I needed a book to distract me from our forthcoming adventures, so I went to the local library. But I wanted no pastoral literary interludes. Given my background, I had always been interested in Oxbridge connections, and I was on the lookout for appropriate reading material. Rather than philosophy or economic theory, I now received more pleasure from biographies, indiscreet diaries and the occasional novel, though what a novel was supposed to be these days was hard to tell. A novel used to be something like Middlemarch. Then it became like Ulysses, like Mann, Nabokov or Céline who throttles you with his acid hatreds, where life is a crock and Celine says—choke on it. Maybe this frenetic, digital age of information overload requires a more compact narrative, the author acting as a harsh editor of our brilliant, tragic destinies, giving us prose études of entertainment, self-slaughter. Not sober, accelerated, gesticulating, boring realism smashed to bits. But, no doubt, I am wrong. Given my present circumstances, I was beginning to think there was more to be gained from experimenting with life, not fiction. But at least, in fiction, I wanted to be spared the existential dread and self-pity.
I settled on an Isherwood diary, which was indiscreet enough. I enjoyed the ups and downs of the peripatetic lifestyle, the brushing up against the great and not-so-great. Getting the sexual and spiritual balance right was challenging: the Vedanta discipline he followed in California seemed to contradict his basic creative drive. The annotated castings-off from Berlin to Santa Monica, the confrontations with the largeness of life, were hard. Despite all of Swami Prabhavananda’s teachings, it was difficult maintaining humility wining and dining the likes of Hollywood A-listers or the Stravinskys. This was part of a life honestly set forth. It just didn’t have the completeness or the depth I wanted. Perhaps this said more about me than him. I was tilting against my own windmills, and who would ever want to see my life in print.
I put the book to one side. It was an easy read, which was what I needed, though there wasn’t all that much about the Auden crowd in their prime. Just then my phone rang and a slew of fax pages came through.
I was no Burgess or Maclean, not even a Blunt—successful, even if traitors—but I was still impressed with my role in these subversive activities. I could almost believe it was a case of the transposed heads.
I was to go to Melbourne and meet with Antonio Vella who had been unwise enough to get involved with the Liberians. His supposedly respectable jewellery shop was a clearing house for cash, most of which was sent to the Cayman Islands. This money was underwriting terrorist activities around the globe. A red line had been ruled through his name. Others were already laying a trail of information about me so that my first call to Vella wouldn’t come as a surprise.
It was wrong to associate Africa just with nature documentaries and those wacky Nigerians who were always wanting to transfer forty million dollars into your bank account. Of course I knew about Mandela’s struggles against apartheid, but not a lot about the divisions within the African National Congress and how these were now shaping contemporary South African politics. Neither did I understand in much depth the geopolitical situation in other African countries. Whatever, it seemed tribal warfare had become endemic, ending with toxic health conditions, poor education and poverty for many.
I would be travelling south next week to claim an interest in the conflict diamonds being offered for sale there. Vella had spent a lot of time successfully schmoozing diamonds and gold in Africa. Charles was trusting me to get through the network here.
But first I had to see my father. I wasn’t looking forward to this because I knew it would mean preparing him for a move to a nursing home. That was the last thing he’d want. I’d been to one or two in the past and heard the pitiful cries for people who had died decades ago, minds scrambled, bodies failing.
I went over to the North Shore, up the Pacific Highway, where some of the long-term residents’ idea of incipient revolution was leaves in the gutter. But this was where Mum and Dad had decided to put down roots. And those roots had grown large and wrapped around each other’s destinies. You never get around to thinking about your parents’ relationship until you’ve shuffled off a few of your own coils. Father, Mother, Dad, Mum. All circling.
You could still see the faint scars of old bushfires on the eucalypts at the back of their home. Sydneysiders loved their bush and wanted it about them despite its regular tendency to burn with a fearsomeness straight out of Dante. But there were the scars of relationship bushfires too, if you knew where to look for them.
I stopped on the pathway up to our home; well, what used to be my home. Strange concisions had led me from my childhood to this moment, memories of parties, pools, tantrums, awful adolescence. Fortune, accidental or designed, had brought me from my bedroom, out into the world and now back to my father to whom I owed so much. I stopped and stared back at those years for a moment, then went on.
Father was lying in bed when I arrived. He usually slept most of the afternoon and then had a little tea. His appetite was going, a bad sign. I thought this might be one of the last times I would see my parents together in the house that had meant so much to them.
But what could I do except try to make Dad feel good. I think my mother had been drinking. Who could blame her when I knew she had been getting a daily ear-bashing from Celia.
I went to Dad. He was lying on his side staring into the middle distance, but I saw at once that his mind was in a further distance.
‘Hello son.’
His voice was feeble, a shred of what it had been in his best stockbroking days.
I sat by the bed and we looked at one another silently.
Finally, he opened his mouth, paused and held out his hand. It was soft and very hot. There was no strength. This was as gentle as I’d ever seen him. His old energy had fled to—where?
I gripped my father’s hand in mine and said, ‘Dad, I love you.’
I don’t think I’d ever said that before. Why don’t we say the things that matter until it’s too late. Since I had joined The Hammer, my constant questioning was morphing, mostly, into statements not needing question marks. All my infernal rhetorical questions seemed pointless.
Mother came to the door looking defeated. She walked up behind me and placed her hands on my shoulders. We became statuary for a minute, saying nothing. We try to explain too much, but as far as I could see there were no easy explanations for our lives. We fitted into our part of the world with an inexplicable strangeness. I felt that so deeply as the three of us met there at chair and bed.
‘And what have you been up to? You haven’t really told us much since you went away.’
‘Went away,’ sank through me.
I obfuscated as best as I could before my mother went to get us all some tea.
‘Try to take care of Chris, won’t you,’ Dad said, after she had gone, ‘and Celia too. I don’t think things are working out there.’
I said I would do what I could, but that, after all, people had to live their own lives.
My father sat up a little in bed.
‘I’m not going anywhere. Do you understand that? I’m not going anywhere.’
Suddenly, the old fierceness was back, the blaze in the eyes.
‘But Dad, you might have to go soon. You are too weak.’
And then I saw the look I knew from the past, the stubbornness taking no hostages to bad fortune. Dad pushed his alarm clock onto the floor in frustration.
‘I’m warning you. I won’t go.’
I suppose I shared my father’s intransigence, but when you put one lot of intransigence up against another lot, nothing much happens.
I left Dad looking a little more content than when I’d first seen him and went to the kitchen to talk to Mum about what we would do. I could see she was grieving, and not really listening to me. She was remembering. I was too.
I’d read all the papers Charles had sent me. Was Nietzsche right when he wrote that nothing is true and everything is permitted? His stinging ironies ha
d to be resisted. The vicious nature of regimes was depressingly similar for citizens unlucky enough to endure them. When I looked at the numbers of malnourished children, dismal educational facilities, pillaging of natural resources, the lack of petrol and flour, the price manipulation of basic foods, failed agricultural harvests, soil degradation and tribal favouritism—what was the death of one tyrant, or of his cronies, compared to all that. Nicholas Vansittart used to say in our tutorials that ethical action had to grow out of philosophical knowledge and understanding, but I’d abandoned that idea as inadequate. Did a mother desperate to find some food for her children have to understand Aristotle to know her great leader was corrupt. The only surprising thing was that revolutionary fervour wasn’t apparent right through Africa and in a swathe of Middle Eastern countries. You could oppress a people or culture only so long, as some states were discovering.
The trade in conflict diamonds had corrupted countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone for decades. Things were improving. Still, it was alarming to see what the people in northern Sierra Leone had been reduced to. Former members of the Revolutionary United Front and their families had descended to scrabbling for diamonds in thousands of unregulated mines as essential agricultural land was turned into a moonscape and children became slave labour. It was as if time had turned backwards, amputations and savage reprisals being the disorder of the day.
A depressed aid worker on the edge of sanity had come to a journalist who worked for one of Charles’ papers and put before him the whole disastrous history. After listening to this tragic story Charles got into one of those ferocious moods when he knew action would be required.
The Peace Diamond Alliance, instigated to improve management of Sierra Leone’s diamond industry, was working too slowly for Charles. And the Kimberley Process, whereby governmental agencies and diamond traders agreed to regulate their trade in illegal diamonds, simply invited his scorn. When confronted by the unpalatable facts of the matter, and knowing a large part of this trade had simply diverted to the Ivory Coast, Charles decided Vella would have to be investigated, and then …
I would go to Melbourne and play my part in the downfall of Vella.
Vella moved between South America, Africa and Europe, dodgy Certificates of Origin for the diamonds in his satchel. I couldn’t see any pattern to his travels. However, he was in Melbourne now, at his jewellery shop, and I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. I would have some members of the group to help me, but, as yet, I didn’t know who they would be.
I packed my best clothes—it was important to create the right impression. Then I made sure all my financial arrangements were in place. People like Vella could sniff out lack of money easily, and if I was going to be buying diamonds, I had to have ready money for the incidentals that are always part of these kinds of transactions.
Charles had put me straight about guileless Australians who didn’t realise operatives were at work in their midst, making the bad old days of the Congress for Cultural Freedom look like a Cold War dinosaur. Then, the CIA had even gone to the trouble of co-opting unfortunate abstract expressionism into propaganda battles, courtesy of MoMA exhibitions abroad. I was surprised when I first saw the documentation of the havoc occurring between security organisations of various stripes. However, I expected that I would be watched and listened to if pro-Western agencies could get their feelers onto me. After all, they were the enemy too, in a way, Charles reminded me, strange as that might have seemed.
Charles was given to sermonising about the failures of contemporary political bureaucracy. Power-crazed apparatchiks and assorted despots, who were just as numerous in the West as in any Balkans hill retreat, wasted yet more energy and resources with their third-rate spats and struggles for domination in Whitehall and Washington. We were free of that kind of thing, and if we were politically incorrect, at least we were not serving up propaganda to the masses.
Melbourne was a different kind of city to the one it used to be in the days when I visited relatives as a child. Some clever heads had come up with a revivified infrastructure and refreshing cultural resurgence.
However, that was none of my concern for the moment since I had to make an appointment with Vella. I phoned him from my hotel suite which was not far from his jewellery store in the city.
An assistant passed on my call, after it had been transferred to Vella’s private line. From our files I knew him to be a small man in his early fifties.
‘Yes. Antonio Vella here. How may I help you?’
The voice was soft, cajoling.
‘I believe you have some diamonds from Africa for sale. I would be interested in purchasing them, if they are still available.’
There was a tense silence. Or was it that I was tense.
‘Ah. What would you be interested in Mister Stevens?’ My assumed name seemed to have cleared suspicion’s hurdles.
And it went on from there. What I had to do was to get him to my suite, then downstairs in the lift, where others would take care of matters. This was beginning to sound like a repeat of the Shevchenko story. Charles said I could have two weeks maximum to get the job done. Being a newspaper publisher, it was easy enough for him to leave coded messages in advertisements. He gained a perverse pleasure from this, which had seemed to me, at first, like something out of Biggles. Still, if it worked—and it did—there was nothing wrong with the procedure.
I said I would call again soon.
That had gone easily enough, I thought, as I put the phone down.
The next day I didn’t have anything scheduled so I decided to go to the public library. One thing Oxford inculcated in me was a love of privately printed books. I enjoyed spending time going through the stacks looking for rare editions. Now, lots of the more valuable books were locked away because the public couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing, tearing out hand-coloured maps, and so forth. People—stating the bleeding obvious—could be vile. But these kinds of books showed what mind and technology could produce when working in harmony.
I was leafing through a particularly interesting edition of Conrad with illustrations when I sensed a shape on the other side of the stacks had intruded on my own subdued patch.
Anton looked between the rows of books, and winked.
‘And how are you, my friend?’
I couldn’t believe it. I looked again to make sure.
‘What on earth are you doing here!’
‘Quietly, quietly! Do not disturb, remember.’
Unsurprisingly, the Conrad didn’t survive any more investigation, and we headed off for coffee in a nearby cafe. We strode past rows of students and researchers pursuing minutiae, each head absorbed in text. I fancied I saw words curling in waves, waves of letters and languages curling outwards. And some of these waves wrapped themselves protectively about us, and some wound out of windows and went into the world, ideas, feelings, free. And the world could be saved by words, and then people like us wouldn’t be needed any longer.
Sure.
‘I’m here to help. You will be pleased to know Thérèse will be with us soon, and two others.’
I wanted to ask Anton about the plane that had been blown up, but the subject remained unspoken territory. Charles didn’t like people gossiping. Knowing how prone we all are to repeating gossip, whether true or not, I understood why it had to be that way.
But Anton did tell me something interesting. His brother, Florian, had decided to join our group. We required medical expertise, and Florian’s practice would be the ideal source for the drugs we sometimes needed in Europe with our kind of work. Anton looked pleased as he told me. I felt jealous because I couldn’t say anything confidential to Celia. His brother’s desire to join The Hammer helped Anton since, as I now knew, it was a strain keeping all the information about our group to myself.
Florian had given his brother something that would help us with Vella, an odourless, colourless liquid which acted as a powerful sedative. We just had to careful with the dose. Since we
had to get information out of this bloke we couldn’t take the usual option. Vella knew too many people who were of interest to us, too many names and addresses. We had to get them from him, Anton insisted.
A degree of watchfulness helps in these circumstances, and I was fairly certain, after we’d left the cafe and had been walking along the street for a while, that we were being followed. Anton agreed we should pretend to part and then he would follow to see what might happen, if anything.
We talked a while longer and, after discussing our strategy one more time, activated our plan.
It was clear I was being followed soon after I turned off the main street and walked down a narrow laneway. As I went further into the warren of buildings, past the dripping air conditioners, hypodermic syringes and sundry detritus, I could hear footsteps closing in on me. I started to run. I didn’t panic because I knew Anton was not too far away.
I found myself surrounded by garages echoing with my own uncertainty. Then, too quickly, there was a person beside me, his hands around my throat. I fell to the ground, struggling to break free. I couldn’t. There was a bottle in the gutter—if I could just get to it. I desperately shuffled forward—where was Anton?—reached the bottle and smashed it on the gutter’s edge. Then, with the broken part gripped by its neck, I turned and tried to shove the jagged edge into the face of my attacker. He fell back onto the ground as I rushed forward to the shape below me. Then, thinking better of his disadvantages, he ran for it. All too suddenly, a blur of T-shirt, jeans and tattoos, he was gone.
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