Stiff (15 page)

An arrow said Necropolis Next Left. A nice democratic town, Necroburg. Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Christa-delphians, all bedded down together in the sprawling suburbs of the dead. Along Box Forest Road, the forest of yellow boxes long replaced by the tin sheds of cut-price monumental masons, I found what I was looking for. In a muddy paddock backing onto the railway line a silver-grey Martinelli hearse was drawn up beside the customary dark rectangle. Two pallbearers sat in the cabin catching a quick puff before the mourners arrived.

A singularly dismal sight it would have been, too, if not for an incongruous splash of colour against the yellow clay of the earth. Draped over the coffin was a piece of scarlet fabric. A flag. A red flag. The people’s flag of deepest red. That which shrouded oft our martyred dead. On top of the flag was a modest wreath of white carnations. It looked like Agnelli was right, the union would be bunging it on in no uncertain terms.

I cruised once more around the little ring-road and fell in with a cortege just arriving at the grassy area opposite. I parked unnoticed in clear view of the Bayraktar plot. A light drizzle began falling and the pallbearers got into the cabin of the hearse. I turned off my engine and waited.

Teardrops of vapour emerged out of the mist forming on the inside of the windscreen, swelled, and tumbled slowly downwards. I wound down my window and the sound of weeping women came softly across the lawn beside me. Short vertical lengths of pipe had been sunk into the grass to make recessed vases. Here and there, little posies of mixed flowers sprouted straight up out of the turf, cellophane and all. Gradually it came to me that this was where they buried the children. I quickly looked away.

A car had pulled up over near the hearse and two men were getting out. I knew immediately they were not union officials. For a start their clothes fitted them properly, expensive-looking overcoats protecting well-cut suits. Also, the car was a recent model BMW, sleek in the rain. The two were heavy set, and crossed the field of mud with a business-like sense of purpose. There was no doubt that they were compatriots of the deceased. Rather well-heeled ones by the look of the togs and the wheels.

The Martinelli crew had dumped their fags and settled into postures of respectful solicitude by the time the pair reached the graveside. Muted words were exchanged and heads bobbed all round. I bent forward and wiped a hole in the condensation. The pallbearers withdrew a little and the two dark-haired men stood together and faced the coffin, their backs to me. Then, and this part really made me sit up and take notice, they snapped to attention and executed a couple of brisk, well-practised military salutes. They stood like that, elbows rigid, immobile in the soft rain, for perhaps fifteen seconds.

Then, as if at an invisible signal, the arms descended and the shorter one bent and picked the white carnation wreath up off the casket. He handed it up to his companion who read the card then tossed the whole thing like a frisbee onto the green carpet covering the mound of dirt beside the grave. Meanwhile the first guy had grabbed a handful of the flag and was hauling it towards him like a waiter changing a dirty tablecloth. As he swept the fabric into his arms, I caught a flash of white, a crescent moon and a star. Bayraktar was being laid to rest not under the ruby standard of the workers of the world but beneath the banner of Ataturk.

The flag was swiftly folded and the coffin disappeared into the earth. The mystery men put their erect carriages into the BMW and drove away. It was all over in less than two minutes. Not exactly a state funeral, but honours of some sort, honours I was prepared to bet were not for services to humanity.

Mustapha closer look at this, I told myself. As soon as the BMW was out of sight and the Martinelli hearse had driven off, I put up my umbrella and squelched across to the hole. The box stared up at me silently, not the budget model either, by the look of the silver handles. The card on the wreath read ‘RIP—Management and Staff, Pacific Pastoral’.

So much for family feeling. The pricks hadn’t even sent someone to the funeral. The union hadn’t showed either, but that was arguably grounds for relief. The first sight of that red flag had me worried, if only that Agnelli was about to be proven right. But a union like the Meaties, with probably twenty thousand blokes on the books, could hardly be expected to turn out every time a member fell off his perch. They’d never get any work done. Not that you’d notice. On the other hand, a company the size of Pacific Pastoral sending fifteen bucks worth of carnations to the interment of a man who died on the job, that was just plain lousy. It wasn’t as though they knew he was ripping them off, after all. It was just plain contempt, pure and simple.

Bayraktar might have been a fat pig with sticky fingers and some pretty dodgy-looking militaristic friends, but so what? The same could be said of the federal Minister for Defence Procurements. A principle was at stake here. A man carks it
in situ
, the least the management can do is send a representative to stand at the graveside and pay the widow the courtesy of some hypocrisy, should she happen to be there. It didn’t have to be the chairman of the board, that would be too much to expect. But they could have sent along the third assistant deputy under-boss. Where was Apps, that gangling streak of officiousness?

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.’