Stiff Page 12

  Merricks had insisted that I keep him appraised. Well, appraised he would be. Appraised of incompetence in the administration of his Coolaroo plant’s payroll. Call me bloody-minded, but one member of Pacific Pastoral’s management at least would be made to rue the day he hadn’t taken half an hour off to whip down the highway and shed some crocodile tears over the coffin of a recently defunct employee. A quick phone call to the CEO’s office describing the discrepancies I had discovered in the administration of the payroll, and the company auditors would be running their fingers through Apps’s books before you could say ‘performance indicators’.

  ‘Headstones from $395,’ yelled a sandwich board at the exit. There were more pressing demands on my finances. An electrician, I figured, would set me back about sixty dollars to get the light working, which would be a lot to pay to have a fuse replaced and listen to a sales pitch about how the whole place needed rewiring. Still, if anyone was going to get electrocuted, I wanted it to be an accredited and fully insured tradesman. The cost of a new roof I didn’t even want to think about, let alone the prospect of wringing half of it out of Wendy, present circumstances considered.

  Rather than dwell on the ugly subject of money I did not have, I turned my thoughts to the strange obeisances I had just witnessed at Bayraktar’s graveside. Some of Labour’s all-but-forgotten heroes and heroines were buried here and I could imagine what they might have said if they knew foreign military types were goose-stepping among their headstones. Was that grey BMW, I wondered, the same one I had seen parked under the carport at the Anatolia Club, a place Sivan described enigmatically as somewhere to be avoided?

  Since I had to pass the Turkish Welfare League anyway, it would only take a couple of extra minutes to pop in and see what light the encyclopaedic Kurd could shed on the subject. And with a bit of luck Ayisha might be there, too.

  I found Sivan pinned down behind his desk, his palms spread defensively in front of his chest. ‘Ah, Murray, my friend.’ He leapt to his feet, like I was the foreign legion come to relieve the fort. ‘Meet Muyesser, Hatice, Huriet.’

  Muyesser was a classic crone in a shapeless floor-length skirt and head-scarf who looked like she’d come straight from offering Snow White a poisoned apple. Her two offsiders were younger and not as conspicuously folkloric. They were busy giving Sivan a hard time and had no intention of being taken in by his transparent diversionary ploy. They stopped their hectoring only long enough to nod in my general direction, then resumed talking over each other and waving pieces of official-looking correspondence. Somewhere in the incomprehensible torrent I clearly heard the phrase ‘Taxation Department’.

  Parked next to one of the women was a stroller out of which a toddler was attempting to writhe his way to freedom. His hair was cropped close to the bone, his burning little cheeks varnished to a high gloss with fresh snot. Poor Sivan slumped back into his seat, resigned.

  Better you than me, mate, I thought. This situation was a perfect example of why I was such a keen supporter of funding for the League. If Sivan hadn’t been here, available to have the shit annoyed out of him in an appropriate community language, these three wicked stepsisters would have been half a mile down the road annoying the shit out of me in broken English. More better this way.

  I cocked my head in the general direction of Ayisha’s office and raised my eyebrows.

  ‘With a client,’ Sivan semaphored over the din.

  While I was waiting, I helped myself to the spare desk, dialled directory assistance and got the number for Pacific Pastoral’s head office. The call bounced upwards off a series of buffers until it reached the forty-ninth floor. I could hear the well-coiffured hair of the ice queen turn at the sound of my voice, but she put me through without argument. Merricks came on briskly, the great man’s time still too valuable to squander on courtesy. ‘Well?’

  The jabber of Turkish across the room increased in volume. I stuck a finger in one ear. ‘Something a little outside my terms of reference has come up,’ I said. ‘But since you asked to be kept informed, I thought I should share it with you.’

  ‘Yes.’ Spit it out man. Time is money.

  ‘It concerns irregularities that have come to my attention concerning your operations at Coolaroo.’

  Merricks took this on board and walked it around the deck a couple of times. ‘Irregularities? What sort of irregularities?’ His peevishness register had dropped a notch.

  ‘I’m not an accountant, Mr Merricks,’ I said blandly.

  ‘But are you implying some sort of dishonesty?’

  ‘As I said, I’m merely keeping you appraised of my observations,’ I said. And having a jolly good time of it, too.

  ‘Look here, Whelan.’ The strangulated English squeak was back in Merricks’ voice. ‘I’m beginning to have very serious reservations about this whole exercise. Is your minister aware that you have taken it upon yourself to start tossing about these sort of vague inferences?’

  I’d expected the darling of the markets to greet the news that he was being diddled with some degree of scepticism, perhaps even to question my motives. But at least he could have shown a little more curiosity about what exactly it was I was alleging before issuing a barely veiled threat to dob me in to Charlene. I should have known that managerial caste loyalties always took priority. What a pompous arsehole, I thought. Stuff you, Charley.

  ‘Listen, Lionel,’ I said, dropping all pretence at deference. ‘If you prefer I could always bring this matter directly to the attention of the appropriate authorities. Frankly I don’t give a fuck either way.’

  Just as I was beginning to think Merricks had hung up on me, he spoke. ‘I understand,’ he said, his words measured and full of meaning.

  The toddler in the stroller had given up trying to escape and was navigating his way around the room by dragging himself along the furniture. He advanced steadily towards me, hand over hand along any object within reach, blowing elastic bubbles of mucus ahead of him as he came. I fended him off with a tissue.

  ‘Do you have a figure in mind?’ Merricks was saying.

  All I had was a list of Turkish celebrities, and I wasn’t even sure where that was any more. But I certainly wasn’t going to tell Lionel Merricks that. I realised I should have taken the trouble to think the whole thing out before I placed the call. It was beginning to feel like a lot of trouble to go to just for the sake of getting a rocket fired up some crappy plant manager I’d only met for five minutes.

  But since I was in this deep, I thought I might as well lay it on with a trowel. ‘Fifty thousand,’ I said. ‘Maybe more, depending on what else turns up.’

  ‘Now wait a minute.’ Merricks seemed to be struggling with his emotions.

  It was then that the kid dragged the telephone cord out of its socket. Ripped it right off the wall, plug and all. The phone went dead in my hand. By the time I had extracted the cord from one sticky little fist and plugged it back in, all that remained of Lionel Merricks was a dial tone. Which was just as well, because one of the women had taken it upon herself to whack the wretched mite so firmly across the knuckles that the only thing Merricks would have been able to hear was a high-pitched wail. Fuck him, I thought. Merricks, not the kid.

  Despite the decibels being emitted by the child, Sivan’s conference with the harpies was continuing unabated. The expression ‘Supporting Mother’s Benefit’ was now cropping up with some frequency. I decided on a tactical withdrawal in the direction of Ayisha’s office. The door was shut. I tapped lightly and poked my head inside. Ayisha was in professional mode, leaning intently forward on her elbows, giving her full attention to something being said in Turkish by a man in a sports coat sitting with his back to the door. ‘Sorry to barge in,’ I began.

  The man stopped talking and swung around, irritated at the intrusion. He had thick curly hair and a self-important, intellectual air. I almost didn’t recognise him without his shower cap and white overalls. Away from the harsh artificial light of the meat works, his
face had lost its ghastly jaundice. Like this, a cheap tie knotted at his neck and a grace note of grey at his high temples, he could have been a professor of history. But no doubt about it, it was Whatsisname, the cleaner from Pacific Pastoral.

  He recognised me immediately, too. And our little chat the day before had clearly made a deep impression on him. Either that or he wasn’t quite the full felafel. In rapid succession, he uncrossed his knees, lurched to his feet, and stumbled backwards, knocking over his chair. His eyes filled with betrayed disbelief and began furiously darting about the room.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  The cleaner looked daggers at Ayisha. If she had any better idea than I did what was going on, she wasn’t showing it. Getting no response, he came to a rapid decision. He extracted his legs from the tangle of fallen furniture, marshalled his dignity, drew himself upright and advanced towards the doorway. When he was almost on top of me, he clenched his fists and thrust his arms forward, wrists pressed together. ‘Yes. It was me,’ he cried. ‘I killed Bayraktar.’

  I didn’t know whether to spit, shit, or go blind. This was a joke, right? How could this broom pusher have killed Bayraktar? He hadn’t even rated a mention in the documentation. Christ, I couldn’t even remember his name. ‘Huh?’ I heard myself say.

  I looked across at Ayisha, but she wasn’t laughing. If anything, she had gone a little grey around the gills. I looked back at the guy in the sports coat and searched his face for some clue, some skerrick of explanation as to the meaning of these theatrics. The bland, self-effacing look that had sat so naturally across his features the day before had been replaced with an intensity that was almost incandescent. He pumped his fists forward again, insisting on being handcuffed.

  Up the corridor behind me came the wailing of the snotty tot and the background jabber of Sivan’s casework. I stepped around the door to enter the office properly, and the cleaner reeled back before me as though expecting a blow.

  ‘Go on,’ he challenged. ‘Arrest me, Mr Policeman.’

  Well, that got a laugh, thank Christ, I was beginning to think all the oxygen had been hoovered out of the room.

  The laugh came from Ayisha, a high nervy snigger. Then she said something in Turkish, a curt little sentence, the immediate upshot of which was that her client suddenly looked like a horse had kicked him. The ominous glow disappeared from his eyes, replaced by a rather touching look of bewilderment. His gaze dropped to his hands, as though he now had serious doubts about their ownership. His fingers were long and fine, the skin that covered them shiny with scar tissue. He stuck them rapidly into his pockets and a single eloquent word that needed no translation escaped his lips. ‘Shit,’ he said.

  Too late, pal. ‘You killed Bayraktar?’ I said. ‘How?’

  But the fire was dying. The man turned, hauled his chair back upright, sat down with an audible oomph, and covered his face with his hands. Ayisha came out from behind her desk, firing me a questioning look. When I shrugged she went down on one knee at the man’s elbow and began whispering in Turkish. First he just sat there with his shoulders hunched, slowly shaking his head. Eventually she extracted a couple of reluctant monosyllables. She persisted, persuading him to lower his hands. Then began a hushed and insistent tide of explanation.

  From the man’s sideways glances I could feel that at least part of the time he was talking about me. Why they were whispering, I didn’t know. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, after all. After a while I began to feel like a bit of a geek, standing there with my back to the door, so I went across and sat down behind Ayisha’s desk. Whatever it was she was saying, it seemed to be doing the trick. The guy looked across at me a couple of times in a half-apologetic sort of way, like we were strangers in a pub and he had just knocked over my beer and we were waiting for the barman to bring me another.

  I still hadn’t been able to shave, and my whiskers were at that stage where they itch like nobody’s business. I sat there trying not to scratch, wondering what the hell was going on. Ayisha’s tobacco was sitting on the desk. I opened the packet and rolled myself a cigarette to keep my hands busy. Out of solidarity with Wendy I’d given up smoking when Red was on the way, and my rolling technique was now a bit rusty. The best I could manage was a lumpy little greyhound with lots of brown threads sticking out the end.

  By the time I’d finished carefully prodding the loose fibres of tobacco into place, Ayisha and the cleaner—his name was Memo, I remembered, Memo Gezen—had been whispering in front of me forever. I was beginning to feel a little excluded. So I leaned forward on my elbows and struck a match. It flared dramatically, erupting into the tide of Turkish and bringing it to a halt. ‘Don’t mind me,’ I said.

  For want of an equally spectacular follow-up, I put the flame to the end of the fag and sucked in. The smoke hit deep—a dirty, forbidden, anarchic, exhilarating taste. My head spun and the tips of my fingers tingled. ‘Feel free to chat amongst yourselves,’ I exhaled.

  Ayisha got up and sat on the edge of the desk. ‘It’s all a misunderstanding, Murray,’ she said. ‘Memo here thought you were a cop. I’ve straightened him out. I told him you’re okay, and you wouldn’t dob him in. You won’t, will you?’

  If anyone else had asked I might have taken offence. Memo had perked up somewhat by this stage. He was positively cheerful, in fact. Obviously Ayisha had convinced him that she could put the genie back in the bottle. ‘So you didn’t kill Bayraktar at all?’ I asked him.

  Convinced that he was safe from immediate arrest, Memo obviously felt some need to explain his weird behaviour. He fished a packet of Winfield out of his jacket pocket, lit one, and gave me a what-the-hell look. ‘I locked him in the freezer and he perished,’ he blurted, half in remorse, half in defiance.

  Perished? I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or congratulate him on the improvement in his vocabulary over the preceding twenty-four hours. Terrific word, perished. So apposite. Very Scott of the Antarctic. Gezen’s accent was much lighter, too.

  Ayisha was off the mark like a bush lawyer. ‘It was an accident,’ she snapped. ‘Besides, the guy was a thug. He deserved to die.’

  I held up one hand. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything, you know that, Memo.’

  He nodded, looked to Ayisha for confirmation and nodded again, almost eagerly. He didn’t have to, but he wanted to. Something was bothering his conscience and he wanted to clear the air. He had a dose of the Raskolnikovs real bad, and he wasn’t going to let either me or Ayisha stand in his way. ‘I was angry,’ he said. ‘Bayraktar, he called me a mountain Turk.’

  Hardly grounds for homicide, one would think. I raised my eyebrows. ‘Are we losing something in the translation here?’

  ‘It’s what right-wingers call the Kurds,’ Ayisha explained. ‘Memo here’s a Kurd.’

  Naturally. Any more Kurds weighed in around here and you could start a cheese factory.

  ‘The money,’ she said irritably, as though Gezen was a slow child. ‘Tell him about the money.’

  Now that he had stopped hyperventilating, Gezen was practically garrulous. ‘Forty dollars a week. He said I must give him forty dollars a week or he will say I am stealing. I get the sack. Jail maybe.’ He hastened to add, ‘I am not a thief.’ At Pacific Pastoral? Heaven forbid.

  ‘He should have told us here at the League,’ Ayisha butted in. ‘We’da fixed the prick.’ I waved her into silence, lest she break the spell. This was all just too fascinating. ‘So you locked him in the freezer and he perished?’

  ‘No,’ said Gezen. ‘I paid. More than two thousand dollars he took from me. Then, last week, he wants more. Fifty dollars a week. Inflation, he says. And all the time he calls me these insults.’ He dragged his chair closer to the desk, going into a kind of confidential huddle as he got to the good part.

  ‘That is when I think I will lock him in the freezer. But not to kill him. That was not my…’

  At last his English faltered. He searched for the right word, vibrating with frustra
tion. He used a Turkish word, glancing again at Ayisha.

  ‘Intention,’ she said. She’d obviously heard this bit before.

  ‘I meant only to frighten him. Then I would rescue him. Understand?’

  Not really. I didn’t. Well, sort of. It seemed a rather fraught way to win friends and influence people, but I could see a sort of desperate logic at work. ‘But something went wrong?’ I said. The roll-your-own was a greasy brown stub in my fingers. As I butted it out Gezen hurried to offer me a fresh tailor-made. Out of courtesy and not wanting to interrupt his momentum I accepted, but I didn’t light it. It’s not like I was really a smoker.

  I could see what Gezen was doing. He was enlisting an ally. The Australian, the government official, on the other side of the desk must be made to understand exactly what had happened, must be won over.

  ‘What I do is this. From the beginning I watch him. He does not see me, but always I watch. I see everything. What I see is this. Every Friday, just before knock-off time, he goes to Number 3 freezer. He looks to see that nobody watches, then he goes inside, two maybe three minutes. It is very cold inside, you understand. Ten minutes and a man will die.’

  Yes, I recalled. A more than usually nippy spot.

  ‘So last Friday, after lunch, I move a forklift truck so it is parked against the emergency exit. This is not allowed, but it happens all the time. Nobody notices. Then when Bayraktar goes inside.’ He mimed the snapping of a padlock. ‘I lock the door.’

  Gezen’s speech had taken on a vivid present-tense intensity. I remembered the cigarette in my hand and lit it. It was insipid, but I drew deep anyway.

  Gezen went on. ‘I wait one minute, two, three. Bayraktar will be very frightened. Soon I will open the door. Then the other one comes.’

  ‘Other one?’

  ‘The mechanic, Gardening.’