by Peter Carey
25
‘You pay me now,’ Pavlovic said. ‘Or I leave you here, dead-set. You walk all the way back to Franklin, wouldn’t worry me.’ He leaned back, opened the door on Mrs Catchprice’s side, and smiled.
Sarkis was smiling too. He had that hot burning sensation down the back of his throat. He sat on the edge of the back seat of the taxi with his broad white hands on his knees. He was baring his teeth and narrowing his eyes – ‘smiling’ – but Pavlovic wasn’t even aware of him. He was turned almost completely round in his seat with his hawk nose pointed at Mrs Catchprice.
‘Might give you nicer manners,’ he said.
‘You’ll be paid later,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘I don’t carry cash on me.’
‘You pay me now,’ said Pavlovic.
‘You heard her,’ Sarkis said, but he was the one no one seemed to hear.
‘Or you get out of my cab. That simple,’ he smiled again. His mouth was prissy and pinched as if he could smell something nasty on his upper lip.
Sarkis did not want to have a brawl in these trousers and this shirt but he could feel anger like curry in his throat. His eyes were narrowed almost to slits in his incredulous, smiling face. Pavlovic was so thin. Sarkis smoothed the $199 grey moire trousers against his muscled thighs. He looked at Mrs Catchprice to see what it was she wanted him to do.
Mrs Catchprice, it seemed, needed nothing from him. Whatever Pavlovic said to her did not matter. Indeed she was concerned with her cigarette lighter, which had fallen down the back of the seat.
‘I did not come to the Wool Wash to sit in the car. Ah,’ she held up her Ronson. ‘I cannot bear it when I see people sitting in their car to look at the scenery.’
Pavlovic sighed loudly and Sarkis – he couldn’t help himself – slapped him on the side of the head, fast, sharp.
‘You stop that,’ Mrs Catchprice said. ‘Right now.’
Sarkis opened his mouth to protest.
‘I don’t hire louts,’ said Mrs Catchprice.
Pavlovic said something too but Sarkis did not hear what it was. Pavlovic was holding a clenched fist in the air and Sarkis kept an eye on it, but all his real attention was on Mrs Catchprice – what did she want him to do?
‘Maybe you should pay him,’ he said.
Mrs Catchprice ‘acted’ her response. She smiled a large ‘nice’ smile that made her white teeth look as big as an old Buick grille. ‘I always pay my suppliers when they have completed the job.’
‘I could have the police here,’ Pavlovic smirked and rubbed his bright red ear. ‘Or I could leave you here. I like both ideas.’
Sarkis did not actually have a police record, but he had experience of the police in Chatswood. To Mrs Catchprice, he said: ‘Maybe you should look in your handbag.’
Mrs Catchprice’s smile became even bigger. ‘You must not equate age with stupidity,’ she said. ‘You’d have to be senile to walk around at night with money in your bag.’
She made him ashamed he had suggested such a cowardly course but he had seen the twenty-dollar notes very clearly in the jumble under the street lights before they caught the taxi. He did not wish to insult or anger her, but he tapped her very playfully on the back of the hand. ‘I think I may have seen some there.’
Mrs Catchprice looked at him briefly, frowned, and addressed herself to the balding, hawk-nosed driver. ‘What will the police think,’ she asked, ‘of a taxi-driver operating outside the correct area?’
‘They do not give a fuck. Excuse my language, but if you were nice, I would care. You are not nice, so I could not give a fuck. The police got no bloody interest in what area I’m in. Most of the young constables don’t even know what an area is. But I tell you this – they got plenty of interest in assault, and they got plenty of interest in robbery. That’s their business.’
‘Maybe you should check your handbag,’ said Sarkis.
‘I can see I’m going to have to train you,’ said Mrs Catchprice. ‘When I say I have no money it is because I have no money.’ To the taxi-driver she said: ‘You wait.’ Then she slid out of the door and disappeared into the night.
The taxi-driver leaned back and shut the door. Mrs Catchprice appeared in the headlights of the car walking towards the river. Then – so suddenly it whipped Sarkis’s head forwards and backwards – Pavlovic reversed, made a U-turn, and before his passenger could do anything he was bouncing up the pot-holed track with the red electric figures on the meter showing $28.50.
They were half way through the first S bend when Sarkis leant forward and hooked his forearm round the taxi-driver’s long thin neck. He pulled it back so hard he could feel the jaw bone grating against his ulna. All he said was: ‘Turn back.’ The driver’s stubble was rubbing against his forearm. He hated to think of this against his mother.
‘Road,’ Pavlovic gasped. ‘Too narrow.’
‘O.K.’
‘Can’t breathe.’
‘Shut up.’
‘Breathe.’
Sarkis released his arm a little. The taxi-driver screamed. He screamed so loud he made the taxi like a nightmare, a mad place: ‘You a dead man, Jack.’ Sarkis could feel the wet on his arm. Not sweat. Pavlovic was crying. ‘I hit my panic button, they get you, cunt. They get you in the cells, they fuck you with their baton, you wait.’ The car slowed and slowed until it was juddering and kangaroo-hopping up the road. As the car leaped and jerked, Pavlovic was flailing around with his arm, trying to grab first Sarkis’s ear or eye but also – the panic button. Sarkis grabbed Pavlovic’s hand and held it. He held it easy, but he was now scared, as scared as Pavlovic. Pavlovic was crying but it was not simple scared-crying, it was mad-crying too.
‘You pull up here,’ Sarkis said.
‘You get twenty years for this. You’re dead.’
‘She gets murdered or something,’ Sarkis said. ‘She’s dead.’ The car shuddered and stalled.
‘You,’ yelled the taxi-driver, his face glowing green in the light of his instruments, but he didn’t finish the sentence.
‘What you think I’m going to do to you?’ Sarkis asked. ‘Did I hurt you?’
‘Just pay me,’ Pavlovic said, glaring at him from streaming eyes.
‘O.K.,’ Sarkis said, relieved. ‘You go back and get her, I’ll pay you.’
‘O.K. You take your arm away now.’
Sarkis unhooked his arm from under the driver’s chin.
‘O.K.,’ said Pavlovic, blowing his nose. ‘You got money on you?’
‘At home.’
‘Then I’ll take you home for the money, then we come back here and get her.’ He was hunched over the wheel. He did not need to tell Sarkis he had his finger an inch away from the panic button.
‘We get her first.’
‘You want me press this fucking button?’
That button was enough to get Sarkis put in jail. Pavlovic used it like a pistol. First he forced him to abandon Mrs Catchprice. Then he drove him to his house where his mother had $52 hidden under the lino in the sitting-room.
While Sarkis stole his mother’s money, Pavlovic sat in the cab with the engine running. He stayed hunched over the wheel, his finger on that button.
‘Come on,’ Sarkis said when he got back in the cab. ‘I’ve got the money.’
‘Hold it up. Hold the notes.’
Sarkis showed him – five tens, one two.
Pavlovic twisted his neck to see the money. He had to keep his finger on that button. Even when he backed out of the drive-way he had to sit twisted sideways in his seat, and he drove back to the Wool Wash one handed, all the way, in silence.
When the meter showed $52 they were almost there, on the main road up above the Wool Wash Picnic Area. Pavlovic stopped the car.
‘You pay me,’ he said, ‘or I hit this fucking button now. I charge you with fucking assault, at least. You understand me.’
‘Relax,’ said Sarkis. ‘No one’s going to hurt you.’
‘Shut up, Jack. Just pay me.’
&
nbsp; ‘I need a lift back. O.K. Can you hear me? I’ll pay you more money when we get back.’
‘Give me the fucking money or you’re a dead man.’
‘You don’t want to make more money?’ Sarkis held out the $52 and Pavlovic snatched the notes. ‘I need a lift back,’ Sarkis said. ‘I’ll pay you.’
‘Not in this cab, Jack.’
‘Just calm down, relax a little.’
‘Get out,’ screamed Pavlovic.
Sarkis shrugged and got out of the car.
Pavlovic locked the car doors.
‘Listen,’ Sarkis began, but the taxi was already driving away, leaving him to stand in pitch darkness.
It was now five minutes to eleven o’clock on Monday night. Mrs Catchprice was already back in Franklin, walking back across the gravel towards her apartment.
26
The Australian Tax Office was in Hunter Street. The glassed, marble-columned foyer remained brightly lit and unlocked and, apart from video cameras and an hourly M.S.S. patrol, the security for the building depended on deceptively ordinary blue plastic Security Access Keys which were granted only to ASO 7’s and above. This was why Gia now had a key and Maria did not.
In the six months she had had the key, Gia had never used it. It sat in its original envelope in the bottom of her handbag, together with its crumpled instruction sheet. Now, standing before the blank eyes of video cameras which were connected to she knew not what, Gia read the instructions to Maria.
‘O.K. Hold the key firmly between thumb and forefinger. Ensure blade is unobstructed.’
‘We should have read this in the car,’ Maria said. ‘I can’t see where the shitty thing goes.’ She jabbed the key at the button.
‘First you’ve got to step into the elevator, Señora.’ Gia took Maria’s arm. ‘Then you put it in the Security/Air-conditioning slot.’
A red light came on. A buzzer sounded. Maria started.
‘Calm down,’ Gia said. ‘No one’s going to shoot you. All we’re doing is working late.’
The lift ascended and the liquid display panel above the door wished someone called Alex a happy birthday. Maria seemed pale and unhappy. Gia took her arm and squeezed it.
‘Relax,’ she said.
‘You know,’ Maria said, ‘that’s exactly the wrong thing to say to me. If you’re dealing with an agitated person, a maniac, you never say “relax”. Relax means what you feel is not important to me. I read that in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.’ She took Gia’s hand and held it: ‘You’re very brave to come with me. Thank you.’
‘I think this is going to be very therapeutic,’ Gia said. ‘I only wish Alistair could see you do it.’
‘This is nothing to do with Alistair …’
Gia thought: Sure! It was the first real sign she’d seen that Maria would let herself be angry with him.
The door opened on to the rat-maze partitioned world of the eighteenth floor which now housed the file clerks and section heads and auditors who concerned themselves with returns from small businesses like Catchprice Motors.
When Alistair’s star had been in the ascendant they had all worked here – although not on small businesses. During those years, no one on the eighteenth floor would have wasted their genius on Catchprice Motors.
They went to big-game fishing conventions in Port Stephens and photographed the people with the big boats and then investigated them to see if their income correlated with their assets. They spotted Rolls-Royces on the way to work and, on that chance encounter, began investigations that brought millions into the public purse. It is true that they were occasionally obsessive (Sally Ho started fifteen investigations on people with stone lion statues in their gardens) but mostly they were not vindictive. They investigated major corporations, multi-nationals with transfer pricing arrangements and off-shore tax havens. They went hunting for Slutzkin schemes, Currans, and sham charities. This is the work for which Alistair recruited Maria Takis and her best friend Gia Katalanis.
It had not been a rat-maze then. Alistair had had all the partitioning ripped out. There had been no careful grading of offices and desks but a clamorous paddock of excitable men and women who lived and breathed taxation. They worked long hours and drank too much red wine and smoked too many cigarettes and had affairs or ruined their marriages or did both at the same time. More than half of them came from within the Taxation Office but many – those with new degrees like Gia and Maria – came from outside it, and thereby leap-frogged several positions on the promotion ladder without sensing that the old Taxation Office was a resilient and unforgiving organism. Had they realized what enemies they were making it is unlikely they would have acted any differently – they were not cautious people. They were sometimes intolerant, always impatient, but they were also idealists and all of them were proud of their work and they were not reluctant to identify themselves at dinner parties as Tax Officers.
It was Alistair who created this climate, and for a long time everyone in the Taxation Office – even those who later revealed themselves to be his enemies – must have been grateful to him. It was something to be able to reveal your profession carelessly.
It was Alistair who said, on national television, that being a Tax Officer was the most pleasant work imaginable, like turning a tap to bring water to parched country. It felt wonderful to bring money flowing out of multi-national reservoirs into child-care centres and hospitals and social services. He grinned when he said it and his creased-up handsome face creased up some more and he cupped his hands as if cool river water were flowing over his big, farmer’s fingers and it was hard to watch him and not smile yourself. This was one half of Alistair’s great genius – that he was good on television. He sold taxation as a public good.
The Taxation Office had never had a television star before, so it was not surprising that Alistair would be envied and resented because of it nor – when the political forces against him succeeded – that he would be treated spitefully in defeat. What was less expected was that the bureaucracy would punish his lover almost as severely, more severely in one way, for Alistair’s office, although much smaller and no longer in the power corner, was at least properly carpeted and had all of its shelving and wiring correctly installed.
‘Oh, the bastards,’ said Gia when she stood at the doorway of Maria’s office. ‘The unmitigated petty little bastards.’
There was still wiring running across the floor from the computer to the black skirting board which was meant to hide it. There were no shelves. There were books and papers stacked on the floor. The only filing cabinet was grey and it was littered with sawdust, aluminium off-cuts, a hammer and a chisel.
‘They fixed the modem,’ Maria said. ‘Gia, I don’t care. I’m never here.’
Gia picked up a tradesman’s dustpan and began to sweep the floor.
‘It’s not the point,’ she said. She picked up metal shavings and a little block of hardwood and dropped them in the pan. ‘What I can’t believe is that anyone would hate you. It’s not as if you were arrogant. It’s not as if you were ever anything but lovely to everyone. Whatever fix Alistair is in, it’s nothing to do with you.’
‘It’s to do with all of us,’ Maria said. ‘We should all be ashamed that he should be treated the way he is.’
Gia did not comment. She thought the great man of principle was a coward and a creep. He spent his days behind his ASO 9 desk in a poky little office across the hall. He now had nothing to do, except administer a division which no longer existed. All he was doing was reading nineteenth-century novels and waiting for his $500,000 superannuation while Maria and her child faced a hostile future you could optimistically call uncertain.
‘Does he talk to you now?’ Gia began to sweep the little coloured pieces of electrician’s cable into the dustpan.
‘He never didn’t talk to me,’ Maria said, ‘and don’t start that.’ She wanted to leave the office and get on with it.
‘Is he nice to you?’ Gia asked, sweeping stub
bornly.
‘Gia, I don’t just want to stand here. Let’s just do it, quickly. Please.’
‘You think I want to hang around here?’ Gia emptied the dustpan into the wastebin and started going round the piled-up books wiping the dust off the covers with a Kleenex tissue. ‘Is he paying for anything?’
‘This baby is my mistake, not his. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at me. Now I need to get into Max Hoskins’s office.’
‘Sure.’
‘You said you could unlock the doors.’
‘Only the front door, only the lift to the floor.’
‘O.K.’
Maria picked up the hammer from the top of the filing cabinet and walked off down the hall. By the time Gia found her she had fitted the claw beneath Max Hoskins’s door and was levering upwards. ‘Kick it,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Gia, out of breath. ‘We can’t do this.’
‘You hold the hammer. Push it down.’
Gia sighed and held the hammer and Maria slammed her shoulder hard against the door.
‘Careful. I don’t want you to go into labour.’
‘Again.’
This time the door ripped open.
‘This is break and entry,’ Gia said, rubbing at the splintered wood at the base of the door. ‘This is not some prank. This is like a violation … If you want to punish Alistair, you should do something to hurt him, not you. You need this job.’
‘This is nothing to do with Alistair. I’m just damned if I’m going to let the department make me into someone I’m not. Gia … please … I need to get at Max’s terminal and then we’ll go back to the Brasserie and I’ll buy you a glass of champagne. If you want to wait for me there, that’s fine, really.’
‘Just hurry, O.K.’
Gia watched from the doorway as Maria took out Max Hoskins’s day book and flipped it open. He had a standard ASO 7 office with a green-topped desk, a leather-bound desk diary, a view to the north, two visitor’s chairs. Only a tortoiseshell comb left on top of the computer terminal was non-standard and it had an unpleasant personal appearance like something found on the bedside table of someone who had died.
