The Bear Pit

by Jon Cleary

  “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—”

  “Not at all.” Gertrude Vanderberg had never had any political or social ambitions. She was famous in political circles for her pumpkin pavlovas, her pot plants and her potted wisdom. She had once described an opponent of her husband’s as a revolutionary who would send you the bill for the damage he had caused; it gained the man more notoriety than his attempts at disruption. “Hans only calls on me when there’s an election in the wind. The rest of the time I do some fence-mending in the electorate and I let him go his own way. Politicians’ wives in this country are expected to be invisible. Roger here thinks women only fog up the scene.”

  “Only sometimes.” Ladbroke might have been handsome if he had not been so plump; he had spent too many days and nights at table. He had been with Hans Vanderberg over twenty years and wore the hard shell of those who know they are indispensable.

  “I think you should spend a season in Europe,” said Juliet.

  “In Bucharest?” Gert Vanderberg knew everyone’s history.

  “Why not? Roumanian men invented the revolving door, but we women have always made sure we never got caught in it.” You knew she never would. She looked across the table at the Opposition leader’s wife: “Mrs. Bigelow, do you enjoy politics?”

  Enid Bigelow was a small, dark-haired doll of a woman who wore a fixed smile, as if afraid if she took it off she would lose it. She looked around for help; her escort was her brother, a bachelor academic useless at answering a question like this. She looked at everyone, the smile still fixed. “Enjoy? What’s to enjoy?”

  Juliet, a woman not given to too much sympathy, suddenly felt sorry she had asked the question. She turned instead to the fourth woman at the table.

  “Madame Tzu, do women have influence in politics in China?”

  Madame Tzu, who had the same name as an empress, smiled, but not helplessly. “We used to.”

  “You mean Chairman Mao’s wife, whatever her name was?”

  “An actress.” Madame Tzu shook her head dismissively. “She knew the lines, but tried too hard to act the part—and she was a poor actress. Is that not right, General?”

  Ex-General Wang-Te merely smiled. He and Madame Tzu were the mainland Chinese partners in Olympic Tower, but there had been no room for them at the top table. Foreign relations had never been one of The Dutchman’s interests and it certainly had never been one of Jack Aldwych’s. Aware that everyone was looking at him he at last said, “I haven’t brought my hearing-aid,” and sank back into his dinner suit like a crab into its shell. He knew better than to discuss politics in another country, especially with women.

  “Ronald
Reagan was an actor,” said Juliet.

  “He knew the words,” said Ladbroke. “He just didn’t know the rest of the world.”

  “You’re Labor. You would say that.”

  And you’re Roumanian, cynical romantics. But he knew better than to say that. Instead, he gestured up towards the top table. “Your husband and your father-in-law seem to be doing all right with Labor.”

  The Aldwyches, father and son, were leaning back with laughter at something the Premier had said. He was grinning, evilly, some might have thought, but it was supposed to be with self-satisfaction. Which some might have thought the same thing.

  Then he looked down at the man approaching them through the shoal of tables. “Here comes the Greek, bare-arsed with gifts.”

  “Do we beware?” Jack Aldwych had had experience of The Dutchman’s mangling of the language, but he had learned to look for the grains of truth in the wreckage. This Greek coming up on to the dais was not one bearing gifts.

  He came up behind Vanderberg, raised a hand and Aldwych looked for the knife in it. But it came down only as a slap on the shoulder. “Hans, I gotta hand it to you.”

  “Hand me what?” Then he waved a hand at the two Aldwyches.

  “You know my friends, salt of the earth, both of ‘em.” The salt of the earth looked suitably modest. “This is Peter Kelzo. He gives me more trouble than the Opposition ever does.”

  “Always joking,” Kelzo told the Aldwyches: he was the sort who could take insults as compliments.

  He was a swarthy man, almost as wide as he was tall, but muscular, not fat. Born Kelzopolous, he had come to Australia from Greece in his teens thirty years ago, found the country teeming with Opolouses and shortened his name to something that the tongue-twisted natives could pronounce. Built as he was, he had had no trouble getting a job as a builder’s labourer; shrewd as he was he was soon a union organizer, though his English needed improving. Within ten years his English was excellent and his standing almost as good, though at times it looked like stand-over. He belatedly educated himself in history and politics. He read Athenian history, aspired to be like Demosthenes but knew that the natives suspected orators as bullshit artists and opted to work with the quiet word or the quiet threat. He did not drift into politics, but sailed into it; but only into the backwaters. By now he had his own building firm and other interests, was married, had children, wanted money in the bank, lots of it, before he wanted Member of Parliament on his notepaper. He ran the Labor Party branch in his own electorate and now he was ready to wield his power.

  He looked around him, then at Aldwych. He had been one of the subcontractors on the project, though Aldwych did not know that. “It’s a credit to you. I gotta tell you the truth, I was expecting casino glitz. But no, this is classical—” He looked around him again. “Class, real class.”

  “A lifelong principle of my father,” said Jack Junior. “That right, Dad?”

  “All the way,” said Aldwych, who couldn’t remember ever having principles of any sort.

  Kelzo gave them both an expensive width of expensive caps: he knew Jack Senior’s history. “Just like Hans here.” He patted the Premier’s shoulder again. “You’ve never lost your class, have you, Hans?”

  “Class was something invented by those who didn’t have it,” said Vanderberg. “Oscar the Wild said that.”

  “I’m sure he did,” said Kelzo and tried desperately to think of something that Demosthenes or Socrates might have said, but couldn’t. Instead, he leaned down, his hand still on the Premier’s shoulder, and whispered, “Enjoy it, Hans. It won’t last.”

  Then he was gone, smile taking in the whole room, and Jack Junior said, “I’ve read Oscar Wilde. I can’t remember him saying anything like that.”

  “I’ve never read him,” said Vanderberg. “But neither has Kelzo. The Greeks haven’t read anything out of England since Lord Byron.” Then he turned full on to Jack Junior, the grin almost as wide as Kelzo’s smile had been. “I haven’t read anything of him, either. Poets and philosophers don’t help us with the voters—Roger Ladbroke keeps me supplied with all the potted wisdom I need. If I started quoting Oscar Wilde, the only voters who’d clap for me would be the homosexuals up in Oxford Street and the arty-crafties in Balmain and they vote for me anyway, ‘cause they think I’m a character. The rest of the voters in this city have had it so good for so long, they ain’t interested in philosophy or smart sayings, not unless they hear it in some TV comedy. The people out in the bush, they’re philosophers, they gotta be to survive, and they’re the ones gimme the difference that keeps me in power. I’m the first Labor premier they’ve ever liked. They think I’m a character, too.”

  “And are you?” asked Aldwych Senior from his other side.

  The Dutchman turned to him. “You’ll have to ask my minder down there. Roger—” he raised his voice, leaning forward to speak to Ladbroke—“am I a character? Mr. Aldwych wants to know.”

  “Every inch,” said Ladbroke, who at times had had to keep the character in recognizable shape.

  Further down the top table from the Premier were Bevan Bigelow, the Leader of the Opposition, and Leslie Chung, a senior partner in Olympic Tower.

  “Have you ever voted for him?” asked Bigelow, nodding up towards the middle of the table.

  “No.” Leslie Chung, like Jack Aldwych, was now respectable, but his past was tainted. He was a good-looking man, still black-haired in his sixties, with the knack of looking down his nose at people taller than himself. Tonight, acting benevolent, he was looking eye to eye with Bigelow. “But I’ve never voted for you, either. I give money to both parties, but I vote for the guy with the least chance of stuffing everything up. Some Independent. It amuses me.”

  “Does that come from being Chinese?”

  Bigelow was a short, squat man with a blond cowlick and a habit of shifting nervously in his seat as if it were about to be snatched away from him; which also applied to his electoral seat, where his hold was marginal. Les Chung, on the other hand, sat with the calmness of a lean Buddha, as sure of himself as amorality could make him. He had made his fortune by turning his back on scruples and now, on the cusp between middle and old age, he was not going to take the road to Damascus. Or wherever one saw the light here amongst the barbarians.

  “No, it comes from having become an Australian.” He had been here forty-three years; he didn’t say the locals still amused him. “Even though we call Hans The Dutchman, you couldn’t get anyone more Australian than him, could you?”

  “I don’t know.” Bigelow looked puzzled, a not uncommon expression with him. “He’s not friendly, like most Australians. He’s got no friends in his own party, you know that?”

  Chung knew that Bigelow had few friends in his party; he was a stop-gap leader because his opponents couldn’t agree amongst themselves whom they wanted to replace him. “I don’t think it worries him, Bev. They’ll never put a dent in that shell.”

  Bigelow nodded at the Aldwyches. “How do you get on with your partners? When old Jack dies, he’s getting on, who takes charge?”

  “We’ve never discussed it. It would be between me and Jack Junior, I suppose. I think I’d get it.” He smiled, “I’m sure I’d get it. There are other partners, the Chinese ones.” He nodded down towards Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te. “They’d vote for me.”

  “A Chinese Triad?”

  “No, just a trio.”

  “There’s another partner, isn’t there?” He could never find a policy to pursue, but his mind was a vault of facts. “Miss Feng?”

  Les Chung looked down at the beautiful girl seated at one of the lower tables with a handsome young Caucasian escort. If he were younger he might have asked her to be his concubine. And smiled to himself at what her Australian answer would have been.

  “We Chinese stick together. How do you think you’ll go when Hans announces the election?”

  “That will depend on his own party hacks. He has more enemies than I have.” Thou
gh he spoke without conviction.

  “Yes,” said Les Chung, but seemed to be talking to himself.

  The evening was breaking up. The Premier and the Aldwyches rose at the top table. Throughout the rest of the room there was a stirring, like the crumbling of two hundred claypans. The waiters and waitresses restrained themselves from making get-the-hell-out-here gestures.

  “We’ll see you to the door,” said Jack Junior. “Your car has been ordered. My wife will look after Mrs. Vanderberg.”

  The offical party moved amongst the tables almost like deity; no one genuflected, but almost everyone rose to his feet. His feet: the women, no vestal virgins, remained seated. The Dutchman smiled on everyone like a blessing; if the grimace that was his smile resembled a blessing. He stopped once or twice to shake hands: not with party hacks but with backers of the Other Party: he knew he was being watched by Bevan Bigelow. He introduced Jack Aldwych to the Police Commissioner and the two men shook hands across a great divide while The Dutchman watched the small comedy. There was no one to equal him in throwing opposites together. He did not believe that opposites attract but that they unsettled the compass. It was others who needed the compass: he had known his direction from the day he had entered politics.

  Then they were out in the foyer, heading for the doors and the wide expanse of marble steps fronting the curved entrance. Juliet paused to help Mrs. Vanderberg with her wrap, another home-made garment, like a purple pup-tent. The two Aldwych men went out through the doors with the Premier, one on either side of him. They paused for a moment while the white government Ford drew in below them. Beyond was the wide expanse of George Street, the city’s main street, thick with cinema and theatre traffic.

  The hum of the traffic silenced the sound of the shot.

  III

  “They’ve taken him to St Sebastian’s,” said Phil Truach. “It looks bad, the bullet got him in the neck.”