‘I thought, just forget Dean? That’s what they want. Sorry, Dean’s missing. End of story. Here’s some money. Don’t tell anyone. Sorry about the girls. I thought, fucking hell, do they think I can buy another Daddy for the girls? One day, they’re grown up, and all they know is their Daddy went away and never came back.’
126
The end of the day was in the wind, a cold end. I looked out over the city. Designed by Americans, the city and its citadel. Built from scratch. Our Brasília.
‘When Dean rang from Melbourne, did he give you any idea of what he was doing?
Anything at all?’
She made a helpless shoulder movement, looked away. ‘I shouted at him, started crying. I’d had it, it was all too bloody much. Birthday party, no-one to help me. Then Lorna, the little one, they’re all rushing around, she fell and hit her head against one of Dean’s bloody garden boulders, I never wanted the ugly things. He wanted these rocks, I couldn’t see the point. Little girl lying there, not making a sound, blood pouring out of her head. I thought she was dead…’
She let go of my hand.
‘Anyway, when he rang, it was after eleven that night, the girls were asleep, I wasn’t going to wake them, just went ballistic, how can bloody work be so important that a father can’t be at home for his little girl’s birthday? Said that sort of thing. I mean, can you blame me?’
This was possibly therapeutic for Meryl but it wasn’t helping me. The view was palling, too.
She fired up another cigarette. ‘So, he said, Dean said, listen, pull yourself together, I’m not having a holiday here. He was cross. Really cross. Shouting. Never like that. Never.’
Tossed her head.
Silence. I could feel her shivering.
‘Christ, it gets cold. Then it’s hot. Never felt well since the day I came here. Never. Hate the place.’
She shook her head, scratched her face. Chemical relief was needed. She turned to me, tears down her face, put out a hand, put it on my chest, on my heart, leaned her head.
‘Love him so much,’ she said. ‘I just couldn’t cope. Stupid, weak person.’
I put my right hand over hers, pressed it. ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re a strong, brave person.
What was he shouting?’
‘He said, he’d been drinking, I can always tell, he said, “Two more days with this bastard Connors and I’m home and fucking Black Tide’s over.’’’
‘The name. Connors. You sure?’
‘Yes.’ Sniff. She sat back. ‘Connors. That’s what he said. This bastard Connors.’
127
‘The other thing. Black Tide? Is that it?’
‘Yes. Black Tide.’
‘You knew what that was?’
‘No.’ Sniff. ‘Well, knew the name, didn’t know what.’
I waited.
Sniff. ‘We went to a barbie at the Conroys’. Friends, well, Tony’s a friend of Dean’s. She says she can’t talk to me any more.’
‘Who?’
‘Deirdre, Tony’s wife. I rang her after they came to tell me.’ She looked around, distracted.
Prompt: ‘And at the barbie…’
‘Tony said to Dean…They were doing the meat. I came out with beers and I heard Tony say, Black Tide’s running again. So I asked Dean on the way home, what’s Black Tide?
A horse? And he said, forget you heard it. Don’t ever mention it to anyone.’
She put a hand to her hair, stood up. ‘Stuck in my mind. Black Tide. S’pose I shouldn’t mention it to you. What the hell does it matter now? Got to go. Kids.’
I stood up. There was an intimacy between us. She came closer. ‘He’s everything,’ she said. She touched her head to my chest. I put my lips to her pale hair, sweet-smelling, my hands on her shoulders. Total strangers on a former hilltop.
‘Listen, Meryl,’ I said. ‘I’ll try to find out about Dean. Don’t sign anything, don’t accept any offers these people make. I’ll get a lawyer to ring you.’
She said, muffled, ‘Aren’t lawyers all crooks?’
I crossed my fingers. ‘That’s a myth,’ I said.
Meryl gathered herself. She took something out of the top pocket of her jacket and offered it to me. It was a photograph of a man with a child on his shoulders.
‘Dean,’ she said. At the door, she looked back, raised a hand, feigned a smile. I raised a fist, felt stupid immediately. It was a symbol of strength, solidarity, hope. What did I know of strength, solidarity and hope?
128
I waited a while, went back inside, wandered around to the lifts. When one came, I politely allowed everyone in, decided to take the stairs. Caught another lift on the next floor. Getting into a cab, outside the front entrance, I looked back. The only person looking my way was a tall man in a grey suit, convict haircut, bony face. He was moving, bringing dark glasses up to his face. And then he found them uncomfortable, stopped to adjust the fit.
Could be nothing. Could be otherwise.
More than two hours to kill. I got dropped in the city centre, or that’s what the man said it was, walked around, found a bookshop, bought a promising-sounding novel called In the Emptiness of Time, found a cafe, drank coffee, reasonable coffee. I saw many men in rubber-soled brown shoes, spotted a number of women with buns: insufficient evidence to back up Shane DiSanto’s generalisation but certainly a worrying incidence. Enough to justify a large university research grant.
I didn’t see the bony-faced man in the grey suit. But not for want of looking.
And still I was early for the plane. In the tawdry bar, I asked for a beer with half a shot of lime.
‘Dynamite combination,’ said the barman. He was young and pale, long nose, sleek fair hair, very likely a final-year student at the local university, cultural studies student perhaps, deconstructing our encounter.
‘Beer cocktail. What kind of glass? Martini glass?’ He had a look, a smart amused look.
Bartending was clearly a fun experience out here at Canberra airport. Low-level politicians. Public servants. Assorted jovial political parasites. Polite people. No hard-core drunks, no unpredictable people to take offence at your smile, throw a full ashtray at you, climb over the counter, get you in a headlock and try to drown you in the drip tray. Around here bartending was just a source of income and good party stories. About how you said all these smart things to this old fart who wanted a beer with lime.
Beer with fucking lime. I ask you.
These thoughts came to me while looking at the person. I was tired. I didn’t say anything, just looked at him. He looked back, smiled another kind of smile, looked away. After a while, even the young and smart and playful recognise men at the edge of endurance.
‘Coming up, sir,’ he said.
23
129
Planes are good for thinking. Reading seems an unnaturally complacent activity when you are risking your life in a hissing aluminium tube that seeks to defy gravity. I studied the picture of Dean and his daughter. He wore rings on both little fingers, small rings with dark stones. He didn’t look like someone who did secret government work, away for months at a time. He looked like a man who repaired things, washing machines, fridges, photocopiers perhaps. Went home at night, Holden in the drive at 6.30.
Two more days with this bastard Connors and I’m home and fucking Black Tide’s over.
Dean Canetti was keeping an eye on Gary Connors on April 3. And he planned to spend two more days involved with him.
What did with Connors mean? Following him? Something else?
Two more days. Did that mean he’d been close to Gary for longer than the day of April 3? Gary had been overseas until April 2. He’d been away from home for more than a week when he telephoned on April 3. Had Canetti followed him overseas?
Canetti was from the government. But not the shopfront government. The hidden government. Gary was from somewhere else: corrupt policeman, then TransQuik, then a person consulted on security by impenetrable foreign companies, including Klostermann Gardier. But still a TransQuik person, according to Barry Tregear, a man not given to conjecture.
Canetti, the man from the government, and Gary Connors, the man from free enterprise, almost certainly bent free enterprise, came together. Presumably, the former was in pursuit of the latter. And then they vanished. On the same day.
Barry Tregear didn’t move in the world of high finance. He moved in a low-finance world where making money generally involved taking it away from someone else. If Barry believed that TransQuik could make it snow in the tropics on a given day, it meant that smart cops knew not to mess with TransQuik.
Smart cops didn’t mess with TransQuik. And the Director of Public Prosecutions didn’t mess with TransQuik.
That was a status jump.
Did this mean that no-one messed with the assured and handsome Steven Levesque, multi-millionaire owner of a Sydney towerblock and of companies with exotic hideaways where Premiers relaxed? A man who was a major donor to a political party. And a man whose exalted name was invoked by a lowly female employee of a company that won a coastal surveillance contract. Invoked and smartly revoked.
130
Klostermann Gardier, acting for other interests, acting as a conduit, tried to buy part of TransQuik.
The bid failed because a journalist called Stuart Wardle gave Tony Rinaldi a question to ask. And Klostermann’s agent, Carlos Siebold, found the question so offensive that he showed TransQuik’s executives the door.
Steven Levesque bought TransQuik after Klostermann Gardier’s bid for a big chunk was abandoned.
Tony Rinaldi said something.
Klostermann Gardier don’t give up.
I, on the other hand, do. You can juggle bits of information for just so long. I asked a long-faced female steward for a whisky and soda. She smiled and went on her way.
At home, weary in the bone marrow, I got the whisky and soda, had two, went to bed.
I fell asleep thinking about the $60,000 Gary had taken out of his father’s bank account. It was a lot of cash to carry around. Was he paying someone off?
Dean Canetti?
The cast in my dream included my landlady, Charlie, Stan from the Prince, all in some rural setting. We were standing in a paddock, planning something, arguing. A rural setting with prolonged ringing. The ringing finally woke me.
‘Early for you?’
Cam, a woman singing in the background, high voice, plaintive Mexican-sounding song.
Recorded? The singer tried a phrase again, better this time. Haunting. Definitely not recorded.
‘Anything that wakes me is too early for me,’ I said.
‘Two things. A bloke we should talk to on Sunday. That’s late a.m. Free?’ Cam didn’t give away much on the phone. An example I had learned nothing from.
‘Yes. I’ll be at Taub’s.’
‘Pick you up 11.45. Second, my cousin’s birthday party. You might like to come.’
‘When’s that?’
‘June the second. Small affair. Don’t get dressed up.’
131
‘I’ll put it in my diary.’
I showered, put on work clothes, set out for breakfast. At 7.10 a.m., the pavements of Brunswick Street were quiet. Everything else in the street had changed but 7.10 a.m.
was still much the same. Only a few people on foot, even numbers of the purposeful and the Where-the-fuck-am-I.
The difference was that the latter seemed younger, paler and sicker these days, courtesy of waves of cheap smack. Cheap only a few times. Once-in-a-lifetime bargains.
I parked outside the newsagent, bought the Age and lugged it down the street to Meaker’s. Sharon the actor came to take my order. She had the frozen-faced look of someone better suited to the three-to-ten shift.
‘No conversation,’ she said. ‘Please.’
Grilled ham. Grilled tomato. Toast. Mustard. Long, strong black.
Enzio himself came out with my order. The cook: short, swarthy, balding, unhappy.
‘This is an honour, maestro,’ I said.
He put the plate down. ‘Got a job in Daylesford. Gettin out of here.’ He scratched his beard stubble.
Enzio began making announcements like this as soon as winter set in. Usually, he was off to warmer climes: Cairns, Broome, Vanuatu. I looked at the plate. He’d been generous, no portion control here.
‘Back to the kitchen,’ I said. ‘We’ll have a word later.’
He left. While I ate, I went through the paper looking for a mention of Steven Levesque. When I’d finished, I paid at the counter and stuck my head into the kitchen.
‘Daylesford,’ I said. ‘Pretty. Gets cold, though. Sure this is a good move?’
‘No respect here,’ he said, stirring scrambled eggs with his left hand while using a delicate wristy action with his right to keep an omelette in motion. ‘Bloody cook. Just a bloody cook.’
‘Enzio, how can you talk about respect? Respect is for ordinary chefs. You’re beyond respect. Your customers won’t let you go.’
A laugh-cough, a suspicious look out of narrowed bloodshot eyes. ‘You hear this bullshit where?’
132
‘Where? Everywhere. I meet a customer, that’s what I hear. Enzio. That’s what we talk about. Know something?’
Pink eyes shifted to me again, hands in ceaseless motion.
‘People don’t call this place Meaker’s.’
Eyebrows up a fraction.
‘The regulars, they call it Enzio’s. Know that?’
He shrugged, took the pans off the heat. ‘Hah. How come I only hear this when I’m leavin?’
I sighed. ‘Enzio, people get used to brilliance. Take it for granted. I’m guilty. We’re all guilty. From now on, I’m going to make sure you hear what the customers think.’
Enzio grunted. ‘Think about it some more. Maybe.’
I patted him on the arm. It takes work to prevent the painstakingly woven fabric of your life from returning to its natural state of short bits of unconnected thread.
At Taub’s, I started on the carcass of the western wall of Mrs Purbrick’s library. Today, most cabinets are made of medium-density fibreboard, dressed up with veneers and the odd piece of solid timber. Charlie pretended not to know of the existence of MDF. A Taub cabinet began with a carcass of forty-year-old European ash. To that was attached a frame-and-panel exterior of timber chosen from The Bank. Taub panels floated in their frames: no glue. Joints, interior and exterior, were mortice and tenon or dovetail, all handcut.
Today, we had the ripping of the ash. Charlie had put out the wood, left me a list of dimensions on a strip torn from the edge of Tuesday’s Age.