jurisprudent
07-24-2010, 07:25 PM
This is a rough draft, I will appreciate any comments and feedback, it will be very valuable. Thank you.
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I am rushing out of my cozy flat and down the street; it is a warm early summer night approaching half past two and I see quite a few people in the street. I stop a taxi and hurry the driver to Canary Wharf. He is an Indian and looks at me with complete calmness, shrugs his shoulders and heads in that direction. “You worried ?”, he asks. I nod, without recognizing it. Yes, I am worried. I am used to hard work but Jim has never called me at two in the night to make me go to that place, the New Tower. Its black silhouette appears, in the darkness of London sky, and I tell the driver to stop. He looks to me with his sluggish, lazy young eyes. “You look crazy, worried, worried”, he says, and I feel that I am on the brink of madness. God. I run to the building, a 45-storey glass wonder overlooking Thames. There are several vultures, also known as journalists, wandering by the entrance. I go past them but they recognise me and start shouting. I still don’t know what is happening. The building is empty, dark, as if asleep. Only the lift goes up and down in sparkling electric lights. I stand and wait, sweaty, the blood is beating in the ends of my fingers, under my short hair. I breathe as if life will disappear in a second and I need to get air in my lungs as to jump in the deepest waters. He is sitting in his office, surrounded by ten or fifteen people, under the big photo of him and the queen and the oil portrait of him in a Napoleon pose. Yes, he loved Napoleon, “who kicked ass”, as he used to say. And Carson did kick ***, too. He was very pale, unshaven, with a dirty collar, besieged by ten or twelve paper cups of coffee. I sit and look at his eyes, red and drifting.
“What is going on?”
“All hell’s loose”, he says, and I remember Jim who told me when he called that the thing was a “disaster”. I think about a factory explosion, market frenzy and collapse, or the death of his only daughter, a little ***** he loved too much (my own opinion). But he says:
“They have something.”
“What? Who?”
“Daily Post. Some documents. I think they should be secret. Nevermind. They will leak them. I am done, Nick, over and forever. Did you see the vultures outside? They don’t know what is going on, they simply smell the flesh of the company and my own blood spilt. And they sit down there, ****ing leeches, and wait. Damn it, Nick, I lead this company, yes, ten years, I brought at least two barrels of gold to the bastards who buy stock and shares, and now they will throw me away, yes, Nick, damn weak idiots. I spoke to Harman.”
Harman was the chair of the board. A former lawyer, like me, around 65, with a new wife 43 years younger, and a new-born daughter too, spending most of the year in his villa in Provence, he is the one who praises the chief executive, like Carson, when the company makes billions, and stabs the knife when the bad time comes. And we know it. It’s simply Harman. Now he is at home, awake, thinking and nervous, but he will stay there until Act Two, the day when the whole board will have to go to a certain committee and talk about the crap that happened and he will say – “I did not notice anything, everything was alright, I was bona fide”. Good faith, mate. So much good faith.
Now Carson looks to me. ‘Nick, I had to do it. It could have brought us down on the floor, all of us. I did the right thing. If I had the time, if some bloody idiot had not sent it to the vultures, I would have mended it. Everything. I have done it half a million times. Nicky, it could have been perfect.”
***
Deep throat. It sounds great. Something mystical but also alluring and secret, just like the guy in the Watergate, the “deep throat”. I have always dreamt of this – the devastating thing you get hold of, then the bomb explodes and blows the world away. I received the envelope and left it at home, it was there, as if burning in the air, for three days, until I occasionally opened it to see 23 pages. 23 magical pages. Some tables, a lot of figures, some signatures, and I felt the second coming was on its way. Hey man, this is the thing. The THING. The THING that makes you famous, legendary. I will be 60 and I will write the book how I kicked the bastards off the banks of Thames. God, I love the man who photocopied these 23 pages and sent them to me. God’s hand. God’s intervention.
It is about three in the night and we are sitting and talking. Me, Will (the editor) and Robby, the best investigative journalist (besides me, of course). They cannot believe their eyes. “Carson may be disgusting but he is clever, Will says, and this is so openly disastrous that I cannot believe it.” Robby looks to a pile of paper and starts on some data about RubCo. A world leader in production of rubber, hence tires and all other products. The capitalization is tens of billions. A sector of the Amazon jungle is under their colonial rule. They pay half of the governments in Africa and South America, and pay the rebels in the other half. Carson became chief executive ten years ago, a ruthless guy who was a self-starter and hated the simple world “no”. You cannot find it in his dictionary, he is always on the run. Push the boundaries, he says in his last interview. His ego is so big he could write his name on London night sky with blinking light bulbs so that the Prime Minister would watch it in amusement.
“Can you summarise all the stuff here, Ken?”, Will asks, and I say “Of course. Product liability. Bad manufacture. 43 cases of accidents with RubCo’s last type of tires. Carson is called at the Transport Agency and asked what is going on. He sees the figures and goes crazy. But the coldblooded bastard talks to a number of guys there, pays a lot and the things just disappear. Disappear. But someone knew of this. My deep throat. And sent it to the right man.”
Will takes the front page from the table, stares at it and says – “God, this will be massive. Massive. Did you call the Transport Agency? What did they say?”
“I will call them tomorrow. Now we need the first blow. Will, we have 43 accidents. And you can go and buy these tires from the shop. You can put them and then go to hell. RubCo kills people, Will. Knowingly.”
Robby, who is silently smoking, looking through the window into the impenetrable night darkness, adds something: “Ken, what happened when you called them?”
I shrug my shoulders. “I wanted to talk with Carson but he was away, playing golf. I told his secretary to send him a message urgently – only three words – “Transport Agency. Tires”. He called back late in the afternoon, he was frantic, mates, really mad, and started shouting like hell, until I simply said – your comment, Mr Carson? He denied everything, but I know he was sweating to death. His dirty secret, he should have thought, is out now. Later the RubCo press office said they will hold a conference in the morning and I sent some reporters and a photographer.”
Willy shakes his head – “They will certainly try to stop us, Ken. Certainly.”
***
They call me around half past three, I tell them to come home, leave Diana sleeping in the bed and make some coffee. The night is warm, I open the window in my study and start an old book I loved when I was a student so many years ago. But my thoughts drift and drift on. My eyes are a bit sore, I have been reading all day and the sudden lamp light is teasing my eyesight.
The doorbell. I open and see a man, in his thirties, tall and blond, with a very tired and worried expression, it seems he has been kicked out of bed to face the explosion of the world. He sits at the other side of the massive wooden table in my study and open a brief case searching for some documents. He says his name is Nick Gardner and acts for RubCo. I know the company, a corporate giant, yesterday I read about their plants in Brazil, the disastrous things they cause in the Amazon forests. When I was a barrister, I was always dealing with private clients; I hate the self-confident thugs that run big corporations. Maybe I would have been richer if I could think less of such things. Maybe I am too emotional, I don’t know, age plays a part, too.
I read the several documents and put them aside, leave the glasses on the table and look straight into Gardner’s blue eyes. “What do you want from me, Mr Gardner?”
He sighs. “Mr Justice, we want an injunction to stop the publishing of any information about RubCo’s last type of tires. Any."
Injunctions are orders that something should or should not be done. I have given hundreds. The lawyers usually urgently come here, at home, and say – my client, an actress, was found by a photograph with another woman in a toilet at a Soho club. Or my client was photographed leaving a gathering of anonymous drug addicts. Or alcoholics. Or there is a picture of him buying whiskey in the supermarket after rehabilitation and 10 years of alcoholism. And I sit here in my study, in the small hours, and I have to decide. Should everybody know about it? Should everybody see this man or woman’s disgrace? Half naked clinging to another naked body in the narrow toilet smelling of alcohol and covered by cocaine? Or the man who was about to invite his new girl friend and bought a bottle of white wine, but tomorrow they will see him and say - he is back to alcoholism, he has failed again. And I think about their parents, and their children, the kid that sees his mother with blown mind and head lying amidst the spilled drugs on the toilet floor. Should everybody know about this fall?
Nick Gardner continues: “These are pure allegations, not proved facts. There was an investigation and enquiry by the Transport Agency, unofficial and secret, and any information that leaks will be damaging the company. These are unfounded speculations, without relevance to public interest but with a great impact on RubCo.”
He wants to say that tomorrow, when the stock exchange opens, RubCo’s shares will be crawling on the floor, the TVs will broadcast the slow death of the CEO and the journalist will proudly boast as guardians of truth. It happens every day.
Let me tell a story. I was a kid, it was in the sixties, and my father was a lawyer, a very good one, he used to hang about the old boys’ network, all the kids he knew from Eton and Cambridge that went to the bar or the civil service. I remember that, one day, one of his great friends who was at the Defense Department, came home not for whiskey and cigar but something else. I remember he was worried, frightened. Afterwards my dad was frightened, too. He did not speak about this until nearly fifteen year later, when I was admitted to the bar, too. We were chatting about the profession and he told me that his friend knew about John Profumo’s affair. He knew that Profumo was sleeping with that woman, and that she was affiliated with the Russian man, who we thought he was a spy. He was frightened that all the military secrets go directly from her bed to Kremlin and beyond. And he talked with dad about leaking the information. Later he gave up and kept the secret until the scandal went full blown, but thus my father knew about it, too. Of course, the client privilege forbids sharing information he got from clients; but this really tortured dad because he believed the Soviets had blown away our security. He said, “I wanted to scream, go and say – this is not right, not right! I wanted everybody to know. But I could not, I simply could not violate the secrecy.”
What has happened with these tires, I ask, and Gardner retorts: “Some claim there might be a defect. But nothing is proved.”
“What is the basis of these allegations?”
“Nothing serious. Somebody tried to link several accidents with the tires. But there are thousands of accidents of cars with our tires, and the tires are not the problem. The weather. Drunk drivers. I don’t know. This is totally unfounded, unreasonable.”
But I go back to the documents, a table with figures, some tricky passages on chemistry and physics. Then I say:
“I cannot stop it. I cannot give an injunction. I cannot reasonably believe this is unfounded. These are real facts, Mr Gardner, this is a report of a governmental agency. I cannot keep this under cover."
***
Harman opens the door dressed in his dark red gown, with a tired red face and entirely bald head, the way I have known him so many years. He leads me through the corridor; everything is dark and silent as his new wife, Jessica, a former model, is now sleeping. We go in a small room where the baby is sleeping. He says, “Jessica loves the afternoon dramas and called her Renata. What a name.” He has four more children from his first wife Annie, until he recently left her for Jessica and they married in Nice. It was a nice wedding, the last time I saw him until this night.
We sit by the window and talk in a low voice. “I did not know anything about that”, pledges Harman, he looks so old now.” It’s Carson’s folly again. I did not know. “
I light a cigarette, it approaches four and I feel so bad. He says, “Ben, you are in it, too?” I nod. Yes. That’s the problem.
“What happened?”
“Seven months ago, we usually get a lot of reports and the experts work on them, so we received a file about RubCo’s new type of tires. There has been 43 recent accidents, personal injuries, several deaths. There was a strong suspicion that there is something wrong with the tires.”
“How strong?”
“Strongest possible.”
“What did you do?”
“I called Carson who said “Bull****. This can’t be right”. Then he came and saw the report and went mad. Mad. Started shouting, swearing. If this goes out, he said, we are down under the waterline, the stock will fall by 70% at least. Think about it, all the corporate bastards stuff that usually goes in these cases.”
“What happened then?”
“He wanted everything to disappear. He said that he can withdraw the products from the market. But he needed at least six, maybe seven to eight months. Are you mad, I said, we will have thousands of dead by that time if people don’t know. Carson shrugged his shoulders. I cannot say anything openly, Ben, we will keep it a secret and it will be a slow process, no other way. I was amazed. You don’t have them in England only, right?, I asked, and he said, you can find these tires from here to Shanghai and Johannesburg.”
I throw the cigarette in the ash tray. The hour is dead, it is so silent. “We were three. Carson told the other two and they just withdrew, they never talked about it since the day we called Carson. He approached me then. No, I really did not want to do it. Really. Really.”
I am not the old boys’ network person. No. I have not been to Oxbridge. I studied for an engineer, worked on drills and oil platforms when I was 25, in Nigeria. I could smell the sluggish petrol feel in the air of the jungle. When I came back, I went in the trade union, then in London. God, at that time they all needed people from the front line. Just think about it, if you sit here and you have oil platforms round the globe, you need some first-hand information what is on the run there. I spent 15 years in corporate boards. I married and divorced twice, now I have a big house in the South, near David Gilmour’s farm (just think about it, I live near a rock legend!). When I was chosen to the Transport Agency, I had to deal with marine communications mainly. So far, so good. But, you see, I had made it up to here, the high levels, and if I think about dad’s shabby house and the oil smell in the jungle, I have done quite a lot, mates. I have money, my sons will be alright. They are in Oxbridge now. But still there is more to come, don’t you think so?
“I said to Carson – I want a peerage. He laughed. Lord Ben Turner. Lord of Back-door-Liverpool-port-bull****? But I had made up my mind, I wanted it. He was so ironic, he laughed at me, I think, but I do not care. I really do not. He called the party folks and arranged it”
When my mandate is over I will go every morning in the Lords. Why? ‘Cause I can! Dad, who was a docker, will be sitting next to me.
Harman asks:”What happened with the report?” “It disappeared. I tore the documents and shredded them. Nothing left, not a sign.
“Then how that appeared again, for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone had a copy”
***
At first I wanted to be a doctor but I failed at the exams and could not get through. It was so difficult in these days. Then I thought I am so good at chemistry that I might go for this. I admit my life has been good so far. I am a well-known expert. In the beginning I was at a big pharmaceutical concern, I was testing new medicines on volunteers. I was wondering what draws these people to the laboratories. I would never agree to be used for tests. Yes, I know how they make all these pills, I know that you can get some prescribed by a doctor and after five years it turns out you have a cancer, you die, and nobody knows that the pills might have caused this. The people, the volunteers at the laboratory, they were paupers, former prisoners, drug addicts. They all needed money. I could not stand it and I left. It was scary.
Many years later, when I was officially invited to the expert panel at the Transport Agency, I knew I will be dealing with dirty stuff again. Very dirty. We analyse the indicators of machine, I check the compatibility with standards, and we report to the committee. I am living surrounded by tons of papers, reports, documents. We receive hundreds of files from laboratories. The bad thing is that even good experts sometimes can’t spot problems. So we gather later information and say whether a product is working well or not.
Year after year, I developed a strange ability. I collect instances, separate facts, disparate occasions and I simply feel the direction. I can say – there is something wrong. I just feel it. I like sciences because you can explain everything, you always have a cause, there is nothing vague. So 43 accidents cannot just happen without a cause. I was reading the data and thought it was too strange. RubCo is not a bad company, we have companies with quite more problems. But RubCo is great at covering all the crap they make. Probably this is one of the reasons why their stock is rising high.
I was reading the report one evening when my son just walked by. He is a first year student at a law school, a clever boy, he gets nothing of sciences though. But he is so curious. He looked at the papers and asked about them. I told him these are accidents that could have been cause by the manufacture of tires. Ah, he said, a tort. What is a tort?, I asked. A civil wrong, dad. He walked on. A wrong. Wrong. I was reading through the pages and the word was reverberating in my mind – wrong. Wrong. I wrote my expert opinion – the tires should be withdrawn from the market because they have a defect to be further analysed. I left a copy at home and sent the report to the committee of the Agency. So far, so good.
Several weeks later I was reading through the latest decisions of the Transport Agency but I could not find anything about RubCo. I checked with the secretary and she said she had sent my report in the due manner. I checked at the archive too, but they did not have a report under any number or name. I waited another month, then one more, and a new document came to me. It stated that the RubCo tires were still causing a lot of problems, but nobody knew of this.
Then, one evening, my younger boy, who was sixteen, was very late and I called him and started shouting but he mumbled that he was at the hospital. “Why?”, I screamed, and he said that a friend of his was hit by a car on the rainy road, and I imagined the body of the boy lying in the hospital, bleeding, maybe not alive. And I thought it could have been my son. I looked through the papers again and counted five death cases in alleged RubCo accidents. God, I thought, if they were alive. On the next morning I opened the Daily Post and found the address of Ken Graham, a famous journalist, he was in the MP expenses affair, I put the 23-page copy of the report in an envelope and sent it. This morning, when I turn on the TV, I see the face of that man, RubCo’s CEO, I am listening to the live broadcast of the conference and think: Right.
***
Vultures. I am sitting behind the massive table in the conference room on the first floor of the building and I am surrounded by them. ****ing vultures. I know what you think now, you think, “Carson is down, Carson failed, Carson is over.” The morning newspaper lies open, there is a photo of me and all the information on the tires. I see the eye of the camera focused on my face. There, beyond, are the shareholders, the bastards hiding in their little ****holes, afraid that they are losing now. Because the shares have dropped. I have been working for this crap for ten years. Ten. I know you could have never made it. No. Never. You could not. You can buy and sell, write in the newspapers, watch the TV but you cannot manage an empire, you don’t have the guts. When I came here, RubCo did not have factories outside England. I made this ****ing company, brick by brick. Yesterday, before all this began, I could lift the phone and require the Prime Minister at the other side. I look to my right, there is Harman, red, on the brink of a heart attack. I despise this fool, I will never leave my wife for a *****y model that could be my granddaughter. I worked for these fools. I made them rich. They have their houses and cars but they do not know what happens in the Amazon jungle, the factories, the labour force we actually exploit. I can say it. I do exploit. You are afraid? You are disgusted? You turn your face? Yes, you do, you don’t have the guts. That’s all.
I will never run away until They drive me out of the board. I will not hide in Southern Spain, drinking cocktails on my private beach. I don’t need it, lying, sweating under the hot sun. I want to create, mates, construct. My first and favourite job was in construction and real estates. You can go and see the place, the edifice of effort and work. Rising high. This is the reason I built this tower. It says: I make. You drink, ****, piss, ****, spit, spoil, sell, throw, leave, hide, escape. I make. I can do it. You are only vultures.
I stand up and look around, all the people rise their heads, stare at me. I have denied everything, I have pledged that I will sue the bastards who spread damaging information and rumours but I will temporarily withdraw until all gets clear. This is the deal I struck with Harman. No I will be off, I don’t want but They made me go; time will run fast and will come back again, folks, don’t forget about me. I slowly walk to the exit. I have been here the entire night and I need some rest at home, a moment when no faces will drift around me.
But the tide of faces has surrounded me, the waves beating at my body, I cannot even breathe and it is getting hot. I am slowly making my way through the crowd and reach the open area in front of the building - some fresh air. I feel the sweat in my hair, down my spine, the tide of people is pushing me but I continue on my way, against the flashes and cameras, the microphones, the shouts and screams, I am still wading. Yes, I am outside, and the car is there, it waits for me, only a few more steps. But something pushes me to the left, I feel suddenly so weak, and I recognise a strange sound has just occurred somewhere so near. Many faces gather closer and closer. I keep falling, without any balance, but I cannot reach the ground because somebody holds me. And I feel something sticky, something warm, streaming, watering my skin. Then the senses disappear.
***
Name: Russel Miller. Age: 45. Occupation: former policeman, now a security guard. Place of residence: London, Putney.
I am standing in the centre of the room in the police station, with handcuffs, surrounded by five policemen. One of them, a girl, is sitting, meticulously writing. I am speaking, I cannot hear my own voice. I have become light, as if volatile, about to transpire in the hot noon air.
“Is this your weapon?”
“Yes. My own.”
Of course it was mine. I was fighting the crime some years ago, right.
Another policeman comes, looks straight into my eyes and says: “Why did you do it? Why?”
Why? I was married, I had two boys. Nice kids, 17 and 11, very bright and clever. We were not much used to going on holidays together but they insisted and we went to a ski vacation in Austria. By car. It was very exciting for them to see half Europe. On the way back home, in the Alps, the car went crazy, yes, simply crazy, it started to glide and crashed into a rock. My neck was broken, my left arm was hurt. But the kids and my wife were dead.
Nobody managed to find what happened. They said: the road. The road was guilty. But I knew the road was alright.
This morning I bought a newspaper and read the article while going to my job, a place nearby, just few blocks down the road, in a big business building. I stopped up in a small newsagent’s, staring at the screen of the TV behind the counter. There was a breaking news red line at the bottom of the screen, I was listening to the voice of the reporter who was repeating, again and again, what has been going on in that affair. On and on, on and on. I walked down the street, the newspaper, cold as a dead body, in my hand; passed by the old church, the small park, the fountain, the river – I could smell it, the salt in the air, the salt. I saw a line of kids, students in dark blue uniforms, walking by the river, they were about ten or so and the teacher was pointing at the Tower bridge, explaining something. A boy and a girl were sitting on a bench, kissing. A man left his car, bought flowers for his wife and drove away. I woman stopped in front of me, asked me for the time, and hurried away, mumbling about the stuff she had to do until she went to her boy’s birthday party. I was walking along the river until I saw the big tall tower, and afterwards I started striding automatically, faster, in a hurry to get to the place, to get where it should happen. Should.
“Why did you do it? Why?”
I turn to the man. “They could have been alive”.
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I am rushing out of my cozy flat and down the street; it is a warm early summer night approaching half past two and I see quite a few people in the street. I stop a taxi and hurry the driver to Canary Wharf. He is an Indian and looks at me with complete calmness, shrugs his shoulders and heads in that direction. “You worried ?”, he asks. I nod, without recognizing it. Yes, I am worried. I am used to hard work but Jim has never called me at two in the night to make me go to that place, the New Tower. Its black silhouette appears, in the darkness of London sky, and I tell the driver to stop. He looks to me with his sluggish, lazy young eyes. “You look crazy, worried, worried”, he says, and I feel that I am on the brink of madness. God. I run to the building, a 45-storey glass wonder overlooking Thames. There are several vultures, also known as journalists, wandering by the entrance. I go past them but they recognise me and start shouting. I still don’t know what is happening. The building is empty, dark, as if asleep. Only the lift goes up and down in sparkling electric lights. I stand and wait, sweaty, the blood is beating in the ends of my fingers, under my short hair. I breathe as if life will disappear in a second and I need to get air in my lungs as to jump in the deepest waters. He is sitting in his office, surrounded by ten or fifteen people, under the big photo of him and the queen and the oil portrait of him in a Napoleon pose. Yes, he loved Napoleon, “who kicked ass”, as he used to say. And Carson did kick ***, too. He was very pale, unshaven, with a dirty collar, besieged by ten or twelve paper cups of coffee. I sit and look at his eyes, red and drifting.
“What is going on?”
“All hell’s loose”, he says, and I remember Jim who told me when he called that the thing was a “disaster”. I think about a factory explosion, market frenzy and collapse, or the death of his only daughter, a little ***** he loved too much (my own opinion). But he says:
“They have something.”
“What? Who?”
“Daily Post. Some documents. I think they should be secret. Nevermind. They will leak them. I am done, Nick, over and forever. Did you see the vultures outside? They don’t know what is going on, they simply smell the flesh of the company and my own blood spilt. And they sit down there, ****ing leeches, and wait. Damn it, Nick, I lead this company, yes, ten years, I brought at least two barrels of gold to the bastards who buy stock and shares, and now they will throw me away, yes, Nick, damn weak idiots. I spoke to Harman.”
Harman was the chair of the board. A former lawyer, like me, around 65, with a new wife 43 years younger, and a new-born daughter too, spending most of the year in his villa in Provence, he is the one who praises the chief executive, like Carson, when the company makes billions, and stabs the knife when the bad time comes. And we know it. It’s simply Harman. Now he is at home, awake, thinking and nervous, but he will stay there until Act Two, the day when the whole board will have to go to a certain committee and talk about the crap that happened and he will say – “I did not notice anything, everything was alright, I was bona fide”. Good faith, mate. So much good faith.
Now Carson looks to me. ‘Nick, I had to do it. It could have brought us down on the floor, all of us. I did the right thing. If I had the time, if some bloody idiot had not sent it to the vultures, I would have mended it. Everything. I have done it half a million times. Nicky, it could have been perfect.”
***
Deep throat. It sounds great. Something mystical but also alluring and secret, just like the guy in the Watergate, the “deep throat”. I have always dreamt of this – the devastating thing you get hold of, then the bomb explodes and blows the world away. I received the envelope and left it at home, it was there, as if burning in the air, for three days, until I occasionally opened it to see 23 pages. 23 magical pages. Some tables, a lot of figures, some signatures, and I felt the second coming was on its way. Hey man, this is the thing. The THING. The THING that makes you famous, legendary. I will be 60 and I will write the book how I kicked the bastards off the banks of Thames. God, I love the man who photocopied these 23 pages and sent them to me. God’s hand. God’s intervention.
It is about three in the night and we are sitting and talking. Me, Will (the editor) and Robby, the best investigative journalist (besides me, of course). They cannot believe their eyes. “Carson may be disgusting but he is clever, Will says, and this is so openly disastrous that I cannot believe it.” Robby looks to a pile of paper and starts on some data about RubCo. A world leader in production of rubber, hence tires and all other products. The capitalization is tens of billions. A sector of the Amazon jungle is under their colonial rule. They pay half of the governments in Africa and South America, and pay the rebels in the other half. Carson became chief executive ten years ago, a ruthless guy who was a self-starter and hated the simple world “no”. You cannot find it in his dictionary, he is always on the run. Push the boundaries, he says in his last interview. His ego is so big he could write his name on London night sky with blinking light bulbs so that the Prime Minister would watch it in amusement.
“Can you summarise all the stuff here, Ken?”, Will asks, and I say “Of course. Product liability. Bad manufacture. 43 cases of accidents with RubCo’s last type of tires. Carson is called at the Transport Agency and asked what is going on. He sees the figures and goes crazy. But the coldblooded bastard talks to a number of guys there, pays a lot and the things just disappear. Disappear. But someone knew of this. My deep throat. And sent it to the right man.”
Will takes the front page from the table, stares at it and says – “God, this will be massive. Massive. Did you call the Transport Agency? What did they say?”
“I will call them tomorrow. Now we need the first blow. Will, we have 43 accidents. And you can go and buy these tires from the shop. You can put them and then go to hell. RubCo kills people, Will. Knowingly.”
Robby, who is silently smoking, looking through the window into the impenetrable night darkness, adds something: “Ken, what happened when you called them?”
I shrug my shoulders. “I wanted to talk with Carson but he was away, playing golf. I told his secretary to send him a message urgently – only three words – “Transport Agency. Tires”. He called back late in the afternoon, he was frantic, mates, really mad, and started shouting like hell, until I simply said – your comment, Mr Carson? He denied everything, but I know he was sweating to death. His dirty secret, he should have thought, is out now. Later the RubCo press office said they will hold a conference in the morning and I sent some reporters and a photographer.”
Willy shakes his head – “They will certainly try to stop us, Ken. Certainly.”
***
They call me around half past three, I tell them to come home, leave Diana sleeping in the bed and make some coffee. The night is warm, I open the window in my study and start an old book I loved when I was a student so many years ago. But my thoughts drift and drift on. My eyes are a bit sore, I have been reading all day and the sudden lamp light is teasing my eyesight.
The doorbell. I open and see a man, in his thirties, tall and blond, with a very tired and worried expression, it seems he has been kicked out of bed to face the explosion of the world. He sits at the other side of the massive wooden table in my study and open a brief case searching for some documents. He says his name is Nick Gardner and acts for RubCo. I know the company, a corporate giant, yesterday I read about their plants in Brazil, the disastrous things they cause in the Amazon forests. When I was a barrister, I was always dealing with private clients; I hate the self-confident thugs that run big corporations. Maybe I would have been richer if I could think less of such things. Maybe I am too emotional, I don’t know, age plays a part, too.
I read the several documents and put them aside, leave the glasses on the table and look straight into Gardner’s blue eyes. “What do you want from me, Mr Gardner?”
He sighs. “Mr Justice, we want an injunction to stop the publishing of any information about RubCo’s last type of tires. Any."
Injunctions are orders that something should or should not be done. I have given hundreds. The lawyers usually urgently come here, at home, and say – my client, an actress, was found by a photograph with another woman in a toilet at a Soho club. Or my client was photographed leaving a gathering of anonymous drug addicts. Or alcoholics. Or there is a picture of him buying whiskey in the supermarket after rehabilitation and 10 years of alcoholism. And I sit here in my study, in the small hours, and I have to decide. Should everybody know about it? Should everybody see this man or woman’s disgrace? Half naked clinging to another naked body in the narrow toilet smelling of alcohol and covered by cocaine? Or the man who was about to invite his new girl friend and bought a bottle of white wine, but tomorrow they will see him and say - he is back to alcoholism, he has failed again. And I think about their parents, and their children, the kid that sees his mother with blown mind and head lying amidst the spilled drugs on the toilet floor. Should everybody know about this fall?
Nick Gardner continues: “These are pure allegations, not proved facts. There was an investigation and enquiry by the Transport Agency, unofficial and secret, and any information that leaks will be damaging the company. These are unfounded speculations, without relevance to public interest but with a great impact on RubCo.”
He wants to say that tomorrow, when the stock exchange opens, RubCo’s shares will be crawling on the floor, the TVs will broadcast the slow death of the CEO and the journalist will proudly boast as guardians of truth. It happens every day.
Let me tell a story. I was a kid, it was in the sixties, and my father was a lawyer, a very good one, he used to hang about the old boys’ network, all the kids he knew from Eton and Cambridge that went to the bar or the civil service. I remember that, one day, one of his great friends who was at the Defense Department, came home not for whiskey and cigar but something else. I remember he was worried, frightened. Afterwards my dad was frightened, too. He did not speak about this until nearly fifteen year later, when I was admitted to the bar, too. We were chatting about the profession and he told me that his friend knew about John Profumo’s affair. He knew that Profumo was sleeping with that woman, and that she was affiliated with the Russian man, who we thought he was a spy. He was frightened that all the military secrets go directly from her bed to Kremlin and beyond. And he talked with dad about leaking the information. Later he gave up and kept the secret until the scandal went full blown, but thus my father knew about it, too. Of course, the client privilege forbids sharing information he got from clients; but this really tortured dad because he believed the Soviets had blown away our security. He said, “I wanted to scream, go and say – this is not right, not right! I wanted everybody to know. But I could not, I simply could not violate the secrecy.”
What has happened with these tires, I ask, and Gardner retorts: “Some claim there might be a defect. But nothing is proved.”
“What is the basis of these allegations?”
“Nothing serious. Somebody tried to link several accidents with the tires. But there are thousands of accidents of cars with our tires, and the tires are not the problem. The weather. Drunk drivers. I don’t know. This is totally unfounded, unreasonable.”
But I go back to the documents, a table with figures, some tricky passages on chemistry and physics. Then I say:
“I cannot stop it. I cannot give an injunction. I cannot reasonably believe this is unfounded. These are real facts, Mr Gardner, this is a report of a governmental agency. I cannot keep this under cover."
***
Harman opens the door dressed in his dark red gown, with a tired red face and entirely bald head, the way I have known him so many years. He leads me through the corridor; everything is dark and silent as his new wife, Jessica, a former model, is now sleeping. We go in a small room where the baby is sleeping. He says, “Jessica loves the afternoon dramas and called her Renata. What a name.” He has four more children from his first wife Annie, until he recently left her for Jessica and they married in Nice. It was a nice wedding, the last time I saw him until this night.
We sit by the window and talk in a low voice. “I did not know anything about that”, pledges Harman, he looks so old now.” It’s Carson’s folly again. I did not know. “
I light a cigarette, it approaches four and I feel so bad. He says, “Ben, you are in it, too?” I nod. Yes. That’s the problem.
“What happened?”
“Seven months ago, we usually get a lot of reports and the experts work on them, so we received a file about RubCo’s new type of tires. There has been 43 recent accidents, personal injuries, several deaths. There was a strong suspicion that there is something wrong with the tires.”
“How strong?”
“Strongest possible.”
“What did you do?”
“I called Carson who said “Bull****. This can’t be right”. Then he came and saw the report and went mad. Mad. Started shouting, swearing. If this goes out, he said, we are down under the waterline, the stock will fall by 70% at least. Think about it, all the corporate bastards stuff that usually goes in these cases.”
“What happened then?”
“He wanted everything to disappear. He said that he can withdraw the products from the market. But he needed at least six, maybe seven to eight months. Are you mad, I said, we will have thousands of dead by that time if people don’t know. Carson shrugged his shoulders. I cannot say anything openly, Ben, we will keep it a secret and it will be a slow process, no other way. I was amazed. You don’t have them in England only, right?, I asked, and he said, you can find these tires from here to Shanghai and Johannesburg.”
I throw the cigarette in the ash tray. The hour is dead, it is so silent. “We were three. Carson told the other two and they just withdrew, they never talked about it since the day we called Carson. He approached me then. No, I really did not want to do it. Really. Really.”
I am not the old boys’ network person. No. I have not been to Oxbridge. I studied for an engineer, worked on drills and oil platforms when I was 25, in Nigeria. I could smell the sluggish petrol feel in the air of the jungle. When I came back, I went in the trade union, then in London. God, at that time they all needed people from the front line. Just think about it, if you sit here and you have oil platforms round the globe, you need some first-hand information what is on the run there. I spent 15 years in corporate boards. I married and divorced twice, now I have a big house in the South, near David Gilmour’s farm (just think about it, I live near a rock legend!). When I was chosen to the Transport Agency, I had to deal with marine communications mainly. So far, so good. But, you see, I had made it up to here, the high levels, and if I think about dad’s shabby house and the oil smell in the jungle, I have done quite a lot, mates. I have money, my sons will be alright. They are in Oxbridge now. But still there is more to come, don’t you think so?
“I said to Carson – I want a peerage. He laughed. Lord Ben Turner. Lord of Back-door-Liverpool-port-bull****? But I had made up my mind, I wanted it. He was so ironic, he laughed at me, I think, but I do not care. I really do not. He called the party folks and arranged it”
When my mandate is over I will go every morning in the Lords. Why? ‘Cause I can! Dad, who was a docker, will be sitting next to me.
Harman asks:”What happened with the report?” “It disappeared. I tore the documents and shredded them. Nothing left, not a sign.
“Then how that appeared again, for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone had a copy”
***
At first I wanted to be a doctor but I failed at the exams and could not get through. It was so difficult in these days. Then I thought I am so good at chemistry that I might go for this. I admit my life has been good so far. I am a well-known expert. In the beginning I was at a big pharmaceutical concern, I was testing new medicines on volunteers. I was wondering what draws these people to the laboratories. I would never agree to be used for tests. Yes, I know how they make all these pills, I know that you can get some prescribed by a doctor and after five years it turns out you have a cancer, you die, and nobody knows that the pills might have caused this. The people, the volunteers at the laboratory, they were paupers, former prisoners, drug addicts. They all needed money. I could not stand it and I left. It was scary.
Many years later, when I was officially invited to the expert panel at the Transport Agency, I knew I will be dealing with dirty stuff again. Very dirty. We analyse the indicators of machine, I check the compatibility with standards, and we report to the committee. I am living surrounded by tons of papers, reports, documents. We receive hundreds of files from laboratories. The bad thing is that even good experts sometimes can’t spot problems. So we gather later information and say whether a product is working well or not.
Year after year, I developed a strange ability. I collect instances, separate facts, disparate occasions and I simply feel the direction. I can say – there is something wrong. I just feel it. I like sciences because you can explain everything, you always have a cause, there is nothing vague. So 43 accidents cannot just happen without a cause. I was reading the data and thought it was too strange. RubCo is not a bad company, we have companies with quite more problems. But RubCo is great at covering all the crap they make. Probably this is one of the reasons why their stock is rising high.
I was reading the report one evening when my son just walked by. He is a first year student at a law school, a clever boy, he gets nothing of sciences though. But he is so curious. He looked at the papers and asked about them. I told him these are accidents that could have been cause by the manufacture of tires. Ah, he said, a tort. What is a tort?, I asked. A civil wrong, dad. He walked on. A wrong. Wrong. I was reading through the pages and the word was reverberating in my mind – wrong. Wrong. I wrote my expert opinion – the tires should be withdrawn from the market because they have a defect to be further analysed. I left a copy at home and sent the report to the committee of the Agency. So far, so good.
Several weeks later I was reading through the latest decisions of the Transport Agency but I could not find anything about RubCo. I checked with the secretary and she said she had sent my report in the due manner. I checked at the archive too, but they did not have a report under any number or name. I waited another month, then one more, and a new document came to me. It stated that the RubCo tires were still causing a lot of problems, but nobody knew of this.
Then, one evening, my younger boy, who was sixteen, was very late and I called him and started shouting but he mumbled that he was at the hospital. “Why?”, I screamed, and he said that a friend of his was hit by a car on the rainy road, and I imagined the body of the boy lying in the hospital, bleeding, maybe not alive. And I thought it could have been my son. I looked through the papers again and counted five death cases in alleged RubCo accidents. God, I thought, if they were alive. On the next morning I opened the Daily Post and found the address of Ken Graham, a famous journalist, he was in the MP expenses affair, I put the 23-page copy of the report in an envelope and sent it. This morning, when I turn on the TV, I see the face of that man, RubCo’s CEO, I am listening to the live broadcast of the conference and think: Right.
***
Vultures. I am sitting behind the massive table in the conference room on the first floor of the building and I am surrounded by them. ****ing vultures. I know what you think now, you think, “Carson is down, Carson failed, Carson is over.” The morning newspaper lies open, there is a photo of me and all the information on the tires. I see the eye of the camera focused on my face. There, beyond, are the shareholders, the bastards hiding in their little ****holes, afraid that they are losing now. Because the shares have dropped. I have been working for this crap for ten years. Ten. I know you could have never made it. No. Never. You could not. You can buy and sell, write in the newspapers, watch the TV but you cannot manage an empire, you don’t have the guts. When I came here, RubCo did not have factories outside England. I made this ****ing company, brick by brick. Yesterday, before all this began, I could lift the phone and require the Prime Minister at the other side. I look to my right, there is Harman, red, on the brink of a heart attack. I despise this fool, I will never leave my wife for a *****y model that could be my granddaughter. I worked for these fools. I made them rich. They have their houses and cars but they do not know what happens in the Amazon jungle, the factories, the labour force we actually exploit. I can say it. I do exploit. You are afraid? You are disgusted? You turn your face? Yes, you do, you don’t have the guts. That’s all.
I will never run away until They drive me out of the board. I will not hide in Southern Spain, drinking cocktails on my private beach. I don’t need it, lying, sweating under the hot sun. I want to create, mates, construct. My first and favourite job was in construction and real estates. You can go and see the place, the edifice of effort and work. Rising high. This is the reason I built this tower. It says: I make. You drink, ****, piss, ****, spit, spoil, sell, throw, leave, hide, escape. I make. I can do it. You are only vultures.
I stand up and look around, all the people rise their heads, stare at me. I have denied everything, I have pledged that I will sue the bastards who spread damaging information and rumours but I will temporarily withdraw until all gets clear. This is the deal I struck with Harman. No I will be off, I don’t want but They made me go; time will run fast and will come back again, folks, don’t forget about me. I slowly walk to the exit. I have been here the entire night and I need some rest at home, a moment when no faces will drift around me.
But the tide of faces has surrounded me, the waves beating at my body, I cannot even breathe and it is getting hot. I am slowly making my way through the crowd and reach the open area in front of the building - some fresh air. I feel the sweat in my hair, down my spine, the tide of people is pushing me but I continue on my way, against the flashes and cameras, the microphones, the shouts and screams, I am still wading. Yes, I am outside, and the car is there, it waits for me, only a few more steps. But something pushes me to the left, I feel suddenly so weak, and I recognise a strange sound has just occurred somewhere so near. Many faces gather closer and closer. I keep falling, without any balance, but I cannot reach the ground because somebody holds me. And I feel something sticky, something warm, streaming, watering my skin. Then the senses disappear.
***
Name: Russel Miller. Age: 45. Occupation: former policeman, now a security guard. Place of residence: London, Putney.
I am standing in the centre of the room in the police station, with handcuffs, surrounded by five policemen. One of them, a girl, is sitting, meticulously writing. I am speaking, I cannot hear my own voice. I have become light, as if volatile, about to transpire in the hot noon air.
“Is this your weapon?”
“Yes. My own.”
Of course it was mine. I was fighting the crime some years ago, right.
Another policeman comes, looks straight into my eyes and says: “Why did you do it? Why?”
Why? I was married, I had two boys. Nice kids, 17 and 11, very bright and clever. We were not much used to going on holidays together but they insisted and we went to a ski vacation in Austria. By car. It was very exciting for them to see half Europe. On the way back home, in the Alps, the car went crazy, yes, simply crazy, it started to glide and crashed into a rock. My neck was broken, my left arm was hurt. But the kids and my wife were dead.
Nobody managed to find what happened. They said: the road. The road was guilty. But I knew the road was alright.
This morning I bought a newspaper and read the article while going to my job, a place nearby, just few blocks down the road, in a big business building. I stopped up in a small newsagent’s, staring at the screen of the TV behind the counter. There was a breaking news red line at the bottom of the screen, I was listening to the voice of the reporter who was repeating, again and again, what has been going on in that affair. On and on, on and on. I walked down the street, the newspaper, cold as a dead body, in my hand; passed by the old church, the small park, the fountain, the river – I could smell it, the salt in the air, the salt. I saw a line of kids, students in dark blue uniforms, walking by the river, they were about ten or so and the teacher was pointing at the Tower bridge, explaining something. A boy and a girl were sitting on a bench, kissing. A man left his car, bought flowers for his wife and drove away. I woman stopped in front of me, asked me for the time, and hurried away, mumbling about the stuff she had to do until she went to her boy’s birthday party. I was walking along the river until I saw the big tall tower, and afterwards I started striding automatically, faster, in a hurry to get to the place, to get where it should happen. Should.
“Why did you do it? Why?”
I turn to the man. “They could have been alive”.