deeply.
Her change of mood was abrupt and disconcerting. But, like I said, I’m not an entirely insensitive guy. I put my arms around her.
Her hand snaked up my back. She stood on tiptoes and pressed the back of my head down towards her closing eyes and opening lips. I kissed her. Compassionately at first. Then, at her insistence, the other way.
Then she peeped and I could see it in her eyes. It wasn’t me that Salina desired. Nor was it my pity. She wanted my complicity. Complicity in what, I couldn’t tell. But whatever it was, I didn’t want any part of it. I prefer to save my cynicism for politics.
Putting my hands gently on her shoulders, I prised my face free. Salina stared up, not comprehending. ‘It’s okay,’ she reassured me. ‘My relationship with Marcus was all but over anyway. We weren’t even sleeping together. Hadn’t been for months.’
The last thing I wanted was the sordid details. I took a step backwards. ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said, sweeping the curtain aside. ‘Make sure you get everything before you go.’
I don’t know why I said it. Taylor’s lonely death, his relationship with Salina, had nothing to do with me. But my remark wasn’t just sanctimonious. It was superfluous. There was nothing for her to get. The paintings that were strewn about Taylor’s studio in such ill-ordered profusion just an hour before were gone, stripped off their stretchers or roughly cut from their frames. The easel in the middle of the room was empty, the suburban dream house vanished. While I’d been downstairs impersonating a seafood dinner, someone had cleaned the place out.
Salina stared at the looted room. On her face was the same appalled expression with which she had responded to Taylor’s drunken speech at the Centre for Modern Art.
I didn’t have the time, the energy or the inclination to keep up with Salina Fleet’s emotional gymnastics. Stepping around the discarded struts of timber and upended jars of brushes, I continued into the hallway and down the stairs.
Marcus Taylor’s work, it seemed, was finally in demand. Suicide was beginning to look like the smartest career move he ever made.
‘It’s about time!’
Agnelli cleared a pile of briefing papers off the back seat of the Fairlane and made room for me. We were due to meet at eleven. It was 11.09. Under the circumstances, I thought I’d done well.
‘Jesus,’ he said, as I finished giving Alan the address of Karlin’s brunch and slid into the back seat. ‘What happened to your ear? You look like Vincent bloody Van Gogh.’ I wasn’t going to begin to answer a remark like that.
And Agnelli didn’t really want to discuss my aural health. His own welfare was preying on his mind. Ministerial impatience suffused the car’s interior like oxygen in a bell jar. ‘Those journos have been on the blower again. Now they’re talking about allegations of corruption in the arts bureaucracy.’
We glided out the back gate of Parliament House and Alan turned the Fairlane towards West Melbourne. ‘Those with their hands on the levers of power are the most corrupt of all,’ I quoted.
‘Who?’ said Agnelli. ‘What?’
‘I think I’ve got it right.’ I fished my scrawled copy of Taylor’s note from my pocket.
Agnelli seized it, avid for the worst. A policy crisis, accusations of pork barrelling, being caught misleading parliament, these he could take in his stride. They were but grist to the mill of everyday politics. But a suicide note, a city landmark, a potential media feeding-frenzy-this was a volatile combination. Agnelli’s most defensive political instincts were aroused. His lips moved as he read.
‘This is the sort of story the press are going to milk for every possible angle,’ I said. ‘They’re just rattling your cage, trying for a reaction, hoping to drum up a political angle where there isn’t one.’
Agnelli corrugated his brow and peered down at the note as though he’d been dealt a very bad hand in Scrabble. ‘This is garbage. Who is this guy anyway?’
‘An unemployed artist,’ I said. ‘Possible psychiatric history.’ Salina called him a manic depressive. I should have pressed her for details. ‘We’ll know for sure in a couple of days. The guy was broke, depressed about his work and shit-faced drunk. There’s even a school of thought that the whole thing was an accident and the note just a circumstantial furphy. But given the location and the fact that he was a painter, a certain degree of media interest is inevitable. My bet is they’ll swarm in the direction of the most obvious cliche-anguished artist dies of broken heart, his talent unrecognised in life.’ Particularly with the nudge in that direction that Salina Fleet was already giving them. ‘The whole thing will have blown over by this time next week.’
‘Maybe.’ Agnelli’s brow unfurrowed slightly. ‘But keep a close eye on it anyway. This sort of drivel is tabloid heaven.’
‘If absolutely necessary,’ I tossed in the clincher, ‘we can discreetly let it be known that shortly before his death Taylor was allocated a small but generous Arts Ministry grant.’
A foxy light came into Agnelli’s eyes. ‘Now why didn’t I think of that?’
The idea that I was being devious was doing wonders for Agnelli’s morale. ‘And to think I had reservations about offering you this job,’ he muttered.
While I pondered that point, he moved on to the topic of our imminent destination. ‘So what about this Max Karlin? The Jew from Central Casting, eh?’ Two years in Ethnic Affairs had done nothing for Angelo’s rougher edges.
‘I met him briefly last night,’ I said. ‘Quite the philanthropist apparently.’ This was intended as a fairly obvious prompt for Agnelli to come clean about his self-appointed fund-raising role. It didn’t work. He kept his cards pressed silently to his chest. ‘I told him how delighted you’d be to meet such a prominent contributor to the public good,’ I tried.
‘And so I will be.’ Agnelli remained impenetrably bland. ‘Better give me my starting orders.’
Madness, I told myself, sheer insanity. Here I was, stage-managing an encounter between a minister in an increasingly fragile government, a man to whom I owed my employment and my loyalty, and a wealthy businessman about whom I knew next to nothing. All with no better objective than having my fears confirmed that Agnelli was planning a new career as a bag-man.
‘Essentially this is just a low-key meet-and-mingle,’ I told him. ‘Karlin is something of an art collector and the Centre for Modern Art has recently copped a fairly decent Arts Ministry grant to buy one of his pictures. Lloyd Eastlake, who chairs the CMA, is keen to see that the government gets its share of the credit. Understandably so, since he was also on the Arts Ministry committee that recommended the purchase.’
Eastlake’s name was another obvious cue, a little reminder to Agnelli that he had not yet told me about the threesome in his office the previous afternoon. If Angelo wanted to limit my role to strictly arts matters, that was his prerogative. He was the minister. He was perfectly entitled to make all the unwise decisions he liked. But the least he could do was take me into his confidence.
Agnelli pricked up his ears, but not in the way that I hoped. ‘What’s Eastlake’s connection with Karlin?’
‘Aside from them both being on the board of the Centre for Modern Art, I don’t know. Eastlake showed me his art gallery last night, but he didn’t take me into his confidence.’ I paused pregnantly.
My delicate condition was of no interest to Agnelli. He was too busy figuring the angles. ‘We’re funding this picture deal on Eastlake’s say-so, right? How much is Karlin getting, and what are we getting in return?’
‘Our kick-in was $300,000, towards a total purchase price in excess of half a million dollars. What we, in the form of the publicly owned CMA, are getting in return is a painting by Victor Szabo.’
Agnelli whistled lightly under his breath. ‘For that sort of dough we could get a Matisse.’
‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But Matisse wasn’t Australian.’
‘And Victor Szabo was?’ Ange was probably finessing the point. I suspected he knew even less about Victor Szabo than I did.
‘Szabo’s background was, er, European, of course,’ I ventured. ‘But the CMA seems to feel that his contribution to the development of Australian art warrants the price.’
‘That may well be,’ said Agnelli. ‘But he’s not exactly a household name, is he? And we’re the ones footing the bill. Big-ticket art buys are hardly a guaranteed vote-winner, you know.’
My sentiments precisely, I told him. But the fact that Gil Methven, neither a conspicuous risk-taker nor a notorious art lover, had okayed the deal suggested that the decision was unlikely to be controversial. ‘Eastlake raised half the total purchase price from corporate donors. Not only does that spread the risk, fallout-wise, it also
