‘What’s the story on this Centre for Modern Art acquisition? Three hundred thousand dollars was a pretty generous grant, wasn’t it?’
‘Piss off,’ said Sproule. ‘If I start to background you on last year’s grants, you’ll be pestering me every five minutes.’
‘Don’t be like that, Ken,’ I said. ‘Angelo’s got to live with this decision, so I might as well know the reasoning behind it.’
‘What’s to tell? The CMA applied for funding. The Visual Arts Advisory Panel recommended the application be approved. Gil Methven accepted the recommendation. End of story.’
‘I might have lived a sheltered life,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t come down in the last shower. Eastlake is chairman of both the CMA and the Visual Arts Advisory Panel.’
‘So what? Eastlake absented himself from the chair and left the room while his panel voted on the grant.’ This was no more than the standard procedure for fending off any suggestion of conflict of interest.
‘Eastlake’s committee could only recommend the grant. Ultimate approval lay with the minister.’
‘You trying to make a point here, Murray?’
‘It’s a big grant. Lloyd Eastlake must have done a lot of arm-twisting to convince Gil to approve it.’
‘Gil agreed to provide half the funds if the CMA could find the other half. He didn’t think they’d be able to raise that sort of dough for an unknown artist. But Eastlake came up with the money and Gil had no option but to keep his part of the bargain. The Centre for Modern Art is Eastlake’s main hobby horse, but he wears a lot of other hats. Not much point in putting the chairman of the Cultural Affairs Policy Committee offside, not with the friends Lloyd Eastlake has in the unions.’
‘His financial clients?’
‘Eastlake has been dealing with the unions since back when he was in the building game,’ said Sproule. ‘What with all these mergers and amalgamations, some unions have found themselves sitting on sizeable assets, as well as having to manage their members’ superannuation funds. They need financial expertise. The word got around that Eastlake had the magic touch and he ended up holding the kitty for quite a few of the comrades. You ever heard of Obelisk Trust? That’s Eastlake.’
‘And Obelisk donated the CMA’s half of the purchase price for this picture they’re buying?’
‘Correctomundo.’
‘Helping an art gallery to buy a painting hardly seems the ideal way for an outfit like Obelisk to target its sponsorship money,’ I said. ‘Isn’t Eastlake just using union money to buy himself a bit of kudos with the art crowd?’
‘Possibly. He’s also engaging in a bit of mutual pocket pissing with Max Karlin. Obelisk has a lot of money riding on the Karlcraft project and paying top dollar for one of Max’s pictures could be construed as a gesture of confidence in the project, a way of shoring up the commitment of other investors.’
At last we were getting to the nub of it. ‘In other words, the Ministry for the Arts has just spent three hundred thousand dollars of public money to massage one of Lloyd Eastlake’s investments.’
‘Not just Eastlake’s, pal. We’re all in this. The Karlcraft Centre project is currently employing a small army of construction workers, most of them union members. It’s spending money on everything from cement to door knobs, doing its bit for the local economy. When it’s up and running, it’ll revitalise much of the central business district, create hundreds of retail jobs and generate millions in government revenues. Putting the arts to work lubricating that process is a job well done, wouldn’t you agree?’
Who was I to demur? I told Ken Sproule I owed him a lunch and rang off. ‘Wakey, wakey, hands off snakey,’ I called through Red’s door. ‘We aren’t going to get much quality time together if you sleep all day.’
He got up and went straight around to Tarquin’s place. By the time I’d finished breakfast and read the papers it was getting on for ten o’clock. I found the card with Eastlake’s phone numbers on it and looked at it for while, thinking about the story Giles Aubrey had told me.
Like old Giles said, the genie was out of the bottle. Routine police procedures to identify Marcus Taylor would inevitably connect him with Victor Szabo. Shit, it had taken me about five minutes. Aubrey was in a confessional mood. Sooner or later, the whole thing would start to come unravelled. Spending public money on art was risky enough. Spending it on a fake would make us look like idiots, unfit to govern. Angelo would be directly in the firing line. A way would need to be found quietly to scotch the whole thing. I called Eastlake on his mobile and told him I’d appreciate an opportunity to talk to him about the Szabo acquisition at his earliest convenience.
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Looking out for Angelo’s interest PR-wise.’ Exactly. Eastlake said he was on his way to the Toorak Road Deli and suggested I join him there.
I went up the back lane and stuck my head in Faye and Leo’s kitchen door. Faye had her hands in the sink and Leo had his head in the fridge. ‘Where’s the cake?’ he said. The boys were on the floor glued to the television. There were no cartoons at that hour and they were reduced to watching a rural affairs documentary on mad cow disease.
‘That reminds me,’ I told Red. ‘You’d better ring your mother.’
‘It’s right in front of you,’ said Faye. ‘So, Murray, what do you think of Claire? Tarquin, turn that TV off. We’re going in ten minutes.’ The Curnows, it transpired, were about to leave for Leo’s mother’s seventieth birthday party and would be out all day.
‘Come and ring your mother.’ I dragged Red out the back door. ‘Then I’ll show you where the rich people live.’
The rich people live in Toorak. Skirting the city centre, we crossed the river and headed into its leafy precincts. In hushed cul-de-sacs and meandering avenues, we peered and craned like tourists at the mansions of the filthy rich. Sydney, I informed Red, had plenty of fat cats and flash rats. But for your genuine, copper-bottomed blue-blood, you couldn’t go past Toorak.
Cruising past the French Provincial farmhouses and Californian haciendas, the ivied walls and gravelled driveways, we drove the Charade down Toorak Road, a street where all the shops are boutiques and even a carton of milk costs more. The Deli was at the city end, a see-and-be-seen place with Porsches at the kerb and fourteen different kinds of freshly squeezed juice. Eastlake’s Mercedes was parked across the road, between a red convertible Volkswagen with an Airedale terrier on the back seat and a Volvo station wagon with P-plates and surfboards on the roof rack.
Spider Webb was standing beside the Merc, looking into the window of a menswear shop called Pour Homme. We parked further down the block, outside one of those places that sells Groucho Marx lamp stands, pink neon telephones and musical birthday cards. A clip-joint for rich kids. Red lit up at the sight of it, so I peeled off ten dollars. Take your time, I told him. And if you shoplift, don’t get caught.
The Deli was somebody’s gold mine. Cappuccinos to the gentry. Pain au chocolat with the accent on the accent. Mobile phones in clear view. Blondes with perfect hair and beesting lips. Jewish husbands with melancholy expressions and big gold Rolexes. Lawyers in leisure-wear.
Lloyd Eastlake was in his element, sitting in a prime booth wearing tennis whites with navy piping. Sitting opposite him was a well-groomed woman in her late forties with big sunglasses and a brittle mouth. The sunglasses were pushed up on top of hair that had the panel-beaten finish rich women spend a fortune acquiring in the taxidermy salons of society hairdressers.
Eastlake saw me enter and waved me over. ‘Murray Whelan,’ he said. ‘My wife, Lorraine.’
So this was the boss’s daughter whose hand had given young Lloyd his leg up in business. Lorraine looked like she’d been repenting ever since, consoled only by the diversion of spending as much of his money as possible. She was just leaving.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting your game,’ I said sociably, an obvious tennis reference.
‘Lorraine doesn’t play,’ said Eastlake. ‘Do you, darling?’
‘Nice to meet you,’ said Lorraine. She’d forgotten my name already. As she headed towards the exit, a ruddy faced man with real estate written all over him moved to fill the vacuum. Eastlake deflected him with an easy gesture, signalled for more coffee and told me to sit down. ‘You don’t look too happy,’ he said genially. ‘Angelo not paying you enough?’
‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad news,’ I said, getting straight down to it before some social fly buzzed over and landed on us. ‘I think we’ve got a problem.’
‘Have we?’ His expression brightened with amusement at my earnestness.
‘You and me both,’ I said. ‘The Szabo isn’t authentic. I’m afraid you’ve been had.’
