The Serpent's Sting (30 page)

‘And what might that be?'

‘A cock, Brian — a cock in a frock.'

Joycey Dovey's demeanour was markedly different from earlier encounters. Brian and I met her in the Tivoli workrooms. She remembered Brian, and lamented again the loss of that white sheath dress. Her amber necklace clattered as she fiddled with it. She addressed me now as ‘Mr Power', and couldn't have been more helpful. Apparently, my newly minted celebrity made any request I might make reasonable and no trouble at all. My request was modest — a tight skirt, a black wig, and a long-sleeved blouse, because Brian had refused to shave his arms. Apart from this small rebellion, he'd agreed to my scheme with an alacrity that took me by surprise. I promised Joycey that if the clothes weren't returned in perfect condition, I'd pay for them to be replaced.

Brian and I hadn't discussed in detail what my plan entailed. This was because I had no clear idea how we should proceed, beyond the vague notion of approaching a group of prostitutes and asking individuals for the name of their pimp. This probably wouldn't be as straightforward as it sounded.

Joycey parcelled up the outfit and wig in brown paper, and we went to the Hopetoun Tearooms to discuss matters. There was no point returning to Mother's house immediately. I was due to meet with the people from J.C. Williamson's a couple of hours later, so a cup of tea, followed by a quiet hour or so in the Athenaeum Library reading
Private Lives
, struck me as an excellent way to pass the morning. The tearooms were busy. Two ladies surrendered their table to us, and complimented me on my courage. One of them shyly asked me to autograph her handkerchief. I did so, but my fountain pen bled into the cotton so that my name looked more like an ink spill than a signature. She didn't mind.

It soon became obvious that the Hopetoun Tearooms were not the ideal place to discuss prostitutes and the idea of Brian approaching them in female attire. The tables were close together, and patrons around us were doing a poor job of pretending not to be straining to listen to our conversation. A month ago, no one would have shown an inclination to eavesdrop on what I said. Now I'd become an object of interest, I had a glimpse of how oppressive fame might be, and I thought how quickly these people would turn if I fell from grace in their eyes. I had to hand it to James Fowler; he'd orchestrated this brilliantly.

Brian and I spoke of uncontroversial things. I told him about
Private Lives
, we drank our tea, had a plate of indifferent sandwiches, some of which were smeared with anchovy paste, which I loathe, and walked up Collins Street to the Athenaeum. This was, I'd always thought, the civilised heart of Melbourne. It had the air of an exclusive club, but without any whiff of snobbery. It was, after all, a library first and foremost, but its members were encouraged to sit and read, and talk. Most importantly, there was an air of discretion in the Athenaeum, akin to the discretion one would expect in a private club. This was doubtless a product of the architecture, rather than a philosophy upheld by either the librarians or the patrons. Still, as Brian and I sat in armchairs well away from the loans desk, it felt like a safe place to talk. Our voices didn't carry beyond our immediate vicinity; even so, we kept them low, and no one disturbed us.

‘Let's suppose,' Brian said, ‘that this plan actually works, and one of the women takes me to meet Albert Taylor. What then? I'll get dressed up, Will, but I'm not turning a trick to demonstrate my credentials to this bloke.'

‘Fair enough, Brian. I agree that having sex with a person who's looking for what you have to offer is going way beyond the call of duty.'

‘Good. At least we're agreed on that.'

It occurred to me suddenly that there was a serious flaw in our scheme. If Brian was taken to meet Albert Taylor, and Geraldine was there, she'd recognise him immediately. That would put Brian in serious danger, and drive Taylor further out of reach. I said this to Brian, and he laughed.

‘You're forgetting that Albert Taylor is Harlen Quist, and that I sat at our table with Harlen Quist on Christmas Day. Geraldine is the least of my worries. Has this just occurred to you, Will? It occurred to me as soon as you came up with this idea.'

‘So why didn't you say something?'

‘Because, Will, I still think it's a good idea. It's not a well-thought-out idea, but it's a good one. The problem of what we do with Taylor remains. Let's try to work this out calmly. Being taken to Taylor is risky. I'm not going to waltz into a well-lit room and try to fool two people who've seen me before. Even if they don't twig straight away, it's still too risky. We could run this by Intelligence, and have them standing by.'

‘Out of the question. They'd never let you expose yourself to that sort of danger. They've made it clear that that privilege is reserved for me. We have to deliver Taylor to them. If we can do that, it will be the most satisfying accomplishment of my life. Albert Taylor is an Intelligence failure. To be the one who hands him in, to see the look on James Fowler's face as I clean up his mess, that would be better than a lifetime of applause in the theatre.'

My body was tense with the exciting possibility that Brian and I might be capable of doing something that the Intelligence units had so far been unable to do. I began to think that we had more imagination than all of their agents put together.

‘I need to lure Taylor away from the light,' Brian said. ‘I need to meet him somewhere dark.'

‘He's not going to come into the open to meet a transvestite. I think he'll want to employ one, but I don't think it's enough to flush him out.'

‘We need a big-ticket item, don't we? We need you.'

Brian was right, and I didn't feel let down that he was wriggling out of his agreed role in finding Albert Taylor. I was agreeably stunned, therefore, when he said, ‘It'll take two of us. You'll still need me to find Taylor. Something is forming in the back of my mind about how we can nab him. I'll go home and sort it out. I agree with you — I think we have to be daring, very daring, and we have to move quickly. This has to be done tonight. As soon as your meeting with Williamson's is finished, come back to Mother's house. I'll have a solid plan by then.'

I didn't see how Brian could come up with a viable plan when I'd been unable to, but the meeting with Williamson's was now uppermost in my mind, so I had no choice but to put my faith in his dubious abilities. I didn't doubt his courage, only the necessary deviousness of his thinking. Brian was a plodder, not a tactician. I assured him I'd be home as soon as I could, and he left the Athenaeum Library, with his brown paper parcel making too much noise as he did so.

The meeting with J.C Williamson's was unexpectedly low key. It wasn't an audition, of course. The part was mine. The producer and the director were the only people I met. They were polite and welcoming, and expressed their enthusiasm for the production's potential to be a great success. No other parts had yet been cast. When I first entered the room — a well-furnished office above the Comedy Theatre — I thought I detected the merest hint of a sneer on the face of the director, a lean and hungry-looking man in his late thirties. He introduced himself as Charles Bertram, and it was as I shook his hand that I saw a shadow of disdain cross his face. He was everything that Percy Wavel wasn't. He radiated a passionate engagement with the theatre, and when he spoke, he did so with an air of authority. He would be a hard taskmaster, the kind of director who would drive his cast to the edge of exhaustion because all that mattered was the performance. I understood his uncertainty about me — I'd been foisted upon him by the management. He tried valiantly to convince me that he was delighted to have the opportunity to direct me as Elyot. The producer, a large, silent man named Maxwell Connaught, was there to make sure that his director didn't threaten their investment by behaving badly.

‘Do you sing, Mr Power?' Bertram asked.

‘I've heard recordings of Noël Coward singing “Someday I'll Find You”, and I think I sing at least as well as he does.'

‘You look the goods,' Bertram said. ‘You have a decent head of hair, at any rate. That saves money on a weave.'

Charles Bertram's hair was retreating into memory.

‘We have all your details. Rehearsals begin in a fortnight. I'd prefer it if you were close to word-perfect at the first rehearsal. I expect that of all my actors. We don't have time to have you blundering about with one eye on the book.'

Maxwell Connaught coughed to indicate that Bertram ought to tone it down a little. I rescued him.

‘I agree with you. I pride myself on being off book before the first rehearsal. I've always done that. I look forward, Mr Bertram, to being directed by you, and I assure you that I am neither a fragile petal nor a prima donna. I want you to be tough on me. I want to give the best performance of my career in this role.'

Fortunately, neither Maxwell Connaught nor Charles Bertram asked questions about the kind of career I'd had in acting. They'd have seen the resumé I'd provided to the Tivoli management, and on paper my career sounded more impressive than it really had been. I'd noted that I'd played numerous key Shakespearean parts in my eponymous company. The tawdry truth of the failure of Queensland's rural barbarians to appreciate my efforts wasn't recorded in my resumé.

By the end of the meeting, Charles Bertram seemed more accepting of me as his leading man. I was relieved that he didn't ask me to sing, or to read any lines. There'd have been no point — he was stuck with me. If I sang or read badly, he would be consumed by fury for the two weeks before work began. Doubtless he'd had an actor in mind when he'd agreed to direct, and he'd take some convincing that I was a better choice. When our meeting came to an end, Bertram shook my hand and managed an awkwardly amiable smile.

‘I won't let you down,' I said. He nodded, and I could hear him thinking,
Yes you will, because you're not the actor I wanted in this play
.

I stood outside the Comedy Theatre in Exhibition Street and tried to marshal my thoughts. I'd been expecting to be elated. Instead, I was trepidatious, and even slightly embarrassed at being perceived as the cuckoo in the
Private Lives
nest. Well, I'd win them over. If there was one thing about my character of which I was confident, it was my ability to charm people. My mother would beg to differ, of course, but the great, unspoken truth about life is that sometimes mothers are a grave disappointment to their sons.

Chapter Nine

CURTAIN

THERE WERE VOICES IN THE FRONT ROOM
when I entered Mother's house. The door was open, so I had no qualms about entering unannounced. Cloris Gilbert was standing with her back to the bay window. Brian was standing on the opposite side of the room. It was an odd tableau. Cloris was distressed. She held a handkerchief in one hand, and an envelope in the other. Brian was holding what had been the contents of the envelope. Cloris was too upset to register my presence, or too upset to express disapproval at it.

‘There's been a development,' Brian said.

I drew my brows together to signal that Brian was being indiscreet.

‘Cloris knows that I'm a private-inquiry agent, Will.'

I wanted to point out that he wasn't a private-inquiry agent; that he was an out-of-work teacher hoping to become a private-inquiry agent. I held my fire.

‘Brian has only just told me,' Cloris said, ‘and I'm so relieved. I feel as if an enormous weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I couldn't go to the police. It's too terrible. It would kill my father.'

‘I'm lost,' I said.

Brian made a show of getting Cloris's permission before revealing the contents of the letter he was holding. She signalled with a small nod that he could go ahead.

‘This was pushed under the door at Drummond Street early this morning. It was addressed to Cloris, and fortunately it was Cloris who found it. It's from Albert Taylor.'

He stopped to allow this to sink in. Cloris took over.

‘This Albert Taylor person wants money, and what I mean by that is that he wants more money.'

‘He's been blackmailing you?' I was genuinely confused.

‘No,' Brian said. ‘He'd been blackmailing John.'

‘Heroin,' I said.

‘Oh, if only it was that simple.'

‘My brother seems to have worked overtime to offer a blackmailer as many options as he possibly could. He seems to have been indiscriminate in his choice of sexual partners, and by indiscriminate I'm not talking about a preference for fat, skinny, ugly, or beautiful women. Well, a picture, as they say …' She withdrew a photograph from the envelope and passed it to me. Expecting something pornographic, I girded my loins. It was a photograph of John Gilbert, his lips touching those of another man, whose features were obscured. It might have been Taylor. It was suggestive rather than conclusive.

‘The letter threatens to deliver the rest, in what is apparently a lurid sequence, to my father and to the gutter press.'

It was instructive, I thought, that the difference between a sleazy blackmailer and Army Intelligence was essentially, well, none.

‘How can all this,' I asked, ‘flow from a simple bloody lunch on Christmas Day?'

‘It doesn't,' Brian said. ‘John was already dead on Christmas Day. You know what I think? John died either accidentally, or otherwise, and Taylor was there to see it happen. He got dressed up as a Yank, and with the help of the real Yank, Private Dervian, carried his body, in broad daylight, to the cemetery, dumped it there, and then came to lunch as if nothing had happened.'

‘Someone would surely have seen them,' I said.

‘I imagine lots of people saw them. When someone does something in plain sight, no one notices, and besides, have the police actually asked for any witnesses? They decided as soon as they saw the needle in his arm that he'd taken his own life. But why would he do it there, beside that big angel?'

‘They wouldn't know where Mum was buried, thank God. That would have been the final insult.'

There wasn't anything more that Cloris could say to help elucidate this ghastly situation. The blackmail note signalled its intention to demand more, without actually demanding it explicitly. Further contact would be made, it said, and this was peculiarly menacing. Brian offered to walk her home, and as she was leaving, Cloris pointed out that the threat of further notes was making her feel vulnerable and watched.

I don't like coincidences. In my life they'd been rare and banal, and I understood that they were no more remarkable, really, than the thousand confluent happenstances that occur every day. We only notice them because their convergence takes us by surprise, and there is no reason why it should. I particularly distrusted any coincidence in which Army Intelligence reared its head. With their involvement, whatever looked like coincidence was far more likely to be the result of obscured manipulation. Where was the coincidence here? Was John Gilbert's connection to Mrs Ferrell's household a coincidence, given that I, too, had a connection to the house? We'd come to it from different directions — me through Geraldine Buchanan, and he through his drug addiction — but it still constituted a kind of coincidence. Even if Geraldine was working for Intelligence (and I no longer thought this likely), I couldn't see a controlling hand here. And yet, I knew there had to be one.

I have to admit, with some small degree of shame, that I was driven more by self-interest than concern about Peter Gilbert learning the whole, grubby truth about his son. James Fowler had been adamant that the destruction of my career had become a personal project of Albert Taylor's, driven by jealousy about my involvement with his girlfriend, Geraldine. I now saw that it was far more likely that his project was to wear my nerves down and then begin to blackmail me. Blackmail seemed to be his most reliable income stream. In the light of the Gilberts' experience, this made sense. Brian and I needed to move fast. We needed to find Albert Taylor tonight.

Having escorted Cloris back to Drummond Street, Brian was gone a considerable time — so long, in fact, that I began to be concerned that something might have happened. Everything seemed fraught. Nothing felt safe. Brian's lateness in returning ought to have been inconsequential; now I was alert to the awful possibility that Albert Taylor was implicated. Brian had been gone for several hours, and I was on the point of telephoning the Gilbert house when he came through the front door. He seemed agitated, but insisted otherwise. I felt sure that his bravado about seducing Taylor with transvestite prostitution opportunities had evaporated. He surprised me, though, by saying that he'd go upstairs for a bath, and that he'd shave closely, but that he wasn't prepared to go the distance for one evening and perform a major depilation.

‘It will be dark, and our aim is to find him and take him on the spot, isn't it?'

‘Yes,' I said, and realised that neither Brian nor I had properly considered what ‘take him' actually meant.

‘Do you remember what we said this morning, Will, that this would take two of us?'

There was an ominous note in his tone that unsettled me comprehensively. I say comprehensively because I was already quite unsettled, and I now found myself losing my nerve.

‘All we have to do is find him, Brian. I don't think we're capable of taking him — and if we did subdue him, what would we do with him? Where would we put him?'

‘That's a relief. So maybe we should at least tell the police what we're doing.'

‘Again, out of the question. I want the small victory of having been the one who found Albert Taylor. It's a mean ambition, but I want to achieve it. I want James Fowler to owe me a favour.'

‘Fair enough.'

We agreed that our ambition might not be realised that night after all. Our plan, such as it was, depended on uncertain variables. We had no evidence that any of the girls who trawled the streets near Camp Pell worked for Taylor, and even if we found one, we couldn't depend on her willingness to pimp for him and deliver Brian into his clutches. If I was wrong about Taylor's reach in the world of prostitution, we'd need another plan.

My uncertainties about the whole enterprise grew as the day declined into evening. In addition, our preparations were complicated by Mother's return to the house in the late afternoon. I could tell that she was feeling the strain of dealing with Peter Gilbert's grief. She was more than usually distracted when we exchanged a few words. She made no mention of my appearance in the newspapers, and although she must have noticed it, she made no comment about the mark on my neck left by the bullet. I don't believe, in this instance, that she was being perverse. She seemed simply exhausted, and I wondered if John Gilbert's death had emptied out Peter Gilbert, and whether it was testing her capacity to offer him comfort. She said she'd come back to the house only briefly. She needed mace to flavour a soup she was making, and the Gilbert kitchen was bereft of mace.

‘They have nutmeg,' she said dully, ‘but it's not quite the same, is it?'

‘I've never been able to tell the difference,' I said, and Mother's unfocussed gaze sharpened just long enough to suggest, in the smallest of glimmers, that she found this unsurprising, as if I disappointed her all the way down to the spice level.

‘They're quite different,' she said. The fact that she barely spoke to Brian, either, underlined the strain she was under. When she'd gone, Brian reiterated Cloris's concerns about her father's health, and the urgent need to protect him from the wolfish menaces of Albert Taylor.

‘He's a small-time hoodlum,' I said. ‘A pimp and a chancer.'

Brian nodded. ‘He's an opportunistic little bottom-feeder, and he shouldn't be able to wreck people's lives.'

Brian's words clarified something for me. He was right. James Fowler had insisted that Taylor was highly intelligent, and that the real risk he posed was to the operatives of the various branches of Intelligence. Be that as it may, it struck me that he was little more than a petty criminal, a weak, morally corrupt little grub who exploited women and the weaknesses he found in others. Thinking of him in this way diminished him and made it seem possible that Brian and I could capture him. Surely the two of us could physically subdue him?

‘Have you ever knocked anyone unconscious, Brian?'

‘No.'

‘We need to screw our courage to the sticking place, and if necessary hit Taylor over the head with a blunt instrument.'

‘It's not like in the movies, Will. Hitting someone over the head can kill him. It's not neat — a single, well-aimed blow so that the victim wakes up later with a sore head. It doesn't happen like that.'

‘All right. Leave that to me. I don't think Intelligence will care if Taylor is delivered to them dead or with brain damage. We both know how they work, Brian.'

‘Have you ever hit a man over the head, Will?'

‘Albert Taylor isn't a man. He's something lower down on the evolutionary ladder.'

‘So we're going to capture Taylor, dead or alive?'

‘Yes, we are.'

‘Christ.'

‘Turn out the lights,' Brian called from the top of the stairs. I did so, and waited for him to come down. A drift of Mother's favourite perfume, ‘Joy', preceded him. He'd applied it extravagantly, hoping that the feminine odour would help plug the gaps in the visual illusion he was creating. I couldn't see him clearly, but his silhouette moved as a woman would move, and when he spoke the effect was dislocating.

‘Mother must never know that I used her lipstick and powder.'

‘Remarkable,' I said when Brian stopped at the foot of the stairs.