The Brush-Off (13 page)

I rode the lift to street level, walked through the parked cars, turned left and looked up. In its heyday, the Y must have been an impressive pile. Seven storeys tall, V-shaped, city views. But the tide had long since gone out, and now it had nothing to look forward to this side of demolition. Peeling grey paint and a hundred grimy windows. But apparently still in use. Although the street-level doors were bricked up, a set of stairs led to a first-floor entrance, a heavy door painted with the Ministry for the Arts logo: a pair of tragicomic masks surmounted by dancing semi-quavers above a crossed pen and paintbrush.

The door was locked. As I turned away, it abruptly swung open and a hunched spine backed out. It belonged to a spotty youth with an armload of music stands. He propped the door open with the stands, went back in, re-emerged with a violin case in each hand. ‘Do you mind?' He held the cases out from his sides and nodded at the music stands. I tucked them up under his armpits, holding the door open with my shoulder. ‘If you're looking for Environmental,' he said, pleased to be the bearer of bad news. ‘They've already left.'

‘I'm looking for someone who lives here,' I said.

He gave me a queer look. ‘Bit late for that. Nobody's lived here for years. It's cheap storage now. Rehearsal rooms. Office space for low-budget arts organisations. Artist studios.' He stood there, waiting for me to close the door.

‘I might just look about, then,' I said.

‘I'm afraid I can't allow that,' he said pompously. ‘Tenant access only at the weekend.'

What was he going to do? Deck me with a Stradivarius?

‘Won't be long.' I stepped sideways into the building and the door swung shut behind me.

An ill-lit vestibule faced an ancient cage-type elevator, its oily cables caked with grime. Exhausted linoleum covered the floor. Stairs ran up and down on either side of the lift and a poky corridor extended back into the building, punctuated by doors at regular intervals. The whole place had been painted with mushroom soup at the time of the Wall Street Crash and not swept since the Fall of Singapore. About twenty tenants were listed on a directory board, the names spelled out in movable letters, subject to availability. Th* Orph*us Ch*ir, J*llyw*gs The*tre *n Educ*tion Tr*up*, Comm*nity Ar*s *nform*tion *esource *ntre, Let's D*nce Victor, Environ Men*l Puppets, Ac*ss Stud*os.

This last item, third floor, struck me as the best prospect. The elevator seemed a bit iffy, so I took the stairs. The third-floor corridor was a dingy passage indistinguishable from those on the floors below, a receding horizon of peeling lino and numbered doors with smoked-glass panels. I started knocking, raising an echo but nothing else. The whole building had a forsaken air. ‘Hello,' I called, tentative at first, then hiking up the volume. My voice came back at me, unanswered. I'd worked my way nearly the full length of the corridor, knocking and trying door handles, before one of them gave.

What I found could not have looked more like an artist's studio if the Art Directors' Guild had whipped it up for a production of
La Boheme
. Every inch of the place was crammed with canvases, crinkled tubes of paint, jars of used brushes, step- ladders, casually discarded sketches, stubs of charcoal. Paint spills Jackson Pollock would have been proud of lay thick on the floor. Mounted on an easel in the centre of the room was an example of the resident artist's work.

The subject was the quintessential suburban dream home of the nineteen fifties. Cream brick-veneer, red tile roof, green front lawn, cloudless sky. The style was photo-realist, hyper-realist, super-realist, whatever they call it. An exact rendering, anyway. Sharply vivid. Perfect in every detail, a real-estate agent's vision splendid. Crowning this ideal, a lovely finishing touch, was a lawn-mower, a spanking new Victa two-stroke, sitting in the middle of the lawn. Although its topic was utterly banal, the picture was oddly disturbing, as though this commonplace scene contained within it a secret of some deep malevolence.

But I wasn't there to immerse myself in art. I tore myself away and continued my search. Half-concealed behind a heavy curtain was a hole in the wall, a short cut into the adjacent room. This was furnished as living quarters, rough but not entirely squalid. There was a small enamel sink, a trestle table with a gas camping-stove, a microwave oven and a rack of op-shop crockery. A futon on a slatted wooden base. A vinyl-covered club armchair. A brick-and-board bookcase filled with large-format colour-plate art books, filed by artist, Australians mainly. Brack, Boyd, Nolan, Pugh, Williams. Empty bottles, six wine, two vodka. An overfilled garbage bag, a little on the nose in the heat. At the window, a metal two-drawer desk and typist's chair. Home sweet home. But whose?

Moving quickly now, feeling like a burglar, I crossed to the desk. It was covered with loose sheets of doodled-on tracing paper, drafting pens, erasers, crayons, chinagraph pencils, note pads. Nothing to indicate the occupant's name.

I slid open the top drawer. A bulldog clip of receipts from Dean's Artist Supplies. An art materials price-list. Envelopes containing colour transparencies of artworks, pictures of pictures, each labelled with a name. Familiar names from the bookcase. Beneath this clutter, held together by a paperclip, were three photographs. The first was old, the print dog-eared, square, black-and-white, a Box Brownie snap. A pretty teenager, full-faced, her hair permed for home defence. The next was also black-and-white, but glossier, a fifties feel. A man and a woman standing at a scenic lookout, a row of mountain peaks arrayed along the horizon behind them. The Twelve Apostles, the Seven Sisters, the Three Musketeers, somewhere famous. It was the same woman, now a twenty-year-old sophisticate in twin-set and pleated skirt, the man in baggy trousers and a beret. The pair of them relaxed, joky, hamming it up for the camera. Lovers. I had no idea who they were.

The last print was colour, curved corners. A young man with shoulder-length hair and wire-rimmed glasses standing in a row of corn, hoe in hand, bare to the waist, the original ninety-pound weakling. Beside him, leaning on a fork, an older man, barrel-chested, high-scalped. The face unshaven, bags under the eyes, but the same comic tufts above the ears, the same brazen stare as I had seen on Fiona Lambert's mantelpiece. Victor Szabo.

The hippy could have been Marcus Taylor. He had the same elongated face, the same feral intensity. It could have been anyone. I held the photo motionless, observing from a great height, staring down like a bird floating on a thermal, waiting for something to reveal itself.

Nothing did. I was asleep on my feet, miserably hungover. I opened the second drawer, working quickly, feeling furtive. A stamp album, most pages still empty. The few stamps it held were all Australian, low denominations. All bore the Bicentenary logo of 1988. Last year's issues. Hand-written annotations in tiny print. Whoever lived here was no great philatelist. A new hobby, perhaps, the interest unsustained. Wedged into the back of the album was a bank passbook. I slipped it out of its plastic cover, flipped it open and read the name.

Marcus Taylor. Bingo.

The dead have no privacy. I thumbed blank pages, looking for a balance. Thunk. Whirr. Somebody had started the elevator. It shuddered and lurched upwards, the sound magnified in the deserted building.

Startled by the sudden noise, I dropped the bankbook. It fell down the gap between the desk and the wall. I began to go down on my knees to retrieve it until it occurred to me that this was probably the police, come to examine the deceased's effects. I felt like a tomb robber. Not that I was doing anything wrong. It's just that I would have been hard put to explain exactly what I was doing. It was, I rapidly concluded, one of those situations where discretion was the better part of anything else you might care to mention.

Dumping the rest of the stuff back into the drawer, I stepped out the door. Down the hallway, the lift groaned and shuddered to a halt, a vague shape behind the grille. Immediately in front of me, a rubbish bin propped open a door marked Fire Escape. The layout of the building suggested these stairs opened onto the adjoining lane. I took them two at a time, scattering litter.

Three flights down, where the street exit should have been, the wall had been bricked up. Half a flight further, they ended at a large door.
Environ Mental Puppet Company
, it said. Beyond, a broad corridor lined with age-speckled white tiles extended towards the vague glow of daylight.

I pressed on, and had taken perhaps a dozen steps when a sudden draft of air stirred the grime at my feet. A pneumatic woomph sounded in my ears. I swung around just in time to see the door slam shut behind me. It was some sort of fire door, steel, fitting snugly into a metal frame. There was no handle on my side.

‘Hey,' I shouted, and banged the palms of my hands against the flat metal plate. ‘Hey.' There was no answer.

I balled my fist and banged again. The heavy steel reverberated with a dull echo, but there was still no answer. Either a draught in the stairwell had slammed the door shut or somebody was playing funny buggers. If I wanted out of this dump, I'd have to find another way.

Giving the door one last futile kick, I turned and headed along the corridor. Its white-tiled walls, even in their grimy state, reminded me of a hospital or a science laboratory, a place of bodily messes and antiseptic solutions. Even the air seemed to have a faintly pervasive chemical odour, as fusty as the cracked porcelain of the tiles. I soon discovered why.

The wide passageway opened abruptly into a cavernous basement, also lined with decrepit white tiles. Sunlight, struggling through a row of frosted windows high up in one wall, illuminated the room with its pallid wash. Occupying almost the entire space was a gigantic cement pit.

Great scabs of peeling green paint clung to its walls like clumps of dried lichen. Overlapping the edge of the huge trough, at the far end of the room, was a tangle of corroded pipes. Attached to the decaying metalwork was a sign. DANGER, it said. NO DIVING. POOL CLOSED. Lying on the bottom of the empty swimming pool, right in the middle, was a body.

Numerous bodies, actually. But the one that grabbed my attention was the whale. It was life-sized, aqua blue and made of fibreglass. Scattered around it was a pod of papiermâché dolphins, several dozen polystyrene starfish mounted on bamboo poles, innumerable cardboard scallop shells, piles of flags and pendants embroidered with sea-horses, and a pair of hammerhead sharks made of lycra and chicken wire.

But none of these were as compelling as the whale. Painted across its deep-sea dial was an idiotic anthropomorphic grin. I was buggered if I could figure out why it was smiling, though. It was high and dry, and so was I.

The only other exit was a roller door, big enough for a truck and battened down with more locksmithery than Alcatraz. Through the narrow gap at the bottom, I could just make out the surface of a laneway. Blasts of hot air were already rising from the asphalt. I rattled the roller a few times and gave a yell, but there was nobody outside to hear.

Next door was a long-disused changing room with vandalised lockers and ancient urinals full of desiccated deodorant balls. I tore a length of iron pipe from the wall of a shower recess. When I bashed it against the fire door, it produced considerably more noise than anything I'd been able to raise with my bare hands. Loud enough to make the blood in my temples throb and showers of sparks shoot into my eyes. But not loud enough, apparently, to be heard by anyone else in the building. I bashed away for a fair while, but all I got was a tired arm and an even more aggravated headache. The door was thicker than a Colleen McCullough novel. I could have banged away all day and not got a result.

I carefully explored the whole place again. The only potential exit was the windows. They appeared to be unlocked. They were also six metres up a sheer wall.

It had just gone 9.15 a.m. The situation was beginning to give me the shits. This whole spur-of-the-moment garretrifling expedition had been of questionable value in the first place. And taking off like a sprung burglar had only made things worse. At this rate, I'd be locked in all weekend. I slumped down beside the wall and lit an aid to clear thinking, my second last.

Bone weariness and enraged irritation fought for control of my body, equally matched. I jumped up, sat down, jumped up again. That little smartarse with the armful of violins had done this. Finally, I collapsed back against the wall and drew what comfort I could from my cigarette. If I'd been the Prime Minister, I'd have cried from sheer self-pity.

Agnelli had got me into this mess, waking me up with his paranoia, sending me to hose down imaginary threats to his public image. Nor was the Premier blameless. If he hadn't decided to reshuffle the Cabinet, I wouldn't have been compelled to change jobs. And if that hadn't happened, I wouldn't have a hangover and be locked in the storage facility of a marine-fixated puppet company.

Who was I trying to fool? Sleuthing around in a brain-dead state for no good reason, it was my own damned fault that I'd managed to get myself in this situation.

In a little over ninety minutes I was due to meet Agnelli, brief him on Taylor's suicide note and escort him to Max Karlin's brunch. A side trip to the supermarket in the interim was beginning to look unlikely. Not that Red would need any groceries, not where he'd be. Standing in an airport lounge waiting in vain for his father to arrive. ‘I was only two days late,' I could hear myself grovelling down the phone to Wendy. ‘You didn't have to tell the airline people to put him on the next plane back to Sydney.'