The Brush-Off Read Free

be stuffed about by a half-drunk dolly bird. One of the security guards had handed him a wallet, and he was reading a plastic card.
    â€˜Marcus Taylor.’ Salina’s tone was defiant now, as she fought for control. The officer nodded, acknowledging her right to be there, conceding nothing else. The stretcher was almost all the way into the ambulance. Even without looking, I knew who he was, this Marcus Taylor.
    â€˜He’s my boyfriend,’ said Salina. Then she corrected herself. ‘Fiancé. He’s my fiancé.’
    The policewoman drew her back, making room for them to close the ambulance door.
    Salina turned then and looked at me like it was all my fault. ‘Bastard,’ she swore.

I’d been given the brush-off before, but this was a bit rich. I could see that the woman was upset, but she could hardly blame me for what was happening.
    Twelve hours earlier I’d never even heard of Salina Fleet, or this Marcus Taylor who was being fed feet-first into the ambulance. Twelve hours earlier, the idea of romping in the rhododendrons with a blonde cultural critic in a pom-pommed mu-mu was as remote as my chances of being appointed ambassador to the Holy See. Seeing a floater being pulled out of the moat of the National Gallery had not been pencilled into my diary.
    Half a day earlier, I wasn’t even on this side of town. I was stuck in a stifling room behind a shopfront in Northcote, being given the hairy eyeball by Leonidas Mavramoustakides. It was the last Friday in January 1989, the stinking hot end of an overheated decade, and I was waiting for a phone call. I wished it would hurry up and come.
    Mavramoustakides was once a major in Greek army intelligence. That was twenty years earlier, during the military regime. He still cultivated the style. Crisp white shirt, hairline moustache, dark tie, gimlet eyes. The dye he used to keep his hair jet black was beginning to run in the heat and little dribbles of it were trickling down beneath his collar. But I wasn’t going to tell him that. Not with the attitude he was taking.
    He was sitting behind a tiny imitation baroque desk made of plywood. Most of it was taken up by a voluminous white marble ashtray, and by two pompously over-flowing correspondence trays, one weighted down by a small plaster bust of Aristotle. Mavramoustakides crushed the tip of his cigarette cruelly into the ashtray, put his elbows on his desk and smiled a mirthless smile. ‘If we don’t get your cooperation,’ he said. ‘We can make things very uncomfortable for you.’
    It was difficult to conceive just how he proposed to do this. I was already about as uncomfortable as humanly possible. The air of the minuscule room was thick with stale cigarette smoke. My shirt was drenched with sweat and stuck to the back of a vinyl chair. My teeth were caked with grounds from the cup of muddy coffee in front of me. And Jimmy Papas, Mavramoustakides’ overweight sidekick, looked like he was about to lumber to his feet and smack me across the chops with his fat hand.
    â€˜Remember,’ warned Mavramoustakides. ‘We are more than half a million Greeks in this city.’ The way he said it, you’d think he was claiming personal responsibility for the fact. ‘You can’t afford to upset that many people.’
    Actually there were only 326,382 Greek-speaking residents of Melbourne and scant few of them paid any attention at all to Leonidas Mavramoustakides. The only reason we were having this conversation was because he and Jimmy Papas were getting to be a pain in the neck. They’d been ringing around and writing letters and two weeks earlier Papas had confronted my boss, Angelo Agnelli, at Kostas Manolas’ daughter’s wedding and threatened to make a scene. Angelo, naturally, had immediately agreed to an appointment. Then, naturally, he found he had an unavoidable engagement elsewhere and deputised me to solve the