The Tax Inspector (21 page)

40

Vish knocked on the cellar door, not once, but many times. When he opened the door, still uninvited, Benny was sitting on the rumpled orange sheet on the couch and staring at him. He was the only neat thing in the middle of this stinking mess and he had laid himself out, so to speak, with his hands folded on his lap, as pale and perfect as a wax effigy.

He had changed the lighting since last night. He had altered the direction of those little reading lights which had originally been above the beds in the family home. He had rigged them up so they shone on the webs of handwriting on the distempered wall, on the green concrete ceiling, on anything but where you’d want a light to be. The room was criss-crossed with the shadows of electric wires.

Vish stepped forward on to an empty ice-cream container. He stumbled and put his hand down to stop him falling.

He put his hand on to a living thing. His heart whammed in his chest.

‘Shit,’ he said.

It was a human being, he saw that. He got such a fright he could hardly breathe. He had his hand on a man’s buttocks.

The man was lying on his stomach and had to crane his neck so he could grimace up at the yellow-robed figure to whom he looked like a gypsy at a country show. He had a little wisp of beard under his lip and trousers made from some velvety material. He showed a lot of teeth, like someone about to be cut in half on stage.

‘You left it too late,’ Benny said. ‘I found another brother.’

Vish held his kurta close to his chest and peered down at the poor fellow who had been pinioned in position like a butterfly. The man stretched up his head again and rolled his eyes at Vish. He had white dry stuff in a rim around the edges of his lips. Vish observed this and accepted it like he might have accepted the presence of a goat or a policeman.

‘Anything you want to say to me,’ Benny said, ‘you can say to Sam. He’s my brother.’

‘Help me,’ Sarkis said.

‘He’s only joking. No one needs you.’

‘Please,’ said Sarkis. ‘My legs are hurting.’

‘Is this what you call being an angel?’ Vish said.

‘Do I look like an angel?’ Benny sneered. ‘You think I’d live down here if I was a fucking angel? No, I’m not an angel – I’m an
attachment
. Isn’t that it? Isn’t that what they call me at the temple?’

Vish smiled and smoothed the air as if he was patting the roof of a sand castle. ‘Even if they do say that …’

‘No, you said that – your guru doesn’t want you to have
attachments
. So now you’re free.’

‘Who is this bloke?’

‘This is Sam. He’s my brother. He’s going to make two hundred grand a year. He’s going to do an F&I course next week …’

‘Don’t hurt him,’ Vish said. ‘He hasn’t done anything to you.’

‘Don’t side with him. That’s fucking typical. You don’t know what he’s done to me.’

‘You’re an accessory,’ Sarkis said to Vish, twisting his head upwards. ‘Why don’t you phone the cops, before you both get in a lot of trouble?’

‘Listen to him,’ said Benny. ‘He’s smart.’

‘You want me to call the cops?’

‘Don’t ask me. Ask him. I’d like to know myself.’

‘You want me to call the cops?’ Vish asked the man. He came closer to him so he could see the dried white stuff around his mouth and his slightly yellow blood-shot eyes.

The man was quiet for a moment. It looked as though he was trying to swallow. ‘Just let me go,’ he said. ‘I’m losing circulation.’

‘See,’ said Benny. ‘I’m just calming him down. He got excited.’

‘You’re right,’ Vish said. ‘You’re not an angel, you’re an insect. You’ll live and die an insect, a million times over. I’m sorry I ever listened to your stupid story. I’m really sorry I came back down here.’

Benny’s lips opened and he went soft around the chin. He stood up, but he put out his hand towards his brother as if he meant to stroke his sleeve. He took the fabric between thumb and forefinger and held it. ‘You give me dog shit to eat,’ he said softly, ‘I’ll still grow wings. It’s my nature. It’s who I am. I’ll tell you, Vishy, they burn us, they shoot us, they pour shit on us and lock us in boxes, but you cannot trap us in our pasts.’

Vish shook his head again.

‘We could be lying around lighting our farts, or doing Ice or M.D.A.’

‘Help me.’

‘One more peep out of you and you’re in deep shit,’ said Benny. To his brother he said: ‘I need you.’ He held out his hand.

‘I need you too,’ said Vish. He took the hand and held it.

Benny looked at him and blinked.

‘We’re brothers,’ Vish said. ‘It is an attachment, but I’ve got it. I put you here, that’s right. It’s my responsibility. So now,’ he grinned, putting his hand around his brother’s neck, ‘I’m going to get you out of here, tonight.’ He made a move on Benny, trying to get a half-nelson on him, but Benny slipped out and started shouting and flailing with his bony hands. Vish stepped backwards and fell off the plank, twisting his leg and falling backwards into the pool of water. A glass fell and shattered. As Vish rose, his yellow robes clinging wet against his barrel chest, Benny came at him with the power cord from the toaster, twirling it like a propeller. The plug smashed a light globe, and bounced against the back of Vish’s hand, and head. He retreated, holding his hand round an injured ear from which fat drops of blood fell, tracing a dripping line up the perforated metal steps to the world outside.

41

Maria waited for Gia in the Brasserie garden near the dripping ferns, sipping mint tea. There was an office love affair being conducted in the bar, and the waiters were eating at the long table by the kitchen, but apart from this the Brasserie was empty.

Maria had planned to tell Gia about Jack Catchprice but Gia was late, and by the time she had arrived, found a dry place to put her briefcase, and begun to deal with the Brasserie’s celebrated cocktail menu, it was after six-thirty.

‘What I am really looking for,’ Gia said, ‘is something very silly and alcoholic.’

‘The Hula-Hula,’ said Peter, taking his order pad out of his grey apron.

‘Does it have an umbrella?’ said Gia skittishly.

‘Trust me. It’s very kitsch. It’s exactly what you’re looking for.’

‘But it tastes nice?’

‘You want silly or you want nice?’

Gia considered.

‘What’s a Mai Tai again? I never had a Mai Tai.’

If you did not know her and saw her do this – run her newly painted fingernails down the cocktail list, fiddle with her gold choker chain – you would think she was vain and indulged, a political conservative from the Eastern suburbs. In fact she was a liberal who worried (excessively) about the waiters and their work and, in Peter’s case, his music as well. In a town where 10 per cent was meant to be the norm, Gia tipped an arithmetically difficult 12.5 per cent.

‘Have a glass of champagne,’ Peter said. ‘You love champagne.’

‘Maybe I should. Should I, Maria? It would have a certain symmetry.’

‘It would be bad luck,’ Maria said. ‘Have the Hula-Hula. Have anything. She has news to tell me,’ she told Peter. ‘She is withholding. She is driving me crazy.’

‘She’s the one who hoards her news,’ Gia said. ‘I’m normally the one who blurts it out. This is her own treatment. She has to wait for everything to be perfect.’

‘If you want perfect, have the Hula-Hula,’ said Peter. ‘If you don’t like it, I’ll drink it for you.’

‘I’ll have the Hula-Hula then.’

‘I’ll have a fresh squeezed orange juice,’ Maria said.

‘It doesn’t have coconut milk does it?’

‘No,’ said Peter. ‘It’s definitely Lo-Chol.’

‘Good,’ said Gia.

‘Tell me,’ said Maria. It was twenty minutes to seven.

Gia hunched down over the table. ‘Well …’ she said.

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Your fellow rang me first …’

‘Jack …’

‘Jack Catchprice. What he hoped was he could just get it stopped.’

‘He couldn’t?’

‘I’m sure he could have but the cop he had in mind just had a major heart attack, but he was really amazing. He was very sweet to me. He got someone else, I don’t know who it was, to talk to Fischer. This took like three hours. They were going back and forth until two-thirty.’

‘Back and forth about what?’

‘About calling it off. Anyway, at two-thirty this very prissy-sounding woman phoned me. I don’t know who she was. Like a real bitch of a private secretary. She gives me two phone numbers. One of them was for his car phone. That’s where I got him.’

‘It makes my flesh creep.’

‘It just rang, you know, like anyone’s phone and then this man answered and then I asked was that Mr Fischer and he said who wants to know and then I said my name, and he said, yes, it was him, and I said, I believe you know who I am.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said yes,’ Gia shivered. ‘It was so creepy and frightening. I can’t tell you how frightening it was. It sounds like nothing …’

‘No, no. I can imagine.’

‘Maria, you
can’t
imagine.’

Peter brought the drinks. Gia’s cocktail was full of fruit and had curling blue and green glass straws sticking out of it. It looked like something in an art gallery whose level of irony you might puzzle over. Gia put her lips to the blue glass straw and sucked.

‘So I said I just wanted to apologize for my behaviour at the Brasserie.’

‘But I thought that’s what you didn’t have to do. I thought that’s what he was fixing for you.’

‘Maria, I’ll kill you. The cop had a fucking heart attack. What else did you want him to do? He was sweet.’

‘I know he’s
sweet …’

‘Christ, I don’t think you can imagine this. I was so frightened, I would have said anything. I’m sure you would have been dignified, but I wasn’t. I would have said anything. It just poured out of me.’

Maria squeezed her hand. ‘Poor Gia.’

‘Then he
interrupted
my grovelling. That was
really
humiliating. He just cut across me and said, give me your number – I’ll have to ring you back. By then I was back in at the office and I didn’t want him to know I worked for the Taxation Office but I didn’t have any choice. And then I just sat by the phone for an entire hour. I won’t tell you all the things I thought, but it was like torture. Ken tried to ring me up to have a chat, and I really fancy him, and I had to say, Ken I can’t talk to you, and he got really offended. Then Fischer finally rang back and said yes he would accept my apology. He made me promise I wouldn’t ever say anything like that again, and I did. It was so pathetic.’

‘God, it’s so creepy. It’s as though you had to talk to something with scales. It’s like some slimy thing you think is mythical. You think it doesn’t really exist and then there it is and you’re touching it. You talked to him about your execution while he was just sitting in his car. It makes me hate this city.’

‘Don’t hate Sydney, Maria. It makes me really anxious when you hate Sydney.’

‘It’s Sydney I hate, not you.’

‘All cities are like this. Where could you go that would be different?’

‘This city is really special.’

‘When you say that I think you’re going to go away. But where could you go that would be any different?’

‘This is the only big city in the world that was established by convicts on the one side and bent soldiers on the other. I’m sorry. I’ll shut up. You must be feeling terrible.’

Gia’s straw made a loud sucking noise at the bottom of her glass.

‘Only when you talk like that.’

‘I’ve stopped. I didn’t know it made you anxious.’

Gia picked the maraschino cherry from her drink and ate it. ‘Maria, I feel great. I’m alive and no one wants to kill me. I’m going to take a week off and just go to the theatre and the art galleries and have lunch with my friends.’ She picked up the orange-slice umbrella and ate the flesh from it. She looked around for a waiter but they were all – Peter too – eating. ‘You saved my life,’ she said.

Maria shook her head: ‘No.’

‘But you did.’

‘They weren’t really going to kill you,’ Maria said.

Gia narrowed her eyes.

‘Oh Gia, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

‘I know that’s what you think.’ Gia drained her glass for the second time and waved her hand.

‘I think it’s horrible. I think it’s really frightening.’ Maria said. She held her friend’s forearm and stroked its pale soft underside. ‘Who can ever know if they would have or not?’

‘I’m sure you would have behaved quite differently.’

‘No. I think you were amazing. I wouldn’t have known what to do. You were very brave.’

‘What’s your fellow’s name?’

Maria Takis bit her lip and raised her eyebrow and coloured. She dabbed her wide mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Which fellow?’

‘Maria!’

‘What?’

‘Stop blushing.’

‘Jack Catchprice? He’s actually a classic investigation target.’

‘Is he nice looking?’

Maria smiled, a tight pleased smile that made her cheekbones look even more remarkable.

‘Is he married?’

Maria looked up and saw Jack Catchprice walk into the Brasserie. He was ten minutes early. Jack was talking to Peter. Peter was pointing out towards the garden. Maria shook her head at Gia.

‘Is this what I think it is? Maria what have you been
doing?’

‘Shush. Don’t look. I’ve been trying to tell you. Don’t look, but he’s here.’

It was not a good idea to say ‘Don’t look’ to Gia. She turned immediately, and looked straight back, grinning.

‘Maria,’ she said in that same whisper that had started the trouble with Wally Fischer, ‘he’s a doll.’

42

Jack had asked her out while they stood in the kitchen of his mother’s apartment. Rain fell from the overhang above the rusting little steel-framed window behind the sink. The rain was loud and heavy. It fell from the corrugated roof like strings of glass beads. Water trickled through the plaster-sheeted ceiling and fell in fat discoloured drops on to a bed of soggy toast and dirty dishes. A red setter tried to mount Jack’s leg.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I can’t go out with clients.’

‘I’m not your client.’

‘But you have an interest, you know.’

‘I have
no
interest, I swear.’ He looked around and screwed his face up. ‘I got out of this family a long, long time ago. Their problems are their problems.’

‘Really?’

‘Really,’ he said. ‘Cross my heart. Check the share register.’

‘Well,’ she said, but the truth was that she had already clearly communicated, through a series of well-placed ‘I’s’, her single status, and she would like to be taken out to dinner more than anything else she could think of. ‘I leave Franklin at three. It’s a little too early for dinner.’

‘God, no, not Franklin. I didn’t mean Franklin.’

‘I have drinks with a friend at the Blue Moon Brasserie at six.’ She did not say it was the attractive friend Jack had already talked to.

‘The Blue Moon Brasserie?’ he asked. ‘In Macleay Street? I could meet you there. We could eat there. Or we could walk over to Chez Oz. I was thinking of Chez Oz. It’s round the corner.’ And when she hesitated, ‘It doesn’t matter. We can decide later.’

‘Oh, I can’t …’ Maria’s face betrayed herself – she would dearly love to be taken to Chez Oz.

‘Jack,’ Mrs Catchprice was calling him from the other room. ‘I hope you’re behaving yourself.’

‘I have to drop in on my father at half-past seven. He’s certainly not round the corner. Nowhere near Chez Oz.’

‘Then I can meet you at the Brasserie and we could have a drink and then I could drive you to your father’s. You like Wagner? You could put your feet up. I could play you some nice Wagner. It doesn’t have to be Wagner. I have the Brahms Double Concerto that is very appropriate to this weather. I have a nice car. I would wait for you while you visited your father. I won’t be bored.’

She did not prickle at the ‘nice car’ although she knew he had a Jaguar from John Sewell’s. She had sat in John Sewell’s herself, two years before, copying down the names of Jaguar owners as starting points for tax investigations.

‘I’ll be driving my own car to the Brasserie.’

‘I’ll drive you back to it after dinner.’

‘My father lives in Newtown.’

‘That’s O.K., I can find Newtown.’

‘I mean it’s not a very exciting place to sit in a parked car for half an hour.’

‘Oh,’ he smiled. His whole face crinkled. She liked the way he did that. He had nice lines around his mouth and eyes and his face, tilted a little, had a very intent, listening sort of quality which she found immensely attractive. ‘I think I can manage half an hour in Newtown.’

She was in the middle of an investigation of his family business. She might be the one who made his mother homeless, but he was flirting with her, more than flirting and she was reciprocating. He was the first man to treat her as a sexual being since she began to ‘show’.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It is an odd situation in Newtown. I have to sneak into Newtown sort of incognito. I might have to ask you not to park outside the house.’

He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows comically.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ she said, ‘I know.’

‘I used to go out with a Jewish woman called Layla. She was twenty-four and I was nearly thirty but I could never take her home. I had to sit outside in the car.’

‘Yes, but you’re not “going out” with me,’ Maria smiled.

‘No, of course not.’ He coloured.

What was weird was that this embarrassment was pleasing. Indeed, the prospect of this ‘date’ gave everything that happened for the rest of the day – including her second serious chat with Mrs Catchprice about the company books, and her unpleasant phone conversation with her section leader where she requested one more day on the job – a pleasant secret corner, this thing to look forward to.

She had never planned to introduce him to her father, or have him sit in that little kitchen drinking brandy. That only happened because they were a little late and because, even after two circuits, the only parking spot in Ann Street was right in front of George Takis’s house where he was – in spite of all the rain – hosing down the green concrete of his small front garden. It was the mark of his widowed state – it was the woman who normally hosed the concrete.

Maria got out of the Jaguar in front of him but he was so taken by the car he did not recognize her.

‘Ba-Ba.’

‘Maria?’

Maria started to walk towards the house but George was drawn towards the Jaguar. When she called to him he did not even turn but patted the air by his thigh, as though he was bouncing a ball.

‘Ba-Ba, please.’

But he knew there was a man in that sleek, rain-jewelled car and he became very still and concentrated, a little hunched and poke-necked, as he stalked round the front of it, not like a poor man in braces and wet carpet slippers who is shamed in the face of wealth, but like a man coming to open a present.

George Takis opened the door of Jack Catchprice’s Jaguar and solemnly invited him out into the street.

It was not yet dark in Ann Street. You could still see the flaking paint sign of the ‘Perfect Chocolate’ factory which made the cul de sac. You could see the expressions on the neighbours’ faces. They were out enjoying the break from the rain, sitting on the verandas of the narrow cottages which gave the street its chequered individuality—white weather-board, pale blue aluminium cladding, red brick with white-painted mortar, etc., etc. The Katakises and the Papandreous were sitting out, and the Lebanese family were in their front-room sitting down to dinner in the bright light of a monster television. Stanley Dargour, who had married Daphne Katakis’s tall daughter, was redoing the brake linings on his Holden Kingswood but he was watching what was happening in front of George Takis’s house, they all were, and George Takis not only did not seem to care, but seemed to revel in it.

It was not yet dark, only gloomy, but the street lights came on. George Takis left his daughter alone on the street next to the mail box with the silhouetted palm tree stencilled on it. The light was really weak and still rather orange but Maria suffered a terrible and unexpected feeling of abandonment. There was nothing to protect her from the judgement of the street. She could not run back into the house, she could not come forward, and yet she had to. Stanley Dargour had put down his tools – she heard them clink – and was standing so that he could get a better view of her over the top of the Jaguar.

Jack Catchprice had stayed in the car with the door shut even while the Tax Inspector’s father had come directly towards him. He had blackened windows and thought he knew what Maria Takis wanted of him, but then the door was opened and he had no choice but to turn the music off and get out.

They shook hands under the gaze of the street.

Then George Takis put his hand up on Jack’s shoulder and guided him into the house. Sissy Katakis called out something to Ortansia Papandreou but Maria did not catch it properly.

In the painfully tidy neon-lit kitchen George Takis made Maria and Jack Catchprice sit on chromium chairs while he fussed around in cupboards finding preserves to put out in little flat glass dishes and then he poured brandy into little tumblers which bore sandblasted images of vine leaves – the Easter glasses. He watched the stranger all the time, casting him shy looks. He was small and shrunken as an olive, his eyebrows angrily black and his hair grey and his whiskers too, in the pits and folds of his shrunken, fierce face.

‘So,’ he said at last. ‘You got a British car, Mr Catchprice.’

‘Yes.’

‘I used to make them cars,’ said George Takis. ‘When the British Motor Corporation became Leyland, we made some of these in Sydney. They are a good motor car, eh? They got a smell to them? That leather?’

‘Yes.’

‘No rattles. Tight as a drum. You could float it on the harbour, it wouldn’t sink.’

Maria frowned. She knew they had made a grand total of ten Jaguars in Australia and that the men had been mortified to be told that the production was ceasing because the production quality was too low.

‘She don’t like them,’ George said. ‘You have one of them cars, you’re a real crook. That’s what she told me, mate. Now she’s changed her mind, eh, mori?’

‘Ba-Ba, lay off.’

‘Ha-ha,’ said George, so eager to make a pact with the new ‘intended’ that he could not worry about the feelings of the daughter he was so afraid of alienating. ‘I always tell her, there are nice people have these cars. Some bastards, but not all. You know what? You know the trouble? You never met one, mori. You never had a chance to discover the truth.’

Maria said, ‘That is about half true.’

‘No, no,’ George said, waving his finger at her in an imitation of a patriarch, topping up his glass with brandy and then Jack’s. ‘Completely true.’

‘Half true,’ said Maria. ‘We never did like people with money in this house. We mostly grew up thinking they were crooks, or smart people.’

Jack smiled and nodded, but Maria thought there were strain marks on his face.

‘We didn’t like Athens Greeks, did we Ba-Ba? That was about the worst thing to be in our view.’ She was irritated with her father.

‘You’ve got to be careful with this brandy,’ George said, adding a little to Jack’s glass. ‘You ever drink Greek brandy before?’

‘Once or twice.’

‘You’ve been to Greece?’

‘Ba-Ba, we’ve got to go. I just came round to see you were O.K.’

Her father ignored her. ‘So,’ he asked Jack Catchprice, ‘you single? Would you like to marry my daughter?’

‘Ba-Ba!’

‘She looks after me real good,’ George Takis said. ‘Here.’ He tugged on Jack’s lapel and led him to where his dinner stood, in the brown casserole dish on the bare stove. ‘Keftethes,’ George said. He lifted the lid. Jack looked in. ‘Meat balls. You want to taste? She can cook.’

‘Ba-Ba,’ Maria said. She was trying to laugh. She knew she was blushing. ‘Mr Catchprice is a client of mine. There’s nothing going on here, Ba-Ba. He just gave me a lift, O.K.’ She rearranged the knife and fork and place mat he had set for himself at the table. She could not even look at Jack. She felt him sit down again at the table. She heard him scrape the preserves from his little glass plate.

George was spooning cold keftethes on to a dish. ‘Every night she comes, or if she can’t come, she calls.’ He fossicked in the cutlery drawer and found a knife and fork. ‘I know people have to pay some service so if they get a heart attack there is someone will know. I said to the fellow, mate, I don’t need one. I’m a Greek.’

He placed the cold keftethes in front of Jack who sat looking back at him with an odd, shining, smiling face.

‘You interested?’ George asked.

Jack picked up the fork. Maria put her hand out and took it from him.

‘Sige apo ti zoemou,’ she said.

She stood up. Her ears were hot. She carried the fork, not the knife, back to the cutlery drawer. She picked up her handbag and put it over her shoulder. Her father – standing alone in the middle of the lonely neat kitchen where her mother’s eyes had once burned so brightly – she was sorry, already, for what she had said:
keep out of my life
.

In English she said: ‘You’re very naughty, Ba-Ba.’

‘She works too hard,’ George said.

She should not have said it. It was wrong to see him take this from a daughter. She was shocked to see his eyes, not angry at all, a grate with the fire gone out. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she said. ‘O.K., Ba-Ba?’

Jack was standing, buttoning his suit jacket, tucking in his tie.

‘You come again,’ George said to him. ‘We’ll drink brandy together.’

Jack smiled this shining, bright smile. You could not guess what it might mean.

George detained them a fraction too long in the harsh light of the front door and then again, at the open door of the Jaguar he made a fuss of retracting the seat belt and making some suggestions about the best seat position. Jack Catchprice watched tolerantly while George Takis adjusted and readjusted the rake of the seat while the street looked on.

‘O.K.,’ he said, crouching by the window when they were leaving. ‘Now just relax, O.K.?’

He stepped back, still crouching, with his hand held palm upwards in a wave.
Sige apo ti zoemou
. She should never have said it.

The Jaguar window slid up silkily without Maria touching the handle. The car slowly rolled out of Ann Street.

‘Oh God,’ said Maria. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. I liked him. It was fine.’

Jack braked at the corner beside the cut glass and gilt jumble of fittings of
PLAKA LIGHTING
and nosed the car into the eight o’clock congestion of King Street. He pressed a button and the Brahms Double Concerto engulfed her in a deep and satisfying melancholy so alien to Ann Street in Newtown.

‘Greeks!’ she said.

‘It must be hard for him.’

‘Yes, it’s hard for him,’ Maria said.

‘But he doesn’t have to have the baby, right?’

She laughed.

‘There’s a sleeping bag down there,’ Jack said. ‘You might like to rest your legs on it.’

She accepted gratefully. She shifted her legs up on to the top of the feather-soft cylinder and kicked her shoes off. The seat was absolutely perfect. She shut her eyes. The music in his car sounded better than the music in her house. The smell of leather engulfed her.

She said: ‘I hope you weren’t too embarrassed.’

He turned the music down a little in order to hear her better.

‘He is so obviously smitten with you. It was very touching. It’s impossible to be embarrassed by that.’

‘I would have thought we were at our most embarrassing when we were smitten.’

‘Oh no,’ said Jack, turning right into Broadway. He turned to her and smiled. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘How are the legs?’