The Bear Pit (2 page)

“I was celebrating,” said Tom. “I made money today. Those gold stocks I bought a coupla months ago at twenty-five cents, there was a rumour today they've made a strike. They went up twenty cents. I'm rolling in it.”

“He'll be able to keep us,” said Malone. “I can retire.”

Tom was in his third year of Economics, heading headlong for a career as a market analyst. Last Christmas Lisa's father, who could well afford it, had given each of the children a thousand dollars. Claire had put hers towards a skiing holiday in New Zealand; Maureen had spent hers on a new wardrobe; and Tom had bought shares. He was not greedy for money, but they all knew that some day he would be, as his other grandfather had said, living the life of Riley. Whoever he was.

“You'll never retire.” Tom looked at his mother. “Would you want him to? While you still go
on
working?”

“All I want is an excuse.”

Lisa was finishing her second year as public relations officer at Town Hall, handling the city council's part in the Olympic Games. For twenty-two years she had been a housewife and mother; she had changed her pinafore for a power suit, one fitting as well as the other. For the first six months she had found the going slippery on the political rocks of the city council, but now she had learned where not to tread, where to turn a blind eye, when to write a press release that said nothing in the lines nor between them. Whether she would continue beyond the Olympics was something she had not yet decided, but she was not dedicated to the job. When one has no ego of one's own there is suffocation in a chamber full of it.

“If he retires, I retire. We'll go on a world trip and you lot can fend for yourselves.”

Tom looked at them with possessive affection. He was a big lad, taller now than his father, six feet three; heavy in the shoulders and with the solid hips and bum that a fast bowler and rugby fullback needed. He was better-looking than his father and he used his looks with girls. If Riley, whoever he was, had a line of girlfriends, Tom was on his way to equalling him. He had the myopic vision of youth which doesn't look for disappointment.

“How come you two have stayed so compatible?”

“Tolerance on my part,” said both his parents.

“They're so smug,” said Maureen from the doorway.

Then the phone rang out in the hallway. Malone looked at his watch: 11.05. As a cop he had lived almost thirty years on call, but even now there was the sudden tension in him, the dread that one of the children was in trouble or had been hurt: he had too much Celtic blood. Was it Claire calling, had something happened to her?

The ringing had stopped; Maureen had gone back to pick up the phone. A moment or two, then she came to the kitchen doorway:

“It's Homicide, Dad. Sergeant Truach.”

II

“I never take any notice of him,” said the Premier, speaking of the Opposition leader seated half a dozen places along the long top table. “He's too pious, he's like one of those Americans who were in the Clinton investigation, carrying a Bible with a condom as a bookmark. Of course it's all piss-piety, but some of the voters fall for it. We're all liars, Jack, you gotta be in politics, how else would the voters believe us?”

Jack Aldwych knew how The Dutchman could twist logic into a pretzel. It was what had kept him at the head of the State Labor Party for twenty years. That and a ruthless eye towards the enemy, inside or outside the party.

The Dutchman went on, “The Aussie voter only wants to know the truth that won't hurt him. He doesn't want us to tell him he spends more on booze and smokes and gambling than he does on his health. So we tell lies about what's wrong with the health system. But you don't have to be a hypocrite, like our mate along the table.”

Aldwych usually never attended functions such as this large dinner. He had been a businessman, indeed a big businessman: robbing banks, running brothels, smuggling gold. But he had always had a cautionary attitude towards large gatherings; it was impossible to know everyone, to know who might stab you in the back. He was always amused at the Martin Scorsese films of Mafia gatherings, backs exposed like a battalion of targets; but that was the Italians for you and he had never worked with them, not that, for some reason, there had ever been a Mafia in Sydney. Maybe the city had been lucky and all the honest Sicilians had migrated here.

Tonight's dinner, to celebrate the opening of Olympic Tower, was a gathering of the city's elite, though the
crème de la crème
was a little watery around the edges. The complex of five-star hotel, offices and boutique stores had had a chequered history and there was a certain air of wonder amongst the guests that Olympic Tower was finally up and running. There were back-stabbers amongst them, but their knives would not be for Jack Aldwych. This evening he felt almost saintly, an image that would have surprised his
dead
wife and all the living here present.

He certainly had no fear of this old political reprobate beside him; they were birds of a blackened feather. “Hans,” he said, “I have to tell you. I always voted for the other side. Blokes in my old profession were always conservatives. Where would I of been if I'd voted for the common good?”

“Jack,” said Hans Vanderberg, The Dutchman, “the common good is something we spout about, like we're political priests or something. But a year into politics and you soon realize the common good costs more money than you have in Treasury kitty. The voters dunno that, so you never tell ‘em. You pat ‘em on the head and bring up something else for ‘em to worry about. I think the know-all columnists call it political expediency.”

“Are you always as frank as this?”

“You kidding?” The old man grinned, a frightening sight. He was in black tie and dinner jacket tonight, the furthest he ever escaped from being a sartorial wreck, but he still looked like a

bald old eagle in fancy dress. “You think I'd talk like this to an honest man? I know you're reformed—”

“Retired, Hans. Not reformed. There's a difference. Will you change when you retire?”

“I'm never gunna retire, Jack. That's what upsets everyone, including a lot in our own party. They're gunning for me, some of ‘em. They reckon I've reached my use-by date.” He laughed, a cackle at the back of his throat. “There's an old saying, The emperor has no clothes on. It don't matter, if he's still on the throne.”

Aldwych looked him up and down, made the frank comment of one old man to another: “You'd be a horrible sight, naked.”

“I hold that picture over their heads.” Again the cackle. He was enjoying the evening.

“Are you an emperor, Hans?”

“Some of ‘em think so.” He sat back, looked out at his empire. “You ever read anything about Julius Caesar?”

“No, Hans. When I retired, I started reading, the first time in my life. Not fiction—I never read
anything
anybody wrote like the life I led. No, I read history. I never went back as far as ancient history—from what young Jack tells me, you'd think there were never any crims in those days, just shonky statesmen. The best crooks started in the Ren-aiss-ance”—he almost spelled it out—“times. I could of sat down with the Borgias. I wouldn't of trusted ‘em, but we'd of understood each other.”

“You were an emperor once. You had your own little empire.” The Dutchman had done his own reading: police files on his desk in his double role as Police Minister.

“Never an emperor, Hans. King, maybe. There's a difference. Emperors dunno what's happening out there in the backblocks.”

“This one does,” said Hans Vanderberg the First.

Then Jack Aldwych Junior leaned in from the other side of him.

“Mr. Premier—” He had gone to an exclusive private school where informality towards one's elders had not been encouraged.

The school's board had known who his father was, but it had not discouraged his enrollment. It had accepted his fees and a scholarship endowment from his mother and taken its chances that his father's name would not appear on any more criminal charges. Jack Senior, cynically amused, had done his best to oblige, though on occasions police officers had had to be bribed, all, of course, in the interests of Jack Junior's education.

“Mr. Premier, I've got this whole project up and running while you were still in office—”

“Don't talk as if I'm dead, son.”

Jack Junior smiled. He was a big man, handsome and affable; women admired him but he was not a ladies' man. Like his father he was a conservative, though he was not criminal like his father. He had strayed once and learned his lesson; his father had lashed him with his tongue more than any headmaster ever had. He voted conservative because multi-millionaire socialists were a contradiction in terms; they were also, if there were any, wrong in the head. But this Labor premier, on the Olympic Tower project and all its problems, had been as encouraging and sympathetic as any free enterprise, economic rationalist politician could have been. Jack Junior, a better businessman than his father, though not as ruthless, had
learned
not to bite the hand that fed you. Welfare was not just for the poor, otherwise it would be unfair.

“I'm not. But there are rumours—”

“Take no notice of ‘em, son. I have to call an election in the next two months, but I'll choose my own time. My four years are up—”

“Eight years,” said Jack Senior from the other side.

Vanderberg nodded, pleased that someone was counting. “Eight years. I'm gunna have another four.
Then
I'll hand over to someone else. Someone
I'll
pick.”

“Good,” said Jack Junior. “So we'll have you as our guest for the dinner the night before the Olympics open. All the IOC committee have accepted.”

“Why wouldn't they? Have they ever turned down an invitation?” He had recognized the International Olympics Committee for what they were, politicians like himself. They were more fortunate than he: they did not have to worry about voters.

He looked around the huge room. It had been designed to double as a ballroom and a major dining room; as often happens when architects are given their head, it had gone to their heads. Opulence was the keynote. Above, drawing eyeballs upwards like jellyfish caught in a net, was a secular version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Muscular athletes, male and female, raced through clouds towards a celestial tape; a swimmer, looking suspiciously like a beatified Samantha Riley, breaststroked her way towards the Deity, who resembled the IOC president, his head wreathed in a halo of Olympic rings. Four chandeliers hung from the ceiling like frozen fireworks; there were marble pillars along the walls; the walls themselves were papered with silk. No one came here for a double burger; nor would the room ever be hired out on Election Night. This was the Olympus Room and though gods were in short supply in Sydney, those with aspiration and sufficient credit would soon be queueing up to enter. Bad taste had never overwhelmed the natives.

Jack Junior privately thought the room was an embarrassment; but he was the junior on the board of directors. Still, it was he who had overseen the guest list for tonight, though it had been chosen by his wife. Class in Sydney is porous; money seeps through it, keeping it afloat. Jack Junior and his wife
Juliet
had not been hamstrung in making out the list. A certain number of no-talent celebrities had been invited; without them there would be no spread in the Sunday social pages, where their inane smiles would shine like Band-Aids on their vacuous faces. The trade union officials and the State MPs from the battlers' electorates, seated on the outskirts like immigrants waiting to be naturalized, were somewhat overcome by the opulence, but they were battling bravely on. After all, they were here only to represent the workers and the battlers, not enjoy themselves, for Crissakes; their wives smiled indulgently at their husbands' attempts at self-delusion and looked again at the seven-course menu and wondered if the kids at home were enjoying their pizzas. The businessmen from the Big End of town were taking it all for granted, as was their wont and want; economic rationalists had to be admired and paid court to, no matter how irrationally extravagant it might be. Business was just coming out of recession from the Asian meltdown and what better way to celebrate than at someone else's expense? Some of them had dug deep when SOCOG had called for help when the Games funds had sprung a leak. The wives, girlfriends and rented escorts took it all in with a sceptical eye. Tonight, if no other occasion, was Boys' Night Out.

The top table was all men. A female gossip columnist, seated out in the shallows, remarked that it looked like the Last Supper painted by Francis Bacon. But four-fifths of the men up there at the long table were ambitious in a way that the Apostles had never been.

The wives of those at the top table, with their own borrowed escorts, were at a round table just below the main dais. The Premier's wife, who was in her seventies, still made her own dresses, a fact she advertised, but, as the fashion writers said, didn't really need to. Tonight she was in purple and black flounces, looking like a funeral mare looking for a hearse. Sitting beside her was Roger Ladbroke, the Premier's press minder, hiding his boredom with the whole evening behind the smile he had shown to the media for so many years. Beside him was Juliet, Jack Junior's wife, all elegance and knowing it. Her dress was by Prada, her diamond necklace by Cartier and her looks by her mother, who had been one of Bucharest's most beautiful women and had never let her three daughters forget it. Juliet's escort was her hairdresser, lent for the evening by his boyfriend.

“Mrs. Vanderberg,” said Juliet, leaning across Ladbroke and giving him a whiff of Joy, “it must
be
very taxing, being a Premier's wife. All these functions—”