Crocodile Tears

want to hear about him?”
    “ Absolutely.”
    “ Well, you’ve probably read a bit about him in the papers. He was brought up in an orphanage in east London. No parents. No family. Nothing. He’d been abandoned in a shopping cart, wrapped in a plastic bag … McCain Frozen Fries. That’s how he got his name. He was fostered by a couple in Hackney, and from that moment things started going better for him. He did well at school … particularly at sports. By the time he was eighteen, he had become a famous boxer. He won the WBO world middleweight title twice, and everyone thought he’d make it a hat trick before he got knocked out in the first round by Buddy Sangster in Madison Square Garden in 1983.”
    “ What happened to Buddy Sangster?” Alex asked. He’d heard the name somewhere before.
    “ It’s funny you should ask. He died a year later. He fell under a train in the New York subway. They showed his funeral on TV. One of his fans even sent a hundred black tulips to the funeral. I remember hearing that …” Edward shook his head. “Anyway, Desmond McCain wasn’t boxing anymore. His jaw had been smashed up pretty badly. He went to some plastic surgeon in Las Vegas, but it was a botch job and it never healed properly. To this day he eats only soft food. He can’t chew. But it wasn’t the end of his career. He went into business … property development, and he was very good at it.
    There were a dozen tenants in Rotherhithe, down on the River Thames, and somehow he persuaded them to sell cheaply to him, and then he knocked down their houses and put up a bunch of skyscrapers and made a fortune.

    “ That was about the time that he became interested in politics. He’d given thousands of dollars to the Conservative party, and suddenly he announced he wanted to be a member of Parliament. Of course, they welcomed him with open arms. He was rich, he was successful—and he was black. That was part of it too. And the next thing you know, he managed to get himself elected in a corner of London that hadn’t voted Conservative since the nineteenth century, and even then it had only been by mistake.
    People liked him. It was the typical rags-to-riches story … you could say plastic bag to riches in his case. He got a big majority, and a year later he was a minister in the department of sport. There was even talk that he could become our first black prime minister.”
    “ So what went wrong?”
    Edward sighed. “Everything! It turned out that his business hadn’t been going as well as people thought. One or two of his developments had fallen behind schedule, and he had huge financial problems. The bank was closing in and it looked as if he might go bankrupt … and of course you’re not allowed to be a member of Parliament if that happens. Too unsightly for their taste. God knows what he was thinking, but he decided to set fire to one of his properties and claim the insurance. That was his way out of the mess. Well, the property in question was a twenty-four-story office building overlooking St. Paul’s, and one night it simply burned to the ground. The next day, McCain put in a claim for fifty million dollars. Problem solved.”
    They came to a sharp bend in the road and Edward Pleasure slowed down. By now the whole road was snow covered, with dark pine trees looming up on both sides.

    “ At least that’s what he thought,” he went on. “Unfortunately for him, the insurance company smelled a rat. They started asking questions. Like, for example, why had the alarms been switched off? Why had the security staff been given the night off? There was a lot of gossip in the press—and then, suddenly, a witness turned up. It turned out there’d been a homeless person sleeping in the underground garage. He’d actually been there when McCain drove in with six gallons of gasoline and a cigarette lighter. He’d been lucky to get away alive. Anyway, McCain was arrested. There was a fairly sensational trial. He was sent to prison for nine years.”
    Alex had listened to all this in silence. “You called him Reverend McCain,” he said.
    “ Well, that’s the strange thing. In a way, McCain’s whole life had been bizarre—but while he was in jail, he converted to Christianity. He did a correspondence course and became a priest in some church no one’s ever heard of. And when he got out—that was five years ago—he didn’t go back into business or politics. He said he’d spent his whole life being