least one person’s memory, who had pursued our noble calling in Mahoney Place twenty years before. It was hard to do without, at least one decent drink inside me.
The street was narrow enough for a ball thrown against a brick fence on one side to rebound and hit the opposite fence on the full. That’s if you were good enough to judge the force and distance right; the kids who were playing this game halfway down the street were good enough. There were two of them-Mediterraneans-taking it in turns. I grinned at them and they stopped to let me pass-the co-ordination and the sweat on their faces was reassuring in the pinball age.
Number 32 was a white-painted brick wall, built on the street line with a door in it, no window. TOTAL GRAPHICS was painted in red on the bricks in metre-high letters. I knocked, reflecting that maybe I’d be more successful if I called myself TOTAL INVESTIGATIONS.
The man who opened the door looked pretty successful in his field, if clothes maketh the man: he wore a velvet shirt open to the waist, revealing a bushel of hair and a kilo of gold charms and medallions. His legs were stick-thin inside tight leather pants. His head was shaved and he wore a diamond stud in one ear. The shaved head gave him that exhibitionist look it always does. Otherwise, he was normal. He went back inside as soon as he’d pulled the door open and I had no choice hut to follow him.
It was a long time back since it had been a private detective’s office. That would be just a bad memory. Now the deep, narrow room was scrupulously clean. Light came in through a bank of skylights high up on one wall. A long bench held half a dozen VDT screens, each with a chair in front of it. There was a large bank of Swedish- looking storage baskets filled with paper and a bookcase half-filled with books whose spines looked all the same. A desk as big as a pool table was covered with coffee-making gear-an urn, filter machine, a grinder, packets of coffee and filter papers.
Baldy practically ran back along the bench and threw himself down in front of one of the screens.
‘Be with you in a minute’, he said. ‘This is nearly out. Bloody exciting.’
Nice to see a man happy in his work, I thought. I closed the door behind me and walked in. ‘Graphics’ suggested paper and pens to me, scissors and set squares. Apart from the paper in the bins there was nothing like that. A big photocopier was in the corner, and here at least there was some frivolous paper-a big poster of Orson Welles as Charles Foster Kane-I was surprised it wasn’t a holograph.
The bald man’s hands danced over the keys and he tapped his sneakered foot as if he was playing Scott Joplin. I looked over his shoulder but couldn’t make anything of the zig-zag flashes that appeared on the screen.
‘Got it!’ he bawled. ‘Fucking A!’ He swivelled around and stood up. Two long strides took him to the coffee table, and his leather pants didn’t split.
‘Coffee?’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
He shovelled coffee into a filter paper, fitted it into the machine and poured the water from a plastic jug. The machine was already hot, and the water hit the element with a loud hiss.
‘Boil the water first. That’s the secret.’
I nodded. ‘I boil the water and then pour it in on top of the powder.’
He shuddered, stagily. ‘Barbarian. Well, what can I do for you?’
He took two polystyrene cups from a metre-high stack and set them on the table. He put two spoons of raw sugar into one and looked enquiringly at me. I nodded and held up one finger-I thought I might need the energy to keep up with him. He jigged while the coffee dripped through. When the beaker was half-full with liquid the colour of shellac, he poured.
‘Here you go. I live on the stuff-it calms me down.’
I drank; the coffee was strong enough to clean drains.
‘I’m trying to locate a man named Phillips’, I put the cup down, dug out one of my cards and handed it over. ‘He was in the same business as me, and he had an office at this address. Some time back.’
He looked at the card and shook his head. Dead-end, I thought. ‘You don’t know him, that right?’
He fiddled with the stud in his ear. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘You shook your head.’
‘I was shaking my head at the terrible design of this card.’ He flicked it with his forefinger’s long nail. ‘Look at that lettering. Depressing! That’s no way to win business, Mr Hardy.’
‘I’ll get a new one designed’, I said. ‘I might give you the job if you can help me.’
He did some more stud twiddling. ‘Have a look at this.’ He rummaged in a drawer and came up with a pile of cards held together with an elastic band. He flipped one over to me like a croupier. The words TOTAL GRAPHICS stood out black and bold against the gold background.
‘Very nice, Mr…?’
‘Style-Ian Style, good name isn’t it? It’s my real one, too.’ He finished his coffee and poured another; I was still waiting for my tongue to stop throbbing. ‘You’re right, one Phillips had this place before me. That’s oh… seven years back. You should have seen it. A real mess.’
‘No style, eh?’
He looked at me. ‘Oh, God’, he groaned. ‘I think I stopped counting remarks like that at about five thousand.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. Yes, Phillips. I kept getting mail for him for years. The re-direction system has never been very effective.’
‘Where did you send it? Do you have an address for him, did you write it down?’
If he had had any eyebrows they would have shot up, but his head was quite hairless. ‘Write it down! No chance. We’re computerised here-totally.’
I smiled, although I didn’t think his joke was so much better than mine.
‘I’ve got it on file.’
‘I’d be grateful if you’d give it to me. I need to see him, urgently.’
‘Do I got the re-designing job?’
‘Sure.’
He got up and bounced across to one of the consoles. His fingers got busy, and symbols began scrolling on to the screen. I sneaked a look at the bookshelf-all computer manuals. He punched a key and froze the image.
‘Here it is. Joshua Phillips, 33A MacDonald Street, Erskineville.’
I went back to the nineteenth century, and wrote it down. ‘When was the last time you got mail for him?’
The screen came alive again, froze.
‘About this time last year. An envelope, private. Nothing ever came back. Does that mean the address still applies?’
‘I hope so. That’s amazingly efficient: I should get a system like that.’
‘You’ll be out of business in five years if you don’t. More coffee?’
I refused the coffee, thanked him for the help and he said he’d submit some designs for the card. I thanked him again and let myself out. By that time he was sitting down at a keyboard again and the sneakers were beating a tattoo.
Erskineville has been hit by the middle class money only in patches. Most of it retains the old atmosphere of toil- awkwardly angled streets built for foot and horse traffic, and a mix of residential and factory buildings. A few of the terrace houses are wide and rise to three storeys, but most are more modest and some get down to the narrowness of 33A MacDonald Street. The house was so narrow that my car, parked exactly outside, seemed to overlap its boundaries.
The tiny place crouched behind a privet hedge three or four metres back from the street; that put its front door about forty metres from the railway line. A train rattled past as I pulled open the rickety gate. The line was on a viaduct over the road, and with the wind in the right quarter it must have sounded in 33A as if the trains were coming through the front window.
It was 4.30 in the afternoon, a time when there were a lot of reasons to be out. It occurred to me that I should have asked Style for Phillips’s phone number which he would surely have had on file, along with his blood type and date of birth.
