The Tax Inspector

‘What you think I’m going to do to you?’ Sarkis asked. ‘Did I hurt you?’

‘Just pay me,’ Pavlovic said, glaring at him from streaming eyes.

‘O.K.,’ Sarkis said, relieved. ‘You go back and get her, I’ll pay you.’

‘O.K. You take your arm away now.’

Sarkis unhooked his arm from under the driver’s chin.

‘O.K.,’ said Pavlovic, blowing his nose. ‘You got money on you?’

‘At home.’

‘Then I’ll take you home for the money, then we come back here and get her.’ He was hunched over the wheel. He did not need to tell Sarkis he had his finger an inch away from the panic button.

‘We get her first.’

‘You want me press this fucking button?’

That button was enough to get Sarkis put in jail. Pavlovic used it like a pistol. First he forced him to abandon Mrs Catchprice. Then he drove him to his house where his mother had $52 hidden under the lino in the sitting- room.

While Sarkis stole his mother’s money, Pavlovic sat in the cab with the engine running. He stayed hunched over the wheel, his finger on that button.

‘Come on,’ Sarkis said when he got back in the cab. ‘I’ve got the money.’

‘Hold it up. Hold the notes.’

Sarkis showed him – five tens, one two.

Pavlovic twisted his neck to see the money. He had to keep his finger on that button. Even when he backed out of the drive-way he had to sit twisted sideways in his seat, and he drove back to the Wool Wash one handed, all the way, in silence.

When the meter showed $52 they were almost there, on the main road up above the Wool Wash Picnic Area. Pavlovic stopped the car.

‘You pay me,’ he said, ‘or I hit this fucking button now. I charge you with fucking assault, at least. You understand me.’

‘Relax,’ said Sarkis. ‘No one’s going to hurt you.’

‘Shut up, Jack. Just pay me.’

‘I need a lift back. O.K. Can you hear me? I’ll pay you more money when we get back.’

‘Give me the fucking money or you’re a dead man.’

‘You don’t want to make more money?’ Sarkis held out the $52 and Pavlovic snatched the notes. ‘I need a lift back,’ Sarkis said. ‘I’ll pay you.’

‘Not in this cab, Jack.’

‘Just calm down, relax a little.’

‘Get out,’ screamed Pavlovic.

Sarkis shrugged and got out of the car.

Pavlovic locked the car doors.

‘Listen,’ Sarkis began, but the taxi was already driving away, leaving him to stand in pitch darkness.

It was now five minutes to eleven o’clock on Monday night. Mrs Catchprice was already back in Franklin, walking back across the gravel towards her apartment.

26

The Australian Tax Office was in Hunter Street. The glassed, marble-columned foyer remained brightly lit and unlocked and, apart from video cameras and an hourly M.S.S. patrol, the security for the building depended on deceptively ordinary blue plastic Security Access Keys which were granted only to ASO 7’s and above. This was why Gia now had a key and Maria did not.

In the six months she had had the key, Gia had never used it. It sat in its original envelope in the bottom of her handbag, together with its crumpled instruction sheet. Now, standing before the blank eyes of video cameras which were connected to she knew not what, Gia read the instructions to Maria.

‘O.K. Hold the key firmly between thumb and forefinger. Ensure blade is unobstructed.’

‘We should have read this in the car,’ Maria said. ‘I can’t see where the shitty thing goes.’ She jabbed the key at the button.

‘First you’ve got to step into the elevator, Senora.’ Gia took Maria’s arm. ‘Then you put it in the Security/Air- conditioning slot.’

A red light came on. A buzzer sounded. Maria started.

‘Calm down,’ Gia said. ‘No one’s going to shoot you. All we’re doing is working late.’

The lift ascended and the liquid display panel above the door wished someone called Alex a happy birthday. Maria seemed pale and unhappy. Gia took her arm and squeezed it.

‘Relax,’ she said.

‘You know,’ Maria said, ‘that’s exactly the wrong thing to say to me. If you’re dealing with an agitated person, a maniac, you never say “relax”. Relax means what you feel is not important to me. I read that in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.’ She took Gia’s hand and held it: ‘You’re very brave to come with me. Thank you.’

‘I think this is going to be very therapeutic,’ Gia said. ‘I only wish Alistair could see you do it.’

‘This is nothing to do with Alistair …’

Gia thought: Sure! It was the first real sign she’d seen that Maria would let herself be angry with him.

The door opened on to the rat-maze partitioned world of the eighteenth floor which now housed the file clerks and section heads and auditors who concerned themselves with returns from small businesses like Catchprice Motors.

When Alistair’s star had been in the ascendant they had all worked here – although not on small businesses. During those years, no one on the eighteenth floor would have wasted their genius on Catchprice Motors.

They went to big-game fishing conventions in Port Stephens and photographed the people with the big boats and then investigated them to see if their income correlated with their assets. They spotted Rolls-Royces on the way to work and, on that chance encounter, began investigations that brought millions into the public purse. It is true that they were occasionally obsessive (Sally Ho started fifteen investigations on people with stone lion statues in their gardens) but mostly they were not vindictive. They investigated major corporations, multi-nationals with transfer pricing arrangements and off-shore tax havens. They went hunting for Slutzkin schemes, Currans, and sham charities. This is the work for which Alistair recruited Maria Takis and her best friend Gia Katalanis.

It had not been a rat-maze then. Alistair had had all the partitioning ripped out. There had been no careful grading of offices and desks but a clamorous paddock of excitable men and women who lived and breathed taxation. They worked long hours and drank too much red wine and smoked too many cigarettes and had affairs or ruined their marriages or did both at the same time. More than half of them came from within the Taxation Office but many – those with new degrees like Gia and Maria – came from outside it, and thereby leap-frogged several positions on the promotion ladder without sensing that the old Taxation Office was a resilient and unforgiving organism. Had they realized what enemies they were making it is unlikely they would have acted any differently – they were not cautious people. They were sometimes intolerant, always impatient, but they were also idealists and all of them were proud of their work and they were not reluctant to identify themselves at dinner parties as Tax Officers.

It was Alistair who created this climate, and for a long time everyone in the Taxation Office – even those who later revealed themselves to be his enemies – must have been grateful to him. It was something to be able to reveal your profession carelessly.

It was Alistair who said, on national television, that being a Tax Officer was the most pleasant work imaginable, like turning a tap to bring water to parched country. It felt wonderful to bring money flowing out of multi-national reservoirs into child-care centres and hospitals and social services. He grinned when he said it and his creased-up handsome face creased up some more and he cupped his hands as if cool river water were flowing over his big, farmer’s fingers and it was hard to watch him and not smile yourself. This was one half of Alistair’s great genius – that he was good on television. He sold taxation as a public good.