The Brothers Wolfe

By Steve Hawke

Meet the Brothers Wolfe. Elliot Wolfe: ambitious, ruthless and living for the thrill of the deal. Athol Wolfe: a young man trying to find a place outside his big brother' s shadow.

Include maiden aunt with a long memory, a mild-mannered father reluctant to bring the family menswear business into the modern world.

Bind them together in a family trust, and throw them into a melting pot of greedy entrepreneurs and high-flying criminals.

Add a sexy French girlfriend with dreams of her own and a big, dark family secret and watch it all explode.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Aug 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781760992279

Book preview

PART I

1 · Windinup, May 2009

The valley faces almost due west, sloping away from Athol on either side of a gentle dividing spur that rises towards the house. He is sitting on a deck, feet on the top step of the flight of stairs that looks down the spurline, inviting the valley into the embrace of Mitzi’s house. On the northern face are rows of hazelnut and oak trees, bare of leaves in the late autumn, as are the vines planted on the southern face to catch the winter light. The pink of the lowering sun is faint through the low cloud. The first damp caresses of a mizzle make themselves felt. It could be Provence, not Pemberton, but for the eucalypts beyond the fenceline, and the chunky, unmistakeable silhouettes of the black cockatoos flying to roost amongst them.

He watches the grass begin to bead with droplets of moisture.

Smiles slowly at the call of the cockatoos.

Leans into the serenity of the landscape, reaching out a hand, curling his fingers as if to draw in a trace of its essence.

This feels like an ending.

Is it?

He thinks he has lost the capacity to tell any more.

A cold gust intrudes on his reverie. He gropes for his jacket without looking. No luck. He sits a little longer, but the sun is gone, the temperature is dropping, the mizzle is thickening. As he pushes to his feet the chortles of a kookaburra trio mingle with the cockie calls.

He finds the jacket, and as he shrugs himself into it, he sees Mitzi standing in the doorway, watching, a glass of wine in each hand, a fire flickering to life in the room behind her, a quiet smile.

‘You know how to live, Mitzi.’

She passes a glass, and extends her smile ever so slightly in acknowledgement.

‘Out here or inside?’ she asks.

‘Here for now.’

They settle at either end of the old verandah sofa, watching the dying of the day.

Athol can still remember the first time he heard her voice, thirty years ago. The smoky laziness of its rhythms, the remarkable deepness of its tone. Her command of English has improved, but the voice has not changed, and that French accent is as voluptuous as it always seemed.

Mitzi raises her glass. ‘To your brother.’

‘To your …?’

‘To my … Question mark. I gave up trying to put a label on we two. We were bound. Are. That is all I can say.’

‘Bound? An interesting choice of word.’

‘He always defied categorisation.’

They lean in to clink glasses, and say it together. ‘Elliot.’

‘Fish food or Phuket? What d’you reckon?’

She winces at the crudity of his pun. ‘I do not like to make guesses in such a matter. Or jokes.’

‘Fair enough.’

The last kookaburra call signals darkness as Athol settles back into the sofa.

There is only one question on his lips, but for reasons he can’t quite fathom, he holds back. Perhaps, tonight, he just wants to indulge in memories, however mixed they might be.

It is Mitzi who breaks the silence. ‘He was a good man, Athol, by my lights.’

It takes Athol a few moments to emerge from his reflections, assimilate her words.

‘With Mum gone to her maker, you’re probably the only person on this earth that thinks so.’ Athol drains his glass.

‘Do not be bitter, Athol. At least not tonight. You and your brother are not quite the polar opposites that you like to imagine. He was not a simple man.’

Athol laughs. ‘No. Simple and Elliot have never gone together in the same sentence; not that I can remember.’

‘Shall we go inside?’

Athol grazes hungrily from the array of cold meats, homemade bread and various delicacies laid out on the low table in front of the fire, and works his way through a second glass of red. A thought occurs as to when and how the spread appeared. While he was on the deck? Pre-prepared? Sent over from René’s restaurant seems the most likely. But he does not ask. Mitzi’s utter self-containment has always intimidated him.

He nods at her offer of a top-up.

‘You’re no connoisseur, are you Athol,’ she says as she pours. ‘This is our best vintage.’

‘Wasted on me, I’m afraid. I’m a wine nuffie, and a foodie’s nightmare. Thanks anyway.’

‘Like Elliot. I tried to educate him, but I had to give up.’

‘A hangover of our Presbyterian upbringing, maybe, such as it was. I think the Masons were a bigger deal for Dad than the church. But that’s our roots.’

‘You couldn’t shut him up about hashish though. He savoured it. Could talk about it ad nauseam. Just the way my brother and I can talk about food and wine.’

‘I just smoked it with him, back in the day. He probably figured the connoisseur type talk would be over my head.’

‘The hash merchant,’ she says, with a rueful smile.

‘What?!’

‘You don’t know this story? That’s what I heard him called, before I’d ever met him.’

‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, Mitzi.’

She selects a single olive; the first food she has taken. Leans back in her armchair, watching him all the while as she eats the fruit, takes a sip of wine. Athol cannot decipher the look. She unfolds from the chair, moves round behind him, to stare through the glass doors into the darkness. His glass is still more than half full, but Athol reaches out to take the bottle from the table and top it up. He senses a night just beginning.

2 · Calais to Marseille, December 1979

Being on the road is Elliot Wolfe’s natural state. He has a flat in Earl’s Court, but he has been on the move since leaving Claremont as a nineteen-year-old at the tail end of the swinging sixties. Three years on the real hippie trail, and some adventures he only boasts about in very select company. Then the last few years organising and transporting the ‘pretend hippies’, as he contemptuously calls his customers, in the fleet of garish campervans and minibuses that he owns. His ‘Lost World’ brand, advertised in student magazines of the Antipodes and the Americas, has carved out a niche in the ‘alternative and adventure’ travel sector. In fact, Elliot is prone to claiming that he invented it as a market.

He once did this Calais to Marseille run in seven and a quarter hours to rescue a tour group whose minibus had died. But this time is very different in nature, and in purpose. Of late he’s developed a sideline that is shaping to put his main business in the shade – if he decides to pursue it after this trip.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth. It’s his favourite saying, even if it makes no sense to him at all. He’d always maintained a network of small-time local dealers to discreetly keep his travellers happy; the drivers knew where to go. And he’d always been aware of the logical possibilities, without actively pursuing them. Until the first medium-size deal fell into his lap, almost literally. Hashish. His own drug of choice as it happened. Which led to another two runs, Tangier to Malaga. No dramas.

Then last month, the first delivery to Sergei in Marseille. Scary dude, no doubt. But very professional, good to do business with, he told himself. That shipment was the big side of medium. This run is serious.

A brief stopover at the bank in Paris to stash his own passport in the safety deposit box and collect the New Zealand one he uses for these escapades. A flight to Lyon in the name of the man on the passport, Guy Richards. A hire car there, also in Richards’ name. A detour to Montpellier to pick up the cargo. He has never covered his tracks this elaborately before, and now, on the last leg to Marseille, he has never been so edgy.

Scary dude.

Wonder if that bird of his’ll be there again? She’s something else. Languid. That’s the word. Wonder if that means she’s on the gear. Nah, she’s got her shit together, I reckon. And that voice of hers. So deep.

He slaps the steering wheel. ‘Mind on the job, Elliot.’ He says it out loud. ‘It’s time to deal.’

3 · Perth, January 1980

Athol pointedly ignores his mother’s chin lift and twirling forefinger urging him to get up and circulate. With the ill grace only a teenager dragooned against his will can muster, he balls his fists deeper into his pockets and slouches yet lower in his chair.

It is the fag end of his third summer stint working in the family shop, as he calls it. He has thus far resisted all his father’s attempts and stratagems to get him to ‘engage’ in the family business. But a three-week spell in January, when they are short-staffed and the days are quiet, goes some way to placating the old man, and beats the shifts at fast-food joints that some of his mates do for their pocket money. And this event is being counted as a work day, otherwise he would have really dug his heels in about being a part of the carry-on.

Though he professes lack of interest, Wolfe’s Menswear is in his DNA. He has been in and out of the Hay Street and Bay View Terrace stores since before he can remember, and listened to accounts of his father’s day-to-day travails in the rag trade over more dinners than he can count. He knows enough to feel in his bones that today’s grand folly is exactly that. Dad chasing the zeitgeist but never catching up. Suits and gentlemen’s leisure wear are Wolfe’s go, not jeans and allegedly funky shirts. Surely there are enough old farts and younger wannabees still left in Perth to keep the tills ticking over?

He only takes in snatches of his father’s speech, as he contemplates his shoes, drawing them in to let some old lady pass. He’s heard it all before, the founding of ‘this great emporium’ by his grandfather, et cetera, et cetera. It’s jazzed up a bit by his father making embarrassing attempts to sound hip. After all, this is supposed to be the launch of ‘Wolfe On The Go’, a ‘men’s boutique for Perth’s young movers and shakers’. Dad, please! he groans inwardly.

His mind drifts to thoughts of scoring a bag from Rob tonight. To a week of freedom before the drudgery of the summer job becomes the nightmare of Year Twelve. To anything but this. He half hears Grandpa’s name being invoked yet again, then cringes as his father concludes … he didn’t catch the segue, but something about ‘my father Rupert Wolfe’s torch will be passed one day soon to my sons, Elliot and Athol.’

He is aware of heads turning in his direction at the back of the room as the thinnish crowd applauds his father, but he keeps his eyes on his shoes.

‘Do you know the truth of it?’

What the?!

He’d hardly been aware of the old lady settling into the seat beside him after she’d stepped around his feet.

He turns to the voice, and after a flurry of uncertainty recognises his Great-Aunt Ida.

The leech. That’s what mum always calls her. Dad prefers to ignore his aunt, and to avoid talking to or about her if at all possible. But for reasons Athol’s never been able to fathom, just the sight of Ida seems to make his mother apoplectic. She almost hissed the leech epithet at him earlier, when the old woman had appeared, an odd presence amongst the hip crowd his father’s advertising agency had assembled for the launch. The family lore is that Grandpa Rupert had gifted her some shares in the company as an act of charity, and that she’d been living off the proceeds and the reflected glory ever since. Athol’s only ever encountered her at company occasions like this, never at a family gathering.

‘Sorry. The truth of what?’

‘Of all this.’ The wave of Ida’s cane encompasses the room. The building. Everything Wolfe.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you’re talking about.’

‘I’m sure you aren’t, young Athol. It’ll all be buried, lost in the mists of time, most likely. We’re good at that here in Western Australia, aren’t we. Burying the past. The State of Excitement, the government’s trying to call it these days.’ There is a mischievous twinkle in her eye as she enquires, ‘Enjoying yourself?’

Her wink disarms him. He cannot help a shamefaced grin.

‘I could tell you some stories about your grandfather and his emporium. If you’re interested.’

4 · Marseille, December 1979

She is not Mitzi. That is yet to come.

She is no longer Marie, peasant girl, playing amongst the hazelnut trees with Kazoo the truffle dog.

In this incarnation she has become Angie. It is a skin she would shed if she could.

It is the first time in weeks that she has been let out of the house. It is the same clear winter sky, the same sea that she can see from there, but here in the café they seem bluer, richer.

Guy Richards. In her mind she hears it in French. Ghee Risharde.

New Zealander.

Is that an island of Australia?

Handsome, no?

Yes.

A cop?

She doesn’t think so, but Sergei is deeply suspicious. He has put her out here as bait.

Cop or not, she does not like Guy’s chances. Sergei put that ridiculous bulletproof vest that makes him look like the Michelin Man’s bastard son in his bag this morning. And pocketed the rosary beads that normally stay sitting on the bedside table. The rosary beads scare the shit out of her.

Lost in her thoughts, she is taken aback, and cross at herself for being so inattentive, when Guy pulls out the bentwood chair opposite her at the tiny table.

‘Hello Angie, wasn’t expecting you at the rendezvous.’

His French is passable, if far from fluent.

‘Guy! You surprised me.’

He cocks an eyebrow as he grins. That double gesture. That, and something about the loose physicality of him. Sergei and his lieutenants all hold themselves so tightly, as if the world is about to pounce upon them. She makes a decision without realising there was one to be made. But she does not lose her wits.

‘You are on your own?’

‘Of course.’

‘I am not.’

His eyes do not dart. They hold hers. Another tick.

‘Can you tell me where your friends are?’

She gives the slightest of shrugs.

His eyebrow movement this time is a mere flicker, an acknowledgement of her situation.

They have each taken a step.

She attracts a waiter’s attention and orders coffees.

‘Sergei calls you the dodo, not the kiwi.’

‘What?’

‘The extinct one, no? He thinks himself witty.’

‘Do I look extinct to you, Angie?’

‘He does not mean you well.’

Another step. Not yet irretrievable.

‘I wish only to make a transaction with him. My understanding is that our first was mutually satisfactory. Whether this second is our last or not is his call.’

‘Sergei is not a man to sit on his hands. I think he may have found out who your supplier is.’

She has declared her hand.

They watch each other across the two feet of table as the waiter deposits their coffees.

‘I may not be required for the third transaction?’

The corners of her mouth lift slightly. She indicates with her eyes the bag slung over his shoulder. ‘You have with you the essentials?’

It takes an effort, but he grins again. ‘Always.’

‘Keep smiling, Guy,’ she says, with a flicker of her fingers that suggests the air around them. ‘It is not for me to tell you, but would you like to hear my suggestion?’

‘I suspect I’m not going to like it, but I am listening.’

‘I do not know what Sergei is planning. I am his woman, not his confidante.’

Elliot can’t help interrupting. ‘His woman? Truly?’

‘He believes that I belong to him. And as things stand now, it is as good as true.’

‘We are both in an awkward situation then, it seems … You were saying?’

‘You have fallen into his lap, you and your hashish. He welcomes your goods, but I heard him say to his main man that he does not like to do business with hippies.’

Angie only closes her eyes for the duration of a deep breath, sharply in, slowly, almost reluctantly out.

Elliot is well used to moments of hyper-clarity in which all the angles of a deal and the imperatives of self-preservation are resolved and crystallised into decision and action. He prizes this instinct above all else. He trusts it absolutely.

Normally.

Her beauty undermines his trust in himself.

Her brow is knit with tension, but somehow this only enhances her …

Perfection?

He senses the word he feels, and is wary. But nor can he deny it. She has the symmetry and sculpted poise of a catwalk model. But that is not it. It is the promise of her bearing; the way that she carries herself. An innate, unselfconscious gracefulness, regardless of this circumstance.

All this in the span of her single breath.

A roll of her fingers on the glass tabletop.

‘There is no time for explanations, Guy. They will already be wondering why I am lingering so long at this rendezvous. I have no essentials, but the time has come for me to leave.’

‘Leave me?’

‘Sergei. If I make it. And that is my suggestion to you also.’ She summons a casual laugh as she gets to her feet, unobtrusively slipping a purse into her pocket from the handbag she leaves on the table. ‘Finish your coffee. I am just going to the ladies.’ Then a change of tone. ‘The cathedral. North-west gate. Four twenty. I will not expect you.’

5 · Windinup, May 2009

‘Sergei had eighty kilos of the best Moroccan hashish, all without parting with a franc. But it would’ve been unlike him to leave loose ends. I assume he came looking. There was much tension and subterfuge until we boarded our flight to Singapore, but no dramatics.

‘By then I knew Elliot’s real name of course. And he asked what name I would like on the passport he arranged for me. Don’t ask me why I chose Mitzi. It has no significance. Just a lightness, or so it seemed.’

Mitzi pauses her tale to attend to the stoking of the fire.

‘How?’ asks Athol.

‘How what?’ she counters, without turning.

‘The fake passport?’

‘Details, Athol. I don’t know. I was holed up in a very unglamorous pensione a few kilometres outside Le Havre while he organised it and wound up his affairs in London.’

She places one more log as the flames begin to take hold again, then resumes her place in the armchair. ‘There are always unknowns, uncertainties. Always. But this you must understand, Athol. We believe that we saved each other’s lives. Truly. Literally. First me his. Then him mine. We each did it … what is the word …’ She smiles to herself. ‘Impulsively. Intuitively. There. Two words. You see, my vocabulary has become better over the years. I like to read.’

She tops up their wine glasses.

‘I never doubted my intuition of that day. I think Elliot did from time to time. But only on the surface, if you know what I mean. Never in his core. Such beginnings create a bond that is not lightly broken. And a trust in each other that will endure even betrayals. Tu comprends?’

‘I hear you.’

When Athol returns from the loo there is a small silver case on the table, and atop the case a smaller virgin block of hashish, an alluring honey brown. It is decades since Athol was a smoker. He takes it delicately between thumb and middle finger, and inhales the long-forgotten sweetness.

‘I thought you might like to put the day to bed, as Elliot says. There is plenty of time for talking tomorrow.’

‘Fuck, Mitzi. That’s creepy. That’s the very last thing he said to me. Time to put the day to bed, bro. I could see the glow of the joint on the verandah when I went to bed.’

‘It’s what he said on many nights.’

Athol shakes his head. ‘I’m half tempted, but I don’t handle it any more. Found out again a couple of months ago with guess who. You?’

A shake of her head. ‘Once in a blue moon, if that. I kept it here for him really.’ She catches herself. ‘Keep? Kept?’ A wan smile. ‘Let’s say keep.’

‘If you say so.’

‘More wine then? I’m done, but you are welcome.’

‘Sure, but don’t waste the good stuff on me.’

‘We only have good stuff here, Athol.’

‘I’m sure that’s true, but not the best then, hey.’

She pauses in the doorway as she goes to fetch another bottle. Turns, holds his eye. ‘You know I am not Mitzi any more?’

‘So I gather.’

‘Legally. By deed poll. I am once again Marie, my true name. People here will be confused if they hear you call me by the old name.’

‘I shall do my best. But you will always be Mitzi in my mind.’

She smiles. ‘I can live with that.’

6 · Perth, March 1934

The lawyer looks up from a final check of the papers, lifts his gaze above the pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, and adjusts his focus to fix Ida. ‘Miss Ida Adelaide Wolfe, eldest child of the late Mr Robert Gordon Wolfe, and sole progeny of said Mr Wolfe and Adelaide Mary Wolfe, nee Jarvis, as attested in these documents before me?’

‘Yes,’ she answers.

He moves his attention to Rupert. ‘Mr Rupert Angus Wolfe, son of the late Mr Robert Gordon Wolfe, and sole progeny of said Mr Wolfe and Susannah Imogen Wolfe, nee Wells, as attested in these documents before me?’

‘That’s me, mate.’

The lawyer tries to disguise his distaste for the familiarity. ‘Thank you, Mr Wolfe, Miss Wolfe. I have before me the will of the late Mr Frederick Wolfe, formerly of Faraway Downs Station, via Halls Creek. Were either of you acquainted with the said Frederick Wolfe? Your father’s older brother.’

‘In a manner of speaking,’ Ida says.

‘Dad preferred not to talk about him,’ offers Rupert.

A dry cough. ‘Our firm has taken advice in relation to Mr Wolfe’s will.’ A shuffling of papers. ‘The Chief Protector of Aborigines advises that it is neither legal under current legislation, nor appropriate in his opinion, for the provisions of the will whereby the property would pass to his half-caste son, to be activated.

‘In these circumstances, it is my solemn duty to inform yourselves that as the two known living relatives of Mr Frederick Wolfe, you jointly inherit his estate, which comprises Pastoral Lease Number 53078, known as Faraway Downs, and the goods and chattels thereon.’

7 · Perth, March 1934

Ida is strolling down the Terrace to meet up with Genevieve, who will be eager for a report on the summons to the lawyer’s office. But her mind is not on the apparent windfall. She is back at Granite Downs, twenty years old – half a lifetime ago. Even then she had thought of it as her Judas moment. And she has just done it again.

‘In a manner of speaking!’

‘My mealy mouth.’ She says it out loud, with a brisk shake of her head, drawing a glance from the businessman walking in the opposite direction.

The journey north had been all that Ida dreamed of: from the sweet pleasure she found in the mingled tears and cheers of friends and family at the Fremantle dockside to the glory of the sunsets on the open sea. She had sailed first class, courtesy of the Montagues, and dined at the captain’s table.

She smiled inwardly as they gathered for dinner each evening after walking the decks. She was the only woman at the table, amongst the pearling masters and station owners and managers returning home from doing business and having a spree in Perth. It was amusing to watch the good-natured way they moderated their coarse humour for her benefit, and competed for her favours. It was done with appropriate reserve and the greatest courtesy, for they all knew that she was headed for Granite Downs as the guest of young Jim Montague, heir to a bigger slice of the Kimberley than any of them would ever lay claim to.

Many of their tales of life on the frontier were clearly far-fetched, and occasionally tended to the risqué. She responded with an appropriate mixture of laughter, wonderment and respect. Her behaviour was impeccable, if perhaps not as modest as the schoolmarms of Perth Ladies College might have liked. ‘A feisty young filly,’ she overheard one of the men remarking to another, and smiled to herself. Their company was so much less staid than she was used to, and she enjoyed it.

The last night of the voyage was spent ashore in Broome as the guest of one of the pearlers who had been a fellow diner at the captain’s table. What a day and a night! Still the memory thrills her. Sights and tastes and smells previously unimagined. The bustle of sailors and divers of diverse nationalities and colours coming and going from his yard. And the pearls! That night the fellow had tumbled a handful from a small chest onto a black velvet cloth. Each was a perfect little globe, a tiny, gleaming world of its own, as strange and mysterious as everything that was happening to her. The pearler saw her covetous eye. ‘Tell Master Montague to come and see me if he’s looking for an engagement ring,’ he winked, causing her to blush furiously.

And then Derby. Jim waving to her from the long, rickety jetty protruding out into the murk brown water of King Sound, not a breath of air to be had, the heat like a hammer. The ride down the jetty in the old horse-drawn tram to the Port Hotel, beset by stares and half-heard ribaldry. She fanned herself with her hat, and told Jim it was the heat, but he could see she was embarrassed.

Even now, remembering back to those days, she feels uneasy. For the first time in her young life she could not feel the rhythm of the people and the places around her. In the world of Derby and the dusty track that wound eastwards towards Granite Downs, it seemed that in her presence things were left half-said or unsaid, unexplained.

She tried to insist to herself that she was indeed in love. But Jim seemed different. The dashing, gay young man of the Perth ballrooms and society gatherings was clearly of another world. Here, the red dust hung around his clothes and his whiskers, as it did about everyone. His face was redder too, and he sweated so – though who was she to talk. And there was a coarseness to his manner, she felt. The style of a young gentleman on the Swan did not meet the requirements of the Kimberley, where he had to prove to himself and everyone else that he was man enough, tough enough, to step into the shoes of his father when the time came. Old