The Tyrant's Novel

by Thomas Keneally

  He said, Can't you understand, Alan? I have my career here. Why can't you just write the damned book? Have an early night! Get up and start! Let's have another drink now. A good night's sleep, and I'll call in on you at eight A.M. Again, any help you need. Only thing: I'm afraid you can't have a secretary. A secretary couldn't be trusted the way Great Uncle trusts us. I'll get a PC delivered to your place, or bring it with me tomorrow. It'll need its A-drive glued up, because Great Uncle's assistant told me there are to be no possibilities of copies.

  Don't bother calling in, I warned McBrien. I'll be out at a restaurant having breakfast. I intend to spend my last thirty-one days in a leisurely manner.

  Hell! said McBrien. He ground his brows against the heels of his hands.

  On July 9, I did not awake as carefree as I had hoped. With the residual sting of Great Uncle's dagger still at my wrist, I was at once reminded of the weight the tyrant had placed on me. I managed to rise, but did not shave, and sat at a table sipping black tea and eating an apple. As promised, at eight o'clock McBrien was at the door, a new laptop and its cordage in his arms.

  I'll install this for you at your desk, he offered. It has a surge protector and a capacity for internal backup. They say you can have voice-recognition software if you like, but it takes at least two weeks to work it into shape before you can start.

  He set to work while I watched. The A-drive, where floppy disks were held, had a plate of metal fixed over it with minute tumblers, such as one saw on those fancy attaché cases with combination locks.

  They've kept the code for opening the A-drive to themselves, McBrien told me, sorting out the cords and plugging in the surge protector.

  Why are you speaking in whispers? I asked him. Is the apartment wired?

  No. They don't do that as much as we citizens think. They're short of resources now, with the sanctions. I was also assured by the principal private secretary that the apartment would not be wired, anyway. That was Great Uncle's own demand. He thinks it's contrary to your dignity as an artist. By the way, Lieutenant Chaddock has been exalted to captain, and will command a day-and-night Overguard detachment, two vehicles, with responsibility for your person.

  My God! I said. What a fix! The neighbors will be delighted. Would you like some black tea?

  Yes. Just a moment.

  He switched the machine on and the screen lit and performed its function. See the symbol there? he said. That brings up your document program. But you know how to word process, don't you?

  I told him of course. Sarah had taught me in the university library, and I'd had a word processor myself. Didn't he remember it was flowing down to the gulf?

  Oh, I've got a little present for you, he told me. He reached into his breast pocket and extracted a bottle. Tommy Hilfiger cologne. For future visits to . . . to certain people.

  I was—as frequently then—touched, yet uncertain. Do you think this will get me a job with the Whisperers?

  He smiled. If that's your fancy. I got the last bottle in the markets. Let's have some tea then.

  I put the cologne on the shelf above my desk. If the truth were told, I was grateful for his company. We went back to my favorite little living room table, where Sarah and I always drank tea. And then, when he'd finished, I told him, all jokes aside, to go and see a people smuggler.

  If I could find one, what about my parents? asked McBrien with some spirit. And my brothers and sisters? Am I to get some damned people smuggler for them too?

  He let that sink in. Well, Alan, we know now what our test will be. We get through this, and life is all gravy. I'll probably get an embassy post as cultural attaché in Rome or Paris or Moscow. You . . . the sky's the limit with you.

  Thank you, I told him, feeling the drag of the unacceptable and unachievable task within me.

  For a second he went pale at my apparent unbiddability. But he gathered all his energy. He had already decided, perhaps unconsciously, to go through this trial cheerily, to lift me on his gusts of optimism.

  If you're not doing anything this morning, he said, then I have some places to take you. Research. On the way out of the city, we'll remind ourselves how some of our brothers and sisters really live under the sanctions.

  Will we, sir? I asked in imitation of a schoolchild. As if I hadn't already been to the Beaumont side and the Eastside markets.

  Then we'll talk to a barge captain at Ibis Bay. Should be back in time for a late lunch if we start now.

  I think I want to get on with On the Waterfront, I told him.

  He said ironically, That'd be a brilliant idea! Absolutely brilliant! Listen, if you're doing nothing in the next thirty days, you might as well come driving with me. Come on!

  He had a black car with his own driver and there were no blindfolds for us today. And it was true that once we crossed the ridge of Beaumont and descended into the poorer townships in the southeast of the city, one became aware again of the fearful terms on which many of our fellow citizens lived. The West had come to an arrangement that they would take a billion of our barrels a year, but the money for them would not come directly to us but to the United Nations, which would then decide how to filter it through to ameliorate the condition of such suburbs as these, and hungry townships in the countryside. The last time I'd been here it had been to look at a rally, research for the book I had given over to Sarah, and all the speakers had complained of the indignity of this arrangement. One man had said, They make us not earners but beggars. By now though, there was probably more doubt in the ordinary people. In the hearts of the women who queued at the end of crumbling streets, drawing up risky water from the city's ancient and part-destroyed conduits, Great Uncle might be blamed with an equivalent sense of fury as was earlier directed against the U.N. sanctions.

  From my last visit here I had learned of a popular illegal newspaper, produced by a young mother of the Beaumont townships. She complained that on the broad river ordinary people saw the parvenus to whom Great Uncle and the Overguard had entrusted both the smuggling of oil above the one-billion-barrel limit and a share as well of the U.N.'s largesse given in exchange for the modest legal quantity of our national output. This new class could be seen luxuriating at sunset on glittering cruise vessels. Rowboats on the river, manned by fathers and sons trying to catch a little protein for their shanty kitchens, were swamped by the cokehead skippers of cruisers. Busloads of the dispossessed lower middle class and workers, moving about the city, were likely to be overtaken by fast cars, with scant regard for pedestrians, driven by Sonny's ugly circle of friends. Situations of poverty and degradation unknown at the time Great Uncle's forces secured our borders, to the joy, at that time, of the West, were now appallingly commonplace. In Market Street, child prostitutes ran after McBrien's vehicle yelling, A dollar! A dollar! These offers were made within the potential hearing of parents. When I had been writing my book, someone told me, You can tell the child prostitutes. They're not as skinny as the others.

  Their suffering and indigence were futile, as any of the children, any of the parents, could have told us. The sanctions, which bit into living flesh, and the aid-for-oil arrangement were absurd, because soft-voiced, fragrant Great Uncle and a thousand other powerful people not only subverted what came the country's way but tried with some success to bring the people to the conclusion that only Great Uncle's ménage could rescue them from the silliness and malice of the West. My book's purpose—in Great Uncle's mind—might have been more to discomfort the U.N. than actually to end these arrangements.

  Even now, revisiting, I found these suburbs as shocking as McBrien, for his own purposes, would have wanted me to find them. Someone should write a book about it, I thought, and of course I had. But it belonged to Sarah and could not be retrieved in honor either by memory or by hand.

  We descended through hilly streets towards Ibis Bay and its storage tanks, an occasional legally moored tanker, its mission recognized by the international community, and the hosts of barges and lighters. They did
the real work of breaking the sanctions, of getting out into the straits to find the numerous waiting tankers that ran our oil for profit, illegally, to the world.

  We stopped near the Ibis Bay wharves. Across the street from a seamen's café stood a vacant soccer ground, and there oil trucks released the dregs of what had been delivered to the barges, to make a black, slicked, inhuman, and inflammable acre.

  Come on, said McBrien.

  I simply went along with him. A dock supervisor led us across decks of barges, over great black pythons of hosing. The air was full of the smell of crude oil. At last we stopped on one squalid, oil-slicked deck. Under the serial number on the barge wheelhouse was painted a grimy name—Joanna.

  The skipper of the barge was working with a large spanner and brass coupling behind the wheelhouse. He saw us coming but did not utter a greeting. He yelled down the little companionway. Hey, Bernie, get up here and try to loosen this.

  Bernie came up. He, like the skipper, had a darkness to his skin, as if he'd been marinated in sump oil.

  Mr. McCauley? asked McBrien.

  Stocky McCauley inclined his head. Come and have some coffee, he yelled over the noise of engines and other busy sounds.

  In the little cockpit we entered I grew nervous as he lit up a small spirit stove to make coffee. It seemed to me that the air was pregnant with oil fumes, but no explosion occurred.

  So you found me all right, eh? he said. Lovely conditions we work in, we crudies. But it's a sort of living.

  So, when's your next trip? McBrien asked him.

  McCauley laughed at the innocent eagerness of McBrien.

  Don't know, he said, with a noise that implied, Silly question! We get a signal. Then we go down the river and out into the straits.

  McBrien said, Great Uncle raised a group named the Sanction Breakers. Are you one of them?

  Mate, I wish I were. Some of them are rich bastards now.

  But many of them were sincere?

  Yeah, and dead too, or given up. Oh, they were great kids.

  McCauley began closing down now, in case he'd said the wrong thing.

  I mean, they were real patriots.

  The coffee was ready and he filled three small cups and offered cubed sugar around.

  Thanks, said McBrien. You know, there's no reason to be shy, Mr. McCauley. We're involved in a project. It's a film project. But a feature film, not a documentary. We want to know what it's really like. No one knows we've come here. You'd be doing us a favor if you just told us what it's all been like.

  Easy for you to say, McCauley commented.

  Yes, I said, a little amazed with myself for playing along. It's easy. But we've got to make this film.

  McCauley looked at me. Maybe it was the lack of engagement in my eyes that got him talking.

  Well, said McCauley, for a start, the Sanction Breakers were a total farce. Why wouldn't they be? They come on as volunteers, saving people from the sanctions, and so on. Then they find that most of the people they're working with are in it for the money. And they know where the real cream goes—into buying Daimlers for the men in charge of the organization. They think they're going to be earning aspirin for the poor, and they're earning computer-driven automobile transmissions for the rich. Now you can go and report me if you like. I don't give a fuck. I'm earning twenty times what a fishing skipper earns, and even if we bargemen don't have a protected life, I still know a lawyer who gets us all off. You guys might get to the Overguard, but we've got our own network down here, and the Overalls are on our side.

  We aren't going to bring a whiff of authority your way, McBrien assured him. This seemed merely to increase McCauley's defiance.

  Well, that's okay, he told us, because I ought to warn you. It's freedom of speech and freedom of assembly down here in Ibis Bay. It's not as easy as you think to run past coastal shelling and patrol boats from the other side, and even though the Americans are way out in the gulf, they still send the occasional rocket our way, too.

  He was now fairly launched on his view of the world. I mean, he continued, why should a young kid believe in giving his life to get oil down the straits when you're actually doing America a favor in any case? It's a charade. They need us too. What we smuggle out there keeps oil prices stable. And the American warship skippers know this. They were put there to stop us, but they know with half their brains their country needs us. God bless America!

  Why do you do it? asked McBrien, no threat at all in his voice. We just want to know for the film. Why does your kind of man, and the men round you, do it? One well-aimed shot from the Others across the straits and you're obliterated. A flame.

  Okay, said McCauley. I do it for my family. And for myself, I suppose. I like filtered coffee and the occasional drink. And presents for the missus. I like a bit of space in my life. The poor bastards of Beaumont, they have no leeway in their lives at all.

  I knew from earlier research that this was true—that even men and women with jobs had to resort to the black market to make a living.

  There are rumors, I surprised myself by commenting idly (I certainly heard such rumors), that officers on the other side are bribed to let people through.

  Finishing his coffee, McCauley considered this. I'd say that's probably true. Otherwise, it must be that they're shithouse shots over there, or half blind. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Others were bribed. But for their own sake they have to fire off a few shots, and make an occasional kill.

  You've lost friends? asked McBrien eagerly.

  A few. But it's usually the novices that get blown up. I had one of those Sanction Breakers on board, and he picks up an AK-47 and starts firing back at the shore batteries. A kid of seventeen! Willing to be martyred and have his balls fried. I still don't believe we got away. Me and the deckhand, we took him ashore, filled him with vodka, and beat the crap out of him.

  Have you ever been approached to get people out? I asked, my eyes on McBrien.

  McBrien put his forehead in his hands and McCauley looked at me lividly, but with a certain whimsy. Then he began to laugh. Go to buggery, he said. If you're going to ask questions like that, you can just piss off.

  I'm sorry, I said, but I had some friends . . .

  What do you think I do? Hide people in oil drums? Wouldn't do it to my worst enemies. Tell your friends to catch a plane. There's no room for anything but oil barrels and an engine on this barge. Even Bernie and I sleep in the wheelhouse.

  For whatever reason, I didn't fully believe him. There must be a way. McBrien and Sonia must be got out within the month. Down the straits some benign tanker, Panamanian or Norwegian, Liberian or Russian or Colombian, must be able to receive them. There had to be a way—some way which wasn't immediately apparent from this cockpit.

  Anyhow, I gave it up for the moment. I felt tired, and realized there was no need for me to deny myself sleep during this ridiculous month.

  Mr. McCauley, I said, wanting to close the field trip down, I'm grateful to you for giving us your time.

  Not at all, gentlemen, he said. A sly grin overtook his features. He believed, wrongly in fact, that as individuals we were immune from that edge of danger at which he worked continually.

  As we left McCauley and made our way back towards shore over the slippery and chaotic decks of other barges, McBrien said hopefully, There you are. The man is a living character—the likable rogue. Construct a family history for him. Until he took this job, was his kid one of the kids running after our car, offering himself for a dollar? Did his wife carry skin ulcers for which there weren't any antibiotics? My understanding is Great Uncle wants social realism, but with the sort of subtlety you had in your stories. That man, McCauley, was social realism in spades. The rough-diamond hero. Hemingway would love him. And his file says he's a veteran of the wars too. Maybe you can throw in a bit of magic realism. His dead friend stepping in through the window to talk with him. I don't see how you can pass it up.

  The way he delivered this apparently i
nformal but well-rehearsed scenario made me think that he was somehow operating according to a fixed bureaucratic scenario, on a path he or someone else at the Cultural Commission had already trod. I began therefore to achieve something like certainty that the national poet, songster, teller of narratives, Peter Collins, had been choice number one, had heard this spiel from his minder, but had fled the task.

  We reached the pier again, and could see Chaddock, who had followed us in his limousine, looking benignly from his car window and allowing us civilized movement. The earth of the plaza and side streets seemed a combustible amalgam of oil and dirt.

  Would you like tea? asked McBrien, pointing to a teahouse whose awning itself seemed impregnated with oil. We went to a table half in shade, half in sun. McBrien took the sunny chair, offering me the seat of lesser glare. A young waitress who seemed unsullied by the air of Ibis Bay came and took our order. As we waited for the tea, I told him that I didn't want to be a bastard—I'd write it if I could. But a month isn't time enough for a sustained literary effort, I told him. I don't care how good those PR people are. They can't make a success out of shit.

  You'd be surprised, McBrien assured me. And people will buy this book for its curiosity value.

  But I'm brain-dead, I told him. The idea of writing makes me ill. Physically. And in other ways.

  Come on, I know you lost Sarah. I know you feel half dead. But this is the act by which you prove yourself living again. You'll be kind of subtitling our state. Is subtitling other people's films any better?

  With the privacy screen of his limo drawn, he continued to talk to me thus all the way back to the city. Obviously, he took comfort from the fact that I seemed more submissive than I had been. He became quite light-headed with his conviction, or the intensity of his desire, that I would prove amenable to the task. We'd lost a good part of the day, he said, but he was sure I could get a few thousand words written by evening.

  Do you need a bottle of vodka to get you going? he asked.