The Brush-Off (4 page)

Despite his nickname, there was nothing arachnoid about Spider. No spindly limbs or jutting canines. On the contrary. He had an athletic build, high cheekbones and fleshy, petulant lips. He would almost have been handsome if not for his ears. You only had to look at Noel Webb to know why they called them jug ears. Chrome-plated, his head wouldn't have looked out of place in a trophy cabinet. Wing-nut would have been a better nickname. But Spider, despite Noel's dislike for it, was the one that stuck. It suited him. There was something predatory about Spider, cold-blooded, self-serving. He'd been like that at sixteen, and he was still like that. You could read it in his pose. We'd been friends once, or so I thought. Then things had happened, violent things that gave me no reason whatsoever to want to renew our boyhood acquaintance. Especially since Spider had clearly fulfilled the criminal promise of his youth. I hoped to Jesus he didn't recognise me.

As I approached, he massaged a piece of chewing gum loose from its pack, tossed it into his mouth and rolled his head like a prize-fighter readying himself for a bout. I resigned myself to our reunion, waiting for him to speak.

But Spider said nothing, gave no explicit sign of recognition. It had been a long time. With luck, he might not remember me. If he didn't speak, I decided, neither would I.

Back to the wall, I sidled past, head up, eyes straight ahead. We were almost exactly the same height and so close that my own face stared back at me from the mercury pools of Spider's sunglasses. Stereoscopic reflections, I thought, of a man not quite succeeding in mastering his loathing.

Spider straightened a little to allow me passage but still he said nothing. His face had slackened into a sphinx-like inscrutability. Only the muscles of his jaw moved, flexing almost imperceptibly around his gum, a gesture of contemptuous amusement at the discomfort of a stranger. Still an arsehole after all these years.

I pressed on. As I crossed the final few paces to the lift, I heard a dismissive, barely audible grunt and felt hidden eyes boring into my back. Then the lift doors yawned before me and out stepped Alan, a polystyrene cup in his hand, his gaze darting towards the Fairlane. Nodding, I stepped into the lift. As the doors whoomphed closed behind me, I felt a shudder of what could have been either relief or foreboding.

If ever there was a bird of ill omen, it was Spider Webb. Loosen up, I told myself, pushing the button for the top floor. It's only a job. It's not the measure of your worth as a human being. There's always the slow descent into alcoholism and penury to look forward to.

The door slid open to a re-enactment of the evacuation of Saigon. Boxes of documents littered the corridors. Base-grade clerks from the Translation and Information sections bustled about, pushing trolleys in and out of rooms. Trish stood feeding files into the shredder. I recognised one of mine,
Current Issues in the Macedonian Community
. It was a slim document and held no state secrets, but that wasn't the point.

Agnelli had been at Ethnic Affairs long enough to generate more than enough stuff-ups to provide ammunition to his political enemies. Especially those from his own party. So before his replacement arrived everything short of the potted plants would be fed into the shredder. By the end of the day, some of my most skilfully wrought briefing papers would be reduced to a pile of fly-specked tagliatelle in the ministerial dumpster. I prayed that I wouldn't be in there with them.

Back when she ran the electorate office, Trish had been a rough diamond, well-upholstered and ready for anything. She was efficient, smart and knew her stuff. Eventually, Agnelli was persuaded to overlook her rougher edges and reward her loyalty with a promotion. A monster was born. Within a month of being made his private secretary, she'd joined Gloria Marshall and taken a course in fire breathing. Success, in accordance with the fashion of the day, had gone straight to her shoulders. She glanced up from the papery gnashing of her task and tossed a nod in the general direction of Agnelli's shut door. ‘Take a number and wait,' she commanded.

I took it into my office and had a cigarette with it. Ours was a smoke-free environment, but what the fuck—as of now I didn't work here any more. Out the window, across the wilting greenery of the gardens, glass-walled towers quivered in the heat haze, molten swords plunged into the heart of the city. In the gaps between, ant-sized men plied construction cranes. Hardier men than the likes of me.

The building boom sustained by Labor's rule was at its peak, a relentless reordering of the skyline that was the most tangible evidence of the government's success. Everywhere the old was being jackhammered away and replaced with the spanking new. So headlong was the charge of money into real estate that slow-footed city shoppers risked being knocked down in the rush to build yet another office tower or luxury hotel. Anything more than twenty years old was obsolete. Yesterday's skyscrapers were today's holes in the ground. Tomorrow's landmarks had lakes in their foyers and computer-monitored pollen filters and the city council was putting little lights in the trees so we'd think it was Christmas all year round.

Not that I, as I pondered my options, had anything to celebrate. My attachment to Agnelli, like his loyalty to me, was contingent on the political realities. Bypassed for promotion this time, Ange would need plenty of runs on the board if he hoped to impress the Premier next time around. My employability depended on how useful he thought I could be in achieving that outcome. This we both understood.

Anybody working in politics who claims to be without personal ambition is a liar. That I hadn't yet quite formulated the nature of my own particular aspirations was beside the point. The fact that I'd placed my political loyalties at Agnelli's disposal for the previous four years didn't mean I had no interests of my own. If Agnelli thought I'd go quietly, he could think again. At the very least he should find me a new position appropriate to my skills. Try to throw me out with the dirty bath water, and he'd soon find that I had plenty of influential friends in the party who'd take a dim view of that sort of behaviour. Plenty. I tried to think of several.

While I was waiting for a name to come to mind, I finished my cigarette. Our smoke-free environment, naturally enough, provided no ashtrays so I took the butt into the executive washroom and stuffed it down the basin plughole. The executive washroom was what we jokingly called the small private bathroom off the minister's inner office. Supposedly for Angelo's exclusive use, it was also accessible from my office. Since it had an exhaust fan, I'd sometimes slip in for a quick concentration-enhancing puff when no-one was looking.

The door leading into Angelo's office was open a crack and I could hear his voice. He sounded keyed up. ‘A new broom,' he was saying. ‘Energetically wielded.'

I was history.

‘Money is the key.' Just the sort of thing you'd expect to hear Agnelli barking down the phone. ‘All the policies in the world won't save us if we don't go into the election with a decent campaign fund.'

Party matters were the subject, so he wasn't speaking to a bureaucrat from one of his new ministries. Whoever it was, my employer was warming to his topic. ‘It's time to start getting serious.'

‘The finance committee's doing everything it can, Angelo.'

Ange wasn't on the phone. He had a visitor. I knew the voice. Duncan Keogh, one of a number of assistant state secretaries from party headquarters. Keogh was a smarmy popinjay, a twenty-seven-year-old smarty pants who could barely remember when Labor wasn't in power. He approached politics as though its exclusive purpose was to provide a career structure for otherwise unemployable graduates of Monash University.

Why, I couldn't help but ask myself, was Agnelli closeted with a mid-level machine man like Duncan when he should have been more concerned with the pressing business of the day, the outcome of the Cabinet reshuffle?

‘Duncan,' I heard my boss say wearily. ‘You're our third finance committee chair in eighteen months. I'm not saying you aren't competent, otherwise I'd never have supported you for the appointment. But you just don't have the sort of clout you need to be effective.'

Keogh needed more than clout. He needed a brain transplant and a personality upgrade. He was a non-performer who had inveigled himself into the finance committee chair by singing some bullshit song about new blood and fresh ideas. Agnelli had bought it, against my recommendation, and seconded Keogh's nomination. Duncan's subsequent performance had been conspicuously ordinary. With any luck, Agnelli had summoned the twerp to tell him he'd better start delivering, that he should either shit or get off the pot.

‘Cabinet-level influence is what you need, Duncan. And that's what I'm proposing to give you,' he said. ‘With you in the chair and me setting the agenda, we can move our fundraising efforts to a whole new level.'

I didn't like the direction this conversation was taking.

Raising the cash needed to run election campaigns was a chronic headache. Last time we'd gone to the polls, we had to mortgage party headquarters to cover the cost of the how-to-vote cards. And, lacking the conservatives' traditional allies in big business, we were forced to scratch for cash wherever we could find it. But rattling the tin for money was a task best undertaken at a very long arm's length from the positions occupied by people like Angelo Agnelli. It was a job best done by more anonymous members of the party apparatus. Collectors of membership dues. Organisers of mail-outs. Conductors of wine-bottlings and quiz-nights. Men like Duncan Keogh. Not Cabinet ministers.

‘I'll still be the chairperson,' said Keogh. ‘Right?'

I could hear his tiny mind ticking over. Letting Agnelli pull the strings, he was thinking, would be a good idea. He would win a big friend and move a little closer to the centre of the action. Agnelli could do all the work and Duncan would still get to put ‘Chairperson, Finance Committee' on his CV.

‘Absolutely,' said Angelo. ‘So, how much have we got in the kitty right now?'

‘Just over four hundred thousand,' said Keogh. ‘Union affiliations and membership levies, mostly. Half in Commonwealth bonds, half on deposit at the State Bank.' A safe player, our Duncan. If this was his idea of a fresh approach, no wonder our finances were in such a parlous condition.

‘We're going to need a shitload more than that,' said Agnelli. ‘A million five, minimum. What about corporate donors?'

Keogh cleared his throat nervously. ‘Barely a pat on the head, so far. About ten grand all up. But we're setting up a sub-committee to look at a strategy to improve that figure.'

‘A committee!' Agnelli snorted derisively. ‘The skyline's full of cranes. Fucking sunrise industries left, right and centre. People making money out of our polices hand over fist. And ten grand is the most they can cough up. What's wrong with these pricks?'

Keogh was really on the ropes now. ‘It's a sensitive area. Either they give or they don't. Mostly they don't.'

Another voice weighed into the discussion, soothing, placatory. ‘Duncan's right, Angelo,' it said. ‘This is a sensitive area. Go blundering around putting the hard word on the business community, you'll end up being accused of peddling influence.'

For the life of me, I couldn't put a face to the voice. But whoever he was, he was talking sense.

‘See,' said Keogh, vindicated. ‘It's not as easy as you seem to think.'

But the other speaker hadn't finished. ‘That's not to say that there aren't ways of approaching these matters. Take your new portfolio, for example, Angelo.' The voice was of a man used to being listened to, someone at ease in a minister's office. ‘Your accounts department alone employs, what, four or five hundred people.' He was speaking, he wanted it understood, hypothetically. ‘That's a lot of office space. Property developers pay sweeteners to private corporations to secure long-term leases on their new buildings. If some of them were to get the idea that the Water Supply Commission was thinking about moving house…'

‘Jesus,' groaned Keogh. ‘We're treading perilously close to the line here.'

‘You don't think the Liberals wouldn't be even more cosy with their business cronies if they had the chance?' said Agnelli.

The more I heard of this, the faster my disquiet turned into outright anxiety. Knowing Angelo as well as I did, it didn't take too much mental exertion to figure out what he was up to. He'd decided to do a bit of lateral thinking.

Like the weather, campaign finances were something that everybody complained about, but nobody did anything to fix. Angelo, evidently, had decided he'd be the one to grasp the nettle. Even the most outstanding performance in Water Supply and the Arts could only earn him a limited number of brownie points with the Premier. But if he succeeded in filling the party war chest, some big favours would be due next time the hats went into the ring. Obversely, the consequences of failure did not bear thinking about.

‘We're all agreed, it's a sensitive area,' said the voice, conciliatory again. ‘And there's no rush. The election is two years away.'

‘Quite right,' said Agnelli, getting the hint. ‘First things first. What sort of interest is the State Bank paying us, Duncan?'

Keogh rustled some paper and named a percentage. It was about ten points lower than what I was paying them on my home loan.