Bear Pit. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ he waved a hand at the two Aldwyches. ‘You know my friends, salt of the earth, both of ’em.’ The salt of the earth looked suitably modest. ‘This is Peter Kelzo. He gives me more trouble than the Opposition ever does.’

      ‘Always joking,’ Kelzo told the Aldwyches: he was the sort who could take insults as compliments.

      He was a swarthy man, almost as wide as he was tall, but muscular, not fat. Born Kelzopolous, he had come to Australia from Greece in his teens thirty years ago, found the country teeming with Opolouses and shortened his name to something that the tongue-twisted natives could pronounce. Built as he was, he had had no trouble getting a job as a builder’s labourer, shrewd as he was he was soon a union organizer, though his English needed improving. Within ten years his English was excellent and his standing almost as good, though at times it looked like stand-over. He belatedly educated himself in history and politics. He read Athenian history, aspired to be like Demosthenes but knew that the natives suspected orators as bullshit artists and opted to work with the quiet word or the quiet threat. He did not drift into politics, but sailed into it; but only into the backwaters. By now he had his own building firm and other interests, was married, had children, wanted money in the bank, lots of it, before he wanted Member of Parliament on his notepaper. He ran the Labor Party branch in his own electorate and now he was ready to wield his power.

      He looked around him, then at Aldwych. He had been one of the subcontractors on the project, though Aldwych did not know that. ‘It’s a credit to you. I gotta tell you the truth, I was expecting casino glitz. But no, this is classical –’ He looked around him again. ‘Class, real class.’

      ‘A lifelong principle of my father,’ said Jack Junior. ‘That right, Dad?’

      ‘All the way,’ said Aldwych, who couldn’t remember ever having principles of any sort.

      Kelzo gave them both an expensive width of expensive caps: he knew Jack Senior’s history. ‘Just like Hans here.’ He patted the Premier’s shoulder again. ‘You’ve never lost your class, have you, Hans?’

      ‘Class was something invented by those who didn’t have it,’ said Vanderberg. ‘Oscar the Wild said that.’

      ‘I’m sure he did,’ said Kelzo and tried desperately to think of something that Demosthenes or Socrates might have said, but couldn’t. Instead, he leaned down, his hand still on the Premier’s shoulder, and whispered, ‘Enjoy it, Hans. It won’t last.’

      Then he was gone, smile taking in the whole room, and Jack Junior said, ‘I’ve read Oscar Wilde. I can’t remember him saying anything like that.’

      ‘I’ve never read him,’ said Vanderberg. ‘But neither has Kelzo. The Greeks haven’t read anything out of England since Lord Byron.’ Then he turned full on to Jack Junior, the grin almost as wide as Kelzo’s smile had been. ‘I haven’t read anything of him, either. Poets and philosophers don’t help us with the voters – Roger Ladbroke keeps me supplied with all the potted wisdom I need. If I started quoting Oscar Wilde, the only voters who’d clap for me would be the homosexuals up in Oxford Street and the arty-crafties in Balmain and they vote for me anyway, ‘cause they think I’m a character. The rest of the voters in this city have had it so good for so long, they ain’t interested in philosophy or smart sayings, not unless they hear it in some TV comedy. The people out in the bush, they’re philosophers, they gotta be to survive, and they’re the ones gimme the difference that keeps me in power. I’m the first Labor premier they’ve ever liked. They think I’m a character, too.’

      ‘And are you?’ asked Aldwych Senior from his other side.

      The Dutchman turned to him. ‘You’ll have to ask my minder down there. Roger –’ he raised his voice, leaning forward to speak to Ladbroke – ‘am I a character? Mr Aldwych wants to know.’

      ‘Every inch,’ said Ladbroke, who at times had had to keep the character in recognizable shape.

      Further down the top table from the Premier were Bevan Bigelow, the Leader of the Opposition, and Leslie Chung, a senior partner in Olympic Tower.

      ‘Have you ever voted for him?’ asked Bigelow, nodding up towards the middle of the table.

      ‘No.’ Leslie Chung, like Jack Aldwych, was now respectable, but his past was tainted. He was a good-looking man, still black-haired in his sixties, with the knack of looking down his nose at people taller than himself. Tonight, acting benevolent, he was looking eye to eye with Bigelow. ‘But I’ve never voted for you, either. I give money to both parties, but I vote for the guy with the least chance of stuffing everything up. Some Independent. It amuses me.’

      ‘Does that come from being Chinese?’

      Bigelow was a short, squat man with a blond cowlick and a habit of shifting nervously in his seat as if it were about to be snatched away from him; which also applied to his electoral seat, where his hold was marginal. Les Chung, on the other hand, sat with the calmness of a lean Buddha, as sure of himself as amorality could make him. He had made his fortune by turning his back on scruples and now, on the cusp between middle and old age, he was not going to take the road to Damascus. Or wherever one saw the light here amongst the barbarians.

      ‘No, it comes from having become an Australian.’ He had been here forty-three years; he didn’t say the locals still amused him. ‘Even though we call Hans The Dutchman, you couldn’t get anyone more Australian than him, could you?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ Bigelow looked puzzled, a not uncommon expression with him. ‘He’s not friendly, like most Australians. He’s got no friends in his own party, you know that?’

      Chung knew that Bigelow had few friends in his party; he was a stop-gap leader because his opponents couldn’t agree amongst themselves whom they wanted to replace him. ‘I don’t think it worries him, Bev. They’ll never put a dent in that shell.’

      Bigelow nodded at the Aldwyches. ‘How do you get on with your partners? When old Jack dies, he’s getting on, who takes charge?’

      ‘We’ve never discussed it. It would be between me and Jack Junior, I suppose. I think I’d get it.’ He smiled, ‘I’m sure I’d get it. There are other partners, the Chinese ones.’ He nodded down towards Madame Tzu and General Wang-Te. ‘They’d vote for me.’

      ‘A Chinese Triad?’

      ‘No, just a trio.’

      ‘There’s another partner, isn’t there?’ He could never find a policy to pursue, but his mind was a vault of facts. ‘Miss Feng?’

      Les Chung looked down at the beautiful girl seated at one of the lower tables with a handsome young Caucasian escort. If he were younger he might have asked her to be his concubine. And smiled to himself at what her Australian answer would have been.

      ‘We Chinese stick together. How do you think you’ll go when Hans announces the election?’

      ‘That will depend on his own party hacks. He has more enemies than I have.’ Though he spoke without conviction.

      ‘Yes,’ said Les Chung, but seemed to be talking to himself.

      The evening was breaking up. The Premier and the Aldwyches rose at the top table. Throughout the rest of the room there was a stirring, like the crumbling of two hundred claypans. The waiters and waitresses restrained themselves from making get-the-hell-out-here gestures.

      ‘We’ll СКАЧАТЬ