Read Online Do Not Disturb by Tilly Bagshawe - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Tilly Bagshawe
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resolve already crumbling. “All right. I’ll buzz him. But I can tell you right now, he won’t see you. He’s having rather a bad day, I’m afraid.”
This turned out to be an understatement.
Inside his office, Anton reached for his open bottle of antacids and slipped another revolting, chalky pill into his mouth.
“No, I will not
calm down
, Roger,” he yelled into the phone. “She’s crucifying me. And that cunt of an editor’s giving her a free pass to do it! There’s more on the story in tomorrow’s paper, apparently. When I think of how much fucking money I gave to their bloody Help a London Child appeal last year.I mean, where’s the fucking loyalty, Roger, huh? Answer me that!”
Anton Tisch was one of life’s winners. Having cleaned up in Azerbaijan in the midnineties, he’d gotten out of the oil business while the getting was still good, before he found himself poisoned or shot or shipped off to Siberia like so many of the Russians who’d gotten greedy and kept their fat fingers in the pie for too long. Diversifying into other industries, he had reinvented himself as a legitimate businessman. His hedge fund, Excelsior, was now one of the largest and most profitable in Europe. His media empire stretched from Delhi to Vladivostok and incorporated everything from online search engines to cable TV stations. And his hotel chain—the mighty Tischens—was among the most prestigious and well respected in a notoriously cutthroat and fickle business.
Dividing his time between his home in Mayfair—he’d had three exquisite Georgian mansions knocked together to create one of the largest privately owned residences in London—and his estate on the banks of Lake Geneva, Anton surrounded himself with every luxury that money could buy.
Of course, as for so many of the world’s wealthiest men, it was the things money
couldn’t
buy that kept him awake at night. Having grown up poor in an obscure village in rural East Germany, what Tisch craved more than anything was social acceptance among the English upper classes—to become part of the famously amorphous British Establishment. But like so many wealthy foreigners before him, he was discovering the hard way that in England there were numerous doors that money alone could not unlock. Abramovich had won over the masses as Mr. Chelski when he bought and poured money into Chelsea football club. But Anton wasn’t interested in being liked by lager louts and yobs. His social sights were set much higher.
His strategy—pouring funds very publicly into civic institutions and high-profile charities—was a good one. He wantedpeople to see him as a modern-day Carnegie: generous, philanthropic, paternalistic; in short, everything that the English aristocracy considered themselves, however misguidedly, to be. Eventually, the plan was for his good works to earn him a knighthood, the social equivalent of an access-all-areas backstage pass.
Only last month, his sources at Whitehall had been reassuring him that he was well on the way to achieving his coveted K. But that was before Heidi.
She wasn’t the first girl to go to the papers with a story shredding his hard-earned reputation. A few years ago another ex, a journalist, had written a piece about Anton’s sadomasochistic bedroom practices that had sent his social ambitions slithering back down the chute to square one.
He ought to have learned his lesson then. But even knowing the dangers he faced at the hands of the notoriously xenophobic British press—German-bashing still sold papers in England—his pathological dislike of women made it almost impossible for him to treat his lovers with the decency or generosity that might have kept them quiet. To Anton Tisch, women were possessions to be used and discarded. Any children he might accidentally have fathered along the way he viewed not so much as people but as collateral damage.
“You know what I was doing last night, Roger?” he bellowed at his British
This turned out to be an understatement.
Inside his office, Anton reached for his open bottle of antacids and slipped another revolting, chalky pill into his mouth.
“No, I will not
calm down
, Roger,” he yelled into the phone. “She’s crucifying me. And that cunt of an editor’s giving her a free pass to do it! There’s more on the story in tomorrow’s paper, apparently. When I think of how much fucking money I gave to their bloody Help a London Child appeal last year.I mean, where’s the fucking loyalty, Roger, huh? Answer me that!”
Anton Tisch was one of life’s winners. Having cleaned up in Azerbaijan in the midnineties, he’d gotten out of the oil business while the getting was still good, before he found himself poisoned or shot or shipped off to Siberia like so many of the Russians who’d gotten greedy and kept their fat fingers in the pie for too long. Diversifying into other industries, he had reinvented himself as a legitimate businessman. His hedge fund, Excelsior, was now one of the largest and most profitable in Europe. His media empire stretched from Delhi to Vladivostok and incorporated everything from online search engines to cable TV stations. And his hotel chain—the mighty Tischens—was among the most prestigious and well respected in a notoriously cutthroat and fickle business.
Dividing his time between his home in Mayfair—he’d had three exquisite Georgian mansions knocked together to create one of the largest privately owned residences in London—and his estate on the banks of Lake Geneva, Anton surrounded himself with every luxury that money could buy.
Of course, as for so many of the world’s wealthiest men, it was the things money
couldn’t
buy that kept him awake at night. Having grown up poor in an obscure village in rural East Germany, what Tisch craved more than anything was social acceptance among the English upper classes—to become part of the famously amorphous British Establishment. But like so many wealthy foreigners before him, he was discovering the hard way that in England there were numerous doors that money alone could not unlock. Abramovich had won over the masses as Mr. Chelski when he bought and poured money into Chelsea football club. But Anton wasn’t interested in being liked by lager louts and yobs. His social sights were set much higher.
His strategy—pouring funds very publicly into civic institutions and high-profile charities—was a good one. He wantedpeople to see him as a modern-day Carnegie: generous, philanthropic, paternalistic; in short, everything that the English aristocracy considered themselves, however misguidedly, to be. Eventually, the plan was for his good works to earn him a knighthood, the social equivalent of an access-all-areas backstage pass.
Only last month, his sources at Whitehall had been reassuring him that he was well on the way to achieving his coveted K. But that was before Heidi.
She wasn’t the first girl to go to the papers with a story shredding his hard-earned reputation. A few years ago another ex, a journalist, had written a piece about Anton’s sadomasochistic bedroom practices that had sent his social ambitions slithering back down the chute to square one.
He ought to have learned his lesson then. But even knowing the dangers he faced at the hands of the notoriously xenophobic British press—German-bashing still sold papers in England—his pathological dislike of women made it almost impossible for him to treat his lovers with the decency or generosity that might have kept them quiet. To Anton Tisch, women were possessions to be used and discarded. Any children he might accidentally have fathered along the way he viewed not so much as people but as collateral damage.
“You know what I was doing last night, Roger?” he bellowed at his British
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