The Butcherbird (31 page)

‘One fifty.’ The voice rang through the panelled room, ricocheted off the domed roof, seemed to cut the strings of the jerking marionette on the podium so that its arms flopped, its mouth fell open. Every head turned to see where its eyes were fixed.

He stood as he’d always stood on the decks of this boat—as if he owned not just the vessel but the ocean it sailed on. The feet were planted wide apart, the face was tanned and healthy, the suit looked as if the tailor had fitted it that evening. There was not a person in the room who couldn’t pick that voice just from a radio interview, there was no one in Sydney who didn’t know Mac Biddulph’s squared-off face.

The charm of the auctioneer was lying on the floor somewhere under the podium. This couldn’t be happening. There was no way he could accept a bid from Mac Biddulph. He had no money. That was the whole point of the auction, wasn’t it? So the banks could harvest whatever was left on the stalks. But this was an auction. A bid was a bid. He looked around the room, desperate for guidance. He caught the eye of the vice president from New York, who shrugged. He probably didn’t even recognise Mac.

‘One fifty then. At the back. Do I hear one sixty? One sixty anyone? Going once at one fifty, twice, I’m selling then, all done at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, sold to … to you, sir.’

Not a foot shuffled on the boards, not a cough escaped, not a catalogue rustled. For a moment, there was absolute silence.

And then, slowly at first, but building quickly like a wave flowing around the room, applause rang out. They dropped what they were holding—pens, papers, hats, whatever—and clapped like a crowd possessed. Mac smiled, let his eyes travel slowly over the faces, waved, and walked from the Honey Bear for the last time.

They walked arm in arm, bodies rubbing gently, legs swinging in unison, unconsciously wrapped together. The ground was covered with an indigo haze of crushed jacaranda petals. The scent of jasmine and gardenias mingled in the humid air. The faintest brush of a light sun shower drifted about them and the kookaburras were already calling the end of the day.

They entered the forgotten park through a rusted gate, jammed forever open. No one came here. They’d stumbled on this lost tangle of exotic plants gone wild on one of their long rambles. It was their favourite release now, to wander together along the harbour foreshore, or through the lanes and alleys of Paddington, past the nineteenth-century terraces and the art galleries and bistros, or to discover one of the myriad public pathways or open spaces that led down to the water.

Their park—it was their park now—had the ruins of a stone building buried in its undergrowth, the huge hand-cut, roughly pecked blocks of the city’s convict past. Sometimes they sat on these tumbled monoliths and ate sandwiches or drank tea. But this evening they made their way to a sandstone shelf jutting out over the cliff, with the harbour lapping virtually beneath, and Jack drew a bottle of white wine and a block of cheese from his small backpack. They sat in the melting dusk, the shadows of the eucalypts falling around them.

Green and yellow ferries scurried back and forth across the golden harbour. Soon their lights would form rippling columns in the black water, but as yet the sun held to a faint promise. The birds fell silent, even the kookaburras left the stage to the animals of the night. They sipped in the deep congeniality of lovers who no longer needed to fill silences. Suddenly Jack thought he could make out a moving shape in the water. It disappeared. He followed the path that might have been. A great head rose from the swell and then a rounded smaller shape alongside. He stifled a cry and pointed for Louise. The whale and its calf swam calmly beneath them, beneath the houses and apartments of the lawyers and merchant bankers and chief executives.

‘I love this city, ‘ Jack said. ‘They say whales won’t swim where the water isn’t clean, but here we are in a working port, surrounded by millions of people and still they come. Somehow it means we haven’t wrecked the world quite yet.’ He turned to her. ‘I want to go back to making beautiful things. Someone else can rule the business world. I want to design houses for ordinary people, houses that don’t cost millions but are simple and functional and elegant. This place has given me another chance and I want to take it.’ He held her forearm. ‘Well, you’ve given me the second chance. No one else. But I’ve learned there are more good people than otherwise and now I’ve met a lot of the good ones. People come up to me in the streets, shake my hand, even shopkeepers—it’s humbling. And, of course, there are the others. But we don’t care about them, do we?’

They walked along the track by the cliffs and peered into the dark water, but the whales had vanished. ‘Will you work with me again? Just the two of us and a couple of young graduates, the way we used to be? Will you walk on with me?’

He couldn’t see her face but he felt the arms wrap around him and the breath in his hair. ‘What do you think, lover boy?’

It took them over an hour to walk back to Alice Street. It was a long while since they’d been so relaxed. They chatted occasionally about the good times to come, the black times past. The landscape had transformed before their eyes when the press articles ran and the other media picked up the story. It was as if a breeze had blown thick fog from the hills and suddenly it was clear the sun had always been warming the valley ahead. They’d heard nothing from ASIC or any other authority, although Mac had been charged, as had Renton Healey. Louise stopped him at one point and said, ‘I told you the good guys always win.’ Jack laughed and held her to him.

As they entered the small front garden through the wrought-iron gate, they didn’t notice the man standing beneath one of the street trees until he spoke.

‘Mr Beaumont? Mr Jack Beaumont?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have a subpoena for you, sir. And Mrs Beaumont, is it? One for you also, madam.’ He disappeared into the night as quickly as he’d emerged and they were left staring blankly at the documents in the half-light.

The whales had left the bays and coves of the eastern harbour now and were swimming slowly outside the shipping lane towards the heads. The mother nudged the calf gently to one side if it strayed towards the marker buoys. They felt the currents of the incoming tide and pushed on into the open sea, turning to the north to join the migration to warmer waters. Just five hundred yards from the shore, but well outside the surf line, they made their way past Manly and Harbord, edged out to sea to clear Long Reef, resumed their line by Mona Vale and Bilgola and Whale Beach, and then swam through the punctuated flashes of the Barrenjoey Lighthouse, leaving Sydney and its sleeping citizens well behind.

Maroubra set the cruise control on the steering column and let his mind, too, slip on to autopilot as the heavy frame of the four-wheel drive ploughed into the air currents. The course was set for Bowral, more than an hour’s drive south-west of Sydney, a place he’d never visited before or even considered for a wet weekend. He thought of it vaguely, if at all, as the retreat of those who rode horses early in the morning—or at least wore clothes that looked as if they rode horses—and then spent the remainder of the day in vast gardens cluttered with daffodils and other colourful objects that sprang unexpectedly from bare ground. Maroubra disliked horses, at least horses that were groomed and cosseted and pranced about in arenas, ridden by people in tight jackets and ridiculous helmets. If they were afraid of falling off, why did they get on? He felt he might appreciate wild horses if he saw a herd of brumbies thundering down a gorge, but this wasn’t an experience that had passed his way.

Yet here he was in the land of leather-patched elbows, searching for a name on a gate. At least you couldn’t miss the gates here. They were all enormous structures of stone and wood or wrought iron, with English names emblazoned on them that sounded as if the Duke of Barwick Feld had slipped away to the colonies for a short break and was taking tea, and a muscular serving wench, just up the garden path. He pushed the accelerator down hard as the engine struggled up the thousand-foot climb through the dense eucalypt forest on the slopes of Mount Gibraltar. The towns of Bowral and Mittagong lay below, but Maroubra’s eyes were searching for the name BLACKBUTT LODGE on a fence or gatepost.

It had been a curious, disturbing call that had brought him here. Late at night, on his home phone, his wife asleep, him dozing, asleep but awake as he often was now, jerked into consciousness by the night call that always rang of disaster. He hadn’t recognised the voice at first. He was attuned to voices, always knew if a friend was sick or troubled from the voice, or if a lie was sliding down the line, or a hand reaching into his pocket. And there were few words to decipher; just ‘Come tomorrow. Bowral, on the mountain, look for Blackbutt Lodge. Be there at eleven.’ But it was the Pope’s voice, flat and strangled and lifeless, nothing like the steady, calm tone he’d heard for so many years—there was no mistaking the timbre underlining the half-whispered instructions.

He saw it now, the name, not on a pretentious assemblage of inappropriate grandeur, but on the cross-pole of a simple frame of undressed trunks. He drove slowly down the steep road of crushed granite and parked in a turning area. No buildings were visible but he could make out strange shapes hiding in the dense copses, organic shapes or twisted, contorted metallic-looking objects. The view through the clearing was a hundred kilometres or more across to a hazy mountain range with honey-coloured escarpments. He stopped to drink in the colours and shapes. Suddenly he realised he was looking through the Jamison Valley to the Blue Mountains, without a structure or a road or any sign of human presence, other than the ghosts lurking in the trees, to interrupt his view.

He didn’t hear or see the spare figure step from behind the tree until the voice startled him. ‘You can look a long time.

There’s a lot to see.’

Maroubra turned at the familiar voice, stronger than it had been in the dark hours, and saw the lean face, lined with tension. ‘Yes. It’s a surprise after all the clipped grass and rose gardens.’

The Pope attempted a smile, but it was thin and unconvincing. He was dressed more warmly than seemed necessary, in a thick woollen jacket and knitted cap, although Maroubra realised the breeze carried a sharp chill here on the mountain. ‘Let’s walk. I’ll show you some sculptures. We won’t go to the lodge, if you don’t mind. I’d rather we weren’t seen together.’

He led the way through the tall, straight trunks, rising thirty feet before the first leaves kissed a branch. Maroubra could see the shapes more clearly now, decipher the forms of something he might expect in an art gallery, if he ever went to an art gallery. They stopped in front of a commanding piece, claiming its right in the centre of a wide clearing, a bronze mask atop a tall wooden totem staring out into the mists of the valley. The base was a roughly cut block of granite, but where the stone met the wood even Maroubra’s untrained eye could discern the skill in the fitting together of the two. The Pope stood back, waiting for a response.

‘It’s a wonderful thing. I don’t know anything about sculpture, but even I can feel its presence.’ Maroubra reached down to rub the joining places with his bare hands. ‘And this work, it’s alive somehow, the way this is done.’

Now the Pope’s face broke into a wide smile as he came forward. ‘It’s morticed, you see. The stone is cut almost like the joints in a fine drawer. And look here at the pinning. They’re cast bronze, cast to fit exactly.’ He also knelt to place his gloved hands on the cold stone. Maroubra raised his brows inquiringly. ‘It’s my son’s. It’s his best piece so far. And he’ll do better things yet. He’s in his stride now, works all day from before breakfast till the light’s gone. He’s mastered the technical skills, now it’s all the images springing up, all the emotion emerging through the hands into the wood and the stone and the bronze.’ He rose and turned to Maroubra. ‘You’re right. They’re alive. And so is he.’

It was the longest speech Maroubra had ever heard from the Pope, almost feverish in its intensity. He felt there was nothing to say, so he rose quietly and they both stared at the sculpture. He could hear the wind in the high trees but there was no other sound, not even a bird call, as the two men stood, almost like carved figures themselves, on the sloping ground.

Finally the Pope shook himself, as if emerging from hibernation, and took a folded envelope from his coat pocket. ‘Here. Take this. Use it for Jack and Louise.’

Maroubra opened the envelope. He could see it was the corporate filing for a company, listing its headquarters, directors, assets and liabilities, but the name was unfamiliar to him. ‘What is this?’

‘Just take it. I saw they were charged.’ Maroubra examined the document more closely. ‘Your name is here as a director.’ He read on and looked up at the Pope in surprise. ‘And that Trudeaux woman. What in God’s name would you be doing on a company board with her?’

The Pope held up one hand. ‘No questions. You take that and you follow wherever it leads you. Whether you’ll find the person you want in a way that will pin him to the wall, I don’t know. It’s the best I can do.’

Maroubra watched his face as he spoke and read the strain. ‘And what will happen to you if I do pursue it to the end?’

The Pope shrugged. ‘That doesn’t matter now. Get on with it, and quickly.’ He turned to go. ‘I have to teach a class.’

Maroubra stopped him, shook his hand, then watched him walk away into the forest. He remained in the clearing, staring into the distant mountains. He knelt and ran his hands again over the joints in the stone and wood before stuffing the envelope into his trouser pocket and hurrying back to the car, shivering in the thin air.

Popsie Trudeaux was in heaven. At least she assumed heaven would largely resemble this haven of pink houses with white roofs; with suntanned, attractive people strutting about in excitingly cut shorts;with dark waiters carrying colourful drinks on glass trays; with bougainvillea cascading over white walls and oleanders hiding money behind high hedges. The whole place was pink and white and rich. The smell of money was stronger than the scent of the flowers.