‘I could just ask one of his security boys.’
‘He’s called them off. He goes out alone.’
That was strange; politicians like a huddle-it helps absorb the egg or lead and makes them feel important. You almost never see one silhouetted against the sky like Clint Eastwood. As she put it the job didn’t sound so hard. At least I wouldn’t be craning to look over the heads of a lot of guys with thick waists and short haircuts. But if she wanted an early start I’d have to wear goggles and a snorkel. She began taking hundred dollar notes out of an envelope.
‘I suppose you want me to start when the weather clears up.’
‘I want you to start tonight.’
At 10 pm I was sitting in my car watching the exit, to the car park of The Belvedere which is one of the new, tall apartment blocks they’ve built overlooking Darling Harbour. Eventually, when a few hundred million dollars of taxpayers’ money has been spent on beautifying everything around there, the people who’ve spent big bucks on their apartments will have a lovely view instead of scraped earth and stained concrete. The rain hadn’t let up so that for now they had acres of pale mud to look at. Tough.
I’d left Helen at home with a stack of video recordings of movies she’d missed because she lived half the year in the bush. She’d promised to keep me some wine and to hold off on ‘Night Moves’ until I got back. She’d keep the promise but I knew I didn’t have to worry about her waiting censoriously up for me. If I got home by midnight or thereabouts, fine; if not, I could find her in the bed.
I was listening to a smart-arse radio hack being rude to his callers. The things the people who called wanted to talk about got sillier and sillier so I couldn’t blame him. No one wants to do silly things-like sit in a leaking car in a rainstorm watching a hole in the ground when there’s a woman and a cask and ‘North by Northwest’ waiting at home.
At 11 pm a white Commodore carrying the number plate Barbara Winslow had given me roared up the ramp. It barely paused at the footpath and swung right past me with indicator lights blinking brightly through the steady rain. I started the
Falcon, indicated right as I pulled away from the kerb, and kept the indicators flashing as I followed the Commodore. We drove east, past the dark, silent department stores and the bottomless mine shafts they’re sinking as part of the renovation of the Queen Victoria Building.
The rubbers on the Falcon’s windscreen wipers weren’t new and they didn’t do a good job on the clean water falling from the sky or the dirty stuff being splashed up from the road. I had to squint, rub the glass and drive closer to the Commodore than I would have liked. I’d caught a glimpse of the driver when the car first appeared and I could see the line of his head and shoulders as we sloshed through the city. It was Winslow all right, fair hair, chin up and no slouching.
We went up through Taylor Square, skirted Paddington and swished into those streets near Trumper Park where the kids would be odds on not to know who the park commemorated. The Commodore turned into a street lined with Moreton Bay fig trees. The rain had stripped a lot of the leaves and left them as mush in the gutters and on the road but there was enough foliage left to hood the street lights already dimmed by rain. Nothing wrong with the Commodore’s stop lights though; they flashed at me bright and early enough to allow me to drop back and pull in to the kerb well before Winslow parked.
Ignoring the rain, I wound down the window to get a clearer view as Winslow flicked the car door closed and scooted through a gate to a deep verandah running the width of a well-kept, double-fronted terrace house. Winslow shook water from his light rain coat by flapping it and jerking his shoulders. He looked nervous as he knocked. A light came on over his head and a woman appeared in the doorway. Winslow grabbed her as if his life depended on trapping her where she stood. Her slender bare arms wrapped around him and I could see her face before she buried it in his shoulder: black hair gleamed under the porch light; teeth and eyes shone against a skin the colour of a ripe plum.
The light went out and with it a sour breath from me. Peeper Hardy strikes again. I waited long enough to be sure he wasn’t just there to hand out a How to Vote card and then I drove home. The water was over the hubcaps in several places between Woollahra and Glebe, and the rain fell hard all night. I drank wine and watched Gene Hackman and went to bed with Helen and didn’t hear the rain. Somehow I thought Ian Winslow wouldn’t be hearing it either.
‘Poor woman,’ Helen said as she buttered the toast. The rain had stopped but big, black clouds hung over the city. We had the lights on at nine o’clock in the morning.
‘Which one?’ I said.
‘The wife.’ She passed me the toast and I poured coffee for us both.
‘What about the other one?’
‘Hmm. He’s the Minister for Ethnic Affairs, isn’t he? God, it’s like that Shirley Maclaine joke about Peacock. He was the Minister for Foreign Affairs so I gave him one to remember.’ She bit into her toast, dropped crumbs on her silk dressing gown and brushed them on to the floor. ‘I don’t find Shirley Maclaine all that funny, do you?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t find Peacock all that funny either.’
‘He’s funny compared with Fraser.’
‘It’s raining again,’ I said.
‘What’re you going to do?’
‘Take another look at the place.’
‘What good will that do?’ Helen pushed her chair back and reached for her packet of Gitanes. She smoked one a day, sometimes first thing in the morning, sometimes last thing at night. You could never tell which it would be. She didn’t know herself.
‘Hardy’s law,’ I said. ‘Put off doing an unpleasant thing if you can. Something worse might happen and then the first thing won’t look so bad.’
Helen smiled and lit her cigarette.
I’d wasted most of the morning waiting for the rain to stop. It didn’t, so now it was early in the afternoon and I’d been watching the house in Woollahra for an hour. In that time I’d seen four women. One was the person who’d greeted Ian Winslow so enthusiastically the night before. She looked even more exotic in the daytime. She’d run down to the corner shop when the rain stopped briefly. She moved like a dancer, long legs, lithe body in tights and a loose sweater. Her hair was piled up on her head like a high, black turban revealing a long, slender neck circled by a white ribbon. Another of the women, who also ran a short errand, was almost as dark but had a different cast to her features, less African, more Indian. The other two were Asian or Eurasian, possibly Filipino. Dressed for the wet weather, they left in taxis.
On a dry day I’d have felt conspicuous. The other cars in the street were younger and better bred than mine; the houses all had that heavily mortgaged but well cared-for look, and there was no soggy rubbish in the gutters like in Glebe. It wasn’t a place for loitering in. I had my hand on the ignition key when the door of the house flew open and a woman ran out on to the street. She threw her head back and screamed up at the leaking sky as she ran. A man charged out of the house but was checked by a passing car. The woman ran down the footpath towards me, still screaming, bare feet flying and one arm flopping oddly as she moved. I got out of the car and she almost fell into my arms. The blood on her rubbed off on me. The man came on; he was dark and big but flabby. There was blood on his white shirt. He stopped and the three of us stood there in the rain.
‘Come,’ the man said. He beckoned with an impatient flick of his fingers.
The woman shivered and shrank closer to me.
‘She doesn’t want to come,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you go?’
‘Wife,’ he said.
‘No! No!’ She gripped my arm. Blood dripped on to the wet footpath. He reached for her and I stepped forward and chopped at the muscle of his extended arm. He yelped and swung at me but he had to move his feet to do it. One foot came down on some Moreton Bay mush and he started to slip; I helped him with a shove to the shoulder. He slithered and crashed into the side of a car. His leg twisted under him as he went down hard.