I rang the janitor. No answer. I went down to the basement. Zim’s wine cage door was open, but the bottles remained neatly stacked. All except for half a dozen bottles with VW stamped on the lid. They were missing.
Back in the apartment, Peg called on my mobile.
‘Yes, dear,’ I said.
‘You’ll be home for dinner?’
‘I’ll be a little late tonight, dear.’
‘What have you been doing with yourself all day?’
This is the moment when men who have been doing something they shouldn’t have been doing involuntarily swallow. I had been doing a lot of swallowing lately. How could I tell her I had, in the space of a single day, bought a Kombi, entered the gates of hell, knocked myself unconscious in a rainforest, lost half my body volume of blood to a gang of ravenous leeches, had a dodgem-car pursuit up the Pacific Highway and consumed an entire bottle of absolutely dreadful Stanthorpe wine? As Captain Blackadder said, ‘This is the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun.’ Or words to that effect.
‘I’ve been doing a project, dear,’ I said.
‘You have?’
‘I have been further educating myself in the great art of the vintner. I have—’
‘What have you really been up to?’
‘Why do you say that? Dear?’
‘Because you only ever call me ‘dear’ when—’
‘Hello? Hello?’ I interrupted. ‘Sorry, you’re breaking up ... dear.’
I felt melancholy in that apartment. For the first time since Westchester Zim’s death, the true impact of his passing hit me. It’s always terrible to lose a friend, but at my age? I would miss the old bon vivant. His humour and unexpected witticisms. He once said, ‘I find “rack of lamb” offensive. To the lamb. It is also known as a “Crown roast”, which is much more regal and respectful to these animal children who died for our pleasure. So why don’t we use that? We don’t call rump steak “backside of cow”, do we?’ Where on earth will I get lines like that any more?
Out of respect for Zim, I cleaned his apartment. Yes, I did. I tidied everything, straightened the pictures, even mopped the tiles in the kitchen. I plumped the couch cushions and aligned the strangely old-fashioned antimacassars. Then I rinsed the wine bottles, including the Stanthorpe red, put them in a bag and took it out to the garbage chute.
I opened it, and I found the very dead corpse of janitor Joe Santorini, stuffed in head-first, his polished work boots stuck skyward, revealing — poor little Joe — that he only wore a size seven.
~ * ~
9
I waited outside Herr Johann Flick’s office with a briefcase at my feet. It was the late Westchester Zim’s case, one I remembered from the first time I met him, decades earlier, in Sydney. He took it everywhere. He lived out of it, had his life in it. He once told me that if he ever had to walk out on his life, he could survive if he had the case. It was nicked and battered and scarred, like old Zim. I felt I owed it to him. To have a part of him with me when I wreaked almighty justice on those who had so rudely killed him.
The developer’s foyer was expansive and expensive and made entirely of glass and steel. I could see virtually all aspects of Brisbane from my knotty, embroidered waiting couch. I was sitting on an elaborately rendered black eagle. Very Germanic. After my encounter with the leeches, sitting on a tapestry eagle head was strangely discomforting.
I wore a fresh Hawaiian shirt, relatively clean shorts and my perennial boatie loafers, decorated with so many fish guts and spilled wine and oil and canal water and samples of assorted TV dinners that had missed my belly and gone floor-bound that it was no longer possible to distinguish which stain was which. They had become, at least in my opinion, a fetching pea-soup green. Inside all this clean glass, I felt everything about me was magnified, like a germ sample under a laboratory slide.
Too bad. Clothes do not maketh the man, my father always said. And mint jelly doth not make the roast, said Westchester Zim.
The office assistant, a pretty young woman who had a little too much of the Eva Braun about her, answered the phone, crinkled up her nose at me, and said, ‘Mr Flick will see you now.’
‘Sehr gut,’ said I, and shuffled with the hoary old briefcase into Flick’s inner sanctum.
Flick sat behind his desk at the far end of the room. It was a long way from the door. I could have used a golf cart to get there. I resented his intimidating office ergonomics. I had to pass one of those glass-cased models of what looked like a housing estate to get to him. It was a little green valley with very neat, red-roofed houses abutting a network of roads and cul-de-sacs. The fake bitumen with miniature plastic cars of all the colours of the rainbow swirled about artistically. There was the perfect community in the stale air of the cabinet. For no logical reason I immediately thought of Julie Andrews pirouetting about on an Austrian hillside bearded with buttercups in The Sound of Music. I try to think of Julie Andrews as little as possible. I suddenly felt squeamish.
Flick sat smoking at his desk. He did not stand to greet me. He did not offer me a chair.
‘Take a seat,’ I said to myself. ‘Don’t mind if I do.’
Flick exhaled a long column of smoke.
‘Where did you learn them?’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your manners.’
‘Swiss finishing school.’
‘What do you want?’
It was a comfortable chair. I would have liked one for the rumpus room back home.
‘Does this come with a pouffe?’ I asked, squeezing the padded arms of the chair.
‘What do you want?’
‘Did you know “pouffe” is French? The word. Nineteenth century. It refers to something “puffed out”. I learned it from my good friend Westchester Zim.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Ever meet Westchester?’
‘As I’ve told you, I’m afraid not.’
‘You would have liked him. He could pick a Castelnaudary cassoulet from one made in the Toulouse tradition simply by sniffing the steam coming off the dish.’
Flick scrunched his nose at me much in the way of Eva Braun outside his heavy oak office door. I was either really on the nose to this crowd, or they liked snorting a bit of Charlie in between business meetings. Or both.
‘That’s a pretty little town in the box over there.’
‘That’s the future. Master-planned cities. That’s our next project, near Ipswich.’
‘What’s it called? Flickville?’
‘Serenity Downs.’
‘Nice. Sounds like a great place to sleep. I’m getting drowsy already.’
‘You’ve got one minute.’
I lifted the briefcase onto my lap and tapped the battered leather. I could see in the distance, through a broad pane of glass, the second span of the Gateway Bridge coming together. The finished Portside Wharf. Cranes here. New motorways there. Boy, this town was really on the move. And when towns like Brisbane started moving, the sharks could smell blood in the water.