The Disappearances of Madalena Grimaldi

by Marele Day

  I moved away from the desk and started following him round. ‘How long ago?’

  ‘How long ago what?’ he said, his mind completely back to the task in hand.

  ‘How long ago did Shakespeare work here?’

  ‘Ooh, let’s see now.’ He pulled the mop through the wringer. ‘Two, three years.’

  ‘Do you still see him?’

  ‘No. I reckon he lost interest. He just dropped off. They often do. No commitment,’ he said disparagingly.

  ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  ‘Not really. He used to walk to work so I assume he lived round here somewhere.’ With a quick flourish he finished the reception area. ‘Ask them,’ he said, meaning the women at the desk. ‘It must be on the records somewhere. Excuse us.’ Off he went to plough other pastures.

  I returned to the desk. Presumably the women had overheard most of the conversation. ‘Could you tell me his address?’

  "Fraid not,’ said the first woman. ‘We can’t give out that sort of information about staff members, volunteers or otherwise. We do about clients—we have to give addresses to police and Social Security, so we figure, why not family members, members of the public. But I’m sorry, not with staff.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s been a client at some stage,’ cajoled. ‘Could you do it on that basis?’

  She smiled. ‘If you’d like to leave your name and address, perhaps we can pass it on. That’s the best I can do,’ she said regretfully.

  It wasn’t the best they could do. ‘Look,’ I said, presenting her with an alternative, ‘you don’t have to tell me the address but could you at least tell me if he is on your records so I know this isn’t all a wild goose chase?’ I stood there, feet firmly planted on the ground. I may have refused to stay last night but this morning they couldn’t get rid of me.

  ‘Well …’ She brought out another ledger from under the desk.

  What was it with all these ledgers? We were living in the Information Age, didn’t they have all this on computers, databases? She was shaking her head. ‘I’m sorry, he doesn’t appear to be on our books.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I said. I felt like seizing the book out of her hands and looking through it myself. I mean, they did have trouble making out my name in the Proclaim register.

  ‘We get so many volunteers through here,’ she explained. ‘Clients who dry out, are full of good intentions. They work here for a couple of days then they’re back drinking again. I mean, we’d have someone like Stan on the books,’ she said, referring to the cleaner, ‘because he’s been a regular, but I’m afraid we have no record of your father.’

  I wrote my name and phone number on a piece of paper. I could have given them my business card but this wasn’t business, it was personal. And knowing I was a private investigator would only complicate things. ‘If you hear anything, could you let me know?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I walked towards the corridor. ‘I’ll just say goodbye to Stan,’ I said and disappeared before anyone could call me back. I found him in a room marked Laundry. ‘Hi,’ I said, holding my hand out to him, ‘I’m Claudia. Guy … Shakespeare’s daughter.’

  He wiped his hand down his trousers. ‘Pleased to meet you, Claudia.’

  ‘I’ve left my number at the desk. If you happen to run into him, or you see anyone who knows him, can you let them know there’s a message for him here?’

  ‘No worries,’ he said.

  I walked out into the streets of Surry Hills again. If he was here two or three years ago, he could still be here now. Within walking distance of Swanton Lodge. I could walk in ever-increasing circles from where I was standing right now and doorknock every residence in the area.

  There weren’t many residences around the Lodge, it was businesses, rag trade premises, a few Chinese clubs, secondhand books and music stores. Perhaps I could just walk around the area, I was bound to run into him. I headed up Campbell Street, crossed over Crown. Before I knew it I was up behind Taylor Square. I walked through a back alley full of crumbling little houses on one side and the garbage from Oxford Street restaurants on the other.

  Taylor Square had always had its coterie of homeless men despite the trendy cafes springing up around it. Cafes with that blotchy paintwork that cost the earth and could have been done for nothing by a five year old left alone with a box of paints on a wet afternoon. The cafes also had bentwood chairs and tables on the footpath to cater for the long hot summer. Sitting at the tables were elegantly pale-skinned people wearing flimsy dresses, singlets with deep armholes, big socks and workboots, talking about art galleries and eight millimetre movies. No-one seemed to be talking about the smoke in the air. In doorways between the cafes lay men who showed absolutely no interest in any kind of conversation at all.

  There were ways of finding out where people lived other than knocking on every door and wandering round the streets. Social Security. He was on it once, he may still be on it.

  Bernie was my Motor Registry contact, he’d been slipping me bits of information over the years and in return I’d been slipping him bits of money. In fact I think I must have paid for the renovations on his house.

  ‘G’day, Bernie. It’s Claudia.’ Bernie went through his usual routine of trying to chat me up and I went through my usual routine of asking about his wife. Then we got down to business. ‘You wouldn’t know anyone in Social Security, would you, someone interested in augmenting their disposable income?’

  ‘I might do,’ said Bernie. ‘Depends what you want done.’

  ‘I’ve got a name, I need an address. Last known address. And it’ll probably be sickness benefits,’ I added.

  ‘OK, I’ll see what I can do,’ Bernie said. ‘It’ll have to be money up front for this one.’ Between ourselves, Bernie and I had gotten to the stage where prompt payment didn’t matter. Often I didn’t pay him till after I had billed the client. Payment to Bernie was part of what is euphemistically known as expenses.

  ‘I’ll get a quote,’ Bernie suggested.

  ‘I don’t need a quote,’ I said. ‘I want the job done, whatever it takes. I know the person in question was drawing Social Security in 1985, the search can start there. I want a current address and anything else on record. I’ll pay the going rate. Plus I suppose you’ll be wanting a small commission.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bernie, ‘you know how it is trying to put a kid through private school.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re doing it tough, Bernie.’

  We worked out the nasty business of payment then I gave him the name. For the first time in his life, wise-cracking Bernie was stuck for words. ‘He’s a relative?’ he asked tentatively.

  ‘Father.’ Bernie was a mate but he wasn’t a friend and I didn’t feel any compunction to go into the details. ‘I’d like it as soon as possible, Bern.’

  ‘It’s already done,’ he said. It must have shaken him because he signed off without his usual ‘cop-u-lator’.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The bushfires had reached Sydney. By the time I got back to the pub everyone was talking about it. ‘City Under Siege’ read the headlines. Eight hundred kilometres of New South Wales coastline was burning, from the Queensland border down to Bateman’s Bay. Sydney was in the middle of it. The leafy North Shore suburbs were ablaze, as were the suburbs to the south. At the beginning of the week there were forty fires, now there were 148. Four lives had been lost, homes destroyed and thousands of people were being evacuated. Already a hundred million dollars worth of insurance was being claimed. It wouldn’t take long before this figure would more than double. ‘The oven door of Hell opened’, began one article as the hot, blistering, north-west winds, uncommon in this season, whipped the fires on. Now you could smell it on the air. The fire was no longer limited to the bush on the periphery of the city but racing up its veins as well.

  In the south a fireball had jumped the Woronora River and swept through Como and Jannali. I thought of Rosa in Lugarno. All that was separating Como from
Lugarno was the Georges River. I’d stood talking to her on her old timber jetty jutting into the Georges River. A fireball couldn’t jump a river as wide as that. Could it?

  News of the bushfires occupied almost all the newspaper space, eclipsing all else. So I almost missed a small paragraph at the end of the In Brief section. A decomposing body had been discovered in the back of vacant premises in Leichhardt. I probably would have read it then promptly forgotten about it except that the premises were on Parramatta Road. I remembered the ‘To Let’ signs on my way to La Giardinera. It had to be one of them. I wondered whether the body was already there the day I walked by.

  I took the newspaper upstairs with me, thinking about the effect heat might have had on the rate of decomposition. One would imagine that a body would decompose quickly because of the heat. However this heat was unusually dry. It seemed an irony, the giant tornedo of fire engulfing the city while at the calm centre of it, one lone body lay decomposing.

  I woke the next morning to the sound of the phone ringing. I got to it just before the recorded message took over. It was Brian. Immediately I felt guilty. Mina had told me yesterday that he wanted to speak to me and I’d completely forgotten about it.

  He’d run a check on Grimaldi as I’d asked him to. He was going to call with the results of that but now something far more interesting had cropped up. Would I like to drop by and see him? He felt like getting out of the office and away from all this bushfire business for five minutes. Perhaps we could meet in a cool dark corner of the Rose and Crown.

  I didn’t go there often but Brian did. It was the place where I’d first met up with him after not having seen him since I was a child. The pub closest to his work, a civilised sort of establishment that used to have little bowls of nuts at the bar for the customers. I remember Brian telling me a few months ago that the place had ‘gone off’. Instead of nuts they’d started serving potato skins.

  Nevertheless, when I arrived at the Rose and Crown he was sitting at his table with a bowl of potato skins in front of him. He had his jacket off, sleeves rolled up and tie loosened. Beside him was an orange juice in a long glass chock-full of ice. I ordered a mineral water. ‘Have a skin,’ he said, offering me the bowl.

  ‘Thought you preferred nuts,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Well, you’ve got to roll with the punches,’ he said philosophically.

  I took a skin and dipped it into the sour cream and chive dip. Overhead a fan was moving the air around, such a nice change from the creepy cold of airconditioning.

  Brian had a briefcase on a chair beside him. It was new. ‘Wedding present,’ he said when he saw me looking at it. ‘Don’t know how I got by all these years without one,’ he said with a touch of irony.

  ‘So what did you find on Grimaldi?’

  ‘I had a company search done. He owns a few properties around Leichhardt but he’s small fry. Has some interesting friends though.’

  ‘Fabio?’

  ‘That name didn’t crop up. I mean, really, Claudia, without a surname it’s pretty hard going.’

  I took a sip of my mineral water, letting this gentle admonition wash over me.

  Brian reeled off a few names, most of them Italian. ‘You’ve probably never heard of any of them,’ Brian said. ‘They don’t get their names in the papers. And because they’re Italian I don’t want you thinking they’re Mafia. Let’s call it multiculturalism. The old Anglo-Celtic network is no longer the only game in town. It’s mostly white collar but if you have a close look at that collar you’ll find grime. It seems Grimaldi’s job is to wash away some of that grime.

  ‘A couple of years ago he was going broke. The height of the recession, it was happening everywhere. But instead of declaring bankrupt, his fortunes suddenly improved. Now I don’t know all this for certain, but based on the company links, a bit of hearsay, and what I know goes on elsewhere, I think someone must have helped him out. In return for favours that were fairly small at the time but gradually got bigger.’

  ‘Very interesting,’ I remarked.

  ‘Ah, but you haven’t seen the most interesting bit.’

  Brian flicked the briefcase open and took out a photocopy in a clear plastic protector. ‘There was a small news item they ran yesterday, but you probably didn’t even notice it.’

  ‘The body in Leichhardt,’ I said.

  Brian was impressed.

  ‘I always read the small print,’ I told him.

  ‘Well, the premises belonged to Grimaldi. And this was found on the body.’ He lay the photocopy out in front of me. ‘It’s from one of the police photos.’

  The background was dark and grainy, but in the foreground was a square of white. A book of matches, and diagonally across it La Giardinera. I recognised it immediately. There’d been one just like it sitting in the unused ashtray the day I had lunch there.

  ‘I believe the police have questioned Mr Grimaldi but not well enough to find something to hold him on.’

  ‘Who was the deceased?’

  ‘Not yet established beyond a shadow of a doubt but the contender is a Leichhardt man whose neighbour phoned the police about a week ago. She was complaining about his dog running loose round the neighbourhood. But forensic thinks he’s been dead twelve, fourteen days, maybe longer, allowing for the dry weather that’s probably slowed down the process of decomposition slightly.’ If the time of death were pushed back a day or two, it would coincide precisely with the day Madalena disappeared.

  ‘If Grimaldi was involved he wouldn’t have left evidence that could implicate him, surely,’ I pointed out.

  ‘You wouldn’t think so. Maybe someone wanted it to look that way, or maybe the guy’s not very smart. Do you know him?’

  ‘Not well enough to give him an IQ test.’

  If I had money on it, I’d be backing Fabio. This could easily have been one of his ‘odd jobs’. Question is, who did he do the job for? As well as working for Grimaldi, Fabio was working for his uncle, whoever that may be. ‘Do you have a list of Grimaldi’s business associates?’

  ‘Indirectly." I’ve got the company directors. You can work it out from there. What’s the job, Claudia, you cleaning up Leichhardt?’

  ‘Not unless I have to. I’m looking for a girl who’s gone missing. Grimaldi’s daughter. I’m hoping the father’s business interests have nothing to do with it, but as you know, nothing is ever simple.’

  ‘Kidnap?’

  ‘No.’ I finished off the mineral water. ‘Your blood’s worth bottling, Brian. Thanks.’ I got up to go.

  ‘When are you coming round for dinner?’

  ‘You’re getting to sound just like Mina,’ I said. ‘Look, things are rather busy at the moment. I don’t want to make an arrangement and have to break it.’

  ‘Found any of your father’s mates, yet?’ he asked innocently. So Janet had phoned.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Has it helped?’

  ‘Yes. It’s helped.’

  ‘I don’t suppose she said anything, but your mother’s worried about you.’

  ‘Isn’t she always?’ I laughed it off.

  If Brian hadn’t been married to my mother, I would have openly discussed my search for Guy with him. But it was all different now. I wanted to talk to him about it but it was no longer appropriate. It would just make things awkward. If I passed on what I now knew about Guy, the cosy little life Brian was building with Mina would crash to the ground.

  When I got outside to the panel van the top of it was covered in black grit. Chunks of cinders falling from the sky. I called Lugarno but there was no answer. I don’t know whether Rosa had an answering machine, but the phone rang on and on.

  I drove to Leichhardt. La Giardinera was closed. The door locked and the closed sign showing. I went round the back. There were no cars in the yard. I went up the stairs to find that door locked too. I put my ear to the door. Inside it was quiet as a grave.

  On my way back to the pub I stopped at Danny’s. T
he Daimler was sitting there, like a cat waiting for its owner to come home. Giving me the cold shoulder. I’d been away too long and it was annoyed. That wouldn’t last long. They always come round in the end. I walked over to it. The paint job had been done. Danny was right—you could tell.

  Danny came out of the workshop wiping his hands on a rag. ‘It’s the best I could do,’ he apologised.

  ‘I love it,’ I said. ‘In fact, why don’t you do one down the other side as well?’

  Danny couldn’t believe it. ‘Mate. This beautiful piece of machinery. What are you trying to do, turn it into a hoon’s car?’

  ‘What about dark green and reddish brown? Federation colours. That’d go well on a European car.’

  ‘You can’t be serious.’

  I don’t know what it was but I was suddenly looking at the Daimler in a different way. I felt strangely liberated. Why the hell did it have to look exactly the way it was when it came out of the factory or wherever it was Daimlers come from? I put this to Danny.

  He gave me a look as if the question was so preposterous it didn’t even call for an answer. ‘It’s a Daimler, not a Monaro. You know how many Daimlers this age there are in Australia? You could count them on one hand—even with a couple of fingers amputated. I won’t do it for you, Claudia. That’s that.’

  Putting a stripe down the other side would have to look like the lesser of two evils. ‘You got any of that paint left?’ I asked.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘It’s going to look odd down one side only, isn’t it?’

  ‘OK, OK. I’ll do the stripe. But that’s all. No more talk of painting it two colours, all right?’

  ‘Agreed. So I can keep the van a bit longer?’

  ‘You don’t want the LTD or the Saab? They’re faster.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere in a hurry. The van’s fine.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  I’m sure Danny thought I’d gone mad. I was beginning to wonder about it myself. It was just a stage I was going through, the extreme behaviour of the last few days. A couple of nights’ quality sleep and I’d be back to normal.