Dragons at the Party (35 page)

Then he heard a shout and saw the Aboriginal boy stand up and point a finger at him. Dallas Pinjarri stood up beside the boy, opened his mouth and shouted something; but at that moment a train rumbled over the bridge high above their heads and the shout was lost in the rumble. Seville turned and ran back to the car.

IV

“How is he?” said Philip Norval.

“Bad, very bad,” said Hans Vanderberg. “The docs reckon he’ll never come out of it. He has terrible brain damage.”

“Damn!” said Norval. “The Americans should have taken him. They’re better at this sort of security than we are. They’re always hiding Russian defectors.”

“Timori isn’t a defector. The last thing he would want would be to go into hiding. The more publicity he got, the more he thought he could go back to Palucca.”

The Prime Minister and the Premier were in an office in the Exhibition Centre. With them were the PM’s chief political adviser, a young man named Godbold, and The Dutchman’s man, Ladbroke.
Other
aides and several Cabinet ministers, both Federal and State, were in the corridor outside. The ball in the huge hall was still going on, the music thumping the thin walls of the office like an orchestrated barrage of howitzers.

“Where’s Madame Timori?”

“I believe she’s gone back to Mr. Hickbed’s,” said Godbold. He was a plump, balding young man, his middle-aged sleek complacency already there in his paunch and his pink jowls. Some day, one guessed, when he was middle-aged, he would be Prime Minister with his own political adviser. But he would be far shrewder than his present master and would listen only to the advice he wished to hear. “I think now is the time, Prime Minister, to stay well away.”

“Oh, I was going to,” said Norval hastily, “I can’t go near them—not now. Are you going to visit them, Hans?”

“Me?” He would as soon have visited the Opposition Leader in hospital. The Opposition Leader was somewhere out in the hall, hale and hearty and happy, for this night anyway, that he was not in power. “I wouldn’t touch them with forty poles, not a foot of them.”

Norval blinked, but got the point of this garbled venom. “What are we going to do if he finishes up as a vegetable?”

“Boil him,” said The Dutchman.

There was a knock at the door and an aide looked in. “Prime Minister, the American ambassador would like a word with you.”

“Show him in,” said Norval, glad of any interruption.

“Oh, and General Paturi is still here—he came back,” the aide added in a lower voice.

Norval looked at Vanderberg. “He’s your guest.”

“Tell him to wait,” said The Dutchman to the PM’s aide and sat down in the chair behind the desk. This was the Centre manager’s office and the Premier, smartly and suddenly, had established who was in charge here. “Ask Mr. Cornelius to come in.”

The American ambassador came in, a very tall Texan who looked more like a Boston banker.
Except
for his face: that was Grant Wood gothic, thin and bony and weather-creased, with silver hair along the sides of his bald head. He had good-humoured eyes and a slow Texas drawl that, Norval had discovered to his fumbling embarrassment, could recite Roman poets and passages from European philosophers the PM had never heard of.

Cornelius looked at the Premier, then at Norval. “Can I speak freely?”

Norval looked at Vanderberg, who just grinned and nodded. Norval said, “Of course, Carl. Go ahead.”

“I’ve already spoken to the Secretary of State. He’s talking to the President and he’ll phone me back.”

“We want you to take Timori off our hands,” said Vanderberg, seeing that Norval was prepared to say nothing.

“Is that what you want?” Cornelius looked at Norval, giving him a chance to say something.

The PM looked at his adviser; eyes were swivelling like the numbers in a fruit-machine. “That would be best, wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, indubitably,” said Godbold, who could write the most pompous speeches.

The ambassador nodded, but looked dubious. “You know how they feel in Washington. This is an election year. The President isn’t running again, but none of the Republican candidates would want Mr. Timori around their necks.”

“What about the Democrats?” said Vanderberg.

Cornelius smiled. “Do you ever worry about how your opponents feel?”

“Only when they’re hanging by their thumbs,” said The Dutchman and grinned at Norval. He and the ambassador understood each other, though their meetings rarely lasted more than fifteen minutes and then only on rare occasions. They had nothing in common except respect for each other’s political ability.

“I don’t think the President will welcome another request that we give the Timoris asylum.”

“Well, that’s exactly what we’re requesting,” said Norval, trying for some determination.

“
Unless he dies,” said Vanderberg. “Which is on the cards.”

“That still leaves Madame Timori,” said Godbold.

The others, all older men, looked at him pityingly. “Women are never a problem,” said The Dutchman. “They can always be got rid of.”

“She has a loud voice,” said Godbold, persisting.

“Women should be seen and not heard, so my father said.”

“I thought it was Sophocles,” said the ambassador, “but I could be mistaken. You’re a fount of wisdom, Hans. But please don’t quote your opinion on women to my wife.”

“We don’t want either of the Timoris,” said Norval. “Carl, try and convince Washington we’re not a country for exiles.”

“I thought that’s what you’re celebrating tomorrow? Weren’t all your convicts exiles?”

“You don’t have to mention that to Washington,” said Vanderberg. “Your President doesn’t know much about history—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Premier,” said the ambassador with tall dignity, “he
is
my President.”

Vanderberg was unembarrassed by his gaffe. “Well, let’s say he doesn’t know much about
our
history. But you’ve got to take the Timoris off our hands. Get the CIA to look after them. America is full of ex-Presidents—another one won’t be noticed.”

“The point is,” said Norval, “you were the ones who bolstered him up for so long. You kept him in power far longer than he deserved to be.”

“I thought he was a friend of yours?” said Cornelius mildly.

“Only a personal friend,” said Norval, and for once missed a joke.

“What the Prime Minister means,” said Godbold with all a young man’s superiority of intellect and education. He had three degrees and the PM had none, “is that Australia and Palucca were never close politically.”

“You’ve been close financially. A lot of Australian investment has gone in there. Doesn’t that give you a political interest? Your Mr. Hickbed has more money invested in Palucca than any American
corporation.”

“Just let me say this—” said Norval, using the politician’s favourite phrase. He bobbed his head for emphasis, as politicians always did. Ladbroke, sitting outside all this, felt he was looking at another television interview by any one of a hundred clones. He looked at his own master, who would never be anything but himself.

“Just let me say this—Hickbed isn’t answerable to the Australian public as I am,” said Norval, dumping another friend. He felt terrible about it, because he was basically a loyal man; but politics was not about loyalty. That was only for the trade unionists in cloth caps and they were long gone. “We’re putting Timori on a plane as soon as the doctors say he’s well enough to travel.”

“Where will you send him?” asked the ambassador.

Norval looked at Godbold, who said, “Chad has said they will take him. They’ve heard he’s worth three billion dollars.”

“Not in Chad he wouldn’t be.” Cornelius shook his head. “You are trying to embarrass Washington.”

“Yes,” said Vanderberg when he saw that Norval was once again going to say nothing. “It’s called being allies.”

Cornelius sighed and shrugged. Sometimes he thought these Australians should have been at the Alamo; they’d have talked Santa Anna into going back to Mexico and would have then sold the fort to Travis and Crockett. “Okay, I’ll do my best. But the President is not going to like it.”

“He’s still better off than Timori,” said Vanderberg.

“Have you caught the man who did it? Seville?”

Vanderberg looked at Ladbroke, who said, “Not yet. They’ve got a watch on the airport and all main railway stations and bus stations. He can’t get far.”

No, except lose himself in this whole vast continent.
“Will he try again when he finds out Timori isn’t dead?”

“Ah,” said Vanderberg, “that’ll be Washington’s worry, won’t it?”

The
ambassador gave him a cold smile, said his good nights and left. He was replaced immediately by General Paturi, who had sped back from his Consulate. His face was as shiny as his medals; it was difficult to tell whether he was afraid or angry. “Let him die!”

“Eh?” said those in the room.

“Let him die! It will solve all our problems, yours as well as ours. Order your doctors to let him die. The woman, too!”

“He’s drunk,” said Vanderberg in a hoarse whisper to Ladbroke.

“He’s a Muslim. He doesn’t drink.”

“You can’t be serious, General?” said Norval.

All the fire seemed suddenly to run out of Paturi. He would not have been a general for a protracted war: a quick victory, surrender from one side or the other, everything over. “No, I suppose not. But it would solve everything, wouldn’t it? What happens now? I heard the report from the hospital. They will be putting him on some sort of life support system.”

“Not yet,” said Ladbroke. “He’s still on the operating table. He may yet die.”

“Our doctors are as good as any in the world,” said Godbold, who knew how many doctors contributed to the Party’s funds. “They may yet save him.”

“Why?” said Paturi.

“I’m going back to the ball,” said Vanderberg, rising; the voters had been left alone long enough. “There’s nothing we can do tonight.”

“I think I’ll go home,” said Norval. “Would you go and collect my wife, Roger?”

Godbold left the room and Vanderberg nodded for Ladbroke to escort General Paturi outside. That left the two politicians alone.

Vanderberg said, “You’ve got to keep up the pressure, Phil. If he doesn’t die and we’re stuck with him, I’m not going to have him here in New South Wales. I’m telling you, so believe me. Get the Yanks to take him, just put him on a plane and tell the pilot to fly across the Pacific until he hits America. Then when he’s run out of fuel, he can ask permission to land. The hijackets do it all the time.”

Hijackets?
“I can’t tell an RAAF pilot to do that! I can’t tell Qantas, either—” Then Norval turned plaintive: “Maybe we can move the Timoris somewhere else. Tasmania?”

“Good idea,” said the Premier of New South Wales. Tasmania, the island State, was always complaining about being left off the national map; this would put it back on the map. “You can put him down there in one of those bloody wildernesses they’re always trying to save. Anywhere but here in NSW. I’ve got enough bloody trouble with my police trying to find out if the Mafia has moved in here.”

“Has it?”

The Dutchman grinned. “I wouldn’t cut you in on the graft, even if they had. Get rid of the Timoris, Phil. That’s all you’ve got to do. Get rid of them, any bloody way you can.”

Five minutes later Norval and Anita were riding home to Kirribilli House in their government Rolls-Royce. Norval’s predecessor had been content with a white Ford LTD, often riding in the front with the driver; the natives always rode in the front seat of taxis, so why should the PM be any more undemocratic? It was Anita who had insisted on the Rolls-Royce and Norval, who had had one of his own for ten years, had made no argument. There had been snide comments in the press, especially Lefty rags, as Anita called them, like the
National Times
and
The Age
, but the general public, surprisingly, had tolerated the extravagance. Usually they preferred their political masters to travel in donkey-carts, but, as one voter said, that was too obvious in Norval’s case.

Anita pressed a button and the glass partition between them and the chauffeur slid up. “So what are you going to do?”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“You never want to think about anything. If you don’t have your teleprompter, you shut your mind.”

“I mean I don’t want to think about it
tonight
. Lay off, Anita!”

She looked at him sympathetically, a sediment of love stirring. “Phil, I’m on your side—I always have been. But you’ve got to make up your mind. You’ve got to start acting like a bastard—like old Hans Vanderberg. Kick out the Timoris.”

“
I can’t—not now. That would be callous.”

“Not
now
—when he’s well enough to be moved. Stand up to Washington—tell them they’ve got to take him. They’ve had Marcos and those other ones in the past, Batista and Somoza—another one won’t make any difference—” She knew more about world politics than he did; she had more time to read the newspapers. She felt for his hand, pressed it. “It’ll win you votes, I promise.”

“What about Russell? He’s in this with them.”

“Stuff Russell. Send him with them.”

V

When Malone got back from the hospital Zanuch had been waiting for him in the Hickbed house. “Where have you been? You got here five minutes ago.”

“I’ve been checking with Sergeants Nagler and Kenthurst, sir. They’ve been giving me a run-down on what’s been happening here.”

“Didn’t they tell you I was here?”

Say no and that would put Nagler in the muck; say yes and he would be in it himself. “I think we’re all concerned, sir, that Seville got away from us again. He was in that house across the street. I gather the old people who live there are pretty upset.”

“I know that!” Zanuch was in a bad mood; his evening had been ruined. “You should have had that house staked out. It was an obvious place for him.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Goodyear refused us permission to have anyone inside the house. They don’t like either Mr. Hickbed or the Timoris—they’re pretty snobby. They’ve changed their minds now—after the event.”