The Big Ask (3 page)

‘Fucking idiot. Trying to prove what a big man he was. I knew he didn't have the guts to use it. Not in front of witnesses, anyway. Don't say anything to Heather, eh? She gives me a hard enough time already.'

He dragged the door open and swung himself up into the driver's seat. I headed for the passenger side, skirting the front of the truck. Checking for oncoming vehicles, I glanced back in the direction of the market. Frank Farrell had reached the canopy and slowed to a casual amble, heading inside with his hands rammed into the slit pockets of his jacket.

I climbed aboard, tossing the spanner back where it belonged. Heather scooted to the centre of the seat, bonedry between two dripping men. She gave me a withering look, then folded her arms across her ample chest and stared straight ahead. ‘You two had your fun?' she sniffed.

Donny tapped the top of the steering wheel impatiently as he pumped the accelerator, revving the engine. ‘We can do it,' he muttered, half talking to himself. ‘I had my doubts before, but I'm certain now. We can win this thing.'

Noise filled the cabin. The roar of air from the demisters, blasting the fog from the windscreen. The slap and sluice of the wipers, the percussive pounding of rain on the metal roof. I checked the time and felt a surge of panic.

Heather saw me look at my watch, registered my anxiety. ‘Murray's a man in a hurry,' she told Donny. ‘Isn't that right?'

Absolutely. Thanks to Heather's ministrations, time had got away from me. It was past 5.30. We were cutting it fine. If I missed the plane, it would definitively prove my failure as a father.

Donny slammed the stick into first and the gears screamed like a Jimi Hendrix solo. We inched forward, a wall of heavy-calibre traffic blocking our way, bottlenecked at the exit gate. A gap opened, Donny swung the wheel and we lurched forward. Heather put her hand on my knee.

‘Shift it,' I muttered. I was talking to the truck in front. Any slower and it would've been going backwards. An air horn sounded behind us, one long continuous blast, on and on.

Then came a pounding on Donny's door, the bangbanging of a balled fist. His arm pumped and his head went out the window. Somebody shouted up at him, staccato sentences, inaudible against all the background noise. Donny cursed, slammed the truck into neutral, hauled on the handbrake and climbed down.

‘With Donny there's always something,' muttered Heather.

I swung open my door and craned back. A curtain-wall truck was pulled up behind us at an angle. The name on the side ended in a vowel. A dwarf-like Sicilian in a leather apron was remonstrating with Donny. Even by the usual standards, he was agitated, jabbering and gesturing into the space we'd just left.

A dark shape lay there on the ground. Whatever it was, we'd made a mess of it. Rolled over it with the rear trailer wheels, burst it open and smeared its contents across the asphalt.

‘We've run over something,' I told Heather. ‘Sack of tomatoes, by the look of it. Donny's getting an earful from some Italian bloke.'

‘Damn,' she said. ‘It'll be pay up, or spend all day arguing the toss.'

Not what I wanted to hear. And now more of them were arriving. The United Nations General Assembly, plenary session. Donny was down on one knee, assessing the damage. Slap, slap, slap went the windscreen wipers, escalating my impatience, now at the jiggling, buttock-clenching stage. ‘I'm going to leg it, try to get a taxi,' I told Heather. ‘I've got a plane to catch. Donny will explain.'

She eyed me sceptically. ‘Is it just me, or are you like this with all women?'

I hoisted my jacket over my head, took a parting glance at the damaged-goods conference and trotted towards the gate, shoes slipping on the rain-greasy asphalt. I felt bad about running out on Donny, but not bad enough to stay behind and risk missing my flight.

If I'd looked back, even for a moment, I might have seen what was looming. I might have seen the great tidal wave of shit that was about to break over me. Just one backward glance and Donny might still be alive. And I wouldn't be languishing in the place where I am now.

It was all Angelo Agnelli's fault, of course.

If it wasn't for Angelo, I would never have been at the market in the first place. I wouldn't have been trying to play funny buggers with the most powerful and dangerous union in the state. I most certainly wouldn't have found myself trying to second-guess a man like Frank Farrell.

The Honourable Angelo Agnelli, member of the Legislative Council, was the Minister for Transport in the sovereign state of Victoria. And it all began in his office on the previous Friday evening. His Parliament House office, to be precise, in the majestic old legislature atop the gentle rise at the eastern edge of Melbourne's central business district.

As government leader in the Upper House, Ange was entitled to one of the building's more imposing bureaux. Its antique desk, french-polished bookcases, overstuffed chairs, velvet curtains, flock wallpaper and moulded cornices dated from the time when our city was a shining colonial jewel in Queen Victoria's crown. His office, in short, looked a cross between Lord Palmerston's study and a Wild West bordello.

It was August 1991 and even Blind Freddy could see that his enjoyment of these facilities was nearing its conclusion. After a decade in office, Labor had lost the plot. It was common wisdom that our defeat at the next state election was inevitable. But the election was still a year away. In the meantime, the sorry business of government went on.

There were three of us, men in suits. Agnelli was standing behind his desk, his waistcoat unbuttoned. Pushing fifty, he was no longer the boy wonder and his once-beaming dial had turned into a doughy ball in which his wary eyes were set like raisins in a slab of stale fruitcake.

Out on the floor of the chamber, Angelo did his best to project an image of senatorial gravitas, grey of temple, thick of waist, measured of speech and glad of hand. In the privacy of his office, during the parliamentary dinner recess, he dispensed with any such pretence. He held a tightly rolled newspaper in his fist and was smacking it against his thigh as he spoke.

‘As if I don't have enough on my plate,
thwap
, what with Treasury screwing me to the floor over the budget estimates,' he said. ‘Now I've got a
thwap
bushfire to fight. What am I paying you for, Nev,
thwap
? If it isn't to keep this sort of crap,
thwap
, out of the papers?'

Neville Lowry was Agnelli's press secretary. He was a tall, sad-faced ex-journalist with a permanent stoop, a reedy voice and about as much hair as it would take to stuff a pincushion. He was perched like a heron on the arm of the office chesterfield, his shoulders slumped forward in the melancholic posture appropriate to his vocation. ‘It's the
Herald
, Ange,' he pleaded. ‘You know what they're like.'

Lowry did not need to elaborate. Melbourne's afternoon broadsheet had never been sympathetic to the Australian Labor Party, in or out of office. And its current editor, a Murdoch hack with the physique of Jabba the Hut and the morals of a conger eel, had made it his mission in life to torment us at every opportunity.

‘But the
Herald
wouldn't have it,
thwap
, if somebody hadn't,
thwap,
leaked it.' Agnelli turned his ire on me. ‘And that's your
thwap
department, Murray.'

Neville Lowry was a comparatively recent addition to Angelo's staff and he still tended to pay the boss some degree of deference. Not a mistake I was likely to make. I leaned forward in my chair and displayed the palms of my hands. ‘What am I now?' I said. ‘The resident plumber?'

For almost seven years I'd worked for Angelo. Stoking the boilers of policy analysis. Tending the vineyards of administrative superintendence. Fixing his fuck-ups and burying his boo-boos. Almost seven years. It was beginning to feel like eternity. First I was Angelo's electorate officer, inherited with the fittings and fixtures when a factional deal handed him a safe seat in the northern suburbs. Back then I managed his constituent affairs, fending off cranky voters and stroking the local party apparatus. And when, in our second term, he was appointed Minister for Ethnic Affairs, he took me along for the ride. This was designed to fend off any suspicion of wog favouritism. As he pointed out at the time, with his characteristic mastery of the bleeding obvious, Murray Whelan is not an Italian name.

Other portfolios followed, rungs in Angelo's ascent up the ladder of political preferment. We'd climbed them together. Local Government. The Arts. Water Supply. Agriculture and Fisheries. And now the big one, the jackpot. In a Cabinet reshuffle the previous month, Angelo had been catapulted into the job of head honcho of the state's rail, tram and road networks.

In better times such a promotion would've been cause for celebration. Unfortunately, Transport had become a poisoned chalice, claiming the careers of two of Angelo's predecessors in less than a year. The problem was money. The government had run out of it. The boom days of the eighties were over and the chickens of fiscal profligacy had come home to roost. With the state deficit running at Brazilian levels, the minister's task was reduced to screwing as much revenue out of the system as possible while presiding over a one hundred million dollar budget cut.

A man of conviction and inner resource might have been able to cope. But those terms had never been applicable to Angelo. In the previous three weeks he'd veered from steely resolve to catatonic retreat to blustering bravado. Now he was tearing strips off his advisers. ‘A leak,' he repeated,
thwap
. ‘Somebody's got it in for me.'

‘That's a pretty wide field, Ange,' I said.

‘You know what the
Herald
's like,' moaned Nev Lowry again. ‘And the Buzz doesn't even pretend to be factual.'

The Buzz was the
Herald
's gossip column, a vehicle for all manner of kite-flying and bait-laying. It was a gadfly in that day's Buzz which had flown up Angelo's trouser leg, a snippet headed
TRUCK CASH GRAB
.

‘The Buzz has it that incoming transportation supremo Angelo Agnelli has been cooking up plans to slap a hefty new tax on trucks. Makes you wonder how the government's union cronies will react to attempts to slug their members. Not to mention the big wheels of the Transport Industry Association. Somebody should warn the minister that you tangle with the truckies at your peril.'

This was a complete beat-up.

Okay, it was true that a Treasury proposal had recently crossed Angelo's desk, arguing for a tonnage levy on heavy trucks to help defray the damage these multi-wheeled behemoths inflicted on the public highway. It was also true that the last time the government tried to make the private transport industry pay its way, irate truck-owners had blockaded the state's milk supplies, forcing a humiliating backdown. Angelo's response to the Treasury proposal had been to bin it. Our administration might have been terminal but it wasn't suicidal.

‘Nev here has issued a press release denying any planned increase in motor registration charges,' I said, throwing a bridge over Angelo's troubled waters. ‘And, if you want, I'll interrogate the girls in the Treasury typing pool.'

Angelo nodded, tossed the newspaper aside and sat down, as though content that his clumsy minions were now showing some evidence of competence. But we both knew that the real cause of his agitation wasn't the piece in the paper. Nor the possibility of a leak. The entire government administration, after all, leaked like a prostate patient with a prolapsed bladder. No, the gossip column item had merely triggered an inevitable event, one that Angelo had been dreading.

‘Howard Sharpe's got a damned nerve, turning up on my doorstep like this,' he said. ‘If the state secretary of the United Haulage Workers has something to talk about, he can make an appointment like anyone else.'

Nev Lowry unfolded his legs and began edging towards the door. Not that he wasn't interested in relations between the government and the unions. As a young journalist Nev had often dreamed of covering first-hand the horrors of war and pestilence. He just didn't want to be around when the Haulers arrived. Who could blame him? Angelo flapped his wrist, dismissing his press secretary.

‘Just tell Sharpe it's a typical piece of
Herald
mischief,' I said. ‘A minor variation on their usual union-bashing theme. Or a bureaucratic cock-up. Disavow all knowledge. Better still, I'll go out and tell him you're not available. Like you said, he should've made an appointment.'

‘Might as well front him now, get it over with,' said Angelo. ‘If it isn't this, it'll be something else. Soon as I got this job, I knew that Sharpe'd be looking for a pretext to ambush me, to let me know what a tough customer he is. This job's difficult enough already. It'll be impossible if Sharpe thinks he can just waltz in here and throw his weight around any time the mood takes him.'

Howard Sharpe's weight was considerable. The United Haulage Workers was bigger than some of the government departments that Angelo had headed. Its twenty-five thousand truck and tanker drivers, aircraft refuellers, baggage handlers and forklift operators moved everything from beer to bricks. Or not, if Howard said so. As well as buildings and cash assets totalling at least twenty million dollars, the Haulers controlled a pension fund in the region of five hundred million. And, not least, a sizeable block of votes on the Labor Party's central administrative panel.

But the Haulers were more than an association of honest toilers, more than just a power base for the right wing of the party, more than just Howard Sharpe's personal fiefdom. They were a law unto themselves. Judge, jury and, it was whispered, executioner.

‘Perhaps this is an opportunity to mend some fences, get a bit of dialogue happening,' I suggested, not altogether facetiously.