narrowed his eyes. ‘You can’t be as naïve as all that.’
‘I’m a stranger around here. Just spell it out in easy words.’
He spread his hands. ‘All right, it’s really quite simple. The big corporations, the off-shore funds, the banks – the whole Cardew Street crowd – they pack a lot of clout, and Conyers is their boy. They don’t like the aura that comes with gambling and Campanilla has been getting itself a bit of a reputation in that regard. They thought it was starting to taint their image, and no banker likes to be thought of as a gambler. That’s why they build all those marble halls to look like churches.’
I nodded. It checked out precisely with what Jackson had said. Negrini said, ‘The word around town was that as soon as the election was over, Conyers was going to get his instructions to crack down on the casinos. Anti-gambling legislation was going to be pushed through and I’d be out. I had to find a horse of my own and the only one available who looked like a realistic runner was Salton. It had to be him.’
‘So you’d actually have been squeezed by Conyers if he’d won the election.’ That explained the £10,000 in banknotes: the casino owner was hedging his bets. ‘But how did you persuade Salton to see things your way?’
‘Salton was a realist. He didn’t mind gambling as long as it was controlled. He knew that if you don’t have legal gambling, you’ll have illegal gambling. And he was a tough negotiator – he was going to double the gambling tax. I went along with that on the basis of half a loaf being better than none, and all that jazz. There was going to be plenty left over.’
I shook my head. ‘I still don’t understand why Salton fell in with you.’
‘Because he wasn’t after me. He was gunning for the striped-pants boys on Cardew Street.’ He paused, watching to see if I was keeping up with him. ‘Do you know how many Euro-dollars are funnelled through this island every year?’
‘I haven’t given it much thought.’
‘I don’t think anyone really knows,’ said Negrini. ‘But the lowest estimate I’ve heard is seven billion, and the highest was ten billion. You come to this island and all you see are tourists. There are a hell of a lot of them and that’s the way I make my money. But the tourists are just the froth on the top. Any government must raise taxes, so this government taxes imports and exports. Goods are taxed coming in and people are taxed going out. You can get on to this island free but you have to pay to leave. There’s a departure tax of two pounds a head for tourists and residents alike. If you buy a car here – say, an American car – you’ll pay a thirty per cent tax on top of the American price. They even tax the freight charges to bring the car from the States at thirty per cent.’
I shrugged. ‘So?’
‘So you have a high cost of living here and a low wage structure. Salton didn’t like that and wanted to change things around. He wanted to cut the import taxes on food altogether so that people could at least afford three square meals a day. To do that, he’d have to tax something else. There are billions of dollars going through here and they don’t leave a cent behind in taxation – and that’s why you find a couple of new banks opening up every week.’
I didn’t need a degree in economics to see that this would be an attractive prospect to a certain kind of investor.
Negrini chuckled. ‘You ought to hear the Cardew Street crowd talk about Salton. You’d think he was a million miles to the left of Chairman Mao. There’s no one so righteous as a corporation lawyer attacked in the bottom line. Salton was going to slap a tax on the corporations, the banks and the trust funds – not enough to make them pull out, but just enough to get the money he needed for his political programme. It would be a pin-prick compared with what they pay anywhere else, but Cardew Street regarded him as a banana republic dictator about to nationalise the lot of them.’
‘And you financed him.’
‘For my own good.’ He shrugged. ‘And because I like to hear the sweet sound of corporations squealing. But God knows what’s going to happen now Salton’s dead. There’s nobody else in the party good enough to step into his shoes.’
‘Sounds like he was something of a one-man band.’
‘Not quite. But the political group he built around him since coming back to the island is full of young idealists, and none of them has any real experience outside of Campanilla. It was the money that put him in pole position – without that, he wouldn’t have had a look-in, especially as a white islander who’d been away for so long.’
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