The Brush-Off Read Free Page A

problem.
    â€˜Piss off, Leo,’ I said, staring at the phone, willing it to ring. ‘You’re talking crap and you know it.’
    We were in the editor’s office at Nea Hellas , a Greek-language tabloid with an ultra-conservative political line and a weekly readership of about ten thousand. Leonidas Mavramoustakides owned and edited the paper and Jimmy Papas was its business manager, a job that consisted largely of convincing delicatessen owners and fish-roe importers to buy advertising space they didn’t really need. This task was proving increasingly difficult, which explained why the two of them were getting so pushy.
    â€˜We only ask what we entitled to,’ growled Papas, doing to his worry beads what he’d like to do to my testicles. ‘ Neos Kosmos, Il Globo, El Telegraph , all these papers get government advertising. How come we don’t get our share? If we don’t, our readers will not vote Labor at the next election. You tell your boss Agnelli that.’
    A little respect would not have been out of order. For me, and for my boss. The Honourable Angelo Agnelli was a Minister of the Crown, the Minister for Ethnic Affairs. Ours was a Labor government, democratic in temper, so obsequiousness was unnecessary. Just a little less contempt, that was all I asked. The kind of scorn that Mavramoustakides displayed was the prerogative of colleagues and associates, not superannuated torturers.
    â€˜Get real, Jimmy,’ I said. ‘None of your readers vote for us anyway. Most of them can’t even read.’
    The function of the Minister for Ethnic Affairs was to spread a microscopically thin layer of largesse over every ethnic community in the state. My task, as his adviser, was to help wield the butter knife. On a day like this, dealing with pricks like this, it was a job whose appeal was limited.
    Fortunately, before I could say something undiplomatic, Sophie Mavramoustakides stuck her head around the door. ‘Phone call for Murray Whelan,’ she chirped, in the manner of a hotel bellboy paging a guest. ‘You want me to put it through?’
    Sophie had a hair-do like a haystack and a lot more va-va-voom than she could burn off working as a typist at her fascist father’s rag. She splashed some of it over me. She was wasting her time. I was single but I wasn’t suicidal.
    Only Trish at the office knew where I was, so this was the call I’d been waiting for. But the last thing I needed was Leo and Jimmy breathing down my neck while I got the news. I unpeeled myself from the plastic chair and indicated I’d prefer to take the call in private. Mavramoustakides grunted. My preferences were beneath his dignity. He’d wanted to talk to the organ grinder, not be fobbed off with the monkey. As far as Leo was concerned, I could go climb a tree.
    Sophie, utilising as much of her bottom as possible, led me upstairs to the chaos that passed for the Nea Hellas production room, indicated which phone I should use and returned Eurydice-like into the Stygian realm below.
    Nea Hellas was on the Northcote hill, one of the few elevated points in the otherwise flat expanse of Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs. The view out its first-floor window swept in a broad arc across the baking rooftops of houses and factories, all the way to the glass-walled towers of the central city, a shimmering mirage on the far horizon. Above, an unbroken blue sky beat down with the full power of a forty-degree summer afternoon. Below, a metropolis of three million lay prostrate beneath its might.
    For much of the decade, the state of Victoria, of which this city was the crowning jewel, had been ruled by a Labor government. For a while things had gone well. More recently, the auguries were less auspicious. The previous year’s election victory had been snatched from the jaws of defeat only by the narrowest of margins. In politics, as in our city’s notoriously fickle weather,