Peter Temple - Black Tide

‘So Saturday’s pretty much taken up then?’ I said.

‘Hang on. All we have to do is pretend that the Roys aren’t having many home games this season. When they play in Melbourne, they’re home. In Brisbane and Sydney and Adelaide and fucking Perth, they’re away. That’s not hard is it? Fewer home games. Get a grip on that and we’ve still got the Roys.’

A large woman at the next table said loudly, ‘Like bloody hell. Never heard such bullshit before.’

‘Settle down,’ said her companion. ‘You shouldn’t listen to other people’s conversations.’

‘Well, he’s got a point,’ said one of the four youngish men at the table on the other side.

‘Point?’ said another of the men. ‘Are you out of your…’

‘Drew, this may be an opportune moment to leave. I can’t charge breakages incurred during an all-in brawl against Donelly’s bill.’

We went to the pub down the street for the cleansing ale, took taxis home. I was in bed trying to focus on the men and their father’s novel when the phone rang. It was Drew, serious.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘got home, poured a last little one, bit in a bottle going to waste, thought I’d give Tony Rinaldi a ring since he’d come to mind. Cheer him up, take his mind off librarians. Well, I remembered some of those company names, y’know? Your bloke.’

‘Yes.’

‘So I said to Tony, what’s the name Klostermann Gardier mean to you? Know what he says?’

‘No.’

‘He says, he’s had a few sherbets himself, he says, Where’d you hear that? That’s a name gets people killed.’

I rang Drew from Taub’s and caught him on his way out to court.

‘Four bloody appearances today,’ he said. ‘In this condition, how can I get justice for the victims of a system designed to punish the poor?’

‘Four of those?’ I said. ‘And not a single dead-set guilty and remorseless criminal arsehole? Tony Rinaldi. Will he talk to me about that stuff?’

Drew sighed. ‘Ask him. I think I told him last night that I’d mentioned to you that he had an interest in the people in question.’ Pause. ‘I think I told him. Well, I must have.’

I said, ‘Thank you. Go the Saints. Goodbye.’

Go the Saints. I’d said it. The first time. It felt like coming out.

Tony Rinaldi now had chambers in William Street. The secretary said he was in conference. I left my mobile number. Today we had to measure up for a library.

Charlie devoted the trip to Kooyong to explaining to me why no-one could be a joiner of any consequence without undergoing what sounded like a fifty-year apprenticeship starting at age four and supervised by the Marquis de Sade.

‘So it’s twenty-five years just sweeping up the shavings,’ I said as we arrived at the address. ‘I can imagine the feeling on the day they let you hand them a chisel.’

It was several million dollars worth of old neo-Georgian house behind a high wall. Through wrought-iron double gates, we could see a gravelled driveway that turned the corner of the house. Beside the gates, a wooden door was set in the wall. I tried the handle. It was open. We went up the path to a massive black front door under a portico. I pressed a polished brass button.

The door was opened by a tall, thin man in his thirties, designer cheekbones, black clothes, short fair hair. Alternate fingers of both hands wore rings, red stones on one, green on the other. He looked at us in turn, a look for each. Charlie was in his formal wear: white painter’s overalls, clean, marked only by a faint oil stain here and there, and the jacket of a pinstriped suit he claimed to have got married in. It was not a claim anyone was going to dispute. I was in a dark suit and striped business shirt. With me carrying Charlie’s sliding measuring sticks, we made a fetching couple.

The man tilted his head, brought his hands up and clasped them under his chin. Now the ring stones alternated, red, green, red, green.

‘Stop and go,’ I said. ‘What about amber?’

He concentrated on me, unsmiling. ‘You are who? Or what?’

I looked at Charlie. He was studying the garden.

‘Here to take measurements,’ I said.

‘Oh. The carpenters.’

Charlie lost interest in the garden. ‘Carpenters build a house for you,’ he said. ‘You need carpenters?’

‘Yes,’ said the man. ‘To build some shelves. When you bring in the materials, please use the tradesmen’s entrance off the lane.’

‘Wrong house,’ said Charlie. ‘Let’s go.’ He turned and set off down the path.

‘Say hello to Mrs Purbrick for us,’ I said. ‘Tell her Mr Taub is now booked up for the foreseeable future.’

‘Ah,’ said the man.

‘And tell her Mr Taub is a cabinetmaker. A cabinetmaker is to a carpenter as a Rolex is to a sundial. Find that comparison illuminating?’

‘Ah,’ he said again. ‘The library.’ He put his hand to his mouth.

Charlie was almost at the gate.

‘Mr Taub,’ the man shouted, running after him. ‘Please come back. Mr Taub. I’ve made a mistake, Mr Taub! Please!’

Charlie stopped, turned his head. His expression was unforgiving.

‘Mr Taub, I’m so sorry about the misunderstanding. We are expecting carpenters. At some time. Shelves in the…in the pantry, I believe. I’m David, Mrs Purbrick’s personal assistant.’

Charlie turned, examined David, then put out his right hand. David looked at it, hesitated, like a man offered a snake. Then he put forward four fingers held straight and tight, thumb up. Charlie’s hand engulfed them. This hand could without effort turn David’s slim and elegant digits into red slime.

It didn’t. ‘Pianist’s hand,’ said Charlie holding up David’s hand for inspection.

I could see David’s neck colour faintly, a drop of blood in a saucer of milk. ‘Very bad pianist,’ he said.

‘Nonsense,’ said Charlie. ‘The hands. Got the hands. Practise every day. Where’s the room?’

David led the way through the front door into a room the size of my sitting room, not so much a hall as a gallery, four-metre-high ceiling, polished floorboards, no cornices or skirtingboards, no furniture, half a dozen paintings. Big paintings, paintings the size of windows. The only one I recognised was a Michael Winters, a Greek landscape with an elusive brooding quality; a painting you would like to see a lot of.

We went through double doors into a corridor lit by skylights that led, eventually, to another set of doors. Halfway down, David indicated left. ‘I’ll get Mrs Purbrick,’ he said and kept going.

It was an empty room of modest size, perhaps five metres square, two long, narrow windows, each framing a bare elm. Like the hall, it was devoid of ornament. Charlie paced out the measurements. I went to the lefthand window. The garden was formal, brick paving, old hedges and trees.

‘Mr Taub. How punctual you are.’

A blonde woman of unknown age reduced to about forty by cutting, injecting and sanding was in the room, holding out a hand, palm down, to Charlie. Everything about her was short: hair, forehead, eyelids, nose, upper lip, chin, neck, torso, fingers, legs, feet, skirt. This led to a certain imbalance because her chest could not be called short. Many things it could be called. But not short.

Gingerly, Charlie took her fingers between thumb and forefinger. With his other hand, he pointed at me. ‘My assistant,’ he said, ‘Jack Irish.’

Mrs Purbrick extended her left hand to me. I took it. For a second, the three of us stood there like a small ill-assorted Maypole dancing team without a pole. Then she dropped our hands and gestured dramatically at the room. ‘Mr Taub, this is yours. Yours. All yours. Do with it what you will.’