‘Or it rains.’
‘Or it rains like it’s never rained before.’
I was sweating, and thirsty, now that we’d left the shaded area of the gardens and walked under the ferocious midday sun.
‘Well, I may be the first retired detective in the Mount Coot-tha gardens to run out of water in the twenty-first century,’ I said, punching him lightly on the arm. There was no cheering Mr Carpenter.
‘I can see I’ve wasted my time.’
‘I’m sorry. Go on. No more jokes.’
‘This thing you’ve got yourself caught up in. Out at Wivenhoe. I can’t tell you what to do, but I can make a recommendation. That’s what I was good at all my life.’
‘And what is your recommendation?’
‘I would suggest that if you want to see your grandchildren out of nappies, go back home and forget all about it.’
‘You’re not the first to make that recommendation in recent times.’
‘I know men like you,’ Carpenter went on. ‘If someone warns you off something, you’ll go at it even harder.’
‘Now you’re getting warm.’
‘And I assume there is nothing anyone could say to dissuade you once you’ve made up your mind to solve a puzzle.’
‘Now you’re even warmer. Puzzles are for children, Carpenter. I’m more interested in matters of life and death. That’s the greatest puzzle of all, for grown-ups.’
I was sweating like a plump hog waiting for the knives of Christmas. Yet Carpenter, in his neat, white short-sleeved shirt, didn’t appear to have raised a single bead of the stuff.
‘What if that matter of death happened to be your own?’ he said finally, stopping and leaning in to smell a rose bush.
We ended up, to my surprise, in the Bonsai House. Could Carpenter have possibly known about the little bonsai I’d received in the library that day? The miniature fig tree that kicked off this bizarre adventure? Exactly how much did this diminutive public servant know?
We were the only two in the house. I could hear water trickling. It was momentarily soothing.
‘If my warnings aren’t enough to dissuade you, then there’s someone I’d like you to meet. Someone from our little water circle.’
‘Brisbane sure has a lot of powerful, secret circles.’
‘If you want to learn about this city’s water infrastructure, its life source, then he’s the only man to talk to.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to learn about that.’
‘Oh, you do,’ said Carpenter, effecting what could have been at the least the vague beginnings of an all-knowing smile. ‘You most certainly do.’
I admired a number of healthy bonsais, then remembered, with a start, seeing my tiny fig on the kitchen windowsill back home that morning while I was on the phone to Carpenter. Several leaves had fallen from its branches and turned yellow. The soil was dry and crumbling. My bonsai was dying.
If I was a superstitious sort of fellow, I might have seen that as an omen.
~ * ~
10
Sometimes life seems to conspire to play quirky practical jokes on certain people. I happen to be one of those people.
A few days after meeting Carpenter in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens I was back again at Wivenhoe Dam for a top-secret meeting with an eighty-three-year-old man who went by the name of Walt Whitman.
Walt Whitman, as it turned out, was to be my informant on all things water-related, and was able to explain why my life was in danger because I’d accidentally crossed the path of a bonsai and a picture of an ancient corpse in the State Library of Queensland. Walt Whitman would fill me in on why the innocent meanderings of an ex-cop and budding family historian could suddenly cause rumblings at the highest levels of government.
Carpenter had called me from a payphone the night before and simply muttered the name and location — Walt Whitman; Captain Logan’s Camp. Then he’d hung up.
Was this a public service-style joke? That this strange case of death and drought should involve an informant named after the famous American poet, hobo and author of the world classic Leaves of Grass — Walt Whitman, author of a poem called ‘The Waters’, that began ‘The world below the brine’. Was this their tacky and obvious and profoundly unfunny code? Or one of those cosmic jokes that had begun to attach themselves to me like summer flies on the back of a crisp white tennis shirt? Or both?
Ho, ho, Carpenter, I said to myself as I drove into the camping grounds named after the area’s most infamous celebrity, the good Captain Logan himself, which lay on the banks of the Wivenhoe.
It was another hot day and the Peugeot had not taken kindly to the conditions and the airless Brisbane Valley Highway out of Ipswich. The car was hissing as I cruised down past empty tent sites and dormant barbecue pits and parked within sight of the dam water.
‘Cool down,’ I said to the Peugeot and made my way to the picnic tables and benches under a stand of gums, overlooking the dam. I shared the shade with several kangaroos and wallabies.
Within minutes I heard a car approaching, and turned to see a rich maroon ZB Custom Ford Fairlane winding its way towards me. As it got closer, I could see it still bore the original raised crest hood ornament. It would have had a Selectair ventilation system inside and bench seats. I knew this car inside out. My father had owned one.
I vaguely recalled Ford’s advertising at the time, announcing that the ZB was the car ‘most people move up to’, and as the Fairlane squeaked to a halt next to the Peugeot, I was filled with nostalgia for my father and the smell of the car when he’d first brought it home, and the maiden voyage I took with him that night, a young copper still living with his parents (though Peg was on the horizon), cruising the streets of South Sydney and Surry Hills and out to Bondi and back.
The driver’s door creaked open loudly and several of the smaller wallabies rose and bolted. An old man emerged and then fastidiously locked the vehicle. It had to be Walt Whitman.
I thought of how he had locked the car and realised that this possession, now almost forty years old, must have been the pinnacle of his achievement as a professional working man. This must have been the symbol of his success as a middle-aged public servant, and from there perhaps he had hit a plateau until retirement.
He shuffled over to the picnic bench.
‘You’re the idiot who’s been causing all the troubles?’
‘Nice to meet you, Mr Whitman.’
‘We had a place for idiots like you in my day. A small room in George Street with no windows. You’d count paper clips till you learned to shut your trap.’
‘And nice to meet you too.’
‘What was that?’
‘Nothing.’
Walt Whitman had reached an age where the entire architecture of human courtesy and decency had collapsed. At his age, on the shoreline of death, so to speak, why be polite?