by Mark Furness
“You must take me back there sometime.”
“Sure.”
“And your children? How old are they now?”
“Alice is twenty. Hugo is sixteen. And you?”
She smiled and waved her ring-less fingers at me. If she had a ring, it was probably in her pocket. Her phone pinged; she looked at the screen.
“Must go. Lovely seeing you again, Gar.”
Sandy kissed me on the cheek, stood and walked over to Claire. They exchanged business cards and shook hands. Sandy walked down the curling staircase towards the main bar, chatting on her phone, hurling a hand about with fury in her eyes. It looked like one of her business deals had gone sour.
Claire returned and sat beside me. “A bit of history there?”
“Ancient,” I said.
Claire topped our flutes from the waiting bottle. “It’s on Dankebank,” she said, showing me Sandy’s business card. Her job title was Vice President – Strategy – Asia-Pacific. I knew a little of Dankebank; it was a giant German-based investment bank and pension fund manager.
“She has an unusual handshake,” said Claire.
“How so?”
“She stroked her fingers on the inside of my wrist.”
“She must like you.”
Claire smiled that great smile again. I wanted to bottle it. I wondered if I should tell her that I had lived with Sandy before I married Charlotte, and that a few weeks after we moved into a flat, Sandy started staying out all night with other men - and women. She thought it was a perfectly acceptable lifestyle; after all, she came home eventually. When I objected, she said I could take it or leave it. I tried it for a couple of weeks before I left it. The last twenty minutes with Sandy in Babel reminded me I’d never properly unpacked after leaving.
Claire’s phone beeped.
“Carl’s getting cross,” she said. “We’re having dinner with some of his firm’s clients. I have to pretend I care about shopping malls. Oh, and the Catholic Church; his firm’s doing their PR for the Royal Commission. Do you want to come?”
“Thanks, but I’m already booked.” I wasn’t, and despite the delicious prospect of knocking a flaming Sambuca over a bishop’s cassock, I didn’t intend to become another tick on Carl Cousins’ journalist scorecard so he could fatten his next invoice to his clients.
“Have a good night,” she said.
She reminded me of someone who was about to fall backwards without confidence that anyone would catch her. I nearly called her back to say I’d come, but the police whistle on my phone trilled, startling some nearby drinkers, a couple of whom bolted for the toilets. I chuckled at the thought that Hugo’s ringtone was sending some decent drugs down the Babel’s drain, but it wasn’t him calling.
“Gar, it’s Bruce Tyson here, the psych nurse. I might have something for you.”
“Shoot.”
“Not over the phone. Can we meet in the morning?”
“Why not now?”
“I’m trying to shake a tail.”
“Seriously?”
“Dance lessons, mate!”
“You know the Pickled Pig in Darlinghurst?” I said.
“I can find it.”
“See you there at 8am.”
When Tyson hung up, I realised I still didn’t have his phone number. His call showed on my handset register as No caller ID.
He didn’t have the body-shape for boogying. Whatever he was up to, I hoped he’d survive the night.
XII
“YOU LEAD a charmed life,” the girl called behind her. She leaned upon a stainless steel railing atop a glass-walled balcony overlooking Bondi Beach, drawing air through her nostrils, searching for salt. But the line of cocaine she had just consumed with her new-found friend had numbed her sense of smell. Her sense of light, however, had sharpened. Sunset had come and gone, but the white caps of breaking waves were visible in the dark. She liked nights, the cool of them - the shadows. She closed her eyes; the cracking surf reminded her of artillery fire. It excited her.
Bart Hills opened his fridge and extracted another bottle of Vintage Krug champagne. This girl was worth it. He could have sworn she was an English actress he had seen on the Game of Thrones TV series, the blond mother of dragons, when she had tapped on the window of his Uber outside the Babel bar and asked the driver if he was in fact her ride. When she said her destination was Bondi, and smiled at him in his back seat, Hills didn’t hesitate to offer to share his car. During the drive, the girl had tried to phone her flatmate, telling Hills she had lost her house key, but the friend did not answer. “Would you like to come to my place while you wait for your friend to call you?” Hills had asked.
Inside his apartment, mid-way through their first bottle of Krug, after she broke out a packet of what turned out to be A-grade cocaine, well, Hills figured his stars were aligning. He wanted to forget about that sneaky bitch, Sandy Wallace, and that sleazy journalist, Gar Hart. And most of all, he wanted to forget about the breaking mind of his friend, Henry East. Good drugs and fine alcohol, and the chance company of a beautiful stranger who knew nothing about him, and expected nothing of him but a good time – yes, that would do the trick.
Hills filled two flutes and joined the best piece of luck he’d had all day on the balcony.
“You haven’t told me your name,” he said, handing her a glass.
She reached up and put a hand around his neck, drawing his ear towards her mouth. “I ... am the white witch,” she whispered with warm breath.
Her lips brushed his ear. Hills stiffened inside his trousers.
The girl stroked his cheek and turned his face gently towards hers. She put her lips upon his and opened her mouth, letting his searching tongue inside her, using her eyes to search the insides of the apartment for more clues about his home life. The only items that held her interest were two things she’d already noticed on the coffee table: an antique-looking book titled The Occult World, and a Ouija board, the items which had inspired her hastily constructed line about the white witch.
“Is that a wand?” she said, smiling, letting her hand fall upon his hardness. He was a proper stallion, this one, the girl thought. What a shame.
The apartment’s entrance door opened and a young man, shorter and stumpier than Hills, and wearing a suit and tie, stepped inside.
“Shi ... ,” she hissed.
“I beg your pardon?” said Hills.
“Sorry. I think my phone is ringing.” She stepped from the balcony into the sitting room and retrieved it from her handbag on the sofa. Looking at her screen, she said, “My flatmate is having a relationship breakdown. I need to go. But can we have dinner?”
“When?” said Hills.
“Tomorrow night. By candlelight.”
“Where?”
“Here. Alone.”
XIII
I FOUND Bruce Tyson waiting for me inside a booth at the Pig, feeding his alleged dancer’s body with bacon and fried eggs, sausages, mushrooms, fried tomatoes and toast coated with finger-thick butter. I was pleased that he’d lived through the night, but breakfast looked a fifty-fifty bet.
“So what’s your oil?” I said, sitting opposite Tyson, waving my hand at Mick for a latte.
“There was a bloke visiting Henry East yesterday. Tall feller, Henry’s age. Didn’t hear his name.”
“Freckled? Sun-bleached hair?”
“Sounds about right.”
It had to be Bart Hills.
“Hear what they talked about?”
Tyson dabbed a finger on some egg yolk that had escaped from his lower lip and was dripping down his chin. He eyed it, licked it off. “What’s it worth?”
“You’re costing me a fortune, mate.”
“Same as last time?”
“Let me hear it first.”
“I heard your name mentioned. And they talked about some bloke called Jeff, or Zeff. I’m pretty sure it was Zeff.”
“And?”
“They’re shitting themselves about t
his Zeff.”
“Okay. Get Henry to talk to me and I’ll double your salary.”
“Fat chance, but I’ll try. By the way, I’d watch your back. It’s the way that blond kid was talking about you today.”
“How?”
“This Zeff is on to you.”
“Okay, what else have you got?”
Tyson reached into his shirt pocket and extracted a scrap of paper. He handed it to me. It contained a mobile phone number. “It’s mine”
I keyed it into the contact list on my phone. Tyson mopped up the scraps on his plate with toast and dabbed the corners of his mouth with a napkin. The plate looked like it had just stepped out of the dishwasher.
“I know what you are thinking,” said Tyson, who drained his coffee.
“What’s that?”
He winked and tapped the plate. “That I’m the sort of guy who doesn’t like to leave a trail of evidence”
I started to like him. As he walked away, I wondered: was Zeff Mr Greyhound? Did he deliver the dead fish to our home? How might he escalate, now he knows that I’ve been chasing Bart Hills?
THAT EVENING, I PICKED up takeaway sushi on my way home from The Citizen and collected Fish from next door. We shared the food and watched TV in the lounge room. On our way up to bed, I stopped at Alice’s bedroom and peered inside. There was a pencil sketch in a frame hanging on the wall behind her bed. The single red poppy had delicate folds of petals, upon which were intricately-drawn, rainbow-coloured ladybirds having a tea party. It was drawn by my father. This was the man who walked out on my mother when I was Alice’s age and phoned me at work to say I should go home because Mum needed me. I walked into the house and found her drunk to vomiting, slumped against a hallway wall, hysterical, smeared in her own shit, spilled pills by her side. I called an ambulance and cleaned her up. Bert had packed his bags that afternoon and moved in with 30-year-old twin sisters. House sharing, he called it. “You’ve only got one life,” he explained to me later over the phone, “and I’ve wasted enough of it.”
I looked into Hugo’s room and studied his three door bolts. My resistance was broken. I went back downstairs to my office.
I used some specialist software provided to me by the IT expert who set up The Citizen’s network at Gunnaroo Tower to browse the websites that had been visited from our home internet in the last few days. It had to be Hugo’s trail to a porn video showing simultaneous penetration of a tiny, pubescent girl by three heavy men with eastern European accents. What the hell did Hugo make of that? What was it with Hugo and his dead mother’s dress and the eye make-up? What was I going to do about it? Anything? I closed my eyelids and massaged my eyeballs. Inside that dark space, I saw Charlotte, like a mime artist behind a glass wall, pleading with me, but I couldn’t understand her sign language. I just felt her frustration.
I pulled from my wallet the packet with Steele’s cocaine inside, prepared it and sniffed the lot. I went to the kitchen, poured a large glass of red wine and sat beside the frangipani in the garden. It had been Charlotte’s favourite tree when in flower. A few sips in, the police whistle trilled. It was a call from the Tangleton Hotel on the southern fringe of the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
“Garsy, it’s Hughie Jones here, mate.”
“Good to hear from you, Hughie. What’s up?”
“You haven’t forgotten, have you? The council officer is coming tomorrow to inspect the factory site at the Hill. We’re booked for 2pm.”
“Of course not,” I lied.
My Moon Hill neighbour, Hughie, and I were seeking a permit from the local council to build a factory shed for our joint venture business: Black Snake Organic Bush Foods. It was my plan to escape from journalism. A long shot, I knew. Hughie and I had already planted Bunya Nut and Quandong fruit tree saplings on the sunny slopes to produce native herbal flavouring for our meat range. Our first recipe for wild suckling pig and yabby sausages, spiced with native lemon myrtle, had tested well with customers in a city restaurant. We had the little freshwater crayfish growing in our dams, and the baby pigs were roaming in the forest, free for the picking. All we needed was the council OK to build our food processing shed so we could hit commercial scale for the gourmet market.
I agreed to meet Hughie and the man from the Canterwell Shire Council tomorrow at mid-afternoon as planned.
Fish and I went to bed. The doorbell woke us. It was just after 12am. Mr Browning was in my bedside dresser. I clipped the magazine into the handgrip, flipped the safety catch off and tip-toed downstairs dressed in my shorts. Fish broke the peace by yapping at the door. I kept the lights off and looked through the security lens at a lone figure standing on the porch.
XIV
SANDY WALLACE’S meerkat eyes peered back at me through the security lens.
She said nothing when I opened the door. The air was damp and her hair and skin were glistening from a rain shower. Her clingy, sleeveless black cocktail dress was slit from the collar to just above her navel, revealing a ribbon of flesh. She carried a pair of black dagger-heels in one hand and a glittering clutch bag in the other.
“What do you want?” I said.
“I’m locked out.”
She looked at the gun in my hand.
“Since when have you had one of those?”
“Family heirloom.”
“Alice and Hugo at home?”
“Why?”
“Can I come in? I’m wet.”
Fish knew what was happening before I did. He disappeared into my office.
I closed the front door. When I turned around, Sandy put her damp palm on my naked stomach in the shadowy hallway. Her hand slid down and she led me upstairs like she was tugging a bull gently by a nose ring.
I LAY SOFT AND SPENT inside her, keeping my weight on my elbows and knees.
“Stay still,” she whispered. “Dead still, or I’ll stop.”
I guessed right about what was coming. She began squeezing me from her inside, rolling her vaginal muscles in waves upon the quickly expanding length of me. Neither of us moved our outer bodies; I fought the urge to thrust and buck. With her fingers she fondled my scrotum, pressing my hardness inside her to the hilt, where she held me tight and rolled her waves over me, and in time she milked me.
I WOKE TO SUNLIGHT through the dormer window, rolled to face the inside of the bed, and was disappointed for a moment. I licked the tip of a middle finger and mopped crumbs of cocaine off a small china plate on my bedside table. All that was left of Sandy was a trace of salt-caramel scent and a smear of cherry-coloured lipstick on my pillow. The bitter taste on my finger helped get me out of bed. Sandy had left her business card on the table, next to my phone and Mr Browning.
Fish followed me about as I packed clothes for the drive to Moon Hill to meet the council inspector and Hughie.
I made two phone calls while I had tea and toast in the kitchen. Alice and Fred were flying to Melbourne for the weekend. Hugo had finished his first day at school in Brighton; he was going to bed when I called. I told him to beware of who he talked to on the internet, to be careful what he looked at, and reminded him that everywhere you go, you leave a digital trail. If Hugo understood what I was getting at, he didn’t let on. He passed the phone to his nana and after talking with her I began mentally preparing for an earlier visit to England than I had anticipated only days ago. Malcolm’s final deadline was approaching fast.
I walked to the local supermarket, tugging a shopping bag on little wheels that Alice bought me for Father’s Day, and purchased fresh fish, fruit and vegetables for my trip to the Hill. I had plenty of beer and wine at home that I could plunder. It was a Friday so I would spend the weekend there. Fish had never liked the bush after he lost his leg in that trap, so I delivered him next door to Sue, along with a box of Cuban cigars I’d been saving since my last overseas trip.
Claire was at her desk when I arrived at The Citizen’s office. She cocked a green eye and put a long index finger to her chin. “Can I ask whe
re you’re off to?”
I was wearing a black tee-shirt and jeans and hiking boots.
“Bush business: just overnight, maybe two.”
“Branch office, is it?”
“I do have a treehouse, as a matter of fact.”
“You contactable?”
“Sure. Phone and email, but reception’s patchy. The atmosphere can be strange.”
“Sounds like another planet.”
“Feels like it at times.”
I packed some files on the East case in my briefcase and downloaded some related documents onto my laptop, then checked my emails at my desk. Jack had copied me and Claire a new press clipping from the latest English edition of The Shanghai Business Journal:
Former Australian Ambassador to China, Ms Kathy Throsby, has joined the Shanghai office of the Trust8 investment advisory firm, the company’s chairman, Mr Charles East, announced today.
Trust8 provides advice to overseas companies seeking to invest in China. The firm’s clients include some of the world’s largest pension funds, as well as individual investors.
Claire appeared in my doorway, excited, waving a sheet of paper.
“You need to see this,” she said, handing me the document. It was a copy of Trust8’s client list. “Cavalcade isn’t just sponsoring Henry’s polo ponies. They have East working for them in China. And there’s another client of East’s that might interest you.”
I scanned the list. It was the name DankeBank, Sandy Wallace’s DankeBank, made my eyes open wide. I put my phone on open speaker, so Claire could hear, and hand-signalled her to stay a silent witness. I pulled Sandy’s card from my wallet and dialled her private line.
“Why didn’t you tell me that you are a client of Charles East?”
“What?”
“DankeBank. You are one of East’s clients in China.”
“You are paranoid, Gar. You need to take a cold shower. I’ve got nothing to do with the bank’s China business. I didn’t even know the bank was employing him, if that’s even a fact. For god’s sake, we have over a hundred offices worldwide and five thousand staff. I don’t keep track of every movement.”