‘You are the only one I can talk to about this,’ he said. ‘There is nobody else.’
Nobody else? Zim might have had his enemies in the foodie circles of Australia, but he had loyal friends and devotees as well. Didn’t he? I always pictured him out on the town each night, supping at the finest eateries with the most important people of the day, shooting bons mots across the silverware, being confided in with grave or titillating secrets. A good meal, he always said, opens the most private of doors. But a great meal invites you inside. (Or something like that.)
‘What do you mean there’s no one else?’ I said to the solicitor. ‘We only met about once a month.’
‘Please,’ the solicitor said. ‘There is no next of kin. It’s very sad. You’d be doing him a great favour. Or the memory of him.’
So I ended up as executor of poor Zim’s estate, and one maudlin, stormy Friday I travelled to Brisbane to sort through his apartment.
As a former homicide detective, I can tell you something. The dwellings of the recently dead can be forbidding places. I have poked through squalid bedsits where lonely, forgotten pensioners have passed away; rifled through the bedroom drawers of missing persons; upturned the houses of drug dealers and fraudsters. But nothing gives you a chill like wandering amongst the furniture and belongings of a murder victim. Knowing they’ll never be coming back. Knowing they’ve left the place as some sort of unforeseen museum to themselves, their last moments frozen in time and space.
Yes, I knew in my bones, as soon as I opened the door to his apartment, and quietly closed it behind me, that I was inspecting the landscape of a murder victim.
Zim’s was a very comfortable apartment. The open lounge and dining area faced a series of sliding glass doors that led onto a balcony. It had a beautiful southern view of the city that took in the Kangaroo Point cliffs, the Botanic Gardens, Parliament House and the river’s dramatic about-face at the tip of the gardens. The leafy promontory appeared, from this elevation, like the prow of a magnificent ship, its decks crowded with fig trees and tropical plants and mangroves.
I sat for some minutes on a squatter’s chair on the balcony, admiring the vista. In the distance, black clouds gathered and roiled, and threw twigs of lightning at Logan and beyond. Birds wheeled and shrieked above the gardens and little tethered boats bobbed at its perimeter. The storm was heading this way.
Back inside the apartment, my radar was sensitive to more than just a dead man’s possessions and how they might be dispersed. More than debts that had to be resolved. That’s the thing about death. It can leave a multitude of loose ends, long and short, all of which have to be tied off before we’re truly assigned to oblivion. For when those threads disappear, you only exist in the memories of others. And when the memories go ...
Zim had taste, I’ll give him that. He had an entire wall of Cézanne reproductions — all the famous fruit paintings. What did Cézanne say? ‘I’ll astonish Paris with an apple.’ Not bad. Zim’s restaurant reviews, you felt, always built towards his encounter with the dessert. Entrees and mains were the scaffolding that you climbed to get to the sweet platform.
‘It was my mother’s fault,’ he once confided in me over a crème brûlée. ‘She was a terrible cook, but she always brought in magnificent desserts. She had what you called, in the old days, a sweet tooth. I confess I was a trifle spoiled in the dessert department. Trifle. You see, I cannot even say the word without making reference to the dessert.’
I wandered into the kitchen. Over time I have learned that there’s nothing sadder than a bachelor’s kitchen. With Zim, it was a bit different. He had no cookbooks on display, no dishes drying on a rack, no glass containers of rice or pasta on show, because Zim never ate at home. I mean never. He took his breakfast coffee at a favoured café down on Albert Street, and ventured out for both lunch and dinner. If he felt peckish late at night, he merely phoned down to the restaurant housed on the ground floor of his apartment building, which had a sort of ‘room service’ arrangement with certain occupants. Zim was one such occupant.
So his kitchen was immaculate, and not just because of lack of use. Under the sink I found an enormous variety of rags and sponges, cleaning utensils and liquid abrasives. He cared for it like the altar in a church.
His bedroom was similarly immaculate. A standard queen-sized bed and lamps. Built-in cupboards. Another print of a baked fowl and vegetables above the bed head. The gathering winds thumped against the sliding doors off the bedroom. The curtains were closed, but I could see the camera flash of lightning at their frills.
He had one book by his bedside — a 1949 edition of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste. He had mentioned Brillat-Savarin to me on many occasions. Too often, when Zim got deeper and deeper into his philosophies on food and cooking, and quoted obscure texts and gourmands at me, I switched off. But I remembered Brillat-Savarin, because he sounded like a very funny man.
‘You would know of him, of course,’ Zim had said one evening over some delicious Cantonese dishes in a restaurant on Margaret Street, just metres from his apartment.
‘Why would I know of him?’ I said, fumbling with my chopsticks. ‘The meals of my working-class childhood were a procession of bread and dripping. Mutton. Peas and spuds. Then I became a policeman. The closest I got to gourmet in those years was when a pie came in its own tin-foil plate and not just a paper bag. Are you getting the picture, Zim?’
‘He was the man who coined the phrase “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Heard of that?’
‘Of course I’ve heard of that.’
‘Well, that’s a start.’
‘What am I, Zim?’
‘You? On Brillat-Savarin’s scale? A barbarian, barely out of the cave.’
‘Always a pleasure dining with you, Zim.’
‘And me? What am I from your observation?’
‘You? You’re the man who’s going to pay the bill tonight, that’s who.’
We finished our mains and Zim spent an age considering the desserts. He never felt it necessary to ask me what I might like. He ordered for both of us.
‘You know, Brillat-Savarin also had another famous quote,’ he said. ‘“A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with one eye.”‘
How peculiar it was to learn that Zim, when his heart had exploded amongst the vineyards on the Gold Coast, had fallen face first into the flowering vines, and had had an eye cleanly removed by a piece of errant wire hidden amongst the leaves. A police mate told me confidentially that the eyeball had given the young female constable who was first on the scene a terrible fright. God can pull some horrible practical jokes when He/She so chooses.
The storm was over the city now. The wind didn’t just howl, it moaned about Zim’s apartment building, and I could hear a thudding through the air-conditioning vents.
I sat on the edge of Zim’s perfect bed, and opened The Physiology of Taste at one of the pages he’d bookmarked. He had underlined a quote in a chapter about the pleasures of eating, and the table. ‘At the first course everyone eats and pays no attention to conversation; all ranks and grades are forgotten together in the great manufacture of life. When, however, hunger begins to be satisfied, reflection begins, and conversation commences. The person who, hitherto, had been a mere consumer, becomes an amiable guest, in proportion as the master of all things provides him with the means of gratification.’