The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus Read online

  About the Author

  Adam Leigh read English at university and wondered if he would ever be able to write a book rather than just read one. He spent the next thirty years in advertising, trampling on those who got in his way while enjoying a lot of long lunches. He learnt everything there was to know about selling dog food, toilet paper, and the small print on a mortgage ad.

  For the last few years, Adam has written extensive topical essays and articles on the foibles of our working lives. The Curious Rise of Alex Lazarus is his first novel.

  Married to a wonderful wife for thirty years, she is his business partner and most uncritical fan. His three children are less forgiving.

  First published in 2021 by Whitefox

  Copyright © Adam Leigh 2021

  The moral right of Adam Leigh to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-1-913532-50-5

  Also available as an ebook

  ISBN 978-1-913532-51-2

  Typeset by seagulls.net

  Cover design by Jack Smyth

  Project management by whitefox

  Printed and bound by Clays

  For Hannah, Sophie, Matthew and Jake

  ‘AMBITION is a proud covetousnes; a dry thirst of honour; the longing disease of reason; an aspiring and gallant madnesse. The ambitious climes up high and perilous staires and never cares how to come downe: the desire of rising hath swallowed up all his feare of a fall.’

  Characters of Vertues and Vices, Joseph Hall (1608)

  A unicorn is a privately held start-up company valued at over $1 billion. The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.

  Mission:

  Family First

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART 1: STARTING UP

  1. Ambition

  2. The Meeting

  3. The Team

  4. The Idea

  5. Family Matters

  6. Money Please

  PART 2: GETTING GOING

  7. Beginnings

  8. Hacking at Growth

  9. Self-Publicising

  10. Family Second

  11. Board Meeting

  12. Serendipity

  13. Acceleration

  14. Cap in Hand

  15. Uncivil Partnership

  PART 3: GLOBAL CONFLICT

  16. A Kind of Madness

  17. Consequences

  18. Success

  19. Attack

  20. This Means War

  21. Law and Peace

  22. Execution

  23. Dawn Chorus

  24. Home Truths

  25. End

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  I can’t believe I am here.

  A bright April morning and I am in Committee Room 2 in the bowels of the Houses of Parliament. Civil servants are silently laying out pads and pencils, adjusting microphones and straightening chairs. I count twelve name-cards – a veritable dirty dozen of cross-party MPs who will attempt to humiliate me in public.

  Somehow, the only thing this reminds me of is Al Pacino in The Godfather Part II, whispering in front of the Senate Committee that he is ‘taking the Fifth’. Of course, I’m pretty sure I haven’t murdered anyone, nor do I have judges and politicians on my payroll to protect me from the inconvenient intrusion of the law. I am most definitely rattled.

  Charles, our trusty legal counsel, tells me to stop fidgeting. I sit on my hands for a second and then realise that the nasty flop sweat on my forehead has somehow found its way on to my out-of-the-packet-pristine white shirt. I know I look like a guilty man and I haven’t even been asked a question.

  You think you’ve got it all and then your world deflates like a sad balloon. The promise of more money than you will ever need and a crusading charitable foundation, you believe you’re on the way to a guaranteed sainthood, or the Jewish equivalent. One small (to your eyes, if not to the media and the political establishment) data breach later and you are vilified beyond comprehension and about to be skewered by a combination of feisty SNP and Liberal Democrat MPs.

  I am anticipating a deluge of jealous ignorance and resentment. They are a bunch of digital muppets about to destroy my carefully constructed business. Politicians are undoubtedly fearful of the technology they can’t explain to their constituents.

  The implications of my imminent ordeal are uncertain. I won’t go to prison, I am told, but the censure I will receive may derail my nascent empire, and the fines and lawsuits could mean my future wealth may not necessitate relocation to Monaco quite yet.

  Above all, I am afraid that I may not be very good under this pressure. A tendency to not always get to the point, coupled with nervous adrenaline acting as a truth serum, may mean I give away too much involuntarily. Having said that, they will be reliant on an adept stenographer to capture my gabbled answers and will have to work hard to find the revelations among some very tortuously constructed sentences.

  I survey the scene with further dismay. My God, the wallpaper is dismal and faded, but not from the sun, as the light is crepuscular and gloomy. The stained-glass window, with the menacing images of a portcullis and an eagle, suggests being pecked to death or ending up in prison. I look at the threadbare carpet and wonder how many of these sessions it has seen. Probably Sir Walter Raleigh thought it had seen better days, too, before he was sent to prison. He had just given us the potato and tobacco and thus can be blamed for the contemporary blights of heart disease and obesity. I have simply blessed the world with a website that makes you a better parent. Maybe one day I will be exonerated and revered?

  I feel totally alone. I try not to look behind me at my family in the visitors’ section. My anxious wife will be making strained small talk with my worried parents. Mum and Dad would always come to see me in any school performance and celebrate my small roles with enthusiastic pride. This, however, is not my celebrated appearance as Nicely Nicely in Guys and Dolls when I was seventeen. Ironically, if you remember his big song ‘Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat’, you will recall the stark line that now seems prescient to my current plight: The devil will drag you under by the sharp lapel of your checkered coat. Right now, I am feeling that the world thinks so too. I am not in heaven but entrepreneur’s hell.

  I glance with indifference for the last time at my beautifully constructed notes and aide-memoire. A cohort of the finest millennial minds have worked without a break for endless days to provide me with uncontentious but often obfuscating answers to the anticipated questions about to be fired my way by the MP for Cleethorpes and his colleague from Colwyn Bay. Stick to the script. Stick to the script. This is the only mantra I have been given to remember. We have role-played, scenario-planned and read tea leaves and cloud formations to prepare for this inquisition. We have even employed a recently retired BBC political correspondent to interview me with his traditional sneering disdain.


  But nothing could have prepared me for the unannounced opening of a small door at the back of the room, behind the raised dais on which the table and chairs of the committee are waiting with menace. Can a chair be menacing? Who knows, but when you are that nervous, anything is possible. Out spews the detritus of our political establishment. Seven grey men and five beige women. Elected to office but, to my mind, incapable of presiding over my fate with any real understanding of the complex nuances of my global digital business.

  They shuffle into their seats, pour water, get out their notes and nod to one another in complicit anticipation of my imminent execution. I think of the irony of my name in this situation. I will need to rise up from a position of extreme discomfort.

  Gordon Hardcastle, Chairman of the House of Commons Cross-Party Communications Committee, clears his throat.

  “So, Mr Lazarus. Please can we start by you explaining why you are in breach of European Cookie Law?”

  PART 1

  STARTING UP

  1. Ambition

  It all started when I was seventeen.

  Perhaps it’s an odd way to tell you the tale of my success by beginning in the austere marble edifice of a synagogue on Rosh Hashanah? For those of you not familiar with our religious etiquette, the sermon on the first day of the Jewish New Year is the biggie – the ‘State of the Union’ or ‘Queen’s Speech’ of our calendar. Full house, infrequent congregants, the rabbi has to make it memorable. We went to a traditional Orthodox North-West London synagogue, where the men sat downstairs, draped in enormous prayer shawls, and the women in a gallery above us, their faces invisible beneath elaborate hats that would not have been out of place at Ascot.

  Rabbi Furstein was our minister for many years. A brilliant speaker with a thick Viennese accent and immaculately trimmed goatee, he had fled the horrors of Nazism to spend his life spreading a message of hope and redemption, delivered with a unique blend of wit and accessible erudition. Although over eighty, he stood rigidly upright, proud of the vigorous exercise routine he practised each day before heading off to morning prayers, to keep him young in body and mind.

  “Mein friends,” he would begin each sermon, curling beautifully manicured hands around the corners of the lectern. His command of English was impeccable, but his accent was what I imagined Sigmund Freud must have sounded like when psychoanalysing a patient. He would use his index finger to point, sometimes at the congregation, sometimes to the heavens, trying to draw an invisible thread between the two. That day he wanted to talk to us about ambition.

  Rabbi Furstein was a would-be stand-up comic who craved the adrenaline surge of a laughing crowd and was wasted in the religion business. He always started with a joke:

  “A few years ago, there was a grand announcement in the Birth Section of the New York Times. Maybe you remember it? ‘Mr and Mrs Marvin Faigenbaum are delighted to announce the safe arrival of their 8lb 6oz beautiful son on July 26, Dr Jonathan Faigenbaum.’”

  The congregation chortled in self-recognition. Jewish communities are collectively driven by an aspiration for progression, perhaps the result of our persecution or the fact that we are not very good at sport. The rabbi acknowledged this as he progressed.

  “Well, I am sure you have heard the joke before, but it does reveal our need to succeed. Which of you does not want their children to do well? Which of you can honestly say that you have not wanted a new possession, a better job, a nicer house? You don’t have to tell me the truth, but I know the real answer. Fear not, I have good news for you all. Judaism has no issue with individual ambition, it just has to be contextualised within our duty to live life with Torah at its heart. The Tenth Commandment states: ‘You shall not covet your neighbour’s house. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.’ It doesn’t prohibit the aspiration of wanting your own belongings. After all, who wouldn’t want a nice ox or donkey? As long as your reasons are positive and not fuelled by envy, you most definitely have the Lord’s blessing. Also, don’t forget to feed them regularly.

  “Did you know that in Hebrew the word for ambition is ‘Shaiyf’? Its etymology is curious as it means ‘ambition, aspiration and striving’ but also, more surprisingly, ‘inhalation and breathing’, which is a very different thing. Now, why would this be? Mein friends, let me suggest something to you.

  “We exist to strive for self-betterment. We are meant to study, to learn and to move forward by improving our knowledge of the world around us to make us better people within our families and communities. It is why we exist. And of course, to exist, you have to breathe. The oxygen in our lungs is the life force that allows us to remain restless in our individual quest to be a better, nicer and wiser person each day.”

  Rabbi Furstein was nothing if not thorough in his sermons. There followed many examples from centuries of Talmudic debate suggesting that ambition was sometimes acceptable and sometimes not, depending on the rabbi, the day of the week and who was asking. Half an hour later (those sermons weren’t short), he concluded with a challenge to the congregation, delivered with an impish smile.

  “So, I ask you, what more are you going to do? What are you going to do for each other? What are you going to do for the community? What more are you going to do for the world? Ambition is a fine thing, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Just do more good things in its pursuit.”

  I suspect I didn’t really pay much attention at the time. I was seventeen, my mind was filled with thoughts of girls, football and which university I might go to. But when we got home for lunch, all hell broke loose between my father and grandfather, their different perspectives and values brought to the fore by the rabbi’s well-intentioned sermon.

  My father, Stuart, is an academic of some repute. A professor of political history at a leading London university, he is also a well-known media commentator and speaker on the corporate circuit. His published works focus on the intersection of technology with political systems. In particular, he has written extensively on the Industrial Revolution. His reputation was cemented by his biography of Ned Ludd (The March of Progress and the Machine Breaker), who, as the founder of the Luddites, smashed the textile machines of the late eighteenth century to protect the livelihoods of the manual workers they were replacing. My father argued that the liberation of technology did not necessarily protect the core values of a healthy society. His mealtime debating nemesis was his own father, Manny.

  Zayde (‘Grandpa’ in Yiddish, if you’re wondering) came to London as a baby from Minsk in Russia in 1910 with his family, who were all milliners. His father made hats for the religious men of the East End, fedoras and trilbies, and Zayde left school at fourteen to learn his trade in a St Mark Street workshop, behind Petticoat Lane. When he returned from national service, he realised that having survived fighting the Nazis, he was more determined than ever to rely only on his own efforts. Knowing he would do great things, he married my grandmother, produced my father and, most crucially, decided to expand the family business to retail.

  In 1947, he opened Feltz’s Felts & Fedoras at the top of Stamford Hill, and over the next few years seventeen more shops followed. In the ’60s he shortened the name to just Feltz’s and started making ladies’ hats too. He sold trilbies and caps wholesale to a range of stores including Burton and M&S, and his ‘cloche de Paris’ was a winner with Dorothy Perkins for many years. Hats, of course, became less ubiquitous, and by the ’80s he had just two shops, which eventually shut down. Sartorially speaking, the growing breed of new yuppies did not feel the need for a head covering.

  Nevertheless, he retired a wealthy man with a big house in Hampstead Garden Suburb and a bolthole apartment in Florida. He educated his two children privately and created a nest egg of capital to do the same for his five grandchildren. My father’s brand of academic socialism did not preclude his commitment to me and my sister, Judith, and we both attended highly regarded independent
schools. But my relationship with my grandfather was far more significant than just being a beneficiary of his largesse. He was my inspiration for believing in the need to achieve material success.

  He would school me in homespun Yiddish aphorisms that articulated an approach to life in which we should strive for more. I was more excited hearing him tell me about the thrill of getting keys to a new shop than seeing my father’s joy as he unpacked a pristine copy of his latest book. I would listen assiduously to Zayde’s stories of bamboozling dozy fashion buyers to secure a significant new order, and glaze over when my father enthusiastically outlined the syllabus of a new course he was teaching. When I was fourteen, Zayde had taught me the difference between turnover and gross profit. At the same time, if Dad tried to explain why I needed to rail against the Thatcherite dismantling of a unionised workforce, I would become a truculent and morose teenager. He’d immediately give up and turn (with some success) to my more receptive younger sister.

  That lunchtime, galvanised by a sermon about aspiration, battle lines were drawn between father and son, with voices slowly rising as their respective positions were outlined. My future was the focal point of the debate. I had mentioned my indecision about university choices and for some reason it had unleashed pent-up tension between them.

  “Sure, Alex should go to university,” my grandfather shouted as he waved his fork around and unwittingly dislodged a piece of roast chicken, which fell on his lap. “But he is going to learn less about life there than he would working in a shop serving customers for a couple of months.”

  My father was having none of it.

  “Listen, Dad. You have no concept of him pursuing knowledge for its own sake and his betterment. I know my son. He is naturally curious. He loves to understand why things are as they are.”

  “I know your son better than you. He wants to make money. He wants to run a business.”