Stiff (20 page)

The idea of dynastic succession among the Labor aristocracy was an affront to my democratic sensibilities, but in Mullane’s case I could see its merits. To pass the time until his inheritance arrived, the heir apparent was serving his political apprenticeship as councillor for the north ward of Coburg. Even within the sorry milieu of local government he displayed such a conspicuous lack of talent that it was universally agreed that the sooner he went elsewhere the better. All the way to the back benches of the state legislature if necessary.

Eventually nature would take its course. Mullane senior and his ageing cronies would die off, and the young dauphin would be despatched to the tumbrels. But right now there was no point in rubbing Daddy up the wrong way. Besides which, the old man kept his ear pretty close to the ground in the party room. And who knows what juicy snippets had been dropped at the Mullane family dinner table? On more than one occasion Junior had inadvertently let the cat out of the bag. Mullane waited until Ciccio brought the coffees, then bent gravely across the table. ‘Somebody’s going to be killed,’ he said. ‘Soon.’

I froze in mid-sip.

‘The way they come down that hill, it’s only a matter of time before there’s blood on the street.’

With relief I realised Mullane was merely peddling his current pet project, a personal campaign for the installation of a pedestrian crossing at Edwardes Lake, a splotch of recreational water bang in the middle of his council ward.

‘You reckon you could hassle Charlene to hassle the Minister for Transport to hassle his department to hassle the Road Traffic Authority, ASAP?’

‘No hassle,’ I said. ‘At least not from Charlene’s point of view. She’s behind you 150 per cent on this.’

In fact Charlene wouldn’t go near the Minister for Transport with a twelve-foot Croatian. And she and the Treasurer had already privately agreed that in an area already so adequately resourced infrastructure-wise, road funding would be better directed to pressing community development and social justice issues—such as capital construction costs of the Carboni Club.

‘The problem will be getting it past those pen-pushing pricks in Transport,’ I warned, conjuring up an elaborate map of the decision-making process. ‘But give her the bullets,’ I said, ‘and Charlene will fire them.’

Mullane proceeded to crap on about traffic density ratios while I waited for a chance to change the subject. ‘Heard this talk about an early election?’

‘I’m sure the leadership has the matter well in hand,’ Mullane said primly. A tendency to mouth platitudes was another family trait he had inherited early.

‘Angelo Agnelli reckons early December.’

Mullane opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and snapped his teeth shut. His was a face not well suited to deception. His jaw worked overtime. Something was trying hard not to burst out. ‘I’m not big on idle speculation.’ He pushed his chair out and stood up. ‘Practical issues, that’s what concerns me. Things that are important in people’s daily lives, traffic safety for one.’

I headed him off before he started in again. ‘Couldn’t agree more, Gavin.’

When we shook hands and Mullane turned away, he had the look of a man whose team is six goals up at three-quarter time, a man more pleased with himself than any paltry assurances about some stupid fucking zebra crossing warranted.

By now it was four-thirty, more than five hours since Ayisha and Gezen had disappeared on me. I rang the League. A heavily accented male answered, one of their volunteer workers, I guessed. Ayisha was not here, he told me. Nor was Sivan. I left my home address and phone number with a message for either of them to call me urgently. It was a painful process of careful enunciation, slow spelling and double checking. Even then I wasn’t entirely sure I’d been understood.

The agenda papers still needed collating, and in barely ten minutes I would need to leave to pick Red up. I sweet-talked Trish into helping me, a gesture towards restoring workplace harmony. She locked the front door and I laid the piles of pages out across the reception area floor, passing the finished sets to Trish to staple together. We were just getting up a head of steam when there was a tap on the front window.

Herb Gardiner was outside on the footpath, a spry leprechaun, as cheerful as ever. I unlocked the door, but I didn’t ask him in. ‘Just happened to be in the vicinity, son.’ He glanced knowingly towards Trish and gave me a wink.

You get some of these retired or near-retired guys with too much time on their hands. They start looking for an interest. The last thing I needed was the old goat taking me under his wing. ‘I’m pretty busy right now, Herb,’ I told him.

He eyed the pages on the floor and dropped his voice. ‘That your report?’

I shook my head warily, not in the mood for any more confidential revelations of shenanigans at Pacific Pastoral. Gardiner lingered, looking for something to say. He seemed to be expecting me to speak first. It occurred to me that he’d had second thoughts about his comments on the prevalence of pilfering at Coolaroo. Nobody wants to go down in the books as a dobber. He checked out Trish to see if she could hear us. She was noisily punching staples into completed agenda sets. ‘What you said,’ he started.

I got there ahead of him. ‘My report only covers the industrial situation,’ I said. ‘Anything else, I can be relied on to keep to myself.’

This confirmed what Gardiner was waiting to hear. ‘Right you are, then, son,’ he said. ‘You’re calling the shots.’ Then he paused pregnantly, expecting me to continue.

What else was there to say? I was tempted to ask him if he knew Memo Gezen. From what he’d said before about the ethnics keeping to themselves, I thought it unlikely. And even if he did, what useful information could he possibly have?

Gardiner kept glancing towards Trish, then taking little steps backwards, as if to draw me outside. I didn’t have time for this kind of chit-chat. If I didn’t get away soon, Red would be left standing in the schoolyard all alone, frightened he’d been left there all night. ‘Back at work yet?’ I said, clearly a concluding remark.

‘Crack of dawn tomorrow,’ he said. An idea seemed suddenly to occur to him. ‘The reason I dropped in, that roof of yours. That builder mate of mine says he can nip around tonight, take a look. You going to be home?’ He said this quite loudly so Trish could hear.

Some inexorable law of mechanical determinism was at work here. Buy something, five minutes later you see a better one at only a fraction of the price. If this builder mate was anything like old Herb himself, he was probably a top tradesman. ‘You wouldn’t read about it,’ I said, ‘I’ve just lined someone up.’

Gardiner sounded a bit cheesed, like he was being pissed around. ‘Don’t be hasty,’ he said, forcefully. ‘You might regret it.’ Boy, was he toey all of a sudden.

No point in having him think I was ungrateful. ‘Thanks anyway,’ I said. ‘But tonight would have been impossible anyway. Monthly branch meeting. I’ll be freezing my arse off in a back room at the Lakeview Hotel until well after ten.’

Poor old Herb shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Like he couldn’t see why I was passing up an offer this good. ‘You sure you know what you’re doing?’ he said.

I told him that I did, and that I had work to do, edging him out the door. He backed off, looking puzzled, his palms spread. ‘Have it your own way,’ he seemed to be saying. As I bent back down to the agenda papers Trish cleared her throat noisily and rolled her eyes sideways. Gardiner was still standing outside the window, watching. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, beckoning me outside.

I didn’t have time for this. I turned away, ignoring him. When I sneaked a furtive look a minute later, he was gone.

Red pulled an envelope out of his schoolbag. It had a Health Department logo.

Your child has been examined today and found to be infested with headlice. Until appropriate treatment is commenced, he/she cannot attend school.

With the note came a glossy brochure. ‘Headlice,’ it read, ‘live equally happily on the rich, the poor, the clean and the dirty, regardless of age, occupation and status.’ Genially egalitarian as this made our little visitors sound, if Wendy turned up and found Red off school with a lice infestation, I would never hear the end of it. The moral high ground would rise beneath her feet and become an unscaleable mountain. But what constituted appropriate treatment?

A haircut, we decided, and a second shampoo. The place Wendy usually took him to was in High Street, Northcote. Snipz Unisex Salon, children a specialty. Only now it was Voula Modes. It smelled of singed cats and was full of bottle-blond matrons in animal print leotards and cashmere sweaters with shoulder pads and appliquéd sequins.

We walked up the hill, me on the outside, half an eye cocked at the slow crawl of outward-bound traffic in the far lane. A window displayed badger-bristle shaving brushes, briar pipes and a black and white print of Tony Curtis. ‘No way, Jose.’ Red shook his head and we kept walking, past a newsagency with a good price on Winfields.

The shops changed. Bed’n’Bath and Seconds’n’Samples gave way to an Indian restaurant, hip record store, boutiques. The next hairdresser was called Hair-o-Inn, a retro horror full of lava-lamps and cone-chairs and other knick-knacks of the sort anyone over thirty had spent their adolescence trying to escape. We stepped inside and a tweenie in black came smirking out from behind somebody’s father’s kidney-shaped rumpus-room bar. Red gazed about like he was in a museum, flipped open an English fashion magazine, a catalogue of tribes.

‘Give him a trim,’ I told the coiffeur and nicked back up the street to the newsagent. Midweek Lotto had jackpotted to five million that week and the counter staff were flat chat handling a late rush of systems entries and syndicates. It hardly seemed worth the wait considering that I didn’t really smoke. I waited anyway.

Back at the hairdressers, Red’s Botticelli locks were a trampled heap on the floor. A sheet flapped like a conjurer’s prop and the boy himself emerged from the chair transformed. His upward-tilted moon of a face, his babyhood, was gone. The new face was keenly alert, a face sufficient-unto-itself, a proper boy’s face. My son the apprentice jockey, in a flat-top several sizes too small.

‘You’re going to die,’ this stranger accused, glaring at the cigarette in my mouth.

‘I’ll be dead when your mother sees you,’ I told him, grinding the cigarette into the linoleum. Furtively I scooped up one of Red’s discarded ringlets, a relic of my baby’s vanished infancy. ‘For the mother,’ I murmured, catching sight of a live louse in the debris.

We shopped, loading the car with groceries. I was jittery, jumping at the clatter of supermarket trolleys, nervously pacing the half-deserted aisles. After the dramas earlier in the day, these rituals of normality should have brought relief. Instead they made me all the more apprehensive. Red’s presence only made it worse. The package of grass was burning a hole in my pocket.

A military funeral, Gezen’s confession and subsequent disappearance, an intruder in the house, a wild chase over backyard fences, the business with Bayraktar’s car. Collectively, they were adding up to a mystery I felt powerless to unravel, but whose lingering menace I felt everywhere around me. In the cereal aisle at Safeway I put my arm on Red’s shoulder at the approach of a swarthy stranger. He was looking for the Coco Pops. When no one was looking I tucked the marijuana deep down behind a rack of muesli. A little bonus for the late-night shelf-stackers.

There I’d been, Mr Clever Dick, bunging on a white knight act, trying to impress Ayisha in front of Bayraktar’s heavy-duty crim mates, when all along she’d been hiding the fact that Gezen was not telling the whole story. Then she’d gone and disappeared, leaving me a sitting duck in a game whose rules I couldn’t even guess at. What a bitch she was turning out to be.

As the Renault reversed out of its slot in the supermarket carpark, a flash of dusty colour caught the corner of my eye. I pulled the steering wheel in an arm-wrenching arc and craned backwards over my shoulder. You’re chasing ghosts in the twilight, I told myself. Two blocks from home, I glanced up at a stop sign and found a cube of lurid blue framed in the rectangle of the rear-vision mirror, an aqua Falcon, its windows impenetrable in the halogen wash of the newly lit street lights. I barked to Red to stay where he was and stepped out onto the road.

The Falcon had the same wide-mouthed grimace as before, but in other ways was subtly different. The duco shone with a higher polish, an air-intake duct sprouted from the bonnet, the tyres were comically fat. The plates were personalised. VROOM, they read. The driver’s window came down and Van Halen came out, loud. Then a head, Adonis with acne. ‘What’s eating you, squirrel dick?’ it shouted.

It was a good question. Before I could think of a pithy retort, the head disappeared and the Falcon peeled past, its horn blaring the first two bars of Dixie. ‘Dickhead,’ said Red. I didn’t dare ask him who he meant.

Two men in suits were sitting in a parked car at the end of our street, a white Commodore. It was the two CIB dicks from Ciccio’s. I parked outside the house and they got out, hoisting they belts up as they came. When they were two houses away I took out a two-dollar note. ‘Go get some milk,’ I told Red. By the will of Wendy he was still too young to go to the corner shop alone. ‘You can spend the change.’ He grinned wildly and trotted off. With that sort of money he’d be standing at the lolly counter for half an hour.

I hoisted the bag of groceries and held the gate open for the coppers. ‘Murray Whelan?’ asked the older one. He had a low centre of gravity and a bulbous aggressive nose but his tone was polite. ‘I’m Detective Sergeant Dalziel. This is Detective Constable York.’ York had been working out. He nodded, real friendly like.

‘Acting on information, gentlemen?’

York ambled down the side of the house. I put my key in the front door and jiggled it about. ‘Do you have a warrant?’

‘Do we need one?’ said Dalziel pleasantly. I held the door open and let him in ahead of me. I hoped to hell nothing else had been planted around the house while I was away. We went through to the kitchen. Out the window I could see Mr Muscle step across Wendy’s rug and stick his head in the toolshed. Dalziel looked around like what he saw confirmed his worst suspicions. ‘You don’t seem surprised to see us,’ he said.