Pat Carson shook his head, nodded, shook his head. ‘Mr Ashley Tolliver, counsel of the fuckin Queen. Her fuckin Majesty. Two days of the sneerin bastard, never done a day’s work, talked like he knew the buildin business, wouldn’t know a concrete pour from a fuckin wet dream. Talked to me like I was some piece of shit, no respect, bit of dogshit on his shoe.’
He drank some whisky. A drop rolled down his chin, caught the light and glowed like a tear of gold. ‘Had a bad accident later, Mr Ashley Tolliver, Q fuckin C, two years later, a good time later. Just lost control of the car. Mercedes, mark you. Into the sea. Down there other side of Lorne, the cliff ’s steep, go off the edge…Never walked again, they say.’ He looked at me. ‘No respect. He had no respect.’
I finished my drink. ‘I’ll come over in the morning. Wait for the post.’
As I neared the library door, I heard Tom saying loudly, ‘…sources close to the company, that means a source
Barry’s voice, stiff: ‘You’re becoming paranoid, Tom, do you know that? They make this stuff up, they don’t need a source.’
‘Bullshit. It’s not the first time. Someone’s feeding this bastard. You know that, don’t you?’
I couldn’t linger. I very much wanted to.
31
‘Proving trickier than I thought,’ said Orlovsky. ‘There’s lots of people doing bits and pieces of voice work. Most of it’s for talking to computers, asking them questions, that sort of thing.’
We were in the kitchen of the Garden House, leaning against opposite counters. I’d told him about the day: the kidnapper’s call, my conversations with Jeremy Fisher and Graham Noyce, my visit to the Altona Community Legal Centre.
‘Where’d this beer come from?’ I said.
Orlovsky drank some of his Dortmunder Pils out of the bottle. ‘A rather nice woman came in to check on the stocks and she asked if there was anything we needed. So I told her.’
‘So suddenly you’re not above eating the rich’s cream. Surprised you limited yourself to beer. Anyway, what’s wrong with typing in your questions to computers, why do you have to talk?’
He drank some more beer, all the while giving me his pitying look. ‘Say you’re being operated on, you’re hooked up to the computer, the surgeon’s got both hands inside you, he’s worried and he wants to know your vital signs. He can’t look up, so what does he do?’
‘He says: “This one’s a goner. What are you doing later, nurse?”’
‘This is post-nurse, I’m talking about the future. He asks the computer. And it answers in a way that he can’t possibly misunderstand. Same for pilots, air controllers, cops, fucking soldiers.’ He smiled his sinister smile. ‘Of course, soldiers already have robots answering their questions. Robots asking, robots answering.’
‘The dignity of the profession of arms. That escaped you, didn’t it?’
‘Must have. I didn’t notice much of your actual dignity, that could be why. Any, now that I think of it. Noticed plenty of your actual indignity.’
‘A literal mind. Best suited to buggering around with computers. So that’s the best you can do on this intonation stuff?’
‘Basically, yes. Feelers out, I stressed the urgency. There’s something, it won’t help. The voice, it’s a mixture of old Hollywood voices, John Wayne and James Stewart and Alan Ladd, actors like that. From Westerns.’
I had difficulty with this. I closed my eyes and drank some beer. ‘Tell me about it,’ I said.
‘I played a little compilation, carefully chosen, to this extremely advanced woman at RMIT. She did a linguistic and acoustic analysis, don’t worry about it, it’s beyond you. They’ve got a huge voice bank, the test shows the intonation of some dead Western stars. It’s all based on a mark-up language called Tone and Break Indices. She was excited, never heard it done that well before.’
‘Well, I’m excited too,’ I said. ‘I may have to leave you and go to sleep, I’m so excited. I hope you found a way to handle her excitement, channel it into something productive.’
Orlovsky smiled and shook his head.
‘And this Teutonic beer’s got an old-sock element to it,’ I said. ‘Old Prussian sock. Research at the cutting edge of technology all day and still we know sweet fanny. Correct me if I’m wrong.’
He sighed. ‘Right. But you probably don’t even know where Prussia is, never mind the taste of an old Prussian sock.’
I said, ‘Son, I’ve done my time with Prussian socks, I’ve night-jumped over the German plain, at a certain level, you get the feeling you’re falling into a cabbage, that’s the smell. Then you land on the plain the Russian tanks were supposed to come charging over to get what they didn’t get in World War Two.’
I drained the bottle. ‘But you wouldn’t know about World War Two, Mick. You’re an eighties boy. What kind of people would have a use for a voiceshake of old Western actors?’
‘Well, anyone who needs voices. I’ll show you.’
He went into the sitting room and came back with his briefcase, put it on the counter, opened it and fiddled with the computer.
The voice said:
‘Okay, that’s the voice we heard,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Now listen to this.’
The voice was deep and sonorous now and the speech slower.
‘And this.’
Now the voice was feminine, light, a woman speaking quickly.
‘And so it goes on.’ He was shutting down the machine.
‘Modulate the basic voice, you can get any number of voices, male, female, young, old. Once you’d done the work, it would be the cheapest way to put a multi-voice track on anything. All it needs is one person to speak with the intonation you want.’
‘And you can’t buy it?’
‘No one’s ever heard of a commercial product like this. Or anyone working on one. This woman at RMIT, Kim Reid, Dr Reid, she says a bloke came wandering into the place a few years ago and asked a lot of intelligent questions about linguistic and acoustic patterns, about Tone and Break. Said he was working on games. But she doesn’t know his name, not sure he gave it, can’t really remember what he looked like.’
‘Anyone can just wander in? You just wandered in?’
‘No. I rang her, she invited me over, came to the office to meet me. But it’s a uni, people wandering everywhere.’
‘Why did this person pick on her?’
‘He’d read something she published about the voice bank.’
Orlovsky opened the drinks fridge, a full-size refrigerator, took out another Dortmunder, offered it to me.
‘No thanks. Was that a Miller’s I saw in there? Published where?’
‘Christ, I don’t know. I didn’t ask. What does it matter? We’ve got Miller’s in the longneck bottle, yes, imported from a country that doesn’t know good beer from fermented horse piss.’
‘Can you ring her? Got a home number?’
He closed the fridge, put the beers on the counter, studied me with his head tilted, his eyes expressing a complete lack of confidence in my state of mind. ‘To ask her what?’
‘Where the stuff was published.’
‘Jesus, Frank.’ He took a bloated wallet out of an inside pocket of his jacket, rejected half a dozen bits of paper before he found what he wanted, a business card. ‘There’s no home, there’s a mobile.’
‘Try it.’
He shook his head, left the room. I went over and uncapped the beers, rinsed my mouth with Miller’s,
