Good Money

by J. M. Green

  ‘One of your ex-clients?’ Ben asked. He inspected the damage. ‘Rank amateur.’

  I had stone cold sludge in my veins. The book. Cesarelli. The money. The execution-style hit. The deadness. ‘I definitely think you should stay here tonight.’

  Ben grinned. ‘Good call. I’ll protect you.’

  14

  IN THE bleary-eyed, semi-consciousness of morning, I staggered to the bathroom and did a quick wee. My head was heavy and I had chills. Virus season had taken its usual quota of victims, including, it seemed, me. So be it, I thought. If I was sick I could now indulge the raging self-pity that was welling up inside me. I sat on the toilet, idly pulling toilet paper from the roll. Only last night I’d had my moment on the roof with Brophy. That moment was a sweet centre in my world of shite. But any hope of seeing him again was irrevocably ruined. Sabotaged by the Hardy idiot gene. The main thing now was to let it disappear, to close the door and keep moving. I took the last sheet and groaned. Now I had to replace the toilet roll. The cupboard under the sink was empty. Thinking I would have to go without, I saw a stack of new rolls on the shelf above the toilet. I had to hand it to Ben, he was a domestic mastermind.

  In the lounge room, his sleeping form snored softly under a pile of blankets on the sofa. Caffeine cravings led me to a packet of ground coffee in the fridge. I managed to assemble Ben’s espresso pot, added a goodly dose of grounds, and set it on the stove. As I waited I noticed that something was different about the world outside, the noise level. Then it clicked: Saturday. The week was over. A blast of steam sputtered from the coffee machine. I poured the contents into a mug and had a cautious sip. It tasted — what was the word? — harmful. I tipped it down the sink and dressed for a Melbourne winter: jeans, thick socks, boots, spencer, shirt, jumper, second jumper, coat, beanie, scarf, and gloves.

  At Buffy’s, I ordered a double-strength flat white.

  ‘Double? That’s four shots.’

  ‘Yep. Defibrillator in a cup. A coffee that could raise the dead.’

  Lucas worked the machine. ‘Got a plan?’

  I looked at his face for signs of intelligence. I found only psoriasis. But then, oh right, the dead. ‘Should they actually rise?’

  Lucas tilted his head. Naturally that’s what he had meant.

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it,’ I said airily. Oh, I had a plan all right. Who didn’t? Who could watch a zombie apocalypse unfold on the screen without musing on the folly of the survivors and what they should have done instead? For me, it was the storing of tinned food, bottled water, spare batteries — and head for home. No zombie would be caught dead in Woolburn.

  He looked alarmed. ‘You should so make a plan. With, like, an upstairs safe room. They have trouble with stairs.’

  Well, der. ‘Right.’

  ‘I don’t say this to everyone, but you’re welcome to hide out here.’

  I had stairs of my own. Three flights. But it was the thought that warmed me. ‘Thank you, Lucas. But I think you should know the juice has gone out of the zombie motif. It used to be a metaphor for dead-eyed consumerism and now it’s just another fucking product. Soon there’ll be a zombie Barbie, with little bite marks.’

  Lucas winced. ‘Yeah, maybe, but don’t say it like that.’

  I picked up a copy of The Saturday Age — a reconstituted forest — and flicked through its pages. No Finchley. No Clayton Brodtmann. On the back page, there was serious concern for St Kilda’s newest recruit’s anterior cruciate ligament. Scans were being conducted on the valuable knee. What was it with knees? There’s an argument against ‘intelligent design’ right there.

  I walked up the driveway to my apartment building replaying the Brophy moment in my head. The lovely offer of a painting, the touch of his hand on my arm, the heat inside me on the cold, cold night. I hadn’t experienced heat like that for a very long time. I reminded myself that, thanks to Ben, I needed to forget about Brophy. The damage had been done. That didn’t mean, however, that it wasn’t opportune to lecture Ben — a reprimand was overdue. But the Mazda was not in the parking space, and when I got upstairs I saw the blankets were folded up on sofa, and the coffee mess had been cleared away. There was no note. Good riddance.

  I made myself a breakfast of leftover tofu curry and scanned the paper, in a bored and disengaged fashion, until a headline caught my attention: VELDT ART PRIZE ANNOUNCED.

  Mrs Mathilde Van Zyl, wife of South African billionaire Merritt Van Zyl, is hosting a cocktail party tonight at the Dragon Bar to announce the launch of the Veldt Art Prize …

  Wife? So Crystal was wrong. Van Zyl was not a ‘fucking poofta’, just a snappy dresser. I read on.

  … ‘This prize is my way of giving something back,’ she said today. The annual prize, which is valued at $100,000, will be awarded to an artist whose work best captures the Australian mood. Mathilde will be on the judging panel for the inaugural year. The Van Zyl’s have agreed to fund the prize for the next ten years. Clayton Brodtmann, a long-time friend of the family, said that Mathilde and Merritt have a long-standing interest in modern Australian art. They opened the Albatross Gallery in 2011. Mathilde is reported to have once said ‘I am completely comfortable about wealth. But one must be thankful to everybody who helped one get it.’

  I had a momentary fantasy of Brophy and I showing up, arm in arm, schmoozing and sipping mojitos. I was taller, prettier, with nicer hair, and I was chatting to some insider and putting in a good word for Brophy. Oh, a girl could dream. A spasm of chills shook me. My headache was worse, my throat was sore, and my nose was running. I took a handful of analgesics and started the shower. Standing under the hot water, I allowed self-pity to descend into sobs.

  An hour later I was on the couch in my pyjamas watching a DVD of The Return of the King on my defective television. The Lord of the Rings was my comfort food, my hot Milo. I needed to hear Howard Shore’s soaring strains, witness Viggo’s weary intensity. Halfway in, my ringtone interrupted everything — the ID was Mrs Chol so I relented and swiped the screen. ‘Hey Mrs Chol, are you okay?’

  ‘No. I am frightened … It is Mabor. He is mad.’

  ‘Mad how?’ I was alarmed by how alarmed she was.

  ‘Crazy mad, looking through my kitchen for something to use as a weapon.’

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘I cannot do that.’

  ‘Would you like me to come over?’

  ‘Please, thank you, Stella.’

  A gale blew down Union Road. It cut through to my skin and I shivered involuntarily as I waited for a tram — but I didn’t care. It was then I realised I had passed into virus euphoria. Though my head was filled with ick, my mind had vacated my diseased body. I stared like a glassy-eyed zombie, in an unblinking, almost pleasant trance.

  When the tram arrived it was packed with schoolgirls being corralled, somewhat unsuccessfully, by a weary teacher. I wondered what event had required them to wear their uniforms on the weekend, and a long weekend at that, the opening of the ski season. They were the kind of schoolgirls with hundred-dollar hairdos, fake tan, perfect teeth. The kind who went skiing. In Europe. I felt sure that if I could read the motto on the breast pocket of their ugly green blazers, it would read Pecuniosus Meretricus. Sluts with money.

  A text alert distracted me and I checked my phone: Library items overdue. One of the schoolgirls spied my phone and made a comment to her friend. Hysterics ensued. Teenage girls were the purest evil. They all got off, thankfully, and I watched them being herded towards the showgrounds.

  I recalled that, at a similar age, my class had been taken on an excursion to Melbourne. When I think of it now, it was an exercise in teacher abuse, twenty-five high school students screaming, yelling, and laughing for four hours on a bus. It was the first time I saw Anguish in the National Gallery. A ewe standing in the snow, her lamb de
ad on the ground before her. Crows gathered, too numerous, hopelessly outnumbering her. Schenck clawed shamelessly at the viewer’s heart, the white snow, the red blood from the mouth of the lamb. Those damn black crows.

  While Mrs Chol made coffee, I stood at the window and watched a gigantic meccano giraffe loading containers onto a waiting ship in Swanson Dock. Assorted shipping vessels were paused in Port Philip Bay. She brought a tray to the low table and honked into a tissue. I tore myself away from the view and sat opposite her. ‘What’s up with Mabor?’

  ‘He was out all night. When he came home this morning, he was so frightened. I had not ever seen him that way. Not even after Adut died. And this morning he was looking around in the kitchen for a knife. He said he needed to protect himself.’

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘I ask him why. But he doesn’t answer. He can’t stop opening the cupboards and drawers. I say there are no knifes in the broom cupboard. And he started to shout at me.’

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘Then he sees his sisters are upset. He sits down, his face is so sad, and his hands are shaking. And …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I say, “what are you afraid of?” And he says, “Mr Funsail.”’

  ‘He’s afraid of Mr Funsail? Who is Mr Funsail?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say more than that. He said that everything was cool when Adut was selling some shards to the teenagers here, the neighbours’ children.’

  Not shards, shard. Ice. ‘Go on.’

  ‘But Mr Funsail wanted Adut to do a different kind of job for him.’

  ‘Mabor told you this?’

  ‘Yes. He said Adut didn’t like that kind of job. So Adut and Mabor went to see that Darren Pickering. Mabor told me there was another man there with him. My boys told them that Adut was out of business. Mabor said everyone agreed, they even shook hands and Mabor came home. But Adut stayed out and he never came home.’

  In another flat somewhere, a child was crying. Doors slammed. I felt jittery — and it wasn’t the fever. I’d have to tell Phuong that Adut had been reporting to Clacker, who was probably dealing ice too. It was crystal bloody clear that the murder of Adut Chol was not an opportunistic robbery gone wrong. It was also clear that when Mabor was interviewed by the police, he left out some very important details. ‘You have to convince Mabor to talk to the police.’

  ‘No. I’ve tried. He won’t. He says even they cannot protect him.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I don’t know. He left after I telephoned you.’

  I put my hand under my jaw, touched the distended glands. ‘I have a contact in the police — a very nice woman, completely trustworthy.’

  Mrs Chol looked at the carpet. ‘No.’

  I wracked my brains for other options. ‘You need legal advice. Go to Legal Aid and get some …’

  Mrs Chol folded her arms. I had seen this move before, determined, proud. It made me want to weep. I went to a sideboard that held sporting trophies and framed family photos. There were a few school portraits of the Chol children. One of Adut and Mabor together. Another of her girls, all with neat corn rows. One was a group shot of an extended family, lots of children cross-legged in front, various women behind them, several tall men at the back.

  ‘What about your brothers?’

  ‘What can they do?’

  ‘Tell Mabor to stay with one of his uncles, with the one in Shepparton, or Swan Hill or wherever. Let him stay there, hang out with his cousins.’

  Mrs Chol was quiet for a moment. ‘Yes. I will call them.’

  I wrapped the scarf around my neck. ‘I hope it works out.’

  On the eleventh-floor landing, I stood for a moment in a little patch of light where the sun was trying to shine. Then I descended in the lift, with fuzz in my head, pain in my limbs, and considered the fact that Clacker was working for Cesarelli. Was Cesarelli calling himself Mr Funsail now? Adut was a loose end — he wanted out, he had incriminating information — so Cesarelli had Adut killed. That would mean his whole conversation with Mabor in the café had been a lie.

  So why string Mabor along?

  Because Cesarelli needed something from him. On the night Adut was killed, Mabor grabbed a bag of Adut’s things and took it out to a waiting car, probably to Cesarelli. Why? Cesarelli knew about Adut’s exercise book, filled with names and dates, and who knows what other highly incriminating information. But Mabor didn’t know which book to look for. Cesarelli would need to keep Mabor on side until he could get hold of it. To Mabor’s face, Cesarelli was pretending to want Clacker dead, and meanwhile he was best mates with the senior counsel for the defence, and probably footing the bill for Clacker’s legal fees.

  I crossed the playground, where children in puffy parkas were playing on the swings. A group of young people, boys and girls, were chatting near the skips and from their midst an airborne bottle flew past me, just missing my head. As real-estate went, the view was first-class, but it was a hell of a place to raise your kids.

  On the tram ride home, I wondered how long Cesarelli had been selling drugs to the residents of those flats. The money I’d acquired that night six years ago could have been his.

  Adut had discovered my secret, but I had no way of knowing if he had used that information. Perhaps Adut had been content to keep quiet until the right moment presented itself to use it for leverage. If he came to me, trying to blackmail me, that was one thing. By telling Cesarelli what I had done, Adut would have scored himself some major brownie points.

  Either way, I was now on the radar of a dangerous criminal. He had sent one of his thugs to break into my flat last night. The man in the thongs, who’d been hanging around Roxburgh Street for the past week — he was probably working for Cesarelli.

  The first time I fired a shotgun at a living thing was when I shot Dad’s dog. The recoil jolted through my arm and shoulder. Dad, workmanlike, threw Marty in the back of the ute, with the ewe carcass and little bits of lamb. He was humming a tune but neither of us was fooled. When we got home, he took his time, butchered and bagged the ewe, chucked it in the big freezer in the small shed, the one next to the plane hangar. Food for the dogs. Then he buried Marty. And locked the rifle on a bracket in the shed. The dog had attacked a sheep, it couldn’t be trusted. It was easily lost, trust.

  I waited until I was home before I rang Phuong on my mobile.

  ‘Sluts with money?’ she said. ‘That’s not funny. Actually, I call that degrading.’

  ‘You are very suited to your job, you know that? Police, that’s perfect for you. Fine, I’ll never mention it again. Now listen, I’ve just come from Mrs Chol’s place. Mabor’s been lying. The business with Clacker? It wasn’t a robbery, it was a set up. I think there’s a connection with Gaetano Cesarelli there.’

  ‘Meet me out the front of your building in fifteen minutes.’

  ‘Wait. What? No.’

  ‘And bring your Department of Justice ID,’ Phuong said, and hung up.

  I stomped around my flat, annoyed with her, with everyone I had ever met, and with some I hadn’t even met yet. And then I saw it: the red, winking eye. I hit play and flopped on the sofa, braced for the sounds of Gothic horror, the voice of Woolburn.

  Stella. Hi. Er. Peter Brophy here. Narcissistic Slacker. I got your number out of the book. Not that many Hardys in Ascot Vale. Ha ha. This isn’t stalking, I’m pretty sure. Um. So. I just was ringing to say ‘hi’. And. I’m sorry I missed you at the party. I don’t know what happened. You left in a hurry. But anyway … if you want … maybe we could —

  The beep cut him off.

  I leapt into the air, fumbled with the machine, nearly deleted it, replayed the message. ‘Maybe we could —’ And once more. ‘Maybe we could —’

  I was bouncing around the room now, not knowing w
hat to do with myself. Chill, I told myself. I took a deep breath, and then put the kettle on. I got out a mug, found an ancient herbal teabag — then I played the message again. Several times. The kettle whistled. I turned it off, poured the water, and began to speculate. I said I liked his paintings. ‘Maybe we could’ might refer to an offer to purchase a painting. I did ask if he had sold any. So, it was a financial transaction he was interested in. But why the halting speech? Nerves? Nervous to ask me for money. It took effort to look me up. He didn’t seem like the hard-sell type. So what type was he? Vision-impaired? But no, he had been drunk. And what of Marigold? God, what a total disaster. What was I getting mixed up in? It was a complete nightmare.

  I stood in the middle of my lounge room with my tea. The DVD was paused. Aragorn’s careworn face was frozen and purple. I knew the scene well, could almost recite the dialogue. In the mountain halls, having followed the Paths of the Dead — Aragorn was surrounded by the oathbreakers, the undead. They were closing in, yet he stood his ground. That measure of courage, I did not have.

  I opened the laptop and googled Peter Brophy. Daggy photos of a long-haired Peter at the old Phillip Institute in Preston, circa 1983. A grainy photo of some inebriated people at the Tote, the caption: Members of Pep Tide and the Chemical Compounds. Peter played drums. Zero Google results for Marigold Brophy. I sipped the tea; it was like drinking hot toothpaste. This shit was never going to ease my suffering. It was time to kick the virus’s arse. Whisky. I checked my watch, my fifteen minutes were up. I picked up my handbag and headed out the door, intending to tell Phuong to drop me at the local bottle shop.

  15

  I WAS standing in Roxburgh Street when a little blue toy car pulled up beside the pine tree. Phuong’s ride sounded like a blender but was equipped with a powerful stereo and numerous drink holders. I hopped in. ‘I’m sick. Take me to whisky.’