by Steve Toltz
We took a seat in front of the stage and ordered drinks and sipped them slowly.
“I don’t like it here,” Jasper said.
“Me neither,” I answered. “Why don’t you like it?”
“Well,” he said, “I don’t understand the logic of strip clubs. Brothels make sense. Brothels I understand. You want to fuck, you go there and you fuck, you orgasm, you leave. Sexual satisfaction. Easy. Understandable. But strip clubs- at best, if you don’t find them disgusting, you get sexually excited, then because you can’t actually fuck these women, you leave sexually frustrated. Where’s the thrill in that?”
“Maybe we’re not as different as you think,” I said, and he smiled. Honestly, with all the noise a father makes about demanding respect and obedience, I don’t think there can be a father in the world who doesn’t, at the bottom of his heart, want a simple thing: for his son to like him.
“Oh my God,” Jasper said. “Look at that bartender.”
“What bartender?”
“That one. Isn’t he one of the millionaires?”
I took a good look at the thin Asian man behind the bar. Was he or wasn’t he? I wasn’t sure. I don’t want to say anything racist like “They all look alike,” but you can’t deny the similarities.
“Look at him,” Jasper said. “He’s working his arse off. Why would a millionaire be doing that?”
“Maybe he spent all the money already.”
“On what?”
“How should I know?”
“I know. Maybe he’s one of those people who have worked so hard their whole lives they don’t know how to do anything else.”
We sat there for a while thinking of people who need hard work to give them self-esteem, and we felt lucky we weren’t one of them. Then Jasper said, “Wait. There’s another fucking one.”
“Another fucking what?”
“Another fucking millionaire! And this one’s taking out the garbage!”
This one I recognized, as he was in the first batch of winners. It was Deng Agee! I’d been to his house! I’d personally tormented him!
“What are the odds that…” My voice trailed off. It wasn’t worth saying. We knew what the odds were. Like a horse race with one horse in it.
“Bastard,” I said.
“Who?”
“Eddie. He’s fucked us.”
We drove straight to the Hobbs building and grabbed the files of the millionaires. We read them and reread them, but there was no way of knowing how many friends Eddie had made rich through my scheme. He’d screwed me. He’d really screwed me. There was no way that eventually someone wasn’t going to find out about this. That snake! That’s friendship for you! It was a truly annihilating betrayal. I wanted to pull down the night with my bare hands.
As we hurried over to Eddie’s house, I assumed that Eddie, my so-called friend, had dropped me unceremoniously into the shit on a whim. What I didn’t know then, of course, was that it was so much worse than that.
We were halfway up the path to his house, hidden behind a jungle of fern, when we saw him waving from the window. We were expected. Naturally.
“This is a pleasant surprise,” Eddie said, opening the door.
“Why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“We went to the club! We saw all the goddamn millionaires!”
Eddie was silent for a minute before saying, “You took your son to a strip club?”
“We’re fucked! And you fucked us!”
Eddie walked into the kitchen and we followed.
“It’s not the end of the world, Marty- no one knows.”
“I know. And Jasper knows. And it’s only a matter of time before someone else knows!”
“I think you’re overreacting. Tea?” Eddie put the kettle on.
“Why did you do it? That’s what I want to know.”
Eddie’s explanation was poor. He said, with no hint of shame, “I wanted to do something nice for my friends.”
“You wanted to do something nice for your friends?”
“That’s right. These guys have had a really rough time of it. You can’t imagine what a million dollars means to them and their families.”
“Jasper, do you think there’s something not right with his explanation?”
“Eddie,” Jasper said, “your explanation sucks.”
“See? Even Jasper thinks so, and you know we don’t agree on anything. Jasper, tell him why his explanation sucks.”
“Because if you made all your friends millionaires, why are they all still working at a strip club?”
Eddie seemed unprepared for this excellent question. He lit a cigarette and wore an industrious expression, as if he were trying to suck the smoke into his right lung only.
“You got me there.”
He’s guilty as hell, I thought, and there’s something sinister he’s not telling me. He was oozing the worst kind of bullshit- obvious, but not transparent enough to see the reason behind it.
“Answer the question, Eddie. Why the fuck are these millionaires all working in minimum-wage jobs in a sleazy rundown strip club?”
“Maybe they spent all the money already,” Eddie said.
“Bullshit!”
“Christ, Martin, I don’t know! Maybe they’re the kind of people who’ve worked all their lives and don’t know how to do anything else!”
“Eddie. Twenty million people are sending in twenty million dollars every week, and when they find out their money isn’t being distributed fairly but is going into the pockets of your friends, whom they will consider my friends, what do you think will happen?”
“Maybe they won’t find out.”
“People will find out! And we’ll all go down!”
“That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“Eddie, where’s the money?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have it!”
“Honestly, I don’t.”
None of us said anything. Eddie finished making his tea and sipped it with a dreamy look on his face. I was getting madder and madder. He seemed to have forgotten we were there.
“How can we bury this?” Jasper asked.
“We can’t!” I said. “We just have to hope no one figures it out.”
As I said this, I realized my mother was wrong when she once told me no matter how far down a road you’ve gone, you can always turn back. I was on a one-way road with no exits and no room to turn around. It was an entirely justifiable feeling, as it happened, because two weeks later everyone figured it out.
Chapter Five
Enter the cannibalistic vigor of the press into my life once again. The story broke all at once, in every paper, on every radio and television station. I was masticated, and good. Leading the charge was none other than Brian Sinclair, the has-been current affairs reporter whom I’d seen with my son’s girlfriend.
Caroline and I were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant, at a table by the window. We were digging into an enormous slab of veal in lemon sauce when his slick silver head popped into my line of vision. We locked eyes through the window. As a public figure, I was accustomed to the odd camera pointing at me like a judge’s finger, but the slippery eagerness on Brian’s face had an effect on me similar to the sudden drop of cabin pressure in an airplane. He signaled furiously at his cameraman. I took Caroline’s hand and we bolted out the back door. By the time we got home, the phone was ringing off the hook. That night we saw our backs disappear on the six-thirty news.
As it turns out, the fourth estate has nothing better to do these days than to boast like weekend fishermen. And Brian was there, his arms outstretched, declaring that he had landed the exclusive story of the biggest scandal in Australia ’s history. He had no trouble linking at least eighteen of the millionaires to the Fleshpot- each a bartender or an accountant or a bouncer or a dishwasher, all running around on camera with their hands over their faces, the physical gesture that’s as good as a confession. Yet the story that
developed later that night was not what I had expected, mainly because when I confronted Eddie with his crime, he hadn’t told me the true nature of his plot. The report was not, as I had anticipated, about Eddie’s friends receiving the benefits that belonged in the pockets of ordinary Australians. I knew it was more complicated and dangerous than that when I finally answered the phone and the journalist on the other end asked the out-of-the-blue question “Just what is your relationship with Tim Lung?”
Who?
Here’s what I found out. The two nightclubs formerly managed by Eddie and for a short time by myself were owned by a Thai businessman named Tim Lung. So far, out of the 640 millionaires made, 18 had at one time or another been employees of this Tim Lung. Eddie had worked for him for many years and obviously was still working for him. The money Eddie had loaned me to build my labyrinth had in reality come directly from Tim Lung. This man whom I had never heard of had, unbeknownst to me, financed my house. He had given me a job as manager of his club. There was nothing I could say. I was tied to him. Or rather, for some unknown reason, he was tied to me. The evidence was circumstantial yet incriminating. Was that all? No, that wasn’t all. It was enough to hang me, but it wasn’t all.
Further investigations brought to light that Tim Lung had owned a small fleet of fishing trawlers seized by French authorities for trafficking guns and ammunition from France to North Africa. This meant the work I had done some twenty years earlier, in Paris, loading and unloading crates on the banks of the Seine, was done for this same fucking guy. Tim Lung- he had been responsible for the underworld battle that led to Astrid’s death all those years ago! My head was spinning. I kept replaying the revelations over in my head. Tim Lung: I had worked for him in France, he had given me a job in Australia, he had financed my house and had finally called in the favor by ripping off the millionaires scheme. Was that what he’d wanted all along? How could that be possible? And how was anyone to believe the unbelievable fact that I had never heard of him? And how could I never have heard of him? A man whom I had been tied to almost all my adult life? This shadowy Thai businessman turned out to be one of the key figures in my life, and this was the first I was hearing of him. Incredible!
I went online to do a search and found a couple of grainy photos and a link to an old interview on a Thai-language corporate website. He was a tall, thin man in his late fifties. He had a gentle smile. There was nothing about his features to suggest criminality. His eyes weren’t even set too close together or too far apart. I turned off the computer, having learned nothing, and not long after the police raided our offices and all the computers were taken. They went on to dig up people I’d known and purposefully forgotten; people I’d worked with in short-lived minimum-wage jobs, inmates at the mental hospital, even prostitutes came out of the woodwork to throw in their two cents. Everyone was on the warpath that led to me.
It was the white-collar crime of the century. I was cooked! I was the personification of everything hated in this country- another fat cat milking decent, hardworking, ordinary Australians of their wages. I was officially a scumbag. A bag of scum! A shitheel. A heel of shit! I was all these things, and more. To my surprise, I was identified racially. A Jew! Even though I had never had any contact with the Jewish community, any more than I’d had with the Amish, the newspapers referred to “Jewish businessman Martin Dean.” And for the first time I was accurately called “half brother” of Terry Dean. That’s it. That’s how I knew I was done for; they were distancing my crimes from those of my iconic brother. They wouldn’t stand for me taking Terry’s legacy down with me.
A lifetime of my fearing people was finally validated- people proved themselves to be absolutely frightening. The whole country was in a whirlwind of hate, a hatred so intense and all-encompassing, you couldn’t imagine any of them were still able to kiss their loved ones at night. This was the instant I felt my destiny- to be an object of loathing- arrive and also the moment I realized there was something to this business of negative energy after all. I felt the waves of detestation profoundly, in my guts. Honestly, you wonder how they ever sneaked the abolishment of the death penalty past a mob like that. I was not unaccustomed to witnessing my countrymen’s hatred focused like death rays over the years: I remember the minister whose wife had paid for designer sunglasses with taxpayers’ money, and that practically was the end of the minister’s career. His son’s phone bill! Or the MP who was forced to deny claims that she tried to get into the Royal Easter Show for free. The people were upset that she didn’t pay her twelve dollars. Twelve lousy dollars! Imagine what they’d do to me!
Of course the appalled faces of my political opponents barely concealed their delight; they adored anything that allowed them to look indignant on behalf of the electorate. It was effortless the way they ground me to dust. They were spared the trouble of having to cook up a scandal to fry me. All they had to do was express shock and act swiftly, to appear to be the one with his foot on my neck. They were all lining up to denounce me, their voices dipped in sewage, pushing each other out of the way to take credit for my downfall.
Oscar was powerless to stop all this, assuming he even wanted to. Reynold had taken over the matter. Anouk tried to reason with her father-in-law and asked him to help me, but Reynold was resolute. “It’s too late now,” he said. “You can’t stop a tidal wave of hatred once it’s reached the shore.” He was right. There was no point making a foolish protestation of innocence. I knew how it worked. I was already sliced and diced in everyone’s mind, so what was I still doing here? You could see it in their eyes- they were astonished that I was still breathing. What a nerve! I considered appealing to the charitable parts of themselves. I even toyed with the idea of telling them I had cancer, but I dropped it. I’d assaulted their pockets, and nothing would soften them to my case. They could learn that my skin was being peeled away by a blind cook who had mistaken me for a giant potato, and they would cheer. Cheer! It seems that in our society Christianity has made permanent inroads in the eye-for-an-eye department but has made little progress on the practical application of forgiveness.
The biggest irony about this whole thing was that the chemotherapy sessions were over and were successful. So just when I had my life back again, it became unlivable. The Buddhists are right. Guilty men are not sentenced to death, they are sentenced to life.
Sadly, Jasper too was the hapless recipient of a severe hammering. I’m ashamed to say he finally had to pay for the sins of the father. He began receiving messages like “Please tell your father that I am going to kill him!” Poor bastard! He became a death-threat messenger service. And don’t think my wife got off any easier. Poor Caroline! Poor babe in the woods! She foolishly agreed to interviews, thinking she could set the record straight. She didn’t understand that they had her role clearly defined and would not stand for it to be corrected or amended. By pitting ourselves against the battler, we had lost our talent to be Australians, and thus our right to a fair go was forfeited. They savaged her. My one actual lie was uncovered and it became public knowledge that Caroline and I had grown up together. Thus her being made a millionaire made her look as guilty as I was. She was left weeping on national television. My love! Women spat on her in the street. Saliva! Actual saliva! And sometimes the saliva wasn’t even white but the dirty dark-green of long-term smokers. Caroline was not prepared for this; at least I’d had a childhood of persecution to prepare me, many mouthfuls of bitter experience to line my stomach. I started out as a figure of contempt and that’s how I ended up- hard to be too upset about it.
And now the saddest part, the tragedy: all my reforms were systematically dismantled, all my innovations, all my warped progress. That was it! The shortest social revolution in history! This little slice of Australian history was going down as a blight. They no longer liked the farce I had orchestrated. It was all coming clear to them now: they’d been hoodwinked. We were right back where we started. Further back, even. They were fast reducing me to a meaningless aberrat
ion, rewriting history at supersonic speed. Whole months were wiped out with every thirty-minute current affairs report. Every TV channel had the sad face of a pensioner telling of her sacrifice in sending in her one dollar a week, all the things lost she could have bought: milk, dishwashing liquid, and, with no trace of irony, lottery tickets. Yes, the national lottery was back in business. People had their crummy odds again.
***
In the mirror, I tried to smile; the smile made my sadness look like a permanent disfigurement. It was my own fault! I shouldn’t have fought against my meaninglessness any more than I should’ve fought against those tumors. I should’ve nursed my tumors until they grew huge and meaty.
I spent the majority of those days stretched out on the floor of my bedroom, my chin resting on the beige carpet until my chin felt beige, and my insides too: beige lungs, beige heart pumping beige blood through my beige veins. I was on the floor when Jasper charged in, intruding on my peaceful beige existence to pass on all the death threats he’d received on my behalf.
“And who the fuck is Tim Lung?” he asked.
Rolling over onto my back, I told him everything I knew, which wasn’t much.
“So my mother died on one of his boats in the middle of one of his gang wars.”
“You could put it that way.”
“So this man murdered my mother.”
“She committed suicide.”
“Either way, this bastard has ruined our lives. Without him, I might have a mother, and you might not be Australia ’s newest love-to-hate-him guy.”
“Maybe.”
“What does Eddie say about him?”
“Eddie’s not saying anything.”
It was true. The authorities were giving him a hard time too, not only as the administrator of the scheme. Having overstayed his visa, he was already a criminal- they confiscated his passport, called him in for questioning every other day, but had not yet deported him to Thailand, as he was needed for their investigations. Even so, he was the only calm one among us. His calm was natural and impermeable. I suddenly admired him, because even though I suspected that his tranquillity was just a mask, it was the most solid and durable mask I had ever seen.