The Brush-Off

by Shane Maloney

  Spider didn’t turn. He just sat there, fish-faced behind his shades, contemplating the sporting section of the Herald, his hat on the ledge above the dashboard. Even when I slid in beside him he didn’t look around. A knob low on the instrument panel might have been the cigarette lighter. I put my thumb on it and pushed until it clicked into place. Agnelli didn’t let me smoke in the Fairlane.

  We sat there, me side-on, Spider gazing into the V of his paper. Profile was definitely Noel Webb’s better angle. Made him look less like a plumbing fixture. ‘So,’ I said. ‘Long time no see.’ Long time no answer, too. More than long enough for me to get a smoke out and tap it on the side of the pack. Pop went the lighter. Spider’s hand shot out. He held the glowing element short, so I had to bend across to fire up, offering the nape of my neck. A gold pinky ring glistened on his little finger, fat and square, set with a crescent of tiny rubies, a real tooth-breaker. Quite the primitive, Spider. ‘This job suits you,’ I said. ‘You’ve got the silent menace bit down to a tee.’

  Spider tossed his chin in the general direction of the Karlcraft building. ‘Won’t you be missed?’ he said, unimpressed. ‘Big shot.’

  ‘Never too busy to catch up with old friends,’ I said, absently flicking a molecule of ash onto the car’s pale grey carpet. ‘Funny, isn’t it?’ I stretched my legs out and leaned back against the headrest. ‘Twenty years since we’ve seen each other, now our paths cross all the time. Down at the Ballet Centre carpark this morning, for instance.’

  Spider very slowly closed his newspaper, folded it neatly in half and laid it beside his hat. ‘MOAT DEATH PUZZLE,’ read a column-wide headline on the front page. He turned his mirrored face towards me, at last. ‘I dunno what you’re talking about.’ His delivery was flat, sneering. ‘And neither do you.’

  The big car’s interior felt suddenly very claustrophobic. Noel Webb had been a tough kid. And if he was acting the hard man maybe it was because that’s exactly what he was. Spider wasn’t the sentimental type. Never had been. And any tenuous connection between us was long gone. My feet were getting colder by the second.

  For nearly an hour I’d waited at the Oulton Reserve, clutching that contraband bottle of bourbon under my duffel coat, its neck sticky and warm in my hand. Footy practice ended, the oval emptied, and still I sat, half of me ashamed, the other half defiant. Ashamed for the theft, for I’d never before stolen from my father. Ashamed for my reason for doing it, to buy friendship. Defying my father to catch me out, defying Spider Webb to doubt that I could deliver. As I waited, I took little sips. The liquid was fiery and harsh, but it kept me warm. Kept me waiting.

  When Spider finally arrived, he came out of nowhere, looming out of the leaden dusk. ‘Got it?’ he said, sinking down beside me. I hesitated then, kept the bottle hidden beneath my coat, wanting some spoken confirmation of our pact.

  ‘You haven’t, have you?’ His scorn was wounding. ‘You didn’t have the guts, did you?’

  That’s when the Fletchers exploded out of a clump of tea-tree edging the football oval. Georgie, the big one, had a steel fencing picket in his hand. The twins trotted at his heels. Like Attila and his horde, they swept down upon us.

  Twenty years is a long time. People change. But if Noel Webb had, I couldn’t see it. Maybe I’d underestimated him, though, pegging him for a car thief. Maybe he’d graduated to something more sophisticated.

  ‘Nice car,’ I said, running an eyeball over the walnut inlay. ‘Been Mr Eastlake’s chauffeur long? His status symbol, that’s what he called you, didn’t he?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ Annoyance had crept into Spider’s voice, evidence that communication might be possible.

  ‘Probably nothing at all,’ I agreed. Probably nothing more than ancient adolescent resentment, octopus-induced irritability, and a suspicious mind. But if I stirred the pot a little, something more might come bubbling to the surface. ‘It’s just that there are points where your employer’s activities and my employer’s interests overlap. And proper attention to my employer’s interests requires that I keep myself broadly informed. I rather hoped you’d understand that, us both being in the service sector.’

  He snorted contemptuously. ‘Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time?’

  As a matter of fact, I did. It was nearly 12.30. Red’s plane was due in little more than two hours and, apart from picking up a pack of cigarettes, I still hadn’t done any shopping. ‘I guess I can always ask Lloyd,’ I shrugged. ‘Just thought I’d ask you first, not wanting to embarrass an old friend and all.’

  ‘I’m shitting myself, Whelan,’ Spider said, brimming with schoolyard disdain. But he tilted his head a fraction and I knew his eyes had gone to the rearview mirror.

  The Mercedes had power windows. Mine made a little whirring noise and let in a wilting gust of heat. I stuck my head out, looked back at the stragglers drifting out of Karlcraft and whirred it back up. ‘Have it your own way,’ I said. ‘Mr Eastlake will be along soon.’

  Spider puffed his cheeks and blew a long steady breath, like I was a deliberately obtuse child, trying his patience. Then, shaking his head as though reluctantly coming to a decision he already regretted, he leaned across in front of me and casually opened the glove compartment. The lid fell down to reveal a shiny, chrome-plated pistol.

  This was not something I saw every day. In fact, I’d never seen one before. Not for real. It wasn’t so long ago that not even cops carried guns. And now that they did, they certainly weren’t guns like this. This was an automatic, chrome-plated with a cross-hatched grip. I’d seen enough movies to know that. Whether it was the current release Baretta .44 with Dolby sound and merchandising tie-in, I neither knew nor cared. Guns did not interest me. They scared the shit out of me, but they didn’t interest me. Beside the gun was an unopened packet of Wrigley’s Arrowmint gum. Spider let my gaze linger for a moment on the pistol, then he picked up the chewy and snapped the glove box lid shut.

  I got the point. Noel Webb was no mere opener of doors, no low-grade flunkey. Nor was he just there for his good looks, his obsequious manner and his masterful grip on the steering wheel. He was there because Lloyd Eastlake’s taste in fashion accessories ran to keeping a bodyguard.

  If an arsehole like Noel Webb thought he could intimidate me by showing me his penis substitute, he could think again. It took more than a flash of metal to impress Murray Whelan. On the other hand, I’d just as soon not have anything to do with guns. Spider unwrapped his chewy and proffered the pack. Take it or leave it.

  I was shagged out, hungover, lied to, pissed off, ear-mangled and behind schedule. It was none of my business if Brian Eastlake thought he needed an armed minder. Nor was the fact that he’d seen fit to give the job to Spider Webb. As to the matter of the vanished duplicate of Our Home, it suddenly seemed unimportant. The main game was being played by the big boys upstairs in Max Karlin’s office, not down here in the gutter with a pistol-packing dipstick. Instead of keeping my eye on the ball, I was chasing a chimera. My duties didn’t run to this kind of crap.

  ‘See you, Spider,’ I said wearily and opened the door.

  Webb already had his nose back in the paper. ‘Not if I see you first.’

  I wished people would stop saying that to me. A man could get paranoid. At least he hadn’t said anything about my ear. For obvious reasons. Even with one in tatters, mine weren’t half as conspicuous as Spider’s.

  I turned back towards Karlin’s office. Agnelli’s Fairlane had pulled away from the kerb and was heading down the street. Wonderful. Agnelli was going without me, the prick. Not only had he probably bitten Max Karlin for a little campaign donation, he was leaving me in the lurch. My Charade was back at Parliament House, a dozen blocks away.

  My best shot at a cab was back towards the Queen Victoria market. A shopping list marshalled in my head. Bending beneath the glare of the burnished sky, I made haste through the empty sun-blasted streets. The market closed at 12.30 on Saturday and it was already
that.

  The century-old fresh-daily aroma of the open-sided sheds advanced to greet me. Hot sugared doughnuts, bananas on the turn, the rustling exhalations of onion skins, the pungency of soy sauce and live poultry. All mixed together, emulsified with forklift fumes and baked under the grill of sheet-iron roofs. Then came the sound—the murmur of shuffling feet, the shouted offers of last-minute bargains, the street sweepers’ hard-bristled brooms, the play of hose-stream on steaming gutters.

  The top shed stalls were already closed, their mountains of lush produce reduced to a range of grey tarpaulin foothills. Downhill, across a street shrill with the beeping of reversing trucks, I found a late-closing Chinaman prepared to risk his vendor’s licence with the offer of dew-misted nectarines and fat knuckles of ginger. At a premium, I bought mangoes, mandarins and firm tomatoes. Red liked avocados. I bought six. From a Greek woman clearing a till behind the last glass counter in the delicatessen section, I inveigled fetta, ham and walnut bread. Then I schlepped my supplies to the cab rank. Every other bastard in Melbourne had got there first.

  There was still two hours until Red’s plane touched down. The dusting could wait. An overloaded plastic carry-bag in each hand, I began up the hill towards the State Library.

  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing and if you really want to live dangerously the State Library is a good place to start. Even on a quiet Saturday afternoon, its obliging staff can take your vaguest apprehensions and turn them into a swarm of disturbing possibilities.

  The domed reading room was hushed and serene, bathed in the cool submarine light that filtered down from its huge cavernous hemisphere high above. The long tables radiating from its centre were like the spokes of a wheel, an imperceptibly moving cog in wisdom’s silent mill. I delivered my victuals into the custody of the cloakroom attendant and moved from the general to the specific, starting with Art Sales Index, the annual digest of works passing under the hammer in the world’s major sales rooms.

  International art prices were going systematically batshit. In the preceding five years, total world turnover on everything from archaic bronzes to zoological watercolours had doubled then doubled then doubled again. And it wasn’t just the Yasuda Fire and Marine or the Getty Museum. The whole world was at it. Firms of English auditors were snapping up Soviet constructionists, Brazilian livestock agents were trying to corner the Flemish rococo and a former signwriter from Perth had just paid £43 million for Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. For that sort of money, you’d want the ear as well. Almost overnight, scraps of pigmented fabric of virtually no intrinsic value were being transformed by the logic of the marketplace into commodities whose prices could have fed all of Africa.

  Not to be outdone by New York and London, domestic prices were hot on the heels of the global trend. According to the gazette of Australian auction records, modest little pictures by well-known Australian artists that could’ve been snapped up any time in the previous two decades for a couple of grand were suddenly fetching five or ten times that amount.

  Victor Szabo’s name appeared infrequently, in some years not at all. But then, according to what I’d heard at the Botanical Hotel, his life’s work amounted only to forty or so known paintings. Eleven of these had been offered at auction in the previous few years, six more than once. The prices had risen slowly at first, barely keeping up with the general trend. Then, more recently, the pace had quickened. This improvement was in line with a general tendency of the market to seek out previously underrated artists as the value of the big names went stratospheric.

  One hundred thousand dollars was the top price listed for a Szabo. Nothing remotely like the figure Karlin was charging. Either there was more to Our Home than met the eye or somebody was being taken for a walk.

  A Fierce Vision: The Genius of Victor Szabo 1911–77 by Fiona Lambert was a handsomely produced coffee-table job published two years previously. Plentiful text, lavish illustrations and a one-paragraph biography of the author on the inside flyleaf. Exhibition curator, gallery director, BA(Hons). Fluff.

  Flipping through, I found what I was looking for. Our Home: Oil on canvas, 175 cm x 123 cm, 1972. Private collection. I pored over the plate’s glossy surface, searching for some previously unnoticed detail that would spring out and distinguish this image from the one I had seen in Marcus Taylor’s studio. It was useless. The two paintings had converged in my memory.

  Two pictures, two dead men. One an artist of growing repute, dead ten years. The other an unknown loser, dead twelve hours. Two things linked them. One was a picture of a house with a lawn-mower in the front yard. The other was a dog-eared photograph among a suicide’s pathetic collection of personal effects. Something about all of this didn’t feel right. Disturbing possibilities rattled around in my brain, nagged at me. The missing painting. Salina’s emotional game-playing. Spider’s menacing evasions. Something was cooking and it didn’t smell right. It smelled of egg on Angelo Agnelli’s face. I decided to keep sniffing.

  Taylor, Marcus was listed nowhere in Lambert’s index. I waded into the body of the text. The literalness of Victor Szabo’s work deploys a multi-layered, almost compulsive, disjunction of a myriad of identities, it began. Its vocabulary welds the specificity of circumstance to the logic of allegory so as to create a bridge between the depersonalised formalism of abstraction and the narrative poetics of an uninhibited quest for the archetypically mundane.

  Well, she wasn’t going to hear any argument from me. I read on. It didn’t get any easier. In comparison with art criticism, the mealy jargon of bureaucracy sparkled like birdsong. Not even in the mouth of the Leader of the Opposition did words convey so little. Scanning and skipping, attempting to draw a thread of comprehension from the furball of Fiona Lambert’s prose, I jotted the few biographical facts I could garner on a library call-slip with a pencil someone had mislaid on top of the catalogue cabinet.

  The bare bones, as far as I could make them out, were that Szabo had been born in Hapsburg Budapest, had studied art in Paris in the thirties and arrived in Australia as a displaced person after the Second World War. Isolated from the local art scene by circumstances and temperament, he found work as a railway fettler in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, sketching and painting intermittently. By the late fifties he had moved south and was living on the outskirts of Melbourne, painting full time, occasionally exhibiting his work, even sometimes finding a buyer. His trademark realism and suburban subject matter began to emerge. Painting constantly, he destroyed most of his output, retaining only his most highly finished pictures. Anti-social and reclusive, he made contact with the outside world only through his dealer, Giles Aubrey. Eventually he fell out even with him. His talent, Fiona Lambert put it, could no longer endure the constraints of the relationship.

  About this time, ’77 or ’78, Lambert herself appeared. And not a moment too soon. Up until that point in the story, no woman had been mentioned who was not another artist, an artist’s wife, or a critic. No wonder, if Fiona’s version of Victor Szabo’s life story was to be believed, the old coot expired in her arms. Sheer astonishment at his change of luck.

  If there was some clue to connect Szabo and Taylor, it certainly didn’t lie in Fiona Lambert’s text. I flicked through the illustrations again. Sketches, draughtsmanlike renderings of landscapes, architectural details, life-studies in charcoal, the finished paintings.

  Two of the sketches, dating from the early fifties, were female nudes. Where had he found his models, I wondered, this New Australian railway labourer? One was a rear view, rough-hewn, a few broad strokes outlining the curve of a back, a fall of hair, the droop of buttocks. The other was a pencil sketch, highly finished, face and shoulders turned in three-quarter profile.

  The resemblance was unmistakable. It was the woman in the photograph in Marcus Taylor’s desk drawer. In the souvenir snap she was more carefree. But the woman in the sketch knew he would go soon, her artistic European lover. That happy time when the camera had captured them together on the moun
tain-top lookout was already fading fast. Her belly was distended, her expression resigned. Marcus Taylor’s birthplace, according to his grant application form, was Katoomba, Jewel of the Blue Mountains, gateway to the original Australian bush.

  Before I left the library, there were a couple more publications I wanted to consult. Veneer: A Journal of Contemporary Cultural Criticism, appeared quarterly. I went straight to the list of editorial credits. Veneer, said the tiniest possible type, acknowledges the financial support of the Visual Arts Panel of the Victorian Ministry for the Arts. I attributed no significance to this fact. I was just interested, that’s all.

  The second book I consulted had printing almost as small. It was thick and yellow and lived in a metal bracket under the pay phone in the foyer. Under Art Dealers, between Atelier on the Yarra and Aussie’s Aborigine Art was a listing for Aubrey Fine Art. I dialled the number and asked for Mr Giles Aubrey.

  There was a moment’s silence, then a sound that could have been eyebrows being raised. ‘Giles Aubrey has not been associated with us for quite some time,’ said a snooty male voice.

  ‘You don’t know how I can contact him?’

  ‘Not really. He sold the business and retired several years ago. This is the current proprietor speaking. May I be of assistance?’ Meaning, can I sell you a picture, and if not piss off.

  ‘It’s a rather delicate matter,’ I said, ‘concerning the provenance of an item bought some time ago, when Mr Aubrey was in charge. Before beginning legal proceedings, I’d prefer to speak with Mr Aubrey. If, however, that’s not possible, what did you say your name was…’