Dragons at the Party

by Jon Cleary

  “Ah, we never worry about that at State level,” said the Premier and grinned. “Well, I think you and I had better do some talking, Phil. Good night, John, thanks for coming in. “Night, Inspector. You’ll keep your trap shut, won’t you? No leaks about this.”

  “Are you talking to me or Inspector Malone?” Leeds was indignant at his abrupt dismissal, but it only showed in his cold demeanour.

  Vanderberg saw his mistake. “Sorry, John. No, I was talking to the Inspector.” He didn’t apologize to Malone; magnanimity hurt him if he was too liberal with it. “Keep it to yourself, right? If I read about it in the National Times, I’ll know where it came from.”

  As Malone went out the door with Leeds he heard the Premier say, “Okay, Phil, let’s you and me get down to a little skulbuggery.”

  In the outer office Leeds said, “I’m sorry I had to put you through that, Scobie.”

  “You get used to it, sir,” said Malone, knowing the Commissioner would remember two other cases when they had been caught up in politics.

  “One shouldn’t have to. You’re sure about Madame Timori?”

  “As sure as I can be without proof. Another twenty-four hours with Sun Lee and I think I could have got the proof. He’s worried about his own skin.”

  “Does he know about the tapes?”

  “No.”

  “Were they illegal tapes?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Then I don’t want to know about them, either. Can I give you a lift home?”

  “Thanks, but I’ve got my car. I’m going back to Homicide—Russ Clements is still there. I’ll have a kip on the floor. If I went home now, my wife wouldn’t let me into bed.”

  Leeds smiled. “My wife would understand how she feels. Good night, Scobie. Let’s hope you collar Seville. You’ll need some satisfaction out of this.”

  Malone went back to Homicide and woke up Clements, who was asleep with his head resting on his arms on his desk. He told him what had been said in the Premier’s office and Clements, another veteran of political interference, just smiled. “So we keep our traps shut?”

  “The Dutchman’s very words.”

  “You going home now?”

  “No, I’ll take a kip here. I’ll go home at six, when Lisa will be awake.”

  They both settled down, heads down on their desks. Malone kicked off what Claire called his party shoes and took off his dinner jacket. Five minutes later, sound asleep at his desk, he could have been mistaken for an all-night reveller who had been brought in drunk and had passed out before he could be hauled off to the nearest cells up at Darlinghurst.

  His phone rang at 6.15, but it was Clements, already awake, who picked it up. He listened, massaging his stiff neck while he did so, then he put down the phone after saying, “Okay, thanks for the info.”

  Malone, awake now, looked up. “What was that?”

  “Seville’s been sighted. He’s kidnapped Dallas Pinjarri.”

  10

  I

  SEVILLE WAS fumbling with the ignition wires, trying to start the motor, when Pinjarri loomed up beside the open window. He was dressed in a checked shirt and jeans, but his face was painted so that he looked wild and fearsome.

  “Where you going, Mick? I wanna talk to you—”

  Seville connected the wires, got the car started. Then he looked at the dark, striped face close to his own and knew he was not going to get rid of Pinjarri without trouble. He looked down the long line of parked cars, their occupants getting out of them with the stiffness of people who had slept in spaces too small for them, and saw the burly policeman from last night standing there with a loud-hailer projecting from his face like a yellow snout.

  “What’s he saying?”

  “There’s been some sorta balls-up. He’s telling everyone they gotta move their cars. Fuck him. What about you and me, Mick? You still owe me four thousand dollars.”

  The policeman had begun to walk along the line of cars; his words were clearer now. In a minute or two there would be confusion as the angry motorists, who had thought they would be allowed to stay here for this Day of Days, began to drive their cars away to look for another parking space. Seville felt the canvas bag on the seat beside him. He pushed it on to the floor in front of the passenger’s seat and slid across the seat.

  “Get in, Dallas, if you want to talk.”

  Pinjarri, unsuspicious, opened the driver’s door and slid in behind the wheel. Seville reached down, took Malone’s Smith and Wesson from the bag and said, “You drive, Dallas. Hurry.”

  Pinjarri looked shocked; the white markings on his dark face seemed to stretch. But he didn’t argue. He put the car in gear and carefully took it out from the kerb.

  “Do a U-turn,” said Seville. “Away from the policeman.”

  Pinjarri did so, not very skilfully; a man in a parked car yelled for him to be careful. Then they were heading back under the bridge. Out of the corner of his eye Seville caught a glimpse of the Aborigines, all with painted faces, running down the slope through the crowd. “Speed up!” he said. “Faster!”

  They went under the bridge, leaving the Aborigines, led by the young boy, standing in the middle of the road shouting. “Put your seat-belt on,” said Seville, and Pinjarri did so, fumbling with it as he drove one-handed past the wharves and up into the city.

  “Where are we going?”

  Seville hadn’t put on his own seat-belt; he didn’t want to be constricted if Pinjarri decided to fight. “Out of the city. Head west.” He had no idea where west was or what was there.

  “Parramatta?”

  “What?”

  “Do you want me to drive to Parramatta?”

  “Yes.” Wherever or whatever Parramatta was. The Aboriginal names confused him, as if they had some secret meaning that he, a foreigner and a white one, could never fathom.

  Pinjarri drove in silence for a while, then said, “You didn’t finish him off.”

  “Timori? No.” He now accepted the fact that he had failed again. He would make no further attempts, he would fly out of here some time today, go straight to Damascus and hole up there till he had recovered. He felt as wounded as Timori. “I’ll send you the money I owe you, Dallas.”

  “Like fucking hell you will.”

  Seville lifted the gun; he was losing patience with Pinjarri, with everything in this godforsaken country. “Moderate your language, Dallas. You’re with a gentleman.”

  “You—a fucking murderer?” Pinjarri laughed; then saw that Seville was serious. “Okay, okay. How long am I gunna have to wait for the money? We could of done with it today. We could of staged a decent fuck—a decent demo.”

  “You’d be wasting your money. That war paint, or whatever it is, won’t frighten them.” He had seen enough of the country, or at least its attitudes, to know who were the inevitable winners. “I should tell you about the Indians in my own country.” He said something in Guaraní.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It’s something I once heard an Indian say. A revolution does not guarantee freedom.” The Indian had probably heard it from a white man; they weren’t natural political philosophers.

  “We don’t want a revolution—we’re not stupid. We want ‘em to just hand back what’s ours.”

  “The land? All of it?” Seville laughed. “They’d give you freedom before they’d give you land. Freedom doesn’t cost them anything.”

  “We’ve got that.” Then Pinjarri saw the argument and nodded bitterly. He drove in silence for some miles, then he said, “We’re coming into Parramatta,”

  It was another city, once a suburb of the capital city; now they merged, like lakes joined by a permanent flood of red-roofed houses and iron-roofed factories. Seville saw an arrowed sign: Katoomba; and said, “Keep going. We’ll go to Katoomba. I’ll let you go there. You can be free.” He smiled, but Pinjarri didn’t smile back. “Where’s the nearest airport?”

  “We’re going the wrong way if you’re loo
king for an airport. The nearest one this way would be, I dunno, Bathurst, I guess.”

  “How far is that?”

  “I dunno. A hundred and twenty, a hundred and fifty ks. Maybe more.”

  “Ks?”

  “Kilometres.”

  Seville was dismayed. He had expected Sydney, a city of more than three million people, to be surrounded by small airports. He had been deceived by the superficial resemblance of life here to American life: the used car lots with their twinkling bunting, like a whore’s come-on; the fast-food outlets spreading like an international attack of indigestion; the brashness of the people who were not always as friendly as they first appeared. In California or Texas and on the East Coast it had seemed there was an airport of some sort, public or private, every thirty or forty miles. Now he was going to have to drive 150 ks to Bathurst, wherever that was.

  “Where is it?”

  “Over the mountains, the Blue Mountains. The road may be closed if the bushfires are still burning.”

  “We’ll take another road.”

  “There’s only the one road.”

  God, he thought, and they boast of their standard of living! It was like Syria. Or Argentina, where the airlines never ran to time and the roads petered out into nowhere, like tracks into a vast swamp. He had forgotten too much of where he had come from.

  “Why do you want me? Let me out, Mick. Forget about the money, just let me out.”

  They had pulled up at a traffic light. A car, with four youths in it, pulled up beside them, and the driver, skin and bones held together by a T-shirt, looked across at Pinjarri, saw the painted face and laughed.

  “G’day, darky! On your way to a corroboree? Who’s your mate—Crocodile Dundee?”

  All four youths hooted with laughter and Seville said quietly to Pinjarri, “Shall I shoot them?”

  “Christ, no!”

  “You see, Dallas? You’ll never beat them.”

  The light turned green and Pinjarri drove on, ignoring the challenge from the other driver to race him. “Let me go, Mick.”

  Seville shook his head. “Ah no, Dallas. You’d tell the police where they could pick me up, at Bathurst. There must be a reward out for me, trying to kill a President. You’d make more than four thousand dollars.”

  “They haven’t said anything about a reward. Me go to the pigs? Jesus, Mick, that’s fucking insulting—”

  “Drive on, Dallas.”

  They skirted Parramatta and soon were on a long straight freeway that ran between rolling fields where isolated housing developments stood out like herds of giant box-like cattle. The grass fields in between were all black, smoke rising in some places like steam from a dark thermal swamp. They passed a big amusement park on their left, the Big Dipper rising above it like the skeleton of some ancient Loch Ness monster brought here for display. The fires seemed to have skirted the park, saving it for another day.

  Up ahead smoke was billowing thickly into the sky, turning it yellow. They came down a long incline at speed, slowed to a crawl as they came to a T-junction and Pinjarri turned right. Seville looked out and up at the escarpment of mountains ahead of them. And saw the police helicopter overshoot them.

  II

  Clements had said, “A young Abo kid told the constable on duty down at the bridge what happened. He got on to Police Centre right away and they’ve got an alert out. The car is a brown Mazda, number-plate HBT-651. They’ve got the chopper airborne and the SWOS guys are standing by.”

  Five minutes later the phone rang again. Clements took the call, said, “Thanks,” and hung up. “The Mazda’s been spotted. At Leichhardt, on Parramatta Road, heading west. The chopper will pick it up.”

  On their way out they picked up Andy Graham coming on early morning duty. Somehow he produced a marked car with a driver. “We can move faster in this, Inspector. The siren and the blue light—”

  “Right,” said Malone and grinned at Clements. Despite his tiredness he felt better this morning than when he had gone to sleep. Hope is a good pick-me-up.

  Now they were coming out of Parramatta on to the Great Western Highway, the siren screaming and the blue light flashing. Two Highway Patrol cars joined them and Malone knew that the SWOS wagons could not be far behind. The young driver was handling the car beautifully, but Malone, a bad passenger at the best of times and the slowest of speeds, sat nervously hunched in the back seat. It didn’t help to see Andy Graham, up front, grinning like an 18-year-old let loose in his first sports car.

  The radio was on, the reports being relayed through Police Centre. “The suspect is now beginning the climb up the mountains from Emu Plains. He is still under aerial surveillance.”

  “We’ll get the bastard this time!” said Graham, no longer grinning.

  They went down the long stretch of freeway at 150 kilometres an hour, siren wailing, light flashing. At this time of morning there was virtually no traffic going their way; in the opposite lane there were already cars heading for Sydney and the Big Day. Up ahead Malone could see the Blue Mountains, no longer blue, and the thick clouds of smoke, like yellow-grey thunderheads, hanging above them.

  “The highway is blocked a mile out of Springwood,” the radio reported. “The bushfires have crossed the road. Police are turning back all traffic. The suspect is in for a shock,” said the police radio officer cheerfully.

  “I bloody hope so,” said Malone.

  “Right,” said Graham up front and grinned again.

  Clements looked at Malone. “Did you call Lisa?”

  “Bugger!” Malone threw up his hands. He looked at his watch. “Never mind, I’ll call her as soon as this is over.”

  In the Mazda Seville was urging Pinjarri to increase his speed, but the Aborigine was taking no notice. It was as if he had gone back to his tribal heritage; he sat behind his bars of paint, fatalistic as an old man. The bone had been pointed and he had accepted it.

  “We’re never gunna get away from that chopper, Mick. I just wanna stay on the road and make sure we don’t crack our fucking necks. I ain’t the world’s best driver. You don’t get much practice when you don’t own a car.”

  “I thought you’d be stealing one every chance you got.” It would be about the level of Pinjarri’s rebellion: he was still contemptuous of the Aborigine and his hopeless cause.

  Pinjarri didn’t answer that, just concentrated on taking the car up the wide curving road. They came up behind a big semi-trailer labouring up the steep grade and Pinjarri slowed.

  “Go past him!”

  “I can’t! There’s a double-line and a bend up ahead—there’s too much traffic coming this way!”

  “Pass him!” The gun came up.

  Pinjarri, sweat glistening on his face so that the stripes were now beginning to smudge, changed down, took the car out from behind the semi-trailer and trod hard on the accelerator. Without believing in any god, he said a prayer: the old primitive instinct at work again. They roared by the huge truck and squeezed in in front of it just as three cars, nose to tail, came round the curve There was a scream of tyres, a blaring of horns but no accident.

  Pinjarri let out a gasp of relief. “That’s the last time, Mick! You can shoot me, if you like. That’ll be better than running head-on into something.”

  Seville hadn’t yet thought of death. He still believed in his skill and his good fortune; his invincibility, if you like. The skill had been less than perfect the past few days, but that had been at killing, not at escaping. He had been caught only once, back in his Tupamaros days; there had been three days of police torture, but then he had escaped, even with the handicap of his broken knee-cap. Since then he had evaded better and more sophisticated police forces than the amateurs who were chasing him.

  The road twisted through cuttings and steep banks. The land on either side was rocky and last week might have been dense bush; now it was a black forest of stumps and bare trunks, highlighted in places with red where logs still glowed. Smoke wraiths danced in slow motion am
ongst the dark trunks and the acrid smell of smoke began to invade the car. Then they ran into a dense yellow pall blocking the road; Pinjarri slowed the car and they crept through it. When they came out of it they saw the police cars and the fire engines drawn up across the roadway a quarter of a mile ahead. Beyond the road-block the forest on either side of the road was a red-and-yellow inferno, flames leaping sixty and seventy feet towards the dense, billowing clouds of smoke above it

  Pinjarri slammed the car to a halt and at once they heard the clatter of the helicopter above them.

  Two miles behind them the police convoy had slowed to a crawl behind the labouring semi-trailer. The sirens were blowing and the blue lights flashing, but the traffic coming downhill couldn’t hear or see because of the curves and consequently neither slowed down nor pulled over on to the road’s shoulders.

  The young driver cursed. “Sorry, Inspector. It’s not worth the risk.”

  “Just take it easy,” said Malone. “He won’t get past that road-block.”

  Then the road widened, the semi-trailer pulled over into the slow lane and the police convoy, now caught up by the two SWOS wagons, accelerated past. At the same moment there was suddenly no traffic coming from the other direction.

  Clements looked out at the devastated countryside, at several houses that were now just charred ruins, standing like rough charcoal sketches of what they had once been.

  “He won’t get far in country like this.”

  “We’re lucky,” said the young driver. “I was up here a couple of weeks ago, bush-walking. We got lost and they had to send in a rescue party for us. I never been so bloody embarrassed in my life. If the bush was like it was a couple of weeks ago, he could lose himself in there for weeks and we’d never pick him up.”

  “I’m glad we’re getting a break at last,” said Malone and looked out at the smouldering homes of people who had had no breaks at all.

  Then they came round a bend and ran into the thick barrier of smoke. The young driver braked sharply, glanced in his rear-vision mirror, said, “Christ, I hope they don’t run into my bum!” and drove cautiously through the thirty or forty yards of dense smoke. Everyone had hastily wound up their windows, but the smoke, or at least its smell, still leaked in and they all took out handkerchiefs and put them over their faces. Then they came out into the clear and there was the brown Mazda, the passenger door wide open, blocking the roadway in front of them.