So much fashionable architecture had been inflicted on the Botanical Hotel that it could have passed for the engine room of an aircraft carrier, all distressed boiler-plate and industrial rubber. Business was booming. Salina Fleet was in the far corner of the bistro section, at a raucous table crowded with faces from the CMA back lawn. Down boy, I told myself. Read the mood. Take it slowly.
I ordered a beer, examining myself in the bar mirror. Uglier men were stalking the earth. The barman was one of them. ‘Grolsch?’ he said. I thought he was clearing his throat. He handed me a tomato sauce bottle of pale brown liquid. Grolsch Premium Lager, read the label. Brewed in Holland. ‘That’ll be four eighty,’ he said.
That explained the balance of payments deficit. Time was when you could get paralytic for four dollars eighty. On Australian beer, at that. I put my hand on my hip pocket and discovered my wallet was gone.
There was a limited number of places I might have mislaid it. Mentally retracing my steps, I got as far back as that low-slung designer chair in Fiona Lambert’s apartment. I went back down the street, took the stairs two at a time, and rapped on Fiona’s little brass knocker. Five minutes, ten at the most, had elapsed since Eastlake and I had left, so it wasn’t like I’d be waking her up. There was no answer. I rapped again, the sound reverberating down the stairwell. Either Fiona Lambert was a very sound sleeper or there was no-one home. Somewhere inside, the phone began to bleat. When it finally rang out, I raised the edge of the Ming Dynasty shrub tub. The key was back in its hiding place. I let myself in.
Streetlight lit the living room. The remains of our drinks sat on the coffee table condensing dribbles of water. My wallet was on the floor, just where I hoped it would be. As I bent to pick it up, my eye was caught by the picture hanging above the mantel, the nude. I stood and studied it.
Its subject was the younger, plumper Fiona Lambert, the one in the photograph. The artist’s approach was clinical, lurid and without a shred of sentimentality. Superbly confident, the picture captured not just Fiona’s likeness but her narcissism as well. The pose was blush-makingly provocative, anatomically explicit. The artist just had to be bonking her teenage ears off.
I did some quick mental arithmetic. At the time he painted the picture, Victor Szabo must have been at least sixty-five. The old goat.
Five minutes later I was back at the Botanical with four dollars eighty worth of Dutch courage in my hand, making eye contact with Salina Fleet.
She waved me over, making space at the table. ‘What did you say your name was, again?’ she demanded, her way of being smart. I didn’t doubt I was already tucked away in Sal’s mental Filofax, cross-referenced against future contingency. Everyone was talking at once, bellowing into the general din. Art scene party time. ‘Saw you at the CMA,’ she half-shouted. ‘Thought you were gone.’
‘So did I,’ I said. ‘When that guy landed on me.’
She laughed and bit her lip at the same time, a cornered look in her eyes. I rapidly changed the subject to the only other thing I could think of. ‘Got sidetracked by Fiona Lambert.’
She relaxed. ‘The Black Widow, we call her.’ I bent closer, the better to hear her, and the bare skin of our forearms touched. A little spark of static electricity shot between us. ‘Better watch yourself there.’
‘Why?’
She was even tighter than me. Not that we were drunk. And so what if we were? The waiter came and stuck a menu in front of my face. It was the sort you read right to left. Everything on offer was either char-grilled, stir-fried, snow-pead, or came with sheep’s cheese. What I really wanted to taste was the waxy fruit of Salina’s apricot lips.
‘Go on,’ I urged. ‘Tell me.’ Keep her talking until we found some common ground, that was the strategy. ‘Why do you call Fiona Lambert the Black Widow?’
A thin-lipped, imperious-beaked bloke was squeezed in on the other side of Salina. I’d met him at the CMA but his name escaped me. When he heard Fiona Lambert’s name, he pricked up his ears and leaned over. ‘They call her that,’ he whispered in an accent that sounded like it came from the same place as my beer, ‘because of the rumour that Victor Szabo died, shall we say, on the job with her.’
He had a bracket like a Borgia pontiff in a Titian portrait. To hear him properly, I had to lean even closer to Salina, so I kept up the questions. ‘They were lovers, were they?’
‘She modelled for him, slept with him, buried him, wrote the book on him, is curating his retrospective,’ said Salina with what sounded suspiciously like envy. ‘She practically invented him.’
‘And now he’s about to be the next big thing, eh?’ I said.
‘Bigger than Sir Ned Kelly himself, if the Black Widow has anything to do with it,’ confirmed the Pope’s nose.
By that stage, I could’ve eaten a nun’s bum through a cane chair. We moved on to the Koonunga Hill cabernet shiraz. Food arrived, cross-hatched from the grill, and I sawed into my fillet of salmon.
‘A brutal deconstruction of mordant reality,’ declaimed Salina.
‘Beg pardon?’ I chewed.
‘A sundering of the constituent components of antipodean materiality.’ She sucked in her cheeks and tried to look severe and authoritative.
‘Eh?’ I popped a french fry into my mouth.
‘The insertion into a distinctively Australian sensibility of the universalising impulse of an internationalist form.’
At last I got it. She was doing a Fiona Lambert impression. Quoting, I took it, catchphrases from her book on Victor Szabo.
‘An unflinching critic of the mundane,’ piped up the schnoz, getting in on the act.
‘ A Fierce Vision,’ we all chortled in chorus.
Holding it up with the best of them, I was. Who’d’ve known that three hours ago I’d never heard of this Szabo bloke. This art business was turning out to be a piece of piss. While we ate, Sal and the other guy kept up a running patter about Szabo. He was quite a mystery man from what I could glean-a refugee from Europe, a misanthropic recluse who had done most of his work in the fifties and sixties while holed up in rustic squalor. ‘A total output of what, fifty or sixty paintings,’ Sal said at one point. ‘Not exactly prolific.’
‘Forty known paintings,’ the accent corrected her. ‘Now that he’s getting better appreciated, who knows how many more will emerge?’
The conversation soon meandered elsewhere, and I was happy to go with it. I would have been happy to go anywhere, given the encouragement I was receiving under the table. At the salad, Salina’s hand brushed on my knee. By the tiramisu, it was lodged between my thighs.
When the liqueurs and coffee arrived, I knew I was going places. ‘Have you ever been exploring?’ she asked, dipping her forefinger in Sambuca and offering me a taste. ‘In the Botanic Gardens at night?’
It would have been churlish to refuse. What I didn’t realise- could not possibly have realised-was that the expedition that followed would lead me much further than over an iron railing and into a thicket of Rhododendron oreotrophes. Further than an exploratory probe in the depths of the fern forest. Further even than the searing flare of an emergency light beside the moat of the National Gallery.
And, before it was over, more than one body would be wheeled into the back of an ambulance.
But right then, in the dead of the night, the itch of crushed leaves still on my skin, all I could see was Salina Fleet’s contorted face.
‘Bastard!’ She said it again.
Not an accusation this time. Not thrown in my face, but muttered under her breath. Her eyes followed the movement of the gurney into the back of the ambulance, the trail of water across the pavement left by the lifeless black legs. Her head shook with the movement of it, emphatic in denial. Despite the heat, she was trembling.
Abruptly, slow motion became fast forward. The flashing light went off. Doors slammed. The ambulance began to draw away. I moved towards Salina, wanting nothing except to comfort and to calm. The policeman blocked my path with a hand to my chest. He gestured towards the rear of the departing vehicle. ‘Friend of his, are you?’