Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

We were halfway up the path to his house, hidden behind a jungle of fern, when we saw him waving from the window. We were expected. Naturally.

“This is a pleasant surprise,” Eddie said, opening the door.

“Why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“We went to the club! We saw all the goddamn millionaires!”

Eddie was silent for a minute before saying, “You took your son to a strip club?”

“We’re fucked! And you fucked us!”

Eddie walked into the kitchen and we followed.

“It’s not the end of the world, Marty- no one knows.”

“I know. And Jasper knows. And it’s only a matter of time before someone else knows!”

“I think you’re overreacting. Tea?” Eddie put the kettle on.

“Why did you do it? That’s what I want to know.”

Eddie’s explanation was poor. He said, with no hint of shame, “I wanted to do something nice for my friends.”

“You wanted to do something nice for your friends?”

“That’s right. These guys have had a really rough time of it. You can’t imagine what a million dollars means to them and their families.”

“Jasper, do you think there’s something not right with his explanation?”

“Eddie,” Jasper said, “your explanation sucks.”

“See? Even Jasper thinks so, and you know we don’t agree on anything. Jasper, tell him why his explanation sucks.”

“Because if you made all your friends millionaires, why are they all still working at a strip club?”

Eddie seemed unprepared for this excellent question. He lit a cigarette and wore an industrious expression, as if he were trying to suck the smoke into his right lung only.

“You got me there.”

He’s guilty as hell, I thought, and there’s something sinister he’s not telling me. He was oozing the worst kind of bullshit- obvious, but not transparent enough to see the reason behind it.

“Answer the question, Eddie. Why the fuck are these millionaires all working in minimum-wage jobs in a sleazy rundown strip club?”

“Maybe they spent all the money already,” Eddie said.

“Bullshit!”

“Christ, Martin, I don’t know! Maybe they’re the kind of people who’ve worked all their lives and don’t know how to do anything else!”

“Eddie. Twenty million people are sending in twenty million dollars every week, and when they find out their money isn’t being distributed fairly but is going into the pockets of your friends, whom they will consider my friends, what do you think will happen?”

“Maybe they won’t find out.”

“People will find out! And we’ll all go down!”

“That’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?”

“Eddie, where’s the money?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have it!”

“Honestly, I don’t.”

None of us said anything. Eddie finished making his tea and sipped it with a dreamy look on his face. I was getting madder and madder. He seemed to have forgotten we were there.

“How can we bury this?” Jasper asked.

“We can’t!” I said. “We just have to hope no one figures it out.”

As I said this, I realized my mother was wrong when she once told me no matter how far down a road you’ve gone, you can always turn back. I was on a one-way road with no exits and no room to turn around. It was an entirely justifiable feeling, as it happened, because two weeks later everyone figured it out.

Enter the cannibalistic vigor of the press into my life once again. The story broke all at once, in every paper, on every radio and television station. I was masticated, and good. Leading the charge was none other than Brian Sinclair, the has-been current affairs reporter whom I’d seen with my son’s girlfriend.

Caroline and I were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant, at a table by the window. We were digging into an enormous slab of veal in lemon sauce when his slick silver head popped into my line of vision. We locked eyes through the window. As a public figure, I was accustomed to the odd camera pointing at me like a judge’s finger, but the slippery eagerness on Brian’s face had an effect on me similar to the sudden drop of cabin pressure in an airplane. He signaled furiously at his cameraman. I took Caroline’s hand and we bolted out the back door. By the time we got home, the phone was ringing off the hook. That night we saw our backs disappear on the six-thirty news.

As it turns out, the fourth estate has nothing better to do these days than to boast like weekend fishermen. And Brian was there, his arms outstretched, declaring that he had landed the exclusive story of the biggest scandal in Australia ’s history. He had no trouble linking at least eighteen of the millionaires to the Fleshpot- each a bartender or an accountant or a bouncer or a dishwasher, all running around on camera with their hands over their faces, the physical gesture that’s as good as a confession. Yet the story that developed later that night was not what I had expected, mainly because when I confronted Eddie with his crime, he hadn’t told me the true nature of his plot. The report was not, as I had anticipated, about Eddie’s friends receiving the benefits that belonged in the pockets of ordinary Australians. I knew it was more complicated and dangerous than that when I finally answered the phone and the journalist on the other end asked the out-of-the-blue question “Just what is your relationship with Tim Lung?”

Who?

Here’s what I found out. The two nightclubs formerly managed by Eddie and for a short time by myself were owned by a Thai businessman named Tim Lung. So far, out of the 640 millionaires made, 18 had at one time or another been employees of this Tim Lung. Eddie had worked for him for many years and obviously was still working for him. The money Eddie had loaned me to build my labyrinth had in reality come directly from Tim Lung. This man whom I had never heard of had, unbeknownst to me, financed my house. He had given me a job as manager of his club. There was nothing I could say. I was tied to him. Or rather, for some unknown reason, he was tied to me. The evidence was circumstantial yet incriminating. Was that all? No, that wasn’t all. It was enough to hang me, but it wasn’t all.

Further investigations brought to light that Tim Lung had owned a small fleet of fishing trawlers seized by French authorities for trafficking guns and ammunition from France to North Africa. This meant the work I had done some twenty years earlier, in Paris, loading and unloading crates on the banks of the Seine, was done for this same fucking guy. Tim Lung- he had been responsible for the underworld battle that led to Astrid’s death all those years ago! My head was spinning. I kept replaying the revelations over in my head. Tim Lung: I had worked for him in France, he had given me a job in Australia, he had financed my house and had finally called in the favor by ripping off the millionaires scheme. Was that what he’d wanted all along? How could that be possible? And how was anyone to believe the unbelievable fact that I had never heard of him? And how could I never have heard of him? A man whom I had been tied to almost all my adult life? This shadowy Thai businessman turned out to be one of the key figures in my life, and this was the first I was hearing of him. Incredible!

I went online to do a search and found a couple of grainy photos and a link to an old interview on a Thai-language corporate website. He was a tall, thin man in his late fifties. He had a gentle smile. There was nothing about his features to suggest criminality. His eyes weren’t even set too close together or too far apart. I turned off the computer, having learned nothing, and not long after the police raided our offices and all the computers were taken. They went on to dig up people I’d known and purposefully forgotten; people I’d worked with in short-lived minimum-wage jobs, inmates at the mental hospital, even prostitutes came out of the woodwork to throw in their two cents. Everyone was on the warpath that led to me.