When the pair of them had moved out of sight, I went into the flats and walked briskly up the stairs to the landing outside Fiona Lambert’s door. I rapped confidently with the little brass knocker, listening for any sound in the flat opposite. There was none. I rapped again, Justin Case. Justin wasn’t home, so I angled up the Ming Dynasty pot-plant holder, slid the key from underneath, opened the door and put the key back in place. It wasn’t breaking and entering. That would never have occurred to me. I was just dropping around when there was nobody home.
Not that I let myself into people’s places on a regular basis. Usually it was the other way around. I’d given a spare key to my place to Faye in case Red ever needed to get in while I was at work and occasionally I’d come home to find she’d left something exotic in the fridge. But this was something new. Just thought I should make the point.
The flat was exactly as I had last seen it. Same Bauhaus chairs, same boxy sofa, same honey-coloured dining table, same pornographic portrait. Out the uncurtained window, the roof of the CMA was just visible between the trees. If Fiona decided to pop home across the greensward, I’d see her coming through the trees.
The object of my search was vague. Anything to corroborate Lambert’s association with the bogus CUSS collection. Anything to connect her with Marcus Taylor, to help clarify the mutually contradictory information I had about their relationship. Had Taylor hated her as the woman who stole his birthright? Or was he providing fake artworks for her Austral Fine Art operation? Was it possible that she had the missing version of Our Home? Given what I now knew, Eastlake’s line about it being a student copy of a masterwork had taken on a decidedly hollow ring.
The small study opening off the lounge room was the logical place to start. A strictly utilitarian space. Walls bare except for a row of tiny canvases, each no more than four inches square, each a different shade of blue. A ladder-frame bookcase filled with art magazines. A chrome-inlaid Aero desk, tres chic, with matching stainless-steel waste paper basket, empty. A cardboard box containing several dozen brand-new copies of A Fierce Vision. A two-drawer filing cabinet. Bottom drawer, stationery supplies. Top drawer, domestic appliance warranties.
On the desk, an Apple computer with a plastic cover. Must learn to use. Postcards. Someone called Vicki saying Budapest was fab. Invitations to exhibition openings. Bills. Gas, electricity, phone. Very ordinary. Visa, Mastercard, Amex. Denting the plastic to the tune of about twenty-two hundred a month. Clothes and restaurants mainly. Mortgage statement. Nine hundred a month, $86,000 left to pay.
On a salary of, what, sixty grand? Fiona Lambert was living beyond her means. Extravagant but, so far, nothing illegal. Nothing relating to Austral Fine Art. Not so much as a sheet of letterhead. Must keep all that over at the CMA.
Scanning the view out the window on my way, I went up the hall to the bedroom.
Heavy drapes, open a chink. Window overlooking a small courtyard. Enough light to see by. Big contrast to the Vogue casualness of the living room. Queen-size bed, black sheets smoothed tight. Cotton. Satin would be tacky. Many big plush pillows, red. Pale carpet, low nap, soft like felt. On the wall above the bed was one huge painting. Not Szabo. Thickly laid-on acrylic paint, high texture, chopped like the waves of a starlit sea. Abstract, tactile, sensual. I could smell clean linen and Oil of Ulan. Red lacquer chest of drawers, antique Japanese. Rice-paper lamps. The whole room reflected back on itself from a mirrored wardrobe occupying entire side wall.
An intensely private atmosphere, redolent of the mysterious feminine. Then again, maybe it was just that I hadn’t been in a woman’s bedroom for quite some time.
I slid open the mirror-fronted wardrobe and saw a great quantity of clothes, all of them either red, white or black. Enough shoes to make Imelda Marcos’s mouth water. About a dozen men’s business shirts. Top brands. Ironed. No half million dollars. No Certificate of Incorporation for Austral Fine Art.
Nothing for me on the rack. I looked in the Japanese chest. For a moment longer than absolutely necessary, I stood staring down at a girl called Fiona’s collection of investment-quality lingerie. Nothing tarty. No reds or blacks here. Shell-pink, ivory, cream. Resisting the temptation to touch, I knelt on the floor and looked under the bed. Nothing, not even dust.
Straight across the hall was the bathroom. The chunky vanity basin was littered with toning lotions and night creams. Princess Marcella Borghese Face Mud. A cupboard held thick towels, folded and stacked. A cane laundry basket contained damp towels and a white t-shirt with two interlocked Cs in gold on the front.
The kitchen was expensively spartan: Alessi kettle, Moulinex, crystal wineglasses, stainless steel Poggenpohl appliances. Japanese crackers on an empty bench-top.
By now I was hyperventilating. ‘Right,’ I said, out loud. Time to go. If Fiona Lambert was up to no good, the evidence of it wasn’t here.
One last getaway glance out the window. Fiona Lambert was crossing a sunlit patch of lawn between two pines, headed for home. She was, perhaps, two minutes away. At the far side of the courtyard were rubbish bins, a rear exit to the flats. I opened the door a notch to reconnoitre my getaway and heard footfalls coming briskly up the stairs towards me, a heavy male tread.
Whoever he was, he’d be on the landing in a matter of seconds. His destination must be the flat opposite. Fiona was still ninety seconds away. It would be close, but an undetected departure was still possible. Closing the door and pressing my back to it, I listened for the man to go into the other flat.
The footsteps came closer. My hearing, all my senses, felt preternaturally heightened. A radio somewhere was broadcasting talkback. Out on Domain Road, a tram clattered by. Somebody’s muffler was due for replacement. The footsteps reached the landing. I waited for the jingle of keys or a rapping on the knocker opposite. All I heard was breathing, the wheezing of an unfit man who had just climbed a flight of stairs on a summer day and was pausing to catch his breath. I strained to hear movement, my heart drumming in my ears.
Distantly, the rhythmic click of a woman’s heels rapidly ascended the concrete stairs.
The tattoo beat of my pulse became a surf-roar of panic.
The door was about to fly open. My idiotic spur-of-the-moment impulse was about to backfire horribly, to result in my discovery and disgrace. What possible pretext could I find for being in a woman’s flat in this way? What would it look like? I’d be taken for a panty sniffer or a petty thief. A pervert, a psycho. How had I got myself into this position? To what idiot impulse had I surrendered my common sense? What outlandish excuse could I invent? I had to think of something and think of it fast.
I did. I hid.
I hid in the first place I found, a louvre-fronted closet beside the entrance to the living room. I took it for a coat closet but found it held brooms and mops and a vacuum cleaner. Shouldering my way between the broom handles, I swung the slatted door shut behind me just as a key snicked into the front-door lock.
A feather duster tickled the back of my neck. The handle of a broom toppled to rest against my cheek. The metal nozzle of the vacuum cleaner was jammed up my posterior crotch. Standing to rigid attention in claustrophobic darkness, I held my breath and awaited the humiliation of discovery.
‘Did you bring it?’ Fiona Lambert opened her front door and stepped through.
Two silhouettes passed before the downward sloping slats of the louvred panel. Just as they did so, I realised that the closet door had not swung completely shut behind me. A chink perhaps a centimetre wide remained open. From where I was standing, it looked as vast as the Grand Canyon.
‘You have the delivery docket?’ said a male voice, a deep rumble.
My senses were so acute that I could feel the hair standing up on the nape of my neck, taste the dust molecules in the air, smell the residues of floor wax clinging to the broom bristles. A spider in the dark behind me exuded the glutinous thread of its web. Heat radiated from my body. Sweat gushed from every pore, cascading down my skin and drip
ping into my eyes. My heart belted against my ribs like the bass riff from a Maxine Nightingale disco hit. The saliva had dried in my mouth and, when I tried to swallow it, crackled like a sheet of cellophane being rolled into a ball. I felt as if I was about to burst into flames.
Two shapes went past, into the living room. Through the gap, I could see the shoulder of a white business shirt. The man wearing it had something tucked up under his armpit, blocked by his torso. He half-turned and I could see the back of his near-bald skull. He was examining a sheet of light green paper. Satisfied with what he read, the man folded the page and put it in his pants pocket.
‘Show it to me,’ said Fiona impatiently, just beyond my vision.
A sliver of dining table was within my narrow line of sight. The man took the thing from under his arm and put it on the table. It was a shoebox in the distinctive hot pink and silver colours of the Karlcraft chain. He took the lid off and removed banded wads of banknotes. He built them into two piles, each about fifteen centimetres high. The money was pale, the colour of hundred dollar bills. Even from inside a broom cupboard on the other side of the room, it looked like a great deal of money.
‘One hundred thousand dollars,’ said the jowly voice of Max Karlin. ‘Cash.’
‘One hundred thousand?’ Lambert was outraged. ‘That wasn’t the deal. Where’s the rest of my money?’
Holding my breath, I leaned forward until my eye was almost pressed to the crack in the door. My field of vision widened to include a good part of the living room. Fiona Lambert stood staring down at the money on the table, her expression caught between elation and petulance.
Karlin ignored her outburst. ‘Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?’
‘You think you can short-change me, is that it?’ snarled Lambert. ‘Our deal was for twice this amount.’
Karlin put his hands in his pocket and moved out of view. ‘It’s all I can afford.’ His attitude was take-it-or-leave-it. ‘If I really wanted to cheat you, Fiona dear, I wouldn’t be here at all. Be reasonable. It’s still a great deal of money.’
‘Our agreement was for one third of the purchase price of Our Home,’ complained Lambert bitterly, her eyes never leaving the money. ‘By my arithmetic, that’s two hundred thousand dollars.’ Karlin had gone in the direction of the couch. Lambert turned to face him. ‘You think it was easy convincing Eastlake to pay more than double the market value?’
Karlin chuckled indulgently. ‘Oh, I don’t doubt you were very persuasive, my dear.’
His crossed ankles came into view. I could picture him on the couch, leaning back, his legs extended in front of him. ‘It’s just that circumstances have changed since we made our little agreement. A year ago, cash was easier to lay my hands on. I was slinging fifty thousand a month in backhanders to the building contractors alone. But things have changed. The money has dried up. My bankers are counting every penny. The other investors are watching me like a hawk.’
Fiona Lambert swung around to face him, bare arms akimbo. ‘Sell another one of your pictures.’ She was spitting chips. ‘Sell two, sell anything. Pay me what you owe me.’
‘Even if I thought I owed you anything, I’ve nothing left to sell.’ Karlin indulged her, but he was unsympathetic. ‘Our Home was the last really valuable picture I still owned outright. The rest were sold long ago. I’ve been leasing them back, keeping up appearances.’ Compared to him, he was saying, she had nothing to complain about.
‘Liar!’ She actually stamped her foot.
Karlin snorted with amusement. ‘Take the money, Fiona.’ His tone was fatherly, unprovokable. He’d seen all this before. ‘Be happy you got anything at all. I’m walking away with nothing. Time was, I was a shoe salesman who liked to collect pictures. Then I decided to be a big-shot property developer. I sold my shops, hocked my pictures, bet everything on one big project. Now, after fifty years of hard work, all I’ve got are banks and investors and unions and construction contractors gnawing at my flesh. Jesus, I’ve even got an art gallery director blackmailing me.’ He emitted a dry humourless guffaw, as if this was the ultimate indignity.
‘You’re breaking my heart.’ Little Miss Lambert didn’t sound so well brought up now.
‘Be grateful you’re getting anything, Fiona. I’m only here because of my sentimental attachment to Our Home. Because I’d rather see it go to a public art museum than be sold off in a fire sale. And because I’m a man who keeps his word. I used to be, at least.’
‘I don’t care where you get it,’ insisted Fiona sullenly. ‘I want my money.’
‘Or what? You’ll sue me? I can picture the scene in court. I can hear your lawyer explaining how you extorted money out of me.’ Karlin came back up onto his feet and gave a sarcastic demonstration. He drew himself up to his full diminutive height and waggled his chubby finger, imitating a lawyer pleading a case. ‘ “They had a watertight deal, Your Honour. She, expert on the works of Victor Szabo, proposed that she would refrain from deliberately raising suggestions that the painting known as Our Home was of dubious authorship. He, in return, agreed to sell the work to her gallery and to pay her a secret commission on the deal. Further, Your Honour, she proposed that if he did not comply with her demands she would cast public doubt on the integrity, and therefore the market value, of other art works in his collection. A perfectly normal commercial transaction, Your Honour.” ’ His address to court complete, Karlin wheeled on his feet and headed towards the kitchen door. ‘Yes, Fiona, I can just imagine that.’
Lambert was silent, scowling, one foot tapping. Her gaze followed Karlin and flashed across my hiding place like a spotlight playing on a prison wall. I cowered back into the darkness and slowly emptied the exhausted oxygen from my lungs.
Plumbing whined in the wall behind me and water hit a metal sink. Karlin was in the kitchen, running a tap, getting his own drink. Under cover of the noise, I gulped down air and eased the tension in my muscles. My skin was tacky with sweat and my pulse still raced, but the terror of discovery was abating, replaced by a sense of exultation. My instinct in coming here had been vindicated.
This Fiona Lambert was some piece of work. Selling an entirely forged collection of art. Forcing Karlin to sell Our Home and blackmailing him into paying her a secret commission on the deal. Inveigling Eastlake into raising the money.
I ran the desiccated rhinoceros of my tongue around the Kalahari of my mouth, cocked my ear for the next amazing revelation and put my eye once more to the crack. So what if I was discovered? Compared with Fiona Lambert’s outrageous felonies, cupboard-skulking was a mere social misdemeanour.
Lambert was sitting at the table, staring at the money. Avarice and triumph lit her face. Karlin’s voice came from the kitchen. ‘Stop squawking and be grateful you got anything. Frankly, my other creditors won’t be anywhere near as lucky. The financial empire of Max Karlin is about to collapse into a pile of rubble and I’m not sticking around to see it happen. I’m on my way to the airport. I’m leaving the country. At five this afternoon, bankruptcy papers will be filed for my private holding company. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, I’ll be in Europe. A liquidator will be sitting at my desk. And the dogs will be fighting over Karlcraft’s carcass.’
Fiona Lambert couldn’t give a damn about Karlin’s misfortunes. Breaking the band on one of the wads of cash, she licked her thumb and started counting. Her lips moved silently like a devotee telling her rosary beads. Karlin came out of the kitchen and when he spoke the sound was so close it startled me. ‘Don’t bank it all at once. Large cash deposits get reported. And don’t start spending it either, not unless you want Lloyd suspecting something.’
‘You think I’m stupid?’ said Fiona rancorously. ‘You think I don’t know that?’ He’d made her lose count and she had to start again. ‘And leave Lloyd to me. I know how to handle Lloyd Eastlake.’
Karlin was standing immediately in front of my hiding place, blocking my view. ‘Tch tch. Greedy girl, tch tch.’ His shape moved towards th
e front door. ‘Goodbye, Fiona.’
Lambert got up from the table. I leaned backwards and held my breath. The front door opened. ‘Bon voyage, Max.’ Fiona was caustic to the last. ‘And thanks for nothing.’ Karlin’s footsteps rapidly receded down the stairs. The door was pulled shut and Fiona spoke under her breath. ‘You miserable little Shylock.’
Charming.
My big moment, I decided, had arrived. Throw open the cupboard door, jump out and spring Ms Director of the Centre for Modern Art with her hands sunk elbow-deep in ill-gotten loot. Bang her up, dead to rights, with the evidence of her sins piled on the Baltic pine dining table of her over-geared pied-à-terre.
Lambert’s silhouette passed the louvred door. I pressed my eye to the crack, waiting for exactly the right moment to make my move.
Her mood had improved remarkably. She kicked off her shoes, sashayed her hips, pumped her arms at her side and sidled across the living room. ‘Let me look at you,’ she cooed throatily. ‘You beautiful, beautiful money.’
She picked up one of the packets of bills and fanned it with her thumb. She kissed it. She slowly ran it over her bare arms, luxuriating in its feel. She squirmed sinuous. ‘Money, money, money,’ she sang. The tune from Cabaret.
Tearing the band off with her teeth, she smeared a fistful of bills across her neck and torso. The loose notes cascaded past her swaying hips and settled on the floor around her feet. She reached for another wad and danced a slow silent rhumba with it, pressing the cash to her belly with one hand and describing a slow circle in the air above her head with the other. She was in a trance.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Turned on by a wad of cash. It was a mesmerising sight. And sexy as all hell. She slid the wad of bills slowly down her body, moaning a low guttural tune in the back of her throat. She moved out of sight. Glassware clinked. She segued back into sight, drink in one hand, money in the other. I’d seen enough. Time to spring.
The Brush-Off Page 24
