Shooting Star

by Temple, Peter

  I let go of her face. ‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’

  I looked at Orlovsky standing in the doorway, still holding the stool, shook my head, looked back at Stephanie.

  ‘You won’t be needing me any longer, then,’ Orlovsky said, the expressionless voice of a butler.

  ‘No.’

  Stephanie turned her head, chunk of hair fallen over her face like Anne’s in the photograph. She was very fetching and she met my gaze. ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ she said. Her tone was pleading.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to find the words. You need some new doors, starting with the garage.’

  I walked out, flicked a glance at Pat Carson, face hidden in the thick woollen carpet, buttocks palely gleaming. ‘Don’t adjust the set, Pat,’ I said. ‘Normal transmission is resuming.’

  We didn’t speak on the way back until Orlovsky said, ‘Calling off the surveillance?’

  ‘No. That didn’t tell us anything. Bright young fella like that can turn his hand to many tasks.’

  ‘His whip hand. What now? Tomorrow?’

  Tomorrow? I didn’t want to think about tomorrow, which had already arrived. I closed my eyes, put my hand under my jacket and rubbed my sore shoulder and said, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

  ‘I love it when you quote Elvis,’ said Orlovsky.

  BACK IN the Garden House, too wound-up to sleep, I slumped into an armchair in the downstairs room housing the television. Orlovsky came in, opened the liquor cabinet and found a bottle of Black Label, two heavy crystal whisky glasses and a bottle of mineral water. Without asking, he poured three fingers in each glass, splashed in water.

  I took my glass, sipped the healing liquid. It went straight to the base of my spine and the tension began to lose its grip. ‘That kid’s getting one hell of a sex education,’ I said. ‘Impregnating at sixteen, Sam Stark, now this.’

  Orlovsky was channel-hopping with the remote. ‘And learning the most interesting bits inside the family,’ he said. ‘That’s really old-fashioned.’

  He settled on CNN, a casually-dressed man speaking earnestly against the backdrop of a rubble-littered and smoking street. ‘Ah, Serbia,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Wie viele Todesmeister kann Europa ertragen? My father won’t be watching.’

  Orlovsky’s father was a Polish Hungarian, a teenage veteran of the Hungarian uprising against the Russians. He came to Australia alone and penniless, worked in the steel mills in Newcastle, saved money, learned English. He went to night school, went to university and did an electrical engineering degree, married a girl of Irish convict descent from Dubbo, fathered Michael and his sister, made lots of money. Then he packed them all up and went back to Europe to become a Cold Warrior, working for Central Intelligence Agency fronts and disappearing into Communist Eastern Europe for long periods. Orlovsky spent ten years in a German village outside Cologne, grew up to speak accentless German. Then they came back to Australia. He once told me that he’d accused his father of turning him and his sister into immigrants in their country of birth.

  ‘Can’t bear the news from Mitteleuropa, my old man,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Makes him feel his whole life’s been wasted. I was watching with him one day and this Serbian woman said she prayed every night for the old Communist days to come back. My dad went out and chopped wood for two hours.’

  We watched pictures of military convoys passing through shattered villages, of sad-eyed and ragged women and children standing in hopeless queues, of strutting young men armed with the best the death merchants had to sell.

  ‘Ever think about Afghanistan?’ said Orlovsky, not looking at me. He had never raised the subject before, not once in the years since.

  ‘Yes. And I dream about it, pieces of it. The worst pieces.’

  ‘I never thought about it, never dreamed about it,’ he said. ‘Then this Defence bloke arrived at work one day, asked me if I’d talk to Cowper’s father, tell him about, y’know…He was going nuts with not knowing, the father. They didn’t tell them much.’ He drank some whisky. ‘I said sure, I’ll tell him. And I did. Nice bloke. He cried. Seemed to make him feel better. And then I went home and that’s when it started. Like I’d pulled a trigger.’

  Orlovsky had been the one to come out of Afghanistan in the best shape. Like the rest of us, his military career was over. But he seemed undamaged, cheerful even. He started a new life immediately, did a four-year electronic engineering course in two, married a fellow-student, went to work as a civilian for a technical branch of the Defence Intelligence Organisation in Canberra. We spoke on the phone at least twice a month, late-night conversations, drinks in hand, laughing a lot, never mentioning the past that bound us, two men whose parachutes had once become entangled in pitch darkness and who had plummeted earthwards in a terrified embrace.

  Then he stopped calling me. And when I called him, he was abrupt, terse, keen to end the contact. Then the phone wasn’t answered, his daytime number only took messages, all ignored. I rang his wife at work. She was reserved, said she’d left him, couldn’t live with him, he seemed to have had some sort of breakdown but he wouldn’t seek help, wouldn’t even talk to her. She thought he’d left his job.

  On a Thursday in July, a doctor from a psychiatric ward in Brisbane rang me. Orlovsky was under observation, committed by a court. He’d walked onto a rich people’s beach at Noosa, thin, bearded, long-haired, filthy, and naked except for a belt. A concerned beach-front property owner suggested that he leave, tried to force him to depart. Orlovsky rendered the man unconscious. When two police arrived, Orlovsky was paddling in the shallows. They didn’t take any chances, the larger one showing Orlovsky his revolver. Orlovsky disarmed him, threw the weapon into the sea, did the same for the partner. More police were called, all the police in Noosa. Orlovsky suggested they shoot him, held out his arms like Christ inviting the cross. With a large crowd watching, the police declined. Instead, they netted him like an animal and beat him with batons.

  I took two days off, flew to Brisbane, talked to him for half an hour in a scented tropical garden. He was clean shaven, shorthaired, clothed in a towelling outfit with matching slippers. I rang people, all the people I could think of. That afternoon, a pale Defence shrink who ceaselessly rotated a gold wedding ring, and a Defence lawyer, a major in uniform, arrived by military aircraft from Canberra. The major insisted on calling me Captain. The shrink talked to Orlovsky’s shrink, to Orlovsky, then the major went to see the Public Prosecutor’s office. Just after 6 p.m., we went to an out-of-session court hearing where the charges against Orlovsky were formally withdrawn. The two of us were on the 8.10 flight to Sydney.

  On the plane, drinking whisky in business class, I’d said to him, ‘We’re quits, sunshine.’

  He’d looked at me, thought about it. ‘You’re getting off bloody lightly,’ he said.

  Now we sat in silence. I sensed that he wasn’t finished with the subject of Afghanistan.

  ‘What do you feel about it now?’ he said.

  ‘Guilt.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For not being able to save them.’

  ‘Inquiry didn’t think you could’ve done anything.’

  ‘Inquiry wasn’t there. I could always have done something.’

  ‘That’s bullshit.’

  ‘Yes. But it’s my bullshit. What’s your problem?’

  He sniffed his whisky, drank half the glass. ‘I haven’t got a problem. I had a problem, a minor problem.’ He opened the old briefcase on the coffee table and fiddled with the laptop. ‘Been thinking about something else,’ he said. He put a speaker plug in his left ear, tapped keys.

  The electronic voice from Saturday:

  Becoming less stupid. Learning to do what you’re told and…

  ‘What’s that mean?’ he said. ‘Less stupid than when? Nothing done before that.’

  ‘Probably just a way of speaking.’

  ‘You don’t think he means less stupid than the last time? The
first kidnap?’

  ‘I’ve said this before. I don’t see people waiting seven years for another try.’

  ‘Maybe they would if it’s for revenge. People who want to punish the Carsons, make them suffer, they might wait.’

  He tapped again, listened, tapped:

  I WANT YOU TO SUFFER AS YOU HAVE MADE OTHERS SUFFER. I WANT YOU TO FEEL PAIN AS YOU HAVE MADE OTHERS FEEL PAIN. I WANT YOU TO BLEED TO DEATH.

  ‘Aimed at Tom or the family?’ said Orlovsky.

  ‘At Tom, but he might simply stand for something. The bastards. The rich. People hate the President, hate the Queen, hate the Pope, but it’s not personal.’

  CNN had moved on to an explosion in Egypt, ambulances, sirens, police and soldiers everywhere, people comforting each other. A dog, just a skeleton covered in thin stretch-cloth, was licking a dark patch on the hard-packed dirt.

  ‘So do they want money or revenge?’

  The thought had been on my mind since the phone call on Saturday. How long ago was that? Early Tuesday. Saturday seemed far away. Was the girl alive? Two joints of a finger will keep in the fridge. Her body could be in the ground somewhere, not far down, waiting for a pet dog to snuffle at the wet soft earth like a truffle-hound one evening, a happy dog digging frantically, rolling in the find, the owner calling it away, fearing the stench of dead possum, of having to wash off the smell of something rotten.

  The smell of Anne Carson, age fifteen.

  ‘Maybe both,’ I said. ‘Lots of both. Then again, maybe they’re just crazy. Think it’s fun to see people throw money into a crowd. We’ve got to get them to show us she’s alive.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘If she is, we try to find them before they kill her.’

  Orlovsky picked up the bottle by the base and tipped whisky into our glasses. ‘Not we,’ he said. ‘You. You’re the sad case, you think you’re doing this for the money but you’re not. You’re the guilty person who wants to make amends, save people.’

  ‘Just one would be nice,’ I said. I finished the drink and went to bed and on the slide into sleep I thought about Alice and came awake as if plunged into cold water.

  BARRY CARSON had a surprisingly modest office on the fourth floor of Carson House: two wood and leather chairs for visitors, old desk, desk chair just like the ones in the office outside, faded Persian rug on a parquet floor, a nondescript view of the building opposite. On the dull cream wall hung black and white photographs of bulldozer-gouged building sites, concrete pours, and tree-raising ceremonies on the windswept tops of buildings, construction workers and men in suits wearing hardhats and raising cans of beer. Only the construction workers’ hardhats fitted and only they looked as if they planned to drink the beer.

  ‘Two or three months with Katherine’s family in England,’ said Barry in his boyish voice. His hands were locked behind his head, he was being open, unguarded. ‘We all thought it was a good idea. Get away, somewhere different. But they’ve never come back.’

  His phone rang.

  ‘Excuse me, Frank.’ He looked at me as he listened, studied me as he spoke into the old-fashioned handset. It wasn’t the unseeing look. He was looking at me.

  ‘Miranda, forgive me,’ he said, ‘I should have made more of this, made sure everyone understood.’ He had a gentle delivery. ‘All media inquiries about the float and the company go to Tom’s people.’ Pause. ‘Yes, I know some people may wish to talk to me or to other senior staff but this is a Tom affair. He has a regiment of unemployable ex-journalists waiting to handle it. Yes. Thank you, Miranda.’

  He put the receiver down. ‘This couldn’t have come at a worse time for Tom,’ he said. ‘It’s taken all the shine off going public, emerging from my father’s shadow.’

  I detected no sympathy in his voice. ‘It’s a long shadow,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, these generational changeovers should happen when you’re in your forties, I suppose. In some families, the children take over in their thirties, earlier. But.’

  Not so much a smile as a lip signal of resignation and acceptance.

  ‘Alice,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. The kidnap shook us, changed our whole world. We’ve never been the same again. The whole family. We went from being pretty carefree to verging on the paranoid. My wife in particular. She seemed more disturbed than Alice. Visibly, that is. Alice was just quiet. Not that she’d ever been all that vocal.’ He looked away. ‘Well, perhaps I didn’t notice. Always busy, travelling a lot. Pretty standard confession that, I suppose. The absentee father.’

  He brought his arms down and folded his hands on the desk, long-fingered hands, square-clipped nails. ‘Katherine almost took our son Pat to England too but the old man talked her out of it. Good at that kind of thing, the master manipulator. I think he had some premonition that Katherine was going for good.’

  ‘Can Alice talk about the subject?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never raised it with her, never wanted to. She may have talked to her mother about it, I don’t know. Katherine wouldn’t tell me if she did.’

  I followed his eyes out of the window. We could see two men in an office in the building across the street, one seated, the other standing at a whiteboard. The seated one’s chair was quarter-turned away from the whiteboard; he didn’t want a lecture.

  ‘They’re in trouble,’ said Barry. ‘Someone’s been selling them down for weeks.’ He looked back at me. ‘I might as well say it. Katherine blames me for what happened. She never said it at the time but when I went to England to see them the first time, she spat it out.’

  ‘Blames you for the kidnapping?’

  ‘No. For calling in the police. She believes that if we’d waited for the ransom instructions and paid the money, Alice would have suffered less.’

  ‘She was assaulted?’

  He looked away again. ‘Yes, but apparently not until the story broke in the media. It may be that that was when they decided to kill her. So I suppose the logic is that if we, I, hadn’t called in the police, we wouldn’t have had the media exposure, and the kidnappers wouldn’t have decided to kill Alice and wouldn’t have done anything to her.’

  ‘That’s pure conjecture,’ I said. ‘To kill her may always have been their intention. If it had happened, you would be blamed for not calling the police.’

  Barry nodded, still looking out of the window. ‘I try to look at it that way. Katherine sees a reluctance to part with money as being involved. Nothing in my life has ever hurt me more than that accusation.’ He sniffed, a delicate intake, moved his head. ‘But there you are. It may be clearer now why we didn’t want the police this time.’

  ‘Yes. What does Alice do?’

  He looked more cheerful now, making eye contact again. ‘She works with children, with autistic children. In a public clinic in London. She started as a volunteer, then they offered her a job. We give the clinic some money, which we earmark for salaries, an annual grant, quite generous. Alice doesn’t know about that and it doesn’t matter. She’s very good at what she does and the clinic values her.’

  ‘Will you ask her today if she’ll talk to me?’

  ‘Why?’

  I felt uneasy, shrugged. ‘It’s remotely possible that the abductions are connected. Remotely.’

  ‘The same people? Seven years apart? What suggests that?’

  ‘Something the voice said on Saturday. About becoming less stupid, learning.’

  ‘Just a way of being threatening, I thought. Anyway, if the police couldn’t track them down then, what chance do you have now?’

  ‘Something may have come back to Alice. It’s worth trying.’

  Barry hesitated. ‘I’ll ask her. Have to catch her early. Do you want a video linkup?’

  ‘If possible.’

  Barry nodded, sighed. ‘Her mother will come back and kill me if you upset Alice.’ Pause. ‘There’s something we should’ve said. Tom didn’t raise it and his presence made me reluctant. In his relentless pursuit of the deal, Mark�
�s been involved with some extremely dodgy people.’

  I waited, nodded.

  ‘About three weeks ago, Tom had a call from Poland. A man with an American-accented voice, but not an American. He said Mark owed his syndicate two million dollars American and if he didn’t come up with the money, they would hold his family responsible for the debt.’

  ‘Responsible? What did Tom understand that to mean?’

  ‘Financially responsible. They expected us to pay Mark’s debt.’

  ‘What did Tom say?’

  ‘He says he told the man to take it up with our lawyers.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The man said they didn’t deal with lawyers and the family should ensure that Mark paid up. He said a polite goodbye.’

  ‘What’s Mark say about that?’

  ‘We should’ve been more open about that too. Can’t get hold of Mark. That’s not unusual, let me say quickly. He’s got a secrecy mania, everything’s terribly hush-hush, he talks behind his hand.’

  ‘But not to you. I gather you won’t be in the same room with him.’

  Barry put his right elbow on the desk, rested his chin on his palm, his index finger rubbing the side of his nose. ‘Where’d you hear that?’

  ‘From Christine.’

  Barry closed his eyes. ‘Ah, from Christine.’ He opened them. ‘A singular woman, Christine, but not someone directly connected with reality.’ He was smiling without a trace of humour. ‘Or did you form a contrary view?’

  ‘Will you be in the same room with Mark?’

  For a moment I thought I’d gone too far. Then Barry’s smile warmed and he laughed, the first time I’d heard him laugh, a pleasant sound.

  ‘Only if I have to,’ he said. ‘And then I keep as far away as possible. There’s something about Mark that chills me, always has.’

  I smiled back. ‘And Tom’s heard nothing from the American-accented man since the phone call?’

  He put his head to one side, smile gone, gave me a long look. ‘Not unless the Polish syndicate is using an electronic voice.’

  The statement floated in the air between us as I sat there thinking that I was totally inadequate to the task I’d taken on. I gathered myself.