He was her favourite. He knew it, and he carried a sense of the unjustness of his own favouritism. He thought Mort was more decent, and Cathy certainly more gifted but he was physically lighter, blond-haired, pretty – a McClusky, not a Catchprice.
The Jaguar had an intermittent fault in the electrics and was, because of this, missing under load. He came down to Franklin more slowly than usual – in forty-five minutes.
He saw the two salesmen standing under yellow umbrellas in the yard, but did not recognize the blond one as his nephew. He crossed the gravel, self-conscious in his Comme des Garçons suit. He climbed the fire escape which had rotted further since his previous visit.
In his mother’s living-room, beneath the photograph of himself shaking hands with the Premier of the State, he met the Tax Inspector.
She was handsome beyond belief. She had a straight back, lovely legs, big black frightened hurt eyes, a chiselled proud nose, and a luxuriant tangle of curling jet-black hair. She was no more than five foot five and she had a great curved belly which he realized, with surprise, he would have loved to hold in both hands.
‘You tell Jack,’ his mother told the Tax Inspector. ‘Jack will know what to do.’
The Tax Inspector told him about the death threat. She sat opposite him at the table. She was upset but she was articulate and considered in the way she assembled the information for him, telling him neither too much nor too little. This impressed him as much as anything else – he was impatient, he demanded that his executives say everything they had to say in documents of one page only.
He sat opposite her, frowning to hide his happiness. She was a jewel. Here, among the smell of dog pee and damp.
‘O.K.,’ he said, when she had finished. ‘There are three ways to fix this. One: your friend does nothing. She’ll get a few more calls and that will probably be that. The crappy part is she has to listen to this creep. It’s upsetting.’
‘It’s terrorism,’ said Maria, who was pleasantly surprised to find a Catchprice who was not angry and threatened and who seemed, more importantly, to be in control of his life. In the way he talked he reminded her of a good lawyer.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘So we rule that out as an option. The second option would be to get some help. Someone – I could do it if she liked – would go and find out how to contact Wally Fischer. And then we could arrange for your friend to apologize. Maybe we could get away with a phone call.’
The Tax Inspector was drawing on the table with her finger.
‘It sounds pretty bad, I know, but you can be sure it would work. She doesn’t want to apologize?’ Jack guessed.
‘In a flash. I’m the one who thinks she shouldn’t.’
‘And she’ll take your advice?’
‘Let’s see what the third option is.’
In fact Jack had no third option to offer her. He had been making it up as he went along. It was a bad habit to specify a number of points. It was a salesman’s habit. Politicians did it too. You said: there are five points. It made you seem in control when you were winging it. People rarely remembered when you only got to four. But this one demanded a third option and he had to find her one. If the friend wouldn’t apologize, he would arrange to have someone telephone Wally Fischer and grovel on the friend’s behalf, impersonate her even – why the hell not? He saw himself drifting into the fuzzy territory on the edge of honesty, but he could not see where else to go. He must fix this for her.
‘I have some friends in the police,’ he said. ‘I can maybe arrange for one of them to have a quiet talk to Mr Fischer.’ Actually this was better. He could talk to Moose Chanley in the Gaming Squad. Moose Chanley owed him one. If Moose couldn’t make it sweet with Fischer, he would know someone with whom he had a working relationship. It was no big deal – networking – 98 per cent of property development was networking. He would need to have Moose phone the friend to tell her Dial-a-Death had been called off. Maybe it would be possible to get whichever of Fischer’s thugs who was currently playing the role of Dial-a-Death to phone her and tell her it was off. No, no, no. Take the simplest course.
‘Why did you pull that face?’
‘I was thinking of Wally Fischer,’ he said.
He had got himself off the main straight road and on to the boggy side-roads of lies and he had to get back on the hard surface again. This was a woman with a clear and simple sense of right and wrong. You could see this in the nose. It was a damn fine nose. It was chiselled, almost arrogant, but very certain. This was apparent when she rejected the thought of her friend’s apology. She was a moralist. She had guts. She was one of those people whom Jack had always loved, people with such a clear sense of the moral imperatives that they would never find themselves in that grey land where ‘almost right’ fades into the rat-flesh-coloured zone of ‘nearly wrong’, people with a clear sight, sharp white with edges like diamonds, people whom Jack would always be in awe of, would follow a little way, more of a way than his profession or what might appear to be his ‘character’ would allow, people in whom he had always been disappointed and then relieved to discover small personal flaws, lacks, unhappinesses that proved to him that their moral rectitude had not been purchased without a certain human price – this one is lonely, that one impractical, this one poor, that one incapable of a happy sex life.
He could imagine none of these flaws in Maria, nor did he seek any. The only flaw he could see was that evidence which suggested there could be no intimate relationship between them, not that she was pregnant, but that because she was pregnant she was, although she wore no ring, married.
One step at a time.
He said: ‘Let me make some phone calls.’
Once he had the death threats cancelled it was only a very small step to having her agree to have dinner with him. He knew this was an achievable goal.
37
Gino Massaro was a greengrocer from Lakemba. He had a large, hooked nose and little hands. He had soft, lined, yellowish-olive skin which was creased around his eyes and cheeks. In his own shop, he was a funny man. He spun like a bottom-heavy top with a black belt above his bulging stomach. He would shadow-box with the men (duck, weave, biff), have sweets for the children, flirt with the women (‘How you goin’ darling, when you going to marry me?’) in a way his exquisite ugliness made quite permissible. In his shop he showed confidence, competence – hell – success. He had two kids at university. He spoke Italian, Australian, a little Egyptian. He had his name painted on the side of a new Red Toyota Hi-Lux ute – G. Massaro, Lakemba, Tare 1 tonne.
No one knew the Toyota was financed on four years at $620 per month. He also had a serious overdraft, and a weakening trade situation caused mainly by competition from the Lebanese – not one shop, three, and all the bastards related to each other – who were staying open until nine at night and all day Sunday as well. He also had a ten-year-old white Commodore with flaky paint and black carbon deposits above the exhaust pipe. On the Tuesday afternoon when he parked this vehicle in front of Catchprice Motors he had just spent $375 on the transmission and there was a folded piece of yellow paper on the passenger seat – a $935 quote for redoing the big end. He also carried – not on paper, in his head – four separate valuations for the Commodore from yards between here and Lakemba, every one of which told him that the car was not worth what he owed on it.
He parked on the service road, behind a yellow Cherry-picker crane. He touched the St Christopher on his dashboard, closed his eyes, and turned off the engine. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and today it didn’t – the engine knocked and farted violently before it became still. Two salesmen in the yard stood watching him. Behind them was a red Holden Barina. He did not like the red or the flashy mag wheels. He did not like it that his son would say it was a woman’s car, but it was the right price range.