The Big Ask (29 page)

‘You want me to find you a job?'

‘In a manner of speaking, Frank. Like you once told me, something can always be found for a friend. This is what I'm thinking. If I was able to provide Angelo Agnelli with some sort of ammunition to use against the Haulers, he'd be very well disposed to finding me a cushy position on the government payroll. Maybe even an overseas posting. You supply that ammunition and I'll give you back your mobile. It's a win-win situation, Frank. So what do you say? You want your mobile back, or should I take it to the cops?'

‘What do you mean by ammunition?' he said.

‘Nothing more than a piece of paper,' I said. ‘If you want in, go to the Haulers' office. I'll call you there in half an hour. If you don't answer straight away, I'll assume you're not interested. Getting you sent up for killing Darren will take time. And there'll be nothing in it for me from a personal point of view. But I don't have anything better to do at the moment. Not having a job and all.'

Farrell did a little contemplative breathing. ‘Yeah, all right,' he said. ‘I'll be there.'

‘By the way,' I added, ‘I've got the trade item in a safe place. So don't get any clever ideas about dropping around to pick it up.'

I hung up. Farrell was cagey, but he was sniffing the bait. I thought I'd hit just the right note of venality. My lunchhour gruyere sandwich didn't agree. It was trying to work its way back up my gullet. There were ants in my pants. Not dead ones, either.

Fifteen minutes later, Red lolloped through the back door, home from school with a bunch of the guys in tow around 4 p.m. I drew him aside, told him I had a commitment for the next few hours and suggested he try to wangle an invitation to dinner at Tarquin's place.

‘Hot date?' he said.

I most sincerely hoped not.

I'd budgeted to meet Farrell before my six o'clock confab with Angelo. Thanks to the delay in getting through to him, we'd now have to meet afterwards. This meant keeping him in cold storage for a couple of hours.

Joggers thundered past me in damp T-shirts as I headed back to the Gardenview Mews. I was wearing a lightweight spray jacket over a polo shirt and jeans. Farrell's mobile was under my arm in a family-size zip-lock freezer bag. I walked through the archway, nodded hello to a bloke in a well-cut suit getting into a rental car in the motor court, checked that the ice machine wasn't vibrating and let myself into Room 23.

I put the mobile and the tape recorder on the dresser, hung my spray jacket over the back of a chair and took a miniature of scotch out of the minibar. I thinned it with tapwater and sipped very slowly, getting my full six dollars worth. And keeping Frank Farrell waiting a half-hour longer than the specified time. At 5.30, I called the United Haulage Workers.

A machine started to tell me the office was closed, then Farrell cut in. ‘Is that you, Whelan?'

‘Personing the desk yourself ?' I said.

‘What do you expect, this hour on a Friday?' he said. ‘They've all gone home. So what's this piece of paper you want?'

‘Go to the stationery cupboard,' I said. ‘Get yourself some union letterhead. Write me a statement that you witnessed Howard Sharpe and Mike McGrath concocting a false and slanderous letter accusing the Minister for Transport of sexual misconduct.'

Farrell snorted derisively. ‘Fuck off,' he said. ‘Agnelli starts flashing something like that around, I'll be run out of here on a rail.'

‘Would you prefer to be taking suicide-note dictation from Bob Stuhl's death squad?'

Farrell made a noise like oatmeal going cold. ‘Like that is it, eh? You want to have your bit of flesh as well. Make you feel better, does it?'

‘I'm helping you get away with murder, Frank,' I reminded him. ‘Your job at the Haulers is a small price to pay. A man of your talents can always find work. If he's not in jail, that is. Or dead.'

‘Okay, you'll get your ammunition,' he said. ‘When do I get the other thing?'

‘Start writing,' I said. ‘Keep it simple. Nothing too fancy. I'll leave the wording up to you. I'll call back shortly and tell you where to bring it.'

I rang off, cracked another miniature, lay back on the bed, stared at my shoes and thought about Donny Maitland.

I thought about the time we'd stood in a crowded kitchen at a loud party. We were drinking flagon claret and arguing about whether Ho Chi Minh was a communist or a nationalist. To the best of my recollection, the only conclusion was a terrible hangover. I remembered, too, that I still had his copy of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. And how he'd brushed me aside in his haste to rescue Red from the burning site office. How it was exactly three weeks since our last conversation. And how his last words to me were an apology.

This rigmarole with Frank Farrell, I reminded myself, was just the first step. Maybe I was tilting at windmills, but one day Bob Stuhl would pay for what he'd done to Donny. At five to six, I swung my feet onto the floor and dialled the Haulers' number. ‘Written it?' I said.

‘I've done what you told me,' he said. ‘What now?'

‘Be in the lounge bar of the Southern Cross Hotel at seven o'clock,' I said. ‘Bring the statement. You can read it to me there. And you won't need your phone or any other weapon. Come alone.'

I hung up, wrapped Farrell's mobile and the tape recorder in my jacket and put it on the luggage rack. Then I opened the door and stood in my shirtsleeves on the walkway and waited for Angelo to arrive. Dusk was beginning to fall and the floodlights had been turned on in the quadrangle. Doors were opening and shutting on the balconies. An elderly couple with Queensland accents bickered their way cheerfully down the stairs and into a station wagon. He hadn't, he told her, driven all this bloody way to eat bloody Eye-talian.

A couple of minutes later, Angelo strode through the archway. For a man whose nomination was now assured, he looked less than entirely gruntled.

‘How's Lothario this evening?' I asked.

‘That bloody sexual predator letter,' he scowled, slinking disconsolately into the room. ‘The press have got hold of it. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't merit a second glance. But now that there's blood in the water, they're trying to dig up dirt on everybody in sight, discredit the entire government. Some hack from the
Sun
's been trying to corner me all day. I only just managed to give him the slip.'

‘Stop bleating.' I followed him inside and shut the door. ‘And quit pacing about. You're giving me claustrophobia. Sit down and shut up.'

He did as he was told, shedding his suit-jacket and sinking into the sofa. I took a half-bottle of champagne from the minibar and filled two plastic tumblers. ‘To your imminent renomination, Comrade Shoo-in,' I toasted. ‘And the end of our long association.'

Ange raised his glass. ‘You don't know how much help you've been to me, Murray,' he said, adopting his most sincere expression. For an awful moment I thought he was going to get sentimental. ‘And I hope you never find out.'

We bumped our plastic cups together and sipped. By this small gesture, it was mutually acknowledged that my obligations to Angelo were now fully acquitted. My hand-holding days were over.

‘Remember the time you invested the party election funds in that dodgy company?' I said. ‘Every last cent. On the day before it went bankrupt.'

Ange unbuttoned his waistcoat, loosened his tie and levered his shoes off. ‘You were nothing when I found you,' he said. ‘I made you what you are today.'

‘Unemployed?' I said.

‘And I think I can truthfully claim,' continued Ange, ‘that I've taken you as far as you can take me.'

In other circumstances my departure from Angelo's employment might have been marked by a small gathering in the office and a farewell card signed by my co-workers. Instead, the two of us lolled in a motel room and exchanged low-level insults over a dribble of South Australian brut and an overpriced bag of crisps. Before long, Ange's eyes were drifting towards the phone on the bedside table.

‘Just a couple of quick calls,' he said. ‘Won't be long. No need for you to stick around.'

Angelo's idea of a couple of quick calls meant factoring at least another half-hour into the time I'd need to keep Farrell dangling. I gave a resigned shrug and left him to it, engaged in conspiracies about which I no longer gave a twopenny toss. Before I left, I pocketed the room key. I took my bundled-up spray jacket with me, donning it on the walkway outside the door. Farrell's mobile and the tape recorder fitted easily into its large pockets.

It had just gone 6.30. A cobbled lane ran behind the motel and I followed it towards Lygon Street, my footsteps echoing up the narrow alley. If Farrell was obeying my instructions, he was somewhere between the Haulers' office in South Melbourne and the Southern Cross Hotel.

Lygon Street throbbed with life. Low-slung cars cruised, motors throbbing, music pulsing behind their tinted windows. The sidewalk tables were filling fast and the aroma of tomato paste and oregano hung heavy in the air as prospective diners window-shopped for tagliatelle con vongole and fritto misto.

I strolled the length of the street to the Astor Hotel, an oldstyle pub with tiled walls the colour of a lung disease, and drank a whiskey at the bar. Then I walked back the way I'd come. Dusk had given way to night and the floodlit cupola of the Exhibition Building glowed above the dark treetops of the gardens. At a phone booth on Rathdowne Street, I rang the Southern Cross, had Frank Farrell paged and waited an anxious five minutes for him to pick up the house phone.

‘Slight change of plans,' I said.

‘You wouldn't be fucking me around, by any chance?' he growled.

‘Do exactly as I say and you'll have what you want very soon.'

The Southern Cross was only four blocks away. I gave Farrell directions to the Gardenview Mews, told him to enter through the archway to the parking quadrangle and said I'd be waiting for him there in exactly fifteen minutes.

Traffic hummed along Rathdowne Street, the theatre and cinema crowd streaming into town, late commuters heading the other way. A black BMW turned from the northbound lane and drove through the archway into the motel. I recognised the driver as the leggy press secretary to the deputy leader of the opposition. What was she up to, I wondered?

I didn't wonder for long. I confronted more compelling questions. Would I be able to get Farrell to talk? Would my little tape-machine trick succeed?

I had a ten-minute start. I used three of them to smoke a cigarette and stare across the road at the sign on the back entrance of the Exhibition Building.
The National Boat and
Fishing Show
, it read. I had the bait in one pocket and the hook in the other. All that remained was to land the catch. I ground my butt underfoot and went into the motel quadrangle.

The black BMW was nose-in to the walkway, two doors away from Room 23. Its driver was nowhere in sight but there was a healthy degree of coming and going along the upper balconies. So far, so good. A public place, but not too noisy for recording purposes. We'd be out in the open, so Farrell would be unlikely to attempt to overpower me and snatch the phone. The most important thing was that he should believe that the swap was the main game. All the while, the tape would be running.

I went along the walkway to Room 23 and tested the handle, assuring myself that Ange had left the room locked when he left. I stripped off my jacket and stuffed it behind the ice machine. Goosebumps rose on my bare arms but I wanted Farrell to see that I wasn't wired. Every possible suspicion was to be allayed.

Pressing the record button, I placed the microcassette on top of the ice machine. Then, clutching the clear plastic bag that contained the mobile, I stood in front of Room 23 and waited.

Thirty seconds later Farrell prowled through the archway.

He was wearing a denim jacket, a denim shirt and crotchhugging jeans. At fifty metres, his eyes were caverns of impenetrable darkness. But when he tilted his head back to scan the scene, the light caught the tautness of the skin over his cheekbones, the hardness of his face.

Until that moment I hadn't really thought of him as a physical threat. Not to me, at least. Perhaps I should've made provision for the possibility. It was too late for that now. I was so far out on a limb I could've got a job as a ring-tailed possum.

I waited until he saw me, then dangled the bait and beckoned. He stalked forward warily, scoping the set-up, eyes darting from side to side. When he was four steps away, I signalled for him to stop. The tape recorder was a metre beyond his right shoulder. I willed myself not to look at it.

‘We'll do it here.' I nodded towards Room 23. ‘When I tell you, shove the statement under the door.'

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Think I'll try to snatch it back once I've got what I want?'

‘Absolutely,' I said. ‘You can hardly blame me for not trusting you, Frank. You're a devious bastard and you've got a terrible temper. Look what you did to poor Darren Stuhl. Analogued him off. Would that be the right expression?'

Farrell didn't rise to the topic. He took a folded sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and extended it into the space between us. In response, I took the phone from its bag and lay it on the ground at my feet. One swift kick and it would be under a car, out of reach. The zip-lock bag went into my back pocket, a crumpled ball.

‘Read it to me,' I said.

Farrell read quickly and without expression, like a courtroom clerk speeding through the ticket. For recording purposes, however, his volume and diction were perfect.

‘I, Frank Farrell,' he read, ‘an official of the United Haulage Workers, do hereby state that I was present when Howard Sharpe and Mike McGrath, respectively state secretary and deputy secretary of the aforesaid union, did maliciously conspire to fabricate and disseminate a libellous letter alleging sexual misbehaviour on the part of the Minister for Transport, Angelo Agnelli. Signed and dated.'