The station master is imprisoned in a timetable as fragile as a house of cards. So many trains arrive and depart from Spencer Street each day. The station master is on tenterhooks watching each come and go, because he knows trains are lethargic beasts prone to dawdle and linger. One late train will infect another with its tardiness, and that will infect yet another, and so on and so on, until the timetable collapses and his station resembles a flu ward with locos laying about on sidings leaking a bacteria of hostile commuters, who have prised open electric doors and popped out emergency windows and are now on the hunt for the dimwit who incarcerated them.
In order to prevent this, the station master spends his day shuffling and shooing locos, panicked as a chess master in a burning building. The 8.15 from Rosanna to platform six is ten minutes overdue. Which moves the 8.30 from Broadmeadows to platform nine … no, ten, no, the 8.45 from Ferntree Gully is there. No, no, no. Trains must run on time.
Just yesterday the 3.40 from Geelong hit a truck that was wedged under a boom-gate at a level crossing in Werribee, killing the truck driver. The station master paced out the minutes waiting for that train, damning the driver of that truck, who turned out to be a father of five, driving long hours to support those five. Sad. But when the Geelong Flyer was delayed, the lateness spread like influenza down the other lines: Hurst-bridge, Frankston, Flemington, even Sydney, and hung there at the outer reaches of the rail network, before ricocheting back in a fusillade of delay and postponement that lasted all day. The station master had every reason to damn that truck driver to hell.
And now this. Now police demanding the master key to his lockers. Reporters sniffing about as if they’d got wind of defective brake pads or sleepers made a feast of by termites. This distraction will keep him from ushering in the 11.42 from Shepparton, a train running a portentous seven minutes behind time, and, unless the passengers disembark smartly, the midday from Geelong will need to be allotted another platform. He is minded to lay this dread scenario at the door of the police and ask them what they intend to do about it.
But he won’t. Because all the station master’s hostility is deep within the station master. The only hint of its existence is the foulness of his breath caused by his dyspepsia. Outwardly, he is a wheedling presence who imagines himself suave. Smiling a smile that has, he persuades himself, soothed many a momentarily disenchanted passenger over the years, he lays his hands flat on his chest with his fingers laced across his sternum, leans forwards low and tilts his head to look up at Speed Draper from beneath the peak of his station master’s cap and tell him, ‘A face I recognise from the television. Mr Draper. Minister. Honoured.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Ian Beaks. I am the station master, fifteenth year, of Spencer Street station. The country’s busiest.’
Aware the press is hovering, Speed Draper speaks softly. ‘Do you have the key to this locker?’ He touches a knuckle on the locker door.
Aware the press is hovering, the station master speaks loudly. ‘I do, minister. And may I, being legally charged with responsibility and guardianship of the goods and chattels enclosed within all the lockers on these premises, which is a relationship of trust assumed and expected between myself and the lessees of these lockers, ask why you want to open two two seven?’
‘A relationship of trust? Responsible for the contents? I hear accomplice, when you say “relationship of trust” with the lessees of this particular locker, Mr Beaks. And I hear receiver of stolen goods when you say “responsible” for these particular goods and chattels. Or am I reading too much into your relationship with these lessees?’
The station master’s voice drops to a whisper. ‘Most certainly, minister. You are. Oh, yes. I’m sorry to give a wrong idea. No relationship. And I know nothing of the contents of two two seven. Nor any locker here. It would be a breach of privacy if I did. I only ever open the very most noisome lockers. The stinkers. Forgotten lunches and practical jokes of a scatological nature, minister, are the goods and chattels in which I deal, sadly.’
The station master scrabbles a key from his trouser pocket. Attached to it is a white ribbon and on it a foam Smurf with Lachie written on his belly. ‘Lachie locker key,’ he explains.
Speed Draper smiles and ushers him towards the locker. The crowd presses in behind the station master as he fits the key to the lock. Despite his earlier plan to keep a safe distance, Weston Guest can’t help himself. It is he who reaches in and retrieves the cardboard tube and holds it out in his cupped hands. The crowd makes room as he extracts the canvas and unrolls the Weeping Woman. And as she emerges there are murmurs of delight, as if from relatives seeing a newborn baby unswaddled for the first time. No articulation can compete with a simple ‘ooh’ or ‘aah’.
Weston studies her suspiciously, his eyes hardened. Eventually he nods and a teardrop forms and runs down his cheek as he announces softly through quivering lips, ‘It is her.’
His bright future is returned to him. They applaud gently, touched by the gallery director’s emotional reaction and not wanting to break into a callow triumphalism that may detract from the poignancy of the moment. She is returned. A priceless, irreplaceable masterpiece is saved. Let us give thanks.
It is a full thirty seconds before this fine moment of redemption is ended by someone shouting, ‘Three cheers’. The cameras begin to flash as the people hip, hip and hooray and Weston smiles reflexively, brushing away the tears. The champagne cork is fired. Speed Draper moves into shot and lays a soothing hand on the gallery director’s shoulder. He faces the cameras calmly. Deadpan. Perfectly cool. Hadn’t he told them, all those doubters? All those folks who said he was a dolt and didn’t know his arse from his elbow, a tiresome old bag of swamp gas that’d lost a masterpiece and had no clue who had the thing or where it was? Hadn’t he told them he was on the case? And look here, now. He sweeps his hand towards the Weeping Woman as the cameras rattle. Here she is. Voilà.
Leni Richthofen has walked this route from the county court to her chambers so many times she could do it blindfolded. Which is as well because the wind is gusting, channelled by the canyons of the legal precinct, and she must keep her head bowed and eyes slit to keep the grit from them. One hand is holding a copy of Post-war Commonwealth Tort atop her horse-hair wig to anchor it on her head and the other is gathering her flying black robe before her as she pushes into the wind along Little Bourke Street, navigating by the lower portions of the shopfronts she is passing.
In the window of Ricardo the Barber, a lamp shaped like a barber’s pole, striped red and white, spins slowly with a payload of mummified blowflies. The next shop is Retravision with seven televisions lined along the floor at the window and six stacked on those seven, and five on those six, and so on, rising in a pyramid of American soap to the summit of televisual art: the thirty-six-inch screen Blaupunkt Ubermall, a screen so perfect that on it the young and restless mother-in-law sleeping with her daughter’s husband almost seems to have invented a fresh and sensible morality.
Except today, eyes down, half-closed and fluttering against the grit, as Leni comes abreast of the seven lowest televisions, they are not showing American soap. She stops and opens her eyes and lifts her gaze. Thirty Weston Guests are holding thirty Weeping Women. Talking excitedly, his arms and hands are darting here and there excitedly, shuddering with light as cameras flash.
‘Oh, God,’ Leni says. Lowering the hand holding the book from her head and taking the wig with it she frees her hair to whip at her face. ‘Oh, God.’
Hearing her, a man in a waistcoat leaving Ricardo’s, smelling of his trademark minty pomade, stops and nods at the televisions. ‘I know. Apparently those terrorists just gave it back. Makes you wonder.’
In her office in her chambers in a sandstone Victorian in Little Bourke, at her desk surrounded by a glade of stacked legal books, Leni picks up her phone and slowly dials the headquarters of the Stinking Pariahs.
‘Bam?’
‘Leni, I been sitting here eyeballing the phone for two hours. Just startin’ to think you were a nice level-headed girl and you weren’t going to call. And I hoped it was so. But, anyway, howdy.’
‘Do you have an idea of how much money you owe me, Bam?’
‘Rough-ish idea.’
‘You wanted to pay that debt with an item.’
‘Item I foolishly thought I had, but I didn’t.
‘Because I had the item. Or, as it happens, foolishly I thought I did, but I didn’t.’
‘Well … I’m not laughing.’
‘I’d feel better if you did.’
‘Well, I’m not.’
‘I’ve got a job for you, Bam. And if you do it, I’ll waive your debt to me.’
‘You waived his debt to get the item. You’re goin’ to waive my debt because you didn’t get the item you waived his debt to get. What do you say on your tax return, Leni? “No income to declare. Was paid in forgeries and assassinations this year.”’ Bam waits for a response. A laugh, a sigh, something to tell him she’s given up on the idea. He can hear her, breathing evenly, waiting for him. ‘My advice,’ he says. ‘Back to you, ’cause you gave it to me, is “Don’t do it. Better to cut your losses. Call it a learning experience and walk away.” Would be the smart thing to do.’
‘How did you go with that advice?’ she asks.
‘I didn’t take it.’