Peter Corris - Casino

Glen was gathering up her things, a bag, sunglasses, keys. ‘You’re not even listening. You don’t give a shit!’

That got me out of my chair. I was suddenly aware of a gap, a yawning empty space, not between us, but in me. I moved towards her, reaching out.

She dodged and headed for the front door. ‘I’ll call you, Cliff. I’ll call you soon.’

I stood in the middle of the room listening to the sounds of an empty house-the refrigerator hum, the banging back screen door, the creaks and rattles. Glen’s cup sat on top of a book that balanced precariously on the arm of the chair she’d been sitting in. The book was Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. I’d lent it to Glen with a strong recommendation. I realised that she’d brought it back and left it behind. I had an almost physical need to discuss the book with her, to learn what she’d thought of it. I didn’t even know whether she’d read it, and it looked like I never would. There was something bleak and final about the empty cup and I took it through to the kitchen and rinsed it, losing it among the other cups and plates and cutlery I’d rinsed or half-washed over the past few days.

I stood at the sink and let the emptiness take me over. I’d felt it before-when Cyn walked out on me, finally, and when Kay Fletcher had relocated to New York, and when Helen Broadway had gone back to her husband and child. The moment had an unmistakable smell, taste and feel to it, and each time it came, I never knew whether it was painful or somehow welcome. Frank Harkness, the eye doctor who I’d bodyguarded a few years back, had told me that the only antidote to one woman was another. But he’d found the ultimate cure in his wife, putting him a long way ahead of me.

In my brief discussion with Oscar Cartwright the night before, I’d negotiated a working agreement for the conditions to apply to my temporary appointment. They included very flexible hours, the right to continue working on cases I already had on hand and a relaxed dress code, very relaxed. In return for these concessions I agreed to scale down from a BMW to a Commodore. I’d made a crack about the chiefs driving foreign cars and the Indians driving Australian-made. It got a sort of a grin and Oscar said he’d consider changing the policy.

‘It’s a contra-deal situation,’ he’d said.

I asked him not to use language like that and got a laugh. I was a laugh a minute that night. These thoughts kept jumping in my head as I shaved and showered and got ready to go to the first regular job I’d had in almost twenty years. My arm was stiff but I exercised it brutally and at the end of the session in the doorway and on the floor I was sweating so much I had to shower again. I ran the water on the shoulder as hot as I could stand it and then cold and the equipment felt looser when I finished. One area of improvement.

It was almost midday and I felt justified in drinking some wine with my toasted cheese sandwich. No gin. I cleaned up the kitchen, put some clothes on to wash and phoned a courier to transport the dinner suit back to the hirers. I couldn’t stand the sight of the thing. I was dressed in my lightweight grey suit when I looked out the window and saw the grey sky and the blowing leaves and a neighbour wearing a sweater. I changed into dark trousers and leather jacket and took off the tie. I knew what I was doing, fiddling about, wasting time, putting off the moment. Washing the teapot my mother used to call it. I rang for a taxi to take me to work.

Oscar must have worded the casino staff up that I was a low-key type who didn’t require the red carpet treatment. Maybe the leather jacket was a bit too low-key for them, but at least I was wearing a clean shirt. I was shown to my office and introduced to Marie, my secretary for the duration. Marie was what you would call a big woman, close to 180 centimetres and heavy with it. She was dark-haired and vivacious, a toey character who looked as if being busy was her main joy in life. I was feeling tired already and I had to pump myself up to match her energy. From what I’d seen of the personnel so far, the casino resembled a TV studio in that every woman had a claim to good looks of one kind or another. The men were a good deal plainer.

Marie watched me try out my chair and desk for size and fiddle with some of the fittings. Then she handed me a printed sheet. ‘I always had a daily schedule drawn up for Mr Galvani and he’d work through it. We were getting to be a team. I was very sorry about what happened to him, Mr Hardy. I liked him a lot.’

‘Me, too,’ I said. ‘Please sit down. What would you consider being a team to be like, Marie? And the name’s Cliff.’

She sat and visibly relaxed into the chair. She was a comfortable kind of woman who liked to be at her ease. OK with me. ‘Generally speaking, I’d give him too much to do in a day and he’d run himself ragged getting through it. Then I’d over-compensate and give him too little and he’d be twiddling his thumbs. Getting the right balance is what I’d call teamwork.’

‘Couldn’t he initiate things himself?’

‘Leaving space for that is good teamwork!’

Bossy, but not overbearing. I grinned. ‘I get it. Well, for me, I think you should start out with the lightest schedule you can imagine and we’ll work up from there.’

‘Beginning tomorrow?’

‘That’s right. I’d like to have a little time to myself just now. No calls, no interruptions. Say, half an hour, and then I’d like to see Messrs Ralston and Carstairs. D’you think you could arrange that?’

She glanced at her watch. ‘They come on at four. I could send them straight up.’

‘That’s would be fine. What’s my title here again?’

‘Security Controller.’

‘Just tell them that the new Security Controller wants to see them. No explanation, no name. OK?’

She smiled, apparently enjoying the notion, and left, no doubt to plan what she considered a light program. I waited until the door was closed before taking off my jacket and draping it over the back of the chair. The air-conditioning kept the room at a comfortable temperature for any kind of dressing. Whether it was any good for thinking I didn’t know. Marie had given me a set of keys and I unlocked the top of the big filing cabinet that stood against the wall opposite my desk. It held a few thin files scattered among the divisions in the first drawer. The other drawers were empty. No problem to shift, even for a man with a crook arm.

I dropped a telephone directory on the floor, rocked the filing cabinet and slid the directory under it. I crouched and slid my hand into the gap. My fingers closed over the spiral binding of a notebook and I pulled it out. I restored things to normal and took the book back to my desk. Scott’s writing wasn’t neat but his notes were legible. The first dozen or so pages dealt with the Cornwall and Roberts cases. As I’d expected- records of interviews and telephone conversations, dates and times, scribbled phone and fax numbers, addresses and tentative conclusions. He kept a running account of his expenses and several receipts and dockets were stapled to the pages. Good work, conscientiously carried out. Full marks.

Two blank leaves followed and then the pages were written on again, more than a dozen of them. The only trouble was that every single word was written in Italian. My Italian is virtually nonexistent-limited to ordering certain items of food and drink and odd phrases picked up from books and the movies. Knowing Scott, these notes were probably filled with Sicilian slang and shorthand expressions and his own brand of abbreviations.

I flicked through the pages and could distinguish only words like ‘casino’, ‘Sydney Casinos’, and names like ‘Cartwright’, ‘Kemp’, ‘Anderson’. There have to be other names, I thought and I looked carefully for them, examining each page as if the meaning of the words might miraculously become clear to me. It didn’t and I had to conclude that if other names were mentioned, they were entered in some kind of code.