Something Fishy (9 page)

Always pragmatic, Lyndal herself would have been the first to urge me to find a new squeeze. Although she might have had something to say about the randy desperation which led me to crack onto a half-sloshed twenty-four-year-old legal stenographer at the Lemon Tree by pretending to be a recently divorced commodities broker.

Problem was, I needed more than a hump. I needed what Lyndal had embodied. Passion plus compatibility. A shared bed, a shared world, a shared future. A combination it had taken me the best part of my life to find.

I'd met Lyndal during the '88 election campaign when she was doing some sort of voter-profiling work for the state secretariat, number-crunching the demographics in a raft of wobbly seats on the urban fringe. Taking the customers' measurements, she called it, so our wonks could tailor policy to a snug fit.

I loved it when she talked like that, her scepticism pitched midway between the earnest cant of the old guard and the blatant cynicism of the up-and-comers. I quite fancied other things about her, too. Eyes, lips, hips, those kinds of things. I planned to make my move at the election-night party, the victory knees-up. I left my lunge too late. It was three years later before I got a second shot, both of us on the rebound.

What I missed most about Lyndal, apart from the touch of her body, was her sharp eye for the nuances, her bedrock sense of justice and her bullshit detector.

And there's never a shortage of bullshit, not in my line of work. You don't even need to go looking for it. It seeks you out.

In early December parliament went into recess until the following March. I spent the next three weeks avoiding factional brawls, handling constituent matters, playing the minor dignitary at civic events and assisting with the disposal of free beer at end-of-year piss-ups. By then, the sky had begun to behave itself, the mercury was pulling its weight and summer appeared to have arrived. Like everybody else in Melbourne, I suspected a trick.

Christmas Eve was the last business day of the year. The only business of the day was to shut the electorate office for the four-week break.

At ten, I drove Red to the airport for his flight to Sydney. The baggage-handlers had turned on their customary peak-period go-slow and there was no danger that the flight would leave on time. I contrived to steer Red into the Mambo outlet.

‘You'll be needing a surfboard,' I said. ‘It can be your Christmas present.'

He beamed and picked out a three-fin thruster.

‘Act surprised when your mother gives you a wetsuit,' I told him.

When I told Wendy that I planned to give Red a board for Christmas, she immediately suggested that she complete the package with a wetsuit. At first, I took the suggestion as her reminder of the deficiencies of my universe, like I was personally responsible for the water temperature in the southerly latitudes. As if to say that when he lived with her in Sydney, her son hadn't needed thermal insulation. Thinking the worse of my former wife was a reflex, but considering her previous form Wendy had been remarkably sympathetic about Lyndal, the whole mess, and since I was the victor in the custody war, I no longer had any true cause for resentment.

‘And I got some of that fizzy bath stuff for her,' Red said. ‘And this is for you. You can open it now, if you like.' He handed me an inexpertly wrapped object.

‘A 48-piece socket set,' I said. ‘This'll be really handy.'

‘Get stuffed,' he said. ‘At Christmas dinner, I mean.'

There was no point in Red schlepping the surfboard with him to Sydney, so I waved him off at the gate-lounge and carried it back through the terminal, a man in a business suit with a Balin thruster under his arm.

On the way to the electorate office, I stopped at AutoBarn in Tullamarine and bought a set of roof-racks for the Magna, then found a chain bookstore and picked up a present for Ayisha.

The electorate office was a shopfront in Bell Street, Coburg, near the municipal library. When there were no delivery trucks blocking the view from the back window, you could see all the way across the K-Mart carpark to St Eleptherios basilica and the dumpsters behind Vinnie Amato's fruit shop.

I arrived just after one o'clock and found Ayisha surrounded by bags of groceries, talking to her husband on the phone. ‘Since when do Macedonians have roast turkey on December twenty-fifth?' she was saying. ‘It's not even orthodox Christmas. And I'm a fucking Moslem, culturally speaking. You want it, you cook it.'

Reminded of lunch, I went into the kitchenette and scraped together a tub of low-fat cream cheese, a jar of kalamata olives, a packet of crispbread and the remnants of a bottle of chenin blanc. I waved the bottle in Ayisha's general direction. ‘Fancy a quick one before you go? This won't be worth drinking by the time we get back.'

She gave me the thumbs-up and finished her call. I filled our glasses and handed her the present.

‘
Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire
,' she read, peeling back the wrapping. ‘For the girl who has everything.'

In return, she presented me with a recent biography of the Prime Minister, 487 pages, hardbound. ‘Take it to the beach,' she suggested. ‘Bury your head in the sand.'

We toasted ourselves for having survived another year, then she gathered up her groceries and departed in the general direction of a month's holiday, leaving the locking-up to me.

The sign on the front door said the office would be open until two o'clock. Since it was unlikely that anyone would have urgent need of our services in the next half-hour, I figured I'd eat lunch then close up early.

Five minutes later, as I was brushing crispbread crumbs off my shirtfront and putting the olives back in the fridge, I heard the front door open and the buzzer on the reception desk ring.

It was Rita Melina. She was wearing pedal pushers, a loose blouse that hung to mid-thigh and big-framed Jackie O sunglasses. A glossy shopping bag with the logo of the Daimaru department store was slung over her shoulder.

‘Happy Christmas, Rita,' I said.

‘Maybe for some,' she said bluntly. ‘Can you spare a few minutes, Murray? I need to talk to somebody official, but not too official, if you know what I mean.'

‘I guess that just about fits my description, Rita,' I said. ‘I'll be happy to help, if I can.'

I led her into my office. She drew up a chair, put her elbows on the desk and pushed her sunglasses up onto her hairdo. ‘This is confidential, right?' she said.

I was about to make some kind of a joke, until I saw the look of flinty determination in her eyes. ‘Up to a point,' I said. ‘I'm a member of parliament, not a priest or a doctor. I couldn't conceal a crime, for example.'

‘Say we were talking hypothetically?' she said. ‘Or I was here on behalf of a friend?'

‘Ms X, for example?' I said.

‘Mrs X, actually,' said Rita.

‘Ah, so,' I said. ‘And what is the nature of Mrs X's hypothetical problem?'

‘She's worried about something Mr X has done, or might have done, and she's wondering how she might raise her concerns with the appropriate authority.'

‘And you're hoping I can provide some informal advice, steer you right,' I said. ‘On behalf of Mrs X, that is?'

Rita flicked her wrist dismissively, dispensing with our tippy-toe pas-de-deux.

‘I think we've established the ground rules, Murray,' she said. ‘Tony's left me. Shot through. Not a word of goodbye, except for some half-baked message on the answering machine about having being called out of town urgently on business. I didn't believe a word of it, of course. He must think I'm an idiot.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘I'm sorry to hear…'

She cut me off with another peremptory flap. ‘I'm not here for marriage guidance counselling, Murray. Some sort of a bust-up between me and Tony has been on the cards for a while, ever since the girls left home. What's he expect me to do, sit around the house counting my wrinkles while some little gold-digger sinks her claws into him? Anyway, a few days ago I finally put my foot down. Told him I wasn't prepared to tolerate his womanising any longer. Told him that if he didn't get rid of that waitress, the one he's been slipping it to, I'd divorce him, take him to the cleaners.'

I sank deeper into my seat and wished that I'd locked the door while I still had the chance. ‘Catholics don't get divorced, Rita,' I said. ‘They stay together and fight to the death.'

Mrs X wasn't interested in my observations about matrimony. She took a pack of Marlboro Lites from her bag, fired one up with a disposable lighter and looked around for an ashtray.

‘It's forbidden to smoke in government offices,' I said.

‘Sunday night, I gave the prick twenty-four hours to make up his mind,' Rita exhaled. ‘Next day, he goes to work, never comes home. Vanishes. So does mega-tits, his bit on the side. She quits without notice, moves out of her flat, tells the neighbours she's going on a long trip. So it's obvious what's happened. Tony's made his choice, taken off with this cow. And good riddance to him. Except for one thing. His passport's gone, too, along with a whole bunch of business papers he keeps locked in his den at home. Banking details and whatnot. The bastard's left me high and dry.'

I tipped the paperclips from a saucer and put it between us on the table. ‘I can understand you being upset, Rita,' I said. ‘But what you need is a lawyer, not a member of parliament.'

She held up her palm, not finished yet. ‘I called Immigration, tried to find out if he's left the country in the last couple of days. They say they can't tell me. Some bullshit about the Privacy Act, even though I'm his wife. So naturally I thought of you, thought that you'd be able to pull some strings, make some unofficial enquiries on my behalf, that sort of thing.'

As a former adviser to a Minister for Ethnic Affairs, I was not entirely unfamiliar with the labyrinthine back corridors of the federal Department of Immigration. So it was quite within the realm of possibility that I could find somebody who knew somebody who could get an informal peek at the information that Rita wanted. On the other hand, it is axiomatic that getting sucked into your constituents' marital disputes is a zero-sum game.

‘I wish I could help, Rita. I really do. But Immigration's federal, I'm state. Different worlds. And frankly, I just don't have that sort of pull.'

‘I thought you were my friend,' she said.

‘I'm not a magician, Rita,' I said. ‘Anyway, even if you confirm that Tony's left the country, what good does it do you?'

‘Apart from wanting to know, one way or the other?' she said. ‘Remember my friend, Mrs X?'

Here it comes, I thought. Whatever it is. Hell hath no fury like a woman stiffed by her spouse of twenty years.

‘Mrs X is just a simple housewife,' said Rita. ‘She knows nothing about her husband's business dealings. Never has. She's always been the home-maker, he's been the provider. A traditional marriage, strict demarcation. She's never had any reason to want it otherwise. After all, he's quite successful, business-wise. Starts out with a little pizza joint, builds it into a booming restaurant, branches out into the wholesale seafood line. Always some iron in the fire. Long as the bills get paid, Mrs X sees no reason to think twice about the situation.'

I nodded, letting her know that I could see where she was going. ‘But now that Mr X has run out on her,' I said, ‘maybe left the country, she's begun to worry that some of his business affairs, about which she knows nothing, might create problems for her. Perhaps he's run out on his debts, too, and she'll be left holding the baby.'

‘Or holding nothing at all,' she said. ‘For all the wife knows, Mr X is even now in the process of transferring his assets to wherever it is that he's gone. Or hiding them where Mrs X will never be able to find them, so that by the time she tracks him down the cupboard will be bare and she'll never see her share of the common property. She might even lose her home. Would that be fair, I ask you?'

‘You really think Tony would do that to you?' I said.

‘Not until he walked out on me,' she said. ‘Now, frankly, I really don't know. Who knows what ideas that piece of trash has been putting into his head? It'd be different if I could talk to him about it. But nobody'll admit to knowing where he is. The staff at the restaurant say they haven't seen him. All I can be sure about is that I can't afford to take the risk he's doing the dirty on me.'

‘So it's occurred to you that if some government agency had reason to suspect that Mr X was engaged in illegal activity,' I said, ‘they might take steps to prevent him moving his assets out of the country?'

‘Exactly,' she said. ‘Freeze his bank accounts, something like that.'

Her brilliant idea lay there on the table between us, like a dead cat. I let it lie there for a while before speaking.

‘I sympathise with your situation, Rita, I really do,' I said eventually. ‘But you can't just go accusing Tony of criminal activity because you think he might be screwing you out of your potential divorce entitlements. You'll probably just make the situation worse with Tony when he eventually resurfaces. Plus, you'll get yourself into trouble with the law. Making false allegations is a serious offence.'