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made it by selling fur jackets fashioned from rabbit skins, but this seemed so unlikely it was dismissed by most. When Jack had jokingly asked at his first group lunch if it was true, the Pope had simply nodded and said, ‘So what?’
    There were people around this table whose intellect challenged him. He looked across at Murray Ingham sitting opposite, dipping a chunk of bread into his bowl. The face was a block of pitted granite with two thick, black slashes above the eyes. How did he grow those brows like possums’ tails? Were they groomed and fertilised and cut like hedges? Jack looked away before the hooded eyes could catch him staring. Murray had written two critically acclaimed novels—both of which Jack had tried to read but which were still in the drawer by his bed with bookmarks a few chapters in—as well as a biography of an obscure artist that had won him awards and prizes and a year in some garret in Paris. And then there was Murray’s apparent disdain for Jack’s facile brain and purposeless life as property developer to the semillon set. At least Jack perceived this contempt from the occasional sardonic remark that was thrown his way.
    Beside him was the imposing figure of the Hon. Mr Justice Norman Crosby, Judge of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, connoisseur of rugby and rum, Latin scholar, collector of Picasso ceramics, author of an unpublished play of considerable vulgarity. The Judge, as he was always referred to in the group, was examining Jack with great interest, much as a taxidermist stares at a potential subject in order to define its precise attitudes.
    ‘Mr Beaumont. Always a pleasure when you grace our table.’ For some reason—and it made Jack nervous, as if he’d committed an undetected felony—the Judge always referred to him as ‘Mr Beaumont’, whereas all the others received their nicknames or given names. ‘What news upon the Rialto? What do you bring us from the real world, the world of commerce, of glamour, of intrigue and money and success, of failure and suicide, or indeed of fraud and jail and terrible penalties, of the ruin of families, the dissipation of great fortunes piled brick upon brick over generations and then dashed to the ground in one lifetime of excess, of gambling, of drink, of illicit sex? What of all this, Mr Beaumont? We wait with bated breath.’
    Jack tossed off a glib response. He knew he could never strike the right note with people like the Judge. Jack Beaumont, the great salesman, ask anyone, look at his record, look at the money he’d made. Why he could buy anyone around the table, pretty well—except the Pope, perhaps, but then nobody knew exactly what the Pope owned or did, just the way he lived—but all the rest. He could buy or sell them all, but as good as he was at selling, sometimes he felt challenged. There was no reason for it. He’d graduated with honours and been second in the year, tacked on an MBA for good measure. They all liked Jack-the-lad, were always happy to see him, welcoming. But with just a few, like the Judge or Murray Ingham, he sensed another level of activity in their brains that he couldn’t reach.
    It hadn’t been like that with Mac Biddulph when they’d met in Mac’s office earlier that morning. There was an immediate rapport. Seated in the vast, gloomy space with two life-sized paintings of brumbies above the desk there should have been an initial feeling of uneasiness. That was the intention of the design, if design was a description that could be applied to a room where the furniture seemed to be built for giants and one unrelenting colour pervaded, a sort of early mineshaft brown that appeared to soak up all the available light.
    Mac had immediately asked him to run his company, HOA, the biggest home insurance company in Australia, as chief executive. It was an absurd notion, he’d felt at first, because he knew nothing of the insurance industry except that it was complex and required sophisticated