The argument was simple. ‘I know that I’m a very junior lawyer but you’ve seen what I can do. You’ve seen what I’ve done for you and for the company in a very short space of time. You wanted me to demonstrate that you need me around. Well, sir, I think I have.’
‘It is quite stunning what you’ve done for me, Maserov. There’s no doubt about that. But what you’re asking, it’s very —’
‘When I met you, even apart from the sexual harassment problems, you had a meta-problem. You didn’t much like Hamilton, in fact, between us, I think you loathed him even then, but you didn’t want to go to the trouble and the expense of taking all your work away from Freely Savage to another law firm, pouring all that historical and institutional knowledge down the drain with the move and waiting for the new firm to get up to speed. Now you don’t have to make that choice. You can keep all your work in the same place.’
‘But I do have to make a choice, don’t I?’
‘Yes, sir, you do. It’s Hamilton or me.’
‘You’re smart, honest, hard-working and you’ve got balls no one would ever suspect you had.’
‘Thank you. Yes, it’s true, few people have ever speculated much at all about my testicles.’
‘But you’re a Second Year, for Christ’s sake.’
‘Yes, I’m a Second Year, a mature-age one. And Hamilton’s a narcissistic, sociopathic bastard. And you know it.’
Malcolm Torrent got up from his desk and walked over to his window and, with his back to Maserov, looked out high above the world that almost everybody else lived in. He stood there for some time. Then he turned around.
‘You draft the document, I’ll sign it.’ He smiled and the two men shook hands. Then Malcolm Torrent leaned into his desk, pressed a button to ask his private secretary, Joan Henshaw, to come in and ‘show Maserov to the door before I gift him one of the grandchildren’.
Maserov could hardly believe what had happened. Nothing like it, nothing of this magnitude ever happened to normal mortals and as Malcolm Torrent’s inscrutable Joan Henshaw rode down in the elevator with him, he wanted to scream, not make small talk. Fortunately for him she, quite uncharacteristically, began to chat.
‘Are you a coffee drinker, Mr Maserov?’
‘Coffee? Yes, I love a good coffee. How about you?’
‘Yes,’ she said, before adding pointedly, ‘Whenever I can manage it, I like to get to Degraves Espresso Bar.’
‘Degraves? I was just . . .’
She looked briefly at her shoes and then, as she looked up again, she betrayed the smallest smile he had ever seen.
‘How’s your Mr Radhakrishnan?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Now he’s a gentleman.’