Peter Corris - The Dying Trade

“Your lover was a dubious connection.”

“He certainly was, the worst. If it got out that he was my lover those important people would drop James cold.”

“Why didn’t James drop you?”

“He loved me for one thing, but that wasn’t all. Brave’s line was that James mustn’t drop me or he’d spread word about Carl.”

“Carl who?”

“It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that Brave was bleeding James dry. I found out later that he got over a hundred thousand from him, maybe two hundred thousand, maybe more.”

I whistled. “That’s big. What does Brave do with the money?”

She set her teeth in a grimace like that of a firing squad commander who has to administer a coup de grace.

“He has expensive tastes in… erotica. He gambles like a madman But we’re talking about me, not him.”

“Sorry, he’s of interest. So are you of course.”

She looked impatient and ran a hand over that fine, glowing pelt.

“Right. I’m jumping ahead in telling it this way because at the time I didn’t know what Brave was doing. I just saw James getting more and more tense and felt more and more guilty myself.”

“Bercer didn’t front up to you with it?”

“Never. He just broke under the strain. He started taking bottles to bed and gorging himself on rich food. He blew up like a balloon and had a heart attack. He had two, actually in a few days and he died.”

“How did that leave you?”

She was so used to the idea that she didn’t even pause to knock the ash off her cigarette — the second since she’d started talking.

“Comfortable, if I’d been careful. I wasn’t.”

I raised an eyebrow, a stagey trick I’d learned from my drunken, diabetic mother who’d pounded a vampy piano in London pubs and queened it up on the Oronsay on the? 10 scheme.

“Brave dropped out of the picture when James died. I gave up my lover, unpleasantly, and went a bit wild. Not here — in the States and Europe. I worked through a lot of money and came home a good bit harder. I’d seen a lot, I was too old for dancing and too smart for whoring, so I thought I’d better have another try at what I’d succeeded at before.”

She’d gone through it in her mind a hundred times and had made her own role tougher with each run through, but she had intelligence, directness and an awareness of the reality of other people — something real gold-diggers don’t have. And her men hadn’t been soft-cocked sugar daddies: Bercer sounded like a shrewd operator in a high-powered world and Gutteridge had been smart and tough. But she was telling the story and this was the part she’d assigned herself. I wanted to hear more.

“You did all right again,” I said.

“No,” she shook her head, “I was getting nowhere for going on a year until I got help. Guess who?”

“Brave again.”

“Yes. I met him at a party. I think I’d tried to find him when I first got back but he’d vanished. Remember that I didn’t have anything against him except perhaps a bit of resentment that he’d gone off so soon after James died. He said he’d had to go back to Canada. OK, I was pleased to see him and pretty soon I was confiding in him again. He talked to me about needing an anchor in my life, a strong man. He introduced me to Mark Gutteridge.”

She was moving steadily through her packet of cigarettes and the room was smoky and heating up fast. My watch put the time at a little past ten which meant that the pubs would be open.

She agreed that it was hot and that a drink would be a good idea. We went down the stairs and I felt my stocks in the building go up several points in the eyes of a dentist with a quiet practice, a hairdresser with big blanks in her appointment book and a guitar teacher whose rooms were smoky and sweet smelling. They hovered about in their doorways as I followed Ailsa’s firm white-denimed buttocks down the corridors of their dreams.

The heat hit us like a jet engine blast when we reached the street. Ailsa had slipped the Porsche I’d seen the day before into an illegal but unobtrusive place behind the building. It was unlocked and she stepped in and reached into the glove compartment, also unlocked, for the keys. I wondered if she ignored security the same way in her house. As she pulled out from the kerb I noticed a red Volkswagen pull away half a block behind. I watched it in the rear vision mirror for a mile or so till it turned off or fell a long way behind. I couldn’t see the driver. The light wouldn’t fall right for me to get a look at him even when the car was close. I directed Ailsa out to Watson’s Bay where the big pub on the beach serves the best fish in Sydney. If Ailsa was only half-way through her story it looked as though we could string it out through lunch, and I was on expenses. She didn’t talk much. She drove fast and well using the Porsche’s power when it was needed and not for show. We reached the pub just before eleven and she slid the car into a patch of shade where a tree hung over the parking bay. She reached over to drop the keys into the glove box.

“Lock it,” I said.

She gave me a sharp, unfriendly look and shook her head.

“For me,” I said. “Your security’s lousy, it’s time to start improving it.”

She shrugged and locked the car putting the keys in her shoulder bag. We went through the cool lounge, up some stairs and into the dining room which has a view of the boats and the water that puts twenty-five per cent on the price of the food and drink.

“What will you drink?”

“Tonic and a slice of lemon. I hardly drink at all these days.”

I gave the waiter the order. I had the same with gin. Out came the cigarettes and she took up her story again without preamble.

“It was all different with Mark. We had a good sexual relationship at the start and he was a very different proposition to James.”

“No playing around?”

She shook her head. “Out of the question. It was all much more complicated. Brave can judge people. He’d picked me and Mark as a good fit and he was right. But the fit wasn’t all that comfortable.”

“The children?”

“Right. Mark doted on them and they were as suspicious as hell of me. He doted, but kept a tight rein on them. He seemed to have them scared. He scared me too at times.”

“Where was Brave in this scene?”

“I’m coming to it.”

The drinks arrived and I tried not to show an indecent interest in mine. She gave hers only the attention it deserved.

“Brave seemed to be a friend of Mark’s in a low-key way. Mark advised him in business matters and helped him to get the land the clinic’s built on. You’ve seen it?”

“Yeah, must have been quite a deal.”

“It was. Some old houses came down. Mark had people in his pocket as I told you. I was interested in Mark’s business. I thought I’d been wrong not to pay more attention to what James did, it might have kept me closer to him. Well, I talked business to Mark quite a bit. In bed mostly, and he gave me the gist of what it was all about. He was involved in land and property speculation. He got tips from people in high positions and he profited from them. He paid off the people who gave him information, in cash sometimes, more often in land and shares. Sometimes the payments came years after the deal, sometimes the kick-backs went to the wives, you understand?”

I did. If I’d got any kick-backs when I’d had a wife I’d definitely have seen that they went into her Swiss account. But the only kick-backs I’ve ever had have been of the in-the-teeth variety. I finished my drink and signalled for another. Ailsa’s had scarcely lost a drop.

She went on: “Sometimes he told me names, but not often. Sometimes it was obvious to me who he was talking about even if names weren’t mentioned. It became a bit of a game with us, a sort of Mata Hari thing, a bedroom game. I’d probe and he’d be indiscreet.”