‘Who is this?’
‘This is a representative of the Esk Bonsai Corporation.’
‘Who?’
‘In light of my employer’s sudden death, I was wondering if you’re still interested in that pallet of Hokidachi or broom-style elms you ordered. ‘
‘Who the hell is this?’
‘I could ask the same thing. In fact, I will ask the same thing. Who the hell are you? And what was your lustrous business card doing on a refrigerator door belonging to a fresh corpse?’
Funny, the power of persuasion. Within thirty minutes I had an ice cold mint julep in hand and was sitting opposite a very tall, thin man dressed all in white, from his Italian leather loafers and ankle-tight socks to his eyebrows. On his head was a pitch-black wig. He looked like a burned match.
I sipped the horrid drink — mint, sugar, ice and bourbon whiskey. I was a VB man myself He hadn’t touched his.
‘Historica. What is that?’ I asked him. ‘The name of some fancy new Lexus or Maybach?’
He snorted softly. ‘A Maybach is a Maybach. Differentiated by numbers only, I’m afraid.’
‘You learn something every day.’
‘Historica,’ he said, ‘is a little group of men and women interested in history. And its proper keeping.’
‘So you’re all ex-public-school librarians. Am I getting warm?’
‘It’s a hobby, that’s all. For lovers of accurate history.’
We were not alone. He had a substantial phalanx of bodyguards sprinkled throughout the property, and two in the lounge room not far from the deck where we chatted. The bodyguards, like all caricatures, wore black suits. The two in the lounge had blond hair. Of course they did. The Die Hard films had a lot to answer for in the world of bodyguards. They were the exact opposite to my rich history nut of a new friend.
‘Accuracy. Proper keeping. These words and phrases puzzle me,’ I said, hiding my disgust at the julep. Mint was for children or people with bad breath.
‘We at Historica believe in accountability and correct, documented sources. It’s that simple.’
‘Like, did Captain Cook’s Endeavour have four masts or five? That sort of thing.’
‘It had three — foremast, mainmast and mizzenmast. Yes, that sort of thing.’
‘So you could tell me,’ I said, pulling a crumpled photograph of the ancient Wivenhoe corpse — not the poor toothless farmer — from my back pocket, ‘whether this chap here was some sort of important person from the early days of Brisbane settlement or just a peculiar, history-obsessed git who liked dressing up in old soldier’s jackets and ran head-first, literally, into an errant musketball during a mock skirmish with his mates?’
I flicked the picture towards him and it came to rest near his untouched julep. He removed a pair of spectacles from his top pocket and looked down at the picture.
‘Interesting.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’
I could see, in the distance, a fantastic storm building on the horizon. A great bank of black cloud had eclipsed the afternoon sun and birds were wheeling crazily above the white sandy spine of Noosa’s beach. Sunbathers continued to lie on their towels, oblivious to the impending apocalypse.
‘I could only hazard a guess, but it certainly resembles a colonial military uniform,’ he went on.
‘You can’t be any more accurate than that?’
‘No.’
‘You’ve never seen this gentleman before?’
‘Under what possible circumstances would I have seen this man before?’
‘Didn’t your mummy ever tell you never to answer a question with a question?’
I could see his goons become agitated in the lounge room.
He smiled. Not a normal smile. A rich person’s smile. No. Let me be more precise. It was the smile of the very, very rich, who know that nothing in the mere mortal way of things can touch them. It was a smile both condescending and infantile. The condescension, often, is in their genes. And the childishness stems from never having had to worry about the raft of normal things grown adults have to worry about. Simple things, such as how to exist day to day.
My new white-linen friend also had a coldness, as essential to his make-up as breathing in and out, which probably had its source in the crib in which his mummy had left him, in the care of his nannies and butlers and footmen.
Still, I wasn’t here to sympathise with some spoiled adult-infant.
‘Listen to me very carefully,’ I said to him. ‘Tell me why your business card was found on a dead farmer’s fridge in the middle of nowhere.’
He paused and glanced up at the coming storm. You could smell the distant rain hitting the hot earth. I knew what he was thinking. He’d have to get inside soon. The winds would come up. And for a man with a very bad toupee, a sudden wind, any wind, was a natural enemy.
‘Now you listen to me very carefully,’ he said, pointing at me with a long forefinger. He showed his teeth for the first time. They were very small and snaggly, like a child’s milk teeth. But they were yellow against his obscene whiteness. ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, you know. Except in the minds of those who do not know history.’
‘Confucius?’
‘Kahlil Gibran, actually.’
‘Let me give you one.’
‘Be my guest.’
‘Rich plonkers with bad hair and poor dress sense do not tell me what to do.’
I turned away from him to watch the storm. It was going to be a hell of a drive back to the Gold Coast in the leaky Peugeot. And that’s what I was thinking about when a suited arm closed like a vice around my neck.
I assume I passed out. For three hours had gone by before I woke to find myself lying on the floor of a dark, industrial-sized freezer with the icy corpse of a nineteenth-century military officer keeping me company.
~ * ~
8
Freezing to death is a fascinating process. Hypothermia affects different people in different ways. Men are more prone to death by freezing than women. People have had their limbs turned into popsicles and survived, while others have perished after sustained exposure to winds that have not even reached freezing temperatures.
The metabolism slows. The muscles contract to try to generate heat. In many cases, freezing victims have been known to rip off all their clothes prior to falling into unconsciousness and, ultimately, death, such is the sensation of extreme heat they feel on their skin.
I thought of all these things as I lay next to my dead colonial officer in a giant freezer somewhere, I presumed, in the vicinity of Noosa. As I woke back into the world, the antique corpse wrapped in clear plastic and leaning on my shoulder, I remembered the sickly sweetness of the mint julep, and yellow jagged teeth, and Peg’s mobile phone sitting in the glove compartment of the Peugeot when it should have been in my pocket.
It was cold all right, but I wasn’t going to panic. Not just yet. I could hear a tremendous booming outside the freezer, which I shared with shelf after shelf of beautiful frozen red emperor and snapper, barramundi and sea perch. I could have been trapped in the belly of a whale.