At 5.40 a.m., exhausted, I declared the night at an end, got up and made a pot of tea. While it was drawing, I found a novel called Over Ice I had been meaning to finish. I read until 8 a.m., when I wrenched myself away from the excitement of a pension in postwar Vienna to clean the flat. Some of the flat. One room. Partly. At 8.30, I drove down Brunswick Street to Meaker’s. The street was almost empty, just me and a few party animals in leather and dark glasses moving towards the caffeine with the care of blind people in a strange place.
I almost missed the item on page five of the Age. ‘Former Minister found dead,’ the headline said. The story said Kevin Pixley had been found dead in the bathroom of his Brighton home. A heart attack was suspected. Mrs Pixley was in London.
What appetite I’d mustered was gone. In the night, I’d turned over the idea of going back to Pixley and putting Bruce’s accusations to him. In the end, I’d concluded that it would be pointless. Kevin Pixley wasn’t going to fall in a heap and confess anything to me.
And what did it matter? Guilt over Danny had started me off. Now I had little doubt that Danny had driven the car that killed Anne Jeppeson. I had nothing to feel guilty about.
I drank a short black and went around to Taub’s. The wood and oil smell of the workshop had the power to cheer me at even the lowest times. Down at my end of the workshop, Charlie had laid out on trestles the wood for my boardroom tabletop: three perfect walnut boards, fifteen feet long, eighteen inches wide and one-and-a-half inches thick. They came from what Charlie called The Bank, the timber stacked in the rafters. The first time Charlie had given me a job using timber from The Bank, I’d asked: ‘What’s this?’
‘Piece wood,’ Charlie said. ‘Swietenia mahagoni. Cuban mahogany. One hundred years old.’
‘I don’t think I’m quite ready for this,’ I said.
Charlie had taken the cheroot out of his mouth and given my statement some thought. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘till you make something nice out of it, it’s just a piece wood.’
I studied the rough walnut boards with reverence. This was one of the classic furniture timbers. Very few makers ever had the chance to work with wood of this quality and size. I turned one of the boards over. Chalked on the other side was the date Charlie had laid the resawn boards down: 10/3/46. This wood’s moisture content was so low that not even the ducted central heating in some Collins Street tower was going to cause it to move. Did an emerging mining company deserve a table made from unobtainable timber air-dried for at least fifty years? Wouldn’t some lesser, wetter timber do? The miners wouldn’t notice. I’d once asked Charlie the same question about a bureau he was making for a hotel owner with drug connections. ‘This arschloch I’m not making it for,’ he said. ‘He’s just the first owner. I’m making it for all the owners.’
I set aside my feeling of awe, put on my overalls and went to work. I gave the boards a preliminary pass over the pride of Charlie’s life, a near-new high-speed 24-inch surface planer bought from a bankrupt furniture factory. I took off a tissue-paper-thin layer, exposing the figure in the wood. I went outside and stood in the drizzle for a few moments so that I could come back in and smell the fragrance of the walnut filling the workshop. After that, I gave the edges two passes each over the long-bed jointer to prepare them for edge-jointing. Then I set the planer and put the boards through again. They came out almost polished. I dipped a finger in a pot of Charlie’s own oil, cold-pressed linseed oil prepared on the workshop stove without chemicals. It was like putting a finger in honey. I drew a squiggle on one of the boards and rubbed the oil in. The wood came to life: smooth, fine-textured, glowing.
I had the three boards on the trestles, admiring the fit of my edge joints, when Drew said from the door, ‘I never saw you look at a client that way.’
I looked at my watch. Three hours had slipped by. ‘I never had a client wanted to be planed, jointed and oiled,’ I said.
We picked up Norm O’Neill and Eric Tanner at the Prince. Wilbur Ong was going to the game with his grandson, Derek Ong, society dentist.
‘They can’t give this bunch a sheilas a beltin, might as well merge with Brighton Bowls Club,’ Norm O’Neill said.
‘I heard Vanotti’s got a groin problem,’ said Eric Tanner. ‘There’s a number of the fellas got things missing in their groins,’ Norm said gloomily.
Things were more cheerful on the way back from the Western Oval. Things were riotous on the way back from the Western Oval. We’d beaten St Kilda 84–79. St Kilda was one of the league’s most improved sides and we’d come from behind to win. It was coming from four goals down—that was what mattered. That was the sweetness. Fitzroy had played its usual game: players dropping chest-marks and handballing at each other’s knees. But then, in the final quarter, Ansell and McCracken kicked two each. Then Grimmer kicked one. We were in front. And we stayed there, fighting off the Saints for ten agonising minutes. At the final siren, in the rain, we embraced one another and drank toasts from Drew’s little silver flask of malt whisky. Around us the Fitzroy supporters croaked out the club song with the joy that comes only to those who have kept the faith through the darkest nights.
At the Prince, the atmosphere was like VE Day. Even Stan was smiling. Even Stan’s wife cracked a joke. We had a few toasts, a few songs, relived a few great games. Then Drew and I took his car home and got a taxi to Vlado’s in Richmond. The warm room was full of Japanese tourists exclaiming at their handbag-sized steaks. We had almost finished ours and a bottle of ’88 Bailey’s shiraz when Drew said, ‘Hear anything more from that bloke who tried to heavy you?’
I told him about finding the two bodies.
He looked at the roof, looked at me. ‘Fucking oath, Jack. Have you gone completely out of your brain?’
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘there’s more.’ I told him about Linda’s digging into Hoagland and my discussion with the Minister.
When I’d finished, he cut the last of his rump in two. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘you won’t mind my saying you’re a stupid prick, will you?’
‘Not really.’
He put a piece of steak in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully, looking around the room. ‘Mate, you don’t seem to have got a grip on something,’ he said.
‘What particular thing is that?’ I asked.
‘You’ve gatecrashed a party at the big end of town. With McKillop, I thought you were getting mixed up with some drug business and someone was giving you a chance to pull your head in. Now you tell me you’ve been trying to tie up the Jeppeson death and McKillop’s conviction and death and Bishop’s and the doctor’s, the whole bloody mess, with Yarra Cove.’
He looked around again. ‘This is dangerous stuff. We shouldn’t even talk about it in public places.’
‘Come on, Drew,’ I said. ‘This is Melbourne.’
Drew drank some wine. He leaned forward. ‘Jack, I think you’re out of touch. You’re still stuck in the days when the Melbourne Club ran this town. All those pompous arseholes who owned factories and insurance companies and played the market. All went to Melbourne Grammar or similar and basically silly buggers who didn’t like Jews or Ities or other kinds of wogs. Otherwise reasonably harmless twerps. Their day’s gone, Jack. They woke up one day and found the real money was in property development. Residential subdivisions. Hotels. Shopping centres. Office blocks. And most of the people making the money didn’t give a shit about joining the club.’
He dropped his voice. ‘I’m talking about people like Joe Kwitny, mate. Came out here with two pounds and holes in his socks. Got a job as a brickie, didn’t know a brick from a banjo. Some old bloke in Preston gave him a crash course for ten bob. Next thing Joe’s the gun brickie, the union’s telling him to slow down or a wall’s going to fall on him. So bugger the union, Joe borrows a few quid, goes off concreting over backyards, putting up brick-veneer houses. That was the beginning. The next thing people like Joe were employing hundreds, doing million-dollar deals, putting up buildings overnight, building whole fucking suburbs out there on the fringes. And on the way they found out how to make sure government gave them the decisions they wanted, how to get the unions on side.’