Naturally, it doesn’t pay to get caught. The trick then is to pass it all off as a mistake. It helps if your plant manager is convinced it really is one. And since this sort of thing can do a lot of damage to the reputation of a nation’s export industries, the official inspectors are loath to come down with a finding of systematic abuse. Fortunately for Pacific Pastoral, the issue never arose. The fire gave them a much-needed pretext to divest themselves of their entire commodity export operations. They flogged the works off to a Japanese feed-lot enterprise based in Queensland, and used the proceeds to finance their move into tourism, media and real estate development, all of which have been a real boon to the state economy. Not that the issue of finance raised its ugly head in my conversation with Merricks. I was very careful about that.
‘Herb Gardiner told me everything,’ I said first up, my back pressed against the door. ‘He felt the need to unburden himself.’
‘I didn’t even know the man,’ Merricks blustered. ‘We’ve got thousands of employees.’
‘True,’ I said. ‘But how many of them were with you on the HMAS Wyndham?’
Another thing Agnelli was right about was how insulated the leaders of big business are. I was probably the rudest person Merricks ever had to deal with. He employed others to deal with ill-mannered oafs like me. He lacked the skills required. ‘A frigate,’ I said, ‘that’s not a very big boat, is it? Not like an aircraft carrier or something.’
‘The Wyndham’s not a boat,’ he bleated. ‘It’s a ship.’ That’s when I knew I had him.
Which was just as well, since I was only guessing about him and Gardiner having met in the Navy. The Office of Naval Records doesn’t give out personnel information and I’d got the name of the ship Lionel served on from the journalist who’d written a profile for the National Times. I’d taken a punt and rung her up, telling her I needed some background for an award the government was thinking of presenting to Merricks. It turned out that he’d mentioned the Wyndham in the course of the interview and I put two and two together. It was sheer quantum mathematics that I got four, since I hadn’t been able to find out anything about Gardiner’s service record either.
With the Wyndham bobbing around in front of us, Merricks’ memory suddenly improved and he was prepared to allow that there may have been a mechanic named Gardiner aboard. And he couldn’t definitely discount the possibility that the same man had been employed at Coolaroo at the time he was an up-and-coming line manager out there. But I’d have a lot of trouble proving he’d had any direct dealings with the man subsequently, he told me. And the suggestion that the two of them had in some way been co-conspirators in criminal activity was a preposterous idea. One that, if repeated in public, would land me in court.
I didn’t doubt that for one minute. But it was a hollow threat. I had no intention of taking on Merricks. The laws of libel are designed to protect the rich, and the idea that Pacific Pastoral might allow its internal records to be used to implicate its own chairman in protracted and systematic fraud was ludicrous. This little chat was just something I felt was needed by way of clearing the air. A personal matter. The last time I had spoken to Merricks, he thought I was trying to blackmail him. In the light of what had happened since, I just didn’t want him thinking he had the moral advantage on me.
‘Meat substitution isn’t really a crime, I guess,’ I told him. ‘More just a bit of sharp business practice, eh? Caveat emptor, and all that. But what about the payroll fraud, the extortion, the drugs? You and Gardiner were diddling the consumers, Gardiner and Bayraktar were ripping off the corporation, and Bayraktar was screwing employees and dealing dope off the loading-bay. Nice sort of company you keep, Lionel.’
I think he was so genuinely scandalised by then that I omitted dangerous driving and attempted murder. I left him standing on the stairs and shut the door behind me.
And to give Merricks the benefit of the doubt, I think it unlikely he actually suggested killing me when he delegated to Gardiner the job of sorting me out. Perhaps he had a generous cash settlement in mind. Lionel is a broad brushstroke man, and not, I think, by nature violent. As distinct from Herb Gardiner, who had clearly been driven barking mad by the prospect of fifteen years’ slow surreptitious graft in the arsehole of the universe disappearing down the gurgler two weeks before he retired to enjoy his illicit earnings. A person can hardly be blamed for the things done in his name by over-zealous subordinates.
Merricks, in fact, is so tractable these days that Agnelli has been able to wangle some very substantial donations out of him to offset the rising cost of elections. The outcomes of which have ensured my continuing employment. So I guess that pragmatism is not merely a civic virtue, it is also a personal grace. In tending the Garden State, one must always be mindful of the serpents.
And it’s not like I have anything to complain about. Not since the bruises healed up, anyway. As I say to Angelo Agnelli on those rare occasions he asks for my advice, ‘Bir tesselli ver.’
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