‘My goodness,’ the Priest said malevolently as I entered the lift. ‘You could almost pass for third year.’
‘And up yours too, Jack,’ I said, as the lift doors closed. ‘Or is that Pastor Jack?’
~ * ~
5
The thing I always found about real-estate agents was they were fonts of information about people’s private lives. They had their turf and they eventually knew, over time, which client used what type of shampoo, who ate fresh food and who preferred packaged, personal habits and fetishes, who was clean and who was slovenly, who had real money and who pretended to have money. They saw signs of domestic violence, loneliness, anxiety, contentment. There was very little that went on in human life and interaction on their watch that they didn’t know about.
Of course my agent, Geraldo, had a few tales to tell about the Priest and the Boltcutter.
‘Odd to you, my friend,’ he said during one of our morning house inspections. ‘But let me tell you, quite mild for the Gold Coast.’
‘That’s mild? The painted men with their guts hanging out? The murderous monks?’
‘In that building alone there are more fruit-loops than a cereal factory.’ He looked at me, expecting a laugh. It was obviously one of his well-used lines. I dutifully guffawed. It pleased Geraldo.
‘There is an old woman in the penthouse there who has not stepped outside since 1987,’ he said, his eyebrows raised. ‘She owns half of Pitt Street in Sydney. The rental cheques — millions, may I say — keep coming in. I know the janitor. The cheques are all over the place, like litter. Millions, I say. She just sits by the window all day staring out at the ocean. You want tragedies, you’ve come to the right place.’
‘But the gentlemen in the medieval grotto?’
‘Wheeler-dealers,’ he continued, ‘but who isn’t, up here? They’re a little Steptoe and Son operation though. Could be a front. A fraud. A cover. You getting my drift?’
‘I know what a cover is, yes.’
‘Who knows. Drugs. Prostitutes. A friend of a friend knows of one southern gentleman who came up here to retire, so to speak, and wanted to start a strip club.’
‘So? Sounds like a good way to pass your twilight years. Better than philately.’
‘Or collecting stamps.’
‘Precisely, Geraldo.’
‘The thing is, he wanted to open a club for people who liked watching other people dressed up as zebras.’
‘Just zebras?’
‘Just zebras.’
‘I thought I’d heard of them all,’ I said wearily.
‘Your Priest and his antiques? Dead people’s rubbish, as far as I’m concerned. I’m a modern guy, on the other hand. I’m a clean lines, glass and pale timber sort of guy.’
He was also — after more than an hour — an annoying, pain in the backside sort of guy. We inspected several canal-side villas that were like those I imagined Australian second-rate former television celebrities might have fawned over in the seventies. They already looked old and something out of early California porno films. They were seedy and decaying.
I missed the history of Sydney architecture. The rows of terraces. The semis. The art-deco apartment blocks. I told Geraldo this.
‘You want history, you better retire somewhere else,’ he snorted. ‘We have buildings here torn down after twenty years and rebuilt. Nineteen seventies is ancient, my friend. This is a place of renewal. Rebirth. We turn the sod here pretty regularly.’
‘No heritage-listed buildings on the Gold Coast?’
He pulled pensively at his earlobe. ‘I think there’s an old toilet block on the highway near Labrador from the fifties.’
Back in my van that afternoon I did my old system-card trick — something I picked up from a colleague in 21 Division. Using those little five- by three-inch ruled cards, once the mainstay of library index systems and public-service filing cabinets, I wrote a name, location or event on a single card and then laid them out on the table in front of me. It was always a puzzle. A confusing jumble of facts and faces. Eventually, if I worked at it hard enough, I could see the pattern that lurked behind the cards.
‘Do you think you may have lost your footing?’ asked Peg that night, which was her way of saying I could not let go of my work, my old life.
I didn’t tell her that I had, resting next to the sugar canister on my little table in the caravan, a shiny bullet. Sometimes I picked it up and turned it over and squeezed it. It was real, all right. It was the footing I needed.
The cards told me I had seen an old colleague from my past — the Boltcutter. I had met his possible partner, the Priest. I knew the Boltcutter, a.k.a. Dapper Dan, was travelling nicely under another pseudonym, albeit a strange one. And I had received a hand-delivered bullet with a calling card attached. I knew, too, thanks to the Priest, that Fair Weather was a pun on words, and referred to some artist bloke called Ian Fairweather. What I didn’t know was who wrote the note on the bullet. And why had it been delivered to me?
I was at the doors of the Southport Public Library when they opened the next morning. There were several octogenarians there, itching to get inside and continue their research into their family trees. I could understand their addiction. I was only a year or so off the family tree obsession myself.
I found a book on Fairweather and took notes on my little system cards.
When it comes to art, I’m the sort of guy who likes to see what he’s looking at. Comes from being a cop for so long, I suppose. None of this symbolism and deeper meaning. Whistler’s mother? You know right there it’s Whistler’s mother. And God save poor old Whistler, I say, after one look at her sourpuss.
Take Picasso. Marvellous stuff, the early pictures, before he started putting people’s noses on their foreheads and eyes on their cheeks. Those faces look like a plate full of offal to me. Makes me bilious just to look at them. I’ve never liked Picasso. And I’ve never liked tripe.
As for this Fairweather. He was a bit of an offal style of guy to my eyes, but he had something else that instantly appealed to me. What was it? A sort of delicate, childish touch that was impossible not to like. Through all the tangled limbs and thickets of humanity the guy had a big heart. And through the crazy patterns and trees there was something beautiful he was reaching out for and never quite getting. He was like Nurse Reginald, but with talent.
I was shocked to learn he had spent much of his life in a handmade hut on Bribie Island. That he’d embarked on insane adventures and was lucky to have lived as long as he did. That he painted on sheets of newspaper and cardboard and that now his work was held in galleries all over the world, from the Tate in London to the Queensland Art Gallery which, I also learned from a friendly librarian, had just reopened after an extensive makeover with a substantial Fairweather collection.
I was going to have to go up to Brisbane and take a good close look at our Mr Fairweather.
I had a decent steak at the Southport RSL and phoned my old mate Freddy Tingle in Sydney. We’d used him for years on fraud cases and he’d been a bonanza for us, especially when it came to the art world. He’d have to be seventy years old by now. He still ran a little gallery in Darlinghurst, in a back lane next to an S&M boutique.