position because it seemed stupid not to, and was so sure of not being granted an interview that she didn’t even bother to check her emails. When she did, she discovered that she had been offered the job. They knew all about her; the interview was little more than a formality. A breezy heavy-set American in his fifties named Brent Kaye welcomed her to the fold, inviting her to a small gathering of company directors the following Friday. They had drinks at an underlit bar in a Holborn hotel, then Brent took her off for dinner, where they sat in a quiet alcove, behind sharp white linen. Brent drank quite a lot for an American, and handled it well.
‘Glad to welcome you aboard,’ he said, playfully punching Alana on the shoulder. His manner was corny but endearingly awkward. ‘You’ve made it to the club. You’re one of us now.’ Alana assumed he was talking about the company, but Brent pointed to his lapel, and the small gold and black enamel pin stuck in his buttonhole. The badge formed a pair of entwined letter E’s. ‘Seen one of these before? Sure you have!’
Now that Alana thought about it, she had. Over the years she had noticed the discreet initials pinned to a number of ties and lapels. ‘What does it stand for?’ she asked.
‘Executive Elite,’ Brent explained. ‘You mean you never heard of us?’
Alana wondered if it was something to do with the Elks. ‘No, but it seems—’ she waved a nail over the badge, ‘—I’ve seen that logo around a lot.’
‘Hell, it’s more than a logo. You’ve seen it because you travel in the same circles. You should be very proud of yourself. You’re the first woman in our industry.’ Brent drained his wineglass and refilled it. He dug in the top pocket of his jacket and produced a slim fold of brown leather, which he slipped across the tundra of tablecloth to Alana. ‘Go ahead, little lady, we reckon you’ve earned it.’
Alana unfolded the little pouch and shook out the gold pin. ‘I don’t understand. What did I do to get this?’
‘Come on, you don’t need to be modest. I think you know very well what you did. You’re gonna find that this little baby opens a lot of doors for you.’ Brent watched while she clipped the badge to her lapel, but wouldn’t be drawn further on the subject.
Throughout the next day’s meetings, Alana took note of those executives who wore the badge – although they were from many different countries, they seemed to have something in common, a look, a manner, something she couldn’t put her finger on. If other members noticed her pin, they didn’t comment on it. At the weekend she spent time with Loic, a copyright lawyer she was seeing in Paris, and watched television while he was dressing, noting a number of officials at a televised UN meeting who appeared to be wearing the same pin. She was starting to get a bad feeling; the more she looked at the damned thing, the more it looked like a modern-day version of the SS insignia. And the ones who wore it – men only, it seemed – looked like the kind of people who denied having anything to do with military atrocities. At night she unclipped the pin and studied it carefully, tipping it into the lamplight.
EE.
Executive Elite, what the hell did that mean? Did you get Air Miles or something with every deal you clinched? She’d been promoted, but what was so elite about that, and why the secrecy? True, the senior executives with whom she dealt seemed to be treating her with a new respect, and sure enough, doors were opening more easily than they had in the past – that wasn’t just her imagination, was it? But what had she really done to deserve the honour? What marked her out for special treatment from all the other executives?
She woke in the middle of the night sweating ice.
It was blindingly obvious. She wondered how she could have failed to spot it before. She had murdered a man – at least, they thought she had – and it had made her eligible to join some kind of club – a society for everyone who had managed to get away with it. She’d proved she had the right stuff to move to the inner business circle. They thought she had murdered Max to get ahead. Upright, honest Max, who was loved with a ferocious loyalty by his staff, and hated by everyone at the top for making it all look so damned easy.
Alana threw cold water on her face and stared at her red eyes in the bathroom mirror. She wasn’t a murderer, she was a professional. Max had slipped. It was the kind of accident that happened to people all the time. She needed to talk to someone. She had to see Brent.
‘Executive Execution?’ hissed Brent, pantomiming horror. ‘Jeez, Alana, this is not the place to talk about it.’ They were standing in the overcrowded bar at Claridges, waiting to go into the richly carpeted dinner lounge that looked like an old cinema. ‘Why don’t we go through to the table before the others arrive?’ It was twenty-five minutes past eight and the room was starting to fill up. The Americans ate early, the French ate late, and English businessmen only ever booked tables for eight-thirty or nine. Brent drank some water and licked his lips, looking a little nervous. ‘Like I told you, it stands for Elite. Nobody ever – ever – says anything about execution. I always argued that we should explain more to our new members, but the board thinks it’s better to let initiates work it out for themselves. Where did you get the idea about the initials?’
‘I worked it out for myself. Maybe that isn’t what you’re called, but that’s what you mean.’
‘I always thought you were gonna be one of the bright ones,’ laughed Brent. ‘Well, you know now, so if you have any questions, it’s the time to ask them.’
‘What do I have to do?’
He looked at her blankly. ‘Nothing. You don’t “do” anything. You already earned the mark of respect. It’ll get you anywhere you need to go. Take a look around, you’ll meet other club members but no one will ever talk to you about it, because there’s really no need. It’s the ultimate club, Alana, one you don’t have to ask to join, one that acknowledges you by one simple act that you’ve arrived at yourself. We have EE members in all walks of life. Insurance, banking, law, media – newspaper proprietors, we sure have a lot of those. What you’ve done is win yourself a gold pass card, honey. Think about it, you surrendered your life working your butt off to keep the pistons of commerce pumping. Your world is a waking dream filled with the art of the deal – that’s true, isn’t it?’ He gave her a secret smile. ‘Come on, look what you do: brokering, planning, forecasting, profit and loss, balancing figures, and all too soon it’s over, but you, you went a step further than that to get on, it’s only fair you should reap a reward.’
‘And that’s why I get to wear the pin.’
‘Well, partly. There’s another reason. It protects you. It means no one can ever do the same to you. You’re safe now. You paid your dues. You’re a protected species. What’s the point of a club if it doesn’t privilege its members?’ He signalled to a waiter. ‘Can we get some wine over here?’
She should have felt wonderful. After all, no one could ever find out that she hadn’t exactly ‘paid her dues’, but had merely watched in drink-numbed amazement as Max suffered a ridiculous accident. As Alana pulled off her shoes beside the hotel bed, she only felt sick and ashamed that, in the final reckoning, this was all her working life amounted to, this was why all the sacrifices had been made. If she had chosen to push Max into an alleyway and knife him into a lonely anonymous death, she would still have been awarded the gold pin. ‘Clearing the path,’ Brent had called it, as if she had just helped to cut away underbrush that impeded the wheels of industry. Max had rocked a few too many boats, it seemed; no one in the upper echelons was sorry to see him go.
The pin got her appointments with people who until a few weeks ago wouldn’t even return her calls. She made better deals and cleared higher profits without working as hard, and after a while it didn’t feel so wrong. She began to think about taking a holiday. As she watched the planes taxiing along the rain-sheened Heathrow runway, she tried to decide where she could take Loic, somewhere far away, a place that neither of them had ever visited before. That was when she saw Brent’s face reflected in the dark glass.
The American was standing behind her, but the customary smile that creased his face had vanished.
‘Brent,’ said Alana as a sense of guilt returned, ‘are you going to Antwerp for the ceramics fair?’
‘No, Alana,’ Brent replied. ‘I came to see you.’
‘Me? I don’t understand.’
‘Oh, I think you do.’
‘Would you like to sit down?’ she asked nervously.
‘No. This won’t take long. Why didn’t you tell anyone the truth about what happened between you and Max that night?’
Alana thought quickly. She’d been over it a thousand times in her head. There was simply no way that anyone could really know how Max had died. She could brazen it out. ‘You know what happened.’
‘I know now.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I know because Max Harwood told me himself.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He’s back with us once again, Alana.’
‘But he’s dead.’ Her voice rose. Other people in the lounge were looking up at her.
‘Max turned up at my hotel last night, having spent three weeks in a clinic with no fucking memory. The last thing he recalls is walking away from you after you tried to jump him for a fuck, and tripping over the end of his bed. Which means—’ Brent leaned forward and reached inside Alana’s overcoat, feeling for the pin and unclipping it, ‘—that you are not eligible to wear this. It seems you don’t have what it takes after all.’ Brent weighed the clip in his hand before slipping it into a pocket. ‘It means you’re not protected anymore.’ His eyes were lazy with contempt. ‘We thought you were the first woman through the glass ceiling who acted like a man.’
‘I’m a threat to you,’ said Alana, realising her position.
‘Maybe, but not for very long.’ Brent smiled. ‘You’d better hurry. I think they just called your flight.’ His smile returned in a shark grin. ‘You learned one thing from this, Alana. You’ve seen us, so you know who to keep an eye out for next time.’
Even as Alana ran for the gate, she knew there would never be any escape. If she thought her life was fast and frightening before, she had no idea how fast and frightening it was going to get in the next few weeks.