Hard Yards

by J. R. Carroll

  22

  By five p.m. Friday, a ceaseless stream of sports fans from all parts of the planet was pouring from the specially built, state-of-the-art train station for the opening of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Designed to carry fifty thousand passengers an hour, the system already seemed to be working at full capacity. Barrett and Geoff took up strategic positions outside the gates of the half-sunken terminal, trying to look like ordinary civilians waiting for someone – which they may well have been, except for the concealed weapons and the walkie-talkies held behind their backs. But, as Barrett had reminded him over breakfast, Geoff had to be wary: if he knew what Duane looked like, there was every chance the American would remember him too. It was a tough assignment, a man of Geoff’s size and striking appearance trying to spot one head among the ceaseless torrent of humanity while remaining invisible.

  The day had been spent sticking close to Bunny. Along with other athletes, he had been training on one of the tracks adjacent to the main stadium, and there were spectators drifting in and out of the place. It was a security nightmare. There was also the added complication of media crews who wanted to interview Bunny and take pictures of the world’s fastest man flying from the blocks and going through his thing. They had asked him what his interests were back home, and he’d said apart from running, his only real interest was racing greyhounds. He owned several, the best of which was a brindle bitch named Sweet Georgia. One of the reporters asked him if he had ever raced against his dogs, and Bunny laughed and said no, but he didn’t think he could manage five hundred metres in thirty seconds. They’d also asked him what he thought about drug cheats, and he said he had no truck with that, but had no further comment to make on the matter.

  At the train station Barrett watched keenly, but his mind was in three places: was Mai Ling on her way to Hong Kong? What about ‘Hollywood Jack’? If Geoff was right – and his nose for these things was rarely astray – Barrett could expect a nasty head-to-head with the Tucci clan soon. Not to mention the pair of bastards who had put a firecracker under his car – that one hadn’t gone away. Christ, was there no end to the crap in his life? People passed him on either side as if he were a rock in the middle of a stream. At least Duane didn’t know him from shit.

  Standing there, legs apart, hands behind his back, sports jacket buttoned to cover the shoulder holster, his mind drifted. He was thinking about Mai Ling again. Whenever she kissed him in that motel room, she had opened her mouth and given him her tongue for a long time, even while he was trying to get her knickers off – as if that were the only way she knew how to kiss. Then a weird thing happened – weird, but it didn’t surprise him at all. Visions of Mai Ling merged into even more vivid ones of Andrea Fox-Fearnor – imagining her quickly forgetting him, screwing around, jetting overseas, doing lines of cocaine and whatever else she felt like. It was easy for Barrett to start feeling sorry for himself once he started down that road. He pulled himself up, and then straightaway, as if scripted, she loomed into view.

  Andrea.

  She had on dark shades, a man’s white shirt hanging loose, faded blue Calvin Klein jeans. He had seen her wearing exactly that outfit. He had helped her take off those jeans more than once. He felt a nervous quiver in his stomach as she approached in the slow-moving glacier. He removed his own shades and stared at her, willing her to notice him. She did. But would she acknowledge him? He decided to make it impossible for her not to, by standing directly in her path. He almost was anyway. It was then he saw she was with someone: a younger man, at least ten years younger, with a pretty face. He felt it was a face he should know. Andrea stopped, and he gave her a warm smile, as if he had been expecting her.

  ‘Hello Andrea.’

  ‘Oh, hi, Barrett. Fancy running into you here.’

  ‘Fancy.’ He glanced at her young companion, and Andrea, well-mannered social creature that she was, saw it was necessary to make introductions.

  ‘Todd Bowman, this is Barrett Pike.’

  They clasped hands. Bowman used that half-handshake that Barrett had never cottoned onto. Practitioners of this particular ritual, he had found, were always quick to get in first, grasping your fingers before you had a chance to grip their hand properly. Whatever secret society they belonged to must train them to do that, he thought. Bowman’s finger-grip was sparrow-like. He had the smallest, most delicate hands Barrett had ever seen on a man. Suddenly he placed the pretty boy: he was a well-known TV actor who had made a name for himself in an outback adventure series in which he played charismatic cattle rustler, Captain Starlight. The series had been a hit, and Todd Bowman had looked the part sitting on a horse, wearing his black cowboy outfit. He was no match for Peter Finch in the original fifties movie, Robbery Under Arms, but then whoever could be? Soap magazines were now touting him as the next Russell Crowe or Guy Pearce. Apparently he had already been signed up for a leading part in a Hollywood blockbuster, so he was on the right track.

  On meeting him, Barrett’s gut feeling was that Todd Bowman was gay. While not overtly effeminate, he displayed certain signs. Taken individually they didn’t mean a lot, but together they delivered an unmistakable impression – the semi-pout set of his too-fleshy mouth, the self-consciously fluid movements, the sizing-up type of look he cast over Barrett, the meticulously razor-cut three-day beard, the excessive eau de toilette. He was also losing his hair – a fact he was trying to disguise by having it fluffed and curled to within an inch of its life. So what was a red-blooded woman like Andrea doing getting around with a fruit actor? The idea of her turning into a fag hag made his stomach do a backflip.

  ‘How are you, Andrea?’ he said, investing the commonplace question with a significance she could not miss.

  ‘I’m very well. Yourself?’

  ‘Oh, wonderful. Couldn’t be better. Things pretty quiet at Palm Beach?’

  A wry little smile crinkled the corner of her mouth. ‘Very quiet. Idyllic in fact.’

  I bet. Just you and Todd and the Colombian marching powder. At that moment he saw Bowman’s tiny hand enclose hers. He had already dismissed Barrett as irrelevant and was clearly anxious to move on to better things. But Barrett’s heart surged, he felt terminally in love with Andrea. He wanted to take her in his arms and give her a full-body hug the way he had embraced Mai Ling outside the motel. Mai Ling had given him a hot time, and she sure knew her way around a man’s body, but being in Andrea’s company quickly put Mai Ling so far in the background she was out of sight. He wanted to take Andrea to New York and shack up in the Pierre or the Plaza or one of those high-flying places she wrote about.

  Instead he found himself saying, ‘We should have a drink one day soon.’ It was a code she would understand: in the early days of their association they used to arrange over the phone to meet for ‘cocktails’ – meaning a torrid bout of sex.

  ‘Should we?’ she came back, sharp as a whip crack, the head tilted slightly in a way that made him want to weep.

  ‘I think so. I’d like to.’

  ‘Darling, we should go,’ Bowman cut in. ‘We’ll never get to our seats in this crush.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ Andrea said, and hesitated, frowning for a split second before moving off, around the rock in the middle of the stream. Twisting his head around Barrett called after her: ‘Andrea. Why don’t you give me a ring?’ She turned briefly, but made no reply, then Todd Bowman had his arm around her shoulder and the pair of them vanished in the crowd.

  Watching her leave, Barrett felt a sense of loss far keener than he could have anticipated. ‘Darling’, Bowman had called her. That didn’t mean diddley-shit – show business people called everyone that. But what was with the hand-holding caper? Bowman had done it deliberately, showing Barrett he was the man of the moment. Bullshit. That so-brief hesitation before Bowman dragged her away didn’t escape his eagle eye. Barrett could understand her cutting him off if he was too dangerous to be around, but how could she stop wanting him, just like that? No. Her memories of their lovemakin
g would be as vivid as Barrett’s own. A sliver of an opening – that was all he needed – and he would be back in business. He knew now he couldn’t do without her. He had to have her back, even if it meant stalking her for the rest of their lives. But was she fucking this Bowman thing? Could she be? Surely not – Andrea had exacting standards. Bowman was a lightweight flake, a fucking child who would not measure up, he felt certain of that much. But then, she was partial to the occasional toy boy.

  Christ, he remembered something else about Bowman now. He’d featured in the Sunday papers earlier in the year after he was found wandering around the streets of Darlinghurst in a daze early one morning. The story was, he was into everything known to man, and he had to dry out at this place in the Blue Mountains. Andrea might sniff coke, but she would not be interested in a clown like Todd Bowman. She still had movie connections from Ivan’s time, she had lunched with Francis Ford Coppola, she was half in the biz, and that’s all Bowman was – an industry acquaintance, one of the many personalities she mixed with. Maybe she was doing a piece on him. Insincere displays of affection were a part of life in that world. All the same, he wished to Christ he wasn’t so fixed on her. He was as crazy about Andrea now as he had been about Karen. In fact in his mind she was becoming Karen: the woman he could never have again was now within his grasp in a different form, provided he played his cards right.

  In a while the crowd began to thin and it seemed unlikely Duane would appear without wall-to-wall cover. In any case he could easily have slipped past without being seen – he wouldn’t have to be a master of disguises in that crush. Barrett and Geoff made their way into the stadium, through the nearest gate, and climbed two sets of concrete steps, through an opening that led to the seating area around the massive arena. Upon entering it, Barrett was instantly blown away by the sheer size and scale of the thing. Looking up at the steel trusses that spanned the stadium and the wing-shaped roof structure made his head whirl. This was by far the biggest sports stadium in the country, possibly in the world. It was a colossal Thunderdome, flooded with a golden late afternoon sunlight that poured between the vast, curved arches of the twin grandstand roofs and, in conjunction with the intensely powerful artificial lighting, produced such a dazzling effect it might have been a digitally enhanced image, or a virtual arena. Even the huge grass surface, encircled by the synthetic running track, looked too brilliant a shade of green to be real. Something else: a stiff wind was blowing; sounds swirled and echoed around the stadium, seeming to funnel upwards from an unseen source and float away through the yawning overhead gap. Someone was speaking on the public address system, but the words that converged on the audience from the many strategically positioned speakers collided or overlapped and became chaotic snatches of reverberating sound waves.

  Staying well apart, Barrett and Geoff moved systematically through sections of seating, scanning the sea of faces in a clearly hopeless attempt to locate the odd man out. They had decided to grid-search as much of the stadium as possible. Barrett glanced at Geoff, standing in the next aisle along, and Geoff had his back to the arena, hands on hips, vainly scanning row after row of seats. In tandem they moved upwards to the next tier, then the third, and so on, then along to the next section of seating where the process was repeated, starting from the upper level. Looking down from here, inside the wing-shaped roofing, was like standing on top of some kind of wildly futuristic skyscraper, about twenty storeys high. This was going to take all night, but even if the odds of finding Duane were a thousand to one against, it was still a worthwhile exercise. Shit happened, but so did miracles now and then.

  Soon a boom of cheering and applause, accompanied by furious flag-waving, filled the stadium confines as the opening performers made their way onto the arena. All eyes were on the spectacle and no-one took any notice of the two men picking their way through the crowd, row by row, tier by tier. Every so often the boom of tens of thousands of hands clapping would be renewed and another burst of music would swirl and echo around the stadium. Barrett and Geoff searched on, seeing none of the action – only the crowd’s reactions to it.

  Around an hour later it was time for the opening address, after which came the unfurling of the flag. Then the moment everyone was waiting to see: the last of the Olympic torch-bearers running onto the arena and officially launching the Games by igniting the flame. Ignoring the spectacle Barrett and Geoff continued grid-searching, glancing across at each other occasionally. Watching Geoff, seeing the keen look of expectation on his face, Barrett suddenly got the idea that Duane might be here, right in front of their noses. If so, and he saw and recognised Geoff, there was a big downside: he might make a move to get away, or he might pull a gun or do something crazy. It was next to impossible to smuggle concealed hardware into this stadium, but a professional like Duane could have a fucking Uzi, or a TEC-9 machine pistol, a plastic Glock 10 or a cut-down Kalashnikov. He would be clever enough to shield it from metal detectors. Dawes had apparently sold him Geoff’s .44 and a hunting rifle, but he could have other weapons apart from those. The Duanes of the world always did. If that was the case, and they flushed him out, he could do enormous damage. He might take hostages. He might go completely batshit. Hundreds of people could die in the stampede if he opened up on the crowd. Christ. Don’t think about that. Barrett felt for the comfort of his Sig and searched on against a backdrop of the Governor-General’s voice – like a shifting wall of white noise behind him.

  He stopped at the top of a tier, turned around and faced the arena as a runner entered, carrying the spluttering Olympic torch aloft. Even the hardest heart could fail to be moved as he mounted the steps, waited a moment, then ignited the flame amid thunderous applause and cheering – now the Games had begun. The arena was ablaze with dying sunlight and converging beams from the huge lighting towers. Barrett turned, ready to continue up to the next tier, but then felt compelled to stop. Something had made him stop. With his back to the arena again he wondered why, and then felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, followed by a sensation that was like ice sliding down his spine.

  He flashed onto another time he had felt exactly that sensation: on that occasion, he had found himself in a bad place – a bad place, but one where he had wanted to be. And the ice sliding down his spine had been his early warning system. It was why he was still alive. He half turned towards the arena, aware only of the din and masses of people. It was as if he were inside a glass dome, and everything else was on the other side of the glass. He looked across, but could not see Geoff – he must have continued up. Barrett backtracked four, five steps, then another two. Then he turned and, trying not to give the impression he was looking for anyone, he allowed his eyes to crawl over the rows of spectators. In his mind he was carrying an image of Duane from the teller machine video, which wasn’t much. He could look different; he could look like anything. But it would be hard to hide that chunky build, the thick arms and neck, the bulldog face.

  Next to him, on the aisle, a man sat. Barrett could only see the top of his head. He was wearing wraparound shades and a dark blue baseball-type cap with Mood Indigo on it. Barrett moved a couple of steps further down, so he could see the man’s face. Like everyone else, the man was watching the arena, so it was not hard to steal a glance or two, a hand sliding over his mouth. The man had on a canary yellow Pebble Beach golf shirt, tan check slacks, running shoes. At his feet there was a small sports bag, black canvas. In terms of physique, this man had all the credentials to be Duane. There was still no sign of Geoff anywhere, and Barrett didn’t want to use the walkie-talkie for fear of giving himself away. He turned back towards the arena, thinking. Geoff would know straightaway, but he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. So … assuming the subject was Duane, what was the next move? Front him? Do nothing, but tail him later, find out where he’s at? The thing was to avoid dramatics, if at all possible. What if he slipped away? He turned and glanced at the man again, desperately trying to match him with the image in his head. N
o moustache – did the man in the video have a moustache? For some reason he thought he did, but now he wasn’t sure. Doubt began to creep in. He thought hard, rubbing his hand over his mouth. The thing to do, he decided, was to get the guy to say something, find out at least if he was American. The Pebble Beach shirt said so, but it wasn’t enough. He had to ask him a question. And he had to watch out in case the man went for the sports bag. Okay – he would ask him if he’d ever played Pebble Beach, spin some bullshit about golf. So he turned – and the subject was not there. The aisle seat was empty, and the sports bag was gone too.

  Looking up, towards the back of the stand where there was a stairwell between levels, he thought he glimpsed a yellow shirt and black bag disappearing. Shit. It was Duane – he would sit on the aisle, in case he needed to clear off fast. Barrett ran up the steps, fumbling for his walkie-talkie, which was clipped to his belt behind him. Then he dropped the bastard, lost precious seconds retrieving it from between a spectator’s legs. Duane would be fucking gone. He reached the stairwell, raced down it two steps at a time to a landing, then down again. Now he was in the main walkway that circled the entire stadium: a cavernous, curving tunnel along which food and drink sellers, police and first-aid stations and toilets were located. There were also signs saying EXIT. At the foot of the stairwell he had a decision to make – left or right? Quick. If he went the wrong way, it was all over. It was probably all over anyway – Duane was one smart son of a bitch. He wasn’t just sitting there waiting to be caught – he was ready. Fuck it. Gut feeling told him to go right – towards the nearest exit sign. When he reached the turnstiles there were two attendants and a cop standing around, shooting the breeze.

  ‘Hey – did a guy come out of here just now?’ Barrett said.