Free The Bear Pit by Jon Cleary Page B

don’t mean Les—he’s one of us. Nor the Feng family—even that girl Camilla isn’t gunna make waves.”
    The original consortium of partners had been a mixture that at times had had Aldwych thinking he was a foreigner in his own country. Besides Leslie Chung there had been two local Chinese families; there were also Madame Tzu, representing herself, and General Wang-Te, the director from a Shanghai corporation whose connections were as murky as the Whangpoo River. Sometimes Aldwych wondered what had happened to the White Australia policy of his youth. There were more bloody foreigners in the country now than kangaroos.
    â€œI still wouldn’t trust Madame Tzu as far as the other side of the street. As for the General—”
    â€œYou’re too suspicious,” said Juliet, a foreigner.
    â€œI thought you Roumanians loved suspicion? You and the Hungarians invented the revolving door, didn’t you, so’s you could watch each other’s back?”
    â€œI love you, Papa.” She knew he liked being called Papa. Once distant from each other, they were now friends. “You’d have made a wonderful dictator.”
    â€œBetter than some you’ve had. That bloke Ceausescu . . . he got what he deserved. The Dutchman was a dictator, but he didn’t deserve to be shot.”
    They were having breakfast on the terrace of the junior Aldwychs’ apartment on the tip of Point Piper. The point was almost sunk by the wealth on it; land here was valued by the cupful. Aldwych, instead of going home to his own big house at Harbord, on the northern side of the harbour, had driven out here with his son and daughter-in-law and stayed the night. He enjoyed Juliet’s company and her looks, but, as with Madame Tzu, he would not have trusted her as far as the other side of the street. He had never trusted any woman but his dead wife Shirl. Beautiful women were even more suspect than others: they knew the value of their looks. Jack Junior, on the other hand, had never fallen for any but good-looking women.
    The apartment was sumptuous, an estate agent could have found no other word for it; but it was not like a House & Garden illustration, it was lived in. Juliet could spend money like an IMF grantee, but Jack Junior begrudged her nothing. Aldwych Senior, sometimes to his own surprise, no longer mentally reproached Juliet for her extravagance. This apartment was a contrast to his own house, where he lived amongst Laura Ashley prints and Dresden figurines, none of which he would ever replace because they had been Shirl’s choice. Shirl had died before Juliet came along and sometimes he wondered how the two women would have got along. He had had reservations about Juliet, but she had proved him wrong. The marriage was now six years old and there appeared to be no cracks in it. Juliet was extravagant, but she didn’t have to be Roumanian to be that; half the country lived on credit beyond its ability to pay and half the country didn’t have multi-millionaire husbands. She had proved a better wife than some of Jack Junior’s other women would have been. There were no children and no talk of any, but that didn’t worry Aldwych. He had little faith that the next forty or fifty years of the new millennium was going to be a cakewalk for the young. He was long past optimism.
    Now, looking at a Manly ferry taking commuters to the city, he was pensive, a symptom of his ageing. “If the hit wasn’t meant for either of us—”
    â€œDad, keep me out of it. If it was meant for either of us, it would’ve been you. Some of your old mates may have wanted a last crack at you.”
    â€œAll my old mates are dead, including the ones who were not my mates. Lenny McPherson is gone, all the old mugs who had it in for me.” In his memory was a gallery of enemies. He had consorted, as the cops called it, with other crims, but he had always been his own man.