by JR Carroll
It was a different Gerald Kamp on the run this time. He regularly changed his appearance in every conceivable way before committing robberies, holing up somewhere until the heat went off and then moving on to greener fields. Police were misled by the widely differing descriptions of the offender or offenders, who commonly struck in outlying towns and then vanished into the bush. The technique was to drive a stolen car to a secret location where he had a trail bike hidden in shrubbery, then ride the bike to a lonely, forested outpost where he had already built a rough hut containing all necessary stores for a few days’ duration. Some senior police believed there were several copycat bandits operating, and valuable resources were wasted following this line of thought. But all the time Wolfgang Lutz knew who it was playing with them, and as events turned out he got his chance to prove he was right. He became a member of a hand-picked task force hunting the bandit they now called Mr Magic, because of his ability to make himself disappear.
Inevitably Kamp was caught, but that was more bad luck than bad management. He was pulling a job in a typically small town when not one but three police officers came in to do some banking. Kamp fired several shots through the windows and tried to make a break for it, but tripped on a culvert outside and was jumped on and quickly handcuffed. He received fourteen years, but the prosecution appealed against what it considered to be a lenient sentence. The case dragged on, with Wolfgang closely involved in the frequent transporting of Kamp from prison to courthouse and back again. Wolfgang had requested the assignment because he had spent so much of his life pursuing Kamp, and wanted to see it through to the end. In time, he believed, he got to know his nemesis quite well, probably better than most people, and he always had the unnerving feeling during their conversations that Kamp, not Wolfgang, was holding the cards.
During one of these ferryings from jail – a journey of eleven kilometres – with Wolfgang at the wheel, Gerald Kamp, despite being handcuffed, managed to cut a hole in the roof of the van with a pair of tinsnips he had fashioned in jail, climbed through and jumped from the vehicle without anyone noticing anything was amiss until they arrived at the court. A full-scale search was mounted, covering miles of wild, hilly country, but there was no sign of him. After a couple of weeks the search was wound down, then abandoned. No-one ever found out how he managed to evade capture and survive in an unforgiving environment during winter, because he hadn’t fallen into police hands since. The prevailing wisdom was that he had set himself up in one of the many caves in the area and lived off the land, trapping and eating birds and other small creatures. All contact with Mr Magic was lost – until that Christmas, when Wolfgang received a card in the mail. Then he got one on his birthday. Then Kamp sent a photograph of himself standing outside Wolfgang’s own police station, smiling straight at Wolfgang with his arms folded. On the back a message was scribbled: ‘Hi, Wolfie. Just thought I’d drop in and say hello. Ciao.’ He never signed himself Gerald Kamp, but instead used a string of joke names or aliases: Houdini, Captain Moonlight, David Bowie – apparently because of his talent for makeovers – Jesse James, and, apparently plucked from nowhere, Lex Leslie, Benjamin Frost, George Stackhouse, Ronald James, Lewis Kenny. These were later found to be the names of mates from his army days. Then one day he went too far. Wolfgang’s sister, who lived with her husband in inner-suburban Christchurch, opened the door midmorning to a blond-haired man who said he was conducting a survey. The man then forced his way in and raped and assaulted her, breaking her arm as she resisted his attempts to take off her clothes. He would have killed her except that her screams attracted the neighbours, who started banging on the door. The attacker ran out the back, but not before he told her to give his best to his old mate, Wolfie.
7
Various strands of thought wove their way through Danny’s mind while he drove his black Golf to the casino: primarily Mischa Fleming, whose trance-inducing kiss still sent ripples through his body whenever he shut his eyes; the bald, smiling standover man whose name he didn’t know but who knew Danny’s; and, over and above those, Paul Sigmund Barry and the matter of PB Investments. Back in 1988 Danny had been very young, about twelve, but he knew about the collapse of PB all right, first hand. His family had lived in Adelaide, where his parents ran a small suburban mixed business, a corner minimart. Danny used to work there for pocket money on weekends and school holidays. He was certainly not privy to his parents’ financial affairs, but he vividly remembered the impact of PB’s crash on his father in particular. Everything they had worked for and saved over the years, their investments and their superannuation plan, simply vanished in a puff of smoke – or, more accurately, in a snowstorm of spurious share and bullion transactions, using two-dollar shelf or dummy companies, numbered accounts in places like the Caymans and the Marshall Islands, quasi-legal investments for which there was little or no proper documentation, and a system of highly involved corporate structures designed to cover Paul Sigmund Barry’s financial tracks. He was the pioneer of the now infamous ‘loop’, a sophisticated and deliberately confusing chain of deals designed to move funds from one continent to another and then back again via a network of ‘friendly’ merchant banks. Launder them, in other words. In those wild and buccaneering days it was known in business circles as the Boomerang Effect. Paul Barry was too cunning and slippery for the authorities. When he was finally blown away, after the crash he simply declared himself bankrupt, put his hands up and did his time. Despite the best efforts of investigators, even top private snoops, no funds or assets were found. Barry insisted that there were no funds or assets, that everything had been swallowed up by a black hole, the financial death star, and lost forever.
Danny remembered the gist of that. He also remembered the day his father Neil had walked into the sea at Glenelg very early one fine summer morning, just as the sun was coming up, leaving his clothes neatly folded on the sand with a note pinned to the shirt. His father had always been a neat, meticulous man. He never approved of untidiness, or loose ends. Or bad debts. Neil Gold had been a plain, honourable man, an uncomplicated corner grocer who worked on the naive assumption that everyone was as straight and honest as he was, that you could do business on the basis of a handshake and by looking someone in the eye. And then, to compound the family tragedy, Danny’s younger sister Milli vanished one day while she was playing in a park. No-one saw anything. The police had no leads. A year to the day later, her mutilated and strangled remains were found floating in a dam. The killer was never found. Police had a list of suspects but insufficient evidence to make any arrests.
His shattered mother, who had distant Singaporean-Chinese antecedents, sold up whatever they had left and moved Danny to Melbourne, where she had relatives. There she managed to scrape up the bare minimum for a deposit on a structurally defective house in the outlying suburb of Airport West, directly under a flight path. She made a living doing piecework for a clothing manufacturer and cleaning offices at night, working sixteen hours a day to wipe the trauma from her life and to make sure young Danny, who was a gifted student even in his early teens, could have a university education. That was in 1990, and even now she could not cope with the inexplicable loss of her lovely daughter, and still had trouble adjusting to the fact that her husband had chosen to take his own life rather than remain with her, even in pain and penury. Some days she even hated him for deserting her. It wasn’t making that much of a quantum leap to say that Paul Sigmund Barry was responsible for Neil’s suicide and, indirectly, for the even greater misery that was to come.
After a while images returned to him of Mischa Fleming: that silvery flash of shaved pubis, sitting behind her on the motorbike with his arms around her waist, the silhouetted face in the car park when they kissed. Danny very much wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to make love to her, give her everything. He was not a virgin, but neither was he experienced in matters of the flesh, or the heart. At the age when most adolescents were testing their wings, Danny was grieving, sitting at home with his moth
er or lying in his bed crying at night instead of partying and dancing and having infatuations with girls. But Mischa was experienced; of that he felt sure – a single kiss told him that much. She had said to call her in the afternoon, but as he entered the casino car park he didn’t think he could wait that long. He wanted her now. He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her and feel the nakedness inside her leather jacket and her black jeans. He wanted her to take him in hand, lead him to her bed and teach him everything. He hoped he wasn’t reading too much into that kiss. Maybe she was a cheap flirt. Maybe she acted like that all the time and it didn’t mean anything special. Surely not. Now in his mind they were both naked and she was toying with him prior to raising her pelvis and guiding him snugly between the delicate lips of her bristly mound. Funny about that: it was the kind of in-your-face thing dykes and punks did, but she did not strike him in any way as lesbian. She’d been far too open to Danny’s obvious advances to be a switch-hitter. He was already convinced she was the female he’d been put on earth to fall for. With one hand unconsciously rubbing his cramped erection Danny switched off the ignition and sat in the car fucking her in his head while his heart thumped. When he snapped out of it, stopping abruptly before it was too late and feeling ashamed of himself, he took a deep breath and looked at his watch: 10.30. How long before he could reasonably call without jumping the gun? Three hours? Christ. Three fucking hours.
But right now there was money to be made. That might take his mind off Mischa for a while, although somehow money didn’t seem important now. Only Mischa mattered. He went up the steps and into the casino, nodding at the security men and quickly joining the punters milling around the tables. Then he looked up and miraculously spotted Victor Wineglass threading his way through the crowd with his palms outstretched as if fending off human contact. He saw Danny and raised a hand, smiling. Today he had on a cream linen suit with a double-breasted vest and a paisley bow tie.
When he came alongside he said, ‘Good morning, Danny. Lovely day for making money.’
‘Aren’t they all,’ Danny said.
Victor handed him a bankroll. ‘Here. Do what you can with this. Use it all if you like. I’ll meet you in the brasserie for a coffee later.’
‘Fine,’ Danny said. Victor disappeared. Danny examined the bankroll, which was all hundreds: it felt like a shitload of money. It felt thick enough to be twenty or thirty thousand dollars at least. Maybe more. Christ, that was putting on the pressure. He began circling the tables, getting a feel for the action. Half an hour went by, during which he did nothing bar watch numbers come up. He kept the bankroll firmly in his pocket with his hand wrapped around it.
There was no real pattern he could discern. Normally he wouldn’t worry about that, just stay out of it, but now he was growing anxious, as if Victor – or someone – was watching and waiting for him to do his thing. Sweat broke out under his arms and trickled down his sides. The hand holding the money was clammy too. He scanned the room, but there was no sign of Victor or the bald man – just hundreds of dull-eyed, sallow-skinned punters, people who looked as if they never saw the light of day, carelessly putting their money on tables and watching it disappear.
In the end, succumbing to pressure, he bit the bullet and, peeling off five hundred, bought ten fifty-dollar chips. Being conservative by nature he could not bring himself to put them all on a single spin, even though he was holding a small fortune. There was something about the fact that it was someone else’s money that pulled him up and made him more cautious than he would be with his own. Then he thought, Christ, whose money is it anyway. Not Paul Barry’s. There was a powerful impulse building inside him to depart from his system and just unload the chips, take pot luck, but he fought it down. Then a wave of nausea passed through him, leaving him hot and prickly and short of breath.
Pocketing the chips he hurried to the men’s room, splashing cold water over his face and leaning over the basin while he got himself together. What the hell is wrong with me: it’s only gambling. Then, standing up straight, he realised it had nothing to do with gambling, that he was experiencing some kind of emotional trauma that had been brought on by the rush of recent events. The sensation he had was one in which several powerful vectors seemed to be converging on him from different directions, pinning him to the wall and making him feel uncharacteristically passive, even helpless.
Mischa Fleming was certainly one of them. He had a driving need, more than anything else, to see her soon. The fact that she was connected to Paul Barry made him worry, given the man’s history, adding to the feeling that he was allowing himself to become enmeshed in a questionable and possibly dangerous line of business. How he came out of it was going to depend on the way he played his chips. Chips. They were in his pocket now, slippery with sweat. In his other pocket was the bankroll. He withdrew it and did a quick count, expertly flicking the notes backwards in the American manner: in the vicinity of thirty-five thousand. Why had they given him so much? Was it a test, or was Barry just impatient? All right. Danny slicked back his dark hair and checked himself in the mirror. I’ll give them a run for their money if that’s what they want.
He came out of the men’s room feeling stronger and more confident. Selecting a table at which one of his favourite croupiers was drumming up a following, he parked himself and sat through several spins, then went to work. At the end of an hour he vacated his place, which was quickly taken by someone else. After visiting the cashier, remembering to ask for a cheque, he then made his way to the brasserie, standing at the entrance and searching for Victor. There he was, seated on the far side, his back to the window. With him was the bald man. Danny hesitated, then went in. As he approached Victor looked up and saw him, and the other man twisted his head around, following Victor’s line of sight. He was smiling, and continued to smile as Danny came alongside the table, feeling slightly nervous and even a little afraid …
‘Danny,’ Victor said, ‘do join us. You haven’t met Lewis here, have you.’
Still standing, Danny shook his head. The man called Lewis extended his hand and Danny accepted it. It was a strong hand, and one that completely enclosed his grip for longer than necessary.
‘Lewis Kenny,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard all about you, Danny. Sit down.’ It seemed to be an instruction rather than an invitation. Danny pulled out a chair and sat between them, aware that Lewis Kenny’s eyes were fixed on him. Kenny lounged back in his chair, the round shades sitting on top of his bald head, observing Danny’s every move.
‘What’s the situation report,’ Victor said, and gestured to a waitress.
‘Profit of twelve thousand so far,’ Danny said.
‘That’s good. Very good.’
The waitress arrived and Danny ordered a mineral water.
‘Danny,’ Victor said, ‘you’re wasting your talents in this … shithole. Really. Sigmund would say the same thing if he were here.’
‘If he could be here,’ Kenny said, and he and Victor laughed at their private joke.
‘No, seriously,’ Victor continued. ‘You really must go to the Platinum Room. Go to the Platinum Room.’
‘But don’t get lost on the way with all that lolly,’ Kenny said in a mock-threatening way, which still sounded threatening enough to Danny’s ear.
‘Ignore Lewis,’ Victor said. ‘He has the style and manners of a barbarian.’
‘Victor says you’re a beautiful mover,’ Lewis said, leaning forward. ‘Those were his very words. I must say you looked as if you were making some nice moves last night. Tell me, does she cop it in the head, Dan?’
Danny momentarily closed his eyes, trying to blink out the intrusive presence of this smirking ape. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Lewis Kenny was one of those men who didn’t care what they said to anyone, and who took pleasure in getting up people’s noses and giving offence because they had no fear. They inspired fear.
Danny suddenly wondered if he was carrying a weapon under his reefer jacket – he seem
ed the type who would. Turning to Victor – but acutely conscious of Kenny’s amused and depthless eyes still on him – Danny said, ‘I’m not dressed properly for the Platinum Room, Victor.’
This was true. The strict dress code in there was a jacket and tie, not the standard neat casual wear Danny had on. Victor shrugged, as if that was such a trivial impediment it would never have crossed his mind. Nevertheless the reality of it could not be denied. The code was strictly enforced.
‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said.
‘Sure, tomorrow,’ Danny replied. But before tomorrow comes, I have to see Mischa. Tomorrow is a lo-ong way off.
For the next hour or so Danny played roulette, adding four thousand to his bank, then he did a rare thing and deviated from his system purely on impulse. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time, but he was also driven by anger. He was still bridling from Kenny’s dirty little remarks about his Mischa. That fucking low-life piece of shit. Danny shook violently as if to dispel the man’s memory, then concentrated on the job. At this particular table red had turned up five times in a row so, working on the assumption that the run had ended, he backed his hunch with the maximum bet – five hundred dollars, from Barry’s roll – and was not at all surprised when black duly saluted. He was tempted to let it ride, but in the end his cautious side prevailed. All he had done was double his money, but five hundred bucks was five hundred bucks. He decided to scam it as a mark of disrespect for Mr Lewis Kenny. Anyway who was to say he hadn’t used his own money? He was carrying so much now, all in various pockets, plus the cheque, that it was hard keeping track, since his commission would not be finalised until the end of the day. Mentally, however, he knew how much he was ahead. He knew the reckoning, and in any case no-one was looking over his shoulder.