So to Tasmania we went, where my recent escapades would hopefully be unknown.
Still, they had lauded me as the luckiest man alive. Proclaimed that God was on my side. That my number wasn’t up. They lavished every pun and cliche in the book on me. And why not? It may well have been a higher power who decided a window cleaner’s platform would be there to greet me, one storey down, when I was thrown from that building; that I would land on the window cleaner himself — a man of portly dimensions; and that his equipment, including a platform net strong enough to stop a runaway Kombi, would be in perfect working order. The platform and the net, that is. Not the window cleaner himself, who was taken to hospital with several broken ribs, a cracked pelvis and a mashed nose courtesy of my old .38, which hit him so cleanly I could hear the bone break like a snapped quail leg the second the two made contact. I agreed — free of charge, and in lieu of a lawsuit — to be used in a new advertisement for the window-cleaning scaffolding, and be photographed in a red rubber super-hero mask. Miracle Man! they called me. This, too, may have added to Peg’s mortification.
Nevertheless, I was alive. Flick, of course, got nicked. For my attempted murder. Then for killing Westchester Zim and Joe Santorini. Corruption charges would follow, so whichever way you looked at it, plain old Paul Smith from Bremen would be spending the rest of his life in jail.
The moment Flick went down, the entire house of cards noisily collapsed. The ripple effect was impressive. Several senior government ministers resigned, citing a ‘need to spend more time with my family’. I’ve always liked this excuse. Staff attrition at the local council was suddenly enormous. An entire department associated with infrastructure property acquisitions just disappeared. They left steaming coffee mugs at their desks. Half-eaten doughnuts. ‘Flickgate’, as it became known, ran deep and wide, and fumigated whole swathes of Brisbane’s professional workforce. At the same time, the world economy collapsed, the state’s water grid ceased construction, plans for dams disappeared and master-planned cities stayed tightly in their miniature airless cases. I know Flick wasn’t responsible for this landslide, but I like to think his demise loosened the rocks a little.
In my days as a rouseabout cop, I was known for certain eccentricities. I never saw it that way. I now see myself as a pioneer of psychological detective work. If you bear this in mind, I want to tell you precisely what I did when I was released from hospital. There was one piece of the puzzle missing, and I needed to get inside it, to work it out as a method actor may inhabit a character. I needed to do it for Zim.
So I returned to the Ertrinken Estate winery in the Gold Coast hinterland. It had, of course, stopped functioning the moment the cuffs were slapped on Flick. It was abandoned. Within minutes of the news reaching this scenic ridge overlooking the glitter strip, the cellar door was quite literally left swinging in the breeze. Half-washed dishes were abandoned in the sink in the restaurant kitchen. A profiterole, with a scalloped bite mark in it (clearly from someone with terrible teeth), was left to go stale on a plate. Time stood still at the place where one had drowned one’s sorrows.
I had had plenty of time to work out the nuts and bolts of Zim’s death as I recuperated in hospital. And I had thousands of his minutely inscribed index cards to pore over. (I had not taken the genuine incriminating ones with me the day I visited Herr Flick in his office. What do you think I am, daft?)
But it wasn’t until I sat in the chair he’d sat in, inside that empty winery restaurant, that I could truly see what happened. As I said, I had to go the hard yards for Zim, out of respect, out of courtesy.
You see, Zim had been here twice for the purpose of reviewing Ertrinken’s restaurant. That’s how darned diligent he was, how particular. And how fair. On the first test run, two weeks before his death, he had, according to his notes, experienced what he described as ‘quite possibly the worst meal of my professional career’. I won’t go into the details he had jotted in his crablike handwriting on the cards, but let’s just say the detection of various cockroach antennae and thorny leg parts in his water glass kicked off the whole disaster, which included a steak with actual ice particles at its centre, and a guinea fowl that he suspected was a chicken in disguise.
As for the wine, he had sipped on a glass of the winery’s own dry white, and found it to be re-fermented. He actually wrote, ‘Nips horribly at the tongue.’ He sent the bottle back and ordered another. The same. He went for a third — the old three strikes you’re out rule. They were ruled out.
The spy game is not confined to governments and big business. The wine and food world is heaving with double agents. When Zim left that night after an argument over not paying for the three bottles of appalling white wine, they knew who he was by the time he’d driven under the rusty metal arch out the front and headed for home. A system of deception and fraud surrounding Zim had been activated by the time he’d pulled into his basement car park in Brisbane that very evening.
Two days after his first Ertrinken visit, he was coincidentally given a complimentary bottle of the VW wine by a Flick associate — a dodgy new sommelier in one of Zim’s favourite restaurants in Eagle Street. Zim studied the label. Could it possibly be from the same vineyard as the one that had turned his stomach and offended his palate just forty-eight hours earlier? Three days after that, at an official state-government function on the Parliament House lawn, a backbencher who was on a judging committee with Zim for the annual fine food awards told him about an incredible ‘secret stash’ he had of the finest white wine ever made in Queensland. Would he care to come back to his office for a taste? Would he like half a dozen bottles for his private cellar? It was, of course, the VW wine. Zim was dizzy with the serendipity of it all. (The wine, tests would later prove, not only contained lethal poisons, but had never been produced in Queensland. It was in fact an award-winning French sauvignon blanc that had been decanted into the VW bottles. Zim may have been onto this. But with wine that good, who cares what it’s wrapped in? Human pleasure can be a blinding, and dangerous, thing.)
So when Zim returned to the winery restaurant for lunch a fortnight later, the manager and staff had a carefully orchestrated plan that came ‘from the top’, namely Johann Flick. Zim walked into an elaborate trap.
As I sat there by the window, in Zim’s chair overlooking the coast, I felt teary. My dear friend. I wished I could have warned him. How could we have known he would indeed be killed to prevent a bad review? Had it ever happened, anywhere, in the history of gastronomy?
When Zim came into the restaurant on the day of his death, he was feted like a head of state, given the best table in the house (which was, incredibly, full), and found himself seated amongst other diners of a very high calibre (if you’re into societal hierarchy), including several government figures, a once-famous movie star and even a celebrity chef from Great Britain. Now you don’t think Zim saw through all this? A man of his worldliness and culture? Sure he did. But the meal was perfect. (Had it been shipped in from elsewhere, and disguised, or concocted by an imported hand? We will never know.) And the wine was superlative, particularly the Kombi drop, with which Zim was now so familiar.