Liner

by James Barlow

  Zito said almost earnestly, ‘What it amounts to is that we solve all your business difficulties. All we ask is a third of the profit.’

  Attolico asked, ‘How much is your turnover?’

  It was no use arguing ‘That is none of your business.’ Tornetta gave him a figure, deducting one third.

  ‘And the profit?’

  ‘Hard to say. I’ve been here only . . .’

  ‘But approximately?’

  Tornetta quoted a figure, again deducting a third.

  ‘How many girls?’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘You pay them – how much?’

  Tornetta began to sweat. Perhaps they had already questioned the girls. He gave the correct figure.

  ‘And the sidelines?’

  ‘I do not understand.’

  Zito informed him with terrifying calm. ‘I explain. The girl you call Lucy Lolita is one of our girls. She says sidelines for a few good clients, up in a bedroom. Thirty percent you collect, yes?’

  ‘I had forgotten.’

  ‘You remembered the turnover, but not the profit,’ Attolico said, like an accountant to a client who wished to be dishonest, which was very distasteful.

  Zito suddenly sat down. ‘Let’s begin again,’ he suggested. ‘Five girls. A hustler. Four shows a night. What’s the rent? You are obviously not a good businessman. We shall improve things.’

  Tornetta stood up, turned, and stretched an arm. ‘Here’s the rent book.’ He opened a drawer of the cheap wooden cupboard by the stove and threw the book lightly to the seated Zito, who took it with his right hand, putting down a pencil.

  Tornetta reached farther very quickly and grabbed the metal jug with the soup in it. Its handle was burning hot, but he was committed now.

  The arc of scalding thick fluid caught Zito across the face and his left ear. His reaction in pain was so violent that he lifted the table into the air with his knees. He fell off his chair and writhed on the floor, screaming.

  Attolico was a knife man. He backed a little because he was startled and wary of the jug. His face was now quite different. The talk was over. He was a professional and entitled now to exercise his skill. His employers would approve.

  He threw a chair at Tornetta, who had to let it hit him or lose the contents of the jug in his outstretched right arm.

  They closed in a corner and Tornetta poured fluid over the knife hand as it was thrust toward his stomach. The movement weakened, lost momentum, and the knife merely penetrated his jacket before dropping to the floor.

  Attolico kicked, fought for the jug, but he had lost his fighting hand, was in fact hissing with pain.

  Tornetta tipped the jug’s contents onto his chest.

  It was too much agony to bear. Attolico pleaded surrender, for mercy, forgiveness; nothing would be said; he would go away, only now, please . . .

  But Tornetta had the terror of someone attacked by a wasp, or who had trodden on a red-back spider by mistake. He had to inflict more harm, to be sure, to crush the wasp, stamp again on the spider.

  The four cupfuls of scalding fluid left in the jug he threw into Attolico’s nose and eyes, which doubled him up, blinded, moaning.

  Tornetta was grinding his teeth and sweating. He had to go on. He mustn’t kill them or the dicks would become involved. But incapacitated – that was a private matter.

  He kicked the prone Zito where it would cripple, and then still fearful, used his shoes on the man’s head.

  He looked around then in desperation for a means of crippling Attolico, who was making much noise and blundering about. There was a small hammer in a drawer. He smashed the man’s knuckles with it, then battered at the back of his head until, like a great wounded bull, the 225-pound Attolico dropped unconscious.

  Tornetta could scarcely breathe. He gulped air like a jet engine.

  The door of the kitchen opened and Prudence walked in. She took in the situation instantly, laughed, commented ‘Ar, Christ, what a beaut mess!’ and rotated in order to leave.

  In panic Tornetta grabbed her by the hair, and when the big girl struggled powerfully, he hit her hard across her nose, breaking it. She wept, howled and bled. It was very satisfying to him. She wouldn’t despise him lightly again. He had a better idea – fulfilment with the jug.

  The metal was still scalding hot. He pushed her big near-naked body against the door she had been anxious to use, and pressed the burning hot metal against her buttocks, branding her.

  Prudence bucked and shouted, and then fell down. The blood from her nose was half choking her; she was now frightened. Tornetta realized that he had been foolish. She might legitimately complain to the dicks and bring the house down. He hit her twice with the small hammer. She lay there groaning on the edge of consciousness, very sad, not likely to bother him. . .

  He in any case locked the kitchen door, put the key in his pocket, went into a shabbier laundry room, long since disused, and from a cupboard picked out his solitary suitcase, already packed. He returned to the kitchen, searched the pockets of Zito and Attolico and found seven hundred dollars.

  Outside, the darkness blinded him for a minute in the dirty yard, but the cool October air, even with its smell of garbage, restored him. He was not exhausted, not even tired, and fright only assailed him inasmuch as it insisted on movement.

  He walked, breathing heavily, through a few back streets. He could smell the bread being baked, and saw the kaleidoscope of neon signs of the car salesrooms in William Street. From Lorenzini’s he inhaled the odour of cauliflower au gratin, which would, he recalled, be followed by zabaglione and very black espresso.

  The hired car was where he had left it two hours earlier. He put the case in the trunk and drove, meaninglessly, movement being needed more at the moment than direction. The bright lights and heavy traffic for a while gave him the sensation of being followed. He concluded that he was panicking. The scent of onions drifted into the automobile at one traffic light, and girls in mini skirts strolled about. No trouble. Flower stalls, bookshops, boutiques, the Crest Hotel, American soldiers on R and R, on past the Pancake Parlour. Tornetta was losing his way and heading towards the docks.

  He drove into hilly suburbia and hid himself among the strings of terraces with their cast-iron verandas, solitary lemon trees in the handkerchief-sized back gardens, dust-covered frangipani and fishbone ferns, and the escalating rows of shabby old wooden houses, saturated in paint of all the colours of the spectrum as the district alternated between gentility, poverty and the current kinky.

  Tornetta had wasted thirty minutes before he realized that gas was being burned up, he was tiring, and he had a long way to go. He filled up the tank and had the tyres checked and picked up the main road to Canberra two hundred miles distant.

  They had been foolish to allow him a few days. He had in the time available been enabled to make a considerable number of arrangements. Perhaps they – the employees of Zito and Attolico – presumed that he, Tornetta, was some kind of cheap hustler, or a glorified ponce.

  In that case they might now conclude that he had gone to ground in one of Sydney’s crummier suburbs, that he would turn up in time and could then be dealt with. But if they were Mafia no suburb could hide him and he would have to exercise the utmost cunning to escape them.

  This he had done in tedious detail. There was a P&O Orient Line vessel in Sydney, and Sitmar Line and Shaw Savill liners in Melbourne. Qantas Airlines had international flights out of Sydney and Melbourne every day; there were other flights of BOAC, Pan American and even South African Airways. They might be watching these places. They might be vigilant enough to canvass the main shipping lines, airline offices and travel agents – ‘I have a friend booked out of here. His name is Tornetta, a man of about thirty-six, twelve stone, five foot nine. He doesn’t even know I’m i
n this city. I wonder if you’d be kind enough to look him up . . .’ And some girl would do just that. But for an internal flight within Australia Tornetta did not need to give his real name. Nevertheless, extreme caution would be needed, and he had booked an air ticket from Canberra to Hobart, the capital city of the island State of Tasmania, using the name Costello. He would have to wait ten minutes in Melbourne for the connecting jet, but if he managed that the chances were very high that he’d reach Hobart unnoticed. And in Hobart, arriving at the dawn of this day after he’d hurt Zito and Attolico, he could board a Greek liner. All this had been explained to him in a travel agency in an outer suburb of Sydney two days ago. The ship was scheduled to sail from Hobart to Sydney, and then to Melbourne, Fremantle, and, after several exotic Asian ports, to Guam, San Francisco, Panama, England and Genoa. Tornetta had a brother in San Francisco about whom ‘they’ would know nothing. Who, given practically no notice, could establish this complicated itinerary in time to interfere with it? Who would expect him to flee six hundred miles south to board a vessel which was coming to Sydney?

  And now, with eyes so tired they could scarcely focus, as the airport bus crossed the concrete bridge over the mile-wide Derwent River, beyond the oil storage tanks, the yacht clubs, the green lawns of the governor’s residence and a curious cemetery on a promontory, conspicuous before the waterfront buildings and small skyscrapers three miles away, he saw that there was a thick trickle of oily black smoke. It rose from the green funnels of a liner and Tornetta’s pulse thumped in excitement, the fruition of words, plans, lies, the exchange of money for pieces of paper. For this was the Greek liner Areopagus which had arrived here in Hobart from New Zealand while he’d been pacing about Canberra airport in anxiety.

  It was only ten o’clock in the morning. Tornetta didn’t know what to do. The ship sailed at 10 P.M., he had been told, but at what time passengers embarked he was unaware of. He decided three o’clock would be a suitable hour. In the meantime, he must dump his suitcase somewhere and pass the hours at a barber’s, having a good meal and reading the Sydney Morning Herald if it was available here.

  Just before three o’clock Tornetta walked with his suitcase to the Empress Dock to board the liner. His first sight of it was comforting, for it was old, corrupt, probably inefficient. My God, he thought, what an old wreck! White paint had recently been applied to its hull and it had a rough texture like powder on an old whore’s face, and brown vertical stains like the fingers of a heavy smoker. He at once felt at ease. It was, he surmised, a ship in which money would talk, bribery, if it became necessary, would be an accepted fact of life.

  He was in fact hours early, but joined a line of people near the bows, failing to notice that they did not carry suitcases. After a while an old man in a white coat, who was holding back this small crowd of about a hundred people, told them indifferently: ‘The other gangway,’ and the wave of an arthritic hand told them where to go.

  Tornetta had a suitcase, and was hot and more than exhausted. He trailed hurriedly around a corrugated steel Customs and Excise shed, passed between scores of parked cars, trod over the thick ropes looped round bollards, and moved out of the way of fork-lift trucks. The old scaly white ship seemed impressively big. There was an atmosphere of holiday – people laughing, girls with cameras – but also of pandemonium. Around the other side of the big shed Tornetta was at once absorbed in a crowd of about a thousand people. Anger began to burn him. He was crushed by children, ladies tarted up as if for a ceremony, holding grimly onto cards – Founder’s Society, Member of the Visiting Ships’ Club, and pass cards from shipping agents.

  People were coming off the ship and into the shed. A few louts in silly shirts pushed through to a row of sightseeing buses, asking, ‘Any birds?’ A priest talked to two policemen, and beyond them people off the ship, bogged down with cases, prams and kids, answered Customs and Immigration officers who sat behind tables. It was as if Hobart had never received a ship before. Tornetta felt suffocated. Now there were cheers. A woman stood on tiptoes and asked him uselessly, ‘Who is it?’ as some footballer talked before the TV cameras.

  The crowd was now too big for the area in which it was confined and began to bulge forward. One of the shirt-sleeved policemen bellowed half-heartedly, ‘Get back there!’ When no one did so, the two of them with a fat Customs man fetched a portable steel barrier and charged the crowd.

  This pushed Tornetta to one side and left him near to the front of the mass. He protested angrily, ‘I want to board.’

  ‘You’ll be lucky. Another three hours,’ a police officer forecast wryly.

  ‘But I have paid –’

  ‘They’re still coming off.’

  Sure enough, a handful of people disembarked two hundred feet away, out of sight, came in bewilderment through the crowd and boarded a sightseeing bus. Several of these buses belched smoke into the crowd as an organized tour moved off.

  ‘I am a passenger, I have paid,’ claimed Tornetta bitterly, aware now that the crowd wanted to visit the ship, not travel aboard her.

  ‘Bit early, aren’t you?’ the policeman suggested. ‘Six o’clock’s your time.’

  Tornetta had no fear of him, he was so angry; stupid dumb dick. But the man unexpectedly allowed Tornetta beyond the barrier.

  It didn’t do him any good. There seemed to be hopeless confusion in the big shed. He was alarmed to see Italians with children, prams, food, weeping, sighing, embracing others, while the officers behind the trestle tables waited indifferently. There was no hurry – except for him.

  He made his way to the obvious opening, beyond which was the bulk of the ship. Two hundred feet to the left was an L-shaped gangway rising to an opening in an upper deck. The same old man in a white coat stood at the foot of these steps. A ship’s officer stood at the junction of the ‘L’ and another at the opening in the ship’s hull. A few persons were still coming off, in no hurry, dawdling, a word or two with the one officer, a laugh with the other.

  The old man in white stopped the seething Tornetta as he approached the gangway. Rage alternated with caution, the need to be totally inconspicuous.

  ‘I have paid. I am not standing round for hours. I have paid. Is this the way to treat a passenger?’

  But the doddering old incompetent didn’t belong to the ship. It meant nothing to him.

  ‘I can’t let you on until they’re all off.’

  ‘And how will you know that, you old fool?’

  The old man became stubborn. Right was on his side. And Tornetta saw the officer at the junction peering down in curiosity, so he retreated to the opening in the Customs shed.

  He stood there feeling conspicuous, a fool.

  The two policemen and the obese Customs man stood there with him, passing the afternoon away. All of life revolved around boarding this vessel, being rid of these buffoons who were standing about exercising dull authority.

  Still people were disembarking, although the Areopagus had been in port at least seven hours that Tornetta knew of. A lout with hair like a bush and a trilby hat jammed on sauntered along.

  ‘Transit passenger?’ the Customs man asked. ‘Disembarking?’ But he was totally indifferent as to which, and the three of them, two policemen and the Customs man, middle-aged, incompetent, perhaps corrupt, checked on nobody. Absurdly, it irritated Tornetta, who above all things wanted incompetence and indifference. For these fools a smile was a guarantee. They were indifferent to parcels coming ashore, even when carried by Chinese youths. ‘Are you lost?’ a policeman asked two over-painted leggy girls, whose eyes were full of themselves, and who were eager for the stares which should have humiliated them: the old eyes running down the legs and estimating the size of breasts. Tornetta viewed them, too, but with dislike, as he stood there exhausted, the small spots of soup stains on his trouser legs.

  The crowd surged through from be
hind, ignoring the policeman. A woman’s voice told them: ‘We can board,’ and they pushed forward to do so.

  Tornetta went ahead of them, but the old man in the white coat had his last moment of authority: ‘The other gangway.’

  ‘You said that was for the crew.’

  The crowd had turned. Tornetta was no longer first, but about two hundredth. No one else carried a case. They were all visitors. ‘We thought we might try the February cruise,’ a woman said to him.

  There were crew members and an officer standing around, but no one stopped Tornetta. No one asked for his ticket or passport, or at what time he wished to go to breakfast and had he had the anti-cholera injection.

  He shoved his way through the groups who stood about blocking the way, and went down a couple of decks, and suddenly he was in silence, alone, a whole hundred cabin doors stretching away to the bows, the polished linoleum shining, unmarked by shoes.

  It was easy to find A Deck. This, too, was empty. The visitors were inspecting bars and ballrooms, resting their tired feet in a lounge and having a coffee, or looking doubtfully at lifeboats.

  He had forgotten that the cabins would be locked, but he saw that along the passage at intervals were boxes. Twenty keys hung in each.

  Tornetta selected the key to what was to be his cabin. Then he moved a hundred feet forward and snatched a key at random. No one would bother him. Not even the officers would dare to question a passenger. ‘Have you stolen the key to A-Ninety-three? Why?’ The passengers on A93 would simply ask their steward for a spare.

  Cabin A145 had two bunks. It was tidy and clean and at the moment absolutely quiet. Tornetta collapsed on the lower bunk and laughed.