Sure, I indicated. Fire away.
‘As a relative newcomer to the administration of the Arts, you, no doubt, will be learning the ropes for some time. And you will, I fully understand, be keen to cultivate diverse sources of information. In doing this, it would be wise to keep in mind just how small and incestuous the arts world can be. Egos are involved, many of them remarkably fragile. Hidden agendas abound. Insinuation and gossip proliferate.’
So far, he wasn’t telling me anything I couldn’t reasonably be expected to know already. I wondered where this little chat of ours was going.
Veale got to the point. ‘Giles Aubrey rang me on Saturday. He told me that you had approached him seeking information of a confidential and sensitive nature. He enquired as to your official status. I told him that you were a member of the Arts Minister’s staff.’ One of several, the inflection suggested. Not necessarily an important one.
He paused, expecting that I might want to explain myself. Instead, I had a question. ‘Did he tell you what I wanted to talk to him about?’
A chastising tone entered Veale’s voice. ‘As I told you, Giles and I knew each other quite well, at one time. But it’s been some time since we’ve spoken and I, for my part, had no wish to encourage further conversation. Frankly, I found it hard to understand what you hoped to gain by subjecting yourself to the gossip and insinuation of anyone as notoriously self-serving as Giles Aubrey.’
Ah so. I should have realised that Aubrey would check my credentials before talking to me. That explained the phone call. Unfortunately, by the sound of it, he also used the opportunity to re-open an old wound of some kind. Veale now had me on the back foot, and for no good reason.
It was my turn to sound miffed. ‘I can assure you,’ I said. ‘I approached Giles Aubrey on an entirely professional basis, to consult him regarding the valuation of a painting. If he suggested otherwise, he was misleading you. In any case, my contact with him was brief. He died yesterday. A fall, apparently.’
That took the starch out of Veale’s shirt. ‘Oh,’ he said.
A contemplative muse brushed her wings across his features. His thoughts began to turn inwards. Sensing the private nature of his reflections, I made some vague bridge-repairing noises about appreciating his point and quietly withdrew. The sound of crunching eggshells rose from underfoot.
It was past 10.30. The boys were beginning to tire of massacring aliens on Trish’s computer. Casting a quick eye over my telephone message slips, I reached for my jacket, ready to go. Just then, reception buzzed to say that I had a visitor, a Mr Micaelis. Assuming him to be an early-bird hoping for an unscheduled appointment, I went out to tell him he was out of luck.
Micaelis was somewhere in his mid-twenties, dark-suited and smelling of Brut 33. He had the slightly put-upon look of the second son of a migrant family. His older brother drove the family truck. His younger brother was studying medicine or architecture. The big plans for him had run as far as accountancy or town planning. Accountancy, judging by the tie. He didn’t seem the arty type.
‘How ya going?’ he said cheerfully. ‘Reckon you could spare us a minute?’ He handed me his card. It was embossed with a little blue star and a French motto. Tenez le Droit. Detective Senior Constable Chris Micaelis, the lettering said. Victoria Police. Well, well. ’Ello, ’ello, ’ello.
We went through the door marked Minister and into my office. Trish shot me a knowing glance as we passed. She hadn’t lost any of her street smarts. She still knew a debt collector when she saw one.
Micaelis declined my offer of a refreshing beverage and parked his carcass into the furniture indicated. ‘S’pose you know what this is about,’ he said.
‘S’pose you tell me,’ I said.
‘This death thing at the weekend.’ The cop’s studied casualness, we both knew, wasn’t fooling anyone. ‘Understand you were there when the body was recovered.’
For the briefest moment I wasn’t sure if he meant Taylor or Aubrey. Micaelis registered the flicker of hesitation. ‘Ms Fleet gave us your name,’ he said. Let there be no false delicacy here, he meant. We know that you and the girlfriend were together.
I would share my full concerns with the police in due course, when Red was safe from Spider Webb’s threats. In the meantime, I would play it straight, answer any questions put to me and find out what I could. ‘That’s correct,’ I said. ‘Salina and I were, uh, strolling in the gardens. We saw the hubbub at the moat and went over. Just as we arrived, they were wheeling the body into the back of an ambulance.’
Sherlock the Greek nodded encouragement. ‘Knew Taylor then, did you?’
‘Never met him. First time I ever saw him was on Friday evening at an exhibition at the Centre for Modern Art. He was drunk and made a bit of a spectacle of himself, as you’re probably aware. I saw him again about 9.30. He was walking alone down Domain Road, even drunker by the look of it. Next time I saw him he was dead.’
Micaelis nodded non-committally. ‘And Salina Fleet? Know her well, do you?’
‘Not really. I met her for the first time on Friday afternoon here—she’s on one of our advisory panels. She was at the exhibition at the Centre for Modern Art—the same one that Taylor was at. I went to the Botanical Hotel afterwards to eat and ran into her again. The pub closed about one and she and I went for a long walk in the gardens. We saw the activity at the moat and went over. She was shocked and upset and that’s when you blokes came on the scene.’
Micaelis studied the back of his hand as though consulting his notes. ‘So between 1 a.m. and 3 a.m. she was with you. Strolling in the park?’
It was clear what he thought that meant. He was almost right. ‘It was a hot night,’ I told him, deadpan.
‘Seen her since?’ he wondered.
‘I saw her early yesterday afternoon,’ I told him. ‘I dropped in briefly to her place in the city to see how she was feeling.’
‘Mmm,’ he said, as though I had merely confirmed a known fact. ‘And how was she?’
‘Naturally she was upset at Taylor’s death. She seemed to prefer to be alone.’
Micaelis gave this some consideration, getting up and going over to the window, his hands plunged into his pockets. He rocked on his heels and jiggled a ring of keys deep in the recesses of his pants. ‘You don’t happen to know where we might find her just at the moment, do you? She didn’t come home last night.’
‘Perhaps she’s staying with a friend,’ I suggested.
‘Any idea who?’ he said pointedly.
‘I don’t know her that well. Have you tried her work?’
Micaelis didn’t need me to tell him how to do his job. ‘Veneer magazine? Not what you’d call a full-time job. They’re between issues and haven’t seen her for several weeks.’
Nothing in the cop’s attitude suggested concerns about Salina’s safety. This reaffirmed my decision not to mention Spider’s appearance at the Aldershot Building. I went fishing. ‘We’ve been getting mixed signals up here about the cause of death,’ I said. ‘Do you know yet if it was suicide or an accident?’
‘The exact cause hasn’t yet been determined,’ said the detective senior constable. ‘You know the police.’ He shrugged absently, as though referring to a slightly eccentric mutual acquaintance. ‘Like to have all the facts before making up their minds.’
‘But there’s something in particular about this situation?’ I persisted, pushing it. ‘Some reason you want to talk to Salina?’
‘Routine procedure, that’s all,’ he said. ‘You’ll let us know if Ms Fleet does contact you, won’t you?’
The boys were hovering outside my glass door, angling for my attention. No doubt they were bored and keen to make tracks. Micaelis looked at them, then at me. In certain matters, the Mediterranean male mind is an open book. Even as I watched, I saw Micaelis put two and two together and get a resounding five. A married man, I was, having a bit on the side.
‘If anything else occurs to you that you think we should know abo
ut,’ he said.
‘I won’t hesitate to contact you,’ I told him. And I definitely would. In just a little less than twelve hours.
Opening the door, I ushered him to the foyer. The boys ran interference. ‘Guess what, Dad?’ said Red, tugging at my sleeve. ‘Tarquin crashed the computer.’
Trish looked daggers at me over the Macintosh, stabbing at her keyboard, desperately trying to recover her zapped files.
I fed the cop into the lift and we got out of there fast.
I gave the boys three choices. Gold of the Pharaohs at the Museum of Victoria, Treasures of the Forbidden City at the National Gallery, or an early lunch. The vote went two-nil for a capricciosa with extra cheese and a lemon gelati chaser.
We drove across Princes Bridge and headed through the city towards Lygon Street where the pizzerias and gelaterias were thicker on the ground than borlotti beans in a bowl of minestrone. Just past police headquarters, where Russell Street becomes Lygon, we hit a red light beside the Eight Hour Day monument. On the diagonal corner, on the tiny patch of lawn outside the Trades Hall, stood a newly erected hoarding. Art Exhibition, it read. Combined Unions Superannuation Scheme Art Collection. Free Admission. Opens Tuesday.
This was the event for which Agnelli had commanded me to write a mirthfully uplifting speech by the next morning. Since I was so close, and since I still had to keep the boys for another hour and a half, I decided to kill two birds with the one casual suggestion. ‘See that place, Red.’ I pointed to the age-stained Corinthian columns of the Trades Hall’s once-grand portico. ‘I used to work there before you were born. C’mon, I’ll show you.’
A mutinous grumble erupted from the boys. ‘We’ll only be ten minutes,’ I exaggerated. ‘Besides which, it’s only 11.30— they haven’t lit the pizza ovens yet.’
The Trades Hall had been built in the 1870s, a palace of labour, and a rich example of high Victorian neo-classical architecture. A brick annexe had been added in the 1960s, an erection of expedience, its design informed by the contemporary precept that nobody gave a rat’s arse about architecture. We went around the side, drove up a cobblestone lane and parked in an undercroft between the old and the new sections of the building. Little had changed in the thirteen years since my career had begun there as Research Officer for the Municipal Workers’ Union. The patina of grime that clung to the walls was perhaps a little thicker. The odours that wafted from the outdoor toilets were perhaps a little ranker. But the same threadbare red flag still dangled ironically from the flagpole. When I told the boys that it was here that the party that ruled the nation was founded, they rolled their eyes and complained about the smell.
‘C’mon,’ I urged, spotting a small sign that indicated our destination lay on the top floor. ‘Want to see the bullet holes from the gun battle where the ballot-stuffers killed the cop?’
‘Go ahead,’ said Red, unenthusiastically. ‘Make my day.’
The story of how, back in 1915, gangsters fought a running battle with police along its first-floor corridor had long been part of Trades Hall mythology. So much so that in the three years I’d worked there I never heard the same version twice. The only point of common agreement was that the bullet-riddled banister had been filched by a souvenir hunter back in the sixties. Which gave me plenty of scope. ‘They ran up these stairs,’ I improvised freely. ‘Firing from the hip.’
We went up a flight of stone-flagged steps eroded in the middle from the innumerable goings up and comings down of the uncountable conveners of the manifold committees of the dedicated champions of labour. On the wall at the first-floor landing was a carved wooden honour board, its faded copperplate listing every General Secretary of the Boilermakers and Gasfitters Union from 1881 to 1963. I touched Red on the shoulder and pointed. R. Cahill, 1903–09. ‘Redmond Cahill,’ I said. ‘Your great grandfather.’
‘So where’s the bullet hole?’ Red said, unimpressed. If I could take the trouble to invent a spurious ancestry, drenched in labour tradition, you’d think the kid could at least pretend to be interested. ‘This way,’ I lied, leading them along a deserted corridor. The place was so quiet that a regiment of mercenaries could have fired a bazooka down its by-ways without risk of hitting anyone.
The Trades Hall hadn’t always been so quiet. In its original form, it was built to accommodate the trade-based guilds whose members had made Melbourne the richest metropolis in the southern hemisphere. In time, it had come to house more than a hundred different unions. The Confectionery Makers’ Association, the Brotherhood of Farriers, the Boot Trade Employees’ Federation, the Tram and Motor Omnibus Drivers—no trade was so small, no occupation so specialised that its members did not have their own union. Eventually, over a period of a hundred years, every nook and cranny of the place had been colonised. Its once-imposing chambers became a rabbit warren of jerry-rigged offices filled with men in darned cardigans and its hallways bustled with women in beehive hair-dos and sensible shoes.
But those days had long gone. The inexorable march of progress had been through the joint like a dose of salts, amalgamating and rationalising the old organisations into industry-based super-unions with names like advertising agencies and a preference for more up-market accommodation. The AWU-FIME, the AFME-PKIU and the CFMEU had ditched the old dump for more modern digs elsewhere. Apart from the Trades Hall Council, which occupied the new wing, there were few remaining tenants.
The labour movement was not, however, entirely unmindful of its heritage. Bit by bit, as the dollars could be scrounged, the place was being restored to its vanished glory. Plasterers’ scaffolding cluttered the stairwells and the smell of fresh paint hung in the air. An art exhibition was about to be staged. Somewhere. If only I could find it. The signs had petered out.
Reaching the top floor, we came face-to-face with a pair of knee-high white socks. They were attached to Bob Allroy, the Trades Hall’s pot-bellied long-time caretaker. He was standing on a ladder, hanging a banner above a set of double doors. CUSS Art Exhibition, it read.
‘Here’s the only man still alive who personally witnessed the murdered policeman’s death agony,’ I told the boys. By now they’d figured out that my impromptu guided tour was just a pretext and were looking decidedly cheesed-off.
Bob Allroy climbed down from the ladder, wheezing. He was one of life’s casualties, never the same since a bag of wheat had fallen on him in a ship’s hold in 1953. His entire life since had been more a gesture of working-class solidarity than an affirmation of his usefulness. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he grunted, recalling my face but unable to summon up a name. He opened one of the doors and I helped him drag his ladder inside. ‘Unbelievable, eh?’ he panted.
Sure was. The last time I’d seen this room it had been a maze of cheap chipboard and second-hand Axminster, a lost dogs’ home for officials of the Society of Bricklayers and Tilers. Now it was a spacious reception room with buffed parquet flooring, hand-blocked wallpaper friezes and freshly antiqued skirting boards. Portable partitions had been erected at right angles to the walls to form a series of shallow alcoves and rows of paintings sat stacked against them, face to the wall, waiting to be hung.
‘Art exhibition,’ explained Bob, not entirely approvingly. ‘The girlie from the cultural office is off sick, so guess who’s been roped into doing all the work?’
Bob Allroy wouldn’t work in an iron lung and we both knew it. ‘Doesn’t officially open till tomorrer,’ he warned, in case I was thinking of stealing a free look. I wasn’t there for an unscheduled squiz, I reassured him, but to rustle up a bit of quick background for a speech I had to write.
Bob moved to one of the windows and licked his lips, his liver-spotted nose drawn like a lodestone to the revolving brewery sign atop the John Curtin Hotel, clearly visible across the road. The girlie from the arts office, he thought, would be back tomorrow. Better be, if everything was to be ready for the official opening. In the meantime, I’d better see Bernice Kaufman, next door in the admin office. She might know something
about it.
This was a definite possibility. There was very little, by her own admission, that Bernice Kaufman didn’t know all about. She hadn’t been President of the Teachers’ Federation for nothing. A couple of minutes with Bernice and, chances were, I’d know more than I’d ever need to about the CUSS Art Collection. More than enough to write Agnelli’s speech. Not the jokes, though. I’d have to write the jokes myself.
Bob Allroy ascended his ladder and began screwing light globes into a reproduction etched-glass gas lamp hanging from the ceiling. ‘Don’t you kids go nowhere near the art,’ he warned. ‘That stuff ’s worth a lot of money.’
Seconding that motion, I told Red and Tarquin to amuse themselves for a minute while I did something important. Then I scooted across to the Trades Hall Council, where Bernice Kaufman was holed-up behind a wall of paperwork in an office marked Assistant Secretary. She could spare me a couple of minutes, but only just. ‘I don’t want to miss my ultrasound appointment,’ she said.
You had to hand it to Bernice. In the time it took to say hello, she’d just happened to draw attention to the fact that she was pregnant. You get to be thirty-five, Bernice had discovered, and your superwoman rating starts to slip if your credentials don’t include motherhood, preferably of the single variety. Being the hardest-nosed, most multi-faced Ms in town doesn’t cut much ice unless you’ve also got cracked nipples and a teething ring in your briefcase. So Bernice had scared just enough body fluids out of an organiser from the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union to secure herself membership of the pudding club. Not just an ordinary member, of course. Being knocked up would never be the same now that Bernice had a piece of the action.
‘Put that cigarette out,’ she barked. ‘Haven’t you heard of passive smoking?’
There was, believe me, nothing passive about Bernice Kaufman. I dropped my fag and ground it mercilessly underfoot. The baby was not due for another five months.
The Brush-Off Page 20
