The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey

life into jewels. She had plump arms and maybe a little too much weight under the chin and her belly pushed out against her clothes, but she was sexy. You had to say, whatever problems she had in bed, she was a sexy woman. You could watch men see it in her, but never straightaway.
    ‘Big night,’ he said. He stood up so she could take the bar stool and he sat instead on the ping-pong table.
    ‘Sure,’ she said. She was bright and tight, could barely talk. Tonight she was going to have her meeting with the band and with the lawyer. She drank her beer. He leaned across to rub her neck, but you could not touch her neck or shoulders unless she had been drinking.
    ‘Don’t, hon.’ She took his hand and held it. Something had happened with the neck and shoulders. Sentimental Cacka had dragged her out of bed at two in the morning to sing ‘Batti, batti’ from Don Giovanni to his visitors. It happened then, he guessed. She never said exactly, but he saw it exactly, in his mind’s eye. You could see the shadows of it. You could draw a map from them.
    ‘What you think?’ she said.
    ‘About what?’
    ‘Will I do it?’
    ‘You’ve got to decide,’ he said. ‘I can’t tell you what to do.’
    ‘I’m just hurt, I guess. I’m pissed off with them for talking to a lawyer.’
    ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I know.’ He patted her thigh sympathetically – he was the one who had persuaded Craig and Steve Putzel that they could pull Cathy out on the road if they did what he said. He was the one who found them this so-called Entertainment Lawyer. He had manoeuvred them all to this point where they were an inch away from having the lives they wanted, all of them. He brushed some ash off his suede shoe. He buttoned his suit jacket and unbuttoned it.
    ‘Big night,’ he said again. Through the Venetian blinds he could see Mort walking down the fire escape from this mother’s apartment. This time next year, all this was going to seem like a bad dream.
    Cathy saw Mort too. ‘They’ve been talking about the doctor,’ she said. ‘You can bet on it. He’s been telling her it was all my idea, the coward.’
    Howie always thought Mort was a dangerous man, but he doubted he would be dishonest in the way Cathy imagined. He watched Mort as he bent over the whitewashed sign Howie had written on the windscreen of the red Toyota truck. He scratched at it with his fingernail.
    ‘He doesn’t like my sign,’ he said.
    Cathy lifted the Venetian blind a fraction so it pinged.
    Mrs Catchprice had walked back from the gates and joined her son. She also scratched at the whitewash with one of her keys.
    ‘You know he thinks “As-new” is sleazy,’ Cathy said. ‘You must have known they’d wipe it off.’
    ‘Ah,’ said Howie, ‘who cares.’
    That surprised her. She looked at him with her head on one side and then, silently, drew aside his jacket, undid a shirt button, and looked at the colour of his rash.
    She said: ‘You really think I’m going to take the leap, don’t you?’
    He wasn’t counting on anything until it happened. She had been this close four years before, and once again, two years before that. Each time Granny Catchprice pulled her strings. You would not believe the tricks the old woman could pull to keep her workhorse working.
    ‘If we’re done for tax I can’t go on the road. You know that. I can’t just desert them.’
    ‘Yes you can,’ he said. He did up his shirt button. ‘This time you’ve got to.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to.’
    She had that tightness in her bones, a flushed luminous look, as if she was about to do a show. He watched her drain her beer.
    ‘You look beautiful,’ he said.
    ‘This time I’m going to do it.’
    ‘When you look like that I want to fuck you.’ He came and held her from behind and began to kiss her neck. She accepted his kisses. They lay on her skin like unresolved puzzles.
    ‘He’s coming up here,’ she said.
    She meant Mort. He could see why she said