Helga's Web (36 page)

The phone went dead and Helidon put it slowly back on the desk. When he let go of it, his fingers remained clamped

in a claw; he had not realized he had been gripping the instrument so tightly. There was a knock at the door and he jerked his head up in shock. But it was only the maid, not Bixby.

“Signora? Shall I make some tea? You and the signore, it would help you—” The maid’s voice was full of sympathy: death, even that of someone she did not know, had made her one of the family.

“Thank you, Rosa. We’ll be out in a moment.” Norma looked down at Helidon still sitting cramped and stiff at his desk. “What did he want, Wally?”

“I don’t know. I mean, if he wants more. We haven’t lost him, darl—he’s still with us.” Then he looked up. “She’ll have to go. We can’t have her around—not now. We’ll have to be on our own till this is over.”

“But I can’t get rid of her like that. I can’t run a place like this on my own—” But she saw the agony in his face and then she nodded. “All right, I’ll tell her in the morning. Do you still want to go to this dinner?”

“No. But we’d better.” He stood up, easing his body out of the chair. “Outside—I mean out of the house—we’ve got to go on as if things were normal. If we suddenly cancelled tonight, those two detectives would hear about it and they’d be back in the morning to find out why.”

The next morning, Thursday, the police came back anyway. That afternoon Bixby rang him at his office. “I see you had some visitors again. The bulls. They seem pretty interested in you, ain’t they?”

“How did you know? Have you been watching my house?”

“Well, let’s say I was driving by, eh?” Bixby’s humour died somewhere down the line; it came through to Helidon as a threat. “Then they went over to the Opera House to see you, too, didn’t they? Looks like they got you tabbed for something, sport. I don’t think we better meet today. I’ll give you a call tonight at home.”

The rest of the day had been a blur to Helidon, one in

which he was vaguely aware of being rude and irritable with his secretary, offhanded with a fellow Minister and then, at the last minute, cancelling a meeting with his Department chief. He went home early, sitting cramped in the corner of the back seat of the official car and looking over his shoulder every time the car pulled up at a traffic light.

“You expecting someone to be following us, Mr. Helidon?” the driver asked.

“What? No.”

“I thought maybe Mrs. Helidon. I mean, she had your car. You know, doing a bit of Christmas shopping and that.” The driver was a small sharp-featured man with a tireless tongue and an equally tireless curiosity. Helidon had tolerated him in the past because such men were invaluable as sources as to what was going on in government circles; White Papers and official memoranda never told half of what one could find out from an inquisitive, talkative official driver. The trick was to see that you never gave him anything he could pass on about you. “I was a bit surprised when you sent for me this morning. I mean, Thursday you usually drive yourself. You want me Mondays and Thursdays from now on?”

He had forgotten this was Thursday, Helga’s day. “Yes, I think so, Wilf. It’s getting to be too much, battling the traffic every day.” He looked over his shoulder again, but in the charge of traffic behind them there was no sign of anyone who looked like Bixby. Or the two detectives, Malone and Clements. He turned back, saw the itchy eye of the driver in the rear-vision mirror. “I’m just looking at it, the traffic, I mean. Wondering why a man chooses to live in the city.”

“Not thinking of retiring, are you, sir?” The sharp little face was as alert as that of a hunting dog.

Norma had brought that up again this morning. “No, Wilf,” he said, and somehow managed a smile. “This is my life.”

When he let himself into the house Norma was siting out on the loggia staring at the smoke-clouded sky to the north. “Twenty homes have been burnt up there at Terrey Hills. I

was listening on the radio. The people lost everything they had.”

“Yes,” he said, only half-hearing what she had said. He sat down, picked up the small bell on the glass-topped table and rang it. “I had no lunch. Rosa can get me a sandwich and a cup of tea.”

Norma stood up. “I’ll get it. Rosa left this morning. You asked me to—” Even the dark glasses did not hide the ravaging of the last twenty-four hours. I’ve made an old woman of her, he thought, and put his hand up to take hers. “There’s only some corned silverside. I didn’t feel up to going shopping today.”

“Forget it. I’m not really hungry. Indeed, I’m—” Then he stopped. “Sorry.”

“What for?”

“Indeed.”

“That’s the least of my worries now.” But she smiled and kissed the top of his head. “There are other people worse off than us, I suppose. Those people up there.” She nodded towards the north and the threatening clouds of smoke.

“Yes,” he said, and felt ashamed that he had no real sympathy left to bestow on other people.

They stayed home that night and at ten o’clock, worn out waiting for Bixby to call, Helidon went to bed. At ten-thirty the phone rang at last. “I think we better get together to-morra, sport. I’m gunna need a bit more money.”

“How much?”

“Wuddia say to twenty thousand?”

Helidon closed his eyes: irony brought its own pain. Norma, lying beside him, reached for his free hand and held it tightly. “That’s too much-”

“I don’t think so. Look, Helidon, things don’t look too bright for you. The bulls are on to you, all right. I’d lay even money you’re their number one suspect. Now if I just rung ‘em up and said I could send ‘em Helga’s diary—”

“What’s in the diary? You haven’t told me a thing yet—”

“And I’m not gunna. That’s what you’re buying, a pig in a poke. All I’ll tell you is, you’re gunna get your money’s worth. Twenty thousand dollars, in cash. I’ll ring you at your office again tomorra, say four-thirty, and tell you where we can meet. Have a good night’s sleep, sport.”

Helidon held the phone against his ear for a moment, deaf even to the dial tone. Norma spoke to him, but he didn’t hear her. Then he felt her nails digging into him and he came out of the wide-eyed coma that had gripped him. He put the phone down, scrawled a note on his bedside pad that Bixby would call him at four-thirty; then he slid down in the bed, gathered Norma in his arms and held her to him. They lay there in the expensive shelter of their bed like two people in an air raid who knew that the bomb to hit their house was already on its way.

And now it was Friday the thirteenth, the day for disasters. He put aside the breakfast tray and got stiffly out of bed. It was years since he had been vigorously athletic, but over the past week it seemed to him that he had become old and infirm. He stood up on legs that felt awkward and painful in the knees; Norma took hold of him as a nurse might take hold of a patient getting out of bed for the first time in weeks. They looked at each other in the wall mirror and Norma struck a spark of wry humour. “Mr. and Mrs. Dorian Gray.”

“Don’t,” he said.

The official car called for him an hour later and he drove into the city in silence: Wilf, the driver, talked all the way but Helidon heard nothing of what he said. His office was in the State Government block, a beautiful dark grey tower that the citizens, with the local talent for belittling anything that embarrassed them with its pretensions, had dubbed the Black Stump.

When he got out of the car the driver noticed the two briefcases for the first time, the full one and the empty one.

“Expecting a heavy weekend, sir?” When Helidon looked blank, he nodded at the briefcases. “Paperwork. You gunna be taking stuff home?”

“That’s all government is these days, paperwork. Isn’t that what they say, Wilf?” But the ten thousand dollars in one of the briefcases dragged him down more than all the paperwork of all his years in parliament.

He rode up in the lift to one of the upper floors, silently nodded good morning to his secretary, went straight through into his office and immediately decided he had done the wrong thing in leaving the house at all. He was too sick and abstracted to be able to go through today’s programme; Cultural Development, never an urgent matter in this State, would not suffer for another day’s delay. He called in his secretary, told her to cancel all appointments for the day, assured her there was no more wrong with him than an upset stomach; then he took the empty briefcase, went down to his bank, drew out ten thousand dollars and did his best to remain oblivious of the teller’s enquiring eye. But he could read the question in the teller’s mind: why would a Cabinet Minister, for the second time in a week, want ten thousand dollars in cash? Other people drew amounts as large as that, but they were usually cranks of some sort or bookmakers. Why would a Minister want twenty thousand in cash? And Helidon was sure he could read the second question in the man’s mind: was it to pay off blackmail?

He went back to his office, the notes feeling like a ton of lead in his briefcase, and spent the rest of the day, for want of something to fill in the time, trying to catch up on Departmental paperwork. His secretary kept popping in and out to ask how he was; at lunch time she brought him some dry biscuits, a glass of milk and a stomach sedative. At four-thirty she called on the inter-office phone.

“There’s a gentleman on the phone, Mr. Helidon. He sounds like a man who called the other day. Do you want to be troubled by him?”

“Put him on, Paula. I know who it is. It’s a private matter.” He knew he could trust her if he told her that; she would not listen in on the conversation.

There was a click; then Bixby said, “G’day, been a scorcher, hasn’t it? You get the extra necessary?”

“I have it. Now what?” It was an effort to keep his voice cool and calm.

“Well, I don’t think we wanna be too conspicuous, you know what I mean? So how about we meet on your boat again? Make it eight o’clock, it’ll be dark by then. Don’t bother to wait for me—I’ll be out on the boat. And remember, sport. No one else but you and me, okay?”

When Bixby hung up, Helidon called Norma. “I’m meeting him on the boat at eight o’clock. I should be home by nine.”

“Darling, do you think you should? I don’t trust him. What if-?”

“If what?” But he knew what she meant and his tone softened. “Darl, he won’t try anything— drastic.” It was an inadequate word for murder. “I’ll tell him that you know where I am. All he wants is the money. I’ll give him that and get the —the diary in exchange. And then—”

“And then?” But she didn’t want an answer. Before he could reply she said, “Wally, don’t bring the diary home. I don’t want to see it. Burn it or tear it up. Anything.”

“You won’t see it, darl,” he promised, determined to protect her from now on from any further pain or worry.

“Will you come home first?”

He hesitated. There were over three hours to fill in before he had to meet Bixby. But if he went home he knew what a wrench it would be to leave there again when the time came: unsafe though it had been to the invasions of Helga and Bixby, it was still the only haven he knew, the only place where there was any comfort. “No, I’ll stay here till it’s time. But come in and pick me up at the club. Wait for me in the car park.”

“Ill be there at eight. You shouldn’t be with him too long. And darling— he careful!’

God, he thought as he hung up, whatever made our love go cold for as long as it did?

At five-thirty his secretary came in, smartly dressed, freshly painted: Friday night was her night on the town with the girls. Helidon had remarked this local phenomenon before and now, to allay her concern for him, he tried for a light note: “Hunting night again, Paula?”

“We don’t hunt, Mr. Helidon. It’s just a girls’ night out.”

In night clubs and restaurants he had seen the groups of women all determinedly enjoying themselves without the company of men; but the occasional girl’s head would turn as a goodlooking man went by and a wistful look would come over her face, as if she knew that what she was enjoying with the other women was only second best. On a sudden impulse he took out his wallet and extracted five ten-dollar notes. “I don’t know how many there are of you, but let the dinner be on me.”

“But, Mr. Helidon—” She was surprised and uncertain. A girls’ night out should not be paid for by a man: it was a surrender of their independence.

“Call it a Christmas present,” he said, still unsure why he had made the gesture, but aware of the twenty thousand dollars in the two briefcases standing by his chair. A bunch of lonely women were entitled to some donation if a blackmailer was worth twenty thousand. I wonder what she would say if I put the briefcases on the desk, opened them and told her to take as much as she wanted?

Reluctantly she took the fifty dollars. “Thank you, Mr. Helidon. We’ll drink a toast to you. Shall I call your driver?”

“No, I’m—I’m going out with Mrs. Helidon. Enjoy yourselves.”

“Oh, we always do,” she said, but she was a little too emphatic; behind her thirty-five-years-old, not unpretty face there was a hint of the effort it took to enjoy what was less than she dreamed of. “Have a nice weekend, Mr. Helidon.”

He sat on in the office in the deepening dusk, not getting up to turn on the lights when the furniture of the room finally became indistinguishable. He had turned his chair round and sat facing out towards the harbour. A half a mile away and below him he could see the floodlit shells of the Opera House; he had been staring at it for a full five minutes before he realized what it was; then he abruptly swung his chair round and looked back into the darkness of the room. When at last he switched on a desk lamp to look at his watch he had made up his mind not to come back to this office in the New Year. He would resign from politics and take a long trip overseas with Norma, start a new life and begin to enjoy more fully the money he had made.

He reached for a sheet of notepaper, took the gold pen out of his pocket, wrote Dear Mr. Premier. One part of his mind noted how steady was his hand: the act of resignation was not so difficult after all. He put all he wanted to say on one sheet; he had never been noted for short speeches or memoranda, but this one could not have been shorter and still made its point. He folded the sheet with his customary neatness, making sure the corners matched, put it in an envelope and sealed it. He put on his jacket and hat, picked up the two briefcases, went down in the lift and handed the envelope to the night duty porter.