Hammerhead

by Peter Nicholson

  My angry silence was met with even angrier silence. How could it have come about that I was on my own here. Time had the hardest lessons stored up for just such moments. But since millions had disappeared without so much as a prayer, why should it be any different for me, or for anyone else.

  We grew too used to life, took it for granted. Just as we got out of bed in the morning and were not astonished we actually existed, that the bones and skin our brain inhabited were not simply rationalist raiment. I knew all the scientific explanations for the human, but I wasn’t sure I believed in them any longer. Those architectural plans, for example. A great aesthetic imagination driven by a vision of splendour had brought forth a unique form of beauty, and builders had made the vision real. But no explanations brought forth the vision. It was not explicable in any book of disquiet.

  Some of the most exciting photographs of the Sydney Opera House were those taken during its construction—the ribs thrusting upwards, the unclad temple steps. Those photographs made you feel how marvellously complex and interrelated our lives were, how fantastic it was we had come so far.

  I carefully examined the documents before me. There were so many of them, and I needed to know the details of each one. Clearly, I would have to bribe someone to gain entrance to the roof.

  After making sketches and notes, I took them home with me and sat trying to memorise the labyrinthine pathways and ladders under those shells. The next thing I would have to do was find Jacmel. Priestnall had probably arranged to meet the colonel in Skyros, and that meant Jacmel would have seen Thérèse and me. I was hardly sanguine at this fact, knowing someone had already tried to kill me in Melbourne.

  I used some local Watchers the following day to keep on the lookout for Jacmel near the Opera House. I didn’t have the time. These Watchers were trained to do the tedious job of keeping track of people. They were used to concentrating for long periods—the average person gets tired looking for someone in a crowd and has even more difficulty following them.

  Then I had to work out who might be a likely person to help me. Security was tight but, as we in The Hammer knew, money speaks all languages. The first individual I approached with an inane question about ‘what goes on up there’ was nonplussed. The second was frosty. But with the third person, Till Euler, I was lucky. It so happened he was something of an expert on the building, having given guided tours in the past. He needed some money for car repairs and was happy to show me around at an opportune moment.

  It was awkward moving around in the sails, and disorienting too, rather like going down into the bowels of the pyramids I should think. Perhaps a better image would have been of someone ascending a super-real Mayan temple. In the spaces below sacrifices of music and drama were regularly made, though sometimes it was the audience led like a lamb to the slaughter. What reflected glories had these roofs not collected: Sutherland, Nilsson and Ella Fitzgerald, Bernstein, Arrau and Bette Davis. Gold below, diamonds up above. That was what I was hoping for.

  As we moved through the dark space I searched for a hidden package. I was sure it would be up here somewhere. But I was out of luck. I would have to come back another time.

  We made our descent. I was going to have to get more CCTV footage destroyed as we had with Vella.

  I made arrangements to meet my guide again before departing to the nearby Botanic Gardens where I sat down on the grass and tried to think things through.

  Everything was gathering to a climax. In me was—hubris? No. Temporarily fashionable intellectuals with their explanations for everything could never be equal to the moment of decision that leads to action. I felt sorry for them. I had been one of the safe ones, until recently. I had lived in my cocoon lined with dollar bills and judged the world with apple-on-the-head certainty. But now I had been opened up to my fractals, my string theory encounter with the real. In the arcades of my nerves each moment held on to, and then let go of, countless possibilities.

  I contemplated a Moreton Bay Fig, its enormous branches bending down to the grass. I gazed at the harbour, the scudding surface an invitation to daring, its coruscations, troughs and rippling a suggestion of something more immense than self.

  I bent my head in homage to the harbour’s beauty.

  And looked up to see Jacmel walking past me through the gardens and down to the Opera House.

  I turned away, trying to hide my face.

  Then I followed as closely as I dared, observing the dapper form of the colonel. My instincts had been right.

  Jacmel made a recce of the environs, walking around the entire building, checking over its exterior with a precision I couldn’t help admiring. After all, it’s what I would have done, and had been doing.

  But I didn’t want to get too close. The people I’d been using would follow on for me and send me reports of Jacmel’s activities. I had to get to the diamonds, and much more importantly, the encrypted messages, before Jacmel did. He must have had specific information and thus he had to be followed at all times so that I could see when my chance would come.

  If people had only known who was moving among them, what violence had been perpetrated by him, or in his name. I hoped most would turn back from the passageway Jacmel trod.

  Jacmel advanced into the distance as I turned to walk back through the gardens to my apartment.

  To think the two of us were tied to a single purpose, with different ends of course, made me pause at the door. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined the faces of the tortured, the disregarded pleas for mercy. There would be no mercy for Jacmel.

  Leads that didn’t go anywhere, intangible presences, squalor—and death. Always and forever, death. This burden was now mine. It sometimes seemed as large and heavy as the weight Atlas bore.

  But I had Anton’s companionship close by.

  Which I suppose was recompense for the disappointment I felt that our double act was over. You had to accept life on its own conditions, however difficult it might be. I knew quite a few of my friends were closing down inside because life hadn’t offered them the golden ticket on the plate they were expecting. Marriages had soured, and my gay friends weren’t faring any better. I noticed some had given away reading. When you didn’t read you stopped considering new ideas and simply recycled what was knocking around upstairs. I could see the rust breaking out on their brows. They thought they were young for their ages, but there was a kind of growing old about them that had nothing to do with skin. If you looked into their eyes you could sometimes see a vacancy. I had avoided that fate, but I had to be strict with my feelings, not indulge them. It was what had got me through Anton’s loss. I could imagine what his opinion would have been of me giving in at this late stage.

  I didn’t want to give in.

  Enid rang from London in the evening. I told her about recent events. She was pleased with what had happened but told me there was consternation in Washington about Priestnall whose body had been discovered not long ago. Stories were starting to leak, especially in New York and Los Angeles, suggesting a criminal background which we knew were true. These were now getting the State Department into trouble. The usual denials were issued, but of course someone behind the scenes knew the details of Priestnall’s past history and about his recent activities.

  Thérèse rang and said she’d be joining me, which pleased me. More than pleased me.

  If we could find out where Jacmel was staying, that would be helpful. I needed one of the people I’d put on his case to find this information. I wanted much more back story for Jacmel, for all the people I’d encountered. But it wasn’t there. And WikiLeaks was no help either. The thing of darkness evaded pinpointing. Despite my efforts, intelligence, all of our resources, I was left groping after imponderables. I wanted black and white, not this murky grey.

  Then, a bolt from the blur. Edwin Sethman, the philanthropist who was part of the main council of The Hammer and a friend of Nicholas too, contacted me. He had found out from some sources in the States that Jacmel was due
to return to Haiti at the end of the week, and so I would have to be prepared to act soon. Sethman said he had heard what good things I had been doing and congratulated me. He wanted to have a long talk about the future of our organisation when I was back in Munich. I rang off saying I would be pleased to see him. I didn’t know what the ‘good things’ were he meant. I didn’t think I’d been all that impressive in my forays thus far.

  It was rumoured Sethman gave away approximately one million dollars each week to charitable foundations. That’s what finding oil in the right place at the right time can enable you to do, if you’re charitably disposed. He was also well known at the auction houses in London, sometimes attending himself, but often sending an agent so as not to raise expectations too high for a particular item he wanted. He was a bibliophile and philatelist and had gathered a tremendous collection over the years, including a Shakespeare First Folio and the rare Tre Skilling Banco stamp from Sweden, a somewhat unprepossessing item, but, because of its rarity, the cause of desperate manoeuvres across continents. The stamp was last sold for over two million United States dollars, so who knows what it would be worth now. One of the books he lent me was a later edition of Peter Wright’s Spycatcher that Margaret Thatcher had tried to stop getting published. The original edition, printed in Ireland, was now quite a valuable item. It gave a disputed history of MI5 and 6’s activities in recent times.

  Somehow, it eased my mind to think of those books and stamps as I waited for events to unfold.

  One of my Watchers told me Jacmel was staying in an apartment close to the Opera House, and he’d had every chance to get to know the building as well as I did. I decided I would now have to keep watch outside his apartment block each night. There were now only three days left before Jacmel was supposed to return to Haiti.

  The first night, nothing. I let the others I’d been using go. They had been helpful, but now I wanted to work on my own, unless Thérèse was with me. She had said she would be on her way soon, but I’d had no further word from her.

  The second night Jacmel went for a walk around the Quay area, near the Opera House. He seemed to be just someone at a loose end. But there would be no letting-up with him. He was at his most dangerous when he seemed nonchalant. I was certain the next evening would be the one when he would attempt to retrieve those diamonds.

  Beneath the swirling harbour water, surely the hammerhead sharks scented blood onshore.

  I put on my disguises for the evening—wig, glasses and so forth. Quite effective, I thought. Most of the disguises we put on in this life aren’t convincing before the strict judgment of history. These had to be. As I prepared myself, my real self under my false self, I thought of how far I had come in the last months. No-one could have believed it, and yet it was true. Perhaps this was how it was for everyone. We showed an exterior to others; our inner lives were something separate. We were like the eroded sandstone cliffs rounding Sydney Harbour. The crags and smoothnesses were on show to passers-by, but what of the geological tides, the sediments within. The drama of living continued, sometimes in boredom, sometimes with joyfulness. We suffered too in life’s brutal endgames. In some unimaginable future the world might be rinsed clean of pain and awfulness, but not here, not yet.

  What was this process through which I was evolving. Had it been active in me during all those years at school, at university, in the banking tower, now I had shed my past and attained this unsettling discrimination. I cast around for the cosy certainties of the lecture room, but they were not to be found.

  In the cyclotron of my wishes I was spun to sheer instinct. If I was weak now, I would have failed. My little learning coursed round my head, hooks of randomness tearing through soft limbs. What use was political philosophy or talk of ethics and morality. My world was centred in my thumping heart. I looked back at life—I couldn’t call it my life at this moment—and life seemed a strange, beautiful thing, but distant from me. I would have to tear myself back to Earth and assume my proper balance in action, if luck was on my side, and the unreliable vizier beyond was kindly disposed to offer the necessary grace.

  The night was overcast, clouds building in piles above illuminated buildings. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra would be performing Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony this evening. Crowds moved to the Concert Hall from the car parks and the trains, moths fluttering to their aesthetic flame, where music might bless, as it could, and liberate unsettled flesh momentarily fixed in chairs. The Tchaikovsky, superb harmonist of torments and joys, would fill the second half of the program, after some Mozart and Meale.

  Jacmel left his apartment in the early evening. I followed him to the Opera House box office where he bought a ticket for the concert. I did the same, to keep track, and the first half of the program ensued with nothing amiss, music soothing savagery. But then, at interval, I watched him moving to the area I knew gave entrance to the roof. The decisive moment had come.

  Using the knowledge gained from the guide who had advised me the other day, I followed behind, trying to be as quiet as I could. I had a gun this time, something I didn’t plan to use, shot in practise, but which Charles and Thérèse both insisted I take with me. Perhaps I should have just waited below for him, but Jacmel was so diabolically clever I couldn’t trust him not to evade me as he had done with others so often before.

  I could hear him in the distance, the cockroach body moving up and on. The orchestra, reconstituted after interval, would by now be treading out the opening bars of the symphony.

  At one moment he stopped, listening intently, before continuing. He clearly was going straight to a particular place. He wasn’t looking for the diamonds. He knew where they were.

  This was just as I thought it would be. Surrealist mission, almost impossible.

  Higher I went until I was at the outside railing that took you to the top of the largest sail. I peered into the dark and could see Jacmel at the crest, bent over, his hands wrenching a box from beneath the ledge separating the two curving shells.

  The wind was hurling itself at the sails, the city winding below, spiralling into whirls of shuddering light.

  I imagined, as the symphony stormed, serried burnished brass, Manfred wandering in the mountains.

  ‘Jacmel!’ I called out.

  He turned suddenly, staring wildly at me. I rushed forward.

  ‘Give me that!’

  He was holding the box in his left hand and had already ripped open its top.

  I grappled with him, there at the rushing height, his free hand trying to hold me off.

  I managed to get my hands on him as we struggled at the brink, no time to use a gun.

  Suddenly the container flew through the air and I saw a spray of uncut diamonds flung into the night, papers dragged by the wind into the harbour.

  Jacmel reached desperately for the box.

  The first movement would now be veering towards its ending, timpani and bass drum thundering to their climax.

  Jacmel reached again, missed, lost his balance, falling.

  His scream burnt the air as he crashed to the shell beneath, then onto the pavement below.

  I fell back, seizing the supporting railing. Then I stared down.

  Human ants were swarming around his corpse.

  Unexpectedly, there was just one piece of crumpled paper lying at my feet between the shells. I picked it up and stuffed it into my trouser pocket. I looked for any other telltale signs. There were none. I turned quickly and made my way back down the ladders that seemed to find their own way for me.

  People outside were rushing to the front of the Opera House. I went with the mass of them and then away, under the walkways, round to Circular Quay. I made my exit calmly, avoiding security cameras as best I could. In the general confusion, and with luck, I escaped.

  So all I had for my troubles was another indecipherable sheet of paper. But Jacmel was dead.

  Back home, disguises discarded, I wondered if I could risk trying to get into Jacmel’s apartment, but dec
ided against it. There would be people crawling over it soon enough.

  I hid my gun, changed my clothes, tore up the ticket to the concert and flushed it down the toilet, then sat, trembling, my mouth and throat so dry they hurt.

  Who was going to receive those diamonds? What was in the messages the wind swept over the harbour?

  Questions fell through my fingers as I tried to hold on to the significant thing, whatever that might be.

  All I could feel for the moment was a slipping sensation, as if I was about to fall too and follow Jacmel to perdition.

  The next day was like next year, next century. Yet, somehow, I had survived. Thérèse had arrived, and we both thought I should get away quickly.

  I rang Celia. I wasn’t going to keep Chris off the agenda any longer. I asked her whether he would like to go on that long-promised holiday. This would be the perfect opportunity to get down to South Australia until the whole fracas that was bound to follow settled into gossip. I had a standing invitation to stay with my old friends, and I was sure they wouldn’t mind two extra coming with me.