Читать книгу Bear Pit - Jon Cleary, Jon Cleary - Страница 5

1

Malone switched out the light in his daughter’s bedroom.

‘Da-ad!’

He switched it on again. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘And I can’t sleep with the light on? God, you’re so stingy! Can I have the light on while I’m thinking?’

‘Depends what you’re thinking.’ He went into her room, sat down in the chair at her desk against the wall. ‘Problems?’

‘Not really.’ Maureen sat up on her bed, nodded at the computer on the desk. ‘I thought I’d try my hand at a Mills and Boon romance. There’s money in it if you click.’

He turned and read from the computer screen:

Justin unbuttoned Clothilde’s tight blouse and her breasts fell out. He picked them up and put them back in again.

‘Thank you,’ said Clothilde, polite even in passion. ‘I’m always losing them.’

‘Not much romance there,’ said Malone with a grin. ‘What follows?’

‘Nothing. That’s the E-N-D. All I have to do is find sixty thousand words to go in front of it. I don’t think I’m cut out for romance –I can’t take it seriously.’

‘Is mat what your boyfriends think?’

She ignored that. ‘Maybe I should try grunge fiction. That had a run a while ago.’

‘Don’t expect me to read it – I get enough grunge out on the job. How’s it going at work?’

Maureen was three months out of university and working at Channel 15 as a researcher. It was a television station that put ratings before responsibility, that insisted the bottom line was the best line in any of its productions. It operated with a staff that was skeletal compared to those of other channels, it had no stars amongst its presenters and no overseas bureaux, buying its international material from CNN and other suppliers. Maureen had hoped to go to work for the ABC, the government channel, where, despite harping from Canberra, no one knew what a bottom line was. She had dreamed of working for Foreign Correspondent or Four Corners, quality shows that compared with the best overseas. Instead she had taken the only job offered her and was a researcher on Wanted for Questioning, a half-hour true crime show with top ratings, especially amongst criminals. They wrote fan notes, under assumed names, to the presenter, a girl with a high voice and low cleavage.

‘We’re doing a special, an hour show on faction fighting in the Labor Party.’

‘On Wanted for Questioning? The ratings will go through the roof.’

She grinned, an expression that made her her father’s daughter. She had his dark hair and dark blue eyes, but her features were closer to her mother’s; she was attractive rather than beautiful, but men would always look at her. She had none of his calmness, there was always energy that had to be expended; she would invent hurdles and barricades if none presented themselves. What saved her from intensity was her humour.

‘No, this is a one-off special – we haven’t been meeting our local quota.’ Channel 15 ran mostly American shows; its programme director thought the BBC was a museum. ‘The word has come down from the top that we’re to pull no punches.’

‘Watch out when you get amongst the Labor factions – they’re throwing punches all the time. Ask Claire.’

‘I have. She’s told me where to go and whom to talk to.’ Like Malone she knew the difference between who and whom. Lisa, her mother, foreign-born and educated, respected English grammar more than the local natives. ‘I think she’s traumatized at what she’s learnt.’

Claire, the elder daughter, had moved out of the Malone house six months ago and was now sharing a flat with her boyfriend Jason. She had graduated last year in Law and now was working for a small firm of lawyers who handled Labor Party business. She was apolitical and Malone and Lisa had been surprised when she had taken the job. With her calm commonsense and her taking the long view, she had told them it was only a first step. She wanted to be a criminal lawyer, a Senior Counsel at the Bar, but first she had to learn about in-fighting. Malone had told her she should have gone into union business, but she had only smiled and told him she knew where she was going. And he was sure she was right.

‘There’s a State election coming up. Is this the time to start ferreting? You could be accused of bias.’

She grinned again. ‘Only the ABC is accused of that. When did you ever hear of a commercial station accused of being biased? The politicians, both sides, know where the majority of viewers are. They’re not going to tread on the voters’ toes.’

He shook his head; without realizing it, he had trained his girls too well. ‘You should’ve been a cop.’

‘I always left that to Claire – remember she wanted to join the Service?’

‘I talked her out of it,’ he said and was glad. Five years after it had happened he still had the occasional vivid memory of Peta Smith, one of his Homicide detectives, lying dead with two bullets in her back. The Crime Scene outline of her body had once or twice been an image in a dream in which the wraith of Claire had risen out of the outline. ‘What have you dug up so far?’

‘Some of the inner branches are stacked – they want to topple the Premier before the Olympics. There are three or four starters who want to be up there on the official dais at the opening ceremony. A billion viewers around the world – they’ll never have another spotlight like that.’

‘Hans Vanderberg isn’t going to let anyone take his place. He’s got his own gold medal already minted.’

He stood up, reached across and ruffled her hair. Lately he had been touching his children more, as if getting closer to them as he got closer to losing them. Maureen would be gone from the house before too long; and even Tom, the lover of his mother’s cooking, would eventually move out. Malone had hugged them when they were small, then there had been the long period when intimacy had become an embarrassment. He was his own mother’s son: Brigid Malone hadn’t kissed him since he was eight years old. Con Malone had shaken his son’s hand on a couple of occasions; when he saw footballers and cricketers hugging each other he said he wanted to throw up. He actually said spew; he never used euphemisms if they were weak substitutions. He never used a euphemism for love, for love was never mentioned. In the Malone family while Scobie was growing up it was just understood that it was there. There was no need to mention it.

‘Take care.’

She looked up at him; there was love in her smiling eyes and he was touched. ‘Don’t worry about me, Dad. I’m not going to get in the way of any punches. What are you wearing that old leather jacket for?’

‘I’ve been out for a walk. It’s a bit chilly.’

‘Throw it out. You look like the back seat of a clapped-out Holden.’

‘I had a lot of fun in the back seat of a Holden when I was young.’

‘Not with Mum, I’ll bet.’

No, not with Lisa. The first time he had had fun with her had been in the back seat of a Rolls-Royce in London when she had been the High Commissioner’s private secretary. The glass partition along the back of the front seats had been up and the chauffeur had not heard the heavy breathing. He had been a pretty rough-and-ready lover in those days, his Ned Kelly approach as Lisa had called it, but she had been an experienced teacher. She had taken him a long way from the back-seat-of-a-Holden directness. ‘You’d be surprised.’

He went out to the kitchen, where Lisa was making tea, their ritual drink before they went to bed. She was measuring spoons of tea into the china pot; no tea-bags or metal pot for her. The kitchen had been newly renovated, costing what he thought had been the national debt; but anything that made Lisa happy made him happy. He took off his leather jacket and looked at it, a faded relic.

‘What d’you think that would bring at St Vincent de Paul?’

‘A dollar ninety-five,’ said Tom, coming in the back door. ‘You’re not going to give it away? What about your 24-year-old shoes? Vince de Paul might find a taker for them, too.’

‘Pull your head in,’ said his father. ‘Where’ve you been tonight?’

‘Mind your business,’ said Lisa, pouring hot water into the teapot. ‘He’s been out with a girl. There’s lipstick on his ear.’

‘There’s lipstick on both his ears.’

Tom wiped his ears. ‘I told ’em to lay off.’

‘Them?’

‘There was a girl on each ear. It was supposed to be a double-date tonight, but the other guy didn’t turn up.’

The banter was just froth, like that on a cappuccino; but, like the coffee’s froth, Malone had a taste for it. They were not the sort of family that boasted it had a crazy sense of humour; which, in his eyes, proved it was a family that had no real sense of humour. Instead, the humour was never remarked upon, it was a common way of looking at a world that they all knew, from Malone’s experience as a cop, was far from and never would be perfect. The comforting thing, for him, was that they all knew when not to joke.

‘I was celebrating,’ said Tom. ‘I made money today. Those gold stocks I bought a coupla months ago at twenty-five cents, there was a rumour today they’ve made a strike. They went up twenty cents. I’m rolling in it.’

‘He’ll be able to keep us,’ said Malone. ‘I can retire.’

Tom was in his third year of Economics, heading headlong for a career as a market analyst. Last Christmas Lisa’s father, who could well afford it, had given each of the children a thousand dollars. Claire had put hers towards a skiing holiday in New Zealand; Maureen had spent hers on a new wardrobe; and Tom had bought shares. He was not greedy for money, but they all knew that some day he would be, as his other grandfather had said, living the life of Riley. Whoever he was.

‘You’ll never retire.’ Tom looked at his mother. ‘Would you want him to? While you still go on working?’

‘All I want is an excuse.’

Lisa was finishing her second year as public relations officer at Town Hall, handling the city council’s part in the Olympic Games. For twenty-two years she had been a housewife and mother; she had changed her pinafore for a power suit, one fitting as well as the other. For the first six months she had found the going slippery on the political rocks of the city council, but now she had learned where not to tread, where to turn a blind eye, when to write a press release that said nothing in the lines nor between them. Whether she would continue beyond the Olympics was something she had not yet decided, but she was not dedicated to the job. When one has no ego of one’s own there is suffocation in a chamber full of it.

‘If he retires, I retire. We’ll go on a world trip and you lot can fend for yourselves.’

Tom looked at them with possessive affection. He was a big lad, taller now than his father, six feet three; heavy in the shoulders and with the solid hips and bum that a fast bowler and rugby fullback needed. He was better-looking than his father and he used his looks with girls. If Riley, whoever he was, had a line of girlfriends, Tom was on his way to equalling him. He had the myopic vision of youth which doesn’t look for disappointment.

‘How come you two have stayed so compatible?’

‘Tolerance on my part,’ said both his parents.

‘They’re so smug,’ said Maureen from the doorway.

Then the phone rang out in the hallway. Malone looked at his watch: 11.05. As a cop he had lived almost thirty years on call, but even now there was the sudden tension in him, the dread that one of the children was in trouble or had been hurt: he had too much Celtic blood. Was it Claire calling, had something happened to her?

The ringing had stopped; Maureen had gone back to pick up the phone. A moment or two, then she came to the kitchen doorway:

‘It’s Homicide, Dad. Sergeant Truach.’

2

‘I never take any notice of him,’ said the Premier, speaking of the Opposition leader seated half a dozen places along the long top table. ‘He’s too pious, he’s like one of those Americans who were in the Clinton investigation, carrying a Bible with a condom as a bookmark. Of course it’s all piss-piety, but some of the voters fall for it. We’re all liars, Jack, you gotta be in politics, how else would the voters believe us?’

Jack Aldwych knew how The Dutchman could twist logic into a pretzel. It was what had kept him at the head of the State Labor Party for twenty years. That and a ruthless eye towards the enemy, inside or outside the party.

The Dutchman went on, ‘The Aussie voter only wants to know the truth that won’t hurt him. He doesn’t want us to tell him he spends more on booze and smokes and gambling than he does on his health. So we tell lies about what’s wrong with the health system. But you don’t have to be a hypocrite, like our mate along the table.’

Aldwych usually never attended functions such as this large dinner. He had been a businessman, indeed a big businessman: robbing banks, running brothels, smuggling gold. But he had always had a cautionary attitude towards large gatherings; it was impossible to know everyone, to know who might stab you in the back. He was always amused at the Martin Scorsese films of Mafia gatherings, backs exposed like a battalion of targets; but that was the Italians for you and he had never worked with them, not that, for some reason, there had ever been a Mafia in Sydney. Maybe the city had been lucky and all the honest Sicilians had migrated here.

Tonight’s dinner, to celebrate the opening of Olympic Tower, was a gathering of the city’s elite, though the crème dé la crèmé was a little watery around the edges. The complex of five-star hotel, offices and boutique stores had had a chequered history and there was a certain air of wonder amongst the guests that Olympic Tower was finally up and running. There were back-stabbers amongst them, but their knives would not be for Jack Aldwych. This evening he felt almost saintly, an image that would have surprised his dead wife and all the living here present.

He certainly had no fear of this old political reprobate beside him; they were birds of a blackened feather. ‘Hans,’ he said, ‘I have to tell you. I always voted for the other side. Blokes in my old profession were always conservatives. Where would I of been if I’d voted for the common good?’

‘Jack,’ said Hans Vanderberg, The Dutchman, ‘the common good is something we spout about, like we’re political priests or something. But a year into politics and you soon realize the common good costs more money than you have in Treasury kitty. The voters dunno that, so you never tell ’em. You pat ’em on the head and bring up something else for ’em to worry about. I think the know-all columnists call it political expediency.’

‘Are you always as frank as this?’

‘You kidding?’ The old man grinned, a frightening sight. He was in black tie and dinner jacket tonight, the furthest he ever escaped from being a sartorial wreck, but he still looked like a bald old eagle in fancy dress. ‘You think I’d talk like this to an honest man? I know you’re reformed –’

‘Retired, Hans. Not reformed. There’s a difference. Will you change when you retire?’

‘I’m never gunna retire, Jack. That’s what upsets everyone, including a lot in our own party. They’re gunning for me, some of ’em. They reckon I’ve reached my use-by date.’ He laughed, a cackle at the back of his throat. ‘There’s an old saying, The emperor has no clothes on. It don’t matter, if he’s still on the throne.’

Aldwych looked him up and down, made the frank comment of one old man to another: ‘You’d be a horrible sight, naked.’

‘I hold that picture over their heads.’ Again the cackle. He was enjoying the evening.

‘Are you an emperor, Hans?’

‘Some of ’em think so.’ He sat back, looked out at his empire. ‘You ever read anything about Julius Caesar?’

‘No, Hans. When I retired, I started reading, the first time in my life. Not fiction –I never read anything anybody wrote like the life I led. No, I read history. I never went back as far as ancient history – from what young Jack tells me, you’d think there were never any crims in those days, just shonky statesmen. The best crooks started in the Ren-aiss-ance’ – he almost spelled it out – ‘times. I could of sat down with the Borgias. I wouldn’t of trusted ’em, but we’d of understood each other.’

‘You were an emperor once. You had your own little empire.’ The Dutchman had done his own reading: police files on his desk in his double role as Police Minister.

‘Never an emperor, Hans. King, maybe. There’s a difference. Emperors dunno what’s happening out there in the backblocks.’

‘This one does,’ said Hans Vanderberg the First.

Then Jack Aldwych Junior leaned in from the other side of him.

‘Mr Premier –’ He had gone to an exclusive private school where informality towards one’s elders had not been encouraged. The school’s board had known who his father was, but it had not discouraged his enrollment. It had accepted his fees and a scholarship endowment from his mother and taken its chances that his father’s name would not appear on any more criminal charges. Jack Senior, cynically amused, had done his best to oblige, though on occasions police officers had had to be bribed, all, of course, in the interests of Jack Junior’s education.

‘Mr Premier, I’ve got this whole project up and running while you were still in office –’

‘Don’t talk as if I’m dead, son.’

Jack Junior smiled. He was a big man, handsome and affable; women admired him but he was not a ladies’ man. Like his father he was a conservative, though he was not criminal like his father. He had strayed once and learned his lesson; his father had lashed him with his tongue more than any headmaster ever had. He voted conservative because multi-millionaire socialists were a contradiction in terms; they were also, if there were any, wrong in the head. But this Labor premier, on the Olympic Tower project and all its problems, had been as encouraging and sympathetic as any free enterprise, economic rationalist politician could have been. Jack Junior, a better businessman than his father, though not as ruthless, had learned not to bite the hand that fed you. Welfare was not just for the poor, otherwise it would be unfair.

‘I’m not. But there are rumours –’

‘Take no notice of ’em, son. I have to call an election in the next two months, but I’ll choose my own time. My four years are up –’

‘Eight years,’ said Jack Senior from the other side.

Vanderberg nodded, pleased that someone was counting. ‘Eight years. I’m gunna have another four. Then I’ll hand over to someone else. Someone I’ll pick.’

‘Good,’ said Jack Junior. ‘So we’ll have you as our guest for the dinner the night before the Olympics open. All the IOC committee have accepted.’

‘Why wouldn’t they? Have they ever turned down an invitation?’ He had recognized the International Olympics Committee for what they were, politicians like himself. They were more fortunate than he: they did not have to worry about voters.

He looked around the huge room. It had been designed to double as a ballroom and a major dining room; as often happens when architects are given their head, it had gone to their heads. Opulence was the keynote. Above, drawing eyeballs upwards like jellyfish caught in a net, was a secular version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Muscular athletes, male and female, raced through clouds towards a celestial tape; a swimmer, looking suspiciously like a beatified Samantha Riley, breast-stroked her way towards the Deity, who resembled the IOC president, his head wreathed in a halo of Olympic rings. Four chandeliers hung from the ceiling like frozen fireworks; there were marble pillars along the walls; the walls themselves were papered with silk. No one came here for a double burger; nor would the room ever be hired out on Election Night. This was the Olympus Room and though gods were in short supply in Sydney, those with aspiration and sufficient credit would soon be queueing up to enter. Bad taste had never overwhelmed the natives.

Jack Junior privately thought the room was an embarrassment; but he was the junior on the board of directors. Still, it was he who had overseen the guest list for tonight, though it had been chosen by his wife. Class in Sydney is porous; money seeps through it, keeping it afloat. Jack Junior and his wife Juliet had not been hamstrung in making out the list. A certain number of no-talent celebrities had been invited; without them there would be no spread in the Sunday social pages, where their inane smiles would shine like Band-Aids on their vacuous faces. The trade union officials and the State MPs from the battlers’ electorates, seated on the outskirts like immigrants waiting to be naturalized, were somewhat overcome by the opulence, but they were battling bravely on. After all, they were here only to represent the workers and the battlers, not enjoy themselves, for Crissakes; their wives smiled indulgently at their husbands’ attempts at self-delusion and looked again at the seven-course menu and wondered if the kids at home were enjoying their pizzas. The businessmen from the Big End of town were taking it all for granted, as was their wont and want; economic rationalists had to be admired and paid court to, no matter how irrationally extravagant it might be. Business was just coming out of recession from the Asian meltdown and what better way to celebrate than at someone else’s expense? Some of them had dug deep when SOCOG had called for help when the Games funds had sprung a leak. The wives, girlfriends and rented escorts took it all in with a sceptical eye. Tonight, if no other occasion, was Boys’ Night Out.

The top table was all men. A female gossip columnist, seated out in the shallows, remarked that it looked like the Last Supper painted by Francis Bacon. But four-fifths of the men up there at the long table were ambitious in a way that the Apostles had never been.

The wives of those at the top table, with their own borrowed escorts, were at a round table just below the main dais. The Premier’s wife, who was in her seventies, still made her own dresses, a fact she advertised, but, as the fashion writers said, didn’t really need to. Tonight she was in purple and black flounces, looking like a funeral mare looking for a hearse. Sitting beside her was Roger Ladbroke, the Premier’s press minder, hiding his boredom with the whole evening behind the smile he had shown to the media for so many years. Beside him was Juliet, Jack Junior’s wife, all elegance and knowing it. Her dress was by Prada, her diamond necklace by Cartier and her looks by her mother, who had been one of Bucharest’s most beautiful women and had never let her three daughters forget it. Juliet’s escort was her hairdresser, lent for the evening by his boyfriend.

‘Mrs Vanderberg,’ said Juliet, leaning across Ladbroke and giving him a whiff of Joy, ‘it must be very taxing, being a Premier’s wife. All these functions –’

‘Not at all.’ Gertrude Vanderberg had never had any political or social ambitions. She was famous in political circles for her pumpkin pavlovas, her pot plants and her potted wisdom. She had once described an opponent of her husband’s as a revolutionary who would send you the bill for the damage he had caused; it gained the man more notoriety than his attempts at disruption. ‘Hans only calls on me when there’s an election in the wind. The rest of the time I do some fence-mending in the electorate and I let him go his own way. Politicians’ wives in this country are expected to be invisible. Roger here thinks women only fog up the scene.’

‘Only sometimes.’ Ladbroke might have been handsome if he had not been so plump; he had spent too many days and nights at table. He had been with Hans Vanderberg over twenty years and wore the hard shell of those who know they are indispensable.

‘I think you should spend a season in Europe,’ said Juliet.

‘In Bucharest?’ Gert Vanderberg knew everyone’s history.

‘Why not? Roumanian men invented the revolving door, but we women have always made sure we never got caught in it.’ You knew she never would. She looked across the table at the Opposition leader’s wife: ‘Mrs Bigelow, do you enjoy politics?’

Enid Bigelow was a small, dark-haired doll of a woman who wore a fixed smile, as if afraid if she took it off she would lose it. She looked around for help; her escort was her brother, a bachelor academic useless at answering a question like this. She looked at everyone, the smile still fixed. ‘Enjoy? What’s to enjoy?’

Juliet, a woman not given to too much sympathy, suddenly felt sorry she had asked the question. She turned instead to the fourth woman at the table.

‘Madame Tzu, do women have influence in politics in China?’

Madame Tzu, who had the same name as an empress, smiled, but not helplessly. ‘We used to.’

‘You mean Chairman Mao’s wife, whatever her name was?’

‘An actress.’ Madame Tzu shook her head dismissively. ‘She knew the lines, but tried too hard to act the part – and she was a poor actress. Is that not right, General?’

Ex-General Wang-Te merely smiled. He and Madame Tzu were the mainland Chinese partners in Olympic Tower, but there had been no room for them at the top table. Foreign relations had never been one of The Dutchman’s interests and it certainly had never been one of Jack Aldwych’s. Aware that everyone was looking at him he at last said, ‘I haven’t brought my hearing-aid,’ and sank back into his dinner suit like a crab into its shell. He knew better than to discuss politics in another country, especially with women.

‘Ronald Reagan was an actor,’ said Juliet.

‘He knew the words,’ said Ladbroke. ‘He just didn’t know the rest of the world.’

‘You’re Labor. You would say that.’

And you’re Roumanian, cynical romantics. But he knew better than to say that. Instead, he gestured up towards the top table. ‘Your husband and your father-in-law seem to be doing all right with Labor.’

The Aldwyches, father and son, were leaning back with laughter at something the Premier had said. He was grinning, evilly, some might have thought, but it was supposed to be with self-satisfaction. Which some might have thought the same thing.

Then he looked down at the man approaching them through the shoal of tables. ‘Here comes the Greek, bare-arsed with gifts.’

‘Do we beware?’ Jack Aldwych had had experience of The Dutchman’s mangling of the language, but he had learned to look for the grains of truth in the wreckage. This Greek coming up on to the dais was not one bearing gifts.

He came up behind Vanderberg, raised a hand and Aldwych looked for the knife in it. But it came down only as a slap on the shoulder. ‘Hans, I gotta hand it to you.’

‘Hand me what?’ Then he waved a hand at the two Aldwyches. ‘You know my friends, salt of the earth, both of ’em.’ The salt of the earth looked suitably modest. ‘This is Peter Kelzo. He gives me more trouble than the Opposition ever does.’

‘Always joking,’ Kelzo told the Aldwyches: he was the sort who could take insults as compliments.

He was a swarthy man, almost as wide as he was tall, but muscular, not fat. Born Kelzopolous, he had come to Australia from Greece in his teens thirty years ago, found the country teeming with Opolouses and shortened his name to something that the tongue-twisted natives could pronounce. Built as he was, he had had no trouble getting a job as a builder’s labourer, shrewd as he was he was soon a union organizer, though his English needed improving. Within ten years his English was excellent and his standing almost as good, though at times it looked like stand-over. He belatedly educated himself in history and politics. He read Athenian history, aspired to be like Demosthenes but knew that the natives suspected orators as bullshit artists and opted to work with the quiet word or the quiet threat. He did not drift into politics, but sailed into it; but only into the backwaters. By now he had his own building firm and other interests, was married, had children, wanted money in the bank, lots of it, before he wanted Member of Parliament on his notepaper. He ran the Labor Party branch in his own electorate and now he was ready to wield his power.

He looked around him, then at Aldwych. He had been one of the subcontractors on the project, though Aldwych did not know that. ‘It’s a credit to you. I gotta tell you the truth, I was expecting casino glitz. But no, this is classical –’ He looked around him again. ‘Class, real class.’

‘A lifelong principle of my father,’ said Jack Junior. ‘That right, Dad?’

‘All the way,’ said Aldwych, who couldn’t remember ever having principles of any sort.

Kelzo gave them both an expensive width of expensive caps: he knew Jack Senior’s history. ‘Just like Hans here.’ He patted the Premier’s shoulder again. ‘You’ve never lost your class, have you, Hans?’

‘Class was something invented by those who didn’t have it,’ said Vanderberg. ‘Oscar the Wild said that.’

‘I’m sure he did,’ said Kelzo and tried desperately to think of something that Demosthenes or Socrates might have said, but couldn’t. Instead, he leaned down, his hand still on the Premier’s shoulder, and whispered, ‘Enjoy it, Hans. It won’t last.’

Then he was gone, smile taking in the whole room, and Jack Junior said, ‘I’ve read Oscar Wilde. I can’t remember him saying anything like that.’

‘I’ve never read him,’ said Vanderberg. ‘But neither has Kelzo. The Greeks haven’t read anything out of England since Lord Byron.’ Then he turned full on to Jack Junior, the grin almost as wide as Kelzo’s smile had been. ‘I haven’t read anything of him, either. Poets and philosophers don’t help us with the voters – Roger Ladbroke keeps me supplied with all the potted wisdom I need. If I started quoting Oscar Wilde, the only voters who’d clap for me would be the homosexuals up in Oxford Street and the arty-crafties in Balmain and they vote for me anyway, ‘cause they think I’m a character. The rest of the voters in this city have had it so good for so long, they ain’t interested in philosophy or smart sayings, not unless they hear it in some TV comedy. The people out in the bush, they’re philosophers, they gotta be to survive, and they’re the ones gimme the difference that keeps me in power. I’m the first Labor premier they’ve ever liked. They think I’m a character, too.’

‘And are you?’ asked Aldwych Senior from his other side.

The Dutchman turned to him. ‘You’ll have to ask my minder down there. Roger –’ he raised his voice, leaning forward to speak to Ladbroke – ‘am I a character? Mr Aldwych wants to know.’

‘Every inch,’ said Ladbroke, who at times had had to keep the character in recognizable shape.

Further down the top table from the Premier were Bevan Bigelow, the Leader of the Opposition, and Leslie Chung, a senior partner in Olympic Tower.

‘Have you ever voted for him?’ asked Bigelow, nodding up towards the middle of the table.

‘No.’ Leslie Chung, like Jack Aldwych, was now respectable, but his past was tainted. He was a good-looking man, still black-haired in his sixties, with the knack of looking down his nose at people taller than himself. Tonight, acting benevolent, he was looking eye to eye with Bigelow. ‘But I’ve never voted for you, either. I give money to both parties, but I vote for the guy with the least chance of stuffing everything up. Some Independent. It amuses me.’

‘Does that come from being Chinese?’

Bigelow was a short, squat man with a blond cowlick and a habit of shifting nervously in his seat as if it were about to be snatched away from him; which also applied to his electoral seat, where his hold was marginal. Les Chung, on the other hand, sat with the calmness of a lean Buddha, as sure of himself as amorality could make him. He had made his fortune by turning his back on scruples and now, on the cusp between middle and old age, he was not going to take the road to Damascus. Or wherever one saw the light here amongst the barbarians.

‘No, it comes from having become an Australian.’ He had been here forty-three years; he didn’t say the locals still amused him. ‘Even though we call Hans The Dutchman, you couldn’t get anyone more Australian than him, could you?’

‘I don’t know.’ Bigelow looked puzzled, a not uncommon expression with him. ‘He’s not friendly, like most Australians. He’s got no friends in his own party, you know that?’

Chung knew that Bigelow had few friends in his party; he was a stop-gap leader because his opponents couldn’t agree amongst themselves whom they wanted to replace him. ‘I don’t think it worries him, Bev. They’ll never put a dent in that shell.’

Bigelow nodded at the Aldwyches. ‘How do you get on with your partners? When old Jack dies, he’s getting on, who takes charge?’

‘We’ve never discussed it. It would be between me and Jack Junior, I suppose. I think I’d get it.’ He smiled, ‘I’m sure I’d get it. There are other partners, the Chinese ones.’ He nodded down towards Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te. ‘They’d vote for me.’

‘A Chinese Triad?’

‘No, just a trio.’

‘There’s another partner, isn’t there?’ He could never find a policy to pursue, but his mind was a vault of facts. ‘Miss Feng?’

Les Chung looked down at the beautiful girl seated at one of the lower tables with a handsome young Caucasian escort. If he were younger he might have asked her to be his concubine. And smiled to himself at what her Australian answer would have been.

‘We Chinese stick together. How do you think you’ll go when Hans announces the election?’

‘That will depend on his own party hacks. He has more enemies than I have.’ Though he spoke without conviction.

‘Yes,’ said Les Chung, but seemed to be talking to himself.

The evening was breaking up. The Premier and the Aldwyches rose at the top table. Throughout the rest of the room there was a stirring, like the crumbling of two hundred claypans. The waiters and waitresses restrained themselves from making get-the-hell-out-here gestures.

‘We’ll see you to the door,’ said Jack Junior. ‘Your car has been ordered. My wife will look after Mrs Vanderberg.’

The offical party moved amongst the tables almost like deity; no one genuflected, but almost everyone rose to his feet. His feet: the women, no vestal virgins, remained seated. The Dutchman smiled on everyone like a blessing; if the grimace that was his smile resembled a blessing. He stopped once or twice to shake hands: not with party hacks but with backers of the Other Party: he knew he was being watched by Bevan Bigelow. He introduced Jack Aldwych to the Police Commissioner and the two men shook hands across a great divide while The Dutchman watched the small comedy. There was no one to equal him in throwing opposites together. He did not believe that opposites attract but that they unsettled the compass. It was others who needed the compass: he had known his direction from the day he had entered politics.

Then they were out in the foyer, heading for the doors and the wide expanse of marble steps fronting the curved entrance. Juliet paused to help Mrs Vanderberg with her wrap, another home-made garment, like a purple pup-tent. The two Aldwych men went out through the doors with the Premier, one on either side of him. They paused for a moment while the white government Ford drew in below them. Beyond was the wide expanse of George Street, the city’s main street, thick with cinema and theatre traffic.

The hum of the traffic silenced the sound of the shot.

3

‘They’ve taken him to St Sebastian’s,’ said Phil Truach. ‘It looks bad, the bullet got him in the neck.’

‘Where’s his wife?’

‘She’s gone to the hospital. We sent two uniformed guys to keep an eye on things there.’

Malone, Russ Clements and Truach were standing on the steps outside the hotel’s main entrance. Crime Scene tapes had replaced the thick red ropes that had held back the hoi polloi as the dinner guests had arrived. The hoi polloi were still there, cracking jokes and making rude remarks about the two women officers running out the tapes. Most of the crowd were young, had come from the cinema complexes further up the street or the games parlours; they had come from paying to see violence on the screens and here it was for free. But soon they would be bored, the body gone. Even the blood didn’t show up on the maroon marble.

‘Who got shot?’

‘That old guy, the Premier, Whatshisname.’

‘A politician! Holy shit! Clap, everyone!’

Everyone did and Malone said, ‘Let’s go inside. Are the Aldwyches still here?’

‘In the manager’s office.’

‘What about the dinner guests? I read there were going to be a thousand of them.’

‘We got rid of them through the two side entrances. You never saw such a skedaddle, you’d of thought World War Three had started.’

Inside the hotel lobby Malone looked around; it was the first time he had been in the building since halfway through its construction. On one of its upper floors a Chinese girl student had tried to shoot him and had been shot dead by Russ Clements. ‘This place is jinxed.’

‘Keep it to yourself.’ Clements was the supervisor, second-in-command to Malone of Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency. He was a big man, bigger than Malone, who lumbered through life at his own pace. He had once been impatient, but experience had taught him that patience, if not a virtue, was not a vice. ‘Otherwise the IOC will cancel all its bookings.’

‘Phil,’ said Malone to Truach, ‘let me know what the Forensic fellers come up with. Where did the shot come from?’

‘They’re still working on that.’ Truach was a bony man, tanned tobacco-brown. He looked Indian, but his flat drawl had no subcontinent lilt. ‘The guess is that it didn’t come from a car. There’s no parking allowed out there and the traffic was moving too fast for someone to take a pot-shot at the Premier. How would they know to be right opposite the hotel just as he came out? Ladbroke, his minder, told me there was no set time for the Premier to leave. His car was on stand-by.’

‘It could’ve been a drive-by shooting, some hoons aiming to wipe out a few silvertails. There was a horde of them here tonight, the silvertails.’

‘Maybe,’ said Truach doubtfully. ‘But if that’s the case, I think I’ll take early retirement. It’s not my world.’

‘Where’s Ladbroke now?’ asked Clements.

‘Here,’ said Ladbroke, coming in the front doors behind them. In the past hour he appeared to have lost weight; he was haggard, his shirt rumpled, his jacket hanging slackly. ‘I’ve just come from the hospital, I’ve left my assistant to hold off the vultures. I want to know what’s happening here.’

‘How is he?’

‘They’re preparing him for surgery. It doesn’t look good.’

The big lobby was deserted but for police and several hotel staff standing around like the marble statues in the niches in the lobby walls. Malone didn’t ask where the guests were; the less people around, the better. Keep them in their rooms, especially any Olympic committee visitors. ‘Roger, did the Old Man have many enemies?’

Ladbroke was visibly upset at what had happened to his master, but he was case-hardened in politics: ‘Come on, Scobie. He’s got more enemies than Saddam Hussein.’

‘I had to ask the question, Roger. Cops aren’t supposed to believe what they read in the newspapers. Let’s go and talk to the Aldwyches.’

The manager’s office was large enough to hold a small board meeting. Its walls held a selection of paintings by Australian artists; nothing abstract or avant-garde to frighten the guests who might come in here to complain about the service or the size of their bill. There were more scrolls and certificates than there were paintings, and Malone wondered how a hotel that had opened its doors only last week had managed recognition so quickly.

The manager must have seen Malone’s quizzical look because he said, ‘Those are diplomas for our staff, our chefs, etcetera. And myself. And you are –?’

Malone introduced himself and Clements. ‘And you are?’

‘Joseph Bardia.’ He was tall and distinguished-looking, a head waiter who had climbed higher up the tree.

‘From Rome,’ said Jack Aldwych.

‘Paris, London and New York,’ added Bardia.

‘May we borrow your office, Mr Bardia? We won’t be long.’

Bardia looked as if he had been asked could the police borrow his dinner jacket; he looked at Aldwych, who just smiled and raised a gentle thumb. ‘Don’t argue with him, Joe. Outside. I’ll see he doesn’t pinch the diplomas.’

Bardia somehow managed a return smile; he hadn’t forgotten his years as a waiter. ‘Be my guests.’

He went out, closing the door behind him and Jack Junior said, ‘Dad, you don’t treat hotel managers like that. Two-hundred-thousand-a-year guys aren’t bellhops.’

‘I’ll try and remember that,’ said Jack Senior; then looked at Malone and Clements. ‘Looks like the jinx is still working.’

‘Just what I said, Jack,’ said Malone and sat down on a chair designed for the bums of 500-dollars-a-night guests. ‘You and Jack Junior were lucky.’

‘Do you think the bullet was meant for either of you?’ asked Clements. The big man had sat down on a couch beside Jack Junior; the elder Aldwych sat opposite Malone. ‘The bullet might of been off-target.’

Aldwych shook his head. ‘We’re spotless, Russ. Since we finally got Olympic Tower up and running, nobody’s troubled us.’

‘And we’ve troubled nobody,’ said Jack Junior.

‘What about the past?’ said Malone. ‘Jack, you’ve got enemies going back to Federation. Now you’re top of the tree, respectable, retired from the old game, what if someone decided he had to pay off old scores?’

Aldwych shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, Scobie. The old blokes who had it in for me, they’re all gone. I’m history, Scobie, and so are they. The new lot –’ he shook his head again – ‘the Lebanese, the Viets, they wouldn’t bother with me. They’re too busy doing each other.’

Malone looked at Ladbroke, who had gone round the big desk and sat in the manager’s chair. He was still shaken by what had happened to The Dutchman, but half a lifetime of working in politics had built its own armour. ‘Okay, like I said, the Old Man has enemies. They want to get rid of him before he calls the election, but they wouldn’t want to shoot him. That would only queer their own pitch.’

‘Why?’

‘They’d become the first suspects. Who’d vote for them if you proved anything against them?’

‘If we prove anything against them, they won’t be running for office. We want a list of all those who’ve been working to toss the Premier.’

Ladbroke frowned. ‘I can give you a list, but you won’t let ’em know where you got it? I’ve already been approached to work for them if they get rid of Hans.’

Malone looked at the other three men, raised his eyebrows. ‘Aren’t you glad we aren’t in politics? Would you work for them, Roger?’

‘No,’ said Ladbroke, managing to look hurt that he should be thought venal. ‘But I wouldn’t tell them that till I’d found another job. And though the Old Man’s been a pain in the arse at times, I don’t think I could work for anyone else, not after him.’

‘You’d be lost out of politics,’ said Malone, and Ladbroke nodded. ‘What happens if he doesn’t recover? He probably won’t, not with a bullet in his neck at his age. Not enough to go back to work.’

‘Then the Deputy Premier will call the election – it’s got to be called, two months at the latest, in March. Our time’s up.’

‘That’s what Hans said tonight,’ said Aldwych. ‘That his –enemies, we call ’em that? – they reckon his time was up, he’d reached his use-by date.’

‘Is the Deputy Premier one of the enemies?’ Malone had had no experience of Billy Eustace. He had slid in and out of ministerial portfolios with hardly anyone noticing. He had never held any of the law-and-order portfolios.

Ladbroke pursed his lips. Those in political circles, whether politicians or minders, are wary of discussion with outsiders. Discussion and argument are food and drink to them, but they don’t like to share it. ‘Billy Eustace? He could be, but I don’t know that he has the troops. And he’d never hire a hitman, not unless he got a discount and fly-buy coupons. Billy has the tightest fist I’ve ever come across.’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ said Clements, but didn’t look at Malone. ‘Jack, can we eliminate you and Jack Junior for the time being?’

‘For as long as you like,’ said Aldwych.

Ladbroke stood up. ‘I’d better get back to the hospital. If the Old Man dies –’ He bit his lip; it was a moment before he went on: ‘I’ll let you know right away. Then get the bastard – whether the Old Man lives or dies!’

It was the first time Malone had seen Ladbroke raised out of his laid-back, almost arrogant calm. ‘We’ll do that. If he regains consciousness, then tomorrow we’ll have to talk to him.’

‘You’ll have to talk to Mrs Vanderberg. She’s running things now.’

‘How’s she taking it?’

‘Badly, I think. But she’s hiding it. She’s as tough as the Old Man. The bastards who wanted to get rid of him should remember that.’

He went out and Malone and Clements stood up to follow him. ‘Take care, Jack.’

‘You can be sure of it,’ said Aldwych.

Out in the lobby one of the Physical Evidence team was waiting. ‘We think we’ve found where the shot came from.’

‘Where?’

Sam Penfold was the same age as Malone but looked older. His hair was grey and his thin eyes already faded, as if the search for clues had worn them out. He collected spoor like a hunter, which was what he was. ‘Across the road. There’s a row of shops, half a dozen or so, rising three storeys. There’s a common entrance that leads up to the first and second floors, with a corridor running along the back, connecting them. The rooms above the shops are mostly single tenants. A quick-job printer, a watch and jewelry repair shop, things like that. And –’

Why, wondered Malone, were so many cops these days using theatrical pauses? Were they all training for TV auditions?

‘And an alterations and repairs business, the Sewing Bee. It had been broken into. From its street windows you look right across George Street to the steps outside there.’ He nodded towards the hotel’s front. ‘A good marksman with a good ‘scope couldn’t miss.’

‘He did miss,’ said Clements. ‘Or close enough. The Premier isn’t dead.’

‘You got anyone over there?’ asked Malone.

‘Norma Nickles is there and I’m going back. We’ll have the place dusted and printed in time to give you prints in the morning. I’m not hopeful, though. We had time to try the door that had been busted. The door-knob was clean, so the guy was probably wearing gloves. All we’ll find, I’m afraid, are prints from the staff and customers.’

‘Why are you buggers always so cheerful?’

‘We’re bloodhounds. You ever see a cheerful bloodhound?’

He left and Malone turned as he saw Bardia, the manager, approaching. He had the look of a man who wished he were back in Rome or Paris or London.

‘Finished, Inspector?’

‘No, Mr Bardia. Just beginning.’

Guests who had been out on the town or visiting friends were coming back, entering the lobby with some apprehension and puzzlement at the sight of the uniformed police and the blue-and-white tapes still surrounding the outside steps. Bardia saw them and smiled reassuringly, as if it was all just part of the hotel’s service.

Then he turned back to the two detectives. ‘The police will be here for – days?’ He made it sound like months.

‘No. Tomorrow, yes. But after that things should be back to normal for you.’ Then he looked beyond the manager into a side room off the lobby. ‘Excuse me.’

He crossed the lobby into the side room and Clements, left stranded, took a moment to recover before he followed him. Les Chung, Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te looked up as the two Homicide men approached. They all had the bland look that Malone, a prejudiced cynic, thought only Orientals could achieve.

‘We meet again.’ Two years before he had met Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te on a case that had threatened to ruin any chance of Olympic Tower’s being a successful venture. The same case on which the Chinese girl, screaming at him, un-bland as a cornered animal, had tried to kill him. ‘Murder seems to bring us together.’

‘Is he dead?’ The bland look dropped from Les Chung’s face.

‘No, but he may soon be – they’re not hopeful. It was attempted murder.’

‘It wasn’t – what do you call it? – a drive-by shooting? A random attack?’

Madame Tzu might have been asking if the Premier had been attacked by a wasp. It was impossible to tell her age within ten years either side of the true figure; but whatever it was, she wore it well. She had a serenity that was a sort of beauty in itself; men would always look at her, though not always with confidence. Men, particularly the natives, tend to be cautious with serene women: it is another clue in the feminine puzzle. She wore a simply cut gold dinner dress, a single strand of black pearls and an air that didn’t invite intimacy.

‘No, Madame Tzu, it wasn’t a random shooting. They knew whom they were after. You and General Wang are staying here at the hotel?’

General Wang-Te had sat silent, not moving in his chair. He was a bony man on whom the skin was stretched tight. Last time Malone had met him he had worn cheap, round-rimmed spectacles that appeared to be standard government issue in China then; tonight he wore designer glasses, rimless with gold sidebars, Gucci on the Great Wall. As he looked up at Malone the light caught the lens, so that he appeared sightless.

‘The general is,’ said Madame Tzu. ‘We’re directors, remember.’

‘Owners,’ said Wang-Te, speaking for the first time.

‘Where are you staying?’ Malone asked Madame Tzu.

‘I still have my apartment in the Vanderbilt. I’m not a hotel person.’ She made it sound as if five-star hotels were hostels for the homeless.

Clements spoke to Chung. ‘Have you had any threats against the hotel, Les?’

Chung was one of the richest men in the city, but the two detectives knew his past history. Years ago, before Clements had joined Homicide, he had arrested Leslie Chung on fraud charges. Chung had got off, but ever since he had been Les and not Mr Chung. Arrest doesn’t breed friendship but it makes for a kind of informality. It is a weapon police officers always carry.

Chung shrugged as if he had been facing threats all his life; they were dust on the wind. ‘One or two. The usual nutters –anti-development, anti-foreign investment, that sort of stuff. But they don’t go around shooting people.’

‘Then you’d say this had nothing to do with the hotel? Or the whole Olympic Tower project?’

‘Nothing,’ said Chung, and Madame Tzu and Wang-Te together added a silent nod.

‘Do you have any enemies in China?’ Malone asked them.

They didn’t look at each other; it was Madame Tzu who said, ‘Of course. Who can claim that in one point two billion people all of them are friends?’

She’s smothering her answer with figures. ‘So, eliminating all the nutters and the one point two billion of your countrymen, would you say the shooting was political?’

The three Chinese gave him a blank stare: the Great Wall of China, he thought. He wanted to scrawl the graffiti of a rough remark on the Wall, but that would be racist. Not, he was sure, that any of them would care.

At last Les Chung said. ‘I think it would be politic to say nothing.’

Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te, like intelligent puppets, nodded.

Malone grinned at Clements. ‘Wouldn’t our job be easy if cops could be politic?’

‘Let’s go home,’ said the big man. ‘I’m tired.’

When the two detectives had gone, Madame Tzu said, ‘If Mr Vanderberg dies, what happens?’

‘Nothing that will affect us,’ said Les Chung. ‘Our bookings are solid till after the Olympics. By then the whole complex will have established itself.’

General Wang-Te was wishing he knew more of history beyond the Middle Kingdom. The history of this country where he sat now had begun only yesterday. ‘Do Australians do much political assassination?’

‘All the time,’ said Les Chung, who knew nothing of the Middle Kingdom, but knew even the footnotes in the history of his adopted country. He was not a man to put his foot into unknown territory. ‘But only with words, not with bullets or knives. To that extent they are civilized.’

‘What a wonderful country,’ said Wang-Te and sounded almost wistful.

4

Out in the lobby Malone said, ‘Let’s go across the road and look at that place – the Sewing Bee?’

They crossed the road with the traffic lights. Traffic was six deep across the roadway stretching back several hundred metres; a drive-by, random shooting in this congestion was not even a theory. They walked up to the row of shops opposite the huge block of Olympic Tower. The footpath still had its late-night crowd, mostly young; groups moving slowly with arrogance and loud voices, challenging with their shoulders, high on group courage. One of them shouldered Clements, an oldie, and the big man grabbed him and swung him round.

He shoved his badge in the youth’s face. ‘You wanna try that again, son? Just you and me, not your army?’

The youth was as tall as Clements, but half his weight. He wore a baseball cap, peak backwards: it seemed to accentuate the blankness of his face. He had stubbled cheeks and chin and a mouth hanging open with shock. His big eyes flicked right and left, but he was getting no support from his six companions. They had no respect for the police badge, but Clements, despite his age (Jesus, he must be middle-aged!), looked big and dangerous.

At last the youth said, ‘Sorry, mate. I slipped.’

‘We all do that occasionally,’ said Malone. ‘Let him go, Assistant Commissioner. He’s only young and not very bright.’

Clements let go the youth and walked on beside Malone. ‘Assistant Commissioner?’

‘You think kids are impressed by a senior sergeant? He’ll live for a week on how he tried to push an assistant commissioner out of the way.’

‘I hope none of the seven Assistant Commissioners get to hear of it.’

The entrance to the rooms above the shops was between a pinball parlour and a shabby coffee lounge. They climbed the narrow stairs and came to a long lighted corridor that ran along the back of the half a dozen offices. They passed the Quick Printery; R. Heiden, Watch & Jewelry Repairs; and Internet Sexual Therapy. They came to the open door of the Sewing Bee.

The alterations centre had two rooms side by side, both with windows opening on to George Street. Sam Penfold and Norma Nickles were in the main room with a woman with close-cropped hair and a belligerent expression, as if she blamed the police for breaking into her establishment.

‘This is Mrs Rohani, the owner,’ said Penfold. ‘We called her and she’s come in from Kensington.’

‘Anything stolen?’ Malone asked.

‘Yes!’ Mrs Rohani had a softer voice than Malone had expected; breathy, as if every word had to be forced out. ‘He took my strongbox, twelve hundred dollars. Out of my desk. He forced the drawer open.’

Malone scanned the room. Clothes hung on long racks, queues from which the flesh-and-blood had been squeezed; dresses, jackets and trousers waiting to see The Invisible Man. There were four sewing machines, all with that abandoned look that equipment gets when its operators have gone home. On a wall was a big blow-up of a Vogue cover, circa 1925, like a faded icon.

Malone looked back at Penfold. ‘Any prints on the desk?’

Penfold in turn looked at Norma Nickles, who said, ‘There are prints everywhere, but I dunno whether they are his. Mrs Rohani has four girls working here and clients come in all day, men as well as women.’

She was a slim, blond girl who looked even slimmer in the dark blue police blouson and slacks. She had been a ballet dancer and occasionally she had a slightly fey look to her, as if adrift on Swan Lake. But she could gather evidence like a suction pump and Malone knew that Sam Penfold prized her as one of his team.

‘I’ve come up with something on that window-sill, though. A distinctive print and Mrs Rohani remembers the man it belongs to.’ She led Malone to the window, pointed to the sill that had been powdered. ‘Four fingers, the tip of the third finger missing – he must of leaned on the sill as he looked out. Mrs Rohani remembers him being interested in looking across at Olympic Tower, though she says he wasn’t the first and he probably won’t be the last.’

Malone turned back to the owner. ‘What was he like? When did he come in?’

“Three – no, four days ago. Man about forty, my height, on the stout side but not much. That was why he was here, wanted his pants taken out. Brought ’em in last week—’ She took a puffer out of her handbag, sucked on it. She was an asthmatic: the situation had taken the breath out of her. She put the puffer away, went on, ‘He came in four days ago to pick ’em up. Both times he walked across to the window, said how much he admired Olympic Tower. Said he used to be an architect. If he was, he couldn’t of been too successful. His pants were fifty-five dollars off the rack at Gowings. People come in here, I know more about ’em than the census-taker.’

Malone wondered what she thought of him in the Fletcher Jones blazer and polyester-and-wool trousers bought at a sale, his usual shopping time, three hundred dollars the lot, free belt and socks. Did she guess he turned lights out when people were not using them, just lying there, thinking?

‘We’ll need a list of all your clients for the past month,’ said Clements.

Mrs Rohani looked dubious. ‘Ooh, I dunno. I’ve got some prominent people, they come in here, they don’t want it known they’re having alterations. You know, their hips have spread, the men’s bellies have got bigger –’

‘I’ll know where to come,’ said Clements. ‘But in the meantime we need that list. We don’t put confidential information on the Internet –’

‘Women as well as men clients?’

‘Everyone. Their names and addresses. Particularly that man with the fingerprints on the window-sill.’

‘How long will it take you to trace him if he has form?’ Malone asked Penfold.

‘Once back at the computer, six minutes, anywhere in Australia.’

Malone, a technological idiot, marvelled at the way the world was going. ‘Remember the old days?’

Then his pager buzzed. ‘May I use your phone, Mrs Rohani?’

He crossed to the phone on a nearby desk, dialled Homicide. He listened to Andy Graham, the duty officer, then hung up and looked at Clements and the other two officers.

‘The Premier’s dead. He died twenty minutes ago on the operating table.’

Mrs Rohani took out her puffer again, sucked hard on it. Malone had a sudden feeling that air had been sucked out of the city.