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It was a difficult question. ‘She’s larger than life,’ Kathy had said. ‘She’s drop-dead beautiful. She works harder than anyone I’ve ever known. God only knows when she sleeps. She’s a perfectionist, so she makes everyone around her miserable. In her own way, she’s a genius. She can be petty and vengeful and incredibly generous.’
Her husband had smiled. ‘In other words, she’s a woman.’
Kathy had looked at him and said, unsmiling, ‘I don’t know what she is. Sometimes she scares me.’
‘Come on, honey, you’re exaggerating.’
‘No. I honestly believe that if someone stood in Lara Cameron’s way … she would kill.’
When Lara finished with the faxes and overseas calls, she buzzed Charlie Hunter, the ambitious young man in charge of accounting. ‘Come in, Charlie.’
‘Yes, Miss Cameron.’
A minute later, he entered her office.
‘Yes, Miss Cameron?’
‘I read the interview you gave in the New York Times this morning,’ Lara said.
He brightened. ‘I haven’t seen it yet. How was it?’
‘You talked about Cameron Enterprises and about some of the problems we’re having.’
He frowned. ‘Well, you know, that reporter fellow probably misquoted some of my …’
‘You’re fired.’
‘What? Why? I …’
‘When you were hired, you signed a paper agreeing not to give any interviews. I’ll expect you out of here this morning.’
‘I … you can’t do that. Who would take my place?’
‘I’ve already arranged that,’ Lara told him.
The luncheon was almost over. The Fortune reporter, Hugh Thompson, was an intense, intellectual-looking man with sharp brown eyes behind black horn-rimmed glasses.
‘It was a great lunch,’ he said. ‘All my favourite dishes. Thanks.’
‘I’m glad you enjoyed it.’
‘You really didn’t have to go to all that trouble for me.’
‘No trouble at all,’ Lara smiled. ‘My father always told me that the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach.’
‘And you wanted to get to my heart before we started the interview?’
Lara smiled. ‘Exactly.’
‘How much trouble is your company really in?’
Lara’s smile faded. ‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Come on. You can’t keep a thing like that quiet. The word on the street is that some of your properties are on the verge of collapse because of the principal payments due on your junk bonds. You’ve done a lot of leveraging, and with the market down, Cameron Enterprises has to be pretty over-extended.’
Lara laughed. ‘Is that what the street says? Believe me, Mr Thompson, you’d be wise not to listen to silly rumours. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll send you a copy of my financials to set the record straight. Fair enough?’
‘Fair enough. By the way, I didn’t see your husband at the opening of the new hotel.’
Lara sighed. ‘Philip wanted so much to be there, but unfortunately he had to be away on a concert tour.’
‘I went to one of his recitals once about three years ago. He’s brilliant. You have been married a year now, haven’t you?’
‘Yes – the happiest year of my life. I’m a very lucky woman. I travel a lot, and so does Philip, but when I’m away from him, I can listen to his recordings wherever I am.’
Thompson smiled. ‘And he can see your buildings wherever he is.’
Lara laughed. ‘You flatter me.’
‘It’s pretty true, isn’t it? You’ve put up buildings all over this fair country of ours. You own apartment buildings, office buildings, a hotel chain … How do you do it?’
She smiled. ‘With mirrors.’
‘You’re a puzzle.’
‘Am I? Why?’
‘At this moment, you’re arguably the most successful builder in New York. Your name is plastered on half the real estate in this town. You’re putting up the world’s tallest skyscraper. Your competitors call you the Iron Butterfly. You’ve made it big in a business traditionally dominated by men.’
‘Does that bother you, Mr Thompson?’
‘No. What bothers me, Miss Cameron, is that I can’t figure out who you are. When I ask two people about you, I get three opinions. Everyone grants that you’re a brilliant businesswoman. I mean … you didn’t fall off a hay wagon and become a success. I know a lot about construction crews – they’re a rough, tough bunch of men. How does a woman like you keep them in line?’
She smiled. ‘There are no women like me. Seriously, I simply hire the best people for the job, and I pay them well.’
Too simplistic, Thompson thought. Much too simplistic. The real story is what she’s not telling me. He decided to change the direction of the interview.
‘Every magazine on the stands has written about how successful you are. I’d like to do a more personal story. There’s been very little printed about your background.’
‘I’m very proud of my background.’
‘Good. Let’s talk about that. How did you get started in the real estate business?’
Lara smiled and he could see that her smile was genuine. She suddenly looked like a little girl.
‘Genes.’
‘Your genes?’
‘My father’s.’ She pointed to a portrait on a wall behind her. It showed a handsome-looking man with a leonine head of silver hair. ‘That’s my father – James Hugh Cameron.’ Her voice was soft. ‘He’s responsible for my success. I’m an only child. My mother died when I was very young, and my father brought me up. My family left Scotland a long time ago, Mr Thompson, and emigrated to Nova Scotia – New Scotland, Glace Bay.’
‘Glace Bay?’
‘It’s a fishing village in the north-east part of Cape Breton, on the Atlantic shore. It was named by early French explorers. It means ice bay. More coffee?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘My grandfather owned a great deal of land in Scotland and my father acquired more. He was a very wealthy man. We still have our castle there near Loch Morlich. When I was eight years old, I had my own horse, my dresses were bought in London, we lived in an enormous house with a lot of servants. It was a fairytale life for a little girl.’ Her voice was alive with echoes of long-ago memories.
‘We would go ice skating in the winter, and watch hockey games, and go swimming at Big Glace Bay Lake in the summer. And there were dances at the Forum and the Venetian Gardens.’
The reporter was busily making notes.
‘My father put up buildings in Edmonton, and Calgary, and Ontario. Real estate was like a game to him, and he loved it. When I was very young, he taught me the game, and I learned to love it, too.’
Her voice was filled with passion. ‘You must understand something, Mr Thompson. What I do has nothing to do with the money or the bricks and steel that make a building. It’s the people who matter. I’m able to give them a comfortable place to work or to live, a place where they can raise families and have decent lives. That’s what was important to my father, and it became important to me.’
Hugh Thompson looked up. ‘Do you remember your first real estate venture?’
Lara leaned forward. ‘Of course. On my eighteenth birthday, my father asked me what I would like as a gift. A lot of newcomers were arriving in Glace Bay and it was getting crowded. I felt the town needed more places for them to live. I told my father I wanted to build a small apartment house. He gave me the money as a present, but two years later, I was able to pay him back. Then I borrowed money from a bank to put up a second building. By the time I was twenty-one, I owned three buildings, and they were all successful.’
‘Your father must have been very proud of you.’
There was that warm smile again. ‘He was. He named me Lara. It’s an old Scottish name that comes from the Latin. It means “well known” or “famous”. From the time I was a little girl, my father always told me I would be famous one day.’ Her smile faded. ‘He died of a heart attack, much too young.’ She paused. ‘I go to Scotland to visit his grave every year. I … I found it very difficult to stay on in the house without him. I decided to move to Chicago. I had an idea for small boutique hotels, and I persuaded a banker there to finance me. The hotels were a success.’ She shrugged. ‘And the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. I suppose that a psychiatrist would say that I haven’t created this empire just for myself. In a way, it’s a tribute to my father. James Cameron was the most wonderful man I’ve ever known.’
‘You must have loved him a lot.’
‘I did. And he loved me a lot.’ A smile touched her lips. ‘I’ve heard that on the day I was born, my father bought every man in Glace Bay a drink.’
‘So, really,’ Thompson said, ‘everything started in Glace Bay.’
‘That’s right,’ Lara said softly, ‘everything started in Glace Bay. That’s where it all began, almost forty years ago …’
Chapter Three (#ulink_afd54453-70b2-5b4a-a15a-5a7a706feb06)
Glace Bay, Nova Scotia September 10, 1952
James Cameron was in a whorehouse, drunk, the night his daughter and son were born. He was in bed, sandwiched between the Scandinavian twins, when Kirstie, the madam of the brothel, pounded on the door.
‘James!’ she called out. She pushed open the door and walked in.
‘Och, ye auld hen!’ James yelled out indignantly. ‘Can’t a mon have any privacy even here?’
‘Sorry to interrupt your pleasure, James. It’s about your wife.’
‘Fuck my wife,’ Cameron roared.
‘You did,’ Kirstie retorted, ‘and she’s having your baby.’
‘So? Let her have it. That’s what you women are guid for, nae?’
‘The doctor just called. He’s been trying desperately to find you. Your wife is bad off. You’d better hurry.’
James Cameron sat up and slid to the edge of the bed, bleary-eyed, trying to clear his head. ‘Damned woman. She niver leaves me in peace.’ He looked up at the madam. ‘All right, I’ll go.’ He glanced at the naked girls in the bed. ‘But I’ll nae pay for these two.’
‘Never mind that now. You’d just better get back to the boarding house.’ She turned to the girls. ‘You two come along with me.’
James Cameron was a once-handsome man whose face reflected fulfilled sins. He appeared to be in his early fifties. He was thirty years old and the manager of one of the boarding houses owned by Sean MacAllister, the town banker. For the past five years, James Cameron and his wife Peggy had divided the chores: Peggy did the cleaning and cooking for the two dozen boarders, and James did the drinking. Every Friday it was his responsibility to collect the rents from the four other boarding houses in Glace Bay owned by MacAllister. It was another reason, if he needed one, to go out and get drunk.
James Cameron was a bitter man, who revelled in his bitterness. He was a failure, and he was convinced that everyone else was to blame. Over the years he had come to enjoy his failure. It made him feel like a martyr. When James was a year old, his family had emigrated to Glace Bay from Scotland with nothing but the few possessions they could carry, and they had struggled to survive. His father had put James to work in the coal mines when the boy was fourteen. James had suffered a slight back injury in a mining accident when he was sixteen, and had promptly quit the mine. One year later his parents were killed in a train disaster. So it was that James Cameron had decided that he was not responsible for his adversity – it was the Fates that were against him. But he had two great assets: He was extraordinarily handsome and, when he wished to, he could be charming. One weekend in Sydney, a town near Glace Bay, he met an impressionable young American girl named Peggy Maxwell, who was there on vacation with her family. She was not attractive, but the Maxwells were very wealthy, and James Cameron was very poor. He swept Peggy Maxwell off her feet, and against the advice of her father, she married him.
‘I’m giving Peggy a dowry of five thousand dollars,’ her father told James. ‘The money will give you a chance to make something of yourself. You can invest it in real estate, and in five years it will double. I’ll help you.’
But James was not interested in waiting five years. Without consulting anyone, he invested the money in a wildcat oil venture with a friend, and sixty days later, he was broke. His father-in-law, furious, refused to help him any further. ‘You’re a fool, James, and I will not throw good money after bad.’
The marriage that was going to be James Cameron’s salvation turned out to be a disaster, for he now had a wife to support, and no job.
It was Sean MacAllister who had come to his rescue. The town banker was a man in his mid fifties, a stumpy, pompous man, a pound short of being obese, given to wearing vests adorned with a heavy gold watch chain. He had come to Glace Bay twenty years earlier, and had immediately seen the possibilities there. Miners and lumbermen were pouring into the town, and were unable to find adequate housing. MacAllister could have financed homes for them, but he had a better plan. He decided it would be cheaper to herd the men together in boarding houses. Within two years, he had built a hotel and five boarding houses, and they were always full.
Finding managers was a difficult task because the work was exhausting. The manager’s job was to keep all the rooms rented, supervise the cooking, handle the meals, and see that the premises were kept reasonably clean. As far as salaries were concerned, Sean MacAllister was not a man to throw away his money.
The manager of one of his boarding houses had just quit, and MacAllister decided that James Cameron was a likely candidate. Cameron had borrowed small amounts of money from the bank from time to time, and payment on a loan was overdue. MacAllister sent for the young man.
‘I have a job for you,’ MacAllister said.
‘You have?’
‘You’re in luck. I have a splendid position that’s just opened up.’
‘Working at the bank, is it?’ James Cameron asked. The idea of working in a bank appealed to him. Where there was a lot of money, there was always a possibility of having some stick to one’s fingers.
‘Not at the bank,’ MacAllister told him. ‘You’re a very personable young man, James, and I think you would be very good at dealing with people. I’d like you to run my boarding house on Cablehead Avenue.’
‘A boarding house, you say?’ There was contempt in the young man’s voice.
‘You need a roof over your head,’ MacAllister pointed out. ‘You and your wife will have free room and board, and a small salary.’
‘How sma’?’
‘I’ll be generous with you. James. Twenty-five dollars a week.’
‘Twenty-fi …?’
‘Take it or leave it. I have others waiting.’
In the end, James Cameron had no choice. ‘I’ll tak’ it.’
‘Good. By the way, every Friday I’ll also expect you to collect the rents from my other boarding houses, and deliver the money to me on Saturday.’
