Call for Simon Shard

by Philip McCutchan

  Shard walked right in amongst them and for a while kept himself to himself. The list of Australia-bound passengers from London, provided by Kennerlee, hadn’t in fact helped, though, working on guess and intuition around age-groups and professions, Shard had narrowed his choice of sharp-faced man down to seven possible names, all of whom without exception had given hotel addresses. Needles in haystacks were all very well, but Shard was feeling a certain pressure of time and decided that the best needle extractor was still, after all, the simple straightforward magnet.

  Shard quickly found a place to call his own: a dirty room in an attic at the top of a tall, thin slum house in the Cross: next door to, of all things, a knocking-shop. It was quite like being back in the office. He’d found this accommodation advertised on a small oblong of white card, one of many varied adverts, for flesh largely, in a frame outside a shop. The youngish woman who ran it was Greek: Mrs. Poupopoulos, with an indeterminate number of yelling children but no visible husband. Mr. Poupopoulos, Shard later discovered, had but recently hopped the twig from home, family and looming prison. Mrs. Poupopoulos had wished him good riddance, but money was nevertheless a problem. And she was sorry for Simon Shard with all those bandages: he could see she suspected a mugging.

  “Thirty dollars the week,” Mrs. Poupopoulos said, eyeing Shard, clearly liking what she saw. “For you, less than I would charge some.”

  Thirty dollars Australian was, give or take a little, twelve pounds sterling. Not cheap to someone who looked like a dropout, since, as the Greek went on to explain, the sum included no food. “To feed I cannot manage,” she said, shrugging and spreading her arms wide. “It is a question of time. There are plenty food shops around. Greek, Italian, Chinese and ordinary Australian food. Good and cheap.” She eyed him again, hopefully. “You come, you stay?”

  What the hell, to a drop-out money wasn’t everything! “I come, I stay,” Shard said. It suited him, dirt and all. He needed to circulate, and eating out was the right circulation. See and be seen, let words spread. Yet, at the same time, brightly shining magnets might not attract anything better than suspicions and needles could thereby be scared off — maybe. Maybe not, but Shard was going for what he considered the best chance and in his view the shine had to come off a little. The bandages were shine enough: for the rest, the name was no longer Shard but Big Tee. That had kind of come to him, just after his call to Hedge from Canberra: Big Tee, it sort of rolled easily, like a pop no group. Suitable, very, for the Cross. Shard liked it, Big Tee.

  Mrs. Poupopoulos opened the door of his room preparatory to leaving him alone, but halted half in, half out.

  “You want…anything else, Mister Tee?”

  Shard almost laughed aloud: she could hardly have been plainer. It was in her voice, her eyes, her mouth; in the hip movement and in the suddenly contrived dip of her dress that uncovered the greater portion of a very big breast, plus nipple. Beth quite apart, Mrs. Poupopoulos wasn’t his cup of tea, nowhere near even a tea bag. He said, “No, nothing else.”

  “You are quite sure?”

  “Yes, thanks,” Shard said, and added politely, “As in the case of food, I can always go elsewhere. Like next door.”

  She didn’t mind in the least: she gave him a big wink and a salacious giggle. “It is handy, a great convenience, that. But when you tire of the over-used old cows that sell in that market, you will remember Connie Poupopoulos…no?”

  “I’ll remember,” Shard said, and managed to get the door shut.

  Next day a tour of Sydney satisfied two urgent needs: as detailed as possible a picture, personally obtained, of the geography; and fresh air away from that hot, ill-ventilated attic. In the morning the Sydney sun beat down appallingly, boiling the slates overhead. The room smelt, too: smelt of dirt, neglect, previous tenancies, mice, fleas. The bed was dreadful: a real boneshaker iron bedstead from the servants’ quarters, real Victoriana, with a lumpy flock mattress, a sheet top and bottom, washed but not washed very clean, with holes in. And two very thin, very smelly blankets, all dog’s-wool and oakum, with an army feel about them as though Mrs. Poupopoulos had bought up some rejects from the Quarter-master’s store when he’d been sorting out the leftovers from World War One. Big Tee Shard thought longingly of home: when he’d been a simple top dick working at the Yard, better known in the Metro as “the factory”, life had been a lot less far-flung.

  He walked all that day, his first full day at Mrs. Poupopoulos’ slum. A snack breakfast at an early opening cafe, all dirty table-tops and bleary looking workmen. Then out of the Cross, down to Woolloomooloo, over the Domain making towards Sydney’s splendidly weird Opera House, and Circular Quay, and the sparkling waters of the harbour fronted by acres of plate glass that walled the skyscraper blocks. Downstream from the Bridge, the deep-blue water was cut by lines of foam from the Manly ferries, out and in, a million white-sailed yachts, and the stately progress of the P & O’s Oriana inward bound from Britain to send out her mooring wires and secure at the berth for the outpouring of wealthy world-cruise passengers. Lucky bastards, as the Australians might say.

  Shard, moving up along Castlereagh Street, thought of his knowledgeable companion in the plane: the shipping man. He’d enthused about Sydney, and he hadn’t exaggerated: it was quite a place. But it wore out sandal soles, and feet. At lunchtime Shard sank thankfully off his suffering feet onto a chair in another cafe, and ate a crayfish mayonnaise followed by a huge rump steak and onions with fried potatoes.

  In the afternoon, up around Darling Harbour to Pyrmont. With a fair plan of Sydney’s central layout in his mind, Shard made his way back to the Domain and sat on a bench. He glanced at his watch: 3.55, a little early. Time passed and no contact appeared. At 4.30 Shard got to his feet, feeling frustrated, and walked towards the Cross. Maybe Hedge back in Whitehall was coming up against difficulties. That night was in a sense colourful, but unproductive, like nine-tenths of any dick’s work: a succession of bars and cafes, beer, whisky, coffee, a foul mixture consumed in the cause of duty. Weird youths, weird girls, poufs, tarts, incognito villains. In a dark alley, Shard found the bloody results of a rape: a girl who sobbed her heart out and cringed away from him because he was a man and therefore a beast: when he spoke of the cops, she spat at him and yelled filth. Maybe, down the Cross, you didn’t call the cops in when you could avoid it. Not so different from parts of London, and Cardiff, and Glasgow, and Liverpool. Shard could understand but he was still a copper: feeling bad about it, he did his duty. He made himself scarce and rang the nick anonymously. After that, he had a bad night. Maybe he went too much by the book and too little by the common-sense rules of humanity and the underground: rape was still better than a slit gut and a weighted sack dropped from a boat somewhere outside Bondi, say.

  *

  Before turning into that dreadful bed, he’d spoken to people. Nothing much, but at least the magnet was getting to work. It started work without volition of its own when a bearded oldie who was in fact a haggard mid-twenties sat at Shard’s table in a cafe where he was having a fried-egg supper. They shared a bottle of tomato ketchup.

  The bearded man looked with cursory curiosity at Shard’s bandaged face. “Get in a fight, did yer?”

  “Road accident,” Shard said, banging the bottom of the tomato ketchup bottle. The magnet must still not shine too bright: he was a copper, the opposition must be lulled, not frightened off. “Bastard drivers!”

  “Here?”

  “Urn?”

  “Happen here in Sydney, did it?”

  “No. Out of town.”

  “Oh.” No asking where: lack of interest, or was it just not done, down the Cross, to be inquisitive? Some curiosity was, however, allowable: the old, old link of the expatriates. “You from home, are yer, mate?”

  Shard nodded. “London,” he said. That was safe. He hurried on, not wishing to be pinned down as to how he’d come out. “You, too?”

  “Yes. Birmingham. Bin out here a while now, couple of years.
” The beard parted and the lips smiled. “Came via Kabul. You know — Afghanistan.”

  Shard nodded understanding; he knew about Kabul, and the junkies of all nationalities who held out their beggars’ bowls to anyone who would give them the price of a shot. The hippies’ paradise, the junkies’ dream of heaven — Kabul. Yes, Shard knew, all right! Involuntarily, he shook his head: times changed, of course they did, but this was beyond everything. Lord Roberts…Kabul to Kandahar…Wolseley, Kitchener, the Duke of Cambridge, the old North-West Frontier of India, regiments dying in the terrible Khyber Pass, dying for England. What would they be thinking of the British image now — those heaven-held ghosts from a glorious past?

  Once again, Shard thought of his young brother.

  Abruptly he asked, “What made you leave Britain?”

  “Too narrow, man, too bloody narrow, and no bloody sun — Birmingham!”

  “Boom city, I thought.”

  “For the bloody wogs, yes. Or if you want the rat race, or to make cars. I didn’t want either. I was at university, and I chucked it in.”

  “What studying?”

  “Biology, physics, chemistry. I was going for a B.Sc., then teaching, or maybe industry. I found I didn’t want it.”

  “Because you got on drugs?”

  The bearded man laughed. “No, man, no. They got me through the first year or I’d have thrown it up earlier. No, I just saw no future, no future that I wanted, so I left, just left and hitched.”

  “All the way to Kabul?”

  “All the way to Kabul. I made a bit of money in Kabul, and came down here to Sydney.”

  “How did you make that much money, then?”

  The bearded man said with a curious simplicity, “By selling my body, man. I’m not a pouf, but plenty are, and I had to live.”

  “Indians?”

  “Afghans — Pathans — wogs. Anything. I couldn’t afford to be particular.”

  They sat in silence: there seemed nothing more to say. Shard had seen too much crime even to feel disgust: it took all sorts, after all, and you were clean, in a sense, only because others were dirty. After a time he asked, “Often come here, do you?”

  “Not often. Sometimes.”

  “We may meet again.”

  The bearded man smiled. “Want to — do you?”

  This time Shard did feel shock: the meaning had been blatant. He almost lost control; he almost became naked copper. He wanted to get up and grab, get up and shake the daylight out of the man, smash that leering smile from the face with a very hard fist. But training held enough to enable him to smile back. He said, “Not that. Just company, someone from home. That’s all.”

  “There’s plenty from home, mate, all round. Still — we may run across one another. If we do, then I can pay you back — perhaps!”

  Shard stared. “What’s that?”

  “I haven’t any bloody money,” the man explained patiently. “The bill. The bloody eggs!”

  Paying up, Shard wondered what the man would have done if he hadn’t. Washed up? Just taken a slinging out? Risked the cops? Or simply paid — the more easily since this gambit was obviously successful from time to time? Shard’s reason for being a sucker was simple: a friendly face among the junkies wouldn’t come amiss.

  Leaving, the man gave a mock salute. “See you, then.”

  “See you.” Shard waved back.

  *

  The following afternoon, luck in the Domain. At 4.10, at the same bench as yesterday, Shard was joined by a tramp — a bum, a roaming Australian nomad complete with billy and tucker-bag, and what looked like a roll of bedding. The tramp smelt like Shard’s room at Mrs. Poupopoulos’s. The long coat was in strips, suitable for the summer certainly, and the trouser legs were bound round with string.

  “Good-day,” the tramp said.

  “Good-day to you.”

  “Nice weather, eh?”

  “Too hot.”

  “Too right. Better’n bloody wet, though.” The bedding roll, if such it was, was shoved down on the bench between Shard and the tramp. The tramp’s hand came away from somewhere beneath the tatters of the overcoat and slid beneath the roll, pushing something towards Shard. Shard leaned across as though trying to catch a word from the tramp, and slid his own hand under the roll. He contacted an envelope, slid it neatly up the dangling front of his T-shirt and into the waistband of his shabby, patched Levi’s. He sat on for another ten minutes; the tramp closed his eyes, sleeping in the hot Sydney sun. Pretending to: grinning to himself, Shard guessed the courier couldn’t wait to free himself from stink and rags and climb into something that wouldn’t stop him getting a drink at Usher’s or the Australia. That was, unless he was beating it right away for the High Commission in Canberra.

  No more was said and Shard got up and went back to his room. Seeing a flea on his pillow, he killed it neatly, leaving a small bloodstain. He pulled out the tramp’s envelope and slit it open. At first sight, it was a fairly full report, broken from its cipher by the High Commission’s cipher boys.

  Hedge hadn’t done too badly.

  Shard sat down to read: TANYA GORUKIN, it said at the top, stark and simple. Then: Born Moscow 13 April 1948 only child of S. M. Gorukin member of Presidium of Supreme Soviet of USSR and his wife Katrina daughter of V. Y. Zernov formerly Chairman Council of Ministers. Educated in Russian State System 1955-65 thereafter three years factory production work combined with attendance at Kharkov University reading scientific subjects. Exit visa 1968 to attend Sorbonne Paris. October 1969 mysteriously disappeared Paris. Next heard of in Santiago Chile imprisoned for smuggling heroin, escaped gaol April 1970. File information ends. Top secrecy maintained but expect early indication of proposed workout.

  Shard read it through again, knowing he held dynamite.

  His mind roamed: Tanya Gorukin came of a power family, which meant trouble of itself. And nothing was known of her after April 1970 — no mention of France, by which Shard meant Cherbourg, no mention of a presence in Britain, of any suspect illegal entry leading to a lonely death on Bodmin Moor. But, if Yvette Gilder had been right in her identification, and Shard never doubted that, then Tanya Gorukin’s presence in Britain could be taken as read. It fitted in any case: Shard saw heroin as the binding link.

  And the proposed workout, for the edification of Hedge?

  No change: and Hedge to be informed that the power of the magnet to attract was Shard’s only current weapon. This, however, would involve a trip to Canberra, and Shard recognised the dangers inherent in too frequent a dropping and resumption of the kind of disguise he was currently using. Hedge was being a nuisance. Hedge shouldn’t dig for preinformation when a man was in the field.

  Hedge could wait. Maybe he wouldn’t have to wait too long.

  *

  That night the sharp-faced, well-dressed man was talking to a character named Petersen. They were talking in a luxury penthouse flat behind Manly Beach and the broad blue Pacific. Petersen, though he was himself dangerous and 90 per cent thug, was wary of the sharp-faced man, who was not a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant though he could have been called a company director. Petersen was wary to the point of being dead scared, since he had boobed badly: the idea had been — the orders had been — to kill the Gilders, husband and wife, after the wife had talked to Shard and before there could be further talking to anyone else; and to bring Shard in so that he, in his turn, could also talk, but only to the sharp-faced man. Things just hadn’t turned out that way so Petersen was apologising and excusing.

  He said, “Wasn’t my fault. Just bloody bad luck! The whole thing went crook when — ”

  “It had better not go crook again, right?” A thin white hand played casually with an ivory paper-knife: casually but with full intended threat of steel rather than ivory if the moment should come for Petersen. Petersen, watching that hand, knew the facts of life without being told.

  He licked his lips. “It won’t go crook again, Mr. Tuball.”

  The s
harp-faced man stared him out. “By God, Petersen, if you’d killed Shard — ”

  “But I didn’t! Look, if it hadn’t of been for that bloody abo running across me and then beating it for help…” Petersen waved his arms. “Look, Christ, it’s no skin off your nose! Shard's alive. And I’m the one that killed those kids — not you.”

  A smile: “Which you’d better remember, Petersen, all your life. You killed, not me. Worried — about killing children?”

  Petersen’s gaze moved away. “Yes, I am. Kids is kids.”

  “So?”

  “It’s different.”

  “Different, why different? Petersen, I thought you had a tough skin. There’s no difference in my book between killing a child and killing anyone else. Don’t you go soft on me, don’t you do that!” The sharp-faced man moved across the room, stood by a window looking out over the lights of Port Jackson spread like hanging lanterns around the dark water of the harbour, beneath other lanterns set in the sky. Then he moved back towards Petersen. “You’ll get over it. When a thing has to be done — well, that’s it, Petersen. Don’t sentimentalise over children — I don’t like it. Get me? When they’re in the way, they have to go. Don't they?”

  “If you say so, Mr. Tuball.”

  “I do say so.” The sharp-faced man moved again, over the thick blue carpet towards a silver cigarette box, its reflexion set in antique walnut. “Don’t waste your tears. There’s too much money involved! You want to be rich. You’ll do it my way.”

  He took a cigarette and lit it, blew smoke towards Petersen. “So that’s in the past, right? Now we’ll talk about the future.”

  CHAPTER VII

  Across the world in his Whitehall office Hedge took another telephone call: Assistant Commissioner Hesseltine.