‘Don’t go!’ Green Face who was now White Face wriggled on the ground.
‘I’m Peter January’s security man,’ I said.
He groaned. ‘Shit! Okay, it’s okay.’
‘You done made my night, mister,’ the car parker said. ‘Spinoza, was it?’
‘Right.’
He backed away and headed for the kitchen door. The man on the ground tucked his left leg back and levered himself up. I watched him but didn’t help. He propped himself against the wall and we inspected each other.
‘Why the hell did you do that?’ he said.
‘You made me nervous following us the way you did. Who are you?’
‘I’m Don Carver. I’m a reporter.’
‘If you want an interview there’s a procedure.’
Carver brushed dirt from his shirtfront. ‘I don’t want a fucking interview. I wanted to observe the bastard. Do you realise where you are? Cameramen sue tennis players for millions in this country-for busting a camera.’
‘The tennis players sue back,’ I said. ‘Well, you’ve got your story. You can tell them the Minister’s got good security.’
He glowered at me. He had the sort of bulky body that won’t respond well to tailoring. His clothes were expensive but they hung around him awkwardly. His hair was precisely trimmed but it still looked thin and scruffy. He wasn’t a happy man. ‘There’s no news in that. He’s always had thugs around him.’
I moved closer to him and brushed more dirt from his jacket. ‘Something just occurred to me-January has had the odd threat since he got here. Now you turn up skulking around and you clearly don’t like him. I could put two and two together.’
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘So you say. Maybe I should have a word about you to the security boys here. Would that cramp your style at all, Carver?’
He stopped glowering and looked uncomfortable. ‘I was just doing my job.’
‘Me, too. You want to take a look at him before you go on your way?’
‘I suppose so.’
He eased himself painfully away from the wall and limped along after me. I took him into the carpark, nodded to the attendant, and we looked in through the window.
Peter January had his arm around Trudi’s shoulders. He was telling a story and Trudi and Spinoza were laughing. Light danced on the glasses on the table and on the bottle as the waiter poured January some wine. He smiled at Trudi and she touched his shoulder to draw his attention to something. I felt Carver stiffen beside me.
He sniffed noisily. ‘Who’s she?’
‘Assistant,’ I said.
‘There’s always someone. Nothing’s changed. Well, I’ve seen all I need to see. What’s your name?’
‘Smith,’ I said. ‘I suggest you get in your Volvo and go home so you can work for your Pulitzer prize.’
He sniffed again and limped off towards his car. I watched the tail-light blend into the traffic and I headed back to the kitchen. The attendant touched his cap as I passed. I settled down at the table and drank my beer which had gone flat. January and Trudi were eating; Spinoza looked at me.
‘Trouble?’
‘Not much.’ I poured some wine and drank it. Spinoza was right, a litre of it would have been bad trouble. ‘I have to stop doing this. It’s no way for a man to earn a living.’
January stopped chewing. ‘Doing what?’
‘Beating up journalists. I just had a run-in with Don Carver.’
January dropped his fork onto his plate. Some sauce splashed over his shirt. ‘Shit! What did you say? You beat up Don Carver?’
‘He’ll have a sore leg, that’s all.’
‘What other journalist have your beaten up lately?’ Trudi said.
‘Sammy Weiss.’
‘That slug.’ She drank some wine and shuddered.
‘I’m not following this,’ Spinoza said.
I reached for bread in the hope that it would improve the wine. ‘It’s all to do with the Minister’s reputation,’ I said. ‘He has to keep up this front of being a womaniser so no one’ll suspect he’s gay.’
‘Hardy, watch it!’ January said.
Trudi laughed. I suddenly realised that I was jealous. ‘Don’t worry, Peter,’ I said. ‘When Carver looked in Trudi was nibbling your ear. He got the right message.’
The party went sort of flat after that. We finished the meal; I didn’t eat anything and drank a bit too much of the wine. Spinoza didn’t drink anything. At one point he slipped out and I gather he spoke to the carpark attendant because when he came back he nodded to me approvingly.
‘Neat,’ he said.
We took January and Trudi to their next meeting which was in a condominium apartment near the Watergate hotel. I stayed in the car with Spinoza and we drank some very good and very strong coffee from a take-away joint.
‘You don’t look much like a citizen of the lucky country right now,’ Spinoza said.
I swilled the last inch of coffee. ‘We were the lucky country for about 24 hours in 1972.’
‘How’s that?’
‘We got a new government that did good things. 24 hours, maybe 48. It was all downhill after that.’
Spinoza looked out over the lights strung up high over the bank of the Georgetown Channel. ‘Luck sure is spread thin. But your man’s doing all right. He’s got past a bombing, I hear, and then there was that little freeway incident. Mind you, he’s going to be exposed tomorrow.’
‘They haven’t told me.’
‘He’s going to this big function in Georgetown-sort of liberal affair-anti-nuclear, pro-Third World, free range eggs thing. Lots of people and very hard to screen ‘em.’
‘Great. I still haven’t looked at your mug shots.’
‘We’ll do it tomorrow-after this thing is over. He does the Senate after that, right?’
‘Yeah. Tell me, Billy, do any of your people ever go over to the other side? I mean to the mob, terrorists or whatever?’
‘Sure. Some of the best and smoothest. The work’s much the same, the money’s better and the life expectancy isn’t much worse, if any.’
‘Thanks. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.’
17
The first person I saw the next morning looked worried and guilty-it was me, in a mirror, and I didn’t have to be a detective to know why. I hadn’t sent Helen her postcard. My stomach felt off after the bad red wine and I didn’t want any breakfast. I was in the corridor intending to go to the lobby where I remembered they had a gift shop. I bumped into Martin and immediately felt better because he looked worse than I did.
‘What happened to you?’ I poked the button to call the lift; Martin was shaking, polishing his spectacles and not looking up to the job.
‘Got drinking with some of the press boys last night.’
‘You don’t look the type.’ We got into the lift and had the chance to examine both our images in the mirrors. Mirrors don’t lie: he looked much worse than me.
‘I’m not really. A couple of beers down the Canberra Rex on Friday night’s my speed. Bit of wine with dinner. I don’t know how it happened.’
‘I daresay there’s more sin here than in Canberra. Don’t worry, you’ll recover. You can have a hair of the dog at this Georgetown bash. You going?’
We arrived at ‘R’, which meant the ground floor, and he stumbled leaving the lift. ‘That’s not the worst of it. They cancelled another meeting with the Minister this morning.’
‘That’s not bad news for me.’
‘It is for him. He feels he’s getting the cold shoulder.’
‘What did he expect? Excuse me, I have to buy something. Where are you going?’
‘For a walk, to clear my head.’
I thought of telling him to be careful and then cancelled the thought. He was over 30 and he had a job in Canberra; he could look after himself.
I bought a postcard of the Washington monument at the news-stand and wrote on it that I’d tried to contact her and that I missed her and that if she didn’t phone me in Sydney when I got back I was going to come up to Kempsey and fix it so that she and Michael and me and the kid all had our say. I got stamps at the desk and mailed the card to the radio station where she worked. Trudi came into view as I was dropping it in the box.