Poor Zim. I should have paid more attention to you.
A mighty crack of thunder shook the building, the lights flickered, and as I wandered out into the lounge room, I noticed the front door wide open.
‘What the ...’ I said.
Then I heard a high-pitched scream and something — a baby gorilla? A small, hyperactive child? — was on my back. I swung around, he swivelled on my neck, and I whacked him flush in the face with the hardcover Brillat-Savarin.
It fell to bits in a spectacular flurry of pages and dust motes and long-dead weevils, and fluttered over my unconscious child assassin. The first thing I thought was that I must get Zim a replacement copy. But dead men don’t need books.
The second was, could I persuade my wife Peg that knocking out children wearing fake moustaches counted as a retirement ‘project’?
~ * ~
4
I’d seen some funny things during my time in law enforcement, but I never expected, in my retirement, to be extracting with tweezers the carcass of a Second World War vintage bug from the weeping eye of a janitor named Joe Santorini in the apartment of a dead friend.
Joe thought I was a burglar. I didn’t know who he was. Perhaps a circus performer, or an old-looking child on a permanent diet of red cordial. When he had attached himself to my back, he’d given me a fright, and copped a face full of the writings of Brillat-Savarin.
When everything had calmed down, and soon after little Joe came to, he began clawing at his eye. He was crying profusely, whimpering like a small boy.
‘Sorry about that,’ I said. I genuinely felt for him. He was wearing his little janitor’s outfit — slate-grey shorts and a matching shirt, with the word JANITOR embroidered above the pocket. The creases in his pants and on his sleeves were so fine and sharp you could have cut a slice of Gateau Savarin with them. If it hadn’t been for the JANITOR giveaway, he could have been a lad on his first day at school.
‘You doan understand,’ he said. ‘I gotta blocked tear duck condition. Now there something in my eye. My eyeeeeeee. ‘
It turned out I had pulverised into his face an ancient insect from the book. I got most of the bug out. He didn’t seem happy.
‘What the hell you doin’ here anyway?’ said Joe. His eye continued to pour a single salty stream down his cheek.
‘Zim’s solicitor sent me, to take care of his estate.’
‘He dead,’ said Joe, lowering his face, the permanent river of tear somehow fitting.
‘Yes, he dead,’ I said. Joe sniffed. We had half a minute’s silence for Zim. ‘Now. Can I ask you the same question? What the hell are you doing here? A blocked sink?’
‘Is Mr Zim’s wine,’ he said. ‘I come for the key.’
‘Key?’
‘To his wine. Downstairs. It has to be moved away. I sneak him a storage cage downstairs for his wine, see? Sometimes he give Joe a bottle. A present. “Here, Joe, this for you,” he sometimes say. Now the room, someone want to use. So I have to move the wine. But Mr Zim, he lock the cage. I need the key.’
‘Boy,’ I said. ‘You city slickers move fast around here when someone drops off the perch.’
‘Hey, space, she the premium in the inner-city nowadays, mate.’ He pronounced it marrrt, like the word had suffered a flat tyre.
Zim had admirable organisational skills. We both went into his office and opened his filing cabinets. There, in a small freezer bag, in a folder marked WINE — KEYS, we found the wine keys. I liked Zim’s logical mind. In the cabinet, I would later discover, were the secret table notes he took on every meal in every restaurant he’d ever reviewed in his career. Zim and I were some of the few men left in the world who used five- by three-inch index cards. He scribbled his notes on these, holding them in his lap as he ate and pondered each course. Every card was numbered and dated. And he kept them, I presume, for litigation purposes. Or a future book. They were his diary, and many were covered in the small food splashes and droplets of the meal under review at that moment.
‘You wanna see the wine of Mr Zim?’ Joe said, wiping the tears from his cheek. We went to the basement.
I followed Joe to a storage cage behind the lift well. There were several other cages on either side of it, open and exposed to the underground car park, stuffed with people’s junk beyond the wire. But Zim’s was the only one that had been lined with flimsy sheets of plywood. He had wanted his privacy. Or wanted his wine to have some privacy. Expensive wine can have a strange effect on people. They’ve been known to kill for a good vintage. Or perhaps he thought the temptation might be too great for thirsty teenage hoons. (On reflection, would today’s teenage hoons even know what wine was? ‘Oi,’ I can hear them say. ‘This stuffs two years old — it’s orrrf. It’s gaaayyy!)
Joe fiddled with the lock and we entered the cage. He pulled a light cord and a single bulb came on. Before us were hundreds of bottles stacked neatly on wooden racks.
‘Mr Zim, he no alcoholic, just so you know,’ said Joe, lowering his gaze ‘He a good man.’
I scanned the racks and a cluster of bottles caught my eye. Faced with a wall of blank black wine bottle tops, both cork and screw-on, these stood out. On the top of the cap each had the stamped symbol of VW, the car manufacturers. I pulled a VW bottle from the rack.
Now I’m no wine buff. Peg once tried to get me involved in a fine-wine tasting club on the Gold Coast. She thought it could be one of my retirement ‘projects’. I went to the first meeting. It involved some plonker (I know it’s a bad pun, but it’s the only way I could ever think of him) swishing about various wines in large glasses and rinsing his teeth with the wine before spewing it into what became a very messy and stomach-flipping bucket of warm human discharge. He was, he said, looking for bouquets, delineating vintage, seeking what notes lay behind the wine and travelling — via his palate — through the vines and down into the soil. One’s tongue, he said, could be trained as a sort of living archaeologist. What tosh. I raised my hand and said that if one’s tongue was to dig deep into the soils of a hillside in Stanthorpe or a slope in the Hunter Valley, shouldn’t we train it to be a geologist? He did not talk to me for the rest of the class.
Nevertheless, I swigged and spat, and tried to excavate soil sub-stratas for tannin and saddle-sweat and hints of gravel. But it wasn’t for me. I had of course embarrassed Peg. I had, she later told me repeatedly, become boorish in my old age.
‘I tried to introduce you to a civilised “project” and what do you do? You spit it back in my face.’
‘I spat it in the bucket.’
‘I thought you might make some new friends,’ she said, sulkily. I didn’t tell her that I liked people who actually drank the wine, not flushed it about their mouths like a haywire lavatory cistern.