The Tax Inspector (17 page)

Tuesday

30

At Catchprice Motors they called a potential customer a ‘Prospect’, and as the big black cumulus clouds rolled in from the west and the first thunder of the day made itself heard above the pot-hole thump of the Fast-Mix Concrete trucks heading north towards the F4, Benny hooked a live one. It was a Tuesday, the second day of Benny’s new life.

He found the Prospect there at eight-thirty, crunching around in the gravel beside the Audi Quattro. Benny made no sudden movements, but when the Prospect found the Quattro’s door was locked, Benny was able to come forward and unlock it for him.

‘Thank you,’ the Prospect said.

‘No worries,’ Benny said, holding the black-trimmed door open and releasing a heady perfume of paint and leather. The driver’s seat made a small expensive squeak as it took the Prospect’s weight. The white paper carpet-protector rumpled beneath grey slip-ons whose little gold chains made Benny take them for Guccis. The guy folded his hands in his lap and asked to be given ‘the selling points’. Benny had not slept all night – he had been working on one more angle in his campaign to seduce the Tax Inspector – but now all of his gritty-eyed tiredness went away and the fibreglass splinters in his arms stopped itching and he squatted on the gravel beside the open door and talked about the Quattro for five minutes without lying once. He watched the Prospect as he spoke. He waited for signs of boredom, some indication that he should shift the venue, alter the approach, but the guy was treating this like information he just had to have. After twenty minutes, Benny’s knees were hurting and he had run out of stuff to say.

Then the Prospect got out of the Quattro. Then he and Benny stood side by side and looked at it together. The Prospect was five foot six, maybe five foot seven – shorter than Benny, but broader in the shoulders. He played sport, you could see it in the way he balanced on the balls of his feet. He had a broad nose, almost like a boxer’s, but you could not call him ugly. He was good-looking, in fact. He had a dark velvet suit and a small tuft of black hair – you could not call it a beard – sitting underneath his lower lip. He was twenty-two, maybe twenty-five years old, and he had Guccis on his feet and he was looking up at Benny – what a wood duck!

‘So,’ he said. ‘When do we do the test drive?’

‘Hey,’ said Benny, ‘don’t panic.’ The truth was: he was unlicensed. They would kill him if they saw him demo this unit. He was going to do it none the less, but gentlee gentlee catchee monkey – he had to wait for Mort who was sitting in a Commodore by the front office. He was hunched over in the seat reading out the engine functions on the computerized diagnostic device – the Compu-tech.

‘The thing you’ve got to appreciate about an Audi,’ Benny said, ‘is nothing is rushed. They rush to make all this G.M. shit, but not an Audi.’

‘I have something for you,’ the Prospect said.

Benny did not notice what he had. He was watching Mort unplug the Tech II and put it in his back pocket.

The Prospect was occupied with a separate matter – withdrawing a sleek silver envelope from his inside jacket pocket.

‘Here,’ he said.

He held it out to Benny.

Benny took the envelope.
What do you want?

The Prospect smiled. Benny was spooked by his black eyes.

‘You have good taste in ties,’ the Prospect said. ‘I’m sure you will like this one.’

The envelope held a black and silver and green tie.

Benny felt a tingling at the back of his neck.

‘Silk,’ said Sarkis.

Benny looked up at the eyes and then down at the tie.

‘I’ll buy it,’ he said. He had a boner. He did not want a boner. He did not want a gift or come in his mouth, but the man’s eyes were like a sore tooth he could not keep from touching.

‘No, it’s a sample,’ said Sarkis. ‘I made it.’

Benny smiled at the Prospect. He wet his lips and smiled.

‘You make ties?’ he asked.

‘There are no good ties in Australia,’ said Sarkis, who was as impressed with Benny’s haircut as Benny had been with Sarkis’s shoes. You needed to be making big money to maintain a cut like that. ‘There’s a big market waiting for these ties. What I need is the capital to do it in a bigger way. Here … have it … It’s a gift.’

The man held the packet out with one hand. The other hand he kept behind his back. He flexed his knees and looked out at the street trees with their pretty red-dotted lichen-encrusted leaves and their hairy, mossy trunks. They were side by side. Benny could feel the space between them.

‘A present? Just for nothing?’

‘For good luck,’ said Sarkis, ‘on my first day here.’

‘First
day?’

‘I’m sorry …’ Sarkis said, suddenly confused.

‘First day? Come on, what are you saying to me. What are you proposing?’

‘Working here,’ said Sarkis. ‘I’m sorry. I was hired to work here. She said someone would come and fill me in.’

‘Got it,’ said Benny. He felt a pain in his stomach. He watched his father nurse the Commodore slowly out along the brown-puddled service road. All the fibreglass splinters in his arms began to itch. ‘Who hired you? Mrs McPherson?’

‘The owner hired me,’ said Sarkis. ‘The old lady.’

This was exactly how Howie got into Catchprice Motors and it made Benny get a freezing feeling behind his eyes. ‘Oh shit,’ he laughed. ‘You got hired by
Grandma.’
He tapped his forehead and rolled his eyes.

‘She’s got the keys,’ Sarkis said. ‘I saw her.’

‘She’s got the keys because she’s got the keys – she doesn’t own the business.’

‘She told me that she did.’

‘Well she doesn’t. It’s owned by my auntie and my Dad and me. Not even my uncle Jack has got shares. He’s a property developer in town, but he doesn’t work here so he can’t have shares. Even my brother,’ Benny said, ‘could have had a future here …’

Then he saw the Tax Inspector’s Colt making a right-hand turn across the traffic to come into Catchprice Motors.

‘I’ve got to tell you,’ Sarkis said, ‘I never sold cars before.’

Benny groaned.

‘So if you can help me …’ Sarkis rubbed his fingers together, indicating money passing hands.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You help me, I’ll split my commission.’

‘We don’t have commissions,’ Benny said. ‘This is a family business.’ But he was mollified by the offer. ‘This is a fucking minefield,’ he said. ‘It’s a snake-pit. They all hate each other. None of them can sell a car. If you work here, you’d have to work for me.’

‘Sure,’ said Sarkis. ‘Sure, O.K.’

‘We’ve got a lot of stock to move,’ Benny explained. ‘We’ve got a fucking enormous tax bill.’ He looked at Sarkis. ‘What makes you think you can sell cars … what’s your name?’

‘Sarkis.’ He hesitated. ‘They call me Sam,’ he told this kid. He hated how it sounded. The kid must be seven years younger and he was saying, ‘Call me Sam’.

‘Sam? Listen Sam. The first thing you’ve got to know is that the car is not the issue. The car is only the excuse. It’s the F&I you make the money from. No one understands that. The kings of this business are the F&I men. There’s no one in Catchprice Motors knows an F&I man from their arsehole. Someone says to my old man, “I need insurance,” he picks up the fucking phone and dials the fucking insurance company for them and it costs us thirty cents and makes us nothing. You want to work here, you got to go away for five days and learn about F&I …’

‘Sorry … what’s F&I?’

‘I’ve been telling you,’ said Benny. ‘Finance and Insurance. F&I. You stay here now, all this week, but next Monday you get on an F&I course. You learn how to use the computer, how to do the paper work. You don’t need to know shit about cars. You don’t need to know the difference between an Audi Quattro and a washing machine. A week from now you’ll know how to sell them comprehensive insurance, disability cover, extended warranty. If that’s impossible …’

‘I’m Armenian,’ said Sarkis. ‘We’re the best salesmen in the world.’

‘Yeah, well don’t go round giving people silk ties. You get people mad with you. Forget it now. Listen to me – I’ve got a hundred bucks and I want to buy a car from you, how are you going to do it? I mean, I come in here with a blue mohawk and a leopard-skin vest and a ring through my nose and when I’ve finished jerking off all I can get together is a hundred bucks …’

‘You can’t afford a car, sorry …’

‘You know as much as the directors of this business.’ Benny could see Cathy standing at the top of Grandma Catchprice’s landing. She was waving her arms around and waving at Benny and Sarkis. ‘You want to sell a car, you’ve got to understand finance, O.K. Listen to me,’ Benny said, ‘not her. You’ve got a hundred bucks, you want a nice car. I say to you, see that old F.J. Holden over there. I’ll sell you that for a hundred bucks.’

‘You call that a nice car?’

‘No, I don’t. Just be patient. O.K. You buy it from me for a hundred. O.K.?’

‘O.K.’ said Sarkis.

‘O.K., now I buy it back from you at five hundred. Car hasn’t even moved. What’s happened?’

‘You’ve lost money.’

‘No, now you have five hundred bucks – you can afford to do business with me. You’ve got enough money for a deposit on a $3,500 car. I can finance it to you. I’ll make good money on the sale, I’ll keep on making money on the F&I. You understand me?’

‘I think so,’ said Sarkis.

‘It takes time, don’t worry,’ Benny said. ‘They think I’m dumb round here, I’ll tell you now.’ He could see Cathy lurching awkwardly down the stairs. ‘But none of them appreciates this. You’re getting it faster than they are. You can make two hundred grand a year in this dump, really. You believe me.’

‘You want to know? I think it’s a great opportunity.’

‘You get this F&I under your belt, we can set this town on fire.’ He turned to face Cathy who was weaving towards them. ‘Just ignore this,’ he told Sarkis. ‘This doesn’t count.’

31

Sarkis watched the chunky blonde woman in the gingham dress walk down the staircase. Her eyes were on him, he knew, and he was optimistic about the effect her presence would have on the conversation she was so obviously about to enter. At a certain distance – from the top of the fire escape to the bottom, and a metre or two onwards from there – she gave an impression of a bright blonde Kellogg’s kind of normality and he hoped that she might, somehow, save him from this sleaze. But then she passed the point where there could be conjecture and he saw, even before he smelt her, that her face was puffy and her mascara was running. The smell was not the smell, as subtle as the aroma of Holy Communion, you get from a drink or two, but the deep, sour aura that comes from a long night of drinking, and it explained more readily than her high-heeled knee-high boots, the careful way she walked across the gravel.

‘Who are you?’ she asked Sarkis. She looked both hurt and hostile and Sarkis’s strongest desire was to turn away from all this poison and walk to the sane, cloves-sweet environment of his home.

Instead he said something he had promised never to say again: ‘Hi, I’m Sam Alaverdian.’

The ‘Sam’ did not make her like him any better. She sighed, and put her finger on the small crease at the top of her nose. ‘So you’re the latest candidate,’ she said. ‘Tell me, honey, what experience do you have?’

‘He’s Armenian.’

‘What’s that got to do with it, Benny?’

‘They’re the best salesmen in the world.’

‘Oh shit, Benny, spare us, please. Tell me … what’s an Armenian? Where’s Armenia? You tell me.’

Obviously, Benny did not know. He stared at her as if he could vaporize her. His eyes got narrower and narrower and she stared right back at him. Sarkis did not want to work for either of them. They both stared at each other for a long time until finally, the woman shifted her ground. You could see her surrender in her shoulders before she spoke.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She put out her little white hand towards him and he stepped away from it.

‘Don’t give me shit about this,’ he said. ‘I’m saving you.’

The woman’s face screwed up. She wiped her eyes and made a big black horizontal streak that went from the corner of her eye into her permed curly hair.

‘I’m saving you,’ Benny said again. He put out his hand to her and she took it and held it, and began to stroke the back of it. Sarkis was embarrassed but they were oblivious to him. ‘I’m making it possible.’

‘Honey, it was a nice try, but we can’t stop the Tax Office. She’s back.’

‘I know she’s back,’ Benny said defensively. ‘I
saw
. Maybe she just came to get her things … you won’t know until you talk to her.’

‘Forget it, Ben.’

‘Try being positive, just for once.’

Cathy smiled and shook her head. ‘Honey, you’re
sixteen.’

Sarkis did not want to interrupt. He waited until whatever process they were engaged in – Benny stroking her hand, she touching Benny’s cheek – was completed. But when they brought their attention back to Sarkis, he said: ‘I can sell.’

The Catchprices took their hands back from each other.

‘What can you sell, Sam?’

‘F&I,’ Sarkis told her. From the corner of his eye he saw Benny smile. ‘I’m an F&I man,’ he said.

She frowned and scratched her hair. The hair was good and thick but dry and brittle from home perming. She took a Lifesaver packet from the pocket of her gingham dress, and bit off the top one.

‘Please,’ Benny said. ‘I can use him.’

She squinted at Sarkis and frowned. ‘We can’t afford an F&I man.’

‘You can’t afford not to have one,’ said Sarkis, wanting to be definite but having no idea how to be really definite, rushing her towards the idea of an F&I man while, at the same time, he dragged his own heels, anxious lest he be forced to talk any more about the alien subject.

‘I’m very sorry, Sam, but my mother had no authority to hire you.’

‘Don’t worry about him. He’s mine.’

‘She made a verbal contract with me,’ said Sarkis, remembering his father’s argument with a builder when they first arrived in Northwood.

This made the woman stare at him very hard.

‘Did she get the chance to tell you about her gelignite?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want to get involved with us, Sam.’

‘I need a job.’

‘How long you been living in Franklin?’

‘Six months.’

‘You better just forget it, Sam. You don’t want this work. Please go away.’

‘You’re the one who should go away,’ Benny said, very gently. ‘You’ve got a reason to go away. We’ve got a reason to stay here.’

The woman looked at Benny and clenched her smudged eyes shut and opened her mouth and suffered a small convulsion or a shiver as if she might be about to weep. Then she turned and walked away across the gravel, holding out her hand to steady herself among the cars as she passed them.