Bear Pit. Jon Cleary
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?’
‘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,