Dragons at the Party

THREE

1

‘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.’

‘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.

2

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.

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.’

3

‘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?’

‘Not alone – I haven’t had a chance. Abdul doesn’t seem to want to talk. Except about how the Americans let him down.’

‘So they did. If they’d sent their Fleet in, a couple of thousand Marines, the generals would have stayed in their barracks and Abdul would still be in Timoro Palace sitting pretty.’

‘Fegan would never have sent the Marines in. He told me last September in Washington that he wanted Abdul out of the way. He’s an embarrassment, Russ –’

‘Who – Fegan?’

‘No, Abdul, damn it. He’s so bloody corrupt –’

‘Now don’t you start being mealy-mouthed … Phil, corruption is a way of life up there. Everybody’s underpaid, so you slip ’em a bit on the side to get things done.’

‘How much did you slip Abdul? The Herald this morning said he’s rumoured to have three billion – three billion –’ Like all TV chat hosts, and politicians and priests, he had been taught to repeat points: one never knew if the audience was dozing. Though he had never known Russell Hickbed to be anything but wide awake. ‘All that salted away in Switzerland or somewhere. That’s quite a bit to have made on the side. More than you or I ever made.’

‘Unless we get him back to Palucca we’re going to make a bloody sight less. Or I am.’

‘Just what have you got there in Palucca, Russ? You’ve never told me.’

‘You don’t need to know.’

‘Meaning it’s none of my business? I think it is, if you want me to shove my neck out on this. My popularity rating is dropping, Russ – it went down three points last week, just when it should be going up, with the Bicentennial going on. They don’t think I can walk on water any more. If this Timori business goes on too long I could be up to my arse in water in a leaky rowboat. And I don’t think you’d be rushing to bail me out.’

Hickbed took off his glasses and polished them. They were in the library, a big room stacked on three walls to the ceiling with books and video cassettes; on close inspection one saw that virtually all the books were to do with some sort of show business and the cassettes were of Norval’s own TV shows. The few novels on the shelves were detective books and popular bestsellers. It was not a room where its owner got much mental exercise, but he had never sought it.

There was the crunching of gravel on the path outside as two of the security men went by. This was a safe area, but one never knew. This was the North Shore suburb of Killara; North Shore being a social state of mind more than a geographical location, since its boundaries began some five miles from the northern shores of the harbour. Kirribilli, for instance, right on the north shore, was not North Shore. Killara itself had once been considered the domain of judges and lawyers, a leafy outpost of the courts and chambers of Phillip Street, the city’s legal centre. It was said that at Christmas the local council workers shouted, ‘Let justice be done!’ and the judges and barristers, mindful of their sins of the year, rushed out and thrust Christmas boxes on the jury of dustmen. Of later years advertising men, TV celebrities and even successful used-car salesmen had moved into the suburb: the tone may have been reduced but not the wealth or the status. It was still North Shore, safe and secure.’

In the big living-room across the hall from the library one of the house’s six television sets was turned on; four of Norval’s staff were in there. Hickbed looked at the blank screens of the two sets in this room, then he looked back at the Prime Minister, the puppet who was now trying to jerk his own strings.

‘If it hadn’t been for me you’d still be in that awful bloody studio hosting your awful bloody TV show and going in five mornings a week to listen to dumb bloody housewives on talkback.’

‘I was making a million bucks a year. It bought all this –’ he gestured around him; he needed his possessions to identify himself ‘– and a lot else besides.’