Bear Pit. Jon Cleary
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Then he turned full on to Jack Junior, the grin almost as wide as Kelzo’s smile had been. ‘I haven’t read anything of him, either. Poets and philosophers don’t help us with the voters – Roger Ladbroke keeps me supplied with all the potted wisdom I need. If I started quoting Oscar Wilde, the only voters who’d clap for me would be the homosexuals up in Oxford Street and the arty-crafties in Balmain and they vote for me anyway, ‘cause they think I’m a character. The rest of the voters in this city have had it so good for so long, they ain’t interested in philosophy or smart sayings, not unless they hear it in some TV comedy. The people out in the bush, they’re philosophers, they gotta be to survive, and they’re the ones gimme the difference that keeps me in power. I’m the first Labor premier they’ve ever liked. They think I’m a character, too.’
‘And are you?’ asked Aldwych Senior from his other side.
The Dutchman turned to him. ‘You’ll have to ask my minder down there. Roger –’ he raised his voice, leaning forward to speak to Ladbroke – ‘am I a character? Mr Aldwych wants to know.’
‘Every inch,’ said Ladbroke, who at times had had to keep the character in recognizable shape.
Further down the top table from the Premier were Bevan Bigelow, the Leader of the Opposition, and Leslie Chung, a senior partner in Olympic Tower.
‘Have you ever voted for him?’ asked Bigelow, nodding up towards the middle of the table.
‘No.’ Leslie Chung, like Jack Aldwych, was now respectable, but his past was tainted. He was a good-looking man, still black-haired in his sixties, with the knack of looking down his nose at people taller than himself. Tonight, acting benevolent, he was looking eye to eye with Bigelow. ‘But I’ve never voted for you, either. I give money to both parties, but I vote for the guy with the least chance of stuffing everything up. Some Independent. It amuses me.’
‘Does that come from being Chinese?’
Bigelow was a short, squat man with a blond cowlick and a habit of shifting nervously in his seat as if it were about to be snatched away from him; which also applied to his electoral seat, where his hold was marginal. Les Chung, on the other hand, sat with the calmness of a lean Buddha, as sure of himself as amorality could make him. He had made his fortune by turning his back on scruples and now, on the cusp between middle and old age, he was not going to take the road to Damascus. Or wherever one saw the light here amongst the barbarians.
‘No, it comes from having become an Australian.’ He had been here forty-three years; he didn’t say the locals still amused him. ‘Even though we call Hans The Dutchman, you couldn’t get anyone more Australian than him, could you?’
‘I don’t know.’ Bigelow looked puzzled, a not uncommon expression with him. ‘He’s not friendly, like most Australians. He’s got no friends in his own party, you know that?’
Chung knew that Bigelow had few friends in his party; he was a stop-gap leader because his opponents couldn’t agree amongst themselves whom they wanted to replace him. ‘I don’t think it worries him, Bev. They’ll never put a dent in that shell.’
Bigelow nodded at the Aldwyches. ‘How do you get on with your partners? When old Jack dies, he’s getting on, who takes charge?’
‘We’ve never discussed it. It would be between me and Jack Junior, I suppose. I think I’d get it.’ He smiled, ‘I’m sure I’d get it. There are other partners, the Chinese ones.’ He nodded down towards Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te. ‘They’d vote for me.’
‘A Chinese Triad?’
‘No, just a trio.’
‘There’s another partner, isn’t there?’ He could never find a policy to pursue, but his mind was a vault of facts. ‘Miss Feng?’
Les Chung looked down at the beautiful girl seated at one of the lower tables with a handsome young Caucasian escort. If he were younger he might have asked her to be his concubine. And smiled to himself at what her Australian answer would have been.
‘We Chinese stick together. How do you think you’ll go when Hans announces the election?’
‘That will depend on his own party hacks. He has more enemies than I have.’ Though he spoke without conviction.
‘Yes,’ said Les Chung, but seemed to be talking to himself.
The evening was breaking up. The Premier and the Aldwyches rose at the top table. Throughout the rest of the room there was a stirring, like the crumbling of two hundred claypans. The waiters and waitresses restrained themselves from making get-the-hell-out-here gestures.
‘We’ll see you to the door,’ said Jack Junior. ‘Your car has been ordered. My wife will look after Mrs Vanderberg.’
The offical party moved amongst the tables almost like deity; no one genuflected, but almost everyone rose to his feet. His feet: the women, no vestal virgins, remained seated. The Dutchman smiled on everyone like a blessing; if the grimace that was his smile resembled a blessing. He stopped once or twice to shake hands: not with party hacks but with backers of the Other Party: he knew he was being watched by Bevan Bigelow. He introduced Jack Aldwych to the Police Commissioner and the two men shook hands across a great divide while The Dutchman watched the small comedy. There was no one to equal him in throwing opposites together. He did not believe that opposites attract but that they unsettled the compass. It was others who needed the compass: he had known his direction from the day he had entered politics.
Then they were out in the foyer, heading for the doors and the wide expanse of marble steps fronting the curved entrance. Juliet paused to help Mrs Vanderberg with her wrap, another home-made garment, like a purple pup-tent. The two Aldwych men went out through the doors with the Premier, one on either side of him. They paused for a moment while the white government Ford drew in below them. Beyond was the wide expanse of George Street, the city’s main street, thick with cinema and theatre traffic.
The hum of the traffic silenced the sound of the shot.
3
‘They’ve taken him to St Sebastian’s,’ said Phil Truach. ‘It looks bad, the bullet got him in the neck.’
‘Where’s his wife?’
‘She’s gone to the hospital. We sent two uniformed guys to keep an eye on things there.’
Malone, Russ Clements and Truach were standing on the steps outside the hotel’s main entrance. Crime Scene tapes had replaced the thick red ropes that had held back the hoi polloi as the dinner guests had arrived. The hoi polloi were still there, cracking jokes and making rude remarks about the two women officers running out the tapes. Most of the crowd were young, had come from the cinema complexes further up the street or the games parlours; they had come from paying to see violence on the screens and here it was for free. But soon they would be bored, the body gone. Even the blood didn’t show up on the maroon marble.
‘Who got shot?’
‘That old guy, the Premier, Whatshisname.’
‘A politician! Holy shit! Clap, everyone!’
Everyone did and Malone said, ‘Let’s go inside. Are the Aldwyches still here?’
‘In the manager’s office.’
‘What about the dinner guests? I read there were going to be a thousand of them.’
‘We got rid of them through the two side entrances. You never saw such a skedaddle, you’d of thought World War Three had started.’
Inside the hotel lobby Malone looked around; it was the first time he had been in the building since halfway through its construction. On one of its upper floors a Chinese girl student had tried to shoot him and had been shot dead by Russ Clements. ‘This place is jinxed.’
‘Keep it to yourself.’ Clements was the supervisor, second-in-command to Malone of Homicide and Serial Violent Crime Agency. He was a big man,