The Fix (28 page)

‘Well, from the stage is one way,' Hayley said. I tried to remember the other doors that she had shown me. ‘But that's only if you're dancing. Or cleaning the stage, I guess. Like, if you're wiping up cream. Not that we use any actual dairy products, since it's a real hassle for the cleaning, even if it is great for your skin. There's also a door behind the bar and one next to the entrance to the fantasy room. It's behind a curtain. None of them are obvious inside the club. Unless the lights are all on and the curtains are back, which they never are when it's open.'

‘I really wouldn't have thought you had a gym and a solarium and a sauna behind there.'

‘It's not the operation people think.'

She picked up a couple of pieces of penne with her fork. Ben was looking around the restaurant. He was sitting with his back to one of the brown-brick archways that framed the murals, and he could see most of the room.

‘Have either of you been here before?' he said. It was a new thought, though we had been in the restaurant close to an hour. ‘I'm sure I've been here before.'

‘I think it's been around for years.' I had driven past it on previous trips. That was all I could remember.

‘Ah . . .' He reached for the bottle of chianti and topped up our glasses. ‘It was a long time ago. It was the family holiday we had before my father left. Actually,
no. That was a restaurant that looked just like this, but it was further down the coast. Da Carlo it was called, at Broadbeach. That was it. It was in a little strip of shops. Probably gone now.' It was another memory from his busted childhood. He was still holding the empty bottle in his hand. ‘I kept the card. The guy gave me a card. No one had ever given me a business card before. I always wanted us to go back, just because of that. I wasn't used to that kind of respect. It had one of those black-and-white photos on it. A Roman street scene just after the war. Or Naples. A woman getting wolf-whistled, a guy on a Vespa. That kind of scene. Anyway, we didn't go back. My father had next-wife plans made that we didn't know about.'

‘Were those the plans that led to you pissing on his bonsai plants?' Perhaps I should have been kinder.

‘Ah, that's right . . . the bonsai plants.' He was smiling, but he didn't seem happy. He put the bottle down. ‘I think he had them to make me feel at home. Which just goes to show how ignorant he is. Bonsai . . . why not a samurai sword? Most of the time I feel very un-Japanese. Like yesterday, those people at the wedding . . .' He stuck his fork into his pasta and started twisting it. ‘I used to surprise myself when I looked in the mirror. When I was a kid. I'd look in the mirror and there was this Japanese guy. It was like the mirror was making it up.'

Neither of us knew what to say to that, but his attention was on his spaghetti so it didn't seem to matter.

When our mains were finished, we persuaded him we had no room for desserts and he made another fuss
about paying the bill, taking it out of the waiter's hand and insisting loudly that it was his responsibility.

‘Prick didn't even give me a card,' he said when we were out on the street. ‘I tipped them too. Gave them a big tip.' He stood looking up at the tall buildings and the stars beyond as if he owned the lot of them.

He made us stop at Vintage Cellars again, where he bought two more bottles of the chianti, on the grounds that it was nice enough and the night was young.

‘He's going nuts, isn't he?' Hayley said while we waited for him outside. ‘I think he's losing it.'

We steered him back to the apartment and soon he was settled in on the balcony, unhappy and hardly saved at all from it by his nice chianti. We sat on the plastic chairs, and Ben cradled his glass in his lap and put his bare feet up on the railing. The breeze tossed the curtains around and he stared out to sea, his eyes half-closed.

‘I read The Charterhouse of Parma – Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma – a few weeks ago,' he said, as though it was not long after the only other time he had mentioned it to me. That had been years before, but he knew I would remember. He turned to Hayley. ‘You wouldn't know what I mean by that. On that last family holiday my father went out for two hours one morning. He came back with a book, and with this story about having been engrossed in it in a second-hand bookshop, and how he'd always wanted to read it. The Charterhouse of Parma. I found out later he'd seen his –' he thought for a while about the right term to use – ‘new woman on that holiday. He'd been with her that morning, for about five minutes short of the two
hours, and that's when he'd decided it was over with us. I think he ducked into the bookshop on the way back and picked up whatever shit he could for two bucks. So, anyway, I read it. Not long after he died. I was going through an airport and there was a new translation. It's this weird book from the 1830s. His name wasn't even Stendhal. And I don't get the history so . . .' He let the thought lapse. ‘My father would never have read it. As if he would have read it. It was such a contemptuous choice really.'

He had told me about the book after the heat had abated from his father's failed attempt to escape to Spain. His father had insisted to the courts that it was a business trip, though he had no correspondence to back that up, no meetings in his diary. He told them that buying a return ticket was proof enough, but Ben put that down to him not being completely stupid and always having an instinct for covering his tracks. Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma. Close scrutiny might have found it wanting but, in the absence of suspicion, what is there that gets scrutinised so closely? He waved his plane tickets around in court, where suspicion was high and the scrutiny unrelenting, and they took his passport, kept him here and made sure he faced trial.

It hadn't played out that way with The Charterhouse of Parma and, if it had, the outcome would have been little different. The holiday ended acrimoniously, with Kerry Harkin stirring up discontent and smoothing the path to the exit. In his head, the deal was already done, his future was in another place and with another wife, and putting a wrecking ball through the holiday was a good first step towards getting there.
He married again a year later, since the divorce paperwork took time.

‘It seemed to work, though. The Charterhouse of Parma.' I couldn't resist it. He had offered up his father as the villain of his story, his melodrama, because of one lie, and a less egregious lie than some. ‘It held up as long as it needed to. Not every lie does that well.'

‘You don't get it, do you?' he said. He was angry that I wasn't letting him set the tone. He wanted to be an innocent victim. ‘You pick and pick and pick and you don't get it. You don't get that what's really killing me is how much of my family story, how much of everything told about us, ends up being about lies. About everything being built on lies. And I tried to change that, and it didn't work.' He shifted on his chair, brought his feet down from the railing. He leaned forward, and turned to Hayley. ‘What you don't know – what I think you don't know – is where all of Josh's picking has got him. And I think you don't know about it because he's embarrassed to be doing what he's doing. Pitching this story, pitching me. And you know why?'

He waited, waited while she said, ‘Why?' It had stopped making sense to her.

‘Because Rob Mueller – that's the guy in the siege, the guy with the gun – his death was suicide and I did no more than fall on him.' He said it in a very measured way. Hayley's surprise was clear. He held up his hand to stop her speaking. ‘But here's the whole story. The story no one knows, including your smartarse boy. Frank Ainsworth, the guy I “saved” –' the word, I was certain, had never been said more sarcastically – ‘had been billing like a bandit. Fudging the figures. A bit
here, a bit there. Maybe even siphoning money out. But in a smart way. I don't know the details and I never had any evidence. Some stuff may never have made it to the books.' Now that he was into the story, he almost looked pleased to be telling it. ‘He had debts. He'd had margin calls when the stock market turned ugly. I know they were a problem. That's all I knew before the siege, actually. The margin calls. So it was greed. Just greed. Rob Mueller was a client. Ainsworth came up with bills he couldn't pay.'

He stopped to think, to bring it to the surface and put it into words. The base of his wineglass clunked against the arm of his chair. He jerked the glass away, as if wine might spill, though the glass was empty. He steadied himself again. ‘With the right clients, you can probably make that work, that kind of deception. They don't know their rights, and they don't want to go up against their own lawyer. The best guess I can make is that Rob was suicidal. Miriam, his wife, got desperate. I think she agreed to sleep with Frank, or to have an affair. So Frank must have had money coming in in other ways that week, if he did that deal. She must have felt totally backed into a corner. Rob found out. That's the stuff he talked about when he was there with the gun.' Ben seemed less drunk, all of a sudden. ‘There was not one second when I would have stood between him and Frank.'

It felt like the truth, finally. Ben put his glass down on the tiles.

‘So what happened then?' I wanted to sound, this time, like someone asking, not picking. ‘The hero part . . .'

‘I was in shock. I couldn't process it. That's the truth. It was a horrible experience, regardless of the details. It was terrifying and then he blew his head practically off. Like, most of it came off. It burst like a melon. And before I could do a thing there were these stories about me out there. I saw my name in the papers before I'd got my head straight, and suddenly I wasn't a con man's son. For the first time in my life. There had never been a good word written about my family. I'd spent my whole life with us ducking for cover. And I thought, maybe we can change. Maybe this is when my name gets a fresh start. But the speed of it had overtaken me by then anyway.'

‘I've seen the coverage. You only had a day or two before he'd dug you in too deep.'

‘And once he made you a hero, he had you,' Hayley said. ‘You'd have to stay quiet or the world would know you were . . . well, a fraud.'

‘Yeah, that's it. A fraud,' he said, prepared to wear the word. ‘Just like my father. Worse.'

So there it was, I thought. Harried forever by the stories of his father – the truth, the half-truths and the hyperbole – the second Kerry Benson Harkin had found himself trapped. By the hope of a better future and, soon after, by the realisation that he had little choice. He had been called a hero, with Frank Ainsworth pumping out detail, and he had appeared to acquiesce. Everyone within range had acquiesced, unwittingly – Max Visser and the staff, the police, the media, the committee who weighed up bravery and, in rare instances, handed out a star. The story came with a villain who was actually a victim and a victim who was a villain but, like many
stories, it was better told with a hero. Shine the light on the hero, and all else falls into shadow.

Ben could imagine the destruction if the truth got out, because he had seen his father hounded, his reputation shredded, his face in the papers and on TV enough that passengers hurled abuse from passing buses.

‘What would you have done?' he said to me. It didn't sound defensive. He simply seemed to be wondering where a person with a different past might have gone, where regular people went in such circumstances.

‘I don't know.' I didn't. I couldn't know his state of mind at the time, or what capacity I might have had to stop the lie and tell the truth. To stand behind the clutch of microphones after Frank Ainsworth had had his turn, and praised me, and say to a crowded room and the wider world that the grateful man with the bandaged head was a thief who was fast-talking his way out of trouble. The choice was to call him a liar then, or become one.

I knew what I would do, and it was not the right thing. I had been Ben's liar already. I had not turned the medal story on its head when I knew it to be false. I had reconfirmed interviews instead of cancelling them. I had given quotes of my own. I had encoded them in a way that let Ben know they were not lies in themselves, but they were part of the lie just the same.

‘And what would you do now?' he said. ‘If you were me?'

‘I don't know. I'm not brave. I'd do exactly what you're doing, I guess. I'd see the week out.' I had to accept that I probably would, and then I would bury the Star of Courage deep in a drawer and keep living
with the shame of it. ‘And I'd wonder about Miriam Mueller. I'd relive it a million times to find a moment when I might have handled things differently so that Rob Mueller lived and Frank Ainsworth got what was coming to him, whatever that is. But I probably wouldn't find one.'

‘I've never met her,' he said, ‘but I've thought about her. Miriam Mueller. She could see Rob was losing it, and she wanted to save him. She was desperate, and maybe what she did looked like the only way out. I don't know where she is now. I'm pretty sure Frank's got to her. Obviously he has. She's got nothing on him, no evidence. He's told me she's saying nothing. “Who's going to believe the wife of a crazed gunman out for a quick buck?” That's what he said. One word and he'll sue the house out from under her.'

I wondered if she would have been the motivation I might have needed, had I been in Ben's position. I wondered if I would have called Miriam Mueller and, with her, brought it out into the open. But Frank would have covered his tracks. There were still risks, beyond the pounding from the media for taking the medal.

I also wondered if I had spent years resenting Ben more deeply than I should have. I had put a lot down to our Tokyo Speed Ponies days. I had constructed a picture of my life then, with Eloise in it, as close to perfect, and I had refused to accept that it had been less than perfect for her. I had wanted to find that – find the thing I thought I had with her – in every relationship since, and that had been its own kind of sabotage. And I had given Ben the blame for every sunk relationship,
for every year I spent fixing other people's stories and managing the telling of them.