The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘Don’t know why you’re asking questions about Legs. She was done out of Sydney, is what I’ve heard. You probably share a desk with the killer, right?’

  This was humour, Queensland-style. The punchlines to jokes also had something a little peculiar about them, a little creepy. I could have told him that I shared a desk with a man called Greaves. Straight. Honest. With horn-rimmed spectacles and ears like tiny pieces of shell pasta. And with one of the keenest, most humourless minds in the business. But why bother?

  The young officer laughed. I laughed just to be polite. I had no idea what he was talking about. Had I been sent here on some wild-goose chase? Was I being set up for something?

  I telephoned my inspector and told him what I’d learned, which wasn’t much. He told me to relax, take a day off, go ride around town on a tram. They don’t have trams here any more, I said. I couldn’t care less, Dusty, he said.

  On the morning I flew back to Sydney, I sat in the crappy little airport terminal and thought of Peg. Would she be on the flight? Would I be lucky enough to have her spill an entire meal down my shirt front? Then I’d have to ring her twice.

  It turned out Legs might have been murdered by a Sydney police officer who was so vile, so feared, so terrifying that just to mention his name was dangerous and possible grounds for extinction. Legs had known a lot. Now the girl from Atherton had been returned to anonymity.

  I read the local paper while I waited for my plane. There was a small item on page seven about a body being pulled from the Brisbane River over near some place called the New Farm Powerhouse. The body was suspected to be that of a missing art dealer from West End. He was missing two toes and a finger, as well as his life.

  Peg wasn’t on the plane. As a result, I resented the other hostesses and landed in Sydney without a single stain on my apparel.

  As we disembarked, I noticed a very well-dressed gentleman strolling towards the terminal. I noticed him because he had the head of a criminal but was wearing a suit befitting professional gentlemen you might find at the Stock Exchange, or before the Bar.

  I noticed him because I had seen him before, in Kings Cross. He ran a small antiques store in Macleay Street, an establishment suspected of nurturing a little casino upstairs.

  He would become known to me, in a very short period of time, as the Boltcutter.

  ~ * ~

  3

  So when I saw the foul Boltcutter again on my morning stroll in Main Beach, things remembered, and quite a significant few that I would have preferred to forget, rained in on my splendour. I knew it was him immediately, despite his tremendous increase in physical volume, the disappearance of anything resembling a neck, the great laval descent of flesh about his head and shoulders. He looked like someone had filled him with air and slowly melted him.

  I picked up my newspaper that day and returned directly to my rented caravan not far from the surf club. I checked over my shoulder repeatedly during the short walk. I took mental notes of vehicle numberplates. I surreptitiously observed high-rise car-park entranceways, building enclaves and any other potential nooks and roosts for a possible assassin. On that single walk, which I’d taken many times in the past few weeks, I noticed at least six general security cameras. I had not had to look for them before.

  My van, too, suddenly felt exposed. Not just to the weather. On a couple of nights I had been woken by a vicious onshore breeze shaking and rattling my little temporary aluminium home. There was a line of pine trees at the back of the park, and a handful of unidentified flora on the southern boundary, but nothing I would consider good cover. I guess families on holidays on the Gold Coast don’t have much of a need for good cover against gunmen from their past. I began to feel very alone.

  I telephoned Peg from the caravan park.

  ‘You won’t believe who I saw in the street today,’ I said to Peg.

  ‘Elvis.’

  ‘It’s going to take you a while to settle in here I’m afraid, Peg.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘If you knew the Gold Coast half as well as I’m coming to — and I’m way ahead of you already — there are more Elvis impersonators here than Las Vegas. So any joke you care to offer about Elvis on the Gold Coast is almost guaranteed not to produce a laugh.’

  ‘I liked you better when you were a cop. You spoke more economically. The offender decamped ... the person of interest is helping police with inquiries ... that sort of stuff. Now you have, as our son would say, a little too much air in the mattress.’

  ‘That used to be the standard criticism of my physique.’

  ‘Your big belly.’

  ‘If you want to put it that way, yes, my big belly. I think I might join a gym.’

  ‘What were you saying?’

  ‘Thank you for your interest. Today I ran into a ghost from the past.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re making friends.’

  ‘A gangster, Peg. One of the more ruthless sadists from the old days up at the Cross.’ I didn’t even want to mention his name.

  ‘He must be an old retired gent now, like you.’

  ‘More than thirty years later, and a thousand kilometres from his old turf, and I happen to walk past him — hardly a foot between us — in my retirement.’

  ‘Gangsters have to retire too, don’t they?’

  ‘Gangsters don’t retire, Peg. It’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle.’

  ‘Packing heat, was he?’

  ‘Packing heat? Not even old coppers say ‘packing heat’, Peg. I get the feeling you’re not showing the same level of concern as I am.’

  ‘So these things happen. You’re moving to the coast. A face you know passes by. Who cares? Maybe he was on holiday. Maybe he plays bowls and eats out on his pensioner’s card. How’s the house-hunting going, by the way?’

  ~ * ~

  I slept poorly that night. A huge, rolling, boiling thunderstorm had swept over the hinterland in the west and headed out to sea. I had never seen storms like the ones I saw in Queensland. Vicious. Without a hint of humanity. Like some people I knew.

  My little van shivered on its concrete apron, and as the thunder rumbled around me and the rain pounded the aluminium skin of the Viscount, I recalled the visit I had paid to the Boltcutter back in the Cross of the early seventies, when he was known as the rather ostentatious Dapper Dan the Antiques Man. He got away with the name. Things were different in the seventies.

  Every now and then the underlings of 21 Division were sent out to check on the illegal casinos — not that we knew they were there, of course — as part of ‘operational procedures’. In short, we let them know we were watching them. I was young, stupid, and eager to get ahead, and during these ‘sweeps’ I would return with bottles of booze, bowls of fresh pasta, and even little brown envelopes as gifts to 21 Division.

  ‘That’s a bribe right there,’ I’d say to a senior officer, pointing to the gnocchi. ‘Should we proceed with the charge?’ I’d be laughed out of the office. The booze, food, and especially the cash, would always magically disappear.

  Dapper Dan’s antique store had its entrance next to a French patisserie, its window shelves filled with strange, golden breads and exotic desserts and elaborate pyramids of biscuits dipped in chocolate. You could smell it on the street. To pass through that and into Dapper’s was like passing from life to death.

  As I opened the door, a bell rang. The showroom was dim, reeked of mildew, and was packed floor to ceiling with old bureaux, mirrored wardrobes, suits of armour, hat stands heavy with felt and feather, dolls in clear perspex tombs, shop dummies dressed as ship captains and saloon madams, and whole shelves of stuffed rodents, dogs, birds.

  ‘Hello?’ I said loudly, and proceeded into the room. ‘Anybody here?’ My left ear was brushed by something and I jumped, startled, and lost my porkpie hat to the ground. It was the giant wing of a preserved American eagle, its talons fastened firmly around a motheaten mouse, its teeth bared in agony.

  It took a while fo
r my eyes to adjust, then the Dapper seemed to materialise in a rear doorway. He was a shadowed outline wearing a canary yellow suit complete with spats and a fob watch. He also wore white leather gloves.

  ‘May I help you?’ He did not move in the doorway. He had one of those voices that was so common in Australia in the forties and fifties. You could hear the English plum rolling around behind a still developing nasally and flat Australian vernacular.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said.

  I shook his hand, and the glove felt fleshy and cold.

  He did not ask me to sit. He did not offer me anything. I could barely see his face in the poor light, and the sunshine trying to pour into the shop front was blocked, diffused, slashed and hacked at by samurai swords, furniture, old clothes, photographs of forgotten faces and dust-coated chandeliers.

  ‘You live upstairs?’ I asked.

  ‘How is that any of your business?’

  I could see behind him a narrow staircase leading up into complete darkness. Dapper wasn’t moving.

  ‘Is that all, constable?’

  ‘It’s senior constable.’

  ‘Oh. Pardon me. Will that be all?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I left slowly and could feel him watching me. There are men in the world who pretend they are something else, and their personas slip and slide and chafe against each other. It makes them easy to spot, with all that chafing. And there are men who show one thing completely, imperviously, and are the absolute opposite underneath. What lies beneath is similarly diamond-hard and immovable. That was Dapper. And that’s what made him so frightening.

  I knew he could handle a Faberge egg with the utmost delicacy with those soft white gloves of his. And I knew, too, he’d break your neck without compunction.

  ‘Good day,’ he said.

  I ducked beneath the eagle’s wing and held my hat as I did so. I kept thinking of the tiny little green feather in my hatband. I entered the street and the perfume of freshly baked baguettes.

  The next morning when I stepped out of the van, the world felt reborn, as it so often seems in Queensland after one of their end-of-the-world storms. The grass near my annexe felt cool beneath my feet. Peg was right. I was being a silly youngish-old man still treading suspiciously into the landscape that is retirement. Then I found a card had been slipped beneath the door of my tin home. It was one of those postcards you buy at art galleries, which depicts the works of artists housed by the gallery. This one was from the Queensland Art Gallery. It showed a painting by Ian Fairweather.

  Written on the back was: ‘Time to visit your Fair Weather Friends’.

  Attached to the card with a pretty piece of red ribbon was a shiny bullet.

  Who said the Gold Coast wasn’t cultured?

  ~ * ~

  4

  It was time to pay Dapper Dan the Antiques Man, a.k.a. the Boltcutter, a.k.a. one of my Fair Weather Friends, a visit. At least I assumed the Boltcutter was the author of the note. I didn’t have many pals in paradise yet, just Verne and Abigail in the van park, Maisy and Bert in the van next to mine, Bob and Patsy behind the bar at the surf club, Geraldo the real-estate agent, and Pep the South American exchange student at the local bottlo.

  I didn’t tell Peg about the bullet. And I knew I should not have acted on an assumption. But I was bored looking at houses. I was bored heading out in the tinny and bobbing about in the Broadwater with my own thoughts. I missed my old mates and my family. This retirement thing was not all it was cracked up to be. I needed to keep busy. I needed to stickybeak around a little, like I’d always done. I watch those big, dumb, dirty ibis poking their long beaks into rubbish bins and I think — yeah, we’ve got a bit in common.

  One call to an old mate at the Sydney regional police headquarters and I was standing outside the door to a high-rise apartment in Paradise Waters.

  The door was painted a shiny, understated black. No turquoise or peach, and no little conch-shell unit numbers for our Dan.

  My only problem was that the elderly gentleman who lived in the apartment was not Dapper Dan the Antiques Man, but a tall, thin, black-robed geezer straight out of a Lon Chaney film. If that wasn’t bad enough, he called himself the Priest.

  His carer, a small Malaysian man called Robert, led me through the flat to a sitting room full of exquisite, heavy oak antique chairs and table nests. Tea was waiting, a tail of steam issuing from a small, gilt-edged pot. The walls were floor to ceiling with paintings and religious icons. It was all crucifixion, self-flagellation, murder, betrayal, blood and misery. It was the sort of apartment that might be enjoyed by a sadist monk from the Middle Ages, if indeed the sadist monk could get past the wonder of fresh tap water, electric toasters, television, and all the other glorious junk that gluts our modern world.

  ‘Wait, please,’ Robert said. He dramatically rolled his hand towards one of the chairs. His permanent smile was unnerving. He wore a tight-fitting satin vest, black waiter’s trousers and shoes so polished they seemed to contain their own source of light.

  I sat, as Robert had requested, and looked out at the reach of Narrowneck and the ocean. A small red biplane eased past. I could see two container ships on the horizon. I noticed the tips of the pines at the back of my caravan park.

  All this crazy summer life going on at ground level — kids on boogie boards being dumped in the surf, old men throwing their pensions into a poker machine, hoons blowing rubber in the Broadbeach car park — and here I was sitting in a silent room that could have belonged to the cellar of an Italian monastery.

  When the Priest entered, I automatically stood. He was clearly mentally unhinged, and something about bona fide craziness — so tailored and complete and a world unto itself — commands a triggered respect in human beings. It is, partly, the ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ factor. I had encountered much of it in 21 Division in the Cross.

  He towered over me, and I was six feet in my socks. He had long, thin grey hair that almost reached his shoulders and was parted with frightening exactitude down the middle of his scalp. His face sported a fanatically trimmed white beard. His black cassock was floor-length.

  He sat in the chair opposite mine, and with a motion of his finger ordered Robert to pour the tea. Robert left and we faced each other for a few uncomfortable moments.

  ‘And you are?’ the Priest finally said.

  ‘Let’s just say I’m an old friend of the Dapper’s.’

  His stare was cold and peculiar. He had long white fingers that were curled over two wood-carved balls at the end of the chair arms.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Dapper Dan. Your flatmate. At least, that was one of the names he went by the last I knew him.’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea who you may be referring to.’ He had lowered his head a little and was now studying me as an entomologist might examine a mutated specimen of Sorghum Head moth.

  ‘You don’t know anyone by the name of Dapper Dan? A ... well, dapper gentleman?’

  ‘Is this some sort of practical joke?’

  ‘I’m afraid not.’

  ‘Then state your business.’

  ‘I’m just an old acquaintance. New to the area. Wanted to pay my respects. To my Fair Weather Friends. He left me a note.’

  I had missed the moment, but at some point the effeminate Robert had turned from tea boy into a miniature parody of a menacing sidekick and bodyguard, the type you might expect to pop up in a bad James Bond film. But one acted by children, for children. A 003 and a half film.

  ‘Fair weather?’

  ‘Correct. Fair weather.’

  ‘Are you some sort of newspaper-crossword cryptologist?’ ‘I don’t even like chess.’

  The Priest wriggled in his chair, put a forefinger to his lips, then issued a malevolent smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘We don’t seem to be having the same conversation. I am a dealer and collector of fine arts. My particular passion is the work of sculptor Etienne Bobillet. I thought you we
re a client of my business partner, Mr Seelenleben, who handles more contemporary works and in particular Australian art — if that is not an oxymoron — and as he is on business interstate, I agreed to see you out of courtesy to him. This note you received about Fair Weather Friends. I can only assume it pertains to the work of the artist Ian Fairweather, of which Mr Seelenleben is a specialist. Does this make any sense to you?’

  ‘Not the foggiest.’

  ‘You are not seeking assistance in the purchase or sale of a Fairweather?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then we are wasting each other’s time.’

  He stood again and for a moment I was reminded of my early psychology textbooks and Nietzsche’s famous paper on the ‘pale criminal’, the great disrupters of humanity, always running away from their darker selves.