by Jon Cleary
“Daniela? I'm Tom's father.”
“I can see the resemblance. The eyes, the widow's peak—” Without moving she was all over him, like a silk rug.
“Come in. Did you get the job? Tom told me—”
“It's mine if I want it. I'll decide tomorrow—”
She turned her back for him to take off her jacket, looked back at him over her shoulder. All of a sudden he wanted to laugh: she was a Late Late Movie fan, she had seen Lana Turner and Lauren Bacall do this. He had always told Tom to find a woman with some mystery to her. Daniela Bonicelli was as mysterious as Marge Simpson. She would be no help at all on the I-Saw case.
Then Lisa, cruising like a destroyer escort, was in the hallway. “Oh, you must be Daniela. Has my husband—” Malone could count the space between the letters—“has he made you welcome? He's gauche around women. Come in and meet the younger men.”
“I'll get some more drinks,” said Malone and went down to the kitchen. A minute or two, then Lisa came in. “What were you expecting? Me to rape her in the hallway?”
“She wouldn't know what rape is. How does Tom get himself involved with girls like her?”
“He's not involved. He's like Maureen—she's one of his toys. I think.”
“How did we raise such libertines? Will you be driving Miss Bonicelli home?”
“Not unless you hold a gun at my head.”
“Fat chance. Kiss me.”
He did and Maureen, in the kitchen doorway, said, “Don't you two ever stop?”
“Only when we're interrupted. Did you bring Neddy here to interrogate me?”
“Come off it, Dad. You know I wouldn't do that. He's a nice guy, he understands family. He's got four brothers and four sisters, his mother was a nun.”
“She must be wishing she'd stayed one. How are Neddy and Jason getting on with Daniela?”
“Boy, she's a bundle, isn't she? Did Tom win her in a raffle? She worked at I-Saw, did she? How well did she know Errol Magee?”
“Why?”
“We had a Four Corners meeting this morning. We're going to do an investigative piece on I- Saw. Who lost money and how much. I might talk to Daniela.”
“Not tonight, you won't,” said Lisa. “Get everyone seated. I'm bringing in the first course.”
“Where do I put everyone?”
“Put all the men in Daniela's lap. That should please her.”
But dinner, as it happened, went off beautifully. When Lisa brought in the dessert Daniela rolled her dark eyes. “Diplomat pudding! My favourite—my mother makes it.”
Lisa warmed to her; or anyway turned off the refrigeration. “Do you like to cook?”
“Love to. I alternate between the kitchen and the gym—it's the only way I can keep my weight down. Errol used to laugh at me—”
“Errol?” Malone couldn't help himself.
“Errol Magee. We lived together for six months.” Then she looked around at the silent watchers. “Have I said something wrong?”
Malone looked down the table at Tom, whose smile was almost a smirk. As if to say, This is why I brought her.
“Not at all,” said Claire. “We're always interested in the rich and famous.”
“Errol?” Daniela had a nice laugh; it shook every rounded inch of her. “He was rich, sure—once. But he was never famous, never wanted to be, he said. He hated being photographed.”
“When did you—er—live with him?” asked Malone, avoiding Lisa's stare from the far end of the table.
“Oh, three years ago, maybe a bit more. Just when things were starting to click for him. Oh, this dessert is fantastic!” She swallowed a mouthful. Then we sort of broke up—”
“But you stayed on at I-Saw?” Tom, also avoiding looking at his mother, put the question.
“Of course. The pay was fabulous and I was worth it.”
Malone had to bite his tongue not to ask what her worth was. He looked along the table at Lisa, who just smiled: she knew what Daniela was worth.
“Those of us who were there early got stock options.” Daniela grimaced; then saw the look on Lisa's face. “Oh no, it's not the dessert! It's fantastic—I'm loving every mouthful. I'll tell my mother about this . . . No, the stock options. One week they were worth eighteen dollars, a month later—” With her spoon she made a sharp downward motion. “That's the story of life in IT, isn't it? Never knowing when to sell.”
“And you feel no resentment at the way things have gone?” It was Claire, the lawyer, who asked the question in Malone's mind.
Daniela put her spoon down on her plate, as if her appetite had suddenly been spoiled. “Yes, we all do. We'd wring Errol's neck if we could find him.”
“Did he have any other girlfriends at I-Saw?” asked Malone, risking his own neck as he avoided Lisa's look. “He had a wife, you know.”
“Did he?” Daniela looked genuinely surprised. “Well, how about him! Yes, he had other girlfriends from I-Saw, but they were just, you know, one-night stands.”
“What an exciting life you modern girls live,” said Lisa and closed the subject; one could almost see her slamming the door on it. “More pudding? Mo, when is Four Corners going to do an investigative piece on TV cookery shows? There were thirty-seven, last time I counted. Cooks are taking over TV, not Murdoch and Packer.”
Malone smiled in resignation at her. She could run a UN peace conference and get peace, even bring order to an Italian or Japanese parliament. He would have to talk to Daniela Bonicelli tomorrow morning.
The phone rang in the hallway and he got up and went out to answer it. It was Clements, sounding dispirited: “I've just got home. We had no luck—Miss Doolan's disappeared. We kept surveillance on the garage for two hours, but there was no sign of her. Okada came down at six-thirty and drove out in a Lexus 400. No sign of the other two Japs. I went upstairs and checked on Kunishima's trading floor. Nobody had seen Nakasone or Tajiri. I think we might have another kidnapping on our hands, mate.”
“So long as it's no worse than that.”
“Who'll pay ransom for her?”
“Maybe they'll be ransom for each other, her and Errol. At the moment, mate, I don't really care. Have you sent everybody home?”
“Everybody but Sheryl and The Rocks girl—Paula? They're spending the night at Magee's apartment, case Kylie decides to come home. But it doesn't look good . . .”
“How's it with Romy?”
“Still chilly. See you tomorrow.”
Malone hung up, checked his notebook, then rang Sheryl Dallen at the Magee apartment. “She come back yet? No? Righto, Sheryl, call her sister, tell—Monica?—to call you if Kylie shows up. Tell her not to panic, that Kylie may have her own plans.”
“Do you think she does?” said Sheryl.
“No,” he said and hung up, suddenly tired. It was not physical weariness, but exhaustion of the spirit. Like Whoever-it-was, he had “seen the future—and it stinks!” Or was it not the future, but the past? He remembered a toy from his childhood, a glass globe with a landscape inside it, that changed from sunlight to darkness as one turned the globe, as if one held in one's hand the prism of life. His seven-year-old mind had grasped none of the message, it was a toy for wonderment, not enlightenment. Only now did he read the message.
The Magee case, in terms of the murder in it, was not a major one. He had experienced much worse and much more dangerous. A strike force was to be set up to handle the Magee kidnapping; Homicide would be a player in it because of the Marcos murder. Yet suddenly he felt weary of it all. Of twenty-five years of other people's crimes, of hatred and cruelty and prejudice and, yes, greed, for power and money. All at once he thought not just of promotion but even of retirement.
Then Claire, on her way to a bedroom to check that Cornelius Junior was still asleep, paused beside him. “You okay, Dad?”
“Does the, y'know, human condition ever get you down?”
She took her time, reading him well. “Sometimes, yes. Jay's mother is coming out of ja
il in six months, maybe a bit more. She'll want to come and see the baby, her grandson. I'll look at her and remember what she did to Jay's father . . . And yet—” She paused, then went on, “I have to give her another chance. For Jay's sake and maybe young Con's.”
He looked at her with love. She and Maureen and Tom, even Lisa, had not been in the toy globe; the landscape therein had been unpeopled. Shadows would come and go in the future, just as they had in the globe he had held in his hand all those years ago. “Take care of young Con.”
She looked at him, understanding. “I'll do that. You take care, too.”
II
Darlene Briskin had been waiting outside the hospital when her mother arrived. “God, I was afraid I'd miss you! There are cops inside—” She nodded at the police car and the paddy-wagon parked in the nearby ambulance area. “God, Mum, what else can go wrong? It's been a bloody disaster from the start—”
“How's Pheeny?”
“He's still unconscious, but he'll live, they say. There are six kids in there—”
“Relax, everything's gunna be all right.” Generals need a certain heartlessness; Shirlee had to put a bit of spine into the backs of her troops. “We'll just go in there and talk to the police as if nothing's happened—”
“For Crissake, Mum, everything's happened!”
But Shirlee was already on her way into the hospital. Darlene shrugged, then followed her.
Phoenix was still in intensive care, tubes coming out of him like tentacles feeding on him. His face had not been injured and Darlene, looking at him, thought he looked more innocent and, yes, intelligent than the brother who had irritated her all her life. If only he would stay like that . . . Then the big-shouldered, blunt-faced sergeant approached them. Shirlee was ready for him.
“I understand he was hit while on a pedestrian crossing. Are you charging the driver?”
The sergeant was patient. He had spent thirty-five years dealing with voters who never looked at anything from the other side. “The driver of the vehicle will be charged with having children in the vehicle without seat-belts. But the accident was not her fault. Your son—” He looked at his notebook, blinked as if there was an entry there in Sanskrit—“Phoenix? That his name?”
“Yes. Phoenix Glen Campbell Briskin.”
His face was a mixture of unspoken comment; but he said, “We have witnesses who say the accident was his fault. He stepped off right in front of the Range Rover—”
“He was on a pedestrian crossing.”
“Mum,” said Darlene, “let it lay. Till later—”
“I believe in the law being the law.”
Darlene felt a faint swooning fit and the unconscious Phoenix seemed to wobble his tubes. The sergeant said, “We'll discuss it in a day or two, Mrs. Briskin. In the meantime—”
“In the meantime?” said Darlene, getting in ahead of her mother.
“The parents of the children may sue. The driver of the vehicle and your brother. Everybody's for litigation these days. Don't quote me.” He folded his notebook, put it away. “We'll be in touch. At your residential address or your place down the South Coast? Where?”
“At home,” said Darlene, silently telling her mother to keep her mouth shut. “Hurstville. You've got the address?”
“Oh yes,” said the sergeant. “We're organized.”
When they were alone beside the silent Phoenix, Shirlee said, “You didn't have to take over like that. I'm not a heart-broken mother.”
Darlene tried for the image in her mind, but gave up. “Mum, you were rubbing that sergeant with sandpaper. He was doing his best to be sympathetic—”
“Sympathetic?” Shirlee grunted in disgust. “He was blaming Pheeny for what happened—”
“Mum—” Darlene wanted to belt her mother. “Maybe Pheeny was to blame—”
Shirlee wasn't paying attention. She was going through the plastic bag containing Phoenix's belongings. “What's this? From Centrelink—lavatory attendant? They were sending him to clean out toilets?”
“Mum . . .” Darlene was holding in her temper and frustration. “Mum, we're gunna have to move that guy Magee. If the cops come down there—”
“They've already been.” Shirlee put Phoenix's belongings into a drawer of the table beside his bed. Neatly. “They come to tell us Pheeny was in hospital. We headed ‘em off down at the gate. Did you talk to Chantelle today?”
“Yeah. She said to be patient. But that was before this happened—” She gestured at her inert brother, for once keeping his mouth shut, “I think we oughta call her again, see what she advises.”
“I think she oughta come and see us. We might have to change our plans,” said Shirlee, tucking in the sheet around her son, shaking her head at how un-neat nurses were these days.
“I don't think that would be a good idea. When I talked to her this morning she said she thought everyone at I-Saw was being watched by the cops. She said she'd heard something else. That the bank—Kunishima?—they'd never pay up for Mr. Magee. They're saying he syphoned off a load of cash before the roof fell in.”
Shirlee found an unbandaged section of Phoenix that could be stroked. “Will Medicare pay for all this?”
“Mum, are you listening to me?” Darlene was going to blow her top any minute now. “I think it's close to time we unloaded Mr. Magee and put it down to experience. I don't believe in omens, but we've had so many things go wrong—Mum!”
Shirlee looked at her across the still form of Phoenix. “I'm listening. If Mr. Magee's the one with the money, wherever he's got it hidden away, then he's the one gunna pay for himself. We start cutting bits off of him, a finger or something, till he tells us where the money is. It's the only way.” She sounded now like a surgeon, one in a field casualty hospital in World War One. “He'll talk, leave it to me.”
“Mum, I'm not gunna be in anything like that—” She shuddered at the thought.
Then a nurse came in, young, pretty and brisk. “You're not expecting the worst, are you? He's going to be fine. He looks as if he was as strong as—as a horse. What did he do?”
“He was a gym instructor,” said Shirlee. “Black belt.”
Darlene waited for the impersonator on the bed, the gym instructor with the black belt (in what?), to twitch. Phoenix remained still. “When he comes out of the coma, will he know where he is? I mean, will he be incoherent or anything? You know, babble?”
“Possibly,” said the nurse, re-arranging Shirlee's neat bed-straightening. “He'll be disoriented. He might think he's in the gym, that he's been knocked or something.”
“Then I'd better stay here,” said Shirlee, planning once again. “Just in case—”
“Good idea, Mum,” said Darlene, trying to avoid being at any dismemberment. “I'll go back to the cottage, see that Corey is okay. My other brother,” she explained to the nurse.
“Are they close?”
Like Cain and Abel. “Bosom buddies.”
“Maybe you should tell him to come up here. It often helps, I mean if the patient is disoriented, if they have close family around when they come to.”
“I'll do that,” said Darlene.
“Take the car,” said Shirlee and passed her the keys. “I'll hold Pheeny's hand while you're gone.”
“Pheeny?” said the nurse.
“Short for Phoenix.”
“Oh yeah. That was the bird that rose from the ashes, wasn't it?”
“I dunno,” said Shirlee. “Glen Campbell never sang that verse.”
Darlene rolled her eyes at the bird on the bed, which didn't stir, let alone rise.
The nurse left and immediately was replaced by a man in the doorway. “Relatives?”
“Yes,” said Shirlee.
“Fantastic! Mother and girlfriend?”
“No,” said Darlene. “Sister.”
“Fantastic! Close family, that's what we want. Allow me to introduce myself. George Bomaker, solicitor.”
He was short and round, and his clothes
looked as if they had been pressed while on him; he had a glazed look, like toffee on an apple. He had a rapid-fire delivery, at least 165 words a minute, and apparently only one adjective, fantastic. He was a natural-born sports commentator, but somehow had become an ambulance chaser.
“I'm rounding up the families of the six poor little dears who were in the accident—a class action, that's what I'm suggesting. In your case, a separate action. I've checked on the lady who drove the Range Rover—her husband's a property developer. We'll sue—”
“How much?” said Shirlee.
“Too early to tell,” said Bomaker, looking at the dead-to-the-world Phoenix. “If there's brain damage or paraplegic damage—”
Darlene felt faint, leant against the bed. She hadn't even considered those possibilities. Shirlee, a true commander, kept a stiff upper lip. “He's got a broken leg and a broken arm and smashed ribs. We dunno if he'll be worse—”
“Let's pray he won't be,” said Bomaker and looked towards the ceiling; God was on the side of litigation. “First things first. I can represent you, I and my two partners?”
“You're experienced at this?” said Shirlee. “I mean, I've read about these cases, they're all the go, aren't they?”
Bomaker tried hard to look offended. “I wouldn't put it like that, not exactly. But yes, careless people and corporations are being made to pay.”
“And how do we pay you?” said Darlene.
Bomaker spread a generous hand. “No win, no pay.”
Then Darlene's mobile rang.
“I'll take it outside,” she said and left, wondering at the risk of leaving her mother and Mr. Bomaker together. But then, she told herself with resignation that was new to her, things couldn't get worse.
III
Errol Magee, depressed in his straps, having exhausted all other subjects to keep his mind alive, had been summarizing his sexual encounters with women. At school in the eastern suburbs the girls at Ascham and Kambala had written him off after single encounters; he had been a nerd not only in class but in bed. It was Caroline, in London, who had educated him; but she had been a clinical lover, like a therapist. On his return to Sydney there had been one or two brief flings before Daniela; she had been completely different from Caroline, basing her bed technique on World Championship Wrestling. Then there had been Louise, who was dreamily romantic in bed, but spoiled matters by murmuring Oh Bruce! (who the hell was Bruce?). Finally there had been Kylie, whose favourite position was soixante-neuf, which was okay up to a point but had its dark moments and rather muffled any love talk. He had never been completely successful in love and in the end he had put it down to the influence of his mother, that squash-playing, tennis-playing, golf-playing bungee-jumper who had wanted him to be nothing but a sporting hero.