Dragons at the Party

by Jon Cleary

  The long line of children was almost on them, the bright sunburned faces looking curiously at the two men arguing. They were a mixed bunch: freckled Anglo-Saxon faces, dark-eyed Mediterranean ones, two or three Orientals: only their voices were Australian, flat-vowelled and quick. Then the girl supervising them, looking back to make sure she had not lost any of her charges, suddenly stumbled and fell into Seville.

  Instantly all the children yelled with glee. “Watch the hole, Charleeeeeeenn!”

  It was obviously an old joke to them. They fell about with mirth, running round Charleen, Seville and the young boy, trapping them loosely with the long rope. Again Seville felt panic; he winced as the girl fell against the gun in his pocket, bumping it against his hip bone. He pushed her away, looked wildly at the children; he waited for their fathers and uncles, the SWOS men, to come round the corner. But nothing happened.

  The girl straightened up, face red with embarrassment. She apologized to Seville and the young boy, got the young children once more into a semblance of a straight line. Clutching their rope, their umbilical cord, they went on up the street, still giggling and laughing, still chanting, “Watch the hole, Charleeeeeeen!”

  Seville mopped his face with a handkerchief. He and the boy were standing outside an old stone house: a plaque said it had been built in 1830. The sun bounced back from the pale beige stone, throwing glare and heat; they could have been standing outside a furnace. Seville suddenly wondered if the dye in his hair was starting to run; he could feel something trickling down his forehead and temples. He took out his handkerchief, wiped his temple; the handkerchief came away unstained. The boy was staring at him.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I didn’t recognize you when you went past me back there. You don’t look nothing like you did the other night. I recognized your walk, but.”

  “My walk?”

  “Yeah, you sorta roll. Like a sailor. It’s a nice dye job, but. You trying to be an Abo?” The boy grinned; his fear was diminishing. “Okay, what about the money?”

  “Dallas was going to trust me. Why can’t you?”

  “Dallas is Dallas. I’m just me, just the messenger boy.” His modesty was genuine; there was no attempt to build himself up. “Geez, I dunno, Mr. Gideon. I don’t wanna hang on to this—” He swung the bag forward. “Even Dallas wanted to get rid of it soon’s he could, he told us that.”

  “Look—” Seville produced the money. Then he explained the procedure for cashing the traveller’s cheques. “I countersign them here and I’ll make them out to Dallas Pinjarri. All he has to do is take them to American Express or any bank and they’ll cash them for him.”

  “Geez, I dunno . . .” He was out of his depth. “You sure they’re fair dinkum?”

  Fair dinkum: more Aboriginal dialect? “I don’t know. What’s that?”

  “Okay. On the level.” Seville nodded and the boy hesitated a while longer. Then: “Okay, sign ‘em. But Christ help you if you’re pulling a swifty. Dallas can be pretty bloody dangerous.”

  “I’m sure he can,” said Seville and, using his brief-case as a desk, he signed five one-hundred-dollar cheques. He signed the name Gideon because he did not want to confuse the boy further.

  He handed over the cash and the cheques and the boy gave him the canvas bag. He zipped it open and felt the cloth-wrapped dismantled rifle inside it; he also felt the two boxes of ammunition and the cloth-wrapped telescopic sight. People were passing them and he tried to look like a man checking he had brought his picnic lunch. He zipped up the bag and nodded.

  “Thank Dallas for me. Tell him I shan’t be seeing him again, but good luck with his cause.”

  “His what?”

  “Never mind.” It would be cruel to joke about Pinjarri’s cause; he had never joked about other hopeless ambitions. He had read that some land had been given back to the Aborigines, but the whites’ patience had grown thin, their sense of guilt not equalling their need for profits. “Good luck to you, too. Don’t lose the money or the cheques.”

  He left him then, going up the side street through the increasing crowd which was now looking hot and already beginning to sound irritated. Mothers were snapping at their children, though the day was less than half over, and fathers could be heard complaining that they should have stayed home in the pool. “Why’d we have to come today in this heat? It’s all gunna be here for another coupla hundred years. If it ain’t, it ain’t worth coming all this way to see.”

  Seville turned down towards Circular Quay, passed the ferry wharves and saw the sign: Harbour Cruises. He crossed to a man standing at a turnstile. “Does the cruise go past Point Piper?”

  “You live there, mate, or you wanna see how the other half lives?”

  “I want to see how the other half lives.”

  “Then this is your cruise, mate. We cater for the battlers of the world. It goes right past Point Piper and the silvertails. If you’re lucky you might catch sight of President Timori and his missus. They’ve just moved in there.”

  Seville bought a ticket and went aboard the big cruising ferry, going on up to the open upper deck and sitting by the rail with the canvas bag and his brief-case between his legs. He had taken the Smith and Wesson from his pocket and put it back in the brief-case. He sat there on the upper deck, complete with weapons, ready for the sight-seeing cruise and particularly the sight of the house where Abdul Timori was sheltering.

  A family of five squeezed into the seats beside him. The father, an overweight man in his forties in sports shirt, shorts and long socks, glanced at Seville and grinned as he took off his straw hat and wiped his red face with an already soggy handkerchief. “Man wants his head read. I coulda stayed home, sunk some tinnies and had a good rest-up.”

  It was all double-Dutch to Seville, but he nodded pleasantly in reply. Beyond the man his three children, all under twelve, were pestering their mother for money to buy ice-cream or lollies or Cokes. The mother, who might have been plumply pretty when she had started out in the early morning but now looked like a wet rag doll, resignedly took money from her handbag and waved the children away. “You’ll send me broke!”

  “Kids!” said their father. He was one of life’s battlers, someone who would never make it to Point Piper. “I hope they bloody fall overboard!”

  “You’d be the first to jump in after ‘em,” said their mother.

  “Only because Gloriette is wearing me best shirt.” He looked again at Seville, friendliness exuding out of every sweat-opened pore. “You a visitor? Where you from?”

  “France,” said Seville, fitting into Martin Dijon.

  The man leaned towards him confidentially. “I wouldn’t broadcast that if I was you. The French ain’t too popular with us. But welcome to Aussie, anyway.”

  “Thank you,” said Seville, wondering if he would be any more popular if he’d said he was Argentinian. He pressed his heels harder against the bag between them.

  The ferry eased away from the wharf, went out into the mainstream and passed the Opera House, an operatic extravaganza in itself; from the north he thought it looked like a school of giant sharks rising to swallow whatever sailed past it. He listened with only half an ear to the amplified descriptions of what could be seen. They sailed close to two of the tall ships and there were excited oohs and ahs and Geez, look at that! from the crowd on board the cruise ferry. Seville looked at the sailing ships, saw that one of them was a training ship from Argentina, one he had seen dozens of times on the River Plate; homesickness all at once hit him like a dizzy spell from the heat. He clutched at the rail.

  “You all right?” said the man solicitously. He turned to one of the children who had come back, the eldest girl. “Gloriette, go and get the gentleman a drink, a bitter lemon or something. Quick!”

  “I’m all right,” said Seville. “Really—”

  “It’s the heat. If you’re not used to it . . . The wife’s not, and she was born here. She gets the hot flushes . . .”

&
nbsp; “Charlie!” His wife had a hot flush of embarrassment.

  Gloriette came back with a bottle of bitter lemon and Seville took it and drank from it. He was surprised at how grateful he felt towards this family; he was not accustomed to ordinary emotions. He gave them all a smile and they all smiled back, welcoming him to Sydney.

  The ferry sailed on, then the guide’s voice said over the loudspeakers: “And now we’re approaching Point Piper. That big white house up there, that’s where President Timori, from Palucca, is staying. It belongs to Mr. Russell Hickbed, one of Australia’s richest men. If you like to pass around the hat, we can buy it for seven or eight million . . .”

  The man beside Seville took out a pair of binoculars and scanned the rich territory on the narrow point. “Boy, would I like to live up there!”

  “There isn’t any Leagues club around here,” said the wife.

  “I’d build me own.” He turned to Seville, offered him the glasses. “Care to have a look? I suppose you got places like that along the Riviera?”

  Seville took the glasses, focused them on the Hickbed mansion. His luck could not have been better: a small group was standing on the top terrace, the Timoris amongst them. Then he saw the woman, Madame Timori, walk away and go down to a lower terrace, followed by one of the men. He gave a small cough of surprise when he recognized Inspector Malone.

  “See someone you know?” said the man beside him.

  Seville smiled at him. “I don’t have that sort of friends.”

  “Me, neither. The only silvertails I know, I read about in the papers. As for that guy Timori—who’d wanna be a friend of his?”

  “I agree,” said Seville, and looked back at his intended target. Then he scanned the surrounding houses and blocks of apartments. At last he saw what he wanted. Then he looked back at Timori, now standing alone at the end of the top terrace, a perfect target at no more than three hundred metres. He would kill him tonight, from an even shorter distance.

  He handed the glasses back to the man beside him. “Perhaps I could buy you and your family lunch?”

  “Thanks a lot, but nah. We brought it with us. Shirl, give the gentleman a sandwich. I got some tinnies in the esky. Be glad to have you join us.” He opened a portable ice-box and took out two cans of beer. “Foster’s, mate, best beer in the world. Or do you drink wine, being a Frenchman?”

  “No, I drink beer.” But not often; he couldn’t stand the awful stuff that was brewed in Damascus. “Thank you, Mr.—?”

  “Charlie McGinn. Charlie will do.”

  “Martin Dijon.”

  “Well, here’s to you, Marty.” He raised his beer can, then took a last look back at silvertail territory. “That Timori, bastards like him, they’re a blot on the bloody landscape. It’s a pity that guy the other night missed him. There you are, chicken and salad. It ain’t gourmet stuff, but I suppose even you French don’t have that all the time.”

  Seville took the sandwich and bit into it; it tasted good and filling. For the first time he was beginning to enjoy Australia and the Australians.

  He looked back at Point Piper, at the big white mansion fading into the glare. The figure was still there at the end of the top terrace, but it was hazy, like a figure about to be washed out of a landscape.

  II

  “You heard about the bushfires,” said Clements as he and Malone walked towards Homicide’s interrogation room. “They’re everybloodywhere. Terrey Hills, Heathcote, up the Blue Mountains. Poor buggers, they’ll have nothing to celebrate tomorrow.”

  Malone hadn’t listened to any news all day; he hadn’t wanted to hear any references to his shame this morning. No policeman likes being taken as a hostage; it is like being stripped naked in public. “I’m sorry for them. But what do you think we’ve got to celebrate?”

  “Nothing.” Clements bit his lip. “Have you heard the cricket score?”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “We’re a hundred and twenty for six. We’re in dire straits.” He opened the door into the interrogation room.

  Pinjarri was there with Jack Rimmer and a bearded young white man whom Malone recognized as Ray Cassell, from the Aboriginal Legal Service. In the past Malone had found him a pain in the neck: like all converts, he was more devout to the faith, more black than any black. He opened up with all guns at once.

  “You’ve got no right bringing Dallas in here—he’s done nothing—this is nothing more or less than racism—”

  “What tribe are you from?” said Malone, then shook hands with Jack Rimmer. “G’day, Jack. Nice of you to come. Hello, Dallas.”

  Pinjarri just grunted, looked at Cassell to provide the ammunition. The lawyer obliged: “I repeat, you have no right to bring him in—”

  “Mr. Cassell,” said Malone patiently, “I’m trying to keep Dallas out of trouble, not pour it all over him. Ask Jack here. Dallas is getting himself into deeper crap than he’s ever been in—he just doesn’t know what’s happening—”

  “That’s fucking right,” said Pinjarri. “I don’t fucking know what’s fucking happening.”

  Jack Rimmer said quietly in his gravelly voice, “Tell us about it, Inspector.”

  Malone was glad of the older man’s presence; he knew he would have got nowhere if he had had to deal with the two younger men alone. “This bloke Seville, the terrorist—”

  “So called,” said Cassell.

  “Okay, this alleged terrorist is trying to kill President Timori—”

  “How do you know?” said Cassell. “Or is this another alleged offence?”

  Malone looked at Rimmer. “Why don’t you take him outside and point the bone at him, Jack?”

  Rimmer grinned. “Go on, Scobie. Shut up for a while, Ray.”

  Malone continued: “I spent twenty minutes with Seville this morning, at gun point. He’s going to kill Timori, make no mistake about it. He has a hand-piece, two in fact—mine’s one of them,” he admitted, and could have torn Cassell’s beard out by the roots when the latter smiled. “We don’t think he’ll want to use those to kill Timori—he’ll want to do it from a distance, with a high-powered rifle. We think Dallas has been trying to supply him with that rifle. If he has already done so, or if he does so when we let him go, he’s going to go down the gurgler.” He looked straight at Pinjarri. “You’ll never get out of jail, Dallas. This is political. They’ll throw the book at you.”

  “You want to help him?” said Rimmer.

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to him if I didn’t.” Malone turned back to Pinjarri. “Dallas, we know you had a gun to give him. He told me that this morning.” A little lying was part of the tools of his trade. Cassell, like a good lawyer, made a scoffing noise, but Malone took no notice of him. “Tell us where the gun is and you’re free. Otherwise . . .”

  “Don’t say anything, Dallas,” said Cassell. “You’re free as it is.”

  Malone looked at Rimmer. “What’s your advice to him?”

  Rimmer looked like a man who was resigned to his advice being ignored, especially by the young. Finally he said, “I think you better tell him, Dallas. You go up before the beak again, you’re gunna be a three-time loser. You’ll cop the maximum.”

  Pinjarri sat slumped in his chair, sullen as a young buffalo. He was picking at a fingernail, stopping every now and then to open and shut his hand, as if he were suffering from cramp. Malone recognized the nerves that were possessing the young Aborigine and he waited, knowing it was only a matter of time.

  “Don’t trust ‘em,” said Cassell.

  Clements looked ready to hit the young lawyer, but Malone glanced at him and shook his head. Cassell was unimportant. Pinjarri was going to make his own decision.

  He shifted restlessly in his chair, then abruptly sat up. “Okay, I’ll talk if you don’t take nothing down, okay?”

  Malone nodded to Clements, who reluctantly put away his notebook. “Go ahead, Dallas. Has he got the gun yet?”

  “No. He come to me and offered me
five thousand bucks to get him a rifle and a „scope. I took it to him last night, but youse blokes turned up before I could give it to him—I mean, at Central. I ain’t seen him since.”

  “Where is it? At your place in Redfern?”

  “It’s in Redfern, but it ain’t at my place. Someone is looking after it for me. You won’t bust them, will you?”

  “No. If we get the gun, nobody’s going to be busted. What sort of gun is it?”

  “A Sako .270.”

  Malone looked at Clements, the gun expert. The latter said, “It would do the job. The „roo shooters use it a lot. If he could get within three hundred metres, Timori would be a dead „roo.”

  “Or a dead man. You ever been an accessory to a murder before, Dallas?”

  “Christ, no! You told me there’d be no fucking bust—”

  “There won’t be. Righto, let’s go and pick up the gun.”

  “I’m coming, too,” said Cassell, but was no longer as belligerent.

  “Sure,” said Malone. “You got your own transport? We never give lawyers a lift in police vehicles. It’s just a prejudice on our part.”

  “What about me?” said Rimmer, grinning.

  “Social workers are just as bad, Jack. But we’ll make an exception for you.”

  They went downstairs and got into the police car, with Clements behind the wheel, Rimmer beside him and Malone and Pinjarri in the back seat. They drove out of the cool of the garage into the furnace heat of the day and Clements switched on the air-conditioning. “Do you Abos feel the heat?”

  “All the time,” said Rimmer, grinning again. “You guys never let up on us.”

  Pinjarri suddenly laughed, a surprisingly healthy sound; then the two white men joined in. The good mood lasted till they turned into the narrow street in Redfern where Pinjarri directed them. The street was deserted, everyone having retreated from the heat, but as soon as the unmarked police car entered the street Aborigines appeared at the front doors of the shabby terrace houses.