The Fix (3 page)

Brett gave me a look when I said it. Frank laughed, but not convincingly. ‘Just the one so far.' He wanted to keep things light, or make it seem as though the conversation was light by nature. He wanted his outburst erased. ‘I'm hoping it stays that way. Anyway, it's Ben who's the story now, and we've persuaded him he needs some backup, someone like you to manage the media side of it and get him ready. Take that stress off him, at least.'

‘That's Josh's thing,' Brett said quickly. ‘This is going to work out well.'

He was trying to fix my crass comment.

‘Okay, here's how it looks to me.' It was time to demonstrate my thing. Time to sell Frank to himself, and file the incident away. ‘This is a firm people can rely on. It's dependable, it's efficient and it will deliver. It doesn't cut corners. It has substance.' It was a message everyone liked hearing about themselves, particularly the people who had spent money on carpets and art. ‘It doesn't make a lot of noise. It's a firm you can trust.' I watched him on ‘trust', but I saw nothing. ‘What Ben
did fits with that. This is a firm where the lawyers would throw themselves at a gunman to save a life, and seek no glory for it afterwards. He's a genuine hero, but a reluctant one, and I think that's a good place to start.'

‘That's us,' Frank said. He was picturing how it would look in the papers. ‘It's Ben, and it's the firm. That's it.'

‘So tell me who you want to reach with this. There'll be quite a bit of media interest on the day, when it's news, but the best way to secure something more, so that it isn't just a news item, would be for me to get to work contacting the right people this week. Selecting a few that'd be a good fit and locking them in, while at the same time working with Ben and you and anyone else to get a handle on the best way of telling the story.' Frank was nodding while I was speaking. He had his pen in his hand, as if he might make notes. ‘Maybe you could also tell me about media coverage you've been getting for other things – anyone who's taken an interest in the firm and might be up for a follow-up, or anyone who doesn't like you.'

‘I can't imagine why anyone wouldn't like us.' Frank smiled again, as if the three of us were in on a joke. ‘We're all about helping the little guy. But I suppose there's always someone who doesn't like you. Someone who remembers one time when you had to knock a few heads together.' He said it as if all reasonable people were in the business of knocking heads. ‘Not the media, though – they don't take much of a look at us. We buy some ad space in the papers for the crash-and-bash and family bits of the firm, but that's about it. My work's particularly with SMEs – small-to-medium business
enterprises. Some of them are big enough to make the papers. We want to reach them, I suppose.' He stopped, to give it some thought. ‘When regular people – by which I particularly mean cashed-up regular people with six to fifty staff – have legal needs, we want to be one of the names they think of.'

‘Good.' Regular people. By Frank's definition I knew only one, and he was sitting next to me with a bad mo and a salmon-coloured satchel. ‘If you're thinking of linking any kind of ad spend to this, my advice is don't. This needs to run down purely editorial channels, or you'll undermine it, and undermine Ben. If you routinely do run ads in any of the publications we get him into, or radio stations we get him on, I think you should pull them for a few days. By all means, bring them in after that, once we've put the firm's name out there, but it's too ugly to look like you're commercialising something like this. People won't like it.'

‘Right,' he said. ‘Excellent.' This time he reached for a pad and made a note. ‘I don't know if anyone's thinking that way, but I'll stop them if they are.' He drew a box around the note, which I couldn't read. ‘Maybe it's time to drop in on Ben.'

His face made it seem as if it might have been a question, but he was already standing. Brett looked my way. I thought he was about to speak, but instead he nodded and then checked his watch. I had imagined Ben Harkin over the years, on and off, and now I was about to see him again.

Frank led us along a corridor that passed glass-fronted offices on one side, and a storeroom and a bay of work stations on the other. A woman sat typing in the first
cubicle, her gaze fixed on the screen, a line of Simpsons figurines along the top of her computer and a Dilbert mug half-full of tea or coffee beside her. Pinned up on her divider was a sheet of A4 paper with a message that read, ‘Workplaces are to be kept neat and tidy, and without personal adornments. Please feel free to express yourself on your fridge at home.' It looked like it had come from an email, but it had been bumped up to eighteen point and covered with glitter and a chain of coloured paperclips.

Next to her, I could see the back of another woman who was on the phone and saying, ‘I just wanted to check that the courier had got there . . .'

Frank had stopped at the third office down the corridor and was tapping on the glass.

Ben Harkin stood in his tailored suit as we walked in, and he met me with a steady handshake. It was the first time we'd ever shaken hands. His black hair had a sheen to it and his shirt cuffs had gold cufflinks, not buttons. He looked like a Vogue magazine-shoot version of a lawyer, but he also looked at ease there, not like a model brought in to pose. He looked to me like a lawyer other lawyers might envy.

‘Josh,' he said. ‘Joshua Lang. Riding in like the cavalry. You've done a lot these past few years, from what I've heard. Over in London. Though you did cross over to the dark side . . .' He was smiling, as if we were back right away at a place where he could make a joke about my old ambitions. He knew I'd gone overseas hoping to write features, to work in investigative journalism and break stories people needed to know about. ‘Lucky for us,' he said. ‘Lucky for me.'

He seemed to have forgotten that we had stopped being friends, and for a moment had me doubting my own memory of it. I was smiling back. I could feel it, the smile opening up on my face. He had me missing the better times we'd had. I couldn't speak, and I was sure my smile had fixed itself into a stupid grin.

‘Ben, we've had a bit of a chat,' Frank said, his hands on the back of a chair. ‘But I thought we'd hold off on the detail until we came in to you.' He turned to Brett, and then looked past Brett to include me. ‘I think we just want people to know that we're proud to have someone of Ben's calibre at this firm.'

It came out stiffly, like a distant father trying to manage a hug. Ben looked down at his desk, and moved his pen. It was Mont Blanc, or something similar.

‘You're going to have to stop feeling awkward about that,' I told him. ‘There'll be pride everywhere on Monday.' He put on a shudder, for effect. He wanted to be sure there was no pretence of willingness. ‘I'm going to have to get to know your version of what happened inside out.'

‘Ben, we've got to do justice to the story this time,' Frank said. ‘You've got to get your due.' He looked at Ben long enough to make sure that the message was getting through, and then he turned to me. ‘It's hard to imagine what it was like. I really didn't think I'd get out of it alive.'

‘Rob Mueller was a very disturbed man,' Ben said. More words that felt rehearsed, or at least spoken before, perhaps worked out when the siege was fresh and Ben was made to tell and retell his story to police, workmates, whoever he came across.

‘There was no reasoning with him,' Frank said. ‘He was deluded. Hearing voices. He said he was on a mission from God. He was going to shoot me and anyone who stood in his way.'

I needed it from Ben, so I turned back to him. ‘And you . . .'

‘Ben jumped him.' It was Frank again. ‘He'd already hit me in the head. There was blood everywhere. He was about to shoot me.'

‘Okay.' I kept my eyes on Ben. ‘Well, I'm going to have to hear it from you too. We can't do all the interviews with Frank's hand up the back of your shirt. The media aren't much into ventriloquism.' It was supposed to be a joke, but it came out sounding hard. ‘You and I are going to have to talk it through. The siege and anything else that might come up. Your father, for example. He's probably going to come up if we do any profile pieces. I was really sorry to read about him.'

Ben nodded, but his face told me nothing. ‘It's okay. You know we weren't close.'

‘Yeah. I was sorry to hear it, though. It can't be easy for you. And I think we've got to expect that it might come up. Not so much in the news stuff, but if there are any feature articles or any longer TV pieces, like Australian Story.' There was something ugly about getting down to business, when this bit of business was his father's death. ‘We can't have it in the back of your mind any time someone's interviewing you. You'll feel better if we have a plan.' Some of his hair had fallen across his forehead, making him look even more like a model. ‘The best way to deal with any difficult issue is to be ready to tell the truth. Be up-front about your
version of the truth. Own it first. So, we're open about your father. I think we have to be. And most of the time he won't be mentioned. This is a hero story, a tragic event that will be remembered for one person's courage. I haven't been called in to fix a problem. This isn't a question of spin.'

‘Exactly,' Frank said, hearing something that sounded right to him. ‘It's not a question of spin. It's about heroism. And you're here to get Ben through it.'

‘And look at it from the media's point of view. They need stories, and this is a good one. So you need to be able to tell it. This is a story that says that in a troubled world there are good guys out there, and good does not go unrecognised. These people are picking up bad-news stories from the wires all the time, and they want something positive. And plenty of the good-news stories they get pitched to them are crap, people flogging gadgets that the world just doesn't need – internet-enabled fridges, multi-articulating toothbrushes, four-blade razors. They'll want this, your story. So we need to work out how to let some light in on the instant when a city lawyer decided to be a hero. That's the key to it. And I can help you get there.'

In one way, it had been easier with the toll road in the Midlands, the organic grocers, the bottled water. There was no siege victim to push into the glare then. I wasn't sure if this was for Ben at all or just good publicity, the firm's unspecial name going out there, hitched to an act of bravery. It felt as if I had left Brisbane as Anakin and come back as Darth, rebuilt into something infinitely cynical and talking amorally about heroes in my breathy metallic voice.

Ben blinked a couple of times, and then smiled. ‘I think we have five-blade razors now.'

I almost told him I was glad we had that covered, but then decided not to take the bait.

‘So can you tell me what happened?' I needed to know that I could get him to the point. ‘Your version of it?'

‘It's just like Frank said. The guy lost it. Hit Frank in the head with the gun. Was going to shoot him. What else could I do, really?' He left it there, the roughest of pencil sketches of what had gone on. He shrugged. That was it. He looked down at his phone. He reached out and touched the digital time display with his fingertip. ‘I'm actually expecting a call from Osaka any minute.'

‘Okay, but there's got to be more.' The self-assured Vogue lawyer who had shaken my hand had backed away, without a story to tell. ‘We need to find a more detailed version of it that you're comfortable putting out there.'

‘I know.' He waited for the phone to ring, but it didn't. ‘Your vowels have changed, Josh. There's something English about them.'

‘Knock, knock,' a voice said in the doorway. It sounded upbeat, out of step with the mood.

‘Max,' Frank said. ‘This is Brett and Joshua Lang. Max Visser. Max is the partner Ben reports to. Josh will be working with Ben, and the rest of us, around the public side of Ben's medal presentation.'

‘Josh Lang,' Max Visser said with unnecessary emphasis, reaching his hand out for me to shake. He was forty-ish, sandy-haired. He was like a better-looking
version of Brett, minus the lip thatch. He stepped past Brett on his way into the room and left him standing there like a before photo. ‘Tell me, you are the Josh Lang I read in the Brisbane Times? Of course you are. I know it from the photo.' His accent was South African. He pumped my hand as if I might spout water. ‘That blog on photocopiers was hilarious. That one with the repair guy. Totally hilarious.'

Ben's phone rang. ‘That'll be Osaka,' he said.

‘We'll talk tomorrow,' I told him, and he nodded without looking my way.

His hand was already reaching for the phone, but he checked his move and said, ‘Actually, Wednesday. I'm in Cairns for the day tomorrow.' And he took the Osaka call without letting me say a thing more.

‘Sorry about that,' Frank said once we were in the corridor. ‘I asked Ben to put some time aside today, but sometimes the clients aren't too accommodating. Tomorrow too, from the sound of it.' He was looking back through the glass at Ben, who was talking, nodding, scrolling through a document on screen. ‘Things come up. But you'll want some time to familiarise yourself with the file anyway, and then you can hit the ground running with Ben first thing Wednesday. I'll make damn sure that works, don't worry.' He said it in a way that left me in no doubt. ‘I'll leave you in Max's capable hands and he can let you know what's what.'

‘Come with me,' Max said. ‘I've got something to show you.'

As he led me further down the corridor, I could hear Frank's voice receding in the other direction. He was taking Brett back to his office, or to the lift. ‘We're
practically carbon-neutral now,' he said. ‘That could be a story, once this is done.'