Iraqi Icicle

by Bernie Dowling

  December can be a heartbreak month for owners and trainers. It is not only the heat. If there is no rain, the training and racing tracks can be as hard as a landlord’s heart. Expensive babies, as the two-year-olds are called, can go down like summer flies. Shin soreness is the main ailment, with the babies’ legs not fully developed to take all that weight at high speed on hard tracks.

  Leaning against the side fence of Doomben racetrack, I watched the parade of horseflesh. Some of those animals cost more to keep than a factory worker’s wage. This is why they call horse racing the sport of kings, rather than the sport of factory workers. The factory workers ultimately control it, though. If they went on a gambling strike, the industry would go belly up in a month.

  It could have been instinct, or luck, or the sound of automatic transmission finding another gear. Whatever it was, I turned to see the late model Ford mounting the footpath. It looked like a sad mishap for a tired early-morning driver.

  Until I spotted the near-black tinted windows and the gaping hole where the front number plate should have been. The big white Ford was wearing my number instead. The car was no more than three metres from me when I leaped skywards, grabbing for the fence around the racetrack. My left hand was lucky, gripping beneath the barbed wire. The right hand aimed a little high and the barbs bit into flesh. The pain was terrible, but I was not about to let go. I knew that being crushed by the white metal avenger would be worse. I kicked my feet up to rest on the wooden cross rail, a metre and a half from the ground.

  The left side of the Ford crashed into the wooden cross bar and the wire just below my legs. The hardwood cracked and the wire above it caved in. The whole fence shook sickeningly, and threatened to collapse, but I held on for dear life.

  I tried to concentrate on willing the driver to flip the car. The driver didn’t lose it, but careered off towards a crash with two racehorses led by a terrified strapper. In desperation the young woman was forced to pull the horses onto the roadway. They clippety-clopped from side to side on the bitumen, but luckily didn’t gallop off down the road. The Ford found the roadway in front of the animals and sped away down Nudgee Road.

  I slowly disengaged myself from the fence and climbed down, trying to wring the pain from my right hand. I stumbled towards the frightened horses on Nudgee Road, where a motorist had the nous to turn her car sideways to block traffic.

  Strangers began offering me waves of sympathy, barely concealing their excitement at viewing the top-notch drama. A young office stiff doing overtime Saturday morning volunteered to call an ambulance and the police. I said I would drive to hospital and call the police from there. The bloke told me not to be silly. I staggered off and when I looked back, I could see the bloke shaking his head. To him, I was just another bullshit macho bronzed Aussie tough.

  I could only keep my right hand on the steering wheel for the seconds needed to change gear on the EH’s stick drive. Even then it was murder. Luckily for me, this was only in the metaphorical sense. The bloke in the Ford would be pissed off that it had not been real proper murder. Luckily also, Royal Brisbane Hospital is only a few kilometres from Doomben.

  If the casualty staff were pleased to be able to practice their miracle of healing on me, they hid it well. Some were coming to the end of the Friday night/Saturday morning graveyard shift, and all looked like they could use an aspirin and a good lie-down themselves. The great Australian Pagan piss-up still raged regularly on Friday nights in 1991. A minority of worshippers would go apeshit during or after the ceremony, and do savage damage to themselves, family and friends, as well as arbitrarily selected strangers. I must have looked, for all the world, like a late starter in the bloodfest.

  I waited for five minutes, as my blood dripped all over the hospital floor. I demanded attention and was led towards the examination room, leaving the placid bloke beside me with the fishhook in his mouth to ponder his recreational choices.

  They shot me up for tetanus, cleaned the wounds and doused the hand with antiseptic. It stung like all hell. The medicine woman told me I was lucky I had not punctured a vein. She decided against stitches, and bandaged me up. She offered me a hit of pethidine, but I had too much to do to be flirting with the Regent of the Land of Nod.

  It was eight-fifty when I got to South Bank, after stopping off at a newsagent to ferret out racing forms from four different papers. South Bank is an entertainment area, built on the site beside the Brisbane River where the city hosted World Expo ’88. If you asked your average stiff living in Brissie at the time, they would tell you that the international fair was the greatest progress since they set up the penal colony of Moreton Bay the previous century.

  They promised us entrepreneurs fortunes from World Expo. Having been kicked off racetracks for life, I fell for it and racked my brains for months, trying to come up with the pot of gold marked Hill, S. It came to nothing. I joined the long queue of disappointed local business people, cab drivers and residents kicked out of their humble South Brisbane homes to build the Expo site. I did hear tales of gold and loot being smuggled out of Australia, so it was nice that someone made a dollar or two.

  As a stiff’s inner-city playground, South Bank is no left bank of the Seine, but it could be a lot worse. There are tree-lined walks, an artificial beach, waterways and DIY barbecues, alongside the Three-F eateries – feed ’em, fleece ’em and fork ’em off – that define the culture of your modern metropolis.

  I pulled up a piece of grass beside the beach of the artificial lake, and began to study the latest race developments. The trial form of the Barret baby, number three in the first, was impressive. A top jock was up. My other digital clock dream numbers, four and five, were both twelve-to-one shots.

  I marked the paper to remind myself to take a $20 trifecta on three-four-five, and a $10 trifecta on three-five-four. It speaks volumes about the allure of gambling that only then did I think to turn to page one for news of Georgio’s murder.

  Nothing. Not one line throughout the whole local daily. Someone had firmly closed the lid on the Georgio coffin. I was quite pleased about this result, though I felt a little sorry for the dead man. Fancy having your sure-fire chance of making page one nixed like that.

  Poor Marcus. If he missed the cut for Saturday’s paper, he would not be in the Sunday press. They file most of their stories on Thursday. Monday’s newspaper would have no word on Georgio. With a skeleton staff of journos working the weekend, any media-friendly copper who heard about the hushing up of the murder would find no reporter to tip off. By Tuesday, a divorce action in the British royal family might eat up page one. In horse racing circles, they say there is no such thing as a dead cert. Robbed of page one, Marcus Georgio’s corpse proved it again.

  I had been at South Bank for the best part of an hour and thinking the ungallant coppers had stood ne up. A shapely pair of fake-tanned legs stood in front of my newspaper. I lowered the paper to see a flimsy white cotton dress covering the bottom half of a black bikini. Higher up was the upper half of the dress and the matching black bikini top. Under a broad-brimmed white hat was the cool face of Crystal Speares. She stood out like Lady Macbeth on Mother’s Day among the ordinary citizens rolling up to play Happy Families. The consummate gentleman, I indicated a piece of turf beside me for Speares.

  ‘You really know how to show a girl a good time, Steele,’ she said, accepting my offer.

  ‘I was expecting someone else, Crystal, someone you would not want to be having a chicken and champagne breakfast with. But you know about that. Are you sitting in for him?’

  ‘I might be. Give it up, Steele. Go away. They are not making heroes in your size this summer.’

  ‘There’s no obituary in the paper on Georgio, your past hero, Crystal.’

  She turned to look at the water and recited:

  I want a hero: an uncommon want

  When every year and month sends forth a new one,

  Til, after cloying the gazettes with cast,

  The Age discove
rs he is not the true one.

  She turned her head back towards me and I frowned suspiciously.

  ‘Byron,’ she said. ‘Don Juan.’

  My frown grew deeper.

  She explained: ‘When I was eighteen, I got a part in the mid-life crisis of a professor of literature. I came out of it with a $2000 watch and four lines of Byron. I pawned the watch.’

  A beautiful woman’s road to bitterness can be paved with surprising side-tracks. Maybe that was half the attraction for the poets. It was time for me to contribute a half-profound observation – any half-profound observation would do. ‘And now you are trying to pawn Byron to me?’

  She accepted the wisdom for more than it was worth and nodded wistfully. ‘Perhaps.’

  I blew it with my next line. When you were raised down in the hard school of the streets, you could fly only so high with the Romantics. ‘To buy some smack,’ was my suggestion to bring us both down to earth.

  She flashed fire and began to talk water. ‘I’m not even going to ask what happened to your right hand. You’re like a baby in the middle of that lake, Hill. You’re out of your depth. And you forget you don’t know how to swim.’

  ‘Tell me a bit more about the water, Crystal. I’ll start swimming soon enough, and in the right direction, too.’

  She pointed towards a mob of kids, splashing and squealing happily in the lake and she spoke softly. ‘A killer crocodile named Mooney is in the water. He sent me to tell you if you poke as much as one finger north of the border again, you are dead.’

  I yawned. ‘That’s a stale threat. Tell me something new. Tell me what Mooney has on you.’

  She laughed, a bitter sound, but still a laugh. ‘Mooney and I don’t mix in the same circles. He hasn’t got anything on me. It is what I know about him. Whoever said information is power must have been talking about life in the clouds. In the real world, information is a death sentence. Unless you are a survivor, like me.’

  ‘I plan to survive too, Crystal.’

  ‘Good for you. I’ll pay to have them put it on your gravestone. Let’s get out of this damned heat. I think I’ll go to Europe, where rich old men lust after snow-white bodies. Even if the old bastards live longer in the colder climate.’

  ‘Talking of snow,’ I said while helping her to her feet, ‘they tell me that a few people are coming down with AIDS from sharing needles.’

  ‘So what?’ she shrugged, ‘None of my business.’

  She began to understand that the statement was quite personal. She shivered, despite the heat. ‘You’re talking about me? I would never share a needle.’

  I believed her. The idea of sharing anything but her body repulsed Crystal Speares. I asked if I could drop her somewhere, but she pointed to the red Mercedes Sports parked down the street. I walked along with her towards the car, though I felt I was batting way above my place in the social order.

  ‘Byron – he was a bit of a cripple, wasn’t he?’ I asked, as she slid behind the wheel and started the engine.

  ‘He was a man, wasn’t he?’

  Crystal Speares drove off, stirring up the street dust around my feet.

  20

  I STOOD FOR A FEW SECONDS, staring through the dusty trail of the modern woman. Up ahead, the Mercedes turned left and out of sight.

  I looked around in every direction for an educated Federal copper named Bradshaw. If he was following me at South Bank, he was as slick as an oil spill on wet clay. More likely, he had better choices than to stick around while Crystal Speares and I exchanged pleasantries. Mooney and Schmidt were the targets Bradshaw had in his sights. He probably figured Speares for a high-class scavenger, not worth the worry. If he looked closer, he would have found a shark who ate private-school boy-men like him for breakfast.

  Another possibility. Bradshaw had tried to persuade Speares to do her duty for Queen and Country, as he had done with the reluctant patriot, me. I hoped he had. She would run rings around him. Dealing with a murderous drug runner like Mooney was child’s play compared to dealing with a beautiful modern woman with street smarts.

  Back in my humble vehicle, the car radio played me some more dead people. For variety, they were broadcasting living people singing dead people’s songs. Did someone stop the rock world in 1985? Would we end up with tribute bands to tribute bands? Pete Townshend, formerly of Britrock band the Who, was right. Rock ’n’ roll is dead. But he should have added that they’re still looking for somewhere to dump the corpse.

  By 11:15 a.m. when I hit the Kirra Beach Hotel, I needed a beer. As I pulled off the highway, I heard a sound that made me curse for being late. As much as I wanted the noise to be three quick backfires, I knew they were gunshots.

  There was no one within cooee of the body, stretched out in the middle of the car park. The drinkers also must have figured car backfires. As the EH crawled past and halted at a discreet distance from the dying man, I could have sworn he looked up at me. When I reached his side, I saw a thick line of blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Disenchanted fisherman Luigi Sebastion’s head fell to rest on the concrete as his boat crossed the bar for the last time.

  Lui’s eyes were wide open. He looked as if he was asking, ‘Why?’ For months, at the oddest moments, I relived the feeling that Lui was blaming me. Blaming me for being late. For not telling him why. I didn’t know why. All the poor bastard wanted was a little help to get out of his brother’s shadow.

  I rose to split when a hand appeared on my shoulder. I looked back and upwards to see Senior Constable Schmidt towering above me. His cop car was parked across the road, with Mooney slumped in the passenger seat. Buddha, who was tailing whom? Who was killing whom?

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Schmidt said softly. ‘We’ll take care of it.’

  I stood up and wiped some thick liquid from my nose as I bowed my head. ‘I didn’t do it,’ I said.

  ‘We know. Look, the crowd’s already coming out of the pub. You better go. It’s just like Kuwait City, the innocents in the way get killed, too.’

  I grabbed Schmidt by the arm as the pub regulars spilled out to take in the show. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Kuwait City hospital,’ Schmidt replied. ‘Saddam’s troops pulled out the life support tubes from the babies.’

  I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. ‘For fuck’s sake, Schmidt, you’re giving me some fairy tale to explain this?’ I pointed to Sebastion’s corpse.

  Schmidt was upset at my unwillingness to accept his poignant comparison. ‘It’s true, Hill. But a fuckhead clown like you always gotta have a different slant on the world.’

  I was as mad as he was. ‘Yair, you’re all doing it to protect the babies. Everyone’s doing it to save the babies. If I go over and have a sniff of Mooney’s gun and it’s been fired in the last five minutes, the bullets will be for the babies.’

  ‘Fuck off, Hill, I’ve got a crime scene here.’

  Schmidt began to push the crowd away as he dialled numbers on his mobile phone. I walked back to my car as Mooney hopped out of his. I called back to gathering bystanders, wanting to help out or to stare.

  ‘It’s okay, folks,’ I said. ‘We’re all doing it for the babies.’

  21

  I EASED THE EH UTE onto the highway and drove towards Tweed Heads. There was nothing else I could think to do. I considered going home, but Nat wasn’t there and I wanted to stay out of the way of Mooney and Schmidt while I figured out what these murders were all about. I desperately wanted to ring Nat, but what could I tell her? Certainly not the truth.

  Back at the unit, I sipped a beer and June Vitalis ignored my silence. She excused herself while I made a call. The local Catholic priest knows the Sebastion family, but he has not seen Lui at mass for a while. Yair, he can go down to the pub and do the business. Last rites, yair, that’s the one I was talking about. Only didn’t you need to race down there quick or else the soul goes scampering off somewhere or other, doesn’t it? The priest would take care of it. Goo
d. My name? Oh, that doesn’t matter. Could he just hurry?

  I was halfway through the beer before June returned. She must have been dying to know what was going on. But thirty-five years with the tight-lipped Gooroo, miserly doling out information, made her used to not asking a single question when she considered the timing was wrong.

  The Gooroo had told me about one time when the police put their steel mallets through the television and the plaster panels of the walls of the unit when June was home alone. The cops said they were looking for evidence of illegal gambling. When the Gooroo arrived, he saw silent June with a beetroot face. The cops were gone, having left a dozen infringement notices and the unit looking like a bomb had hit it.

  June gave Con some looks with icicles hanging from them. But she asked not a single question. The Gooroo told me he wanted to crawl under the carpet when the local electrical retailer brought in the new TV and the builder came in to repair the walls. He said it was the day that he realised just how much he loved June. Because she never asked him what sort of a business he was in when the police smashed the TV and the walls under the pretext of looking for betting slips.

  I rang the Gooroo’s work number, listening as the phone diverter shifted the call from the widowed pensioner’s home to the butcher’s shop. I asked Gooroo for his TAB account number, and told him I was going to place $30 in bets, for which I would give June the money.

  I had to persuade June to accept the $30 for my trifecta bets over the phone on Gooroo’s account. I was able to convince her that the $2000 in my wallet would see me through a month or two, even if I went to Tassie for part of that time.

  The clock dream worked out spot on. Number three, trainer Barret’s baby, won easily, just as Billy Scharfe had told me it would. It ended up a short-priced favourite. But four and five, at good prices, ran second and third, in that order. The dividend for the trifecta was $62.20 for a $1 investment. I won more than $1,200 for my $20 bet. June asked if I had lost, because my expression did not change when the race broadcast finished.