by Jon Cleary
Clements told him about the advice from the Victorian police. “He went up to Canberra to see Tony Lango and Arnold Debbs.”
“Debbs? The MP? You sure?”
“The Feds gave us their word on it,” said Clements. “After I got the advice from Melbourne, I rang the Feds in Canberra half an hour ago.”
Danforth ran the ham of his hand over his short-back-and-sides, scratching for a coherent thought. “That’s gunna complicate things. What’ve you got in mind?”
“Russ and I are going to see Debbs this morning,” said Malone.
“Well, don’t lean on him too hard. You know what these bloody politicians are like.” He looked at Chew and Ludke. “How are you two going?”
“I think it’s moved out of our areas,” said Jack Chew; it was difficult to tell whether he was relieved or disappointed. “I don’t think we’re going to find out much more than we know now, I mean about Harry Gardner and Terry Sugar. That right, Hans?”
“I think the next act is going to be here on Scobie’s turf,” said Ludke.
“Act?” said Danforth. “What d’you think this is, some sorta bloody musical comedy?”
“An opera,” said Malone. “It won’t be over till the fat lady sings.”
“What fat lady?”
We’d better stop baiting him, Malone thought, or he’s going to turn nasty. “It’s just a saying, Harry. I’ve been listening to Sebastian Waldorf.”
When Danforth had gone, Clements said, “I thought the fat lady sang after American baseball games?”
“Maybe she does, I dunno. Let’s go and see Arnold Debbs and see if he has anything to sing. Thanks for coming in, Jack, Hans. Russ’ll let you know how we get on. We’ll see you at Jim Knoble’s funeral.”
Malone and Clements went down to the garage. As they got into their usual unmarked car Malone said, “Did you tell Debbs why we wanted to see him?”
“I didn’t speak to him, I spoke to his secretary. I said we were voters who wanted to make a donation to the Party, one that we didn’t want to trust to the post.”
Ah, Russ, how could I have doubted you?
They drove out to Debbs’ electoral office, less than two miles from the heart of the city. It was an area of light industry, rows of old one-storeyed terrace cottages, half a dozen towering Housing Commission blocks of flats, rundown stores, a seedy-looking pub and a scrubby park where four winos lay under a tree discussing the state of the nation as viewed from the bottom of the heap. Debbs’ electoral office was in a single-fronted shop, one of six facing the park. On one side of it was a butcher’s shop and on the other a fruiterer’s, each of them advertising in rough lettering the bargains of the week. On the window of Debbs’ store was: Arnold Debbs, Your Federal Member.
“Is he the bargain of the week?” said Clements as he and Malone got out of the car.
“Not in my book.”
There were half a dozen people sitting or standing in the front section of the shop when the two detectives entered. They were all battlers, some of them looking as if they had already lost the battle and surrendered. Malone looked at a young mother, thin and poorly dressed, a baby in her arms and a two-year-old clutching her knee; he turned away, unable to stand the misery and hopelessness in her pinched, already ageing face.
Those waiting looked up curiously at the newcomers and Malone saw the instant stiffening of four of them; this was an area where the natives recognized a policeman by his smell. The thin young man behind the reception table, his bony face sallow from overwork and too much time spent in party rooms, looked with the same suspicion as the constituents at the two policemen.
Clements introduced himself and Malone, mentioning nothing about the earlier phone call. “We’d like ten minutes of Mr. Debbs’ time.”
“I’m afraid Mr. Debbs is busy. These people have been waiting, some of them more than an hour.”
That’s right, Malone thought, make the cops out to be gatecrashing bastards who don’t care for the rights of others. He turned to the voters. “We’re sorry to butt in, we’re Labour like you—” He hadn’t voted formally in ten years and he was pretty sure that Clements had the same outlook towards political parties. “Blame our visit on the Federal government. You know what the Liberals are like.”
One or two of the voters nodded, too-bloody-right-they-knew-what-the-bloody-Libs-were-like; but a couple of young men leaning against the wall just sneered. They knew what bloody cops were like.
The secretary stood up, tall and gangling. If he was aiming some day for pre-selection as a candidate, he had everything, in these days of charisma above talent, against him. “I’ll see if Mr. Debbs is free.”
He was back in ten seconds, ushering a Greek woman out ahead of him. She glared at Malone and Clements and didn’t move out of their way as the two detectives stepped round her and followed the secretary into the back room of the shop. He introduced them and went out, closing the door behind him.
The office was a small room papered with posters of Debbs and party promises. There was also a poster of Penelope, as if to remind the voters that the Debbs represented them also at State level. Malone wondered if the Debbs had had any children, whether they would have installed a son or daughter in the local town hall to look after local government. But ambition had made the Debbs too busy to have children.
Debbs didn’t look surprised to have the police visiting him; in this electorate, with his mix of constituents, it wasn’t unusual. He sat behind a table on which were half a dozen files, some letters waiting to be signed and a small metal stand of foreign flags grouped around the Australian flag, a salute to multiculturism. Malone further wondered if a new flag was added every time a constituent of a new nationality moved into the electorate. The secretary outside looked as if he would have the nose of an immigration officer.
“Inspector Malone—” Debbs rose and put out his hand; then he offered it to Clements. It was a politician’s hand, moving of its own accord. “It must be important, to bring you way out here.”
Way out here: two miles at the most. But, Malone guessed, Debbs probably felt no more at home here in this area than those voters who had recently arrived from Greece or Italy or the Lebanon.
“We shan’t take up too much of your time, Mr. Debbs—” Malone went for the throat. “Do you know a man named Joseph Gotti?”
“One of my constituents? The name doesn’t ring a bell. I’m not the sort of politician who remembers everyone’s name.” Debbs smiled, being frank.
“No, he’s not one of your voters. He came from Melbourne, came up to see you in Canberra a week or two ago. An Italian, smallish build, young. A professional hitman.” Malone delivered the last like a professional hitman, right between the eyes.
Debbs didn’t blink, but the pale blue eyes abruptly hardened, became thin blue screens behind which his real eyes had retreated. “Oh, him. I didn’t take to him at all. But a hitman? You exaggerate, Inspector, surely? No, you don’t, I can see that. Where is he now?”
“In the City Morgue. I shot him the other night.” Another professional hit right between the eyes; but again Debbs didn’t blink. “It was in the papers.”
“Of course! I heard it on the radio—but I didn’t take any notice of the man’s name. Who was he shooting at? You?”
“We think it was your friend Brian Boru O’Brien.”
For a moment the real eyes were pressed against the blue screen, showing venom. “Did Mr. O’Brien send you to see me?”
“No. Why did Gotti come to see you, Mr. Debbs?”
Debbs sat back in his chair. He wore an expensive shirt and tie under the cheap dark blue woollen cardigan, part of his disguise when he came to honour the locals with his presence. This was a safe Labour seat; he would never be voted out, no matter how he treated the natives. But this area was not really his scene, though he had been born not five miles from here. Like his wife he was not really Labour, if the truth was ever to come out; both of them could just as easily have been Li
beral or even National, the conservative rural party, though the latter possibility would have made even the farmers’ sheep laugh. They had chosen Labour because the party talent at that time had been at an all-time low and they had known they could easily beat the competition for pre-selection as a candidate. They lived in Strathfield, a solid middle-class suburb halfway between their respective electorates, and looked upon these duty visits to their parishes as penance for sacrificing their real self-interest. The cardigan, worn to impress the locals of his humble origin, felt like a hair shirt every time he put it on.
“Inspector, for a month there I was acting-Shadow Minister for Immigration. Gotti came to see me about an uncle of his who wants to emigrate from Italy. I told him I could do nothing for him myself, but to see his local member, Nick Odskirt. When you’re in Opposition there’s not much one can do,” he said sadly, but sad for himself not the voters.
“Did Gotti give any references, say who’d recommended he come and see you?”
“No, he just turned up. He seemed a young man with a lot of initiative. I mean, to come all the way up from Melbourne.”
“Did he say why he didn’t come up to see the Minister?”
“Yes, he told me he’d been given the brush-off. He said he was a Labour voter. A hitman!” He shook the big white head, as if hitmen were unknown in the Labour Party.
Clements was bursting to smile; instead, he said, “I have a note from our informants, Mr. Debbs, that a week before, Gotti came up to Canberra and went to see Tony Lango. Did he mention Lango as a reference?”
Debbs frowned, as if trying to remember another voter’s name. Then he raised his eyebrows; they went up the teak-coloured face like white grubs. “You mean Tony Lango, the one mentioned in the Crime Authority report in the newspapers? The Mafia man? Good God, no! If he’d mentioned him, I’d have had him thrown out at once. Was he an associate of Lango’s? Good Christ, and he was asking me to sponsor one of his uncles! The uncle could have been a don or a godfather or whatever they call them!”
Malone recognized a blank wall, even one hung with a cardigan. He stood up. “Righto, we won’t take up any more of your time, Mr. Debbs. The voters outside have probably got more problems than we have. Can we get you here if we think of anything else?”
“No, I’m going back to Canberra right after lunch. I’ll be there for the next fortnight, Parliament is in session.” He stood up, held out his hand; the screen slid away from his eyes, they looked almost friendly. “Why was Gotti trying to kill my friend Mr. O’Brien?”
“We don’t know,” said Malone. “Do you, Russ?”
“Haven’t a clue,” said Clements, giving Debbs back his hand. “But something’ll turn up. It always does.”
The two detectives went out through the outer office, Malone now apologizing to the now considerably larger waiting crowd. “Great feller, Mr. Debbs. He’ll do everything he can for you. Vote for him every time.” He looked at the secretary. “Right?”
“Every time,” said the secretary, waiting for his MP to retire or die so that he could put his own name up for pre-selection.
Out on the footpath there were more people waiting. Malone was surprised at the patience on their faces, as if waiting was a lifelong habit. These were the unlucky ones in the Lucky Country; he felt helpless and angry just looking at them. He knew there would be precious little help inside for them, Debbs had his own problems.
The two policemen got into their car. Across in the park the winos were weaving and stumbling around on the brown, patchy grass, playing touch football with a sweet sherry bottle. The fruiterer came out of his shop and approached the car.
“You police?” He was a Greek, but he had the local nose. “Why you don’t arrest them bums? They a bloody nuisance.”
“They’re just playing football,” said Malone. “I thought they were South Sydney practising for the grand final.”
“I bet you barrack for them silvertails, Manly,” said the fruiterer, sour as one of his own lemons.
As they drove away Clements said, “What d’you reckon about Debbs?”
“He’s a liar, every slice of him. Now we’ve got to find out why.” V
“They’ve traced young Gotti to me,” said Arnold Debbs, cardigan discarded, now at ease again in his English-tailored suit; or as at ease as he could be in view of what he now knew. “They’ve traced him to you, too, Tony.”
Tony Lango edged a little closer to the log fire in the big stone fireplace; he always felt the cold, was never comfortable except at the height of summer. He was as wide as he was tall, not all the bulk of him fat. When he had first come to Australia thirty years ago from Calabria he had earned money as a part-time wrestler around the clubs and on late night television; now he was a full-time farmer and drug dealer. He had a broad swarthy face, a huge nose overhanging a thick moustache and deceptively merry eyes; children loved him, as they had Hitler. He had three sons and four daughters and seventeen grandchildren whom he doted on; and he had been responsible for the deaths of hundreds of other children, to none of whom he ever gave a thought. Late in life he had set his eye on respectability, but he had left his run too late. He would have been amused to learn that he and O’Brien had had similar ideas.
“How d’you know all this?”
“I have a contact.” The contact had given Debbs the information only a few minutes before Malone and Clements had arrived at his office that morning. “It’s reliable, Tony. That’s why I got on to all of you in a hurry.”
He had called the conference as soon as the two detectives had left his office. By chance, all of those he had phoned had been available and now they were all gathered here at the Debbs’ country retreat on the outskirts of Bowral, halfway between Sydney and Goulburn. He and Penelope had bought the thirty acres and the old colonial cottage three years ago, but they had never publicized the purchase and so far, fortunately, no media muckrakers had discovered it. Bowral was a retirement retreat for silvertails and none of the Debbs’ constituents would have looked with favour on their MP’s living the country squire life.
It was not a big house and the room in which the five men sat was small enough for them to fill it. Penelope, an unlikely pioneer type, had furnished it with colonial antiques; there was even a spinning-wheel standing in one corner, though it was useless for spinning lies and promises. There were woollen rugs on the polished floorboards and, appropriately, a print of a local, long-dead bushranger on a wall.
“Where’d you get this Gotti anyway, Tony?” said Leslie Chung. He was in his mid-forties, a refugee from Shanghai via Hong Kong; he was rumoured to be a Triad boss, but Debbs wasn’t sure if that was true. Chung was a jewellery and gem importer and that was all Debbs really knew about him; he doubted if the others in the room knew much more. Chung was balding, slim and always impeccably dressed: his clothes told more about him than his thin, impassive face. He was always polite, but in the manner of a royal executioner: he would bow before cutting off your head. “He wasn’t very efficient, trying to shoot down Mr. O’Brien in front of a crowd of witnesses, including a police inspector.”
“I was the one who recommended him.” Dennis Pelong was the brute in the room, a burly man with a face as blunt and hard as his huge fists. He had come straight from a golf course and Debbs wondered what sort of club would have him as a member. He wore a woollen beanie that made him look pointy-headed and did nothing for his unintelligent looks, a turtleneck sweater and a bulky golf jacket. He looked like an over-the-hill heavyweight just back from a training run. Nobody knew exactly where he came from. Debbs thought there was a streak of the tarbrush in him, but one couldn’t tell whether it was Aborigine, Maori, Tongan or anywhere south of the Equator. He ran one of the biggest drug rings in the country, had an animal ruthlessness about him and Debbs was afraid of him more than of anyone else in the room. “He done some good jobs for me, three or four. Don’t start fucking complaining, Les.”
“I was just remarking, Dennis, not making an i
ssue of it.”
“Yeah, well . . .” Pelong couldn’t stand the Chink, he was so fucking uppity. Pelong was a racist, even towards his own mother, the dark-skinned woman whom he had last seen when he had run away from home on his fourteenth birthday.
“Let’s talk about what we’re gunna do, not what’s been done,” said Jack Aldwych. “We gotta wash out any connection with Gotti. You do anything about that, Arnie?”
Debbs kept his temper, which he never displayed in front of these men, knowing it would only endanger him. He hated being called Arnie; but he would never have chided Jack Aldwych for doing so. Big Jack, as he was called, was the biggest man in this gathering, biggest in physique and in his power. He was in his late sixties, handsome in a coarse, beefy way, with thinning silver hair, shrewd blue eyes that looked kinder than they actually were, and a voice like a gravel chute in full working order. He had a legitimate business empire of a chain of clothing boutiques, half a dozen hotels, real estate holdings and a medium-sized engineering plant that, a joke to those in the know, made safes for trusting businessmen. He had no investment in casinos or night-clubs—“You own one of them,” he had once told Debbs, “you always got the police sniffing around.” He was one of Australia’s ten richest men, but he never figured in any of the lists of the country’s richest. His real wealth, like an iceberg of green slime, was hidden beneath the surface.
“It’s being attended to, Jack. Gotti’s body is being sent back to Melbourne and the file on him will just sort of be put to one side.”
“Just like in Canberra?” said Chung, and all the men, with the exception of Debbs, laughed. They all had minor bureaucracies of their own, but Christ help any mug who put any business to one side, like they did down in Canberra.
Debbs admired and envied the power these men had: it was almost imperial. He aspired to such power, though theirs was based on the uses of evil and he was not, basically, an evil man. All that bound him to them was that they had all been duped by that bastard Brian Boru O’Brien. It was not the amount of money they had been duped of that made them so implacably resolved to kill O’Brien: it was almost petty cash to some of them. It was the knowledge that he could turn out to be the informer who could send them all to prison for years; or, in the case of Jack Aldwych, for the rest of his life. Debbs sometimes wondered why he had introduced O’Brien to them. But hindsight is everyone’s stroke of genius.