Bear Pit

‘I’m never gunna retire, Jack. That’s what upsets everyone, including a lot in our own party. They’re gunning for me, some of ’em. They reckon I’ve reached my use-by date.’ He laughed, a cackle at the back of his throat. ‘There’s an old saying, The emperor has no clothes on. It don’t matter, if he’s still on the throne.’

Aldwych looked him up and down, made the frank comment of one old man to another: ‘You’d be a horrible sight, naked.’

‘I hold that picture over their heads.’ Again the cackle. He was enjoying the evening.

‘Are you an emperor, Hans?’

‘Some of ’em think so.’ He sat back, looked out at his empire. ‘You ever read anything about Julius Caesar?’

‘No, Hans. When I retired, I started reading, the first time in my life. Not fiction –I never read anything anybody wrote like the life I led. No, I read history. I never went back as far as ancient history – from what young Jack tells me, you’d think there were never any crims in those days, just shonky statesmen. The best crooks started in the Ren-aiss-ance’ – he almost spelled it out – ‘times. I could of sat down with the Borgias. I wouldn’t of trusted ’em, but we’d of understood each other.’

‘You were an emperor once. You had your own little empire.’ The Dutchman had done his own reading: police files on his desk in his double role as Police Minister.

‘Never an emperor, Hans. King, maybe. There’s a difference. Emperors dunno what’s happening out there in the backblocks.’

‘This one does,’ said Hans Vanderberg the First.

Then Jack Aldwych Junior leaned in from the other side of him.

‘Mr Premier –’ He had gone to an exclusive private school where informality towards one’s elders had not been encouraged. The school’s board had known who his father was, but it had not discouraged his enrollment. It had accepted his fees and a scholarship endowment from his mother and taken its chances that his father’s name would not appear on any more criminal charges. Jack Senior, cynically amused, had done his best to oblige, though on occasions police officers had had to be bribed, all, of course, in the interests of Jack Junior’s education.

‘Mr Premier, I’ve got this whole project up and running while you were still in office –’

‘Don’t talk as if I’m dead, son.’

Jack Junior smiled. He was a big man, handsome and affable; women admired him but he was not a ladies’ man. Like his father he was a conservative, though he was not criminal like his father. He had strayed once and learned his lesson; his father had lashed him with his tongue more than any headmaster ever had. He voted conservative because multi-millionaire socialists were a contradiction in terms; they were also, if there were any, wrong in the head. But this Labor premier, on the Olympic Tower project and all its problems, had been as encouraging and sympathetic as any free enterprise, economic rationalist politician could have been. Jack Junior, a better businessman than his father, though not as ruthless, had learned not to bite the hand that fed you. Welfare was not just for the poor, otherwise it would be unfair.

‘I’m not. But there are rumours –’

‘Take no notice of ’em, son. I have to call an election in the next two months, but I’ll choose my own time. My four years are up –’

‘Eight years,’ said Jack Senior from the other side.

Vanderberg nodded, pleased that someone was counting. ‘Eight years. I’m gunna have another four. Then I’ll hand over to someone else. Someone I’ll pick.’

‘Good,’ said Jack Junior. ‘So we’ll have you as our guest for the dinner the night before the Olympics open. All the IOC committee have accepted.’

‘Why wouldn’t they? Have they ever turned down an invitation?’ He had recognized the International Olympics Committee for what they were, politicians like himself. They were more fortunate than he: they did not have to worry about voters.

He looked around the huge room. It had been designed to double as a ballroom and a major dining room; as often happens when architects are given their head, it had gone to their heads. Opulence was the keynote. Above, drawing eyeballs upwards like jellyfish caught in a net, was a secular version of the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Muscular athletes, male and female, raced through clouds towards a celestial tape; a swimmer, looking suspiciously like a beatified Samantha Riley, breast-stroked her way towards the Deity, who resembled the IOC president, his head wreathed in a halo of Olympic rings. Four chandeliers hung from the ceiling like frozen fireworks; there were marble pillars along the walls; the walls themselves were papered with silk. No one came here for a double burger; nor would the room ever be hired out on Election Night. This was the Olympus Room and though gods were in short supply in Sydney, those with aspiration and sufficient credit would soon be queueing up to enter. Bad taste had never overwhelmed the natives.

Jack Junior privately thought the room was an embarrassment; but he was the junior on the board of directors. Still, it was he who had overseen the guest list for tonight, though it had been chosen by his wife. Class in Sydney is porous; money seeps through it, keeping it afloat. Jack Junior and his wife Juliet had not been hamstrung in making out the list. A certain number of no-talent celebrities had been invited; without them there would be no spread in the Sunday social pages, where their inane smiles would shine like Band-Aids on their vacuous faces. The trade union officials and the State MPs from the battlers’ electorates, seated on the outskirts like immigrants waiting to be naturalized, were somewhat overcome by the opulence, but they were battling bravely on. After all, they were here only to represent the workers and the battlers, not enjoy themselves, for Crissakes; their wives smiled indulgently at their husbands’ attempts at self-delusion and looked again at the seven-course menu and wondered if the kids at home were enjoying their pizzas. The businessmen from the Big End of town were taking it all for granted, as was their wont and want; economic rationalists had to be admired and paid court to, no matter how irrationally extravagant it might be. Business was just coming out of recession from the Asian meltdown and what better way to celebrate than at someone else’s expense? Some of them had dug deep when SOCOG had called for help when the Games funds had sprung a leak. The wives, girlfriends and rented escorts took it all in with a sceptical eye. Tonight, if no other occasion, was Boys’ Night Out.

The top table was all men. A female gossip columnist, seated out in the shallows, remarked that it looked like the Last Supper painted by Francis Bacon. But four-fifths of the men up there at the long table were ambitious in a way that the Apostles had never been.

The wives of those at the top table, with their own borrowed escorts, were at a round table just below the main dais. The Premier’s wife, who was in her seventies, still made her own dresses, a fact she advertised, but, as the fashion writers said, didn’t really need to. Tonight she was in purple and black flounces, looking like a funeral mare looking for a hearse. Sitting beside her was Roger Ladbroke, the Premier’s press minder, hiding his boredom with the whole evening behind the smile he had shown to the media for so many years. Beside him was Juliet, Jack Junior’s wife, all elegance and knowing it. Her dress was by Prada, her diamond necklace by Cartier and her looks by her mother, who had been one of Bucharest’s most beautiful women and had never let her three daughters forget it. Juliet’s escort was her hairdresser, lent for the evening by his boyfriend.

‘Mrs Vanderberg,’ said Juliet, leaning across Ladbroke and giving him a whiff of Joy, ‘it must be very taxing, being a Premier’s wife. All these functions –’

‘Not at all.’ Gertrude Vanderberg had never had any political or social ambitions. She was famous in political circles for her pumpkin pavlovas, her pot plants and her potted wisdom. She had once described an opponent of her husband’s as a revolutionary who would send you the bill for the damage he had caused; it gained the man more notoriety than his attempts at disruption. ‘Hans only calls on me when there’s an election in the wind. The rest of the time I do some fence-mending in the electorate and I let him go his own way. Politicians’ wives in this country are expected to be invisible. Roger here thinks women only fog up the scene.’

‘Only sometimes.’ Ladbroke might have been handsome if he had not been so plump; he had spent too many days and nights at table. He had been with Hans Vanderberg over twenty years and wore the hard shell of those who know they are indispensable.

‘I think you should spend a season in Europe,’ said Juliet.

‘In Bucharest?’ Gert Vanderberg knew everyone’s history.

‘Why not? Roumanian men invented the revolving door, but we women have always made sure we never got caught in it.’ You knew she never would. She looked across the table at the Opposition leader’s wife: ‘Mrs Bigelow, do you enjoy politics?’

Enid Bigelow was a small, dark-haired doll of a woman who wore a fixed smile, as if afraid if she took it off she would lose it. She looked around for help; her escort was her brother, a bachelor academic useless at answering a question like this. She looked at everyone, the smile still fixed. ‘Enjoy? What’s to enjoy?’

Juliet, a woman not given to too much sympathy, suddenly felt sorry she had asked the question. She turned instead to the fourth woman at the table.

‘Madame Tzu, do women have influence in politics in China?’

Madame Tzu, who had the same name as an empress, smiled, but not helplessly. ‘We used to.’

‘You mean Chairman Mao’s wife, whatever her name was?’

‘An actress.’ Madame Tzu shook her head dismissively. ‘She knew the lines, but tried too hard to act the part – and she was a poor actress. Is that not right, General?’

Ex-General Wang-Te merely smiled. He and Madame Tzu were the mainland Chinese partners in Olympic Tower, but there had been no room for them at the top table. Foreign relations had never been one of The Dutchman’s interests and it certainly had never been one of Jack Aldwych’s. Aware that everyone was looking at him he at last said, ‘I haven’t brought my hearing-aid,’ and sank back into his dinner suit like a crab into its shell. He knew better than to discuss politics in another country, especially with women.

‘Ronald Reagan was an actor,’ said Juliet.

‘He knew the words,’ said Ladbroke. ‘He just didn’t know the rest of the world.’

‘You’re Labor. You would say that.’

And you’re Roumanian, cynical romantics. But he knew better than to say that. Instead, he gestured up towards the top table. ‘Your husband and your father-in-law seem to be doing all right with Labor.’

The Aldwyches, father and son, were leaning back with laughter at something the Premier had said. He was grinning, evilly, some might have thought, but it was supposed to be with self-satisfaction. Which some might have thought the same thing.

Then he looked down at the man approaching them through the shoal of tables. ‘Here comes the Greek, bare-arsed with gifts.’

‘Do we beware?’ Jack Aldwych had had experience of The Dutchman’s mangling of the language, but he had learned to look for the grains of truth in the wreckage. This Greek coming up on to the dais was not one bearing gifts.

He came up behind Vanderberg, raised a hand and Aldwych looked for the knife in it. But it came down only as a slap on the shoulder. ‘Hans, I gotta hand it to you.’

‘Hand me what?’ Then 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?’