Free Dragons at the Party by Jon Cleary

enough of politicians for the day.
    When the door had closed Vanderberg looked at his political secretary. “He’s a good copper. It’s a pity he’s so honest. A little larceny never hurt anyone, right?”
    “Right,” said Ladbroke, who had known all about larceny before he took this job; he had been a political columnist and had seen the State’s best practitioners at work. He was a plump, anonymous-looking man in his late thirties who had no illusions left but didn’t miss them. “I’ve got Jack Phillips and Don Clary at work. If there’s any dirt, they’ll dig it up.”
    “Oh, there’ll be dirt, I’ll bet your boots on it,” said Vanderberg, who never bet anything of his own. He stood up, looking pleased. “It would make a great Australia Day if I could topple the Prime Minister, wouldn’t it?”
    “Great,” said Ladbroke, and the headlines broke in his head like a blinding light. He was a lapsed Catholic and for a moment he thought he’d had a vision.
    “Do the press know about this bloke Seville?”
    “Not as far as I know. The police want it kept quiet for the time being.”
    Vanderberg thought for a moment. “Well, we’ll see. We might leak it, just to keep things on the boiling.”
    “I’ll prepare something, just in case.”
    “I’m going home for a coupla hours.” The Dutchman lived in his electorate on the edge of the inner city. Glebe had once been a middle-class area, then for years it had been home for the working class and had become a Labour stronghold. Now the trendy academics from nearby Sydney University had moved in, bringing their racks of Chardonnay, their taste for foreign films and their narrow view of any world but their own. They voted Labour, but laughed at The Dutchman. But they knew and he knew that none of them would last two rounds with him in the political ring. “We might have a good weekend.”
    Avagoodweekend was a TV slogan for a brand of fly-spray. Ladbroke wondered if Phil Norval, the TV hero, knew he was about to be sprayed.
    II
    Malone was greeted at his front door by a four-year-old centurion in a plastic breastplate and wielding a plastic sword. “Who goes there? Fred or foe?”
    “Fred.”
    “Fred who?”
    “Fred the Fuzz.” He picked up Tom and kissed him. His own mother Brigid had probably kissed him as a very small child, but from Tom’s age he could remember no kisses from the hard-working religious woman who loved him but was incapable of public sentiment. He sometimes wondered how often she had kissed his father and if she still did. Malone himself made a point of being affectionate towards his wife and children. “Where’s Mum?”
    “Here.”
    Lisa stood in the kitchen doorway silhouetted against the late sunlight coming through from the back of the house. She was in shorts and a halter-top and at thirty-seven she still had the figure she had had at twenty-seven. She swam every day, summer and winter, something he didn’t do in the unheated pool, and she went to a gym class twice a week. She was more beautiful than he knew he deserved, but she was not vain about it nor was she fanatical about keeping fit. She had been born in Holland and she had the Dutch (well, some Dutch) habit of discipline. She and her parents were as unlike Hans Vanderberg as it was possible to be.
    “A bad day?” She could recognize the signs.
    He nodded. “What did you do?”
    “Mother and Dad took us all to Eliza’s for lunch, then we came back here and swam all afternoon. They’re out by the pool with Claire and Maureen. Your mother and father are here, too.”
    Malone rolled his eyes in mock agony. “Now I know how the Abos felt on that first Australia Day. Who’s going to be the first to tell me what to do with Timori? Dad or your old man?”
    “You’re my old man,” said Tom. “The kids at school call you that.”
    “You’ve got a pretty bright lot at your kindy,” said Malone. “They know an old man when they see one,”
    He changed into his