Ah Koo longed to feel the carving but knew he dare not touch it. He felt intimidated just being in the same room as such a piece of furniture. And the thought of why the single chair faced the screen, where Little Sparrow sat hidden from view, made him want to run for his worthless life. But such a cowardly and unmannerly act would cause his host mortal offence.
Ah Koo silently prayed that the Dragon Master would think better of visiting someone so patently unworthy. He told himself for the umpteenth time that he would be more than satisfied with Ah Wong’s second choice of xun meng xing shang, reasoning that a mere peasant’s dream could not possibly need the personal attention of the greatest soothsayer in all the land.
Before the meal began, Ah Wong enquired solicitously about Ah Koo’s stomach ailment and, now that the dinner was inevitable, was assured that a miraculous cure had taken place. Ah Koo’s self-imposed fast meant he was starving.
The meal consisted of a great many dishes, all sumptuous, some extravagant, with a predominance of pork, to indicate Ah Wong’s generosity as a host. Ah Koo had never tasted better. His host plied him with increasingly refined delicacies until he could not fit another grain of rice into his straining stomach. It was the most splendid repast he had ever eaten, and if it had not been a banquet for many, it had certainly been one for two old friends. In Ah Koo’s opinion, he had been repaid a thousandfold for rescuing Ah Wong all those years ago.
He had, during the course of the dinner, graciously accepted two glasses of rice wine, and while the pork fat in his stomach prevented him being anything more than slightly tipsy, he was relaxed enough to overcome his jaw-chattering anxiety when a servant pushed open the heavy door and Tang Wing Hung, the Dragon Master himself, made a sudden appearance.
Both men kicked back their chairs and stood to rigid attention with their heads bowed in respect. Ah Koo was afraid to look up. No introductions were offered but the Triad boss was quick to put them at ease. ‘Sit,’ he said quietly and motioned them to resume their seats. Bowing deeply, they did as they were told. Tang Wing Hung moved over to the Three Dragon Chair and seated himself comfortably, with his hands resting on the dragon heads that terminated each of its arms. Ah Koo stole a quick glance at the seated Dragon Master. To his surprise, he saw that his face was as broad as any lowborn peasant’s and as deeply pocked as Little Sparrow’s, and that his legs were relaxed and crossed at the ankles.
Behind the screen, Little Sparrow had her hand tightly covering her mouth in case the Dragon Master should hear her rapid breathing.
Tang Wing Hung refused Ah Wong’s offer of French brandy or food, then, slightly adjusting his position in the chair, he nodded and said quietly, ‘You may proceed.’
Despite the effects of the rice wine, Ah Koo now found himself trembling uncontrollably, his knees knocking together under the table. He dared not raise his eyes as Little Sparrow began to talk. In fact, he kept them glued to the table for the entire dream recital.
Where she found the strength in her voice Little Sparrow would never know. She related the dream calmly, pausing, colouring in the background and placing the emphasis where it was needed. When her narration finally ended she had given a masterful performance.
Tang Wing Hung rose from the Three Dragon Chair, and the two men jumped from their seats and stood to attention, heads bowed. Ah Koo was momentarily terrified as he waited for a reaction to the dream. The Dragon Master gave them the briefest of nods, then glanced at the screen for a moment before looking down at Ah Koo. ‘You may use the xun meng xing shang. There will be no charge for his services.’ He nodded a second time and then, to the astonishment of the two men, turned and addressed the screen. ‘Dream Mistress, it was a most worthy telling.’ He turned and walked the few steps to the door, and before Ah Wong could rush to open it, it was swung open by a servant positioned on the other side who had had his eye glued to a tiny magnified glass peephole. Without turning to acknowledge them, the Dragon Master swept out.
Little Sparrow, seemingly riveted to the tiny three-legged stool, moved for the first time. Despite its undoubted chunkiness, she simply could not believe the extent of the pain in her unworthy arse.
CHAPTER TWO
I RECALL THE MOMENT when my life changed forever. The phone rang at my desk in the agency at exactly six minutes past one on a Monday at the start of the lunch hour. I know the exact time because Ross Quinlivan, our creative director, had popped his rusty, untidy, ginger-moustachioed Irish-Australian head around the door of my glass cubicle and said, ‘Pub? Sango? Couple of beers?’
Ross always ordered a cheese and tomato sandwich with two middies to arrive on the bar together. The sango went untouched, save for a single bite. It was his make-believe lunch. The two beers, one fast, one slow, he regarded as an essential component of his diet. I once asked if he ever ate vegetables. ‘That’s a fucking tomato, isn’t it?’ he said, pointing to a red bit protruding from the bitten sandwich.
I knew the phone rang at six minutes past one o’clock because Ross’s head always appeared at precisely five minutes past the beginning of lunch hour, just to demonstrate his self-discipline. He would have been thinking about the first two beers of the day since at least noon, but he always waited the additional five minutes to demonstrate to himself that he was a man with a will of steel.
‘Not today, mate. Got a two o’clock Wills meeting. New fag. Gotta get this layout finished,’ I’d replied. I heard his rubber-soled brogues squeak down the passage towards the distant ding of the lift arriving in the foyer of the creative department. So I reckon six minutes past the hour was spot-on.
I have no idea why when significant events occur the precise time is important to me. Maybe it’s some sort of genetic throwback – the Chinese are obsessed with numbers. Or it may be like remembering where you were when you heard of President Kennedy’s assassination. By the way, that was at exactly 12.30 p.m. on Friday, November 22nd, 1963, the exact time the first of Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle shots entered his upper back, penetrated his neck, slightly damaged a vertebra and the top of his right lung, then came out of his throat just below his Adam’s apple and nicked the left side of his tie knot.
See? I can’t bloody help myself.
Anyway, yeah, the phone rang. ‘Hello, Cookie,’ I said into the receiver.
‘Koo?’ a voice barked at the other end.
‘Ah … yes?’
‘My office, now, please!’
The ‘please’ was clearly insincere and the use of my surname alone wasn’t a promising sign. The reference to my immediate presence in his office indicated it was someone in the agency, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea who. I called the switchboard.
‘Odette? Do you know who just called me?’
Odette had a reputation for being able to identify any voice in the world after hearing it only once. She was Maltese, but clearly had Spanish blood, and she’d been with the agency since just after the war, when she joined as a trainee on the switch at the age of seventeen. Having quickly been promoted, she was now senior switchboard operator and, at thirty-eight, still a great-looking sort with the figure of a flamenco dancer. Her dark flashing eyes could give you a hard-on at a glance or send you whimpering away like a kicked puppy. She was said to have been the chairman’s mistress at one time, and while this may merely have been agency scuttlebutt (plenty of that around), anyone silly enough to think she didn’t pack a punch in the agency would be wrong. She had the dirt on everyone, particularly the chairman, apparently. Fortunately, we got on very well.
‘No call came through switch, Cookie,’ she replied.
Whoever it was dialled direct. That can’t be bad. No secretary or call through the switch. Then it hit me. The gravelly voice, almost a growl, the result of ten thousand fags too many. Jesus – the chairman of the board, Charles Brickman! He personally looked after the W.D. & H.O. Wills cigarette business – our biggest and oldest account. I flew into a panic. The two o’clock Wills meeting? Christ, surely not! My layout for t
he new brand is no big deal. But he’s dialled through himself, using his very own tobacco-stained forefinger!
In five years he’d never attended a single client meeting. With him, it was strictly chairman to chairman. If it weren’t for his portrait in the agency foyer, I’d have had trouble remembering what he looked like.
I’d never been in Brickman’s office and had seen him only once, three years previously, the only time I’d heard his voice. He was a small, slight guy – shorter than me – in a trilby and with a pronounced limp. He was said to avoid the passenger lift, taking the goods lift from the car park in the basement to the tenth floor, where his office supposedly occupied the entire northern corner overlooking the harbour. It was also said that he never acknowledged staff. On the one occasion I heard him speak, senior staff had been summoned to the boardroom just before knock-off time at five o’clock. I must have only just made the cut, having been appointed a creative group head two weeks previously. Situated on the ninth floor and mostly used for client meetings, the boardroom wasn’t all that big, so it was curious to see a microphone set up on a small temporary wooden platform near the door. The table had been removed, and the twenty or so senior staff were crammed together.
Our managing director, Paul Simons, suddenly called for silence from the doorway, then announced in a voice just short of senatorial, ‘Lady and gentlemen, the chairman!’
Charles Brickman limped in and, mounting the platform, cleared his throat not once but twice. Enhanced by the microphone, it sounded like gravel moving down Ah Koo’s gold sluice. Then he spoke. ‘You will not be aware that I have just returned from America, where I sold Brickman & Crane to the Americans. We are henceforth to be known as Samuel Oswald Brickman.’
Crane had gone missing in the new name, though this was hardly a surprise. Nobody, not even Joy Young, the sole lady in Brickman’s introduction and our radio manager, could remember when there had been a Crane, and she had joined the company a year after it started.
Rumour had it that before the war John Crane got six years in Long Bay for embezzling agency funds, dobbed in, it was said, by Charlie Baby himself. He then went to live on Norfolk Island, originally the most notorious convict settlement of them all. Anyway, he’d been rubbed out of the agency letterhead and history with this latest announcement; so had the corniest telephone joke in the industry. In response to Odette’s standard phone greeting – ‘Brickman and Crane!’ – some smart-arse from a rival agency, fresh from a liquid lunch, would say, ‘Oh, is that the construction company? I’d like to speak to the foreman.’ Odette would famously respond in her delightful Maltese accent, ‘Vamoose, wanker!’ before she cut him off. Management had tried to stop her after a senior account man, attending an advertising convention, learned from a counterpart in another agency that they only did it to hear her famous rebuttal. But she had nevertheless continued and now John Crane was destined to become a forgotten part of agency history.
‘There’ll be a half-page advertisement announcing the sale in the financial section of tomorrow’s Sydney Morning Herald,’ Charles Brickman concluded hoarsely. He paused, glanced at his wristwatch and rasped, ‘You can all go home now.’ That was it, short and sweet, not a word more than necessary. A curt nod of the head and he limped from the boardroom.
‘I guess he’s not going to buy us a beer then?’ Ross muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
I remember thinking the ad in the Herald the following morning announcing the sale must have been set at the newspaper. No art director in the creative department briefed on the announcement or, for that matter, anyone in the production department doing the finished art would have been foolish enough to keep it quiet. They’d know they’d blow the trust the rest of us had in them forever.
Later, over a beer in the pub where we’d all gathered to spread the news to the rest of the staff, Ross voiced my thoughts. ‘Just goes to show what the bastards in management really think of creative, doesn’t it? We’ll be the first American agency to arrive in Australia since J. Walter Thompson in the late twenties, and it’s left to an account executive to write the copy and some no-hoper Herald compositor, no doubt wearing boxing gloves, to finesse the job and do the actual layout for the announcement.’
‘Mate, have you considered the acronym?’ I asked.
‘What?
‘S-O-B?’ I pronounced each letter. This got a big laugh.
‘Come to think of it, that’s not too bad. Sonofabitch Advertising!’
I waited. ‘Nah, Sob! We’ve gone from Brickman & Crane, the construction company, to Sob Advertising. I’m not so sure we’re much better off. And just you wait – they’ll send out a Yank creative director to kick arse.’
All-round murmurs and quaffing of beers followed while this thought was absorbed. We were all aware of the reformation in American advertising – the sixties’ creative revolution coming out of New York. The winds of change had been blowing down Madison Avenue like everywhere else.
‘Which is good,’ we would reassure ourselves. ‘About bloody time. Yeah, yeah … improve things … mumble, mumble, burp.’
But the cultural cringe was still a very real part of the Australian psyche and we secretly wondered if we were up to it. The print stuff coming out in the American Art Directors Annual was pretty piss-elegant, and we were conscious that we were not in the same league as the creative guys at Doyle Dane Bernbach, whose Volkswagen ads were among the very best of a thousand other mind-blowing print ads and TV commercial reels coming out of New York agencies: Doyle Dane Bernbach, McCann Erickson, Ogilvy & Mather, Grey Advertising, Jack Tinker & Partners, BBDO and Ted Bates; and out of Chicago, Leo Burnett. New York’s Madison Avenue was to the advertising business what Broadway was to theatre; it was where all the big American agencies were to be found and where these agencies’ names were, so to speak, up in lights. In New York, the account executive prepared the brief and the creative department translated it into meaningful and exciting advertising. Here, the account executive called all the shots and decided with the client what they wanted, and the creative people simply did as they were told. Not surprisingly, the advertising was pretty dull. In creative terms, Australia was still in the dark ages.
My prophecy in the pub came true. New York sent out a creative director named Jonas Bold. (Jonas! Was this yet another portent?) But he proved to be a great darts player, all-round good guy and notorious ‘muff-diver’, as he called it. The secretaries and the girls in the media department must have been on the new contraceptive pill, because they all seemed to want a piece of the good-looking Yank. That was, until a lightly tanned leggy blonde junior copywriter named Sue Chipchase decided to exercise the second syllable in her surname and set out to get him. Six months later, he took Sue back to the Bronx to get his Jewish parents to agree to him marrying his blonde, blue-eyed, miniskirted Australian shiksa. Returning to Sydney, she marched Jonas down to Hardy Brothers, the jewellers who made the Melbourne Cup, and came back with a rock the size of a small agate.
Shortly after this, Jonas was promoted to creative director of the New York office and left Australia with his new bride, who, in the meantime, had given up copywriting (a clash of interests). She now had her own byline, working for Vogue Magazine Australia with a social-business-smart-girl-about-town magazine column, appropriately named ‘Chip ’n’ Chase’. Funnily, our New York agency held the American Vogue account.
But nobody really minded. Nepotism was, after all, the backbone of global advertising and we all liked Sue; she wasn’t only long legs and big baby blues – there was a good brain in that pretty head. Besides, we owed Jonas heaps. He stood up to clients and account management and fought for our ideas. He’d taught us a heap, bolstered our confidence and fattened our egos, then left us to get on with it. Ross Quinlivan, a popular choice, was appointed creative director to replace him.
We were doing okay, in fact, pretty well. The previous year I got two print ads in the New York Art Directors Annual, and Ross got the f
irst Logie for a TV ad for Coca-Cola. We were pretty chuffed with ourselves.
So here I was on the tenth floor, outside the chairman’s office, being inspected by a dragon woman I judged to be in her late fifties, who had bobbed hennaed hair, the grey not entirely covered, who from her expression appeared very recently to have sucked a lemon. ‘Mr Koo?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re late! The chairman doesn’t like to be kept waiting.’
‘I’m sorry … er, Mrs … ?’
‘Miss!’ A sharp reproof, no name proffered; then, a moment later, a forefinger stabbed at a button on the desk intercom. ‘Mr Brickman, Mr Koo has finally arrived.’
‘Yeah, righto.’ The intercom’s crackle added to his gravelled tones. He sounded three years closer to emphysema.
Miss Henna Head gave a dismissive toss of the head towards the inner office. ‘You may go in.’
Charles Brickman was sitting at his desk, a huge, antique, early Georgian one – very nice. He was writing with a gold Parker pen and didn’t look up when I entered. A thin blue spiral of cigarette smoke climbed into the air above his head from a large Lalique glass ashtray to his left, the beautiful object already filled with butts. The office was large and imposing, expensively furnished with carefully chosen antiques. It was in surprisingly good taste, which, sadly, hadn’t extended to the rest of the agency, which consisted of wood and semi-opaque glass cubicles divided by long passages, each office equipped with a plain pine desk and plastic upholstered visitor’s chair.
I’d designed the foyers and interview rooms for my family’s eighteen Sydney funeral parlours and in the process learned a bit about antiques. I’ve always liked old furniture. It’s another way of understanding history. While at art school I did a course in antique-furniture design, especially English and French. It was this that foolishly prompted my uncle John, who runs the family C&B – Coffins & Burials – to commission me to do the parlour interiors. Not that the average punter, known in the business as the ‘Dearly Bereaved’, would recognise a genuine antique from a fake as they negotiated the final send-off of a loved one, but what the hell. I was never going to get a second chance and so I figured I might as well do the job properly.
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