“Mum, it’s not going to happen. Mum . . . Mum?” She was crying. “Mum, are you there? Do you want me to come over?”
18. I told Mitch about my impromptu meeting with Donald Sheere, and he seemed impressed. That was making it happen, going out and winning the business. He was not worried about Gorman and the risk committee. He said he thought that between the two of us we would have Gorman eating out of our hands and that if you had Gorman, you had the risk committee. Mitch said we just needed to “do a Kissinger.”
“What do you mean?”
“Kissinger used to get all sorts of high-powered adversaries to the table by telling adversary one that he’d better be there because adversary two was going to be there and was very eager to meet him. Then he’d tell adversary two that he’d better be there because adversary one was going to be there and was very eager to meet him. So we tell Gorman that Donald Sheere is definitely in, and you tell Sheere that Gorman and the risk committee are definitely in.”
Mitch was a well-rounded man. He’d read up on all sorts of things, not just finance and the market. He could have done anything with a mind like his. He just didn’t have the personality for sales. With his poker face Mitch was, ultimately, an acquired taste. He did not instantly come to mind when one was putting together a dinner party guest list. It was not that he was colorless or phlegmatic. I knew he was enthusiastic about this deal, but it was reflected more in determination than in excitement. I saw the determination in his eyes when we talked about Sheere’s other precondition, a meeting with Sid Graeme’s contact.
“This one’s yours, Joe. You’d better fix it.”
Do you or don’t you invite Mitch to a dinner party? For a start, he is very guarded about his personal life, so much so that I don’t even know whether he is married or divorced. Second, I don’t know if he can be trusted not to say what he thinks. I admire the way his mind works, but he is an analyst and not a dealer, which means he values getting it right above all else. At a dinner party, you have to allow your most important guests to be right even when they are wrong, to instruct you even in what you already know. The call for these deceits is the criterion that determines the right people to invite. I have never been sure Mitch understands this.
There is another reason for not inviting him. He would find my small talk and ingratiating manner quite nauseating and, in front of him, I would be ashamed of the fatuousness of my conversation. What did I talk about at dinner parties? I talked about the dollar. I talked about the mark, the pound, the euro, the yen, interest rates, the Dow, the FTSE, the Nikkei, and the Hang Seng. I regaled people with little bits of information from journals I had begun to read but had stopped, distracted by the thought of the young woman from the dry cleaner’s sitting on top of me or by that perpetual question, the one that would not be resolved no matter what I did: “Am I any good?”
Anna seemed to take the Sheeres’ unavailability as a gift from God. She canceled the dinner party citing, to the other invitees, the shock of Sam’s kidnapping; and of course everyone she spoke to, usually the wives, was nothing but sympathetic. Instead she put her efforts into planning a birthday party for Sam. She was going to invite all the children in his class, and organize games and prizes, the full catastrophe. I could not fault her with Sam.
Sid Graeme told me to forget it. Was I out of my mind? There was no way his contact would meet with Donald Sheere. He said the man would not even agree to be identified. I told him that was a shame because it killed the deal.
“Joe, you obviously don’t know what these guys are like.”
“Well, isn’t there any way around this?”
“You want me to make it worth his while?”
“I didn’t say that, but I’ve got a very interested Donald Sheere. He likes it, Sid. He likes the sound of it very much, for Christ’s sake, but he needs a little comfort. You can understand that. If he’s going to put in the kind of money you want, it’s only natural he’d want some assurance.”
“Joe, my guy won’t talk. It’s bad enough that he talked to me that time. If it ever got out that he was discussing the party’s health policy with Donald fucking Sheere, the man is dead. No future, you know what I mean?”
“Wait a minute, Sid. You said he’s talked to you that time. You mean you’ve only spoken to him once about this?”
“No, that’s not what I mean.”
“Well, how many times have you discussed it with him?”
“How many times? What does it matter?”
“You want me to get Sheere to pour a vault of his money into Health National on the basis of one throwaway line capable of misinterpretation?”
“Joe, you’re out of line.”
“I’m sorry, Sid. I really don’t mean to be rude, and I think you know that. Shit, I’m not casting anything on anyone but, Jesus, Sid . . .”
“How many times have I got to tell you, he doesn’t like to talk about things like this to guys like us.”
“Guys like who?”
“Me and Sheere.”
“How many times have you talked about their policy turnaround?”
“I don’t know.”
“More than once?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. A few. Listen, Joe, call Sheere and see if it’s enough for him to talk to me.”
“No offense, but I can tell you it won’t be.”
“Joe, call him. Let him prove you right. Tell him the guy has to think about his future. He’ll understand.”
“Sid, he’ll tell me to tell you to take care of his future. Tell the guy the future is not an enemy, it’s an opportunity.”
“Joe, please, give it a try. Call him. See if it’s enough for him to talk to me.”
I did not give Donald Sheere a “try” because I knew what he would say. And however much I stood to gain if I could get Sheere to take up a substantial part of the issue Sid Graeme was planning, I was still Sheere’s broker and it was decidedly not in my interest to alienate him. So if I needed to exert any pressure to bring these men together, it had to be on Sid Graeme not Donald Sheere. I gave it a little over ten minutes, and then I called him back.
“No deal, Sid. I hate to say ‘I told you so,’ but he wants to hear it directly from your contact.”
“Well, then . . . I’m fucked, Joe. This guy, he’s . . . he’s a family man . . . and a good Catholic.”
“So am I. What the hell does that mean? You’ve got to tell him that talking to Donald Sheere is not like talking to the devil. He’s already talking to you.”
“No, Joe. I mean if he’s ever called upon to swear on the Bible and give evidence about whom he’d been talking to and what was said, this guy will tell the truth.”
“Good for him. Very admirable. It’s never going to happen. And if it did, any such meeting, if indeed he remembered one—and even then the best Catholics have memory lapses, Sid—any such meeting was a social one between a politician and some prominent members of the business community. At this social meeting, if he has to remember it, there were many things discussed: the weather, football, Bananas in Pyjamas, a family trip to Sea World, and certain aspects of the opposition’s health policy. Tell him that he’s not doing anything wrong, that it’s all innocent or Donald Sheere wouldn’t be in it.”
“And neither would I be.”
“And neither would you be. Tell him all that, Sid, and then ask him if he likes sailing.”
“Sailing? Why sailing?”
“Because if he does, you should buy him a fucking boat.”
I still don’t know whether the man sails or not. But everybody needs to be sold something. I needed to sell Sid Graeme the story that he needed to sell to the opposition contact to make him agree to a meeting with Donald Sheere. In selling it to him I was also delivering what Sheere needed in order to go ahead with the whole Health National deal. The meeting was, after a torrent of calls back and forth, scheduled for late afternoon the next day. I felt like
a million dollars.
The police had called me at work, but I hadn’t taken the call. I had been too busy. That was true. I wasn’t just avoiding them. Sheere could testify to that. Sid Graeme too, if it came to that. I tried not to think about it and found that easy to do most of the time, particularly after my success in arranging the meeting between Sheere and Graeme. But whenever I did catch myself thinking about the police, I always assumed the worst—that it was the incident with the photographer that they wanted to talk to me about, not Simon Heywood, and I felt something in my stomach, some small baseline anxiety that would eventually course through my veins when the shit hit the fan in some detective’s office. My father’s stomach was stronger than mine. You can’t choose what you inherit.
There was another semi-hysterical message from my mother on the voice mail of my cell phone. What time would I be picking her up to bring her over to our place for Sam’s birthday party? And if Sarah’s husband lost his job, would I be able to get him another one? What the hell did that mean? Had he lost his job?
19. The meeting took place in a private room in Sheere’s club, an impressive ivy-covered Regency building that ran off Collins Street at the Spring Street end. I was there first but wasn’t admitted until Sheere arrived and signed me in. He had brought with him a young lawyer, Buchanan, who shook my hand with a sudden force which told me that irrespective of where we stood in relation to each other concerning the business at hand, sooner or later one of us would have to get rid of the other. There was not room for both of us in Donald Sheere’s stable of upwardly mobile acolytes. We’d actually met before. I could see he remembered, but he wasn’t going to be the first to acknowledge it. Neither was I. Buchanan’s hair was slicked back and he wore a pastel purple shirt with a louder tie than any Laffenden had ever sported. He looked like one of those brash teenagers one sees wearing an earring after hours in bars and nightclubs. But if he did wear one in that kind of place, he didn’t have the guts to wear it in front of a man like Sheere, and of course, his judgment was a hundred percent correct in this. I wanted to kill him.
Meretricious lawyers like Buchanan mostly came from the right secondary schools, the same schools that produced the majority of the people in our firm. From there they went to law school where they majored in coke and “e” and sex with the honey-skinned daughters of their father’s friends. As a kid I had seen them on the 69 tram, acting up for those more English than the English schoolgirls who wore their hair in ponytails and their tunics short and smoked ultra-mild menthol cigarettes. I only ever took that streetcar to play football. There were wealthy Catholics at the end of the line in Kew, but we didn’t know them.
Buchanan was already a partner in Sheere’s favored law firm. He had been brought along to scrutinize the deal, to “legal” it, to perform a snap “due diligence.” Given that it was not he that was putting the deal together, the only way he could promote himself in this was to find something wrong with it.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said, keeping hold of my hand long after he had delivered the line.
The choice of venue for the meeting and the unnecessary presence of Sheere’s blond and tanned lawyer, not to mention the barely animated suit Sid Graeme felt the need to bring along, could not have been calculated to make the ageing opposition backbencher more uncomfortable. Mitch was there too, and I was glad he was. The backbencher sat frozen in his chair like a frightened rabbit. He looked like one of those people you see outside polling booths handing out how-to-vote cards that nobody takes.
Sid Graeme and I got the small talk going as best we could in an attempt to relax the frightened backbencher, but it didn’t work. He drank his scotch like a dying man, holding on to the glass with both hands. He wanted it to be all over. But when we got to the opposition’s health policy, he sang right on key. Graeme had obviously rehearsed him. Mitch and I were silent as Sheere asked a few questions that called for him only to reiterate what I had already told Sheere. The man was humming along nicely, and I thought it was all about to end when Buchanan felt the urge to remind us that he was there. He started to cross-examine the rabbit, and my heart sank.
“Are you really saying there is no opposition at all to managed care in the parliamentary party?”
“No, I said no effective opposition.”
“ ‘No effective opposition’? What does that mean?” Buchanan fired back.
“What little opposition there is will not prevent us from passing the bill.”
“Why is there any opposition to it?”
“Ideologically, the party has always held that medical care is not rightly a for-profit industry, a state of affairs that managed care is designed to facilitate. It’s only recently that . . . well, how can I say it? Pragmatism has begun to prevail over this view and in favor of managed care. But not everybody is in favor of it.”
“Why is that?” Buchanan snapped.
“It’s a political party, Mr. Buchanan, not a board of directors. We accept a diversity of opinion and some members have, I suppose, been successfully targeted by those elements within the medical profession who are opposed to the implementation of managed care.”
“Who are those elements?” Buchanan came back.
“Oh, come on, you’re not in court now,” I said angrily.
“Give the man the opportunity to answer,” Sheere intervened on Buchanan’s behalf.
I thought he wouldn’t know, but he did.
“There’s a psychiatrist who is vehemently opposed, and he has written a number of position papers on the matter. I would imagine that most doctors would be opposed to managed care to a lesser or greater extent, but this guy is fairly passionate and vocal.”
“What’s his name?” Buchanan asked.
“Alex Klima.”
“Is he alone in this?”
“No, there are others who’ve written about it, but he seems to be the . . .”
“The ringleader?” Buchanan asked.
“Well, he’s the most vocal. We’ve all been lobbied by him. But we’ll be passing the legislation anyway. I think even Dr. Klima knows that.”
“He knows?”
“He doesn’t actually know,” the backbencher continued, “but as I was saying before, he would have a fair idea of how few of us really believe it’s as bad as he says.”
As it turned out, despite Buchanan’s best efforts, the answers given by the backbencher did nothing to diminish the attractiveness of the idea to Sheere. If anything, they added to the urgency of the deal. If this psychiatrist, Alex Klima, had an inkling that the legislation would get through, then the longer we waited the more chance there was that other people would get to know. If people knew, the acquisition cost of private hospitals would rise sharply. So it was agreed that night. The backbencher returned to his hole, and Sheere and Graeme instructed Mitch and me to do all that was necessary as quickly as possible.
When everybody left, I walked Mitch back to his car primarily to ask him whether he thought we would have any problem getting Gorman and the risk committee to agree to underwriting the issue. He smiled and told me that he hadn’t let me down. We had them all, Gorman, the backbencher, Sheere, and Graeme. I could have hugged him. I didn’t, but I asked if he had chosen anyone to room with at the corporate retreat.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, “but that’s not . . . When is that?”
“Oh, it’s not for a couple of months, but the form came around today. You know what they say about the early bird.”
“Joe, that makes me a worm.”
“Hey, Mitch, forgive me my insensitivity. I’m not used to asking men to sleep with me. Now what do you say?”
“I think I can trust you.”
“We should have a drink to celebrate this Health National thing.”
“I’d love to, but I’ve got to be . . . we’ve both got to be there extra early tomorrow morning and, to be honest, the tension has taken a lot out of me. Remember, you’re the dealer, not me. I’m the backroom type.
”
You had to love Mitch.
20. Elated all the way home, it did not hit me until I pulled up in the garage and stopped thinking about the deal. I was late. I was very late on a day I had, days earlier, promised to be home extra early. I had missed his birthday party. I knew that the deal I had just facilitated would come to mean more to Sam’s quality of life, and even to Anna’s, than being there for his seventh birthday, but they would never see it that way. I would have hurt him by breaking my promise to be there. It was the sort of thing children grow up never forgetting. They grow up with the taste of that kind of crushing disappointment only a father can dispense permanently stuck under their tongues, and you grow old smelling it on their breath whenever they talk to you. And the only way to get rid of it is to do something worse.
The house was quiet. Bizarrely, like something out of The Twilight Zone, a long children’s party table had been laid but nothing, or almost nothing, had been touched. I wondered if I hadn’t gotten the day wrong. I could live it again. But then Anna would not have put everything out, including jellies and cut-up watermelon, twenty-four hours early. Why would she have done that?
I was walking up the stairs when the thought first came to me. I wanted to scream. It was something he would never forget and it would overshadow my lateness and there was nothing I could do about it. Anna, her mother, Sophie, and perhaps even my mother had prepared a party for him, invited everyone in his class and a bear from a children’s television program. That had to count for something. There were tears in my eyes that my eyelids crushed out onto my face when, on reaching the top of the stairs, I realized none of the children had come.
Anna had him in the bath and when I opened the bathroom door she turned around and they both looked up at me. I knew I was right. From a class of twenty-eight, three children had turned up. The other twenty-five had not come. What had his parents done? Like me, Anna had been crying and I wondered if she had been able to hide it from him. Downstairs in the living room on the coffee table near the television my mother’s hard candy remained untouched.