I accepted this advice with a grateful dip of my head. ‘Salina?’ I said. ‘Unusual name.’
Too late, I realised that this must have sounded like a very lame come-on line. Do you come here often? What star sign are you?
She didn’t seem to mind. ‘Literary,’ she said. ‘Lyrical, at least. The result of having an academic for a father.’
The literary/lyrical reference was over my head. Troilus and Cressida. Tristan and Isolde. Starsky and Hutch. Salina and…?
She came to my rescue. ‘ Out in the west Texas town of El Paso,’ she began to recite:
‘ I fell in love with a Mexican girl
Night time would find me in Rosa’s cantina
Music would play, Salina would whirl. ’
Either Salina’s father lacked all academic rigour or he was hard of hearing. I knew the song. Marty Robbins was on every juke box in every bar I’d ever worked in. As a publican’s son who had paid his way through university pulling beers, I had an acute ear for bar-room gunfight references in popular music. The Mexican maiden who did the whirling at Rosa’s cantina was called Felina, not Salina.
‘Your father’s academic discipline,’ I asked. ‘What did he teach?’
‘Three-point turns, mainly,’ she said. ‘And reverse parking. He was chief instructor at the Ajax Driving Academy. I followed in his footsteps. I teach cultural studies, part-time, at the Preston Institute of Technology.’
PIT used to be a trade school for the motor industry. Not much call for that sort of thing any more. Not unless you were a Japanese robot. ‘Really?’ I said, like she might be having me on. ‘How interesting.’
‘Salina’s a bit prissy,’ she said. ‘You can call me Sal. But never Sally.’ No, she definitely wasn’t a Sally. And I didn’t care if she was having me on. At Ethnic Affairs, the only women who flirted with me either had moustaches or fathers with shotguns.
‘ Her name was McGill,’ I said. ‘And she called herself Lil.’
‘ But everyone knew her as Nancy,’ she replied. ‘The Beatles’ White Album is on my students’ required reading list.’
Having a cigarette was one thing. Standing in a blast furnace was another. We ground our butts underfoot, toe to toe. ‘Let’s twist again ,’ she said.
‘Like we did last summer, ’ I closed the couplet.
As we slipped back into the air-conditioned relief of the conference room, Phillip Veale materialised at my side. He pinged a fingernail on the rim of his glass. The crowd fell silent and turned our way. It was a jolly little speech, delivered in administrative shorthand.
‘Welcome to those just back from summer hols. A new year awaits. Exciting developments. Fresh challenges. Not least of which, a new minister, Angelo Agnelli, whose commitment is well known.’ Veale’s ambiguity raised an appreciative chuckle from the assembly. ‘A minister so keen he’s already sent his right-hand man to join us.’ Eyes darted my way, measuring my response. I tried to look sly. ‘So,’ Veale raised his glass, staring directly at me. ‘The king is reshuffled. Long live the king.’ It was blatant flattery. Always the best kind.
I glanced about for Salina Fleet but she must have slipped out under cover of the formalities. Pity, I thought. Still, I had no cause for complaint. Semi-secure employment, congenial surroundings, a drink or three, a little light buttering-up. A man could do worse.
Outside, the late afternoon sun was turning the harsh concrete of the Arts Centre a glowing fauvist orange. Warning-light amber.
It had gone 6.15 and the drinks crowd was thinning to a hard core. I took one last snort for sociability’s sake, slung my hook and headed downstairs. By rights, if my day had gone as planned, I should have been at the airport, meeting Red’s flight from Sydney. Instead, I was headed for the front of the National Gallery, under instructions to find a total stranger named Lloyd Eastlake so we could go look at some modern art together. Half an hour, I’d give it. Tops.
A slab of shadow had fallen across the forecourt of the gallery. The mouse-hole curve of the gallery entrance dozed, a half-shut eye in a blank face. The crowds were gone, the tourist buses departed, the gelati vans pursuing more lucrative business at the bayside beaches. Later, theatre goers would begin to arrive. For now, apart from a trudging trickle of home-bound pedestrians and a pair of teenage lovers having a snog on the moat parapet, the place was deserted.
Out on St Kilda Road, the tail end of the rush-hour traffic crawled impatiently towards the weekend, raising a desultory chorus of irritable toots. I propped on the edge of the moat, trailing my hands in the cool water, and waited for Lloyd Eastlake, Our Man in the Arts, to arrive. At least he wouldn’t have any trouble finding me.
A slow five minutes went by. Romeo and Juliet broke off their tonsil hockey and wafted away, hand in hand. The passing trams became less crowded, less frequent. A silver Mercedes pulled into the Disabled Only parking bay in front of the gallery entrance, its interior concealed behind tinted windows. It sat there for a long moment, too late for the gallery, too early for the theatre. Then the back door opened and man in a suit got out. Well-heeled, self-assured, brisk. I recognised him instantly. The man I had seen coming out of Agnelli’s office earlier that afternoon.
He crossed directly to me. ‘Murray Whelan?’ he said, not much in doubt about it. ‘I’m Lloyd Eastlake.’
He was quite handsome in a conventionally masculine way. Close-up, I pegged him for a well-preserved fifty- five, fit as a trout even if the good life had tipped the bathroom scales a smidgin over his ideal weight-to-height ratio.
Shaking off the moat water, I accepted his offered handshake. His grip was competitively hard, as though advertising the fact that he had once worked with his hands. But not for some time. The nails were manicured.
‘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
