The Fix (8 page)

It had been a joke, but it kind of crumpled.

‘Yeah, well,' he said. ‘No second album since there wasn't a first, I guess. And I never did find that girl a good bottom half.'

‘Is Frank different since the siege?' It was supposed to come out sounding like conversation, but it probably didn't.

‘How do you mean “different”?' He straightened one of his cufflinks.

‘I mean not the same.' It shouldn't have been a hard question. ‘Is he more irritable, more likely to react to things? Is the way he deals with people different?'

‘Oh, right.' He laughed. ‘They book you to get me through the interviews, and as some kind of bonus you diagnose Frank's PTSD? Or is that part of the service?' He waited for me to say something. At the bar behind him, a waiter was lighting tea-light candles and dropping each one into its own small glass bowl. ‘No. He's just the same. Frank is Frank.'

‘When I was in his office on Monday, the phone rang and he went nuts at whoever called. Then today I overheard him talking about coming down on someone like a ton of fucking bricks.'

Ben started to say something, but then held it back. ‘He's not known for being indirect.'

‘Does it ever have consequences?'

‘Consequences? It gets the job done. That's a consequence.' He seemed to be losing patience with me. ‘It cuts through the crap.'

‘What about negative consequences? Was it a factor with Rob Mueller?'

He pushed back in his seat, and bumped his knives with his forearm. ‘I don't know what you've seen. But I'd be pretty sure it's nothing. Just the kind of thing that goes on in any workplace with more than one person. You probably need to get over it. It really won't help us with Monday, with next week.'

He put his hand out to straighten the knives, lining them up in parallel again. A champagne cork fizzed discreetly from a bottle at a nearby table and he looked over that way, distracted by the noise.

‘You should take a look at the menu,' he said. ‘This place is good for steak. Some would say the best. I don't know if you've worked those things out since you got back. It hasn't been that long, has it? They showed me your CV. They said our new PR company had this great guy who'd be just the thing. You'd got all kinds of fucked-up people ready for the media. They handed it to me and I just kept seeing Joshua Lang, Joshua Lang, Joshua Lang. And thinking, he's never going to take it. But you did.' He laughed, as if the world – or perhaps the stupid people who lived on it – could still surprise him. ‘When did you know it was me? The job?'

‘After I'd said yes to it. After my oven failed and needed replacing. After I'd told Brett I'd do it. Monday. About twenty minutes before I got to your office.' So, we knew where we stood. Or I thought we did. I believed him. I believed his response to being handed my CV, and he had given it to me without needing to. I would need that directness from him, and the best way to get it was to give an honest answer in return. ‘Most of these jobs aren't like this. Most of the time, someone's hiding something. Even when the job isn't bad news. Even if it's just to make the story neater. But usually someone got screwed somewhere along the line, or there's a slightly dirty secret or two, ticking away. And I've got to find them and see if I can cut the wire. I don't do a lot of heroes.'

‘And do they feed you?' he said. ‘Those people whose wires you're cutting? I'd recommend the steak. Any time someone else is buying this steak, you should say yes.' He handed me his open menu. ‘Of course, don't feel you need to take my advice.'

The more wires I had to cut and the dirtier the secrets, the better they fed me. That was how I remembered it. I looked at the two pages open in front of me. Each dish was named in bold and then described by a further paragraph of text. Most of the dishes had detailed paddock-to-plate stories about their meat. Ben watched me read it, and then looked away, towards the door.

‘What is it with menus since I went away?' I hadn't meant it to, but it came out sounding like a comedian's set-up, like a line from someone who had watched too much Seinfeld. ‘I've known less about women at the end of a second date than they tell you about the beef now.'

‘I know. That's what the women you date say too.' He laughed, a little too loudly. The line was fair enough, though, there for the taking. ‘No, it's crazy, isn't it? It's great beef here, but for some reason restaurants all got in the habit of giving you the bio. Or maybe the obit'd be more correct. I assume that, in the days when they told us nothing and sold it to us for a lot less, the cattle used to live on the same romantic undulating grasslands they've been inhabiting more recently.' He picked up another menu and opened it. ‘You could write this copy. You were always good at that kind of stuff at uni.'

‘Well, I do think the present version could do with a little more work. The months in the feedlot are a huge missed opportunity. I'm seeing something along the lines of “handfed luscious golden grains by fair Swiss maidens”. That's just before the bit where they have the backs of their heads punched in and they get slung up on a hook. That's the part of the happy cow bio that's the real test of spin.' Did the cows ever wonder, as one week of an exceptionally lucky life stretched into
another, and food became only more plentiful? Or was there no greater narrative than the grass and the grain?

‘And despite that image,' he said, ‘I'm still going to eat it, because it's just too damn good. Anyway, there's plenty of choices on other pages for those of a more delicate disposition. The Koreans will go for a big lump of bloody Black Angus, though, so that's why we're here. Otherwise we'd probably have updated things a bit and gone somewhere molecular. Or post molecular, depending on how much wank was called for. Granita of clarified mussel broth with coriander flower puree smoked over organic olive pits,' he said in his best wanker voice, ‘dusted with dehydrated saltbush and served on a coffee soil. I'm sure you saw all that in London. Foam it, burn it, turn it into dust.'

The restaurant door swung open, just as he was gathering momentum. Max noticed us and seemed to nod. The lighting was too subdued for me to see the others clearly.

‘It sounds like you're describing something you found in a bin,' I said, but Ben was standing, and not listening.

Max handled the introductions, talking slowly about my brief role with the firm, and its link to Ben's hero status. The larger, older Korean, Mister Park, looked surprised and did a gun-cocking mime to Mister Kim who nodded and clarified.

Everyone ordered steak, of one kind or another. Bottles of red wine arrived. Both countries were toasted, and remarks were made about working together and mutual prosperity. Mister Kim translated as quickly as he could, but the pauses made each
sentence of the toasts seem even more stilted and more formal. Vincent talked about what a pleasure it had been to meet Mister Park on a trade mission to Seoul, and what a pleasure it was now to have the chance to show him some of Queensland.

Mister Park ate his steak ravenously, and drank the wine as if it was water, nodding as Mister Kim translated and offering in return succinct asides through mouthfuls of partially chewed Black Angus. Mister Kim made these into polite, even gracious, sentences and watched his own meal go cold. He talked about how pleased Mister Park was with his meetings in Queensland, and with the beef. He talked about the great future of toll roads, and their automation. He talked about golf, Mister Park's liking for golf, and for shooting things, especially large animals. He said Mister Park liked Alaska, and moose hunting.

‘He always wants to do more business with Alaska,' he said. ‘But Australia is good too. Queensland is good. We have met – Mister Park and I – some Australian businessmen before. One night in Manila. They know how to have a good time.'

He turned to Mister Park and said a few words. Mister Park gave a laugh, put his cutlery down and gave the nation two thumbs up. ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie,' he said, and Mister Kim added, ‘They said that, the Australians. They often said that. And oi, oi, oi.'

‘Oi, oi, oi,' Mister Park reminisced, and he laughed again.

‘Mister Park liked those Australians. He had a good night. There was very fine entertainment for Mister Park in Manila.'

Max turned my way and said, ‘What did I tell you?' He leaned forward and caught Mister Kim's attention. ‘Mister Kim, could you please tell Mister Park we like entertainment too?'

He sat back and hummed, badly, a bar or two of I've Never Been to Me. Mister Kim translated his remark about entertainment and Mister Park smiled a fat, knowing smile. He cleared his throat, as if he was about to make another toast.

‘Bring her over and rub her with butter,' Mister Park appeared to say then, in halting English and like a man talking through a mouthful of marbles. He laughed uproariously.

The rest of us laughed too, the way people with guns to their heads laugh if their captors tell them to. Had he really said it? Butter? Bring her over and rub her with butter? Max Visser, stuck in his humming somewhere around the word ‘paradise', stared at Mister Kim.

‘That is a phrase he picked up somewhere on his travels,' Mister Kim said hesitantly. ‘Mister Park likes to pick up things on his travels. That's just a phrase. He understands it also to be Australian. I was not with him on that journey.'

* * *

SO IT WASN'T KARAOKE.
It was never going to be, as far as Mister Park was concerned. Max Visser's evening plans vaporised before we had even climbed into the two cabs that took us to the Silver Spur.

‘Jesus,' he said to me as we pulled out from the kerb.
‘I really don't know . . . This isn't for blogging, okay? Ben, Ben, did you think this is how he'd take it when I mentioned liking entertainment?'

‘Well, crass Australians in Manila . . .' Ben was in the front seat. ‘Sounds like titty bar to me. Maybe even ping-pong balls.'

‘Oh god, not ping-pong balls.' Max seemed to flinch at the thought. ‘There's no way I can go home tonight with a good enough explanation for ping-pong balls.'

‘Well, not unless you happen to find yourself playing ping pong during the next couple of hours,' Ben said, and laughed. ‘And I have to say I think that's pretty unlikely.'

The other cab was ahead of us in the traffic and had already pulled up outside the club when we arrived. Mister Park was standing on the pavement with his hands on his hips, looking up at the neon lights, which featured a stacked cartoonish Annie Oakley type blowing smoke from a discharged revolver, and winking. He pointed something out to Mister Kim, who was following him out of the cab.

The last of Warrant's Cherry Pie could be heard playing inside the club as Ben, Max and I caught up with the others at the entrance. There was shouting, and applause which faded quickly.

‘So this'd be four, five and six then?' the woman at the box office said through a microphone as she passed drink vouchers and raffle tickets to Vincent on a turntable.

Vincent was putting his wallet away. ‘Group discount for six,' he said to us. ‘Max, try not to look as if we're taking you out the back to shoot you.'

The huge Pacific Islander on the door eyed us impassively and lifted a curtain aside for us to enter the club. He wore all black and had an old-fashioned crew cut and an ID tag with the number forty-three on it. He had the kind of look that might take third prize as the Rock's character in a Get Smart movie lookalike competition.

The club was decked out like a Wild-West saloon, with barmaids in bustier tops and high hair. The lights were low and the ceiling lost in darkness, the walls near the stage draped with heavy burgundy curtains. Above the bar, I thought I could make out the outlines of wagon wheels, arranged like disjointed Olympic rings. At the far end of the room, two unoccupied pool tables glowed green under hooded lights, their balls racked and waiting. They were the only patches of brightness in the room. There were entrances off to other rooms, though the signs above them were too dark to read. I thought I could just make out the distinctive hook of Van Halen's Hot for Teacher coming from one of them and assumed that, behind the closed door, a stripper in a cruelly short skirt, a bun and librarian glasses was in the process of misbehaving, or dispensing discipline.

The stage in the saloon room was golden and keyhole-shaped, with a pole in the centre of the circle. Even there the lights were down for now, as two staff members on their knees squeegeed away the last of the faux-cream from the Cherry Pie act. On three sides of them, men clustered around upturned barrels or stood by themselves holding their drinks and gazing at the curtains, as if waiting for a bus. A few were in business suits, but most were at
the shabby end of casual, in jeans and short-sleeved shirts with checks or raucous patterns.

We found an unoccupied barrel and formed a loose semicircle around it, facing the stage. Mister Park was talking animatedly, and pointing to the trashy themeing.

‘Mister Park says this is very like Anchorage,' Mister Kim said. ‘Very happy. And will there be horses? In Anchorage there was a lady with a horse.'

A woman, snugly laced into her bustier and with her blonde hair piled high on her head, arrived with a platter of dark brown spring rolls and dim sims.

‘I'm Bianca. I'll be your hostess. Would you like to order any drinks, gentlemen?' she said, in a tone more brisk than friendly, as Mister Park gawked at her straightforward cleavage as if it was better than real. She had stripped at one time herself, perhaps, but those days looked to be in the past. ‘Your vouchers will cover any non-premium domestic beer, house wine or single shot of spirits with mixer, but I can also take orders for other drinks. I can also organise any special shows or personal dances that you may require.'