“I’m funding this scheme. I don’t need your permission.”

“Hey- that’s true. You don’t.”

“Listen, Martin. You should be thankful. Your brother, while he was, in my opinion, a dangerous maniac that Australia has no business celebrating-”

“That’s just what he was!” I shouted, thrilled to my bones. For it’s a fact that nobody had ever expressed this very obvious opinion.

“Well, blind Freddy can see that. The point is, he is plain adored by this country, and your close association with him gives you the credentials you need to be taken seriously.”

“OK, but I-”

“You don’t want us to go on and on about it. This is your scheme, this is your turn in the spotlight, and you don’t want your long-dead brother overshadowing you from beyond the grave.”

“Mate, that’s it exactly.”

“After this first week, Marty, you’ll come into your own, don’t worry.”

I had to admit, Oscar Hobbs was a real gentleman. In fact, he was charming me more each time I met him. He seemed to understand me right away. I thought: Maybe people need to grasp that nepotism doesn’t necessarily mean the ascension of an idiot.

“Anyway, let’s get into details. What’s your scheme?”

“OK. It’s simple. Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“OK. Listen to this. With our population of roughly twenty million people, if everyone in Australia mailed just one dollar a week to a certain address and that money was divided by twenty, every single week of the year twenty Australian families would become millionaires.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it!”

“That’s your idea?”

“That’s my idea!”

Oscar leaned back in his chair and put on a thinking face. It was the same as his regular face, only a little smaller and a little tighter.

The silence made me uncomfortable. I gave him a few more details to fill it.

“Now what if, after the first week, the people who have just become millionaires from the previous week put in a one-time payment of a thousand dollars as a thank-you. That means after the first week we’ll always have a weekly budget of twenty thousand dollars to support the administrative costs of the enterprise.”

Oscar started nodding rhythmically. I pushed on: “So by my calculations, at the end of the first year 1,040 families would have become millionaires, by year two 2,080 millionaires, by year three 3,120 millionaires, and so on. Now 3,120 new millionaires in three years is pretty good, but at that rate it would still take roughly 19,230 years for every Australian to become a millionaire, not even factoring in the rate of population growth.”

“Or decline.”

“Or decline. Obviously, for the number of Australian millionaires to grow exponentially, we need to increase the payment each year by a dollar, so in year two we put in two dollars a week- that’s 40 millionaires a week, or 2,080 millionaires for the year; year three we put in three dollars-60 millionaires a week, or 3,120 millionaires for the year; and so on until every Australian is a millionaire.”

“That’s your idea.”

“That’s my idea!”

“You know what?” he said. “It’s so simple it might actually work.”

“Even if it doesn’t,” I said, “what else are we going to do with this acid spot in time that goes by the name of Life?”

“Martin. Don’t say that in an interview, OK?”

I nodded, embarrassed. Maybe he didn’t recognize the quote because I didn’t say it in Italian.

That night Eddie turned up at the house in his usual freshly ironed pants and wrinkle-free shirt with his face that made me wonder if they have Asian mannequins in Asian department stores. I hadn’t seen him in a while. Eddie was always disappearing and reappearing. That’s what he did. Seeing him, I suddenly remembered my idea that all along he’d hated my guts. I watched him closely. He wasn’t giving himself away. Maybe he’d been pretending to like me for so long he’d forgotten that he didn’t. Why would he pretend to like me anyway? For what sinister trap? Probably none- to soften up his loneliness, that was all. I suddenly felt sorry for the whole lot of us.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“ Thailand. You’d like Thailand, you know. You should think of going there one day.”

“Why the hell would I like Thailand? I’ll tell you where I think I’d like: Vienna, Chicago, Bora Bora, and St. Petersburg in the 1890s. Thailand I’m not so sure about. What were you doing there?”

“Did I see your picture on the front page of the paper today?”

“You might have.”

“What’s going on?”

I told him what was going on. As Eddie listened, his eyes seemed to sink deeper into his skull.

“Look,” he said, “I’m not doing anything right now. Things have been a little bad for me lately, as you know. I don’t suppose you need any help in there, making people millionaires?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Why not?”

It was true Eddie had been down on his luck. He had bungled his life too; the strip clubs he’d been managing (one of which I had partially destroyed with my car in a moment of mental collapse) had been shut down by police because underage girls were stripping. The clubs were also known for drug deals, and one night there was a fatal shooting, the worst kind. Throughout these calamities Eddie had kept remarkably cool, and I suspected it wasn’t a façade, either. He had a way of remaining aloof from physical disturbances. It was as though they were happening in a reality he was watching through binoculars.

So when he asked me if he could be a part of the millionaire scheme, of course I said yes. When someone close to you who has never asked you for anything finally does, it’s quite touching. Besides, I still owed him all the money he’d loaned me, and this was a way to pay him back.

Considering he had managerial experience, I suggested he take care of the administrative aspect. In truth I was greatly relieved. I only wanted to see the idea realized; I personally wanted nothing to do with administering anything.

“I can’t believe we’re going to make people millionaires,” Eddie said, slapping his hands together. “It’s a bit like playing God, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“I don’t know. For a second I thought it was.”

If we were playing God in the movie of his life, would it be in character to hand out money? I suppose with an eternity on his hands, even God would run out of ideas eventually.

Oscar wasn’t keen on the idea of Eddie running the administrative side of the enterprise, but he was inhumanly busy running two television stations, an Internet service, and three newspapers. I couldn’t help but be impressed. If you knew how hard these bastards worked, you’d never say anything negative about privilege again, and you wouldn’t even want it for yourself. So he okayed Eddie and gave us a large office each in the Hobbs News Building. We were able to pick our own staff, and though we only hired females with great cleavage (a habit from our strip-club days) we weren’t just clowning around in there. Eddie got right to it. He really took charge. With Oscar’s influence, he obtained the electoral rolls for every state, made a database, and rigged up some system where the names would be jumbled around in the computer much like balls in a lottery bubble. Then, quite at random, the computer would somehow pick the first twenty names. Actually, even though I can’t be precise in my explanation of how it worked, it wasn’t that complicated. Nothing surprising about that. There’s plenty of uncomplicated things I don’t understand.

That was it, really. The newspapers publicized the details of the scheme, and by the end of the week the dollar coins came streaming in. Our poor staff was snowed under opening envelopes and counting millions of those round cold dollars. We were also all gearing up for the opening-night party, when the names of the first millionaires would be read out on national television. It was going to be one of those A-list parties where the guests either make a fool out of you or pretend you don’t exist. I wasn’t looking forward to it. And there was my public role as mastermind behind the unsophisticated scheme; standing next to Oscar Hobbs, I was to read out the list of names, then the new millionaires, rounded up earlier that day by Eddie’s crew, would come up onstage and shriek appropriately. That was the plan. Today was Thursday. The party was next Friday. Oscar had organized a deal with all the TV stations. It would be like the moon landing. For one night there was going to be peace between the warring networks. Oscar was incredible- all this he did in between managing everything else.