The Dying Trade (6 page)

CHAPTER 5

I woke with a headache that was partly due to the crack I'd taken the night before. I looked out of the window across the rusting roofs of Glebe. The sky had a dull, leaden look—the day was going to be hot. A Sahara wind was already whipping the ice-cream wrappers and other crap along the gutters. I made coffee but it was bitter and I swilled it down the sink. About the only good thing I've ever heard of Mick Jagger is that he likes scrambled eggs and white wine for breakfast. I made my version of scrambled eggs, piled a glass up with ice and topped it up with hock and soda. I put the drink down fast, made another, and took it, the food and
The News
out to the courtyard, feeling better every minute.

The paper headlined the hunt for Costello, the police expected a breakthrough hourly, and there were pictures of beefy guys in shirt sleeves heavying honest citizens. Giles' departure from this vale of tears didn't get a mention. I ran my eye hopelessly over the cryptic crossword and consoled myself with the meteorological report—hot, high winds ahead of a thunderstorm. I skimmed the paper again and was surprised to find an idea forming in my mind. I let it take shape for a few minutes and then gave it another drink in case it went away hurt.

I shaved, took a shower and put on my other suit which is said to be lightweight but always makes me sweat like a pig if I move at a pace above a royal stroll. I was already hot when I slipped into the car. The radio aerial had been broken off just above the mounting and was lying in three pieces across the bonnet in the shape of the mark of Zorro. I swore and swept the pieces into the gutter. Insurance was supposed to cover things like that, but how do you insure yourself against insurance premiums? The car started cheerfully and I moved off towards the city.

I reached my office, two floors up above St Peters Street, close to 9.00. The Cross, or what's left of it after the developers had their way, is just a block north. The whores were already at work, not doing any business among the winos squatting on the pub steps, but keeping in practice. My office opens straight into the corridor, no ante-rooms for people to wait or die in. I inherited it from a clairvoyant who fell under a train. The desk was covered with astrological signs and cabbalistic symbols in inks of various colours—I never had the nerve to rub them out and confined my own doodling to the blotter.

The knock came at exactly 9 o'clock. I sang out that the door was open and she came in slowly and tentatively like a schoolboy coming into the head's study. She wore a light blue mottled smock over tight flared white trousers. Her fine breasts complemented the tailoring of the smock and that length of lean thigh in white denim was something to see. Her low-heeled sandals vaguely matched her tooled leather shoulder bag and there wouldn't have been much change out of three hundred dollars for the set. Yesterday she'd been wearing a scarf or something over her head. Now I could see that her dark, reddish hair was cut short, almost cropped. It lay on her sleek head like a burnished metal cap. She wore yesterday's sunglasses, or maybe she had a few pairs the same. A cigarette came out of her bag almost before she hit the chair and she was one of the fastest people with a lighter I've seen.

She took a quick look around the office which in colour scheme and layout is more like a railway waiting room than anything else. She didn't react to it one way or the other, which probably meant that she'd been in worse places, maybe much worse. She drew hard on the cigarette.

“It must have seemed strange to you,” she said, “telephoning like that last night.”

“It did, but when people need help they do strange things.”

“Can I take up some of your time, Mr Hardy? I have a long story to tell. I'll pay you of course, starting from now.”

“Before you start spending money I'd like to know why you've changed your mind about me. I was a fly on the wall to you yesterday.”

“That's a fair question. Yesterday I was having a bad time with the man you saw. I'm sorry, it made me testy. Today I need help and I've been thinking. I don't like Bryn Gutteridge, but he's a good judge of people. If you're good enough for him you're good enough for me.”

She acted on the “if you have to ask the price you can't afford it” plan and that was all right with me. I nodded reassurance on the point, rolled a cigarette and settled back to listen.

“Today is close enough to fifteen years to the day since I gave up being a dancer. I wasn't bad, I can still do a bit. I'm pretty fit.”

“Yes,” I said, “you look fine. Put 90 per cent of people to shame.”

“Well, I gave up dancing and that sort of life, theatre and so on to get married. I married a man named Bercer. I was twenty-four, he was fifty-nine, I was poor, he was rich. It's an old story and there was nothing very different about it except that it worked out all right. He was nice to me. I liked him and for about three years I thought I'd done the right thing. I read a lot, went to plays I wouldn't have given a thought to before. I improved myself.”

“You did a good job,” I said, “but then . . .?”

“But then I met a man more or less my own age. I fell for him and we had an affair, a pretty hot one. He was married and I handled it all very badly. I got upset when I couldn't have it all my own way when things went wrong. James, my husband, didn't suspect that I was being unfaithful but he was worried about me and sent me to see a doctor, a counsellor . . .”

“Brave.”

“Yes. He was helpful at first, encouraging. I'd lost track of the friends I'd had when I was dancing and they weren't much anyway, pretty wild. I had no one to confide in. Brave was sympathetic and available day and night. I came to rely on him absolutely and I told him about my lover. That was a terrible mistake.”

“He blackmailed you?”

“No, not me. He blackmailed James. He told James that there were things about me that would ruin him financially and socially.”

“What was Bercer's business?” I knew but I wanted to know whether or not she did and what she felt about it.

“Property development, building, and he did big stock exchange deals. It all hinged on the people he knew, politicians, lawyers, top public servants, even a few military men. We went to hundreds of parties, had dinner engagements six nights a week, sometimes seven. There were lots of smoke evenings, the gentlemen with their cigars and the ladies talking trivia.”

I looked down at the frayed end of my cigarette and teased it with my thumbnail. “It sounds terrible.”

“It was, a lot of the time. But there were some good holidays, good trips, and the men weren't all oafs and the women weren't all vacuous. It wasn't so bad. I went to a good school, my accent's all right and I could hold my own. But James had to be absolutely clean for his deals to come through, no dubious connections.”

“Your lover was a dubious connection.”

“He certainly was, the worst. If it got out that he was my lover those important people would drop James cold.”

“Why didn't James drop you?”

“He loved me for one thing, but that wasn't all. Brave's line was that James mustn't drop me or he'd spread word about Carl.”

“Carl who?”

“It doesn't matter. The important thing is that Brave was bleeding James dry. I found out later that he got over a hundred thousand from him, maybe two hundred thousand, maybe more.”

I whistled. “That's big. What does Brave do with the money?”

She set her teeth in a grimace like that of a firing squad commander who has to administer a coup de grace.

“He has expensive tastes in . . . erotica. He gambles like a madman. But we're talking about me, not him.”

“Sorry, he's of interest. So are you of course.”

She looked impatient and ran a hand over that fine, glowing pelt.

“Right. I'm jumping ahead in telling it this way because at the time I didn't know what Brave was doing. I just saw James getting more and more tense and felt more and more guilty myself.”

“Bercer didn't front up to you with it?”

“Never. He just broke under the strain. He started taking bottles to bed and gorging himself on rich food. He blew up like a balloon and had a heart attack. He had two, actually in a few days and he died.”

“How did that leave you?”

She was so used to the idea that she didn't even pause to knock the ash off her cigarette—the second since she'd started talking.

“Comfortable, if I'd been careful. I wasn't.”

I raised an eyebrow, a stagey trick I'd learned from my drunken, diabetic mother who'd pounded a vampy piano in London pubs and queened it up on the
Oronsay
on the £10 scheme.

“Brave dropped out of the picture when James died. I gave up my lover, unpleasantly, and went a bit wild. Not here—in the States and Europe. I worked through a lot of money and came home a good bit harder. I'd seen a lot, I was too old for dancing and too smart for whoring, so I thought I'd better have another try at what I'd succeeded at before.”

She'd gone through it in her mind a hundred times and had made her own role tougher with each run through, but she had intelligence, directness and an awareness of the reality of other people—something real gold-diggers don't have. And her men hadn't been soft-cocked sugar daddies: Bercer sounded like a shrewd operator in a high-powered world and Gutteridge had been smart and tough. But she was telling the story and this was the part she'd assigned herself. I wanted to hear more.

“You did all right again,” I said.

“No,” she shook her head, “I was getting nowhere for going on a year until I got help. Guess who?”

“Brave again.”

“Yes. I met him at a party. I think I'd tried to find him when I first got back but he'd vanished. Remember that I didn't have anything against him except perhaps a bit of resentment that he'd gone off so soon after James died. He said he'd had to go back to Canada. OK, I was pleased to see him and pretty soon I was confiding in him again. He talked to me about needing an anchor in my life, a strong man. He introduced me to Mark Gutteridge.”

She was moving steadily through her packet of cigarettes and the room was smoky and heating up fast. My watch put the time at a little past ten which meant that the pubs would be open.

She agreed that it was hot and that a drink would be a good idea. We went down the stairs and I felt my stocks in the building go up several points in the eyes of a dentist with a quiet practice, a hairdresser with big blanks in her appointment book and a guitar teacher whose rooms were smoky and sweet smelling. They hovered about in their doorways as I followed Ailsa's firm white-denimed buttocks down the corridors of their dreams.

The heat hit us like a jet engine blast when we reached the street. Ailsa had slipped the Porsche I'd seen the day before into an illegal but unobtrusive place behind the building. It was unlocked and she stepped in and reached into the glove compartment, also unlocked, for the keys. I wondered if she ignored security the same way in her house. As she pulled out from the kerb I noticed a red Volkswagen pull away half a block behind. I watched it in the rear vision mirror for a mile or so till it turned off or fell a long way behind. I couldn't see the driver. The light wouldn't fall right for me to get a look at him even when the car was close. I directed Ailsa out to Watson's Bay where the big pub on the beach serves the best fish in Sydney. If Ailsa was only halfway through her story it looked as though we could string it out through lunch, and I was on expenses. She didn't talk much. She drove fast and well using the Porsche's power when it was needed and not for show. We reached the pub just before eleven and she slid the car into a patch of shade where a tree hung over the parking bay. She reached over to drop the keys into the glove box.

“Lock it,” I said.

She gave me a sharp, unfriendly look and shook her head.

“For me,” I said. “Your security's lousy, it's time to start improving it.”

She shrugged and locked the car putting the keys in her shoulder bag. We went through the cool lounge, up some stairs and into the dining room which has a view of the boats and the water that puts twenty-five per cent on the price of the food and drink.

“What will you drink?”

“Tonic and a slice of lemon. I hardly drink at all these days.”

I gave the waiter the order. I had the same with gin. Out came the cigarettes and she took up her story again without preamble.

“It was all different with Mark. We had a good sexual relationship at the start and he was a very different proposition to James.”

“No playing around?”

She shook her head. “Out of the question. It was all much more complicated. Brave can judge people. He'd picked me and Mark as a good fit and he was right. But the fit wasn't all that comfortable.”

“The children?”

“Right. Mark doted on them and they were as suspicious as hell of me. He doted, but kept a tight rein on them. He seemed to have them scared. He scared me too at times.”

“Where was Brave in this scene?”

“I'm coming to it.”

The drinks arrived and I tried not to show an indecent interest in mine. She gave hers only the attention it deserved.

“Brave seemed to be a friend of Mark's in a low-key way. Mark advised him in business matters and helped him to get the land the clinic's built on. You've seen it?”

“Yeah, must have been quite a deal.”

“It was. Some old houses came down. Mark had people in his pocket as I told you. I was interested in Mark's business. I thought I'd been wrong not to pay more attention to what James did, it might have kept me closer to him. Well, I talked business to Mark quite a bit. In bed mostly, and he gave me the gist of what it was all about. He was involved in land and property speculation. He got tips from people in high positions and he profited from them. He paid off the people who gave him information, in cash sometimes, more often in land and shares. Sometimes the payments came years after the deal, sometimes the kick-backs went to the wives, you understand?”