Stiff (12 page)

Apart from the rent being cheap, there was a certain logic in this choice of location for the League’s office. Most of Melbourne’s Turks were factory workers, imported by the jumbo load to fill the assembly line at Ford or Repco. So if any Australian-made car less than fifteen years old ever missed the turn and ploughed through the League’s plate glass window, it had a better than even chance of connecting with the very bloke who had spot-welded its front assembly into place.

I locked the Renault, a purely symbolic gesture in this neighbourhood, and walked inside. The League’s front office consisted of two dented filing cabinets, an ancient Gestetner mimeograph machine, probably the last in captivity, and three battered desks. Paperwork trays overflowed with forms and documents and handbooks from various government departments and philanthropic organisations. Posters from the local screen print co-op covered the walls creating an atmosphere of embattled engagement that not even the damp seeping upwards from the threadbare linoleum could dispel.

A cluster of men was hunkered down around one of the desks, men with faces that were maps of a wide brown land. But not this wide brown land. Not yet anyway. At their centre was Sivan the Kurd.

I didn’t know then, and still don’t, if you can tell a Kurd from a Turk by looking at him. But for my money Sivan was everything you could have wanted in a manifestation of that proud and embattled race. He had the beak of an eagle, shoulders built for bandoliers, a torso the size of Asia Minor and a crop of grizzled stubble that had me reaching self-consciously for my own lame thirty-hour growth.

He made a rumbling noise, a thick geological growl that began deep inside and came erupting out his toothy grin. ‘Murray, my friend.’ His arm swept wide. ‘Meet Sayfeddin, Gokhan, Bulent.’

A good head for names was indispensable in my line of work, standing at a politician’s shoulder refreshing her memory. But to my unending dismay, Turkish names could rarely find purchase on my mnemonics. Greeks I could do— they were all Jim or Con or Nick. Italians, no problem, even since the Johnnies and Joes had taken to reverting to Giovanni and Giuseppe. And no one ever got fired for calling an Arab Mohammed. It was bound to be in there somewhere. Unless he was a Christian, in which case George or Tony was usually a safe bet. But Gokhan? Bull ant? Sayfeddin? Say what?

‘
Merhaba
,’ I mumbled.
Yassou
.
Ciao
. Howdy doody. This I could do in a full range of community languages, including Maltese, but I’m a great believer in the unifying influence of English, so that was as fluent as I was going to get.

‘
Merhaba
,’ they all replied, looking at me expectantly.

I cocked my head towards the back of the building. ‘Ayisha in?’ I wanted a quiet chat, not to go live-to-air on Radio Istanbul.

Sivan indicated a narrow corridor opening in the back wall of the room. ‘Girl mechanic today.’

The corridor was lined with tourist posters of the Bosphorus and newspaper photographs of heads that looked like they belonged on the banknotes of some very foreign currency indeed. I found Ayisha kneeling on the floor of an office that was a smaller, pokier version of the one out front, her head buried in the innards of an antique photocopier. Bits of machinery were spread in an arc on the floor around her backside. She had her back to the door and didn’t see me arrive.

Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, and as she reached purposefully behind her for some part or other, her hands black with toner powder, she looked for all the world like a Heroine of Labour resolutely overfulfilling her norm for Xerox repair under the first Five Year Plan. My heart clenched itself into a fist. Forward to the World October, it silently shouted.

I had been leaning against the door frame, silently admiring her industry for nearly a minute when she pulled her head out of the machine’s interior and sprung me. ‘Jeeze, Murray,’ she said. ‘What are you perving at?’

A question very much to the point. I felt heat spread across my cheeks. ‘That name I mentioned yesterday,’ I countered quickly. ‘Find anything out?’

‘Nearly scared the shit out of me,’ she said. ‘Sneaking about like that.’ Clearly, she had forgotten to ask. She stood up, demonstratively kneed the photocopier door shut, and palmed the print button. The machine whirred and began ejaculating copies. ‘You all right?’ She came right up to me and stared at my face, deliberately much too close for comfort.

I tried to hold her gaze. ‘Just a few scratches, that’s all. It’s not contagious or anything.’

‘Those faction fights can get pretty rough, I hear.’ She patted a sooty palm against my cheek. I felt myself flush under the smear of graphite. It was a wonder she didn’t get third-degree burns.

I stepped back abashed, and cracked the back of my head on the door frame. ‘You should have seen the other guy.’

Suddenly a hand clamped down on my shoulder from behind and spun me round. ‘Trying to seduce Ayisha, eh?’

It was Sivan. He must have been reading my mail. ‘It is useless,’ he said. ‘Many have tried, all have failed.’

‘Get stuffed,’ said Ayisha. She plonked herself down behind her desk and started rolling a grubby cigarette. ‘Murray here wants to know about some guy he thought we might know. Name of…’

‘Ekrem Bayraktar.’

Sivan repeated the name, rolling it around his mouth like he was making concrete out of it. ‘
Bayraktar
means he who carries the flag, the standard bearer.’ Sivan had been a school teacher before the army tore up his diploma and poked matches under his fingernails. What he was saying was all very interesting, but I wanted lowdown not etymology.

‘You heard of him?’

Sivan shook his head.

‘What about any of these guys?’ I handed him the payroll list.

He ran a hairy finger down the names, turned to Ayisha and broke into a broad grin. ‘He wants to know if we have heard of Nasreddin Hoca.’

A sly twinkle crossed Ayisha’s face. She caught me watching and dipped her head to light her sooty fag. I didn’t want her thinking I was a complete drongo. ‘The parable of the walnut,’ I said, quick as a flash. I pointed to the name underneath. ‘What about this guy, Gazanfer Bilge?’ Rhymed with pilfer.

Him, Sivan knew. ‘Wrestler,’ he rumbled. ‘Very famous in the nineteen fifties. You know Turkish wrestling? First they put oil on their bodies and…’ He advanced, arms spread, intent on demonstrating a key grip. I fended him off with the next name. ‘Orhan Gencebay. That Turkish?’

Sivan froze in mid-stride. He rolled the list into a tube and waved it about in front of his mouth. ‘
Bir tesselli ver
,’ he wailed, his voice weirdly high and strangulated. ‘
Yaradanin askina
.’ He swayed from side to side and with his free hand pounded a beat on the edge of the desk.

I rolled my eyes towards Ayisha. She didn’t know what was going on either. Sivan threw his arms wide and changed languages, holding the same tune. ‘
Everybody make mistakes
,’ he sang.

I got it now. ‘Singer?’

‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘Tom Jones. Molly Meldrum.’ He ironed the paper microphone flat on the surface of the desk and dropped back into pedagogic mode. ‘You know Turkish music? The
saz
is similar to the
bouzouki
, the drum is called
darbooka
, the…’

‘Kartal Tibet.’ I snatched up the list and read the next name. ‘Let me guess, husband of the famous Donna Kebab.’

‘Close,’ said Ayisha. ‘Movie actor, I think. Before my time. More Sivan’s vintage.’ Sivan was all of thirty-five.

‘Commercial crap,’ said Sivan. ‘Do you know the films of Yilmaz Guney? For example,
The Herd
?’

A mythical sage, an oily athlete, a pop singer, a film star. The early shift at Pacific Pastoral was beginning to look a little top-heavy with talent. I interrupted Sivan’s discourse on modern Turkish cinema. ‘Ever heard of a place called the Anatolia Club?’

Sivan stopped talking and gave Ayisha a very strange look. ‘Oh, very bad place, my friend,’ he growled. ‘You should not go there.’

‘Why? What is it?’

Before he could answer, Gokhan—or was it Sayfeddin— burst through the door. He said something tense in Turkish, a harsh sounding phrase, then abruptly turned and disappeared.

‘Shit.’ Ayisha was on her feet, slinging her bag across her shoulder.

‘What?’

She came round the desk, chewing her bottom lip and took off out the door. My entrails turned to iced water and I took off after her. She shot out the front door like a rocket, turned left and sped up the footpath.

A burly, hard-faced man in a military-style jacket was standing beside the Renault, resting a jack-booted foot provocatively on the front bumper. He was levering up the blade of my windscreen wiper. ‘Hey,’ I demanded. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

He turned and lazily raked me with cold contemptuous eyes, sure of his own power. Then he slowly raised his arm and pointed back over my shoulder. Without looking, I knew what he was pointing at. CLEARWAY, the sign beside me read, 4:30–6:00 p.m.

‘Fair go, mate,’ I pleaded, staring in disbelief at my watch. 4:32, it said. He thrust a pink piece of paper into my hand. Pay the City of Coburg forty dollars, it said. Or else. Further up the street Ayisha opened the door of a newish metallic-blue Laser. She waved gaily and drove off, scot free.

A line of trams was backed up along the centre of the road, leaving the Renault blocking the only other northbound lane. As far back as I could see, traffic sat stalled, horns blaring. For the briefest moment I considered leaving the car where it was and going back inside to ask Sivan what he had been about to say about the Anatolia Club. The Grey Ghost tapped his behaviour modification pad against his thigh. ‘I’d shift it,’ he said nastily. ‘If I was you.’

I took my time, rolling the parking ticket into a ball as I went. I slammed the door, gunned the engine, pulled out around the nose of the tram, threw an illegal u-turn in the face of the oncoming traffic, stuck my arm out the window, gave the by-laws Nazi the finger, hit the gas, and burned rubber. It wasn’t forty dollars worth, but it was consolation of sorts.

Up to that point, you’d have to admit, I had been doing pretty well in the amateur sleuth stakes. In barely four hours not only had I confirmed that industrial action was unlikely at Pacific Pastoral, but I had established that something dodgy was going on in the vicinity of their payroll, and that there was more to this dead bloke Bayraktar than met the eye.

So as I parked behind the electorate office and slipped in the back door, I must confess to feeling as pleased with myself as a man might with a squashed-up forty dollar parking fine in his pocket. I even had enough unanswered questions to justify paying another visit to Ayisha’s office fairly soon.

Back in my cubicle, I found things exactly as I had left them. The same overflowing in-tray, the inevitable yellow pile of phone message slips, the same tattooed oaf sitting in my visitor’s chair with his size tens parked on the walnut veneer.

Our more troublesome sort of customers usually got bored after a couple of hours of the cold shoulder and took their grievances elsewhere. Two full days was a new record. Not that I told Mr Adam F. Ant that. He might have taken it for encouragement. Instead I pretended he wasn’t there, sat down and dug out the Pacific Pastoral file. Without the coroner’s envelope all it held was a single sheet of paper with Herb Gardiner’s name written on it. I added the payroll list and ticked off the four names I knew for sure were phonies.

There were any number of reasons why someone might work under a false name. Minimising tax on a second job was one. Holding down a paying job while pulling the dole was another. Illegal immigrants did it. All you had to do, after all, was fill in a false tax-declaration form and put some bogus details no one would ever check on the personnel department sheet. Half the uni students in the country were doing it, including some majoring in Ethics. Shit, I’d done it myself a dozen years before, signed on for bar work as F. Engels. It was a bad undergraduate joke, made worse by the fact that I kept forgetting to answer to the name Fred. Not that the boss gave a toss, long as the job got done.

But this was different. One fictitious name was unremarkable. Two would have been a coincidence. Four or more, all of the same ethnic persuasion as the foreman, suggested an altogether different kettle of calamari. Either Bayraktar was turning a blind eye to the legal niceties on behalf of a clutch of his compatriots, or stuffing the odd bit of stray beef up his overalls was not the only means he had found to diddle Pacific Pastoral.

Of course, neither the internal financial administration of Pacific Pastoral nor the affairs of the deceased Bayraktar were any of my business. But things were now developing a momentum of their own at a level well below the threshold of rational thought. An idle mind, as the Brothers used famously to say. Curiosity had me by the short and curlies.

I picked up the phone and dialled Wageline, a telephone service offered by the Labour Ministry to provide information on award wages and conditions. The going rate for a part-time casual labourer in the meat industry was nine dollars eighty an hour. I did some rapid arithmetic on the inside cover of the file. Nine dollars eighty times forty hours equalled close to four hundred dollars. Less tax, I figured on a take-home pay of three twenty-five. About thirty dollars a week less than me. Not brilliant money in anyone’s language.

After that, the figures were pure hypothesis. Any company operating a hand-delivered pay-packet procedure was crying out to be ripped off. Bayraktar had keys. He’d been in a position of trust. Suppose, just for argument’s sake, that he’d also been in a position to add dummy names to his work team, then confirm their attendance and hours?

The four fake names were due a total of thirteen hundred dollars. Multiply that by, say, twenty-five weeks a year and the figure totalled somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty-two thousand dollars, a very attractive part of the world. Even if the fiddle was only being worked one week in four, it was still a nice little earner. All in cash, in handy buff envelopes.