Stiff (19 page)

That left the cops, either the locals or the big boys downtown. And I couldn’t see them getting interested unless I turned on a pretty convincing production number. Dropping Charlene’s name might help crank up some muted enthusiasm. It might also result in a headline reading ‘Labor MP Aide in Ethnic Feud Death Probe’. And talking to the cops wouldn’t be much point without spilling the beans on Memo Gezen, which would be a breach of faith. Worse, it would be a surefire guarantee that I could kiss my prospects with Ayisha Celik goodbye forever.

And where did Memo Gezen fit into the picture anyway? This story of his about being stood over by Bayraktar tallied okay, but thereafter the tale had got decidedly unconvincing. The man himself was impossible to read, one minute impassive and compliant, the next wild-eyed, sparks erupting out the top of his head. And to top it all off, there was his connection with militant Kurdish politics.

The problem was I had no tangible intelligence to work with. What I had to do was persuade Greg Coates to change his mind and sling me Gezen’s immigration file. Maybe then I’d have some hope of working out what was going on. Another thought occurred to me. Maybe Gezen hadn’t disappeared of his own volition. With Sivan on the phone and Ayisha out in the street watching my mock heroics, could someone have slipped in the back way and spirited him out the back door? Take it easy, I told myself, there are enough far-fetched ideas flying around here already.

Halfway back to the office a steady shower began. I tucked my head under my jacket and took the short-cut up the back lane. I was only a few paces into the narrow bluestone-paved canyon of back fences when I heard the throaty rev of a souped-up engine somewhere behind me. In this area, a lowered chassis, fat tyres, and a basso profundo engine timbre is virtually mandatory among large sections of the male population. If I’d looked around every time someone dropped a notch and spread rubber, I’d have had a twisted vertebrae before you could say fuel-injected overhead cam.

But when I heard the crunch of the sump hitting the kerb immediately behind me, I swung around automatically. A turquoise flash of chrome and duco was roaring towards me, its windscreen a rain-streaked blur. I turned on my heels and took off as fast as my legs would carry me.

The lane opened into a side street a hundred metres away, an impossible distance. On either side were the back gates of shops and houses, all of them closed. Leading with my shoulder I threw myself against the first I came to, a teetering dunny door of a thing. It was more solid that it looked. Bouncing off, I felt my feet slither out from underneath me and came down hard on the weathered bluestone cobbles. I scrambled to my knees and found myself staring between my legs at the oncoming grille, reading off the digits of Bayraktar’s number plate, the numbers closing fast.

Across the lane I could see Ciccio’s pile of empty Bisleri bottles through the gap where the sheet-metal halves of his back gate were held together by a sagging coil of heavy-duty chain. Catapulting across the Falcon’s path, I smashed my head into the gap, hoping to Christ I could force it wider. I felt the whip of steel links against my neck and heard the hinges scream.

Bottles rose to meet me, an avalanche of empties skidding across the wet concrete into the yard. A smear of blue streaked past at the edge of my vision. Then one of the bottles was in my hand and I was back in the lane watching it tumbling end over end, it’s slow-motion trajectory ending in a milky wash of white as it shattered the Falcon’s rear window. The sound of breaking glass came back down the lane towards me, mingled with the rapidly fading screech of tyres as the car disappeared.

My heart pumped hard and fast, fed by the jitter of adrenalin coursing through my veins. This was getting beyond a joke. Back down the lane my flattened pack of Winfields was demonstration of the driver’s murderous intent. Don’t you just hate it when somebody tries to kill you and you don’t know who or why?

Ciccio had come to his back door, wiping his hands, the old card players behind him, craning for a view. I brushed past them, my voice rasping in my ears. ‘Corretto.’ I needed a drink and pronto.

Ciccio fished around under the bar and came up with a bottle of grappa. He tipped a hefty measure into a strong black coffee and watched me down it in one. It was nearly enough to stop my hand shaking. But not quite. I took the second and third slugs neat.

‘Fucka idiots,’ he said. ‘Orta be a law.’

That was it. Things were getting far too hairy to be tolerated any longer. This sort of thing was well beyond the requirements of my job description. If you wanted a meeting stacked or a booth-by-booth breakdown of voting trends with emphasis on the flow of preferences, I was your man. Needed your how-to-vote cards printed cheap? See me. But being a homicide victim? I didn’t have the training.

I took a last shot of grappa, punched a fresh packet of fags out of Ciccio’s vending machine and ordered my rubbery legs out the door and around the corner to the cop shop. By the time I got there, my hands had stopped shaking enough to prise the cellophane off the cigarettes. ‘Someone just tried to kill me,’ I said.

The uniformed walloper behind the counter was an athletic-looking lug in his late twenties with the full-page crossword in
People
open in front of him. He looked up like he resented the intrusion. ‘That so, sir?’ he said, his eyes taking a long slow cruise over my three-day growth, past my skewiff tie to the damp patches the puddles in Ciccio’s yard had left on my pants.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘First they broke into my house, then they tried to run me over.’ The grappa seemed to have finally settled my nerves. I managed one of the smokes out of the pack and inserted it between my lips.

‘And who would this be you are referring to, sir?’ Next he’d be saying ‘’ello, ’ello, ’ello’.

‘That’s what I want you to find out,’ I said.

He took a pen out of his shirt pocket and clicked it emphatically. ‘Your name?’

I was thinking about the rego number of the Falcon. The image kept fluctuating in and out of focus. Something, something, eight six five. I must have moved my lips. The cigarette fell to the floor. As I straightened from picking it up, the copper leaned right across the counter, following my progress, wrinkling his nose.

‘Have you had a drink at all today, sir?’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well yes, but…’ I couldn’t quite find the matches. ‘You wouldn’t have a light, would you?’

The copper gave me a facetious look and squared off the edges of a little pop-up card on the counter that read Thank You for Not Smoking. Why don’t they ever just say No Smoking? I patted myself down and felt a lump in my inside jacket pocket, a trafficable quantity of a prohibited substance. The idea of this visit, I concluded, had been a deeply flawed conception.

Talk about making a bad impression. I had got myself so far behind the eight ball that the only way I’d ever convince this guy of anything would be to tell him the whole story. Even then I couldn’t see him believing me, let alone taking any useful action. An unknown assailant, no apparent motive, no injuries, no witnesses, the complainant some half-pissed bozo with a pocket load of wacky weed. I turned on my heels and strode out the door. From now on I would rely on my own ingenuity. It wasn’t much to be going on with. I started by botting a light from a passer-by.

Trish had locked the office and stuck a Back in Five Minutes card inside the door. I locked the door behind me, left the card in place and dialled Greg Coates’ number. ‘Couldn’t you stretch a point?’ I wheedled. ‘Just one little file. Another Turk, name of Memo Gezen.’

‘Jesus, not again?’ he said. ‘Unless it’s official, I can’t help, at least for the time being. I’ve stuck my neck out for you far enough for one day. Beside which, if I was you I’d be more interested in what a certain Italian of our mutual acquaintance is up to.’

‘Agnelli? What’s he got to do with it?’

‘Get off the grass, mate. I’ve been applying the blowtorch to some friends of mine at the state office, and very tightlipped they were too. All this ringing around Agnelli’s doing, he’s not peddling gossip. He’s lining up support for a career move.’

Somehow this did not surprise me. A lot of lawyers fancy themselves as legislators and Agnelli had all the required qualities—vanity, ambition and untrustworthiness. It had only been a matter of time before his parliamentary aspirations surfaced. ‘Yeah? So which seat is he after?’ I couldn’t see Agnelli contesting anything marginal.

‘This is where my sources got very circumspect. But if I were you I’d try imagining him in a frock and sensible shoes.’ This had to be bullshit. No way was Agnelli dumb enough to make a play for Charlene’s seat. No way would the faction allow a popular member to get dumped in favour of a sleazebag like Agnelli. I pleaded for the names of Coates’ sources at state headquarters, but got no more out of him. I accused him of having me on, sticking it up me for the business with the Bayraktar file. By the time he hung up I was convinced he was serious.

And the truth or otherwise of what he was saying was not the only issue. Speculation of this sort had a tendency to take on a life of its own. And as Agnelli himself pointed out, some sections of the press would only be too happy to jump on the bandwagon. Let alone the idea that one of her most senior staff members was stabbing her in the back. If I didn’t nip this little furphy in the bud toot sweet, it would be all over town before you could say knife in the back.

It took me half an hour, but I finally got through to Agnelli. All it would take for him to put Coates’ gossip to bed was a simple denial. That, and an oath on his mother’s soul. ‘Something urgent has come up. We need to talk.’

‘I’m in a meeting right now.’ Other voices eddied around in the background. Agnelli put his hand over the receiver and said something. When he took it away the noise had stopped. ‘I’ll come in,’ I said. ‘Ten minutes is all I’ll need.’ I wanted to be looking at Agnelli’s face when he talked to me. After we’d cleared the air on his plans for the future, we could move on to the legal issues thrown up by Memo Gezen’s confession. ‘I can be there in half an hour.’

‘No.’ Agnelli all but jumped down the phone. He immediately back-pedalled, softening his tone. ‘I’ll call you back, okay?’ Click. The prick hung up in my ear.

Well, fuck you, pal, I thought. I dialled the House again, asked for Charlene and got put through to the party room. She was in the chamber, someone told me, the final reading of the Insurance Bill. The information came as a relief. The impulse to call Charlene with uncorroborated gossip that one of her most trusted lieutenants was planning to do a Macbeth smacked of lack of judgment. Sitting in front of me on the desk was Ennio Picone’s phone message slip. I decided to activate the nonna network.

‘Maestro,’ I cried. ‘Many apologies for not calling earlier.’ I took my time, confirmed Charlene’s appearance at the Carboni Club dinner dance, made the right noises as the old man went on and on about the catering arrangements. Finally I popped the question.

‘Angelo Agnelli,’ I said. ‘He’s got terrible manners, I know, but Charlene finds him useful. Only I think he might be looking around for a new job. Have you heard anything?’ Maestro Picone shrugged audibly.

‘Old Mrs Agnelli senior, you wouldn’t consider having a quiet word with her for me, would you? See what you can find out.’

If Agnelli’s grandmother didn’t know what he was up to, Picone would work his way through the family tree until he found someone who did. Right up his autostrada, this sort of thing, keep him happy for days. Naturally he’d want something in return. I’d deal with that when the need arose. He promised to call back as soon as he had news.

While I’d been talking to Picone, Trish had come back, bringing with her a pile of photocopies, the agenda papers for that night’s branch meeting. Most of the time chairing branch meetings was a tedious chore, a quasi-official part of my job. But it was also a way of maintaining close links with the local rank and file support. So if Agnelli was planning a challenge, he would sooner or later have to make his intentions known among the natives. Which was something he could hardly do without me finding out.

Trish dumped the papers across my desk in a row of neat but still uncollated piles. An agenda, minutes of the previous meeting, a sheet of draft resolutions, a discussion paper on federal resource development policy. Such was the ammunition with which the membership waged its eternal war against the pragmatism of those it sent to parliament. A ceaseless and often hopeless battle perhaps, but a politics of persuasion, not of muscle-flexing and murder attempts. Not like some places I could think of. Sydney, for example. Or a lane off Sydney Road.

My thoughts must have shown on my face. I looked up to find Trish squinting across the desk at me. ‘You look a bit like a bloke who used to work here,’ she said. ‘He was in more often than you, and wasn’t as much of a derelict.’ She was right. I was beginning to resemble one of our more unwanted customers. I guiltily stubbed out my cigarette on the inside of the wastepaper basket. ‘He didn’t try to burn the place down, either,’ she jibed. ‘Better smarten up, Murray. Your four o’clock appointment’s here.’

Gavin Mullane was something indescribably minor in the Miscellaneous Workers. His father had been the area’s Lower House MP for longer than anyone could remember, and it had long been agreed within the faction that when he eventually fell backward on his parliamentary superannuation Sonny Jim would succeed him. I made myself respectable and went out to greet him, ‘Great to see you, Gavin,’ I said and took the poor bastard next door for a coffee. Behind his back as we passed Trish made a repetitive stroking gesture, thumb and forefinger touching at the tips.

Young Gavin had grown up in the shadow of his father, an experience that had left him damp. The family tendency was to thin lips, Presbyterian noses, and the kind of unflinching worthiness that could put a doorknob into a coma. The fact that Junior still lived with his parents, though well into his thirties, was perfectly understandable. I could see them sitting around together, reading Hansard and listening to the wireless. Gavin let me buy the coffee without offering to pay.