‘Well?’ Faye hissed into my ear, behind a tree. ‘Thirty-three. Owns her own business. Not bad looking.’
What did she expect me to do, jump the woman on the spot? ‘Where’s the father of the child?’
‘Left them a year ago. New cookie.’
‘Coffee?’ said Leo. ‘Sambuca? Port?’
We walked back to Faye and Leo’s, slapping mosquitoes. I swung Grace up onto my hip. She took it as her due and twined her arms around my neck. Her sleepy head nestled in the crook of my shoulder. A daughter, I thought, would be nice. Eventually.
‘She’s not usually so trusting,’ said Claire.
‘I wouldn’t trust Murray as far as I could throw him,’ said Faye.
Cleopatra was on television. We sprawled in the dark before the flickering set, draped with drowsy children. The girls, curled like kittens in their mothers’ laps, were soon rendered unconscious by Richard Burton’s narcotic vowels. Elizabeth Taylor, fabulously blowzy, seethed and ranted. Leo lay bean-bagged on the floor, Tarquin using his shins for a pillow. Red slumbered against my shoulder. ‘This film,’ observed Claire, ‘is longer than the Nile.’ She made, nevertheless, no move to leave.
What were the poor people doing tonight, I mused. Max Karlin, for all his outward trappings, was teetering on the brink. Desperate to find those elusive big-ticket tenants, those precious million-dollar customers willing and able to sign on the line, ten floors for ten years. Multinationals. Public utilities. Government departments needing accommodation for hundreds of pen-pushers, sitting there at their desks sending out those millions of water bills.
By the time the credits rolled, Claire and I were the only ones still awake. Perhaps all that on-screen sensuality had given me the wrong idea, but her posture seemed more than accidentally provocative. She lay draped languidly at the other end of the couch, errant corkscrews of hair framing her face. The fabric of her dress moulded to her body. She could not possibly have been unaware how wanton she looked.
She wasn’t. From behind lowered lids, she was measuring my reaction. No longer concealing my interest, I ran my gaze lazily over her body. Then watched her reciprocate.
Our eyes devoured each other. The time had come to act, to grasp the transient moment. Gingerly, I prised Red’s sleeping head from my lap. My hand edged towards Claire’s extended leg.
Red’s eyes sprang open. ‘Tricked ya!’ he yawned. His arm flung out in a stretch and connected with my sore ear.
‘Ow,’ I said. Faye woke with a start, activating Chloe.
‘Huh? snuffled Leo, inadvertently letting Tarquin’s head fall to the floor. ‘Is it over?’
‘My ankle,’ groaned Tarquin. ‘You kicked my ankle.’
Instantly, there was more barging around going on than Cleopatra ever dreamed of. ‘Is it time to go home yet, Mummy,’ pleaded Grace, rubbing her eyes.
‘Yes, darling,’ sighed Claire. ‘I guess it is.’
Sunday’s dawning came sticky with humidity, heavy with the prospect of rain. By dawning I don’t mean the sun’s rosy-fingered ascension. Nor do I mean the day’s first blossoming when I reached for my winsome sleep-mate while thrushes warbled outside my window. I mean eight, when I shucked off the sheets, checked that Red was still asleep in his room and padded to the corner for the papers. I’d slept as deeply as the heat allowed, but my choice of dreams could have been better. Again, I’d been visited by Noel Webb.
Again, we were sitting in the wintry twilight on a park bench in the Oulton Reserve, Spider’s contempt ringing in my ears, the three Fletcher boys looming over us.
The Fletchers were weedy runts but they’d been raised on a diet of belt buckles and brake fluid and they had us at unfavourable odds. They were sharpies, an amorphous tribe of terrifying reputation, precursors to the skinheads. In an era when every adolescent male in the world yearned for longer locks and tighter pants, the sharpies wore close-cropped hair and check trousers so perversely wide they flapped like flags. Rumoured to carry knives, they were less a gang than an attitude of casual violence looking for somewhere to happen. And now they had found me.
The moment I most dreaded had arrived. And Noel Webb, my as-yet-unpaid protector, was edging away. Flanked by his twin brothers, Geordie, the seventeen-year-old, thrust his face into mine. ‘What are you looking at?’ he snarled. His denuded skull occupied my entire field of vision.
A craven bleat issued from my mouth. ‘Nothing.’
The twins snickered. ‘Nah-thing, nah-thing.’
They acted like idiots, but that didn’t make them any less dangerous. The kid their brother kicked to death wasn’t much older than me. Trying to fight back would only provoke them. Not that fighting back entered my mind. My guts had shrivelled into a queasy lump and my legs were jelly. The contraband booze beneath my coat was my only hope.
But before I could get it out, offer it up in supplication, Geordie grabbed the crook of my elbow and jerked me upright. The twins closed from either side, pistoning their bony kneecaps into my thighs. ‘Ow,’ I said. Piss weak. A heel swung behind mine and swept my leg away. Wayne and Danny were pressed so close that I stumbled first against one then the other. Pinning my arms, they buffeted me sideways, setting me spinning like a top, biffing and slapping me as I turned, yelling encouragement to each other.
A circle of faces flashed before me. Fletcher faces. Noel Webb’s face. Denied his mercenary price, Spider had gone over to the enemy. Or worse. A set-up all along. The tough men of the district had found some fresh meat. Round and round I spun, all the while attempting to wrestle the bottle from beneath the folds of my coat. Dizzy, strait-jacketed, sweaty with panic. That’s when I woke up.
Both the Sunday papers had given the Suicide in the Moat story a run on page three. Both featured Salina Fleet in her widow’s weeds, wistfully gazing at one of Marcus Taylor’s sketches like it was the shroud of Turin. I took fresh croissants back to the house for Red’s breakfast and rang Ken Sproule.
He’d seen the paper. ‘As predicted,’ he said. ‘Angelo can stop peeing his pants.’ Despite his crack at Agnelli, Sproule had thought it worth keeping his own ear to the ground. ‘This suicide stuff ’s a load of crap. They found bruising to the back of the skull consistent with a fall. The cops tend to think he was walking along the parapet, tripped over, knocked his head and fell in.’
‘What about the manifesto?’
‘Could mean anything. Or nothing. The fact that it was found on the body doesn’t necessarily make it a suicide note. But an anguished suicide makes far better copy than a clumsy drunk. Particularly with the girlfriend pushing that line. You watch. By this time next week, he’ll be a great unrecognised talent and his work will start turning up in the auction houses. Not a bad looker, the girlfriend, eh? She’s on some committee at the ministry, you know.’
‘While you’re on the line,’ I changed tack, ‘I met Lloyd Eastlake last night. What’s a hot shot like him doing on a minor policy committee like Cultural Affairs? He fits that scene like a pacer at a pony club.’
‘Parliamentary ambitions,’ Sproule said. ‘Same reason anyone gets themselves onto a policy committee. If you’re not a union official, it’s the best way to get yourself noticed, find out how things work. My guess is that Eastlake has targeted the arts to build a profile as something other than just another penny-ante money man.’
‘He didn’t look too penny-ante to me.’
‘That’s because you’ve led a sheltered life, Murray. That chauffeur-driven stuff might impress his investors, but it doesn’t mean much in the big picture. For every Alan Bond or Robert Holmes a Court, there’s a hundred Lloyd Eastlakes. They’re a sign of a buoyant economy, springing up like mushrooms after rain. We need them to make the system work. But don’t confuse Eastlake with serious money. You could probably count his millions on one hand.’
‘Not a bad result for a humble chippie, though.’ I ashed my cigarette in a saucer, sipped cold instant coffee from a cracked cup and wondered what I’d be doing if I had even a lousy one million dollars. ‘So why does he want to get into parliament?’
‘Why does anyone? If we psychoanalysed every parliamentary candidate we’d have full nut-houses and empty legislatures.’
An operator like Ken Sproule could never be taken on face value. He could be poisoning the wells. He could be giving me the good oil. But he was right about one thing. In our line of work, it was best not to think too much about people’s motives.
‘Tell me something else,’ I said. Since Ken was in a talkative mood, the least I could do was listen to him.
