No Place in the Sun (14 page)

Tom was surprised at the proposal. ‘I’m doing grand here though, and I like the place well enough. Anyway, I can’t see myself taking a cut in earnings just to move back home.’

‘Who said anything about a cut? I reckon we can both make a fortune on this. I’m having one last big throw of the dice before I retire, I want to put four or five million in the bank in the next two years, and you can do pretty well out of it too. Probably a lot better than you’re doing now, and selling stuff that you can stand over.’

‘Nothing wrong with the stuff I’m selling now.’ Tom was indignant at the inference.

Harry held up his hands. ‘Sorry if I offended you, but you know yourself that real property is a step above the myths that your friend Alan is peddling. Anyway, maybe the money will tempt you, I honestly believe that you can earn a lot more than you’re earning now.’

Henry had been staying out if it, but he turned to Tom. ‘I looked at the figures on Harry’s projections, if he hits the kind of sales that he’s expecting you’ll both make a fortune.’

Tom was all ears now. ‘How much are we talking about?’

Harry leaned in over the table and spoke quietly. Work it out for yourself, a thousand apartments, we have first pick at them before anyone else, so in theory we could sell them all in a year, prices about a hundred and twenty upwards, and we have eight percent of that from the developers.’

Tom did a quick calculation. ‘Eight percent? That adds up to a lot of moolah. How much of that would be mine then?’

‘I’ll do all the advertising, I reckon on going down the exhibition route, works well in the UK. Bring in the punters in their hundreds to a big venue, loads of good display material, the usual, like you see at the big shows in London. You flog the stuff off; we can break the development into phases to stop flooding the market, maybe get to raise the prices a bit on later phases. I reckon we can easily sell twenty or thirty places any weekend, maybe more than that if you get a good run at it, and I’ll give you at least a grand a pop for every sale closed. One percent of the sale price to be exact. If you give it one good year, you should earn at least a million.’

Tom absentmindedly stirred his coffee. ‘This is all a bit sudden, but I like the numbers anyway. Can I think about it for a few days?’

‘Don’t think too long, I need to get moving on this. I have an exhibition booked for three weekends from now, and I’d need you back in Dublin in less than two weeks.’

‘You should go for it, Tom; you’re wasting your talents selling timeshares.’ Henry looked at the young salesman. ‘Chance of a lifetime, lad; Harry is all right and you’d be better off away from Alan Merchant, he’ll be trouble in the long term.’

‘You are leaving, I know you are.’ Carmen was crying.

‘How do you figure that out?’

‘Last evening you bring to the bins much garbage, many trips over and back, and now there is nothing left in the apartment, no food, no personal stuff. I know you are leaving.’ She hugged the pillow to herself and wept bitterly.

‘I was going to tell you, but I didn’t want to hurt you, didn’t know where to begin.’

‘You could begin by telling me always the truth maybe? You are one fucked-up person, Tom, you know that? You have no emotion, nothing, nada.’

She got out of bed and dressed quickly, throwing pillows and cushions around angrily as she looked for her clothes. ‘You Irish, all the same, you want to sleep with Spanish girl but you no want to stay with her.’ She slammed the door as she ran from the apartment.

Tom sighed; it was a pity about Carmen. She was a decent sort, had helped him move from the rented apartment up to his new place, and had made sure he got back his full deposit from the place downstairs. She was right though, he was never going to be serious about her; there was something about an Irish girl that was so much more appealing. There would be plenty more fish in the sea, and there would be time enough for fishing when he got back there.

The plane was less than half full and he slept for much of the way. The announcement from the captain woke him; they were beginning their descent, only half an hour before he would be back on Irish soil. It felt good in a way, especially now that Walter had managed to find him a great apartment that would be ready to live in before the end of the month. In the meantime, Walter and Pamela had invited him to stay with them.

It would be good to live in a proper home for a while; this bachelor living could be a bit boring sometimes. A part of him wanted to settle down, to find a nice girl and make a proper home with her, but maybe that would happen now that he was making the move back to his native city. The apartment in Puerto Banus would keep; it would make a useful base for any time he had to come to Marbella on business, and his capital would be appreciating a lot faster that it would in the bank in Gibraltar.

It had all happened quickly after that dinner with Harry Corbett in Benehavis. They had driven out the following morning to the site at Playa Verde and met with the developer and the marketing manager on site. The project was huge, and the excavators were busy moving truckloads of earth around to create the landscape that would merge the golf course with the buildings that would surround it. The sales manager pointed out the location of the various blocks, as well as the hotel and clubhouse, and Tom quickly grasped the overall picture. He was able to get a mental picture of where each block was to be built, as well as being able to visualise where each apartment type would be located and the aspect that would be enjoyed by each property. He was mentally drawing up his sales pitch, working out a strategy for selling every apartment no matter which way it faced or on which floor it was located. His selling experience in the timeshare development would stand him in good stead; he had developed an ability to carry a mental three dimensional picture of each apartment building in his head, so that he could make a sales pitch for almost any apartment and sound like he knew it intimately.

Alan had been good enough about his leaving under the circumstances, and paid him most of what was coming to him. ‘We’re nearly out of this one anyway, Tom, and I think I’ll give it a rest for a while. It’s getting harder and harder to stay ahead of the newspapers and the television stations and their investigative journalists; everybody wants to throw mud on our profession nowadays.’

The taxi man was foreign, hadn’t much to say except to ask for directions several times. Tom wondered at the rapid changes taking place in his native city; it was a first to meet a taxi driver who seemed to have no idea of where he was going.

Harry was at work before him the following morning; this guy wasn’t afraid to get stuck in. His desk was piled high with brochures, enlarged photos and all kinds of publicity material. He pulled out two photocopies of advertisements from the pile and handed them to Tom.

‘Welcome to Sunspots, Tom, sorry I haven’t time to roll out the red carpet. These two ads are going into two of the Sunday papers this week; I need you to write the editorial to go in with them.

Tom was surprised. ‘Do the newspapers allow you to write the editorial? I thought that that was their job.’

‘If you saw what I’m paying for the bloody ads to those gangsters… There’s no bloody way that I’m giving them that amount of money and not be allowed to write my own editorial.’ Harry was under pressure.

‘Ok. Give me a general idea of what you want; do I just praise the development up to the skies, no hint of objectivity or anything?’

‘That’s the idea. The last thing I want is objectivity, just make it half and half, deal with the development itself and then the prospects for investing in Spain. Make it look like Connor Morris wrote it, his name will go on it. There’s a copy of the paper there from last week, give you an idea of his style, stick to that more or less.’

‘And the same with the other one, the one for the Globe?’

‘Yes, but don’t make it the same article obviously, just the same message. Do it in the style of Murtagh, make it look like he wrote it. Shouldn’t be too hard, the fucker is nearly illiterate by the look of a lot of what he writes. I think he just copies out brochures and puts his name to them, nice handy way to make a living.’

Tom cleared a space on the desk in the corner and got stuck in. It was good to be back in a normal work environment, even if the sky outside was grey and the rain wasn’t far away. If truth be told, he had been getting tired of selling to the losers who trudged in to Pueblo Alto Blanco; the only good thing about that place was the money. Still, it should be even better here if Harry had his sums done.

By ten o’clock the two articles were ready for the Sunday papers. Harry looked them over and nodded his approval. ‘There’s a great property journalist lost in you, Tom, these are better than the junk that those two peddle every week. They’ll have an easy ride this week, all their work done for them. Pull out the best pictures you can get from the developer’s stuff and let them off. That’s that job done at least.’

They retired to the meeting room with two cups of coffee to discuss strategy. Harry seemed to have most of the problems figured out; he had obviously been thinking about this operation for several months. He outlined the way that they would approach the selling process; they would need to sell substantial numbers of apartments if this was to work.

‘I’ll have to spend a lot of money on advertising, but that’s not your problem. I’ll also do a lot of public relations work, but the idea of hundreds of Irish people owning homes abroad is one that will tickle the fancies of the media people and it should be easy enough.’

‘So do you want me to have an input into that side of things?’ Tom didn’t want to take on anything that he wasn’t paid to do, but he also wanted this business to work and was prepared to give it his best efforts.

‘You know the Costa del Sol like nobody else in this business around here, so it would be useful if you did some bumph on that side of the business. I’ll need you to write the website material as well, background stuff on Marbella and the Costa generally. I can do bits on the golf; I didn’t waste all my time down there.’ Harry smiled.

‘I don’t know much about websites, I never really did anything in that area.’

‘Don’t worry about the mechanics of it, just write the stuff and I have a technical guy that will shove it into the right place on the website. Keep it like the stuff you wrote this morning, half on the location and the development, and half on the potential for investment down there.’

‘So what about the exhibitions? Where will we do them?’

‘I have the ballroom of the Old Masters Hotel booked every second weekend for the rest of the year, and hopefully we can fill it every time. We start on Fridays at lunchtime, about twelve o’clock so we can catch the office crowd, and we work late Friday nights. Then we do two full days on Saturday and Sunday, start about ten and finish whenever the last person has left more or less.’

Tom liked the sound of it all, it seemed like there was a chance to make an awful lot of sales if Harry’s PR could talk up the idea of investing in Spain. Sunspots seemed to be a very focussed company, and it enjoyed the backroom backup of Harry’s existing estate agency business, so it carried very little in the way of overheads. There was one thing worrying him though.

‘Will you and I be enough to deal with a stampede of sales if the crowds are big? Do we need some extra salesmen?’

Harry pondered the question. ‘I don’t want to hire anyone else, I think you and I can do most of it, what do you think yourself?’

Tom paused, if they took on another salesman it would dilute both their returns, but on the other hand what if they lost sales because people got tired waiting to see someone? ‘I have an idea that might be worth considering. I have a friend in the business here, and he doesn’t work weekends, maybe he could do the Sundays if they prove to be busy.’

‘Is that Walter, the guy you’re staying with?’

‘Yes, top class salesman, old enough to give an air of respectability as well when he teams up with yourself.’

‘Might be a good idea, do you think he would like to work a few weekends? Maybe his boss wouldn’t be too happy to see him working for the opposition.’

‘I don’t really see a problem; I mean they aren’t in the foreign property business, and Sunspots is completely separate from your own home-based operation. Anyway, if you’re happy to go with it, I’ll ask him tonight.’

They went through a list of items that Harry had made on his notepad, and Tom was surprised at how much of the detail the older man had thought of. He had obviously been working on this project for months, and his grasp of the small issues was impressive. In particular, his idea about the lawyer was very good.

‘There’s this guy Miguel, he’s a young lawyer from De Silva’s law office in Marbella. He’ll fly in every Friday of an exhibition weekend and set up his stall in the hotel. Ostensibly he’ll be there to give Spanish legal advice, but in reality he will be there to make sure that as many sales as possible are tied up on the day. He can take deposits as well as tying down the buyers, and that will mean that we have already moved on that buyer to the legal process in Spain, so we can more or less forget about them. We can then spend the early part of the week chasing up the ones that have paid deposits but haven’t talked to the lawyer.’