Peter Corris - Taking Care of Business

‘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.

‘That’s not as rigid as it sounds,’ Marriott said. ‘We had ways of keeping below that level because none of us wanted to float the company. Rog made sure we all understood about that-writing things off, tax dodges really.’

‘Rog?’

‘The lawyer, well, paralegal guy who helped us set up in the first place.’

‘And he’s not in the picture now?’

‘No. He hated Stefan after a while and wouldn’t work with us anymore. Anyway, since Stefan moved in all that’s gone by the board and we have to float now. Stefan’s enforcing the terms of the original agreement.’

‘And what’s involved in that-floating?’

Marriott shrugged, an odd gesture to go with what he said. ‘Millions for us of course as the original partners, and the way Stefan’s drawn up the prospectus and company plan, not that much loss of control. Accountability and all that, but there’s ways around such things and Stefan knows them all.’

‘And you think he wants you out of the way so he can divide up the millions more… equitably?’

‘No. Worse than that. So that after the float he can sell out to someone big. With the stock I’m going to hold, I could veto that.’

I’d been scribbling a few notes while he talked and I looked at them now. ‘What does… Mark think about all this?’

The shrug again. ‘Mark’s brain is so fried with coke and ecstasy and Christ knows what else, he just does whatever Stefan wants. It was Stefan who got him hooked in the first place and he supplies him now with the drugs and the women.’

I’d been sitting down too long and felt restless. I stood and stretched and went to the window. It was late on a winter afternoon and the light was dimming fast. There’d been some rain and the roads and footpaths were dark. I could feel Marriott watching my back. There was a kind of energy in him despite his commonplace appearance. Naivety as well. He was focused and concise, and I could believe that he’d helped to develop some brilliant money-making scheme but had difficulty in coping with life’s realities. I traced a meaningless figure in the dust on the window. ‘How did Steve die?’

‘He fell under a train at Strathfield station.’

I rubbed out the scribble and turned around. ‘Why wasn’t he driving his BMW?’

‘Steve was like me; he wasn’t interested in all that yuppie crap. He lived in a flat in Strathfield. He wore jeans to the office every day.’

‘Nice suit you’ve got on, Mr Marriott.’

He forced a smile, or that’s the way it looked. Smiling didn’t come easily to him. He had bad teeth and I was beginning to think that he might also have a breath problem. ‘We’ve got this far,’ he said. ‘Call me Charlie. Have you got anything to drink? Don’t private eyes keep a bottle in the desk drawer?’