White Dog

27

On the twenty-fifth floor, the lift stopped and allowed me into a room in the building’s core, a box of reinforced concrete, but not claustrophobic, lights in four deep alcoves and spots in the ceiling. The effect was of a small Moorish courtyard.

I crossed to a steel door pretending to be made of wood. An electronic keypad glowed. Above it was a button with the camera symbol. I knew about this. The entrant was required to put in a code number, press the button that switched on the video cameras to give security a full view of the lift and the anteroom. If this didn’t happen quickly, it triggered a security alert. Inserting or adding a number was an alarm signal and armed people would arrive inside a minute.

I pressed the button marked Ring. The electronic sentry went green with approval, I was being watched from the foyer, where I’d given my name.

The door slid open, revealing a short passage. I went down it into a double-height panelled foyer with a staircase rising to a landing. At left and right were sets of double doors, eight panels each, no doubt salvaged from some nineteenth-century boom-time building long fallen to the breaker’s ball.

A man appeared on the landing. Medium height, medium age, full head of crisp greying hair, medium length, brushed back and to the side with a parting.

‘Jack,’ he said, warmth in the single word, and started down the stairs, treading lightly.

I waited.

‘Tony Haig,’ he said. ‘I told them to ring me when you got here.’

A perfect dark suit, white shirt, grey tie, regular features, the nose a trifle truncated — he could have been the life model for a dummy in Myer’s window in 1965.

We shook hands. He showed the strength in his hand but he didn’t overdo it. ‘Come up,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you rang, thought about ringing you. More than once.’

We climbed the staircase side by side. I felt his arm behind me, just touching my jacket, as one might escort an elderly relative up a staircase, taking care but not wishing to suggest the need for it.

‘There’s a bit of symmetry about you being here tonight,’ he said.

You and explosions. There’s a fearful fucking symmetry.

‘Yes?’

‘We’re celebrating the resurrection of Seaton Square, Mickey’s Brunswick project. That closes a chapter, not so?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m never sure whether anything’s finished or just lying in wait.’

Haig laughed, it was a genuine sound, good-humoured. ‘Spoken like an old-world pessimist,’ he said.

The hand behind me touched me in the small of the back, a gesture of intimacy and affection. It was a European touch, not what someone did casually to another man going into the pub in Tingaboora or Rainbow.

‘Glad you could come, Jack,’ he said.

I reached the landing and he opened a door and ushered me through. We stood above a big room, longer than it was wide. Two or three dozen people were standing with drinks, a small bar set up in a corner, white-shirted waiters with trays moving in the crowd.

Beyond a wall of glass lay a vast scape of lights, horizontal and vertical, moving and still, pinpricks, strings, clusters, pillars, silver, pinks, yellows, blues, reds. At this height, everything was calmed by distance and rain.

‘I don’t know who you’ll know,’ said Haig.

I saw Steven Massiani near the window with two men and a woman.

‘Probably no one,’ I said.

We went down the two steps to the room. A waiter offered champagne in expensive flutes, the wine with a minute silver bead.

‘The Billecart Salmon,’ said Haig. ‘Know the stuff?’

‘Only by name,’ I said, drinking some.

‘Good fizz,’ he said. ‘Too good for some of this lot.’

He took me around, introduced me to people. He didn’t say what I did for a living and he didn’t say what they did. Most of them were youngish, in black or grey, jackets worn over collarless shirts, the full range of hair, from nothing to plenty. Many of the men needed a shave, some could have done with a swift kick up the arse. One woman had hair like a monk’s cap and wore a silken sleeveless top slit to the belly, olive-skinned bulges showing. I knew the names of a few of them: restaurant owners, fashionable architects, a gallery owner, a photographer, two artists. We stopped briefly at the small court of an ageing film director — two women and a youth I thought I’d seen on television, mostly cheekbones and big brown eyes, all absorbing cinematic genius through their pores. The director paid close attention to Tony Haig, ignoring his own acolytes while we were there. It was a food chain.

Haig left me with two men who soon returned to talking money. I thought it was money, I registered only the term ‘capacity to service’. They could well have been talking about stud horses.

I walked across to the window, uneasy, knowing that I shouldn’t have accepted the invitation, should have met Haig at another time, perhaps not at all. There was no reason to be in this place, with these people.

The view was dazzling but the canvas was too big. Like all views, it needed to be painted to be appreciated properly. When I turned, I saw the paintings on the long gallery wall, well spaced, all sizes. I went up the stairs and had a look. Modern paintings, no artist I recognised, all oils, lots of landscapes and seascapes — cliffs, promontories, bays, coves, water, light. There was also a sequence of dark paintings by the same artist, views of snow-topped peaks, icy lakes, forests and plunging rivers that conveyed a loneliness and a sadness.

And there were portraits, marked differences in style but all striking because the subjects, men and women, had faces of character. At the end of the line was one of Tony Haig. He was in a collarless white shirt, tanned face half in shadow. Behind him was a blank wall, white, rough-plastered, with a single aperture, like a gun-slit. One tendril of a creeping plant was stealing through the slit, invading, a thin green snake, a leaf at its tip.

It was a fine painting, the Haig portrait. They were all worth looking at, paintings of merit as far as I could judge. There was not one that you would pass by with a single glance.

A man of taste and means, Anthony Haig. Or possibly just of means — taste was something the rich could buy.

‘Interesting, aren’t they?’

I turned. Behind me was the woman I’d seen across the room in the group with Steven Massiani.

‘You’re Jack,’ she said. ‘Tony pointed you out. I’m Corin Sleeman. I was married to Mickey.’

She had her hand out, close to her body. I took it. It was small, a child’s hand, my hand felt inflated, I felt like an enfolder.

‘It’s been horrible,’ she said. ‘A really bad dream.’

She had the face of a girl in a pre-Raphaelite painting, not the hair, which was blonded and careless, but the nose, the brow, the poreless skin, the innocent and expectant mouth. The pre-Raphaelite child in middle age, a face no less arresting for the signs of time.

‘At least we’ve woken up,’ I said. ‘Who are these painters?’

‘Corsicans,’ she said. ‘Tony collects Corsican art.’

‘He would have a corner on the market then,’ I said.

‘I liked Sarah’s work,’ she said. ‘I had her do a piece for a building in South Melbourne. The client’s wife hated it, loathed it, a Frankston girl, her father was a smash repairer.’

‘She’d know crumpled metal,’ I said. ‘It might have brought back memories of the days when her father started work by hosing off the blood.’

She started to smile, had pause. ‘Come and join us. You know Steven, I understand.’

‘We’ve met,’ I said.

We went down and to Steven Massiani, Haig and another man, his back to us. As we approached, he turned. He was overweight, balding, with round glasses on a small nose. I’d seen him before, in a photograph, walking down a street with Mickey Franklin. Bernard Paech, once a director of Mickey’s company, Yardlive.

‘Hello, Jack,’ said Massiani, hand out. ‘Good to see you looking well.’

‘You don’t know Bern,’ said Haig, ‘Bernard Paech. He works with me. With me but not always for me.’

I shook hands with Paech. He was smoking a cigar. ‘The co-director of Yardlive,’ I said.

‘Briefly,’ Paech said.

A waiter appeared. Everyone except Massiani took new glasses of champagne.

Haig raised his flute. ‘Health and happiness,’ he said.

We drank.

‘Steven’s joined me in the Seaton Square project,’ said Haig. ‘Corin’s done the redesign.’

I looked at Massiani. ‘Do I remember you saying you’d learned your lesson in the suburbs?’

He smiled, a shrug. I now saw in his face someone who had known unhappiness early, perhaps beginning in the preschool playground. ‘A good memory,’ he said. ‘Tony’s the great persuader. Plus we’ve saddled him with the risk.’

‘I’m not the great persuader,’ said Haig. ‘Bern’s the persuader.’

‘What happened to the objectors?’ I said.

‘Allayer of concerns,’ said Paech. ‘That’s what I am.’

‘Was that easy for Seaton Square?’ I said.

‘No more difficult than putting condoms on a bucketful of snakes,’ said Paech. ‘Well, marginally easier. New proposal. Scaled down. A good package. Subsidised childcare centre, public park, that sort of thing.’

He drew on his cigar, blew smoke at the ceiling. ‘Also the three main objectors changed their minds, a big help that was.’

Haig laughed. Corin Sleeman didn’t laugh, looked away. Massiani didn’t laugh either. He was looking down, holding his empty glass by the base and running his flat hand, the fingers, around the rim. Through the noise of talk, the soft music playing, I heard the thin, hollow high sound he was creating.

‘The important thing,’ he said, looking up, at Paech, ‘is that it’ll get built.’

Paech was about to speak but he didn’t.

‘And if it’s well done,’ said Massiani, ‘in a few years no one will remember the objections.’

‘That’s right,’ said Paech. ‘Exactly.’

He’d received the message.

Haig scratched his head. He had an amused look. ‘Jack,’ he said, ‘you haven’t had the tour.’

He took my arm and we crossed the room, went through a door into a passage. There was a glimpse of a kitchen on the left, three men and a woman standing at a counter, one man’s head down, close to the granite countertop.

‘The idiots,’ said Haig. ‘Like movies? I love movies. I watch one every day, that’s the minimum, I’ve watched five in a day, what kind of habit is that?’

He showed me into the first room off the passage to the right. It had two couches and a soft armchair facing a huge television screen, two smaller ones beside it. There seemed to be a dozen speakers on the electronic wall, and hundreds of tapes and CDs in racks.

‘I’m an insomniac,’ he said. ‘Also I can’t fucking get to sleep. I wake up on this couch, clothes on, the first thing I see is Grace Kelly kissing Cary Grant, the lucky bastard.’

We left the room, went down the corridor, Haig in front. He opened a door, found a switch, lights came on, not bright.

‘This is my special room,’ he said. ‘My special interest.’

It was a large space, a combination of library and museum, with tall bookshelves, glass cases, paintings and other framed objects in alcoves. There was a devotional feeling, the shadows, the way the light lay in soft pools and skewed rectangles, hung down the walls, the glow of colour in the paintings, the lustrous gilt of the frames.

‘My collection,’ he said.

I looked around the room. It was a museum and a shrine to Napoleon Bonaparte and it spoke of obsession and deep pockets.

‘You didn’t put this together by getting to French flea-markets before the crowds,’ I said.

Haig smiled, pleased, a boy’s smile. ‘You won’t believe the junk. After they brought his bits back from St Helena in 1840, Napoleonic memorabilia became an industry. Nothing like it again until Elvis.’

We toured, Haig pointing and explaining, not lecturing. There were hundreds of books on Bonaparte and his times, dozens of oil paintings and drawings of Bonaparte, five or six busts, bas-relief profiles and figures, statuettes, battlefield maps, a pistol, a sword, signed notes, letters and documents, a silver cup in a leather holder, a horse’s hoof on an ebony base, a lock of hair, a pair of boots, a telescope with gold inlay, a quill pen beside a silver inkpot, an ivory letter-opener, an ebony and silver baton, a fragment of a flag.

‘Why Napoleon?’ I said. We were looking at a single patent-leather shoe with a buckle of gold.

‘My father. He was a Corsican. Stefanu Leca. Steve Leca.’

He went to a bookshelf and took down a small, battered, cloth-covered book. ‘ The Life of Napoleon, by A. J. Danville,’ he said. ‘My dad bought this and a little English dictionary at a secondhand bookshop in Brisbane. He didn’t have any English. He got it from this book. At night, cutting cane all day.’

Haig showed me the edge of the book, dark marks.

‘Blood from his hand, the first few days. He’d never done any manual work. His father was a tailor.’

‘Where does Haig come from?’ I said.

‘My mother. My father was working on her father’s property near Bundaberg. He’d taught himself engines, bricklaying, plumbing, he could do anything, fix anything.’

He put the book away and stood with his back to the shelf, his face half in shadow as it was in the portrait. ‘My father put the daughter of the house up the pole. They chased him off the property like a fucking dog, threatened to kill him. She went to Sydney to have the baby, stayed there with her aunt, didn’t go back to Queensland till I was three.’

‘So you were raised as Haig.’

‘Yes, didn’t know anything about my father till just before my mother died. I was always told I was adopted. Then my mother told me. She was ill and she told me.’

I went to the exhibits in the middle of the room, two death masks of Napoleon, one plaster, one bronze, on a slender plinth under glass and spotlit from above.

‘The jewels,’ said Haig. ‘Found them in Cuba. His doctors on St Helena made a gypsum cast of the emperor’s head after he died. One of them, his name’s Antommarchi, he sold copies and then he went to live in Cuba. It’s more than possible that the plaster one is an original, from St Helena.’

‘Did you ever meet your father?’ I said.

‘I tracked him down in Broken Hill. Buggered by work but happy. Brought up two kids after his wife died. He wouldn’t take anything from me, I had to force money on him, then he gave it to his kids. His other kids.’

‘And he gave you the book?’

Haig was on the other side of the plinth, looking at the masks. ‘The book was special for him. He knew every word in it. He told me that in the beginning he had to look up all the conjunctions and the prepositions. I wish I had his little dictionary but he’d lost it.’

I said, ‘Someone paid my hospital bill and put fifty grand in my bank account.’

He looked up. ‘That was me,’ he said. ‘If it bothers you, please give it away.’

Disarmed, unhorsed.

‘Why?’

‘An impulse, a whim. I liked Sarah very much. You got hurt trying to help her.’

‘You’d do that on a whim? That much money?’

Haig laughed. ‘I’m a rich man, you won’t believe what I’ve done on a whim.’

‘Do you know someone called Donna Filipovic?’ I said.

No furrow in the brow. ‘No.’

I took a chance. ‘A company called Amaryllo, registered in Monaco, I understand you’re connected with it.’

Haig smiled. ‘Connected?’

‘Through Charles Hartfield.’

Haig raised both hands, wide, blunt-fingered, passed them across his temples, smoothed hair needing no grooming, lowered his hands, held them palm up.

‘Jack,’ he said, ‘What’s this? Sarah’s dead. You don’t have to find a defence for her anymore.’

‘Did you remember Sarah telling a story about an argument with a driver near Mickey’s apartment? It was the night you met, dinner with Mickey.’

‘No.’

Looking at him over the emperor’s death masks. ‘The witness Donna Filipovic,’ I said. ‘She’s lying, she wasn’t there, she never saw Sarah that night. Someone fed her that story.’

‘The family, they’re paying you to go on with this?’

‘No,’ I said.

He stared at me. ‘Let’s say for argument’s sake Sarah didn’t kill Mickey,’ he said. ‘Then you ask, who would take the trouble to kill him and set her up?’

I didn’t reply.

Haig exhaled loudly, a sad shake of the head. ‘Why would anyone bother?’ he said. ‘Given the fuck’s mood swings, allround mental state, the drink, the drugs, Mickey was going to do the job himself. Just a matter of how long.’

‘You provided the finance for Seaton Square and then you wanted to pull the plug on him,’ I said. ‘He was enraged with you. That’s right, isn’t it?’

‘Jack, Jack,’ he said, ‘Mickey fucked up Seaton Square almost from the kick-off. All he got right was getting hold of the property. And that’s another story. After that, it was like the Cresta fucking Run in a shitstorm. Everything was a stuff-up — everything. He wound the thing up and up. I’ll tell you I’m no stranger to ambitious development but this was insane. And he wouldn’t listen to anyone. Well, he’d listen, sit there nodding his fucking coked-up head, yes, yes. Then he’d go off and do the opposite.’

He paused, shaking his head again. ‘Mickey enraged with me? I can tell you, many times I’d have shot the cunt if I’d had a gun. And fuck the consequences.’

Silence in the museum of Bonaparte, no sound except the stern ticking of the brass clock, said to come from the emperor’s first place of exile, Elba.

‘But while you’re looking for people to blame, Jack,’ said Haig, ‘try the people the stupid prick bribed over Brunswick. In his worst moments, he was going to take them down with him.’

‘I need a piss,’ I said.

‘This way.’

We left the room. He opened another door.

‘Through the dressing room. You’ll find your way back. Straight down the passage.’

A four-poster uncanopied bed was tightly made, the dark wooden floor shone, the curtains were open. I could see across the wet smudged city to Williamstown.

I went into the dressing room. It held the stock of a small, expensive men’s outfitters. On the shelves to the left were laundered shirts. Socks and underwear and sweaters were in glass-fronted drawers. Two racks held shoes, twenty pairs at least. On the right hung suits, sportsjackets, trousers, casual jackets, overcoats, raincoats. A regiment of ties was draped over rods on either side of the long mirror at the end of the room.

The door to the bathroom was open. It was big and plain, not a bathroom the interior decor crowd would create. Someone wanted this chamber to be a place for ablutions only: two small basins, a glass shower stall the size of a small room, a toilet, no bath.

I had my pee and went back to the party, found Haig. ‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I’ll send you the tax receipt from the Salvos. Thank you for the thought.’

He walked me to the landing, touched me again in the affectionate way. ‘We’ve got a lot in common, Jack,’ he said. ‘Working-class fathers, rich mothers. How’d you like her father?’

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘Not a great deal.’

‘Even more in common than I thought.’

A hand offered, we shook.

‘You’ve got to look after yourself,’ he said. ‘Life’s full of bullshit. Full of Mickeys. The trick is to walk away from them. I’m learning that, I’m nearly there.’

I was halfway down the staircase when he said, ‘Jack.’

I stopped, looked back. He was standing with his hands clasped in front of his chest. ‘I’m going to my house in Corsica next month,’ he said. ‘Private flight. Why don’t you come? Good this time of year, hot, dry, it smells like nowhere else on earth. The maquis, the sea. Sweetness and salt. Napoleon said it was the only place he would recognise blindfold.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Can I let you know?’

‘Ring Bern,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a good time.’

I departed Marengo. A block away, I eased the Stud from between German bookends, an Audi and a Mercedes, and set out for Fitzroy. A wet night was on the city, the towers glowing in the damp air that softened everything, carried a smell of burnt fossil fuel.

Home, the place where they have to take you in. There weren’t any of them left but I could still be sure of admittance because I had the key.

I parked outside the boot factory and went upstairs to the cold rooms.