‘What are the few things still needing to be sorted out?’
‘Understandings.’
They pulled back for their drinks to be served.
Carver said: ‘What’s understandings mean?’
‘Agreements.’
‘With whom? About what?’
‘The dissolution.’
‘For fuck’s sake, George: talk in words that make sense! Are you – the firm – out?’
‘There are still some things that need to be agreed.’
There was another long silence.
Carver said: ‘They don’t let you go, these people, do they?’
‘They’re going to.’
‘I don’t believe you. You don’t believe yourself!’
Without knowing what it was, they both disinterestedly ordered that day’s special when the head waiter returned and at the same time nodded to the house claret.
‘They don’t have a choice.’
‘George! I’ve got to know!’
Northcote shook his head, gesturing for another whisky. There was a tremble in his hand of which Carver hadn’t been aware before. Don’t over-interpret, Carver told himself. ‘George?’
‘They know it’s all over,’ insisted Northcote. ‘They want all the files and records…’ The block came. ‘The… the…’
‘Evidence,’ finished Carver. He nodded again in acceptance of the wine, without tasting it.
‘It solves the problem. That’s how it was always going to be. Separating the firm. No evidence, either way.’
For a moment Carver could not respond, silenced by the other man’s seemingly easy acceptance of what he considered a disaster threatening – even impending.
‘So you give them all our records dating back…’ Carver paused, stopped by an abrupt question. ‘Dating back how long, George? When did it all start…?’
‘A long time ago,’ said Northcote. ‘And it took a lot more years to build up to what it became. There aren’t many records with us any longer. But enough.’
‘Where?’ demanded Carver, remembering his fruitless computer search.
‘Safe.’
What was missing from the older man’s voice, Carver asked himself. Guilt? Remorse? Embarrassment? Acknowledgement of wrongdoing? All of them, Carver decided. If there was an intonation, it was of pride, in whatever it was he had created. He’d always accepted that his father-in-law was self-confident to the point of overwhelming arrogance, which Alice had more than once accused him of being as well, but this went beyond that. But then, Carver further asked himself, how could Northcote be otherwise, after the unstoppable international success he’d achieved, now with offices in every one of the world’s financial capitals? But this… Carver was stopped again by another numbing, unthinkable uncertainty. ‘You told me you were trapped into it… that you didn’t realize it was criminal?’
‘That’s what it was… how it happened.’
‘When – remember we’re talking precisely, exactly – did you realize what you were into?’
‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘George! For fuck’s…’ Carver abruptly stopped with the arrival of their food, which they discovered to be rack of lamb. As soon as the waiter was out of earshot Carver said: ‘George. Tell me true. Don’t tell me things weren’t like I imagine them to be or that I’m misunderstanding or that I shouldn’t be as pig-sick worried as I’m worried at this moment. How long ago?’
‘Maybe twenty years.’
‘How long ago?’ persisted Carver. ‘Precisely. Exactly.’
‘Twenty-two. But it was a longer evolving process, to get everything set up.’ The attitude reflected in the voice now was truculence.
Carver recognized it was a different story from that Northcote had first offered, of a struggling accountant, just starting out. ‘How’d they keep you in line? They blackmail you: tell you how you’d be debarred if you didn’t go along with everything?’
Northcote moved his meat around his plate, eating none of it. Saying nothing.
Carver completed his own non-eating carousel, despising himself for matching the earlier verbal mockery. Then he said: ‘They’ve had you, George, haven’t they? For most of your career they’ve had you, just like this…?’ Carver closed his hand, as if crushing something.
‘I could handle it then: can still handle it now,’ insisted the other man, pushing his plate aside.
Carver said: ‘How’s about this? How’s about a stomach-against-his-spine hungry guy who got initially caught, but who then went with the flow? Paddled the boat, even? You had the choice, all those years ago, of blowing the whistle. But you stayed with the system: their system, your system. Same system. Everyone gets rich. And you, additionally, got protected. Wasn’t that how it ran, George: you their willing guy, all the way along the line?’
Northcote’s face flushed redder than the previous night. ‘I didn’t have a choice!’ The voice – the anger – was cracked.
Carver waved for their untouched meal to be taken away, waiting until it was. ‘You did a Faust on everyone, George. You sold out to the Devil…’ He sniggered a laugh. ‘How about that! You sold out to the underworld! Isn’t that how it was… how it is… you got the joys of this life, leaving those who inherit to pay your dues…?’
Northcote shook his head against the new approach from the waiter. To Carver he said: ‘What the fuck would you have done, dirt poor, knowing you could climb the mountain, but not knowing how: which way to go? Not knowing, then, even which way you were going? You want to tell me that?’
‘No, I can’t tell you that,’ admitted Carver, totally honest. ‘I’d have certainly been frightened. Tempted, too… maybe even have been eager. But mostly tempted, I guess. I don’t know.’
‘So that’s how it is,’ said Northcote.
‘No,’ refused Carver. ‘That’s how it was. Now is how it is. Tell me about last night.’
‘I told you about last night.’
‘George!’
‘I won’t let them win… beat me…’
They’d won. Made this man their own mob-backed Wall Street colossus, Carver accepted, his numbness growing into a tingling feeling of total unreality. ‘They’ve owned you, George. Owned the firm – owned all of us – from the word go!’ How could he be talking like this, in an ordinary manner – conversationally – like everyone else around him in this safe, protected, uninvadible bastion of total, privileged security!
‘There’s a way,’ declared Northcote.
‘What way? Which way?’
‘I kept some records… the records you – no one – was ever supposed to find… I… they…’
Carver seized the stumble. ‘Janice! What does Janice know?’ Janice Snow was Northcote’s black, permanently weight-watching but constantly failing personal assistant who averaged 190lbs when she followed the regime and ballooned way above when she didn’t, which was most of the time. She’d been with Northcote before Carver had entered the firm. It had been Janice who’d earlier insisted Northcote hadn’t arrived in the office, when he clearly had.
‘Absolutely nothing: only that they’re my personal accounts.’
‘How many are “they”?’ demanded Carver, determined to discover as much as he could from a man who was clearly as determined not to volunteer anything. ‘How many more companies are there than Mulder, Encomp and Innsflow?’
‘None.’
‘I have your word on that?’ What the fuck use was the word of a man who’d been a Mafia puppet… Yet again, Carver’s mind stopped at a conclusion he didn’t want to reach but had to, because it was the only one possible. They were talking – conversationally, quiet-voiced, how-was-the-weekend? where’s-this-year’s-vacation? – about the Mafia!
