‘I haven’t even seen it yet.’
‘Got a lot of people interested. Gonna be gone in a flash. Take it or leave it.’
‘I would have thought the purchaser could at least get the vehicle checked over by professionals, the motor, the—’
‘Take it or leave it. You’re wastin’ my time.’
In the bright neon of his office I could see some badly hand-drawn, do-it-yourself prison tattoos on his forearms.
‘How long you been in the Kombi game?’
‘None of your freakin’ business. What are ya, a cop?’ His face hardened, which was saying something, as it was already cold and granite-like and pitted with the ghost of some teenage acne before it changed.
‘Don’t be rude, Rufus. I’m just trying to establish your antecedents.’
‘What’d you call me?’
‘Your mother and father must have had some sense of humour, calling you Rufus T. Firefly, eh? Couple of wags,’ I said. ‘To me you suggest a baboon.’
‘What’s that sposed to mean?’
‘It’s from the movie. The Marx Brothers movie.’
‘The who?’
‘The Marx Brothers. The name of your business.’
‘I don’t know who they are, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m just the manager here.’
‘Is your name Rufus T. Firefly?’
‘What’s it to you? You want the van or not?’
It sometimes takes a decent degree of investigation to work out whether someone is a frontman for a business or dodgy operation, but I didn’t need to dig too deep with Firefly. He was illiterate and an idiot to boot. He was as much a part of the Marx Brothers Kombi Auto Shoppe as a hood ornament on a Splittie. (Memo to non-Kombi people — they don’t have hoods. Got me?)
‘You’re a real tough guy, Rufus.’
‘You’re not kiddin’.’ He cracked his knuckles. I had not met a dumber man since my long-time hairdresser in western Sydney. Sylvio had a good heart, but his cranium was so empty he could have rented it out. (He’d unexpectedly come out with things like: ‘I got my wisdom teeth out last week. Cost me a bomb, but the amnesia guy who put me under was the most expensive. Woah wah, he charged through the nose. I should have knocked meself out, would’ve been cheaper. Me. I shoulda trained to be one of those amnesia guys. Never have to work again.’ Thanks Sylvio.)
‘You like wine, Rufus?’
‘Wha?’
‘That bottle of plonk there. On your shelf. Nice drop?’
‘I’m a beer man.’
‘Of course you are.’
I stood and walked around the desk, took the wine off the shelf and fondled the bottle.
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘Fifty bucks, if you buy the Kombi now.’
‘My, my, Rufus, you’re an entrepreneur as well, eh?’
Sure enough, it was the exact brand of wine I had been shown while watching Field of Dreams with Zim, and had seen in his basement cellar. I made a mental note of the name of the winery. Ertrinken Estate. Gold Coast hinterland. I put it back on the shelf, next to the knuckleduster that appeared, to the naked eye, to have blood and strands of hair gruesomely attached to it.
‘You a knucklehead, Rufus?’ I asked.
‘Wha?’
I put my hands in my trouser pockets, elaborately enough to lift my Hawaiian shirt and show him my neat Beretta tucked into my belt. ‘Show me the van.’
I have to say, it was a beauty. A dull cream, and fitted out with rotting chipboard cupboards and a dicky fold-down bed. The second I stepped into it and inhaled its mouldy aroma, I was twenty again, staring out through a broad, curved windscreen at pristine beaches and ancient forests and a magnificent future full of song, women and, coincidentally enough, wine. Inside that van, all the ills and evils of the world disappeared. Until Rufus’s scratchy, beer and smoke-ravaged voice dragged me back to the present.
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘Don’t waste any more of me time. You want it?’
Of course, I bought it. I was about to lay down the cash there and then. I could see a nirvana beyond this wretched industrial estate and the seething hatred that came off Firefly like the heat off severely sunburned skin.
I checked my watch. Right on time, my old mate Bluey Stone, former expert mechanic, pulled up in his restored Mustang as prearranged, walked straight to the back of the van and lifted the motor hatch for inspection.
‘What is this?’ said a surprised Firefly. ‘The frickin’ Wild Bunch for pensioners?’
Bluey wore very thick spectacles. I mean, forget the glass bottoms of a Coke bottle. Bluey’s were Hubble telescopes in a horn-rimmed frame. When he looked at you, the impression was not of a man severely visually impaired, but of a lunatic freshly escaped from the asylum. Bluey glanced up at Rufus, still without saying a word, and I could see the prison tough in Firefly momentarily recoil. There is one thing as powerful as a gun, and that’s madness.
‘What do you think, Dr Stone?’
And after a few tweaks and taps, Bluey silently nodded.
‘Thank you, Rufus,’ I said, producing a roll of cash. ‘We’re done here.’
I should have driven straight home in my bus and met the wrath of Peg head-on. It would be a storm I could not avoid. I had raided the retirement fund for a silly old man’s dream. There were a few consequences I could foresee. I’d either be divorced very soon, which was fine because at least I now had somewhere to sleep when she kicked me out of the house. Or she’d kill me and I’d be buried in my Kombi. Which was fine, too. Have you noticed how expensive a good coffin can be nowadays?
But I didn’t drive home. I had some wine to taste, up at the Ertrinken Estate vineyard in the hills.
~ * ~
6
When my deceased friend Westchester Zim heard that I was to attend a wine appreciation course with Peg, he laughed with such throaty vigour that I thought he might have suffered a stroke at the end of the telephone line.
‘Zim, are you okay?’ I asked, genuinely concerned.
‘Fine, fine,’ he finally spluttered.
‘I’m pleased you find me amusing.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just, it’s ...’
‘What? Out with it, Zim.’
‘... like bringing together tomato sauce and duck confit.’
‘Zim, I do believe you are a bone fide snob.’
To make amends and appear encouraging, he sent me a chapter of medical educator Dr Philip E. Muskett’s book, The Art of Living in Australia from 1893. The chapter — ‘On Australian Wine’ — I found fantastically dull, but there were a few gems embedded in its dry prose. He was very enthusiastic about starting a national wine industry, was Dr Muskett. I sensed he liked more than the occasional tipple. ‘Apart from its beneficial influence on the national health,’ Muskett wrote with more bounce than usual, ‘it would cover the land with smiling vineyards ... it would absorb thousands from the fever and fret of city wear and tear into the more natural life of the country’.
Good old Dr Muskett. He had to have been one of the pioneer sea-changers of Australia. (How crowded could our feverish and fretful cities have possibly been in the 1890s? Have another drink, Dr Muskett.) But what a lovely turn of phrase — smiling vineyards.
When I turned into the Ertrinken Estate in the hills behind the Gold Coast, I immediately felt the opposite. In fact, it was worse than that. The entrance gate was something out of an early gothic horror movie, all mossy stones and rusted metal arches. (Fake, of course, right down to the moss. This was the Gold Coast after all.) I swear there was a vulture fashioned into the ironwork, though it could have been a poorly rendered eagle. And believe you me (I’ve always favoured that odd phrase, uttered habitually by my grandfather Herb), believe you me, it seemed sunny on the road through the hinterland (perhaps I was experiencing that inner-dawn of driving my new/old Kombi bus), but instantly dark once I crossed the vineyard’s threshold. Then there was the long driveway bordered wi
th tall and eerie pines, straight out of some dank fairytale in which innocent children in lemon-starched white smocks wander into the maw of a European forest. It was a set from Edward Scissorhands. It would not have surprised me in the least if a wolf standing on its hind legs and dressed as Grandma in puffy pantaloon pyjamas had greeted me inside.
It may be encroaching dementia, but shadows loom large as you get older, and for comfort I patted the Beretta on the passenger’s seat of the Kombi as I puttered over the crunching gravel.
I locked the vehicle, straightened my Hawaiian shirt and made for the open cellar door. If only Zim could have seen me now. (Was he watching me, halfway through some fifty-course degustation up in heaven? Smirking? Possibly coughing on a shaving of truffle with the comedy of it all?) I was acting on pure instinct. It had always served me well. I still had a hunch that my friend had not suffered a fateful heart attack that day in these very vineyards, but that his demise had been brought on, and swiftly, by persons as yet unknown. And by a method yet to be determined.
Why kill Zim? Surely a bad restaurant review couldn’t lead to the sanction of a professional hit. Or could it? I had seen people murdered for less. But it was hard to imagine a human life being taken for criticism of a roasted tomato or an undercooked lamb shank. Then again, Zim could be cutting, much like his beloved A. A. Gill. ‘The calamari,’ Zim once memorably wrote, ‘would have brought smiles of recognition to legions of Malayan rubber plantation workers, or factory hands at the headquarters of Dunlop Volley tennis shoes. It had the same texture, and age, of something that might have shod the feet of Ken Rosewall during his Wimbledon singles disappointments.’
Perhaps Zim had stumbled across something, as a journalist, and not just a food critic, that someone didn’t want known to the general public. He was acquainted with an enormous number of people in high places, and a lot of them told him things at the end of a good meal that they would never have uttered otherwise. Some combinations of wine and food can open fissures in the human heart, let alone the brain. These people trusted Zim. But what if something found its way onto one of those little pocket index cards of his? And what if someone wanted to destroy that card, and Zim along with it?
‘Can I help you?’
A man had appeared at the cellar door, startling me. He had extraordinary hair. If you could call it hair. He was short, so I had a brilliant view of his cranium. He had follicles that sprouted in tufts aligned in perfect equidistance from his forehead to his crown. A hair transplant, but a fantastically bad one. It was almost as though a miniature vineyard had been planted upon his scalp. A vineyard in the dead of a permanent winter.
His teeth were yellowed and crooked, as if all his savings had been absorbed by the vineyard, and he had nothing left for his dental work. I did not want to get near him, just as one might keep a safe distance from a poisonous plant.
‘Wine,’ I said stupidly.
‘You’ve come to the right place.’ He spotted the Kombi on the drive. The grin broadened. ‘Wo kommen sie? Deutchland?’
‘Could you repeat that?’
‘You come from Germany?’
‘I come from Erskineville.’
‘Sorry,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know Erskineville.’
‘No need to apologise. I’m looking for your Kombi wine. Heard great things about it.’
‘Kombi wine?’
‘Yes. Your white wine with the red Kombi on the label. Little VW symbol on the top.’
His grin disappeared. So this was not to be one of Dr Muskett’s smiling vineyards.
‘I am lost. So sorry. The little ...’
‘A friend of mine put me on to it. Name of Zim. Westchester Zim.’
‘Zim?’
‘Little red Kombi. On a ridge. On the label. Nein?’
‘No,’ he said firmly now. ‘You must have the wrong place.’
‘This is the Ertrinken Estate?’
‘Ertrinken. Correct.’
‘Tell me, what does it mean, Ertrinken?’
‘Ertrinken. It means the drowning. To drown, you know?’
‘Happy stuff.’
‘How do you say? To drown one’s sorrows.’
‘Very amusing.’
He seemed annoyed by this banter, the man with the vineyard on his head. The skin between the tufts had turned pale pink.
‘Why don’t you take a seat inside, and I’ll ask the cellar-man about this Kombi wine, hmm? Please. Wait here.’
He disappeared into the gloom of the cellar and I began to feel agitated. When my host did not return after ten minutes, I ambled about the grounds. The air was moist and fresh, the soil a rich red, the vineyard restaurant perched on the edge of a ridge. It commanded a magnificent view of the Gold Coast, the high-rises needle-like and chalky from this distance. To the right of the winery buildings was a wall of rainforest and at its base a small entranceway. Again, it was something out of a sinister fairytale, but aren’t we irresistibly lured to such doorways, to the portal that separates civilisation from terror? From what we know and what we don’t? Don’t we love to have the stuffing scared out of us? It’s only a story, right?
I cautiously crept closer to the entranceway and there found a tiny hand-painted sign. To the Pools.
I looked back and saw no sign of life at the cellar door, so in I walked, into the gloom. It took a while for my eyes to adjust, and I blindly bumbled along the track. I heard things scurrying in the ground foliage, and a distant whipbird.
The track gradually descended for a hundred metres then lifted and fell again. The forest seemed to darken. My heart pounded. I heard a crash behind me and pulled out the Beretta, swinging it around wildly. It was the type of darkness you might see figures in. Or might imagine you’ve seen. The fear was still the same. Fear always is.
‘Idiot,’ I said to myself, and walked on. I kept the Beretta out.
Five minutes later I began to hear running water, then, unexpectedly, the track led into a huge open amphitheatre, and at its base was a series of deep pools cut into stone. It was eerie. Almost unnatural. A perfect narrow waterfall flushed into the pools. The water was loud here, close to deafening, as it bounced back off the tall stands of rainforest. I half expected to see a semi-naked woman washing her hair with a new brand of apple-scented shampoo under the cascades.
I went to the edge of one of the smaller pools and looked down. It was a very dark. It was deep. It appeared infinite. Foam flecked the surface. I could see my frothy wobbling reflection.
That’s when I heard a gunshot. I swung around, let off two bullets myself and fell backwards into the pool as crazed and startled birds exploded from the trees.
~ * ~
7
The leech is a fascinating creature. Did you know the gnatbobdellida variety has three jaws, and may have more than one set of eyes? It possesses very handy suckers and its multi-toothed jaws chomp away like miniature chainsaws, before sucking your blood and greasing the meal with an anticoagulant. The fact that it’s also a hermaphrodite makes it the perfect solo unit. It’s got it all.
I had never seen a leech in my life, being an inner-city Sydney type of boy. Even my Boy Scout clubhouse was a disused factory shed on an oily concrete apron in Alexandria. No grass or forests there, unless you counted the weeds in the concrete cracks. (Which, in fact, I think I did, to earn my Bushcraft badge.)
No, leeches and I were strangers to each other, until that afternoon when I was pulled out of the rainforest adjoining the Ertrinken Estate winery in the Gold Coast hinterland, in pursuit of the killer of my old friend Westchester Zim. I must have hit my head on the edge of the rock pool, because when I awoke I was reclining on a long settee in a walnut-walled office at the winery, with the creepy man with a vineyard planted on his head poring over me with a pair of tweezers. He had beside him an open glass containing eleven leeches he had extracted from my person. He had another twelve to go. At least. I didn’t want to think where else these ghoulies had burrowed beneath my
clothing.
‘They like you,’ he said, pulling another from my arm, inadvertently poking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth with the concentration. ‘They think you taste good, hmm?’
I couldn’t stop looking at his broken, yellowed teeth. The transplanted tufts were a pleasing Monet landscape compared to the canines. I glanced at the glass. The leeches were squirming about in there, wet and gleaming with my blood.
‘Wouldn’t have a drink on you, would you?’ I asked, thinking this a passable gag in a winery, and under the circumstances, but my creepy friend continued with his grisly work.
The Toe Tag Quintet Page 17
