Maybe the Horse Will Talk Read online

  You wanted to believe it. Maserov had seen people at Freely Savage wanting to believe similar corporate professions of gratitude. You wanted to buy in. You felt better if you did and so many did, as much as they could for as long as they could, and you tried not to pay too much attention to other things you heard unofficially and on the grapevine. There was overtime pay and your name would be recorded as a team member.

  Yet none of the support staff in the team wanted to be the last one there despite the overtime, no one wanted to be alone. ‘You want witnesses,’ Maserov whispered to himself.

  Because Mike Mercer was the senior member of the team, the team leader, he would be the person signing off on the whole endeavour, he would determine when the tender was ready to go. There were some typos in the document but essentially it was done. Some beers were shared in another office along the corridor. You could hear occasional laughter. Job well done, everyone. Carla would tidy up the typos.

  She was alone at her workstation and could hear the festive sounds coming from down the hall. She had three pages to go when Mercer came back to his office, looking over her shoulder at her progress as she went. ‘Nearly there,’ she said in a tone that tried to give the impression she felt she was part of the team. She was part of the team. It was just that she didn’t feel like it. He asked her to print it out and bring it to him when she was finished.

  By the time it was all printed the noise from down the hall was dissipating and when she sat down opposite him as instructed while he read through it she could hear nothing at all. But perhaps, she thought, there was still someone there. Mike Mercer had closed his office door. It was hard to know for sure who was still there.

  It was 2.20 am. Mercer was pacing his office pretending to read the document. Each time he got close to her Carla could smell the beer on his breath. She could feel him behind her.

  ‘You’ve done well, my girl,’ he said. He let the document drop to the ground and began kneading her shoulders.

  ‘Get up!’ Maserov shouted after the event and to himself.

  Carla did get up. With his hands on her shoulders, Mike Mercer turned her around. She was facing him.

  ‘You want this as much as I do,’ he whispered.

  ‘No! No, Mike, this is a mistake. Stop!’

  ‘You’ll like it.’

  He pushed her down flat on her back on the carpet and put his mouth over hers. He was hard. She could feel it as she tried to get out from underneath him. He deliberately misinterpreted her movement as simulated sex and he began to dry hump her even more vigorously.

  ‘I know you’re liking this,’ he said quietly between breaths.

  She wanted to scream but nothing came out of her but air. This was a nightmare, the nightmare. Reaching his hand between her thighs, he attempted to feel whether he had excited her but her stockings and underpants gave nothing away and she pulled his hand from her crotch before he could go inside the garments to get to flesh, membrane.

  ‘Mike, are you fucking crazy?’ she managed to say between gasps. Ignoring her, and breathing hard like a jogger in a marathon, someone on a mission, he tore the buttons off her blouse and ripped off her bra with one hand. He shifted his position upwards so that he was sitting on her chest and, with her breasts exposed, he leaned forward with his fly undone. Her words were useless now. Her consent was irrelevant.

  ‘I know you’ve wanted this for months.’

  Leaning forward, he attempted to place his fully erect penis in Carla’s mouth. When writhing, squirming, her eyes screwed tightly shut, she refused, still with his leaden weight on her, he rubbed himself back and forth on top of her until he ejaculated between her breasts. In this state, with his ejaculate on her chest and Mike Mercer now relaxing the pressure of his weight, she slid out from underneath him and ran terrified out of his office, down the now empty and silent corridor, to the women’s bathroom. She looked at herself in the mirror, alone there under the strip light at almost three in the morning, dishevelled, make-up smudged, clothes torn, and splashed water on herself in an attempt to get clean enough to go out into the street, to catch a cab, to escape. What would the cab driver think? What kind of man would he be? Did he, himself, know what kind of man he would be when he looked at her? He would be waiting for her at a cab rank in King Street outside the Spearmint Rhino Gentlemen’s Club.

  Maserov could see it all. There was nothing in the affidavit that did not ring true to him, not even Mike Mercer asserting that he knew Carla had wanted this. But how could Carla have wanted it? This had nothing at all to do with sex. The paragraphs in Carla’s affidavit told a story, not of sex, but of humiliation and power, the arbitrary exercise of power with the expectation of almost complete impunity.

  Maserov read that Carla had, subsequent to the attack, resigned from Torrent Industries by the month’s end and was, at the time of swearing the affidavit, receiving ongoing psychiatric care at her own expense.

  Maserov thought he might be sick. He knew men like this, had seen them. When he had grabbed his chance to do something for Malcolm Torrent and buy himself some time to look for other employment, the plaintiffs were nameless, faceless victims. Now, on reading Lilly’s and Carla’s affidavits, they were real people to him. He wondered what he was doing defending Torrent Industries against these sexual harassment claims. This wasn’t why he had gone to law school.

  The affidavits of Ms Carla Monterosso, the plaintiff with the lawyer, had been prepared by a certain A.A. Betga. Maserov stared at the name, Betga, because, unusual as it was, it was strangely familiar to him, although he couldn’t say why. He said it to himself a few times sitting at his desk. He said it to himself walking to the men’s room and then a few more times at the urinal. Then he remembered.

  A.A. Betga was August Anselm Betga. He had been a few years ahead of Maserov in law school and was famous, almost legendary, for two things. First, it was said that he earned the money to put himself through law school by working several seasons as the entertainment director on a cruise ship. Second, he was unequivocally brilliant, apparently almost freakishly so. He came either first or second in every single subject he took and topped his year every year of his degree. He was a winner of the Supreme Court Prize, the most prestigious academic award available to law students, frequently won by young lawyers beginning their journey to great legal distinction and often culminating in a judicial appointment to one of the higher courts.

  It was the only A.A. Betga he had ever heard of and the only one it could be. Maserov didn’t know him, although Betga had been pointed out to him in his first week of law school. He might even recognise him. Maserov’s problem, he learned after a day and a half, was that none of the phone numbers and none of the addresses given by Betga in the relevant affidavits were current. When he contacted the Law Institute, the address of Betga’s practice in their records corresponded with that of Carla Monterosso’s house. The email address they had for him, which was the same as that on the affidavits, wasn’t operative.

  The only way of getting hold of Betga, he realised, would be to visit him at Carla Monterosso’s place, which was ironic since he was seeking Betga only to have him speak on her behalf. There was, however, a problem with that. Maserov knew there was a no contact rule, which forbade him from communicating directly with the client on the other side of a civil matter. There were, of course, exceptions to the no contact rule, just as there were to every rule (except the ones that permitted no exceptions, at least until other smarter people had found them) and so, to cover himself, Maserov hastily wrote a letter to Betga that he presumed Betga would never receive and sent it to all the addresses Betga had listed in the relevant court documents, informing him of his wish to speak, ideally, with Betga, and if not with him then directly with the client, Ms Carla Monterosso.

  III

  He waited ten days, suspecting this was long enough to cover him should he need an exception to the no contact rule. When, as expected, he’d hadn’t received a scrap of evidence that Betga
was still handling the case or even alive, he headed out to the East St Kilda terrace house of Carla Monterosso one evening on a wing and a prayer, in a 27-year-old Saab, the sight of which induced in most people surges of Weltschmerz, and in Eleanor Maserov something approaching contempt.

  Unlike her lawyer, Carla wasn’t difficult to find. She still lived in the property listed as her address in her affidavits.

  Maserov rang the doorbell and waited in what would have been the dark had it not been for the valiant strivings of an intermittently on streetlight nestled inside a cushion of branches and exhausted powerlines. He could hear what sounded like a television game show that was, on closer listening, the news, as well as a small child crying and a woman’s voice alternating between addressing the child in coos and addressing an adult in more exasperated tones.

  ‘No, I’ll get it . . . Why not? I can get the front door as well as you. Okay, you get your hand on your holster and cover me.’ That was the last thing Maserov heard before the door was opened just enough to reveal a tall woman somewhere in her late twenties to early thirties with large dark almond-shaped eyes framed by thick jet black hair and wearing silver-grey compression leggings. The woman was holding a little girl who looked likely to grow into the woman holding her and whose age Maserov guessed at somewhere between one and two.

  ‘Yep?’ Ms Monterosso said through the gap in the door.

  ‘Hi, my name’s Stephen Maserov. I’m a lawyer and I’m looking for Carla Monterosso?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name’s Stephen Maserov,’ he said, holding one of his business cards up to the screen door between them, ‘and I was wondering if you could help me. I’m trying to contact Mr Betga, A.A. Betga, whom I understand to be your lawyer.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Who is it?’ called a man’s voice from inside.

  ‘I don’t know . . . a lawyer,’ Carla called back to the man.

  ‘No, I didn’t think he was here,’ continued Maserov, ‘but I wondered if you could help me find him. You’re Ms Carla Monterosso?’

  ‘Where’d you say you’re from?’ she asked him.

  ‘What does he want?’ the man’s voice called to her from inside and down the hall.

  ‘I don’t know. Will you let me talk to him?’ Carla called back, holding the little girl tightly within her arms and bouncing rhythmically for her benefit via shallow squats.

  ‘Where’d you say you’re from?’ she asked him again.

  ‘My name’s Stephen Maserov. I’m a lawyer with Freely Savage Carter Blanche and I’m trying to find —’

  ‘I got nothing to say to you,’ she said, closing the door.

  Maserov stood there frozen for a moment, looking at the closed front door, and heard Carla say, presumably to the man’s muffled questions, ‘How should I know? Said he’s looking for Betga.’

  Maserov realised that, although technically she hadn’t actually admitted it, this was almost certainly Carla Monterosso, and she had opened the door only to close it on hearing he was with Freely Savage, so she knew who A.A. Betga was. So Maserov tried twice more at different times of the day to visit her, having left phone messages that went unanswered. On both occasions his visits were unsuccessful.

  How hard could it be to track down this woman’s lawyer, he wondered to himself. How could he even dream of solving Malcolm Torrent’s sexual harassment problems if he couldn’t do that? And why wouldn’t Carla Monterosso agree to speak to him, not even long enough to tell him where Betga was or even just how to contact him? As he sat in his car he could see himself using up the precious time Malcolm Torrent had gifted him and drawing a salary for it, but without making the slightest progress towards solving Torrent’s problem or securing alternative employment. He was squandering the gift. The car smelled of him and even he knew it. It wasn’t an intrinsically unpleasant fragrance but it used to smell a little of Eleanor. Had he squandered his life with her? A tiny cinder of self-regard waved at him and then surrendered to the gale of anxiety he kept beneath all his business shirts.

  He was parked outside Carla Monterosso’s house two days later, waiting for her to come home, when he realised that few people would consider what he was doing anything other than stalking. Here was a lawyer, a man, acting for a client she was suing for sexual harassment and he himself could be regarded to be stalking her, at least by the ethics committee of the Law Institute. When he saw her car pull up he took a breath and opened the door of his car.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, taking her little girl out of the car. ‘I’ll call the cops. My partner’s a cop,’ she said as though just remembering.

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m just trying to find Betga.’

  ‘Fuck off, whoever you are,’ she said, propelling Maserov back into his car. If only she’d seen the reassuring sight of the children’s car seats in the back seat. How non-threatening is a man with two kiddie car seats behind him wherever he goes? But he didn’t have kiddie car seats, they were in Eleanor’s car. What about a young mother and two kiddie car seats? Carla Monterosso might respond less defensively if she was approached by a woman.

  IV

  ‘Let me get this straight. You’re trying to co-opt me into coming with you to the home of a victim of sexual harassment in order to convince her to give you the whereabouts of her lawyer. Is that right? And you think she’ll talk to me because I’m a woman?’ Eleanor Maserov was standing in the kitchen of their marital home with a glass of twelve-month-old Shiraz in her hand and an expression that was the perfect cross-fertilisation of astonishment and contempt.

  ‘Well, I hate to say it but this isn’t just a problem for me. It’s kind of your problem too,’ answered Maserov.

  ‘Now you’re going to tell me again how if you don’t keep your stupid job we can’t keep the house.’

  ‘Eleanor, where did all this anger come from?’ Maserov asked and then immediately regretted it and swallowed the air as though this might be what one does when trying to un-ring a bell, one that had become untethered in one’s head. The clock ticked in the otherwise silent kitchen they once shared and he looked more closely at his shoes than he had since she had asked him to move out. But it was just as he’d thought, they were no more interesting than they were when he lived with her and their children. And still the silence whizzed around his ears as he waited for her to say something, something that promised to be not good.

  Maserov moved in towards her and tried to put his arms around her.

  ‘In what universe does that seem like the appropriate response to this situation?’ Eleanor asked him.

  Maserov drew breath but he had a ready answer. ‘Well, we’re both tired. We know each other very well, we’re under pressure and, most importantly, we love each other,’ he said with a vulnerability that couldn’t have left him more open if he’d tied his hands behind his back and approached her with his chin pleading, ‘Please hit me.’ But before she had a chance to lean in for the kill, he threw her off balance with, ‘We have two children, two little boys whom we each love more than anyone and anything else in the world. And no one will ever love them ahead of everything else other than you . . . and me.’

  In the twenty minutes it took for the inside of the wine bottle to reach bone-dry Eleanor came around to asking what it was he thought she could do to help him get the details of Carla Monterosso’s lawyer, A.A. Betga, that he couldn’t do himself.

  In the backseat of Eleanor’s car sat the two Maserov children in their respective car seats, little Beanie and the even littler Jacob. There had been no one to look after them so they’d had to accompany their parents. While Maserov went to see his children every night to bath them, read them stories, and put them to bed, the longer Eleanor’s mandated separation, her ‘much-needed time apart’, lasted, the more he worried that the separation might become permanent simply through inertia, even if it was never deemed permanent as a matter of any articulated policy. It would be a kind of status quo post bellum, a bellum wh
ose casus was a mystery to him. One morning he had woken up and there it was, a bellum, resting on his wife’s face.

  This led him to worry that his children would grow up with little memory of his being around much at all. Nothing else worried him more than this, not even the unemployment, underemployment or economic humiliation he was tightrope-walking to avoid. These were, after all, increasingly the norm everywhere he looked, although seemingly better hidden by people who weren’t him. And anyway, at least theoretically, they were reversible. But your children not remembering your being around, not loving you, that’s irreversible.

  Maserov drove. Eleanor was sitting next to him. It had been a few months since she’d been in the Saab they used to share. Now, since asking him to live by himself, she had a much newer car, which she shared with a finance company that agreed to let her drive it, fill it with fuel, clean it and insure it, on the condition that she would pay an exorbitant undiminishing rental while the car depreciated to worthless.

  When they pulled up not far from Carla Monterosso’s worn weatherboard terrace house Maserov could see a look of unease settle gracefully on his estranged wife’s face.

  ‘You want me to go in?’ Eleanor asked uncertainly.

  ‘Not if you can get her talking at the front door.’

  ‘You think just ’cause I’m a woman she’s going to give me the whereabouts of her lawyer when for some reason she wouldn’t give them to you?’

  ‘She won’t even let me talk to her.’

  ‘She doesn’t trust you because you’re a male lawyer representing the company that’s protecting the man that sexually harassed her.’