visual arts recommended them, if that’s what you mean by union connections.’
‘Which reminds me,’ I said. ‘I’d better get the names of the board members. Make sure Angelo does the acknowledgments right.’
Bernice flicked through the CUSS file and handed me a list. The Secretary of the Trades Hall Council chaired the board. Most of the other names belonged to prominent union officials. Some of them didn’t.
‘Lloyd Eastlake,’ I read out loud. A knot formed itself in the pit of my stomach.
Bernice nodded confirmation. ‘You know him?’
‘He heads up my policy committee.’
‘In that case,’ said Bernice, ‘I don’t have to tell you what an asset he is. It was Lloyd’s idea for CUSS to get into art in the first place. Frankly, the rest of the board was lukewarm. But they soon changed their minds. Not only did Austral acquire works by blue-chip artists at very good prices, they found buyers who were prepared to pay considerably more than the works had cost us. The board was so impressed with the investment potential that it immediately upped its level of commitment. It also decided to take a long-term view, to build up the collection rather than just buy and sell on spec.’
‘So you must have quite a lot of contact with this Austral crowd? Mind if I take notes? Can I borrow a pen?’
Bernice handed me writing materials. ‘Typical,’ she clucked. I poised the pen. ‘As company secretary,’ she went on, ‘I am, of course, responsible for the overall administrative framework. But Lloyd insists-and I agree with him on this point-that he handle all direct liaison with Austral himself. That way, individual board members can’t try to push their personal tastes. You can imagine what sort of a dog’s breakfast we’d end up with if that was allowed to happen.’ Not, she felt, that there was any need for Angelo’s speech to concern itself with such detail. ‘Downplay the investment aspect. Emphasising the cultural benefits to our members would be more appropriate.’
‘I agree,’ I said. The investment aspects didn’t bear thinking about, given what I knew or suspected about the actual value of the works in the room upstairs. Novelty was about the most value they could claim. ‘By the way,’ I asked. ‘How was the ultrasound?’
Bernice’s hand went into her bag like a shot. ‘See for yourself.’ She handed me what appeared to be a polaroid photograph of meteorological conditions over Baffin Bay taken through the screen door of a low-flying satellite during a lunar eclipse.
‘A boy,’ I guessed, pointing to what looked like an isthmus extending into the north-west quadrant.
Bernice radiated ambivalent pride. ‘Sometimes you surprise me, Murray.’
There were plenty more surprises in store for Bernice Kaufman before her bonny bouncing little numbers man was dragged screaming into the delivery room. But she wouldn’t be hearing them from me. Not right away. Not until I’d had a chance to ponder the meaning of the amazing information the past hour had brought to light. ‘Thanks, Bernice,’ I said. ‘You’ve been incredibly helpful.’
For a brief moment, Bernice’s insurgent maternal hormones escaped into her voice box. ‘Anytime, Murray,’ she sighed wearily. ‘Now piss off. I’ve got work to do.’
Pocketing Bernice’s cheap ballpoint pen, I backed out the door and headed downstairs, deep in thought.
Arts was supposed to be a cushy posting. Everybody knew that, for all of Ken Sproule’s talk about the culture vultures ripping your flesh. Freebies to the opera and holding the minister’s hand at gala soirees were supposed to be the name of the game. Not Spider Webb, dead bodies, police investigations, missing pictures and forgery rackets.
Was it really possible that Lloyd Eastlake knew the paintings in the CUSS collection were fakes? Surely not. A measly half a million dollars worth of pictures was small beer compared with the sort of dough he handled every day at Obelisk Trust. He had too much at stake to engage in such risky business, even if he was that way inclined.
But the moral, legal and financial dimensions were not the only ones to be considered. There was a much more important aspect to all this. The political one. The resignation of the Deputy Premier and the Cabinet reshuffle had been designed to counter a growing perception that the government was financially incompetent, no longer a fit custodian for the public cookie jar. What would happen to voter confidence when it was revealed that the government’s appointee as head of the Arts Ministry panel that handed out grants to artists couldn’t tell a fake from a fish fork? And that one of its members was brokering forged artworks?
Admittedly, this was not the sort of issue upon which a government stands or falls. But nor was it something you’d want to read about in your morning paper. Not if your boss was the minister responsible. Not if it was your job to see that precisely this sort of thing didn’t happen.
Things were starting to get seriously complicated.
Going to the police on this CUSS forgery business was out of the question. Nothing would be gained and much might be lost. A quiet word in the right ear at the right time and the unions could bury their own dead. And, in any case, I was holding firm to my decision not to talk to the cops until Red was safely up, up and away.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t make some discreet enquiries of my own in the meantime. The problem was where to start. This needed some nutting out. I drove back to my new office, nutting all the way.
Trish thrust a wad of telephone message slips into my paw as I came in the door. Mendicant terpsichoreans and lobbyist librarians. String quartet convenors and craft marketers. Festival creators and design innovators. People whose calls I was paid to return. ‘Thought you’d taken the day off,’ she said.
I went into my calm new office, sat at my new desk, looked out my big window and I asked myself the same question I’d been asking myself all the way from the Trades Hall. The inescapable one.
Was Lloyd Eastlake knowingly involved in the faking of the CUSS art collection? And if so, did that mean he was implicated in the death of Marcus Taylor?
Realities were at work here that experience had ill-equipped me to deal with, but that I would very swiftly have to learn to manage if I wanted to keep my head above water. Back in Ethnic Affairs, I’d encountered my fair share of wealthy men. Some of the richest men in the state were migrants. Not that you’d often find them snoozing in the library at the Melbourne Club. Their own communities knew them as employers and entrepreneurs, as the patrons of social clubs and the doers of good works, and perhaps as other things I made it a point never to inquire about. I’d known them as pleaders for community projects, as genial hosts at national day celebrations, as abstract factors in predictable electoral equations.
But in a very real-meaning political-sense, their transactions and their reputations, their associations and ambitions, were fundamentally a matter of indifference to me. Apart from the one or two who had scaled the Olympian heights of industry, they were generally at a remove from the real centre of power. For all their money and their sectional influence, they were ultimately on the outside looking in. No transgression, error or lapse on their part could really hurt the government.
But not so Eastlake. Eastlake was on the team, one of the boys, a man publicly identifiable with the standards by which we ran the state. A man with a finger in every pie. The party pie, the money pie, the union pie, the culture pie. And some of these pies, unfortunately, now also contained Angelo Agnelli’s finger.
I found Lloyd Eastlake’s card and laid it flat in front of me on my desk. I built a hedge of yellow phone message slips around it. I tapped its cardboard edge against the blond timber. I buzzed Phillip Veale, two glass partitions away. ‘Hypothetically speaking,’ I said. ‘What’s the score on the director of a public art gallery also operating as a consultant to private clients?’
‘Hypothetically speaking,’ said Veale. ‘Probably legal. Possibly unethical. Definitely unwise.’ He didn’t ask who and I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t help but feel that our relationship was on the mend.
Then I called a contact at the Corporate Affairs Commission and asked him to look up the company registration information on Austral Fine Art, Pty Ltd. He promised to get back to me within an hour.
Finally, I called Eastlake. Not the mobile number. If he was in his car or on the hoof, Spider might overhear the call. I rang the number that looked like it might be his direct office line. It was. He picked it up after the first ring. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ he said. ‘I’ve been frantic.’
‘It’s Murray Whelan.’
‘Oh, hello.’ He dropped his voice an octave and changed down to cruising speed. ‘I thought it was someone else.’
‘Are you speaking hands-free?’ I like to know exactly who is listening to my conversations. ‘Is there anyone else in the office with you?’
‘No. I’m alone. Why?’
‘Regarding that matter we discussed yesterday at the Deli. I need to talk to you again.’
