Dragons at the Party Read Online Free PDF Page 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.
    III
    “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 ‘em 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 x 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