by Jon Cleary
Seville drove on past the Cricket Ground, passed a racecourse on his right and climbed a ridge to a shopping centre. There, at some traffic lights, he turned left and went looking for a quiet street where he could leave the car. But first he had to look for a house with a For Sale sign on it. He found such a house, had driven past it a couple of times, then driven on another mile or so to abandon the car.
He got out of the Honda and locked it. Then, carrying his brief-case he walked back to the vacant house. He made sure no one was watching him; there was no one in the front gardens of the surrounding houses. They were all solid one-storey dwellings with orange-red tiled roofs, built in the 1920s: unpretentious, boasting nothing of their owners’ ambitions, if indeed they had any. Music was blaring from a radio in the house immediately opposite, but the houses on either side of the house for sale had their windows closed and their blinds drawn.
He opened the front gate, walked across the narrow neglected lawn and round to the back of the house. He opened the brief-case; it was a small portable tool-shed. He had refined the case over the years, eliminating some equipment, adding other items. He took out a small leather wallet and in thirty seconds had opened the back door and was stepping into a back veranda that had been glassed in and converted into a room.
He went further inside and found the bathroom. He clicked on the light switch, but there was no electricity. The bathroom was dimly lit by sunlight through the narrow frosted window, but he would have to put up with that. He relieved himself, feeling both mental and physical relief as the fluid ran out of him. He was surprised and upset at how tense he had become.
Then he got to work. He propped up his remaining passport, the mark of his last emergency identity, and compared the photograph in it with the face that looked back at him from the dusty mirror over the bathroom sink. He had to change from the blond Michel Gideon to the dark-haired Martin Dijon, a French national born in Belfort. He took out the hair dye and the rubber gloves.
An hour later his hair was dark brown and dry. He brushed it and a sheen appeared on it, making it look more natural; it did not have that dull look he had noticed on the badly dyed hair of some men and women. He took a shower, relieved that at least the house’s water had not been cut off, then got back into the clothes he had been wearing. He was fastidious about cleanliness and he regretted he had not been able to bring some clothes with him when he had left the pub in Rozelle. He should have at least put a clean shirt and underwear in his brief-case.
There had not, however, been time. It was only by chance that he had glanced out of his bedroom window and seen the police cars coming down the street. At the same moment there had been a knock on his door and he had opened it to be confronted by Mr. and Mrs. Brigham. He was not to know that, friendly people that they were, they had come up to ask him to have dinner with them that evening. He had panicked again when Brigham, a hearty man who had no sense of his own privacy and valued no one else’s, had pushed uninvited into the bedroom. Seville had picked up the policeman’s gun from where it had been lying on the bed and hit the landlord with it. Brigham had gone down with a loud moan and Mrs. Brigham had opened her mouth to scream. He had warned her not to and she had shut her mouth so hard he had heard her teeth click. Then he had grabbed up the brief-case and, prodding her with the gun, gone down the stairs. At the bottom they had met Inspector Malone.
During their ride in the white Ford he had begun to respect the police officer. If Australians could be said to have dignity, something he doubted, then Malone had it; not a European dignity, or the arrogant South American kind, but a native self-respect that had nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion. There was intelligence there, too: he must make no mistake in under-estimating it. This Sydney policeman might not have the sophistication of some of those senior officers he had come up against overseas, but he was no fool. He would remain out of Inspector Malone’s way for the rest of his stay in Sydney.
He picked up the brief-case, into which he had re-packed the rubber gloves and the hair dye, put his navy-blue blazer over his arm and left the house. He had to find Dallas Pinjarri before the police found him. If he could not pick up the rifle from Pinjarri, he would have to examine the risk of breaking into some gun shop and stealing a weapon. He longed for the convenience of Beirut or Damascus or even Milan or Paris, where he had so many contacts and any sort of weapon, from a knife to a bazooka, was readily available.
He was beginning to regret he had accepted this commission. The money had been the temptation; he wondered if, in his youth, he would have come all this way out of political belief. Now he was approaching middle age he was beginning to doubt that he had indeed ever had any political beliefs. He had despised his mother and his sisters and their friends: their beliefs, political and social, had ossified into stony attitudes that nothing could chip. He had sometimes sat watching them at dinner parties and tea parties (his mother, introduced to it by his father, had had tea at four every afternoon) and compared them with the stone and marble busts on the mausoleums in the cemetery in Recoletta, where his ancestors, one of them a general, another an admiral, lay in their extravagantly built crypts. He had had the proper background: St. George’s School, university, working in the family law firm, vacationing on the family estancia. He had escorted girls from the right families, made love to two or three of them. His life had been laid out for him, like an old well-travelled road where all the bends and dips were known and no ambushes could possibly occur. Then he had heard about the Tupamaros and the future they wanted for Argentina.
He had joined them to escape the dullness of what faced him. He had told himself and them that he believed in their aims; only later had he admitted, but only to himself, that it was their methods that appealed to him. There had been excitement such as he had never before experienced: the risks were like a drug, though even then he had gained a reputation for being ice-cool under all circumstances. He had left the Tupamaros eight years ago; or rather, they had expelled him. They had realized he was in the battle for his own ends, a mercenary whose only pay, then, had been self-satisfaction; he had not cared at all about the wider aims against the junta and its oppressive rule. He had moved to Europe and the Middle East, joined other factions, gained an international reputation for his planning and his daring; but he had always been in the shadow of Carlos, the Venezuelan, and Abu Nidal, the Palestinian. During the Falklands war he had sardonically thought of offering his services to the British; his father, had he been alive, would have been torn apart by conflicting loyalties. But the British, decent as always, would never have employed a terrorist, at least not in a war they knew they could not lose.
He was a complex man, too much so to encourage close friendships, and he had begun to feel lonely. The excitement of the risks had lasted till a year or two ago and then it had begun to fade. It was then that he had begun to think about retirement.
The successful completion of this job and the claiming of the full payment of a million dollars had now become the ultimate ambition. He had never wanted anything so much before, if indeed he had ever really wanted anything at all. Life had been a day-to-day affair, well planned only in regard to the task in hand: he hated sloppy execution. There had been no final aim, for any cause or for himself. But this was different.
He walked back to the shopping centre on top of the Randwick ridge and found a phone-box. He dialled Dallas Pinjarri’s number, waited while it rang and rang; he was about to hang up and then the receiver was lifted. The voice on the other end was breathless, as if its owner had been running.
“Yeah? That you, Dallas?”
“No. I wanted to speak to Dallas. He’s not there?”
“Who’s that?”
“A friend of his. Who are you?”
“It’s none of your business, mate.” The voice was youthful, a boy’s; but it had all of Dallas Pinjarri’s belligerence. “What you want him for?”
The voice was too young to be a policeman’s; Seville took a risk
. “He has a package for me.”
“Oh.” There was silence for half a minute; Seville guessed a hand had been put over the mouthpiece. Then: “Dallas has been taken away by the pigs.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Did the police take the package?”
Again the hand must have been placed over the mouthpiece. Seville wondered who was there at the other end with the boy. Then the hand was taken away: “No, they didn’t. Are you Mr. Gideon?”
Seville hesitated, then said, “Yes. Are you the boy who met me at the Entertainment Centre the other night?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you have the package?”
Again there was a silent consultation at the other end of the phone. Seville wished the boy would get off the line and let whoever was in charge take over. But perhaps there was no one in charge. He remembered his encounters with the Aboriginal radicals on his last visit: there had been half a dozen leaders, but no one in charge. Maybe that was the tribal system; he did not know. He had never believed in anarchy: that was only a fools’ empire.
The boy came back on the line. “Yeah, we got it. Not here. We got it somewhere else. Dallas said you were paying five thousand bucks for it.” The boy said the amount as if he didn’t quite believe anyone would pay that much for anything.
“That’s correct. A thousand dollars down and the rest will be paid by bank draft.”
“Yeah, that’s what he said. Well, you still want it?”
“Yes, I do. As soon as possible.” So that I can get the job done and be gone from here as soon as possible.
“You wanna come here and pick it up?”
“Where’s here?”
“Redfern. Wonga Street.”
“Is that where the police picked up Mr. Pinjarri?”
“Yeah, why?”
“No thanks.” They really were naïve. “Choose somewhere else. Somewhere where there will be a crowd.”
Another consultation, this time without the hand over the phone: there seemed to be half a dozen voices offering suggestions. Then the boy was on the line again: “How about The Rocks, down by the harbour? I’ll be waiting on the corner of Argyle Street in an hour, okay? Bring the thousand bucks.”
“Argyle Street. And no tricks, young man, or you’ll be a dead young man.” Seville did not like melodramatic threats, but he had found, with the young Arabs he had had to work with, that melodrama seemed to accentuate the seriousness of a situation in their eyes.
The young Aborigine wasn’t impressed: he had been too long amongst the phlegmatic whites or had a sense of Aboriginal fatalism. “Yeah? Well, we’ll see about that. You be there, mate. I ain’t gunna hang around with that package too bloody long.”
Seville came out of the phone-box, looked around for a taxi, but there was none in sight. He had to wait ten minutes before one came along; impatience began to put him on edge again. “American Express head office.”
“Where’s that, mate?” The driver was an Asiatic.
“I haven’t the faintest idea. It’s your job to find it and take me there.”
The driver looked at him in the driving-mirror. This bloody foreigner hadn’t got into the front seat with him, like any democratic Aussie would do; he was so bloody uppity, he was sitting in the back and giving instructions. “Don’t talk to me like that, mate, or you can get out and walk.”
Seville put his hand on the brief-case; he could almost feel the metal of the two guns through the leather. “Perhaps you’d like me to report you to the police?”
Then to his horror he saw the police patrol car coming up the street towards them. The driver saw it, too. He looked at Seville again in the mirror, looked at the police car; then he put the taxi into gear and took off as if the police might arrest him for loitering. “Slow down,” said Seville, recovering. “You don’t want to be arrested for speeding. Pull up at the next phone-box and we’ll check the address of American Express in the phone-book.”
When they pulled in at the first phone-box they came to, the phone-book, naturally, was missing half its pages. They had to pull up at two other boxes before Seville found the address he wanted. Another five minutes brought them to American Express headquarters in the heart of the city.
“I can’t wait here,” said the driver.
Seville got out and paid the exact fare, something he normally never did; he had never been a lavish tipper, because that only brought attention to oneself; but he had always been generous. He handed over the cash and waited for the abuse. But the driver, working in Sydney, had become accustomed to no tipping. Australians, he knew, were the lousiest bastards on earth. He was just surprised that the foreign bastards were picking up the habit. It was just as well there were so many Americans in town or he mightn’t have had any pickings at all.
“I hope you get your cheques cashed,” he said. “You look as if you need it.”
“Thank you,” said Seville.
“Up yours,” said the driver with Oriental politeness and drove off.
Seville put on his blazer and went into American Express. There was a line in front of each of the two cashiers’ desks and it took twenty minutes for him to reach the counter. He produced his Dijon passport and his traveller’s cheques. The girl behind the counter gave him an American Express smile, then threw cold water on him.
“I’m sorry, sir, our limit for the moment is five hundred dollars. We’ve had a terrific run on our cash. If you could come back later?”
“You couldn’t make an exception?” He gave her his most charming smile.
She had had a surfeit of charming smiles. “I’m sorry, sir. Later, for sure. But five hundred dollars for now.”
He settled for that and left the office. He looked at his watch, then for a taxi; but all the taxis going past were engaged. He asked the way to The Rocks, then headed north towards the harbour. He passed the Regent Hotel, went in and tried to cash more cheques; but the hotel was cashing cheques only for guests. He went on, feeling the heat now as he hurried. He saw the boy waiting on the corner of Argyle Street, but he walked on past him, knowing the boy would not recognize him. He crossed to the opposite side of the wide main street, which a sign told him was George Street North; he always liked to know exactly where he was. He stood there and watched the boy.
He was waiting anxiously, carrying a canvas bag, on the corner of Argyle Street. Seville watched him for several minutes. The boy seemed nervous, but there was no sign that he was accompanied by anyone, certainly not by any Aborigines. At last Seville decided he had to come out into the open. He surreptitiously took one of the Smith and Wessons out of the brief-case and slipped it into his blazer pocket. Then he crossed the road towards the waiting boy.
The boy had chosen the spot well; or had it chosen for him. The Rocks, a restored early settlement area, was crowded with tourists and holiday-makers. The nineteenth-century shops were full of people buying reminders of the country’s history; there were many genuine home-made articles, but there were plates made in Korea and Taiwan that were decorated with pictures of Captain Cook landing at Botany Bay. Glassware, pottery and leatherware celebrated the Bicentennial; T-shirts proclaimed My Dad Was A Convict or My Granny Was the Darling of The First Fleet. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of the light-skinned Aboriginal boy holding tightly to the canvas bag. If he looked nervous and sullen, that was not their concern. If the bloody Abos didn’t want to enjoy the celebrations, bugger ‘em.
The boy was standing against the wall of a hotel, a pub where he was surrounded by drinkers standing in the hot sun so that they could maintain their thirst for more beer. Seville was half-way across the wide main road when he saw the sign above the building on the corner opposite the hotel: Police. He pulled up sharply and was almost run down by a car; there was a shriek of brakes that was almost like the shout of someone pointing a finger at him. There he is! Panic flashed through him again, but he brought it swiftly under control. He continued, his hand now in his pocket clutching the gun.
; Seville caught the boy’s eye, jerked his head and kept walking up the hill of Argyle Street. He didn’t look back to see if the boy was following him; he was looking covertly across at the police station. It was an old building, looked as if it might once have been a bank; it was discreet, as if the police did not want to frighten off the tourists. As far as he could see there were no faces at the windows, no guns showing. He kept walking, the crowd flowing up and down on either side of him like a moving protective wall.
He turned into a side street and a moment later the boy caught up with him. The boy, peering at him cautiously, said, “Are you Mr. Gideon? You look different—”
Seville said angrily, “Are you trying to set me up? Why did you choose to meet me right opposite a police station?”
“I didn’t know, but. Honest—” The boy’s face was glistening with sweat; he was afraid, more than just nervous. “I never been down here before—one of the other guys, he suggested it—”
Seville was watching the corner, waiting for the police SWOS men in their flak jackets and with their automatic weapons to come plunging round it. But all that came round it was a crocodile of very young children, twenty or thirty four-year-olds, all holding on to a rope and led by a pretty young girl who looked hot and harassed and obviously wishing she had chosen another day and a few more years to introduce the children to their heritage.
“You got the money?” said the boy and held out the canvas bag, plainly wanting to be rid of the rifle it contained.
“I have only five hundred dollars in cash. I’ll have to give you the rest in traveller’s cheques.”
The boy stopped, at a loss. “Nah, nah. I dunno nothing about cheques. What’s a traveller’s cheque?” Why should he know? thought Seville. He has probably never travelled more than a hundred miles in his life. He was a city Aborigine, not a bush nomad and certainly not one who could afford traveller’s cheques. “Cash or nothing, mate, that was what I was told to ask for.”
“I don’t have the cash! I can’t get it for you right now—” Seville could feel his temper rising. He began to wonder what else could go wrong. He had always thought that Ireland or Italy was where Murphy’s Law worked best, or worst: Australia seemed just as bad.