But the moral, legal and financial dimensions were not the only ones to be considered. There was a much more important aspect to all this. The political one. The resignation of the Deputy Premier and the Cabinet reshuffle had been designed to counter a growing perception that the government was financially incompetent, no longer a fit custodian for the public cookie jar. What would happen to voter confidence when it was revealed that the government’s appointee as head of the Arts Ministry panel that handed out grants to artists couldn’t tell a fake from a fish fork? And that one of its members was brokering forged artworks?
Admittedly, this was not the sort of issue upon which a government stands or falls. But nor was it something you’d want to read about in your morning paper. Not if your boss was the minister responsible. Not if it was your job to see that precisely this sort of thing didn’t happen.
Things were starting to get seriously complicated.
Going to the police on this CUSS forgery business was out of the question. Nothing would be gained and much might be lost. A quiet word in the right ear at the right time and the unions could bury their own dead. And, in any case, I was holding firm to my decision not to talk to the cops until Red was safely up, up and away.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t make some discreet enquiries of my own in the meantime. The problem was where to start. This needed some nutting out. I drove back to my new office, nutting all the way.
Trish thrust a wad of telephone message slips into my paw as I came in the door. Mendicant terpsichoreans and lobbyist librarians. String quartet convenors and craft marketers. Festival creators and design innovators. People whose calls I was paid to return. ‘Thought you’d taken the day off,’ she said.
I went into my calm new office, sat at my new desk, looked out my big window and I asked myself the same question I’d been asking myself all the way from the Trades Hall. The inescapable one.
Was Lloyd Eastlake knowingly involved in the faking of the CUSS art collection? And if so, did that mean he was implicated in the death of Marcus Taylor?
Realities were at work here that experience had ill-equipped me to deal with, but that I would very swiftly have to learn to manage if I wanted to keep my head above water. Back in Ethnic Affairs, I’d encountered my fair share of wealthy men. Some of the richest men in the state were migrants. Not that you’d often find them snoozing in the library at the Melbourne Club. Their own communities knew them as employers and entrepreneurs, as the patrons of social clubs and the doers of good works, and perhaps as other things I made it a point never to inquire about. I’d known them as pleaders for community projects, as genial hosts at national day celebrations, as abstract factors in predictable electoral equations.
But in a very real-meaning political-sense, their transactions and their reputations, their associations and ambitions, were fundamentally a matter of indifference to me. Apart from the one or two who had scaled the Olympian heights of industry, they were generally at a remove from the real centre of power. For all their money and their sectional influence, they were ultimately on the outside looking in. No transgression, error or lapse on their part could really hurt the government.
But not so Eastlake. Eastlake was on the team, one of the boys, a man publicly identifiable with the standards by which we ran the state. A man with a finger in every pie. The party pie, the money pie, the union pie, the culture pie. And some of these pies, unfortunately, now also contained Angelo Agnelli’s finger.
I found Lloyd Eastlake’s card and laid it flat in front of me on my desk. I built a hedge of yellow phone message slips around it. I tapped its cardboard edge against the blond timber. I buzzed Phillip Veale, two glass partitions away. ‘Hypothetically speaking,’ I said. ‘What’s the score on the director of a public art gallery also operating as a consultant to private clients?’
‘Hypothetically speaking,’ said Veale. ‘Probably legal. Possibly unethical. Definitely unwise.’ He didn’t ask who and I didn’t tell him. I couldn’t help but feel that our relationship was on the mend.
Then I called a contact at the Corporate Affairs Commission and asked him to look up the company registration information on Austral Fine Art, Pty Ltd. He promised to get back to me within an hour.
Finally, I called Eastlake. Not the mobile number. If he was in his car or on the hoof, Spider might overhear the call. I rang the number that looked like it might be his direct office line. It was. He picked it up after the first ring. ‘Where the fuck are you?’ he said. ‘I’ve been frantic.’
‘It’s Murray Whelan.’
‘Oh, hello.’ He dropped his voice an octave and changed down to cruising speed. ‘I thought it was someone else.’
‘Are you speaking hands-free?’ I like to know exactly who is listening to my conversations. ‘Is there anyone else in the office with you?’
‘No. I’m alone. Why?’
‘Regarding that matter we discussed yesterday at the Deli. I need to talk to you again.’
Eastlake didn’t mind indulging my penchant for the melodramatic at the weekend. But, come the working week, he was a busy man. ‘Not more of Giles Aubrey’s tall tales, I hope.’
‘Aubrey’s dead,’ I said.
‘Dead? How?’
‘That’s what I want to talk to you about. Among other things. Face-to-face and as soon as possible.’
A couple of long seconds went by. ‘The soonest I can see you is six.’
Not the most convenient of times, Red-wise, but I was the one doing the asking. ‘Fine,’ I said. Eastlake gave me Obelisk’s address, a downtown office block, and rang off.
Three other people could help me shed light on what was happening. One of them was lying low. One would keep. The other, I decided, might best be caught on the hop.
‘Don’t worry,’ I told Trish’s disapproving look as I headed out the door. ‘I’m not going far.’
Just across the road and into the trees.
Fiona Lambert was wearing a fire-engine-red, thigh-length tunic that emphasised the paleness of her skin and the indelible-ink blackness of her hair. She was standing at the front door of the Centre for Modern Art watching two men in company work-wear drag a flat wooden crate out of a van parked in the driveway.
I sat across the road in my car, watching her watch them.
A young woman in harem pants and a beehive flitted about, getting in the way. I remembered her from Friday night. Janelle Something. Fiona’s assistant. The delivery guys negotiated the crate through the door and Fiona and Janelle followed them inside.
Our Home had a new home.
And Ms Lambert, at a guess, would be far too preoccupied for the next little while to participate in the kind of consultative process I had in mind. Our Home would have to be uncrated, examined, gloated over, stored away. Slipping the Charade back into gear, I pulled out from the kerb. I had an idea. Not the best idea I’d ever had. But, at the time, it had a compelling sort of logic.
I drove through pools of shade cast by elms and pines, turned into Domain Road and found a parking spot in a quiet residential side street. Hope Street, said the sign. I left my jacket in the car and walked around the corner.
Domain Road, with its two-storey terrace houses and small apartment buildings, was quiet. A solitary jogger panted along the footpath. I leaned against a parked car and cased Fiona Lambert’s pink stucco block of flats. After a couple of minutes, the dowager with the miniature mutt came out the front entrance and carried her schnauzer across the road. She clipped a lead to the benighted animal’s collar and led it into the park. Doo-doo time for Dagobert.
When the pair of them had moved out of sight, I went into the flats and walked briskly up the stairs to the landing outside Fiona Lambert’s door. I rapped confidently with the little brass knocker, listening for any sound in the flat opposite. There was none. I rapped again, Justin Case. Justin wasn’t home, so I angled up the Ming Dynasty pot-plant holder, slid the key from underneath, opened the door and put the key back in place. It wasn’t breaking and entering. That would never have occurred to me. I was just dropping around when there was nobody home.