‘So did I,’ I said. ‘When that guy landed on me.’
She laughed and bit her lip at the same time, a cornered look in her eyes. I rapidly changed the subject to the only other thing I could think of. ‘Got sidetracked by Fiona Lambert.’
She relaxed. ‘The Black Widow, we call her.’ I bent closer, the better to hear her, and the bare skin of our forearms touched. A little spark of static electricity shot between us. ‘Better watch yourself there.’
‘Why?’
She was even tighter than me. Not that we were drunk. And so what if we were? The waiter came and stuck a menu in front of my face. It was the sort you read right to left. Everything on offer was either char-grilled, stir-fried, snow-pead, or came with sheep’s cheese. What I really wanted to taste was the waxy fruit of Salina’s apricot lips.
‘Go on,’ I urged. ‘Tell me.’ Keep her talking until we found some common ground, that was the strategy. ‘Why do you call Fiona Lambert the Black Widow?’
A thin-lipped, imperious-beaked bloke was squeezed in on the other side of Salina. I’d met him at the CMA but his name escaped me. When he heard Fiona Lambert’s name, he pricked up his ears and leaned over. ‘They call her that,’ he whispered in an accent that sounded like it came from the same place as my beer, ‘because of the rumour that Victor Szabo died, shall we say, on the job with her.’
He had a bracket like a Borgia pontiff in a Titian portrait. To hear him properly, I had to lean even closer to Salina, so I kept up the questions. ‘They were lovers, were they?’
‘She modelled for him, slept with him, buried him, wrote the book on him, is curating his retrospective,’ said Salina with what sounded suspiciously like envy. ‘She practically invented him.’
‘And now he’s about to be the next big thing, eh?’ I said.
‘Bigger than Sir Ned Kelly himself, if the Black Widow has anything to do with it,’ confirmed the Pope’s nose.
By that stage, I could’ve eaten a nun’s bum through a cane chair. We moved on to the Koonunga Hill cabernet shiraz. Food arrived, cross-hatched from the grill, and I sawed into my fillet of salmon.
‘A brutal deconstruction of mordant reality,’ declaimed Salina.
‘Beg pardon?’ I chewed.
‘A sundering of the constituent components of antipodean materiality.’ She sucked in her cheeks and tried to look severe and authoritative.
‘Eh?’ I popped a french fry into my mouth.
‘The insertion into a distinctively Australian sensibility of the universalising impulse of an internationalist form.’
At last I got it. She was doing a Fiona Lambert impression. Quoting, I took it, catchphrases from her book on Victor Szabo.
‘An unflinching critic of the mundane,’ piped up the schnoz, getting in on the act.
‘A Fierce Vision,’ we all chortled in chorus.
Holding it up with the best of them, I was. Who’d’ve known that three hours ago I’d never heard of this Szabo bloke. This art business was turning out to be a piece of piss. While we ate, Sal and the other guy kept up a running patter about Szabo. He was quite a mystery man from what I could glean—a refugee from Europe, a misanthropic recluse who had done most of his work in the fifties and sixties while holed up in rustic squalor. ‘A total output of what, fifty or sixty paintings,’ Sal said at one point. ‘Not exactly prolific.’
‘Forty known paintings,’ the accent corrected her. ‘Now that he’s getting better appreciated, who knows how many more will emerge?’
The conversation soon meandered elsewhere, and I was happy to go with it. I would have been happy to go anywhere, given the encouragement I was receiving under the table. At the salad, Salina’s hand brushed on my knee. By the tiramisu, it was lodged between my thighs.
When the liqueurs and coffee arrived, I knew I was going places. ‘Have you ever been exploring?’ she asked, dipping her forefinger in Sambuca and offering me a taste. ‘In the Botanic Gardens at night?’
It would have been churlish to refuse. What I didn’t realise— could not possibly have realised—was that the expedition that followed would lead me much further than over an iron railing and into a thicket of Rhododendron oreotrophes. Further than an exploratory probe in the depths of the fern forest. Further even than the searing flare of an emergency light beside the moat of the National Gallery.
And, before it was over, more than one body would be wheeled into the back of an ambulance.
But right then, in the dead of the night, the itch of crushed leaves still on my skin, all I could see was Salina Fleet’s contorted face.
‘Bastard!’ She said it again.
Not an accusation this time. Not thrown in my face, but muttered under her breath. Her eyes followed the movement of the gurney into the back of the ambulance, the trail of water across the pavement left by the lifeless black legs. Her head shook with the movement of it, emphatic in denial. Despite the heat, she was trembling.
Abruptly, slow motion became fast forward. The flashing light went off. Doors slammed. The ambulance began to draw away. I moved towards Salina, wanting nothing except to comfort and to calm. The policeman blocked my path with a hand to my chest. He gestured towards the rear of the departing vehicle. ‘Friend of his, are you?’
Salina was moving out of reach, being led towards the police car. She wasn’t looking back. The air was humid, cloying. I shook my head. ‘Not really.’
The cop was about ten years younger than me. His shirt had two stripes on the sleeve, and he had a howitzer on his hip. ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, mate?’
I looked down and saw that I still had the bottle of wine we’d pinched from the hotel. We’d been swigging out of it as we crossed the lawn and I was holding it by the neck. Barely a tepid mouthful remained in the bottom. The Botanic Gardens suddenly felt a very long way away. The taste on my tongue was bile, not apricots.
Beyond a pair of security guards, Salina was being helped into the back seat of the police car. The cop followed my line of sight. ‘You with her, are you, mate?’
Salina stared back towards me. She was calmer, regaining control, her face as bloodless as marble. Guilty and contrite. She gave a little rueful shake of the head. Goodbye, Murray, it said.
I shook my head slightly, mirroring her movement. ‘Not any more,’ I said. It seemed like the right thing. Only later did it feel like cowardice.
More police were arriving. Another two squad cars and an unmarked Falcon. A security guard, fishing in the moat, pulled a pair of thick-rimmed glasses out of the water. Another had the discarded shopping trolley from earlier in the afternoon and was dragging it out of the gutter. The car with Salina went.
There were maybe six cops, as many security guards. I was the only civilian. I dropped the wine bottle into a rubbish bin. It was empty and the bottle hit the bottom with a blunt thud that went straight to my temples. ‘Go home, pal,’ ordered a honcho in an Armaguard uniform. ‘The show’s over.’
I could, I supposed, have identified myself, claimed some small entitlement to information. A pretty picture that would have made. A crumpled suit, grass stains on my fingers, a gutful of souring wine, trying to throw my rather limited weight about. And for what? To find out how come my hot date had been cut short?
Snatches of radio chatter and snippets of half-overheard conversations gave me more than enough clues to satisfy my immediate curiosity on that point. The body in the cowboy boots had been found by a security guard. He’d come outside for a cigarette and noticed a dark shape lying on the bottom of the moat, in the shadow of the retaining wall. He thought it was a roll of carpet. Idiots were always dumping things in the moat. He shone his torch into the water and saw what it was. He called another guard and they attempted resuscitation. It was no use. The guy could have been lying there for hours. An empty scotch bottle was found beside the body.
I trudged across Princes Bridge to the dormant railway station, laid my cheek upon the rear-seat upholstery of the only cab at the r
ank and murmured my address to the driver, a Polish scarecrow in tinted plate-glass hornrims. ‘Hot,’ he said. ‘Wery hot.’
‘Gdansk, it ain’t,’ I agreed.
Chauffeured for the third time that day, the pulse of the passing streetlights throbbing at my temples, the grog finally catching up with me, I succumbed to a headachy doze. And in my waking sleep, I found myself thinking unbidden thoughts of a time long gone.
My father had just taken the licence of the Olympic Hotel, his fourth pub in ten years. Apart from the name, there wasn’t anything sporting about the Olympic, not unless you counted the horse races droning away on the radio in the public bar. Mum hadn’t been dead long when we made the move, and Dad had taken me out of St Joseph’s and put me in the nearest government secondary school. It was a haphazard choice. He said he wanted me near him. More like he didn’t want to keep paying the fees.
That was okay with me. Compared to where I’d been, Preston Technical was a breeze. Nobody gave a flying continental about academic results. Soon as they got to fifteen, most of them were straight out the door and into apprenticeships or factory jobs. Plenty of work for juniors in those days, the sixties. But not much teenage entertainment. Not unless you could get your hands on some piss. Not unless you knew how to handle the kid whose father owned the pub.
At St Joey’s the only real source of fear was the Brothers, pricks with leather straps, a weight advantage and the high moral ground. At the tech we had the Fletchers, fifteen-year-old twins and their older brother, ferret-faced thugs who hunted in a pack and made the Christian Brothers look like the Little Sisters of Mercy. There was an older Fletcher still, but he was in Pentridge prison. The initial charge was manslaughter but the magistrate believed him when he said that if he’d been seriously trying to hurt the bloke he’d have worn his kicking shoes. So he got off with reckless endangerment and grievous bodily harm. Five years.
The Fletchers lived on the Housing Commission estate, prefab concrete boxes built in 1956 to accommodate the Olympic athletes and already falling to bits when the welfare cases moved in after the Games were over. When you rode your bike to school through Fletcher territory you needed steely nerves, strong thighs and tough friends. That’s what they told me at school, anyway. But I was the new kid. I didn’t have any tough friends. Not until I was adopted by the one they called Spider. Then I had a friend. Just my luck.
General Jaruzelski woke me long enough to dump me on my doorstep and extract his fare. Then I was face down in my own empty bed, dreaming again. But not of Spider Webb, or the Fletchers, or the bad business with the stolen bottles of bourbon. This dream was more promising.
A wood nymph was tugging at my toga. One more fold and I would spring free and plunge into her grotto. But my toga was tangled and there was a thyme-drunk bee in my ear. Buzz buzz, it went, buzz buzz. I swatted it and it stung my eyes. Daylight poured into the wound and pierced my brain with a red-hot poker. The camp-fire ashes of a thousand marauding armies filled my mouth. Buzz buzz, said the persistent bee. Then a voice started shouting about the weather. Hot. Again. As if I didn’t know that already.
Untangling myself from sweat-drenched sheets, I swung my feet onto the floor, slammed one hand down on the clock-radio and picked up the phone with the other. What prick would ring me at 7.04 on a Saturday morning?
Agnelli.
‘Urgghh,’ I said. The glass of water beside my bed had been there so long it had formed a skin. When it hit my tongue, sea monkeys hatched, spawned, died, and shed their exoskeletons down my throat. I fumbled for a match and fumigated my oesophagus with cleansing smoke.
‘You heard about the National Gallery last night?’ My boss was wide awake, keyed up.
‘What?’ I grunted, my head throbbing from the effort. Had I missed something? ‘Somebody swipe a Picasso?’
‘Some idiot drowned himself in the moat. I’ve had three different reporters on the phone since 6.30, wanting a comment.’
Even in my fuddled state, I got the point immediately. To the press—reduced to reporting the weather—a body in the moat of the National Gallery would be a story straight from heaven. In a city without distinguishing landmarks—no opera house, no harbour—the Arts Centre was the closest thing to a civic icon. Its picture was on the cover of the phone book, in every tourist brochure and glossy piece of corporate boosterism. Melbourne, City of the Arts. Look. See. Naturally a death in the moat would be a sensation. And if a political angle could be found, so much the better.
But what political angle? By covering my head with a pillow and closing my eyes, I could just about see to think. ‘Why call you? What’s it got to do with you?’
‘According to the journos who rang me,’ Agnelli said, ‘this whacker committed suicide in protest at the lack of government support for the arts.’ At least it wasn’t because his girlfriend was rolling around in the hydrangeas with the responsible minister’s major-domo.
‘What makes them think that?’ There’d been no mention of a protest motive at the death scene, not that I’d heard. And I couldn’t see any immediate point in informing Agnelli that I was there when they dredged up the body.
‘He left a note.’ There was more than a hint of anxiety in Agnelli’s voice. ‘A manifesto, the press are calling it.’
I realised why Agnelli was aerated enough to have called me at this ungodly hour. Two years before, a Picasso really had been swiped from the National Gallery. It was held hostage by hijackers demanding more government funding for the arts—a motive so cryptic as to bamboozle the police utterly. The ransom negotiations were conducted on the front pages of the daily press. In a series of manifestos, the Arts Minister was described successively as a tiresome old bag of swamp gas, a pompous fathead, and a self-glorifying anal retentive. Subsequent insults were so erudite they had millions rushing for their dictionaries. Eventually, the painting was recovered, abandoned in a railway station locker. But the thieves were never caught.
So it wasn’t hard to infer whence Agnelli was coming. Public ridicule and ministerial amour-propre make a poor mix, and mere mention of the word ‘manifesto’ was bound to set a cat among Agnelli’s pigeons. I took a deep breath and started again. ‘Just exactly what does this manifesto say?’
‘Jesus Christ, Murray, that’s what I want you to find out.’
‘Has this alleged suicide note been released?’ By ratcheting the terminology down a notch I hoped to quiet the quivering antennae of Agnelli’s ego.
It didn’t work. ‘Not according to the journalists who rang, but the general gist is being bandied about. And I’d rather not find out the details by seeing them on television. No surprises, Murray. I thought we were clear on that. No surprises.’ Meaning that I should pull my finger out and have something reassuring to contribute to the overview. Pronto. ‘I’ll pick you up behind Parliament House at eleven. You can bring me up to speed on the way to this Max Karlin brunch thing.’
I told him I was on the case, buried my head in the pillow and tried to get back to sleep. It was a waste of time. Twenty litres of used booze were backed up in my southern suburbs, leaning on the horn. On top of which, a pounding noise was now coming from outside in the street.
Reaching across the mattress, I eased a chink in the curtains. Sunlight stabbed my frontal lobes. Across the narrow street, a guy in shorts and a carpenter’s belt was fixing a For Sale sign to the facade of the house immediately opposite. The letters on the hoarding were as big as my hand. Inner City Living, they read. A Gem from the Past. An Investment for the Future. No room to swing a cat, in other words, but the market is buoyant.
From the front, the house was identical to mine, a single-storey, single-fronted terrace. The whole street was the same, all twenty houses. A cheese-paring speculator had built them as a job lot back in the 1870s. Workingmen’s cottages they were called at the time—as distinct from the grander two-storey terraces in the surrounding streets with their cast-iron balconies and moulded pediments.
This neighbourhoo
d was once considered a slum—such an affront to the national ideal of the suburban bungalow that whole blocks of it had been bulldozed in the name of progress. But those days were gone. Thanks to the miracle of gentrification, dingy digs in dodgy neighbourhoods had become delightful inner-city residences with charming period features in cosmopolitan locales. It was truly amazing what a lick of paint, a skylight and an adjective or two could do for real estate values.
This was the fifth time in the two years I’d lived there that a house in this street had been put on the market. I couldn’t help but wonder what this one would fetch at auction. Mine had set the bank back nearly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A pretty penny—and a bargain at that—for two bedrooms, a kitchen–living room and a back yard the size of a boxing ring. And, with my variable interest rate bobbing around at 16 per cent, a very good reason to get out of bed and go to work.
I padded to the bathroom, fine grit beneath my bare soles, wind-borne detritus of our island continent’s blasted interior. A reminder to give Red’s room a quick dusting before he arrived. As I crossed the lounge room, I reached into the bookcase, pulled out the dead weight of 101 Funniest Australian Cricket Stories and tossed it onto the couch where Red would see it when he arrived. He’d sent it to me for Christmas, a boy’s idea of the right sort of gift for his dad, and I treasured every page, even though I’d never read a word of it. Just as well Wendy hadn’t done the buying for him, or I’d have got Cooking for One.
Not that it wouldn’t have been handy, I reflected as I rinsed the forlorn breakfast bowl that had been soaking in the sink.
Next Christmas he’d give me Home Maintenance Made Easy. And it, too, would go into the bookcase unopened. Right beside The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. That one I bought myself. Got bogged down in the War of Spanish Succession. One night soon I’d try again, get right on top of Metternich.
Red gave me what he thought a boy should give his father. But he needn’t have worried about my home maintenance needs. I had none. After seven years with Wendy, fruitlessly wrestling with cross-cut saws and counter-sunk wood screws, all I wanted was to change the odd light globe. That’s why I’d bought a renovated house.
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