Free Little White Lies by Lesley Lokko

died at Auschwitz, together with his wife and two small daughters, the only members of the Hamburg Harburgs to have met such a fate. In some ways thankfully, his father had died of a heart attack shortly after Lionel took his mother and sisters to England – at least Hitler hadn’t got him. All in all, Lionel reflected in those sombre moments when he allowed himself to think on it, they’d been fortunate. But it didn’t ease the pain of Otto’s death. His own brother: gassed, dumped, disposed of, like an animal led to slaughter. He had never been able to visit Auschwitz and he never would. Never.
    He shook his head quickly to clear it and tried to concentrate on the business ahead. For the second time in his career, he sensed great changes in the air.
He
could see, even if Uncle Paul couldn’t, that the era of the gentleman banker was almost gone. Clients no longer shook hands on a deal, expecting the handshake to hold firm against competition, dips in the market, losses and risks and circumstances beyond one’s control. Now clients and bankers spoke to one another through their lawyers. But the changes didn’t stop there. Between bankers themselves, the old rule about not treading on each other’s toes or poaching clients by offering better deals elsewhere, was dying. Advertising and marketing, those anathemic ‘professions’ that seemed to him to be a mixture of everything he despised – flattery and pseudo-psychology – had crept into the industry with disastrous results. Suddenly everything was up for grabs, including loyalty. Their competitors were now stealing accounts that had been in the firm for decades. Colleagues appeared to have no qualms about stabbing each other in the back, all in the name of increased profits. Yet Uncle Paul wouldn’t countenance the thought of striking back. He was proudly adamant. The Harburgs did
not
do business that way. They would not lower themselves by joining in the frenzy.
Their
clients would never leave them. Relationships at Harburg’s were for life.
    He was wrong, as it turned out. He was now an elderly man, almost bent double with curvature of the spine but he was stubborn. His wife had passed away almost five years earlier. With no children or grandchildren to occupy him, Uncle Paul lived for the bank. He came in every morning by chauffeur as he had done for over half a century and clung to his seat on the board.
    But Lionel was a very different type of banker. He was a twenty-first-century man. He’d been born at the
fin-de-siècle
, at a moment when the old order of things was being swept aside. His decision to flee Germany and what he saw as his failure to save other members of the family from Hitler had made him wary, both of the past and of the future. He kept a wary eye on both but trusted in neither. He’d come to the painful conclusion that the only place that mattered was the here and now. He was a man of action, not words. In an unconscious rejection of his own father, perhaps, he stuck to his belief that what mattered most was the
ability to act
.
    The trip to Venezuela was one such act. It was time for the bank to move away from the European upper-middle classes who had been their traditional clients and find other avenues for business. If they didn’t, he told Uncle Paul flatly, there would be no banking legacy to pass on. It was a touchy subject. P. N. Harburg & Son, the London branch of the family business, was Uncle Paul’s baby, the replacement for the children he’d never had. With Lionel’s unexpected arrival in London, the delighted Uncle Paul had added the ‘
& Son
’ to the bank’s name. It mattered little that Lionel was not his son. He was a nephew but more of a son than anyone could ever have guessed. Now, in the twilight of his life, it pained him dearly that there might be nothing left of the bank worth handing down. It didn’t make for the most cheering conversation between them.
    Lionel drained the last of his champagne and