by Mark Furness
The woman is calling from the ute in a new language I don’t understand. Instructions for the crossbow phantom, I guess. I aim at him, part-blinded by the spotlight. I think about his head and then focus on his chest because it’s bigger. I squeeze: a burst of gold and white. The arrow and the bullet cross each other inside the flash. Searing cold flares inside my thigh, like I’ve been shot with ice.
My bullet should have hit him square in the breastplate. I can’t see more than his outline. He staggers, drops on one knee. I fire again into his chest. He falls on his side, not backwards as I expect. I hope Mr Browning is powerful enough. The spotlight stays on me. I move from its glare. It doesn’t follow me. A shadow jumps from the back of the ute.
I limp fast from the dam and push into trees beside the paddock, falling on my side behind a trunk. The ripped nerves in my thigh scream. I finger the arrow shaft: the tip is protruding from the back of my leg, the feather fletching in front.
“We will never stop coming for you, Gar,” she calls, spraying light from her hand-held torch, scanning the edges of the paddock. “Come out now and save your children. Or be a coward.”
I check my phone; the dam water has killed it. I lift my jumper at the neckline and bite it to help me do the job in silence. Using the heel of my hand, I punch the feather-end of the shaft into my leg and pull the arrowhead from behind. It slides through, burning like yanked rope as I wrench the whole shaft out. I rub my fingers over the wounds and hold the fingers up to a shard of moonlight. There’s not enough blood to suggest an artery is split. I take off my jacket and jumper and tie the jumper against my wounds using the sleeves, then limp into the forest, following the groove of a kangaroo track, careful not to tread on fallen branches and break the silence. I glance behind me, looking for pursuing light ...
II
93 days earlier ...
ACCORDING to the café clock, I had an hour to wait for courtroom 7C to open in the building next door. I sipped a latte and returned to a newspaper story titled Snow White and the Seven Dunces, a moralising tale about some teenage boys and a girl who got rat-faced on one of their father’s yachts and flashed their naked bums at ferry passengers on Sydney Harbour. One of the cleverest boys posted photos of the outing on Facebook, adding to evidence discovered by police upon the yacht that nostrils full of cocaine cut with laundry powder, and bellies full of vodka, are sure-fire sources of A-grade ideas.
What kept me reading was the fact that the boys attended the same illustrious school that had educated Henry East, who was due to appear shortly in 7C. Accompanying the ferry tale was a story noting that Henry, 26, was about to be sentenced for his guilty plea to using ‘inside information’ that he stole from his employer, a global investment bank, to profit from buying and selling shares in companies listed on the public stock market. He pocketed just over one million dollars – and faced up to ten years in prison.
What the newspaper didn’t say was that Henry had more than his freedom and fine young body on the line. He had a few hundred million dollars waiting for him if he could survive this day and outlive his father. I wasn’t putting my money on him achieving either when I read his body language as he walked into the café. After listening to his trial for days on end, I still didn’t get why he’d risked so much for what amounted to pocket money to a human being born with his ancestral gifts. Simple greed didn’t cut it for me.
Henry, who had been released on bail pending his sentencing by the judge, moved like an injured athlete and towered over his lawyer, a squat man with a pimply, pink forehead framed by wispy fair hair. The man o’ law sported a red necktie with its tongue swept back over the shoulder of his dark suit. I cupped a hand to my brow to make a visor as Henry and his swashbuckler passed my table. They sat at my back, so absorbed in their tête-à-tête I doubt they’d have noticed if I was starkers. I looked in a wall mirror. Henry’s face was in it.
He had a thick, dark mane framing a perfectly symmetrical face that was as pale as candle wax, inset with large brown eyes and offset by a long but not-protruding nose. He was cleverly dressed in an unfashionably roomy, single-breasted navy blue suit, white shirt and dull blue tie; it maintained the sensibly conservative image he’d aimed at the judge throughout his trial. I wondered if his wan complexion this morning was a ruse, a bit of make-up applied in the law chambers on legal advice before the walk to court, to squeeze any last juices of sympathy from the judge. But it seemed a bit late for that. Justice Tobias Tanner, who now waited for him next door, looked like he sucked lemons prior to every courtroom curtain rise that I had witnessed
In the café, Henry’s lawyer was perky as he ordered an espresso, and why wouldn’t he be? Unlike his client, he knew that whatever happened in court, he would be sleeping at home this night on his king-sized mattress and fancy sheets.
“What if I go to prison?” hissed Henry.
Now in my game as a journalist, I only have a couple of rules when it comes to speaking the truth you’d rather hide. Rule number one: never do it within earshot of strangers. Rule number two: capitalise on people breaking rule one. I slipped my notepad and pen from my jacket pocket, kept my head down, and casually scribbled.
“You won’t go to jail,” said the lawyer. “You’ll be fined at most.”
“You can’t guarantee that. They can come after me in there.”
I circled ‘they’ in my notebook. Henry shuffled in his seat like a racehorse trapped in a barrier gate, like he could smell the testosterone-rich sweat of the men waiting for him inside the razor-wire fences of Silverwater Prison.
The lawyer’s volume lifted: “Listen. We’ve agreed the strategy with your father. Whatever happens today, this ends it, Henry. Right?”
The lawyer, who was facing the café entrance, looked up past my right shoulder and went wide-eyed.
“Hello, Edgar,” I heard behind my back. I turned around. Charles East, who had snuck quietly in to the café, was grinning like he’d found something nasty stuck to his shoe. He was more obviously horse-faced than his son, but then Charles’s skin and bones had spent nearly seventy years succumbing to gravity and the waning reproductive capacity of his body cells.
“Good morning, Charles,” I said, closing my notebook. I returned his grin with equal sincerity.
He had gone for a grey pinstripe suit, white shirt and royal blue tie. The grey leftovers of his hair were clipped tight against his narrow head and his irises were smoke-coloured and barely visible inside the watery whites of his pink-rimmed eyes. He had the mouldy air of a funeral director. I guessed that spectating the fruit of your loins being battered in court for days on end would do that.
The three of them wandered away whispering, Henry in the middle of the huddle. Charles glanced back at me and then poked his lawyer in the chest with a stiff finger. Henry’s head and shoulders slumped. He looked like an overgrown toddler who’d been smacked. I felt sorry for him. I followed them.
As Henry waited on the footpath for the building’s revolving door to meet him, he glanced at me. I got the feeling he wanted my help. I sensed a young man who had botched an escape plan. What he was running from, and where he had wanted to go, intrigued me. They entered the building, passed through a security checkpoint, and opened a door to a private room reserved for lawyers and their clients.
On my way up to 7C in the lift, a couple of male television reporters who were wearing corsets – their flesh-coloured, spandex belly-flatteners were visible through their white shirts when their jackets weren’t buttoned up – explained to each other, and therefore the rest of the passengers in the lift, with great eloquence why Henry, the son of a man worth just south of a billion dollars according to the latest published rich list, would steal a million dollars through insider trading and ruin his young life. They didn’t buy the defence team’s submission about Henry succumbing to gambling addiction and depression. In the reporters’ summation: “He’s a greedy fuckwit.”
I found a seat near the front of the courtroom in
the row behind Charles and skimmed background notes I’d made so I could file my report quickly after the outcome was known. Charles had groomed his only male seed for great things, sending him to Sydney’s prestigious Cranbrook School, then to Oxford University in England where he studied international law and politics, and met the right people. But I’d found a brighter jewel. Henry’s late grandfather, Sir Arthur Allan East, had been fond of parroting the even longer dead American President, Theodore Roosevelt, on the subject of eugenics: The great problem of civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population ... Criminals should be sterilized ... Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind...
Room 7C was a soundproof, windowless theatre illuminated by hard, white ceiling lights and occupied by about thirty, mostly sober-looking men and women wearing dark suits. They were the usual mix: friends, enemies pretending to be friends, hired legal help licking their lips at the minutes they were billing their client, and yawning reporters. I looked for Henry’s mother, the Family Court Judge Victoria East, but couldn’t spot her in the settling crowd.
A wiry man wearing a pinstripe suit squeezed past several people in my aisle and sat beside me, so close our hips touched. I moved out of contact but I needed to have a look at him. He had silvery, Caesar-cut hair and stared at my notes. When I closed my pad, he grinned at me with a face that reminded me of a saw-toothed greyhound in need of a muzzle. Charles turned, staying seated, and shook the man’s hand. They said nothing.
“Very theatrical, Charles,” I said.
“All rise,” interrupted the court officer.
Henry stood, chin up, buttoned his jacket and crossed his hands over his crotch like a choir boy about to sing solo.
Justice Tanner strode, white-wigged and black-robed, into the room through his private back door, spittle glistening on his lips. He sat and the rest of us followed, except the defendant, who saved the court officer the trouble of ordering him to stand.
Tanner knew his words this morning would echo through corporate boardrooms, airport Chairman’s Club lounges, and the plushest homes in the land for days on end, even rippling overseas. So he spoke from notes.
“Insider trading,” the judge said, “is a cancer eating the flesh and bone of our society. It amounts to the privileged acquiring secret knowledge and using it to cheat others. The defendant, because of his position, had a crystal ball to future events in our financial markets. The law prohibited him – not from having that crystal ball – but from using it for personal gain.”
Tanner paused for effect. Charles tilted his head down and pressed his temples with his middle fingers. His pet greyhound polished some of his own teeth with the pad of a middle finger.
“When a young person enters the workforce, do we want to teach that person to value honesty and fair play, or do we want to encourage them to develop skills of deception and manipulation for personal gain at the expense of others? I have taken the defendant’s background into account. I have also taken account of his guilty plea. Justice knows no favour. I do not believe a simple fine is appropriate in this case.”
I turned to Henry. It looked as if his neck snapped; his head fell and he faced his feet, keeping his body stiff and straight.
The judge swung his axe: “I therefore sentence the defendant to two years’ imprisonment, with a minimum of twelve months to be served before eligibility for parole. Additionally, I impose a fine equal to two times his illegal benefit.”
Henry grasped the railing in front of him, looking at his father. I turned an ear to them and prepared to scribble their conversation into my notepad.
“You’ve got to move forward now,” Charles called, not bothering to stand. “Be strong. This time will pass.”
Charles’s version of that ‘be a man’ codswallop rang a bell; I saw myself at the age of six. My father and I were fishing from a dinghy with rods. He cast his line with one hand, the other locked, as usual, on a can of beer. A glint of steel whizzed near my eye and I threw up a hand in self-defence. His hook embedded itself deep inside my middle finger. “There’s only one way out of this, Garsy,” he said. “If we go backwards, the barb will rip your finger to shreds.” So he grabbed my hand, cut the line with a knife, and nipped the tie-end off the hook with a pair of pliers. Then he pushed the body of the hook out, barb first. “Sometimes in life,” he said, as he knotted his hanky around my bleeding wound, “the only way out of the shit is to forward ho!” My mother took me to the doctor for a tetanus shot and stitches. Bert went to the horse races.
When Henry was led through a side door to begin his term, the chatter started like thickening rain. I too had expected Henry to get mates’ rates - community service or a suspended sentence.
“For God’s sake,” someone chirped in the hallway outside the courtroom, “the judge lives just a few doors down from the Easts.”
I got the chirper’s point: The judge’s family and the Easts were birds of similar feathers. But I reckoned Tobias had a smaller house without the harbour frontage of the East’s 100-year-old family home, Tamerlane. And maybe he’d never been invited to the East’s parties, or not the right ones. Their big charity events attracted the chauffer-driven: government ministers, foreign ambassadors, corporate chairmen, Hollywood actors. That sort of herd.
Charles’s greyhound joined me in the crowded courtroom lift. He followed me into the street. I walked for almost a block and saw reflected in shopfront windows that he was keeping just a few steps behind me. I didn’t fancy being tailgated all the way to my office. At a red pedestrian light, I turned to face him. He looked about forty: fit, tanned, clean-shaven. The outdoors type. As we went eye-to-eye, I worked out why he had made me feel so uneasy in the courtroom, and it wasn’t his fondness for rubbing hips with strangers. The pupils inside his grey irises were big, far too big and black for the amount of midday light, and his mouth had white spittle stuck in the corners. Anti-depressants, I guessed: maybe anti-psychotics. I gambled he was still taking them, or wasn’t long off the last dose.
“I already have a dog,” I said.
“I know,” he said.
I did have a real dog.
“Are you the East’s new errand boy?” I countered.
Shaping the fingers of his right hand into what looked like a gun, he smiled, pointed at me from his hip and said, “Ka-Pow!” He grinned and walked away.
He turned a corner into a shopping arcade and disappeared before I had the brilliant idea of taking his photo with my mobile phone. I wished I could draw as well as my daughter, Alice. My hands were sweaty when I massaged my neck, and it was a cool day. I figured Charles was in severe pain right now, but he was employing some strange tactics to share it around and try to keep my reporting on his son’s imprisonment inside the rails.
I hailed a taxi to go to my office, pondering on exactly how I’d report Henry’s imprisonment to the global readers of The Citizen. Charles East was a corporate marriage broker. He had business tentacles across the world, but he was best known among a clique of the internationally wealthy for plugging Western businesses into China, and helping the richest Chinese plant their money and children overseas as insurance, in case they fell afoul of the revolving rulers of the Peoples’ Republic.
For publication, my editors chipped out my side-commentary about Henry’s grandfather wanting to sterilise criminals. They also removed my speculation that Henry may not have acted alone, and my open question: did he really just stumble across his inside information in his workplace? The Citizen’s editorial hierarchy – supported by jelly-backed defamation lawyers – stuck with the facts accepted by the court: Henry was a rogue, a one-man-band. On the upside, I guessed my editors’ approach would keep Charles and his new dog feeling relaxed and cocky while I sniffed around their affairs in private.
MONTHS PASSED. I KEPT my eyes open for a legal appeal by the Easts against Henry’s jail sentence, but it didn’t come
. That wasn’t the Charles East I knew, letting his only son go down for the count. I took a punt that after this long in a prison, Henry’s mind might be a pressure cooker full of fear. I decided to offer him an outlet valve.
The New South Wales prison system is delightfully quaint. To contact a prisoner you need to use snail mail. No emailing or cold calling, either in person or by phone. So I wrote Henry a letter asking if we could have a chat. In case someone unpleasant intercepted my correspondence, I thought it wise to hire myself a post office box to help filter any reply. The post office was next door to my local pub, so it was easy to check it every evening. I wasn’t sure if it was common sense or paranoia, but I purchased a pocket mirror so I could look behind my back whenever I opened the box.
III
A NAKED, wiry-limbed man relaxed against a built-in bench seat in a baking hot sauna room, barely a bead of sweat visible upon his cashew-nut-coloured skin. He spread his arms across the top of the wooden-slat seat and eyed the younger man sitting opposite him. “Are you sure about this? Absolutely sure?”
The man to whom the question was aimed shaped his long fingers into a make-shift comb and swept straw-coloured hair from his glistening forehead. “One hundred per cent.”
The wiry man smiled and browsed his companion’s sun-tanned skin which was streaked with rivulets of sweat and reminded him of crackling emerging on a side of roast pork. Wiry-man licked his lips and said, “You look good enough to eat.”
The young man grimaced: “Do we have to meet like this, every time?”