Something Fishy

by Shane Maloney

  Within a month, he was back in custody. Disturbed during a daylight burg in South Yarra, he belted the householder, an eighty-two-year-old retired judge, with an antique inkstand. The old beak went down squeezing his heart-attack alarm. The ambulance arrived just as Syce was coming out the front door, making like he lived there. The paramedics, burly boys, sat on him until the cops arrived.

  In his ten-year life of crime, Rodney Syce had generated enough paperwork for a psychological profile to emerge. In layman’s terms, he was a gutless mongrel, a coward given to unprovoked outbursts of violence, a loner who had trouble maintaining relationships with other people.

  Except in prison. There, Syce seemed to find the sort of society he craved. Quick to suss the pecking order, he found ways of attaching himself to a high-status inmate, some means of making himself useful to a top dog.

  Someone like Adrian Parish. At fifty-three, Parish was king of the heap in remand. An armed robber and old-school all-rounder, he was a tiler by trade. He had a reputation for covering his tracks well and keeping his head down between jobs. He used violence only when he believed it was necessary. Shooting at coppers to avoid arrest, for example. And, although he’d been charged with dozens of offences, he had a knack for beating the rap. In a thirty-five-year career as a professional criminal, he’d served a mere eight years and seven months of jail time.

  But Parish had run out of luck. An armoured-truck heist had turned to shit. Shots were fired. A guard had a coronary embolism and nearly died. Dye-bombs spoiled the cash. When fingerprint fragments were found in the burned-out getaway car, the driver rolled over. Parish was rousted from his marital bed at 5 a.m., charged with everything but indecent exposure, committed to the County Court for jury trial, found guilty and remanded for sentencing. The judge was poised to throw the book. The way things were going, Adrian Parish would be a very old man by the time he got out of prison.

  But while he was waiting for sentence, Rodney Syce entered his orbit. And Rodney had qualities that Adrian appreciated. He could ride a motorbike and do what he was told.

  The sands of Woolamai beach had turned to grey. The sky and the sea were seamless. The breaking waves advanced, line after line, roaring like distant artillery.

  If I had a gun, I told myself, I’d kill Rodney Syce. Do it with my bare hands if necessary. If I ever found him, came face-to-face with him, saw him walking down the street.

  But I knew that it was just as well I didn’t have a gun. If I had a gun, I might already have taken revenge.

  Three times I’d spotted Syce. The first was during the AFL grand final. The Eagles were thrashing the Cats. Late in the last quarter, Peter Matera darted from the pack and took a stab for goal. The ball went wide and sailed into the crowd. Fans rose, reaching to grab it. A camera tracked the action, magnifying the image on the electronic scoreboard. One of those who reached for the incoming pigskin was Rodney Syce.

  I knew him as soon as I saw him. He had a beanie pulled down around his ears, a West Coast scarf swathing his neck. Probably figured he could pass unnoticed, one of thousands decked out in blue and yellow.

  I came up out of my seat, fumbling for my mobile, dashing down the stairs to the section of terrace where the ball had landed, jabbering at the task-force detective who picked up the phone. Then the full-time siren blew and the crowd was streaming for the exits, ninety-seven thousand people in motion.

  Even before the last of the fans had dispersed, two dicks were sitting with me in the stadium’s media centre, running the tape over and over, slow-motion and freeze-frame. Yes, they agreed, the guy did look a bit like Syce. It was possibly him. But within a week, it wasn’t. The seat was bought with a credit card by a retired librarian from Warrandyte. The lead was scratched.

  The second time I saw Syce, he was coming out of a service station on the Hume Highway near Wangaratta. It was Boxing Day and I was driving back after spending Christmas with Lyndal’s parents at their orchard near Beechworth. It was their first Christmas without her, Red was in Sydney with Wendy, and I hadn’t seen Lyndal’s family since the funeral. We ate roast turkey on the screened veranda and sat not saying much in the listless afternoon heat and I slept on a trundle bed on the floor between two near strangers who would have been my brothers-in-law if not for Rodney Syce.

  An hour into the trip home, I was filling the tank at a roadhouse pump when a man came out the gas-station door and got into a dust-covered Falcon. Wraparound sunglasses, stringy goatee, but Syce all right, no doubt in my mind. I bolted inside to the cashier. ‘That guy just left, you know him?’

  The cashier shook her head, I grabbed the phone and the Falcon was intercepted at roadblock just south of Glenrowan. The driver came out with his hands in the air, babbling that he’d paid already, the cheque must have been held up in the Christmas mail. An unlicensed driver with $900 in outstanding speeding fines. A win of sorts, but not Rodney Syce. Not by a country mile.

  After my third sighting, I had a house-call from Detective Sergeant Damian Meakes of the Syce Task Force.

  I’d never warmed to Meakes. He seemed bloodless and far too style-conscious for a copper. Four-button suit and designer spectacles. Talked to me down his nose.

  ‘A courtesy call, Mr Whelan,’ he informed me. Courtesy my arse. He’d brought a social worker with him, a sincere young thing with spaniel eyes and a Masters in Hand-holding.

  ‘Sightings of this kind aren’t uncommon, Murray,’ the Victim Liaison Officer reassured me earnestly. ‘They’re a recognised coping mechanism. A victim’s way of dealing with feelings of helplessness and frustration. Even guilt.’

  ‘Guilt?’ I said. Syce was the guilty one. And so, I was beginning to think, were the rozzers. Guilty of gross fucking incompetence. ‘First you let this prick escape, then you fail to catch him.’

  ‘Your anger is perfectly understandable,’ cooed the VLO.

  ‘If I want my bumps read,’ I told her, ‘I’ll find somebody better qualified than a cop shrink.’

  There was no more counselling after that. I did, however, receive a phone call from the Chief Commissioner. One of the privileges of my parliamentary rank was to have the balm dispensed from the highest level. But it was the same old balm. The recapture of Rodney Syce, the CC assured me, remained an ongoing priority. But it was probable that he’d left the state, possibly even the country, so an arrest might be some time in coming. In the meantime, the chances of my lucking upon him were low. And I was helping nobody by cracking the shits with his officers.

  I ate crow, right and proper. Thanked him for taking the time. Promised I wouldn’t trouble the constabulary again, not unless I had substantial cause. Offered my assistance, should an appropriate occasion arise. That’s when he pitched the idea of fast-tracking the inquest.

  And now the inquest had come and gone, another milestone on the road to nowhere. Syce was the free man and I was a prisoner of self-pity and hunger for revenge, so bent out of shape that it sometimes took all my strength to keep hold of the things that made life worth living.

  The surf raged and pounded. I let the icy tide wash over my feet, felt the tug into oblivion.

  But this too solid flesh refused to melt. It stood there, barefoot in the freezing water, shivering. Get a fucking grip, I told myself.

  Nothing could bring Lyndal back. It was time to stop wallowing in misery and dreams of revenge. Time to concentrate on the here and now. Count my whatnots.

  For a year and a half, the folds of my wallet had held the ultrasound photograph of the embryo in Lyndal’s belly. The girl-child with the joke name. Lysistrata Luscombe-Whelan. Had she been born, she’d be almost a year old, crawling around the kitchen, playing merry hell with the pots and pans.

  I opened my wallet, took out the picture and touched it to my lips. I placed it gently on the swirling foam and watched the tide carry it away. As I waited for the moment when it disappeared into the embrace of the sea, the sharp clap of a breaker rang out. Above the far horizon, Venus was rising. />
  Then I was splashing forward, calf-deep, grabbing at the photograph, wiping it dry on my chest.

  This wasn’t over yet.

  A soft rain was falling by the time I got home from San Remo. It continued to fall, in varying degrees of softness, for most of the next six weeks. In Melbourne we call it spring.

  If the coronial circus provided any new leads, the police didn’t share the fact with me. To the best of my knowledge, Rodney Syce remained no closer to capture than he was on the day he killed Lyndal.

  From time to time, I bumped into Alan Bunting in the corridors of Parliament House. We did not speak of the sea. Red’s eight came third in its heat at the rowing carnival. By early November it was still raining but the air grew a fraction warmer each day. I began to consider destinations for the summer break.

  The Legislative Council of Victoria was designed by its colonial fathers as a brake on progress. It did the job well. As the spring session began to peter out, it sat for only two or three days a week. To fill the available time, the parliamentary party turned its energies to a new round of factional warfare.

  The Australian Labor Party is composed of two main factions. Them and Us. Ideologically distinct only at their extremities, their function is the distribution of spoils. But fighting over the spoils of defeat was a ritual for which I could muster little enthusiasm. For the moment, I was content to lick my private wounds and leave the backstabbing to others.

  Certain party obligations, however, remained inescapable. One of these was the annual Melbourne Upper fund-raising dinner and trivia quiz night. That year, it was held on the second Friday in November. As usual, the venue was La Luna, a restaurant near the Moonee Valley racetrack. Steaks and seafood a speciality.

  La Luna’s proprietor, Tony Melina, once fancied himself as something of a player and helped round up some stray Italian votes in the preselection contest for the local federal member. But that was years ago. Business had long since taken precedence over politics, and Tony’s involvement in the party was ancient history. But he always gave us a discount price for the fund-raiser, so we stuck with La Luna. Whatever its faults, the Australian Labor Party has a great respect for tradition.

  Starting as a check tablecloth and Chianti-bottle candlestick sort of place, La Luna had worked its way steadily upmarket, evolving into Tony’s idea of contemporary Mediterranean. The wrought-iron torch sconces and bagged brickwork were superseded by murals in the manner of ancient Roman mosaics. Nymphs and satyrs now peeked from behind trompe l’oeil plasterwork. The floor space was expanded and a central bar installed, black marble with onyx inlays and overhead glassware racks. Messalina meets Maserati.

  Tony’s wife Rita pounced as I came though the door. ‘Murray, you big hunk,’ she said, offering her cheeks for a peck-peck. ‘It’s been ages. Getting too high and mighty for your old friends?’

  Rita was petite, not yet forty, tight-packed and high-maintenance. She had a haystack of raven hair, sculpted nails and enough gold jewellery to drown a duck. She abducted my arm and dragged me to the bar. ‘Your lot are upstairs, getting stuck into the nibbles,’ she said. ‘Have a quick drink with your auntie Rita before you go up.’

  We perched knee-to-knee on tubular chrome barstools and the barman poured two glasses of white wine. Rita locked her big brown eyes onto mine and ran a hand down my arm. ‘Still hurting, aren’t you, baby?’ Her hand settled on my knee.

  I shrugged and hid behind my drink. ‘Life goes on. And my boy keeps me busy.’

  Rita nodded knowingly. ‘He must be what, twelve, thirteen now?’

  ‘Fifteen,’ I said, glad to be off the hook. ‘Doing okay at school. Couldn’t ask for better. Yours?’ I racked my memory. ‘Carla and…’

  ‘Lauren. Both fine. Carla’s married now, threatening to make me a grandmother. Lauren’s on the overseas trip, waitressing her way around Europe. Must be in the blood.’

  ‘You were never a waitress, Rita,’ I smiled. ‘Your old man would never have stood for it.’

  Rita’s father Frank had a furniture emporium just down the street from the electorate office. Rococo, traditional and moderne. An immigrant success story, he had higher hopes for his only daughter than marriage to the boy from the fish’n’chip shop. But when his ambitions were thwarted by teenage passion and its unintended consequences, he copped it sweet. He bankrolled young Tony into the pizza business, but only on condition that his princess never knead the dough or sling the capricciosa.

  ‘Maybe I should take it up,’ sighed Rita. ‘I need a career now that the chicks have flown from the nest and Tony’s busy building an empire.’

  She waved her drink with weary forbearance at the starched napery, floral centrepieces and mood lighting, as if fate had condemned her to sit by the fireplace like some shrivelled, black-clad nonna.

  ‘Speaking of Tony,’ I said. ‘Is he about? I should say hello.’

  A party of six were being led to their table by a waitress, a bit of a strudel, a fleshy blonde in her late twenties. One of the men made a joke and she laughed, a little too loud, too saucy. Rita’s rings tightened around her wineglass and her lips thinned.

  ‘Tony?’ She raised her shoulders a millimetre, a gesture of utter indifference. ‘He’s around somewhere, handling something.’ She lit a Marlboro Lite, exhaled a long stream of smoke and showed me her profile, also utterly indifferent. ‘Handles everything around here, Tony does.’

  Just then, rescue arrived in the form of Ayisha Celik, my electorate officer. Ayisha and I went back a good ten years, back to the time when she worked at the Turkish Welfare League and I took care of the electorate office in Melbourne Upper. Once upon a time I entertained certain delusions about my chances with the kohl-eyed Levantine looker, but Ayisha was long-since married to a Macedonian mother’s boy and was now a mother of three herself.

  Since her days at the TWL, Ayisha had worked for the Multicultural Resource Centre and, until the incoming government cut its funding, an advocacy organisation for self-help groups. Foster parents, women’s shelters, recovering glue-sniffers, fur-allergic cat-fanciers, you name it. She also worked as Lyndal’s campaign manager in the three-way preselection contest that sent me to parliament. She knew Melbourne Upper like the back of her hand. Me, I suspected, she knew even better.

  ‘Started drinking already?’ she said. ‘Hello, Rita.’

  Rita squeezed out a faint smile. ‘Hello, Ayisha. Got everything you need?’

  Ayisha laid a proprietary hand on my shoulder. ‘Except an emcee,’ she said. ‘Our guest comedian hasn’t shown up. Looks like you’ll have to do the honours.’

  ‘Duty calls.’ I gave Rita a shrug, downed my drink and followed Ayisha’s ever-broadening backside towards the stairs.

  ‘What a classic,’ said Ayisha over her shoulder. ‘You know she’s only here tonight because she knew you’d be coming. She had to satisfy her curiosity, get the gossip. Poor Murray, she’ll be able to tell the other ladies-who-lunch, what that man needs is a…’

  ‘You make me sound like a train wreck,’ I said. ‘What’s the turn-up?’

  ‘Thirty-two,’ she said. ‘Even fewer than last year. Frankly, I don’t know why they bother. We’ll be lucky to cover costs.’

  ‘It’s not the money, it’s the participation,’ I reminded her, as we started up the stairs. ‘The only role left for rank-and-file Labor Party members is attending crappy fund-raisers that don’t raise any funds.’

  We found the party faithful seated at two long tables in the upstairs dining room, tucking into antipasto and forming themselves into teams for the trivia challenge.

  The lighting was harsher than downstairs, there were no flowers and the tablecloths were paper. But Tony’s special price included complimentary garlic bread and adequate quantities of wine and beer, so nobody was complaining.

  I knew almost everybody in the room. They were the bedrock of the local membership. Handers-out of how-to-vote cards and veterans of a thousand pointless meetings. Sentimentali
sts and failed opportunists. A retired tool-maker and his librarian wife. Three schoolteachers and a nurse. A kid so young he thought the White Australia Policy was an ironic marketing push for a new laundry detergent. I shook a few hands, patted some cardiganed backs, kissed some cheeks. Then Ayisha handed me a list of questions.

  ‘Good evening, friends and comrades.’

  Jeers of amiable derision erupted.

  ‘Let’s begin with an easy one. For ten points, in what year was the shearers’ strike that led to the foundation of the Australian Labor Party?’

  ‘Point of procedure,’ shouted somebody up the back.

  By ten o’clock we were done. The questions were asked, the jokes shared, the raffle drawn, $235 raised for the collective coffers. For the thousandth time, the outrages of the current administration were reprised. I recited the party line that we’d fight our way back to power at the next election, but I didn’t believe it and neither did the troops. Our last years in government were a shambles. We just had to take our lumps and wait for the tide to turn. In the meantime, all we could do was gnash our teeth, rend our garments and commiserate with each other over spaghetti con vongole and Caterers Blend coffee.

  As soon as decency permitted, I split.

  Back downstairs, the clamour of a hundred diners was bouncing off the walls. Staff flitted between tables, trays laden. There was no sign of Rita. I asked the barman if Tony was in. He pointed his bow tie towards the kitchen door. ‘Office,’ he said. ‘Better knock.’

  Beyond the kitchen was a greasy-floored alley stacked with drums of cooking oil and cartons of tinned tomatoes. ‘Private,’ said the peel-and-stick sign on the door past the staff washroom. I gave a brisk rap.

  ‘Come,’ came the command. If Tony was doing any handling, he was doing it very lightly.

  I opened the door a fraction and peered though the gap. The office was a windowless cubicle, its every vertical surface layered with pieces of paper. Price lists, invoices, booking sheets, postcards, staff rosters, suppliers’ phone numbers, fish identification charts, health department notices, a calendar with a scene of Mt Vesuvius. The horizontal surfaces were cluttered with ring-binders, ledgers, clipboards and phone books.