by Kim Westwood
I wedge the ampoule back in its slot then match up the two halves of the polyshell. The seal is a crude job, the EHg logo burred and indistinct. There’s no way C&C would do such a botch job.
Gail speaks in an angry undertone. ‘The buyer, Savannah Rose, is a long-standing customer of mine. Some guy tried to sell her this outside her place of business. She paid him for it so she could show it to me and ask if I’d stooped to selling my stuff on the street. Then she opened it. She thought I’d crossed over to the Dark Side.’ Gail turns her fierce gaze on me. ‘She owns the Shangri-La on Madams Row. I’ll set up a meeting for you. I also want you to go back to Fishermans Bend — with Anwar this time.’
Anwar is Gail’s distribution manager, and one of her most trusted friends.
Gail shifts forward in her seat. ‘There’ll be more where this came from. The question is, how much more? EHg already has its scouts out, ready to whisk the stuff off the street as soon as it lands. Meanwhile, we need to find out where they’ve set up shop — and my information says Barrow Road.’ She flicks a short, unvarnished fingernail against the shell on the table. ‘If that doesn’t net us anything, we’ll search every factory and warehouse at Fishermans Bend.’
My heart sinks. Several large blocks, several large buildings to a block. ‘That’s a lot of buildings.’
‘I know,’ she replies. ‘But if we don’t find the tail of this monster and twist it hard, business will be going belly up very soon.’
And going with it will be my cosy flat, its impossible-to-replace privacy, even its spiky desert landscaping, all beyond the means of someone unemployed. Gone will be the safe place for my cat, and my ability to feed and protect the both of us. Demoralised, I think of Meg’s not-so-subtle job offer, then feel instantly guilty. My boss’s rival had accidentally tapped into my weakest spot: fear of Nitro being taken away by the pet exterminators.
Gail refixes the curtain sash, and I follow her out of the alcove.
‘There’s an APV excursion Friday, but I could start surveillance with Anwar tonight if you want,’ I tell her.
‘I want,’ she says.
5
Evenings, Madams Row glimmers, a bastion of sin, the ruby-studded thoroughfare a ward against the moral privations of the city. Reds and pinks soften brick and cobble and wash a diffuse light onto the pavements, while business shingles promise all kinds of comfort, a seeker’s hidden pleasures. I’m not reticent to admit at times I’ve been that seeker, loneliness and unrequited love a potent mix for any transgressive.
The area has undergone a transformation since the madams took it over; but there are no pimps or bouncers outside chaser-lit doors, and no jiggling body parts and garish signs advertising Girls Girls Girls. Instead, the precinct’s sensibilities are tuned to those of a different century — how it might have been, for instance, inside the walled pleasure quarters of the Oiran — and its business owners are as respected in their modern-day realm as the Athenian hetaerae were. (Fair to say, this is a fanciful connection to a past more mythological than historical, but it’s one I like to conjure, and ironic that it’s taken a pandemic and a splinter of the Christian Right to provide the circumstances of change.)
Those working in the sex and escort industry have ever been at the mercy of pimps and ‘benefactors’, but here it’s the madams who hold the reins of power. Politically astute, they’ve wrought a secret agreement with Melbourne City Council to register their businesses as ‘guesthouses’, and stay in operation as long as they never admit to what they really do. This succeeds thanks to the variety of services they offer those challenged by infertility and impotence, while their contributions to the municipal coffers provide enough of a prop-up for the city’s struggling economy that even the moral crusaders among the people’s elected representatives have hesitated to curtail such a large and reliable source of income. Just don’t mention it to the wowsers.
I walk slowly, savouring the atmosphere. This is the time of lull, the transit into night, and it’s my favourite, even though a slight tinge of melancholy accompanies the gradual cloaking of daytime preoccupations. For me, the twilight will always carry an alluring air of freedom.
The Shangri-La is a three-storey building halfway down the Row, its shingle expertly swaged metal, lit from within. A crimson door and welcome mat hide in the recesses of a tiled portico, the lanky geraniums in the window boxes each side stretching for a rare glimpse of sun. The door’s security grille, shut fast in the off hours, has been swung wide, the bordello open for business. The brass knocker on the door is two entwined bodies. I grasp their various parts and bang.
Rudolph Valentino opens the door — or, at least, someone who looks very like him. He seems to know already who I am, and graciously ushers me in. Steering me away from the client parlour to my right, he takes me left into a reception area. Minimalist and assured, it could be the lobby of a boutique hotel. A Rothko print graces one wall: two wads of colour slit midway by a third.
I’m gestured to a voluminous couch beside a low table, its vase of oriental lilies wafting a pungent — and expensive — sweetness into the air. As I stare at the Rothko, imagining a distant sea in the midway strip, Savannah Rose arrives through a door behind the reception desk.
Her name had thrown me off track. I’d expected a blonde prairie girl, but stretching her many-braceleted arm towards me is a sultry, aristocratic Egyptian.
‘Gail sends her regards,’ I tell her as we shake hands.
‘Gail is always welcome at the Shangri-La,’ she replies, and smiles a glorious smile.
Briefly I wonder how welcome, how often. If I were Gail, it would be as often as possible.
Savannah and Rudolph exchange a look of tacit understanding, then she leads me out of the room past the Rothko. I pause just long enough to realise it’s not a print, and stare in new amaze at my hostess’s seductively clad back.
We enter another ground-floor room decked out in more opulent style. It reminds me of a Moroccan salon with its gilt-edged mirrors and lights caged in metal filigree, the plush ceiling-to-floor drapes in a rather visceral shade of red no doubt hiding what would be disillusioning views. Against one wall is a wooden cabinet with a carved latticework front, its shelves arranged with tantalising items: leather, silicon, metal. I glance over them, feeling too constrained to look properly; but they remain in my peripheral vision, beckoning.
Savannah gestures to two day couches set on a small riser against adjacent walls, their ornately carved ends meeting rather intimately in the corner. Naked bodies again. As we settle into velvet cushions, they release the scent of cinnamon and orange. Fabrics swirl rich colour, and I feel mildly opiated.
The beautiful man from reception brings us drinks on a tray, setting them down on the low table between us. I watch his smooth departure. Rudolph, eat your heart out.
‘Travis makes a mean mint julep,’ Savannah says as I pick up my drink.
The glass is frosty cold, and its contents taste so good I want to slurp them down. Savannah, on the other hand, sips with seamless etiquette, taking the opportunity to observe me over her glass. I hope I’m measuring up, but feel awkward being treated as visiting royalty when I’m dressed like the paid assassin: head to toe in basic black for the all-night stake-out with Anwar.
I place my glass back on the coaster protecting the table’s polished inlay, and launch straight in. ‘Tell me about the guy selling on your doorstep.’
Savannah leans back into the cushions and sighs. Her bracelets clink softly.
‘He was a string bean with bling who stank of cheap aftershave — the sort who used to pimp in this area before we saw them off. He was also wired. A tic in one eye and lots of unpleasant teeth-grinding. Whatever was running through his system made him pretty careless, and he wasn’t trying to hide his wares. In fact, he was waving the stuff around, showing it off.’
The whole thing sounds like a taunt, a message sent to the heart of Gail’s distribution territory that she’s being set up fo
r a fall. And why wouldn’t a competitor want to knock EHg and its sole distributor off a coveted perch?
My thoughts swing to Mojo Meg and the exchange I’d witnessed in the speakeasy. But as battle-hardened and ruthless as Meg is, this kind of attack is anathema to the moral code she shares with all the businesses that satellite around the Glory Hole and its diverse clientele. To shoot a chink in the armour of one Ethical ultimately weakens them all, and they know it, especially when there are others in the game courting very different friends: bent NF politicians in bed with the hormone farms, Neighbourly Watch racketeers ‘protecting’ the Non-ethicals for a cut of their profits, and an army of parasitic dealers flogging a cocktail of addictives in their hormone mixes.
Savannah continues. ‘First I was incensed someone could hawk their wares so brazenly right outside my door, then worried when I saw the logo on the polyshells. I paid the asking price so I could take one to Gail and find out what was going on. The guy seemed so blasé, as if he knew someone had his back …’ She muses awhile, then says, ‘Those slimy lowlifes don’t usually feel so safe in here.’
I know what she’s referring to. These days the madams are a formidable force with their own systems of protection. The first is a private security firm, aptly dubbed the ‘Red Quarter militia’ for its uncompromising efficiency. The second is an impressive visitors list that includes a bevy of NF politicians and Neighbourly Watch card-carriers — and, no doubt, a correspondingly impressive collection of incriminating photos kept in a vault somewhere as surety against their clients’ unendearing capacity to turn with the political tide.
I listen as she describes breaking open the polyshell. By then she’d decided it was stolen goods. Of course, on the first whiff she knew it to be entirely animal … She lapses into silence.
I wonder how much kit the street seller had managed to foist on the unsuspecting before he got to the Shangri-La. Clearly he was an expendable, and by now will have taken his reward and bored back into the understoreys of this sorry city to ingest it, plenty of others to do his employer’s dirty work for a handful of pills or bag of powder. But with four other Ethicals distributing in the city area, why did they go for EHg? Was it a chanced-upon opportunity, or a more personal link none of us has sussed yet?
Savannah leads me down a central hallway — all doors politely closed — to the front entrance. I resist the urge to make a quick detour through reception to visit the Rothko one more time. I’ve never been within kissing distance of an original.
‘Give my greetings to Gail,’ she says, adding, ‘You’d be welcome here too, anytime …’ Her demeanour is cool and professional, but her eyes are smouldery, inviting.
The heat rises in me, just a little, before something starts up a frantic internal flapping of hands against the dangers of the flame. If I were unattached, I’d be more than charmed: I’d be tempted. But right now I’m a one-girl genderbender, and that girl happens to be Savannah’s well-paid electrician.
‘I’m honoured,’ I say, and step out the red door.
My agreed pick-up with Anwar is at the bottom of Benedict Street, opposite the Southern Cross train station renamed Station of the Cross. He swings open the van’s passenger door and I lever myself up inside. Glancing across, I see he’s dressed in his usual: a neatly pressed suit. He looks like an office worker going to his daily nine-to-five, whereas I look more like a cat burglar in my black joggers, black pants and zip-up jacket. For the second time this evening — but for an entirely different reason — I feel style challenged, even if it’s due to a lifelong resolution to never wear anything I can’t run like hell in.
Unlike the spruce white Cute’n’Cuddly delivery vehicles, this van is rusty and battered, as if on its last few clunking kilometres before a final parking space in the wrecker’s yard. But that’s just for show. Behind the blistered patina of cheaply tinted windows it’s fitted out for comfort, and the nice new SEC motor under its mouldering bonnet whirrs as quietly as a beetle’s wings.
We negotiate the nightmare of detours that’s the perpetually unfinished roadworks at the end of Saviour Street then cross the river into Port Melbourne. At the city end of Barrow Road, Anwar pulls onto the verge and kills the lights, and we sit there while the van’s engine flutters silkily, its clever hybrid design a reminder of human ingenuity amid so many mistakes.
The streetscape ahead is a chiaroscuro of shadowy recesses and glimmering surfaces lit by moon, nothing stirring above the layers of industrial dirt. I remind myself it’s early yet for Fishermans Bend. Nothing happens here till after midnight.
We ease into gear and inch forward, tyres crackling on broken glass.
The industrial park is set out on an unfinished grid, many of its streets petering into dead ends, waiting for the extensions and development that never came. Several roads lead left off Barrow as it heads towards the Angels Gate Bridge. We do a slow crawl to the cul-de-sac then park with our backs to the water and wait, our eyes fixed on the wreckage across the road that was once one of the swishest drug factories in town.
I scan the misshapen buildings doubtfully. ‘Gail’s sure they’re doing business around here …’ I let the sentence hang.
‘She is,’ says Anwar.
My eyes are drawn to the plastic Donald Duck figure stuck on the dashboard, its head bobbing gently on a spring. Surely it’s a piece of frivolousness not reflective of Anwar’s restrained style. But then, what do I really know of him?
I breach the silence again. ‘Where’d you get the van from?’
‘The confiscated vehicles compound on Atonement Street.’
I shoot a look sideways. Last I heard, the compound and the police headquarters next to it had been torched by two of their own on a steroids rampage.
‘They had a fire sale,’ he says, deadpan. It’s the closest thing to a joke I’ve ever heard from him.
Anwar is small and unprepossessing, with an almost surreal equanimity. That level of calm is, ironically, disconcerting to be around at first; but I’ve shared overnight vigils with him before and have become used to the lack of chit-chat, the long silences. No chance of any personal intimacies accidentally escaping here. What little I know of his life has been pieced together from other sources, the scars on his arms enough to silence questions out of mere curiosity.
The child of asylum seekers, at twelve years old he saw the rest of his family drown in international waters just off the Lucky Country. The residue of grief that must be there he covers well. He was put in a detention centre until the government of the day finally conceded to the human rights lobbyists and let the survivors of the sunken fishing vessel become Australian citizens instead of keeping them in a stateless limbo. Still, Anwar could have gone into adulthood an angry man, or broken-spirited and weighted with a victim’s despair; instead he developed a stepped-back relationship with the world, an invisible buffer against the vicissitudes of life.
The only person this reticence doesn’t apply to is Gail. As long as I’ve known them, she and Anwar have been close, no one else she trusts more. That trust is clearly mutual.
I push back in my seat to unbend my too-long legs and place my feet on the dash beside Donald. Anwar fishes in a duffle bag and passes me his thermos. Hot chocolate. I’m grateful — and mildly guilty that I hadn’t organised anything to share with him for the long haul.
‘Moon’s close to full,’ he observes.
‘All trades tonight,’ I agree.
With no artificial light of any sort, Fishermans Bend is a preferred location to barter contraband. In moonlight it also becomes a playground for the drag racers, who command the wide empty streets with their illegal souped-up rides, racing each other without lights on. I think of Ferguson’s paint factory, and wonder if its upstairs office will be visited tonight.
After several minutes, no movement in the shadows opposite, Anwar puts on his overcoat and I pocket my can of mace. We lock the van and walk carefully over to the EHg building. Behind us, choppy planes of ink-bla
ck water shine like freshly poured tar, and waves slop under the lone wooden pier, nudging at its mooring bollards. A regular ferry service used to stop here, and in happier times there’d be a row of hopefuls casting their lines into the not-so-clean waters of the bay. Unfortunately, the seafood caught in the Yarra Basin lost its appeal once it was discovered that the mercury levels in the fish had reached percentages high enough for folk to start filling their own thermometers.
Anwar leads and I follow, our torch beams flicking across the broken architecture. I’m glad not to be searching here alone.
We enter the rear of the building, passing glass-divided labs with aisles of benchtops and shattered sinks, then the powder-preparation rooms, their ransacked containment cabinets all doors open. Beyond that is office space, the equipment long gone and nothing of interest.
It’s the same at NatureCure, so we move on to BioSyn. There we find three people sprawled semicomatose in a corner and rudely give ourselves permission to rifle through their stash. But it’s not any stuff marked with EHg’s logo, just some brandless feel-good-then-die crap laced with God-knows-what gut-rotting, brain-sizzling impurities. We hand it back and leave them moaning incoherencies in their grotty corner.
On our return recce of Barrow Road and the business parks behind it, we stop several times to peer through windows and try locked doors, and once to investigate a movement between buildings that turns out to be two people grinding their pelvises into each other against a wall. We even swing by the paint factory, shining a light on its front entrance to check for the flag — not up. There’s nothing anywhere to suggest the presence of a packaging operation or distribution site.
Our last stop is the Ponds on Reserve Road. Several vehicles are already in the picnic parking area, none of them what you’d call flash, so ours fits right in. I grab a blanket from the back of the van. Not exactly the height of sartorial elegance, but who cares on a park bench? Time to sit and see what’s on offer.