Stiff (5 page)

‘Yeah?’ he said. ‘Where do you reckon that story in the
Sun
today came from? That “informed sources at Trades Hall” crap doesn’t seem suspicious to you?’

So this was Agnelli’s great revelation. He was buying me this splendid luncheon so I could massage his petty paranoia. ‘Typical
Sun
beat up, Ange. Anything to slag the government. They’ve been churning out that “War Drums at Union HQ” stuff for a hundred years.’

‘Notice it wasn’t signed?’

‘So?’ As far as I was concerned, no self-respecting journalist would want their name associated with anything in that awful little rag.

‘Anyone at the journalists’ association will tell you that’s a clear signal the piece was cooked up in the editor’s office.’ Agnelli suddenly leaned forward, beckoning across the hot and sour sauce. ‘Truth is,’ he muttered, ‘it’s not just Charlene we’re talking about here. There are bigger things at stake than a one-sided pre-selection brawl. Word is, and mum’s the word, the chief has decided not to go to full term. There’ll definitely be an election before the end of the year.’

My mind raced, but I merely nodded noncommittally and poured myself a thimble of tea, letting the news germinate, take root, send out branches, bear fruit. If Agnelli was right, and it was just the sort of thing Agnelli made it his business to be right about, then I had no choice. As of now, like it or not, I was on the Lollicato case. Shake the Agnelli family tree, I thought, and out would fall a crop of papal nuncios’ bastards.

Lollicato was yet another lawyer, working out of the Broadmeadows Legal Service. A tribune of the people, big on street cred. Years of fronting for first offenders in shitbag cases had given him a sanctimonious edge. And now that I thought about it I could see the signs of creeping ambition. Young Lolly was changing his look. The earrings were disappearing, one by one. Ties were in evidence, even out of court. Such a transformation was not inconsistent with parliamentary aspirations.

If Lollicato wanted a seat, fine. So did half the party. When the time came, he was entitled to make a run, even to play a little rough if that was his style. But if he and his disgruntled union mates were sour enough to run a dirty tricks campaign in the
Sun
, and there was a surprise election in the offing, it wouldn’t matter whether his shot at Charlene hit home or not. The
Sun
was the biggest selling paper in the state, pitched well under the lowest common denominator. Kicking Labor was its second nature, and it would jump at any chance to bag us as an infighting rabble of intriguers. Not that this was necessarily an inaccurate picture, but it was one we preferred not to be bandied about in the lead up to the polls. Talk about frightening the horses.

‘Get the executive committee to haul him in, clip his wings.’ I eventually said.

‘Based on what?’ said Agnelli. ‘We need to make a case first. So far all we’ve got is a bit of gossip and a plausible hypothesis. Lollicato could just be flying a kite. The real question is whether he and his union mates have got enough clout at Pacific Pastoral to make serious mischief.’

‘What’s Charlene think about all of this?’ I asked.

‘Put it this way,’ said Agnelli. ‘It’s my job to see that Charlene knows what she should now. It’s my job to see that she doesn’t know about things she shouldn’t know about.’

He was right. Charlene had to be kept out of the picture, at least for the time being, or we really would have headlines reading ‘Minister in Pre-Selection Wrangle’. It was also clear that Agnelli was expecting me to do all the leg work. But I was not about to volunteer for any cowboy reconnaissance mission.

‘I see,’ I said, and turned my attention back to the table. Those Golden Chopsticks were indeed richly deserved. It was a pity to spoil a lunch like this with politics. But politics was paying and the bill had just been presented.

When Agnelli eventually broke the silence, he seemed to have changed the subject. ‘MACWAM met this morning. They were shitting themselves.’

The Ministerial Advisory Committee on Ways and Means had started off as Charlene’s private brains trust, a half-dozen old pals from the universities and the career civil service. After the election it was beefed up to an official body and given the job of overseeing smooth passage of Charlene’s raft of reforms. Agnelli’s official title was MACWAM Executive Officer. MACWAM presided, but Agnelli executed.

‘You know what a pack of nervous nellies they are,’ he went on. ‘It’s taken me two years to get them this far. Now, less than a week before the final vote on the new industrial health and safety bill, they’ve broken out in a cold sweat. The
Sun
runs a story about some silly dago turning himself into a Paddle Pop and now they think the whole legislative process is about to jump off the rails.’ For a former defender of the industrially maimed, Agnelli could seem remarkably insensitive to the fate of individual members of the working class.

I could see where all this was heading, and was surprised at how soon I had resigned myself to it. I clicked my tongue sympathetically, feeding Agnelli his lines. ‘So you told them that you wouldn’t rest until you were sure that some feral shop steward was not about to declare class war at such an inconvenient juncture in the imminent legislative process.’

Agnelli grinned. He liked having his cleverness appreciated. ‘Naturally they felt better immediately. And just to formalise matters, I got them to ask me to commission a full and detailed report before the final reading of the bill on Friday.’

Agnelli was full of more than just fried rice, but he could play a committee like Rostropovich played Shostakovich. Now he was sawing away at my strings. ‘You can do it on your ear, Murray.’ he said. ‘You know the drill. Nothing fancy, couple of pages, max. As long as it’s in by Thursday it’s all the official sanction we need to cruel Lolly’s pitch. How soon do you think you can get out to Pacific Pastoral and take a look around?’

I put up a last, half-hearted, line of resistance. ‘A big firm like that won’t take too well to me waltzing in off the street and grilling the workforce.’

‘Leave them to me, Murray. Relations with the business community are my forte. And take a squiz at this.’

Agnelli was really enjoying himself now. Charlene’s buff envelope materialised in his hand and skidded across the table. ‘If the deceased happened to have any shit on him, the high moral ground would tend to be cut from underneath Lollicato somewhat, don’t you think?’

Inside the envelope was a file containing a sheaf of papers and some photographs. One spilled out. It was of a very fat, very dead body with white stuff around its lips.

‘Go ahead, Murray,’ said Agnelli. ‘Finish the duck.’

It had already gone three when I tossed the coroner’s envelope onto the passenger seat, shoved Joan Armatrading into the tape deck and headed north. The sky had cleared to a pearly luminescence but the wind was still keen, entertaining itself by stripping the last of the blossoms off the flowering cherries in Princes Park.

Agnelli was probably being over-paranoid about Lollicato, I decided, but there would be no harm in giving his conspiracy theory the quick once-over. His inference that the fate of the government now rested on my shoulders was a bit rich, but any potential threat to Charlene, however unlikely, warranted a closer look. Guarding Charlene’s back was, after all, the prime part of my job. And a couple of days’ break from old ladies’ plumbing and demented tattooees would be a welcome change of pace.

By some obscure culinary demarcation agreement, Chinese restaurants are prohibited from serving decent coffee. So by the time the stately boulevard of Royal Parade became the narrow funnel of Sydney Road, I was in desperate need of a caffeine fix. And I was in just the right place to find one.

Melbourne’s main north–south axis was a clotted artery of souvlaki joints and low-margin high-turnover business. Half the Mediterranean basin had been depopulated of its optimists in order to line Sydney Road with free-wheeling enterprise. Bakeries and furniture shops run by Abruzzesi and Calabresi sat cheek by jowl with the delicatessens of Peloponnesian Greeks and the bridal boutiques of Maronite Lebanese. Signs in Arabic announced halal butchers and video shops displayed soap operas freshly pirated in Damascus and Nicosia. The promise of strong black coffee loitered in the air, and through the windows of the Cafe de la Paix, the Tivoli and the Lakonia I could see men bent over tiny cups of bracing black nectar. But parking spots were few and far between, and it wasn’t long before I found myself stuck in a half-mile-long snaggle of mid-afternoon traffic with no option but to go with the flow.

At the traffic lights beside Brunswick Town Hall, a Rod Stewart haircut at the wheel of a customised panel van was taking the time to pass encouraging recommendations to a poor cow in skin-tight denims wheeling a yowling brat across the road. Further on, the windows of empty shops had been aerosoled with hammers and sickles and plastered with initials and slogans in languages I couldn’t identify. PKK. KSP. KOMKAR. Def Leppard.

At the top of a slight rise, a sandwich board outside the Mighty Ten hardware store read ‘Pink Batts Must Go’. I parked illegally in a loading zone and stuffed the back of the Renault with bulky packages of the fibreglass insulation, paid for with a card already well over the limit.

Five minutes further up the road and I was back at the electorate office. I parked in a side street, and nicked into Ciccio’s Cafe Sportivo, the Italian coffee bar next door. I was standing at the zinc counter, downing an espresso and considering my next step, when the vanguard of the proletariat marched through the door.

Her name was Ayisha Celik. She was a community development worker at the Australian Turkish Welfare League. Exactly what she developed in the Turkish community I wasn’t sure. I knew what she developed in me, and I hoped it didn’t show enough to cause embarrassment.

She had skin the colour of honey and her lips were like ripe pomegranates. Her eyes, ringed in black, were as dark and wilful as a peregrine falcon’s. Her bosom spoke of silk cushions, fretted screens and tinkling fountains. Inspired by such a vision the Ancients had crossed the Bosphorus and pitched their tents beneath the crenellated walls of Troy. All in all, Ayisha Celik had the kind of looks that make veils seem like a sensible idea in places where hot-blooded men go around armed to the teeth. She made a bee-line for the counter and slapped a clipboard down in front of me. ‘Slackin’ off as usual I see, comrade,’ she accused cheerfully.

Ayisha had arrived in Australia at the age of eight and spoke with the teasing upward-rising inflection the kids taught each other in schools where only the teachers spoke English at home. ‘Do us a favour, will ya?’ she said. ‘Sign this.’ The clipboard displayed a ragged column of signatures.

Her words wafted towards me on a warm zephyr of spearmint gum, triggering primal erotic associations connected with Saturday afternoons in the back row of the Liberty Cinema. I wondered, not for the first time, what it might take to arouse reciprocal feelings in her. As usual, nothing presented itself. According to Trish, who specialised in such topics, Ayisha was unlucky in love. I was much heartened by this information. And although she was still in her twenties, a good five or six years younger than me, I liked to think that she at least found me interesting. Not that she gave any sign of that being the case.

Still, it’s a free country. I could think what I liked.

I picked up the clipboard and tried to look fascinated by the petition. The Australian Turkish Welfare League was big on petitions. ‘Who is it this time? The United Nations? The International Court of Justice? The Water Supply Board?’

Ayisha was in no mood. She had news. ‘You know Sivan, our welfare worker?’

Everyone knew Sivan, a laughing beetle-browed man with thick English, another collector of signatures. ‘They’ve arrested his brother.’

‘They’ could only mean the Turkish military, a regime whose taste for terror had driven thousands into exile. Some, Sivan among them, had ended up in the local Turkish community. Many were professionals and artists, progressives and liberals who were putting their skills to work for the benefit of their fellow expatriates. Others, I suspected, had been quite keen on the idea of armed struggle until an even keener crew of nasties had got the drop on them.

Up until that time, I hadn’t had a great deal to do with Charlene’s Turkish constituents, but they seemed a sociable enough mob. For Muslims, most of them were about as fundamentalist as the C of E. And if it wasn’t for their kebab shops, every Friday night the streets of the northern suburbs would have been awash with gangs of half-plastered school teachers looking for somewhere cheap to eat. All I knew, and all I needed to know, was that they could pretty well be relied upon to turn out en masse for Labor.

‘We think it’s because Sivan works for a subversive organisation,’ Ayisha was saying.

‘The League?’

The Australian Turkish Welfare League was two rooms and a secondhand coffee dispenser a couple of blocks up the road from the electorate office. Ayisha, Sivan and a clutch of volunteer social workers ran information programs and cultural activities there for newly arrived migrants, partly paid for by grants from the Ethnic Affairs Commission. If pressed for an adjective to describe the League, subversive would not have sprung to mind. Charlene called it cost-effective service delivery in an area of perceived need. What I called it was damned convenient. If ever I needed translation for the odd Turkish customer that walked in the door, all I had to do was get one of the League people on the blower and have them sort it out in the vernacular.

Naturally, in keeping with their advocacy role, the folks at the League went in for the customary amount of third-worldish polemic. Ayisha, for instance, tended to get about in a red keffiyeh, sounding like Vanessa Redgrave. But nobody in their right mind could seriously believe the League posed a threat to anyone, let alone a fully tooled-up fascist oligarchy twenty thousand kilometres away.

Well, at the time I didn’t think so. ‘You’re petitioning the junta?’ It seemed a little optimistic even for the League.