Jon Cleary - Dragons at the Party

Jan Pretorious, too, was retired; but he had been a boss. He had been born in Sumatra of a Dutch family that had lived there for four generations making money out of rubber, tea and the natives. He and Lisa’s mother had come to Australia after Indonesia had gained its independence; he had brought little of the family fortune with him because by then there had been little of it left. At first they had not liked Australia and, when Elisabeth found herself pregnant, had gone home to Holland. A year there had convinced them they could never live in the northern climate and, with the baby Lisa, they had come back to Australia. He had gone to work in the rubber trade, at first working for Dunlop, then starting his own business making rubber heels. By the time Malone had married Lisa, half of Australia, including its police forces, were walking on Pretorious heels. Jan had once had all the arrogance of a colonial imperialist, but Australia had mellowed him; it had been that or get his face pushed in by the likes of Con Malone. He still occasionally dreamed of the old days, but he was dreaming as much of his adventurous youth in the Sumatran jungle as he was of a dead and gone imperialism. He and Con had one thing in common: they would like to turn the clock back, though it would not be the same clock. Scobie did not love him, but he felt an affection for him and a respect that was almost like love.

‘I don’t like the looks of that Madame Timori,’ said Brigid Malone, who read only the Women’s Weekly but never truly believed what it told her. ‘She’s all fashion-plate and nothing underneath it.’

‘She’s just a decoration for him ,’ said Elisabeth Pretorious.

Their husbands looked at them, wondering if and when they had been decorated.

How wrong you both are, thought Malone, looking at his mother and mother-in-law.

Brigid Malone and Elisabeth Pretorious had nothing in common except, perhaps, a distant beauty. They had once been pretty girls, but the years of hard work, two miscarriages, another child dying in infancy and her bitter disappointment at the way her trusted God had treated her had crumpled and smudged and almost obliterated, except to the sharpest eye, that Brigid Hourigan of long ago. She now spent her time visiting her grandchildren and once a week going with Con to the senior citizens’ club in Erskineville, where they had lived for fifty years and where she and Con railed against the immigrant newcomers whom neither of them would ever call Australians. President Timori could have been a Catholic saint but Brigid Malone would never have made him welcome, not in Australia.

Elisabeth Pretorious had kept some of her looks. Money and a less arduous life had enabled her to do that; also she had had fewer disappointments than Brigid. Her God had been a comfortable one who, through the sleek smug priest in the suburb where she lived, never asked too much of her. She was a Friend of the Art Gallery, a Friend of the Opera and she was forever mentioning her good friends the So-and-So’s; but as far as Malone could tell she had no friends at all and he felt sorry for her. It struck him only then that she and his mother might have something else in common.

‘Do we have to have them here?’ she said.

Malone shrugged, let his daughters slide off his lap. They jumped back into the pool as if it were their natural habitat. ‘What would you do? Would you let them stay?’

‘No,’ said his father-in-law.

‘They claim they’re political refugees.’

Pretorious gave him a sharp look: almost forty years ago he and Elisabeth had made the same claim for themselves. ‘I think we have to draw the line somewhere. The man’s a murderer. Or his army was.’

‘It’s his army that’s kicked him out.’

‘Are you on his side?’ said Con Malone suspiciously.

‘Christ, no!’

The centurion leaned across and whacked him on the knee with his sword. ‘You told me not to say Christ. That’s swearing.’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Brigid, smiling sweetly at her four-year-old saint.

Lisa had been sitting quietly and Malone knew she was studying him. Some husbands are unfortunate in the way their wives study them, but those wives are those who know they could have done better. Malone knew, however, that he was being studied in a different way: Lisa had come to know him better. He had very few secrets left that she did not know.

Later, after the Malones and the Pretoriouses had left, when the children were asleep and the old house was showing its age as the heat of the day creaked out of its timbers, she said, ‘You wish you weren’t on this case, don’t you?’

‘A holiday weekend – what do you think?’

‘You know what I mean.’

They were in bed in the high-ceilinged main bedroom, a sheet covering only their lower halves. The house was not air-conditioned; they had an air-conditioner mounted on a trolley, but they rarely brought it into the bedroom. Malone, an old-fashioned man in many ways, had a theory that air-conditioning only brought on colds. He was also sensual enough to like a sweaty woman beside him in bed, a compliment that Lisa at certain times didn’t always appreciate.

He said slowly, ‘I think I could be getting into a real mess with this one. Nobody seems to care a damn about the poor bugger who was shot.’

‘I met Delvina once.’ He turned his head in surprise, looked at her profile against the moonlit window. They had not drawn the drapes, to allow some air into the room, and he knew they would be woken early by the morning light. ‘I did a PR job for the dance company when she was with it. We didn’t get on well – I featured another girl instead of her. I thought she was too obvious, didn’t give the company the right image.’

‘Where’s girl you featured, now?’

‘Probably married, with three kids and living in the suburbs. Delvina was never going to finish up there, in the suburbs.’

‘She may finish up with her head blown off.’ He lifted the sheet and fanned himself with it. ‘I’ve never worked on anything like this before. It’s all strange territory.’

‘Here be dragons.’

‘Eh?’

‘On ancient maps, when they came to the unknown parts they used to write, Beyond this place here be dragons. Australia would have been one of those places once.’

‘Tell that to Phil Norval. He claims to’ve got rid of inflation and everything else. He can add dragons to the list.’

‘Delvina has probably already told him. She used to sleep with him when he was still in TV. Mrs Norval would be able to tell you about that.’

‘I can’t back down now, Russ. I’ve got to walk tall in this.’

‘For crissake, Phil, you’re only five feet eight – forget about walking tall!’

Philip Norval and Russell Hickbed were in the Prime Minister’s private residence, a property he had bought at the height of his TV fame and to which he retreated on the rare occasions when he wanted to escape the trappings of his office. It was a large mansion in grounds that held a hundred-foot swimming pool, an all-weather tennis court, a jacuzzi, a sauna and, as one TV rival remarked, everything but his own natural spa.

‘We’ve got to get him back to Palucca,’ said Hickbed. ‘Christ knows what those bloody generals will do. They’re already talking to Jakarta!’

‘Is there much danger in that?’ Foreign affairs were not Norval’s strong suit; Jakarta had never figured in the ratings. ‘I’d better talk to Neil Kissing about that.’

Kissing was the Foreign Minister and no friend of Hickbed. ‘Leave him out of it. We don’t want Cabinet interfering in this – you’ve got too many do-gooders in it.’

‘Who?’

‘Never mind who. Just let’s keep this between you and me. We’re the ones with something to lose, not the bloody government. Have you talked to Delvina?’