White Dog (22 page)

‘The idiots,’ said Haig. ‘Like movies? I love movies. I watch one every day, that’s the minimum, I’ve watched five in a day, what kind of habit is that?’

He showed me into the first room off the passage to the right. It had two couches and a soft armchair facing a huge television screen, two smaller ones beside it. There seemed to be a dozen speakers on the electronic wall, and hundreds of tapes and CDs in racks.

‘I’m an insomniac,’ he said. ‘Also I can’t fucking get to sleep. I wake up on this couch, clothes on, the first thing I see is Grace Kelly kissing Cary Grant, the lucky bastard.’

We left the room, went down the corridor, Haig in front. He opened a door, found a switch, lights came on, not bright.

‘This is my special room,’ he said. ‘My special interest.’

It was a large space, a combination of library and museum, with tall bookshelves, glass cases, paintings and other framed objects in alcoves. There was a devotional feeling, the shadows, the way the light lay in soft pools and skewed rectangles, hung down the walls, the glow of colour in the paintings, the lustrous gilt of the frames.

‘My collection,’ he said.

I looked around the room. It was a museum and a shrine to Napoleon Bonaparte and it spoke of obsession and deep pockets.

‘You didn’t put this together by getting to French flea-markets before the crowds,’ I said.

Haig smiled, pleased, a boy’s smile. ‘You won’t believe the junk. After they brought his bits back from St Helena in 1840, Napoleonic memorabilia became an industry. Nothing like it again until Elvis.’

We toured, Haig pointing and explaining, not lecturing. There were hundreds of books on Bonaparte and his times, dozens of oil paintings and drawings of Bonaparte, five or six busts, bas-relief profiles and figures, statuettes, battlefield maps, a pistol, a sword, signed notes, letters and documents, a silver cup in a leather holder, a horse’s hoof on an ebony base, a lock of hair, a pair of boots, a telescope with gold inlay, a quill pen beside a silver inkpot, an ivory letter-opener, an ebony and silver baton, a fragment of a flag.

‘Why Napoleon?’ I said. We were looking at a single patent-leather shoe with a buckle of gold.

‘My father. He was a Corsican. Stefanu Leca. Steve Leca.’

He went to a bookshelf and took down a small, battered, cloth-covered book. ‘
The Life of Napoleon
, by A. J. Danville,’ he said. ‘My dad bought this and a little English dictionary at a secondhand bookshop in Brisbane. He didn’t have any English. He got it from this book. At night, cutting cane all day.’

Haig showed me the edge of the book, dark marks.

‘Blood from his hand, the first few days. He’d never done any manual work. His father was a tailor.’

‘Where does Haig come from?’ I said.

‘My mother. My father was working on her father’s property near Bundaberg. He’d taught himself engines, bricklaying, plumbing, he could do anything, fix anything.’

He put the book away and stood with his back to the shelf, his face half in shadow as it was in the portrait. ‘My father put the daughter of the house up the pole. They chased him off the property like a fucking dog, threatened to kill him. She went to Sydney to have the baby, stayed there with her aunt, didn’t go back to Queensland till I was three.’

‘So you were raised as Haig.’

‘Yes, didn’t know anything about my father till just before my mother died. I was always told I was adopted. Then my mother told me. She was ill and she told me.’

I went to the exhibits in the middle of the room, two death masks of Napoleon, one plaster, one bronze, on a slender plinth under glass and spotlit from above.

‘The jewels,’ said Haig. ‘Found them in Cuba. His doctors on St Helena made a gypsum cast of the emperor’s head after he died. One of them, his name’s Antommarchi, he sold copies and then he went to live in Cuba. It’s more than possible that the plaster one is an original, from St Helena.’

‘Did you ever meet your father?’ I said.

‘I tracked him down in Broken Hill. Buggered by work but happy. Brought up two kids after his wife died. He wouldn’t take anything from me, I had to force money on him, then he gave it to his kids. His other kids.’

‘And he gave you the book?’

Haig was on the other side of the plinth, looking at the masks. ‘The book was special for him. He knew every word in it. He told me that in the beginning he had to look up all the conjunctions and the prepositions. I wish I had his little dictionary but he’d lost it.’

I said, ‘Someone paid my hospital bill and put fifty grand in my bank account.’

He looked up. ‘That was me,’ he said. ‘If it bothers you, please give it away.’

Disarmed, unhorsed.

‘Why?’

‘An impulse, a whim. I liked Sarah very much. You got hurt trying to help her.’

‘You’d do that on a whim? That much money?’

Haig laughed. ‘I’m a rich man, you won’t believe what I’ve done on a whim.’

‘Do you know someone called Donna Filipovic?’ I said.

No furrow in the brow. ‘No.’

I took a chance. ‘A company called Amaryllo, registered in Monaco, I understand you’re connected with it.’

Haig smiled. ‘Connected?’

‘Through Charles Hartfield.’

Haig raised both hands, wide, blunt-fingered, passed them across his temples, smoothed hair needing no grooming, lowered his hands, held them palm up.

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘What’s this? Sarah’s dead. You don’t have to find a defence for her anymore.’

‘Did you remember Sarah telling a story about an argument with a driver near Mickey’s apartment? It was the night you met, dinner with Mickey.’

‘No.’

Looking at him over the emperor’s death masks. ‘The witness Donna Filipovic,’ I said. ‘She’s lying, she wasn’t there, she never saw Sarah that night. Someone fed her that story.’

‘The family, they’re paying you to go on with this?’

‘No,’ I said.

He stared at me. ‘Let’s say for argument’s sake Sarah didn’t kill Mickey,’ he said. ‘Then you ask, who would take the trouble to kill him and set her up?’

I didn’t reply.

Haig exhaled loudly, a sad shake of the head. ‘Why would anyone bother?’ he said. ‘Given the fuck’s mood swings, allround mental state, the drink, the drugs, Mickey was going to do the job himself. Just a matter of how long.’

‘You provided the finance for Seaton Square and then you wanted to pull the plug on him,’ I said. ‘He was enraged with you. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Jack, Jack,’ he said, ‘Mickey fucked up Seaton Square almost from the kick-off. All he got right was getting hold of the property. And that’s another story. After that, it was like the Cresta fucking Run in a shitstorm. Everything was a stuff-up – everything. He wound the thing up and up. I’ll tell you I’m no stranger to ambitious development but this was insane. And he wouldn’t listen to anyone. Well, he’d listen, sit there nodding his fucking coked-up head, yes, yes. Then he’d go off and do the opposite.’

He paused, shaking his head again. ‘Mickey enraged with
me
? I can tell you, many times I’d have shot the cunt if I’d had a gun. And fuck the consequences.’

Silence in the museum of Bonaparte, no sound except the stern ticking of the brass clock, said to come from the emperor’s first place of exile, Elba.

‘But while you’re looking for people to blame, Jack,’ said Haig, ‘try the people the stupid prick bribed over Brunswick. In his worst moments, he was going to take them down with him.’

‘I need a piss,’ I said.

‘This way.’

We left the room. He opened another door.

‘Through the dressing room. You’ll find your way back. Straight down the passage.’

A four-poster uncanopied bed was tightly made, the dark wooden floor shone, the curtains were open. I could see across the wet smudged city to Williamstown.

I went into the dressing room. It held the stock of a small, expensive men’s outfitters. On the shelves to the left were laundered shirts. Socks and underwear and sweaters were in glass-fronted drawers. Two racks held shoes, twenty pairs at least. On the right hung suits, sportsjackets, trousers, casual jackets, overcoats, raincoats. A regiment of ties was draped over rods on either side of the long mirror at the end of the room.

The door to the bathroom was open. It was big and plain, not a bathroom the interior decor crowd would create. Someone wanted this chamber to be a place for ablutions only: two small basins, a glass shower stall the size of a small room, a toilet, no bath.

I had my pee and went back to the party, found Haig. ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I’ll send you the tax receipt from the Salvos. Thank you for the thought.’

He walked me to the landing, touched me again in the affectionate way. ‘We’ve got a lot in common, Jack,’ he said. ‘Working-class fathers, rich mothers. How’d you like her father?’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Not a great deal.’

‘Even more in common than I thought.’

A hand offered, we shook.

‘You’ve got to look after yourself,’ he said. ‘Life’s full of bullshit. Full of Mickeys. The trick is to walk away from them. I’m learning that, I’m nearly there.’

I was halfway down the staircase when he said, ‘Jack.’

I stopped, looked back. He was standing with his hands clasped in front of his chest. ‘I’m going to my house in Corsica next month,’ he said. ‘Private flight. Why don’t you come? Good this time of year, hot, dry, it smells like nowhere else on earth. The maquis, the sea. Sweetness and salt. Napoleon said it was the only place he would recognise blindfold.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Can I let you know?’

‘Ring Bern,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a good time.’

I departed Marengo. A block away, I eased the Stud from between German bookends, an Audi and a Mercedes, and set out for Fitzroy. A wet night was on the city, the towers glowing in the damp air that softened everything, carried a smell of burnt fossil fuel.

Home, the place where they have to take you in. There weren’t any of them left but I could still be sure of admittance because I had the key.

I parked outside the boot factory and went upstairs to the cold rooms.

Four men in an old Studebaker Lark, on a Sunday afternoon, we went to the football in the indoor stadium. At the first change, St Kilda leading by eight goals, I brought out the samosas I’d smuggled through security, concealed on my body. We ate in silence for a while, then Norm wiped his lips of flakes, held out his hand for another one, and said, ‘Jack, bin sayin the team’s on the edge of a big one.’

Eric coughed. ‘Scuse me,’ he said. ‘Scuse me, what you bin sayin is the team’s full of duds and the coach shoulda stayed in Warrnambool,’ he said. ‘I’m the one’s bin predictin this.’

‘You idiots,’ said Wilbur. ‘Saints bin twelve-odd goals in front and the Hawks come back and win. Idiots.’

‘Not today,’ said Norm. ‘That was another bunch. This lot puts me in mind of the Lions in ’48.’

‘Jeez,’ said Wilbur, ‘I reckon yer short-thingy memory’s goin. Round 11 in ’48, Lions play the Saints, Lions top of the ladder, Saints got one draw from thirty-one games, one draw from thirty-one games, that’s sparklin form, not so? Who’d yer reckon wins?’

Norm finished chewing, put up a hand and added smudges to his glasses. ‘Don’t do to dwell on the past,’ he said. ‘Unhealthy.’

At the halfway mark, St Kilda’s lead was all but vanished. I went off and got the pies. When they too were almost gone, Norm said, ‘Big worry, this lot. Puts me in mind of the day the bloody Hawks come from twelve-odd goals behind …’

‘Shut up,’ said Wilbur. ‘Just shut up and eat.’

In the last quarter, matters improved. The Saints stood up. So did we, often, as we watched our team humiliate Carlton. The arrogant Blues, the benchmark for football arrogance, they were run off their legs.

On the way to the Prince, the Youth Club agreed that they had all predicted the famous victory, seen it coming from a long way, always been on the cards, matter of time.

Serving the beer, Stan said, ‘Well, looks like your team could miss the wooden spoon this year. Not coming last, that’s like winning a grand final for the Saints.’

Norm looked at him, adjusted his thumb-blurred monster glasses for a clearer view. ‘The problem with you, Stanley,’ he said, ‘is you don’t have yer dad’s judgment. Now yer father, had he not bin dragged screamin from this place by wife number two, Morrie’d be shoutin us a round.’

‘Have I taken any money?’ said Stan, chin up, skewered through the heart. ‘Have I asked for money?’

I was home by seven, lighting a fire on a winter’s night, filled with the sweet humming happiness of having seen my team win. Did people who often saw their teams win lose this feeling? That was so far beyond my experience as to be unthinkable.

I stood in front of the fireplace, watching the Avoca kindling flare on top of the grey, powdered and weightless remains of an Avoca tree, hands deep in the pockets of the old footy coat. It was a terrible garment, elbows and cuffs threadbare, lining torn. The pockets held tickets, bits of biscuit, matchsticks, keys to forgotten doors, coins no longer current, a plastic lighter, coughdrops coated with fluff and crumbs. On the front were stains: beer, tomato sauce, the brown fluid that leaked from pies, champagne from a bottle uncorked in the parking lot after a Fitzroy win.

I was thinking about uncorking a bottle, about what to eat later, when the phone rang.

‘Comin your way,’ said Barry Tregear. ‘Only got a minute.’

‘Time for a drink?’

‘No, mate. Just a word.’

‘Hoot,’ I said.

I was unwinding the cork from the screw when I heard the horn. Opening the front door of my building, feeling the shock of cold, seeing the wind shaking the bare oak branches, I regretted not putting on the footy coat.

The passenger door of the dark Falcon was unlocked. I got in, grateful for the warmth of the cabin.

‘You’d be a happy man,’ said Barry. ‘Sticking it to the blue boys like that.’

‘My word,’ I said.

He was studying me. ‘Christ, you’re thin,’ he said. ‘Eating?’

‘I’m eating.’

‘Yeah? The salad sambo? Get into the junk, mate. Build you up quick. Now, this stuff. First, the girl. Feehan. Hooker. Reported missing 15 February 1995. No trace. Then there’s Dilthey. What I read says he’s got a couple of tickets in Queensland, small stuff. Local, there’s nothing. He had a job in the table-dancing business for a while. Someone says he was running a few girls and boys but they couldn’t find them. Then he’s in a motel in Kaniva. Tied to a chair, mouth taped up, hands broken, smashed, face the same. And shot up the nose with a .22. Twice.’