by Jon Cleary
Gertrude Vanderberg, in thirty-five years in politics with The Dutchman, had met all types; the richest whore in the world, as she thought of Delvina, was just another type. “Madame Timori, I’m so glad you’re enjoying our little soirée.”
Malone grinned inwardly. He didn’t know whether Gertrude Vanderberg could speak French, but her pronunciation of the one word had sounded perfect to him, even though her tongue had been in her cheek.
“A lovely understatement,” said Delvina, recognizing that this homely old cow was as shrewd as the equally homely old goat sitting beside her. Then she looked at Paturi. “General, what a surprise to see you here! Are you planning a coup here in Sydney, too?”
Even Vanderberg had to chuckle at that. But Paturi just sat stone-faced; in ten years of dealing with Madame Timori he had never scored a point. Not until the coup of last week, and he was still getting adjusted to that.
“I have nothing to say,” he said, which was the truth.
“Oh, you haven’t met Inspector Malone.” She waved her hand at Malone as if he were a prize possession. “He is in charge of the police trying to find out who is trying to kill the President. I think he suspects you, General.”
There was a gasp from the wife of the Minister for Water Resources: it sounded like a pipe bursting. Everyone else at the table sat up in shock; all except The Dutchman, who continued to lounge in his chair as if he had heard all this, or something like it, before. Malone, aware that everyone was staring at him, kept his eye on Paturi.
The General said, “You are mistaken, Inspector.”
“I hope I am, sir. But perhaps I may talk to you some other time? Tomorrow morning, maybe?”
Paturi just shook his head and Vanderberg said, “The General has diplomatic immunity, Inspector. But maybe I can persuade him to talk off the record with you.” He was a master himself at talking off the record; that way he had torpedoed more opponents, in his own party and in the Opposition, than he could remember. “Leave it with me.”
Paturi saw he was trapped. Being a general who had fought no wars, he knew no way to retreat. He just sat in stony silence. Delvina gave everyone at the table a regal smile, took Malone’s arm and guided him back on to the dance floor. But now the music had stopped and they had to traverse the length of the hall past tables lined with stares. I’m dreaming this, Malone thought, I’m walking down here in a Maidenform bra and nothing else.
“You’re not used to the limelight, are you?” said Delvina.
“That was something I told my kids just a couple of hours ago.”
“You have children? One never thinks of policemen having them.”
“You’ve read too many American detective novels. How did you know we have General Paturi on our list of suspects?”
“It’s logical, isn’t it? The assassination attempt fails, he arrives here a couple of days later. It’s too much of a coincidence.” She was echoing Zanuch.
“Aren’t you afraid you’re on the hit list, too?”
“No. Well, yes, maybe.”
They had almost reached the Norvals’ table. She had made her royal progress and the bystanders, even those who sneered at or hated her, would be sorry to see her go. Society, T-shirt as well as shirt-front, was tolerant of her tonight at this celebration of Australia making good. She was an Aussie who had made good, if by the worst possible means; if the outlaw Ned Kelly was a national saint, that was no sin. If footballers could become heroic by thuggery, they must give equal rights to a woman. It was the husbands who said that, not the wives.
“Will you arrest General Paturi if I’m shot?”
“We may. Or we may arrest Sun Lee. He’s made some interesting phone calls to Beirut since he’s been here. Did you know that? Good night, Madame. Thank you for the dance.”
He left her staring after him. He could have sworn that her eyes were glazed with fear.
III
Seville sat in the attic of the big house on the high side of the street from the Hickbed mansion. It was an old house, built at the turn of the century, all gables and balconies, the baronial castle of a family that was a household name in the State’s history. Most of the rooms were now unused, their Victorian furniture covered with dust-sheets; only an elderly couple, the last of the family, still lived in the house.
Seville had come out here to Point Piper this afternoon, having deposited the canvas bag with the rifle and ammunition and his brief-case in a locker at Wynyard Station in the centre of the city. He had had confidence in his disguise; he had settled into the identity of Martin Dijon. He had used public transport to get here, getting off the bus at the beginning of the road that ran along the ridge and walking to the end of the point. This was not an area where people sat out on their front verandas; the front doors looked as if they might never be opened. No one tinkered with his car or washed it in these streets; no children played on the footpath. Some of the houses were striking advertisements of the wealth on this narrow point, but in the main anonymity was the name of the game. Conspicuous anonymity, perhaps, like the dark glass in celebrities’ limousines, but at least a knee was bent to the wish.
The street where Russell Hickbed lived was not deserted. There, the demonstrators were still doing their picketing and at least one television crew was still staking out the house. A few spectators, outsiders, not locals, had arrived, but, having got there, looked as if they were not quite sure why they had come. Two police cars stood outside the Hickbed ornamental gates, which looked to be decorated with crossed dollar signs and three golden balls, the gamut of financial speculation. Seville, standing amongst the spectactors, could see at least two uniformed policemen in the mansion grounds.
Then he had gone looking for the house he had observed through the glasses from the cruising ferry this morning. It was almost opposite the Hickbed house, on high ground held up by a sustaining stone wall. A curved driveway, beyond gates even bigger and more ornamental than Hickbed’s, led up through gardens to the house. A sign on the gates said that the property was protected by Delphi Security Service.
Seville studied it without making himself too conspicuous. He decided that the line of sight from the attic windows in the gabled roof would give him a clear view into the Hickbed house. All he had to do was bide his time, come back this evening and hope that he could force entry into the house without too much commotion. He did not want to have to kill again unless it was absolutely necessary. It was, of course, necessary that he kill Timori.
He was back again at nine o’clock, this time with the canvas bag and his brief-case. He had again come by public transport; again he walked along Wolseley Road to the end of the point. But this time he cut up into a side street before reaching the street where Hickbed lived. He entered the side gate of a rambling stone-and-brick house; the gate said Tradesmen’s Entrance, a relic of times past; but he was a tradesman and he smiled at the irony. He went down a side passage, treading quietly in his rubber-soled shoes, and through the sweet-smelling garden at the rear. He climbed the back wall and dropped down under the trees in the rear garden of the old gabled house. It was not fully dark, but he felt certain he would be difficult to see in the shadows under the thick camphor laurel trees.
The rear of the house was in darkness, but there were lights in the front rooms and upstairs. There was no flood-lighting in the gardens; whoever lived here kept advertising to a minimum; the grand old house itself was enough advertisement. Seville had no idea who lived in the house nor did he care. If he had to kill them, he would rather not know their names. Now that he had decided to retire, he wanted to discard memories, not go on collecting them. He smiled at the thought that perhaps, subconsciously, he was aspiring to his mother’s sense of respectability.
As he had suspected, the grounds were being patrolled. He crouched down behind two large, thick camellia bushes as a policeman, cap off as he wiped his sweating forehead, strolled past. The officer, a young man, paused, then stepped into another clump of camellias farther along.
A moment later Seville heard him relieving himself. Then he stepped out of the bushes and continued on his round.
Seville waited till he came by again. It took him six minutes to circle the grounds; he must have paused for a while at the front of the house. Seville waited and watched as the policeman did two more circuits: five minutes and seven minutes. It was not tight security, Seville noted, but perhaps the presence of the police was meant as no more than a deterrent. There was, he guessed, probably another officer at the front of the house.
As soon as the young policeman passed out of sight on his fourth round Seville made his move. He sprinted across the back lawn, stumbling as his knee almost gave way, and finished up on a wide back veranda that was half-enclosed by latticework. It took him three minutes to find the alarm system; it was as ancient as the house. Perhaps the Delphi Security Service was better at protecting oracles.
Then he heard the policeman coming back, this time accompanied by a colleague. He crouched down low, shielded by the lattice-work. He had zipped open the canvas bag and he had one hand on the Smith and Wesson that lay on top of the dismantled Sako rifle. The policemen paused almost opposite him and one said, “Geez, I’d love a beer!”
They passed on and Seville went to work. He opened his brief-case and took out a small hand-drill. He drilled a hole in the alarm-box by the back door; he had to smile at the simple innocence of people who believed in such an antiquated safeguard; it would not have kept out a lapsed Boy Scout. He put the drill away in the case, methodical as always; then he took out a can of fast-setting foam and sprayed the foam into the hole. He wiped the nozzle of the can and put it back in the case and took out a Swiss army knife. Then he heard the footsteps again and he dropped back down behind the lattice-work.
The young policeman, alone this time, came by again. He paused, then walked across the lawn. Seville, watching him through the lattice-screen, saw him draw his pistol; then the beam from a torch he held probed the bushes along the back wall. A cat darted out of the bushes and the policeman gave a grunt, then laughed and switched off the torch. He continued on round the front of the house.
Seville stood up again, sure now that the foam had set and neutralized the bell in the alarm box. With the knife he slipped back the catch of the window into the kitchen. He put the knife back in the brief-case and snapped it shut. Brief-cases were the tool-bags of bankers, businessmen and diplomats: his carried just a few extra tools.
He slid over the sill and found himself in the large kitchen, the sort where in other days, when such human conveniences existed, the staff would have eaten. He could hear voices and music from inside the house: someone was looking at television. He went quietly along a narrow hallway that led into a wide entrance hall. He paused a moment, listening to the sounds coming out of a doorway to the left; the television set was in there. An old movie was playing; he heard a distinctive voice, Cary Grant’s, say, “Never trust anyone.” Seville nodded at the sentiment.
He went quickly and silently up the wide stairs that led to the upper floors. Some of the rooms were lit, but most of them were in darkness. He passed a huge bedroom; it was like peeping into a corner of a Victorian museum. A big brass-railed bed, two heavily stuffed armchairs, a full-length mirror on wheels: it was like a return visit to his grandmother’s bedroom in the estancia near Bariloche. He went on past it, hurrying now, struck by some odd feeling he couldn’t identify. Was it regret for the way his life had gone, or conscience, or just homesickness?
The question stayed with him as he climbed the narrow stairs into the attic. There he sat amidst the alluvia of other people’s lives, things washed up from the life that had gone on in the house below: toys, a baby carriage, books, heavily-framed photographs, a gramophone and a pile of 78 rpm records. He sat down in an old leather chair and tried to drain himself of the feeling that had attacked him. Yet over the next hour his life of years ago kept coming back to him, as if this attic, indeed this house, was a museum where memory was endemic.
It was warm here in the attic and he had taken off his jacket. Far to the west there was a red glow in the sky: he guessed the bushfires were still burning. He had no interest in such disasters: they were for people who left themselves exposed to such hazards.
He had assembled the rifle, checked the telescopic sight: it was more than adequate for the job in view. He could see down across the street and the Hickbed front gardens into the Hickbed house; the range would be less than a hundred yards. He would have to move fast once he had fired the fatal shot, but he was confident that in the initial confusion after the shot he would have plenty of time to be gone. There was no organized fireworks display tonight, but out on the harbour the occasional rocket was being let off. The sound of the shot could, for a moment or two anyway, be mistaken for a firecracker.
The Hickbed grounds were flood-lit, the flowers and shrubs somehow drained of their colours so that they looked like clumps of bone coral. All the lights in the house were on; the drapes were drawn in the ground-floor rooms but not in the rooms above. He had been sitting there two hours, beginning to grow impatient, wondering if he had chosen the wrong side of the house to watch, when he saw Abdul Timori appear in one of the upper rooms.
He steadied the rifle and took aim.
IV
Abdul Timori did not like his own company, but he had had to get used to it over the past week. He had always surrounded himself, even as a young man in Palucca and in Europe, with friends and hangers-on, he had never cared which, who would laugh at his jokes or keep him entertained. When he had married Delvina she had tried to weed out some of the hangers-on and he had let them go; he had objected when she had tried the same sorting out amongst his friends, or those he called his friends. He needed company, he had told her, and he had been adamant that he would not be deprived of it. He did not crave friendship, not after he became President: that, he realized, would be a weakness. But company, yes: he needed to be reassured, to see his position reflected in the faces of others.
He was now also afraid: something he had never been before. The coup had startled him by its success; he had been aware that it was being plotted, but he had never dreamed that it would succeed. The friends, the company he had craved, had abruptly deserted him, leaving the sinking captain for a ship they hoped would remain afloat. He had not feared for his life then, such revenge had long since died out in Palucca; or so he had thought. Then last Friday night’s assassination attempt had brought him face to face with the ugly fact that someone actually wanted to kill him.
He had run through a gallery in his mind, at first quickly, then slowly, dropping off suspects along the way like the judge in some art competition. At least two of the generals in the junta would be capable of ordering a murder, if not of actually committing one: General Paturi, he was sure, would be one of them. There had been others in the gallery: Sun Lee, Russell Hickbed, even Philip Norval: he spared no one his suspicions. And there were, of course, the organizations that arranged termination, as he believed they called it: the CIA, the KGB, the various terrorist gangs, including those backed by the emergent fundamentalist Islamic groups that had spread from the Middle East. He was eclectic in his suspicions, the mark of a true dictator.
It was fear that had prompted him to say no when Delvina had suggested they should accompany Russell Hickbed to the Bicentennial Ball. Security there would, of necessity, be lax; he would, at some point in the evening, have to present himself as a perfect target, if the assassin should still be tracking him. And why go, anyway?
“We need to present ourselves more publicly,” said Delvina. “Show we are not the dragons the newspapers are saying we are.”
“My dear, we are dragons. Or were.” He was having no late pangs of conscience; he knew what they had been. But he had been amazed at the freedom of the press here in Australia; it seemed it was allowed to criticize anyone, even the country’s own leaders. Democracy could be taken to stupid lengths. “No amount of public relations is going to change t
heir image of us. Australians are simple-minded. They tolerate their corrupt politicians because they elect them and to condemn them would be a reflection on their own judgement. But they can’t stand an honest dictator like myself. I’m not going to go to some ball and be jeered at.” He had had enough of that on the way to the airport in Bunda. “We are not going.”
“I’m going.” She had no maid, because there was no accommodation for her in the Hickbed house; she began to lay out her own things. She chose carefully because she knew this might be her farewell performance in Australia.
“Darling, you’ve been jeered at before—I’ve read some of the critics’ reviews of your dancing. You’re used to it. I’m not.”
“You don’t have to be nasty.”
She took out her jewel-box from a closet, put it on the end of the bed. It was no small box; it was almost the size of a butter-box, a jewel-case for a medieval caliph. It was made of thick teak bound with decorated iron straps; it was an effort for her to lift it on to the bed. When she opened the lid the light flashed on a king’s ransom; if anyone was buying back kings these days. She looked at it, as always, with greedy delight.
“No, I don’t have to be nasty. I’m surprised that I am. Perhaps we have been seeing too much of each other since we left the palace. There was room enough there for us to avoid each other.” He looked around their bedroom, a large room by local standards, a cupboard by his. “I don’t know why I’m not suffering from claustrophobia.”
“I’ll move out, find another bedroom.” She picked out a tiara, a necklace, a bracelet and a ring: tonight was emerald night.
“Please yourself. Perhaps Russell will share his with you. It’s bigger than this.”
She went off in a huff, her tiara and her fifteen-thousand-dollar gown, intent on public relations even if her private relations were in need of repair.
Timori had watched Hickbed go off with her, glowing as if he had just been presented with an oil lease. He had had dinner alone and then gone into Hickbed’s library and sat amidst the unread books and reviewed his life past and future. He did not consider the present, for he knew that for the moment he was helpless and at the mercy of the Australian police who were protecting him. Then he had come upstairs to the bedroom again.