Jon Cleary - Dragons at the Party

‘You want to get this feller Seville, don’t you? Jesus Christ, he might try for me next! Phil Norval would pay him.’ He grinned at the thought, relishing the sensation of his own death.

‘I don’t think the bullet’s been made that could put a dent in you.’

Vanderberg grinned again: with pride this time. Somehow it looked uglier than his malevolence. ‘Maybe I shoulda been a copper.’

Leeds managed a smile, said goodbye and left. He was going out to the Cricket Ground to watch the Test match for an hour or two and he hoped he wouldn’t run into the Prime Minister again. He had had enough of politicians for the day.

When the door had closed Vanderberg looked at his political secretary. ‘He’s a good copper. It’s a pity he’s so honest. A little larceny never hurt anyone, right?’

‘Right,’ said Ladbroke, who had known all about larceny before he took this job; he had been a political columnist and had seen the State’s best practitioners at work. He was a plump, anonymous-looking man in his late thirties who had no illusions left but didn’t miss them. ‘I’ve got Jack Phillips and Don Clary at work. If there’s any dirt, they’ll dig it up.’

‘Oh, there’ll be dirt, I’ll bet your boots on it,’ said Vanderberg, who never bet anything of his own. He stood up, looking pleased. ‘It would make a great Australia Day if I could topple the Prime Minister, wouldn’t it?’

‘Great,’ said Ladbroke, and the headlines broke in his head like a blinding light. He was a lapsed Catholic and for a moment he thought he’d had a vision.

‘Do the press know about this bloke Seville?’

‘Not as far as I know. The police want it kept quiet for the time being.’

Vanderberg thought for a moment. ‘Well, we’ll see. We might leak it, just to keep things on the boiling.’

‘I’ll prepare something, just in case.’

‘I’m going home for a coupla hours.’ The Dutchman lived in his electorate on the edge of the inner city. Glebe had once been a middle-class area, then for years it had been home for the working class and had become a Labour stronghold. Now the trendy academics from nearby Sydney University had moved in, bringing their racks of Chardonnay, their taste for foreign films and their narrow view of any world but their own. They voted Labour, but laughed at The Dutchman. But they knew and he knew that none of them would last two rounds with him in the political ring. ‘We might have a good weekend.’

Avagoodweekend was a TV slogan for a brand of fly-spray. Ladbroke wondered if Phil Norval, the TV hero, knew he was about to be sprayed.

Malone was greeted at his front door by a four-year-old centurion in a plastic breastplate and wielding a plastic sword. ‘Who goes there? Fred or foe?’

‘Fred.’

‘Fred who?’

‘Fred the Fuzz.’ He picked up Tom and kissed him. His own mother Brigid had probably kissed him as a very small child, but from Tom’s age he could remember no kisses from the hard-working religious woman who loved him but was incapable of public sentiment. He sometimes wondered how often she had kissed his father and if she still did. Malone himself made a point of being affectionate towards his wife and children. ‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Here.’

Lisa stood in the kitchen doorway silhouetted against the late sunlight coming through from the back of the house. She was in shorts and a halter-top and at thirty-seven she still had the figure she had had at twenty-seven. She swam every day, summer and winter, something he didn’t do in the unheated pool, and she went to a gym class twice a week. She was more beautiful than he knew he deserved, but she was not vain about it nor was she fanatical about keeping fit. She had been born in Holland and she had the Dutch (well, some Dutch) habit of discipline. She and her parents were as unlike Hans Vanderberg as it was possible to be.

‘A bad day?’ She could recognize the signs.

He nodded. ‘What did you do?’

‘Mother and Dad took us all to Eliza’s for lunch, then we came back here and swam all afternoon. They’re out by the pool with Claire and Maureen. Your mother and father are here, too.’

Malone rolled his eyes in mock agony. ‘Now I know how the Abos felt on that first Australia Day. Who’s going to be the first to tell me what to do with Timori? Dad or your old man?’

‘You’re my old man,’ said Tom. ‘The kids at school call you that.’

‘You’ve got a pretty bright lot at your kindy,’ said Malone. ‘They know an old man when they see one.’

He changed into his swim-trunks, went out to the back yard, kissed his daughters, said hello to his parents and his in-laws, swam half-a-dozen lengths of the thirty-five-foot pool, then climbed out, sat down and waited for the avalanche of opinion.

Con Malone pushed the first boulder. ‘All right, what’s he like? When they let crims like him into the country, it’s time I went back to the Ould Country.’ Con had been born in Australia, had never set foot outside it, but was always threatening to go back to Ireland. He was sixty-eight years old, every year stamped there in the square, creased face with its long upper lip; he was built like a tree-trunk (he had once been a timber worker) and he still couldn’t say no to a fight, anyone, any time, anywhere. Only his age and the shame of younger opponents saved him from a licking. ‘Him and Phil Norval are a good pair.’

‘Oh, I don’t think Norval’s corrupt or a criminal. He’s too stupid for that.’ Jan Pretorius was a Liberal voter, that is to say a conservative one. When, some decades ago, the conservative party, looking for a new image, had usurped the name Liberal for itself, the ghost of Gladstone had climbed out of his grave in England but, with Australia already full of English ghosts, had been denied entry to protest his case. The name did not worry Jan Pretorious; he voted for the party’s principles, which suited his own conservative outlook. He had a respect for politics and politicians that over-rode his contempt for some of the latter. He was still European, and not Australian, in that attitude. ‘Someone is putting pressure on him to allow President Timori to stay here.’

‘The bloody Yanks,’ said Con Malone, who would blame the Americans for everything and anything.

‘You think so?’ Pretorious looked at his son-in-law. He was a distinguished-looking man, with silver-grey hair and a florid face that, despite his having been born in the tropics, had never become accustomed to the Australian sun.

‘I think it might be closer to home,’ said Malone.

‘Who?’ said Brigid Malone and Elisabeth Pretorious together. They had no interest in politics, but they had a parfumier ’s nose for a whiff of gossip.

Malone smiled, dodging the question and gave his attention to his daughters who, wet and slippery, slid over him like young dolphins. He looked at Lisa, who had the centurion in her lap. ‘I’m going to be working all weekend.’

‘Awh-h-h-h Daddy!’ his daughters chorused and Tom waved his sword threateningly.

‘Why don’t you apply for an administrative job, a nine-to-five one?’ said Pretorious.

‘Because he’d be unbearable to live with,’ said Lisa.

‘He oughta never been a copper in the first place,’ said Con Malone, who had taken years to live with the shame of being a policeman’s father, ‘I done me best to talk him out of it.’

Malone, above the heads of his daughters, studied the two old men. They were the gold, if from opposite ends of the reef, that was the decency of this celebrating nation. Con Malone was the almost archetypal working man of the past: class conscious, prejudiced, scrupulously honest about his beliefs and passionately dedicated to mateship. He had recognized that the world at large had enemies: Hitler, Tojo and, later, Stalin. There was, however, only one real enemy in his eyes: the boss, any boss. Now that he was retired, living on his pension, he sometimes seemed at a loss without an enemy to hate. He and his son fought with words, but he would only raise his fist for Scobie, never against him. Malone loved him with a warmth that, like his mother, he would be too embarrassed to confess to the old man.