‘That was the 450 SLC, right?’ chipped in Malcolm. ‘The two-door coupe.’
‘…arguing the toss about whether I’m in a fit state to drive. Anyway, this bloke comes along, he’s doing the rounds, working for some car-detailing firm. They go around during the afternoon, checking for dents, rust spots, that sort of thing. They put their card under the wiper-flaking chrome, cracked light, whatever-and a quote for the job.’
I could just see it. Spider Webb prowling the toffs’ carpark with a twenty-cent piece in one hand and an eye to the main chance.
‘So Ken gets an idea. This bloke can drive us into the city, take the car overnight, cut and polish it, drop it off at my place in the morning. It’s either that or walk through the rain to the main gate, get a cab, come back the next day for the car. So I said okay. Next morning, there’s the Merc in my driveway, spic and span, never looked better. It hadn’t been running at its best, and he had a few ideas about that. Ended up looking after my wife’s car as well. When I moved up to the SEL, I needed a driver and put him on full-time.’
Malcolm loved it, the adventures of the cavalier millionaire. ‘Hundred and fifty grand’s worth of vehicle and you handed the keys to a complete stranger?’
Not a bad story, but it sounded like pub talk to me. And a funny way to hire a bodyguard. Through the Deli’s plate-glass front window, Spider was visible across the road. He was sipping from a polystyrene cup and lazily chewing gum at the same time. Blank-eyed, bored, watchful. Drip dry. ‘This is the guy with the ears, right?’ I pushed mine forward by way of example. The wound was healing nicely. ‘Thought I saw him down near the Arts Centre yesterday morning.’
A pair of social lions prowled over, her in an Alice band, him in a track suit, faces from the CMA opening. Eastlake tossed me their names. ‘You remember…’ I remembered I had someone better to spend my time with. Offering my seat, I said hello, made my excuses and went to find Red.
His ten dollars had bought a roll of mints and a small electronic game in the shape of a spaceship. The mints weren’t bad. I was trying to wheedle a couple more out of Red when we crested the Punt Road hill and hit the tail end of a string of traffic that ran all the way to the river.
Throwing a hasty left at Domain Road, I cut past the Botanic Gardens and through to St Kilda Road. The traffic was lighter there, although the Arts Centre had attracted quite a crowd. Had Marcus Taylor’s famous death, I wondered, prompted a renewed interest in the Old Masters? The gelati vans were back in force and delinquents on skateboards were surfing the steel waves of the sculpture on the lawn next to the Concert Hall. Red was drawn like a magnet to the sight. On impulse, I pulled into a vacant parking space.
A juggler had set up shop beside the sculpture in front of the State Theatre, a hideously ugly brown lump. The sculpture, not the juggler. The juggler was dressed as King Neptune and had three carving knives and a flaming firebrand aloft simultaneously. I thought I knew how he felt. Just as he finished, an octopus on stilts appeared through the crowd. ‘Check this out,’ I told Red. ‘It’s harder than it looks.’ Especially since one of the stilts had a bend in it. Red wasn’t interested in some promenading fish. His interest lay with the skateboarders. I told him to run ahead, that I’d join him in a few minutes.
Jumping up onto the parapet of the moat, I threaded my way past parked backsides and headed towards the entrance of the National Gallery. The parapet was a little less than a metre across, about the width of a standard table. Not exactly an acrobatic challenge. But then Marcus Taylor didn’t have a great track record when it came to tables. It would, I could see, have been quite easy for someone with a few drinks under his belt to slip and knock himself out on the hard grey basalt. But what was Taylor doing walking along the parapet? He was coming from the other direction and the most direct way to the YMCA did not lie along the front of the building.
I went the way I’d have gone if I was Taylor, skirting around the back. At the stage door of the Concert Hall, I found the same guy on duty who’d let me into the Arts Ministry the previous morning, and got him to unlock the YMCA. The same air of scrofulous melancholy pervaded the place, but not the same silence. As the lift juddered open at the third floor, Lou Reed advanced down the corridor to meet me.
He was coming from one of the formerly locked rooms. A woman in bib-and-brace overalls stuck her head through the open door and watched me advance, her eyes narrowing. ‘If you’re a journalist,’ she said, ‘you’re a bit late. I already told that lot who were here yesterday everything I know. Which is nothing. The guy was a hermit.’ She had a stick of charcoal in her hand. Behind her I could see big sheets of parchment paper taped to the walls. They were covered in black squiggles that might, given a couple of million years, have eventually evolved into horses. Or dogs. Or giraffes.
‘If I look like a journalist, I can assure you it’s not intentional.’ I nodded towards Taylor’s end of the corridor. ‘I’m a sort of friend.’ Well, Taylor was in no position to contradict me.
‘Oh,’ she said, scowling. ‘I didn’t…’ She was going to say she didn’t know he had any, but stopped herself in time. ‘Didn’t have a lot to do with him. Like I said, he kept to himself.’
‘There was a painting he was working on last time I was here,’ I said. ‘I was sort of interested in it.’
‘Help yourself,’ she said, turning her back in disgust. ‘Everyone else has.’
When I opened Taylor’s door I discovered what she meant. Taylor’s rooms had been plundered of almost anything of value. The camp stove had been nicked, the microwave oven, the desk lamp, even jars of used paintbrushes. Most of the books had gone from the brick-and-board case. A half-dozen back copies of Veneer remained, a thin tome entitled The Necessity of Australian Art and a dog-eared copy of A Fierce Vision. I thumbed through it. A sheet of tracing paper marked the plate of Our Home, the principal details precisely transferred to a pencil-drawn grid. Using such a template, a competent draughtsman could easily have enlarged the image to actual size and transferred it onto canvas. It told me nothing I didn’t already know, that Marcus Taylor had whipped up a pretty fair version of Our Home. Whether it was his first or second attempt, why he’d done it, and where it had gone, were all questions that remained unanswered.
Taylor’s dog-eared little collection of photographs was still in the desk drawer. When I compared them with the sketch in Fiona’s book, there wasn’t much doubt that Victor Szabo’s life-drawing model was the woman in the photo. The young hippy that could have been Taylor could still have been Taylor. Szabo was still definitely Szabo. I put the snaps in my pocket.
The cheap plastic-covered stamp album was still there, too, with its paltry contents of low-denomination recent releases. Stamp collecting was a hobby that had never captured my imagination. But waste not, want not. If Red didn’t fancy the album, some other child might. That little girl, Grace, for example. Philately might not get me everywhere, but it would give me an excuse to go calling on her mother.
The bankbook was still slotted into the crevasse between the desk and the wall where I’d dropped it in my haste to flee. I hooked it out with a bent coat-hanger and found myself looking at the most interesting thing I’d seen all day.
Critically unappreciated he might have been, but Marcus Taylor was clearly finding a market for something he was doing. Over the previous six months, he’d made a number of deposits. The sums varied from twelve hundred to four thousand dollars, totalling nearly twenty thousand. Not a bad little nest egg for a man whose grant application form said that his sole income was unemployment benefits.
I pondered its meaning. But not for long. Red would be wondering what had become of me. I dropped the bankbook back behind the desk. It felt like evidence. Of what, I didn’t know. Sticking the stamp album under my arm, I headed back along the side of the National Gallery. A gang of young hoons was stampeding down the footpath, pushing a shopping trolley full pelt. One of them was crouched inside the cart, gripping the sides for dear life, screaming insanely at the kid doing the steering.