by Jon Cleary
II
O’Brien and Waldorf at first did not hit it off together. There were differences in the basic make-up of the two men that prompted a mutual suspicion, more on O’Brien’s part than on Waldorf’s. The former was serious, especially more so now: to have one’s life under threat, to have one’s career and empire falling apart, to be in love with a woman and know their affair had no future: such despair did nothing to lighten the mood of a man who had always been serious about anything he attempted. Waldorf, on the other hand, was apparently all frivolity: though afraid, he played to the threat against his life as if it were another operatic exaggeration; he would have his hand between the soprano’s legs while she stroked him with a dagger. Malone knew within five minutes of bringing Waldorf to the Congress that he had made a mistake. But it would have been a bigger mistake to have left him alone to take care of himself.
“Why the hell did you bring him here?” O’Brien demanded in a fierce whisper. Waldorf had gone into the second bedroom to unpack his two bags, but the bedroom door was open. He was humming to himself and Malone hoped he and O’Brien were not in for a musical fortnight or however long. “Why didn’t you ask me?”
“There wasn’t time.” Malone explained about the phone call to the house at Yowie Bay. “Russ Clements and I went down to see Blizzard’s aunt, down the South Coast. He called her while we were there, then he called Waldorf’s house. He’s getting closer, Brian.”
“Okay, but why bring that guy here? What am I supposed to be running, a communal safe house?”
Malone sighed, giving in. “Righto, I’ll move him as soon’s I can find a place for him. The Department’s going to have to come to the party and provide a safe house for all of us.”
“I’m not moving out of here.”
“You’re getting to be a pain in the arse, Horrie.”
“Don’t call me Horrie!”
“Well, then stop telling me how to do my job!” The humming had stopped in the second bedroom; there was the sound of a drawer being slammed shut, like a pistol shot. “If they take me off this one, you could be stuck with a cop who’ll handle you like some rent-a-crowd demonstrator. I’m in this thing up to my eyeballs, as deep as you or the opera singer inside there—the only thing is I have to catch Blizzard as well as dodge his bullet. All you have to do is keep your bloody head down!”
Malone’s outburst made O’Brien step back a pace. He was interrupted from making a reply by Waldorf’s coming to the bedroom door. “I heard most of that. If I’m in the way, Horrie—”
“For Christ’s sake, stop calling me Horrie!”
All at once, worn out by the whole day, Malone fell down into a chair and started laughing. It wasn’t hysterical laughter, but it sounded like it against his usual dry amusement. The other two men stopped glaring at each other and looked at him as if he had done something totally bizarre, like fainting. Then, Waldorf, the frivolous one, the one with the easiest laugh, began with a smile that quickly volumed into a deep laugh. O’Brien, the odd one out, looked for a moment as if he would turn his back on them and retreat to his bedroom. Then slowly the big wide smile spread across his face. He started to laugh, a distinctive sound that Malone suddenly remembered from the past, as uninhibited as a child’s. He could be ruthless, but there was no malice in him nor petty temper. If there had been, Anita Norval would not have fallen in love with him. The big living-room rippled with laughter, though none of them really had anything to laugh about.
“Okay, you win, Scobie. I’m sorry, Sam—”
“Don’t call me Sam,” said Waldorf, still laughing.
He had got over the shock of the threat on his life quicker than Malone had expected. Once Malone had told him he would have to move out of his house he had acted efficiently and quickly. Miss Vigil, who had evidently brought her bags straight from the airport, expecting overnight lessons, had been sent packing. Waldorf had taken her to another part of the house and two minutes later was back with Malone and Clements.
“She’s taken my car and gone home to her mother. She’s a bit upset.”
“He might follow her,” said Clements. “You didn’t tell her you’d visit her, did you?”
“Well, I—”
“That’s out,” said Malone firmly. “You’ll just have to give her lessons at the Opera House, if you want to see her. Is it serious between you two?”
Waldorf smiled, as if the thought couldn’t be taken seriously. “Nothing’s serious, Scobie, not unless you’re married. She’s a nice girl, but I’m twice her age. My elder boy is only four years younger than she is. She—” Then he stopped, the smile fading. He was one of those who could never help themselves, who always told too much about themselves. It was plain that he was serious about only one thing, his family. And, it seemed, he had lost them. He went on after a moment, “Rosalie will be all right. I shan’t go near her, not till after you’ve caught Blizzard.”
Then he had disappeared again into another part of the house, and come back ten minutes later with two large suitcases, a topcoat, a raincoat, and a suede hat.
“How long are you expecting us to take to nab Blizzard?” said Malone.
Waldorf laughed, looked at the suitcase. “Caruso never went anywhere without a truckload of trunks.”
“But he was a tenor, wasn’t he?”
“That’s true. And as far as I know, no one ever tried to shoot his balls off. I’ll leave one of the bags behind.”
“Bring „em both. Russ will help you carry „em out to the car. I have a bad back and I have the rank.”
“Get stuffed, Inspector,” said Russ and headed for the front door without offering to pick up a bag.
Malone grinned. “You see? Discipline hasn’t changed since you were in the force.”
Driving into the city from Yowie Bay, Malone sat half-turned round in the front seat, looking back. It was a while before Waldorf recognized that he was looking right past him. “Someone following us?”
“Not as far as I can tell. But he followed us down to Minnamook and he must’ve followed us back here to your place. He’s good at it.”
“I’ll lay money he’s already gone home,” said Clements. “He’s made his point for the day. He’s started you sweating. Me, too,” he added, as if what he had said might have sounded insulting. “Do you want me to hang around tonight?”
“No, put your feet up, study your stock market hints. First thing tomorrow, though, get on to the TV stations, borrow all their tapes on the crime scenes and the funerals, if any. Call in Jack Chew and Hans Ludke. The three of you go through those tapes, pick out any faces you see more than once and trace them.”
“I’ll get the tapes delivered this evening. We can’t take our time on this one.”
“No.” He read the concern for himself in Clements’ voice. “Thanks.”
Closer to the city Waldorf said, “What’s Brian Boru O’Brien like? I can barely remember him as Horrie O’Brien.”
“He’s likeable,” said Malone. “Ten per cent of the time.”
“Five per cent,” said Clements.
But now, half an hour after Waldorf’s arrival, the two men at last looked as if they might be getting closer to compatibility. “Do you have to sing tonight?” O’Brien said.
“No, tomorrow night. We give the throat a rest two or three nights a week. Union rules.”
O’Brien looked at his watch. “It’s early, but let’s go down for dinner. We’ll go to the Gold Room.” He saw Malone’s dubious look. “He’s not going to poison the whole restaurant to get at us. We’ll be safe.”
“I wasn’t thinking about that. The police per diem doesn’t run to eating in the Gold Room—I’ve seen their prices. Does the Congress have a McDonald’s?”
“I’ll pick up the tab.”
“I’ll split it with you,” said Waldorf.
“No.” O’Brien’s emphasis was a little hard-edged. He had that self-conscious aggression that self-made men have who always pick up the tab, as if
to allow anyone else to do it would topple them from the peak they had achieved. “It’s on me.”
Malone, the comparatively poor man in the room, watched this small encounter; he guessed that Waldorf was also a man always first to reach for the bill. He felt embarrassed, even though, as Lisa said, she always had to take the fishhooks out of his pockets before she sent his suits to the cleaner’s. But, the practical cop, he raised a point that had nothing to do with picking up the tab: “Do we take one of the security fellers down with us?”
“Do we need to?” said O’Brien. “I’m tired of being haunted by those guys.”
“Better them than Blizzard.”
“We’ll take the risk,” said O’Brien, as if the decision was his alone. The phone rang and he picked it up. “Hullo? . . . Just a moment.”
He looked hard at Malone and the latter waited for him to say that the nursery rhyme was about to be sung again. “Blizzard?”
O’Brien frowned; then shook his head. “No. I’ll take it on the other phone. Hang up for me, will you? It’s my friend.”
He went into the bedroom and closed the door. Malone hung up the phone and looked at Waldorf. “He has a friend he wants kept out of this.”
“Who wouldn’t? In a way I’m glad my family are in Germany. I’ll call „em tonight when we come back from dinner. The kids will be home from school for lunch. They’re going to special summer classes to learn German. That’s what they’re going to grow up to be—Germans.”
“Do you speak German?”
Waldorf nodded. “But I always thought I’d die an Australian. Maybe I will.”
“Forget that sort of talk!” Malone was surprised at the sharpness in his own voice.
Waldorf nodded again, all the light frivolity gone from his manner. “Sure, it’s stupid to talk like that. Sorry. But I read the papers while I was in the bedroom, about what happened here last night. You were lucky.”
“Last night’s thing had nothing to do with Blizzard.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“No, I’ll leave that to Brian. They were after him, not me.”
He had called Lisa and the children in Noosa as soon as he had returned to the hotel late this afternoon. Then he had called Claire at Holy Spirit. She had been told by the day girls at school what had happened last night at the hotel, that his name had been mentioned, and she had sounded worried and all at once very young again. He had done his best to reassure her, but when he had got off the phone he had felt as if he had somehow betrayed her and Maureen and Tom. It was illogical to think so, he had only been doing his job, taking risks that were part of it. But logic has nothing to do with love: if it did, mathematicians would all be Don Juans or doting fathers. He wondered what Waldorf would tell his family in Germany, how much he would explain to them.
O’Brien was on the phone to Anita Norval for twenty minutes. During that time Waldorf went into the second bedroom again to change. When he came out he looked all set for a fashion commercial, in a double-breasted navy blazer that had more gold buttons than could be found on a fleet of admirals, a pale blue cashmere turtleneck sweater and cavalry twill trousers with creases so sharp they could have sliced bread. O’Brien’s door then opened and he, too, had changed: into a double-breasted navy blazer with more gold buttons etc. Malone, the standard-bearer for the unfashionable, grinned.
“How about that? I’m going to dinner with Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” His mother had never read him nursery stories, but he had heard Lisa reading them to the children. It struck him all of a sudden that he had never heard her reading anything about green bottles standing on a wall, though he had known that rhyme as a child.
O’Brien went back into his room, came out in a grey sports jacket. “That better?”
The mood between the three of them had lightened; O’Brien’s mood, in particular, had improved considerably. The conversation with Anita had been the next best thing to holding her in his arms. It had been the one bright spot in his whole day.
“How did things go with the NCSC?” said Malone on the way down in the lift.
O’Brien shook his head. “They’re holding my head under water. I’m struggling.”
“I’ve been reading about your troubles,” said Waldorf diffidently. “Does it help to wish you luck?”
“Thanks, but not much. I need more than luck.”
The Congress hotel was owned by some Japanese yakuza, who had managed to buy reputable front men here in Australia; the major hotels were being taken over by foreigners, as if they had come to the country, sampled the service and decided it should be better. The developer, a true-blue Aussie, who had built the Congress, had piously swallowed his xenophobia, grabbed the proffered millions and retired to the Queensland Gold Coast. There he had bought a penthouse in a high-rise development owned by more Japanese. All the horses on the merry-go-round carried money, but the bets were in yen.
The Gold Room had not been designed for serious eaters. The food was just reasonable though elegantly served, but the restaurant was meant to be a showcase where the performers paid to be seen. It was all gold-flecked mirrors, gold frames and gold carpet, the monotony relieved only by the white linen and the green marble pillars along each wall; green and gold were the national colours and Malone wondered if the room had been designed by an Olympic coach who had gone mad on steroids. The waiters, mostly Asian, wore gold epaulettes that made them look like Ruritanian generals; the plate and glassware were rimmed with gold. It was enough to turn over any sensitive stomach, especially that of any commodities dealer in today’s falling gold market. Malone noted that most of the diners were the hotel’s foreign guests, Japanese, Americans and the odd bod from the Middle East. The natives, who had flocked here before the Crash of „87, were conspicuous by their absence. Once sheeplike in their rush to be seen at the “in” places, they were no longer willing to be fleeced. Malone looked at the gold-trimmed menu and figured that his per diem would have bought a bowl of soup.
The three men ordered; then Waldorf said, “I wonder what Blizzard’s eating tonight?” Malone and O’Brien looked at him coldly and he smiled and went on, “We haven’t talked about him since the three of us got together. Here’s a man trying to kill me and I don’t know a damn thing about him.”
“We know bugger-all ourselves,” said Malone, “except that when he was young he was a crack shot. He still is, apparently.”
“I’ve been racking my brains to remember anything, anything at all about him, and all I’ve come up with is that he was a nut about movies. He told me once that he’d only discovered them when he came to Sydney. Didn’t they have cinemas down where he came from, Minnamook or whatever it is?”
“He’d have had to go into Wollongong, I guess. What sort of movies was he interested in? Horror films?”
“Not as far as I remember. Detective movies, cop shows. He asked me to go with him once, we went to see a private eye movie with Paul Newman, Harpoon something like that—”
“Harper,” said O’Brien, a film buff, “I saw it, not with him, though.”
“Remember there used to be a TV set in the recreation room? He’d get up and sneak down there and watch the Midnight Movie. I saw him there one night, all the lights out and him sitting practically in the set, with the sound turned down. He told me once he’d seen Dick Powell five times in Murder, My Sweet.”
“That was from a Raymond Chandler book, Farewell, My Lovely. They made it again in the seventies with Mitchum.”
“Was that what he wanted to be? A private eye?”
“Maybe,” said Malone. “His aunt told me he was always reading Raymond Chandler and other mystery writers. But there was no work for private eyes in Australia in those days, we didn’t know anything about industrial espionage then. It was always just divorce work. He’d have wanted more than just peeping through a bedroom window.”
“The thing that always puzzled me,” said Waldorf, who appeared to remember more of Blizzard than the other two co
uld, “was that, in his own quiet way, he was anything but dumb. Why the hell did he need to cheat in that exam?”
“Unless he wanted to come top of the class,” said O’Brien, who understood ambition. “If you came top of the class, you never got posted to the bush.”
Their first course was brought by an Oriental Ruritanian whose epaulettes looked like sliding off his narrow shoulders. There was pâté de fois gras for Waldorf, with Murrumbidgee truffles, whatever they were; native bush food had lately become a fad, as if all the white citizens were expected to become honorary Aborigines. Malone and O’Brien had oysters; Malone had been abroad only twice in his life and had never tasted anything to compare with the local breed. The main course was served with a flourish that embarrassed Malone, who did not like attention from strangers. Three waiters arrived and gold covers were lifted high from the dishes and Malone waited for them to be clashed together like cymbals. There was duckling à l’orange for Waldorf and steak for O’Brien and Malone. There was a bottle of Leeuwin Estate Chardonnay „84 and one of Grange Hermitage „68. All three had coffee but no dessert, cheese or liqueurs. Malone caught a glimpse of the size of the bill as O’Brien signed it and he heard the fishhooks in his pockets rattle in dismay.
Going back up in the lift Waldorf said, “If you’re doing nothing, would you care to come to the opera tomorrow night? The Magic Flute isn’t hard to take.”
Malone hesitated, then said, “I’ll come. My wife’s had me watch the opera on TV a couple of times.”
“Did you stay awake?” Waldorf recognized a non-aficionado.
“With all that yelling?”
Waldorf laughed. “What about you, Brian?”
“I have a date tomorrow night. Anyhow, I think the soprano might be a bit loud for me. My favourite singer is Peggy Lee, slow and easy.” He saw Malone looking at him. “I was going to tell you about the date. I’ll be okay.”
“You going to take one of the security men with you?”