An Iron Rose (21 page)

‘Why did you?’

‘What?’

‘Look so pleased?’

‘So,’ Anne said. ‘Blacksmiths are not without insight. I worked for a merchant bank that was hired by a company to fight off a takeover bid by one of Leon’s companies. Very messy business, went on for months, working seventeen, eighteen hours a day, seven days. One Sunday I got home and my husband had gone off with my best friend. Anyway, we fought off Leon and we had a no-hard-feelings drink with the other side and Leon showed up. I think he then began to see me as a substitute for the company he couldn’t have. Anything Leon can’t have leaps in value in his eyes.’

‘So he took you over.’

She smiled. ‘Well, as I said, he’s a charming person. He has the gift of charm. It was a totally uncontested takeover. But as I found out, for Leon, you conquer the peak, another peak beckons. More coffee?’

‘Just a drop.’

‘There’s plenty.’ She poured. ‘That’s me. And I’m not complaining. What about you?’

‘My wife didn’t like my hours either.’

‘Blacksmiths work long hours?’

‘Pre-blacksmith.’ I stood up. ‘Time to go. Thanks for the coffee.’

She stood up too. Standing on the step above me put her eyes level with mine. We looked at each other. ‘Let me know when you’d like to see the mill,’ I said.

Anne nodded. ‘Can you give me a number?’ She wrote it in her leather-bound book.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘See you soon then.’

She put out a hand and straightened my shirt collar, pulled her hand back. ‘Thank you,’ I said. I thought she blushed a little.

‘Terrible urge to straighten pictures,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you. Next week.’

I drove home in the waning day. Towering dark clouds on all horizons made it seem as if I were crossing a valley floor. It was dark by the time I stopped outside the Heart of Oak to see if Flannery was there. He wasn’t.

‘Car went in your drive just before dark,’ Vinnie said.

I left the vehicle where it was, walked up the road, climbed the paddock gate in the far corner and crossed the sodden field so that I could come at the house from the back, from behind the smithy.

The caller was still there: a car was parked in front of the office. I went across the gravel, slowly, my gravel, gravel put down so that I could hear it crunch. All senses on high-beam, I looked into the kitchen window.

Something touched my leg. I froze.

The dog, puzzled.

Inside, Lew was feeding the stove. He turned and said something to someone out of my field of view. The person laughed.

I let out my pent-up breath and opened the back door.

Berglin was in my favourite chair, long shoes on the table, cigarette dangling from a hand.

‘MacArthur John Faraday,’ he said. ‘Home is the hunter.’

There was no other way to do this. ‘Lew,’ I said, ‘I need to talk to this gentleman alone.’

When he’d gone, I said, ‘You lied to me.’

‘Come again?’ Berglin’s eyebrows went up in the middle.

‘That trace. Gabriele Makin.’

‘Yeah. Dead.’

‘Not dead. Undead. Not a million fucking kilometres from here.’

He blew smoke towards me, eyes narrowed. ‘You sure?’

‘Of course I’m fucking sure.’

‘How’d you find her?’

‘Phone book. What the fuck did you use?’

‘Contractor.’

‘Why?’

He blew smoke. ‘Why? I’m going to put some personal request through the system? I’m going to do that? I put that Melanie Pavitt through the system, Canberra’d be asking me why I wanted to find a person turns up dead. Make sense to you? Fresh air’s slowing the brain out here.’

‘Who’s the contractor?’

Berglin mashed his cigarette into the ashtray Lew had found for him. ‘It’s my worry. I’ll talk to him. Believe me, I’ll talk to him.’

From nowhere the thought came to me. ‘Alex Rickard,’ I said. ‘You’re using Alex Rickard.’

Berglin was lighting another cigarette, lighter poised. He lowered it. ‘I’ll stand on the cunt’s head,’ he said. ‘We’ll know why in quick time.’

‘What about a beer?’ I said, slack with relief. Not Berglin to blame but Alex Rickard.

‘Thought you’d never ask.’

I opened two Boags, found two glasses, sat down at the table.

Berglin took a big draught from the bottle. ‘Listen,’ he said, two reasons I’m out here in the fucking tundra. One is, from your time on the Lefroy fuck-up, the name Algie mean anything?’

‘Algae? As in blue-green slime?’

‘Don’t know. Could be. Not likely. Could be A-L-G-I-E. Could be two parts: Al G, like a first name and a surname initial. Maybe Al Gee.’

‘No. Never heard it. It’s someone’s name?’

‘Calls himself that, yeah.’

‘How’s this come up?’

‘Run-through last night, Bulleen of all fucking places. Nothing’s sacred. Person we had an interest in last year. Local jacks turned over this low-level garbage in Footscray, he tells them this weed bloke’s grown overnight. Now he’s a smack supplier, found some fucking original channel—big, not your arse full of condoms at all. Scully’s cockbrains wire the place up like a recording studio, move in across the road. Nothing to report. So they say. Stereo-quality farting, got the man mango-kissing his sister-in-law, very vocal performance, that’s about it. Waste of public money.’

He drank some more beer. ‘This is good,’ he said, looking at the bottle. ‘The pointyheads can make beer. Anyway, subject closed until last night. Then the serene Bulleen household is severely disrupted. Man alone at home, wife at the Chadstone shopping centre. He’s beaten, badly knocked about, teeth dislodged, flogged. Worse. Throat cut.’ He paused. ‘Don’t say anything, the thought occurs.’

We sat in silence for a few seconds. Berglin drank most of his beer, wiped his thin lips. I got out two more.

‘Good dog,’ he said. ‘Now the reason for all this unpleasantness might have remained obscure, MacArthur. But for one thing. False wall in the back of the house, space about a metre between the kitchen and the laundry. Get into it through the ceiling. Up the ladder in the garage, through the inspection hole. Last night, half the fucking kitchen wall kicked in.’

Berglin put out the cigarette, more gently this time, found another one, looked at it, put it down on the table. ‘Christ knows what these cunts went off with,’ he said, ‘but they left behind, down there in a corner, up against the plasterboard, a quarter kilo of outstanding, medal-winning-purity product. Melbourne Show quality.’

‘How come?’

‘Just bad light, they reckon. Pricks in a hurry, got plenty, never saw it.’

‘Algie,’ I said. ‘Where’s that come in?’

‘The wife says, she is a very scared person, that the deceased said to another man, person she doesn’t know, she was near them in a public place, he said, “Algie’s on, the lot”.’

‘That’s it?’

‘She heard that. Algie.’

‘Four words. What public place? Street? Shopping centre? Lots of noise?’

‘Noisy, but Algie, yeah. She says, she said to him in the car, who’s Algie? He said, just a bloke I’m doing business with.’

‘Could have been clearing his throat. Said it fast?
Algiesonthelot.
Native English speakers these Bulleen people?’

‘Since your departure,’ said Berglin, ‘we find ourselves bereft of ideas. But we stumble on. He’s Turkish, old man’s a Turk. We’ve run Algie by umpteen Turks. More Turks than Gallipoli. Doesn’t make sense in Turkish.’

‘But it’s come up before.’

‘What?’ He was studying the beer bottle again.

‘Algie. Algie—the word in question.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s been around.’

‘Around? Well, familiar word. Algie. Since when? Since before Lefroy?’

‘No. That’s why I’m here. Asking you.’

‘So when’s it come up? How long after Lefroy?’

‘Not long. Soon. On some drug bug, these spiders are talking. Appears to be about Lefroy. The one says, heard it was Algie.’

‘I’ve never heard that,’ I said. ‘How come I don’t know that?’

‘Mac, no-one needs to know everything.’

‘What does that mean? Exactly?’ I said.

‘What it says.’

I took a deep breath. ‘Soon after Lefroy I had a definite need to know about anything like that, Berg,’ I said. ‘But moving on, you’re here because you’re in some kind of shit, second Lefroy-style run-through, new boys in Canberra think it’s time you kicked on to that block at Batemans Bay. That it?’

‘Third,’ said Berglin.

‘Third?’

‘Third Lefroy-style run-through. There’s lots of them go on but not killing. Three years ago, we had two Chinese blokes, property investment advisors for Hong Kong syndicates, that’s the story. Rent a flat in St Kilda, ground floor, beachfront, big flat, four bedrooms, gold taps, that sort of thing. They come and go, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bangkok, Hawaii, Sydney, Brisbane. Never stop for more than a few days, real estate people show them around buildings. Hong Kong clears them, Scully’s people give them a clean bill. Operation terminated. I had a bad feeling, but we couldn’t go on without the local jacks.’

Berglin lit his cigarette. ‘About eighteen months ago, the lady lives upstairs looks down from her balcony, sees a pool of blood on the balcony below. From under the door. It’s all tiles, inside and out. Blood runs free. She calls jacks. Chinese bloke’s taped up, throat cut.’

He looked at me in silence for a while.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Woman there too. A hooker. In the bathroom. Same treatment as the bloke. And worse. Much worse. We kept the details quiet.’

I swallowed. ‘This means what?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Stuff, money, probably money. Pick-up, pay off. Someone knew.’

‘Algie?’

‘Yesterday was a big day for shit floating up. There was another hooker these Chinese blokes liked. Hired by the day on other visits. Woman called Lurleen. We couldn’t ever find her. Yesterday she rings a number we gave this other hooker, her friend, back then. Lurleen’s back in town and she’s scared. I had a little walk and talk with her. Guess what?’

‘No.’

‘She’s in the flat too on the night. She’s got a key, been there all afternoon. Now she’s in the kitchen, hears the doorbell, hears the Chinese open the door, he says something and then she hears him scream. She doesn’t fuck around, knows shit when she hears it coming, out the door to the garage, gone. Next day she reads the bit in the paper, moves interstate. Wollongong. She reckons anyone looking for her, they won’t look there. I reckon she’s right.’

‘How does she help?’

‘Algie,’ Berglin said, ‘That’s what the Chinese said at the front door. He said, “You are Algie?” A question.’

‘She heard that from the kitchen?’

‘He had a high voice, the Chinese, she says. Clear voice. And there was a half-open door to the hallway and the sitting room. Open-plan place.’

‘You give her the name before she told you what she heard?’

‘Don’t be a dork. This woman’s kosher. Lefroy and the Chinese, same visitors. And if this Algie in Bulleen is Lefroy’s Algie…’

I finished my beer, fetched two more. ‘So that would just about get you to the second thing that brings you here,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Berglin. ‘Bianchi and Mance at the pub in Deer Park. You need to tell me who told you that.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘My telling days are over. Anyway, person can’t take it any further. Just heard it.’

Berglin nodded, drank some beer, scratched his head. ‘Need a pee,’ he said. ‘Let’s go outside. I like an open-air pee when I’m in the country. Pee, a cigarette and a look around. The stockman’s breakfast.’

We went into the night, over to the paddock fence and pissed on the weeds.

‘Wouldn’t want to expose the pork out here too long,’ Berglin said. ‘Lose it to frostbite. Listen, should be clear to you if Mance was playing both you and Bianchi, the idea came from Scully. Bianchi was just a cockbrain, messenger, fetch the hamburgers, get us a pie.’

‘And then,’ I said, ‘you have to begin to think the unthinkable.’

He zipped his fly. ‘A possibility, no more.’

‘Here’s another possibility. Three separate surveillance operations, three targets dead, stuff gone. And it’s all got nothing to do with the surveillance.’

‘Odds higher there,’ Berglin said. ‘It gives me the same worry you had and that makes doing anything very difficult.’

‘And I hear the surveillance records vaporised.’

Berglin looked at me, head tilted. ‘For a bloke way out of the loop, you hear a lot.’

‘What about the spring cleaning after I left?’

‘Did that, but houses get dirty again. Christ, let’s get inside.’

At the back door Berglin stopped, tapped my arm, took out a cigarette. ‘Mrs Bianchi, she went on protection, new name, new everything, new tits even if I read the expenses right. Got a bloke looking for her now, reliable bloke, one hundred percent, reports only to me. He says he’s warm. We find her, you want to talk to her?’