Stiff (25 page)

Is it me, I thought, or does this woman take the cake? Softly enough not to upset the octopus, I laughed. Ayisha’s tale had filled me with enough strength to totter across to the cupboard and screw the top off the Jamesons bottle. I thought of the wine, nicely chilled at the bottom of the lake. Ayisha gave a cautionary shake of her head. Bloody Moslems, no appreciation of the tonic properties of the sacred waters. I added a tot to both our cups of tea and moulded a wad of her tobacco into a lumpy cylinder. All this physical therapy was doing me good. My thought processes were beginning to fight their way free. I did the attention-grabbing trick with the match again. This is why people smoke. So many clichés, so readily at hand.

‘The aqua Falcon,’ I said. ‘Bayraktar’s car. Ran me off the road. Right into Edwardes Lake. I ended up floating down some creek. Then spent half the night trying to get a cab to pick me up.’ I slumped back, exhausted from the effort of talking. I tried to get my thoughts into some sort of order.

‘Jesus,’ she exclaimed. ‘This is getting right out of hand. You’re gunna hafta call the cops.’

I shook my head. It hurt. ‘No point,’ I winced. ‘Unless I tell them about Memo. And that’s not going to do your, or the League’s, credibility any good, is it? It was you who convinced him he could trust me, remember.’ Frankly, I couldn’t give a shit about Gezen at this stage.

She looked at me like I was a gibbering idiot. ‘My credibility? Jeeze, Murray. Somebody’s trying to kill you and you’re worried about my credibility?’

Isn’t she fantastic, I thought. The warm tea and whiskey were beginning to work their cure in the pit of my stomach. I started to unscrew the whiskey cap again. Ayisha wrested the bottle out of my unresisting grasp. ‘Call the police!’ she ordered. What was it about me, I wondered, that brought out the bossy boots in women?

‘I would,’ I said, ‘if I thought it’d do any good. But it’s like your bloody petition. The cops won’t act without evidence. And when they do move, it’ll be too slow. Or too late.’ She didn’t know about my earlier conversations with the constabulary, of course. ‘Shit, I don’t even know why this is happening. You got any ideas?’

That shut her up. And thank Christ, too, said the octopus. On the table a saucer was piled with butts, hers and mine. If I survived, I’d have to invest in an ashtray. ‘In fact I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t Gezen driving the Falcon. Maybe he changed his mind about confessing and decided he’d eliminate the only other people who knew what had happened.’

She thought I was serious. ‘Gimme a break.’ She leaped up a lit herself a cigarette on the gas jet. ‘Memo’s a little flaky, I’ll admit that, but you can’t seriously think he’s a killer.’

I felt old eight legs shift, spread his grey gelatinous membranes and puff a slow balloon of darkness through the water towards me. A cool black cloud of ink, blotting out the light and noise and the jabber of voices in my head. The world was out there somewhere, moving distantly, glimpsed through a red-tinged slit. I made it go away.

Ayisha was shaking my shoulder. ‘You okay?’ I jerked upright. I must have dozed off. This was fucked. How could I think in this condition? A sob story like Gezen’s would have aroused every conceivable sympathy in someone like Ayisha. It was cruel to taunt her. ‘You okay?’ she repeated.

I was okay. Red was okay. My constant companion the octopus was so fucking okay it was dancing a hornpipe with my frontal lobes. I had some thinking to do. The only tangible evidence of what had happened was the Falcon parked outside in the street. And in itself the car proved nothing. No doubt the only fingerprints it carried were mine, smeared all over the wheel, the doors, the hood. And I could guess why it had been abandoned with the key in the ignition. What better way to dispose of a car than to leave it where it was certain to be nicked by joy-riding kids who would dump it miles away?

No. It would take more than a dead man’s car, a hair-raising tale and a half-baked story about extortion and revenge to get the cops fired up. I could be dead by the time they extracted their collective digit. The only thing I had going for me was that whoever ran me off the road probably thought I was already. ‘The Anatolia Club,’ I said. ‘I think I should pay it a visit. Let them know I’m on to them. See what I can find out.’ But not alone. ‘You reckon Sivan will come with me?’

‘I’d like to see you try to stop him,’ Ayisha said, grinning. She was close, her presence overwhelming my senses. I could smell her, taste her. She yawned, no longer able to hide her tiredness. I made my play.

‘You go home,’ I urged. ‘Thanks for minding Red. For everything. I’ll talk to Sivan in the morning, speak with Memo again, sort something out.’ I cocked my finger like a gun. ‘No single fascist act must go unchallenged.’ I quoted from somewhere, unable to remember where.

It wasn’t much of a plan, but she nodded approval. She was tired, resigned. The clock on the stove clicked over. 3:35 a.m. Then she was shaking her head. ‘But first you gotta see a doctor. What if you’ve got concussion? You could slip into a coma or something.’

‘First thing in the morning,’ I promised. The furry muck on my tongue mingled with the taste of tea and whiskey. I held down a retch. My timing was terrible, I told myself. I wasn’t in a fit state for anything,

‘It’s nearly morning now. Got any blankets? I’ll stay on the couch. Keep an eye on you.’

‘No,’ I insisted, wanting nothing more. Her hand moved, erasing the air between us, brushing my objection aside. Luckily I’d changed the linen. I led her up the hall to the bedroom, trying not to collapse on the way.

She stood with her back to the bed while I went through the motions of reaching up to where the spare bedding was stowed, stacked tight on the top shelf of the wardrobe. I tugged at the scratchy wool, high on tiptoes, dizzy from the altitude. The blankets broke free and I teetered before her, a man leaning into a strong wind. Then the wind dropped and I was pitching forward. Ayisha’s arms extended effortlessly, receiving me, enfolding me. Her neck and my forehead, I observed as if from a distance, yielded a perfect fit. Motionless, cradling my eggshell head, she was a bottomless well into which I tumbled headlong into a free fall.

‘Oh, boy,’ exclaimed key sectional interests of my metabolism, sensing an advantage. ‘You can’t keep a good man down.’ Actually you can, I’m grateful to say. I felt her warmth reach out and enclose me in its embrace. Warmth, yes. Heat, no. There never would be any heat, I comprehended. But even in the finality of that knowledge I could not bring myself to move, but stood there letting myself be cradled in her arms. What energy I had was devoted entirely to not weeping with gratitude.

Then Red walked into the room and I jumped about ten feet into the air. For a long moment he stood there, regarding me with heavy-lidded, vacant eyes. Then he gripped his pyjama pants by the elastic, gave them an upward tug, turned, and somnambulated towards the bathroom.

Nurse Ayisha, herself at the far extremity of wakefulness, scooped up the blankets and draped them over her arm. ‘That reminds me,’ she yawned. ‘Your wife rang just after you left. Said she’d be on the early flight. Said you’d know what that meant. She sounded very nice.’

I’ll bet she did.

‘And someone called Angelo Annoletti or something. Said to call him urgently when you got home. Bit late now, I suppose.’

Charlene! He must have rung about Charlene! God, she’d slipped my mind entirely since the branch meeting. Morning, first thing in the morning I would call. Later, later, much later. Sleep first. ‘Take the bed,’ I said. ‘I’m used to the couch.’ Shameless to the last.

Ayisha bustled me onto the couch, draped me with blankets, turned off the light and left me to die in peace. A blissful shroud of stillness settled over me. The darkness was good. Nobody would find me there. I could hide for a long time, nothing but me and infinite deep space and far, far away, the distant spiralling remnants of long exploded galaxies. The darkness was good. Darkness and the tick of molecular particles, hydrogen, oxygen, coalescing, swelling, tumbling, colliding, disintegrating. Tick, infinite pause, tick, infinite pause, tick.

The fucking roof was leaking. Very slowly, not much, but leaking drip after drip into one of the pots Ayisha had positioned across the floor. I screwed my ears as tightly closed as possible without disturbing the octopus and retreated into the soundproof maze of reason.

Somewhere my thinking had jumped the rails and taken a wrong turn. All along I had assumed that the nexus between me and Bayraktar ran through Gezen. The break-in, the stuff with the Falcon, it had all started after Gezen’s confession. Therefore they were connected. But if this was not the case, then the chain of cause and effect I had constructed was missing some pretty crucial links. The longer I thought about it, the more it looked like a badly frayed string of dubious suppositions and unlikely coincidences. Get to the sharp end of the issue, I thought. Ask yourself the fundamental question. Who stands to gain from your death?

Those guys from the Anatolia Club, for instance. Even if they were a pack of right-wing psychos, why pick on me? Why not one of their own benighted compatriots? Had I witnessed something I shouldn’t out at the cemetery? If so, were they also trying to bump off the two employees of the Martinelli family? That would be a serious mistake in anyone’s language. Besides which, they hadn’t even noticed me. And so what if I’d rushed out of the League’s office shaking my fist at them? Hardly a killing offence, and it gave them no reason to connect me to Gezen. And even if they could do that, how had they connected Gezen with Bayraktar’s death? In fact, I couldn’t even be completely sure it was the same BMW I had seen parked under the carport at the Anatolia Club.

Gezen said they were following him, but Gezen also thought I was a copper, his bad conscience playing merry hell with him. Obviously they couldn’t have been following him when only fifteen minutes earlier they had been playing parade-ground soldiers over their dead comrade at Fawkner Cemetery. Now that I thought about it, the idea that I had inadvertently stumbled into some sort of internecine ethnic warfare was less than plausible. Worse, I had been guilty of the most blatant kind of ethnic stereotyping. An old trap for new players. Christ, I’d be imagining the mafia after me next.

There must be a logical solution, I told myself. Could something other than Bayraktar’s death be the issue? Something I knew but didn’t know I knew? Something worth killing me to keep concealed. So who else knew my interest in the Coolaroo plant? Who might be spooked by the sudden arrival of a snooper on the scene? Who might have access to the dead man’s car?

Could Apps, the human jack-in-the-box, have found out that I dobbed him in to the boss for slack book-keeping and decided to get revenge? A drastic solution, but maybe. He was pretty highly strung, after all.

The boss himself, Merricks? He was out. For a start he had authorised the investigation. Mainly though it was the difficulty of imagining him behind the wheel of an aqua Falcon 500 in his Melbourne Club tie. Not his style at all.

There was Agnelli, whose idea it had been in the first place. Agnelli, who might well have reasons for wanting me out of the way for a while. Out of the way in hospital? Out of the way dead? Christ, maybe it was the fucking mafia, after all. And what about the drugs? Planting dope in my house had clearly been part of an attempt to discredit me. And the quantity of grass suggested a criminal connection, which took me back to the Anatolia Club. Shit, it was all too confusing. My head was spinning again.

Then there was the missing file. Had I merely mislaid it? Or had someone been worried enough to raid the electorate office, steal my notes, and leave a mess that made the break-in seem the work of artistically impaired vandals? But why? Unless somebody thought I had more information than I really did. There was nothing in the file. All it held was the list of Bayraktar’s phony names, a thumb-nail draft of the preamble of my MACWAM report, a bit of rough arithmetic and a scrap of paper with the name Herb Gardiner on it.

What was it that Gezen had said? ‘Then the other one comes. Gardening. I do not think he will come so soon.’ Meaning what? According to Gardiner’s statement it was only by chance he had happened to be in the chiller at all. A spur of the moment decision to check the thermostat. ‘Six or seven minutes he is inside.’ How long does it take to check a gauge?

Old Herb knew I had the list of phony names. He was interested enough in my activities to visit the office. In a strangely animated state, at that. He knew where I worked, where I lived, and my plans for the evening. His house wasn’t a million miles from Edwardes Lake, either. Nor from the public bar of the Lakeview Hotel. And you don’t have to be a gangster accomplice of a man to get hold of his car keys. You just have to take them off his key-ring when you find his body in a freezer. None of which explained why a man like Gardiner might want me dead. It was all too fantastic, too paranoid.

Then, in the interminable drawn-out vastness of time between two droplets of water, I heard at last the inexorable clunk of a penny dropping. And at exactly that moment the baying began. The long, full-throated, moon-mad howls of a captive dog.

The sky was crystalline, utterly cloudless, miles high. The night had entered that great silence that precedes the birdsong. Apart from the pooch, that is, shut in the Falcon and yowling fit to wake the entire neighbourhood. The instant I opened the driver’s door, she shut up. She just banged her tail on the vinyl a couple of times and sat there looking up at me. Wanted attention, then didn’t know what to do with it. Just like some people.

I left the door open while I examined the patch-up job on the car’s rear window. It was a work of art. The clear plastic had been cut to a precise fit. The waterproof seam of electrical tape was light blue, not quite a match with the paintwork, but a good try. A triple layer, the edges straight as a die. All very shipshape. I was thinking about a sailor, about fragments of conversation, things seen but not noticed, all rushing to reassemble themselves, like the film of an explosion running in reverse.