The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  Flick sat smoking at his desk. He did not stand to greet me. He did not offer me a chair.

  ‘Take a seat,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  Flick exhaled a long column of smoke.

  ‘Where did you learn them?’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Your manners.’

  ‘Swiss finishing school.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  It was a comfortable chair. I would have liked one for the rumpus room back home.

  ‘Does this come with a pouffe?’ I asked, squeezing the padded arms of the chair.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Did you know “pouffe” is French? The word. Nineteenth century. It refers to something “puffed out”. I learned it from my good friend Westchester Zim.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘Ever meet Westchester?’

  ‘As I’ve told you, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘You would have liked him. He could pick a Castelnaudary cassoulet from one made in the Toulouse tradition simply by sniffing the steam coming off the dish.’

  Flick scrunched his nose at me much in the way of Eva Braun outside his heavy oak office door. I was either really on the nose to this crowd, or they liked snorting a bit of Charlie in between business meetings. Or both.

  ‘That’s a pretty little town in the box over there.’

  ‘That’s the future. Master-planned cities. That’s our next project, near Ipswich.’

  ‘What’s it called? Flickville?’

  ‘Serenity Downs.’

  ‘Nice. Sounds like a great place to sleep. I’m getting drowsy already.’

  ‘You’ve got one minute.’

  I lifted the briefcase onto my lap and tapped the battered leather. I could see in the distance, through a broad pane of glass, the second span of the Gateway Bridge coming together. The finished Portside Wharf. Cranes here. New motorways there. Boy, this town was really on the move. And when towns like Brisbane started moving, the sharks could smell blood in the water.

  ‘Been doing a bit of research, Flicky old boy. Knowledge is power, and all that guff. Know what I mean? Amazing what you can find out these days with modern technology, like that internet thingy. Fascinating what you can dig up if you have a hunch about somebody. Like I have a hunch about you. You see, I had a dream. A dream of a car that would take me away from our complicated world to a purer place. Get my drift?’

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘A Kombi, Flick. Slept in her last night, actually, down by the Botanic Gardens. Haven’t slept that good in years. Better than your little Snooze-away Downs here. Anyway, I had plenty of time to think, there in the back of the van. And the most extraordinary dots started joining together. As if by magic. A few phone calls later, Flicky my lad, and I was starting to see a richer picture. An evil picture. A picture of an unscrupulous developer who arrived out of nowhere and started buying up half of a booming little tropical city. A man who, once upon a time, in a European forest far, far away, did some pretty naughty things, then changed his name. No, not just his name, but his entire life. Indeed, his actual face. It’s almost a German version of My Fair Lady, the way this fellow, this grub from the streets of Bremen, this Paul Smith, or should I say, Herr Paul Schmidt, had such a chameleonic ascent. How he went from cashier in a sex shop to low-level drug dealing to creatively laundering international drug funds into legitimate projects on behalf of the big boys.’

  Flick murdered his cigarette. He snorted the last drag out his nose, sat back, folded his arms and stared at me.

  ‘But that wasn’t enough for Paul from Bremen,’ I went on. ‘Once he was reborn he had a “big idea”. The old light bulb above the head. The glühbirne atop der kopf. Pauly had a vision. Not an entirely original one, I’ll admit. But what if Pauly from Bremen greased the right palms, feathered the correct nests, targeted the right pouffes to plump up, and got insider knowledge of a booming city’s future plans, and what if lucky Pauly just happened to own property that not only doubled, tripled, but increased in value tenfold when grand infrastructure projects just happened to synchronise with his investments. Can you believe that Pauly Smith, they’d all say? A genius. Then, what if he replicated that uncanny talent across the country? Well, Pauly would be a very sought-after man, wouldn’t he? And he’d also be very rich.’

  Flick coughed. He smiled. He lit another cigarette. ‘Your one minute is up.’

  ‘I’m not finished,’ I said. Through the smoke, I could see a giant eagle finely etched into the glass behind his desk. ‘Our Pauly, though, should have remembered his roots in bland Bremen with its brass pig statue downtown. Did you ever rub its nose for luck when you were a little thief living on the streets? Bet you did. You see, Paul, cities on the make don’t lose their small-town endearments. You should have done your research. Brisbane is a place that has known corruption. Has lived it. It’s in the soil. It’s also a place, despite its explosive growth and grand vision, which has gossip and tittle-tattle as its bedrock. People here still talk over the back fence. That’s what I like about it. And that was your big mistake. Did you honestly think you could bribe your way through government without anybody noticing? Cosmopolitanism in one town, Paul, can be seen as ignorance and idiocy in another. Not everything translates. If the premier uses the wrong cutlery in a fine dining restaurant here, it’s news the next day. Am I getting through to you, Paul? Small inside the big. A place and its people still connected to the earth.

  ‘You thought the little boutique winery on the side, the gestures to some cultural depth, could blind people to your common heritage? And your little Kombi chop shop? The scumbags you hang out with there? Still a common thief, hey, Paul? You don’t understand much about Kombi people either, I’m afraid. They’re bonded. Blood brothers and sisters. They talk, find things out, share, for the common good. The way it used to be — looking out for each other. I know some things about you that even you don’t know, my friend. All reported to me by Kombi spies. You thought you’d come to a place like this and bluff your way through? This is Brisbane, man. Once a grub, always a grub. And in a town like this, there are three primary ways that secrets move around. In the bedroom. Over the back fence. And over a meal. Has mankind ever been any different? But someone found you out, didn’t they?’

  ‘Is that a question?’

  ‘The last time I checked my primary school grammar book, yes, it was.’

  ‘Why don’t I have you shown out.’ He pressed a buzzer on his desk. Can you believe that? The villain with a red emergency button on his desk? This guy had seen too many movies.

  Doors behind me opened.

  ‘You like technology, Paul? Computers? Laptops? Digital voice recorders?’

  ‘Get him out!’ Herr Flick/Schmidt shouted to some approaching goons. I didn’t need to turn around to see their shiny European suits and passé ponytails. When had I stumbled on to the set of Die Hard?

  ‘Sometimes,’ I said, gripping Zim’s briefcase before being reefed out of the chair, ‘just a pencil and a little square of paper can do all the damage. The might of the pen, Paul. The might of the pen.’

  In a struggle with the German henchmen from central casting, I accidentally managed to knock over the model of Snoozeville, and shattered glass and little fragments of roofs and trees and shopping malls and train stations spilled across the shiny office floor. They got under our feet, these broken pieces of domestic bliss, and down we all went, giving me enough time to pull out my cheap pawnshop .38. Before I knew it the darned thing had gone off by itself, exploding a huge window that looked out over the hills of Mount Coot-tha.

  And as the gorillas threw me, still clutching Zim’s bag, out of the building from the twenty-first floor, the briefcase latch opened and hundreds of my late friend’s lovingly inscribed index cards fluttered about me. It was a throw of confetti from Zim himself. And, I thought, the last thing I would see in my life.

  ~ * ~<
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  10

  When my broken left leg had finally healed, Peg and I decided we’d make that trip to Tasmania after all. So we packed up the Kombi, waved goodbye to the family, pulled out of our driveway to much fanfare from the neighbours and turned right onto the Pacific Highway.

  ‘How’s this?’ I said to Peg, barely containing my exhilaration. This was what it was all about. The freedom of the open road. The limitless possibilities. The great human desire for locomotion. I was as giddy as a schoolboy.

  ‘How long will it take to get there?’ Peg said, filing her nails. We’d been driving for four minutes.

  She could not deflate me. I had almost died at the hands of Herr Johann Flick. It’s not every day you go abseiling from a Brisbane high-rise, without a parachute, kite, bungee rope or cocktail umbrella, and live to tell the tale.

  Of course, I’d made the papers again. Thus our hurried trip to the Apple Isle. I had become an embarrassment to Peg. It was something I hadn’t counted on being for another twenty years, as a permanently dribbling, nappy-wearing, chair-bound, ga-ga old fruit who thought that ‘the war’ was still raging. The Vietnam War, that is.

  So to Tasmania we went, where my recent escapades would hopefully be unknown.

  Still, they had lauded me as the luckiest man alive. Proclaimed that God was on my side. That my number wasn’t up. They lavished every pun and cliche in the book on me. And why not? It may well have been a higher power who decided a window cleaner’s platform would be there to greet me, one storey down, when I was thrown from that building; that I would land on the window cleaner himself — a man of portly dimensions; and that his equipment, including a platform net strong enough to stop a runaway Kombi, would be in perfect working order. The platform and the net, that is. Not the window cleaner himself, who was taken to hospital with several broken ribs, a cracked pelvis and a mashed nose courtesy of my old .38, which hit him so cleanly I could hear the bone break like a snapped quail leg the second the two made contact. I agreed — free of charge, and in lieu of a lawsuit — to be used in a new advertisement for the window-cleaning scaffolding, and be photographed in a red rubber super-hero mask. Miracle Man! they called me. This, too, may have added to Peg’s mortification.

  Nevertheless, I was alive. Flick, of course, got nicked. For my attempted murder. Then for killing Westchester Zim and Joe Santorini. Corruption charges would follow, so whichever way you looked at it, plain old Paul Smith from Bremen would be spending the rest of his life in jail.

  The moment Flick went down, the entire house of cards noisily collapsed. The ripple effect was impressive. Several senior government ministers resigned, citing a ‘need to spend more time with my family’. I’ve always liked this excuse. Staff attrition at the local council was suddenly enormous. An entire department associated with infrastructure property acquisitions just disappeared. They left steaming coffee mugs at their desks. Half-eaten doughnuts. ‘Flickgate’, as it became known, ran deep and wide, and fumigated whole swathes of Brisbane’s professional workforce. At the same time, the world economy collapsed, the state’s water grid ceased construction, plans for dams disappeared and master-planned cities stayed tightly in their miniature airless cases. I know Flick wasn’t responsible for this landslide, but I like to think his demise loosened the rocks a little.

  In my days as a rouseabout cop, I was known for certain eccentricities. I never saw it that way. I now see myself as a pioneer of psychological detective work. If you bear this in mind, I want to tell you precisely what I did when I was released from hospital. There was one piece of the puzzle missing, and I needed to get inside it, to work it out as a method actor may inhabit a character. I needed to do it for Zim.

  So I returned to the Ertrinken Estate winery in the Gold Coast hinterland. It had, of course, stopped functioning the moment the cuffs were slapped on Flick. It was abandoned. Within minutes of the news reaching this scenic ridge overlooking the glitter strip, the cellar door was quite literally left swinging in the breeze. Half-washed dishes were abandoned in the sink in the restaurant kitchen. A profiterole, with a scalloped bite mark in it (clearly from someone with terrible teeth), was left to go stale on a plate. Time stood still at the place where one had drowned one’s sorrows.

  I had had plenty of time to work out the nuts and bolts of Zim’s death as I recuperated in hospital. And I had thousands of his minutely inscribed index cards to pore over. (I had not taken the genuine incriminating ones with me the day I visited Herr Flick in his office. What do you think I am, daft?)

  But it wasn’t until I sat in the chair he’d sat in, inside that empty winery restaurant, that I could truly see what happened. As I said, I had to go the hard yards for Zim, out of respect, out of courtesy.

  You see, Zim had been here twice for the purpose of reviewing Ertrinken’s restaurant. That’s how darned diligent he was, how particular. And how fair. On the first test run, two weeks before his death, he had, according to his notes, experienced what he described as ‘quite possibly the worst meal of my professional career’. I won’t go into the details he had jotted in his crablike handwriting on the cards, but let’s just say the detection of various cockroach antennae and thorny leg parts in his water glass kicked off the whole disaster, which included a steak with actual ice particles at its centre, and a guinea fowl that he suspected was a chicken in disguise.

  As for the wine, he had sipped on a glass of the winery’s own dry white, and found it to be re-fermented. He actually wrote, ‘Nips horribly at the tongue.’ He sent the bottle back and ordered another. The same. He went for a third — the old three strikes you’re out rule. They were ruled out.

  The spy game is not confined to governments and big business. The wine and food world is heaving with double agents. When Zim left that night after an argument over not paying for the three bottles of appalling white wine, they knew who he was by the time he’d driven under the rusty metal arch out the front and headed for home. A system of deception and fraud surrounding Zim had been activated by the time he’d pulled into his basement car park in Brisbane that very evening.

  Two days after his first Ertrinken visit, he was coincidentally given a complimentary bottle of the VW wine by a Flick associate — a dodgy new sommelier in one of Zim’s favourite restaurants in Eagle Street. Zim studied the label. Could it possibly be from the same vineyard as the one that had turned his stomach and offended his palate just forty-eight hours earlier? Three days after that, at an official state-government function on the Parliament House lawn, a backbencher who was on a judging committee with Zim for the annual fine food awards told him about an incredible ‘secret stash’ he had of the finest white wine ever made in Queensland. Would he care to come back to his office for a taste? Would he like half a dozen bottles for his private cellar? It was, of course, the VW wine. Zim was dizzy with the serendipity of it all. (The wine, tests would later prove, not only contained lethal poisons, but had never been produced in Queensland. It was in fact an award-winning French sauvignon blanc that had been decanted into the VW bottles. Zim may have been onto this. But with wine that good, who cares what it’s wrapped in? Human pleasure can be a blinding, and dangerous, thing.)

  So when Zim returned to the winery restaurant for lunch a fortnight later, the manager and staff had a carefully orchestrated plan that came ‘from the top’, namely Johann Flick. Zim walked into an elaborate trap.

  As I sat there by the window, in Zim’s chair overlooking the coast, I felt teary. My dear friend. I wished I could have warned him. How could we have known he would indeed be killed to prevent a bad review? Had it ever happened, anywhere, in the history of gastronomy?

  When Zim came into the restaurant on the day of his death, he was feted like a head of state, given the best table in the house (which was, incredibly, full), and found himself seated amongst other diners of a very high calibre (if you’re into societal hierarchy), including several government figures, a once-famous movie star and even a celebrity chef from Great Br
itain. Now you don’t think Zim saw through all this? A man of his worldliness and culture? Sure he did. But the meal was perfect. (Had it been shipped in from elsewhere, and disguised, or concocted by an imported hand? We will never know.) And the wine was superlative, particularly the Kombi drop, with which Zim was now so familiar.

  Sometime during the lunch, however, his government friend on the food and wine judging panel had sidled up to the table and uttered some quiet words to Zim. And that’s when Zim wandered out to the flagstone balcony with the million-dollar view, wrote down a few notes on one of his little index cards, then strolled over to inspect the vines that ran in trellises down the front of the red-soiled ridge. Flick had hoped to get Zim — and prevent the bad review — in the quietness of Zim’s own Brisbane apartment with the poisoned VW wines that, through government contacts, had made their way into the reviewer’s hands. But Zim wasn’t of such low breed as Flick. He didn’t guzzle the wine straight away. It was something Flick, despite his physical transformation, could never understand. Of course Zim had cellared the wine. Of course he had postponed the satisfaction for the perfect moment. Had waited for the right meal to complement the wine.