The Brush-Off

by Shane Maloney

  ‘Claire mounted our Jogjakarta trishaw-drivers, you know, Murray,’ said Leo.

  Blow-ups of Faye’s arty holiday photos lined the Curnows’ hall, flatteringly framed. ‘The ones inside the front door?’ I said, admiringly. ‘You did that?’

  ‘Mounting street-vendors is my bread and butter.’ Claire permitted her eyes a small smile, beginning to relax.

  Before I could ask her if she’d mind taking a look at my etchings, the kids swarmed over us, Indians storming the fort. We ate. Ravenous, nothing in me but a coffee and a berry sandwich, I fell on the food. Faye and Claire talked kindergarten politics.

  When we’d eaten, Leo got out a bat and we played cricket with the kids, using the No Ball Games sign for stumps. Claire hit a six off my first ball. In time, the shadows meshed together and the night fell gently from the sky. We crept through the velvet darkness, feeding cautious possums pieces of leftover fruit.

  ‘Well?’ Faye hissed into my ear, behind a tree. ‘Thirty-three. Owns her own business. Not bad looking.’

  What did she expect me to do, jump the woman on the spot? ‘Where’s the father of the child?’

  ‘Left them a year ago. New cookie.’

  ‘Coffee?’ said Leo. ‘Sambuca? Port?’

  We walked back to Faye and Leo’s, slapping mosquitoes. I swung Grace up onto my hip. She took it as her due and twined her arms around my neck. Her sleepy head nestled in the crook of my shoulder. A daughter, I thought, would be nice. Eventually.

  ‘She’s not usually so trusting,’ said Claire.

  ‘I wouldn’t trust Murray as far as I could throw him,’ said Faye.

  Cleopatra was on television. We sprawled in the dark before the flickering set, draped with drowsy children. The girls, curled like kittens in their mothers’ laps, were soon rendered unconscious by Richard Burton’s narcotic vowels. Elizabeth Taylor, fabulously blowzy, seethed and ranted. Leo lay bean-bagged on the floor, Tarquin using his shins for a pillow. Red slumbered against my shoulder. ‘This film,’ observed Claire, ‘is longer than the Nile.’ She made, nevertheless, no move to leave.

  What were the poor people doing tonight, I mused. Max Karlin, for all his outward trappings, was teetering on the brink. Desperate to find those elusive big-ticket tenants, those precious million-dollar customers willing and able to sign on the line, ten floors for ten years. Multinationals. Public utilities. Government departments needing accommodation for hundreds of pen-pushers, sitting there at their desks sending out those millions of water bills.

  By the time the credits rolled, Claire and I were the only ones still awake. Perhaps all that on-screen sensuality had given me the wrong idea, but her posture seemed more than accidentally provocative. She lay draped languidly at the other end of the couch, errant corkscrews of hair framing her face. The fabric of her dress moulded to her body. She could not possibly have been unaware how wanton she looked.

  She wasn’t. From behind lowered lids, she was measuring my reaction. No longer concealing my interest, I ran my gaze lazily over her body. Then watched her reciprocate.

  Our eyes devoured each other. The time had come to act, to grasp the transient moment. Gingerly, I prised Red’s sleeping head from my lap. My hand edged towards Claire’s extended leg.

  Red’s eyes sprang open. ‘Tricked ya!’ he yawned. His arm flung out in a stretch and connected with my sore ear.

  ‘Ow,’ I said. Faye woke with a start, activating Chloe.

  ‘Huh? snuffled Leo, inadvertently letting Tarquin’s head fall to the floor. ‘Is it over?’

  ‘My ankle,’ groaned Tarquin. ‘You kicked my ankle.’

  Instantly, there was more barging around going on than Cleopatra ever dreamed of. ‘Is it time to go home yet, Mummy,’ pleaded Grace, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ sighed Claire. ‘I guess it is.’

  Sunday’s dawning came sticky with humidity, heavy with the prospect of rain. By dawning I don’t mean the sun’s rosy-fingered ascension. Nor do I mean the day’s first blossoming when I reached for my winsome sleep-mate while thrushes warbled outside my window. I mean eight, when I shucked off the sheets, checked that Red was still asleep in his room and padded to the corner for the papers. I’d slept as deeply as the heat allowed, but my choice of dreams could have been better. Again, I’d been visited by Noel Webb.

  Again, we were sitting in the wintry twilight on a park bench in the Oulton Reserve, Spider’s contempt ringing in my ears, the three Fletcher boys looming over us.

  The Fletchers were weedy runts but they’d been raised on a diet of belt buckles and brake fluid and they had us at unfavourable odds. They were sharpies, an amorphous tribe of terrifying reputation, precursors to the skinheads. In an era when every adolescent male in the world yearned for longer locks and tighter pants, the sharpies wore close-cropped hair and check trousers so perversely wide they flapped like flags. Rumoured to carry knives, they were less a gang than an attitude of casual violence looking for somewhere to happen. And now they had found me.

  The moment I most dreaded had arrived. And Noel Webb, my as-yet-unpaid protector, was edging away. Flanked by his twin brothers, Geordie, the seventeen-year-old, thrust his face into mine. ‘What are you looking at?’ he snarled. His denuded skull occupied my entire field of vision.

  A craven bleat issued from my mouth. ‘Nothing.’

  The twins snickered. ‘Nah-thing, nah-thing.’

  They acted like idiots, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous. The kid their brother kicked to death wasn’t much older than me. Trying to fight back would only provoke them. Not that fighting back entered my mind. My guts had shrivelled into a queasy lump and my legs were jelly. The contraband booze beneath my coat was my only hope.

  But before I could get it out, offer it up in supplication, Geordie grabbed the crook of my elbow and jerked me upright. The twins closed from either side, pistoning their bony kneecaps into my thighs. ‘Ow,’ I said. Piss weak. A heel swung behind mine and swept my leg away. Wayne and Danny were pressed so close that I stumbled first against one then the other. Pinning my arms, they buffeted me sideways, setting me spinning like a top, biffing and slapping me as I turned, yelling encouragement to each other.

  A circle of faces flashed before me. Fletcher faces. Noel Webb’s face. Denied his mercenary price, Spider had gone over to the enemy. Or worse. A set-up all along. The tough men of the district had found some fresh meat. Round and round I spun, all the while attempting to wrestle the bottle from beneath the folds of my coat. Dizzy, strait-jacketed, sweaty with panic. That’s when I woke up.

  Both the Sunday papers had given the Suicide in the Moat story a run on page three. Both featured Salina Fleet in her widow’s weeds, wistfully gazing at one of Marcus Taylor’s sketches like it was the shroud of Turin. I took fresh croissants back to the house for Red’s breakfast and rang Ken Sproule.

  He’d seen the paper. ‘As predicted,’ he said. ‘Angelo can stop peeing his pants.’ Despite his crack at Agnelli, Sproule had thought it worth keeping his own ear to the ground. ‘This suicide stuff ’s a load of crap. They found bruising to the back of the skull consistent with a fall. The cops tend to think he was walking along the parapet, tripped over, knocked his head and fell in.’

  ‘What about the manifesto?’

  ‘Could mean anything. Or nothing. The fact that it was found on the body doesn’t necessarily make it a suicide note. But an anguished suicide makes far better copy than a clumsy drunk. Particularly with the girlfriend pushing that line. You watch. By this time next week, he’ll be a great unrecognised talent and his work will start turning up in the auction houses. Not a bad looker, the girlfriend, eh? She’s on some committee at the ministry, you know.’

  ‘While you’re on the line,’ I changed tack, ‘I met Lloyd Eastlake last night. What’s a hot shot like him doing on a minor policy committee like Cultural Affairs? He fits that scene like a pacer at a pony club.’

  ‘Parliamentary ambitions,’ Sproule said. �
�Same reason anyone gets themselves onto a policy committee. If you’re not a union official, it’s the best way to get yourself noticed, find out how things work. My guess is that Eastlake has targeted the arts to build a profile as something other than just another penny-ante money man.’

  ‘He didn’t look too penny-ante to me.’

  ‘That’s because you’ve led a sheltered life, Murray. That chauffeur-driven stuff might impress his investors, but it doesn’t mean much in the big picture. For every Alan Bond or Robert Holmes à Court, there’s a hundred Lloyd Eastlakes. They’re a sign of a buoyant economy, springing up like mushrooms after rain. We need them to make the system work. But don’t confuse Eastlake with serious money. You could probably count his millions on one hand.’

  ‘Not a bad result for a humble chippie, though.’ I ashed my cigarette in a saucer, sipped cold instant coffee from a cracked cup and wondered what I’d be doing if I had even a lousy one million dollars. ‘So why does he want to get into parliament?’

  ‘Why does anyone? If we psychoanalysed every parliamentary candidate we’d have full nut-houses and empty legislatures.’

  An operator like Ken Sproule could never be taken on face value. He could be poisoning the wells. He could be giving me the good oil. But he was right about one thing. In our line of work, it was best not to think too much about people’s motives.

  ‘Tell me something else,’ I said. Since Ken was in a talkative mood, the least I could do was listen to him. ‘What’s the story on this Centre for Modern Art acquisition? Three hundred thousand dollars was a pretty generous grant, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Piss off,’ said Sproule. ‘If I start to background you on last year’s grants, you’ll be pestering me every five minutes.’

  ‘Don’t be like that, Ken,’ I said. ‘Angelo’s got to live with this decision, so I might as well know the reasoning behind it.’

  ‘What’s to tell? The CMA applied for funding. The Visual Arts Advisory Panel recommended the application be approved. Gil Methven accepted the recommendation. End of story.’

  ‘I might have lived a sheltered life,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t come down in the last shower. Eastlake is chairman of both the CMA and the Visual Arts Advisory Panel.’

  ‘So what? Eastlake absented himself from the chair and left the room while his panel voted on the grant.’ This was no more than the standard procedure for fending off any suggestion of conflict of interest.

  ‘Eastlake’s committee could only recommend the grant. Ultimate approval lay with the minister.’

  ‘You trying to make a point here, Murray?’

  ‘It’s a big grant. Lloyd Eastlake must have done a lot of arm-twisting to convince Gil to approve it.’

  ‘Gil agreed to provide half the funds if the CMA could find the other half. He didn’t think they’d be able to raise that sort of dough for an unknown artist. But Eastlake came up with the money and Gil had no option but to keep his part of the bargain. The Centre for Modern Art is Eastlake’s main hobby horse, but he wears a lot of other hats. Not much point in putting the chairman of the Cultural Affairs Policy Committee offside, not with the friends Lloyd Eastlake has in the unions.’

  ‘His financial clients?’

  ‘Eastlake has been dealing with the unions since back when he was in the building game,’ said Sproule. ‘What with all these mergers and amalgamations, some unions have found themselves sitting on sizeable assets, as well as having to manage their members’ superannuation funds. They need financial expertise. The word got around that Eastlake had the magic touch and he ended up holding the kitty for quite a few of the comrades. You ever heard of Obelisk Trust? That’s Eastlake.’

  ‘And Obelisk donated the CMA’s half of the purchase price for this picture they’re buying?’

  ‘Correctomundo.’

  ‘Helping an art gallery to buy a painting hardly seems the ideal way for an outfit like Obelisk to target its sponsorship money,’ I said. ‘Isn’t Eastlake just using union money to buy himself a bit of kudos with the art crowd?’

  ‘Possibly. He’s also engaging in a bit of mutual pocket pissing with Max Karlin. Obelisk has a lot of money riding on the Karlcraft project and paying top dollar for one of Max’s pictures could be construed as a gesture of confidence in the project, a way of shoring up the commitment of other investors.’

  At last we were getting to the nub of it. ‘In other words, the Ministry for the Arts has just spent three hundred thousand dollars of public money to massage one of Lloyd Eastlake’s investments.’

  ‘Not just Eastlake’s, pal. We’re all in this. The Karlcraft Centre project is currently employing a small army of construction workers, most of them union members. It’s spending money on everything from cement to door knobs, doing its bit for the local economy. When it’s up and running, it’ll revitalise much of the central business district, create hundreds of retail jobs and generate millions in government revenues. Putting the arts to work lubricating that process is a job well done, wouldn’t you agree?’

  Who was I to demur? I told Ken Sproule I owed him a lunch and rang off. ‘Wakey, wakey, hands off snakey,’ I called through Red’s door. ‘We aren’t going to get much quality time together if you sleep all day.’

  He got up and went straight around to Tarquin’s place. By the time I’d finished breakfast and read the papers it was getting on for ten o’clock. I found the card with Eastlake’s phone numbers on it and looked at it for while, thinking about the story Giles Aubrey had told me.

  Like old Giles said, the genie was out of the bottle. Routine police procedures to identify Marcus Taylor would inevitably connect him with Victor Szabo. Shit, it had taken me about five minutes. Aubrey was in a confessional mood. Sooner or later, the whole thing would start to come unravelled. Spending public money on art was risky enough. Spending it on a fake would make us look like idiots, unfit to govern. Angelo would be directly in the firing line. A way would need to be found quietly to scotch the whole thing. I called Eastlake on his mobile and told him I’d appreciate an opportunity to talk to him about the Szabo acquisition at his earliest convenience.

  ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Looking out for Angelo’s interest PR-wise.’ Exactly. Eastlake said he was on his way to the Toorak Road Deli and suggested I join him there.

  I went up the back lane and stuck my head in Faye and Leo’s kitchen door. Faye had her hands in the sink and Leo had his head in the fridge. ‘Where’s the cake?’ he said. The boys were on the floor glued to the television. There were no cartoons at that hour and they were reduced to watching a rural affairs documentary on mad cow disease.

  ‘That reminds me,’ I told Red. ‘You’d better ring your mother.’

  ‘It’s right in front of you,’ said Faye. ‘So, Murray, what do you think of Claire? Tarquin, turn that TV off. We’re going in ten minutes.’ The Curnows, it transpired, were about to leave for Leo’s mother’s seventieth birthday party and would be out all day.

  ‘Come and ring your mother.’ I dragged Red out the back door. ‘Then I’ll show you where the rich people live.’

  The rich people live in Toorak. Skirting the city centre, we crossed the river and headed into its leafy precincts. In hushed cul-de-sacs and meandering avenues, we peered and craned like tourists at the mansions of the filthy rich. Sydney, I informed Red, had plenty of fat cats and flash rats. But for your genuine, copper-bottomed blue-blood, you couldn’t go past Toorak.

  Cruising past the French Provincial farmhouses and Californian haciendas, the ivied walls and gravelled driveways, we drove the Charade down Toorak Road, a street where all the shops are boutiques and even a carton of milk costs more. The Deli was at the city end, a see-and-be-seen place with Porsches at the kerb and fourteen different kinds of freshly squeezed juice. Eastlake’s Mercedes was parked across the road, between a red convertible Volkswagen with an Airedale terrier on the back seat and a Volvo station wagon with P-plates and surfboards on the roof rack.

  Spider Webb wa
s standing beside the Merc, looking into the window of a menswear shop called Pour Homme. We parked further down the block, outside one of those places that sells Groucho Marx lamp stands, pink neon telephones and musical birthday cards. A clip-joint for rich kids. Red lit up at the sight of it, so I peeled off ten dollars. Take your time, I told him. And if you shoplift, don’t get caught.

  The Deli was somebody’s gold mine. Cappuccinos to the gentry. Pain au chocolat with the accent on the accent. Mobile phones in clear view. Blondes with perfect hair and beesting lips. Jewish husbands with melancholy expressions and big gold Rolexes. Lawyers in leisure-wear.

  Lloyd Eastlake was in his element, sitting in a prime booth wearing tennis whites with navy piping. Sitting opposite him was a well-groomed woman in her late forties with big sunglasses and a brittle mouth. The sunglasses were pushed up on top of hair that had the panel-beaten finish rich women spend a fortune acquiring in the taxidermy salons of society hairdressers.

  Eastlake saw me enter and waved me over. ‘Murray Whelan,’ he said. ‘My wife, Lorraine.’

  So this was the boss’s daughter whose hand had given young Lloyd his leg up in business. Lorraine looked like she’d been repenting ever since, consoled only by the diversion of spending as much of his money as possible. She was just leaving.

  ‘I hope I’m not interrupting your game,’ I said sociably, an obvious tennis reference.

  ‘Lorraine doesn’t play,’ said Eastlake. ‘Do you, darling?’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said Lorraine. She’d forgotten my name already. As she headed towards the exit, a ruddy faced man with real estate written all over him moved to fill the vacuum. Eastlake deflected him with an easy gesture, signalled for more coffee and told me to sit down. ‘You don’t look too happy,’ he said genially. ‘Angelo not paying you enough?’

  ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,’ I said, getting straight down to it before some social fly buzzed over and landed on us. ‘I think we’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Have we?’ His expression brightened with amusement at my earnestness.