Mitch will, sooner or later, find out what went wrong with the Numero-one–Wide World Names deal but he’ll keep it to himself, store it for use in the future should the need arise. Right now he’s not bothered about it enough even to momentarily warm himself in the glow of having been proved right or to nourish himself for an instant on the fresh steaming schadenfreude on which some of the others will be feasting. To Mitch, Laffenden is a casualty of the vicissitudes of the market. There is nothing more to talk about. But the others are talking about it, slyly, quietly. They are wondering whether Laughing Boy is going to fall on his sword or whether he’s going to have to be walked out. There is more to see if he’s walked out. The word is that he will be walked out but that’s only because people want him to be walked out. Although not even the biggest fool, the dumbest loudmouthed cowboy, could think that what’s happening to Laffenden couldn’t happen to him, they all want to see him walked out. I do.
Many people here have never liked Laffenden. He’s young and loud, he’s made a lot of money, and he’s told everyone about it. In this he is like a lot of the people in the firm. Many people here have never liked many people here. When, years later, Laffenden remembers all those eyes watching him carry his boxes from his workstation by the window, down the passages formed between the desks, past the photocopy machine and the water cooler, past reception to the elevator; when he remembers certain half-whispered comments from colleagues who he would not have expected to so relish his demise, comments he was only half meant to hear made in the near orgasmic relief that it is Laffenden and not the maker of the comment who is dead, comments made to themselves, rather than to him, which attempted to explain why this was happening to him and not to them—when, years later, Laffenden remembers all this, he probably won’t remember that many people here never liked many people here. He won’t remember that it was nothing personal.
Dennis Mitchell has other things on his mind. Forget Laffenden and Anna’s boyfriend. Mitch wants to see me. He wants this to happen immediately. Mitch is in heat. He wants to talk privately, out of the office, and so we meet for coffee downstairs.
“You’ve heard about Laffenden. I never liked him. You probably guessed that. Is this about Laffenden?” I ask him.
“Laffenden’s through,” Mitch says dismissively.
“I know. Do you know what happened?”
“The deal fell through over the weekend,” he says as though nothing could be less relevant to us, as though he is hurriedly going to humor my need to pay lip service to the topic.
“I know it fell through. Do you know why?”
“No. Do you know?” Mitch says, shifting almost nervously on his seat on his side of the booth in the coffee shop.
“Mitch, what’s this about?”
He looks around the room. No one, including the waitress, pays us any attention. I have escaped to this place many times, though never with Mitch. I come here for the continental-style coffee cake. I shouldn’t, but it’s the icing and the chopped walnuts. The radio plays songs for my mother. Nothing momentous was ever meant to happen here. Mitch hunches over, puts his hands together on the table in front of him, and then raises his eyes from his hands to my face.
“Sid wants to see you.”
“Sid Graeme?”
“Yeah. He wants a meeting. This is pretty big, Joe.”
“What’s it about?”
“Look, Joe,” he says, almost in a whisper, “this has got to be between you and me. It’s more than a matter of commercial discretion. This is a political hot potato.”
“Sure, Mitch, no one can know. Now what the fuck are you talking about?”
My body suddenly begins taking messages from its outskirts. The cuts, the sprains, and the bruising around my ribs, from my attempt only days earlier to kill a man on the stone tiles around my pool, are losing patience with Mitch.
“Joe, this is as big a thing as you’ve ever been involved in. You can’t even tell anyone in the firm about it. Not yet.”
“What do you mean? You want us to do something involving Sid Graeme and you want us to do it outside the firm?”
“No, of course not. Just don’t tell anybody till after Sid Graeme has filled you in on it and we’ve discussed it.”
“Jesus, Mitch. What’s this all about?”
“Are you in, Joe?”
“You know I am. I’m always in.”
12. Between talking to Mitch and my meeting with Sid Graeme later in the afternoon, I wish to hide from Gorman, from my clients, from the other dealers, and from reception. I wish to be left alone to contemplate making enough out of whatever Graeme has in mind to buy off the past, to relegate it to having existed only to make everything sweeter from now on. The damp, threadbare childhood home that a frightened ageing mother cannot bring herself to leave; the mostly absent twice-convicted father they let out just in time to die somewhere, anywhere other than on the system’s watch; the two siblings absent without leave and the overgrown damaged one I can never forgive or sufficiently apologize to; the dangerously intelligent and dissatisfied wife with the widest eyes, the smoothest skin, the softest shock of hair, who looks upon me as a vulgar aberration in her life, an aberration with whom she made the mistake of having a son she wants to share with an old boyfriend. How much money does it take to be impervious to this? And will it help when you’re an object of curiosity, even for people who do not know you, because your son was taken?
Of course I am not left alone. I take calls from clients, but my mind wanders more than usual. What had Mitch said about me? How come it’s me and no one else that’s in on this, whatever this is? Laffenden is finished.
Were his eyes always such a pale blue? I could never look in them when he was on top. I can look now. We all look. We have to look. He had a loud mouth. Of course we look. If we could, we’d look way past his carriage of the boxes, down the corridors, past the parking garage into the first of many bars. If we could, we’d be there at the bottom of each glass as the contents further drained the blue from his eyes until they had the egg-white cloudiness of the eyes of an old dog. We would be there when he tells his young wife how she has never understood the pressure he’s been under. She will try to understand exactly what has happened but she will always think she doesn’t understand because when he finally, reluctantly, explains, it will all sound too simple. She had always assumed her husband’s job was far more complicated than the manner of his losing it made it sound. But she will immediately understand his shortness of temper, why they must stop frequenting the restaurants where the maître d’s squeezed her husband’s hand and kissed her on the cheek as they arrived. She will understand when an agent forgets to warn her in advance that the young couple he brought through the day before would like to be shown through the house a second time. If we could, we’d be there when she throws a vase at Laffenden and, in a voice that would cut glass, tells him that he is useless. We might even want to be there when she calls up an old boyfriend.
Anna, you won’t believe what happened to Laffenden today. She won’t believe it. She won’t ever hear about it. She won’t understand that I won. I’m still here, watching him leave. Anna won’t remember ever having met Laffenden at a firm Christmas party. So I make a mental note to find someone I can talk to. Anna, was there a day when you thought we would be friends forever? On that day, you would have wanted me to have someone to talk to if you weren’t around, not in preference to you, but just in case you were unavailable. You wanted the best for me. How long is it now that you have been unavailable? That’s why I went to her every week. I swear it. Okay, not at the beginning, and we didn’t just talk. Christ, no. But sometimes we did, sometimes we just talked. But now even she is gone. Now I can’t even talk to her. Anna, why did you take even her away? Why did you condemn me to solitary confinement? If my thoughts, my feelings, never get any fresh air, if they stay locked up in that dull, plodding, thick head that I have to lug around everywhere, how is it any different from solitary confinement? Ho
w did you do it, Anna? How did you manage to co-opt Angelique?
If I am to stay sane I will have to talk to someone or at least imagine that I am talking to someone. It has been a long time since I have even imagined confiding in Anna. But Angelique, until Friday, I thought I could confide in her. I would have told her everything. That’s the truth. I would have told her about Sam and Anna’s boyfriend, about Mitch and Sid Graeme.
13. Four days after Sam was taken, Mitch arranged for me to meet Sid Graeme at the head office of Health National, Graeme’s health-insurance company. At the top of Collins Street, it was a new building with a Renaissance façade. Façade is everything.
“Joseph, I’m glad you could get away.”
“I got the impression I would have been mad not to.” “Is that what Mitch said?”
“More or less.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Joe.”
“I’m sure it’s not true. Don’t believe everything Mitch tells you.”
“Oh, but I do. Don’t you?”
“Well, actually, I do. We work pretty well together.”
“That’s what I’ve heard. Pretty well and pretty close.”
“That’s true, Mr Graeme.”
“Sid. If we’re going to go ahead it’s got to be Sid. Okay?”
“Okay, Sid.”
“Are we going to go ahead together, Joe?”
“I would say so, but I don’t know anything about it yet.”
“What do you know about me, Joe?”
“You’re very successful. You’ve got a large and diverse portfolio. You’re the chairman and majority shareholder of this health-insurance company. You’re on the boards of lots of listed companies. And you’re a member of the federal government health-care advisory committee.”
He smiled. He was waiting for more.
“You donate to both parties although more to one than the other.”
“Well, they’re the government more often.”
“You’re connected at the top in one way or another to the opera, the ballet, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Arts Trust, the Young Leaders’ Program, the Children’s Trust, the Casino, and the Australian Football League. Have I left anything out?”
“If you have, I don’t remember it either. Do you know how I got started?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think you inherited it.”
“No, Joe. I didn’t inherit it.” He poured us both a scotch. “My father was a salesman. He sold parts for cars, new and used parts. When I was nine years old, my father walked out. This happens all the time, I know. A man has a midlife crisis, meets a younger woman, starts a new family. Or else he gets some business opportunity and takes off. It’s terrible, isn’t it? I mean that, I’m not trying to be . . . funny. But that’s not what happened with us. My father didn’t meet a younger woman. He didn’t meet any woman. He didn’t take up any business opportunity, didn’t get a new job. He went out one day when I was nine, and he never came back. Eventually, we found out that he’d moved five miles down the road. He didn’t want to have anything to do with us.
“When I was seventeen I joined the air force. You ever in the service, Joe?”
“No.”
“I joined the air force when I was seventeen.”
“What did you do in the air force?”
“I was stationed at Sale. I was a waiter in the officers’ mess. You’re probably wondering how I got from there to here.”
“I’m sure it’s interesting.”
“I used to go into the radio room. I wasn’t authorized to go in there but I’d sneak in. You know there are oil rigs off the Gippsland coast there?”
“Yes. I’ve even seen them.”
“Well, I used to go into the radio room and intercept the signals from the rigs. That’s how I learned the results of the drilling. Then, knowing which company’s rigs had done well, I’d get every cent I could beg, borrow, or steal and buy into the stock before the information got to the market.”
“You did well?”
“I did very well. And I learned that information, the right knowledge at the right time, makes all the difference—that, and the right contacts.”
“The right contacts,” I said quietly, as though it was new and wise.
“Mitch understands this. I think he understands it as a matter of instinct. He said you understand it too, the importance of contacts and of timing.”
I kept telling myself to have patience, that I would understand what he was talking about as soon as he decided to stop promoting himself and tell me exactly what he had in mind. He was not a tall man. He was not a thin man. He used all his power not to be short and squat, and he almost pulled it off. But in the context of his life, some fifty or so years, his power would have been too recently acquired to protect him from the particular wounds and inarticulable cruelties you suffer after a father, unannounced, moves away and leaves you crumpled on a chair, as though you were a jacket he had tried on for a while and had not liked the feel of. At least my father’s absence was the consequence of failed attempts to help us in the only way he thought he could. Sid Graeme had soft hands, almost pudgy, good for an entrepreneur, but not for a waiter serving air force officers in the mess at Sale thirty years ago. To look at his hands, you could see the accidents, the fumbling, the humiliation that is the inevitable consequence of hands like that. Yes, he talked too much about himself, but sooner or later he would get to the point because the point was where the money was. As he sat there talking out of his suit, so controlled, with me waiting to understand what this was all about, I had to admire his anger, the purity of his anger. It was there with him, even when he was quiet. It was definitely there, and it had been there way before the money. I recognized it. It meant business.
“I’m the majority shareholder in Health National. We want to buy a number of private hospitals.”
“How many?” I asked.
“As many as we can, as soon as we can.”
“I thought private hospitals weren’t doing too well at the moment. Aren’t they . . . aren’t they sort of struggling?”
“They are, Joe. At the moment they are, but the government wants to pass legislation that will facilitate the introduction of U.S.-style managed care. Managed care would make private hospitals very profitable. Managers run things more efficiently than doctors. There’s a lot of fat to be trimmed in health care and medical people have no interest in doing it. I would do it, and the more hospitals I owned the more opportunity I’d have to do it, obviously.”
“What exactly is managed care?”
“Managed care is a system of health provision that is nothing short of a revolution, Joe, a triumph of common sense. It involves a commercial relationship, a contract, between the health insurer, such as Health National on the one hand, and participating private hospitals and private specialist doctors on the other.”
“I thought we had that already.”
“Commercial relationships between health insurers and health providers have been creeping in steadily over the last ten years or so, but there are obstacles to their legal enforceability. The proposed legislation will remove these.”
“Okay, but isn’t this just a technicality?”
“Not at all. If the relationship between the health insurer and the participating private hospitals and private specialist doctors were contractual, it would transcend the relationship between a patient and his doctor or hospital.”
“What do you mean, transcend?”
“It would take precedence over the doctor/patient relationship. In fact, it would only be on account of the relationship between the doctor and the health insurer, and the relationship between the patient and the health insurer, that there would be any relationship, or at least any commercial relationship, between the patient and the doctor at all. This benefits everybody.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, the benefit for the patient, personally, is that the health insurer pays all the health-care bills directly t
o the providers, the doctors and hospitals. Without managed care, the patient gets billed directly by the service providers and then afterwards has to recover whatever costs he can from the insurer. The benefit to society is that it allows huge cost reductions to the health insurer and to the private hospitals. It’s been found, not surprisingly, that non-medical managers and accountants working for the health insurers and the private hospitals can manage health care in ways that greatly reduce costs and make the whole system more profitable.”
“How do they do that?”
“Well, they can do it in many ways. Nurses can be directed to do some of the work of doctors. A lot of it’s very routine. There’s a saving right there. Non-specialist doctors can be directed to do some of the work of the specialists. Specialists charge more. Cleaners can be given some on-the-job training to do some of the work of nurses. A lot of nurses’ work is pretty basic. In many cases, in-patients can be discharged much earlier. Participating doctors can be contractually obliged . . . guided, with respect to the treatment they’re advised to undertake—and also with respect to the fees they’re able to charge. You see, Joe, if a contract is drafted properly, a doctor would be in breach for merely informing a patient of treatment not offered by a particular insurer’s plan.”
“An insurer like Health National?”
“Absolutely. Why not?”
“But how does the health insurer know in advance which procedures are necessary in any given case?”
“That’s a good question, Joe. It’s not a stab in the dark for us. It could obviously prove completely disastrous if what we did were not medically legitimate, and that’s where statistics come in. By rigorous use of statistics, we can actually know what’s likely to be necessary for the treatment of any particular illness or injury, and also how long we can reasonably expect a patient to need to be in hospital.”
“And if they need longer?”
“They rarely do.”
“But if they do?”
“Then they can either go somewhere else or else pay out of their own pocket, on an ascending scale, of course. But the staff and the whole system would be encouraging the patient not to lapse into the ways of the bad old days. Everybody wins, Joe, and we’re able to cap costs. Even ancillary procedures such as pathology, X-rays, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance imaging can be tightly controlled and restricted to keep costs down. You ever had one of those?”
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