The Brush-Off (8 page)

‘Don't let the National Gallery trustees catch you paddling in their pool,' he warned. ‘They think its a bloody holy water font.' He indicated the open door of his car. ‘C'mon. This'll be fun.' Flash wheels but still one of the boys.

The interior of the Mercedes was so cool it could have been used to transport fresh poultry. I followed Eastlake into the back seat, sinking into the soft leather upholstery. Agnelli's Fairlane was impressive in a high-gloss velour-seat sort of way, but it had a utilitarian aspect that never let you forget that it was public property out on loan. This car said private wealth, personal luxury, a separate reality.

As I pulled the door closed behind me, the big car purred into life. ‘Centre for Modern Art,' said Eastlake. ‘Thanks, Noel.'

My eyes darted forward to the driver. He was wearing a white shirt and a chauffeur's cap. The cap fooled me for a moment, made me think that the Mercedes was hired. Then I registered the pair of fleshy flanges protruding from the sides of the man's skull, and the wire arms of the aviator sunglasses hooked over them.

‘Certainly, Mr Eastlake,' said Spider Webb. ‘Coming up.'

‘You're not one of the sanctimonious ones, are you?' Eastlake sprawled back, observing me with good-natured amusement, misreading the nature of my reaction to his driver. His red silk tie was patterned with little pictures of Mickey Mouse. The sort of tie that says the man wearing it is either a complete dickhead or he doesn't give a flying fuck what anyone thinks of him. ‘You don't take a dim view of a man because he's earned himself a few bob?'

His few bob's worth of German precision-engineering purred gently and Spider eased it into St Kilda Road, joining the traffic stream headed away from the city centre.

‘Not at all,' I said. ‘It's just that you're the first Labor Party member I've ever met with his own chauffeur-driven Mercedes.'

‘How do you know?' said Eastlake agreeably. ‘You'd be surprised how well off some of the comrades are.'

Doubtless he was right. If Labor really governed for everyone, not just for its traditional blue-collar base, then a millionaire should feel just as much at home in the party as any boiler maker ever did. If the Prime Minister had no problem with that concept, why should I? A decade in government at state and federal level had smoothed over a lot of the old class antagonisms, ideological and personal. Getting real, we liked to call it.

We veered left and headed up Birdwood Avenue into the manicured woodland of the Domain. A late-afternoon haze had turned the sky to burnished steel, bleeding the shadows out from beneath the canopies of the massed oaks and plane trees. Geysers of water sprang from sunken sprinkler heads in the lawn and hissed across the roadway. Not that I could hear them. The cocoon of the Mercedes was a world apart.

‘Old loyalties run deep,' said Eastlake, catching my mood. ‘I'm a Labor man, born and bred. You don't change your football team just because you change your address.'

This Lloyd Eastlake was not at all what I had expected. A wheeler-dealer ex-carpenter with a penchant for modern art. A party player with a back-stairs fast-track to ministerial ears. I toyed with the idea of asking him how his meeting with Agnelli had gone. Shake the tree, see what fell out. I decided to sit, not give anything away until I had a clearer sense of the lie of the land.

‘You'll have to tell me all about the Cultural Affairs Policy Committee,' I said, making myself comfortable, putting both of us at our ease. ‘I'm on something of a steep learning curve here, as Angelo no doubt told you. And what's the story on this Centre for Modern Art?'

Eastlake took a blank card out of his wallet and scrawled a couple of telephone numbers on it with a small gold pen. Private numbers. High-level access. ‘Call me next week and I'll bring you up to speed on the policy committee.' He tucked the card in my breast pocket. My backstage pass.

‘As for the Centre for Modern Art, it's a bit of a pet project of mine, to be frank.' He reassumed his relaxed posture and proceeded to expound. ‘The National Gallery is all Old Masters and touring blockbusters. And the commercial galleries are little more than the unscrupulous peddling the unintelligible to the uncomprehending. The CMA's mission is to fill the gap, to provide public access to the full range of modern Australian art, from its originators through to the creative work of contemporary young artists. Being relatively new, we don't yet have our own collection, but we're working on it.'

Art really turned the guy on. I could sense the genuine enthusiasm. For art, and for the games that went with it. The pleasures of collecting. And of getting someone else to pay.

‘Quite successfully too, judging by the government's $300,000 contribution to your acquisition fund.'

Eastlake looked at me sideways, crediting my homework, sensing criticism. ‘Good art costs money,' he said. ‘Do you have any idea how much government money the trustees of the National Gallery have got over the years? The nobs are never slow to stick their hands out, believe me. The old masters are more than happy for the public to pay for their Old Masters. Isn't it time that someone else got a fair suck of the sausage? Newer artists. Or the forgotten ones the art establishment has written out of history?'

He wasn't going to get any argument from me on that point. He saw that and got down off his high horse.

‘I started off as a carpenter, you know.' He slipped into an avuncular tone. ‘It's a cliché, I know, but when I first began to succeed in business, I felt that people were contemptuous of me. Not that I particularly cared what they thought, but I didn't want anyone thinking they had the edge on me just because of my background. I'd always had a bit of an interest in art, so I cultivated it. I started going to exhibitions, asking questions, buying pictures. Eventually, I got invited onto exhibition committees and boards of directors. Not the National Gallery, of course. I'm still a bit beneath its dignity. I don't entirely flatter myself that it's because my taste and judgment are held in high esteem. I know it's partly because of my business and political connections. But nobody looks down his nose at me any more. Art is an even greater status symbol than having a chauffeur. Isn't that right, Noel?'

‘That's right, Mr Eastlake.' Spider was smarmily obliging, sharing a little private joke with the boss.

I raised my eyes to the rearview mirror and found him observing me, stony faced. He tilted his head upwards and literally looked down his nose at me. Making a point. He'd recognised me all right, back in the garage, and knew that I'd recognised him. There was no mirth in the gesture. None whatsoever. I stared back into his mirrored eyes until he returned them to the road.

‘The thing to keep in mind'—Eastlake had resumed his briefing mode, oblivious—‘is that most arts practitioners, the creative people, are Labor supporters.'

We passed the squat pyramid of the war memorial and turned down an elm-lined side road. The Mercedes cruised to a gentle stop outside a small white house standing by itself in the middle of the park, complete with a front veranda and an old-fashioned rose garden.

‘We've arrived,' Spider announced. Eastlake opened the door and stepped out. As I made to follow, Spider slung his elbow casually onto the seat back. ‘Haven't we?' he said, pointedly. ‘Mate.'

‘Hello, Spider,' I said.

He didn't like to be reminded. ‘Bit of a snob these days, Murray? You didn't say hello this afternoon. And a bit of an art buff, too. Moving in all the best circles. Haven't turned into a poofter, have you?'

‘Even if I had,' I said, feet on the footpath, ‘you'd be safe.'

The Centre for Modern Art looked more like the lawn cutter's residence than the cutting edge of the avant-garde. Its function as an art gallery was betrayed only by a rather inconspicuous sign on the gate and people spilling out the front door with drinks in their hands. Clearly Labor voters to a person.

Eastlake led me up the garden path, nodding hellos. He surged into a narrow hallway with a polished-wood floor, track-lighting, and white walls hung with pictures of dwarfs with enormous penises. Through archways opening on either side I could see people milling about, drinking, chatting and pretending to look at crucified teddy bears and scrap-iron dingoes. ‘I'm just the front man here,' Eastlake was saying. ‘The real work is done by the our director, Fiona Lambert. You'll like Fiona. Everyone does. Bright as a button. Darling.'

Darling? Eastlake and I were getting on pretty well, but it seemed a little early in our relationship for this degree of affection.

‘Dahling!' The word echoed back from the far end of the hall. A woman of export-quality glamour elbowed her way through the crowd towards us. She was somewhere in her late twenties. Her skin was extraordinarily pale, translucent almost, and lustrously moisturised. She was wearing a little black dress with spaghetti straps, its colour exactly matching her finely arched eyebrows and the precisely engineered bob of hair that framed her face. It was a face with too much character to be called pretty, but it was still well worth looking at. Her legs were bare and went all the way to the floor where they ended in a pair of low-heeled brilliantly shiny shoes, one black, one white. If it hadn't been for the slash of postbox red at her mouth, she could have got a job as a pedestrian crossing. But not one I'd ever cross. She was so far out of my price range she might as well have been the Hope diamond. She offered Eastlake one of her cheeks.

‘Fiona, darling.' He pecked the air beside her ear. ‘I've brought you a present.' He meant me.

Fiona Lambert inspected me with shrewd green eyes, and politely showed me some teeth that must have cost daddy a pretty penny. Her LBD was cut low to display a divine declivity, dusted with barely visible pale-yellow freckles. Not that I noticed.

Eastlake was right, she was as bright as a button—as neat, as highly polished, and just as hard. He introduced us, explaining the change of ministers and embellishing my credentials somewhat. Ms Lambert smiled non-committally and extended her fingertips. The handshake was slight, barely making contact, but there was a firmness of muscle there that made me think of ballet points and horses. I felt like a politician's yes-man in a cheap suit.

Eastlake promptly bailed out. ‘Why don't you induct Murray into the mysteries, Fiona darling, while I get us a drink.' He merged into the throng, waving ineffectually at a disappearing waitress. More people were arriving. I felt conspicuously overdressed in my workaday collar and tie. The only other men in suits were very old and slightly bewildered. The rest of the crowd was haphazardly casual, the women with stylishly eccentric spectacles, the men meticulously louche.

Fiona Lambert put her hand lightly on my elbow and steered me out of the hall. We went into a room hung with minimalist paintings so well executed I had to look twice to make sure they were really there. The room was filling and there was a slight crush of bodies. Fiona Lambert stood disconcertingly close. Sooner or later I would be asked my opinion of the stuff on the walls. There was bound to be some sort of formula, but I didn't know what it was. A heavy bead of perspiration broke from under my arm and trickled down inside my shirt. ‘Lloyd was somewhat vague about the occasion,' I said, groping for small talk.

‘Primarily, it's an opportunity for some of the more promising newcomers to show what they can do.' Fiona Lambert was nothing if not well-bred, and she knew her job. ‘More of a social thing, really. So our friends and supporters don't forget us over the summer.'

‘You make it sound like the night football,' I said. Might as well play the part.

She forged a mechanical little smile. Her attention was elsewhere. A couple were walking through the door, making an entrance. He was well into his sixties, gnomically stocky and almost completely bald. His heavily lidded eyes and well-tanned skin made him appear simultaneously indolent and cunning. He was wearing a sixty-dollar white t-shirt under a nautical blazer. He looked like a cross between Aristotle Onassis and a walnut. She was fortyish, twice as tall and whipcord thin, with leathery skin and a helmet of red hair that had been worked on by experts. The man's eyes scanned the room until they found Fiona Lambert.

‘Speaking of friends and supporters,' she said, her fingers fastening around my elbow. ‘Come and meet the Karlins.'

As we crossed the room, Lloyd Eastlake sailed into our orbit with a glass of champagne in each hand. He spotted our destination and arrived first, thrusting the drinks ahead of him. ‘Max and Becky Karlin.' He smooched the air beside the woman's earhole. ‘Meet Murray Whelan, trusty lieutenant to our new Arts Minister, Angelo Agnelli.'

Karlin bent slightly forward at the waist and offered me his hand. My fingers disappeared into an encompassing embrace of flesh and Karlin pumped them softly, as though gently but firmly extracting some essential oil. He fixed me with oyster eyes, my hand still encased in his paw. For a moment I thought he was going to ask me what size shoe I wore. ‘You tell your minister that this con man is robbing me blind.'

‘Con man? Robbing you?' Eastlake reeled back in mock outrage. ‘Six hundred thousand is not what I'd call robbery.'

Karlin let go of my hand and waggled a chubby finger in my face. ‘Don't trust this fellow,' he clucked dryly. ‘Do you know what he has done to me?'