BEFORE EXHAUSTING the last of the birdshit deposits which were the source of its fabulous wealth, before going into business as a detention facility for asylum seekers, the nation state of Nauru destroyed two landmark buildings in Collins Street and erected a 52-floor octagonal monument to its own ineptitude and corruption.

Who would want to have an office on this site? My mate of course.

“If I applied your standards, Feels, I’d be sleeping on the beach. Also,” he said, revealing his true Melbourne heart, “the last time I looked, you lived in Sydney.”

Woody had his office on the fiftieth floor and here he liked to swing back and forth in his fancy chair and gaze up at the violent scudding clouds and down on Parliament House and out to his developments at Docklands. He could see all the way south to St. Kilda and north-east to Collingwood and all that rising damp he had inherited when his father was shot to death.

That murder was not a subject I ever raised with Woody. His personal history resided in the world of “it is said.” It is said that he was a stellar student at Melbourne High. It is said he had wanted to be a literature professor. It is said he had no choice but to pick up his father’s revolver. It is said that he continued that habit long after he employed others to collect his rents. I know this last is true because he once persuaded me to go to the beautiful old Florentino restaurant to pick up “something” he had stupidly left behind. He didn’t say it was a pistol but I noted the blanched face of the unerringly polite Raymond Tsindos when he presented me with a shoebox marked “Mr. Townes.” Outside, on Bourke Street, by the window of that famous bookshop, I lifted the lid. I never told him what I saw.

It is not common for people in Melbourne to carry guns. Indeed it is a criminal offence. So it may seem odd that, rather than stain his good name, my friend’s idiosyncrasy brought a certain frisson to his reputation. Patron of the arts, collector of first editions, street fighter, champion of the left, also, of course, most of all, a property developer. In a different society Woody Townes would have been a player in nothing grander than a city council, but in our dry sclerophyll country his species nests very high indeed.

“I’m going to save your arse, young Felix.”

“That’s very noble of you, mate.”

He stared at me and I, like a drunk who realises he has caused offence, was confused and hurt and dared not look away. This was not Woody in the Wentworth but Woody in his office. My mate had scary moments.

“Thanks for this,” I said.

“Ah, comrade,” he sighed, “you know I am not noble.”

“In your fashion, mate.”

“You thought you were fucked,” he said. “You were up shit creek again.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“Now you’re going to be top dog.”

Oh fuck, I thought, as I sat down opposite him, he is offering me one of his disgusting penthouses on the Yarra. It would be impossible to refuse.

“Just a place to stay till I get started.”

“But what would you possibly start on? Workwise.”

“Jeez. I’ve just arrived.”

“Maybe you’ll be working sooner than you think. You know who the Angel’s mother is?”

“Yes. And so do you.”

He raised his big eyebrows, grinning, withholding.

“You’ve been in touch with her,” I suggested.

“Mate, I’ve never stopped being in touch with Celine.”

The innuendo was not prettily expressed, but I wanted to believe what he was hinting at. “You got me a gig?”

“You write the bloody story, mate. Exclusive. Felix Moore. The defendant won’t talk to anyone but you.”

“Bullshit.”

“I bailed her. Five hundred k,” Woody said, as if he’d purchased a Dobell portrait. I did not judge him for his vulgarity. I admired him. Who else in Australia would have stepped up in his place? “While you were packing shit in the park in Sydney, I was on the phone. I bailed the bloody Angel before the US could touch her. What about that? She’s yours.” He was grinning at me like a wide-mouthed frog. I didn’t have to tell him I was already on her side.

“And she wants me to write her story? That’s what you’re saying.”

“Mate, she never heard of you.”

I didn’t believe him for a second, and in any case I did not care.

“No newspaper’s going to run this,” I said.

Wodonga threw his sandwich in the bin and I recalled I had heard his stomach had been stapled and that when you ate with him at Florentino he would vomit discreetly into his handkerchief. He sat more formally now, his awful elephantine hands clasped gently above his stomach.

“Book,” he said. “Big advance. You can lose your court appeal and pay your damages and still buy Claire a sexy nightie. The contract is being written now. But if you don’t want the job, just say so.”

As it turned out the money was terrific, although his company would own the copyright and I would have no royalty, ever, and no recourse if my name was, without consultation, removed from the title page. Nor did he tell me that he did not control the source at all. For many weeks I would be tormented by the subject’s unavailability. If he had warned me? It would not have changed a thing. I saw myself accept a fat brown envelope that I imagined contained a paperback. Woody said it was $10,000 and I did not even count.

“A good-faith deposit,” he said. “Buy yourself a suit.”

“Fair enough,” I said, thinking, fuck the suit, I can pay the school bills.

Woody slipped into his jacket and took a dainty umbrella from his drawer.

“You’re going to write about a traitor,” he said, watching me stuff the envelope into my jacket. “Being the mug you are, you will fall in love with her. The only problem is: she will most likely be put to death.” I was about to remind him that Australia had no death penalty but he retreated to a private bathroom in the office and peed so long and loud I knew he was showing off his prostate operation.

“I’ve got the table at Moroni’s,” he said when he emerged. “Do you need a comb?”

“Certainly not.”

I did not need a comb to gain admittance to Moroni’s. I had eaten there a hundred times, with Gough Whitlam, John Cain—that is, a Prime Minister and a State Premier whose speech I had once rewritten in that very restaurant, assisted, it might be added, by Moroni’s lethal grappa.

The maître d’ was named Abramo. He was always the same, like a benign James Joyce with perfect vision. Abramo had good reasons to be fond of me as he shortly demonstrated by ignoring Wodonga and warmly welcoming my slovenly self. He showed me to a corner table where there sat an unusual individual. First, she was a woman, the only one in all the hushed besuited room. She was wearing a charcoal silk Shanghai Tang jacket with a brick-red lining and her haircut was a million-dollar job, by which I mean short and simple and sustained by strong, almost springy, silver hair. I was wrong about her age, and so would you have been. She had all those looks that come from great cheekbones, the sort of structured beauty a hundred years of Gauloises could not corrode.

As I approached she stood to shake my hand. She said her name but I did not catch it. I assumed she was the publisher.

“Felix Moore,” I said. I heard Woody groan. He could not believe I didn’t recognise the famous face.

“Felix,” she said. “It’s Celine.”

I began to speak but could not end the sentence. The traitor’s mother leaned across and kissed me on both burning cheeks.