That Empty Feeling Read online

  ‘Have you got medication for that blood pressure?’

  ‘Yeah. And for everything else.’ He took a long swallow and managed a short-winded laugh. ‘Truth is the old ticker’s not too hot. Waiting for the results of some more tests, but it doesn’t look great. The quack says the best treatment is to avoid stress. How do I do that if I’m being conned?’

  ‘Who by?’

  He tossed off most of his drink. ‘Fucking direct, aren’t you?’

  ‘Only way to go, mate. If you’re going to be a client you have to stay alive long enough to tell me the problem and pay me a retainer. Unless you get a grip on yourself there’s no time to lose.’

  ‘You’re right, you’re right.’ He put the paper cup with only an inch or so of fluid in it on the desk and pushed it away. A self-denying gesture of sorts. I took a solid belt of my drink.

  Barry mopped his face again and leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘Here’s the thing, mate. I was married—well over twenty-five years ago, now. It didn’t work. I still rooted every woman I could get my hands on and my wife left me after a few years. There were two kiddies—a boy and a girl. I hardly knew their bloody names, I was so busy making a quid and staying alive.’

  It was typical of people like Barry to flavour explanation with a touch of apology and a stronger touch of self-justification.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘she took the kids back to England—she was a Pom like me—and divorced me. She didn’t ask for maintenance or anything and that was the last I heard of her . . . and them.’

  ‘Until?’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, until this kid turns up claiming to be my son. His name’s Ronald Saunders and he says he was adopted by Sylvie’s—that’s the wife’s name—second husband and took his name.’

  ‘Has he got any proof he’s your son?’

  ‘He’s got a couple of photos of Sylvie holding a baby he says is him.’

  ‘No birth certificate?’

  ‘He left it back in the UK. He’s applied for a copy, and the adoption papers.’

  ‘What about a passport?’

  ‘He’s got that. British. So he must’ve had a birth certificate.’

  ‘Nothing from his mother and stepfather?’

  Barry shook his head. ‘Both dead in a car accident. Showed me a newspaper clipping.’

  ‘What about the sister?’

  ‘Um, Barbara. He says she left home when she was sixteen and he thinks she’s on the game in London. They’re not in touch.’

  ‘It’s conveniently vague,’ I said. ‘What makes you think it’s true?’

  ‘Three things. He’s the spitting fucking image of me when I was that age and he’s got the same in-your-face attitude.’

  I had a fair idea from his behaviour what the answer would be but I asked the question anyway. ‘What’s the third thing?’

  He drew in a deep breath. ‘I want to believe it. I’ve had a rackety life. I’ve got a lot of . . . competitors and no real friends. Haven’t had a relationship with a woman for years. I’ve just used professionals and that’s a fucking lonely life.’ He looked embarrassed and fiddled with his cuffs. ‘And . . . if I’m on the way out, I’d like to think there was someone to keep things going. Someone close.’

  I nodded. ‘What does this Ronald want?’

  ‘Ronny? Nothing. He just wants to work for me, with me.’

  ‘Learn the criminal trade, as it were?’

  ‘I know you like taking the piss, Hardy.’

  Hardy now, I thought. What happened to Cliff and mate?

  ‘I’m a legitimate businessman these days, more or less. A developer, an entrepreneur, as they say. I could use someone I could trust and hand things over to. Even if the heart stuff ’s fixable, I’m not getting any younger. And I make no bones about it: I’m a lonely man.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He looked around the room—at the windows, the crumpled venetians, the dented filing cabinet and at me.

  ‘You’re not doing so good,’ he said. ‘I’m offering you work and you’re coming the high hat.’

  ‘I said okay. Tell me what you want.’

  ‘I want you to investigate him. Meet him, weigh him up, talk to him. Then see what he does, where he goes, who he meets.’

  ‘What if he’s not who he claims to be—or if he gets pissed off at being investigated?’

  ‘I’ll have to take that chance, but if you’re as good as you’re cracked up to be, he’ll never know you’re checking.’

  Flattery now, I thought. Oscar Wilde said the flatterer is seldom interrupted, but Barry stopped right there and I had that sense I get with a lot of clients, probably most. There was something he hadn’t told me.

  ‘Ronny showed up a few months ago. I liked him. Couldn’t help it. He’s likeable. He needed money so I gave him a few little jobs to do and paid him. Nothing much.’

  ‘Nothing much of a job, or nothing much of money?’

  ‘Both. So he knows some of the things I do.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Shit, paying off politicians and officials to steer things my way. Everyone does it. It’s still the only way to do business in this town.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s the quickest way maybe, or the easiest, but it’s not the only way.’

  He became aggressive again. ‘Listen, this is something you wouldn’t understand at your level. You borrow money to get things done. At interest from people who charge an arm and a leg and are fucking impatient. Every day you run over your date to pay back eats you alive. So you have to speed up development decisions, rezonings, environmental reports, permissions . . .’

  I did understand it. I understood that it meant the money providers got heavy with the borrower and the borrower got heavy with the people he was buying. And other people got heavy with them. It wasn’t a world I wanted to get into.

  He read my mind. He leaned forward, picked up his drink and drained it. ‘Like I said, I’ve got . . . competitors and there’s things I don’t want certain people to know. I’m worried that Ronny might be a plant.’

  ‘Suppose he is, what then?’

  ‘Nothing. I’m disappointed and I piss him off. That’s all.’

  ‘What if I find out he’s a con artist and who put him up to it?’

  He opened his hands. ‘Then I know the score. I’m a winner and so are you, Cliff.’

  4

  I didn’t have many qualms about working for someone like Barry Bartlett. As far as I knew he’d never killed anybody, and I’d worked for lawyers and politicians who’d stretched the laws to breaking point and beyond. Sometimes it was a hard line to draw. This sounded more or less like a personal problem, although Barry’s mention of people he called his competitors (colour them enemies) sounded a warning note. But he was right about my financial situation; the windows needed cleaning and the venetians needed to be replaced.

  I had him sign a vaguely worded contract and pay me a retainer. He gave me an address for Ronny Saunders and the registration number of the company car he was driving.

  ‘Have you checked him out at all yourself?’

  ‘Nah. Didn’t have the energy. And there seemed to be plenty of time, then. Thought about it, but . . . Then I remembered you.’

  I said I had a few things to clean up first before getting started.

  ‘That’s okay,’ Barry said, giving me his card. ‘BBE is having a drinks party at my offices the day after tomorrow. Ronny’ll be there. You can kick off then. You’ll see some familiar faces.’

  ‘BBE?’

  ‘Barry Bartlett Enterprises.’

  ‘Of course.’ I remembered occasionally seeing Barry’s picture in the society pages of the magazines they kept at my doctor’s surgery, but the name of his business hadn’t really registered.

  He tossed his cup at the waste-paper bin. It hit the rim and fell in. ‘Till Friday. Have a shave,’ he said. ‘Bring a woman, if you like, and wear a fucking suit.’

  I did have a couple of things on hand—fini
shing up on a dodgy car insurance claim and the vetting of a company’s security system, which involved trying to beat it and could be fun—but I intended to spend some of the time checking on Barry Bartlett himself. The fortunes of people like him rise and fall and where he was in the cycle could have a bearing on the job he’d assigned me, and particularly on my chances of being paid.

  I knew Barry had made money through the use of a stevedoring company and a number of corrupt customs officials in the past. If you could circumvent the payment of import duties and penalties on certain cargoes you could provide the market with cheap goods about which no questions would be asked. As far as I knew this operation hadn’t involved drugs. I made some phone calls to check on the current state of play. I didn’t trust that Barry had told me everything.

  I spoke to a couple of wharfies in pubs and a ‘retired’ customs officer in a Darlinghurst bistro and learned that Barry, like this guy, had got out of that business just before a Royal Commission and a crackdown.

  Jimmy Cook, a financial journalist, told me that BBE was a middle-to-heavyweight player in Sydney’s ever-increasing development scene these days, making sensible bids for projects and so far delivering results on time.

  ‘What about union problems, cash-flow hold-ups, that sort of thing?’ I asked.

  I could hear Cook expel smoke as he spoke. ‘Clean bill of health. Let me know if you hear any different.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ Harry Tickener said the next day when I gave him Jimmy Cook’s assessment of Barry Bartlett’s current business status.

  Harry was an old friend who’d worked for almost every newspaper ever published in Sydney and had been fired by most of them. He ran a newsletter called Sentinel with the logo ‘We Name the Guilty Men’. He did, too, and he spent almost as much time fighting libel writs as collecting information and writing his exposés. Sentinel had some backing from a couple of radical unions and individuals, got some advertising from a left-wing community radio station and depended to a large extent on volunteer labour. I’d done some pro bono work for Harry myself.

  Harry put his sneakered feet up on a desk of about the same vintage as mine and scratched at the fringe of ginger hair he retained. ‘Barry Bartlett’s got his finger in some very dirty pies but he wears thick gloves.’

  ‘Good writing,’ I said. ‘Have you had a go at him?’

  ‘No, he’s got that shyster Todd Silverman in tow and I’ve just got clear of a slander action that would’ve finished me if it hadn’t fallen over at the last minute. I don’t need Silverman up my arse.’

  At that time, Harry ran the operation out of a small terrace house in Macdonaldtown—two down, two up, no room to swing a cat anywhere. The room that served as his office had space for his chair, a desk, two filing cabinets and a stool. Otherwise every surface was covered with paper, every cranny was packed with books and files. I squatted on the stool with my knees lifted nearly to my waist. A couple of flies buzzed around looking for somewhere favourable to land.

  ‘What sort of pies?’

  Harry took a no-frills can of insect killer from a drawer in the desk and zapped the flies. Then he sneezed violently.

  ‘Shit, I’m allergic to that stuff.’

  I said, ‘You need a low-allergy spray.’

  ‘I need a lot of things I haven’t got. Bartlett’s development operation’s legitimate enough as those things go, but it’s partly a front.’

  ‘For?’

  Harry waved his hand at a pile of manila folders. ‘I wish I could say I’ve got evidence like the stuff in there—statements, analyses, statistics—but I can’t. There’s something big, very big, behind what Bartlett does. You get hints from the names of people he employs, from the overseas trips he takes and the things he invests in.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Trucking companies, cruise ships, mineral exploration. Rumours of something to do with oil.’

  ‘Profitable concerns, surely. Australian business on the move.’

  ‘Yes, but with no discernible connection between them. In that kind of business it’s an economic imperative that one hand shakes another. I’m certain there is a connection and it’s a good bet that it’s very dodgy. I’m not even sure Bartlett knows what’s really going on himself.’

  ‘That’s vague. I can see why you haven’t written anything.’

  ‘Not yet. I’m thinking about it. So he’s offered you a job, has he?’

  ‘Come on, Harry. Not in the way you imply. I gave up working for other people long ago. He wants me to investigate something personal.’

  ‘Are you going to do it?’

  ‘I need the work.’

  ‘If I weren’t a friend of yours I’d ask you to keep your eyes and ears open for me but I won’t. I know you’ll play it straight for as long as you can.’

  ‘That’s not a vote of confidence.’

  ‘You’ve got some sort of obligation to Bartlett, haven’t you?’

  ‘Not exactly. He did the right thing by someone he could’ve exploited. I respected that.’

  ‘Hitler was good to his dogs. Just be careful, Cliff. Be very careful.’

  ‘It’s a personal thing,’ I said, knowing that it might not be.

  ‘Nothing’s personal,’ Harry said, ‘not entirely.’

  5

  I had a contact at a clipping agency used by all sorts of people who wanted to know what the newspapers were saying about them and their clients, and how they were looking in photographs. I rang him and asked what he had on file for Barry Bartlett.

  ‘Nothing juicy recently, just reports of developments and society-column stuff,’ he said after doing a check.

  ‘That’d please him. What about back a bit?’

  ‘Quite a lot—dubious business stories, bit about managing boxers.’

  ‘What about when he played football?’

  ‘A few things. He didn’t play first grade for very long.’

  ‘Photos?’

  ‘One, when he copped a suspension. He’d have been in his late twenties.’

  ‘That’ll do. Could you fax it? Usual arrangement?’

  That meant a payment into his TAB betting account.

  ‘It’ll be rough, grainy.’

  ‘That’s Barry.’

  I sat in the office and waited for the fax machine to kick into life. The sheet shuttled through and I saw that my guy hadn’t exaggerated. Barry had been snapped opportunely rather than posed; physical surroundings and lighting were all against a clear photo. He was on the move, gesturing violently at someone, and his features were a bit contorted, but it was recognisably a younger, thinner Barry with the years and the indulgence stripped away. I studied it carefully before slipping it into the file I’d opened on the case.

  Barry’s invitation was for 6.30. It was that time of year when it could be hard to decide what to wear, but not this time—I only had one suit. A woman was harder; there was no one ‘in my life’, as they say. I decided to ignore that invitation. Who knew? There could be a single woman there looking for company.

  The offices of BBE were in Alexandria in a sort of business park that had been created out of sold-off railways land. These were the days before Alexandria got tarted up and the look-alike buildings were laid out among concrete paths, white gravel sections and struggling, newly planted trees. The office blocks featured user-friendly ramps and lighting and there was a row of hopeful shops with chairs out front catering to the eating, drinking and smoking needs of the workers.

  BBE occupied an entire two-storey building; not the biggest but not the smallest. I arrived at 7 pm with the light dimming and the building fighting back with a lot of discreetly placed fluorescent. There was a set of wide glass doors and I could see a congregation of well-dressed people immediately inside milling about with glasses in their hands. Waiters in white mess jackets and black pants circulated with drinks trays. It all looked welcoming, but entry wasn’t just a matter of rocking up—you had to run the guest-list gauntlet.

  Th
e first face I saw was familiar—Des O’Malley, guarding the door, looking uncomfortable in his suit and a too-tight collar. He was burly, running to fat, and had a livid red birthmark on the left side of his face that had probably made him angry from the day he first became aware of it.

  ‘Gidday, Des. Expecting me, I hope.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Looks like a nice party.’

  ‘It was, till you got here. I’ll kick the shit out of you one of these days, Hardy.’

  ‘But not while we’re working for the same guy, eh?’

  ‘Give it time.’

  O’Malley was an ex-middleweight boxer who, after throwing one fight too many and too obviously, had been avoided by managers and promoters. Then he’d worked as a standover man. He was a full-blown heavyweight now. I’d run up against him a few times in the past, always unpleasantly.

  ‘Any time you like, Des, as long as it’s just you and me. Somewhere without two of your mates in their steel-capped boots.’

  O’Malley was better at physical than verbal sparring. He swore and would’ve spat if the tiles in front of him and the polished floor behind him hadn’t been so pristine. He stepped aside and I went in.

  Pot plants, chairs, table and a desk in the reception area had been pushed aside to provide a party space. Two long trestle tables held bottles, glasses and finger food. A microphone and a lectern had been set up at the end of the room under a banner that read: BBE CELEBRATES 10 YEARS OF DEVELOPMENT.

  About a hundred besuited men and more than half that number of well-dressed and coiffured women were drinking champagne from flutes and nibbling canapés. I took a glass and drifted around. I was looking at a bunch of BBE brochures set out on a coffee table that had been pushed into a corner.

  ‘Hello, Hardy.’

  I turned to see a tall, white-haired man in a suit that would’ve cost three times as much as mine approaching me with a glass in one hand and a paper plate in the other. He put the plate, well-stacked with crackers anointed with cheese, anchovies and other things I couldn’t identify, down on top of the brochures.