The Toe Tag Quintet

by Matthew Condon

  ‘What happened, Sherlock?’ I said.

  ‘I am Hans,’ he said.

  ‘Many Hans make light work.’

  ‘Please, stop talking. You banged your head. You talking funny.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘You fell in the pool. We get you out. You covered in leeches. We get them off.’

  ‘You’re a one-stop shop, Hans.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘For a surgeon, you got steady Hans.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  He dropped several more leeches into the glass before I noticed a man sitting quietly by the window. He was dressed in an immaculate navy suit, polished shoes, a crisp white shirt and burgundy tie. I couldn’t see his face because the light diffusing through the fine curtains, but his slicked-back hair seemed to glow in a way that only heavily gelled naturally blond hair can. Perhaps I had mistaken him for a reading lamp. What was it with people’s hair in this place? Still, I had seen this pate before.

  ‘And who are you?’ I boomed across the room. ‘Nurse Ratched?’

  He remained silent and motionless. I hate that. I hate all that ‘silence is power’ malarky. As you might have guessed, I prefer a verbal exchange. The more I stared at him, the more his glowing dome seemed like Nurse Ratched’s immaculate white cap in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Come to think of it, if I’d watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — another in my top ten films of all time — with Zim instead of that blasted Field of Dreams, I might not be covered in leeches, Zim could still be alive, and the Kombi dream could have been postponed for another year or two.

  ‘Sorry?’ I said to the dark stranger by the window. ‘I didn’t catch that. Perhaps you’re Chief Bromden. Deaf and dumb.’

  ‘You got a wise mouth, mate,’ the suit finally said. He too pronounced it marrrrrt, flat as a pancake, just like Joe the janitor. How come nobody could say ‘mate’ properly any more?

  ‘It speaks!’

  ‘Is the bump on the head, Herr Fleek, I’m sure,’ said my leech hunter.

  ‘Hair Fleek?’ I said, incredulous. And when I’m incredulous, my voice cracks and goes up like a teenage boy in maturational transition with a solo whisker on his chin.

  ‘Flick,’ the suit said. ‘Johann Flick. Friends call me Joe. You can call me Johann.’ Another Joe. Perhaps I’d been wrong all along. I was actually an extra in Groundhog Day.

  ‘And you can call me Nancy,’ I said. ‘Hey, hey, Dr Zhivago, that one hurt.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the hair transplant.

  ‘So, Fleek,’ I said. ‘I came in here for a bottle of plonk, fell into a rock pool and got lathered with man-eating beasties. Why are you here, overseeing my recovery?’

  ‘I own this winery.’

  ‘Ohhhh, I see. You’re worried about an insurance claim from me.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I happened to be in the restaurant today for lunch when I heard some yobbo had let off a gun at the pools and nearly fractured his skull. This winery has an impeccable reputation worldwide. I’m not about to see it soiled by some demented grub disconnected with my enterprise.’

  ‘I’ve been called a lot of things, Fleek ...’

  ‘What’s your business here?’

  ‘Wine, Fleek. The VW vintage. I’m a Kombi nut.’

  ‘How long have you been a Kombi nut, as you call it?’

  I checked my watch. ‘About three hours.’

  Still I could not see his face, though he lit a cigarette and the smoke eased about his upper torso. The light through the window captured its paisley swirls.

  ‘The VW wine, as you call it. It was discontinued. It is no more. So sorry.’

  ‘Oh, what a shame. Maybe I could nab a bottle on eBay.’

  ‘It was promotional. A handful of cases. May I ask how you came to learn of it? You’re a wine expert too, are you?’

  ‘A dead friend of mine gave it a favourable review. Man called Zim. First-rate palate. He recommended it. Admired the body, so to speak.’

  ‘Then he was a man of impeccable taste.’

  ‘You never heard of him? He passed away, right here, down amongst your impeccable vines.’

  ‘Can’t say I have heard of him, no.’

  ‘A man drops dead in your vineyard and you didn’t hear about it? Tsk tsk, Herr Fleek.’

  ‘I’m a busy man. What was it — a heart attack? People die every day. Do you hear about every one of them?’

  ‘Busy doing what?’

  ‘I’m sorry — you illegally discharge a firearm on my property, cause a major disturbance to my business and, worst of all, you interrupt my lunch. Are you in any position to ask me questions?’ His voice had changed. I had heard this type of voice before. It had the timbre of a man with a very substantial temper, as deep as a rainforest rock pool.

  ‘One more to go,’ said my doctor with the hideous teeth, as he triumphantly dropped the final leech into the glass. They looked as though they were attacking each other, those leeches, fighting for the pint of blood, or so it seemed, they had sucked from me.

  ‘I want to see where he died,’ I said. ‘Zim.’

  The blond-haired man stood, smashed out his cigarette in a large glass ashtray and walked to the door. As he left he said, without turning to face me, ‘Children should never play with firearms. They could meet with a nasty accident.’

  I sat up in the settee and observed my arms and legs. The hair transplant had brought the glass of leeches up to his face and was watching them with a little too much excitement for my liking.

  ‘Herr Doctor,’ I said. ‘Can I go?’

  ‘Nobody’s keeping you,’ he said, relishing the writhing annelids.

  I hobbled out to the vestibule, then down the stairs to the driveway. The Kombi was parked exactly where I’d left it, but the driver’s door was unlocked. I didn’t wait to warm the motor and gave her a little rev on the way out, kicking up some gravel.

  As soon as I hit the tarred bitumen outside the creepy gates of Ertrinken Estate, the sun burst through a phalanx of clouds. The world was a sunny vineyard again.

  I opened the glove box, retrieved my mobile and listened to a message. It was from an old contact in forensics in Brisbane. ‘Your mate Westchester’s results are in. Poisoned. Very sophisticated. Thought you’d like to know.’

  I knew I had to get back to Zim’s apartment as soon as I could. I also knew, halfway down the range, that I was being followed. By a black split-screen Kombi, as big as a hearse.

  With dread, I slapped my belt and pictured my beautiful Beretta sinking to the centre of the earth in that infinite rainforest pool, picking up legions of leeches as it disappeared forever.

  I remembered that in Groundhog Day the lead character tries, time and again, to kill himself, but wakes every morning to a new and interminable day. I was beginning to know how he felt.

  ~ * ~

  8

  I’m not a big motor-racing fan. It just doesn’t do it for me, all the noise and fumes and lap after tedious lap. As a television spectacle it is incomprehensible to my feeble mind. I’d rather watch a film on the grazing habits of Tibetan yaks. Did you know they have bigger hearts and lungs than your garden variety bovine? All the better for munching at high altitude.

  Oh, I could go on about yaks. But motor racing. I had it in mind that afternoon I left the Gold Coast vineyard and made a beeline for Westchester Zim’s apartment because I was hurtling down the range in my Kombi being followed by a black split-screen Kombi that could only have been driven by villains, but very dumb villains. Why would smart villains announce their villainry in a villainous black car? Also, the moment we hit the Pacific Highway to Brisbane, I got involved in the third car chase of my life.

  The first was at the Sydney Easter Show when I was eight and my brother, Stanley, was five. We were riding the dodgem cars. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice to say a chase ensued and poor Stanle
y ended up with a fractured skull and a lifelong fear of motorised vehicular transport. He will still not ride with me in a car — any car.

  The second happened when I was a cop in Sydney and was in a high-speed pursuit with a Leyland P76 Coupe. It ended up head-butting a streetlight. Its bonnet flew off and landed on the windshield of my police vehicle. My car collided with another streetlight. The coupe driver and I were both rushed to hospital in the same ambulance.

  Now I was in another, and if you know unmodified Kombis, you’ll know that this particular chase resembled my ding-dong dodgem battle with little Stanley, though possibly at a lower level of velocity.

  At the high point of the chase, just as we were passing the Logan Hyperdome, we must have hit the clipping sonic speed of just under 80 km an hour, full throttle. Considering it was a 100 km zone, it’s a miracle we weren’t both pulled over by the highway patrol for going too slowly. Nevertheless, the chase was on, and we clicked and clacked all the way to the city like two snails racing for a freshly detected puddle of beer. (Snails, if you didn’t know, are very much like a large proportion of the Australian male population. They adore beer, throw it down, get promptly drunk and invariably drown in it. Not a bad way to go.)

  As we hit the cross-city tunnel roadworks to the south of the CBD, I still had my persistent tail, but she was coughing a bit of smoke. With some crafty manoeuvring I knew I could hold out for a full engine blow. But Splittie drivers are persistent — they carry an air of superiority over us common Bay Window Kombi owners, and though she belched out a fair bit of blue stuff, I couldn’t lose her.

  The villains got so close to my tail at one point that I realised they were driving not just any old Splittie, but a multi-windowed Samba, which was top-notch, arguably the Queen of Kombis. But as I slipped up the Margaret Street exit, this final turn was the Samba’s undoing. She erupted in a pyre of delicious smoke and came to an unceremonious halt, and I slipped into the anonymity of the city.

  I still had the key to Zim’s apartment, but out of courtesy I rang the janitor’s bell. He did not appear. By the time I got to Zim’s door, I knew I was too late. The door was half-open and inside it looked as though a herd of yaks had passed through en route to some choice grazing on Mount Coot-tha.

  Everything had been upturned and routed. Zim’s pristine kitchen had been soiled, possibly for the first time. His framed Cézanne’s on the wall were cock-eyed. On the kitchen bench I found several bottles of wine that had been opened and drained. They’d raided Zim’s fridge and savoured a particular sticky that might have accounted for their monthly wages, if indeed henchmen were on salary. They knew not what they had drunk.

  I went straight to Zim’s office and found it similarly trashed. The drawers to his index-card filing cabinet were all open, but incredibly none of the cards had been disturbed. This made sense. In my experience, when lug-headed moronic petty criminals whose reading experiences stopped with The Little Engine That Could are faced with any sort of laborious paperwork or sheer weight of wordage — and trust me, Zim had neatly filed many thousands of those pocket-sized cards — a small wire in their heads almost instantly disconnects from the brain’s mainframe and they move on to something else. (A very similar process to when I witness motor racing.) I could be thankful for small mercies.

  For the remainder of the afternoon, before I reported the burglary to police, I sat down with a glass of the only wine left in the house — a Stanthorpe Merlot that put lead in my weary pencil — and made a few phone calls.

  My newfound friend Mr Johann Flick was, it turned out, no stranger to the local police authorities, nor was he entirely unknown to the Crime and Misconduct Commission. He was, as one source told me, on his way to becoming ‘the biggest and most ruthless developer in southeast Queensland’, and if an aerial map of Brisbane city’s newest developments was ever drawn up, Flick’s portfolio would include neat parcels of fevered construction at either end of the city’s anticipated north—south tunnel. Herr Flick, I also learned, had a strong interest in the city’s water grid, specifically the Southern Regional Water Pipeline. Flick was scrambling for any patch of dirt that the pipeline abutted or passed through. He was also influential in the emerging satellite cities of Ipswich and the Sunshine Coast.

  For no reason, I immediately thought of a very old phrase — ‘and He turned water into wine’.

  I rang the janitor. No answer. I went down to the basement. Zim’s wine cage door was open, but the bottles remained neatly stacked. All except for half a dozen bottles with VW stamped on the lid. They were missing.

  Back in the apartment, Peg called on my mobile.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll be home for dinner?’

  ‘I’ll be a little late tonight, dear.’

  ‘What have you been doing with yourself all day?’

  This is the moment when men who have been doing something they shouldn’t have been doing involuntarily swallow. I had been doing a lot of swallowing lately. How could I tell her I had, in the space of a single day, bought a Kombi, entered the gates of hell, knocked myself unconscious in a rainforest, lost half my body volume of blood to a gang of ravenous leeches, had a dodgem-car pursuit up the Pacific Highway and consumed an entire bottle of absolutely dreadful Stanthorpe wine? As Captain Blackadder said, ‘This is the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun.’ Or words to that effect.

  ‘I’ve been doing a project, dear,’ I said.

  ‘You have?’

  ‘I have been further educating myself in the great art of the vintner. I have—’

  ‘What have you really been up to?’

  ‘Why do you say that? Dear?’

  ‘Because you only ever call me ‘dear’ when—’

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ I interrupted. ‘Sorry, you’re breaking up ... dear.’

  I felt melancholy in that apartment. For the first time since Westchester Zim’s death, the true impact of his passing hit me. It’s always terrible to lose a friend, but at my age? I would miss the old bon vivant. His humour and unexpected witticisms. He once said, ‘I find “rack of lamb” offensive. To the lamb. It is also known as a “Crown roast”, which is much more regal and respectful to these animal children who died for our pleasure. So why don’t we use that? We don’t call rump steak “backside of cow”, do we?’ Where on earth will I get lines like that any more?

  Out of respect for Zim, I cleaned his apartment. Yes, I did. I tidied everything, straightened the pictures, even mopped the tiles in the kitchen. I plumped the couch cushions and aligned the strangely old-fashioned antimacassars. Then I rinsed the wine bottles, including the Stanthorpe red, put them in a bag and took it out to the garbage chute.

  I opened it, and I found the very dead corpse of janitor Joe Santorini, stuffed in head-first, his polished work boots stuck skyward, revealing — poor little Joe — that he only wore a size seven.

  ~ * ~

  9

  I waited outside Herr Johann Flick’s office with a briefcase at my feet. It was the late Westchester Zim’s case, one I remembered from the first time I met him, decades earlier, in Sydney. He took it everywhere. He lived out of it, had his life in it. He once told me that if he ever had to walk out on his life, he could survive if he had the case. It was nicked and battered and scarred, like old Zim. I felt I owed it to him. To have a part of him with me when I wreaked almighty justice on those who had so rudely killed him.

  The developer’s foyer was expansive and expensive and made entirely of glass and steel. I could see virtually all aspects of Brisbane from my knotty, embroidered waiting couch. I was sitting on an elaborately rendered black eagle. Very Germanic. After my encounter with the leeches, sitting on a tapestry eagle head was strangely discomforting.

  I wore a fresh Hawaiian shirt, relatively clean shorts and my perennial boatie loafers, decorated with so many fish guts and spilled wine and oil and canal water and samples of assorted TV dinners that had missed my belly
and gone floor-bound that it was no longer possible to distinguish which stain was which. They had become, at least in my opinion, a fetching pea-soup green. Inside all this clean glass, I felt everything about me was magnified, like a germ sample under a laboratory slide.

  Too bad. Clothes do not maketh the man, my father always said. And mint jelly doth not make the roast, said Westchester Zim.

  The office assistant, a pretty young woman who had a little too much of the Eva Braun about her, answered the phone, crinkled up her nose at me, and said, ‘Mr Flick will see you now.’

  ‘Sehr gut,’ said I, and shuffled with the hoary old briefcase into Flick’s inner sanctum.

  Flick sat behind his desk at the far end of the room. It was a long way from the door. I could have used a golf cart to get there. I resented his intimidating office ergonomics. I had to pass one of those glass-cased models of what looked like a housing estate to get to him. It was a little green valley with very neat, red-roofed houses abutting a network of roads and cul-de-sacs. The fake bitumen with miniature plastic cars of all the colours of the rainbow swirled about artistically. There was the perfect community in the stale air of the cabinet. For no logical reason I immediately thought of Julie Andrews pirouetting about on an Austrian hillside bearded with buttercups in The Sound of Music. I try to think of Julie Andrews as little as possible. I suddenly felt squeamish.