The Brush-Off

by Shane Maloney

  ‘Since when does asking a question constitute political interference? Don’t be a prick. Tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘What’s going on is a routine police inquiry into a sudden death,’ said Sproule in tones that brooked no contradiction. ‘Tell you what,’ he softened slightly. ‘If I hear anything relevant I’ll let you know. Can’t say fairer than that, okay?’ Okay as in end of issue. Okay as in never.

  ‘Well I certainly wouldn’t want to do anything that might jeopardise an ongoing investigation, Ken.’

  Sproule, for some reason, thought I was being facetious. ‘Don’t get your wig in an uproar, Murray…’

  But I was already hanging up. The stapler had finished its whoomphing and Claire had appeared in the archway, attentive. ‘I never did ask about your job,’ she said. ‘What exactly is it you do?’

  It was time I came clean, told her the truth. ‘It’s hard to explain,’ I said. ‘I assist the minister.’

  The parodic Drysdale was in its new frame, indistinguishable from its pre-accident condition. ‘Brilliant,’ I said, wrapping it in the beach towel. It was 1.35. Every minute’s delay increased the chance of the picture’s absence being discovered. And now there was potentially a great deal more at stake than a bit of embarrassment over some accidental damage. ‘How much do I owe you?’

  This went down like an Elvis impersonator at La Scala. ‘You owe me an explanation, for a start.’

  ‘You’ll get one, I promise.’ I started for the door. ‘Soon as I can.’

  Soft soap didn’t cut any ice around here. Claire blocked my way, hands on hips. ‘How soon will that be?’

  ‘I want to see you again. Soon and a lot. But I can’t do it today. I’ve got to get back to work, then I have to take Red to the airport. I won’t see him again for a couple of months and I want to spend a little time with him, just him and me, this evening. Let me take you to lunch tomorrow. I promise I’ll tell you everything then.’

  The curtain was closed, Gracie not in sight. I put my hand on the back of Claire’s head. She didn’t resist but she wasn’t so enthusiastic any more. I gave her a big wet one and bolted out the door, feeling like a fool.

  With a good run of green lights, I was back at the Trades Hall in six minutes and at the open door of the exhibition room in another two. My towel-wrapped package was under my arm. Bob Allroy was up his ladder, back turned, his hand in the etched-glass mantle of a reproduction light-fitting. Bob was one of the few men still in regular employment capable of making a day’s work out of changing a light globe. I crept across the room and slipped the picture back in place.

  ‘No touching,’ Bob growled from above. ‘It’s moran my job’s worth if anything happens to them pictures.’

  Returning Dry Gully to the collection was one thing, finding out how it got there in the first place was another. That was a question for Bernice Kaufman.

  The receptionist was still out to lunch, so I went straight through to Bernice’s office. It, too, was empty, as was that of the neighbouring Industrial Officer. But the big fat suspension file labelled Combined Unions Superannuation Scheme was still sitting there, right where Bernice had left it. Lowering myself into the inflatable ring cushion on her chair, I began thumbing.

  For all her ferocious efficiency, Bernice was unlikely to win any Institute of Management awards for the neatness of her record-keeping. The CUSS file contained everything but the kitchen sink—minutes of sub-committees, auditors’ reports, back copies of the members’ newsletter—all of an unedifyingly general nature.

  Naturally enough, there was a lot of accounting stuff, including a collection of monthly statements from Obelisk Trust. As of the thirtieth of the previous, CUSS had a balance of slightly more than $6 million in its Obelisk account, half equity linked, half property trust, the first yielding 19.2 per cent, the second 22.8 per cent. Even to a man unschooled in the finer points of finance, these seemed like passably tolerable rates of return. But it wasn’t where CUSS kept its cash reserves that interested me so much as where it got its art.

  I hit that particular jackpot when I opened a well-stuffed manilla folder and found a sheet of paper bearing the elegantly understated letterhead of Austral Fine Art, Pty Ltd. It was the cover page of a document, dated five months earlier, confirming a number of purchases made by Austral on behalf of the Combined Unions Superannuation Scheme and listing the price of each work. Austral’s address was a postoffice box in South Yarra and Drysdale’s Dry Gully, at $60,000, was its single most expensive acquisition on CUSS’s behalf.

  Bulldog-clipped to the letter was a swatch of pages, also on Austral letterhead, each headed Provenance and Certificate of Authenticity, and consisting of a simple one-paragraph statement, signed at the bottom. The one I wanted read:

  Sir Russell Drysdale: Dry Gully (1946)

  This painting is the work of the late Sir Russell Drysdale and is

  from his estate. Austral Fine Art unconditionally guarantees the

  authenticity of the above named work.

  The signature on both the letter and the certificates was an ornate arabesque, executed in fountain pen and utterly illegible. But the name and title typed below it were decipherable at a glance.

  Fiona Lambert, it read, Managing Director.

  ‘Interesting?’ Bernice Kaufman loomed in the doorway, her voice dripping sarcasm.

  ‘Ah!’ I jumped to my feet, beaming. ‘You’re back.’ I gestured towards the unattended reception area. ‘Hope you don’t mind me waiting for you in here.’

  Bernice’s proprietary eyes raked every file, folder and item of correspondence for evidence of unauthorised tampering. ‘Forget something?’

  I hastened around the desk, relinquishing the Assistant Secretary’s throne to its rightful owner. ‘I’ve got an angle for Angelo’s speech I’d like to run past you. Get your input.’ I tumbled my hands around each other, meshing my fingers like gears. ‘How about he emphasises collaboration between the arts industry and union movement?’

  ‘If you were qualified in any way at all for your job,’ she advised me primly, ‘you would know that the union movement enjoys extensive links with the cultural sector. The Operative Painters and Decorators have, for a number of years, been at the forefront of raising artists’ awareness of health and safety issues. Many unions have engaged artists to create works in collaboration with their members. The Building Workers’ Union had a poet-in-residence last year.’

  A concrete poet, presumably. ‘Good points,’ I said eagerly. ‘Exactly the sort of thing Angelo’s speech should mention. What about those consultants you mentioned, Australasian Fine Art, do they have union affiliations?’

  Another silly question. ‘It’s Austral, Murray, Austral. And a CUSS board member with extensive links to the visual arts recommended them, if that’s what you mean by union connections.’

  ‘Which reminds me,’ I said. ‘I’d better get the names of the board members. Make sure Angelo does the acknowledgments right.’

  Bernice flicked through the CUSS file and handed me a list. The Secretary of the Trades Hall Council chaired the board. Most of the other names belonged to prominent union officials. Some of them didn’t.

  ‘Lloyd Eastlake,’ I read out loud. A knot formed itself in the pit of my stomach.

  Bernice nodded confirmation. ‘You know him?’

  ‘He heads up my policy committee.’

  ‘In that case,’ said Bernice, ‘I don’t have to tell you what an asset he is. It was Lloyd’s idea for CUSS to get into art in the first place. Frankly, the rest of the board was lukewarm. But they soon changed their minds. Not only did Austral acquire works by blue-chip artists at very good prices, they found buyers who were prepared to pay considerably more than the works had cost us. The board was so impressed with the investment potential that it immediately upped its level of commitment. It also decided to take a long-term view, to build up the collection rather than just buy and sell on spec.’

  ‘So you must have qui
te a lot of contact with this Austral crowd? Mind if I take notes? Can I borrow a pen?’

  Bernice handed me writing materials. ‘Typical,’ she clucked. I poised the pen. ‘As company secretary,’ she went on, ‘I am, of course, responsible for the overall administrative framework. But Lloyd insists—and I agree with him on this point—that he handle all direct liaison with Austral himself. That way, individual board members can’t try to push their personal tastes. You can imagine what sort of a dog’s breakfast we’d end up with if that was allowed to happen.’ Not, she felt, that there was any need for Angelo’s speech to concern itself with such detail. ‘Downplay the investment aspect. Emphasising the cultural benefits to our members would be more appropriate.’

  ‘I agree,’ I said. The investment aspects didn’t bear thinking about, given what I knew or suspected about the actual value of the works in the room upstairs. Novelty was about the most value they could claim. ‘By the way,’ I asked. ‘How was the ultrasound?’

  Bernice’s hand went into her bag like a shot. ‘See for yourself.’ She handed me what appeared to be a polaroid photograph of meteorological conditions over Baffin Bay taken through the screen door of a low-flying satellite during a lunar eclipse.

  ‘A boy,’ I guessed, pointing to what looked like an isthmus extending into the north-west quadrant.

  Bernice radiated ambivalent pride. ‘Sometimes you surprise me, Murray.’

  There were plenty more surprises in store for Bernice Kaufman before her bonny bouncing little numbers man was dragged screaming into the delivery room. But she wouldn’t be hearing them from me. Not right away. Not until I’d had a chance to ponder the meaning of the amazing information the past hour had brought to light. ‘Thanks, Bernice,’ I said. ‘You’ve been incredibly helpful.’

  For a brief moment, Bernice’s insurgent maternal hormones escaped into her voice box. ‘Anytime, Murray,’ she sighed wearily. ‘Now piss off. I’ve got work to do.’

  Pocketing Bernice’s cheap ballpoint pen, I backed out the door and headed downstairs, deep in thought.

  Arts was supposed to be a cushy posting. Everybody knew that, for all of Ken Sproule’s talk about the culture vultures ripping your flesh. Freebies to the opera and holding the minister’s hand at gala soirées were supposed to be the name of the game. Not Spider Webb, dead bodies, police investigations, missing pictures and forgery rackets.

  Was it really possible that Lloyd Eastlake knew the paintings in the CUSS collection were fakes? Surely not. A measly half a million dollars worth of pictures was small beer compared with the sort of dough he handled every day at Obelisk Trust. He had too much at stake to engage in such risky business, even if he was that way inclined.

  But the moral, legal and financial dimensions were not the only ones to be considered. There was a much more important aspect to all this. The political one. The resignation of the Deputy Premier and the Cabinet reshuffle had been designed to counter a growing perception that the government was financially incompetent, no longer a fit custodian for the public cookie jar. What would happen to voter confidence when it was revealed that the government’s appointee as head of the Arts Ministry panel that handed out grants to artists couldn’t tell a fake from a fish fork? And that one of its members was brokering forged artworks?

  Admittedly, this was not the sort of issue upon which a government stands or falls. But nor was it something you’d want to read about in your morning paper. Not if your boss was the minister responsible. Not if it was your job to see that precisely this sort of thing didn’t happen.

  Things were starting to get seriously complicated.

  Going to the police on this CUSS forgery business was out of the question. Nothing would be gained and much might be lost. A quiet word in the right ear at the right time and the unions could bury their own dead. And, in any case, I was holding firm to my decision not to talk to the cops until Red was safely up, up and away.

  But that didn’t mean I couldn’t make some discreet enquiries of my own in the meantime. The problem was where to start. This needed some nutting out. I drove back to my new office, nutting all the way.

  Trish thrust a wad of telephone message slips into my paw as I came in the door. Mendicant terpsichoreans and lobbyist librarians. String quartet convenors and craft marketers. Festival creators and design innovators. People whose calls I was paid to return. ‘Thought you’d taken the day off,’ she said.

  I went into my calm new office, sat at my new desk, looked out my big window and I asked myself the same question I’d been asking myself all the way from the Trades Hall. The inescapable one.

  Was Lloyd Eastlake knowingly involved in the faking of the CUSS art collection? And if so, did that mean he was implicated in the death of Marcus Taylor?

  Realities were at work here that experience had ill-equipped me to deal with, but that I would very swiftly have to learn to manage if I wanted to keep my head above water. Back in Ethnic Affairs, I’d encountered my fair share of wealthy men. Some of the richest men in the state were migrants. Not that you’d often find them snoozing in the library at the Melbourne Club. Their own communities knew them as employers and entrepreneurs, as the patrons of social clubs and the doers of good works, and perhaps as other things I made it a point never to inquire about. I’d known them as pleaders for community projects, as genial hosts at national day celebrations, as abstract factors in predictable electoral equations.

  But in a very real—meaning political—sense, their transactions and their reputations, their associations and ambitions, were fundamentally a matter of indifference to me. Apart from the one or two who had scaled the Olympian heights of industry, they were generally at a remove from the real centre of power. For all their money and their sectional influence, they were ultimately on the outside looking in. No transgression, error or lapse on their part could really hurt the government.

  But not so Eastlake. Eastlake was on the team, one of the boys, a man publicly identifiable with the standards by which we ran the state. A man with a finger in every pie. The party pie, the money pie, the union pie, the culture pie. And some of these pies, unfortunately, now also contained Angelo Agnelli’s finger.

  I found Lloyd Eastlake’s card and laid it flat in front of me on my desk. I built a hedge of yellow phone message slips around it. I tapped its cardboard edge against the blond timber. I buzzed Phillip Veale, two glass partitions away. ‘Hypothetically speaking,’ I said. ‘What’s the score on the director of a public art gallery also operating as a consultant to private clients?’

  ‘Hypothetically speaking,’ said Veale. ‘Probably legal. Possibly unethical. Definitely unwise.’ He didn’t ask who and I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t help but feel that our relationship was on the mend.

  Then I called a contact at the Corporate Affairs Commission and asked him to look up the company registration information on Austral Fine Art, Pty Ltd. He promised to get back to me within an hour.

  Finally, I called Eastlake. Not the mobile number. If he was in his car or on the hoof, Spider might overhear the call. I rang the number that looked like it might be his direct office line. It was. He picked it up after the first ring. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ he said. ‘I’ve been frantic.’

  ‘It’s Murray Whelan.’

  ‘Oh, hello.’ He dropped his voice an octave and changed down to cruising speed. ‘I thought it was someone else.’

  ‘Are you speaking hands-free?’ I like to know exactly who is listening to my conversations. ‘Is there anyone else in the office with you?’

  ‘No. I’m alone. Why?’

  ‘Regarding that matter we discussed yesterday at the Deli. I need to talk to you again.’

  Eastlake didn’t mind indulging my penchant for the melodramatic at the weekend. But, come the working week, he was a busy man. ‘Not more of Giles Aubrey’s tall tales, I hope.’

  ‘Aubrey’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘Dead? How?’

  ‘That’s what I want to talk t
o you about. Among other things. Face-to-face and as soon as possible.’

  A couple of long seconds went by. ‘The soonest I can see you is six.’

  Not the most convenient of times, Red-wise, but I was the one doing the asking. ‘Fine,’ I said. Eastlake gave me Obelisk’s address, a downtown office block, and rang off.

  Three other people could help me shed light on what was happening. One of them was lying low. One would keep. The other, I decided, might best be caught on the hop.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I told Trish’s disapproving look as I headed out the door. ‘I’m not going far.’

  Just across the road and into the trees.

  Fiona Lambert was wearing a fire-engine-red, thigh-length tunic that emphasised the paleness of her skin and the indelible-ink blackness of her hair. She was standing at the front door of the Centre for Modern Art watching two men in company work-wear drag a flat wooden crate out of a van parked in the driveway.

  I sat across the road in my car, watching her watch them.

  A young woman in harem pants and a beehive flitted about, getting in the way. I remembered her from Friday night. Janelle Something. Fiona’s assistant. The delivery guys negotiated the crate through the door and Fiona and Janelle followed them inside.

  Our Home had a new home.

  And Ms Lambert, at a guess, would be far too preoccupied for the next little while to participate in the kind of consultative process I had in mind. Our Home would have to be uncrated, examined, gloated over, stored away. Slipping the Charade back into gear, I pulled out from the kerb. I had an idea. Not the best idea I’d ever had. But, at the time, it had a compelling sort of logic.

  I drove through pools of shade cast by elms and pines, turned into Domain Road and found a parking spot in a quiet residential side street. Hope Street, said the sign. I left my jacket in the car and walked around the corner.

  Domain Road, with its two-storey terrace houses and small apartment buildings, was quiet. A solitary jogger panted along the footpath. I leaned against a parked car and cased Fiona Lambert’s pink stucco block of flats. After a couple of minutes, the dowager with the miniature mutt came out the front entrance and carried her schnauzer across the road. She clipped a lead to the benighted animal’s collar and led it into the park. Doo-doo time for Dagobert.