Burn, and Other Stories

by Peter Corris

  ‘Good evening, professor,’ Jonas Buckawa said.

  ‘Gidday, Jonas. Go easy with the grip, son, I’m going to need those fingers to fix your peepers. Sit down and let’s take a look at you.’ He gave Buckawa a gentle shove towards the chair.

  One of the attendants stepped forward and grabbed Harkness’ upper arm. ‘Be more respectful of the leader,’ he said.

  Harkness shook the hand off and looked furiously at Buckawa who was sitting in an upright, regal posture in the chair. ‘What the fuck’s this, Jonas?’

  The same man spoke again. ‘Do not use foul language.’

  I was turning towards Sangster for an explanation when I was gripped in an expert choke-hold. John Kelo opened my jacket and slipped the .38 out of its shoulder harness.

  ‘Examine your patient, please, doctor,’ Kelo said. ‘You will be performing the operation tonight.’

  Harkness laughed. ‘You’re off your head. And I won’t touch him until I hear what you bastards are on about. Jonas?’

  The man whose task it seemed to be to handle Harkness raised his fist. Buckawa froze him with a look. ‘Don’t be foolish, Leo. You must not damage the doctor.’

  Leo backed off. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Kelo hadn’t taken his eyes off me. He nodded and the choke-hold was released. I rubbed my neck and thought about turning round to do some nose-breaking. I could feel Sangster twitching beside me. The nurse opened a door and I could see through into an operating theatre—harsh lighting, gleaming chrome, an antiseptic smell.

  Harkness folded his arms. ‘Forget it. I’m not operating tonight and maybe not at all unless I get an explanation for all this crap.’

  ‘Things have changed, professor,’ Buckawa said smoothly. ‘I have had visitations … visions … dreams. I am called to do great things, but my enemies are all around and I cannot stay here long.’

  Buckawa’s body appeared to be relaxed but there was tension in his voice and something unnatural about his unwavering stare. I remembered Harkness saying that he approved of Buckawa because he wasn’t corrupt and he wasn’t religious. I could only guess at what he was feeling now. He moved forward, taking a device from his pocket, and shone it into each of the seated man’s eyes in turn. He snapped his fingers at the nurse and she handed him another gizmo with a headband attached to it. He slipped it on and fiddled with a control before leaning down and looking into Backawa’s eyes again through the lens.

  He straightened up and sniffed, felt for his pipe.

  ‘No,’ Leo said.

  ‘Get stuffed.’ Harkness took the pipe and tobacco tin out and began to go through his ritual. ‘No slicing tonight, children. Pressures’d have to be monitored for three days, minimum. Have to do measurements for the intra-ocular lenses. We need an anaesthetist …’

  ‘Much of that data is on hand,’ Buckawa said. ‘We have anticipated you. The implants and lenses are available. Sister Pali and Nurse Kwaisulia are highly competent theatre personnel. Dr Sangster can act as anaesthetist.’

  Ian Sangster said, ‘No.’

  Harkness said, ‘Fuck you.’

  I swung hard at Nurse Kwaisulia and got him on the right cheekbone. I felt my knuckle crumple and it didn’t seem to bother him much at all. Harkness dropped his pipe and tin, went into a crouch and bullocked Kelo back against the wall, driving back a man who outweighed him by twenty kilos by sheer force of will and anger. I went for Kwaisulia again but Leo stepped in and the two men grabbed my arms and held me easily. Harkness got in one good shot at Kelo’s ribs but then the bigger man’s strength told—he pushed the doctor away and grabbed both his fists. Harkness’ hands were swallowed by those big black fingers and Kelo forced his arms down to his sides. I realised what he was doing—protecting Harkness’ hands and limbs from damage.

  Harkness glared at Buckawa, who had sat impassively in his chair throughout the action. You can’t make me operate on you. That’s not the way it works.’

  ‘Things are going to work differently,’ Buckawa said, ‘I have already told you that. I have discovered something interesting about the concept of a free press.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘Press statements have been prepared in which you announce your support for the Buka oilfield project, and your belief that the income generated will do great things for eye health in Melanesia.’

  ‘Who’ll believe that crap?’

  Buckawa smiled. ‘Some plants do not have to grow to full size, it is enough that they take root.’

  ‘You’re mad. What’s happened to you, Jonas?’

  I stared at Buckawa and noticed for the first time the Rolex, the heavy gold ring, the silk shirt and the suit. ‘I can tell you what’s happened, Frank,’ I said. ‘He’s switched sides.’

  Harkness bent to retrieve his smoking gear. He tucked it away in his pocket and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it. The sooner the stink of you’s out of my nose the happier I’ll be.’

  Kwaisulia rumbled angrily but the others seemed unconcerned. Buckawa said, ‘I hope you don’t have any ideas of … disabling me.’

  Harkness grinned at him. Thirty years of pipe smoking had worn down the tops of two of his teeth, giving him a tough, don’t-mess-with-me look. ‘You’ll just have to take your chances, won’t you, sunshine? Now which eye is the bad one? I hope I can remember to get that right.’

  Kelo gestured to Leo and Kwaisulia to let me go. He took a pistol from his pocket and pointed it at me. ‘You and I, Mr Hardy, though professionals, can be of no use here.’

  Sister Pali opened the door and Kelo gestured for me to go out. Harkness was looking grim. He gave me a sharp nod. The only satisfactory thing I could see in the room was the swelling on Kwaisulia’s face. Kelo shepherded me down the passage and into an office. I sat in one of the easy chairs and he wheeled the chair out from behind the desk and took that. Smart man; it looked uncomfortable, which is what you want to be when you’re guarding a man who doesn’t like you.

  ‘Your boss is nuts,’ I said.

  Kelo shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Possibly. Who cares?’

  ‘You’re in it for what you can get?’

  He nodded. ‘There is a lot to get.’

  ‘Why the rush? And the heavy stuff? Harkness would have done the job under the original terms. What difference does a few days make?’

  Kelo didn’t answer and I was left to make my own conclusions. Somehow, a few days did matter. Why? We sat in silence while an hour crawled past. I could have done with a drink, but Kelo didn’t look like the flask-carrying, hospitable type. A tap came on the door and Leo put his head in. He and Kelo exchanged nods. Leo took the pistol and the upright chair and Kelo left the room. Leo was young and nervous. He handled the pistol awkwardly. I slumped down in my chair, wondering if I could reach his knee with a long kick, or if I could get to the heavy glass ashtray on the desk before he shot me. Doubtful on both counts.

  It was the right line of thinking though because I was ready when the shots boomed outside and the glass shattered. Surprise stalled Leo for an instant but set me off: I was out of the chair, hammering down on the hand that held the gun and jabbing for his eyes before he knew what was happening. I hit his right eye and he screamed. I wrenched the gun away and clouted him with it above the ear. He groaned. Blood was leaking from his eye. I hauled him out of the chair and laid him on his back. ‘Listen, Leo. You’re going to lose that eye unless you lie here perfectly still. I’ll get the doctor for you. But don’t move. Understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered ‘The doctor.’

  I checked the pistol—a .45 Colt Trooper, nice gun. Nothing was happening in the corridor but I could hear noises coming up from the lower level. There were two more shots from different weapons and shouts in a language I couldn’t understand. Then silence. I eased forward to look down the stairs. John Kelo was backing up towards me with his hands in the air. Below him were two men. One stood on the bottom stair facing towa
rds the door, the other was a few steps below Kelo; his gun was pointed up at the Bougainvillean’s broad chest.

  I tried to keep my voice loud and steady. ‘Stand where you are. I’ve got clear shots at all three of you.’ I proved the point by putting a round into the wall a metre from the gunman’s head.

  Everybody froze. The man at the bottom of the stairs also had a gun and he lifted it a fraction.

  ‘You at the bottom. Put it on the floor.’

  The man on the stairs was trying to locate me but I had a partition to hide behind and the acoustics in the stairwell were puzzling him. ‘You, too,’ I said. ‘The gun on the step behind you.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘When the guns are down we’ll talk. Mr Kelo, plant your fat arse on the stairs.’

  Kelo slowly lowered himself, keeping his hands in the air.

  ‘We’re the Federal Police,’ the gunman said. ‘Put down your weapon.’

  I laughed and cut the sound off when I heard a note of hysteria in it. ‘I hope you are, mate. But until I’m sure you’d better do as I say.’

  He bent smoothly and put his gun on the stair. His right hand went into his jacket and he took out a small folder which he flipped open. ‘Phillip Allen, Detective Sergeant. Can we stop this?’

  Kelo came out of his crouch like a tiger. He swept up the gun, straightened, turned. I shot him in the right shoulder; he yelled, the gun flew from his hand and he bounced off the wall before falling, slowly, awkwardly, to the bottom of the stairs.

  After that, it was a matter of cautious approaches and you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. We convinced each other that we were PEA Hardy and policemen Allen and Blake. Kelo was bleeding badly and in shock. Blake was phoning for help when Frank Harkness came storming down the stairs.

  ‘What the fuck’s going on here? Who the fuck are you?’ He confronted Allen and for a minute I thought he was going to plant one on him.

  ‘Policemen, Frank,’ I said. ‘It’s a bit of mess. Could you take a look at the bloke on the ground there?’

  I pointed and Harkness’ belligerence fell away. He hurried down the stairs and bent over Kelo.

  ‘Ambulance is on its way,’ Blake said. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Strong man. Plenty of meat on him. If they get here tonight he should be okay.’

  ‘How’s Buckawa?’

  Blake was assembling weapons—he had my. 38, which they must have taken from Kelo, the Colt Trooper which I’d handed over and Allen’s pistol. Allen moved closer to Harkness who was packing his pipe. ‘Are you Professor Frank Harkness?’ he said.

  Harkness nodded.

  ‘Do you have any knowledge of the whereabouts of Jonas Buckawa?’

  Another nod. Harkness, standing immediately under a No SMOKING sign, lit a match.

  ‘I’m here to interview him.’

  The doctor puffed smoke and laughed at the same time. ‘You won’t be interviewing him for a while yet, sonny Jim. He’s up there sedated and bandaged to buggery.’

  Allen seemed unable to cope with Harkness’ style and manner and I wondered if it was something he’d assumed long ago as a means of putting people off-guard and getting his own way. Sirens sounded outside and the ambulance team raced in followed by a couple of uniformed cops. There was a lot of talking and note scribbling. The paramedics loaded Kelo onto a stretcher and headed for the door. Then I remembered Leo.

  ‘Hang on,’ I yelled. ‘There’s another one. Frank, up here.’

  He bounded up the stairs beside me and if there’d been another flight I think he might’ve got to the top first. I dashed along the passage and opened the door to the room where I’d left Leo. He was lying rigid on the floor, not moving a muscle, with his eyes closed. The trickle of blood had dried on his dark face. Harkness bent over him and the touch of his hands seemed to soothe Leo instantly.

  ‘Open up, son.’

  The eyelid flickered, then lifted slowly. I didn’t want to look. I remembered how soft and jellylike the eye had felt when I hit it. ‘Frank, is it … ?’

  ‘Fucking mess. We’ll have to get him into the theatre. Where’s that other pair? They’re not bad.’

  Kelo was taken off in the ambulance. I rounded up Pali and Kwaisulia who were sitting quietly in another room on either side of the recumbent Buckawa. We got Leo into the theatre and I finally had time to talk to Allen and Blake, with Ian Sangster sitting in. They told me that there were a number of new charges pending against Buckawa in PNG—fraud, embezzlement, assault—and that the Buka Strait Committee had very recently disowned him. That was news to Ian. The Committee was persisting with the lawsuits and the surveillance and Buckawa’s splinter group was looking to make a deal.

  ‘That fits,’ I said. I told him about Buckawa’s behaviour and what Kelo had said. ‘What now? You’ve got a fair bit on him—illegal entry to Australia, firearms offences …’

  Blake and Allen exchanged looks. ‘Just between you and me, Hardy,’ Allen said, ‘I think our government wants to cooperate with Mr Buckawa, not prosecute him.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said ‘Kelo …’

  Allen smiled. ‘Got the wrong end of the stick. Like the people who gave us the tip.’

  Harkness came into the room, puffing smoke and drying his hands. ‘He’ll be all right, wasn’t as bad as it looked. You’re a fucking gloomy threesome. What’s next?’

  ‘Frank,’ I said. ‘You and me are going off somewhere to drink a little whisky.’

  Ghost Writer

  The magazine was old and faded, the paper yellowed and crisp. I treated it gently, opening it to the page which had been marked by a Post-it. The article was entitled ‘Death Duo’ and it went for atmosphere right from the jump. I read:

  A body lay on the steps. One hand rested just above the level of the water and a narrow watchband was visible above the cuff of a light-coloured coat. Dark hair curled damply to the nape of the neck. The legs were a little apart: the new sole of a woven brown leather shoe faced upwards.

  No marks could be seen on the head or hands, but beside the face lay two items, a train ticket from Adelaide and a small silver rose. A dawn walker had called the police from The Rocks station; they arrived as the mist was lifting from the Opera House …

  I skimmed another few paragraphs and put the magazine down. ‘I remember it,’ I said. ‘Vaguely—she really made a name for herself with that piece.’

  The woman sitting in the client chair in my Darlinghurst office nodded. Dark red hair waltzed around a pale, perfect face—huge green eyes, sculpted nose, cheekbones, put-it-here lips. Physically, Madeline Ozal had everything women dream of having and men lust after. Furthermore, she had a quality that was probably worth around a million a year to her as an actress—she riveted your attention so that it didn’t matter what she said or how she said it, you just wanted to hear more, and watch.

  ‘Valerie Drewe,’ she said. ‘God, what a bitch.’

  I watched the way her lip curled. You read about it, lip-curling, actually seeing it was unnerving. ‘She was a very successful writer,’ I said. ‘Went on from journalism into—’

  Madeline Ozal’s hand-waving dismissal was like a signal to take your own life without a moment’s regret. ‘I don’t want to hear about it. I know all about her prizes and husbands and real estate holdings. She was a slut and the world’s a better place without her.’

  ‘I’m confused. I’m not used to dealing with celebrities, alive or dead. What—?’

  She reached out and grabbed the twenty-year-old magazine. Its yellowed pages fluttered as she shook it. ‘Valerie Drewe implied that the woman they found in the water a few hours later had killed the man and then drowned herself. That’s all bullshit. All that silver rose crap—’

  Vague was the right word for my recollection of the case. It had happened before I got into the private enquiries business and I’d read about it in the tabloids and magazines like any other voyeur. ‘Forgive me, Miss Ozal, but this is all old history. I’ll be blunt—w
hat’s it to you?’

  The big eyes filled with tears. ‘Cliff, they were my Mummy and Daddy. She didn’t kill him and she didn’t kill herself. I was just a baby. They couldn’t have.’

  The whole story came out then over coffee and tissues. Madeline Ozal had been brought up by her mother’s sister who was married to a Turk. Hence the name. The name on her birth certificate was Macquarie, daughter of Ernest, whose occupation was given as ‘playwright’, and Josephine, nee Peters.

  ‘Madeline Macquarie,’ she said. ‘Not as good, is it?’

  I shrugged as I made notes. ‘Is it important?’

  ‘You bet. No one would ever have heard of Norma Jean Baker.’

  ‘What about Meryl Streep?’

  She laughed. ‘You’ve got a point. Kurt Butler told me you weren’t dumb, not that Kurt’s all that well-equipped to judge.’

  Butler was an actor I’d bodyguarded some years ago. I hadn’t seen his name in lights lately, but it’s always nice to be well-thought of, even by a has-been. Madeline Ozal was no has-been—she was big and getting bigger. ‘I had a bit part in one of his movies,’ I said. ‘I threw someone off a building or fell off myself. I can’t remember which.’

  She laughed again. ‘In Kurt’s movies it hardly matters. Look, the only people who know about my parents are my aunt and uncle and now you. But soon the whole world’s going to know.’

  This sounded like the nitty-gritty, worth getting a contract form out of the desk for. ‘You’re expecting to be blackmailed?’

  ‘No. I’m writing my biography … well, I’m sort of writing it.’

  Astonishment made me rude. ‘You can’t be a day over twenty-five. What’s there to write about?’

  She smiled, showing perfect white teeth, nicely spaced. ‘I was brought up by an insane woman who ate twenty-four hours a day and was terrified of going to sleep on account of nightmares. Plus I’ve been in the movie business here and in the States for ten years. You’d be surprised. No, I’m going to reveal the truth about being an orphan in the book. It’s a big selling point.’