It was no mystery to Frank Moretti why he had taken up his small part as a subcontractor in people-smuggling. It wasn’t “My humanitarian hobby”, as he privately joked to himself, and sometimes even tried to believe, if only a little.
No; it was because his part was profitable. Easy and highly profitable: a few phone calls, some kickbacks, a hired people-mover and a man—Tariq al-Hakim—to let them out and take them away and deliver them.
With the exception of the women he paid for, Moretti rarely found human beings beautiful, but he was pleasantly surprised how trading in them could be so lucrative. Today another container had arrived, this time all the way from Shanghai, with its load of canned Albanian tomato paste—and twelve men. Why Albanian tomato paste would be coming out of Shanghai was a mystery to Moretti; it had been explained to him as old trading ties.
No wonder he felt unwell. What a night! First the stripper crazily calling, wanting God knows what, then after his dinner guests had thankfully gone and he was about to ring Tariq al-Hakim for the hundredth time, the doorbell rang.
A wave of fear and guilt broke over Moretti when he answered the door to a cop asking too many questions about the stripper. ‘And my crime?’ Moretti suddenly thought, ‘what is it, and how is it different from what so many of my neighbours do for their money? After all,’ he argued with himself, ‘how is what I do poles apart from what we are all told to do every day?’
Then he remembered how Lee Moon had smiled over his tumbler of Johnnie Walker Blue Label the day they had met, and told him how free trade agreements lied, how in truth some things weren’t exactly permitted, and some products were even officially disapproved of, but it was tacitly understood they too were part of the deal. Lee Moon was a pleasant-looking man who was always beaming, and reminded Frank Moretti of the Dalai Lama in an expensive dark suit.
“Yes, yes!” said Lee Moon, and his smile opened his face up further into what seemed delighted astonishment. “Organs of vanished backpackers, virginity of Mai Chai children—yes, yes; Frank, you know, yesterday I was offered collagen harvested from the skin of executed Chinese convicts to distribute here in Australia. Yes, yes! Is remarkable!”
And indeed it was. Lee Moon laughed. How funny it all seemed! Frank Moretti laughed.
“You know, Frank,” continued Lee Moon, “what matters is not all these regulations—do this, can’t do that—no,” and here he held up a finger and leant forward. “No, it’s the spirit of free trade, of this great globalised world, that is what matters. Yes, yes. The spirit of the age: buy and sell, Frank; everything exists to buy and sell. Even us! Yes, yes.”
Frank Moretti laughed. Lee Moon laughed.
“Us!” said Lee Moon, raising his whisky.
“Us!” said Frank Moretti, raising his whisky.
And Frank Moretti had the momentary sensation of being strangely joined in this toast not just to Lee Moon, but to something vast and cruel that loomed over them both like a cold shadow of this world. He involuntarily shivered, but he knew this bad feeling would quickly pass, that more money would soon flow, and that before long he would forget this unsettling sensation. He drained his tumbler and with a smile shook Lee Moon’s hand.
Looking back, thought Frank Moretti, what Lee Moon had said was true. That we exist to be bought and sold. That our natural laws, our destiny, our biology, amount to our capacity to cut a deal. That the world is a bazaar. And all this Moretti felt he had signed up to and lived in accordance with.
Yet worried as he was about his own situation when the cop came calling, Moretti found himself lying when the cop asked him about the stripper—not to protect himself, but to protect her, the crazy stripper—so strangely had he lied to try to save her. He said she hadn’t been there for a month.
The cop had a Greek name and was smart enough to be friendly, and Moretti, rather than shut the door on him and call his lawyer, felt it wiser to appear helpful. It was, in any case, his way with authority, his Sydney way: to smile, help, offer hospitality and friendship.
And so when the Greek cop said yes to a late-night drink, they had one, then another, and the single malts led to a fine grappa and that in turn led to Moretti—when complimented on his art—growing a little proud and unable to resist taking the cop on a quick tour of the house and its more interesting treasures. And so—and not without a collector’s desire to impress with their more exotic collections—he had the Greek cop open up the hallway cabinet to show him what was gathered there. He had already started in on the Beretta story when the cop looked down at him with a curious expression.
“It’s missing,” said the Greek cop.
Though shocked, Moretti recovered quickly, realising his obvious astonishment was an asset in proving his own innocence. He agreed with the Greek cop that it must have been an inside job—a tradesman, a waitress, one of several nurses who attended to him daily—but there were so many, he continued, it was hard to remember all their names. But when asked directly, he replied that it couldn’t have been the stripper, for she had not been there for so long. It was such a stupid lie, and yet he persisted with it.
“And besides,” said Moretti, “she has no idea what’s in the cabinet, far less where the key’s hidden.”
He agreed with the Greek cop it was a mystery, such a strange mystery, and he knew the Greek cop didn’t believe a word he said, and yet he hadn’t betrayed her. It was inexplicable.
“Nobody knows what moves anybody,” the Greek cop tried one last time as he was about to go. “You sure it couldn’t be her?”
After the Greek cop left, Moretti realised that had he been taken into custody and grilled, perhaps he might have confessed what he had done, told them about all his many businesses—the forgeries of Aboriginal paintings and company memoranda, the phoney antiques, the smuggling of drugs and people—and even how he had done it; but it would have been the explanations as to why that would be impossible to give and, Moretti felt, impossibly annoying.
How could Moretti tell the cop that he had divined in the stripper the same passions that had led him to this house, these possessions, and this life of deception? For he too, after all, was what he had never told her: not rich, not from the eastern suburbs or the north shore, not from an established family of Italian vintners, but just another westie on the make, a westie who reinvented himself after his car smash with a new name for his new body and a desperate desire to rise. He had always hated wogs, and it seemed right to take on a wog name for the hideous mess of flesh he had been left to live in.
He should have told the cop all he knew about her and admitted it must have been she who had taken the gun. But how could he say she was him before his smash, and he couldn’t betray her? He had agreed when Lee Moon said everything exists to buy and sell. But what if it wasn’t true? What then?
He put on a CD of Dinu Lipatti’s recordings of Chopin’s Nocturnes in an attempt to calm himself, to remind himself once more of beauty and art. Once it began, he spun his wheelchair and was about to head over to the sideboard on which the phone sat, to call—but he had the oddest sensation. Everything felt unexpectedly heavy, and every movement became the most extraordinary feat.
Something was creeping over his body, at the same time as something else was emptying out of it. What was it tingling up and down his arm, numbing his fingers as he tried to find the controls of his wheelchair? Who was it pushing in his ribs? Who was it crushing his chest? Sitting on his lungs? Who was it tightening their fingers around his neck, pushing his tongue back, choking him?
“No! No! No!” he suddenly cried, terribly, terribly afraid. He began to panic, realising he must do something, anything. But all his concentrated effort to move only resulted in a rocking of his torso that grew ever more pronounced until he came so far forward that, losing his balance, he was unable to throw himself back.
He toppled out of his wheelchair onto a Renaissance chair with ivory inlay. But the fine pinpricks all over the chair, similar to those in much of his other antique furniture, were not some unusual finish but borer holes, so much dust waiting to be released from the mirage of taste in which it was imprisoned. One leg, rotten with woodworm, snapped as Moretti’s small, heavy body pitched onto the chair seat. He slid sideways and fell to the floor, the side of his head smashing heavily and, the coroner would later determine, fatally, on the bottom shelf of a bookcase, and Moretti would never be conscious of rising in this world again.
All that could be heard in the house was the sound of felt-covered hammers attacking wires strained within a wooden box to an almost unbearable tension, as Chopin’s piano notes continued playing over Moretti’s dead body.