The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  You would think I might have shown more sense, hmm? I had, after all, worked for a part of my career in the vice squad. I had cracked heads that contained such complicated and intricate devilry that even these young contemporary computer hackers couldn’t find a way in. I had reduced some of my era’s meanest men to tears. (One actually slumped to the floor of the interrogation room, assumed a foetal position, and wailed for his mammy. I sang him an Al Jolson song, which only made him wail even louder.) I was once a great believer in the Eight-Point Philosophy of Persuasion. That’d be the eight bony points revealed when you close both fists.

  But no. I was too fuzzy with the call of the wide-open road. Too blinded by the Kombi, a machine the equivalent of the good old-fashioned Australian swag. A bed on wheels. A hotel on four Dunlops. Peace. Love. Groovy, man. I was blinded by rainbows and Lucy, in the sky, with her ruddy diamonds.

  I’d done my research. Since retiring to the Gold Coast, Peg had insisted I take on some ‘projects’. This is what happens when you retire. You do ‘projects’, which is code for something to keep decaying, pre-senile minds occupied, but which don’t actually contribute anything to society or impinge on it in any way. ‘Get a project,’ my doctor had said. Jack telephoned: ‘What project you got going?’ I had a yam one day to the postman, astride his puttering Kawasaki. ‘You doing any projects?’ he shouted through his helmet visor. I sensed a conspiracy.

  So I took on the Kombi project. I immersed myself in the vehicle’s fascinating history. I read everything I could on that canny Dutch businessman, Ben Pon, who’d visited the German VW factories in Minden shortly after the Second World War. He loved Volkswagens, Mr Pon, and planned to become the Netherlands’ importer. (How dear Westchester Zim would have enjoyed Pon. How proudly they would have compared each other’s three-letter surnames.) It was in the factory, taken over by the British, that Pon first noticed the little Plattenwagen zipping about the floor on that April day in 1947. The Plattenwagen was a small, toy-like transport vehicle made exclusively to move parts about the factory. But in it — and this is genius — Pon saw the future. He scribbled down in his notebook a drawing of a van that looked like a loaf of bread on wheels. And there it was. The VW transporter. Able to carry about everything from a brass band to a gaggle of handcuffed war criminals.

  So Pon is widely considered the big daddy of the Kombi. He was also daddy to Ben Pon Junior, a famous sports-car racer, who competed for the Netherlands in clay-pigeon shooting at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Pon Junior now owns a winery in Carmel, California. (This, too, would have pleased dear Zim no end.)

  All this scholarship was on my mind when I first stepped onto the oil-spattered driveway of the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe at Duck Soup Beach. I’d caught the bus that day and en route had checked out the surf. (You see how adolescent my thinking had become, within the orbit of a Kombi?) Then I took the short stroll to the workshop in an industrial estate behind a row of hoop pines.

  I was admiring the shells of several dozen Kombis littered about the Shoppe and wondering about Pon and how he couldn’t have known that the little bread box he sketched would lead to all this industry and dream-weaving on the other side of the world more than sixty years later, when I saw him for the first time — Rufus T. Firefly. He was wearing the uniform of Gold Coast tradesmen — Bermuda shorts, soiled runners without socks, a surf T-shirt and enormous tattoos. I’ve met some tough cases in my time, but Firefly sent a shiver down my spine. As did one tattoo on the back of his left calf, which later became the centrepiece of several of my nightmares. It was a picture of a Kombi submerged in water, with a woman trapped in the cabin, apparently drowning. Her floating aura of hair looked spooky beneath Firefly’s own wiry leg hairs.

  ‘Yeah?’ sneered Firefly. He had the eloquence of a caveman at the very dawn of human speech, when grunt gave way to words.

  ‘I’m here about the Kombi,’ I said.

  He merely flicked his head. I followed him into the workshop, its dark corners sporadically illuminated by explosions of spark from a welder’s gun.

  If I’d known this lowlife had had a hand in my good mate Westchester Zim’s death just a fortnight earlier, I would have popped him right there in his office chair, sitting all smug and evil below a calendar of a naked woman doing strange things on the pop-top roof of an innocent Kombinationskraftwagen. But I didn’t. I couldn’t have dreamt of the connection at that stage. Like an ageing baby deer in an old Hollywood animation, I had stumbled into a forest of fantastic depravity and wrongdoing. Its evil would reach deep into the soil like an ancient grapevine, and enter the dark corners of the police, the judiciary and government itself. I was busy wondering whether I was of too ripe a vintage to learn how to surf, or wear a tie-dyed T-shirt without looking daft.

  And had you told me what was in store for my scarred and bloated frame, I might have avoided the great art of vehicle restoration and picked up a little Toyota straight off the showroom floor.

  ‘Have I gotta deal for you,’ Firefly said, setting fire to a small cheroot with a lighter fashioned in the shape of a woman with large, flashing breasts. That time-honoured phrase, that almost genetic cliche of the second-hand car salesman, should have set off every bulb on my switchboard. But it didn’t. I was in what the best psychoanalysts might refer to as a ‘Kombi trance’.

  Then the fun began.

  ~ * ~

  2

  Let’s go back a few weeks, so I can tell you what my dear friend Westchester Zim was like — when he was alive.

  Zimmy, as he was fondly known, was one of Queensland’s first, and finest, restaurant critics. He was first because when he started reviewing in Brisbane in the sixties, he only had about three restaurants over which he could cast his fearsome eye and skewer with his devastating turn of phrase. That’s not a terribly big and bountiful carousel to go around on.

  He told me, confidentially, that to fill his newspaper column space in those days he simply reviewed the dinner parties he was invited to, and invented a name and address for the ‘restaurant’. His newspaper received hundreds of complaints from readers trying unsuccessfully to find, for example, ‘Le Petit Poulet’, or ‘Slappers and Flappers New York Ribs’. Once, after reviewing his tennis partner Mary Kostas’s souvlaki, giving the entirely fictitious ‘Dimitri’s Moustache’ a big thumbs-down, he was approached in Queen Street by a burly gentleman sporting a Mediterranean handlebar moustache big enough for a children’s bicycle. ‘You Zim?’ the brute said. ‘Me Dimitri.’ And he socked poor Westchester in the face.

  Zim’s little ruse was soon uncovered, and he made his way to Sydney in the early seventies, where there were enough restaurants to preclude him from actually inventing them. That’s where I met Zimmy, in a tacky South Korean chophouse in Chinatown one evening. When I say I met him there, I should be more precise. We were in fact conducting a fairly routine drug raid, and Zim was soon lined up against the wall with the other startled customers. Our guns were drawn. ‘I’m not a suspect!’ Zim shouted, his hands trembling. ‘I’m a restaurant reviewer!’ (Oh, how many times have I quoted that luscious line back at him?) It was lucky we were there. Zim had given the chophouse half a star only the year before, and just as we quietly entered, our hands on our holsters, the restaurant manager had shrieked, raced across the room and tried to throttle a startled Zim. It was deliciously chaotic. The lobsters in their tanks had a front-row seat. In my official report later that night, I wrote that we’d conducted a successful raid, and additionally had prevented a murder.

  That’s how Zim and I had got to know each other, and he would often give me insider knowledge on the best places to eat across town. ‘Zimmy,’ I’d say to him on the phone, ‘I feel like something Turkish, and it’s the wife’s birthday.’ And, sure enough, we’d arrive at his recommendation and be made a fuss of. Even Zim muttered in Turkish still sounds like Zim.

  He was ahead of his time, Westchester. He was, he said, born to review restaurants. It’s the way his head
worked. It was how he saw the world. He reviewed everything as he experienced it — a bus ride to work (‘The driver was firm but courteous, the transport itself clean and without frills’), watching men mowing in the Botanic Gardens (‘The grass was left unattractive near the harbour rocks, thus ruining the overall aesthetics’), even having a bath (‘Once again, I found the Sydney water harsh and not conducive to a good lather, but altogether splendid compared to the amnionic headiness of Brisbane water’). He’d been a fussy eater as a child, and had quite literally put his mother in an asylum for six months when he was a toddler. He’d stayed with his aunt during her convalescence. ‘A chance,’ he said many times, ‘to expand my developing palate.’ I cannot blame Zim here. I once ate at his mother’s house near the end of her life, and her boiled brisket made me dry retch.

  He could, as you might have already guessed, be a little off-putting with his verbose manner. Strangely, the way he spoke — full of pomp and wind — was the opposite to his printed prose. His reviews were sharp and crisp, without an ounce of fat. I, and most certainly the restaurant owners, will never forget his classic review of a Tibetan eatery called The Sound of One Hand Clapping. The entire review was just six words: ‘The sound of no hands clapping.’

  Zimmy was perhaps a decade older than me, and I was not surprised that he finally left Sydney and returned to his hometown of Brisbane to semi-retire. What he found, after a thirty-year absence, was a culinary transformation. Brisbane was no longer a place where the year’s gastronomic highlight was the arrival of the frozen dim sim. He was like an old horse that had returned to a magical orchard, and in his excitement he went back to full-time reviewing, becoming, in the process, something of a celebrity around town. Zim and the age of the celebrity chef-reviewer collided. He was a man to be feared. He could close a restaurant overnight, such was his power.

  You would think, with all that professional eating, that Zim would be a man of formidable proportions. But he was the opposite. Zim had hollow legs, as his mother had always told him. It was a phrase, in fact, that he had usurped as the title for his perennially incomplete autobiography. He was sensationally thin, and too tall for his weight. Clothes dangled off the wire of him. His hair, too, though thick and white, defied the teeth of a comb and grew into a sort of edifice of spun sugar. Zim had the top knot all his life. His enemies called him Pigeon.

  When I, too, retired to the Gold Coast, he invited me up for the odd meal, and if I drank too much, which I always did with Zim, we’d return to his inner-city apartment overlooking the river, its walls heavy with art, and he’d read to me passages from his favourite restaurant critics from around the world. He loved the internet, did Zim, because he could raid newspaper and magazine websites for great food writing.

  In this last year of his life, he’d been fanatical about the British critic A. A. Gill, even memorising the Londoner’s best passages. With the muddy brown Brisbane River oozing past behind him, he’d recite them to me like some amateur Shakespearean actor.

  ‘“I sat down, touched the stickiness of a table that had been wiped with a dirty cloth, and knew instantly that you should never eat the same thing twice,”‘ pronounced Zim, quoting Gill. He continued: ‘“Like history, food repeats itself — once is comedy, twice is vomit. The ribs and that barbecue flavour — such a cosmopolitan, grown-up Hollywood version of home-grown brown sauce — tasted as if they’d been boiled in an ashtray ... This is bad from a bad place where the bad people live. This is a glutinously awful pig-swamp bad, out all on its own in the badlands. This is, to put it simply, just so you don’t forget, terribly bad food.’”

  At this Zim would have to sit down to compose himself. ‘He’s brilliant, this Gill,’ he’d say. ‘So daring. So fresh. I wish I had his courage. And his country’s more lenient defamation laws. Here, get a load of this: “‘Next, my milk-fed lamb was three squiggly, munchkin bits of nascent sheep. You rarely get this in England, and I can’t think why — the place is lousy with the sodden, limping, maggoty things, with farmers always complaining that they can’t give them away at car-boot sales. The Easter milk-fed lamb has a serious premium. A drunk man with a stocking on his head has to grab the teeny-weeny, gambolling, gamine-eyed, plaintively bleating baby from its mother’s nipple, then shoot it in the face with a nail gun while mumsy runs in circles. I can’t imagine why you can’t get it at Tesco ... it is utterly delicious and worth every soft, sentimental bleat.’”

  ‘Now that’s good,’ I said.

  ‘Now that’s brilliant,’ he replied.

  I miss Zim. They said he’d had a heart attack at some new and trendy restaurant/vineyard in the Gold Coast hinterland. Dropped stone dead while taking a stroll through the trellises and vines.

  Only later would I find out he’d been murdered.

  At his funeral, I read out his favourite A. A. Gill passage: “‘I started with a complimentary shot glass of insemination-temperature cauliflower soup, with a cold cream cappuccino top and a grey, slimy nose-blow of truffle oil as a garnish. You can sip it like espresso, the waiter said helpfully. Liquidised cauliflower tastes like fat boy’s farts. Effluent cauliflower with added truffle oil tastes like corpse bloat. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t want it and I don’t care to be quizzed about why I didn’t enjoy it.’”

  This was, of course, an allusion to death itself. Everyone laughed. Except the expensively dressed man with blond, gelled hair in the back pew. Our eyes locked for a moment. I jotted a mental note. I thought later — how might Zim have reviewed him?

  ‘Potentially fatal to a good palate.’ How right he would have been.

  ~ * ~

  3

  A day after Westchester Zim’s funeral, I was shocked to receive a call from his solicitor, asking — no, begging — me, to take charge of his affairs.

  ‘You are the only one I can talk to about this,’ he said. ‘There is nobody else.’

  Nobody else? Zim might have had his enemies in the foodie circles of Australia, but he had loyal friends and devotees as well. Didn’t he? I always pictured him out on the town each night, supping at the finest eateries with the most important people of the day, shooting bons mots across the silverware, being confided in with grave or titillating secrets. A good meal, he always said, opens the most private of doors. But a great meal invites you inside. (Or something like that.)

  ‘What do you mean there’s no one else?’ I said to the solicitor. ‘We only met about once a month.’

  ‘Please,’ the solicitor said. ‘There is no next of kin. It’s very sad. You’d be doing him a great favour. Or the memory of him.’

  So I ended up as executor of poor Zim’s estate, and one maudlin, stormy Friday I travelled to Brisbane to sort through his apartment.

  As a former homicide detective, I can tell you something. The dwellings of the recently dead can be forbidding places. I have poked through squalid bedsits where lonely, forgotten pensioners have passed away; rifled through the bedroom drawers of missing persons; upturned the houses of drug dealers and fraudsters. But nothing gives you a chill like wandering amongst the furniture and belongings of a murder victim. Knowing they’ll never be coming back. Knowing they’ve left the place as some sort of unforeseen museum to themselves, their last moments frozen in time and space.

  Yes, I knew in my bones, as soon as I opened the door to his apartment, and quietly closed it behind me, that I was inspecting the landscape of a murder victim.

  Zim’s was a very comfortable apartment. The open lounge and dining area faced a series of sliding glass doors that led onto a balcony. It had a beautiful southern view of the city that took in the Kangaroo Point cliffs, the Botanic Gardens, Parliament House and the river’s dramatic about-face at the tip of the gardens. The leafy promontory appeared, from this elevation, like the prow of a magnificent ship, its decks crowded with fig trees and tropical plants and mangroves.

  I sat for some minutes on a squatter’s chair on the balcony, admiring the vista. In the distance, black clouds
gathered and roiled, and threw twigs of lightning at Logan and beyond. Birds wheeled and shrieked above the gardens and little tethered boats bobbed at its perimeter. The storm was heading this way.

  Back inside the apartment, my radar was sensitive to more than just a dead man’s possessions and how they might be dispersed. More than debts that had to be resolved. That’s the thing about death. It can leave a multitude of loose ends, long and short, all of which have to be tied off before we’re truly assigned to oblivion. For when those threads disappear, you only exist in the memories of others. And when the memories go ...

  Zim had taste, I’ll give him that. He had an entire wall of Cézanne reproductions — all the famous fruit paintings. What did Cézanne say? ‘I’ll astonish Paris with an apple.’ Not bad. Zim’s restaurant reviews, you felt, always built towards his encounter with the dessert. Entrees and mains were the scaffolding that you climbed to get to the sweet platform.

  ‘It was my mother’s fault,’ he once confided in me over a crème brûlée. ‘She was a terrible cook, but she always brought in magnificent desserts. She had what you called, in the old days, a sweet tooth. I confess I was a trifle spoiled in the dessert department. Trifle. You see, I cannot even say the word without making reference to the dessert.’