pictures and, my boy, the art business is a racket.’
SOLOMON’S SOLUTIONS
I need a bodyguard,’ Charles Marriott said.
I said, ‘Why?’
‘Because I think my life is in danger.’
‘All our lives are in danger,’ I said. ‘Nothing surer.’
He looked at me through his wire-framed glasses and stroked his short, gingery beard. He was a tall, spindly individual with narrow shoulders, a pasty face and a slight stoop. He didn’t look the sort of man who should fear for his life, barring accidents, until he was near his three-score-and-ten. Quiet type. Safe. But his eyes were busy. They darted around my office looking frightened. I can understand why you’d look frightened in my office if you have phobias about dust, draughts and old furniture, but not otherwise.
Marriott stopped fiddling with his facial hair and brought his scared gaze around to fix on me. ‘I’ve been told you like to joke to upset people. You don’t need to do that to me. I’m upset already. I need help, Mr Hardy, and I’m willing to pay for it.’
I wondered who’d told him that and whether it was true. I couldn’t think of a recent client with that kind of analytical capacity, but his response got my attention.
‘If I can help, I will, but everybody who employs me pays the same-a retainer variable according to how long it looks like the job’ll take; two hundred and fifty a day, GST included, plus expenses.’
He nodded. ‘So can I consider you engaged?’
‘No, not quite. I’ll have to hear what’s on your mind first. If you’ve been importing heroin freelance from the Golden Triangle and the Triads and the Yakuza are after you, I’ll have to pass.’
My father used to say that only men with weak chins grew beards. He continued to say it after I grew one, and I’ve got as much chin as anyone needs, but I still tend to look at bearded blokes with the thought in mind. Marriott s beard was wispy, but it grew on a solid chin. ‘When do the jokes stop?’ he said.
I pulled myself up straighter in my chair. ‘Now,’ I said. ‘Tell me why you feel in danger?’
‘What d’you know about the IT industry?’
I moved my hand across the surface of my computerless desk. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘You’d better assume that. I doubt I know anything worth knowing. Is IT your game?’
He stroked the beard again. ‘Interesting choice of words. It was a game at the start. A bloody exciting game, but it’s turned into something else.’
I nodded. ‘The money’d do that.’
He gave a respectful nod and told me that he’d started up a dot com with two partners a couple of years back. They were all computer studies graduates from the University of Technology and couldn’t wait to become players.
‘We were full-on computer nerds. Especially Mark and me. Totally into it.’
‘Surfing the net,’ I said, just to be saying something.
He looked at me as if I’d dribbled on my chin. ‘Way beyond that. We were all good programmers and lateral thinkers.’
I persisted. ‘Hackers.’
He looked exasperated and I raised my hands in apology. ‘I’m sorry. That exhausted my vocabulary. I was just getting it over with.’ The truth was, computers bored me and I wasn’t feeling as if this was going to be my sort of thing. But he plugged on, which meant that at least he was serious.
‘I’m talking about Steve Lucca, Mark Metropolis and me. We formed Solomon Solutions and went at it. We did a fair bit of Y2K bug stuff, remember that?’
‘Yeah. Didn’t worry me too much.’
‘Bit of a scam, really. But we made some money and so we had some capital behind us to go for the big stuff.’
‘Which is?’
‘Database financial consulting.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Solomon is now just about the best in the southern hemisphere for accessing financial information worldwide and forecasting government and corporation policies, company profits and share movements.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Bucks.’
‘Big bucks. You have to pay to use Solomon to get our advice and forecasts, which are bloody good, and when you do, Solomon can monitor your transactions and take its commission on successful deals.
‘We developed this brilliant software, you see. It’s all automatic, and your user fee goes up, but we sweeten the pill by having the commission we take go down as your business progresses. It’s all geared to exchange rates, of course.’
I was starting to get interested. As someone who thinks stockmarkets and futures trading and currency speculation ought to be illegal, I was aware that I was radically out of step with the times. I dimly grasped what Marriott was saying, enough to understand that it sounded like being allowed into the mint with a U-haul van.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘three into however many millions you’re making goes very nicely.’
Talking about success had excited him, but now he was sobered. ‘For a while it was four,’ he said. ‘We brought in this marketing man. The money side of it was getting a bit hard to handle. Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We were helping move billions around the shop and we started to get into tax and business troubles ourselves. Weird. We brought Stefan Sweig in as a full partner, even though he hardly had any capital. We’d known him at UTS. Bloody economics genius and no slouch with computers either. Bit younger than us.’
‘And you are how old?’
‘Twenty-six, shit, no, twenty-seven. I’m losing track. Mark and Steve… uh, much the same. Stefan’s maybe twenty-three. Looks younger, acts older.’
I was starting to become interested in Charles Marriott. He had some idea of how to tell a story and I could sense the relief he was experiencing at letting it all out. Cliff Hardy-private enquiries and narrative therapist.
‘Stefan got us into the big time. He knew the buttons to push. The trouble to avoid. Got us out of our tax hole like magic. We thought we were going to go under at one point and we just… bobbed up, better than ever. Advertising revenue, more clients…’
‘Sounds like I should hire him,’ I said.
Marriott shook his head almost violently. ‘No. He’s poison. I wish we’d never… No, I can’t say that. But we should’ve, I don’t know, drawn up a better partnership agreement when we brought Stefan in, one that protected us somehow. We were bad at that all along.’
‘Who drew up the agreement?’
Marriott suddenly looked angry and older than twenty-seven, much older. ‘Stefan did, with a lawyer mate of his. Can you believe it?’
I didn’t want to do myself out of a job, but I had to say it. ‘Get another lawyer.’
‘I did, or tried to. No way to change it. Watertight.’
I shrugged. ‘I still can’t see the problem. If you’re going gangbusters with this thing, four into even more millions goes even more nicely.’
‘Three, or two.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Steve’s dead. I think Stefan had him killed. And I reckon I’m next. Or it could be something worse.’
With me having virtually no understanding of big business, it took a bit more explaining. But Marriott was patient and seemed to be drawing some comfort just from talking. There were certain clauses in the original partnership agreement that plotted the future of the company. One was that when business reached a certain level, the company should be floated.
