by Tim Ayliffe
‘Hi.’
Melissa faked a smile and climbed into the back seat of the four-wheel drive, lifting her headphones over her ears.
‘Teenagers,’ Jenny said.
Bailey laughed. ‘I remember.’
Russell was still ruffling Campo’s ears. ‘Nice dog.’
‘She’s a rescue. My daughter got her for me. I think you’re at university now, aren’t you, Russell?’ Bailey said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Deferred,’ Russell said, getting back on his feet.
An awkward silence followed until, eventually, Bryce cut in. ‘Russell’s still working out what he wants to do with his life. Aren’t you, mate?’
‘Something like that. Good to see you, Mr Bailey.’
Russell smiled, climbing inside the four-wheel drive alongside Melissa.
‘You too, mate.’
‘Bryce,’ Jenny said, ‘I’ve locked up. I think it’s time to go.’
Bailey left the family to pile into the four-wheel drive, thinking back and trying to remember what Miranda was like at that age, shamefully realising that he didn’t really know. Miranda’s teenage years were a blur. The years when Bailey had been so focused on his job chasing stories about war and terrorism that he hadn’t been much of a father. Being held hostage and tortured by Islamic extremists in Iraq had offered Bailey a painful reminder about the life he’d left behind. The life he’d missed out on. Ten months in captivity had given him a lot of time to think. He had made a vow to himself that if he made it out alive, he’d be a better father to Miranda. Repair the damage of the lost years. Be there for her. And he had.
* * *
The plank of plywood on the White Lion’s front door was gone, replaced by a new sheet of glass. The only sign of last night’s violence was a dark stain on the concrete. The guy with the hose had done his best but dried blood was a hell of a thing to make disappear. Or maybe Bailey was just seeing things.
He tied Campo’s leash to a pole out front and walked over to the security guard, all dressed in black, checking customers’ birth dates and sobriety at the entrance.
‘G’day, mate.’
‘You’re right, go in.’
‘I was actually hoping to ask you a few questions, if that’s all right.’
‘Hang on.’
Bailey stepped to the side, letting a small group of people flash their driver’s licences to the all-powerful man on the front door who could make or break their night.
‘Happy birthday.’ The security guard smiled at a girl who looked like she had come straight from school. ‘Take it easy.’
‘Thanks.’
The guard waited for the door to close behind them before turning to Bailey. ‘Odds on favourite to be spewing in the alley by ten.’
Bailey laughed along with him. Building a rapport – trust – for the questions that would follow.
‘So, what can I do for you?’
‘My name’s John Bailey. I’m a journalist. Just looking into what happened here last night, wondering if you were here and might be able to let me know what you saw.’
‘Night off last night.’ The guy looked past Bailey’s shoulder to the couple approaching, waving them through. ‘Enjoy the night, guys.’
‘Anyone working who was here last night?’
‘Best talking to the manager,’ he said, thumb pointing over his shoulder towards the bar. ‘Short stocky blonde. Name’s Tanya.’
‘Thanks.’
There wasn’t much of a crowd inside, although it was still early. Just after six-thirty on a Wednesday night. Tanya wasn’t hard to find, the security guard’s description spot-on. She was loading a tray stocked with notes and coins into the register beside the beer taps.
‘Excuse me.’
She looked up. Busy. ‘What can I get you?’
‘Lemonade would be good, thanks.’
Bailey thought that he’d better order something, giving them a reason to converse.
‘Four fifty,’ she said, shovelling some ice into a glass.
Almost five bucks for a glass of sugar and water. He could have bought a beer for that price at the RSL down the road. But now wasn’t the time to complain.
‘Are you Tanya?’
‘Yeah.’
‘My name’s John Bailey. I’m a journalist. I’m just wondering if I can ask you a couple of questions about what happened here last night.’
Tanya stopped the flow of lemonade coming from the post-mix pistol in her hand. ‘Sorry, mate. Don’t really want my name in a newspaper.’ She resumed pouring, placing the glass on the wooden bar in front of Bailey.
‘Off the record is fine.’ He handed her a ten-dollar note. ‘Your name won’t come into it.’
Tanya dropped Bailey’s change on the bar mat and he put the lot into her tip jar, currying favour.
‘What do you want to know?’
It worked.
‘Anything you can remember, to be honest. I heard a group of guys with face masks came in and started a fight. Is that right?’
‘At first I thought they were going to rob the place, balaclavas and all that.’ Tanya looked around the pub, leaning across the bar. ‘And I wouldn’t quite call it a fight either. They went straight for this group of mainly Black guys and girls. Yelling all sorts of racist stuff.’ She looked uncomfortable, reluctant to repeat the words. ‘Y’know what I mean.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Anyway, it all escalated pretty quickly. Our guard on the front door had no chance of stopping them. Not his fault. We’ve given him a few nights off because he’s so shaken up by the whole bloody thing.’
‘So, what happened?’
A man appeared beside Bailey at the bar, pondering the beer taps like it was the most important decision of his life. Sydney’s craft beer craze had left him with too many options.
‘Nicki!’ Tanya called out to a woman polishing wine glasses just as the man went to ask a question. ‘Could you serve this customer, please?’
Bailey followed Tanya down the end of the bar. ‘Bit light on staff, I don’t have too much time to talk.’
‘No worries,’ Bailey said. ‘You said it escalated quickly?’
‘Yeah. This big Black guy starts pushing them back. A few punches thrown. There must have been six or seven guys with masks. One of them threw a bloody bar stool through the glass,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘They drag this guy outside and next thing I know he’s lying on the footpath, bleeding. Out cold. I called the cops and asked for an ambulance too. Knew it was bad. How is he, do you know?’
‘Not great, to be honest. He’s in an induced coma. I’ve been talking to a friend of the family.’ Bailey wanted her to know that he was interested in the victim. ‘They hope he’s going to be okay but won’t know for a little while yet. What about security cameras? Any chance I can take a look?’
‘Sorry. Cops took all that. Not sure I could show you, anyway.’
‘Understood.’ Bailey wasn’t getting far. Everything she had told him he had already learned from media reports and his conversations with Jonny Abdo. ‘What about these guys who barged in, was there anything else about them you remember? Their clothing? Did you glimpse a face?’
‘They were clearly all blokes, I think I told you that. Clothes? Jeans. Shirts. T-shirts. Nothing that really stands out.’ She paused, face scrunching. ‘Actually, there was one thing.’
‘What’s that?’
Bailey instantly regretted interrupting her. Too eager.
‘A tattoo. The big Black guy ripped one of their shirts. He had a tattoo on his chest.’
‘Do you remember what it was? A symbol? A word?’
‘It was a number, actually. Two numbers. Fourteen and eighty-eight. Written in an odd way.’
Bailey grabbed a napkin off the bar and a pen from his pocket. ‘Can you show me?’
‘Sure.’
Tanya took the pen and scribbled on the napkin, holding it up when she’d finished: 14/88.
‘Fourteen ei
ghty-eight?’
Tanya shrugged. ‘That’s how I remember it. But, like I said, it all happened so fast that I only saw it for a second. Shirt got ripped as they were dragging him outside. And then he was on the ground, unconscious, and they ran off somewhere.’
Fourteen and eighty-eight. Something about the numbers was familiar to Bailey but he couldn’t remember why.
‘I need to get back to work, mate.’
Bailey dug into his pocket for a card. ‘This is me. If you remember anything else, can you give me a call?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ She was looking down at the card in her hand. ‘Enquirer Magazine. Haven’t heard of that one.’
‘It’s new. First edition comes out in March.’
Tanya looked puzzled. ‘And you’re doing a story on what happened last night?’
‘Might be part of it,’ Bailey said. ‘Looking at racism in Australia.’
She laughed, uncomfortably. ‘Plenty of it. I haven’t seen anything like I saw last night though. Scary thing is… the whole race thing doesn’t surprise me.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Look around you, mate. Mostly white people around here. I live in Campsie. Full of Asians. Go further west and it’s the Lebanese, Iraqis. Sydney’s a segregated place these days. Maybe you should write about that.’
The one thing that Bailey missed about being off the drink was the truth talk he heard in pubs. Publicans had the best ear to the street. They knew what was happening in people’s homes. What kept families up at night. They also knew how to pick winners at the track and inside parliament.
‘Might just do that. Thanks for the chat.’
When Bailey stepped outside, Campo was staring innocently at him, wagging her tail beside a mountainous turd on the footpath.
‘She left you a present,’ the guard said, pointing and smiling.
‘She’s good like that.’
Bailey pulled a plastic bag from his pocket, wondering who was the superior partner in the relationship. He bathed Campo, fed her, patted her, and right now he was lifting her steaming turd off the concrete. Bailey couldn’t help thinking that if aliens were looking down on earth, monitoring behaviours, they’d probably think dogs were the ones running the world.
CHAPTER 8
It wasn’t difficult to find the meaning of the tattoo that Tanya had glimpsed beneath a torn shirt at the White Lion. The fourteen and eighty-eight each had their own specific meaning. Combined together in the way that Tanya had scribbled on a napkin, they were a potent symbol of modern white supremacy, tattooed on prison gangs and Neo-Nazis the world over, particularly in America.
Eighty-eight was the simplest to understand. It was a reference to Adolf Hitler.
Bailey had made the discovery seconds after typing in the words ‘far right nationalism’ followed by ‘88’ into his internet search browser. With the letter ‘H’ being the eighth letter in the alphabet, the number ‘88’ was simply the numerical version of HH.
Heil Hitler.
Fourteen was a little more complicated. It was a reference to a guy called David Lane who got handed a 190-year prison sentence for the murder of Jewish radio host Alan Berg, who was shot dead in the driveway of his home in Denver in 1984. Lane was part of a white supremacist group called The Order and, while in prison in the 1990s, he came up with a fourteen-word slogan that became a rallying cry for the Neo-Nazi community.
We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.
Lane died in 2007 but his slogan lived on. The ‘Fourteen Words’ was quoted by the perpetrators of racially motivated massacres in Pittsburgh and Christchurch. The number ‘14’ had been spray-painted across synagogues and the offices of politicians and newspapers. And as Bailey was discovering, it was also a popular tattoo for Neo-Nazis wanting to showcase their anger with ink.
Bailey would award no prizes for creativity, but the fact that someone had decided to pay homage to a white supremacist and a Nazi dictator by tattooing these numbers on their chest was a chilling reminder of racism and hate. In Australia. In Sydney. In the pub up the road from his house.
For the next few hours, Bailey sat on a stool in his kitchen, trawling through the websites, Facebook pages and chatrooms of every Australian far right nationalist group he could think of, searching for references to the ‘Fourteen Words’ and the numerical homage to Hitler. The Freedom Front. Blue Boys. The 1788 Group. Australia Resistance. The Aussie Liberation Party. Some of them had their own symbols, like crossed swords and fists, but he couldn’t find any Australian group that explicitly used the numbers ‘14/88’ together.
As distasteful as he found the ramblings and discussions that most of these groups were involved in online, he found no evidence of violent acts, either. Whoever was responsible for last night’s racist attack on Matthew Lam hadn’t gone online to boast about it.
It was dark outside by the time Bailey had decided that he was done scouring the web. Dark inside his house too. The only light was coming from the blue and white beam from his computer screen. He climbed off his stool, taking a moment to steady himself, legs stiff from being seated for so long, and switched on the light. The kitchen was a mess. Old newspapers, coffee cups and plates littering the stone benchtop, left to sort themselves. He rubbed his eyes, suddenly tired. He’d fix the mess tomorrow.
Campo had crept up beside him, sniffing his leg. Beady eyes looking skyward, hoping for some dinner.
‘All right, Campo. Let’s see what we’ve got.’
He opened the pantry, grabbing a bag of dry food and a can of meat. The dog was a fussy eater but he hadn’t had a chance to get to the supermarket to buy her the premium mince she liked. Biscuits and tinned meat would do.
The plate of bacon and eggs that Bailey had wolfed down in Summer Hill was hardly enough to get him through the night. Opening the fridge door, he found a couple of plastic containers half-filled with the rice and lamb rogan josh he’d ordered earlier in the week. Two nights ago? Three? He couldn’t remember. He lifted the lid on the lamb, giving it a sniff test. It smelled good. Curry always smelled good. Deciding that the spices had extended the life of the rogan josh, he popped the two containers into the microwave. Fingers crossed.
He settled onto the couch in the lounge room with his steaming plate of curry, switching on the television to catch the latest news about the bushfires. The newsreader telling him that an entire South Australian island was virtually on fire and that two men had been burnt alive in their car as they tried to escape the flames. The updates for New South Wales and Victoria weren’t much better. More homes lost. More dead. People stranded without supplies. Fuel lines hundreds of metres long. Government assistance lagging. When would it end?
Bailey was about to switch off the television and close his eyes when another story caught his attention. A speech by the new boss of Australia’s domestic spy agency, ASIO. His annual threat assessment. This time the headline act wasn’t Islamic terrorism. Australia was facing a new threat – the rise of white supremacist groups. Bailey turned up the volume.
‘Right-wing extremism has been in ASIO’s sights for some time, but obviously this threat came into sharp, terrible focus last year in New Zealand.’
The director-general was standing behind a podium, talking to a room full of journalists and bureaucrats at the Canberra Press Club.
‘In Australia, the extreme right-wing threat is real and it is growing. In suburbs around Australia, small cells regularly meet to salute Nazi flags, inspect weapons, train in combat and share their hateful ideology. These groups are more organised and security conscious than they were in previous years. We continue to see some Australian extremists seeking to connect with like-minded individuals in other parts of the world, sometimes in person. They are not merely seeking to share ideology and tactics.
‘Meanwhile, extreme right-wing online forums proliferate on the internet, and attract international memberships, including Australians. These online forums share and
promote extremist right-wing ideologies, and encourage and justify acts of extreme violence.
‘We expect such groups will remain an enduring threat, making more use of online propaganda to spread their messages of hate.
‘While we would expect any right-wing extremist inspired attack in Australia to be low capability, like a knife, gun or vehicle attack, more sophisticated attacks are possible.’
‘And what the hell are you doing about it?’ Bailey said to the screen.
The newsreader moved on to another story. Something about a new flu-like virus in China that nobody seemed too worried about. Bailey switched off the television.
He looked at his watch: 9.15 pm. It was still relatively early but it had been so long since he’d worked a day like this that he was exhausted. He lay back on the couch, closing his eyes.
Sleep.
CHAPTER 9
KABUL, 2011
‘Wait here. I’ve arranged for someone to meet you.’
Bailey watched Harriet Walker lift the scarf from around her neck and place it on top of her head.
‘I’m not staying. Everything you need is in there.’ She bent down, tapping the brown envelope on the table. ‘Gets back to me, you know what happens.’
‘You know I won’t let that happen.’
‘Yeah, I do. But I felt the need to say it. My arse is on the line now. Be careful.’ She stood up, her chair dragging on the dusty floor. ‘You need to forget my number for a while.’
‘If this is what you say it is, I won’t be sticking around long. Might go to London, finish writing it there.’
‘Good.’
Walker looked over her shoulder, checking the room. They were alone. A stained globe dangling from the ceiling offering a dim, yellow light. They were surrounded by shelves stacked with rolled carpets and cardboard boxes. The space in the middle barely big enough for the small table and two chairs. Beads were hanging like long strands of hair in the doorway. The only way in. The only way out.
‘You going to be all right, Hat?’
‘Who knows?’ She shrugged her shoulders, faking a smile. ‘He won’t be long.’