Dragons at the Party

by Jon Cleary

  Abdul Timori had been labelled by the Fleet Street tabloids as the Playboy of the Western World, though Synge would have disowned him. His mistresses were laid endlessly across Europe and America; love-making was his only successful sport. He owned a string of racehorses that invariably finished without a place; bookmakers quoted them at prices that embarrassed both the horses and the jockeys who rode them. He took up motor-racing and drove in the Mille Miglia, the Targa Florio and the Le Mans 24-hour event; he finished in none of them, managing, miraculously, to emerge unscathed from crashes that earned him the nickname Abdul the Wrecker. His father, however, had insisted on his deathbed that Abdul should succeed him, and the ruling party, its faction leaders all afraid of each other, had agreed. They had assumed that Abdul would be no more than a playboy President and they, splitting the spoils between them like true democrats, could run the country as they wished.

  They were mistaken. Abdul turned out to be a better politician than any of them; and a despot to boot, a boot he used to great effect. The two jails of Bunda, the national capital, were soon full of party men who thought they could be independent of him; common criminals were hanged, to make way in the cells for the jailed politicians. The latter, however, did not remain there long. Nothing changes the mind of a pragmatic politician so quickly as his having to share a prison cell with his rivals; it is more upsetting than sharing a voting booth with a citizen voting against you. All at once they were born-again Timori supporters, shouting hallelujahs, or the Muslim equivalent, to the skies. The army generals, already wooed by Abdul with promises of long courses in Britain and the United States, smiled cynically at the venality of politicians and swore to Abdul that he had nothing to fear from them.

  Abdul, in turn, was wooed by the Americans. Recognizing that anyone who raised the anticommunist banner was going to be saluted by Washington, he invited the Americans, for a consideration, to enlarge their naval base. For the next thirty-four years Palucca enjoyed a stable existence, a state of affairs accepted by all but those who believed in freedom of expression, honest government and democracy. Since Abdul Timori believed in none of those aberrations and the Americans forgot to remind him of them, nothing, it seemed, was going to disturb the Timori delusion of his own grandeur.

  He married the daughter of another old family, but it was a marriage of inconvenience: he found she got in the way of his mistresses. He divorced her by clapping his hands and telling her she wasn’t wanted; a procedure that several foreign ambassadors, whose wives were a hindrance, marvelled at and envied. Timori married again, this time one of his mistresses, but she at once turned into a wife and after a year he got rid of her, too. Finally, ten years ago, he had married Delvina O’Reilly, who had come to Bunda as a speciality dancer, a Mata Hari whose intelligence work was only in her own interests. Her mother had been a Malay, her father an RAAF sergeant-pilot; she had been educated in a convent but had never learned to be a good Catholic or even a good girl. At dancing school it was said that the only time her legs were together was during the execution of an entrechat; one smitten choreographer tried to write a ballet for a horizontal ballerina. When she married Abdul Timori, in a wedding extravaganza that Paris-Match ran over five pages, she let him know it was for good: for her good if not his. Abdul, to everyone’s surprise, not least his own, accepted her dictum.

  Then the plug fell out of the oil market and Palucca’s economy slid downhill on the slick. The Americans were suddenly more interested in Central America than in South-east Asia; Washington also, at long last, began to have pangs about the corruption in the Timori regime. Abdul and Delvina Timori began to assume the image of a major embarrassment. The Americans, belatedly, looked around for an acceptable alternative, meanwhile pressing Timori to resign on the grounds of ill-health. Madame Timori, who was in the best of health, even if her husband wasn’t, told the Americans to get lost, a frequent location for them in foreign policy. The British, the French, the Dutch and all the lesser ex-colonial powers sat back and smiled smugly. As a mandarin in Whitehall remarked, nothing succeeds in making one feel good so much as seeing someone else fail.

  Then the Paluccan generals, all too old now for courses at Sandhurst and West Point, tired of army manoeuvres in which never a shot was fired, decided it was time they earned the medals with which they had decorated themselves. They staged a coup, asked the Americans to fly the Timoris out of Bunda and promised a brand new future for Palucca and the Paluccans.

  That was when the trouble started outside Palucca.

  III

  “Nobody wants them,” said Russ Clements. The Americans wouldn’t fly them out and they leaned on Canberra.”

  “Kenthurst was telling me last night,” said Malone, “that everyone down in Canberra wishes they’d move on. Including Phil Norval.”

  “Canberra is going to be even more shitty when we tell ‘em what came in from Interpol this morning.”

  When Malone had arrived at Homicide this morning Clements had been waiting for him with a phone message from Fingerprints. The print on the cistern button in the Kiddle flat had been positively identified: it belonged to Miguel Seville.

  “Are there any mug shots of Seville?” Malone asked.

  “Just the one.”

  Clements took a 5 x 4 photo out of the murder box, an old shoe carton that over the years had, successively, held all the bits and pieces of the cases he had worked on. It was falling apart, only held together by a patchwork skin of Scotch tape, but he held on to it as if it were some treasure chest in which lay the solution to all murders.

  “It was taken about twelve years ago, when the Argentinian cops picked him up. That was before he became a mercenary, when he was with that Tupperware crowd. Tupperware?”

  “Tupamaros.”

  Clements grinned. “I was close.”

  “I know a Tupperware lady who wouldn’t thank you for it.”

  Malone looked at the photo of the curly-haired handsome young man. He would have been in his late twenties or early thirties when the photo was taken, but already the future was etched in his face: a defiance of all authority, a contempt for all political and social morality. Malone wondered if he had ever had any genuine belief in the Tupamaros’ fight against the Argentinian junta and its repressive rule.

  “He’s taken the place of that Venezuelan guy,” said Clements. “That Carlos. Whatever happened to him?”

  “Special Branch said the rumour is that the Libyans got rid of him. Maybe we should ring up Gaddafi and ask him to get rid of this bloke, too.”

  “You reckon he’ll try another shot at Timori?”

  “Depends how much he’s been paid. And who’s paying him.”

  Malone looked out the window, over Hyde Park and down to the northern end where Macquarie Street ran into it. That street was where the State politicians conducted their small wars; but there was no terrorism. There might be vitriolic and vulgar abuse that made other parliaments look like church meetings, but there were no assassin’s bullets. Now Timori, the unwanted guest, had, even if involuntarily, brought that danger to Sydney.

  “Did The Dutchman have anything to say this morning?” So far Malone hadn’t looked at this morning’s newspapers. He was not a radio listener and he usually got home too late to look at the evening TV news. When he got the news it was usually cold and in print, but he had found that the world still didn’t get too far ahead of him. There was something comforting in being a little way behind it, as if the news had somehow been softened by the time it got to him.

  “His usual garble. I dunno whether he’s for or against Timori.”

  “If Phil Norval’s for him, The Dutchman will be against him.” The Dutchman was Hans Vanderberg, the State Premier, an immigrant who had come to Australia right after World War Two, had become a trade union official, joined the Labour Party, got on well with the Irish Catholics who ran it, taken on some of their characteristics and ten years ago had become Leader of the Party and Premier. He was famous for his garbl
ed speeches and his double-Dutch (or was it Irish?) logic; but he was the best politician in the country and he and everyone else knew it. He was also a magnificent hater and he hated no one more than Prime Minister Philip Norval.

  Malone looked at his watch. “We’d better get over to Kirribilli. What time do Presidents have breakfast?”

  “I know what time I had mine. Six o’bloody clock.”

  Malone grinned; he always liked working with Russ Clements. “You’d better get used to it, sport. This looks like it’s going to be a round-the-clock job.”

  “How does Lisa feel about you working on the holiday weekend?”

  “She wouldn’t speak to me this morning. Neither would the kids. I’d promised to bring them all in to The Rocks to see the celebrations.”

  “I was going to the races. I’ve got two hot tips for today.”

  “Put them on SP. Where do you get your tips?”

  “From a coupla SP bookies I used to raid when I was on the Gambling Squad.”

  “How much are you ahead this year so far?”

  “A thousand bucks and it’s only January twenty-third. They’ll be holding a Royal Commission into me if it keeps up.”

  “What do you do with all your dough?” Clements always looked as if he didn’t have his bus fare.

  “Some day I’m gunna have an apartment in that block down at the Quay, right there above the ferries. People will point the finger at me and say I made it outa graft, but I won’t give a stuff. I’ll pee on ‘em from a great height and if some of it lands on some crims I’ve known, so much the better.”

  Malone grinned, wished him well, stood up and led the way out of Homicide. The division was located on the sixth floor of a commercial building that the police department shared with other government departments, most of them minor. Security in this commercial building, because of the shared space with other departments going about their mundane business, was minimal. Malone sometimes wondered what would happen if some madman, bent on homicide towards Homicide, got loose in the building.

  They drove through the bedecked streets of the city. The citizens held high hopes for the coming year; it was no use living in the past, even though they were celebrating it. They had just come through the worst recession in years; they had been told to tighten their belts, torture for the beer-bellied males of the population, but for this week they were letting out the notches. There is nothing like a carnival for helping one forget one’s debts: banks are always closed on Carnival Day.

  They drove over the Bridge, above the harbour already suffering a traffic-jam of yachts and cruisers and wind-surfers, and turned off into the tree-lined streets of Kirribilli. This small enclave on the north shore of the harbour, directly opposite the Opera House and the downtown skyscrapers, had had a chequered history. In the nineteenth century it had been the home of the wool merchants. In the 1920s middle-class apartments had been built on the waterfront. After World War Two it had gone downhill till in the late sixties it had become a nest for hippies and junkies. Then real estate agents, those latterday pioneers, had rediscovered it. Now it provided pieds-à-terre for retired millionaires, luxury apartments for some prominent businessmen, small town houses for young executives and their families and, almost as a gesture of social conscience, two or three rooming houses for those who couldn’t afford the prices of the other accommodation. Kirribilli, an Aboriginal word meaning “a good place to fish,” also provided Sydney havens for the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and ASIO, the national intelligence organization. It was natural that the local elements, including those in the rooming houses, thought of themselves as exclusive.

  The dead end street leading to Kirribilli House was blocked off by police barriers. The television and radio trucks and cars were parked on the footpaths of the narrow street. The anti-Timori demonstrators were jammed solid against the barriers; there was a sprinkling of Asians amongst them, but the majority were the regulars that Malone recognized from other demonstrations; in the past twenty years protest had become a participation sport. Standing behind the demonstrators, as if separated by some invisible social barrier, was a curious crowd of locals, some of them looking disturbed, as if already worrying about falling real estate barriers. Murder and political demos did nothing for the exclusivity of an area.

  Standing just inside the gates of Kirribilli House was a group of thirty or forty Paluccans, men, women and children. They were all well dressed, some in Western clothes, others in Eastern; they looked nothing like the photos Malone had seen of those other refugees of recent years, the Vietnamese boat people. Yet for all their air of affluence they looked frightened and lost.

  “They’re probably the lot who came in with the Timoris on the RAAF planes,” Clements said. “They’ve had them out at one of the migrant hostels.”

  “Better question them, find out if any of them were missing last night. Get Andy Graham and Joe Raudonikis to talk to them.” Then Malone noticed the three Commonwealth cars parked in the driveway. “Someone’s here from Canberra.”

  Someone was: the Prime Minister himself. As Malone and Clements walked towards the house, Philip Norval, backed by half a dozen staff and security men, came out of the front door with Police Commissioner John Leeds.

  The Commissioner, as usual, was impeccably dressed; he was the neatest man Malone had ever met. He was not in uniform, probably as a concession to the holiday weekend, but was in a beautifully cut blazer, slacks, white shirt and police tie. Why do I always feel like a slob when I meet him? Malone thought.

  Then he looked out of the corner of his eye at Clements, a real slob, and felt better.

  “Ah, Inspector Malone.” Leeds stopped with a friendly half-smile. He nodded at Clements, but he was not a man to go right down the ranks with his greetings. He turned to the Prime Minister. “Inspector Malone is in charge of the investigation, sir.”

  Philip Norval put out his hand, the famous TV smile flashing on like an arc-lamp. He gave his greetings to everyone, even those who didn’t vote for him. “Scobie Malone? I thought you’d be out at the Test.”

  “Maybe Monday, sir. If . . .” Malone gestured towards the house. He had once played cricket for New South Wales as a fast bowler and might eventually have played for Australia; but he had enjoyed his cricket too much to be dedicated and ambitious and, though he never regretted it, had never gone on to realize his potential. In today’s sports world of ambition, motivational psychologists, slave-master coaches and business managers, he knew he would have been looked upon as a bludger, the equivalent of someone playing on welfare.

  Norval said, “I’m going out there later.”

  He would be, thought Malone. Though he had never shown any talent in any sport, Philip Norval never missed an opportunity to be seen at a major sporting event, preferably photographed with the winners. There had been one dreadful day at a croquet championship when, not understanding the game or the tally count, he had allowed himself to be photographed with the losers; in the end it hadn’t mattered since they had all turned out to be conservative voters. He occasionally was photographed at an art show or at the opera, but his political advisers always told him there were no votes in those camera opportunities.

  He was fifty but looked a youthful forty. Blond and handsome in the bland way that the electronic image had made international, he had been the country’s highest paid television and radio star for a decade, the blow-dried and pancaked tin god host of chat shows and talk-back sessions, with a mellifluous voice and no enemies but the more acidic and envious TV critics who, if they were lucky, earned one-fiftieth of what he was paid. A kitchen cabinet of rich industrialists and bankers, looking around for a PM they could manipulate into the correct right-wing attitudes, had taken him in hand and within six years put him in The Lodge, the Prime Minister’s residence in Canberra. He had been there five years now, was in his second term and, though known as the Golden Puppet, so far looked safe from any real opposition.

  “We have a problem he
re, Inspector.” He was famous for his fatuities: it came of too many years of playing to the lowest common denominator.

  “Yes, sir.” Malone looked at Leeds, his boss, who was entitled to know first. “We have a lead. We think the killer could be Miguel Seville.”

  “Seville?” said Norval. “Who’s he? Some guy from Palucca?”

  “He’s an international terrorist, an Argentinian.” Leeds was perturbed, looked searchingly at Malone. “You sure?”

  “It’s a guess, sir, but an educated one.”

  Norval looked at one of his aides for his own education: it was tough enough trying to keep up with the voters’ names, let alone those of terrorists. The aide nodded and Norval himself then nodded. “Oh sure, I’ve read about him. But how did he get into the act?”

  “I don’t know, sir,” said Malone. “I’m just going in now to put some more questions to President Timori.”

  “Take it easy, Inspector,” said Norval. “You’d better explain what we’ve decided, Commissioner. Keep in touch.”

  He shook hands with Leeds, Malone and even Clements, looked around to make sure he hadn’t missed an outstretched paw, then went up the driveway to the waiting cars. Just inside the gates he stopped and raised his arms in greeting to the crowd at the barriers. The demonstrators booed and jeered and suggested several unattractive destinations. He just gave them the famous smile, aware of the newsreel cameras advancing on him, then got into the lead car and the convoy moved off. The Golden Puppet might be manipulated in significant matters, but no one knew better than he how to juggle the superficial.

  “What’s been decided, sir?” said Malone.