Dragons at the Party. Jon Cleary

and thought of themselves as benevolent, honest and born to rule. They were no different from all the Europeans who had preceded them in Palucca.

      Mohammed Timori died in 1953 on the same day as Josef Stalin, which meant he got no space at all in Western newspapers. The Americans, prompted by John Foster Dulles, decided to compensate for that lack of regard; they established a naval base and named it in his honour. Abdul Timori, who was then twenty-five, was called home from Europe to succeed his father. His election as President for life was no more than a formality, like high tea, monogamy and other European importations, and was looked upon as just as much a giggle.

      Abdul Timori had been labelled by the Fleet Street tabloids as the Playboy of the Western World, though Synge would have disowned him. His mistresses were laid endlessly across Europe and America; love-making was his only successful sport. He owned a string of racehorses that invariably finished without a place; bookmakers quoted them at prices that embarrassed both the horses and the jockeys who rode them. He took up motor-racing and drove in the Mille Miglia, the Targa Florio and the Le Mans 24-hour event; he finished in none of them, managing, miraculously, to emerge unscathed from crashes that earned him the nickname Abdul the Wrecker. His father, however, had insisted on his death-bed that Abdul should succeed him, and the ruling party, its faction leaders all afraid of each other, had agreed. They had assumed that Abdul would be no more than a playboy President and they, splitting the spoils between them like true democrats, could run the country as they wished.

      They were mistaken. Abdul turned out to, be a better politician than any of them; and a despot to boot, a boot he used to great effect. The two jails of Bunda, the national capital, were soon full of party men who thought they could be independent of him; common criminals were hanged, to make way in the cells for the jailed politicians. The latter, however, did not remain there long. Nothing changes the mind of a pragmatic politician so quickly as his having to share a prison cell with his rivals; it is more upsetting than sharing a voting booth with a citizen voting against you. All at once they were born-again Timori supporters, shouting hallelujahs, or the Muslim equivalent, to the skies. The army generals, already wooed by Abdul with promises of long courses in Britain and the United States, smiled cynically at the venality of politicians and swore to Abdul that he had nothing to fear from them.

      Abdul, in turn, was wooed by the Americans. Recognizing that anyone who raised the anti-communist banner was going to be saluted by Washington, he invited the Americans, for a consideration, to enlarge their naval base. For the next thirty-four years Palucca enjoyed a stable existence, a state of affairs accepted by all but those who believed in freedom of expression, honest government and democracy. Since Abdul Timori believed in none of those aberrations and the Americans forgot to remind him of them, nothing, it seemed, was going to disturb the Timori delusion of his own grandeur.

      He married the daughter of another old family, but it was a marriage of inconvenience: he found she got in the way of his mistresses. He divorced her by clapping his hands and telling her she wasn’t wanted; a procedure that several foreign ambassadors, whose wives were a hindrance, marvelled at and envied. Timori married again, this time one of his mistresses, but she at once turned into a wife and after a year he got rid of her, too. Finally, ten years ago, he had married Delvina O’Reilly, who had come to Bunda as a speciality dancer, a Mata Hari whose intelligence work was only in her own interests. Her mother had been a Malay, her father an RAAF sergeant-pilot; she had been educated in a convent but had never learned to be a good Catholic or even a good girl. At dancing school it was said that the only time her legs were together was during the execution of an entrechat; one smitten choreographer tried to write a ballet for a horizontal ballerina. When she married Abdul Timori, in a wedding extravaganza that Paris-Match ran over five pages, she let him know it was for good: for her good if not his. Abdul, to everyone’s surprise, not least his own, accepted her dictum.

      Then the plug fell out of the oil market and Palucca’s economy slid downhill on the slick. The Americans were suddenly more interested in Central America than in South-east Asia; Washington also, at long last, began to have pangs about the corruption in the Timori regime. Abdul and Delvina Timori began to assume the image of a major embarrassment. The Americans, belatedly, looked around for an acceptable alternative, meanwhile pressing Timori to resign on the grounds of ill-health. Madame Timori, who was in the best of health, even if her husband wasn’t, told the Americans to get lost, a frequent location for them in foreign policy. The British, the French, the Dutch and all the lesser ex-colonial powers sat back and smiled smugly. As a mandarin in Whitehall remarked, nothing succeeds in making one feel good so much as seeing someone else fail.

      Then the Paluccan generals, all too old now for courses at Sandhurst and West Point, tired of army manoeuvres in which never a shot was fired, decided it was time they earned the medals with which they had decorated themselves. They staged a coup, asked the Americans to fly the Timoris out of Bunda and promised a brand new future for Palucca and the Paluccans.

      That was when the trouble started outside Palucca.

      3

      ‘Nobody wants them,’ said Russ Clements. ‘The Americans wouldn’t fly them out and they leaned on Canberra.’

      ‘Kenthurst was telling me last night,’ said Malone, ‘that everyone down in Canberra wishes they’d move on. Including Phil Norval.’

      ‘Canberra is going to be even more shitty when we tell & what came in from Interpol this morning.’

      When Malone had arrived at Homicide this morning Clements had been waiting for him with a phone message from Fingerprints. The print on the cistern button in the Kiddle flat had been positively identified: it belonged to Miguel Seville.

      ‘Are there any mug shots of Seville?’ Malone asked.

      ‘Just the one.’

      Clements took a 5 × 4 photo out of the murder box, an old shoe carton that over the years had, successively, held all the bits and pieces of the cases he had worked on. It was falling apart, only held together by a patchwork skin of Scotch tape, but he held on to it as if it were some treasure chest in which lay the solution to all murders.

      ‘It was taken about twelve years ago, when the Argentinian cops picked him up. That was before he became a mercenary, when he was with that Tupperware crowd. Tupperware?’

      ‘Tupamaros.’

      Clements grinned. ‘I was close.’

      ‘I know a Tupperware lady who wouldn’t thank you for it.’

      Malone looked at the photo of the curly-haired handsome young man. He would have been in his late twenties or early thirties when the photo was taken, but already the future was etched in his face: a defiance of all authority, a contempt for all political and social morality. Malone wondered if he had ever had any genuine belief in the Tupamaros’ fight against the Argentinian junta and its repressive rule.

      ‘He’s taken the place of that Venezuelan guy,’ said Clements. ‘That Carlos. Whatever happened to him?’

      ‘Special Branch said the rumour is that the Libyans got rid of him. Maybe we should ring up Gaddafi and ask him to get rid of this bloke, too.’

      ‘You reckon he’ll try another shot at Timori?’

      ‘Depends how much he’s been paid. And who’s paying him.’

      Malone looked out the window, over Hyde Park and down to the northern end where Macquarie Street ran into it. That street was where the State politicians conducted their small wars; but there was no terrorism. There might be vitriolic and vulgar abuse that made other parliaments look like church meetings, but there were no assassin’s bullets. Now Timori, the unwanted guest, had, even if involuntarily, brought that danger to Sydney.

      ‘Did The Dutchman have anything to say this morning?’ So far Malone hadn’t looked at this morning’s newspapers. He was not a radio listener and he usually got home too late to look at the evening TV news. When he got the news it was usually cold and in print, but he had found that the world still didn’t get