Stiff (3 page)

Just after eleven Agnelli rang.

Angelo Agnelli was Charlene Wills’ ministerial adviser at Industry. The Industry Ministry was where government policy rubbed noses with the big end of town. The nose was Ange’s weapon of choice and Charlene paid him a princely sum to implement initiatives, expedite the legislative process, keep the mandarins on their toes, and God knew what else. Recently, he’d been making the effort to find the time to look over my shoulder and make tut-tutting noises.

That day, the big bee in Agnelli’s bonnet was Joe Lollicato. A couple of years previously, Joe had been elected to one of the municipal councils in the area. And in the last round of local government polls he’d been returned with a handsomely increased majority. To Agnelli, who’d never been elected to anything in his life, this sort of personal popularity was both a personal affront and evidence that Lollicato was positioning himself to seize the party’s endorsement away from Charlene.

‘Forget Lolly,’ I told him. ‘Parliamentary ambitions are a fact of life around here. Lolly wouldn’t be the first person in local government to start thinking he’s on the up-escalator to Canberra. But if Lollicato wants a stab at Charlene’s job, and that’s a debatable point, he’ll have to wait until she decides to go, then take his chances along with everyone else. If he tries anything sooner, he’ll find out that a stretch at a suburban town hall, a few half-baked factional connections, and an Italian surname won’t be enough to convince a pre-selection panel to dump a sitting member. A minister at that.’

Agnelli refused to be mollified. ‘There are plenty of people in the party who’d like to see Charlene taken down a peg or two. Lollicato’s a sneaky little prick. It wouldn’t pay to underestimate his deviousness. He’s got more friends than you’d suspect.’

These were facts that could not be disputed, but they were hardly very specific, just the usual Labor Party love talk. The real reason for Agnelli’s antagonism towards Lollicato, I suspect, was cultural. I thought this because sensitivity to ethnic cultural nuances was an essential aspect of my professional capabilities.

Charlene’s electorate, the whole area in fact, had Italians coming out of its armpits. Fully a quarter of all the Italians in the entire country lived in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, not counting their second and third generation descendants. This was apart from the Greeks, Lebanese, Maltese, Macedonians, Turks and Maoris. All things considered, Melbourne Upper should have been called Wogolopolis. A high level of skill in multiculturalism was, therefore, an indispensable aspect of my job.

It was, I believed, a requirement I fulfilled as reasonably as could be expected for the descendant of three generations of Irish publicans. I had been handing out how-to-vote cards in Italian since I was a teenager. I knew better than to confuse the Federazione Italiana Lavoratori e Famigli with the Comitato d’Assistenza Italiano. I knew who could be relied on at the vegetable market to buy a book of raffle tickets at election time, and whose brother-in-law was private secretary for the Christian Democrat mayor of San Benedetto del Tronto. And while I would have been the first to admit to having trouble picking a Guelph from a Ghibelline in a dappled olive grove in the Tuscan twilight, I could, to the extent required by profession, reasonably claim to know my tortellini from my tartufo. ‘This isn’t some sort of Italian crap, it is Ange?’ I said.

Agnelli was obsessed. ‘That little shit Lollicato is capable of doing any amount of damage if he thinks he can use it to his own advantage. You see the newspaper this morning?’

‘Minister in Pre-Selection Wrangle?’

‘Jesus, where was that?’ There was real panic in Agnelli’s voice.

‘Relax, Ange. You mean the dead guy at the meatworks in Coolaroo? I’ve been wondering about that. What’s the story?’

Agnelli’s voice took on a gossipy conspiratorial hiss. ‘What are doing for lunch?’

‘I was thinking of having a pie.’ I whispered back. ‘You reckon it’s safe?’

‘Be serious for a minute, can’t you, Murray? I’m trying to put something useful your way. Come into town.’

I swung my chair around. The amazing tattooed nuisance had his boots on my desk, right on top of the in-tray. ‘I dunno,’ I told Agnelli. ‘I’ve got a lot in front of me at the moment.’

‘I’ll buy.’ Agnelli’s salary was nearly double mine and this was his first gesture of generosity with anything but unsolicited advice. Clearly, something was going on.

‘Ministry or House?’

‘House. And since you’re coming in, can you do us a favour and give old Picone a lift. He’s having lunch with Charlene and I want to pick a bone with the old bugger first. Give him the two-dollar tour and bring him downstairs.’

I took my umbrella off the filing cabinet, turned off the two-bar radiator and gently moved Ant’s feet over to the out-tray.

‘Anyone calls,’ I said. ‘I’ll be out for the rest of the day.’

October was shaping up as the customary disappointment, dithering between erupting into spring or pissing down all the way to Christmas. For the second week in a row, the predicted break in the damp had failed to materialise and rumour had it that the smart money was out the back sawing gopher wood into cubits and collecting matched pairs of animals.

In the rare intervals between showers, masses of frigid air fleeing north from Tasmania or some similarly dismal polar region swept into town and did their best to give spring a bad name. An hour after Agnelli’s call I was copping the full brunt of one of these tornadoes as I trudged my way up the terrace of Parliament House.

Our glorious forebears, febrile with easy money and puffed up with Victorian self-aggrandisement, had built the House on a hill and modelled it on classical lines, all monumental portico and reiterated horizontal emphasis. The result was considered by some to be a commanding vista. Personally, with nothing to deflect the nut-numbing elements but a two-piece ninety-nine-dollar del Monaco special, and my pace slowed by the company of a wheezing geriatric, I found it all a trifle overstated. When Ennio Picone stopped for the third time for a bit of a breather. I grabbed his arm and all but frogmarched him up the last dozen steps and into the shelter of the foyer. Gentleman that he was, Picone took it for a courtesy. Gentleman that I was, I let him.

Ennio Picone was one of Charlene Wills’ prize constituents, an elegant seventy-seven-year-old with fine hands and a matinee moustache. At one time the leader of a dance band, he had spent thirty years tirelessly orchestrating the social life of the electorate’s Italians. He had played at their weddings. He had taught music to their children and grandchildren. And now that they were retired, he organised their leisure—for which their grown-up children were profoundly grateful.

Those of us who conducted Charlene’s affairs knew that we ignored this little old man’s ceaseless vitality at our peril. He warranted special attention. It was my job to see that he got it. I wondered what Agnelli wanted with him.

I walked Picone across the coat-of-arms inlaid in the foyer floor and led him into a spacious, high-ceilinged hall with an iceberg of white marble shaped like the young Queen Victoria embedded in the carpet. Leading off to one side was a corridor and a high double doorway. ‘Charlene will be with you as soon as possible, Maestro Picone,’ I said. ‘She’s a bit busy right now.’

I shouldered one of the doors open and casually displayed the interior of the parliamentary chamber. It was quite small, hardly more than twenty paces deep, but utterly fantastic, the plaster and gilt hallucination of an imagination overdosed on allegory. Not a surface in the entire room had escaped being moulded, embossed, inlaid, fluted, scalloped, gilded or engraved. Ant’s tattoos had nothing on this joint.

An arcade of ivory columns flanked the walls. Above, a squadron of bare-bosomed Amazons brandished symbolic artefacts—the Spear of Boadicea, the Laurels of Victory, the Sheathed Sword of Mercy, the Chain of—what, of Command? Unicorns capered down the wall, and eagles fluttered on high. Heraldic waffle-work of every description abounded unbound, cascading downwards to the rose of padded leather upon which the Honourable Members of the Legislative Council lounged like so many bull seals on a rocky headland.

Best of all, and this was even more than I could have hoped for, Charlene Wills herself was holding the floor.

Charlene was in her mid-fifties, at the height of her powers and, apparently, enjoying herself immensely. When the Cabinet posts had been dished out after the election, there had never been any doubt that Charlene would get a guernsey. For a start she had the factional support, but on top of that she was popular, visible and had a tone of voice that scared the living shit out of the boys in the caucus.

She was using it now, a relentless, piercing monotone capable of reducing even the most fractious party conference to numbed compliance. Her topic was obscure—some amendment to some paragraph of some sub-section of some Act, but she was giving it her usual all. You could tell straight off that she knew her stuff and would waste no opportunity to bore it right up the Opposition first chance she got. She was loyal, conscientious, devoted to her constituents, and I loved her like a mother, which was convenient as I no longer had one of my own. Her colostomy bag you couldn’t notice, even if you were one of the very few who knew about it.

Unfortunately I’d seen less and less of her in the previous two years. What with being a senior minister and Leader of the Government in the Upper House, she found it hard to make time for electorate matters and had been forced to leave me more or less to my own devices. It was getting so that I virtually had to fight my way through a phalanx of bureaucrats and ministerial advisers just to talk to her, apart from our regular fortnightly meetings. And she’d cancelled the last two of those.

Which reminded me of Agnelli. I allowed Picone a lingering moment to fully register the sumptuousness of his surroundings, and Charlene’s central place in them, then tapped him on the shoulder. ‘This way, Maestro.’ I made a courtly sweep of the arm. Ostentation is never wasted on Italians.

Parliament, we both knew, was a pantomime. Real power was exercised across the road in the Department of Premier and Cabinet, in Management and Budget, in offices with whiteboards and synthetic carpet tiles. But you could hardly impress a constituent with an open plan office and an ergonomic typist’s chair, however artfully constructed.

I led Picone along the oak-panelled corridor and down a narrow staircase into a vaulted chamber of bluestone and exposed brick, the law’s subterranean forge. Charlene’s parliamentary office was a glassed-in alcove tucked under one of the supporting arches. Two desks took up most of it, each buried under piles of well-thumbed papers, sheaves of documents bound in manilla folders thick with registry notations. Shelves crowded with green-bound volumes of Hansard and glossy policy proclamations ran up the walls. What little space remained was occupied by a heavy leather chesterfield and a cheap glass-topped coffee table littered with government brochures and the day’s newspapers.

A tinny speaker on the wall was broadcasting Charlene’s oration from the chamber above. Underneath it, sitting on a corner of one of the desks like he could think of nothing more deserving of his time than greeting the Minister’s visitors, was Angelo Agnelli. It was novel to see him sitting somewhere other than on a fence.

Ange was pushing forty just a tad harder than it was pushing back. He had a full head of photogenic black hair, a chubby boyish face skin-deep in conviviality, a manner calculated to make people feel that he had their number. Angelo Agnelli collected numbers. Sometimes they even added up.

As we entered he tugged at the cuffs of his expensive shirt and reached up to turn off the speaker. He shook hands with Picone and seated him on the chesterfield with the courtesy of a world-weary Venetian diplomat. Then he took a copy of that morning’s
Coburg Courier
out of his jacket pocket and dropped it onto the coffee table. It was folded open at a photograph of a group of old men standing at the end of a bocce pitch trying hard to look sorry for themselves, Picone at their centre. The picture took up the bottom half of page three. Most of the top half was taken up by a banner headline reading GOVT STALLS ON ITALIAN PENSIONER CENTRE.

I could have kicked myself. Timely monitoring of the local press was one of my jobs. I’d only been in the room ten seconds and Agnelli was already one up on me.

‘What’s this fucking shit, Picone?’ he said.

Picone, unoffended, showed his palms and shrugged. ‘Ten months we already wait. People, they say maybe you not so fair dinkum on your promise.’

This explanation seemed to please Agnelli. ‘What people? Joe Lollicato you mean! Offered to help give us a little nudge in the right direction, did he? Have a word with the local paper, remind us of our obligations, eh? Nothing to do with wanting Charlene’s seat upstairs, of course.’ He pointed at the ceiling. ‘You want Charlene’s help, you better watch yourself, Picone.’ Evidently Agnelli had not enjoyed his piano accordion lessons. He could always be relied on to put on a good show, but voter relations were not his strong suit.

Picone knew what was expected of him. He shrugged resignedly and mimed the look of a chastened man. But you could see that he didn’t mean it. Why should he? In taking his grievance to the local rag he was merely observing the cardinal rule of those who live in a safe seat: never allow yourself to be taken for granted. If the government drags its heels delivering on a promise, scream like a scalded cat.

Charlene had long since promised her electorate’s Italian senior citizenry that the government would build them new clubrooms. And old Ennio knew her well enough to know that she would deliver. Eventually. He just wanted to make sure that he’d still be around to take the credit the day the brand new Carboni Club opened its doors.

And so what if Lollicato had been urging the old farts on from behind the scenes, as Agnelli seemed convinced? Lolly was as entitled to cultivate his garden as any other local politician. Picone was merely playing his little part in the game. A man is never too old for that.