Stiff Read online

  ‘Speaking of which.’ I pulled the time sheet list out of my pocket and folded it down to the bottom half. ‘Know any of this lot?’

  Gardiner took a spectacle case out of his pocket, slipped on a pair of half-glasses and tilted the sheet of paper to the light. ‘What’s this, the Cairo phone book?’

  ‘They were all on Bayraktar’s shift last week.’

  Gardiner shook his head. ‘I’m not much good with ethnic names, I’m afraid.’

  I drained my tea and began to get up. ‘Well, thanks a lot.’ This was music to my ears.

  ‘Anytime, son. Happy to help. Need anything else, just let me know. But you’d better be quick. I’m due to be demobbed any day now. Only a couple more weeks of 5 a.m. starts and I’m my own man.’

  ‘So I hear.’ I took the list back. Not an entirely unproductive half-hour all in all. A free feed, plus old Herb had driven yet another stake through the heart of Agnelli’s conspiracy theory, at least the Pacific Pastoral part of it. I changed the subject. ‘What do you think you’ll get for this place?’

  ‘The agent thinks ninety-five, ninety-five and a half. I wouldn’t know these days. It needs a lot of work.’

  Apart from the décor I couldn’t see where, but then Gardiner probably changed the tap washers once a week. ‘That’d make my place worth about fifty bucks. You should see it. Talk about needing work! I was up in the ceiling putting in some insulation last night and the roof fell in on me. That’s how I got these.’

  ‘Nasty,’ said Gardiner.

  ‘They’re the least of my worries.’ I fingered my scabs. ‘Think I can get a roofer to come and give me a quote? Been on the phone half the day I have.’ Well I would be, as soon as I got back to the office.

  Gardiner got up and started wrapping the remaining scones in a serviette. ‘Here, take these, son,’ he said. ‘She’ll get shirty on me if she thinks we didn’t eat them all. And while you’re here, give me your details. I’ve got a mate in the building trade who might be able to help you out.’

  ‘You sure?’ I hesitated only long enough to be polite before stuffing the bundle into my pocket.

  ‘Sure I’m sure,’ he said. He wrote my address and phone number on a pad by the phone and opened the front door. ‘I’m getting as much as I need.’ Faint kitchen noises came from back in the house. ‘Believe me, son. Believe me.’

  Out on the street, the rain had let up. All that remained of the puddles was an iridescent glaze. By the look of it, things were on the improve. When I glanced back, Gardiner was still standing at the open door, the little white terrier nuzzling his hand. I gave a nod and climbed into the Renault, one hand already dipping into the package in my pocket. A quick half-hour drafting up the MACWAM report and I’d have this thing knocked on the head.

  Context, I thought. Make that Background. Double underline. The words in my head began to shape themselves into a preamble.

  Background

  A situation has recently arisen in the context of the ongoing legislative process relating to the Industrial Insurance Act such as to suggest it advisable that specific consultations be undertaken in relation to addressing uncertainties which may have been perceived to have arisen as a consequence of press speculation concerning a recent workplace fatality in the Melbourne metropolitan area.

  Not bad for openers, I thought, mentally moving on to Implementation. But my concentration was slipping. An image kept surfacing in my mind, a tubby little man in harem pants.

  Nasreddin Hoca, he of the hefty turban and curly slippers. He of the bushy beard and pithy parable. Fancy him working at Pacific Pastoral. It was a bit hard to imagine that wry old wiseacre in a pair of white overalls and a shower cap, hefting a side of beef out of a refrigerated semi. Not his style at all. Not unless the arse had fallen out of the obscure epigram business.

  If Red’s bedtime story book was right and this Nasreddin Hoca guy was a famous Turkish legend, up there in the Mother Goose category, then wouldn’t Bayraktar have known he was signing off against a false name? Interesting. Since I was out and about, I decided on the spur of the moment to roll past Bayraktar’s address. From what I could remember of the coroner’s file, it was either 363 or 636 Blyth Street. Either way, the detour would not take me far out of my way. A few extra minutes of solitude in the car would help me finish mentally drafting the report.

  Blyth Street is a broad avenue running east–west from the Merri Creek to Sydney Road. I started at the Merri end and cruised past respectable homes with barley sugar columns holding up their porches. 363 was a Shell self-serve, so I followed the numbers up towards Sydney Road.

  Once upon a boom the local gentry had lived up this end, in polychrome brick villas and imposing terraces fretted with iron lacework. Things had taken several downturns since then and all that remained to hint at the vanished grandeur was the occasional one-winged terracotta gargoyle or the peeling curve of a bay window. Mostly it was blocks of flats, crummy, identical strata-titles, pockmarking the streetscape. Six feet of red scoria and a dead cabbage palm out the front, letterboxes exploding with junk mail down the side. Bayraktar’s joint was bound to be in one of those.

  But closer to Sydney Road, things were on the up and up. Skips full of builders’ rubble sat by the kerb outside big Victorian terraces, evidence of renovations in progress. Brass plates and Mercedes hinted at solicitors and pathologists. And 636 was no dingy block of flats, flung up in the sixties.

  It was a classic two-storey boom-era Italianate mansion, modestly substantial and trying its best to look inconspicuous behind a cast-iron fence, the original by the look of it. A dinky little square tower sat on top, and jutting out above the front door was a coach-porch sort of arrangement. Everything had been painted a matt white with fetching gloss highlights in olive green on the woodwork and the little iron balconies wrapped around the first floor windows. The overall charm was complemented by little security cameras mounted under the eaves at each corner. Taken together with the gunmetal grey BMW parked under the portico they gave the place the discreet and impenetrable air of a private casino on the Côte d’Azur.

  Far too fancy a set of digs for a meat lumper, even if he was a foreman. By the look of it, somewhere along the line someone had screwed up the paperwork. I slowed to a crawl and peered out the passenger window at the brass plate on the gatepost. Etched in black were the words Anadolu Klubu, then underneath in smaller letters Anatolia Club.

  An irate toot sounded behind me, a glazier’s truck in a hurry. Up ahead, the lights at the corner had just gone orange. I hit the accelerator and raced them, turning up the hill into Sydney Road. Past the Patras Emporium and Appliance Discounters I went. Past the Court House Hotel and the Edinburgh Castle, past Barnacle Bill’s, past the black walls of Pentridge. Two blocks past the electorate office I pulled into the kerb outside the Turkish Welfare League.

  The League was another shopfront opening directly onto Sydney Road. The only other businesses this far up were in the motor trade. Direct-to-the-public retread wholesalers, windscreen replacements while-u-wait, Midas Mufflers. And up here, the road was an industrial-strength drag strip.

  Apart from the rent being cheap, there was a certain logic in this choice of location for the League’s office. Most of Melbourne’s Turks were factory workers, imported by the jumbo load to fill the assembly line at Ford or Repco. So if any Australian-made car less than fifteen years old ever missed the turn and ploughed through the League’s plate glass window, it had a better than even chance of connecting with the very bloke who had spot-welded its front assembly into place.

  I locked the Renault, a purely symbolic gesture in this neighbourhood, and walked inside. The League’s front office consisted of two dented filing cabinets, an ancient Gestetner mimeograph machine, probably the last in captivity, and three battered desks. Paperwork trays overflowed with forms and documents and handbooks from various government departments and philanthropic organisations. Posters from the local screen print co-op covered the walls cr
eating an atmosphere of embattled engagement that not even the damp seeping upwards from the threadbare linoleum could dispel.

  A cluster of men was hunkered down around one of the desks, men with faces that were maps of a wide brown land. But not this wide brown land. Not yet anyway. At their centre was Sivan the Kurd.

  I didn’t know then, and still don’t, if you can tell a Kurd from a Turk by looking at him. But for my money Sivan was everything you could have wanted in a manifestation of that proud and embattled race. He had the beak of an eagle, shoulders built for bandoliers, a torso the size of Asia Minor and a crop of grizzled stubble that had me reaching self-consciously for my own lame thirty-hour growth.

  He made a rumbling noise, a thick geological growl that began deep inside and came erupting out his toothy grin. ‘Murray, my friend.’ His arm swept wide. ‘Meet Sayfeddin, Gokhan, Bulent.’

  A good head for names was indispensable in my line of work, standing at a politician’s shoulder refreshing her memory. But to my unending dismay, Turkish names could rarely find purchase on my mnemonics. Greeks I could do— they were all Jim or Con or Nick. Italians, no problem, even since the Johnnies and Joes had taken to reverting to Giovanni and Giuseppe. And no one ever got fired for calling an Arab Mohammed. It was bound to be in there somewhere. Unless he was a Christian, in which case George or Tony was usually a safe bet. But Gokhan? Bull ant? Sayfeddin? Say what?

  ‘Merhaba,’ I mumbled. Yassou. Ciao. Howdy doody. This I could do in a full range of community languages, including Maltese, but I’m a great believer in the unifying influence of English, so that was as fluent as I was going to get.

  ‘Merhaba,’ they all replied, looking at me expectantly.

  I cocked my head towards the back of the building. ‘Ayisha in?’ I wanted a quiet chat, not to go live-to-air on Radio Istanbul.

  Sivan indicated a narrow corridor opening in the back wall of the room. ‘Girl mechanic today.’

  The corridor was lined with tourist posters of the Bosphorus and newspaper photographs of heads that looked like they belonged on the banknotes of some very foreign currency indeed. I found Ayisha kneeling on the floor of an office that was a smaller, pokier version of the one out front, her head buried in the innards of an antique photocopier. Bits of machinery were spread in an arc on the floor around her backside. She had her back to the door and didn’t see me arrive.

  Her hair was wrapped in a scarf, and as she reached purposefully behind her for some part or other, her hands black with toner powder, she looked for all the world like a Heroine of Labour resolutely overfulfilling her norm for Xerox repair under the first Five Year Plan. My heart clenched itself into a fist. Forward to the World October, it silently shouted.

  I had been leaning against the door frame, silently admiring her industry for nearly a minute when she pulled her head out of the machine’s interior and sprung me. ‘Jeeze, Murray,’ she said. ‘What are you perving at?’

  A question very much to the point. I felt heat spread across my cheeks. ‘That name I mentioned yesterday,’ I countered quickly. ‘Find anything out?’

  ‘Nearly scared the shit out of me,’ she said. ‘Sneaking about like that.’ Clearly, she had forgotten to ask. She stood up, demonstratively kneed the photocopier door shut, and palmed the print button. The machine whirred and began ejaculating copies. ‘You all right?’ She came right up to me and stared at my face, deliberately much too close for comfort.

  I tried to hold her gaze. ‘Just a few scratches, that’s all. It’s not contagious or anything.’

  ‘Those faction fights can get pretty rough, I hear.’ She patted a sooty palm against my cheek. I felt myself flush under the smear of graphite. It was a wonder she didn’t get third-degree burns.

  I stepped back abashed, and cracked the back of my head on the door frame. ‘You should have seen the other guy.’

  Suddenly a hand clamped down on my shoulder from behind and spun me round. ‘Trying to seduce Ayisha, eh?’

  It was Sivan. He must have been reading my mail. ‘It is useless,’ he said. ‘Many have tried, all have failed.’

  ‘Get stuffed,’ said Ayisha. She plonked herself down behind her desk and started rolling a grubby cigarette. ‘Murray here wants to know about some guy he thought we might know. Name of…’

  ‘Ekrem Bayraktar.’

  Sivan repeated the name, rolling it around his mouth like he was making concrete out of it. ‘Bayraktar means he who carries the flag, the standard bearer.’ Sivan had been a school teacher before the army tore up his diploma and poked matches under his fingernails. What he was saying was all very interesting, but I wanted lowdown not etymology.

  ‘You heard of him?’

  Sivan shook his head.

  ‘What about any of these guys?’ I handed him the payroll list.

  He ran a hairy finger down the names, turned to Ayisha and broke into a broad grin. ‘He wants to know if we have heard of Nasreddin Hoca.’

  A sly twinkle crossed Ayisha’s face. She caught me watching and dipped her head to light her sooty fag. I didn’t want her thinking I was a complete drongo. ‘The parable of the walnut,’ I said, quick as a flash. I pointed to the name underneath. ‘What about this guy, Gazanfer Bilge?’ Rhymed with pilfer.

  Him, Sivan knew. ‘Wrestler,’ he rumbled. ‘Very famous in the nineteen fifties. You know Turkish wrestling? First they put oil on their bodies and…’ He advanced, arms spread, intent on demonstrating a key grip. I fended him off with the next name. ‘Orhan Gencebay. That Turkish?’

  Sivan froze in mid-stride. He rolled the list into a tube and waved it about in front of his mouth. ‘Bir tesselli ver,’ he wailed, his voice weirdly high and strangulated. ‘Yaradanin askina.’ He swayed from side to side and with his free hand pounded a beat on the edge of the desk.

  I rolled my eyes towards Ayisha. She didn’t know what was going on either. Sivan threw his arms wide and changed languages, holding the same tune. ‘Everybody make mistakes,’ he sang.

  I got it now. ‘Singer?’

  ‘Bingo,’ he said. ‘Tom Jones. Molly Meldrum.’ He ironed the paper microphone flat on the surface of the desk and dropped back into pedagogic mode. ‘You know Turkish music? The saz is similar to the bouzouki, the drum is called darbooka, the…’

  ‘Kartal Tibet.’ I snatched up the list and read the next name. ‘Let me guess, husband of the famous Donna Kebab.’

  ‘Close,’ said Ayisha. ‘Movie actor, I think. Before my time. More Sivan’s vintage.’ Sivan was all of thirty-five.

  ‘Commercial crap,’ said Sivan. ‘Do you know the films of Yilmaz Guney? For example, The Herd?’

  A mythical sage, an oily athlete, a pop singer, a film star. The early shift at Pacific Pastoral was beginning to look a little top-heavy with talent. I interrupted Sivan’s discourse on modern Turkish cinema. ‘Ever heard of a place called the Anatolia Club?’

  Sivan stopped talking and gave Ayisha a very strange look. ‘Oh, very bad place, my friend,’ he growled. ‘You should not go there.’

  ‘Why? What is it?’

  Before he could answer, Gokhan—or was it Sayfeddin— burst through the door. He said something tense in Turkish, a harsh sounding phrase, then abruptly turned and disappeared.

  ‘Shit.’ Ayisha was on her feet, slinging her bag across her shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  She came round the desk, chewing her bottom lip and took off out the door. My entrails turned to iced water and I took off after her. She shot out the front door like a rocket, turned left and sped up the footpath.

  A burly, hard-faced man in a military-style jacket was standing beside the Renault, resting a jack-booted foot provocatively on the front bumper. He was levering up the blade of my windscreen wiper. ‘Hey,’ I demanded. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  He turned and lazily raked me with cold contemptuous eyes, sure of his own power. Then he slowly raised his arm and pointed back over my shoulder. Without looking, I knew what he was point
ing at. CLEARWAY, the sign beside me read, 4:30–6:00 p.m.

  ‘Fair go, mate,’ I pleaded, staring in disbelief at my watch. 4:32, it said. He thrust a pink piece of paper into my hand. Pay the City of Coburg forty dollars, it said. Or else. Further up the street Ayisha opened the door of a newish metallic-blue Laser. She waved gaily and drove off, scot free.

  A line of trams was backed up along the centre of the road, leaving the Renault blocking the only other northbound lane. As far back as I could see, traffic sat stalled, horns blaring. For the briefest moment I considered leaving the car where it was and going back inside to ask Sivan what he had been about to say about the Anatolia Club. The Grey Ghost tapped his behaviour modification pad against his thigh. ‘I’d shift it,’ he said nastily. ‘If I was you.’

  I took my time, rolling the parking ticket into a ball as I went. I slammed the door, gunned the engine, pulled out around the nose of the tram, threw an illegal u-turn in the face of the oncoming traffic, stuck my arm out the window, gave the by-laws Nazi the finger, hit the gas, and burned rubber. It wasn’t forty dollars worth, but it was consolation of sorts.

  Up to that point, you’d have to admit, I had been doing pretty well in the amateur sleuth stakes. In barely four hours not only had I confirmed that industrial action was unlikely at Pacific Pastoral, but I had established that something dodgy was going on in the vicinity of their payroll, and that there was more to this dead bloke Bayraktar than met the eye.

  So as I parked behind the electorate office and slipped in the back door, I must confess to feeling as pleased with myself as a man might with a squashed-up forty dollar parking fine in his pocket. I even had enough unanswered questions to justify paying another visit to Ayisha’s office fairly soon.

  Back in my cubicle, I found things exactly as I had left them. The same overflowing in-tray, the inevitable yellow pile of phone message slips, the same tattooed oaf sitting in my visitor’s chair with his size tens parked on the walnut veneer.

  Our more troublesome sort of customers usually got bored after a couple of hours of the cold shoulder and took their grievances elsewhere. Two full days was a new record. Not that I told Mr Adam F. Ant that. He might have taken it for encouragement. Instead I pretended he wasn’t there, sat down and dug out the Pacific Pastoral file. Without the coroner’s envelope all it held was a single sheet of paper with Herb Gardiner’s name written on it. I added the payroll list and ticked off the four names I knew for sure were phonies.