Dragons at the Party (7 page)

“I don’t see why it’s necessary,” said Madame Timori, throwing cold water.

Malone ignored her. “Mr. President, we have a lead on the man who tried to shoot you. We think it is Miguel Seville. He’s an Argentinian, one of the world’s leading terrorists. Maybe
the
leading one.”

Sun Lee had come out of the house to stand in the background just behind Timori’s chair. The rest of the Presidential entourage, the men, women and children who had spent last night in one of the immigrant hostels, had moved down from the front of the house and stood in a group in the shade of some trees, looking as if they wanted an audience of the President but were not game to ask. But Malone noticed that they were all suddenly still, as if they had heard what he had said, and behind Timori the private secretary seemed to stiffen.

Timori raised an eyebrow, but that was all. He was dressed in white slip-ons, white cotton slacks and a blue batik-patterned shirt: he could have taken his place on any of the cruising yachts out on the harbour or at any one of the barbecue picnics out in the suburbs. Except for his face: there was no holiday spirit there. He looked sick, older even than he had yesterday. Last night’s bullet hadn’t hit him, but he had read his name on it: it was unfortunate that poor Mohammed Masutir had had involuntary power of attorney.

“Why would they hire a foreigner to kill me?” He sounded affronted as well as puzzled: for all his corruption he was a true nationalist.

“Perhaps it was the Americans,” said his wife. “The CIA will hire anyone. Remember those Mafia they hired to try and kill Castro?”

“But they
were
Americans,” said Timori. “No, it wouldn’t be the CIA. President Fegan is my friend,” he told Malone.

“I’m sure he is, sir.” Malone did not voice his truthful opinion, that in top politics there were
no
friends, only expendable partners. He could not believe that Timori had read no history. “Have you had any trouble from terrorists in Palucca?”

“None,” said Madame Timori. “I told you there were to be no political questions!”

Pull your head in, Delvina
. But Malone’s voice was still mild: “It wasn’t meant to be political, Madame Timori. I’m just trying to build up a picture in my mind so that we can do something about catching this man Seville before he makes another attempt on the President’s life.”

“You think he’ll do that?” Timori had a soft silky voice; now it was just a whisper. “What sort of protection can you give me?”

“I can give you none, sir. That’s up to the Federal Police and our Special Branch.”

“What do
you
do, then?” Madame Timori’s voice was neither silky nor a whisper. Over under the trees the group was leaning forward, ears strained.

“I’m afraid we’re always called in too late to prevent anything. That’s why we’re called Homicide—after the crime that’s been committed.”

“Homicide? I thought you fellers had finished here?”

Malone turned his head as the newcomer passed him, shook hands with Timori, then kissed Madame Timori on her upturned cheek. He was a barrel of a man, a mixture of muscle and fat, dressed in blue slacks and shirt and a raw silk jacket. Amongst all the sartorial elegance on this terrace—even Sun Lee looked like an advertisement for one of Hong Kong’s best tailors—Malone felt like someone who had just stepped out of a St. Vincent de Paul store.

“I’m Russell Hickbed.” He was the sort of man who would never wait for someone else to introduce him. His broad, blunt-featured face had no smile for Malone; the pale-blue eyes behind the horn-rimmed glasses held no hint of friendliness. “You’re—?”

“Inspector Malone.” Malone didn’t stand up or offer his hand. He sensed at once that only by remaining seated was he going to keep control of this interview with Timori.

“Well, didn’t you get the message, Inspector?”

Malone had never met Hickbed before but he had seen him on television, on
Four Corners, Sixty
Minutes
and on the Carleton-Walsh show. Always laying down the law on the economic situation, on foreign policy, on equal rights: he was a nineteenth-century mind who shamelessly used a twentieth-century medium to preach his arch-conservative message. He had made his fortune in Western Australia in the construction business and the resources boom, then come East to take on the Establishments of Sydney and Melbourne and, according to his own estimate, beaten them to a pulp. Other Sandgropers, as Western Australians were called, had done the same, with varying degrees of success. The others still kept their bases in Perth, the Western capital, as if needing the moral, or immoral, support of their fellow millionaires; but Hickbed, folding his mansion tent on the Swan River, had settled in Sydney, buying an even bigger mansion on the shores of the harbour. Nobody knew how much he was worth, but if he lost a million or two on Monday he had usually recouped it by Tuesday. He had the rich man’s magnetism for money.

“What message was that?”
He’s expecting me to be a mug copper, so I’ll be one.

Hickbed looked at the Timoris. The President seemed uninterested; but the First Lady was tense and angry. “The police here seem to be a law to themselves!”

Hickbed took off his glasses and wiped them; somehow his face looked blank and less aggressive without them. “Is that so, Inspector?”

“Perhaps you should ask the Premier.” Malone knew that Hickbed and The Dutchman were enemies who would cross an ocean to avoid each other. “The politicians make the laws in this State.”

“This has nothing to do with the Premier or New South Wales.”

“I’m afraid you don’t know the law, Mr. Hickbed. Homicide is a State offence, not a Federal one. I think it has something to do with States’ rights.”

Hickbed recognized the barb. Before he had come out of the West he had been one of the nation’s most vociferous advocates of States’ rights. Then he had finally realized the real power would always remain in Canberra. That was when he had become leader of the kitchen cabinet that had taken charge of Phil Norval.

He put his glasses back on, looked threatening. “You’re making trouble for yourself, Inspector.”

Malone
looked at him, then at Madame Timori, finally at the President. The latter might appear uninterested, but it struck Malone that he had missed nothing of the exchange between himself and Hickbed.

“They warned me of that the first day I put on a uniform. A policeman’s lot . . .”

But Hickbed had never listened to Gilbert and Sullivan. “You’re a pretty uppity policeman, aren’t you?”

Malone put away his notebook and stood up. “It must be the surroundings. I was once in the Mayor’s mansion in New York—I got a bit light-headed there, too. I must be more ambitious than I thought.”

“Oh, you’re
that
Malone!” Hickbed looked at him with new interest, if no more respect. “The one whose wife was kidnapped or something with the Mayor of New York?”

“With the Mayor’s wife, actually.” Malone turned away from Hickbed; he also turned away from Madame Timori. “I’m not giving up on the case, Mr. President. I’d still like to nail this feller Seville before he tries to kill you again.”

Timori stood up, getting out of his chair with the stiff movements of an old man. But his eyes seemed to have come alive; he put out his hand to shake Malone’s and his grip was firm. He smiled, a gold tooth that Malone hadn’t seen before all at once suggesting the raffish look he once must have had. He’s a bastard, Malone thought, corrupt as a rotten mango. But you might find yourself liking him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You too?”

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

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

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

“You got any other bets?”

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

“And where do the Timoris go?”

“Who cares?”

Malone grinned. “You fellers are special in Special Branch.”

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

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

“What about the ASIO spooks?” said Malone. “Anyone invited them in?”

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

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

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

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

3

I

“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?”