Better Than This (28 page)

As I went back to my Saab I heard the sound of an approaching car back on the road. As it got closer it slowed, and I expected it to pass by, but when it didn’t I realized it must have stopped. I could hear the low rumble of the motor, the dull bass of a supercharged monster. It was an odd sensation, listening to this vaguely menacing sound that seemed so foreign in these otherwise tranquil surroundings. The hairs on my arms stood up on end as if a cool breeze had come up from the sea. Then suddenly, without warning the beast roared and rubber squealed like a herd of pigs at slaughter. It went on and on, a loud protesting scream and a hazy cloud of blue smoke drifted along the section of road I could see. The air was tainted with the sharp unpleasant smell of burning rubber, then the tyres found purchase on the asphalt and the din of the motor began to fade as the car sped back the way it had come.

When once again it was quiet I allowed myself a smile. Even the very rich weren’t immune from the draggers looking for somewhere to go at night. I’d read in the papers how they travelled in packs like marauding wolves to some new spot where they could drink beer and race their machines along a piece of straight road away from the eyes of the cops.

I drove through the gates, which closed smoothly behind me, and followed the private road which led down the hillside, curving through the woods until it emerged in a broad open parkland studded with trees. A large house dominated the foreground, and beyond it lay brown hills and glimpses of the ocean. I’d been prepared for something extravagant but this exceeded my expectations. Until that moment a part of me had felt like a burglar. It was partly because Sally’s moral stand pitched what I was doing in stark relief, but it was a lot more than that. We’re conditioned from a very young age to believe that we should work hard, and that the rewards we get in life are directly linked to the level of effort we put in. But that isn’t true, and probably never has been. People get rich for all kinds of reasons. Some do work incredibly hard, relying on tenacity and talent to make their mark, but others are just plain lucky, or dishonest, or they are born with advantages that ensure they live out their lives in a world closeted by privilege and power.

Take the guy in the factory who does a ten-hour shift five or six days a week for forty-five years and raises a family and lives in a modest house in a sprawling suburb on the edge of a big city. Does he work any less hard than somebody who sits in front of a screen and pushes numbers around the money markets, or buys and sells stocks? One makes a million a year, the other thirty or forty thousand. Maybe the guy on Wall Street is smarter, but that’s just luck. But maybe he isn’t. Could be if the guy from the factory had a better education, different opportunities, he could have made a fortune on Wall Street as well, or if he had an idea for a dot. com perhaps he too would live in a house like the one before me. There were people in Silicon Valley making obscene fortunes, often on shaky foundations. We’re talking hundreds of millions. Sometimes they’re still in their twenties.

I thought about my dad who had worked hard all his life, believing in fair play and the notion that people ought to be rewarded for their own efforts. Then a big corporation decided to increase their share in the local market. Some junior executive in an office tower across the country looked over a few numbers on a report and sent out a memo before he went to lunch, no doubt feeling he’d done a good day’s work. And the end result? My dad ended up broke. His dreams shattered to the extent that he believed putting the barrel of a gun to his head was preferable to another day in this world.

Looking at Morgan’s house I didn’t feel like a burglar any more. It’s all a lottery, and it will never be fair. Communism was meant to be the great leveller, but it didn’t work because it goes against human nature. Instead of making everybody equally rich, it made everybody equally poor and unhappy. As a species we’re designed by nature to scramble to the top of the pile.

It’s an evolutionary absolute and we adapt to the prevailing conditions. In our world the ability to make money is the modern equivalent of being adept at smashing in a rival’s skull with a club or fending off wild animals.

The house was huge, built of stone, with a wing on each side and a circular drive out front that met wide steps leading to massive double doors. It was a mixture of baronial European and American kitsch, pure Californian gothic. The door was answered by a man in a dark suit who I gathered was Morgan’s butler. He showed me across a hallway dominated by a staircase that swept up to the first floor, from which I expected Scarlet O’Hara to appear at any moment. He opened the door to a large sitting room cum-library where he asked me to wait. The room was probably forty feet long, and at one end windows looked out over the garden towards the ocean. Beyond a broad stone terrace was a swimming pool and tennis courts. Somebody was practising using a ball machine on one of the courts. The faint repetitive pop of the machine firing balls across the net was followed by the whump of the racket as it made contact.

I saw that it was a woman and while I waited I watched her. Though she was fifty yards away I could tell that she was beautiful. She had long dark hair and tanned, smoothly muscled legs. She moved about the court with supple ease and from the way she swung a racket she seemed to know what she was doing. Somehow the scene was so completely appropriate it was almost a cliche.

“Mr. Weston?”

I turned at the sound of a voice. I recognized Morgan from pictures I’d seen of him. His greying hair was combed back, emphasizing sharpish features and intelligent blue eyes. He wore light tan trousers and a button-down blue shirt with no tie.

“I’m Nelson Morgan.”

We shook hands. His grip was firm, his demeanour polite but cool as we weighed one another up. He appeared confident and utterly relaxed, but I sensed the steel behind his eyes. I was curious about him. I knew a little from what I’d read, that he was private, supposedly a tough man to work for who expected high standards from those around him, and that his business acumen was matched only by his ruthlessness. But none of that revealed anything about him really. I only knew what everyone did, that he had made more money than most people could even conceive of.

He glanced out of the window towards the tennis courts. Most people would have made some remark, asked if I played, said something about the woman perhaps, even commented on the view, but Morgan made a brusque gesture towards some chairs across the room.

We sat down, and he crossed his legs and fixed his gaze on me. “My assistant said that you have something belonging to Leonard Hoffman that I might be interested in.”

Evidently he believed in getting down to it, but I wasn’t going to be hurried. I was curious about the relationship between Morgan and his old partner and I wanted to know more. “You’re aware that he died recently?”

He raised his eyebrows slightly and tilted his head a fraction. “No, I didn’t know that.”

I waited for him to ask how it had happened, but he didn’t and I saw that he wasn’t going to. He wore no expression. No pretence that he was cut up about it. I was irritated by his lack of reaction. “I believe you and he used to be partners.”

“A long time ago.”

“You were friends as well I understand.”

He studied me for a second or two, and then he said, “I’m a very busy man. What is it that you want, Mr. Weston?”

I understood a little better how this man had achieved so much. He knew how to seize the initiative and remain in control. But I wasn’t fooled. If he didn’t want to know what I had to say I wouldn’t have been sitting there. I let a few moments pass, long enough to make my own point.

“I run an advertising agency,” I told him.

“Carpe Diem, yes I know.”

I was taken aback, which was his intention, though I reasoned that I shouldn’t be surprised since I’d left my name with his assistant, and our office number.

“You were recently involved in a bid against KCM for the advertising account of one of my companies. Spectrum Software,” he went on with the suggestion of a faintly arrogant smile.

“You know a lot about me,” I said, figuring he probably had one of his assistants call Larry Dexter, who no doubt had been happy to fill in the blanks. I guessed Morgan probably thought he knew pretty much all there was to know. I decided that I didn’t like him very much. “Did you also know that Leonard Hoffman worked for Spectrum Software before you bought the company?”

Nothing more than a slight twitch in the corner of his eye betrayed a reaction. But it was there. “Really?”

I stood up, and wandered to a table where I picked up a heavy polished paperweight and examined it. “Really. In fact that’s how I met him. He knew I’d had dealings with Spectrum, so he thought Carpe Diem might be able to help him with something he was working on.” I smiled and put the paperweight down. “You know, Mr. Hoffman didn’t like you much, Mr. Morgan.”

Morgan steepled his fingers beneath his chin and regarded me silently. “He told me an interesting story actually. He said the two of you were once partners.” I paused, and the silence extended. I felt as if I was playing some kind of mind chess and in a way I was enjoying myself. Finally Morgan conceded the next move.

“He told you the truth. We were partners once, briefly. A long time ago.”

“He also said that after your business venture failed and you both went your separate ways, that you got started again by selling a software program that he’d written.”

“I assume there is some point to all of this,” Morgan remarked.

“You assume correctly. Mr. Hoffman said that without the money you got for his program you wouldn’t have been able to start your own company again. But he claimed that you never paid him his share. He said you cheated him.”

Morgan’s expression was implacable, though behind his eyes the machinery in his mind moved with calculating precision. Eventually he smiled, as if he’d decided that for now anyway he should be nice to me.

“Mr. Weston, how well did you know Leonard?”

I shrugged. “We only met a few times before he died. He was sick. It was cancer by the way, in case you’re interested.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, sounding not at all sorry.

“I could let you know the funeral details if you felt like sending flowers,” I said.

He hesitated before commenting wryly, “Obviously you empathized with Leonard’s story.”

“Are you saying it wasn’t true?”

“Truth and fiction have a way of becoming mixed over time, in my experience. I’m sure Leonard believed his version of events to be accurate.”

“But that’s not how it happened?”

“When Leonard and I started our first company we were both very young. We thought we would make a fortune.” He spread his hands. “That proved not to be the case, and for all sorts of reasons. After our company failed I decided to start again. I offered him the chance to come in with me, but he refused.”

I was surprised and it must have showed. Morgan smiled ruefully. “No doubt Leonard neglected to tell you that. You see Leonard was a very clever software designer, but he wasn’t a businessman. It takes a certain resilience to succeed in anything. It also takes determination, self belief and you have to be willing to take risks. Frankly, those were all qualities Leonard lacked. When I offered him a second partnership I insisted on different terms. I wanted him to be responsible for the technical aspects, but he was to leave the business issues to me. He chose to refuse.”

“But you still used software he wrote to start your company.”

“He had relinquished any claim to it. Although I’m sure he convinced himself over the years that he didn’t. It was only when he discovered that I was successful that he decided I owed him money. But the truth is that the money I made from that software was convenient, but it wasn’t essential. I would have succeeded without it. Leonard didn’t understand that.”

Although I suspected that Morgan’s version of what had happened might be closer to the truth than the one Hoffman had told me, there remained something cold about the way Morgan rationalized his actions.

“Whatever happened, you could have paid him off when he came to you years ago,” I said. “That’s all he wanted. After all you could afford it.”

“I saw no point. Leonard was also an alcoholic. Throughout his life he destroyed whatever opportunities came his way. His relationships failed. His career suffered. Even though he was brilliant in his way, he was flawed, Mr. Weston. Whatever he told you has to be considered in that light. If I’d given him the money he asked for it wouldn’t have made any difference to his life.”

Interesting. There are fourteen thousand homeless people on the streets of San Francisco, a city with a population of little more than three quarters of a million. The prevailing wisdom is that you shouldn’t give them money, and the logic that’s generally espoused is the same one Morgan used in relation to his old partner: Basically that they’ll only waste it. It’s a very morally superior stance, so automatically suspect. Personally I give the panhandlers with the best lines a buck or two. “Can you help me with a down payment on a cheeseburger?” Or how about, “Could you spare some money for whisky?” Or a sign I read that said, “WWW. Got any change dot. com Irony is alive and well even among the homeless.

To Morgan I said, “You don’t know that for sure.”

“True. But it’s what I thought at the time.”

I could see that Morgan was comfortable with the decision he’d made. But then why had the mention of Hoffman’s name gotten me into see him? And why for that matter had Hoffman carried such a burning enmity for his old partner for so long? This had all happened a lot of years ago after all. Intuitively I guessed there was more to this.

“Leonard Hoffman approached you more than once didn’t he?” I asked.

“As a matter of fact he did,” Morgan conceded after a slight hesitation. “He came to me regularly over the years. Usually he was in some kind of fix. He wanted money. Always he said I owed him.”

“But you didn’t agree?”

A flicker of defensiveness showed in his eye. “I didn’t feel I owed him anything. And as I said, he was a drunk. I didn’t believe giving him money would help.”