Stiff (17 page)

But Gezen still had a problem. ‘Why do the police watch me, then?’ he said.

This guy’s bad conscience was certainly working overtime. I must have done a poor job of concealing this thought. Gezen’s eyes flared again, the weirdness back in evidence. Then he was up, heading out the door. We found him staring down the passage. ‘There,’ he gestured.

The three women and their yowling child had gone. Sivan was deep in a phone conversation, bent low, taking careful notes. Gezen jerked his head again. I stepped in front of him, following the line indicated through the plate-glass window, out into the street. Across the road in front of my Renault two dark-suited men were sitting in a parked car, the one in the driver’s seat making an elaborate show of reading a street directory.

‘That’s not the jacks,’ I said. For a start the Victoria Police didn’t go tooling about in sporty European coupes. Also, I recognised the men. It was the goons from the cemetery.

Ayisha jostled in beside me, the two of us squeezed together in the narrow passageway. I bent closer, feeling her hair graze my cheek. ‘Not ours, anyway,’ I whispered. ‘More like the Turkish secret police, wouldn’t you say?’ She swivelled her eyes around, knowing it wasn’t the cops out here, letting me have my lame little joke.

‘What’s the Anatolia Club?’ I said quietly, a secret conversation, just ours, my mouth accidentally against her ear, in danger of electrocution. She creased her brow into a silent question, her two perfect eyebrows arching like downy black caterpillars. ‘I think Bayraktar was a member,’ I whispered.

Her jaw hardened and a flare of alarm shot across her face. She repeated the short, sibilant, deeply expressive word that Gezen had uttered earlier. ‘Wait,’ she snapped. She turned and closed on Gezen, making reassuring sounds in Turkish, propelling him backwards down the narrow passageway until he disappeared into the obscurity of its far end. Then she wheeled and advanced on me. ‘Stop pissing about, Murray,’ she hissed, not in the least bit playfully. ‘This is serious.’

Her face was so close I could taste the mixture of spearmint and tobacco on her breath. Any closer and I would do something I’d regret. ‘Take it easy,’ I said, backing off. ‘I’m on your side, remember.’

Sivan looked up from his phone call, registered our presence, and returned to scribbling notes.

Quickly I described how I had driven past the address in Blyth Street the day before and seen a BMW like the one parked across the road. For good measure I threw in the goings-on I had just witnessed at Fawkner Cemetery. As she listened, Ayisha gnawed her bottom lip and glanced nervously out the window. ‘It’s a gambling club,’ she said. ‘Run by right-wing thugs. Maybe more, even.’

‘More? Like what.’

‘Rumour is they keep an eye on things in the local community for the consulate.’ She shrugged meaningfully. ‘You think they’re really after Memo?’

She said something else, but I didn’t hear it. I was already out the door, feeling the wind cut like a knife. Streams of traffic hummed past in both directions, as I dodged and skipped towards the twin yellow stripes at the centre of the road.

As a rule of thumb, I kept my nose out of ethnic matters, for all the obvious reasons. When it came to complex, bitter and intractable conflict, the Labor Party more than met my needs. Tolerance, however, had its limits. Obscure foreign toughs could not be allowed to go cruising around my patch, staking out the offices of a perfectly respectable welfare organisation, without having their activities at least remarked upon. You have to draw the line somewhere.

I was standing on that line now, waiting for a wall of semi-trailers to pass, their tyres raising a slurry off the wet asphalt. Through the flashing gaps between each successive truck I saw the faces in the BMW turning impassively to observe my approach. Blue-shaven faces, hard-featured, don’t-fuck-with-me, no-speaka-da-English, see-this-knife faces. I closed on them, ten metres, five, two, suddenly regretting my bravado. A less confrontational, more oblique, more measured approach might be appropriate. Hi there, I could say. Looking for something? Can I help? Behind me Ayisha was on the footpath, gnawing that lip again.

The BMW trembled gently, flashed an indicator and inserted itself into the latest wave of steel and rubber hurtling down the southbound lane.

‘Piss off, you mongrels,’ I yelled at its departing bumper bar, fist in the air. ‘You’re in Australia now.’ An ancient Greek in a tram shelter looked up impassively from his cane. ‘Not you, mate,’ I hastened to reassure him. ‘Not you.’

Ayisha stood shaking her head in amazement, clapping and grinning, and I realised where my urge for heroics had come from. In like Flynn, I told myself. Up the Revolution.

Back inside, Sivan was still engrossed in his phone conversation. The inner office was empty. I walked through to the backyard. Gezen wasn’t in the outhouse either. Ayisha had slung her coat, a huge quilted thing, over her arm and was back on the footpath, looking up and down the street. ‘We’ve got to talk,’ I said.

‘Later.’ She climbed into a taxi and wound down the window. Her arm came out and I felt her palm, cool on my cheek, brushing past with the forward momentum of the cab. ‘You were fantastic. You won’t say anything, will you?’

Shit no. Leastways not until I got to a phone.

‘Here,’ said Ant. ‘Hold this.’

Two days before, this Pacific Pastoral caper had been a minor chance to earn a few brownie points with the powers. Now it was a major can of worms. If only I had come straight back to the electorate office after the funeral, I would have been sitting at my desk finishing off Charlene’s correspondence while arranging for some super-efficient roofing firm to drop around and seal my drips. Instead, it was already noon and, not only were my drips still dripping, I was standing around with a fluorescent tube under my arm watching Ant balance on an upended milk crate on the top of my desk.

Fixing the flickering overhead light was item four on a list of odd jobs Trish had given the tattooed complainant that morning. The first was replacing the toilet window that the burglars had broken. Then came adjusting the automatic closing gizmo on the front door, and eliminating the rattle in the gas wall-furnace. Trish was never one to let a chance go by. ‘He’s got nowhere else to go,’ she told me when I returned from the League and found him hoisting the milk crate onto my desk. ‘Apparently his girlfriend, Gail…’

‘G.A.I.L.’

‘She really has kicked him out. This morning I found him asleep in his car out the front. If you’re only going to hang around like a bad smell today, I told him, at least make yourself useful.’

So there he was, making himself so fucking useful I couldn’t get at my desk. How a man was supposed to get anything done in a lunatic asylum, let alone have a discreet telephone conversation about manslaughter, was anyone’s guess.

I passed the fluoro tube up with one hand and dialled the ministry with the other. Agnelli was such a smart lawyer, he was bound to know some similarly talented criminal lawyer. Between the two of them they could take Gezen off my hands, along with any uncomfortable legal consequences his impromptu confession might have thrown up. Presuming he ever surfaced again. More likely he’d had second thoughts about unburdening himself so freely and was currently sitting with his luggage in the international departure lounge at Tullamarine waiting for the next direct flight to Ankara.

I tried Agnelli’s direct line again. It was still engaged. Somehow Ayisha’s tobacco and matches had found their way into my jacket pocket. I rolled myself a calming smoke and called A-OK Allweather.

‘Yeah?’ This time it was a younger woman, bored and snappish.

‘Is that A-OK Allweather?’

‘Hold, please.’ Inane repetitive music blared.

‘Rip-off merchants,’ said a voice from above. Ant was slipping the diffuser panel back into place. ‘I done a job with them once. The specs said four gauge but they used two point six. Said no one would notice. Twenty years time the brackets’ll be completely stuffed. Shit work, mate, take my word for it.’

A deejay screeched in my ear like an enraged mouse trapped in an empty margarine container. ‘You telling me you know something about roofing?’ Number plates I could imagine, mail bags, a bit of hot wiring. Trish might have been impressed with this odd-job stuff around the office, but as far as I was concerned all it amounted to so far was oiling a sticky hinge and changing a few light globes.

‘Gas fitter by trade,’ said Ant. ‘But I’ve been around. Metal fabrication. Plumbing. Concrete. Roofs. You name it.’ The mouse went heavy metal. ‘What about domestic? Ordinary houses?’

Ant dropped something solid into his tool box and stepped down. ‘I might not be Bertram Russell, sport, but I know what domestic means.’

A-OK was still somewhere on the other side of a dozen howling chartbusters. I was sure that I would live to regret what I was about to say, but I was desperate enough to say it anyway. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I might be able to put a bit of work your way, round my place. We could nip across now if you like, have a quick look, tell me if you’re interested.’

‘Get fucked,’ said Ant amiably. ‘You’re just trying to get rid of me.’

‘By showing you where I live? You want some paid work or not?’

‘What sort of work?’

Fifteen minutes later we were standing on the footpath outside my front gate. The rain had stopped for the time being, but the sky pressed low and menacing. Drips hung from the rust-frayed gashes in the guttering and my ball of rags protruded above the line of the roof like a goitre. Ant clicked his tongue ominously. ‘I’ll need a ladder,’ he said, and headed down the side path, peering upwards and shaking his dead. Winding me up for a big slug, I assumed.

As the front door key snicked into place, a sound erupted inside the house. Heavy footsteps pounded in the bedroom. A shadow flashed across the leadlight panel, retreating towards the other end of the house. I twisted the key, cursing the stiffness of the lock. As the door finally flew open, a crash came echoing up the hall, followed by a muffled oath. I flew through the house and shot out the back door.

Ant was sprawled on his back, blood and broken teeth spewing from his mouth. The side fence rocked. I vaulted the rickety timber slats and landed amid the Vesuvius cups of Mrs Bagio’s foundation garments flapping on a rotary hoist. Footsteps sounded down the side of the sleepout. A second fence loomed, an obstacle course of old water pipes, Mr Bagio’s bean trellis. Up and over I went, rubbish bins breaking my drop. Down a driveway towards the street a car door slammed. I hit the nature strip just in time to see the tail-end of an early model Falcon 500, a flash of aqua blue, go fishtailing around the corner. But not before I got the last three digits of the rego number.

When I got back inside, Ant was sitting at the kitchen table. A damp towel tinged with pink was pressed to his mouth and he was poking around a saucer filled with fragments of denture—a palaeontological exhibit, the upper jaw of homo pictorial. He peeled away the cloth to display a mush of split lips and swelling nose. ‘Fuck was that?’ he lisped. ‘Cunt hit me in the face with the screen door.’

It didn’t seem the appropriate time to instruct him on non-sexist language. ‘Some junkie low-life, I guess.’ I panted. ‘Driving some piece of shit.’

‘Get anything?’

I doubted it. Whoever it was—not that I’d actually seen them—had not been moving like someone with a television set under their arm. I took a look around. There was no sign of forced entry, no broken window or splinter marks around the locks. Everything seemed pretty much as I had left it when I’d gone to work. I had to laugh, imagining the look of dismay on the face of any housebreaker unlucky or dumb enough to target this place. Across the mouldy-smelling carpet of damp newspapers covering the lounge room the stereo was untouched.

A couple of years before, Wendy had come home and found the front door open, the place clumsily ransacked, the portable tape deck missing. It was a nuisance and an intrusion, but the occasional break-in by bored kids or junkie desperados was only to be expected. It was all part of the inexorable process that begins with heritage colours and native gardens and culminates in some Liberal-voting busybody ringing your bell one night while you’re eating dinner to ask if you’d be interested in helping set up a local chapter of Neighbourhood Watch. If you found the odd burglary impossible to live with you might as well sell up and lock yourself away in some high-security terrace in Fitzroy or a flat in St Kilda. If you were going to be pillaged like a member of the gentry, you might as well live like one. All it took was about fifty grand, which I didn’t have.

The bedroom was a mess, but no more than usual. By the look of it, we’d disturbed the intruder early in the piece. I lingered, shutting drawers and smoothing down the bed covers, slight gestures to re-assert my presence. Discarded socks, mine and Red’s, lay scattered on the floor. I began scooping them up. It was like I’d been caught in a car accident wearing dirty underpants.

Having some joker sneaking about the house didn’t worry me much—I’d just sent the creep packing, after all. But this was the sort of thing that could easily upset a little kid. It wasn’t as though I’d found a steaming turd in Wendy’s knickers drawer or anything, but a couple of hours either way and it could have been Red’s face being smashed in with the screen door. Better not to mention it. I paired off the socks and tossed them into the laundry basket until I was down to a solitary black thing with a hole in the heel. ‘Just one sock missing, then, sir?’ I could hear the police asking.

I knelt down beside the bed and stuck my hand under. What I found wasn’t a sock. It was a zip-locking plastic bag containing more marijuana than I had ever seen in my life. There must have been a good two ounces of it, packed down hard. Either Red was more precocious than I gave him credit for, or our unknown intruder had fled with considerably less that he came with. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the grass, wondering what to do with it.

Ant stomped up the hall, his ballooning lip curling back to reveal an obscene flash of tongue and gum. ‘Where’s that ladder, then?’