Helga's Web

by Jon Cleary

  “The banks aren’t open Saturdays. You’ll have to wait till Monday. Something worrying you, Bixby? What made you forget that?”

  Bixby chewed a little harder on the match. “I dunno. I guess it’s because I ain’t been working this week. You lose track of the days. Okay, it’ll have to be Monday, but make it cash.”

  Gibson went into the study and Bixby, restless now, moved around the living room, finishing up at the big window that looked west towards the city and the Opera House. From here he could see almost the whole of the last part of his journey last Monday night. Like he’d told Grafter, it hadn’t been easy.

  After he had checked that he could pick up a boat without any trouble in Rushcutters Bay, he had driven down to the Domain and along the road that led to the point. The Domain, like most parks, was deserted at night but for lovers in their cars. He had known that a man on his own in a car would be suspected as a Peeping Tom, it was a great place for creeps like that, and he had stayed only long enough to refresh his memory on how far he would have to go by water to get to the Opera House. He had parked above the path that led down to Fleet Steps. That’s where he’d have to take the dame’s body aboard the boat; that meant he’d have about three-quarters of a mile’s rowing, if he kept to the shoreline, before he got round to where he could slip in under the Opera House pilings. Well, that wouldn’t be so hard. But first he had to get the bloody boat around to Fleet Steps and that wasn’t going to be so easy. He’d have at least two miles’ rowing because he’d have to keep well clear of the naval depot at Garden Island; otherwise he’d have the Navy demons butting in, wanting to know what he was doing around there at night. Going out into deep water to skirt Garden Island might mean he’d run into a Water Police patrol boat and those bastards wouldn’t just wave to him and pass on; but that was something he’d have to risk. If he was going to get rid of the dame’s carcass so that no one would ever find her, then the Opera House was the only shot and he would have to take all the risks it meant getting there. Now, standing in Gibson’s living room, he knew he could have taken her up the bush somewhere, up to one of the thickly timbered valleys in the Blue Mountains,- and buried her there; he could even have taken her up to the outskirts of the city, left her in the scrub somewhere right in the path of the bushfires that were raging: she’d have been no more than a blackened skeleton in no time. But somehow those ideas had never occurred to him that night. He was a stranger to anything ten miles inland from the heart of the city; he had been a water man all his life and physically and mentally he stayed by the water. He guessed it was some sort of animal instinct.

  It would have been a bloody sight easier burying her up in the bush. He had driven out to Alexandria, stopped in a street where there were only factories dark and silent for the night, transferred the body from the back of the car to the boot, then driven back to Rushcutters Bay. He’d gone looking for a small boat, found one and quietly sculled it away through the school of yachts moored in the small bay. That had been easy. The long row out round Garden Island and back inshore below the Domain had been the tough bit. He had sweated all the way, not from the rowing but because he had been dead scared the water demons would appear. But finally he had made it, moored the boat beneath the steps, climbed up to the road, walked back through the Domain and caught a cab down outside the Woolloomooloo wharves. A girl there, doing no good with the merchant sailors, had tried to pick him up; she was probably still wondering why he had so savagely knocked her back, probably thought he was a queer or something. By the time the cab had dropped him back at his car at Rushcutters Bay it was almost midnight. He waited there another hour, chewing matches, sitting in the dark and beginning to wonder what he was going to do for cash now he was out of a job. He might have to go back to the game, doing over factories for whatever he could get out of them. A new game had started up over the past few months, bank hold-ups, but that didn’t appeal to him. You had to carry a gun for that and if ever the demons landed you and you had a gun on you, they saw you copped the lot when they got you into court. The bank jobs might give you cash in a hurry, but sooner or later you got caught. Whereas a good factory man, if he was careful, could go on forever.

  At one o’clock he drove back to the Domain. Most of the lovers had had enough for the night; those blokes who hadn’t made it had given up and gone home and those that had had probably run out of steam. Two or three cars still remained, but anyone who was still at it at this hour wouldn’t be looking up to see what was going on outside their own bedroom in the back seat. He got the body out of the boot, but she was harder to carry now than when he had brought her out of the flat. She wasn’t completely cold yet, but she’d started to go stiff; he noticed when he lifted her head that her lower jaw was completely locked. He lifted her on to his shoulder,

  cursing the silk dressing gown; he wondered for a moment if he ought to throw it away, then decided against it. He wasn’t squeamish, but he didn’t fancy the idea of handling her naked. He knew there were creeps who did women when they were dead, but he knew he’d never come to that. Maybe he was being bloody stupid, a real wowser, but dead women should have something on them. It was what his first wife, the silly bitch, would have called decent.

  It was another hour before he’d got her hidden down in the basement of the Opera House. There had been a few moments when he could have done with some help, when it had taken all his strength to handle her up from the boat. He’d been stopped by no one, but once he’d had to hold the boat steady in under the pilings when a security guard came to a spot right above him and flashed his torch around. It had not been easy, just like he’d told Grafter, but now she was buried there in the Opera House, in her own private tomb, the biggest bloody mausoleum in the world, and like as not she’d stay there forever. There had been nothing in the papers so far about her being missing and it looked like no one was going to care. For all the world and Grafter Gibson knew, she’d gone back to Germany.

  Gibson came out of the study with the check. “That finishes it. We shouldn’t hear another word out of her. Unless—” He drew back the check as Bixby reached for it. “You didn’t rough her up at all?”

  Bixby was all innocence. “Why would I wanna do that? I told you, I hadda argue with her, but what woman don’t argue? I admit I told her something might happen to her, but soon’s I said that, she got the point right away. You won’t have to worry about her again, Grafter. She’s gone and gone for good.”

  Gibson handed over the check. “All right. Now you go and you be gone for good, too. If ever I hear you’re hanging

  around any of my boats, I’ll have the police down on you before you know what hit you.”

  Bixby was going to make some threatening retort, but he abruptly thought better of it. The old bastard didn’t know it, but he held the whip handle; if ever he found out the girl had been killed, Old Grafter wouldn’t think twice about cracking that whip. “I told you, I’m going away. I’ll be gone by Tuesday.”

  “Where are you thinking of going?”

  Bixby grinned, put on the straw hat, ran his hand round the brim. “That depends, you know what I mean? I got some other business to attend to. If that pays off, I might even take a trip overseas.” He was at the door now, but he paused and looked back and around the living room. “You got a real nice set-up here, Grafter. Just shows how far you can go when you’re smart, don’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Gibson. “Just keep it in mind.”

  2

  “I’m working for the Aboriginals this Christmas,” said the young girl, clanking her gold bracelet, the lucky charm of the Darling Point tribe. “It’s my conscience, darling. And I want to learn to throw a boomerang.”

  “A queer jockey?” said the Wahroonga matron. “But how do the poor horses like that?”

  “Cost me seven thousand dollars,” said the grazier down from the country. “The wife thinks money is vulgar—until she wants some.”

  “It’s just my bloody luck to be right-hand man to
a left-handed boss,” said the young executive.

  Walter Helidon moved among the shrapnel of the cocktail chatter. The Christmas charity party was being held at the Royal South Shore golf club and in those rare moments when he looked back to his beginnings he marvelled that he was a

  member of the club. As a boy he had caddied here, but that had been over thirty years ago; the members he had caddied for were either dead or too old now to remember the tow-headed boy named Wally. In those days the club had had as many restrictions as any royal household; it revelled in its Royal title as if it had been made part of the King’s own domain. Applicants for membership were scanned as if they were to be honoured with a barony; the blackball was holed in one more frequently than the golf ball. Overnight-rich men were barred, as were professional turf men such as trainers and jockeys, foreigners who were not diplomats, and Jews: there had been several cases of apoplexy when a Jew had been named as Governor-General of the country and the club had had to entertain a Yid as the Royal representative. Restrictions had eased somewhat since those days, but election to membership was still difficult. Walter Helidon had been elected because someone on the committee had suggested that the club never knew when a member who was a Cabinet Minister might not be an asset. Helidon had been delighted to accept the nomination and was now doing his best to reduce his handicap from 30 to 28. As a youth, playing in a caddies’ competition, he had gone round the course in six over par, but he never boasted of that now and was only glad that his name had never figured among the prizewinners of the competition.

  “Hullo, Wally.” Les Gibson sat in a window seat looking out over the course. He was clutching a glass in one bony claw and looked like a man interested in neither Christmas nor charity.

  “Hello, Les. You look like Scrooge. How did they get you to a thing like this?” Gibson was one man who would never be elected to membership and Helidon could only suppose he was here at the invitation of one of the charity women who was after a sizable donation.

  “At the point of a gun,” said Gibson. “How’s the eye? Last time I saw you a voter had just clocked you.”

  Helidon managed a smile, humoring the old bastard. He had not forgotten the insults Gibson had handed him at their last meeting, but in the political game you could only harbour grudges against opponents from other parties, never against an uncommitted voter. You never knew when you might need him. “With all your money, Les, what do you vote?”

  “Communist. They’re the only ones who can afford to be honest—they’ll never get into power in this country, not with the millions of reactionaries we call the easy-going, democratic Aussie.” He looked around the big room at the easygoing, democratic reactionaries who remained oblivious of his contempt of them. “The voters are the same, Wally. Hypocrites, every bloody one of ‘em, all voting out of their pockets. The only honest voters today are the radical kids, the demonstrators.”

  “They’d be pleased to have you as one of their backers. Why don’t you give them a million or two?”

  “I wouldn’t back ‘em. I’d shoot the bloody lot of them. If ever they did get into power, I’d be one of the first for the chopping block. I admire ‘em, Wally, but I’m not bloody stupid. I admire tigers, too, but I wouldn’t want one as a pet.”

  Helidon felt in a benevolent mood. After all, Christmas was the time to be charitable, even to old crooks like Grafter Gibson. And he had heard no more from Helga, so maybe she, too, had been touched by the Christmas spirit, and had decided to call it quits and leave hiMalone. He suddenly felt in the mood to enjoy the party and he said, “I think I envy you, Les, in a way. You’ve got enough money and you’re old enough to have all your worries behind you. You can say and do exactly what you like.”

  Not quite, Wally, thought Gibson. But all he said was,

  “The time to be honest is when you’re young, not when you’re old. The truth doesn’t improve with age.”

  “I still envy you.”

  “You could be the same as me if you wanted to give up politics. But if you did that, Wally, you’d die of anonymity. You wouldn’t be the first, but I think it’d be a terrible bloody death in your case.”

  Helidon’s benevolent mood disappeared as quickly as the smile from his face. “Have you ever had a kind word to say to anyone, Les? Or vice versa?”

  “Yes,” said Gibson, his mottled face screwed into a smile that could have been malicious or affectionate, depending upon who saw it. “Here she comes now.”

  Glenda Gibson, rustling like old leaves in her yellow silk, came up to them. “Mr. Helidon, I’ve just been talking to your wife. She’s so pleased and so must you be!”

  “Why?” Helidon was puzzled. Norma, still suffering from the reaction to her fight with Helga last Monday, had been in no humour for the party and had only come because she was chairwoman of the charity committee.

  “What was in the papers this morning—that she’s been made president of the Blue and Red Ball.”

  “That’s headline news?” Gibson asked drily. “When’s the inauguration? You gunna wear a top hat, Wally?”

  Helidon kept his temper. “Don’t be too critical, Les. We may have over two and a half million people, but we’re still a small town. And the women do some good.”

  “You’ll be saying the same for you politicians next.”

  “Now that’s enough of that, Les,” said Glenda. “No matter what the size of a place is, little town or big city, there always has to be someone at the top.”

  “Christ Almighty,” said Gibson, grinning lovingly at her, “you’re starting to sound as if you wished you’d be in the running.”

  Glenda looked at Helidon. “Could you imagine me as a so-

  ciety queen, Mr. Helidon, with him as my consort or whatever they call it?”

  Helidon’s smile did not have to be forced this time. “An impossible picture, indeed, Mrs. Gibson.”

  He moved away and Gibson looked after him. “When he was born I bet they squeezed him out of his mother like shaving cream out of a tube. He’s so bloody smooth.”

  “Maybe he has to be, in his position. You shouldn’t be so critical, Les. He can’t afford to be as frank as you are.”

  “He’d never offend anyone, not even his missus, for fear she mightn’t vote for him. He spends his whole time pussyfooting around, never wanting to get out of step. He’s a dull bastard and there’s no getting away from it—if he just swore or got drunk, I’d think a bit more of him. Not much, but a bit. Have you had enough, hon? Let’s go home.”

  “In a while. The Archbishop would like to meet you.”

  “The Cardinal? I’ve met him.”

  “No, the Anglican Archbishop.”

  “Jesus, Glenda, isn’t one set of God-botherers enough for you?”

  “Now don’t be like that, Les. You know what Father Wrig-ley says—we should all try to be ecumen-whatever-it-is.”

  “If being ecumenical means being matey with Father Wrigley, I’d rather be a bigot.”

  “I think I’d rather have him visit us than that Mr. Clixby or whatever-his-name was who came this evening. You do have some rough-looking men working for you.”

  “He’s not working for me any more,” said Gibson, regretting the seven hundred dollars it had cost him but thinking how easily the girl had been got rid of. “You won’t be seeing him again, hon. Now where’s the bloody Archbishop?”

  Walter Helidon, on the other side of the room, was just starting to feel the effects of his third martini. He looked about him, thinking: this is the cream of the city and, mock cream though I may be, they’re mixing me in with them. He

  lifted another martini from a passing tray and toasted himself. He might never go any higher than this, but this was good enough. Helga had been wrong: you didn’t get this far if you were no more than a schoolboy. Merry Christmas, Walter.

  “You look pleased with yourself/’ Norma Helidon, throat encircled by the repaired string of pearls, paused beside him. She flashed her smile at a gabble
of young girls as they swooped by like predators on their way to take down the older men for as much as they could get in the name of charity; in the background their escorts waited with the smug satisfaction of young men who knew that what they would offer the young girls later in the night would be more welcome than a charity donation. “I wish I had your self-delusion.”

  “I told you before we left—” He smiled at a woman, recognizing her as one who worked for him in his electorate; he and Norma stood side by side like a firing squad shooting smiles instead of bullets. “If Helga was going to get in touch with us again, she’d have done it by now.”

  “Have you tried to get in touch with her?”

  “Yes,” he admitted after a moment’s hesitation. “I rang her twice to try to tell her she could have the money. There was no answer. Personally, I think she’s had second thoughts about what she was up to, has got scared and done a bunk. After all—” He switched on another smile, this time at a couple whose respective ancestors had come out with the First Fleet: his as convicts, hers as army officers: both heritages were now respectable, though, in the new national spirit, his was the more to be envied. Convicts, so long as they were four generations removed, were now considered the best of stock. “We’re both a little more important than she thought. She may have got scared of our position.”

  Norma, with some of the candour she had almost forgotten, changed her smile to a wry one. “You’re kidding. No girl

  like her was ever a respecter of position—even if we had any. A new Premier, and you could be out of the Cabinet tomorrow. As for me—” The smile widened again in recognition of another passing couple, this time Louise County and her husband, a small thin man with the resigned look of one who had chosen to surrender in the battle of the sexes. Louise was said to have defeated him on their honeymoon twenty years ago and he had been walking wounded ever since. “Being chairwoman of a committee composed of a dozen women like Louise isn’t position. It’s just civilized masochism.” .