But he could tell me no more. He confined his interests to bond issues, horses and his lover. He could give no reasons, nor offer any guesses. His was not a speculative mind. I ended up quite admiring him for his little peccadilloes. It showed that he was not entirely an automaton. Somewhere in him there was a little imp, urging him to transgress and, after many years, he had given in. I hoped very much he was enjoying himself, because he was not very good at it. Sooner or later, he would be discovered and his world would crash in ruins.
'Thank you,' I said when it was clear I had exhausted his knowledge. 'You see, you have told me nothing that was so very dangerous. It is a small sin in comparison to your others. And will remain very much more secret than they will.'
'What do you mean?' he asked, apprehensively.
'Simply that what I could find out fairly easily, then so others can.
And will.'
I bowed to him, and left, leaving him standing, watching me. I am glad to say – what a strange world of amorality I had come to inhabit! – that M. Hubert acted on my warning. I never got the full details, but it appears that he set about using his very considerable talents to embezzle a good deal more money over the next year. When the bank finally discovered that the accounts were not quite what they should be, M. Hubert went to Buenos Aires, and vanished for ever.
I had a great deal of puzzling to do, and I think best when I am walking. So I walked back across the Bois de Boulogne to Paris, and walked still further, through the rough houses and ever-shrinking fields which were still a part of the far west of the city then, before resting in a café. There I sat, surrounded by laughter and smoke, as I pondered what M. Hubert had told me. Clearly, I would have to inform Barings. From what he had said, the bank might know that this issue was going to be tricky, but would not yet know the full extent of the difficulties that were coming their way.
But I still could not make sense of it. These banks seemed to be acting in concert, but they were behaving like rank amateurs; almost as if they wanted to throw their money away. If, for a moment, you conceded they were not total fools (which is occasionally tempting with bankers, but rarely with the most senior ones) then there must be a reason. But what might it be? Barings issues a bond, half of which is taken up in England, leaving them with two and a half million sterling to place on foreign markets. Some of it would go, no doubt. So, assume that there is a shortfall of two million. A vast sum of money and it would cause difficulties, as Barings obviously could not cover that from its own resources. But such things had happened before, even if not quite on that scale. At the last resort there was the Bank of England, which would advance Barings the bullion from its reserves. Barings would have to pay through the nose, no doubt, but it would survive. Its reputation for canny manoeuvres would be dented, but its titanic strength would be demonstrated for all the world to see. The only result would be that everyone would have lost a great deal of money. What was the point of that?
Two large glasses of beer brought me no closer to an answer, so I resumed my walk. I enjoyed it; that part of Paris which has the Avenue de la Grande Armée running through it has become much drearier in the past decade or so. Then it was a very peculiar quarter, with great apartment blocks rising up out of nothing, with perhaps a field full of cows to provide the city with milk on one side and a mason's yard or some other small workshop on the other. Tall buildings, six floors high, snuggled up to one-storey workers' hovels which had not yet been swept away by property developers. One patch of barren land was occupied by a gypsy encampment, another by an open-air music hall, in between a fashionable, and spectacularly ugly, church, which looked forlorn and abandoned even though it was brand new.
It was nearly six o'clock, so I had just time, if I found a cab, to get to Barings' office near the Bourse. It was a nuisance, as I didn't yet see the urgency, but I thought I might as well get it done with, otherwise my day tomorrow would be disrupted. Then I planned a trip to the public bath for a long soak, and an early night. I was exhausted. I should say that I was still in two minds about helping Barings at all; I had not quite forgiven them for their readiness to let me go. But old obligations are hard to get rid of; I thought of many of my colleagues with affection and, somewhat childishly, I thought it would be pleasant to demonstrate what they had lost.
