Peter Temple - Black Tide

‘Coming up, sir,’ he said.

Planes are good for thinking. Reading seems an unnaturally complacent activity when you are risking your life in a hissing aluminium tube that seeks to defy gravity. I studied the picture of Dean and his daughter. He wore rings on both little fingers, small rings with dark stones. He didn’t look like someone who did secret government work, away for months at a time. He looked like a man who repaired things, washing machines, fridges, photocopiers perhaps. Went home at night, Holden in the drive at 6.30.

Two more days with this bastard Connors and I’m home and fucking Black Tide’s over.

Dean Canetti was keeping an eye on Gary Connors on April 3. And he planned to spend two more days involved with him.

What did with Connors mean? Following him? Something else?

Two more days. Did that mean he’d been close to Gary for longer than the day of April 3? Gary had been overseas until April 2. He’d been away from home for more than a week when he telephoned on April 3. Had Canetti followed him overseas?

Canetti was from the government. But not the shopfront government. The hidden government. Gary was from somewhere else: corrupt policeman, then TransQuik, then a person consulted on security by impenetrable foreign companies, including Klostermann Gardier. But still a TransQuik person, according to Barry Tregear, a man not given to conjecture.

Canetti, the man from the government, and Gary Connors, the man from free enterprise, almost certainly bent free enterprise, came together. Presumably, the former was in pursuit of the latter. And then they vanished. On the same day.

Barry Tregear didn’t move in the world of high finance. He moved in a low-finance world where making money generally involved taking it away from someone else. If Barry believed that TransQuik could make it snow in the tropics on a given day, it meant that smart cops knew not to mess with TransQuik.

Smart cops didn’t mess with TransQuik. And the Director of Public Prosecutions didn’t mess with TransQuik.

That was a status jump.

Did this mean that no-one messed with the assured and handsome Steven Levesque, multi-millionaire owner of a Sydney towerblock and of companies with exotic hideaways where Premiers relaxed? A man who was a major donor to a political party. And a man whose exalted name was invoked by a lowly female employee of a company that won a coastal surveillance contract. Invoked and smartly revoked.

Klostermann Gardier, acting for other interests, acting as a conduit, tried to buy part of TransQuik.

The bid failed because a journalist called Stuart Wardle gave Tony Rinaldi a question to ask. And Klostermann’s agent, Carlos Siebold, found the question so offensive that he showed TransQuik’s executives the door.

Steven Levesque bought TransQuik after Klostermann Gardier’s bid for a big chunk was abandoned.

Tony Rinaldi said something.

Klostermann Gardier don’t give up.

I, on the other hand, do. You can juggle bits of information for just so long. I asked a long-faced female steward for a whisky and soda. She smiled and went on her way.

At home, weary in the bone marrow, I got the whisky and soda, had two, went to bed. I fell asleep thinking about the $60,000 Gary had taken out of his father’s bank account. It was a lot of cash to carry around. Was he paying someone off?

Dean Canetti?

The cast in my dream included my landlady, Charlie, Stan from the Prince, all in some rural setting. We were standing in a paddock, planning something, arguing. A rural setting with prolonged ringing. The ringing finally woke me.

‘Early for you?’

Cam, a woman singing in the background, high voice, plaintive Mexican-sounding song. Recorded? The singer tried a phrase again, better this time. Haunting. Definitely not recorded.

‘Anything that wakes me is too early for me,’ I said.

‘Two things. A bloke we should talk to on Sunday. That’s late a.m. Free?’ Cam didn’t give away much on the phone. An example I had learned nothing from.

‘Yes. I’ll be at Taub’s.’

‘Pick you up 11.45. Second, my cousin’s birthday party. You might like to come.’

‘When’s that?’

‘June the second. Small affair. Don’t get dressed up.’

‘I’ll put it in my diary.’

I showered, put on work clothes, set out for breakfast. At 7.10 a.m., the pavements of Brunswick Street were quiet. Everything else in the street had changed but 7.10 a.m. was still much the same. Only a few people on foot, even numbers of the purposeful and the Where-the-fuck-am-I.

The difference was that the latter seemed younger, paler and sicker these days, courtesy of waves of cheap smack. Cheap only a few times. Once-in-a-lifetime bargains.

I parked outside the newsagent, bought the Age and lugged it down the street to Meaker’s. Sharon the actor came to take my order. She had the frozen-faced look of someone better suited to the three-to-ten shift.

‘No conversation,’ she said. ‘Please.’

Grilled ham. Grilled tomato. Toast. Mustard. Long, strong black.

Enzio himself came out with my order. The cook: short, swarthy, balding, unhappy.

‘This is an honour, maestro,’ I said.

He put the plate down. ‘Got a job in Daylesford. Gettin out of here.’ He scratched his beard stubble.

Enzio began making announcements like this as soon as winter set in. Usually, he was off to warmer climes: Cairns, Broome, Vanuatu. I looked at the plate. He’d been generous, no portion control here.

‘Back to the kitchen,’ I said. ‘We’ll have a word later.’

He left. While I ate, I went through the paper looking for a mention of Steven Levesque. When I’d finished, I paid at the counter and stuck my head into the kitchen.

‘Daylesford,’ I said. ‘Pretty. Gets cold, though. Sure this is a good move?’

‘No respect here,’ he said, stirring scrambled eggs with his left hand while using a delicate wristy action with his right to keep an omelette in motion. ‘Bloody cook. Just a bloody cook.’

‘Enzio, how can you talk about respect? Respect is for ordinary chefs. You’re beyond respect. Your customers won’t let you go.’

A laugh-cough, a suspicious look out of narrowed bloodshot eyes. ‘You hear this bullshit where?’

‘Where? Everywhere. I meet a customer, that’s what I hear. Enzio. That’s what we talk about. Know something?’

Pink eyes shifted to me again, hands in ceaseless motion.

‘People don’t call this place Meaker’s.’

Eyebrows up a fraction.

‘The regulars, they call it Enzio’s. Know that?’

He shrugged, took the pans off the heat. ‘Hah. How come I only hear this when I’m leavin?’

I sighed. ‘Enzio, people get used to brilliance. Take it for granted. I’m guilty. We’re all guilty. From now on, I’m going to make sure you hear what the customers think.’

Enzio grunted. ‘Think about it some more. Maybe.’

I patted him on the arm. It takes work to prevent the painstakingly woven fabric of your life from returning to its natural state of short bits of unconnected thread.

At Taub’s, I started on the carcass of the western wall of Mrs Purbrick’s library. Today, most cabinets are made of medium-density fibreboard, dressed up with veneers and the odd piece of solid timber. Charlie pretended not to know of the existence of MDF. A Taub cabinet began with a carcass of forty-year-old European ash. To that was attached a frame-and-panel exterior of timber chosen from The Bank. Taub panels floated in their frames: no glue. Joints, interior and exterior, were mortice and tenon or dovetail, all handcut.

Today, we had the ripping of the ash. Charlie had put out the wood, left me a list of dimensions on a strip torn from the edge of Tuesday’s Age.