Murder Song (27 page)

“That's a coincidence.” O'Brien had warmed to Joanna at once. She had a directness about her, though it wasn't a hard approach. “I was invited to the opera tonight. Sebastian Waldorf—do you know him?—he's staying with me.”

“Sebastian Tightpants? We had a thing going for a while, before I married again. I belong to the Friends of the Opera.”

“With Sebastian she was just friendlier than any of the other Friends.” Anita smiled affectionately at her sister.

“What's Sebastian doing, staying with you? Are you old mates? Anita said you used to be in pop
music,
not opera.”

O'Brien had not told Anita about Blizzard's hit list; she still believed that his only danger came from whoever had ordered Wednesday night's attempt on his life. Up till now he had managed to conceal from her that Malone and Waldorf were staying with him at the Congress; he saw her now looking at him curiously. “We knew each other years ago. He's just staying with me for a couple of nights, we're catching up on old times.” He suddenly tasted alum, wished he could spit it out. “He's singing tonight,
The Magic Flute.”

“I know. He won't look his best tonight, not covered in feathers—he plays a bird-catcher. That's a laugh—he's been chasing birds all his life. He should have called himself Randy Waldorf, but that would have sounded too much like a pop singer. Well, enjoy each other. I'll ring the doorbell when I come home, just as a warning I've arrived.” She said it without a wink or a leer; she was still a lady in many ways. She kissed Anita, then looked at O'Brien. “Do I kiss you, too?”

O'Brien smiled, leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek. “Good-night, Joanna. And thanks.”

“I've never stood in the way of true love. I'm a conservationist when it comes to that.” There was a ring at the front door. “There's my man. “Bye.”

She went out, leaving O'Brien and Anita facing each other across a narrow space that vibrated with Anita's hurt and curiosity. And fear. “You didn't tell me about this chap Waldorf. Why?”

He reached for her hand, but she held her arms at her side. He was still diffident towards her at times, almost a little in awe, like a young man lacking confidence with his first girl. Only in bed, where the blood took over, was he confident.

“I didn't want to tell you. I didn't want you worrying any more than you are now.”

“Worrying about what?” The hurt drained from her, but she was still puzzled and afraid.

Hesitantly, watching her carefully, seeing each word he spoke chipping away at her, he told her of the hit list and Frank Blizzard. She stood stiffly for a moment, then it seemed that she flung herself at him. He held her to him, all at once certain of her and of himself.

“
Oh God, Brian!” She kissed him fiercely, bruising his mouth. “What else can happen to you? How much more bad luck can you have? What did you do, run over a nun or something?” she said, trying to be wry and not hysterical.

He grinned, the lapsed Catholic who hadn't spoken to a nun in more years than he could remember. “My mother used to say that. My luck's just turned, that's all. I've had a good long run. I found you,” he said and, unwittingly, made it sound like a sad climax.

“Let's go up to bed.” She took his hand, led him upstairs.

“Where's your sister's husband? Is he likely to come home and find us?”

“He's on an oil rig somewhere in the Bass Strait—they have some industrial trouble down there. He called Joanna an hour ago. He won't be home till Saturday night.” She had led him into a guest bedroom; she was delicate about using Joanna's bed, though she knew her sister wouldn't mind. The room had a double bed, not a king-sized one like Joanna's, but it was wide enough for what they had in mind. Love-making is a game that can be played on the narrowest of battlefields. “Undress me.”

“I was never any good at this, I'm all fingers and thumbs—”

“Don't tell me about your experience. Or lack of it.”

He smiled, totally confident now as he peeled off her clothes, doing it with more tenderness than she had hoped for. “This is like peeling a lotus—”

She kissed him gently. “You're a continual surprise, darling—you come out with unexpected things—”

It had been a line from an old pop song sung by—he couldn't believe the coincidence! By Bob
Norval,
from the Salvation Four Plus Sinner. His world was turning full circle. He had forgotten that other Norval, as had the rest of the world.

“What's the matter?” Anita said.

He sat down on the bed in front of her, kissed her bare full breasts. Accustomed to younger women, he was still amazed that a woman of her age could be so slim and firm and beautiful. Though he was no longer young himself, he had lived too long, or lusted too long, amongst the young.

“
Don't let's talk.” His voice was a husky whisper. “Not now.”

Their love-making was both tender and furious, as it should be. She was completely uninhibited, a deflowered girl from
The Perfumed Garden;
he was content to let her make all the suggestions, though no word needed to be spoken. He had remarkable stamina, a horizontal marathoner; they wore each other out, both winners, no losers. Afterwards they lay enjoying their wounds on the rumpled battlefield.

At last she said, not looking at him but at the ceiling, “What do we do, darling?”

He knew what she meant; there was no point in playing dumb. “There's nothing we can do. Sooner or later we've got to say goodbye.”

“No!” She reached for his hand; he felt her nails dig into it. “Don't talk about
that
! I mean, what are we going to do about this—this hit list?” She stumbled on the phrase, as if it were foreign, a term she didn't understand.

He continued to lie on his back, but turned his face towards her. Her dark hair was tousled, her face glowed, she had that young look that love and sex can bring back, no matter how fleetingly, to a woman. Then he looked into her eyes and saw the pain and hopelessness: she looked her age
there.

“All we can do is leave it with the police. They're doing the best they can.”

“Is that why Inspector Malone was with you the other night at the Town Hall?” He nodded. “And he's on the list, too? Oh God. Does he have a family?”

“A wife and three children. They're safe somewhere up in Queensland.”

“But you're not. Neither is he. Would the man who's trying to kill you have followed you here?”

He tried to reassure her, not confessing the fear he had felt when standing outside the front door less than two hours ago. “I wouldn't have come if I'd thought that would happen.”

“Let's go away somewhere.” But even as she said it she knew the hopelessness of it.

“Where?”

“I don't know. Anywhere. One reads about it every day—people disappearing,”

“Sweetheart, it would never work.” He had money in a bank account in Switzerland, more than
enough
for them to live comfortably anywhere in the world; the courts might sequestrate all his holdings here in Australia, but it wouldn't matter. Money was not their problem and, it struck him only now, it was a subject she had never discussed. She had been accustomed to wealth all her life; he was troubled by the thought that she might have wondered at the greed that had driven him to accumulate his. But that was another subject she had never discussed. Their love was deeper than their knowledge of each other, but that, he guessed, might be the way of the world. He had certainly never known all that he might have of his two wives. “Someone would find us eventually. Anyway, you can't leave your children and your grandchildren, not for ever.”

She knew the truth of what he was saying; she felt it like a stab in the chest whenever she thought of it. She wondered if she would have felt differently if she were like Joanna; her own sense of morality encased her like an old-fashioned corset. She felt no guilt that she had broken her marriage vows (how old-fashioned that sounded, even in the silence of her mind); Philip had broken them long ago and many times. But marriage did not end with Philip: her son and daughter and her grandchildren were part of it. She owed something to them, if no more than an example; or at the very least, to protect them from the scandal if she left Philip and disappeared with a man already branded as a scoundrel, even if the iron had not yet seared him. She had reached that rarefied level in the nation's society, narrow though it was, where the standards were still almost Victorian; the young might wish her the best of Aussie luck, but the majority of the citizens would never forgive her. Certainly her mother and father never would.

She rolled over on to her true love, raised herself to look at his face as if it might be her last look. “All I want is for you to stay alive.”

IV

Malone was not enjoying the opera; the first act had convinced him that he would never become a regular opera-goer. Waldorf had told him that the opera was almost an English pantomime set to some better music; but he had never seen a pantomime and now was glad he had not. He had liked Waldorf's opening song, but thereafter his ear had wandered; he had found that his main interest was in
looking
at the soprano playing the Queen of the Night. Waldorf had told him that in the company she was known as Queen of the Nymphos. If asked by Lisa what he had thought of the opera, he would not comment on the Queen.

At the first interval he sat for a few moments while the huge auditorium emptied. Then he was sitting in a long empty row and suddenly he felt exposed, a shag sitting on a rock and waiting to be knocked off. He looked up and around him, twisting his head almost in a panic; but there was no one aiming a rifle at him, there was going to be no drama in the interval. He got up and went out into the foyer.

He stayed on the fringe of the crowd. It was a mixed lot, young and old, jeans-dressed and dressed-up; there was a large sprinkling of the foreign-born, the older ones enjoying this distant echo of nights in Vienna and Bayreuth and Milan. A very goodlooking blonde woman, who looked faintly familiar, passed by with a sleek seal of a businessman who looked as if he thought he was already halfway to bed with her. Malone heard the woman say, “He was better as Don Giovanni than as the bird-catcher. But then they're both after birds, aren't they?”

Malone debated whether he would try for a drink at the crowded bar, decided against it and turned away to see a face he recognized, though he did not know the man's name and he looked different in a suit and without his usual open-necked shirt and anorak. The Channel 15 cameraman smiled at him, hesitated, then came towards him.

“Inspector, not on duty, are you?”

“You'd have brought your camera, if I was?” Malone didn't mean to sound so sour.

The cameraman shook his head. “Not tonight. I'm here just to hear the music—I'm a great Mozart fan. You like him, too?”

Malone shrugged. “Sometimes. You know, I don't know your name?”

“Colin Malloy. Oh, this is my wife Julie.”

She had evidently been to the ladies' room. She was small and pretty, younger than Malloy by at least ten or fifteen years; she looked like a woman who needed protection and she had chosen an older,
more
reliable man. He put his arm round her. “This is Inspector Malone, hon. We've met several times on the job. He doesn't like having the camera turned on him.”

“I don't blame you, Mr. Malone.” She turned a wan face up to her husband. “I've got a dreadful headache. I think I'll go home.”

I'd like to do the same, thought Malone as the bell rang to end the interval.

Malloy looked disappointed, but he frowned with concern above his dark beard. “I'll get us a cab and we'll go and pick up the car. “Night, Inspector. Enjoy the rest of the opera.”

“Before you go—” Malone hesitated, not wanting to delay Mrs. Malloy, who seemed to be getting paler by the moment. “Tell me something. When you shoot your film or tape or whatever you use—”

“Tape.”

“How much is used in the actual newscast?”

Malloy still had his arm round his wife, as if he was afraid that she might faint against him here in the rapidly clearing foyer. “Depends on the news items. If we get two minutes on the screen, we think we're lucky. We might get that for a major disaster.”

“What happens to the rest of the tape?”

“It's just thrown out. They might keep some of it, say a shot of a particular person, for the files, but most of it would be thrown out. There's an awful lot of waste in our game.”

“There is in any game, except ours. We never have any money to throw away. Good-night, Mrs. Malloy. I hope your headache soon clears up. It's a pity to miss Mozart,” he lied convincingly.

The Malloys went across the foyer and down the wide steps and he went back in for the final act. He would send Russ Clements out again tomorrow to chase up those clips the TV newsrooms had filed. Frank Blizzard wasn't a ghost. Somewhere he had left a print of himself, something more than a voice reciting an old, threatening nursery rhyme.

When the final curtain fell Malone pushed his way out through the crowd and went down to the stage door. Waldorf had left word that he was to be admitted; none the less, the doorkeeper looked at
him
curiously, wondering what a detective-inspector wanted with one of the company's leading singers. Was Sebastian Waldorf to be arrested for rape, for seduction of a minor? He knew the reputation of everyone in the company. Some day he would retire and write his own opera, once he'd learned to compose music.

Malone, given directions to Waldorf's dressing-room, sidestepped his way through the musicians and chorus members already rushing to catch the last bus or to grab a lift from a fellow member who had a car. Despite his boredom out front, Malone felt a curiosity, almost an excitement, at being backstage. This was theatre, make-believe, glamour: all the clichés that were contradicted by his own work-world. Here everything was heightened, even if only by the imagination and conceit of those who worked in it; there were other rewards besides those of pay and promotion, there were fame and applause and the realization of creativity. None of these thoughts was coherent or even put into words in his own mind as he went down the bustling corridor. He was just aware of a more heightened feeling than he had felt out in the auditorium.