by Peter Temple
‘In future, please ring before seeking to see Mr Wootton,’ she said.
‘But it’s really you, you, you I want to see.’
‘Good-day, Mr Irish.’
At the door, I turned and said, ‘Mrs Davenport, have you any idea of the effect your icy demeanour has on men?’
She didn’t look at me. ‘I understand there are telephone counselling services for those unable to seek professional help in the normal way,’ she said. ‘Good-day again.’
‘God,’ I said, ‘you just keep tightening the screw, don’t you?’
I went down to the street with birdsong in my heart.
‘In your hands, Mr Irish,’ he said, a plump face under slick hair, a brisk voice. I knew him, he’d delivered before.
I said thank you. There was no signing for envelopes from D. J. Olivier. I went back to my table and opened this one with a sharpened bicycle spoke I’d found in the alley and sterilised. A wad of A4 sheets of paper, some photographs, laser-printed. A sticky yellow square was attached to the first page. One handwritten sentence: ‘Care might be in order.’
A stranger to care, I returned to my chair behind the tailor’s table. I read:
MICHAEL RAIMOND FRANKLIN
Born 1962, Brisbane. Father Gianfranco Francesca, labourer, mother Alessandra Francesca, nee Cometti, household duties. Only child. St Patrick’s College, graduated 1979. Engineering University of Queensland 1980–81. First-class honours, passes all subjects.
Passport information: First use, 1982. Stamps, in sequence, for United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, United Kingdom, Australia, September 1986.
Registered as employee of Casterton Construction, Brisbane [see below for Casterton] in December 1986. Position: supervisor.
I skimmed pages about apartment rentals, two property purchases, car leases, a boat purchase, air travel, hotel and restaurant bills, traffic fines.
Employed by MassiBild, Melbourne, 1989–1995. Occupation given as ‘executive’.
Tax details followed. Mickey had done well in Brisbane; Melbourne was also good to him. D. J. Olivier had seen the tax returns Alexander Marti Partners of Brisbane filed for Mickey.
Married Corin Grace Sleeman 1996. Sleeman is an architect whose firm, French, Marconi & Kinane, has worked on many MassiBild projects. She was photographed with Steven Massiani at the Melbourne Cup in 1995.
Director Yardlive Pty Ltd, registered 1992. Other director is Bernard Karl Paech [see below]. Six properties registered in company name. Yardlive, trading as Joinville Developments, has put up two medium-size apartment blocks, one built by MassiBild, and been engaged in a number of inner-city redevelopment projects.
Credit card and customs information followed, six pages. I was too weak to read it.
Nothing else known. Subject mentioned in document leaked to Sydney Morning Herald in July 1999 but not published. Source unknown, possibly National Crime Authority. (Part of document attached.) The document refers to Casterton Construction as a company with links to Anthony Kendall Haig and gives details about Haig.
RELEVANT PART OF LEAKED DOCUMENT
Anthony Kendall Haig. Born 1952, Sydney. Mother Felicity Lorraine Kendall Haig, no father recorded. Haig has married twice. Divorced Catherine Jean Kelly, 1989, son by her lives in US. Seeks company of much younger women.
First income tax paid in 1985–86, occupation given as ‘investor’. Gross income $78,472, taxable $32,863. Return filed by Alexander Marti Partners, Brisbane, filed all subsequent returns. [For Marti, see AI/674/87 continuing.] Huge income growth since, presented as commissions and trading in commercial and residential property. For 2000, gross of Saint Charles Holdings was $17,783,000.
Audited by Tax in 1996, 1998. No action. File note 1998 says: ‘Transactions continue to be complex in the extreme and, as repeatedly noted, worthy of full-scale investigation.’ (This officer, shifted from Audit in August 1998, will not co-operate.)
Subject’s company Saint Charles involved in hundreds of property dealings, usually arranger of loan finance but often buyer and seller. Deals with dozens of developers, construction companies and private companies all over country. Finance generally offshore. Frequent provider is First Crusader Finance, Monaco. This entity run by Charles Robert Hartfield, once partner in Melbourne solicitors Alan Duchard, Gaitelband, legal advisor to property developer Tendram, part owned by Hartfield’s wife’s cousin, Selwyn Howard Cornell. Tendram into receivership in 1990, debts of $260 million. Estimate is upwards $30 million sent offshore in 18 months before collapse. Hartfield now has Polish passport, resident of Monaco. [Wife, now of Noosa, is attempting to sue Hartfield.] Haig is close to Hartfield and spends time in Monaco. [See Attachment 3B.]
Subject’s connections make action difficult. He is a donor to both parties through Saint Charles. Large circle of associates includes former federal cabinet minister Michael Londregan, now in business as investment advisor in Sydney.
Two investigations discontinued under pressure. February 1995, death of employee James Gavin Medlicott, 36, found to be suicide. Medlicott twice arrested for sex offences, charges dropped. Present offsider Bernard Karl Paech, 44, accountant, worked for Massiani family company MassiBild 1991–97. [For Paech, see AI/857/86/89/94-98 continuing. For Massianis see AI/992/83-4/92-6 continuing.]
MassiBild and associated companies involved in many deals with Saint Charles. Paech operates from office in Little Collins Street, Melbourne. Michael Raimond Franklin, mentioned earlier, worked for Casterton Construction of Brisbane (a company with links to Haig and Paech) from 1986 before moving to MassiBild in Melbourne in 1989. Informant W3 identifies Franklin as key player until he left Massiani in 1995 to start property development firm Joinville Development. Paech was for a time co-director of the parent company, Yardlive. [See Attachment 3A.]
That was the end of the fragment. The report said more would follow. I looked at the photographs. Two men on a city street, the blurred foreground suggesting that the photographer was across the road. 3A was written in a corner. The taller man was Mickey Franklin looking sideways at his companion, questioning, two fingers holding his dark glasses up on his forehead.
The other man was broad, pudgy, balding, round glasses, scratching his head. Was this Bernie Paech?
The second photograph, labelled 3B, showed the deck of what was probably a big motor yacht seen through a thicket of masts and rigging. A man in a T-shirt was talking to a young woman in a bikini, a girl with short wet-looking blonde hair. Anthony Haig?
Seeks company of much younger women.
When did he start doing that? How old did you have to be to be accused of this offence?
Another woman had her naked back to the camera. To her right, a fat man with a shaven head, dark glasses, was looking into the camera, pointing. He had a cigarette in his mouth.
This would then be Charles Hartfield, solicitor, once of Melbourne, now of Monaco. He didn’t look too happy at the instant of being snapped but he would probably look content on other occasions. But perhaps not. Pinching $30 million, dumping the wife and kids, becoming a Pole, that could carry a price. In the long run, it might have been easier to do honest work in William Street, drive home to Kew or Glen Iris in the BMW, go to the place at the beach in the Merc wagon on weekends.
I looked at the first photograph again, Mickey Franklin and Bernie Paech in the street. Now I saw that Bernie wasn’t scratching his head, he was on the phone. Mickey was wearing a well-cut piece of cloth – it lay on him like oil on a dead penguin.
Too late to ease my way out of this? It was a job for a team and a team might not get anywhere either. Mickey had no doubt done naughty things, that was the norm in his line of work. But you didn’t get knocked for it. Apart from which, he’d been on his own for years, a corner-shop operator, no threat to the Massianis or any other giant. Sarah Longmore might or might not have killed Mickey but I was highly unlikely to find any other firm suspects.
An involuntary groan, a sound born of impotence and anxiety. It was followed by thoughts of coffee. I set out for Brunswick Street. The street was abuzz, teeming with people talking on their mobiles about their fantastic new jobs/projects/relationships. Until recently, I would have had a quick browse in the bookshop where the gun shop used to be, but it too was gone. A business called Twicks in its place, and, in due course, Twicks, a purveyor of tastefully arranged homewares made by slave labour somewhere, would be another stratum in the ghostly midden of departed businesses.
Enzio’s was having a successful opening day. It too was trilling with mobiles and alive with the sound of happy banter. I found a seat against the wall for the second time that day and spotted a few Meaker’s regulars who’d transferred: the pharmacist who’d quit pill-dispensing to write terrible plays; the publisher with the drinking problem who’d once stuck her tongue into the tight cleavage of a cabinet minister’s wife at a book launch; the haggard maker of documentary films known to have tried to fake his own kidnapping to extort money from his rich father.
I thought about Mickey Franklin. He was starting to look like someone with a fair bit of unexposed form. A key player, said the document leaked from somewhere, no doubt a government agency. Player in what?
Olivier’s fragment didn’t have the sound of yet another investigation into rigged tenders, union pay-offs, cash and kind bribes, safety trade-offs, sweeteners for inspectors, over-invoicing, under-invoicing, insurance rip-offs, off-site beatings, severe discomfort caused by poisoned fast food, tragic accidents in freeway traffic put down to the inexplicable failure of vital bits of brakes and steerings. It had the ring of crime intelligence-gathering, the sort of stuff passed around meetings in Canberra.
This stuff wasn’t going to help me. I had a name, that was the way to go. My coffee arrived. The taste of it improved my mood greatly.
After lunch, I went around to Charlie’s and spent the afternoon assembling drawers, each one subjected to rigorous quality inspection.
‘I can do this, you know,’ I said after a while. ‘It doesn’t require a twelve-year apprenticeship under a sadistic Tischlermeister.’
‘Just looking,’ said Charlie.
Wootton rang while we were cleaning up. ‘That name,’ he said. ‘I’ve tracked down the mother.’
Into Tingaboora under steady rain, just before 11 am, passing rotting wooden houses, listing hay shelters, paddocks growing crops of old car bodies and their innards – seats, engine blocks, gearboxes, radiators, drive shafts, axles. Erosion rivulets ran down the slopes, fence pickets hung in space over gullies, and, on the flatter bits of ground, a few sheep stood, sad prisoners in their massive growths of dirty wool.
There were four streets in the town, two running parallel each way, a noughts and crosses grid. I drove up and down them, all gravel except for the main one, looking for the name and number. The two running east–west turned to mud beyond the last unstable broken-guttered weatherboard houses. A hundred metres away, across a bumpy moss-green floodplain strewn with rubbish and engraved with the deep doughnuts made by drunken hoons, a line of willows marked a creek. Two cows were tethered at the end of one street, heads together. They looked at me, gentle eyes, creatures spared the pain of wanting something else. At the end of the other street, a goat was chewing a beer carton, absorbed in the task.
No street names, no numbers I could see. I gave up and parked the Stud in the main street, a few doors down from the pub, the Balmoral, beyond the hairdressing salon and the milkbar.
I sat, tired, the back, in the neck, not keen to do anything, easy to rest my head against the door jamb, have a little sleep. A car, a swish. Minutes passed. I sat up, wiped the windscreen. A man wearing a Collingwood beanie on top of a pulled-down balaclava was approaching. Sinister, helmeted, an impoverished knight reduced to pushing a bicycle with a flat back tyre. The eyes in their apertures looked at me, the man veered from his path to get a closer look. Our eyes met. He looked away, looked again, moved along, looked back, stopped. I thought he was going to come back, knock on the window, ask me a question. He wouldn’t want anything, people didn’t beg in these towns. But he didn’t. He made a head and shoulder movement suggesting some inner shiver. Then two women came out of the pub, perhaps mother and daughter, both grown up too quickly, both in lurid pink tracksuits. The younger one was carrying a child on her hip, her arm hooked around its midriff. It screamed, drummed heels. She stuck her cigarette in her mouth, smacked the child’s face with a fluid forehand, said something to her companion, a slew of words.
I waited until they passed before getting out. It was a raw day, icy air smelling of wood fires and damp and turned earth. In the Balmoral bar, a sad place of fake wood, formica, split plastic seats extruding yellow foam, the smell was of fried onions, cigarette smoke and something chemical, carpet cleaner perhaps, sickly. There were five customers, an old woman at a table by herself, two wizened men at the bar, a man and a woman playing pool. She was shooting, leaning over the table and showing a roll of naked fat the colour of porridge above huge buttocks sausaged inside stretch pants.
I went to the bar. The barman was side-on to me, head tilted, listening to a small radio on the bottle shelf. I looked at my watch: the first race at Moe, first of four maidens, all hope and no pedigree. I didn’t bother him, turned my back and looked around, stopped short of the buttocks and came back along the photographs on the wall. Football teams.
‘Fuckin nag,’ said the barman.
The race was over. He had the long, choleric, dog-jowled face of an eighteenth-century hanging judge, all he needed was the horsehair wig to cover his moulted scalp.
‘Good-day,’ I said. ‘I’m having trouble finding street signs.’
‘Yeah?’ Eyes just red slits, weeping.
‘I’m looking for Eales Street.’
‘Yeah? Drinkin?’
‘No thanks. Just looking for help.’
‘Not the fuckin tourist bureau here, mate. Fuckin pub.’
He went off down the counter, turned right through a doorway. He had a limp.
‘Eales,’ said the nearest of the wizened men. ‘Say Eales?’
‘Yes. Eales.’
He gave me a good examination. ‘Bank,’ he said. He looked vaguely fishy, head rising to a point, no dip between forehead and broad nose, mouth lipless.
I registered. ‘No. It’s a family matter. No trouble involved.’
The man beyond him was leaning forward to look at me, alert eyes in a face like a thrashed golf ball. ‘Ballick, right?’ he said.
‘Right. Mrs Ballich.’ I said the name as he had.
The men looked at each other, nodded, pleased.
‘How did you know?’ I said.
They turned to me, Fish and Golfball.
‘The girls, not so?’ said Fish.
‘Janene,’ I said.
Golfball made a whistling sound. ‘Janene,’ he said. ‘She come in here one day, back from Melbin with this other sheila, this bloke, flash car. Big bloke, mind you. Like that Rocca.’
‘Soft,’ said Fish. ‘Soft. Wog. Had the wog look. Pissweak wogs. Wogs and Abos. No guts.’
‘Well, the wogs run, din they?’ said Golfball, eyes on me, waiting. ‘In the war.’
‘That’s possible,’ I said.
‘Like dogs,’ said Fish. ‘Bloody pathetic. Our fellas coulda shot em up the arseholes. Showed mercy they did. Up the arseholes, crawlin. Like dogs.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘Eales Street. Which one is that?’
Golfball waved to his left. ‘Last one,’ he said. ‘Last on the right. The young bitch gone off too now. Darwin, they say.’
‘Bloody good riddance,’ said Fish. ‘She’s a lowie, deadset. Pulled fellas like a bitch on heat, they come from bloody miles around, lizards damn near pokin out.’
‘All Abos and chinks,’ said Golfball. ‘Darwin. Me Uncle Ross was up there once. White man’s grave he used to say.’
‘Piss artist, your Uncle Ross,’ sa
id Fish. ‘Still, hadda beat his liver to death with a stick.’ He eyed me. ‘Door open and engine goin, mate. Mary Ballick’s run outta roots in this town. She’d be hungry.’
The barman appeared, he’d had another drink in the back. ‘Still here?’ he said. ‘Still not fuckin drinkin?’
I took out a fifty-dollar note and put it on the counter. ‘These helpful gentlemen are a credit to your lovely town,’ I said.
He looked at the money, frowned.
I beckoned. He hesitated, came closer. I looked into his eyes of red. ‘Give them whatever they’re drinking, judge,’ I said. ‘And don’t keep the change. Clear to you?’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’
It took me two minutes to get to Mary Ballich’s house, a weatherboard standing behind a wire fence on a bare block, nothing growing except couch grass and weeds and moss and fuzzy grey mould on hundreds of dog turds. The house’s white paint was almost gone, the naked wood turned grey. Smoke lisped from a brick chimney that had lost most of its mortar and would fall down in a high wind one day soon, some soot-blackened bricks would go through the rusted corrugated iron, through the lath and plaster ceiling.
An old orange Corolla with a savage list to starboard stood in front of a fibreboard garage it had never called home.
I parked outside the front gate, half open, leaning, its hinge post broken at the base, and got out.
The rain had stopped but the wind had picked up, coming over the featureless green undulations with a whooing sound that acted on the brain the way organ dirges did. I went up the cracked concrete, stepped up to the verandah, avoiding a collapsed plank. The verandah felt unsteady, nails loose in rain-eroded boards. I stood before a screen door with holes in the flywire of the upper panels. They had the look of holes punched – drink and testosterone holes. I opened the door and the dents in the front door said mine was not an unreasonable assumption.
