Stiff (18 page)

I quickly stuffed the package in my pocket. The presence in my home of illegal substances was not something I wished to reveal to this tattooed yoik. ‘I suppose I’d better call the cops, report the break-in.’

‘Waste of time,’ Ant grunted. It was clear he preferred as little contact as possible with the sherlocks.

I figured he was probably right. We’d have been sitting around for a good hour waiting for the uniforms to arrive with their clipboards so they could fill in a triplicate incident report for the non-existent insurance claim. I’d give them the dope and the digits I’d memorised from the Falcon number plate. Six months later, assuming the car wasn’t stolen, they’d ring me up and want me to take a day off work and hang around the magistrate’s court so some whacker with pinprick eyes could spend six months having his criminal skills honed at the taxpayers’ expense. No thanks. I got the ladder.

Ant disappeared into the ceiling, bloody towel in one hand, torch in the other. I rolled one of Ayisha’s smokes and stood in the gloom of the hallway, staring up at the trapdoor and hoping to Christ I was doing the right thing, thinking I should have got references.

When he came down his lip was curled back in a sneer, whether from the swelling or with contempt I couldn’t tell. ‘Rooted,’ he snorted. ‘Totally fucked. Battens are stuffed. Iron had the dick years ago. You need rewiring too.’

‘How much?’

‘Just the roof ? Sixteen hundred.’

I had no idea if it was high, low or off the register. I thought long and hard for about ten seconds. Unless I acted soon the placed would be down around my ears by the time I got a proper quote. Aside from which, it seemed a bit churlish to quibble with a man who had a notch down the middle of his face in the shape of my back door. ‘How soon can you start?’

Ant shoved a fuse into place and the lights came on. ‘Soon as this weather stops.’

‘Discount for cash?’

‘Sixteen hundred is cash. Two men for two days plus materials.’

‘Insurance? What if you fall and break your neck?’

‘Drag me into the street and leave me to die.’

‘My pleasure.’ We shook on it and drove to a materials yard. Ant told them what he needed and we organised delivery for the next morning. They even accepted my cheque. I was overdrawn, but they weren’t to know that. Things seemed finally to be moving in the right direction.

On the way back to the office it occurred to me that the intruder might return to look for his drugs, maybe when Red was in the house. I didn’t want that happening, but I could hardly sit around the house waiting for him to turn up. A better idea would be to get to him first, give him back his dope and tell him to fuck off in no uncertain terms. Of course I couldn’t do something like that myself. But the man who could was sitting right beside me.

First things first, though. Ant needed new teeth and I needed to figure out who owned the lairy blue Falcon. I dropped Ant at a tram stop in Sydney Road with twenty dollars and instructions on how to find the dental college. You could get free dentures there if you didn’t mind being used for practice by the students. I didn’t mention the students.

A year or so before, Trish had a boyfriend who worked at motor registration. He’d come to our Christmas party, got legless and barfed taramasalata all over my desk. The two of them had a big break-up soon after, not related. When I got back to the office Trish was at lunch. Lover boy’s number was still in her teledex.

‘I’m calling from the minister’s office,’ I said. It was half true. ‘Trish suggested I call.’ It was he who had done the dirty, so I figured mention of Trish might trigger some sense of obligation. ‘I don’t know if this is your department, but she said that if anyone could head me in the right direction you could. The thing is, Mrs Wills was doing some shopping over the weekend and somebody dinged her car. Stove the tail-light right in, snapped off part of the trim. Pissed off without as much as a howdy-do. Luckily somebody witnessed the whole thing, took down the offender’s make and model and half the rego number and stuck it under the windscreen. Naturally Charlene doesn’t want to make a federal case out of it, but I wondered if there’s any way to track down the owner?’

‘You need the Search Section.’

Lothario had better things to do than favours for half-forgotten workmates of old girlfriends. ‘Bring some ID, fill in an application and pay a search fee. You’ll be notified in about a week.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Not the powerless ‘oh’ of an individual faced with a remote and uncaring bureaucracy. The ‘oh’ of a mover and shaker realising he is talking to a turkey. There was an almost imperceptible change in attitude, a minuscule drop in barometric pressure. ‘It was a Falcon 500,’ I said. ‘Aqua blue, mid-seventies model. Something, something, something, eight six five.’

‘I’ll have to go downstairs,’ he said, just so I’d know how much trouble was involved. ‘I’ll call you back.’

I hung up, then dialled again, the Turkish Welfare League.

‘No, Ayisha has not come back.’ Sivan didn’t sound particularly concerned. ‘I thought maybe she was with you,’ he added slyly.

‘The client she was with, any sign of him?’

‘Client?’

‘The curly headed guy in Ayisha’s office about two hours ago.’

‘Memo Gezen?’ Sivan hadn’t seen him, but he knew who he was. ‘Leading anti-fascist fighter. Tireless worker for the PKK.’

PKK? I’d seen those initials before on posters along Sydney Road. Clenched fists, upraised Kalashnikovs, armed revolution, Kurdish nationalistic guerrillas. The full kit and caboodle. ‘No, this guy’s a cleaner.’

‘Very clever disguise, eh? Did you know that since the coup d’etat more than eighty thousand people have been imprisoned? It is the policy of the regime that…’

Many migrants remained politically active in the affairs of their native land. There was nothing unusual in that. Lots of Italians were members, office bearers even, in the Italian Communist Party. The El Salvadorean who repaired our office photocopier was reputed to be on the central committee of the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front. And now that I knew of Memo Gezen’s political dimension a whole lot of pieces fell into place.

I cut into Sivan’s flow of baleful statistics. ‘Look, get Ayisha to call me as soon as she gets back in, will you? And one other thing. Look out the window and tell me if there’s a BMW parked across the street.’

‘I can’t see one. Why?’

‘Nothing. Get Ayisha to call me, okay?’

‘Sure, Murray. I think you like her, huh?’

I’d liked her a lot more before I’d begun to feel like I was having my string jerked. According to one of the yellow slips on my desk Greg Coates had called while I was out. There was a tick in the Urgent box. Ayisha’s tobacco was down to powdery dregs. I rolled as I dialled, one-handed, back to the old form.

‘You prick,’ Coates said. ‘Dropped me right into it, you did.’ He was as pissed off as I’d ever heard him.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘That Turk of yours, Bayraktar. He’s hot property. I did like I promised and called up his file this morning. Access was still denied and five minutes later two of our security blokes lobbed on my doorstep wanting to know what my interest was. Took quite a bit of tap dancing before I managed to convince them it was a clerical error. Very keen to interview the man, they were. I think you’d better tell me why you’re so interested.’

Coates would have to wait until the waters cleared. Anything I told him would be around the traps like a dose of the crabs before the day was done. Which was only fair enough. I’d do the same for him. ‘Nothing to tell. The bloke’s name appeared in a story in Monday’s
Sun
linking Charlene to a potential industrial conflict. I was just following up.’

‘You know where to find him?’

‘I’ve got a fair idea. What do they want him for?’

‘Everything short of buggering his dog, from what I could tell. He’s got a record as long as your arm in West Germany. Grievous bodily harm, drugs, you name it. The krauts were compelled to show him the door. Then he slipped in under our net. Came in as a temporary resident, supposedly working for some cultural exchange mob called the Anatolia Club. Stated occupation, ceramic artist, believe it or not. He throws things all right, but they’re not pots. So, if you know where he is…’

‘Try Fawkner Cemetery,’ I said.

‘He’s dead?’

‘I understand they’re very reluctant to bury you there otherwise. Tell your security blokes they can read all about it in Monday’s edition of the
Sun
. Cause of death was reported as a heart attack.’

This put Coates back in good humour. He’d be getting mileage out of this one for years. Nothing like a bit of mutual pocket-pissing to keep the fences mended. ‘Look,’ I said, while he was so cheery, ‘there’s this other Turkish bloke I was wondering about.’

‘No way,’ he said. ‘Not until things quieten down. I’ve got security clearance to maintain here, pal. And what about a bit of quid pro quo. You never finished telling me about Agnelli’s big scoop on the election date.’

‘Agnelli’s sworn me to secrecy,’ I said. It always pays to over-emphasise the value of your information, I find. ‘Word from the Cabinet room is it’ll be a snap job. Pre-Christmas. Second week in December probably.’

‘Shit, that’s barely ten weeks away. Sounds like crap to me.’

‘I’m just telling you what he said. And from what you told me about the punishing he’s giving the phones, I’m not the only one he’s telling.’

‘He could be making a fool of himself on this one. I know for a fact that the state admin committee is up to its neck in a substantial rejig of campaign structures. It wouldn’t be too smart going to the polls with half the party machine in dry-dock. Still, there might be something in it. Worth pulling in a couple of calls to check out.’

‘Let me know how you go.’

‘Don’t forget to apologise for me tonight at the branch meeting.’

The idea that Agnelli might be wrong about the imminence of an election wasn’t surprising. Everything I had learned since yesterday afternoon about the alleged Lollicato–Pacific Pastoral connection cast serious doubt on his credibility.

Jesus, though, this stuff about Bayraktar was interesting. It certainly backed up Gezen’s tale of extortion, as well as the police suspicion of thievery in Number 3 chiller. This connection with the Anatolia Club was a major worry. An organised group of paramilitary right-wingers, possibly connected to a foreign government, running a political and criminal standover operation out of a well-secured building in the middle of a Melbourne suburb. And I’d just blown them a very public raspberry.

The phone rang. It was Loverboy at Motor Rego. ‘Got a pen?’ he said. ‘It’s a bit of a mouthful. I’ll spell it for you. Car’s registered to an Ekrem Bayraktar. B-A-Y-R-A-K-T-A-R. Get that?’

No I didn’t. I didn’t get it at all.

Bayraktar was dead. I’d seen the photographs and stared down a pit at the silver handles on his Martinelli rosewood deluxe. So who the hell had been thumping down my hallway leaving a trail of cannabis behind in their wake? Was there some essential internal logic at work here that I was failing to notice?

The disordered mass of files and paperwork the previous night’s intruder had dumped on the office floor lay in an untidy sprawl across my desk, half-hidden under a yellow confetti of phone message slips. On top of everything else that was happening, half the known universe seemed to want to talk to me. I began systematically sorting through the mess, hoping that some superficial restoration of order might help me make sense of what was going through my mind.

Some of the calls were from local party branch members. No doubt they would be wanting to know if there was anything interesting enough on the agenda of that night’s meeting to tempt them out for the evening. Others would want their apologies noted. Gavin Mullane, son of the local Lower House MP, had rung to confirm a four o’clock appointment I had made with him the previous week. Roofing companies were now returning my calls, proving the axiom that it never rains. Old Maestro Picone had left word that he wanted to talk about Charlene’s celebrity appearance at the Carboni Club dinner dance. Mundane as it was, this housekeeping was beginning to look pretty alluring compared with the dramas on offer elsewhere in the electorate.

By the time I had finished working my way through the jumble of paperwork, I knew for sure I no longer had the Pacific Pastoral file. The previous afternoon it had been sitting on top of my in-tray. Trish hadn’t seen it either, or so she signalled as she sat chatting on the phone with her mother.

I called Agnelli. He was at lunch, so I flashed Trish five fingers and walked down to the shops, figuring a bite to eat and the taste of smoke in my mouth might help the mental processes along. On a bench in the market arcade I ate a bucket of chips and broached a new packet of Winfield, trying to figure out the connection between a dead man’s car, the botched burglary of my home and a missing file. Nothing fitted. It simply didn’t make sense.

Apart from the question of why anyone interested in Pacific Pastoral would also steal a petty-cash tin and draw a penis on the bathroom mirror in felt-tipped pen, the file itself was useless. All it contained was the list of names from Bayraktar’s shift—names on record out at the Coolaroo plant—a few random jottings, and a handwritten draft of the introductory paragraph of my report for the MACWAM. Stealing that made no sense at all. The file, I decided, had to be back at the office somewhere staring me in the face.

The Falcon presented two possibilities. One was unconvincing and the other downright scary. Either it had been stolen and its use in the attempted burglary was sheer coincidence. Or Bayraktar’s mates at the Anatolia Club had it and I’d got myself stuck in the middle of some kind of internecine Turkish–Kurdish thing.

According to Coates, the Anatolia Club was on the file as Bayraktar’s sponsor, which meant the Immigration Department security boys must have already checked it out. So either the spooks were satisfied it had no connection with Bayraktar’s criminal activities or they were running their own agenda. Shit, what was I thinking? They hadn’t even known Bayraktar was dead. They were probably too busy framing little old Greek ladies on phony pension fraud charges to be any help to me.