The Brush-Off mw-1 Read online

  The cop was about ten years younger than me. His shirt had two stripes on the sleeve, and he had a howitzer on his hip. ‘Don’t you think you’ve had enough, mate?’

  I looked down and saw that I still had the bottle of wine we’d pinched from the hotel. We’d been swigging out of it as we crossed the lawn and I was holding it by the neck. Barely a tepid mouthful remained in the bottom. The Botanic Gardens suddenly felt a very long way away. The taste on my tongue was bile, not apricots.

  Beyond a pair of security guards, Salina was being helped into the back seat of the police car. The cop followed my line of sight. ‘You with her, are you, mate?’

  Salina stared back towards me. She was calmer, regaining control, her face as bloodless as marble. Guilty and contrite. She gave a little rueful shake of the head. Goodbye, Murray, it said.

  I shook my head slightly, mirroring her movement. ‘Not any more,’ I said. It seemed like the right thing. Only later did it feel like cowardice.

  More police were arriving. Another two squad cars and an unmarked Falcon. A security guard, fishing in the moat, pulled a pair of thick-rimmed glasses out of the water. Another had the discarded shopping trolley from earlier in the afternoon and was dragging it out of the gutter. The car with Salina went.

  There were maybe six cops, as many security guards. I was the only civilian. I dropped the wine bottle into a rubbish bin. It was empty and the bottle hit the bottom with a blunt thud that went straight to my temples. ‘Go home, pal,’ ordered a honcho in an Armaguard uniform. ‘The show’s over.’

  I could, I supposed, have identified myself, claimed some small entitlement to information. A pretty picture that would have made. A crumpled suit, grass stains on my fingers, a gutful of souring wine, trying to throw my rather limited weight about. And for what? To find out how come my hot date had been cut short?

  Snatches of radio chatter and snippets of half-overheard conversations gave me more than enough clues to satisfy my immediate curiosity on that point. The body in the cowboy boots had been found by a security guard. He’d come outside for a cigarette and noticed a dark shape lying on the bottom of the moat, in the shadow of the retaining wall. He thought it was a roll of carpet. Idiots were always dumping things in the moat. He shone his torch into the water and saw what it was. He called another guard and they attempted resuscitation. It was no use. The guy could have been lying there for hours. An empty scotch bottle was found beside the body.

  I trudged across Princes Bridge to the dormant railway station, laid my cheek upon the rear-seat upholstery of the only cab at the rank and murmured my address to the driver, a Polish scarecrow in tinted plate-glass hornrims. ‘Hot,’ he said. ‘Wery hot.’

  ‘Gdansk, it ain’t,’ I agreed.

  Chauffeured for the third time that day, the pulse of the passing streetlights throbbing at my temples, the grog finally catching up with me, I succumbed to a headachy doze. And in my waking sleep, I found myself thinking unbidden thoughts of a time long gone.

  My father had just taken the licence of the Olympic Hotel, his fourth pub in ten years. Apart from the name, there wasn’t anything sporting about the Olympic, not unless you counted the horse races droning away on the radio in the public bar. Mum hadn’t been dead long when we made the move, and Dad had taken me out of St Joseph’s and put me in the nearest government secondary school. It was a haphazard choice. He said he wanted me near him. More like he didn’t want to keep paying the fees.

  That was okay with me. Compared to where I’d been, Preston Technical was a breeze. Nobody gave a flying continental about academic results. Soon as they got to fifteen, most of them were straight out the door and into apprenticeships or factory jobs. Plenty of work for juniors in those days, the sixties. But not much teenage entertainment. Not unless you could get your hands on some piss. Not unless you knew how to handle the kid whose father owned the pub.

  At St Joey’s the only real source of fear was the Brothers, pricks with leather straps, a weight advantage and the high moral ground. At the tech we had the Fletchers, fifteen-year-old twins and their older brother, ferret-faced thugs who hunted in a pack and made the Christian Brothers look like the Little Sisters of Mercy. There was an older Fletcher still, but he was in Pentridge prison. The initial charge was manslaughter but the magistrate believed him when he said that if he’d been seriously trying to hurt the bloke he’d have worn his kicking shoes. So he got off with reckless endangerment and grievous bodily harm. Five years.

  The Fletchers lived on the Housing Commission estate, prefab concrete boxes built in 1956 to accommodate the Olympic athletes and already falling to bits when the welfare cases moved in after the Games were over. When you rode your bike to school through Fletcher territory you needed steely nerves, strong thighs and tough friends. That’s what they told me at school, anyway. But I was the new kid. I didn’t have any tough friends. Not until I was adopted by the one they called Spider. Then I had a friend. Just my luck.

  General Jaruzelski woke me long enough to dump me on my doorstep and extract his fare. Then I was face down in my own empty bed, dreaming again. But not of Spider Webb, or the Fletchers, or the bad business with the stolen bottles of bourbon. This dream was more promising.

  A wood nymph was tugging at my toga. One more fold and I would spring free and plunge into her grotto. But my toga was tangled and there was a thyme-drunk bee in my ear. Buzz buzz, it went, buzz buzz. I swatted it and it stung my eyes. Daylight poured into the wound and pierced my brain with a red-hot poker. The camp-fire ashes of a thousand marauding armies filled my mouth. Buzz buzz, said the persistent bee. Then a voice started shouting about the weather. Hot. Again. As if I didn’t know that already.

  Untangling myself from sweat-drenched sheets, I swung my feet onto the floor, slammed one hand down on the clock-radio and picked up the phone with the other. What prick would ring me at 7.04 on a Saturday morning?

  Agnelli.

  ‘Urgghh,’ I said. The glass of water beside my bed had been there so long it had formed a skin. When it hit my tongue, sea monkeys hatched, spawned, died, and shed their exoskeletons down my throat. I fumbled for a match and fumigated my oesophagus with cleansing smoke.

  ‘You heard about the National Gallery last night?’ My boss was wide awake, keyed up.

  ‘What?’ I grunted, my head throbbing from the effort. Had I missed something? ‘Somebody swipe a Picasso?’

  ‘Some idiot drowned himself in the moat. I’ve had three different reporters on the phone since 6.30, wanting a comment.’

  Even in my fuddled state, I got the point immediately. To the press-reduced to reporting the weather-a body in the moat of the National Gallery would be a story straight from heaven. In a city without distinguishing landmarks-no opera house, no harbour-the Arts Centre was the closest thing to a civic icon. Its picture was on the cover of the phone book, in every tourist brochure and glossy piece of corporate boosterism. Melbourne, City of the Arts. Look. See. Naturally a death in the moat would be a sensation. And if a political angle could be found, so much the better.

  But what political angle? By covering my head with a pillow and closing my eyes, I could just about see to think. ‘Why call you? What’s it got to do with you?’

  ‘According to the journos who rang me,’ Agnelli said, ‘this whacker committed suicide in protest at the lack of government support for the arts.’ At least it wasn’t because his girlfriend was rolling around in the hydrangeas with the responsible minister’s major-domo.

  ‘What makes them think that?’ There’d been no mention of a protest motive at the death scene, not that I’d heard. And I couldn’t see any immediate point in informing Agnelli that I was there when they dredged up the body.

  ‘He left a note.’ There was more than a hint of anxiety in Agnelli’s voice. ‘A manifesto, the press are calling it.’

  I realised why Agnelli was aerated enough to have called me at this ungodly hour. Two years before, a Picasso really had been swiped from the Na
tional Gallery. It was held hostage by hijackers demanding more government funding for the arts-a motive so cryptic as to bamboozle the police utterly. The ransom negotiations were conducted on the front pages of the daily press. In a series of manifestos, the Arts Minister was described successively as a tiresome old bag of swamp gas, a pompous fathead, and a self-glorifying anal retentive. Subsequent insults were so erudite they had millions rushing for their dictionaries. Eventually, the painting was recovered, abandoned in a railway station locker. But the thieves were never caught.

  So it wasn’t hard to infer whence Agnelli was coming. Public ridicule and ministerial amour-propre make a poor mix, and mere mention of the word ‘manifesto’ was bound to set a cat among Agnelli’s pigeons. I took a deep breath and started again. ‘Just exactly what does this manifesto say?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Murray, that’s what I want you to find out.’

  ‘Has this alleged suicide note been released?’ By ratcheting the terminology down a notch I hoped to quiet the quivering antennae of Agnelli’s ego.

  It didn’t work. ‘Not according to the journalists who rang, but the general gist is being bandied about. And I’d rather not find out the details by seeing them on television. No surprises, Murray. I thought we were clear on that. No surprises.’ Meaning that I should pull my finger out and have something reassuring to contribute to the overview. Pronto. ‘I’ll pick you up behind Parliament House at eleven. You can bring me up to speed on the way to this Max Karlin brunch thing.’

  I told him I was on the case, buried my head in the pillow and tried to get back to sleep. It was a waste of time. Twenty litres of used booze were backed up in my southern suburbs, leaning on the horn. On top of which, a pounding noise was now coming from outside in the street.

  Reaching across the mattress, I eased a chink in the curtains. Sunlight stabbed my frontal lobes. Across the narrow street, a guy in shorts and a carpenter’s belt was fixing a For Sale sign to the facade of the house immediately opposite. The letters on the hoarding were as big as my hand. Inner City Living, they read. A Gem from the Past. An Investment for the Future. No room to swing a cat, in other words, but the market is buoyant.

  From the front, the house was identical to mine, a single-storey, single-fronted terrace. The whole street was the same, all twenty houses. A cheese-paring speculator had built them as a job lot back in the 1870s. Workingmen’s cottages they were called at the time-as distinct from the grander two-storey terraces in the surrounding streets with their cast-iron balconies and moulded pediments.

  This neighbourhood was once considered a slum-such an affront to the national ideal of the suburban bungalow that whole blocks of it had been bulldozed in the name of progress. But those days were gone. Thanks to the miracle of gentrification, dingy digs in dodgy neighbourhoods had become delightful inner-city residences with charming period features in cosmopolitan locales. It was truly amazing what a lick of paint, a skylight and an adjective or two could do for real estate values.

  This was the fifth time in the two years I’d lived there that a house in this street had been put on the market. I couldn’t help but wonder what this one would fetch at auction. Mine had set the bank back nearly a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. A pretty penny-and a bargain at that-for two bedrooms, a kitchen-living room and a back yard the size of a boxing ring. And, with my variable interest rate bobbing around at 16 per cent, a very good reason to get out of bed and go to work.

  I padded to the bathroom, fine grit beneath my bare soles, wind-borne detritus of our island continent’s blasted interior. A reminder to give Red’s room a quick dusting before he arrived. As I crossed the lounge room, I reached into the bookcase, pulled out the dead weight of 101 Funniest Australian Cricket Stories and tossed it onto the couch where Red would see it when he arrived. He’d sent it to me for Christmas, a boy’s idea of the right sort of gift for his dad, and I treasured every page, even though I’d never read a word of it. Just as well Wendy hadn’t done the buying for him, or I’d have got Cooking for One.

  Not that it wouldn’t have been handy, I reflected as I rinsed the forlorn breakfast bowl that had been soaking in the sink.

  Next Christmas he’d give me Home Maintenance Made Easy. And it, too, would go into the bookcase unopened. Right beside The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. That one I bought myself. Got bogged down in the War of Spanish Succession. One night soon I’d try again, get right on top of Metternich.

  Red gave me what he thought a boy should give his father. But he needn’t have worried about my home maintenance needs. I had none. After seven years with Wendy, fruitlessly wrestling with cross-cut saws and counter-sunk wood screws, all I wanted was to change the odd light globe. That’s why I’d bought a renovated house.

  So what if all the bench tops were apple-green and the cupboards burnt-orange? So what if all my furniture came from the Ikea catalogue and looked like it was designed for Swedish dwarfs? So what if the walls were still bare after two years? I could walk to work whenever I wanted. Red had a room of his own when he came to stay. And perhaps my new-found friends in the arts could recommend something suitable to adorn my vacant hanging space. Home is where the heart is, after all. Even if it did get a little lonesome from time to time and the shelves in the fridge could’ve done with a good wipe.

  My heart and I went into the bathroom, stood under a hundred icy needles of cold water and started making plans. The first item on my agenda was to forget about last night as soon as possible. Salina Fleet had been a bad idea, even without the business at the moat. In fact, the business at the moat may have been a blessing in disguise. A Salina Fleet was not what I needed at this juncture in my life.

  What I needed was groceries. A ten-year-old kid can go through a hell of a lot of groceries in three days.

  Hit the oracle, make a few calls, raid the supermarket, meet and brief Agnelli, take in Max Karlin’s brunch, then out to the airport to pick up Red. After that, maybe the local swimming pool. Cool down, then take in a movie. Play it by ear.

  My first call was to Ken Sproule. Half past seven on a Saturday morning was not the ideal time to go shopping for favours, but I remembered that Sproule had a two-year-old daughter. If he wasn’t out of bed already then two-year-olds weren’t what they used to be.

  As a rule of thumb, personal networks are always preferable to official channels. Sproule would understand implicitly why I was calling. His boss Gil Methven may have been Police Minister for less than a day, but Ken was fast on the uptake and I preferred to be steered informally around police procedures than to go dropping Agnelli’s name into the loop at this early stage.

  Sproule was up all right, monitoring Cartoon Connection and cutting toast into fingers. He was thankful for the distraction and when I drew the map he laughed out loud. ‘Agnelli’s only had the job twelve hours and already artists have started killing themselves.’

  ‘Maybe the guy hadn’t heard about the reshuffle,’ I said. ‘Maybe he couldn’t stand the thought of Gil Methven staying in the job.’

  We went on like this for a while until Sproule was in a thoroughly good mood, then I asked him to suggest the least conspicuous way for me to find out what was in the suicide note. Surprisingly, he volunteered to make the calls himself. Under normal circumstances getting someone like Sproule hitting the phone on my behalf would have taken a fair amount of horse-trading. But the idea of a corpse in the moat of the National Gallery stimulated his morbid curiosity. ‘Fifteen months in that job, the only bodies I ever saw were in the last act of Hamlet,’ said Sproule. ‘I’ll call you back in a couple of hours.’

  It was closer to a couple of minutes. ‘Something just occurred to me. The name Marcus Taylor rings a bell. Don’t quote me, but I think he might have applied for a grant.’

  ‘Did he get one?’

  ‘That’s the part I can’t remember.’

  ‘If I’m not here when you call back,’ I told him, ‘try the Arts Ministry.’

  I hiked over to
Ethnic Affairs via a cup of coffee, picked up my car and drove to Arts, twiddling the radio dial across the eight o’clock news bulletins. The top-rating commercial station had already picked up the story. Melbourne’s arts community, it said, was deeply shocked by the apparent suicide of the promising young painter Marcus Taylor -the young part was encouraging, given that Taylor had looked to be about my age- in protest at lack of government support for the arts. Salina, identified as a prominent art critic, was quoted as describing Taylor’s death as a shocking waste.

  As I passed the National Gallery, a television news crew was shooting background footage of the moat. The vultures were circling.

  The ministry was locked, but Phillip Veale’s name worked magic at the stage door of the Concert Hall. Keys were immediately conjured up and I was escorted to the top floor of the Ballet Centre and admitted to the deserted offices. The list of grant recipients was where I had left it. And Marcus Taylor’s name was on it. Professional support, $2000.

  Not exactly a king’s ransom, but as a free gift it was a damned sight more generous than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. By the standards of Joanna Public and her overtaxed consort, it might even teeter dangerously close to the edge of government extravagance. A layabout artist could be drinking red wine out of the public trough for six months with a cheque like that.

  Swinging my feet up onto the desk, I let a contented smile settle over my lips. From a PR point of view, Agnelli now had an ace up his sleeve that could be played if the media decided there was mileage to be had from the starving-artist-versus-government-indifference issue. Not that it was likely it would ever come to that. My advice to Ange would be to keep his head down for a couple of days and wait for the whole thing to blow over.

  I picked up the list again. While I was on the job, I might as well do it properly. So far, all I knew about this Marcus Taylor was that he tended to histrionics, had a poor sense of balance and had ruined my plans for the previous evening. Quietly aching parts of my own anatomy told me that much. Information of an official nature might be more useful. You can’t have too much information. Beside the names on the grants list were reference numbers. Everything I had seen so far of Phillip Veale suggested he ran a tight ship. Somewhere in these offices would be a file containing Taylor’s application form.