Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Golden Boy
Golden Boy
Golden Boy
Ebook207 pages3 hours

Golden Boy

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

This is a story about how falling in love caused a war. It is a story about how a beautiful and bewitching woman stole a fortune from her husband and ran away with his enemy.
So far so good.
If then I tell you that the woman and the man are Helen and Paris and that the people they stole from were the Greeks then you have the story. Except that this story is about now not three thousand years ago.
If you know your Homer (or if you have seen the film about Troy) then you will recognise the characters and events but this story is about crime and drugs, guns and sex, killing and being killed. It is about different places – London, Greece, Amsterdam, Africa, Afghanistan. It is about a deserted wife, about a bastard discovered, about assassins and assassinations. Above all it is a story about instant and insatiable lust, about a woman so lovely and compelling that men died desiring her.
Golden Boy is Book One of “Pathways to Revenge”; Book Two is on the way.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherLeo Salter
Release dateApr 15, 2012
ISBN9781471618765
Golden Boy

Related to Golden Boy

Related ebooks

Thrillers For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Golden Boy

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Golden Boy - Leo Salter

    Preface

    This is a story about how falling in love caused a war. It is a story about how a beautiful and bewitching woman stole a fortune from her husband and ran away with his enemy.

    So far so good.

    If then I tell you that the woman and the man are Helen and Paris and that the people they stole from were the Greeks then you have the story. Except that this story is about now not three thousand years ago.

    If you know your Homer (or if you have seen the film about Troy) then you will recognise the characters and events but this story is about crime and drugs, guns and sex, killing and being killed. It is about different places – London, Greece, Amsterdam, Africa, Afghanistan. It is about a deserted wife, about a bastard discovered, about assassins and assassinations. Above all it is a story about instant and insatiable lust, about a woman so lovely and compelling that men died desiring her.

    Golden Boy is Book One of Pathways to Revenge; Book Two out from Spring 2012.

    Leo Salter is a recently retired academic with a PhD in

    Physical Chemistry and an MA in English Literature.

    He spent the late seventies and eighties in Africa and now lives in Cornwall where his wife is a GP.

    This is dedicated to my wife who has always encouraged me to leave the ivory towers of Mount Ida and thrill at the simple joy of life.

    1.

    Talking Squares

    Sometimes. At the match. The crowd breathes out together, exhales in a huge gasp of disappointment as some moment of chance is incomplete. A shot fumbled, a pass intercepted, a goal saved. A passing moment of crowd despair. A sigh.

    Even in the moments of orgasm rolling one-on-one her sighs had that incompleted sadness. As though somehow the moment of ecstasy was not complete enough and yet at some stage in commencement and execution it had promised so much.

    o-o-o-o-o

    Sitting around on bling shiny golden glossy furniture in the Intercontinentals of the Mediterranean and the Gulf they plotted; of course they have religion, they have always had religion right from the first days in the desert 600 years after the other prophet, the crucified one. But now there is no God to fight them with, there is only Mammon, the Bible’s name for the god of materialism we worship now, the name the Bible gives to Hell’s ambassador, the wolf- demon of money, the son of Lucifer, the god of Greed and Avarice.

    o-o-o-o-o

    The Silens Corporation was as Mammon, it mainlined on the military-industrial-political world of power and wealth, its tentacles stretching across the globe and into space itself, taking its profit from arms and drugs, property and gambling, taxes and public works, criminals, politicians, the rich, the wealthy, the trade in sex and, most recently, from terrorists, the very people who plotted their destruction, the very people who, with laptops and connections and infinite amounts of oil money, driven by belief, by faith and a vision of the afterlife, plotted to attack the godless infidels of greed, plotted to attack the Silens Corporation, a Cathedral dedicated to Mammon.

    o-o-o-o-o

    It seems such a foolish folie á deux. More than foolish it’s utterly suicidal. Ridiculous. I’ve left Keret, betrayed him, betrayed his honour. But at least there’ll be no more of the slobbering fat dribbling weight of him on me.

    I am in love. The stupid words I’ve always sniggered at. But what good is it to me? I was bought and sold as a chattel, my education, my clothes, my whole life paid for by a man who bought me as a child from a breeder of concubines, who bought me from a man whose father and grandfather were breeders of concubines. What freedom is there for me in a world of men? What freedom does falling in love bring me in this world? (Nomea’s diary en route to Paris, Spring)

    o-o-o-o-o

    It has been theorised that Circassians are the closest to God's original model of humanity and thus the purest and most beautiful whites were the Circassians. The story of Circassian women is a sad one; Turks and Tatars habitually took them for their harems and sold on their daughters from breeding farms.

    o-o-o-o-o

    You will be wrapped in a shroud of fine cotton taken from the place of your crime, wrapped in your own stains of fornication. You will be lowered down into a hole in the ground so your breasts lie level on the soil. Ten of us will form a circle and stone you. They will be hard sharp stones of flint that fit into a man’s fist, large enough and sharp enough to cut and break, to gauge and slash your flesh, to turn your eyes and ears into blood and bone. We will stone you to death. (Email from Keret to Nomea)

    o-o-o-o-o

    They would never have fought to keep me if I hadn’t brought the money. They were greedy for it all, inexorably greedy. (Nomea’s diary in Marrakech, Summer)

    o-o-o-o-o

    In South Africa, the Nederduits Gereformeerde Kerk, the Nederduitsch Hervormde Kerk, the Gereformeerde Kerke in Suid-Afrika, and the Afrikaanse Protestantse Kerk are harsh churches when they are crossed in matters of sin, racial mixing, church attendance, Sunday observance . . . and money. Pretorius’s father was sinful in his drinking, gambling, and whoring, and whored best on Sunday when trade was slack and prices were low because of it. He was considered only sort of sinful in his production of mixed race children. Like some 19th century American Presidents he insisted that he had to have sex with his blacks to improve his stock and he was considered only sort of sinful because everyone knew that this was ordained (more-or-less) by the Bible. But what could not be condoned by the vicar, the priest, the dominie or by the predikant, what could not be swept under the carpet or buried under the voorkamer floor, was his attitude to money – in particular his attitude to other people’s money. He died for it, his wife and some of his children died for it, and it was only his son Pretorius and his stolen away daughter who survived. And people whose sisters are stolen away and raped sometimes live with it by driving down the nature of that crime – especially when the rape is followed by a marriage. And it all started and ended with a disagreement about horses which were indeed bought and paid for but never delivered to the buyer by Pretorius’s father.

    o-o-o-o-o

    Once the church held avarice in check and calvinsed the acquisition of wealth but now our god is money, Christ the Risen King is dead. (Nomea’s diary, off Paxos, late October)

    o-o-o-o-o

    Mother-bred to be indestructible, taught to utterly and relentlessly destroy those against him, to irrevocably and violently savage them in life, to publically mutilate them in death, to jeer when he conquered and to laugh at mercy; so run from Gunther and seek a wall for your back.

    o-o-o-o-o

    A sniper, one man, firing from the right, a shot kicking up ahead of him, running for cover, his hand shattering, his weapon gone in fragments, the side of his head tearing open, seeing through one eye now, pain like never ending torrents of boiling acid, a fourth shot, his ankle blown away, hanging from his shin by cartilage and mangled bone.

    o-o-o-o-o

    He phoned me in Alsace. He needed the safe house in Morocco, in Marrakesh, he needed a rendezvous, a place to be met, he needed a fast boat from Spain with weapons and cash, he needed to brief us.

    As if we needed briefing! The whole world knew what he’d done. The whole world was laughing at Keret, calling him a cuckold, making horns behind his back, sneering at a man who’d bought a woman as a child and couldn’t keep her from his enemy’s bastard son. The whole world swore that they would avenge him. They swore to Siskim they would avenge the theft of his (and their) billions and rescue his brother’s wife.

    But all knew it was neither revenge nor rescue. It was to be a stealing back, a stealing back with profit.

    Do not harm her, Keret said, Above all, do not harm her.

    And so they swore also that any man who harmed her would bring about the slaughter and destruction of his family.

    o-o-o-o-o

    Questions of conflict of interests (both real and apparent) bedevil attempts by honest men to constrain war. Nothing can prevent the resort to force when the communion of power is celebrated. Everyone has an interest in playing down problems, of ensuring equilibrium, everyone wants to live their lives out in peace, lives normal or otherwise. Except for the terrorists, terrorists live to exploit; terrorism is just another left-field darwinian niche for our species. Like crime. (Nomea’s diary in East Ukraine, November).

    2.

    Golden Boy

    Christian was a mean and nasty public schoolboy and eventually, in his adulthood, that meanness and nastiness became arrogant and brutal, it became dominated by an indifference to the lives of others that he hid beneath an ingrained superficial slime of pretence. But like all of us, there were moments when he could have chosen to be different, moments when he could have chosen to be better. For much of his life he was a thoughtless and self-centred golden boy, a chosen one; but for some of his life he was something both different and better, something much better and more human.

    His father Neil, though, as it turns out, not his father, was an apparently understated, below-the-radar main cog in the Silens Corporation, but so well-connected with the powers-that-be that his seemingly indifferent placing in the scheme of things fooled no-one inside the Corporation and beggared belief for those on the outside. Loyal (as it turns out, absolutely, totally loyal) to the Corporation boss (Pretorius Silens) and the boss’s family (Pretorius’s wife Hanne and their many sons and daughters), Neil was now a middle-to-late 50s salt of the earth, son-of-the-soil, man’s man, born near to where the Kentish coalfields used to be. He had graying–going-on-silver, pepper-and-salt, distinguished-looking hair, with a fashionable old school unkempt-but-macho, jack-the-lad fluff of a just too long cut above the ears so that it lay spunky-older-man on his collar and he had a penchant for Gieves and Hawkes brown brogues (black in town). He was paid much more than well enough to live more-than-well, to send his son (though, as it turns out, not his son) to an upper echelon public school on the welsh marches, to run a late model top-of-the range (SLS AMG) Mercedes and to holiday for a few several weeks or more each year at piquant villas here and there in Tuscany, Antigua and other places much the same; and to own a house (small chateau) in renovation in France – unfashionably in Alsace. In Alsace because his mother came from there. She had married the slight, often drunk, softly (Cork Irish) spoken captain in British intelligence (liaising 3 ways with the US, Leclerc and the British) who (as she often said) at 18 she fell in love with as she listened to the sad romantic songs he played on the piano in Cafe Obernai. The Irish father and the French mother left Neil with a strange blend of catholic hedonism, sinfulness and guilt which by behaviour alone he transferred to Christian (his only child, his son, but not) but there was never any suggestion that baptism into the true faith of the one and only Holy Mother the Church was part of Christian’s destiny.

    Neil’s wife (Renee), in her late 40s and still slim and girlish, was the straight-stocking-seamed hockey-legged product of a ‘Best of English’ Girls School, good and tender to him, homely, supportive, good with food and time to cook it and serve it with endearment – a tendency that sent him just ever so slightly the wrong side of embonpoint which in turn sent him longer and more frequently to the corporation health spar early in the morning which in turn meant he got up earlier, and, since he worked long hours, and got home late, led to a long day and in his middle-to-late fifties this made him think longer and more seriously about calling it a draw and living forever in his (still in renovation) house (18th century chateau) in France. Renee was affectionate to her husband and son, setting food and wine on the table, buying clothes, arranging for the airing of their beds, changing flowers (herself) in the house, tending to them both, the two men in her life; and early on in her marriage mastering the art of faking an orgasm and pleasuring herself silently in the shower and, as it turns out, on occasion, more noisily elsewhere. In his own way Neil’s slothfulness about the pleasures of others (and selfishness about his own) led him to the bordellos of (naturally enough) Paris, the S&M parlours of Berlin (in later life) and (when he was there) the luxuries of Kyoto; but he was careful, covert and did nothing exceptional for a senior man in the Silens Corporation – unless his abhorrence of coke, opium, speed, meth, (etc.) and excessive alcohol meant his reputation for sobriety and abstinence (almost) made him an exception.

    He had an air of friendliness, he knew the desk staff and secretaries at the Berkeley Square HQ by their first names, he knew about their families, their hobbies, their illnesses, and talked to them about their troubles and difficulties.

    How are you today George?

    Out celebrating the birth of my first granddaughter last night, sir, so a bit under the weather at the moment said with a rueful laugh.

    It was enough for Neil to make a mental note about a congratulations card and a small cheque and a check on George’s drinking habits. The Corporation needed discretion from its staff, especially the staff on the front desk, and it didn’t need flapping drunken tongues.

    Neil’s job was to oversee logistics for the Corporation personnel; cars, boats, planes, trains, charters, hotels, and safe houses, so a healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) degree of paranoia was ever present. The guns, hits, poisonings and bombs were for a Catalan called Ivan to fix; though, of course Neil knew, worked closely with, and trusted Ivan.

    Neil made it his business to always know where everyone would be, and (impeccably loyal) always held his tongue. He worked his secrets not just to hold off the whisperers from the press, not just keep out the semi-governmental sellers of information (customs, police, airline clerks, card merchants in sub-continental call centres) but also to prevent inside trades deduced from the business meetings he arranged.

    He worked not just to conceal the mistresses of the powerful and the lovers of the romantic (those who flew to exotic destinations under the influence of love) but also, with Ivan, he worked to keep their leaders safe from the nastier ends of business (the ambushes on the bends and hills on roads at night, the honey-pots and cameras in secret hotels that were never secret at all, the bits of synthetic (but feasibly natural) E. Coli washed into a breakfast bowl by some paid hotel assassin) and he worked so that he could make sure that everyone was where they should be, and that all the travel and journeys and visits and meetings were compatible with what was wanted, and that no sly behind the door traitorous deals were being made in exotic places. He had the trust of the boss and the respect of all and had been party (usually, though not always, at a distance) to the death of several (or maybe double figures) who underestimated his insight into the dealings of men and who were ignorant of his power to terminate their futures for misfaith and double-dealing.

    Then there was Christian the golden boy, to all intents and purposes his son, but who knew somehow that his parents were not quite his parents. From his early childhood Christian had been quick enough to see, instinctively tuned and thoughtful enough to notice, quick enough to overhear and quick to sneak through drawers left open and computers left insecure, and clever enough (some would say cunning) to put together all the dribs and drabs of half-heard conversations and half-understood legal documents to construct a theory as to why there was a certain objectivity in the way Neil and Renee looked at him. As he got older he was smart enough then to reflect upon why it was the way it was sometimes.

    You’re a very special child to us and we have great love for you. This and words like it didn’t ever quite ring true to him – and he knew them by their names, was encouraged to do so, felt as early as is possible that it would never be mummy and daddy, mum and dad, but always Neil and Renee.

    Renee his mother, his carer, call it what you will (What was it about her, he thought that does not seem quite like other mothers?) who looked so wistfully through her Connemara colleen green eyes at him and yet, although the love in her eyes was palpable the wistfulness was a part of the same secret conversation about something being concealed. He felt and knew that somehow she was consciously distanced from him, that she held back as though unsure and uncertain. It was not like the messy emotional red-in-tooth-and-claw way he saw it between other families and he felt he knew there

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1