Maybe the Horse Will Talk Page 6

  Now Featherby was an eighth-year lawyer at Freely Savage, living on a diet of Diet Coke, anything with doxylamine succinate, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and the amphetamines that he either bought or bartered for on the black market at Freely Savage. He managed to smile in bursts of a few seconds at a time whenever people in his department gathered around the high-speed photocopier for sponge cake and two-dollar-ninety-nine spumante on the occasion of a department member’s birthday. It had been an initiative of HR several decades earlier that many departments had quietly abandoned. On careful examination of dusty cupboards in even these departments an archaeologist could still sometimes find the plastic cutlery and polystyrene cups that had been so essential to the ritual. Featherby was one of the fee-earners still forced to engage in it. He would stand there zombie-like, all pinstripes and brittle greyish lifeless hair, his face alternately, like a blinking neon sign, affecting a tortured smile then catatonia, a tortured smile, catatonia . . . He had a wife who in the middle of the day he had trouble picturing.

  This was the lawyer in charge of the Torrent Industries sexual harassment files. This was the man Stephen Maserov called on the afternoon of his first day working out of the offices of Torrent Industries.

  ‘Featherby,’ responded the eighth-year lawyer when he picked up his phone.

  ‘Hello, is that Bruce Featherby?’ Maserov asked from his new office.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ said Featherby.

  ‘I’m calling from Torrent Industries,’ Maserov said. ‘I’ve been asked by Malcolm Torrent to have a look at all the files concerned with allegations of sexual harassment levelled against executives of Torrent Industries.’

  There was a pause. Maserov knew what it signified. Featherby was processing what he had just heard. Featherby was unlikely to feel that what he had just heard would be good for him. It probably wouldn’t be neutral either. Had Featherby billed too much? Had he taken too long? Had he overlooked something? A man with a perennially dry mouth suffers more than most when his mouth becomes Sahara dry.

  ‘I’m sorry, what’s this about?’ Featherby asked over the phone, trying to keep his heart, which was beating like that of a rabbit, inaudible to his unknown interlocutor.

  Maserov repeated, ‘Yes, I’m calling from Torrent Industries and I’ve been asked by Malcolm Torrent to have a look at all the files concerned with the allegations of sexual harassment that have been levelled against executives of Torrent Industries.’

  ‘I’m sorry, who is this?’ asked Featherby.

  ‘My name is Stephen Maserov.’

  ‘You’re from Torrent Industries?’

  ‘Yes, I’m calling from Torrent Industries. Mr Torrent has asked me personally to peruse the files and —’

  ‘Maserov, did you say?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you mind terribly spelling that?’

  ‘Not at all. I spell it as well as anyone. M-A-S-E-R-O-V.’

  ‘Thank you. Can I ask the general purpose of your perusal, Mr Maserov?’

  Featherby’s politeness told Maserov that he thought Maserov was working for the client and not a junior lawyer in his own firm about to be flicked to the job market like a piece of lint to the floor.

  ‘Yes, of course. Mr Torrent has asked me to conduct what you might call an audit of the files for Torrent Industries.’

  Through the silence at the other end of the phone line Maserov heard Featherby hurriedly alighting on and then off and then back onto the possibility that all the hours he had ever worked, all the indignities, everything he had endured to become an eighth-year lawyer at Freely Savage, it had all been for nothing. But you don’t get to be an eighth-year lawyer at Freely Savage without picking up a few tricks.

  ‘Mr Maserov, would you be able to shoot me your request in an email and include the best number for me to reach you and I’ll be delighted to help you.’

  You had to admire the shimmy, and Maserov did. Featherby, despite his terror, had managed to stall for time, time to think and gain confirmation of Maserov’s identity, and still affect a willingness to help without actually promising anything. And it was all delivered with an immaculate politeness that would have made the housemasters of his alma mater give him a standing ovation.

  They got off the phone and Maserov began the email Featherby had requested. Though he would be sending it from his new Torrent Industries address, Maserov knew Featherby would discover he worked for Freely Savage. What he didn’t know was whether that would help or hinder his getting the files.

  Maserov now had no legitimate distractions to take his mind off the email from the Freely Savage Human Resources department. It was sitting in his inbox like an unexploded bomb. He took several deep breaths and allowed his mind to go for a walk through the field of possible outcomes. There beneath the long dry grass lay the barely hidden tombstone of his tenure at Freely Savage. This was the worst that could happen. Human Resources might be executing Hamilton’s order to have him terminated. If this were so there would be nothing for it but to test the strength of Malcolm Torrent’s commitment to him as the anti-Hamilton, as Jessica had named him. Could it be something else, something worse? Had somebody died?

  Both his parents were already dead so they couldn’t be bursting at the seams to tell him that. Suddenly he thought of Eleanor and the boys. Could they be trying to tell him something about them, some horrible news? The dread of this and the need to be relieved of it led him to open the email without further delay. It read, ‘Dear Stephen, Could you please make a time to see Bradley Messenger at your earliest convenience?’ It was signed by someone he’d never heard of, said to be the executive assistant of Bradley Messenger, director of Human Resources. So it had nothing to do with his wife or children and it didn’t, in and of itself, end his employment. The suspense wasn’t killing him but he suspected something associated with the email would try very soon. He would have to make a time to go back to Freely Savage to see Bradley Messenger, the Gauleiter of Freely Savage HR.

  Within an hour of Maserov’s email Featherby responded with ‘Dear Sir, Thank you for your enquiry. Unfortunately it’s not possible to accede to your request without jeopardising the prosecution of these matters. Yours, Bruce Featherby, Freely Savage Carter Blanche.’ Maserov knew at once that Featherby knew who he was. He decided it was time to go for broke with Featherby.

  ‘Bruce Featherby,’ said Featherby with an upward inflection in ‘Featherby’ when he answered his direct line.

  ‘Bruce, Stephen Maserov. Thanks so much for getting back to me,’ Maserov said, referring to the email but making it sound as though it was Featherby returning his call.

  Featherby tried to take pre-emptive measures. ‘Maserov, we can’t send you the files.’

  ‘But I’m their lawyer,’ said Maserov.

  ‘Whose lawyer?’ asked Featherby, slightly confused.

  ‘The alleged sexual harassers’,’ answered Maserov.

  ‘No, I’m their lawyer,’ shot back Featherby.

  ‘We are both their lawyers,’ said Maserov in an attempt to sound conciliatory. ‘We are both Freely Savage lawyers.’

  There was a pause while Featherby held his breath, a skill he had honed in his youth while on a series of terrifying school camps in remote locations. He and Maserov both knew that Featherby would have been told directly or otherwise that Maserov was Hamilton’s enemy. There was no conflict in this for Featherby. It was not a subtle matter. Maserov was a second-year nothing who no one knew existed twenty-four hours earlier. Hamilton was omnipotent.

  But this second-year nothing with his own Torrent Industries phone number and email address was so inexplicably brazen in his attempt to get hold of the sexual harassment files that Featherby wondered if the whole thing was a trap engineered by Hamilton. Perhaps, Featherby thought, he had failed to make sufficient progress on these or some entirely different files and possibly now he was being audited by Hamilton for suitability for the status of ‘former person’.

&nb
sp; ‘Former person’ referred to a category of lawyer in the firm who had fallen off the partnership track but who for some reason hadn’t yet been fired. There weren’t many of them but the other lawyers, in fact everyone who worked at Freely Savage, knew a former person when they saw one.

  A former person might have a Body Mass Index that would embarrass the firm should they ever get out of the building or be seen by a client. Alternatively, a former person might wear clothes with the outline of a hard-to-shift food stain of which they’re unaware because their eyesight has deteriorated in the course of the years trying to make budget. A male former person might have facial hair not reflective of any current fashion among young men but reflective of a man who weeps alone at night into the depths of his pillow. The distance between the tip of his tie and his belt might be between three and five centimetres greater than mandated by an unspoken new fashion diktat.

  A female former person might wear too much perfume or else she might wear a perfume marketed at her grandmother, or show too much cleavage in a manner that her tormentors usually welcome but don’t in her case because of her age or a vague sense of desperation that clings to her, which they exploit to ridicule her just far enough out of earshot for them to be able to pretend, in a shining micro-corporate example of plausible denial, that they didn’t think she could hear them. She might be kept on because she understands a particularly difficult provision of the Tax Act no one else can understand but if that provision should ever be amended she’d be out faster than you can pour stale water out of a vase.

  Featherby wondered if this whole attempt by an apparently rogue Second Year called Maserov didn’t prefigure his banishment, his recategorisation to the status of ‘former person’. So he held his breath, as evolution had taught him to do in moments of possible danger.

  ‘Maserov, I know who you are,’ Featherby said quietly and seemingly without emotion over the phone.

  ‘Good, good, then you know I’m under instructions to peruse all the sexual harassment files.’

  ‘You won’t be getting them,’ Featherby said, but as he was putting his phone down to prematurely end the call he heard Maserov’s voice and the words were enough to get him to put the phone back to his ear.

  ‘Featherby, you know you’re instructed to make the files available to me. Let’s not play games.’ Maserov could hardly believe that it was him saying this. It seemed to come not from him but directly from somewhere around the orbitofrontal cortex region of his brain.

  ‘What do you mean instructed? Who do you think you’re instructing?’ Featherby snapped back like a rubber band. ‘You’re a Second Year.’

  ‘Featherby, you can think of me as a second-year colleague or, if it’s more helpful, you can think of me as the client.’

  ‘How can you be both? You can’t be both?’ Featherby asked, genuinely perplexed.

  ‘You can see . . . on your phone . . . the number I’m calling from. I’m calling from the client. I’m at Torrent Industries. I’m on the inside,’ Maserov continued.

  Maserov could almost hear Featherby thinking. No question he had made the much more experienced lawyer sweat but Featherby held his nerve.

  ‘I shouldn’t even be talking to you,’ Featherby fended, and with that he hung up.

  Maserov decided to do the only thing he could think to do. He wrote an email on behalf of Malcolm Torrent addressed to Featherby and copying in Hamilton, requesting the files be sent to Maserov at Torrent Industries. It was bold but necessary. Whether it worked or not, Maserov would know where he stood and if he really did have Malcolm Torrent’s backing. He took the letter to Malcolm Torrent’s private secretary, Joan Henshaw, told her what he had done and asked her to put it into Mr Torrent’s inbox for him to forward. Within an hour he saw that Malcolm Torrent had indeed sent it. What he couldn’t see was Featherby’s face when he received an email from Malcolm Torrent.

  The arrival of the files on the desk of his Torrent Industries office triggered a release in the tension in the muscles in his back and chest Maserov had thought everybody always felt. His eyes moistened and he felt he was in danger of falling asleep. The evaporation of fear can have that effect. Whether or not he could ultimately do anything to assuage Malcolm Torrent’s concern about the allegations of sexual harassment, it looked as though his plan to buy himself twelve months was working. He could barely believe something he had thought of and acted on in a moment of acute stress was actually working. If only Eleanor could be made to appreciate the daring and the brilliance of it.

  Walking up the incline of Collins Street towards the Paris end in this relaxed state for a one on one with Bradley Messenger, the director of Human Resources at Freely Savage, Maserov considered what he’d been able to glean from the files thus far on the basis of a very cursory reading. There were four sexual harassment claims by former Torrent Industries employees. Was it a spate, a pattern, the tip of an iceberg of a still-to-be-revealed culture ranging from off-colour, uncomfortable, embarrassing and degrading sexist banter to career-damaging misogyny to, in the worst cases, sexual assault and rape? Yes, of course it was, if Torrent Industries was anything like the law firm handling the complaints.

  All but one of the alleged victims were representing themselves, he noticed. Only one of them had engaged a lawyer. This particularly piqued Maserov’s interest. Why would three out of the four alleged victims sue a construction behemoth without engaging a lawyer? Yet judging from a brief glimpse of their files, each one of the three had a statement of claim that read perfectly. It was as though a lawyer, a good lawyer, had drafted them. Not surprisingly, none of the three self-represented plaintiffs worked at Torrent Industries anymore and neither did the one plaintiff who had a lawyer on record.

  ‘Stephen! Stephen Maserov!’ Bradley Messenger exclaimed theatrically when Maserov entered his office. ‘We in HR are very glad to see you here.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m just visiting,’ Maserov said, accepting the invitation in the HR director’s gesture to sit down.

  ‘Absolutely! Just visiting. You’re the Second Year who caught the eye of Mr Malcolm Torrent, no less. We’d already had our eye on you. Marked you down as one to watch, a Freely Savage no-nonsense, go-getting, type A personality.’

  Maserov sat there for a moment slightly stunned by the welcome. ‘You know, the whole division of people into type A and type B personalities is a bogus one. As a Human Resources professional, that would probably interest you,’ he responded with unusual abandon. After all, he’d stood up to Hamilton and was still breathing. Who was Bradley Messenger compared to Hamilton?

  ‘I think you’ll find the categories of type A and B are accepted everywhere.’

  ‘Like American Express,’ added Maserov, ‘which isn’t actually accepted everywhere. My dry-cleaner won’t touch it.’

  ‘No, if you do a little more reading you’ll see these personality types were devised by doctors so I’m very comfortable using them,’ said Bradley Messenger.

  ‘Yeah, they were cardiologists,’ Maserov said. ‘They weren’t psychologists or psychiatrists. And they were funded by the tobacco lobby.’

  ‘Well,’ began Bradley Messenger, starting to get ever so slightly exasperated through his smile. ‘We at Freely Savage represent many pillars of the tobacco establishment. In fact, they have us on a retainer, don’t they?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘If it weren’t for the tobacco lobby and its vigorous defence of the attacks on them we’d probably never have developed the much-imitated Document Retention Program, one of a number of litigation tactics that have made us market leaders.’

  ‘That’s the one where we hide, lose, throw out or destroy a client’s incriminating documentary evidence and then charge them for it. That’s how the Supreme Court saw it,’ Maserov continued.

  ‘“Winnowing for relevance”, wasn’t that what it was called in his honour’s judgment?’ asked Bradley Messenger.

  ‘No, that’s what we called it on appeal. And we lost,’ explained Maserov.
<
br />   ‘Well, you can’t win everything, although don’t quote me on that. Stephen, you know your stuff because you’re the lawyer and that’s why we’ve called you in to see us. How would you like to be the Second Year representative in our fee-earner fact audit?’

  ‘I don’t really know what that means.’

  ‘You know what most of it means,’ Bradley Messenger volunteered.

  ‘I know what most of the words mean on their own. All of them, actually.’

  ‘You see, there you are!’ said Bradley Messenger triumphantly. ‘And this is only the first time we’ve ever discussed it and already you’re pretty much on top of its meaning. Anyway, Stephen, we’re asking how you’d like to be the representative of the Second Years.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘In our comprehensive audit of the needs, wants and proclivities of the fee-earners.’

  ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’

  ‘Well, for our first fact-finding audit we want to know what the second-year fee-earners think of hot-desking.’