Brian Freemantle: Two Women

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!

‘You have my word,’ recited Northcote, in immediate reply.

He despised this man, Carver abruptly decided. It was as much a shock as all the other revelations of the last thirty-six hours. Maybe even greater. Until now he had been in awe – in trepidation – of this lion of a man with a lion’s mane (but a bull’s shoulders) who had dominated his life and Jane’s life and so many other lives but whom he was now coming to regard as nothing more than a clay effigy – a hollow clay effigy at that – of the supposed Colossus who could not have stood guard, legs astride, over any empire. Most certainly – and provably – not over his own, which wasn’t his at all but which had been allowed and granted him, in return for his usefulness.

‘You’re going to give them all the records?’ Itself a criminal – certainly a professional – offence but that no longer seemed a consideration.

‘Yes.’

‘But you’re making copies?’

‘Yes.’

‘Over so long you’re talking in tons!’

‘Things went back, after the statutory limitation. It’s just what’s in my personal section of the vault.’

‘Where are the copies?’ Carver repeated.

‘Safe,’ insisted Northcote.

‘Where are the copies?’ persisted Carver.

‘Not all together yet. You’ll know, when they are. And where they are.’

‘Don’t you think they’ll expect – suspect at least – you’ll do this?’

‘There’s no reason why they should. Everything’s amicable.’

Both men shook their heads to the offered humidor but both ordered brandy, Carver deciding he genuinely needed it. He said: ‘Only for as long as they choose to let it be amicable.’

‘I told you, you watch too much television.’

Carver had to push the calmness into his voice. ‘George. Don’t you have any idea how serious… dangerously serious… all this is!’

‘This is not Chicago in the twenties, Al Capone and machine guns. I know these people. Have done, over a lot of years.’

He was wasting his time, Carver realized, incredulously. ‘I’ll need more than the location.’

‘What?’

‘Names.’

‘It’ll involve you.’

‘I am involved, for Christ’s sake!’ said Carver, in continued exasperation.

‘Let me think on it.’ Northcote smiled abruptly over his brandy snifter. ‘I’m driving up with Jane this afternoon.’

‘I know. What about Friday?’

‘It’ll all be settled by then. You got everything in hand?’

Carver didn’t answer, looking across the table at his father-in-law, who stared back. Finally Northcote said: ‘I’ll make the formal retirement announcement in the keynote speech. Everything will be confirmed by Friday.’

Carver acknowledged that he’d condoned a crime: crime after crime after crime, more crimes than could be counted. Which had – astonishingly – been easy. All so logical. All so acceptable. All – all and every aspect of it – so illegal. Was he prepared to go with that? Was he ready, prepared, to be Superman in the red shorts? Or Eliot Ness? Or John Carver, trying to preserve an empire from crumbling? He said: ‘You were my icon. You were Jane’s icon. Everyone’s icon. God.’

‘Grow up, John.’

‘I just have,’ said Carver. ‘I didn’t enjoy it.’

Alice was already at their table, at their place – the place in the Village he couldn’t remember choosing for those early lunches but which had become their place since. Everyone called everyone by their first names, the moment they were regulars. A very different club from the Harvard: a preferred club even. In which he felt comfortable. Easy. Here – despite the suit in which he definitely felt un comfortable – he was John: anonymous John, no one John. In the Harvard Club he was Mr Carver. Or more often, sir. Rich son-in-law of richer father-in-law, both of whom could order, as they had carelessly ordered, $250 lunches and not eat anything, nor drink more than a token sip of their matchingly expensive wine. Alice was drinking beer.