Free Stiff by Shane Maloney

through to Versa-Tile. Twenty minutes later all I had were half a dozen engaged signals, an invitation to call back later, four answering machines, two no longer connecteds and a wife who would tell hubby when he came home.
    The Amalfi was the city’s newest and tallest office tower, a fifty-storey icicle of blue-tinted glass with Kuwaiti finance and tax-free cash bonuses and designed to reflect the many moods of the sky. Its disposition that morning was decidedly unsettled.
    Big corporate tenants occupied the higher floors and various government departments were housed lower down. Each had separate entrances and elevators so the business types on their way to the top could be spared the ordeal of having to rub shoulders with scruffy androgynes in polyester cardigans. The corporate entrance was a marble-clad lobby on Collins Street with imposing brass revolving doors. The government tenants entered via an open vestibule around the corner where a gaggle of furtive smokers clustered around a midden of squashed butts.
    The Education Department central bureaucracy had set up shop on some lower floors and Agnelli was standing at the government entrance talking to an official from one of the teacher unions, a factional heavyweight, when I arrived. He immediately broke off the conversation and hurried over. He looked me up and own and opened his mouth as if to make some remark, thought better of it and propelled me wordlessly through the revolving doors into the open mouth of a lift.
    ‘Let Merricks do all the talking,’ he said as we shot upwards into the stratosphere. ‘And for Christ sake, don’t contradict him. These captains of industry are totally surrounded by sucks telling them how fucking brilliant they are. Makes them very sensitive.’ He said something else, but my ears were popping and I missed it.
    We got out at the forty-ninth floor and found ourselves facing a reception desk of black lacquer, burnished to a mirror shine and bearing an arrangement of long-stemmed exotic flowers shaped like the genitalia of some endangered species. Behind it sat a receptionist with a face heavily in hock to the Estée Lauder counter at David Jones and sculpted extensions so long they would have curled up and died at the mere sight of a keyboard. Agnelli she eyeballed coolly. When she got a load of me the ambient temperature dropped a good fifteen degrees.
    ‘Mr Merricks is expecting you.’ She sounded as though she could not in her wildest dreams conceive why. She led us across a carpet that murmured soft caresses as we passed, and abandoned us in a corner office with a desk you could land a Lear jet on. Two entire walls were floor-to-ceiling glass.
    The view was hypnotic, vast, drawing the gaze irresistibly. Rimmed by the green of sand-belt suburbia, the beaten pewter of the bay extended southward to an invisible horizon. Factories and freeways spread a grubby picnic rug as far west as the light would allow. Immediately below, the Spencer Street switching yards were a model train set. Hornby Dublo by the look of it. Out past the Westgate Bridge and the cubist statement of the Newport power station, oil refineries and smokestacks disappeared into a smudgy haze. But mostly it was sky, lots and lots of sky. A flock of seagulls flew past at eye level. Here and there over the bay celestial conveyor belts of sunlight pierced the clouds with radiant beams as though the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary was imminent.
    I sank into one of a matching pair of pale-green kid leather sofas. Agnelli strode over to the window, his hands clasped behind his back, his excitement impossible to conceal. I could feel a lecture coming on.
    ‘Look at that.’ Agnelli gestured like a carnival barker. ‘Industry. Chemicals. Plastics. Automobiles. Foodstuffs. Biotechnology. Computers. The busiest port in Australia. Anything that gets made in this country gets made here. Compared to us the rest of the country’s a fucking pineapple plantation or a