Dragons at the Party (21 page)

“Of course. You’re determined to save my life, aren’t you, Inspector?”

“If it’s possible, sir,” said Malone, not offering him too much hope, and hoping Joe Nagler could not hear him. He hated the man for his policies and his corruption, but could not help liking him for his stoical humour.

“Who do you start with?” said Delvina, feeling she was losing command.

“Mr. Sun,” said Malone and looked directly at the Chinese.

“But you’ve already interrogated him, haven’t you?”

“Not really.” Malone smiled, as if implying there were whips and blackjacks and worse in the closet.

Timori said, “I’m sure Mr. Sun will co-operate. There is an explanation for everything that’s troubling you. Except, of course, who is paying to have me killed. I don’t think Mr. Sun will be able to help you there.”

“Who else is going to be interviewed?” said Hickbed.

“You,” said Malone, glad of the opening. “I’ll be doing that.”

“When?” Hickbed didn’t like being besieged at any time, least of all on his own territory. BHP, the nation’s largest corporation, had once tried to take him over and had finished up so badly bruised from its efforts that it had stayed away from him ever since. A mere police inspector could be crushed into a powder.

“Now would be as good a time as any.”

Hickbed
took off his glasses; they had steamed up again. He made a noise like a wild boar grunting in the scrub; but he was dressed in Italian linen amongst the camellias and azalea bushes and the effect wasn’t quite the same. “I’ll make up my own mind about that.”

Delvina, dressed in the best Chinese silk and as smooth, rose from her chair. “Inspector, would you come for a walk with me?”

Malone raised his eyebrows, looked at Timori. Did you ask permission of an ex-President to go for a walk with his wife?

But Delvina had never asked permission of her husband for anything. She just walked away without a backward glance. Malone looked again at Timori, who smiled and nodded, then he followed Delvina.

She led him down steps on to a lower terrace, stood against the white stone balustrade with a statue of Aphrodite smiling conspiratorially over her shoulder. Malone knew nothing of Greek goddesses, but this one looked a shrewd sister to Delvina. The sculptor had been cynical rather than romantic.

“May I call you Scobie?” She was wearing a musky perfume that Malone could smell above that of the roses in the big stone urns along the terrace. She smiled at him, no longer the imperious wife of a President.

Malone, too, smiled. “Go ahead. May I call you Delvina?”

“No. I have my position to keep up.”

“I have mine, too. But go ahead—Scobie will do.” He laid his jacket over the balustrade, thought about taking off his tie and decided against it. There was danger in being too relaxed around Delvina Timori.

“We’re in a delicate situation,” she said. “And a dangerous one, too. I know we’re not popular here, but Australians don’t understand how things have to be run in Palucca.”

“What about the Americans and the British and the French? They don’t seem to understand, either.”

“Till you’ve lived there, you don’t understand. I didn’t, not till I’d been there two or three
years.
My husband is what I suppose the ignorant would call a dictator, but some countries need a man like him. Palucca does. So does Australia,” she added, as if waiting for Abdul to be asked. “We are doing our best to see he returns to Palucca.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me,” she said. “I was using the royal plural.”

“It suits you,” he said with a grin.

She had the grace to smile; she wasn’t all poison and steel. Then she was sober-faced again. A pity, he thought: she looked almost beautiful when she smiled. “Scobie, what’s the point of all this investigation? We’ll be gone from here in a couple of weeks. Either back to Palucca or to Europe—we shan’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I mean, who would?”

She sounded like the expatriate snobs he had met on his one trip to London. He looked out at the harbour, a painting come alive by magic. The yachts were out again in force this morning, a chorus of gay notes swelling before the rising breeze. The tall ships, which had come from all over the world for the Bicentennial, were anchored in various bays for tomorrow’s sail past; he could see them, their masts and spars like symbols from the past, riding majestically above the smaller craft. He looked along at the mansions on this point, then across at the distant shore and the green oasis of Taronga Zoo. This was silvertail territory and those out on the harbour in the boats, big and small, weren’t short of a quid; but tomorrow wouldn’t be celebrated by the silvertails alone. People would be coming in from all over the city, from the bush too, the poor as well as the rich, and all of them, even if a little unsure of the history they would be commemorating, would be loud in their pride in what they had. Everyone, that is, but Dallas Pinjarri and Jack Rimmer and what Jack called the tribe, but he doubted if Delvina had ever given them a thought anyway.

“I think I would,” he said quietly.

“A real Aussie?” she said, but managed not to sneer.

He
nodded. “Get on with it, Delvina. You’re going somewhere in a couple of weeks . . . ?”

For a moment she looked as if she might spit at him, something she might have done in Bunda but not in Point Piper. “That’s my point. We’ll be gone and everyone will soon forget the fuss.”

“The fuss about Mr. Masutir? And the old lady over at Kirribilli and the young policeman who was killed last night? I don’t think I’ll forget it.”

“Of course
we
shan’t forget them. We’re
involved
, you and us. But the public—do you think they remember those sort of things? They get all their news from TV and nobody remembers that. They’ll even forget all this, what’s going to happen tomorrow.” She gestured at the harbour.

“Not if they’re here to see it. If they see it on TV, maybe yes. But not if they’re here. I hope to bring my kids to see it and I hope they’ll remember it for the rest of their lives . . . You forget one thing. No one’s going to forget you and the President too easily.” He looked up towards the house. Timori and Hickbed were still on the top terrace, gazing down at them. “You could bring down the Federal Government. Someone’s working on that right now.”

“Who?”

“The State Premier.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. But I’d lay money on it and I’m not a betting man.”

“How much do you earn?”

He smiled sourly and shook his head. “Don’t try that one, Delvina. I’m squeaky clean, always have been.”

“No, how much do you earn?”

“Forty-two thousand a year, plus a few perks. A week’s dress allowance for you, so my wife tells me.”

“Newspaper exaggeration. I get a discount.” Charges of extravagance never worried her; life should be an expensive dream. She put her hand on Aphrodite’s naked buttock, as if to emphasize her own penurious nakedness. “It’s not much, is it?”

“
It’s more than you ever earned as a dancer.”

“Dancing was just a means to an end.” She looked around her, hoping this was not the end. She had met Malone only twice back in the old days of the dancing company; he had been on the Fraud Squad then and had come investigating a secretary who had been choreographing the books. They had never talked like this, but there had not been a situation like this. “I could give you a hundred thousand dollars.”

“No.”

“Two hundred thousand.”

“I could arrest you—well, no I guess I couldn’t. Did the President know you were going to try and bribe me?”

“No, it was a spur of the moment thing.” But he was sure she never did anything on the spur of the moment. Her emergency plans were as calculated as her ambitions. “Forget it, Inspector.”

“Yes, Madame Timori.” He picked up his jacket from the balustrade. “Are you worried for the President’s safety?”

“Of course I am!” She was regal again: having tried the common touch she had, being common, recognized it had its limitations. “How dare you suggest I’m not!”

“I didn’t suggest anything. If he is killed, will the generals let you go back to Palucca?”

“Probably not. I don’t know. Why?”

“Nothing,” he said, trying to look enigmatic. He felt he had regained a little of the initiative from her, though he was still not sure of the direction in which to head.

For the moment they headed back up the steps to the top terrace and the house. Timori watched them till they were only a few feet from him, his face as inscrutable as Sun’s standing just behind him. Then he smiled. “So what arrangements have you come to?”

“None, sir,” said Malone.

Timori pursed his lips. He had been sure the offer of the bribe would be accepted; Delvina had discussed it with him as an emergency ploy. He was nonplussed when he was faced with honesty, especially
from
a policeman. Dictators, in many ways, are uneducated in the ways of the world. “So the investigation goes on? And all the muck-raking?”

Malone was surprised at the bitterness in Timori’s voice. He had thought the ex-President was resigned to his future, to exile, to the opprobrium. “I won’t be muck-raking, Mr. President, not unless it’s necessary, to find out who’s paying Seville.”

“Damn Seville! Who cares about him?”

“I thought you did, sir.”

Timori stared at him. In Palucca, Malone thought, my head would be off within the next hour. There was no mistaking the rage in the ex-President’s dark face; then all at once the rage drained out of it and something else replaced it. It was a moment before Malone recognized it as fear.

“You may go, Inspector.” He turned and walked away to the end of the terrace and stood staring out at the harbour. Delvina hesitated, then she gave Malone an angry look and followed her husband. She took his hand and they stood close together, gazing north, towards Palucca. It was only by accident they were looking in that direction: neither of them had the slightest idea about the points of the compass. When Abdul prayed each day it was Sun, the Buddhist, who always had to point him towards Mecca.

“You’ve over-stepped the mark again, Inspector,” said Hickbed. “We’ll have your head for this.”

Then the housemaid appeared. “Inspector Malone? You’re wanted on the telephone.”

Saved by Russ Clements: Malone knew it would be him. He followed the girl into the house. “Are you Vietnamese? Or Filipino?”

“No, sir. I’m from Palucca. I work for Mr. Hickbed two years.”

He might have known. “What did you think of Madame Timori when you were there?”

She was not embarrassed by the question. “Oh, she was wonderful, sir. She called herself the Mother of the Poor.”

“And was she?”

“Was she what, sir?”

“
Mother of the Poor.”

The girl had her first doubt; she frowned. “Oh, I think so. There’s the telephone, sir.”

She went away towards the back of the house, shaking her head at foreign policemen who asked stupid questions. Malone picked up the phone. “Yes?”

“Inspector Malone? Scobie, this is Russ. We picked up Dallas Pinjarri. But no gun.”

IV

“General Paturi’s on the doorstep,” said Neil Kissing, the Foreign Minister. “Or anyway, his embassy’s doorstep. You’ll have to see him.”

“
You
see him,” said Philip Norval. “He’s not a Head of State. Or is he? How do these juntas divvy up their status?”

“
I’m
not seeing him, not on my own. He’s your baby, not mine. He wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t invited Timori. He’d be in Washington or somewhere, worrying the guts out of them.”

Kissing had been in politics for twenty-five years. He was now in his mid-fifties, a bluff, curly-haired man who came from a working-class background. He had deserted his father’s party, the Labour Party, because of the in-fighting that always seemed to be going on; he had joined the Liberal Party and been stabbed in the back so many times he had become known as the Dartboard. The deepest wound had been inflicted when Norval and his backers had manipulated the numbers and, after years of striving, he had been defeated for the Prime Ministership. He had been given Foreign Affairs as compensation and he had worked brilliantly in the post; the fact that the Big Powers, and even the Small Powers of Europe, took little notice of Australian policies did not count. The nation’s voice, if only a bleat in the corridors of world power, was a triumphant shout in the nation’s newspapers: Kissing’s minders saw to that. He was biding his time, certain that he would be Prime Minister before he had to draw his superannuation.

“I’m not carrying the can for you this time, Phil. You handle these buggers on your own. I’m having enough trouble with Suharto in Indonesia. And with Singapore.”

Sometimes he wished Australia was elsewhere on the world map. Say where Sicily now was:
shrunken,
of course, to fit into the Mediterranean, but that wouldn’t matter. There was so much of the country that could be discarded. The whole middle third of it, which was just so much desert; Tasmania, which was always being left off maps anyway, even by Australian cartographers; he’d wipe off Queensland, too, which wanted to secede, or so it was said. It would be a pleasure to have to deal with the Europeans instead of the Asians; he would still get the dirty end of the stick, but the Europeans were less touchy about abuse. They expected that from the relics of their empires.

Phil Norval smoothed down his hair. He had just had his personal barber attend to it; the blondness had been touched up a little so that it would catch the light in tomorrow’s cameras. Tonight, too, he would be at the Bicentennial Ball and he wanted to look his best for that. His suntanned handsomeness always looked good at night and he would look particularly good beside Anita, who was fair-complexioned and, more importantly, short. He had never forgotten how, on a visit to Europe, he had been photographed alongside the six-foot-two wife of a Scandinavian Prime Minister. He had looked like her page-boy.

He was feeling depressed and worried, not a common state of mind for him; he was famous for always being buoyant and smiling through any disaster, natural or political. He had had an uncanny knack for being able to shrug off the blame for any of his government’s mistakes; he had chosen (with much advice from Hickbed and the kitchen cabinet) a Cabinet whose ministers, willingly or unwillingly, had always been able to carry the can. Now they were deserting him. None of them, with the exception of Kissing, was in Canberra and though he had sent for them, none of them had responded. They were, his minders had been told by their minders, celebrating the Bicentennial in their electorates, as all good ministers were expected to. They would come back to Canberra in the event of war or his own death, but that was all.