Facing the Music

by Brian Smith

  The sound of his phone broke into Mike’s thoughts, although he had not properly disengaged from them when he answered, ‘Georgiou.’

  ‘Michael?’ He didn’t know the voice, but the two note motif the woman made of his name was so musical compared with the amputated ‘Mike’ he usually heard, he was charmed.

  ‘Michael?’ There it was again. ‘This is Carla Mancini.’ Even in his flummoxed state he noted she used her maiden name. Was that her practice or did it signify a change of status?

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t recognise your voice. You didn’t speak on Friday night.’

  The music continued as she said whimsically, ‘When with my father, there is little opportunity to speak.’ Her voice remained light but became brisk. ‘Actually, that is why I’ve rung you.’ He could hear the businesswoman speaking. ‘I would like to speak with you about our fathers.’

  ‘Our fathers?’

  ‘Yes. They cannot speak with one another so we must do it for them.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You do not?’ she sounded surprised, surprised and a little disappointed. ‘All the more reason we should speak. I apologise for the short notice, but would you be free to have lunch with me tomorrow?’

  He stopped himself from replying, ‘Of course,’ and instead said, ‘Yes, I could make that. What time?’

  ‘Shall we say one o’clock at Café Filipo? When you arrive give your name – you will be expected.’

  ‘I shall look forward to it.’ She wouldn’t read it as more than politeness, surely.

  ‘Until tomorrow.’

  Mike sat staring at the blank wall of his office. What did she want? Was it really to do with their fathers or was this an approach from Rubicon? He still thought the most likely explanation for the attempted disruption of CityView had its origins at Riverside.

  Mike needed to be home in time for the concert Jac’s recorder group was giving late in the afternoon, so did not walk to Doherty’s Gym but took his car. As he drove across Queens Bridge, the righteous anger he had felt in the morning began to ebb. What did he hope to achieve by confronting Shane? What could he say that might make him change? He would need to be careful not to make things worse for Mary. If he did stir Shane up, he might well take it out on her. He was fortunate to find a parking spot a short way up Queen Street. Across Flinders Street was the brick facade of the railway viaduct bearing the sign DOHERTYS 24/7 GYM and underneath the words WE NEVER CLOSE. He crossed with the lights and entered the gym. Immediately inside the door was a counter attended by a fit-looking young guy in a black T-shirt. Behind him a long gallery with an arched ceiling stretched into the distance. Three women jogged on treadmills that faced a line of TV screens. Beyond them four men rode stationary cycles in front of a long mirror. Through the window at the far end Mike could see people walking along the path by the river.

  ‘G’day,’ the attendant said.

  ‘G’day. Is Shane Francis working out here today?’ Mike asked.

  ‘Shane?’

  ‘Yeah. A big guy with blond hair.’

  ‘Could be on the weights.’

  The attendant nodded towards an archway in the right wall. The gym consisted of a series of linked parallel tunnels, like a set of whitewashed catacombs, with different equipment in each gallery. Mike went through the archway and found a man in a grey tracksuit contorting himself on a metal frame bolted to the floor. Further along, two men were exercising with barbells in front of another mirror, their brief shorts displaying bodies rippling with overdeveloped muscles. Beyond them he could see Shane raising hefty weights by pulling down on the levers of a machine constructed from metal bars, wire ropes and pulleys. The effort showed in his tense muscles, set face and heavy breathing. When he noticed Mike approaching he let go of the levers, sat back and wiped his face with a towel.

  ‘Come to work out with me, have you?’ he said with a cheeky smile. ‘I reckon it’d do you a lot of good.’

  Mike went directly to the point. ‘No, I’ve come to tell you to stop beating up Mary.’

  Shane stiffened for a moment and then rose to his feet. He was not tall enough to look down on Mike but, standing close beside him, the difference in bulk and strength was apparent. He shook his head and said, ‘No, Mike. You’ve got it wrong. It was an accident. We were both pissed.’

  ‘Don’t give me that,’ Mike spat with sufficient venom to make the bodybuilders look around at him.

  ‘Have you spoken to Mary?’ Shane asked.

  Mike took a deep breath. Shane’s relaxed attitude was getting to him. ‘I didn’t need to. I could see what you’d done, even though she tried to camouflage it.’

  ‘But did she tell you how it happened?’

  Mike was not going to cause Mary any further trouble with Shane by telling him what she had said. ‘No, I told you I could see for myself.’

  Shane nodded his head as though Mike had made a concession to him. ‘Well there you are. She wouldn’t say anything because she was embarrassed. Like I said, we were both pissed and, to tell you the truth, the sex got out of hand. That sister of yours is really something when she gets going, and likes to experiment. This time her crazy idea ended up with me falling right on top of her. I was too far gone and couldn’t help it. Sorry you got the wrong idea, but you can see why she’d be shy about telling.’

  Shane’s sleazy smile infuriated Mike. ‘Bullshit,’ he shouted and pushed Shane away. ‘I know what you did, and if you do it again I’ll kill you.’ This time it wasn’t just the bodybuilders, but several other men who had come into the gallery, who turned to look at them.

  ‘Don’t get physical with me.’

  The menace in Shane’s voice went as quickly as it had come, and he laughed. ‘Calm down, mate. I hear you fancy yourself as a street-fighter these days, but I wouldn’t try it on in here. They take a dim view of any rough stuff.’ He leant down to pick up his towel. ‘Time to go. A run along the river back to my car and home. Mary’s cooking something special tonight. She tells me Lissa gave her the recipe.’

  Mike stood glowering at Shane. He shouldn’t have lost his temper. He wouldn’t get far with Shane that way. He had more confidence these days that he could handle any rough stuff, but it was not the sensible way to go, no matter how satisfying it might be to take the smile off Shane’s face.

  ‘Are you coming?’ Shane asked but did not wait for an answer before walking towards the entrance. When he reached the counter, the attendant stared at him enquiringly. ‘OK?’

  Surely, Mike thought, he hadn’t heard his outburst up here. Perhaps someone had alerted him. This place wouldn’t run to closed-circuit TV.

  ‘No problem,’ Shane replied. ‘Just a little family disagreement. All good now.’ As if to offer proof he put his arm around Mike’s shoulder and said, ‘Come on, mate. I promise you we’ll be more careful in future.’

  Mike would have liked to break free from Shane, but his grip was strong. Still holding him firmly, Shane piloted Mike through the door on to Flinders Street. ‘You and I should get on better,’ he said affably. ‘After all we’re members of the same family. That’s what your dad said on Friday.’ When Mike attempted to shrug his arm away, he let go and added, ‘From what I hear you’ve got a few people gunning for you. I’d worry about them rather than me.’

  It came as a welcome relief to Mike when his phone sounded and he could turn away and lift it to his ear.

  ‘Mike, it’s Alan Reardon.’

  ‘Oh, hi, Alan.’

  ‘Can you speak up? There’s a lot of noise at your end.’

  Mike lifted his voice. ‘Yeah. I’m in Flinders Street with a lot going past on the road and the footpath. It’s hard to hear you as well. Is that better?’

  ‘Still no good. Go somewhere quiet and give me a call as soon as you can.’

  ‘OK. Talk to you soon.’

  When Mike rang off, Shane, who had been carefully watching and listening to Mike asked, ‘Everything OK?’

  �
��Sure. Just a work matter. I must go.’ He saw the lights begin to blink red and hurried across Flinders Street.

  ‘Take care,’ Shane called after him, still maintaining his pretence of brotherly concern. He turned to make his way towards Docklands unaware he was being watched by a tall man sitting at a table in the kerbside cafe next to the gym, a baseball cap pulled well down on his head. Although he was close enough to see and hear the two men, neither had realised he was observing them. Mike had never met him and Shane was too attentive to Mike to notice Rick, his mate in Ivan’s gang, among the patrons of the cafe.

  When Mike reached the car, he immediately called Alan Reardon.

  ‘Mike Georgiou,’ he said.

  ‘That’s better. We need to meet. There’s something I want to show you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We need to meet somewhere we won’t be seen. Do you know the Lord Nelson? Could you be there in say half an hour?’

  Still angry with himself over the way he had mishandled Shane, Mike was in no mood for dealing with a secretive and anxious union official. ‘The Lord Nelson?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a pub in Nicholson Street, Fitzroy. We should be safe there.’

  ‘Safe? Safe from what?’

  ‘I’ll explain when we meet.’

  If Alan was going to be so mysterious, Mike was not going out of his way to accommodate him. ‘I can’t be there in half an hour. In fact the earliest I could make it would be eight o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll see you then.’

  Mike arrived in Fitzroy early and had no difficulty finding the Lord Nelson. It was a quiet night, perhaps not unusual for this pub. The bistro was closed and the only movement in the bar came from a bank of TV screens filling the back wall and displaying current betting odds as well as the running of a horserace. Where would they be running at this time of night, Mike wondered. The bar room was U-shaped with the bar itself filling the void of the U. Along one arm sat or stood about a dozen nondescript individuals, their eyes on the TV screens. A small group of pensioners clustered together at the end of the bar, looking to Mike as though the Fitzroy Youth Club from Peter Temple’s Jack Irish novels had abandoned the Prince of Prussia and come to the Lord Nelson instead. It was hard to imagine Alan Reardon was a regular here, unless he was an addict of the TAB and this was the nearest one to where he lived. Mike knew almost nothing about him.

  He bought himself a beer and took a seat at a table in the empty arm of the room. Earlier he had done his duty and sat through the torture of six young girls blowing on their recorders. He hated the recorder as a musical instrument and agreed with the comedian he remembered describing it as an ill wind that nobody blew good. The girls were in tune with this description, if nothing else, although their teacher expressed satisfaction and the parents affected delight in their performance, adding to his pain. He found it difficult to hide his feelings from his family and envied Lissa’s ability to appear genuinely thrilled with the poorly coordinated squawks they heard from their daughter. Lissa had been less thrilled when he told her he had seen Shane.

  ‘You must leave Mary to sort things out, not go barging in making even more trouble for her,’ she hissed at him.

  ‘But you saw her on Sunday. It’s got to stop.’

  ‘You’re right there, and I told Mary that on Sunday.’

  ‘You talked about it with Mary on Sunday?’ he asked, unable to keep the surprise from his voice.

  ‘Mary and I are good friends; haven’t you noticed? That’s what good friends do – they talk with one another. They don’t just talk past each other like some people do. Shush. They’re about to start the concert.’

  He had long admired Lissa’s ability to toss such barbs at him and get away before he could think of a reply.

  Just after eight Alan Reardon entered the bar, nodded to Mike and said, ‘G’day. Is that a heavy?’

  ‘No, a light. I’m driving.’

  ‘I take cabs these days. A bit safer, I reckon.’ He went to the bar and returned with two glasses, sat opposite Mike and said, ‘You weren’t followed here?’

  Mike shook his head impatiently. ‘For God’s sake stop this cloak and dagger stuff. You love to keep everything to yourself, but it’s time you started telling me what’s going on. Why come to this out of the way pub? What are you doing at Riverside? What is it you’re going to show me?’

  ‘OK, OK. But, before I begin, I want your word you will tell no one of our meeting and keep strictly to yourself what I’m about to tell you.’

  ‘That’s a bit steep when I don’t know why I’m here and what you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘I can’t risk it getting out. If that’s your attitude we may as well go our separate ways. Sorry.’

  Partly swayed by Alan’s intensity, partly out of a desire not to have wasted his own time and partly from curiosity, Mike weakened. He waved a hand as if dismissing Alan’s ultimatum. ‘OK, OK, you have my word. Can we get on with it?’

  ‘Thank you. All this started when George asked me to look into Riverside. We’d heard whispers the firm was putting off some of our members without their full entitlements and were cutting corners on a bunch of work practices. What I found was a rash of attempts to short-change some of our members. There aren’t many sites that don’t try these dodges when cash flow is a problem. It was the intimidation I found unusual.’

  ‘Riverside has a cash flow problem?’

  ‘There’s a guy called Ivan Sarac who has come into the company and doesn’t mind bending the rules if he can get away with it. As soon as I started making a pest of myself, and began calling up their employee and pay records, he tried to put pressure on me.’

  ‘How did he do that?’

  ‘He has a few heavies he uses to threaten people. That’s why I take a lot of care over my safety – what you call “cloak and dagger”. I persisted and the problems are pretty much sorted out, at least for now – the problems for our men at Riverside, that is. From being around the site I began to build up a picture of what was going on. For a start, the sales of the units in the latest tower at Riverside are going badly and Rubicon has slowed down construction while they revamp the design to go for the middle rather than the top end of the market. This is where the cash flow problems come from and it’s where you come in. It puts them in direct competition with CityView and explains why they would try to disrupt you.’

  Mike nodded. So Vern had been right about the threat to CityView from Riverside and he had been right about the problems on the site coming from the Rubicon people.

  ‘Sarac is just the man for the job,’ Reardon continued. ‘I bet it was one of his heavies who was leaning on Ted Horton and making a nuisance of himself at your site.’

  Mike gave a frustrated sigh. ‘I’d pretty much worked that out for myself, and we’ve seen off Ted and his mate. Why get so excited that you have to drag me up here and swear me to secrecy?’

  ‘OK, I was just getting to that,’ Alan replied defensively. ‘Yesterday I took some shots you might like to see.’ He took a set of photographs from his pocket and placed them, one by one on the table, like a dealer at a card game. In the first one the thug, Bruno, looked up at Mike. The picture was slightly fuzzy, as if shot from a distance with a telephoto lens, but Bruno was unmistakable, as was Shane, standing beside him to tend a barbecue. The second was a wider shot, which covered a group, consisting of Bruno, Shane, a taller man with a baseball cap and a fourth man whose arms were raised as if he were addressing the others. ‘Do you know any of these guys?’ Alan asked.

  ‘The one on the left is Bruno, the hood who gave us trouble at CityView. I don’t know his surname, but the blond guy next to him is Shane Francis.’ Mike noticed Alan glance quickly across at him. ‘He lives with my sister. I don’t know the other two.’

  ‘With your sister? You must have some interesting chats, swapping notes on the doings at Riverside and CityView. I wonder if Sarac knows you and Shane are members of the same family.’

&n
bsp; ‘Hardly that. I just spent some time this afternoon telling Shane to lay off my sister. When he gets drunk he beats her up.’

  ‘Yeah, that sounds like Shane. He still works on Riverside as Sarac’s man on the spot and obviously has some extra off-site duties like cooking the steaks. He’s not as scary as the man you call Bruno but not far behind. By the way, Bruno’s surname is Kordic. The one doing the talking is Ivan Sarac, the guy I mentioned earlier, and the one with the cap is the third of Sarac’s heavies. His name is Rick Jennings.’ He paused and Mike had the feeling Alan was about to play his trump card. Down on to the table went a group sitting at a table, eating. There were six of them: the four from the previous shot, Angelo Rossi and Vern McKenzie.

  Mike felt a surge of annoyance, partly with Alan for the theatricality with which he presented his revelation, but more with Vern for associating with these people. ‘They’re at his house at Flinders, aren’t they?’ he said.

  ‘How do you know he has a place at Flinders?’

  ‘More interesting, who tipped you off they were going to be there?’ Mike replied.

  ‘But what about our friend Mr McKenzie? What was he doing there?’

  Mike wondered how long they could go on batting unanswered questions at one another. ‘I’ll have to ask him.’

  ‘Don’t do that.’ Reardon’s tone had lost all its lightness and his words came down hard, demanding obedience.