The Brush-Off mw-1 Page 3

  I took it into my office and had a cigarette with it. Ours was a smoke-free environment, but what the fuck-as of now I didn’t work here any more. Out the window, across the wilting greenery of the gardens, glass-walled towers quivered in the heat haze, molten swords plunged into the heart of the city. In the gaps between, ant-sized men plied construction cranes. Hardier men than the likes of me.

  The building boom sustained by Labor’s rule was at its peak, a relentless reordering of the skyline that was the most tangible evidence of the government’s success. Everywhere the old was being jackhammered away and replaced with the spanking new. So headlong was the charge of money into real estate that slow-footed city shoppers risked being knocked down in the rush to build yet another office tower or luxury hotel. Anything more than twenty years old was obsolete. Yesterday’s skyscrapers were today’s holes in the ground. Tomorrow’s landmarks had lakes in their foyers and computer-monitored pollen filters and the city council was putting little lights in the trees so we’d think it was Christmas all year round.

  Not that I, as I pondered my options, had anything to celebrate. My attachment to Agnelli, like his loyalty to me, was contingent on the political realities. Bypassed for promotion this time, Ange would need plenty of runs on the board if he hoped to impress the Premier next time around. My employability depended on how useful he thought I could be in achieving that outcome. This we both understood.

  Anybody working in politics who claims to be without personal ambition is a liar. That I hadn’t yet quite formulated the nature of my own particular aspirations was beside the point. The fact that I’d placed my political loyalties at Agnelli’s disposal for the previous four years didn’t mean I had no interests of my own. If Agnelli thought I’d go quietly, he could think again. At the very least he should find me a new position appropriate to my skills. Try to throw me out with the dirty bath water, and he’d soon find that I had plenty of influential friends in the party who’d take a dim view of that sort of behaviour. Plenty. I tried to think of several.

  While I was waiting for a name to come to mind, I finished my cigarette. Our smoke-free environment, naturally enough, provided no ashtrays so I took the butt into the executive washroom and stuffed it down the basin plughole. The executive washroom was what we jokingly called the small private bathroom off the minister’s inner office. Supposedly for Angelo’s exclusive use, it was also accessible from my office. Since it had an exhaust fan, I’d sometimes slip in for a quick concentration-enhancing puff when no-one was looking.

  The door leading into Angelo’s office was open a crack and I could hear his voice. He sounded keyed up. ‘A new broom,’ he was saying. ‘Energetically wielded.’

  I was history.

  ‘Money is the key.’ Just the sort of thing you’d expect to hear Agnelli barking down the phone. ‘All the policies in the world won’t save us if we don’t go into the election with a decent campaign fund.’

  Party matters were the subject, so he wasn’t speaking to a bureaucrat from one of his new ministries. Whoever it was, my employer was warming to his topic. ‘It’s time to start getting serious.’

  ‘The finance committee’s doing everything it can, Angelo.’

  Ange wasn’t on the phone. He had a visitor. I knew the voice. Duncan Keogh, one of a number of assistant state secretaries from party headquarters. Keogh was a smarmy popinjay, a twenty-seven-year-old smarty pants who could barely remember when Labor wasn’t in power. He approached politics as though its exclusive purpose was to provide a career structure for otherwise unemployable graduates of Monash University.

  Why, I couldn’t help but ask myself, was Agnelli closeted with a mid-level machine man like Duncan when he should have been more concerned with the pressing business of the day, the outcome of the Cabinet reshuffle?

  ‘Duncan,’ I heard my boss say wearily. ‘You’re our third finance committee chair in eighteen months. I’m not saying you aren’t competent, otherwise I’d never have supported you for the appointment. But you just don’t have the sort of clout you need to be effective.’

  Keogh needed more than clout. He needed a brain transplant and a personality upgrade. He was a non-performer who had inveigled himself into the finance committee chair by singing some bullshit song about new blood and fresh ideas. Agnelli had bought it, against my recommendation, and seconded Keogh’s nomination. Duncan’s subsequent performance had been conspicuously ordinary. With any luck, Agnelli had summoned the twerp to tell him he’d better start delivering, that he should either shit or get off the pot.

  ‘Cabinet-level influence is what you need, Duncan. And that’s what I’m proposing to give you,’ he said. ‘With you in the chair and me setting the agenda, we can move our fundraising efforts to a whole new level.’

  I didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking.

  Raising the cash needed to run election campaigns was a chronic headache. Last time we’d gone to the polls, we had to mortgage party headquarters to cover the cost of the how-to-vote cards. And, lacking the conservatives’ traditional allies in big business, we were forced to scratch for cash wherever we could find it. But rattling the tin for money was a task best undertaken at a very long arm’s length from the positions occupied by people like Angelo Agnelli. It was a job best done by more anonymous members of the party apparatus. Collectors of membership dues. Organisers of mail-outs. Conductors of wine-bottlings and quiz-nights. Men like Duncan Keogh. Not Cabinet ministers.

  ‘I’ll still be the chairperson,’ said Keogh. ‘Right?’

  I could hear his tiny mind ticking over. Letting Agnelli pull the strings, he was thinking, would be a good idea. He would win a big friend and move a little closer to the centre of the action. Agnelli could do all the work and Duncan would still get to put ‘Chairperson, Finance Committee’ on his CV.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Angelo. ‘So, how much have we got in the kitty right now?’

  ‘Just over four hundred thousand,’ said Keogh. ‘Union affiliations and membership levies, mostly. Half in Commonwealth bonds, half on deposit at the State Bank.’ A safe player, our Duncan. If this was his idea of a fresh approach, no wonder our finances were in such a parlous condition.

  ‘We’re going to need a shitload more than that,’ said Agnelli. ‘A million five, minimum. What about corporate donors?’

  Keogh cleared his throat nervously. ‘Barely a pat on the head, so far. About ten grand all up. But we’re setting up a sub-committee to look at a strategy to improve that figure.’

  ‘A committee!’ Agnelli snorted derisively. ‘The skyline’s full of cranes. Fucking sunrise industries left, right and centre. People making money out of our polices hand over fist. And ten grand is the most they can cough up. What’s wrong with these pricks?’

  Keogh was really on the ropes now. ‘It’s a sensitive area. Either they give or they don’t. Mostly they don’t.’

  Another voice weighed into the discussion, soothing, placatory. ‘Duncan’s right, Angelo,’ it said. ‘This is a sensitive area. Go blundering around putting the hard word on the business community, you’ll end up being accused of peddling influence.’

  For the life of me, I couldn’t put a face to the voice. But whoever he was, he was talking sense.

  ‘See,’ said Keogh, vindicated. ‘It’s not as easy as you seem to think.’

  But the other speaker hadn’t finished. ‘That’s not to say that there aren’t ways of approaching these matters. Take your new portfolio, for example, Angelo.’ The voice was of a man used to being listened to, someone at ease in a minister’s office. ‘Your accounts department alone employs, what, four or five hundred people.’ He was speaking, he wanted it understood, hypothetically. ‘That’s a lot of office space. Property developers pay sweeteners to private corporations to secure long-term leases on their new buildings. If some of them were to get the idea that the Water Supply Commission was thinking about moving house…’

  ‘Jesus,’ groaned Keogh. ‘We’
re treading perilously close to the line here.’

  ‘You don’t think the Liberals wouldn’t be even more cosy with their business cronies if they had the chance?’ said Agnelli.

  The more I heard of this, the faster my disquiet turned into outright anxiety. Knowing Angelo as well as I did, it didn’t take too much mental exertion to figure out what he was up to. He’d decided to do a bit of lateral thinking.

  Like the weather, campaign finances were something that everybody complained about, but nobody did anything to fix. Angelo, evidently, had decided he’d be the one to grasp the nettle. Even the most outstanding performance in Water Supply and the Arts could only earn him a limited number of brownie points with the Premier. But if he succeeded in filling the party war chest, some big favours would be due next time the hats went into the ring. Obversely, the consequences of failure did not bear thinking about.

  ‘We’re all agreed, it’s a sensitive area,’ said the voice, conciliatory again. ‘And there’s no rush. The election is two years away.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Agnelli, getting the hint. ‘First things first. What sort of interest is the State Bank paying us, Duncan?’

  Keogh rustled some paper and named a percentage. It was about ten points lower than what I was paying them on my home loan.

  ‘Shit,’ said Agnelli. ‘My cheque account pays more.’

  ‘The money could definitely be working harder,’ agreed the other man, businesslike now. ‘Managed properly, 20 per cent or higher isn’t out of the question. That’s another $50,000 a year, straight up. And no favours required.’

  The intercom buzzed. ‘Premier’s Department on line one,’ squawked Trish’s voice. ‘About the swearing-in of the new Cabinet. And Murray has just arrived.’

  At the sound of my name, I scurried back into my own office and lit another cigarette.

  Agnelli was heading straight into the kind of troubled waters he paid me to steer him away from. Why hadn’t he discussed his foray into fund-raising with me first? And who was this guy in his office? Knowing exactly who Agnelli was talking to, about what, and why, was what I got paid for. At least it had been, I reminded myself. Angelo’s problems were not necessarily mine any more.

  Sitting behind my artificial-woodgrain desk, gazing between my shoes into the reception area, I tried to concentrate on my own immediate predicament. What I needed was a bit of instant expertise. Just enough to make Angelo think I might still be of some use, despite the changed circumstances. A couple of tantalising scraps of inside info on the Amalgamated Tap Turners and Dam Builders Union could go a long way. I opened my teledex and started scanning, hunting for a contact who could provide a crash course in the finer points of H20.

  At that moment, Agnelli’s door opened and Duncan Keogh strutted out, a pocket battleship in an open-necked sport shirt that strained at the thrust of his barrel chest. The shirt had a design like a test pattern and looked like Duncan had bought it at one of those menswear shops with a rack outside on the footpath. Any two shirts for $49.95 plus a free pair of pants. He was probably under the impression that he’d got a bargain. Not for the first time, I thought that maybe the Australian Labor Party should consider instituting a dress code.

  Close on Keogh’s heels came a man who didn’t need any fashion advice. His lightweight summer suit was so well tailored it made Keogh’s clothes look like he was wearing them for a bet. He could have been anywhere between his late forties and his early sixties, depending on the mileage, and he had the self-assured air of a man who didn’t muck around. What he didn’t muck around doing wasn’t immediately apparent, but he’d made a success of it, whatever it was. His tie was red silk and so was his pocket handkerchief. He was fit, well-lunched and towered over Keogh like a gentleman farmer walking a Jack Russell terrier on a short leash.

  He was laughing at something Keogh was saying, but only with his mouth. His eyes, up there where Duncan couldn’t see them, were saying dickhead. Whoever he was, I liked him. He looked like he’d be a handy man to have on a lifeboat. While the others were singing ‘Abide With Me’, he’d slip you his hip flask of Black Label. He and Dunc went into the lift, doing the doings.

  ‘Who was that?’

  Trish, standing at the shredder, pretended she couldn’t hear me, giving nothing away until she knew whether I was in or I was out. Jerking her head in the direction of Agnelli’s door, she gave me leave to enter.

  The great panjandrum’s inner sanctum was as dark as a hibernating bear’s cave. The air conditioning was on high and the heavy drapes were drawn against the glare of the day and the wandering gaze of the clerical staff in the Ministry for Industry and Technology next door. Through the cool gloom I could just make out the shape of Agnelli himself, a ghostly presence in shirt sleeves etched against the cluster of framed awards and diplomas on the wall behind his desk. Seeing him there like that-surrounded by his Order of the Pan Pontian Brotherhood, his Honorary Master of Arts from the University of Valetta, the little model donkey cart presented with gratitude by the Reggio di Calabria Social Club-made my heart go out to him. Three years at the epicentre of political power and his office looked like a proctologist’s consulting rooms.

  His back was turned and he was reaching up to unhook one of the framed certificates. His University of Melbourne law degree. He studied it for a moment, then laid it carefully in an empty grocery carton sitting on his desk. Across the room I could read the box’s yellow lettering. Golden Circle Pineapple, it said. This Way Up.

  Shivering at the sudden drop in temperature, I stepped forward. Agnelli turned to face me. ‘You heard?’

  I nodded. ‘Water Supply and the Arts.’ I showed him my palms. Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and die.

  Angelo indicated I should sit at the conference table, then crossed to the drapes and tugged them half-open. Harsh daylight swept away the conspiratorial shade. He got a couple of cans of beer out of his bar fridge, kicked his shoes off and sat down opposite me. So, he seemed to be saying. Here we are. Two men who know what’s what. He slid me one of the cans-my poison chalice, I took it. And so it was, as it turned out. But not in the way I thought at the time.

  He shrugged. ‘I won’t say I’m not disappointed.’

  Power had improved Ange, the way a couple of drinks do to some people. It had smoothed down his more abrasive anxieties, made him more mellow, less in need of having constantly to assert himself. But his forties were well upon him, and he could no longer pass for a child wonder. His smooth black hair still came up well in print, and his cheeks still bulged with chipmunk amiability, but the good fairy of middling high office had scattered ashes at his temples and given him slightly more chins than were absolutely necessary. His heart remained where it had always been, though. Marginally to the left of centre, and closer to his stomach than his brain.

  ‘This will mean some changes, of course,’ he said.

  I popped the tab off my can and waited for the bullet. Agnelli’s gaze loitered in midair, among the dust motes playing in the beams of sunlight, as though they might offer him the right form of words.

  ‘Tell me, Murray,’ he said, at long last. ‘What are the Arts?’

  This was very disheartening. Why go through the pretence of having me fail the job interview? I sucked on my can. Bitter, beer, but fortifying.

  Agnelli’s question, it turned out, was entirely rhetorical. He didn’t want my opinion. He wanted an audience. The axe was too brutal. There must needs first be a little armchair philosophising. A deep and meaningful on the complexities inherent in public intervention in the cultural sector.

  ‘Let me bounce this off you,’ he said. A little bouncing before the big bounce. ‘The Arts are the measure of how far we have come and how far we have yet to go. A resource to be developed, an economic as well as a social asset. When I hear the word culture I think excellence and I think access…’

  I wasn’t sure where this was going, but at least he wasn’t reaching for his revolver. ‘Not bad,’ I s
hrugged. ‘Bit vague.’

  ‘Then you’d better sharpen it up for me,’ he said.

  ‘You want me at Arts?’ I must have sounded a little incredulous.

  ‘If you don’t mind.’ Ange had a way of making you feel like it was your decision, even if he was making it. ‘For the time being. Until things settle down.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we’ll see.’ No doubt we would. If, he was making it clear, I didn’t botch it.

  So, here I was, my fortunes again leg-roped to Angelo Agnelli. Less than a minute before, I’d been merely apprehensive about my future. Now I had real cause for concern. ‘I’ll line up a departmental briefing, then,’ I said, by way of acceptance.

  ‘Fine.’ Ange tossed his can at the waste basket, scored. ‘You know Lloyd Eastlake?’

  I shook my head. ‘Should I?’

  ‘He chairs the Cultural Affairs Policy Committee.’ In theory, policy committees shaped the party platform and guarded it from the expediency of ministers. In practice, they were ineffectual talking-shops and magnets for inconsequential schemers. That did not mean, however, that due lip-service did not need to be paid. ‘Bit of a mover, from all reports,’ Agnelli said. ‘Well connected in the unions. Not factionally aligned. Seen quite a few arts ministers come and go.’ That wouldn’t have been hard. The arts ministry changed hands more frequently than a concert pianist with the crabs.

  ‘There’s some sort of art gallery thing he’s invited me to this evening. The Centre for Modern Art.’ The policy committee chairman wasn’t wasting any time cosying up to the new minister. ‘Reckons it could be a good opportunity to start developing links with the cultural community.’

  ‘Could be,’ I agreed tentatively. No skin off my nose what Agnelli did with his Friday nights.

  ‘I told him I couldn’t make it, got a family function it’s more than my life’s worth to miss.’ In other words, he planned to spend the evening on the phone, doing his factional arithmetic, figuring out where his esteem in the eyes of the Premier had turned to water. ‘I told him you’d represent me. Standard booze and schmooze, you know the drill. He’ll pick you up in front of the National Gallery at 6.30.’