by Jon Cleary
He took the rifle and the pistols from beneath the seat and put them back in the canvas bag. He was not sure why he did it; it was a form of housekeeping. He started up the car again and drove out of the airport and back towards the city. On the way he passed two police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming, going in the opposite direction; it was a warning not to come back to the airport in the morning. Over to his left the outer city’s lights lit up yellow clouds that could have been rain clouds or just smoke. As he drove he thought of Timori falling face down away from the window in the Hickbed house.
He had no remorse about taking the man’s life. He had never felt remorse, not even when innocent people died in the bomb attacks he had organized. In any war there had to be casualties amongst the innocents; how many had been guilty amongst the casualties in London and Dresden and Hiroshima? There had been less of that when he had belonged to the Tupamaros; except for the police torture, that had been a simple, almost innocent war compared to those he had joined later. He had not examined the whys and wherefores of the Paluccan situation, but it was still a war of sorts. Any struggle for power was a war and he drew no distinctions.
He switched on the car radio, as much to keep himself awake as anything else. He was all at once bone tired, mentally as well as physically; he would sleep for a week when he got home to Damascus. The radio was playing some middle-of-the-night music, a group he hadn’t heard in years: Dave Brubeck and his quartet. He knew the number, “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” It brought back memories of his first year at university, when he and the varsity jazz club would sit far into the night playing Brubeck, Mulligan and the other Americans who excited them then. He began to hum the melody.
Then the music stopped and the announcer said, a little breathlessly: “We’ve just had a news flash! President Timori, of Palucca, has just been shot! He’s been admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he is in a critical condition. That’s all we have at the moment. More later . . . Now back to Dave Brubeck . . .”
Seville snapped off the radio and thumped a hand hard on the steering-wheel. They were faking: the man was dead! He knew it—dead! He could not have missed: the back of the dark head had been squarely in the centre of his sight. The range had not been extreme, his aim had been steady, the bullet at that distance could not have failed to do the ultimate damage. They were faking, hiding the truth for some political reason.
But he would have to stay on in Sydney now to be sure. He had been consumed with pride in a job well done; which might not, now, have been done well or at all. Besides, there was the matter of the million dollars. He wondered if his client would pay pro rata, if Timori should survive and he could not get to him again. Half a million was better than no bread at all.
The city was quiet, though there were people in the streets, a good many of them drunk or at least merry. Some of them had been partying since the beginning of this long weekend; the weekend would end tomorrow, Tuesday, the last day of the second century of the founding of this colony. A few people, mostly young, looked as if they had been celebrating since the end of the first century; they leaned against lamp-posts and threw up their insides, their dignity with it. Australians, he decided, were the worst sort of drunks; but he thought with Latin prejudice. He had never seen, only read about, the English and Scottish football fans. Once again he wanted to be gone from this uncouth country as soon as possible. For one mad moment he wanted to take out the Sako and mow down all the drunks as a contribution to civilization. He had his standards.
He dare not go looking for a bed in a hotel, if any could be found. He had seen a headline in a weekend newspaper: NO ROOM AT THE INN. He would stay in the car, let it be his hotel for the night. He drove through the midnight streets down towards the harbour, carefully negotiating the drunks, came out on to the waterfront and saw the Harbour Bridge towering above him like a giant Meccano set. Cars were parked end to end along the kerbs of the road that ran back under the bridge; he drove under the giant arch and along past a wharf which had been turned into restaurants and souvenir shops. The restaurants were still open, their owners having decided that tonight there would be enough business to warrant staying open all night. The crowds were gathering for tomorrow’s sail-past, getting in early for the best view of the harbour. Cars were still arriving and, though Seville passed several parked police cars, he felt safe. No policeman would be looking for a stolen car in this confusion.
He drove on along the wharves, found no parking spot, turned round and drove back. As he passed back under the bridge a car pulled out in front of him on the waterfront side of the road. He swung into the vacant space at the kerb, bouncing one wheel up on the pavement and down again as he squeezed the Mazda in between a van and a BMW. He disconnected the ignition, letting the motor die, then looked up to see the burly policeman coming towards him. His hand went into the canvas bag.
The policeman stopped by the open window of the car, bent down. “How lucky can you be, eh?” He grinned and walked on.
Seville leaned back in the seat, his body turning to jelly. He had felt like this only once before. He had flown from Tripoli in Libya to Tokyo, arriving worn out by jet lag, only to find that the Red Army group which had sent for him were expecting him to engage with them at once in the kidnapping of a Cabinet minister. Everything had gone wrong through no fault of his; the planning had not been right, the execution too hasty, his own tiredness too strong. He had collapsed after it, escaping only by the skin of his life, and he had never forgotten the experience. He was weak now and he lay for a few minutes trying to recover some muscle and bone. Then he realized he was also desperately hungry: he hadn’t eaten anything since the sandwich on the cruise ferry.
He couldn’t leave the car and go along to one of the restaurants; he had broken the lock on the driver’s door and he did not want to leave the canvas bag with the guns in it in the car, not even in the boot. Then he saw the lighted van parked on the opposite side of the road, a line of ten or twelve people queued beside it. He got out of the Mazda and on unexpectedly weak legs, so that he staggered the first couple of steps, he crossed the road to the van. Five minutes later he came back with two meat pies and a carton of coffee that tasted as if it had been brewed in a dish-washing machine.
The burly policeman came back as he reached the car. “Pies, eh? Best bloody meal there is. Enjoy it, sport.” He went on, handing out camaraderie as on other occasions he would hand out warrants.
Seville ate his supper, drank the coffee, then settled down for the night. The crowd had quietened down, sleeping on the pavement or in their cars or vans, storing up their energy for the Big Day tomorrow. Seville thought about Timori, wondered whether he was still alive or had died in the hospital; but he was too tired to care. Timori, dead or alive, could wait till tomorrow. He slept and dreamed: he was climbing the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia, but the ice kept breaking off beneath him, falling away with a loud crack into the lake below him while he leapt from one foot-hold to another on the towering blue-white wall.
He woke stiff and still tired, blinked at the sun coming straight in on him through the windscreen. He sat up, twisting his neck to take the crick out of it. He felt dirty and sweaty and wanted nothing more at the moment than a good soaking bath. Well, yes, there was something he wanted more than a bath or anything else: news of Timori. He connected the ignition wires again, then turned on the radio.
He was lucky: the on-the-hour news was just beginning: “President Timori, of Palucca, who was shot last night in the home of Sydney businessman Russell Hickbed is still in intensive care in St. Vincent’s Hospital. After an operation lasting four-and-a-half hours, doctors say that his condition is still critical. Police are searching for his alleged assailant, Miguel Seville, who is believed to be still in Sydney . . .”
Seville switched off the radio, then disconnected the wires again. He sat for a moment staring out at the harbour, its waters just a golden lake under the rising sun. Small private boat
s and early morning ferries were dark moving shapes on the golden glare; the shells of the Opera House seemed about to take off into the yellow sky. He turned his head and looked back under the bridge and saw the yellow-brown pall of smoke spreading from the west. The bushfires evidently were still burning.
He got out of the car and stretched his limbs. He would have breakfast—the pie-van was still parked across the road—and then he would head out of Sydney for some other airport, there to catch a feeder plane that would connect with a plane for Singapore, Hong Kong, anywhere. He would settle for half a million dollars; he would leave Timori to the doctors. But it would always be a festering sore that he had not done the job properly.
He crossed the road to the pie-van, stood at the end of the queue that was even longer than last night’s. He idly glanced up the grassy slope that run up from the roadway and under the bridge. It was already packed with spectators for today’s big event; it seemed that most of them had been there all night. Then he saw the group of twenty or thirty Aborigines and the big calico sign, supported by two poles dug into the ground, that hung above them: GIVE US BACK OUR LAND!
Then he heard a shout and saw the Aboriginal boy stand up and point a finger at him. Dallas Pinjarri stood up beside the boy, opened his mouth and shouted something; but at that moment a train rumbled over the bridge high above their heads and the shout was lost in the rumble. Seville turned and ran back to the car.
IV
“How is he?” said Philip Norval.
“Bad, very bad,” said Hans Vanderberg. “The docs reckon he’ll never come out of it. He has terrible brain damage.”
“Damn!” said Norval. “The Americans should have taken him. They’re better at this sort of security than we are. They’re always hiding Russian defectors.”
“Timori isn’t a defector. The last thing he would want would be to go into hiding. The more publicity he got, the more he thought he could go back to Palucca.”
The Prime Minister and the Premier were in an office in the Exhibition Centre. With them were the PM’s chief political adviser, a young man named Godbold, and The Dutchman’s man, Ladbroke. Other aides and several Cabinet ministers, both Federal and State, were in the corridor outside. The ball in the huge hall was still going on, the music thumping the thin walls of the office like an orchestrated barrage of howitzers.
“Where’s Madame Timori?”
“I believe she’s gone back to Mr. Hickbed’s,” said Godbold. He was a plump, balding young man, his middle-aged sleek complacency already there in his paunch and his pink jowls. Some day, one guessed, when he was middle-aged, he would be Prime Minister with his own political adviser. But he would be far shrewder than his present master and would listen only to the advice he wished to hear. “I think now is the time, Prime Minister, to stay well away.”
“Oh, I was going to,” said Norval hastily, “I can’t go near them—not now. Are you going to visit them, Hans?”
“Me?” He would as soon have visited the Opposition Leader in hospital. The Opposition Leader was somewhere out in the hall, hale and hearty and happy, for this night anyway, that he was not in power. “I wouldn’t touch them with forty poles, not a foot of them.”
Norval blinked, but got the point of this garbled venom. “What are we going to do if he finishes up as a vegetable?”
“Boil him,” said The Dutchman.
There was a knock at the door and an aide looked in. “Prime Minister, the American ambassador would like a word with you.”
“Show him in,” said Norval, glad of any interruption.
“Oh, and General Paturi is still here—he came back,” the aide added in a lower voice.
Norval looked at Vanderberg. “He’s your guest.”
“Tell him to wait,” said The Dutchman to the PM’s aide and sat down in the chair behind the desk. This was the Centre manager’s office and the Premier, smartly and suddenly, had established who was in charge here. “Ask Mr. Cornelius to come in.”
The American ambassador came in, a very tall Texan who looked more like a Boston banker. Except for his face: that was Grant Wood gothic, thin and bony and weather-creased, with silver hair along the sides of his bald head. He had good-humoured eyes and a slow Texas drawl that, Norval had discovered to his fumbling embarrassment, could recite Roman poets and passages from European philosophers the PM had never heard of.
Cornelius looked at the Premier, then at Norval. “Can I speak freely?”
Norval looked at Vanderberg, who just grinned and nodded. Norval said, “Of course, Carl. Go ahead.”
“I’ve already spoken to the Secretary of State. He’s talking to the President and he’ll phone me back.”
“We want you to take Timori off our hands,” said Vanderberg, seeing that Norval was prepared to say nothing.
“Is that what you want?” Cornelius looked at Norval, giving him a chance to say something.
The PM looked at his adviser; eyes were swivelling like the numbers in a fruit-machine. “That would be best, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, indubitably,” said Godbold, who could write the most pompous speeches.
The ambassador nodded, but looked dubious. “You know how they feel in Washington. This is an election year. The President isn’t running again, but none of the Republican candidates would want Mr. Timori around their necks.”
“What about the Democrats?” said Vanderberg.
Cornelius smiled. “Do you ever worry about how your opponents feel?”
“Only when they’re hanging by their thumbs,” said The Dutchman and grinned at Norval. He and the ambassador understood each other, though their meetings rarely lasted more than fifteen minutes and then only on rare occasions. They had nothing in common except respect for each other’s political ability.
“I don’t think the President will welcome another request that we give the Timoris asylum.”
“Well, that’s exactly what we’re requesting,” said Norval, trying for some determination.
“Unless he dies,” said Vanderberg. “Which is on the cards.”
“That still leaves Madame Timori,” said Godbold.
The others, all older men, looked at him pityingly. “Women are never a problem,” said The Dutchman. “They can always be got rid of.”
“She has a loud voice,” said Godbold, persisting.
“Women should be seen and not heard, so my father said.”
“I thought it was Sophocles,” said the ambassador, “but I could be mistaken. You’re a fount of wisdom, Hans. But please don’t quote your opinion on women to my wife.”
“We don’t want either of the Timoris,” said Norval. “Carl, try and convince Washington we’re not a country for exiles.”
“I thought that’s what you’re celebrating tomorrow? Weren’t all your convicts exiles?”
“You don’t have to mention that to Washington,” said Vanderberg. “Your President doesn’t know much about history—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Premier,” said the ambassador with tall dignity, “he is my President.”
Vanderberg was unembarrassed by his gaffe. “Well, let’s say he doesn’t know much about our history. But you’ve got to take the Timoris off our hands. Get the CIA to look after them. America is full of ex-Presidents—another one won’t be noticed.”
“The point is,” said Norval, “you were the ones who bolstered him up for so long. You kept him in power far longer than he deserved to be.”
“I thought he was a friend of yours?” said Cornelius mildly.
“Only a personal friend,” said Norval, and for once missed a joke.
“What the Prime Minister means,” said Godbold with all a young man’s superiority of intellect and education. He had three degrees and the PM had none, “is that Australia and Palucca were never close politically.”
“You’ve been close financially. A lot of Australian investment has gone in there. Doesn’t that give you a political interest? Your Mr. Hickbed has more money invested i
n Palucca than any American corporation.”
“Just let me say this—” said Norval, using the politician’s favourite phrase. He bobbed his head for emphasis, as politicians always did. Ladbroke, sitting outside all this, felt he was looking at another television interview by any one of a hundred clones. He looked at his own master, who would never be anything but himself.
“Just let me say this—Hickbed isn’t answerable to the Australian public as I am,” said Norval, dumping another friend. He felt terrible about it, because he was basically a loyal man; but politics was not about loyalty. That was only for the trade unionists in cloth caps and they were long gone. “We’re putting Timori on a plane as soon as the doctors say he’s well enough to travel.”
“Where will you send him?” asked the ambassador.
Norval looked at Godbold, who said, “Chad has said they will take him. They’ve heard he’s worth three billion dollars.”
“Not in Chad he wouldn’t be.” Cornelius shook his head. “You are trying to embarrass Washington.”
“Yes,” said Vanderberg when he saw that Norval was once again going to say nothing. “It’s called being allies.”
Cornelius sighed and shrugged. Sometimes he thought these Australians should have been at the Alamo; they’d have talked Santa Anna into going back to Mexico and would have then sold the fort to Travis and Crockett. “Okay, I’ll do my best. But the President is not going to like it.”
“He’s still better off than Timori,” said Vanderberg.
“Have you caught the man who did it? Seville?”
Vanderberg looked at Ladbroke, who said, “Not yet. They’ve got a watch on the airport and all main railway stations and bus stations. He can’t get far.”
No, except lose himself in this whole vast continent. “Will he try again when he finds out Timori isn’t dead?”