Stiff Read Free Page B

fulfilled as reasonably as could be expected for the descendant of three generations of Irish publicans. I had been handing out how-to-vote cards in Italian since I was a teenager. I knew better than to confuse the Federazione Italiana Lavoratori e Famigli with the Comitato d’Assistenza Italiano. I knew who could be relied on at the vegetable market to buy a book of raffle tickets at election time, and whose brother-in-law was private secretary for the Christian Democrat mayor of San Benedetto del Tronto. And while I would have been the first to admit to having trouble picking a Guelph from a Ghibelline in a dappled olive grove in the Tuscan twilight, I could, to the extent required by profession, reasonably claim to know my tortellini from my tartufo. ‘This isn’t some sort of Italian crap, it is Ange?’ I said.
    Agnelli was obsessed. ‘That little shit Lollicato is capable of doing any amount of damage if he thinks he can use it to his own advantage. You see the newspaper this morning?’
    ‘Minister in Pre-Selection Wrangle?’
    ‘Jesus, where was that?’ There was real panic in Agnelli’s voice.
    ‘Relax, Ange. You mean the dead guy at the meatworks in Coolaroo? I’ve been wondering about that. What’s the story?’
    Agnelli’s voice took on a gossipy conspiratorial hiss. ‘What are doing for lunch?’
    ‘I was thinking of having a pie.’ I whispered back. ‘You reckon it’s safe?’
    ‘Be serious for a minute, can’t you, Murray? I’m trying to put something useful your way. Come into town.’
    I swung my chair around. The amazing tattooed nuisance had his boots on my desk, right on top of the in-tray. ‘I dunno,’ I told Agnelli. ‘I’ve got a lot in front of me at the moment.’
    ‘I’ll buy.’ Agnelli’s salary was nearly double mine and this was his first gesture of generosity with anything but unsolicited advice. Clearly, something was going on.
    ‘Ministry or House?’
    ‘House. And since you’re coming in, can you do us a favour and give old Picone a lift. He’s having lunch with Charlene and I want to pick a bone with the old bugger first. Give him the two-dollar tour and bring him downstairs.’
    I took my umbrella off the filing cabinet, turned off the two-bar radiator and gently moved Ant’s feet over to the out-tray.
    ‘Anyone calls,’ I said. ‘I’ll be out for the rest of the day.’

October was shaping up as the customary disappointment, dithering between erupting into spring or pissing down all the way to Christmas. For the second week in a row, the predicted break in the damp had failed to materialise and rumour had it that the smart money was out the back sawing gopher wood into cubits and collecting matched pairs of animals.
    In the rare intervals between showers, masses of frigid air fleeing north from Tasmania or some similarly dismal polar region swept into town and did their best to give spring a bad name. An hour after Agnelli’s call I was copping the full brunt of one of these tornadoes as I trudged my way up the terrace of Parliament House.
    Our glorious forebears, febrile with easy money and puffed up with Victorian self-aggrandisement, had built the House on a hill and modelled it on classical lines, all monumental portico and reiterated horizontal emphasis. The result was considered by some to be a commanding vista. Personally, with nothing to deflect the nut-numbing elements but a two-piece ninety-nine-dollar del Monaco special, and my pace slowed by the company of a wheezing geriatric, I found it all a trifle overstated. When Ennio Picone stopped for the third time for a bit of a breather. I grabbed his arm and all but frogmarched him up the last dozen steps and into the shelter of the foyer. Gentleman that he was, Picone took it for a courtesy. Gentleman that I was, I let him.
    Ennio Picone was one of Charlene Wills’ prize constituents, an elegant seventy-seven-year-old with fine hands and a matinee moustache. At one time the leader of a dance