Shane Maloney - The Brush-Off

A minister is rarely alone and almost never lost in silent contemplation. It was a sight to behold. From time to time, Angelo’s leonine head would rise and he would peer over at me. I was pretending to read Craft Annual. His hand would extend towards the phone, hover, then withdraw. His fingertips would drum on the desktop. His gaze would again lower.

Eventually, the suspense got too much for me. Undeterred by Trish’s gorgon bark, I invited myself into the ministerial presence. ‘How was the water?’ I said. ‘Dam and be damned, as they say in Tasmania, eh?’

Angelo broke off from his self-guided tour of purgatory and regarded me bleakly. ‘Damned’s the word,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’

Angelo Agnelli was not a bad man. He was no better or no worse than he ought to be. He was vain and his ambition exceeded his abilities. So what? In a politician these are not failings but the minimum requirements for the job. Why else do it? Angelo was a minister because enough people thought he should be one. Those people, for better or worse, were my people. Perhaps they didn’t know Angelo quite as well as I did. But they had not entirely misjudged him. He was occasionally a fool, but he was not an idiot. He could be petty, but he was rarely malicious. Others, perhaps, could do his job as well, or even better. But it was Angelo, not others, who signed my pay cheque at the end of the week.

If there was to be a pay cheque. Just as well I’d taken out insurance.

I did as I was bid and sat down. The glorious morning sunlight pouring through the floor-to-ceiling windows might as well have been acid rain. Angelo stared at it in blank-faced silence for a long moment.

Then he rapped abruptly on his desk as though calling his internal caucus to order. ‘About your future here,’ he said. ‘Things have not necessarily transpired as entirely advantageously as initially anticipated.’ He sounded like the freshly-mouldering Hirohito announcing the capitulation of Japan.

‘You’re not satisfied with my performance?’ I asked.

Now that Ange had set his course, he had no intention of allowing himself to be distracted. ‘I was going to tell you about something today,’ he said. ‘Get your input and so forth. But events appear to have overtaken me.’

He slapped the papers on his desk with the back of his hand. He stood up. It was getting momentous. He began to address me as though I was a plenary session of state conference. ‘I am responsible…’ he began.

His mouth, unaccustomed to this phrase, did not know what to do next. He began again. ‘A situation has arisen…’ That was better. ‘A situation has arisen whereby it may be possible for me to be seen to be responsible for the diminution of a significant component of the party’s campaign funds.’ There, he’d said it.

‘Really,’ I said. ‘How could a situation like that have come about?’

‘Against my better judgment,’ he said. ‘I allowed myself to be persuaded to become involved in the affairs of the finance committee.’ He didn’t say who had done the persuading. My preferred candidate was the invisible little Angelo sitting on his shoulder, the one in the red suit with the horns and tail.

‘A bad call was made. The long and short of it is that as a consequence of subsequent events, events beyond my control…’ He glared down at the newspapers with an expression he’d borrowed from Charlton Heston for the occasion. ‘I am no longer able to confirm your ongoing employment. As soon as the implications of this situation become more widely appreciated, my position will no longer be tenable. In fact, I will have no option but to tender my own…’ He searched for the word. He didn’t have far to look. It was on the tip of his tongue. ‘Resignation.’

For the sake of Angelo’s finer feelings, I feigned surprise. ‘Really!’ I said. ‘Is it that bad?’

As ideas went, it was worse than bad. Resignation would be an admission of culpability. A free ride for the opposition. A step closer to power for the true grafters. The smug, despicable, self-serving, incompetent, sanctimonious blue-bloods of the old-school-tie brigade. The enemies of the human race. The Liberals. The ice was thin enough beneath the government without the heat given off by Angelo Agnelli sweating over his failures.

‘I’m a little confused here.’ As I spoke, I reached across Agnelli’s desk and drew the phone towards me. ‘It was my understanding that finance committee affairs were Duncan Keogh’s responsibility.’ Agnelli’s phone was as state-of-the-art as the desk it sat on. ‘Shouldn’t we hear what Duncan has to say about all this?’

Before Agnelli could stop me, I pecked out Keogh’s number and pushed the hands-free button. The speaker went brr-brr and Keogh’s irritable hello came down the line, loud and clear. ‘Murray Whelan here, Duncan,’ I said. ‘Calling from Angelo Agnelli’s office.’ My call sign.

Agnelli, exhausted from the unaccustomed rigours of self-examination, slumped back into his chair and buried his head in his hands.

Duncan wasn’t having a very good morning either. ‘Tell Angelo I can’t get anybody at Obelisk to talk to me. All deposits have been frozen and they reckon they can’t deal with us preferentially just because of our association with their former CEO. Especially because of that. They say everybody wants their money and we’ll just have to wait our turn. They don’t have any idea how long that might take.’ He was talking twenty to the dozen and his sweat was oozing through the phone speaker. ‘Rumour is that it wasn’t just the Karlcraft collapse that tipped the balance. That chickenshit prick Eastlake stuffed things up right and proper. We might be lucky to get back anything at all.’

He went on and on like this for quite some time, sinking the silent Agnelli ever deeper into the slough of despond. Then, barely pausing to draw breath, he changed tack. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I admit it. I should have withdrawn the money yesterday afternoon. But Agnelli should have called me himself.’

At the mention of his name, Angelo shuddered visibly.

So far, I hadn’t said anything. Personally, I found Keogh’s remarks perplexing. ‘I don’t know what any of this is about, Duncan,’ I said. ‘But Angelo couldn’t possibly have called you yesterday afternoon as, for some reason, you seem to think he should have. He was out of town on ministerial business. And you’re the signatory to the finance committee accounts, aren’t you?’

Keogh, sensing slippage in the rug under his feet, switched to the offensive. ‘You tell Agnelli I’m not wearing this alone,’ he snarled. ‘He said at our meeting on Friday that he’d be backing me all the way to Cabinet.’

‘What meeting was that?’ I said.

Angelo took his head out of his hands.

‘You know very well what meeting. The one in Agnelli’s office at Ethnic Affairs.’

This didn’t sound at all right to me. ‘Are you sure about this, Duncan?’ I said. ‘Angelo hasn’t mentioned any meeting to me. You kept minutes, did you?’

‘Of course I didn’t keep minutes.’ Dunc was getting quite snappy by this stage.

‘Was there anyone else at this meeting, Duncan?’ I wondered. Some good was coming of Eastlake’s death already. ‘Anyone who can back you up on this?’

A tinge of luminescence had begun to creep over Agnelli’s eastern horizon.

‘You still there, Duncan?’ I said. For a while the only sound coming out of the speaker was the steady bubble of boiling blood and the rustle of the rug beneath Keogh’s feet reaching escape velocity. Then Duncan made a manly lunge for the soft option.

‘You tell Agnelli that he can tell the Premier that if I can’t get our funds out of Obelisk by close of business tonight,’ he said, courageously taking it upon himself to do the noble thing, ‘he’ll have my resignation on his desk first thing in the morning. You can also tell Agnelli to go take a flying fu…’