by Peter Temple
Although it was cold and too early for the after-work crowd, the half-dozen tables outside were taken. Inside, there were only a few customers. I found a seat near the kitchen. The man operating the coffee machine was not of the new generation of cafe people; he had the pained expression of someone too long standing to perform a repetitive task: the assembly-line worker’s look.
A young man, possibly the son, came out of the kitchen. He was wearing the apron in the picture, a long black apron with La Contessa printed on it. I asked for a short black. When it came, I had the picture out, facing him.
‘That’s probably you,’ I said, tapping on the reflected apron.
He was intrigued, had a good look. ‘Yeah,’ he said.
‘Who’s that?’ I said, my finger on the fleshy man.
‘Alan Bergh,’ he said, suspicion starting. ‘What’s this, what’s this about?’
‘I’m a lawyer.’
This statement often has the effect of briefly paralysing the brain of the hearer.
‘Right.’ Uncertain. ‘What do you—’
‘I’d like to get in touch with Alan.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s away.’
‘Away from where?’
‘Where? His office.’
‘Where’s that?’
He indicated with a thumb. ‘Vietcong supermarket. Upstairs.’
He’d learned that from his father. The war in Indochina was not over. The battle for the hearts and minds of the invaders had still to be won.
I didn’t pursue the matter. The waiter left, went outside.
The coffee was terrible, sour, third-rate beans, old, probably black market.
‘Come again,’ said the father, giving me my change.
‘Can’t wait to.’
I walked in the direction indicated by the son’s thumb. Halfway down the block was a business that satisfied his description. Beyond it, a heavyweight door with a mail slot carried the names of two businesses on the first floor: VICACHIN BUSINESS AGENCY and CORESECURE.
The door was locked. I pressed the buzzer on the wall.
‘Yes,’ said a woman’s voice, hissing through holes in a slim stainless-steel box beside the door.
‘Client of Coresecure,’ I said. ‘Here to see Alan.’
‘Mr Bergh not here,’ said the voice, staccato.
‘When’s he coming back?’
‘Don’t know.’
I accepted that, wrote down Vicachin’s phone number. Coresecure didn’t have one on the door. Then I went home, a slow journey in failing light in the company of irritable people.
Coresecure wasn’t in the White Pages. Nor was it in the Yellow Pages in any category I could think of. I packed up for the day, not a great deal to pack, and drove around to Lester’s Vietnamese takeaway in St Georges Road.
Lester was alone in the shop, in the kitchen. When the door made its noise, he looked up and saw me in his strategically placed mirror.
‘Early, Jack,’ he barked. ‘How many?’
‘I need a favour,’ I said.
‘Ask.’
I asked. He nodded, took the piece of paper and went back to the kitchen, held a long, rapid-fire conversation in Vietnamese on the phone.
He came back and returned my slip of paper. ‘They talk to you,’ he said. ‘You can go there tomorrow.’
I drove home in drizzle, tail-lights turning the puddles to blood, listening to Linda on the radio taking calls on Victorians’ gambling habits. The daylight was gone before I found my mooring beneath the trees.
Upstairs, I put on the kitchen radio to hear a man say: …accept that the state’s now on a gambling revenue drip and raise the tax till the bastards scream.
Linda: You’re saying gambling’s a fact of life, so get the most public benefit out of it?
Caller: Exactly. And this Cannon Ridge casino, the Cundall casino, slug it. Playground for the rich, double the bloody gambling tax.
Linda: Thank you, Nathan of Glen Iris. Now there’s a challenging point of view, even if the logic may be slightly fuzzy. What’s your view, Leanne of Frankston?
Leanne: Linda. I’m a compulsive gambler, I’ve had treatment…
Enough. She would ring or she wouldn’t. It was probably better if she didn’t. We could meet from time to time as friends. Old friends. We’d made a good start at that.
Had she rubbed her left leg against my right? Not a rub, but a linger. A touch and then a linger.
How old did you have to be before this kind of rubbish stopped?
I got a fire going, bugger cleaning the grate. Everything was dirty in my life, why worry about a pile of soft, clean ashes?
Now, a drink. I looked in the cupboard. Campari and soda, Linda’s end-of-day drink, the bottles not touched since Linda. I poured a stiff one, settled on the couch to think. The phone rang.
‘No doubt,’ said Drew, ‘I find you poring over your footy memorabilia, sniffing old Fitzroy socks, marvelling at the size of your antecedents’ jockstraps, lovingly preserved.’
‘Large in their day but dwarfed by those to come,’ I said. ‘I gather you’ve found a form of happiness with some unfortunate.’
Tell me that it is not Rosa, please.
He sighed. ‘To find joy and to share it, that is life’s purpose. You probably have no idea who said that.’
‘No. Let me have a stab. You.’
‘Spot on. Anyway, you can’t dwarf a jockstrap.’
‘The courts will decide what you can and cannot do with a jockstrap. Who?’
‘A corporate lawyer. International experience. Top-tier firm, I might add. With a personal trainer.’
I gave silent thanks. ‘Trains her to do what? Find 48 billable hours in the day? Render the simple incomprehensible? Conspire with the other side to shake their clients down?’
I could imagine the pained Drew look.
‘Slander your fellow servants of the law if you will,’ he said. ‘This delightful creature has been slumbering, awaiting the kiss of an awakener.’
‘Slumbering? Form?’
‘Unraced.’
‘Age?’
‘I’m not filling in an application here.’
‘I’ll put it to you again.’
‘The thirties. Thirty-five, six. Thereabouts, I suppose.’
‘That’s quite a slumber. How did this happen?’
‘Her secretary was in a bit of strife. Vanessa came along to give the poor woman moral support. You’ll have noticed the effect a commanding physical presence, razor-sharp intellect, and professional brilliance can have on women.’
‘I have. How’d you get Vanessa to notice you?’
‘I can feel waves of jealousy passing through this instrument.’
‘I hope you’re talking about the phone. You got the secretary off?’
Drew sighed. ‘Actually, no. Could’ve been worse though.’
‘Moving away from your erotic fantasies,’ I said, ‘as a man of affairs, does the name Alan Bergh mean anything?’
‘It does.’
‘Tell me.’
‘An employers’ secret agent, Mr Bergh. Years ago, when the unions could still get up a decent strike. Before a Labor government broke the Builders’ Labourers.’
‘Does everyone except me know that?’
‘Unusually, no. Bergh planted thugs in marches, demos, the blokes at the back who lob the first unopened can of VB at the cops, that sort of thing.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Appeared for one of his thugs. You were on sabbatical then.’
He was saying that this was in the time, the long time, when I was drunk, half-drunk, getting drunk again, after my wife Isabel’s murder.
‘The client told you?’
‘We were pleading guilty, mate, as befits people shown on television poking what looks like an electric cattle prod up a police horse’s bum. A former racehorse. With not unpredictable consequences.’
‘Took off at great speed?’
‘No. Reared and e
ndangered lives, jockey fell off.’
‘Surprising. Given a touch of the jigger, your race-horse generally shows a bit of toe, leaves the field behind. That’s the idea of jigging them. So the client told you about Bergh?’
‘Not him. Another bloke came in. An extremely dubious character. I got the impression that he’d hired my client and was a bit worried about what I’d do in court. I didn’t want to discuss the matter with him, so he said, listen, just don’t do anything that’ll piss off Alan Bergh.’
‘And?’
‘Over a cheering glass with the labour aristocracy down at the John Curtin, I asked about Bergh. The word was that he did jobs for employers. The nasty work. Not still in business, is he?’
‘He’s in some business. Haven’t worked out what it is yet.’
I was still trying to work it out in the last moments before sleep. I tried to find a thread in everything I knew about Robbie/Marco. Hopeless. It wasn’t a fabric, it was a heap. And now there was a sophisticated attempt to blackmail a judge of the Supreme Court sitting in a drug importation case.
Marco was murdered. He was being watched, and then he was murdered. The supplier of the surveillance clips knew that and wanted me to know that. Milan Filipovic hadn’t thought it likely that Marco had stuck a too-potent needle in his arm.
‘Needle’s a big fucken surprise to me,’ he’d said.
But Detective Sergeant Warren Bowman said the dead man had needle tracks.
Alan Bergh and the woman in the car belonging to a Sydney high-flier. How did they fit into Marco’s life and death?
Sleep claimed me, troubled sleep, full of strange places, peopled with strangers.
Up early stumbling around the streets, back to Richmond in peak-hour morning traffic, thinking about Colin Loder and his dad. That was what worried him most: his dad finding out that he had it off with non-women.
Not his brilliant legal career crashing. Not his wife and children finding out. Just his expectation of his dad’s horrified reaction. His dad probably had his suspicions anyway.
Mr Justice Loder should announce that he was being blackmailed because he was gay or bi, had been silly enough to appear on camera.
Was that all Colin was worried about? Consenting adults? Did his album hold photographs that told a different story?
In Bridge Road, I parked in a loading zone and rang the bell at Vicachin Business Agency.
‘Yes,’ the voice hissed again.
‘Lester rang about me. Yesterday.’
The door bolt unlocked.
The stairway was dark. Upstairs, the offices of Coresecure and Vicachin faced each other across a dim corridor. Vicachin’s door opened and a young woman, unsmiling, beckoned me into an office, walls decorated with travel posters. She opened an inner door and stood back.
A balding middle-aged man in a black suit and striped shirt was behind a desk. He stood up and put out a hand. ‘Call me Tran,’ he said, briskly.
‘Jack Irish.’
‘Sit, Jack.’ He sat down and adjusted his glasses. ‘Your friend tells me you want to know about Alan Bergh. There’s not much I can tell you.’
He had an American accent.
‘He’s gone somewhere?’
‘Well, he hasn’t been in for a couple of weeks.’
‘Have you told anyone?’
‘No.’ He wasn’t looking at me, looking down, fiddling with his glasses.
‘Something may have happened to him.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t like to interfere. Mind my own business.’
‘Do you know much about Coresecure, Tran?’
Tran held up his hands. ‘God knows. Something to do with company security. I think Alan was a soldier once. He speaks some Vietnamese.’
‘Who’s the landlord?’
‘I collect the rent.’
An answer to a question I hadn’t asked. ‘That’s up to date?’
‘Oh yes. Three months in advance.’
‘What did you find when you checked his office?’
‘Nothing.’
As he said it, he knew he’d been taken, tugged at an earlobe, perhaps thinking about the mind-myown-business problem.
‘You worry whether someone’s collapsed, heart attack, you know,’ he said.
‘Of course. Would you mind if I had a look?’
Tran’s eyes said nothing. ‘I don’t understand. Your friend says you’re a lawyer. What is your interest in Alan?’
‘It’s complicated. I think it’s important to find Alan. Very much in his interests. You can trust me not to involve you in any way.’
A long think.
‘I can’t let you into his office.’
‘You don’t have to.’
More thought. Then he opened a drawer at his right and took out two keys on a metal disc, put them on the desk. He stood up, turned his back on me, went to the window. I took the keys.
‘Thank you for talking to me, Tran,’ I said. ‘I imagine a security consultant’s office would be guarded by the latest alarm system.’
He turned. ‘No. Nothing of value, I suppose. Sorry I couldn’t be more help.’
We shook hands and I left. The outer office was empty. I crossed the corridor and unlocked the Coresecure office. Inside, it was dark and musty.
I felt like a burglar.
In many ways, I was a burglar, always intruding, taking things I had no right to.
There was little to take in the Coresecure office. It consisted of two rooms, the front one not used, the back one minimally furnished. There was a desk, nothing on it except a telephone and a box of tissues. The drawers contained printer paper, an ink cartridge and a box of ballpoints. A printer was on a stand next to a filing cabinet, empty. To the right of the desk, a bookshelf held capital city telephone books, copies of an American magazine called CORPORATE SECURITY, and a dozen or so books, company histories and books about business failures and corporate crime.
The wastepaper basket was empty.
I went behind the desk, picked up the telephone and pressed the redial button.
Nothing. Last call cleared.
Standing behind Alan Bergh’s desk, in his boring office, his telephone in my hand, a feeling of disgust, of failure and futility, settled on me. This was not the way an adult should spend time.
I pulled a tissue out of the box, wiped the instrument, replaced it, realised how silly this was for a member of the legal profession, gave the phone an extra rub anyway and went around looking for other things I’d touched. Paranoia satisfied, I clicked off the light.
In the near-dark of the outer room, reaching for the doorknob, I saw the mail basket. The mail was collected downstairs and someone, Tran’s assistant no doubt, posted it through Coresecure’s slot. It fell into a basket attached to the door.
A burglar. A thief.
I did a quick sort of Coresecure’s mail and left, posting the firm’s keys through the mail slot after closing the street door.
Back to Fitzroy, to the office. I’d never spent so much time there. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be at Taub’s, making things. Any things.
At my table, I opened the purloined mail. I’d stolen two bank statements, a credit card statement, and a mobile-phone bill.
I read the bank statements. One was for a cash management account holding $66,354. No transactions in the statement period, an interest credit. A cheque account statement showed three deposits adding up to $28,730 and cash withdrawals, two a week, four or five hundred dollars each time. Six cheques had been drawn against the account, the biggest for $3024. The most recent transaction was a cash withdrawal of $500 two weeks earlier and the account was $12,340.80 in credit.
On to the credit card statement.
Alan Bergh spent money on restaurants, hotels, plane tickets and hire cars, bought clothes at expensive shops, and paid the account balance inside the interest-free period. Rich and prudent.
The last account was the mobile-phone bill: four pages detailing how Alan ha
d incurred a debt of $2548.20. The man gave good phone. I got a pen and asterisked the frequently called numbers and the long calls. Then I rang for Mr Cripps. He was at the door inside fifteen minutes.
Coffee.
Urgent, compelling was the need. I walked swiftly, bought the Age on the way, found Meaker’s near-empty. A new waiter, a thin young man, took my order.
Waiting for my long black, I postponed reading the paper, watched a man taking things out of the back of a van in the loading zone. A sign-writer: Beems Brothers, Sign-writers.
My coffee came. I sipped.
Foul taste of uncleaned machine, reused grind.
Poised to complain, I realised that I didn’t recognise the large person lolling against the counter in front of the machine. Fat, in fact.
I raised a hand. There was anxiety in me.
The new waiter came over. ‘Something else?’
He had big teeth.
‘What’s happened to the usual mob?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The people who usually work here?’
‘New management,’ he said. ‘New staff.’
‘What?’
‘Sold.’
‘As of when?’
‘Pardon?’
‘When did this happen?’
He held up his hands. ‘Temp, mate, can’t help you there.’
I got up and went to the kitchen door.
‘Hey,’ said the man at the coffee machine.
I ignored him, looked in. No Enzio. A small fat man was at the stove. He sensed me, turned his head.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Enzio?’
‘Who?’
‘The cook.’
‘Dunno.’ He looked away. ‘Ask the manager.’
Behind me, the big man said, ‘Staff only, mate.’
I didn’t look at him, went back to my table, picked up my paper, made for the door. The waiter said loudly, ‘Hang on, coffee’s not free.’
I turned, he was close. ‘That isn’t coffee,’ I said with venom.
‘Lettim go,’ said the big man, back behind the counter.
I looked at him.
‘Piss off. See ya, buddy. Go somewhere else.’
Walking away, holding a course, the flow of the aimed and the aimless breaking around me, I was compelled to look back. The sign-writer was scraping at the name Meaker’s on the window.
