Jon Cleary - Dragons at the Party

‘I’d be grateful if you can – nail? – him, Inspector. It was always my ambition to die in bed, preferably beneath a beautiful woman –’ The gold tooth winked at the First Lady; she gave him an unladylike glare and Hickbed, unexpectedly, looked embarrassed. Malone just grinned. ‘I don’t want to die from an assassin’s bullet. I hate surprises.’

‘We’ll do our best, sir. Well, I’d better go. Just one more question –’ But he looked at Sun Lee, not at the other three who had been expecting the question. ‘You’ve heard of Miguel Seville, haven’t you, Mr Sun?’

Sun hadn’t been expecting the question: he wasn’t entirely ready with his answer. ‘Me, Inspector? I – why should I have heard of him?’

‘You must read the newspapers, Mr Sun, even in Bunda. Did you ever hear of him coming to Palucca? Private secretaries usually know all the gossip. At least they do in this country.’

‘Mr Sun has no time for gossip,’ said Madame Timori, who had once provided so much of it and still did.

Sun took his cue from her. He shook his head, gave Malone a cold stare: ‘I know nothing about Mr Seville.’

Malone returned his stare, then nodded and turned his back on the Chinese. He said his goodbyes to the Timoris, ignoring Hickbed, and left the terrace, going round the corner of the house past the group still standing like an abandoned bus queue in the shade of the trees. In the front of the house, his jacket over his arm and his tie loosened, was Russ Clements, talking to Detective-Inspector Nagler of Special Branch.

‘G’day, Scobie. You don’t look happy.’ Joe Nagler was a thin dark man with a sad face that belied his sense of humour. He was one of the few Jews in the force, but that didn’t prompt him to waste any sympathy on the newer ethnics in the community. He divided the world into, as he called them, the goods and the bads and where you or your ancestors came from made no difference. ‘Madame Timori been rubbing you up the wrong way?’

‘You too?’

Nagler nodded, smiling sadly. ‘Imagine her and Boadicea Thatcher running the world! Or one or two of the ethnic dames we have out here.’

‘I didn’t know you were a misogynist. Does your nice Jewish mother know?’

‘She put me up to it. No Jewish mother wants her son loving another woman.’ Nagler was happily married to a nice Catholic girl and had five children: the Pope, as he said, always got into bed with him and the missus. He changed the subject: ‘So we’re looking for this guy Seville?’

‘You got any other bets?’

‘He’s good enough for me. This isn’t a job I’d have picked as my favourite. Let’s find him, wrap it up and go home.’

‘And where do the Timoris go?’

‘Who cares?’

Malone grinned. ‘You fellers are special in Special Branch.’

‘I thought of transferring once,’ said Clements. ‘They wouldn’t have me.’

‘You should have had a Jewish mother. She got me in. Well, I’m glad we’re all working together.’

‘What about the ASIO spooks?’ said Malone. ‘Anyone invited them in?’

ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, had its Sydney headquarters half a block up the street in another converted waterfront mansion. The Federal Government looked after its representatives here in Kirribilli. Through the trees Malone could see the magnificent nineteenth-century pile that was Admiralty House, built by another of the colony’s early merchants, a more successful one than Mr Feez of Kirribilli House. Yesterday the Governor-General had been in residence, but this morning Malone saw that the tall flagpole in the large gardens was bare. The G-G had folded his flag and fled, turning his back on his neighbours.

‘Half the demonstrators outside are ASIO spooks, undercover,’ said Nagler, and Malone and Clements smiled agreement with him.

The talk was inconsequential, but they all knew they were sitting on a landmine of a type they had never met before.

‘The trouble is,’ said Nagler, ‘there are certain people just across the water who’d love to see this whole thing blow up in Phil Norval’s face.’,

‘Bugger ’em,’ said The Dutchman, ‘I run the police in this State, not Phil Norval.’

‘I shouldn’t let myself be quoted on that,’ said John Leeds.

Hans Vanderberg grinned. It was a marvellous grin, a mixture of malevolence and friendliness, of cynicism and paternalism: each voter could take what he liked from it. He was a small man, with a foxy face and thick grey hair with a high quiff, a style that Leeds thought had gone out at least fifty years ago. It was Saturday, there were no official functions till this afternoon, so he was casually dressed: the brown slacks of one suit, the blue jacket of another and a shirt that suggested a drunken holiday on the Barrier Reef. He was a living denial of the latterday maxim that the voters voted for the electronic image; on a TV screen he looked like a technical fault. He was the very opposite of his arch-enemy the Prime Minister.

‘You know what I mean, John. Phil Norval’s up to something and he ain’t gunna get away with it, my word he’s not. We’ve got to grab the bull by the balls–’

‘By the horns,’ said Ladbroke, his political secretary, who was known to the Macquarie Street columnists as the Keeper of the Faux Pas.

‘What’s the difference? You ever had a bull by the horns in a china shop, John?’

‘Offhand,’ said Leeds, ‘I can’t remember it.’

‘What’s Phil Norval’s connection with the Timoris? He’s not doing this for them just because the Yanks asked him. Who’s in charge of the case?’

‘Inspector Malone.’

‘Scobie Malone. I remember him. Get him to do some digging.’

‘I’m sorry, Hans, you know I won’t let any of my men get into political work.’

Vanderberg grinned again, but this time it was purely malevolent. He swung his chair round and looked out the window, but Leeds knew he wouldn’t be looking at the view. They were in the Premier’s office on the eighth floor of the State office block, with a magnificent view right down the harbour to the Heads. But they were too high up for The Dutchman: if he was out of shouting distance of the voters he was looking on a barren landscape.

‘Just my luck to have an honest Commissioner. I oughta been Premier back in the old good days.’

‘Good old days,’ murmured Ladbroke; but only to himself.

‘You know nothing about those days,’ said Leeds. ‘You’re always saying history doesn’t mean anything.’

‘It’s true. A voter, he goes into a voting booth, he doesn’t remember the last election, he’s voting on what his pocket tells him today. He don’t want to know about yesterday, dead kings and prime ministers and Magna Carta, all that stuff. Neither do I.’ He swung his chair back to face Leeds. He might not have a sense of history, which really is only for statesmen; he did, however, have a wonderful memory, which a successful politician needs more than an arm or a leg. ‘Wasn’t Madame Timori, whatever her name was before, Delvina Someone, Delvina O’Reilly, that’s it – wasn’t she a TV dancer before she got her name in the papers with that dance company?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Leeds. ‘Where did you learn that?’

‘ TV Times .’ He might have, too, Leeds thought. He would read anything, even a bus ticket, if it contained information against an enemy. ‘There’s something going on there, I dunno what. Russell Hickbed’s been to see ’em twice.’

‘Was that in TV Times ?’ Leeds stood up. It was time to go, before he got into an argument with the Premier. They respected each other’s ability, but they would never be friends. ‘I’ll keep Malone working on the case, then.’