The Serpent's Sting

by Robert Gott

  ‘Not shot at. Shot.’

  ‘That did it for us. That’s when we really knew we wanted to secure your services. Albert Taylor will come looking for you. That’s as certain as the sun rising.’

  I took another slug of whisky, and was overcome with a sudden drowsiness. This incident had been so shattering that it had exhausted me far more thoroughly than I’d thought it had. James Fowler’s voice began to sound as though it was coming from very far away, and my vision blurred. Unable to prevent myself from falling asleep, I realised as my head fell forward onto the table that I’d been drugged. In the seconds before consciousness fled, I experienced a muted spike of outrage.

  I woke in my own bed. It was close to midnight, and I had a headache. Pinned to my shirt was a note from James Fowler.

  ‘Sorry about the Mickey Finn. We thought it was the most efficient way to wind up the evening. The headache won’t last long. James.’

  I’d lost control of almost every aspect of my life. Even my career, which I’d believed I’d been organising, was being stage-managed by other people. Every attempt to take charge of my destiny had been thwarted by corpses, women, criminals, and Intelligence agents — although the distinction between a criminal and an Intelligence agent was purely academic.

  I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face. There was light under Brian’s door, so I knocked and opened it simultaneously. Brian was lying on his bed, fully clothed.

  ‘How long have you been home?’ I asked.

  ‘Half-an-hour or so. Why?’

  ‘So you weren’t here when James Fowler and his merry men carried me, unconscious, to my bedroom?’

  He sat up.

  ‘You’re kidding. They found you passed out somewhere?’

  The perverseness of Brian’s thinking never failed to appal me.

  ‘No, Brian. I was unconscious because they made me unconscious.’

  Before he could interject with another annoying misreading of my words, I gave him a no-holds-barred summary of my evening, right down to Carol’s judiciously placed hand on my cock. His eyes became wide with wonder, and he began to resemble the small boy he used to be.

  ‘I know I’ve said this before, Brian, but if you’re working for these people, now would really be the time to tell me.’

  ‘I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.’

  ‘Did Cloris tell you that I called round to Drummond Street?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Cloris today.’

  ‘She slammed — well, closed — the door in my face.’

  ‘She probably doesn’t like you. You don’t get on with Peter, and I imagine that most of what she knows about you she’s learned from him. There was also the unfortunate way you first met.’

  ‘That didn’t seem to bother her at all. I thought she handled it very well, and I liked her for that.’

  ‘Her brother’s death has changed everything for the Gilberts, Will. She thought she was all right at first, because she didn’t get along with him very well, but both she and her father have begun to unravel over it. Mother has been magnificent. The funeral’s on Monday. Did I tell you that?’

  ‘No, Brian, you didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘John Gilbert’s body has been released to the family. They were told that yesterday.’

  ‘So there’s been a cause of death?’

  ‘Yes. Peter isn’t satisfied, according to Cloris. No suspicious circumstances. The body showed no signs of violence — no bruising — and it was flooded with heroin. Accidental overdose is the polite conclusion, but suicide is suspected.’

  ‘So how did he end up in the cemetery?’

  ‘The autopsy revealed something we couldn’t see. Underneath his shirt sleeve, a syringe was dangling from a vein in his arm. He’d chosen that spot deliberately — no one knows why — and pumped himself with a lethal dose. That’s what Peter can’t fathom. How could his son hate him so much, and how could he miss this, how could he not notice?’

  It was politic to say nothing at this point.

  ‘Something about this stinks,’ Brian said. ‘The connection between John Gilbert and the Fitzgibbon Street house can’t mean nothing. I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence.’

  ‘Neither do I. John Gilbert and Geraldine had been …’ I steeled myself to say it, ‘intimate. James Fowler insists she’s not working for them, and although I hate to admit it, I might have been wrong about her being an agent. She was an actress who bolted when she thought I was investigating her, and she is essentially a prostitute. I have nothing against prostitutes per se, except when they want to blackmail me and when they have lovers who want to kill me. This is, as Portia says to Shylock, the predicament in which I now stand.’

  ‘Where to from here, Will? This is turning into a proper fiasco.’

  ‘I don’t know. The one thing I do know is that I’m not going to be the bait in a trap set by Intelligence. I can’t tell you how much I hate those bastards.’

  ‘They’ve got you by the short and curlies, and they’ve got photos of your short and curlies to prove it.’

  ‘You’re not really helping, Brian, and you’ve used that line before.’

  He looked sullen, as if his hilarious joke had gone unappreciated. My mention of Portia must have been in response to a deep, unconscious thought. Portia was a woman, dressed as a man. Brian was a man who could dress convincingly as a woman. Albert Taylor was a man who sold women for sex.

  ‘Every night,’ I said, ‘outside Camp Pell, there’s a huddle of whores who wait for soldiers to emerge and pick them up for the evening. The authorities must be aware of it, and they’re turning a blind eye to it.’

  ‘The coppers will have been paid off.’

  ‘Probably. Given that Taylor’s girls work out of Parkville and Carlton, I’d imagine a couple of them would be posted on that beat.’

  ‘But they’re not going to take us to Taylor just because we ask them to.’

  ‘No, they’re not. We need to give them a reason to take us to Taylor. We need you, Brian.’

  He sat up quickly, the muscles of his face forming a comically sceptical expression.

  ‘Am I going to be enthusiastic about your plan, Will?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. Consider this, though. It’s daring, and requires that you be daring. This is the sharp end of private-inquiry work, Brian. This is where discreet inquiries just won’t cut it.’

  ‘Stop buttering me up and get to the point.’

  ‘I want you to wear a disguise.’

  ‘As a Yank soldier?’

  ‘As a woman.’

  Brian cocked his head on one side.

  ‘I wonder if you’re serious.’

  I hadn’t thought my idea through, so it evolved as I spoke it.

  ‘We both know from our experience up north that you have a previously unknown and unexplored talent — the ability to pass convincingly as a woman. Perhaps calling it a talent is a bit grand. Your features under the influence of make-up are curiously ambiguous. I look grotesque in lipstick. You look, well, pretty. Slap on a wig and a skirt, and away you go. The voice is a difficulty. However, I’m suggesting that you offer Albert Taylor something a bit more exotic than he currently traffics in.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘A cock, Brian — a cock in a frock.’

  Joycey Dovey’s demeanour was markedly different from earlier encounters. Brian and I met her in the Tivoli workrooms. She remembered Brian, and lamented again the loss of that white sheath dress. Her amber necklace clattered as she fiddled with it. She addressed me now as ‘Mr Power’, and couldn’t have been more helpful. Apparently, my newly minted celebrity made any request I might make reasonable and no trouble at all. My request was modest — a tight skirt, a black wig, and a long-sleeved blouse, because Brian had refused to shave his arms
. Apart from this small rebellion, he’d agreed to my scheme with an alacrity that took me by surprise. I promised Joycey that if the clothes weren’t returned in perfect condition, I’d pay for them to be replaced.

  Brian and I hadn’t discussed in detail what my plan entailed. This was because I had no clear idea how we should proceed, beyond the vague notion of approaching a group of prostitutes and asking individuals for the name of their pimp. This probably wouldn’t be as straightforward as it sounded.

  Joycey parcelled up the outfit and wig in brown paper, and we went to the Hopetoun Tearooms to discuss matters. There was no point returning to Mother’s house immediately. I was due to meet with the people from J.C. Williamson’s a couple of hours later, so a cup of tea, followed by a quiet hour or so in the Athenaeum Library reading Private Lives, struck me as an excellent way to pass the morning. The tearooms were busy. Two ladies surrendered their table to us, and complimented me on my courage. One of them shyly asked me to autograph her handkerchief. I did so, but my fountain pen bled into the cotton so that my name looked more like an ink spill than a signature. She didn’t mind.

  It soon became obvious that the Hopetoun Tearooms were not the ideal place to discuss prostitutes and the idea of Brian approaching them in female attire. The tables were close together, and patrons around us were doing a poor job of pretending not to be straining to listen to our conversation. A month ago, no one would have shown an inclination to eavesdrop on what I said. Now I’d become an object of interest, I had a glimpse of how oppressive fame might be, and I thought how quickly these people would turn if I fell from grace in their eyes. I had to hand it to James Fowler; he’d orchestrated this brilliantly.

  Brian and I spoke of uncontroversial things. I told him about Private Lives, we drank our tea, had a plate of indifferent sandwiches, some of which were smeared with anchovy paste, which I loathe, and walked up Collins Street to the Athenaeum. This was, I’d always thought, the civilised heart of Melbourne. It had the air of an exclusive club, but without any whiff of snobbery. It was, after all, a library first and foremost, but its members were encouraged to sit and read, and talk. Most importantly, there was an air of discretion in the Athenaeum, akin to the discretion one would expect in a private club. This was doubtless a product of the architecture, rather than a philosophy upheld by either the librarians or the patrons. Still, as Brian and I sat in armchairs well away from the loans desk, it felt like a safe place to talk. Our voices didn’t carry beyond our immediate vicinity; even so, we kept them low, and no one disturbed us.

  ‘Let’s suppose,’ Brian said, ‘that this plan actually works, and one of the women takes me to meet Albert Taylor. What then? I’ll get dressed up, Will, but I’m not turning a trick to demonstrate my credentials to this bloke.’

  ‘Fair enough, Brian. I agree that having sex with a person who’s looking for what you have to offer is going way beyond the call of duty.’

  ‘Good. At least we’re agreed on that.’

  It occurred to me suddenly that there was a serious flaw in our scheme. If Brian was taken to meet Albert Taylor, and Geraldine was there, she’d recognise him immediately. That would put Brian in serious danger, and drive Taylor further out of reach. I said this to Brian, and he laughed.

  ‘You’re forgetting that Albert Taylor is Harlen Quist, and that I sat at our table with Harlen Quist on Christmas Day. Geraldine is the least of my worries. Has this just occurred to you, Will? It occurred to me as soon as you came up with this idea.’

  ‘So why didn’t you say something?’

  ‘Because, Will, I still think it’s a good idea. It’s not a well-thought-out idea, but it’s a good one. The problem of what we do with Taylor remains. Let’s try to work this out calmly. Being taken to Taylor is risky. I’m not going to waltz into a well-lit room and try to fool two people who’ve seen me before. Even if they don’t twig straight away, it’s still too risky. We could run this by Intelligence, and have them standing by.’

  ‘Out of the question. They’d never let you expose yourself to that sort of danger. They’ve made it clear that that privilege is reserved for me. We have to deliver Taylor to them. If we can do that, it will be the most satisfying accomplishment of my life. Albert Taylor is an Intelligence failure. To be the one who hands him in, to see the look on James Fowler’s face as I clean up his mess, that would be better than a lifetime of applause in the theatre.’

  My body was tense with the exciting possibility that Brian and I might be capable of doing something that the Intelligence units had so far been unable to do. I began to think that we had more imagination than all of their agents put together.

  ‘I need to lure Taylor away from the light,’ Brian said. ‘I need to meet him somewhere dark.’

  ‘He’s not going to come into the open to meet a transvestite. I think he’ll want to employ one, but I don’t think it’s enough to flush him out.’

  ‘We need a big-ticket item, don’t we? We need you.’

  Brian was right, and I didn’t feel let down that he was wriggling out of his agreed role in finding Albert Taylor. I was agreeably stunned, therefore, when he said, ‘It’ll take two of us. You’ll still need me to find Taylor. Something is forming in the back of my mind about how we can nab him. I’ll go home and sort it out. I agree with you — I think we have to be daring, very daring, and we have to move quickly. This has to be done tonight. As soon as your meeting with Williamson’s is finished, come back to Mother’s house. I’ll have a solid plan by then.’

  I didn’t see how Brian could come up with a viable plan when I’d been unable to, but the meeting with Williamson’s was now uppermost in my mind, so I had no choice but to put my faith in his dubious abilities. I didn’t doubt his courage, only the necessary deviousness of his thinking. Brian was a plodder, not a tactician. I assured him I’d be home as soon as I could, and he left the Athenaeum Library, with his brown paper parcel making too much noise as he did so.

  The meeting with J.C Williamson’s was unexpectedly low key. It wasn’t an audition, of course. The part was mine. The producer and the director were the only people I met. They were polite and welcoming, and expressed their enthusiasm for the production’s potential to be a great success. No other parts had yet been cast. When I first entered the room — a well-furnished office above the Comedy Theatre — I thought I detected the merest hint of a sneer on the face of the director, a lean and hungry-looking man in his late thirties. He introduced himself as Charles Bertram, and it was as I shook his hand that I saw a shadow of disdain cross his face. He was everything that Percy Wavel wasn’t. He radiated a passionate engagement with the theatre, and when he spoke, he did so with an air of authority. He would be a hard taskmaster, the kind of director who would drive his cast to the edge of exhaustion because all that mattered was the performance. I understood his uncertainty about me — I’d been foisted upon him by the management. He tried valiantly to convince me that he was delighted to have the opportunity to direct me as Elyot. The producer, a large, silent man named Maxwell Connaught, was there to make sure that his director didn’t threaten their investment by behaving badly.

  ‘Do you sing, Mr Power?’ Bertram asked.

  ‘I’ve heard recordings of Noël Coward singing “Someday I’ll Find You”, and I think I sing at least as well as he does.’

  ‘You look the goods,’ Bertram said. ‘You have a decent head of hair, at any rate. That saves money on a weave.’

  Charles Bertram’s hair was retreating into memory.

  ‘We have all your details. Rehearsals begin in a fortnight. I’d prefer it if you were close to word-perfect at the first rehearsal. I expect that of all my actors. We don’t have time to have you blundering about with one eye on the book.’

  Maxwell Connaught coughed to indicate that Bertram ought to tone it down a little. I rescued him.

  ‘I agree with you. I pride myself on being off book befor
e the first rehearsal. I’ve always done that. I look forward, Mr Bertram, to being directed by you, and I assure you that I am neither a fragile petal nor a prima donna. I want you to be tough on me. I want to give the best performance of my career in this role.’

  Fortunately, neither Maxwell Connaught nor Charles Bertram asked questions about the kind of career I’d had in acting. They’d have seen the resumé I’d provided to the Tivoli management, and on paper my career sounded more impressive than it really had been. I’d noted that I’d played numerous key Shakespearean parts in my eponymous company. The tawdry truth of the failure of Queensland’s rural barbarians to appreciate my efforts wasn’t recorded in my resumé.

  By the end of the meeting, Charles Bertram seemed more accepting of me as his leading man. I was relieved that he didn’t ask me to sing, or to read any lines. There’d have been no point — he was stuck with me. If I sang or read badly, he would be consumed by fury for the two weeks before work began. Doubtless he’d had an actor in mind when he’d agreed to direct, and he’d take some convincing that I was a better choice. When our meeting came to an end, Bertram shook my hand and managed an awkwardly amiable smile.

  ‘I won’t let you down,’ I said. He nodded, and I could hear him thinking, Yes you will, because you’re not the actor I wanted in this play.

  I stood outside the Comedy Theatre in Exhibition Street and tried to marshal my thoughts. I’d been expecting to be elated. Instead, I was trepidatious, and even slightly embarrassed at being perceived as the cuckoo in the Private Lives nest. Well, I’d win them over. If there was one thing about my character of which I was confident, it was my ability to charm people. My mother would beg to differ, of course, but the great, unspoken truth about life is that sometimes mothers are a grave disappointment to their sons.

  Chapter Nine

  CURTAIN

  THERE WERE VOICES IN THE FRONT ROOM when I entered Mother’s house. The door was open, so I had no qualms about entering unannounced. Cloris Gilbert was standing with her back to the bay window. Brian was standing on the opposite side of the room. It was an odd tableau. Cloris was distressed. She held a handkerchief in one hand, and an envelope in the other. Brian was holding what had been the contents of the envelope. Cloris was too upset to register my presence, or too upset to express disapproval at it.