Stiff (4 page)

So Picone folded his hands in his lap and humoured Agnelli by not interrupting him while he played the minister’s hard man. What more could he be expected to do? his face seemed to say. Hadn’t he come all the way into town in Murray Whelan’s decrepit Renault, walked up all those steps in the freezing wind, pretended to be impressed by this overblown colonial copy of some Palladian palazzo?

‘Charlene is very disappointed,’ Agnelli was saying. ‘She’s a good friend of the community. You should be ashamed.’

Then Charlene Wills herself came through the door, her plump frame rounded off by the shoulder pads of her knit suit.

‘Maestro Picone was wondering if you would be available to be guest of honour at the Carboni Club annual dinner dance,’ I said. ‘He thinks it would be an ideal opportunity for the community to thank you for your work in securing funding for the new senior citizens’ centre. Isn’t that right, Maestro?’

Charlene tossed a bulky buff envelope onto the desk in front of Agnelli. ‘Lovely. Delighted. Check the diary, Angelo. You’ll stay for lunch of course, Ennio? Hello, Murray. You’ll have the file back on my desk first thing in the morning, won’t you Angelo? Or my life won’t be worth living.’ She was already out the door, her constituency on her arm.

The envelope landed with a thud. It carried the logo of the Office of the Coroner and had something scrawled across the front in heavy felt-tipped pen. Upside down I could read the words ‘Pacific Pastoral/Ekrem Bayraktar.’

As God is my witness, I should have got up and walked away then and there.

Agnelli scooped up the envelope, flourished it triumphantly, and took off up the stairs like he either had an appointment with destiny or a very full bladder. Once outside, he braced himself against the squall blowing along Spring Street, hurtled down the parliamentary declivity and led me onwards into the city.

Since Agnelli was buying, I was content to let him lead. Especially since his destination appeared to be The Society, where a free lunch was worth having. But he didn’t falter as he tore past its tinted windows, and I caught only the barest sparkle of silver cutlery before he darted across the road and headed up a lane.

Conversation was impossible. Apart from maintaining a blistering pace, we were both fully occupied negotiating a passage through mountains of old cobblestones and untidy hillocks of sand. What had been a mere footpath for the previous hundred years was in the process of being converted into a pedestrian access facility harmonised to the heritage aspects of the built-form environment. And judging by the amount of excavation going on, it was putting up quite a bit of resistance. Either that or the city council was financing the exercise by strip-mining the entire precinct for minerals.

This kind of obstacle course was something we were all getting used to. Ever since Labor’s arrival in power the city had taken on the aspect of a vast construction site. The leadership had wasted no time making it abundantly clear to both the business end of town and its own membership that the party’s historical antagonism to speculation was a thing of the past. A government that couldn’t come up with jobs wouldn’t last five minutes. Property development equalled jobs and no sentiment was to be wasted on sentiment. Overnight, ancient landmarks became vast pits filled with tip-trucks and management types in business shirts and hard hats.

In keeping with its resolve on the issue, the government had just given some of the more boisterous elements in the building unions a severe judicial crutching. As a result, there were so many construction hoardings and concrete trucks in the city it was impossible to find anywhere to park. And deep festering pools of bad blood awaited the unwary at the Trades Hall.

So far none of those juicy new jobs had come my way. Meanwhile my sense of historical geography was having the shit shot out of it. The old familiar shape of things was changing so fast that it was sometimes hard to know exactly where I stood.

I had no such problem that day, however. Our objective was clearly Chinatown. The pavers beneath our feet had taken on a decidedly oriental motif and all around us gaggles of almond-eyed citizens nicked in and out of eating houses with dead ducks in their windows and names like Good Luck Village and New Dynasty. At a dragon-entwined archway Agnelli abruptly stopped and pushed open a black lacquered portal encrusted with brass studs the size of the hubcaps on a Honda Civic.

I was pleasantly surprised and immediately suspicious. My initial assumption when we entered Chinatown was that Agnelli’s generosity would run no further than a cheap dim sum, hardly worth my ten-kilometre drive into town. Instead, I found myself being ushered through a grove of bamboo into the Mandarin Palace, winner for three years in succession of the Golden Chopsticks Award in the
Age
Good Gourmet Guide. Judging by the high standard of grovelling we got from the smoothie in the Chou En-lai suit who handed us the menus, Agnelli was a regular.

It was hard to credit that this Agnelli was the same nervy solicitor who had come tentatively tapping on my door at the Municipal Workers’ Union ten years earlier, asking to be introduced around the traps. The legal firm that looked after our workers’ compensation cases had just taken him on. He joked that he’d probably only got the job because the senior partners assumed he could speak to some of the plaintiffs in their own language.

In reality, his language skills consisted essentially of what he had managed to pick up in his mother’s kitchen in Mitcham. His Italian was dialect, secondhand, and unintelligible to most of his clients, especially the Italians. On top of which, he was an indifferent litigator, not that that’s ever been an impediment to a successful legal career. But he took to industrial law like a duck to water. For the following three years he pursued it so avidly that he eventually caught enough to hang out his own shingle.

Poaching the best of his old firm’s clients and spreading his briefs generously around the barristers’ chambers, he steadily built an impressive network in the law and the unions. Now here he was, factional heavyweight, member of the state executive of the Socialist Left, and if not the architect then at least the master builder of some of the government’s most ambitious reforms. Self-approbation burst from him like a fountain from a ruptured pipe.

He sat the coroner’s envelope face-down on the floor beside his chair, murmured something in the waiter’s ear, and pressed a steaming white hand towel to his florid cheeks. ‘How’s Wendy?’ he said. ‘Still enjoying Canberra?’

The family small talk was to demonstrate that he hadn’t lost the common touch. ‘Fine. She’s fine.’ I hoped I didn’t sound too unconvincing. The truth was I hadn’t spoken to my wife in over two weeks and hoped it stayed that way.

‘You two certainly make an odd couple,’ Agnelli went on. ‘There she is, flying about the country in her power suit, shouldering bureaucrats aside, writing policy for the PM’s department. Here you are, sitting in a three-metre-square cubicle, doing Charlene’s housework.’

Agnelli’s line on my personal life wasn’t so much tactless as simply out of date. The fact was Wendy and I were over in everything but name. All that remained was the inevitable public brawl over custody of our child, Redmond. As Agnelli might have put it, Wendy was out of my league. And she’d worked so hard getting there I was relieved to see her go.

Wendy had been in Canberra for nearly a year on secondment from the Women’s Information Referral Exchange to the Office of the Status of Women Industrial and Technological Change Secretariat. Originally the job had been temporary, four months tops. But life with OSWITCS had proven infinitely more personally empowering than WIRE and her contract kept being extended.

When the offer had first come up, a tribute to Wendy’s professional standing, I could hardly have stood in the way of her career, could I? Red would miss her but, now that he was settled into school, it was my turn to experience a stint of prime parenting. It was only for a few months, after all, and she would be commuting back to Melbourne two weekends a month. Sure, I said, go.

Ten months later, the so-far-undeclared reality was self-evident. The weekends at home had become more infrequent, what with the conferences in Darwin and Perth, the in-service-skills-enhancement seminars in Cairns, and Wendy’s ongoing professional need to piss in every pocket within a bull’s roar of Lake Burley Griffin. Separation had merely confirmed what we had probably long suspected anyway. Our lives were going in opposite directions.

Not that anything had been spelt out yet. It didn’t need to be. We were both old hands at reading which way the wind was blowing. Wendy still phoned Red most nights. She could never be accused of being an uncaring mother. Absent yes, negligent no. Sometimes it was me who picked up the phone when it rang and we exchanged banalities, but there was little the two of us could find to say to each other any more.

I took it for granted there was someone else. Bound to be. I even had a mental picture—Senior Executive Service, fleet vehicle, desktop computer, divorced, weekender at Batemans Bay, beard. Not that I minded. I felt no rancour. I just didn’t want to know about it. And if Wendy had any ideas about getting Red, she and the Family Court had another think coming.

‘So,’ Agnelli was saying, ‘she still funding long-term unemployed Tasmanian lesbians to build mud-brick whale refuges?’

What a jerk. You had to laugh. A platter of minced pigeon breast arrived, too pricey a dish to be paid for with domestic chit-chat. While the waiter was shovelling a load onto my plate I fed Agnelli his cue. ‘If you want someone killed,’ I said, ‘it’ll cost you more than a feed of sang choi bao.’

Agnelli smiled the thinnest of thin smiles. Ministerial advisers were part of the new breed, technical experts who did not like to be reminded, even in jest, of the sometimes rough and tumble reality of political life in the branches and the machine. Politics for them was just another career option. These guys hadn’t got where they were without at least some political credentials—Agnelli’s ticket had been punched by Labor Lawyers and his clients in the unions—but their personal writ ran no further than the distance between their ministers’ ears.

Top-level access and plush salary packages made them feel important, but they were uncomfortable and sometimes even a little fearful in the rough company of party organisers from down the line. And they never really knew where they were with battlefield sergeants like me, crude types who came fully equipped with invisible networks, tacit alliances, and uncertain ambitions. We who could fill halls with a single phone call. Jokes about having people knocked off and knowing where the bodies were buried made the likes of Agnelli nervous. And he didn’t need any reminding that it would take more than a free lunch to get me where he wanted me. Or so I thought.

Agnelli launched his spiel. ‘Let’s contextualise. Then we can parameter the specifics.’

It was getting so I couldn’t tell if people were joking when they talked like that. I gave Agnelli the benefit of the doubt.

‘Charlene’s held her seat for what, ten years?’ he asked blandly.

I plucked a figure out of the air. ‘Eleven years, two months, five days.’

The sarcasm was wasted. Agnelli was winding himself up to something. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘To think that all but two and a half years of that was spent in Opposition. What a waste of talent.’

‘I’ll tell her you said that,’ I said. ‘Sucking up to the boss on your own time.’

Agnelli made a self-deprecating gesture. ‘I’m like you, Murray. Strictly an idealist. Goes without saying. It’s the others I worry about. The ones who can’t wait to get their snouts into the trough.’

Lollicato again, I thought. Boring. When were we going to get to the envelope and, with luck, the story behind the report in the
Sun
?

‘Ah, but think how useful a bit of general ambition is to a reforming government like ours,’ I said. ‘Everybody out there, beavering away, racking up brownie points, hoping to be given the nod.’

‘Granted.’ Agnelli was working overtime at being agreeable. ‘But all that nervous energy needs to be managed, directed, channelled. Problem is, the collective memory is short. Even some of our own people seem to have forgotten that no Labor government has ever been re-elected in this state. Three years ago nobody under forty could remember the last time there was a Labor government here. Now half the reporters in town can’t remember when there wasn’t one. And the way some people are carrying on, there won’t be one for much longer.’

Unbidden, steaming platters arrived, glistening and fragrant. I should have held on to my suspicions more firmly. Instead, I picked up my chopsticks and waded in. ‘Not Lollicato again?’

The ma-po beancurd was ravishing. Pungent and slimy. I decided to let Agnelli do all the talking.

‘If I was him,’ he said, referring to Lollicato, ‘I’d be thinking that my best chance of knocking off Charlene would be to undermine her credibility as Minister for Industry. Quietly stir up some sort of business–union conflict then step back and watch the fireworks. Do it all at a distance. That way I wouldn’t have her blood on my hands when I get reluctantly drafted to replace her after she’s become a liability to the party.’

It wasn’t a bad plan, but I couldn’t see Lollicato pulling it off. ‘Bit ambitious for Lolly, isn’t it? He’d be lucky if he could knock the head off a beer.’

Agnelli drew his chair closer to the table, squared off his chopsticks, picked up a fat ginger scallop and dropped it into my bowl. ‘Joe Lollicato’s very well connected at Trades Hall, don’t forget. His brother used to be an organiser with the Meat Packers’ Union. And there are plenty in the union movement who are still dirty on the government over those building union prosecutions. They might be on the back foot at the moment, but setting Charlene up for a fall would be a good way of telling the government to stay out of union business.’

It was all quite plausible. ‘That’s the greatest load of shit I’ve ever heard, Ange,’ I said. ‘That rarefied air you’ve been breathing has gone to your head.’