The bushfires had reached Sydney. By the time I got back to the pub everyone was talking about it. ‘City Under Siege’ read the headlines. Eight hundred kilometres of New South Wales coastline was burning, from the Queensland border down to Bateman’s Bay. Sydney was in the middle of it. The leafy North Shore suburbs were ablaze, as were the suburbs to the south. At the beginning of the week there were forty fires, now there were 148. Four lives had been lost, homes destroyed and thousands of people were being evacuated. Already a hundred million dollars worth of insurance was being claimed. It wouldn’t take long before this figure would more than double. ‘The oven door of Hell opened’, began one article as the hot, blistering, north-west winds, uncommon in this season, whipped the fires on. Now you could smell it on the air. The fire was no longer limited to the bush on the periphery of the city but racing up its veins as well.
In the south a fireball had jumped the Woronora River and swept through Como and Jannali. I thought of Rosa in Lugarno. All that was separating Como from Lugarno was the Georges River. I’d stood talking to her on her old timber jetty jutting into the Georges River. A fireball couldn’t jump a river as wide as that. Could it?
News of the bushfires occupied almost all the newspaper space, eclipsing all else. So I almost missed a small paragraph at the end of the In Brief section. A decomposing body had been discovered in the back of vacant premises in Leichhardt. I probably would have read it then promptly forgotten about it except that the premises were on Parramatta Road. I remembered the ‘To Let’ signs on my way to La Giardinera. It had to be one of them. I wondered whether the body was already there the day I walked by.
I took the newspaper upstairs with me, thinking about the effect heat might have had on the rate of decomposition. One would imagine that a body would decompose quickly because of the heat. However this heat was unusually dry. It seemed an irony, the giant tornedo of fire engulfing the city while at the calm centre of it, one lone body lay decomposing.
I woke the next morning to the sound of the phone ringing. I got to it just before the recorded message took over. It was Brian. Immediately I felt guilty. Mina had told me yesterday that he wanted to speak to me and I’d completely forgotten about it.
He’d run a check on Grimaldi as I’d asked him to. He was going to call with the results of that but now something far more interesting had cropped up. Would I like to drop by and see him? He felt like getting out of the office and away from all this bushfire business for five minutes. Perhaps we could meet in a cool dark corner of the Rose and Crown.
I didn’t go there often but Brian did. It was the place where I’d first met up with him after not having seen him since I was a child. The pub closest to his work, a civilised sort of establishment that used to have little bowls of nuts at the bar for the customers. I remember Brian telling me a few months ago that the place had ‘gone off’. Instead of nuts they’d started serving potato skins.
Nevertheless, when I arrived at the Rose and Crown he was sitting at his table with a bowl of potato skins in front of him. He had his jacket off, sleeves rolled up and tie loosened. Beside him was an orange juice in a long glass chock-full of ice. I ordered a mineral water. ‘Have a skin,’ he said, offering me the bowl.
‘Thought you preferred nuts,’ I pointed out.
‘Well, you’ve got to roll with the punches,’ he said philosophically.
I took a skin and dipped it into the sour cream and chive dip. Overhead a fan was moving the air around, such a nice change from the creepy cold of airconditioning.
Brian had a briefcase on a chair beside him. It was new. ‘Wedding present,’ he said when he saw me looking at it. ‘Don’t know how I got by all these years without one,’ he said with a touch of irony.
‘So what did you find on Grimaldi?’
‘I had a company search done. He owns a few properties around Leichhardt but he’s small fry. Has some interesting friends though.’
‘Fabio?’
‘That name didn’t crop up. I mean, really, Claudia, without a surname it’s pretty hard going.’
I took a sip of my mineral water, letting this gentle admonition wash over me.
Brian reeled off a few names, most of them Italian. ‘You’ve probably never heard of any of them,’ Brian said. ‘They don’t get their names in the papers. And because they’re Italian I don’t want you thinking they’re Mafia. Let’s call it multiculturalism. The old Anglo-Celtic network is no longer the only game in town. It’s mostly white collar but if you have a close look at that collar you’ll find grime. It seems Grimaldi’s job is to wash away some of that grime.
‘A couple of years ago he was going broke. The height of the recession, it was happening everywhere. But instead of declaring bankrupt, his fortunes suddenly improved. Now I don’t know all this for certain, but based on the company links, a bit of hearsay, and what I know goes on elsewhere, I think someone must have helped him out. In return for favours that were fairly small at the time but gradually got bigger.’
‘Very interesting,’ I remarked.
‘Ah, but you haven’t seen the most interesting bit.’
Brian flicked the briefcase open and took out a photocopy in a clear plastic protector. ‘There was a small news item they ran yesterday, but you probably didn’t even notice it.’
‘The body in Leichhardt,’ I said.
Brian was impressed.
‘I always read the small print,’ I told him.
‘Well, the premises belonged to Grimaldi. And this was found on the body.’ He lay the photocopy out in front of me. ‘It’s from one of the police photos.’
The background was dark and grainy, but in the foreground was a square of white. A book of matches, and diagonally across it La Giardinera. I recognised it immediately. There’d been one just like it sitting in the unused ashtray the day I had lunch there.
‘I believe the police have questioned Mr Grimaldi but not well enough to find something to hold him on.’
‘Who was the deceased?’
‘Not yet established beyond a shadow of a doubt but the contender is a Leichhardt man whose neighbour phoned the police about a week ago. She was complaining about his dog running loose round the neighbourhood. But forensic thinks he’s been dead twelve, fourteen days, maybe longer, allowing for the dry weather that’s probably slowed down the process of decomposition slightly.’ If the time of death were pushed back a day or two, it would coincide precisely with the day Madalena disappeared.
‘If Grimaldi was involved he wouldn’t have left evidence that could implicate him, surely,’ I pointed out.
‘You wouldn’t think so. Maybe someone wanted it to look that way, or maybe the guy’s not very smart. Do you know him?’
‘Not well enough to give him an IQ test.’
If I had money on it, I’d be backing Fabio. This could easily have been one of his ‘odd jobs’. Question is, who did he do the job for? As well as working for Grimaldi, Fabio was working for his uncle, whoever that may be. ‘Do you have a list of Grimaldi’s business associates?’
‘Indirectly." I’ve got the company directors. You can work it out from there. What’s the job, Claudia, you cleaning up Leichhardt?’
‘Not unless I have to. I’m looking for a girl who’s gone missing. Grimaldi’s daughter. I’m hoping the father’s business interests have nothing to do with it, but as you know, nothing is ever simple.’
‘Kidnap?’
‘No.’ I finished off the mineral water. ‘Your blood’s worth bottling, Brian. Thanks.’ I got up to go.
‘When are you coming round for dinner?’
‘You’re getting to sound just like Mina,’ I said. ‘Look, things are rather busy at the moment. I don’t want to make an arrangement and have to break it.’
‘Found any of your father’s mates, yet?’ he asked innocently. So Janet had phoned.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’
‘Has it helped?’
‘Yes. It’s helped.’
‘I don’t suppose she said anything, but your mother’s worried about you.’
‘Isn’t she always?’ I laughed it off.
If Brian hadn’t been married to my mother, I would have openly discussed my search for Guy with him. But it was all different now. I wanted to talk to him about it but it was no longer appropriate. It would just make things awkward. If I passed on what I now knew about Guy, the cosy little life Brian was building with Mina would crash to the ground.
When I got outside to the panel van the top of it was covered in black grit. Chunks of cinders falling from the sky. I called Lugarno but there was no answer. I don’t know whether Rosa had an answering machine, but the phone rang on and on.
I drove to Leichhardt. La Giardinera was closed. The door locked and the closed sign showing. I went round the back. There were no cars in the yard. I went up the stairs to find that door locked too. I put my ear to the door. Inside it was quiet as a grave.
On my way back to the pub I stopped at Danny’s. The Daimler was sitting there, like a cat waiting for its owner to come home. Giving me the cold shoulder. I’d been away too long and it was annoyed. That wouldn’t last long. They always come round in the end. I walked over to it. The paint job had been done. Danny was right—you could tell.
Danny came out of the workshop wiping his hands on a rag. ‘It’s the best I could do,’ he apologised.
‘I love it,’ I said. ‘In fact, why don’t you do one down the other side as well?’
Danny couldn’t believe it. ‘Mate. This beautiful piece of machinery. What are you trying to do, turn it into a hoon’s car?’
‘What about dark green and reddish brown? Federation colours. That’d go well on a European car.’
‘You can’t be serious.’
I don’t know what it was but I was suddenly looking at the Daimler in a different way. I felt strangely liberated. Why the hell did it have to look exactly the way it was when it came out of the factory or wherever it was Daimlers come from? I put this to Danny.
He gave me a look as if the question was so preposterous it didn’t even call for an answer. ‘It’s a Daimler, not a Monaro. You know how many Daimlers this age there are in Australia? You could count them on one hand—even with a couple of fingers amputated. I won’t do it for you, Claudia. That’s that.’
Putting a stripe down the other side would have to look like the lesser of two evils. ‘You got any of that paint left?’ I asked.
‘A bit.’
‘It’s going to look odd down one side only, isn’t it?’
‘OK, OK. I’ll do the stripe. But that’s all. No more talk of painting it two colours, all right?’
‘Agreed. So I can keep the van a bit longer?’
‘You don’t want the LTD or the Saab? They’re faster.’
‘I’m not going anywhere in a hurry. The van’s fine.’
‘Suit yourself.’
I’m sure Danny thought I’d gone mad. I was beginning to wonder about it myself. It was just a stage I was going through, the extreme behaviour of the last few days. A couple of nights’ quality sleep and I’d be back to normal.
‘The guy—Fabio—with the Chrysler. Remember we were talking about him last time?’
‘Yeah, I remember.’
‘I know you said you didn’t have an address but do you have a surname? A contact phone number? Surely you’ve got an invoice, something like that.’
‘I doubt it. I’m a mechanic, not a secretary. I hate all that paperwork. I keep most of the records in my head.’
‘So what do you do when it’s tax time? Mail your head in, like John the Baptist?’
‘I don’t know John the Baptist, I’m a Muslim. I stick all the scraps of paper in the office in an envelope and give it to my accountant.’
‘How much was the paint job?’
‘Getting the colours, mixing the paint, the labour …’
‘OK, Danny, give me a round figure. I don’t need the complete inventory.’
‘Seventy bucks.’
‘Seventy bucks! For a line of paint half a centimetre wide?’
‘That’s a fair price, I’m not putting anything on it. You’re a regular customer.’
I knew what he was saying was right. It was just that lately the Daimler had become a bottomless money pit. I wrote him a cheque. Sometimes I pay him cash but I have to have something to claim as a tax deduction.
‘A hundred and fifty,’ I said, giving him the cheque. ‘The second stripe’s not going to cost as much as the first because you’ve got the paint already. The rest of it is to buy half an hour of your time to look around the office and see if you can come up with anything on Fabio or the Chrysler.’
‘It’s that important, huh?’
‘It could be. You can ring me on the home number or the mobile.’
I returned to Raf’s painting. Once again there’d been progress but the artist was missing. What did I have to do, watch the place twenty-four hours a day? I went over to the newsstand. Every newspaper had FIRE! on it in bold black letters.
I don’t know if the guy remembered me from before or not, but he was amiable enough. We got talking about the painting. Then the artist. He told me Raf had gone, that he’d usually left by this time of day. Mostly he worked here during lunch hour, that’s when he got the best crowds. I bought the afternoon paper. It felt crisp and dry, like a desiccated leaf. One more degree of heat and the city would spontaneously combust.
When I got home there was a message from Bernie asking me to ‘give him a ring sometime’. It was noncommittal, hard to tell from his tone of voice whether the news was good or bad. It was too late to ring him at work and I didn’t want to ring him at home. I had a shower to cool off and opened the French doors. It didn’t make a blind bit of difference to the temperature.
I tried Rosa again. No answer. I tried her at John and Anna’s but all I got was the answering machine. Where was everyone, had they suddenly gone on holidays? I tried La Giardinera and got the answering machine there as well. The recorded message gave the hours of opening and invited the caller to give name, time, number of diners and a contact phone number if they wanted to make a booking. It was dinnertime. Why wasn’t anyone there?
I tried driving to Lugarno but the police and fire brigade had set up roadblocks and I couldn’t get through. I came back to the pub in search of a few quiet beers. They weren’t that quiet—I was surrounded by conversation on all sides. The word on everyone’s lips was fire. They were talking about Ash Wednesday when seventy-two lives were lost in Victoria and South Australia, they were talking about the 1967 bushfires in Tasmania. I overheard the argument about eucalypts needing fire to burst open the seed pods, about spontaneous combustion. The stories of vandals sending kites into the air with their tails alight, whether a boy who had been caught deliberately lighting a fire should be charged with murder. Then they got onto other disasters. Granville. Cyclone Tracey. No-one mentioned the floods of 1985.
Three beers and I was still stone cold sober. But hopefully it would be enough to give me a good night’s sleep. I went upstairs and got into bed.
At 4 am I was jolted out of bed by the smell of smoke. I saw a brown haze everywhere. Jesus, the pub was on fire! I raced downstairs, into the bar, into the restaurant. But there was nothing burning. The smoke was coming from outside. In the north-west there was a dull red glow in the sky. The wrong direction for it to be the light of dawn.
I went back upstairs and closed the French doors in an attempt to keep the smoke out. It made the room as hot as a furnace. And didn’t make a difference to the smoke. It found its way in, under the doors, through every little crack. Softly and silently its long wispy fingers crept into our rooms, our clothes, our hair, all the way into our lungs, our bodies. Whether you were sleeping or awake, you had to breathe it in. We had no choice, there was no other air but this.
I woke up just after nine with the same smell of smoke in my nostrils, feeling decidedly unrefreshed. I reached for the phone and tapped out Bernie’s number.
‘It’s Claudia.’
Bernie started explaining that the price had gone up. The job had taken longer than anticipated. As if he was a builder I’d employed to do renovations.
‘Is there a result?’ I asked.
‘Are you prepared to pay?’
‘Of course I’m prepared to pay,’ I said impatiently.
‘Then there’s a result.’
Bernie told me that his contact had examined the records from the present back to 1985, for sickness benefits. There was an address for a Guy Francis Valentine c/- the Matthew Talbot Hostel but it changed in 1987 to a private address in Surry Hills. Then in 1990 the sickness benefits had stopped. Bernie’s contact had then looked at unemployment and other kinds of benefits till it finally occurred to him to try the old age pension.
I could have kicked myself when I heard him say that. It was so obvious. Why hadn’t I suggested that in the first place? This was where he had found the address. It was still current. Since 1990 Guy Francis Valentine had been drawing old age pension cheques. And was still doing it.
In those scanty records, change of address and change of pension, was the story of my father’s life, clearly laid out before me. ‘And?’
Bernie knew what I wanted to hear next but he wasn’t saying it. ‘Claudia, if it was just between you and me, there’d be no problem. But … well, the person wants to know I’ve got the money before he’ll give me the address.’
‘How much is it? I can drop the money over right away.’
Bernie told me how much it was. God, if I thought the Daimler was a money pit it was nothing compared to this.
‘Yeah, I know,’ said Bernie. ‘And that’s just what my contact’s asking. I haven’t put anything on top for myself. Seeing as how it’s your father.’ Bernie sounded almost embarrassed.
‘Thanks Bernie,’ I said, ‘I appreciate that. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
‘Give me a call when you’re near the building. I’ll come out for a cigarette.’
The Department of Motor Transport, now known as the Roads and Traffic Authority, is in Rosebery, a working class area with few houses and lots of industry. Though the name has changed, the building is still the same. As directed, I gave Bernie a call on the mobile as I approached Rothschild Street. He told me to meet him around the back and gave me quite specific directions as to where he’d be. He’d walk along the street a little, to be away from other smokers also cast out of the building to carry on their dedication to the drug. I wondered if workers in the WD & HO Wills tobacco factory, not all that far from here, were allowed to smoke in the building.
Bernie didn’t have to be that specific, he’s not difficult to spot. As soon as I turned the corner I saw him. The bald head, heavy-rimmed glasses and Russian doll shape were all there trundling along the street. Bernie’s shape always gave me a surprise, he had such a thin voice.
I cruised along till I came up level with him. He leaned in the window. I showed him the bills so he could see it was the right amount, then he put them in his pocket. ‘You won’t be needing a receipt, will you? I’ve left the book upstairs.’
I looked at him with dry humour. ‘What about the address?’
‘Right. I’ll go and ring him. Copulator, Claudia.’
‘Bernie,’ I said, ‘get in the car. You can use my mobile.’
He looked around furtively.
‘For heaven’s sake, Bernie, it’s the address of an old age pensioner, not the French Connection.’
He got into the car. I switched the mobile onto hands-free mode so I could hear what was said as well. Bernie tapped out the number. It occurred to me that the contact might become difficult, that he wouldn’t hand over the address till he actually had the money, but he must have trusted Bernie. He simply asked if Bernie had counted the money and when Bernie said he had, the contact gave him the address. I didn’t need to write it down, it rang out loud and clear in the van and finally tattooed itself on my brain.
‘Mission accomplished,’ said Bernie with a flourish. He got out of the van and lit a cigarette.
‘Thanks, Bern, I’ll be phoning you. Oh, I’ve got something else. If you’re interested.’
‘Sure.’
‘American Chrysler, personalised plates—FABIO.’ I spelled it out for him.
‘Fabio?’
‘You know him?’
‘Isn’t he one of those romance cover models?’
‘I doubt it would be the same one. How do you know about romance cover models?’
‘My wife reads them.’
Sure, Bernie, sure. As soon as he was gone I grabbed the street directory and found my father’s street. I left the street directory open on the passenger’s seat and drove off, heading for Surry Hills.