The Tax Inspector

by Peter Carey

  The Hare Krishna was called Fish. He plugged the telephone in beside the bride dolls’ cabinet and Maria began to create the correct emotional distance between herself and her client who now sat down on a yellow vinyl chair some three metres away and arranged her ashtray and cigarettes on its stuffed arm.

  Maria looked across the room, frowning. If pregnancy had not prevented her, she would have chosen this as the day to wear her black suit.

  She had not been aware there was a call on the line until Fish handed her the telephone and said, without any other preamble, ‘Your office.’ So just as she was steeling herself to threaten Mrs Catchprice, she heard Gia’s voice: ‘I just had a death threat.’

  When Maria heard ‘death threat’ she thought it meant a threat of dismissal because of their activities last night.

  ‘What will they do?’

  ‘What do you think they’ll do? They’re watching my house.’

  ‘They’re watching your house?’

  ‘It was eight o’clock in the damn morning. In the morning. How could he find my name, by eight in the morning, let alone my number? How could he even know who I am?’

  ‘Who is “he”?’

  ‘Wally Fischer.’

  Mrs Catchprice was holding her ashtray, a small replica of a Uniroyal tyre with a glass centre. She was craning her withered neck towards the conversation.

  ‘He called you on the telephone?’

  ‘Not him personally.’

  ‘Gia, darling, please, tell me what happened.’

  ‘The phone rang. I was still in bed. I picked it up. It was a man. He said: “This is Dial-a-Death, you insolent little slag.” He said, “Which day would you like to meet your death? Today? We could just burn your car today. Then you could wait while we decided which day you were going to meet your death.”’

  ‘They’re just scaring you,’ said Maria, but her throat was dry. She had read about Dial-a-Death in a tabloid paper.

  ‘You’re not listening, Maria. They were watching the house.’

  ‘They wouldn’t dare. For God’s sake, you’re a Tax Officer.’

  ‘He said, your slut friend has left. You are alone in the house. It was true: Janet had just left.’

  ‘Have you called the police?’

  ‘The police? Don’t be naïve, Maria. You don’t ring the police about Wally Fischer. He pays the police. He lives up the road from the Rose Bay police station. I’ve got to ring Wally Fischer. I’ve got to apologize.’

  ‘Christ,’ Maria said. ‘I hate Sydney.’

  ‘Maria, I called you for help.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’

  The phone went dead. Maria closed her eyes.

  ‘Everything all right?’ said Mrs Catchprice.

  ‘No,’ said Maria. ‘It’s not.’

  She sat for a moment trying to steady herself. She had failed her friend completely.

  ‘I need those books,’ she told Mrs Catchprice. ‘I need them here right now.’

  ‘I need them too,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’ll be a lot better when I have the books. Please,’ she said. ‘I want to wind up this job today.’

  ‘How nice,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I’m so pleased. There are so many important things I need to ask you.’

  Maria heard herself saying, ‘Mrs Catchprice, my best friend has just received a death threat.’

  36

  Jack Catchprice loved smart women, although to say he ‘loved’ them is to give the impression of hyperbole whereas it understates the matter. He had an obsession with smart women. He had a confusion of the senses, an imbalance in his judgement where smart women were concerned. Their intelligence aroused his sexual interest to a degree that his business associates, men admittedly, found comic as they watched him – slim, athletic, strikingly handsome, with a tanned, golfer’s face and just-in-control curly blond hair, good enough looking to be a film star – go trotting off to Darcy’s or Beppi’s with some clumpy, big-arsed, fat-ankled woman whom he had just met at some seminar and on whom he was lavishing an amusing amount of puppy-dog attention. If he had been a whale he would have beached himself.

  And indeed his sexual radar was somehow confused and his private life was always in chaos as he flip-flopped between these two most obvious types – the bimbos whom he treated badly, and the mostly unattractive geniuses whom he seemed to select from the ranks of those who would despise him – academics, socialists, leaders of consumer action groups.

  It never occurred to him that it might be his own mother who had implanted this passion in him. The parallel was there for him to see if he wished to – in the privacy of the Catchprice home there was never any doubt about who the smart one was meant to be: not Cacka, that was for sure, no matter how many ‘prospects’ he shepherded across the gravel, cooing all the time into their ears. It was Frieda who read books and had opinions. She was the one who was the church-goer, the charity organiser, and – for one brief period – Shire Councillor. These things had more weight – even Cacka gave them more weight – than selling cars to dairy farmers, and yet it would have been repugnant for Jack to imagine that the women he fell in love with were in any way like his mother. He imagined he felt no affection for her, and whether this was true or not, there were betrayals he could not forgive her for. She had been the smart one, the one who read the front page of the papers, but she had let Cacka poison her children while she pretended it was not happening.

  Jack had driven out from the city in an odd, agitated mood – bored, tense, but feeling the sadness that the various roads to Franklin – the F4, the old Route 81, or the earlier Franklin Road – had always brought with them. These roads, on top of each other, beside each other, followed almost exactly the same course. They made the spine of his life and he had driven up and down them for nearly forty years. It was an increasingly drab second-rate landscape – service stations, car yards, drive-in bottle shops and, now, three lanes each way. It was the path he had taken from childhood to adulthood and it always forced some review of his life on him. Its physical desolation, its lack of a single building or street, even one glimpsed in passing, that might suggest beauty or happiness, became like a mould into which his emotions were pressed and he would always arrive in Franklin feeling bleak and empty.

  He would drive back to Sydney very fast, surrounded by the smell of genuine leather, with the Mozart clarinet concerto playing loudly. He left as if Catchprice Motors were a badly tended family grave and he were responsible for its neglect, its crumbling surfaces, its damp mouldy smell, its general decrepitude. And it was true – he was responsible. He had a gift – he could sell, and he had applied it to his own ends, not the family’s. No one ever said a thing about this, but as Jack became richer, the family business sank deeper and deeper into the mud. They could see his betrayal in his expensive cars – which he did not buy from them – and his suits which cost as much as his brother made in a month.

  When his mother called for help, he gave it, instantly, ostentatiously. She called him at nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, in the midst of her second meeting with the Tax Inspector. Even while she whispered into the telephone, Jack was mapping pencilled changes in his appointment book and by a quarter to ten he was on the road. He was meant to somehow ‘send away this Tax woman’ who his mother imagined was going to jail her.

  It was impossible, of course. He could not do it. Indeed, driving out to Franklin was less useful than staying in his office and talking to some good professionals, but Jack was like a politician who must be seen at the site of a disaster – he felt he must be seen to care.

  As for whether he did care or did not care he would have found it hard to know what was the honest answer. He thought his mother dangerous, manipulative, almost paranoid, but he was also the one who sent her the photograph of himself shaking hands with the Premier of the State. He would say he no longer felt affection for her, but he phoned her once or twice a week to t
ell her what building he had bought or sold and whom he had lunch with. If it was true he felt no affection for her, it was equally true that he craved her admiration.

  He was her favourite. He knew it, and he carried a sense of the unjustness of his own favouritism. He thought Mort was more decent, and Cathy certainly more gifted but he was physically lighter, blond-haired, pretty – a McClusky, not a Catchprice.

  The Jaguar had an intermittent fault in the electrics and was, because of this, missing under load. He came down to Franklin more slowly than usual – in forty-five minutes.

  He saw the two salesmen standing under yellow umbrellas in the yard, but did not recognize the blond one as his nephew. He crossed the gravel, self-conscious in his Comme des Garçons suit. He climbed the fire escape which had rotted further since his previous visit.

  In his mother’s living-room, beneath the photograph of himself shaking hands with the Premier of the State, he met the Tax Inspector.

  She was handsome beyond belief. She had a straight back, lovely legs, big black frightened hurt eyes, a chiselled proud nose, and a luxuriant tangle of curling jet-black hair. She was no more than five foot five and she had a great curved belly which he realized, with surprise, he would have loved to hold in both hands.

  ‘You tell Jack,’ his mother told the Tax Inspector. ‘Jack will know what to do.’

  The Tax Inspector told him about the death threat. She sat opposite him at the table. She was upset but she was articulate and considered in the way she assembled the information for him, telling him neither too much nor too little. This impressed him as much as anything else – he was impatient, he demanded that his executives say everything they had to say in documents of one page only.

  He sat opposite her, frowning to hide his happiness. She was a jewel. Here, among the smell of dog pee and damp.

  ‘O.K.,’ he said, when she had finished. ‘There are three ways to fix this. One: your friend does nothing. She’ll get a few more calls and that will probably be that. The crappy part is she has to listen to this creep. It’s upsetting.’

  ‘It’s terrorism,’ said Maria, who was pleasantly surprised to find a Catchprice who was not angry and threatened and who seemed, more importantly, to be in control of his life. In the way he talked he reminded her of a good lawyer.

  ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘So we rule that out as an option. The second option would be to get some help. Someone – I could do it if she liked – would go and find out how to contact Wally Fischer. And then we could arrange for your friend to apologize. Maybe we could get away with a phone call.’

  The Tax Inspector was drawing on the table with her finger.

  ‘It sounds pretty bad, I know, but you can be sure it would work. She doesn’t want to apologize?’ Jack guessed.

  ‘In a flash. I’m the one who thinks she shouldn’t.’

  ‘And she’ll take your advice?’

  ‘Let’s see what the third option is.’

  In fact Jack had no third option to offer her. He had been making it up as he went along. It was a bad habit to specify a number of points. It was a salesman’s habit. Politicians did it too. You said: there are five points. It made you seem in control when you were winging it. People rarely remembered when you only got to four. But this one demanded a third option and he had to find her one. If the friend wouldn’t apologize, he would arrange to have someone telephone Wally Fischer and grovel on the friend’s behalf, impersonate her even – why the hell not? He saw himself drifting into the fuzzy territory on the edge of honesty, but he could not see where else to go. He must fix this for her.

  ‘I have some friends in the police,’ he said. ‘I can maybe arrange for one of them to have a quiet talk to Mr Fischer.’ Actually this was better. He could talk to Moose Chanley in the Gaming Squad. Moose Chanley owed him one. If Moose couldn’t make it sweet with Fischer, he would know someone with whom he had a working relationship. It was no big deal – networking – 98 per cent of property development was networking. He would need to have Moose phone the friend to tell her Dial-a-Death had been called off. Maybe it would be possible to get whichever of Fischer’s thugs who was currently playing the role of Dial-a-Death to phone her and tell her it was off. No, no, no. Take the simplest course.

  ‘Why did you pull that face?’

  ‘I was thinking of Wally Fischer,’ he said.

  He had got himself off the main straight road and on to the boggy side-roads of lies and he had to get back on the hard surface again. This was a woman with a clear and simple sense of right and wrong. You could see this in the nose. It was a damn fine nose. It was chiselled, almost arrogant, but very certain. This was apparent when she rejected the thought of her friend’s apology. She was a moralist. She had guts. She was one of those people whom Jack had always loved, people with such a clear sense of the moral imperatives that they would never find themselves in that grey land where ‘almost right’ fades into the rat-flesh-coloured zone of ‘nearly wrong’, people with a clear sight, sharp white with edges like diamonds, people whom Jack would always be in awe of, would follow a little way, more of a way than his profession or what might appear to be his ‘character’ would allow, people in whom he had always been disappointed and then relieved to discover small personal flaws, lacks, unhappinesses that proved to him that their moral rectitude had not been purchased without a certain human price – this one is lonely, that one impractical, this one poor, that one incapable of a happy sex life.

  He could imagine none of these flaws in Maria, nor did he seek any. The only flaw he could see was that evidence which suggested there could be no intimate relationship between them, not that she was pregnant, but that because she was pregnant she was, although she wore no ring, married.

  One step at a time.

  He said: ‘Let me make some phone calls.’

  Once he had the death threats cancelled it was only a very small step to having her agree to have dinner with him. He knew this was an achievable goal.

  37

  Gino Massaro was a greengrocer from Lakemba. He had a large, hooked nose and little hands. He had soft, lined, yellowish-olive skin which was creased around his eyes and cheeks. In his own shop, he was a funny man. He spun like a bottom-heavy top with a black belt above his bulging stomach. He would shadow-box with the men (duck, weave, biff), have sweets for the children, flirt with the women (‘How you goin’ darling, when you going to marry me?’) in a way his exquisite ugliness made quite permissible. In his shop he showed confidence, competence – hell – success. He had two kids at university. He spoke Italian, Australian, a little Egyptian. He had his name painted on the side of a new Red Toyota Hi-Lux ute – G. Massaro, Lakemba, Tare 1 tonne.

  No one knew the Toyota was financed on four years at $620 per month. He also had a serious overdraft, and a weakening trade situation caused mainly by competition from the Lebanese – not one shop, three, and all the bastards related to each other – who were staying open until nine at night and all day Sunday as well. He also had a ten-year-old white Commodore with flaky paint and black carbon deposits above the exhaust pipe. On the Tuesday afternoon when he parked this vehicle in front of Catchprice Motors he had just spent $375 on the transmission and there was a folded piece of yellow paper on the passenger seat – a $935 quote for redoing the big end. He also carried – not on paper, in his head – four separate valuations for the Commodore from yards between here and Lakemba, every one of which told him that the car was not worth what he owed on it.

  He parked on the service road, behind a yellow Cherry-picker crane. He touched the St Christopher on his dashboard, closed his eyes, and turned off the engine. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and today it didn’t – the engine knocked and farted violently before it became still. Two salesmen in the yard stood watching him. Behind them was a red Holden Barina. He did not like the red or the flashy mag wheels. He did not like it that his son would say it was a woman’s car, but it was the right price range.

  H
e was not a fool. He knew he should prepare the Commodore, have it wax-polished, detailed, present it as well as if it were apples at five dollars a kilo. But who had time? Every second he was away from the shop he lost money. He picked the pieces of paper off the seat, and the ice-cream carton off the floor and thrust them into the side pocket.

  Then he got out of the car, locked it, and walked into the car yard. With fruit he was a different man, not like this.

  He was already on the gravel when he saw the face. He would have retraced his steps, but somehow he couldn’t. The blond salesman was smiling at him in a weird kind of way, and Gino was smiling back.

  Gino knew that his angelic smiling face was a lie, that he secretly and silently mocked his big nose, his fat arse, his car blowing too much smoke. But now he had come this far and he was somehow caught and caressed by the smile which made him feel that he did not care if he was despised and he had no will or even desire to turn back. It was the feeling you had with a whore. You knew it was not true, but you pretended it was. He thought: this kid with the yellow umbrella would rob me if I let him. But he could not turn back and so he walked across the gravel towards him. Lines of plastic bunting hung across the yard. They made a noise like wings flapping in a cage.

  38

  ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do,’ the one called Benny said. ‘First thing, I’m going to give you five grand for your old car, smoke or no smoke.’

  They were all sitting in the red Barina with the engine on and the air-conditioner running. The one called Benny was in the front seat, with his hand resting on Gino’s headrest. The other one, Sam, was in the back. This one didn’t say too much.

  Gino sat with his hands on the wheel feeling the cool quiet air blasting on his face. He liked it in there. He liked the smell, the dark green digits glowing out of the black leather dark. He had that feeling, of surrender and luxury, like when you were in an expensive barber’s shop. As long as they cut and snipped and combed he did not care what sort of haircut he was getting, only how it felt, like in that whore house in Surry Hills when he paid them to rub his toes afterwards – $100 an hour to have your toes rubbed. Those were the days – a crazy man.