Robert came to my side and made to lead me out of the dungeon.
‘Is there any way I could contact Mr Seelenleben?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ the Priest said.
‘Can I leave a message?’
‘No.’
As Robert steered me by the arm towards the door I noticed, on a small wooden hutch, a framed photograph of a woman and three children — one of those terribly formal 1960s pictures that fathers often had on their desks at work. The colours were all bleached-out pastels.
I stopped and picked up the frame and studied it.
‘Your children?’ I asked the Priest.
‘Yes.’
‘You come now,’ Robert protested.
‘Wife, too?’
‘Yes. In a former life.’
I saw a crucifix on the wall behind the happy mother and children. I believed, too, the picture was a portal in this apartment of death. A small window into a part of the Priest that he could not, despite everything, keep sealed. I took a punt on the cross and feeling the picture gave me.
‘You had holy orders?’
‘Anglican minister.’
‘Since retired,’ I said.
‘Since retired.’
I put the picture down. Robert was virtually pushing me towards the black door.
‘Gave up the Good Lord for art. There are lesser things to abandon Him for. ‘
I was poking and prodding the underbelly of the Priest. I wanted to break through to something, anything. ‘To leave your wife and children for as well, I suppose. Though my experience tells me that moral abandonment is usually enacted for another person, not a room full of objects. Nietzsche got it right, you know.’
It did the trick. He came to the open doorway and stood in the black frame.
‘You are a private detective?’ he asked.
I turned and stood facing him in the hallway.
‘I’m a private citizen.’
‘A first-year psychology student, then.’
‘Second year. Before that, I spent almost forty years chasing pale criminals.’
‘Mr Seelenleben will be back on Thursday, if you’d prefer to call in then.’
I pressed the button to the elevator.
‘Seelenleben,’ I said as I waited. ‘It was a word Freud used. It refers to the inner life of the child. Tell your boyfriend I’ll call Thursday.’
‘My goodness,’ the Priest said malevolently as I entered the lift. ‘You could almost pass for third year.’
‘And up yours too, Jack,’ I said, as the lift doors closed. ‘Or is that Pastor Jack?’
~ * ~
5
The thing I always found about real-estate agents was they were fonts of information about people’s private lives. They had their turf and they eventually knew, over time, which client used what type of shampoo, who ate fresh food and who preferred packaged, personal habits and fetishes, who was clean and who was slovenly, who had real money and who pretended to have money. They saw signs of domestic violence, loneliness, anxiety, contentment. There was very little that went on in human life and interaction on their watch that they didn’t know about.
Of course my agent, Geraldo, had a few tales to tell about the Priest and the Boltcutter.
‘Odd to you, my friend,’ he said during one of our morning house inspections. ‘But let me tell you, quite mild for the Gold Coast.’
‘That’s mild? The painted men with their guts hanging out? The murderous monks?’
‘In that building alone there are more fruit-loops than a cereal factory.’ He looked at me, expecting a laugh. It was obviously one of his well-used lines. I dutifully guffawed. It pleased Geraldo.
‘There is an old woman in the penthouse there who has not stepped outside since 1987,’ he said, his eyebrows raised. ‘She owns half of Pitt Street in Sydney. The rental cheques — millions, may I say — keep coming in. I know the janitor. The cheques are all over the place, like litter. Millions, I say. She just sits by the window all day staring out at the ocean. You want tragedies, you’ve come to the right place.’
‘But the gentlemen in the medieval grotto?’
‘Wheeler-dealers,’ he continued, ‘but who isn’t, up here? They’re a little Steptoe and Son operation though. Could be a front. A fraud. A cover. You getting my drift?’
‘I know what a cover is, yes.’
‘Who knows. Drugs. Prostitutes. A friend of a friend knows of one southern gentleman who came up here to retire, so to speak, and wanted to start a strip club.’
‘So? Sounds like a good way to pass your twilight years. Better than philately.’
‘Or collecting stamps.’
‘Precisely, Geraldo.’
‘The thing is, he wanted to open a club for people who liked watching other people dressed up as zebras.’
‘Just zebras?’
‘Just zebras.’
‘I thought I’d heard of them all,’ I said wearily.
‘Your Priest and his antiques? Dead people’s rubbish, as far as I’m concerned. I’m a modern guy, on the other hand. I’m a clean lines, glass and pale timber sort of guy.’
He was also — after more than an hour — an annoying, pain in the backside sort of guy. We inspected several canal-side villas that were like those I imagined Australian second-rate former television celebrities might have fawned over in the seventies. They already looked old and something out of early California porno films. They were seedy and decaying.
I missed the history of Sydney architecture. The rows of terraces. The semis. The art-deco apartment blocks. I told Geraldo this.
‘You want history, you better retire somewhere else,’ he snorted. ‘We have buildings here torn down after twenty years and rebuilt. Nineteen seventies is ancient, my friend. This is a place of renewal. Rebirth. We turn the sod here pretty regularly.’
‘No heritage-listed buildings on the Gold Coast?’
He pulled pensively at his earlobe. ‘I think there’s an old toilet block on the highway near Labrador from the fifties.’
Back in my van that afternoon I did my old system-card trick — something I picked up from a colleague in 21 Division. Using those little five- by three-inch ruled cards, once the mainstay of library index systems and public-service filing cabinets, I wrote a name, location or event on a single card and then laid them out on the table in front of me. It was always a puzzle. A confusing jumble of facts and faces. Eventually, if I worked at it hard enough, I could see the pattern that lurked behind the cards.
‘Do you think you may have lost your footing?’ asked Peg that night, which was her way of saying I could not let go of my work, my old life.
I didn’t tell her that I had, resting next to the sugar canister on my little table in the caravan, a shiny bullet. Sometimes I picked it up and turned it over and squeezed it. It was real, all right. It was the footing I needed.
The cards told me I had seen an old colleague from my past — the Boltcutter. I had met his possible partner, the Priest. I knew the Boltcutter, a.k.a. Dapper Dan, was travelling nicely under another pseudonym, albeit a strange one. And I had received a hand-delivered bullet with a calling card attached. I knew, too, thanks to the Priest, that Fair Weather was a pun on words, and referred to some artist bloke called Ian Fairweather. What I didn’t know was who wrote the note on the bullet. And why had it been delivered to me?
I was at the doors of the Southport Public Library when they opened the next morning. There were several octogenarians there, itching to get inside and continue their research into their family trees. I could understand their addiction. I was only a year or so off the family tree obsession myself.
I found a book on Fairweather and took notes on my little system cards.
When it comes to art, I’m the sort of guy who likes to see what he’s looking at. Comes from being a cop for so long, I suppose. None of this symbolism and deeper meaning. Whistler’s mother? You know right there it’s Whistler’s mother. And God save
poor old Whistler, I say, after one look at her sourpuss.
Take Picasso. Marvellous stuff, the early pictures, before he started putting people’s noses on their foreheads and eyes on their cheeks. Those faces look like a plate full of offal to me. Makes me bilious just to look at them. I’ve never liked Picasso. And I’ve never liked tripe.
As for this Fairweather. He was a bit of an offal style of guy to my eyes, but he had something else that instantly appealed to me. What was it? A sort of delicate, childish touch that was impossible not to like. Through all the tangled limbs and thickets of humanity the guy had a big heart. And through the crazy patterns and trees there was something beautiful he was reaching out for and never quite getting. He was like Nurse Reginald, but with talent.
I was shocked to learn he had spent much of his life in a handmade hut on Bribie Island. That he’d embarked on insane adventures and was lucky to have lived as long as he did. That he painted on sheets of newspaper and cardboard and that now his work was held in galleries all over the world, from the Tate in London to the Queensland Art Gallery which, I also learned from a friendly librarian, had just reopened after an extensive makeover with a substantial Fairweather collection.
I was going to have to go up to Brisbane and take a good close look at our Mr Fairweather.
I had a decent steak at the Southport RSL and phoned my old mate Freddy Tingle in Sydney. We’d used him for years on fraud cases and he’d been a bonanza for us, especially when it came to the art world. He’d have to be seventy years old by now. He still ran a little gallery in Darlinghurst, in a back lane next to an S&M boutique.
Freddy had a standard joke. Sometimes, he’d say, the S&M customers came into his gallery by mistake, and when reminded of their error, they asked, ‘Well, while I’m here, do you mind hanging me?’ Boom, boom.
‘Fairweather?’ Freddy said on the phone. ‘You want to buy or sell?’
‘Neither. Is he a big name these days? What’s he getting on the market?’
‘Let’s put it this way — if you’ve got a Fairweather, I’d hang on to it. One of his abstract soliloquies sold at auction for $80,000, which I think was a steal. For a smallish picture painted on a page of The Courier-Mail newspaper. That was in the seventies. Recently? A major work topped one million dollars.’
‘Who’s the best person to see in Brisbane about Fairweather?’
‘I always used James Fenton Browne. A terrific appraiser of Fairweather. He could sniff a Fairweather fake a mile off.’
‘Used?’
‘They found him eaten out by crabs in Moreton Bay about a month ago.’
‘Are you serious?’ I suddenly remembered a story about the mystery of the Crab Pot Hand in the local newspaper.
‘Some place called Peel Island. They almost didn’t find him in the mangroves. Until a local fisherman pulled up his crab pot and found nothing in it. Just poor old James Fenton Browne’s left hand.’
I felt squeamish. I saw the dead art appraiser with eyes on his forehead and a nose coming out of his neck.
Picasso had a lot to answer for.
~ * ~
6
I always know when I’m being followed. That’s not intuition or street smarts or an irregularly well-honed radar. I thank the French for this quality in my life.
I drive a Peugeot 504, white, with light-brown upholstery still as good as the day the car rolled off its factory floor, except where the stuffing is blooming like old yellow carnations out of rips and tears. I love that car. I bought it shortly after Peg and I got married and, despite her protestations, I have refused to get rid of it. Bury me at wounded Peugeot, I tell her.
If it was good enough for De Gaulle, it’ll do me.
The one thing I know is that I can’t go over 80 km an hour in the old warhorse. Well, I can. It can physically go faster. But if I bust 80, the steering wheel starts to shake and a thin branch of smoke, as blue-grey as from the tip of a Gauloise, issues from the steering column. Pffft, I have been known to exhort. So what? It is French, after all. Of course it smokes.
So on the day I headed up to Brisbane in my Gallic rattler, I never exceeded the car’s known limit, which, on the Gold Coast to Brisbane superhighway is not even a canter, and I noticed in my trembling rear-vision mirror a large black sedan creeping along at the same pace about 200 metres behind me.
As I said, it didn’t take a Mensa membership to deduce the obvious.
The black car was still keeping pace with me when I pulled into Little Stanley Street and disappeared into an underground car park. I cruised around for a while and waited for my pursuers to follow suit. They didn’t.
When I parked and climbed the stairs to South Bank, it only took a few minutes for two goons to suddenly appear in my peripheral vision. They were wearing black suits and black shades. Nobody wore black suits and black shades in Queensland, unless they were undertakers with light-sensitive eye conditions. Or first years in Gangster 101. Or members of Johnny Cash’s extended family.
They followed me into the newly refurbished Queensland Art Gallery. Didn’t even remove their sunglasses. I went straight to the Fairweather room. I harboured a humorous fantasy that one of the guards might recommend the goons remove their shades to best appreciate Fairweather’s subtle colourations. I might even suggest it myself.
Besides, they weren’t going to inflict grievous bodily harm on me in an art gallery. This wasn’t The Da Vinci Code, though I think I was one of the few people on earth who had not read the book. In the film I’d only made it to the part where they find the old man naked in the Louvre. I did not like to think of old men dead and naked. It turned my stomach like the offal Picassos.
When it transpired the dead Da Vinci pensioner had scrawled clues to his killers in his own blood, I turned off the DVD. I had experienced enough death to know that victims of fatal shootings don’t present intellectual riddles in blood before expiration. They are too busy calling for their mother, or holding their innards in, or trying to locate a missing part of their skull, or not.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. Was I seeking the crab-nibbled James Fenton Browne amidst all this beauty? For the Fairweathers, face to face, were extremely beautiful. A book could not reproduce their ethereal quality, the life of them that seemed to hover above ordinary sheets of paper and cardboard and fragments of masonite.
I had come to art late in life. You don’t get much time to ponder Courbet’s line work or Rockwell’s romanticism when you’re banging villains’ heads against cobblestones in Surry Hills or saving some junkie from drowning in Rushcutters Bay. I’m the sort of guy who, when I was young and didn’t know any better, bought poster prints of famous art works like Van Gogh’s sunflowers or Monet’s lilies with VAN GOGH and MONET in big letters along the bottom and got them framed. We once had a little tile hanging on a nail on the lavatory door which read: ‘Here ‘Tis, Hers or His, So in You Whiz, on Private Biz’. Not one of the great works of art, but direct.
No. I had to meet Mr Freud before I knew what to look for in a picture.
The goons were pretending to be viewing works in the adjoining room and kept poking their heads into the Fairweather space to see if I was still there. I took out my little system cards and jotted a few notes about the Bribie Island artist. I had never heard of Bribie Island. Seeing how he painted, I assumed it was in Indonesia or Tahiti.
I was very taken by the Fairweathers’ renditions of mother and child. I felt a lot of love in Fairweather. I thought for a moment I might pop into the gallery shop on the way out and see if they had some posters of his paintings with FAIRWEATHER written across the bottom.
Turning my back on the goons, I made some more notes about a wonderful picture of women bathing and heard someone cough lightly behind me.
‘May I help you?’ a voice said.
‘Not really,’ I said, finishing my jottings on Fairweather’s failed raft expedition from Darwin to Bali. Just as the cough was delivered I had a strange sense o
f déjà vu. There had been a case, many years ago in Sydney, involving the corrupt magistrate Murray Farquhar and a number of famous artworks. I was starting to think one of them might have been a Fairweather. I was hastily writing this down, when another cough cut through my thoughts.
‘Are you quite sure you don’t need any assistance?’
I turned, annoyed. It was a well-presented gentleman, also in a suit — this one a fitted three-button number, dark blue, with the finest pinstripe through it, as delicate as trails of spider web.
The gentleman inside the suit had the facial bone structure of a flyweight boxer — striking cheekbones, heavy around the eye sockets, small of ear — and the sartorial splendour of an old-fashioned dandy. Like the Dapper, too, he had a physique that juxtaposed rudely with such delicate cloth.
The Toe Tag Quintet Page 3