Stiff (29 page)

As Agnelli drove he reached into his inside jacket pocket. ‘You seem to have forgotten just how close to the bottom end of the political food chain you are, sport. Talk about Whelan the Wrecker. A trained chimpanzee could have done a better job.’ He had a piece of paper in his hand. My report to MACWAM. ‘No immediate cause for concern…Press reports having no basis in fact.’ He quoted my concluding paragraphs snidely and flapped the page in my face and changed lanes. ‘You’re deliberately trying to make me look like an idiot in front of the committee, aren’t you? “No cause for concern.” Shit, yesterday there was only one dead body, now there’s two and for all I know the count is still climbing.’

He stuffed the paper back in his pocket. I took it that I was supposed to be impressed by all of this. The car was overheated and stuffy and I’d had a hell of a night. I closed my eyes, let a gentle torpor settle over me, and concentrated on getting the octopus to go back to sleep. I guess I must have yawned. This did not go down well.

‘You think it’s a joke, don’t you?’ Agnelli screamed. ‘I’ve got Merricks on the phone at the crack of fucking dawn screaming government incompetence at the top of his tits, and you think it’s a joke. Half the fucking joint burned down and the other half is out of commission indefinitely. If you had one iota of decency, you’d resign on the spot. You’d order me to stop the car, right here and now, and get out. You’d resign and spare Charlene, and the rest of us any further embarrassment.’ He slowed down, as if I might take him up on the suggestion and throw myself out of the moving vehicle. ‘You, mate, are in more shit than a Bondi surfer.’

A sticker on the front of the glovebox thanked me for not smoking. I reached over and tried to peel it off. The sticker was made out of some sort of paper that tore when I pulled it. Thank You for Not, it now read. ‘One thing I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘The story in the
Sun
on Monday. How did you do that part?’

Agnelli did not miss a beat, I’ll say that for him. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘It’s all been bullshit, hasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Lollicato was never planning a challenge at all. You’ve been feeding me crap from the word go, keeping me busy chasing my own tail.’

Agnelli was suddenly deeply intent on the traffic. He seemed to find it hard to speak while getting his mouth back down below melting point. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘Because you’re lining yourself up to challenge Charlene.’

‘Ah,’ he said, a long, upwardly-inflected exhale. It was, I knew, as close as he would come to an admission.

‘And Charlene?’ I said.

‘Charlene?’

‘Yeah, the woman you’re busy trying to shaft. How is she?’

He shrugged. ‘Ask her yourself,’ he said.

We were in Royal Parade by then, going down the long tunnel of shade cast by the avenue of big trees. I closed my eyes, feigning sleep. After a while the silence got to Agnelli. He snapped on the radio. It was the ABC. Crap, crap. Blah, blah. Then we got the ten o’clock news. The Reagan reelection campaign was entering its final phase. The word Armageddon was mentioned. Marcos had ordered the trial of suspects in the Benigno Aquino killing. I couldn’t see much coming of that. The Maralinga Royal Commission had commenced. The British High Commissioner was bitching that Britain’s name was being dragged through the mud. So not all the news was bad, then.

After five minutes of this, I had almost fallen asleep for real. Then the local bulletin came on. The fire had already been overtaken by more current stories. In a joint state–commonwealth police operation, illegal gambling equipment had been seized from an address in Brunswick overnight. It was believed that charges relating to immigration offences would be laid in the near future. After that I must have dozed off properly, because the next thing I knew Agnelli had pulled into a vacant space outside the Peter MacCallum Institute. That woke me up quick smart. Peter Mac is a cancer hospital. ‘What are we doing here?’

‘Talking to Charlene.’ That was as much as I could get out of him.

‘She’s okay though, isn’t she?’

‘You’re so fucking smart,’ he said. ‘You tell me.’ He led the way along halls that smelled like the 1930s, all wax and boracic soap. Outside her room he softened a little. ‘She wants to tell you herself,’ he said.

Charlene was in a private room, in a bed with too many pillows, a view of the back end of the Titles Office, and ominous plumbing fixtures. She was propped up with a tube sticking into her arm and another coming out her nose. It was the first time I had ever seen her without make-up. Her complexion was parchment, as if her face had ceded priority to more demanding parts of her metabolism. Her customary rigid helmet of a perm had flopped into a lifeless mat. She looked a hundred. Whatever was happening to her was happening fast.

She was studying a document. Her reading glasses had slipped down to the end of her nose and she looked over the top of them. A major display of gladioli had been shoved to the back of the bedside table to make way for dispatch boxes. Arthur, her driver, was standing at the foot of the bed scrutinising his shoes.

‘Lovely,’ she whispered. ‘Beaut.’ She signed the page, handed it to Arthur, and sank backwards. Arthur nodded to us on the way out, far too emphatically.

Wordlessly Agnelli and I parted and stood one on each side of the bed. Charlene took off her glasses and put them aside. She winced at the effort and tried to hide it. ‘Sit down,’ she ordered. Her voice was a tremulous echo of what it had been.

The visitors’ chairs were made of tubular metal and plywood and had been painted cream sometime during the Battle of Balaclava. Mine shrieked when I dragged it across the floor. I cringed and sat down as quietly as I could.

‘It’s just a few tests,’ Charlene said. ‘Not the death of Napoleon.’ Paradoxically, her frailty made her seem all the more powerful. ‘Angelo told you?’ she said.

‘Told me what?’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Didn’t want you getting any wrong ideas.’

‘What’s wrong, Charlene?’ I said. ‘You look terrible.’ I thought I could tell her that because it was something she would already know.

‘Bit of a growth,’ she said. ‘An opportunity to reorder my priorities.’

One of her hands lay on top of the bedclothes, like a chook’s claw with rings on. She let me pick it up. It was cool to touch. As she spoke, I rubbed it between my palms. It didn’t seem to get any warmer.

‘I’ve decided to retire,’ she said. ‘The Premier knows. One or two others. Now I’m telling you.’ To my eternal shame my first thought was of myself. Charlene read my mind. ‘It’s all been taken care of,’ she said. ‘Angelo.’

Agnelli leaped up, strode to the foot of the bed and gripped the metal bed-end. Rehearsing, I realised as he spoke, his new role. ‘Charlene and the faction leaders have agreed that I should take on Melbourne Upper,’ he announced, pausing long enough for Charlene’s silence to constitute confirmation.

I assumed she would have some pretty good motives for going along with this caper. She lay impassively, giving me no hint what they might be.

‘As you know,’ Agnelli went on, addressing the chart above Charlene’s head. ‘There are always those at the local level who find it difficult to reconcile these sorts of decisions with both traditional practices and their own personal agendas.’

Charlene fidgeted impatiently under the sheets. ‘Cut the cackle, Angelo. You’re not in parliament yet,’ she said. She inclined her head in my direction and spoke so softly I had to bend closer to hear her. She did this, I realised, to stir Agnelli. ‘The truth is, Murray, this close to an election we can’t afford another factional brawl over preselection. Angelo is what you might call’—here she paused and made a minor show of looking for the right word—‘acceptable to both the left and the right.’

‘Acceptable?’ I said. ‘This is quite a surprise.’ Agnelli couldn’t conceal a look of triumph. ‘And it’s bound to be messy.’ Agnelli temporarily shelved his hubris. I went on. ‘Parachuting in some heavyweight with high-level connections and expecting the local branches to endorse him. It won’t go down very well.’

‘Quite right,’ said Charlene ambiguously. ‘That’s why we want you to smooth over the transition. Help Angelo garner the support he’ll need in the electorate. That sort of thing.’

Do Agnelli’s dirty work for him? Like buggery I would. ‘Ange has just finished telling me how little confidence he has in me,’ I said.

‘Ah, don’t be so thin-skinned,’ said Agnelli. ‘You think I’d want you if I didn’t think you could do the job?’

‘Aside from which,’ said Charlene, more to the point, ‘someone well regarded in the electorate will need to be right there beside you all the way through the process.’

An immediate answer seemed to be required. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Perhaps Charlene took my silence for a rebuke. She pretended, at least I hope she was pretending, that is was a negotiating silence.

‘Angelo has agreed,’ she said, ‘that in return for my support, and as a personal favour to me, that he will retain you as his electoral officer for at least the next parliamentary term, whether or not we are in government. His agreement is a matter of record. Isn’t that right, Angelo?’

‘Absolutely,’ said the fucking snake who little more than half an hour before had been trying to get me to jump out of his car.

The temptation to tell Agnelli to shove it was strong. But Charlene had obviously gone to some pains to see me looked after in whatever deals Agnelli was busy cutting. And, truth be known, it was hardly an ideal time to be looking for a new job. The Family Court did not look kindly on the custody claims of unemployed fathers. Aide-de-camp to Agnelli wasn’t exactly the Ambassador to Ireland but it was a job. And a boy must have a job. I couldn’t bring myself to say yes, so I just nodded.

‘Good boy,’ said Charlene and squeezed my hand. ‘Forgive me?’

I never found out what she meant by that. A hippo-faced specialist in a white coat barged through the door with a clutch of chinless interns in tow and turfed me and Agnelli out. That’s what you get for not going to the right schools.

If she meant, did I forgive her for leg-roping me to Angelo Agnelli’s political fortunes, the answer was yes. The decision was mine and I’ve accepted responsibility for it.

If she meant, did I forgive her for conniving with Agnelli to send me on a wild goose chase, the answer is I don’t know. I don’t know because I could never bring myself to ask the prick if Charlene was party to it, so I’ll never know if there was anything to forgive. Nor could I bring myself to enquire too fully into the intricacies of the deal that saw Agnelli become the party’s endorsed candidate for Melbourne Upper. The fact is some things just don’t bear too close examination. Sometimes it’s enough just to know that you’re still on the team. I held my hand out to Agnelli.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Comrade.’

The rest is, as they say, ongoing context. Let me parameter the specifics for you.

Charlene was out of hospital the next day just in time to usher the workplace insurance legislation safely into law and see the end of the spring session of parliament. Three days later she announced her resignation and a week after that writs were issued for a state election. While all this was happening, I was having a few sleepless nights waiting for the coppers to come knocking on my door. When they hadn’t turned up after a month, I knew they probably never would.

We won the election, despite the best efforts of the
Sun
, with an increased majority. We even picked up a marginal gain in Melbourne Upper, but only at the booths in the heaviest Italian areas. Five months later Charlene was dead. We gave her a wonderful send-off and she’s buried out at Fawkner Cemetery. Eternally committed to the electorate is probably the way she’d put it. Keeping in touch with the grass roots.

Going out there again, past those rows of tombs lined up like a miniature set from some sword and sandal epic, reminded me of those weirdos with the military salutes standing over Bayraktar’s coffin. By then I knew what had been going on, or thought I did. Coates and I had pieced the basics together, and I fleshed the rest out from incidental titbits that Agnelli picked up on the legal grapevine when the Anatolia Club gambling case came up.

Appearances can be deceptive. At first sight the fact that the Anatolia Club looked so much like a small private casino blinded me to the fact that it essentially was just that. And as such had certain requirements in the way of personnel. That’s where Bayraktar came in, initially at least.

The proprietors, including the two bozos I’d seen at the cemetery, had imported Bayraktar from Turkey to act as their debt collector. They were former military officers and Bayraktar had once been an NCO, so they might have known him from the army. Perhaps he’d merely been recommended by their crim colleagues in West Germany. In any case, he turned out to be a bit of a liability, inclined to shake down the clientele on his own account. Rather than grasp the nettle the way that Gardiner ultimately did, they suggested he find employment elsewhere. But they let him keep his little flat out the back, a sort of implicit threat to any of their customers tempted to welsh on their commitments.

Temporarily forced to work for a living, Bayraktar had fallen on his feet. First he was recruited by Gardiner to front the payroll scam. Then he began putting the squeeze on likely fellow employees. Eventually he worked out that Pacific Pastoral provided the ideal set-up for shifting drugs about the countryside. When Gardiner eventually got fed up with all these extracurricular antics and give him the big chill, the crew at the Anatolia Club were probably as relieved as anyone else.

But he had been a fellow soldier, and honour required that his death not go uncommemorated. His former associates at the club signed for his body, chipped in for a medium-priced Martinelli walnut overcoat and stood in the rain at attention for two minutes. I can only hope someone does as much for me when the time comes.

Not that any of this came out at the inquest. No new evidence was presented to counter the original supposition that the fat boy had taken a heart turn in the midst of laying in his weekend supplies of scotch fillet. The coroner came down on the side of natural causes, and took the opportunity to comment broadly on the importance of maintaining safe work practices in the cool-storage industry. The Department of Labour responded with a press release pointing out that it was in the process of amending the regulations regarding mandatory aisle-widths and expected to gazette them in the not-too-distant future.