Shooting Star

by Temple, Peter

  ‘The other side, further down.’

  ‘Opposite the lane?’

  He frowned, hawked again. I closed my eyes.

  ‘Suppose. Yeah.’

  ‘This’s on Thursday? The second time?’

  ‘Nah. Tuesday she said that.’

  ‘You didn’t see him on Thursday?’

  ‘Nah. Like I was in a hurry Thursday. Job in Noble Park, my old man’s on the mobile, we didn’t…’ He stopped. ‘Just dropped her, like. Had to get back. I swear…’

  I straightened up, went over and stood above him. Between fingertips, I took a few hairs on his scalp, a small clump, twisted them, pulled. ‘Tell your mates about all this, Craig?’

  He winced, shook his head, found that too painful. ‘Never said a word, Jesus, never told anyone. I’m engaged, her family’ll murder me.’

  I didn’t say anything, looked around, weighed and measured the quality of the moment: three men on a strip of stained concrete, mournful wind worrying at the tin buildings around us, making them creak and whine and croon and speak of failure and loneliness, and this one man so scared that he could evacuate his bowels at any moment.

  All these things reminded me of why I’d thought I would be happier growing things.

  I let go of the twist of hair, put my hand under the man’s chin, cupped it. ‘Craig,’ I said, ‘don’t go away, don’t say a word to anyone about today.’

  Relief in his eyes.

  ‘Look at me.’

  He couldn’t look up at me, just sniffed and said, ‘Not a word, I swear, I promise you.’

  ‘Do that, your lovely bride-to-be’s family won’t have to murder you. Why’s that?’

  He nodded, eyes closed.

  On the way back, in the sluggish highway traffic, I said, not looking at Orlovsky, ‘Arsehole skills. Not too rusty, are they?’

  He took a long time to answer, lit another stolen Camel, one of the last. ‘The difference between us,’ he said, ‘is that I’m just doing this for the money. You’re another matter entirely.’

  ‘ONE OF those things with sliding doors,’ said the tweed-jacketed Malcolm Cherry of Hayes & Cherry, a narrow shop in Revesdale Street that sold bathroom fittings. ‘A pretty battered one with curtained windows. Tarango? Durango? A name like that. People movers, I understand they’re called. What does that make your ordinary car?’

  I looked at the price tag on an impressive piece of plumbing, chrome-plated pipes forming a sort of shower cage. Showering once a day, roughly a dollar a shower for twenty years. ‘This is not your ordinary shower,’ I said.

  ‘Nice, isn’t it? Prince Philip has one.’

  ‘He always looks clean. This vehicle?’

  ‘Parked in our loading zone. People do it all the time. Run off to get something, back in minutes. There’s a marvellous deli two doors down. Some of them are coming in here, God forbid you’d complain.’

  ‘But the people mover?’

  ‘Repeat offender. Not the vehicle, the people in it. Before they were in an old stationwagon. White.’

  ‘The same people. You’re sure? How many?’

  ‘Absolutely. Two. The vehicle pulls up, passenger gets out, well, falls out is closer. He could use a shower. He’s always in a tracksuit.

  A garment not too familiar with the Surf, I can tell you. And a baseball cap. Red.’

  ‘Anything on the cap? A logo, anything?’

  ‘Makita. And he wears these huge runners. Big plastic things. Like boats. Grotesque. And off he goes. Then the driver has the effrontery to think he can lounge around until the other creature comes back.’

  ‘Did you get a look at him, the driver?’

  ‘Not a good look. Too much facial hair. And dark glasses and some kind of headgear. It looked like a back-to-front cap with the peak cut off. Strange.’

  ‘The passenger. Wear glasses?’

  ‘Those ghastly black frames like Buddy Holly. Or is that Roy Orbison?’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Hard to say. Fifties. More.’

  ‘And this happened again on Thursday with a different vehicle?’

  ‘Again, only worse.’ Malcolm Cherry flicked a finger at something on his tie. ‘This Tangelo thing pulls up and, lo and behold, the older dero-type gets out. Wearing the cap. I thought, bugger this, this time I’m ringing the council, get the bloody parking inspector around here from wherever he’s hiding. I’m at the back, on the phone, waiting for someone to answer, when the vehicle leaves.’

  ‘What time was this?’

  ‘Just before five, I suppose. But hold on, hold on. A minute later, the young fellow who works part-time here goes out and what does he find?’

  I could feel the tiny pulse in my throat. I shook my head.

  ‘The bloody vehicle’s in the lane. Someone’s reversed it into the lane. That’s private property. Only three businesses are entitled to use the lane. Us, the record store and the florist. I said to James, that’s it, and I’m out the front door.’

  He paused. ‘And at that moment, out comes the Tarango or whatever and off it goes.’

  ‘Didn’t get the rego, did you?’

  ‘No. Didn’t really think about it. Get it next time.’

  ‘What was he doing in the lane? Young fellow see anything?’

  ‘James says the driver was just closing the sliding door when he walked by. Wasn’t picking up anything from the shops, checked straight away. Business vehicles only, that’s the agreement.’

  ‘James,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind a word with him.’

  Malcolm looked at his watch, a big chrome-plated deep sea diver’s instrument, the sort of thing you wouldn’t be scared to wear in the Prince Philip shower cage. ‘He went off for a coffee just before you came in. Be back any minute.’

  I went for a walk down the street, around the corner, in the glass side door of TRIPLE ZERO!, the record store. I was in a small vestibule, pulsating music audible, facing another door. I opened it and the sound was like a blow to the whole upper body. It hit you, then it invaded you, stuck probes up your nose, into your mouth. My fillings seemed to be transmitting sound and I could taste them. I subdued the impulse to flee, stood my ground. When my brain accepted that it could function in these conditions, I went around the bend into the long leg of the store. It didn’t look like a place that sold recorded music. It looked like a series of minimalist lounges separated by Art Deco pillars, teenagers sitting around, standing, in groups, in pairs, alone. Near the entrance was what looked like a bar from some fifties film. It was all so casual, not a store, a hangout. But when you walked around, you could see there were clear lines of sight from the bar and from a glass window in a partition wall and there were camera pinholes everywhere. Management didn’t want their radical store to also serve as a shootin and rootin gallery.

  I walked around. No one paid any attention to me. With a bigger crowd, you could lose sight of another person in here, no doubt about that. But Carmen hadn’t lost sight of Anne because on Thursday she wasn’t with Anne. She was waiting for Anne to arrive from trucking with Craig. Then they would step out the front entrance and into Whitton’s double-parked car and get home at the expected sports day time. Conspirators all.

  There was no point in looking for Anne on Thursday’s security video because she was never in the store. Anne didn’t get to the end of the laneway, to the delivery door into TRIPLE ZERO! There was a vehicle in the lane. To reach the door, she had to pass between it and the wall. Perhaps the vehicle’s sliding side door was open. Perhaps someone came around the back as she was abreast of the door. Perhaps the person took her by the shoulders and pushed her into the vehicle. Perhaps there was someone else inside, someone who dragged her in, put something over her face, prevented her screaming…

  I went back to Hayes & Cherry. Malcolm introduced me to James, a fair-haired teenager so clean and so dapper that he appeared to be genetically destined to sell aids to cleanliness and grooming.

  ‘Tall,’ he said. ‘And thin. We
aring a beanie and dark glasses.’

  ‘Beard? Moustache?’

  ‘Moustache, quite a big moustache. Dark.’

  I said to Malcolm, ‘You said the driver had a beard, didn’t you?’

  ‘The one on the other days did. On Thursday, I didn’t get a good look at him. I was too enraged at the sight of the other one coming out of the vehicle.’

  ‘Moustache, definitely,’ said James. ‘Not a beard. He had a weak chin. It sloped back.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Thirty, perhaps a bit older.’

  In the car, driving back to the Carsons’, I said to Orlovsky, ‘We may have to rethink this. They may have smart technology but these people are not A-list kidnappers, they would be lucky to get onto any list. Not without expanding the alphabet.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  ‘Bad, very bad. The stupid are capable of anything.’

  ‘Unlike the clever, who are generally capable of nothing.’

  ‘Nothing this clumsy,’ I said.

  ‘On the other hand,’ Orlovsky said, ‘they may not be stupid. Perhaps they just don’t care very much.’

  I didn’t want to hear that. I said, ‘Don’t say that. Not caring is much worse than stupid.’

  The Express Post envelope arrived just after 10 a.m. the next morning, addressed to Tom Carson. The writing had been done with a ruler and the sender was a B. Ellis, who lived at 11 Cromie Street, North Melbourne.

  There was nothing in the envelope except a Smartie box, a cheerful package, aglow with the colours of the sweet flat beans.

  But it didn’t contain chocolate pills. It contained something wrapped in aluminium foil.

  Two joints of a little finger, clean, odourless, fresh as chicken from the best butcher in Toorak.

  LEANING FORWARD, elbows on the desk, chin in his hands, Pat Carson looked gaunt, shrunken, every minute of his age. He was breathing deeply but he seemed to sigh out more air than he took in.

  With me in the study were Noyce and Orlovsky and Stephanie Chadwick. Noyce was clasping and unclasping his hands, swallowing a lot.

  ‘I’ve told Tom and Barry,’ he said. ‘They called Tom out of a meeting with the institutions.’

  I looked at him. ‘Institutions?’

  ‘The big investors, super funds, that kind of thing. For the float. To sell the CarsonCorp float.’

  Orlovsky was in his trance again, unwavering gaze on Pat Carson’s courtyard garden.

  ‘It’s the police now,’ said Pat Carson. ‘You were right, Frank. Should’ve bloody listened. Pigheadedness’s done a lot for this family, startin from the top.’

  Noyce nodded rapidly. ‘I think that’s the course of action to follow, yes,’ he said. ‘We had no way of knowing this sort of thing would happen. And we let Alice’s kidnapping weigh too heavily on us.’ He looked at pale Stephanie, who was sitting near her grandfather. He coughed. ‘I’ll speak directly to the Chief Commissioner. Ensure they pull out all the stops.’

  I didn’t say anything. I was scared about what I had to say, ashamed that my instinct was to go far away, and so I was thinking about waking in the Garden House, showering in the huge slate-floored shower room, putting on the towelling dressing gown, thick and soft and smelling faintly of cinnamon. Thinking about the three newspapers on the table in the hall and how somehow the kitchen knew you were up and breakfast came under cover on a trolley pushed by a kitchen hand in white: today, fresh orange juice in a tall, cold glass beaker, cereals, creamy scrambled eggs and thick-sliced smoked ham with grilled tomato. The server made sourdough toast in the kitchen.

  ‘The butter’s from Normandy,’ he’d said. ‘It’s very good.’ He went away and came back with coffee in a stainless-steel vacuum flask.

  Orlovsky had come to the table wearing only his own towel, a sad threadbare thing, drank a glass of water and made himself a grilled tomato sandwich. ‘It starts with food,’ he said darkly.

  ‘And ends as food,’ I’d said, having no idea what he meant. ‘Live a little.’

  ‘Frank?’ Pat was eyeing me. ‘When Graham’s talked to this fella whoever he is, you deal with the cops on behalf of the family. Okay? No offence, Graham, Frank knows the set-up, knows how the buggers work.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Noyce, nodding vigorously, not happy, ‘that’s fine, that’s a good way to do it. Right, Frank? No time to lose either.’ He started to rise.

  ‘If that’s what you want to do,’ I said.

  Orlovsky came out of his state, turned his cropped head slowly. Noyce sat down.

  ‘That’s what we should do, not so?’ Pat Carson said. He was on to me, his chin was out of his hands, up, his head tilted, twenty years off his age.

  I tried to work out the best way to do this, to be truthful and to escape. I couldn’t. ‘It’s your decision,’ I said.

  Noyce said, ‘On Saturday evening, you said…’

  Time to say it.

  ‘And on Thursday and on Friday,’ I said. ‘Today’s Monday, Graham.’

  ‘Don’t understand,’ said Pat, eyes crinkled. ‘What’s all this? We shoulda done it, we didn’t, now we do it.’

  ‘It’s too late,’ I said.

  Orlovsky was studying me like some strange object in a gallery, a curious piece of sculpture perhaps, judgment held in check only by fear of not quite getting the point.

  Pat sat back, put his hands on the desk, spread the fingers on the silken mahogany, lowered his chin. I hadn’t done him any good. In his eyes and his hands and his shoulders and his chin, you could see the resentment. I heard the round snick into the breech, waited for the bullet, wanted the bullet.

  Stephanie leaned across and put her left hand on her grandfather’s right hand, kept it there.

  Sack me. I willed him to say the words. I wanted to be away from this grand house, back in my own life, such as it was.

  Anne Carson’s face in the Portsea photograph came into my mind. The schoolgirl screwed by her driver. The girl who opened the holiday house gate for grown men, drunk men with breath as pungent as woodsmoke. The girl in the back of the yellow van with the cocky locksmith.

  There was something in her face, something in the eyes, the look of a child wanting praise, wary of displeasure.

  A girl with only a stub for a little finger. It would be bandaged now. By what crude hands? Perhaps they had given her a painkiller. Perhaps they had given her a shot of something before. Before and later. Heroin was as easy to buy as aspirin, easier in some places, an excellent painkiller. And they could keep doing that, she’d do a bit of projectile vomiting, then she’d be relaxed, she wouldn’t feel too bad about the whole thing.

  ‘Tell me, Frank, tell me.’ Pat Carson’s voice was soft. He was still sitting back, chin almost touching his chest, shaggy eyebrows raised.

  The old man didn’t want to fire me. He wanted me to tell him what to do. He didn’t know that I didn’t want the responsibility, that I was scared of having it, that the idea of telling this family what was best for the safety of the girl made me feel sick at the stomach. To carry the bag for them was one thing. I was just an expensive courier. But to shoulder the weight of a girl’s life, a girl lying somewhere, probably in the dark, terrified, in pain…

  ‘They’ve had her for more than seventy-two hours,’ I said. ‘Keeping someone hidden, it doesn’t get easier. These people are sweating, they’re under the gun. And they’ve lifted the stakes, they’re trying to pump us up to something. It’s too late for the cops.’

  Pat was moving his jaw. He still wasn’t sure what I was saying.

  ‘They told you not to bring in the police and you didn’t,’ I said. ‘If you had, the newspapers, television, the radio, they’d have co-operated with the cops for a while. Media blackout. But the media won’t keep quiet for long. Seventy-two hours, that’s about it. Then it’s just a question of who goes first. I’m assuming that the kidnappers know this, that they’ve read about other kidnappings.’ I paused. ‘In particular, about your other kidnappi
ng. They may be those kidnappers. I doubt it very much, but it’s possible.’

  I looked at Orlovsky. He was interested in his hands. I looked at Noyce. He’d got the point, didn’t necessarily agree with it. So had Stephanie, who recrossed her legs at the ankles and bit her lower lip. She looked like someone who slept badly, never felt rested, feared the small hours. I knew that feeling.

  ‘Mr Carson,’ I said. ‘My fear is that the police won’t even get a ten-minute media blackout now. It’s too long after the event. And the force leaks. Too many people are involved. You can’t keep it secret. That’s why they have to go to the media and beg them not to print stories like this.’

  ‘Yes? That means?’

  ‘It means the kidnappers will assume that you went to the police straight away and the police arranged a media blackout. On Thursday. That you disobeyed instructions from the start. Like Alice again, Mr Carson.’

  Noyce held up a hand, like a schoolboy in class. ‘Mr Carson,’ he said, a pressing tone of voice, ‘I think we need to talk to Tom about this.’

  Pat looked up, looking at me not at Noyce. He blew out breath, a sad sound, half sigh, half whistle. He leaned forward, put his forehead on his clasped hands, closed his eyes.

  We sat there, not looking at one another, for a long time. Finally, Pat spoke, voice barely audible.

  ‘In your hands, Frank. We’re in your hands.’

  Hands.

  Without thought, dread making a ball rise in my stomach, press against the solar plexus, I looked at my hands lying between my thighs, palms upward. My mother’s voice was in my head, the sharp intonation, the pauses:

  We will fall into the hands of the Lord, and not into the hands of men. For as his majesty is, so is his mercy.

  I didn’t have the hands for this kind of thing anymore, not the hands, not the heart. The ability to take responsibility for the lives of others had gone from me in a few horrible moments, left my being and floated away. I hadn’t known that then. Learning it took time. Much too much time.

  Weak at heart, I said, ‘I want to talk to the girl’s mother. And to take the calls from now on. I want them diverted to me.’