by Marele Day
She became the career woman and I started getting bogged down in dirty nappies. I didn’t really get in touch with her again till I came back from the States, ironically now in the same business.
‘How was the martini?’
‘Dry. So dry I had to prise it out of the glass.’
Stella heard us and started giggling under her breath. Then she remembered she was the waitress and handed us a menu.
‘I’ll have the trout with truffle sauce,’ said Carol when Stella came back.
‘Sirloin for me, Stella. Rare.’
‘Side salad?’
‘Yes,’ we chorused. Then rather too quickly, as if to move away a little, Carol said, ‘And a bottle of Chardonnay.’
‘Drinks at the bar,’ said Stella turning on her heels.
‘Pretty girl, pity about the manners.’
‘She’s a pretty man as well. Does drag shows in Oxford Street Friday and Saturday nights. Waitressing is a bit of a come down for her. She only does it to make ends meet, so to speak.’
‘Your sense of humour hasn’t improved over the years, Claudia.’
‘At least I’ve still got one.’
Despite her ‘manners’, Stella, when she wanted to, made an art form out of waitressing. She glided the plates in front of us as if they were air. She also had a bottle of Chardonnay, chilled. She poured the taste portion into Carol’s glass. Carol nodded then Stella filled both our glasses.
‘How’s the fish?’
‘Nice,’ said Carol, swallowing, ‘compliments to the chef.’
‘How did you go with Sally Villos?’
‘Drew a blank.’
‘What?’
‘Look, a guy dies of a heart attack, it happens every day. They may have asked her a few questions but there’s nothing on file. What’s the big deal?’ Then her tone changed. ‘Unless of course this is more than routine insurance you’re doing.’
‘Well, there was something else. There was heroin in the bloodstream.’
‘But that’s not what he died of. I did go as far as the autopsy report. And I know about the pacemaker,’ she said, dabbing the corners of her mouth. ‘Any more questions?’
No suspicious circumstances surrounding the death.
If Sally was as tight with the cops as she had been with me they wouldn’t have discovered a thing. I wondered if she’d told them about the man. But I couldn’t ask Carol. Not yet. Not till a few more of the pieces had come together. The whole thing was too embryonic to have a miscarriage of justice at this early stage.
THERE IS A question that the innocent ask. They burn with curiosity but finally inflamed they ask. In their world of Bankcards and Sunday lawn mowing they don’t often meet a man like me. I look like them. White. Then the thread unravels and I flash them colours of my life. And they, in their curiosity, reveal flashes of theirs. Even a man who believes he is white to the core has colours. The gauche green they hide, the cowardly yellow, the red they spurt forth in anger, the ever present darkness they would rather forget. But it flaps at their shoulders and finally settles there, hunching its scrawny neck in ruffled feathers sticky with blood. Sometimes they put their morality in a box and take out single fibres: ‘But you know this man, you’ve followed him for weeks, you know his habits, you’ve heard his voice. What do you feel when . . .?’ Nothing. I feel nothing. It is like starting the car in the morning, you have to do it, it is part of the routine.
You can’t be in business and have an ordinary man’s conscience.
Murders are not committed in hot-blooded passion the way a man might kill his wife. They are planned and carefully executed. The actual act is the smallest part of the operation. A mere manifestation, end product, of the thought that made the plan. A plan that seeks out the solitary, vulnerable moments. Off-duty moments.
In the early days I planned and executed. It was my finger on the trigger. Now I plan and it is someone else’s finger on the trigger.
Seek out the solitary moments. Even in a crowd a man can be solitary: unguarded and off-guard.
Assassination on the Rocks. Know your target, know how he thinks, know his habits. Pre-empt him. Lucky (or Unlucky as he’s since become known) visited his mother on Wednesdays. You’d think in his line of work he’d be more cautious. But Lucky was lucky for too long. Started to think he was immortal. Untouchable. Not only was he living as if he was, he was thinking as if he was. Made the fatal mistake of believing his own publicity. Never lose sight of the man behind the image because while the image rides on the crest in a bulletproof vest it is the flesh and blood man that is fallible. Shards of flesh and blood in the street are the dying proof.
Lucky Nolan had been in the game a long time. Long enough to get greedy for more. To slice off a bit of the cake he wasn’t entitled to. The percentages weren’t right. We had an interview and he didn’t come up with all the answers.
Family visits are men’s solitary moments. They slip out of work clothes and become once again new-born babes. Tangled in the sticky threads of love they falter.
The kindergarten across the road might prove a problem. Choose a rainy Wednesday when the children are inside. A rainy day is good. Windscreens are misted and shapes are vague. He would be busy putting up an umbrella . . . waiting for a break to run for it. It would be no trouble picking out his flashy car. Outside the kindergarten. Opposite his mother’s house. Do it after. When he’s full of tea and scones and mother’s milk.
A door opens, a man comes out. No umbrella but he holds a newspaper over his head. He starts to walk across the road. Briskly. Time it for the rain. As he puts the key in the car door the red Mercedes draws level and delivers him a message that blows his brains out.
I PARKED THE rented LTD, donned a blond wig, and a pair of dark glasses, and walked round into the video arcade. I could have been wearing a gorilla suit and the teenage boys staring fixedly at their machines would never have noticed.
A gigantic Maori stood at the door affecting nonchalance while his eyes slid all over the place. I bought some tokens from a woman in a glass box and looked for a free machine. There was one down the back. Galaga. Also down the back were two doors. Locked. I imagined someone behind those doors looking at a screen that scanned not only the arcade but the whole city. Someone who knew my face beneath the wig and glasses.
It was stiflingly hot in there though no-one else seemed to notice. And sterile, despite the bright flickers on the screen and the electronic nursery rhymes coming out of them. The woman in the glass box was reading a magazine, occasionally exchanging cash for tokens.
Five bombers appeared on the bottom of the screen ready to attack a variety of electricoloured opponents that fired out white arrows. These were the ones to avoid, otherwise your bomber exploded and disappeared. Apart from firing rapidly and knocking out the alignment of opponents at the top of the screen, and those that came swirling in from the sides, you gained by taking risks. This was what I was interested in. It involved capture. If you were within range when the blue light beamed down it took your bomber back up behind enemy ranks. But if you timed your capture and moment of escape successfully you won your bomber back and could then fire with two guns. If you didn’t time it right you were eliminated from the game.
I sauntered over to the Maori and indicated with a movement of my head that I’d like to talk to him outside. He gave the machines the once-over with his flick-knife eyes then stepped out on the street.
‘What’s your problem?’
‘Oh . . . you know,’ I said, twitching and trying to look like I was hanging out.
‘No, I don’t.’
I drew a deep breath and prepared for capture. ‘I want to score.’
‘Keep playing, that’s the way to score.’
‘No, score. You know,’ I looked furtively up and down the street, ‘smack.’
‘The only smack you’ll get is one on the bum if you keep up this line of enquiry.’
I was standing at the edge of the blue beam and he
wasn’t going for it. I pulled another fighter out of my sleeve. ‘Ronny said I could score here.’
His eyelids came down to a lazy half-mast and he chuckled. ‘You’ve bombed out, lady. Get lost.’
I ‘got lost’. Round the block. To the back alley where the car was parked.
I put the accessories back in the car and went into a hamburger restaurant across the road from the arcade. ‘Hamburger restaurant’ seemed to be a contradiction in terms but the place was definitely restaurant and the food hamburger. What they had in common was that both of them were plastic. You ordered your food by number at the counter, paid for it with the order, then waited. Quick service was something they prided themselves on, but then it didn’t take long to put a pre-made, pre-packed hamburger in the microwave.
I took my hamburger to a window seat with a good view of the sleaze of George Street and especially the sleaze of the arcade. I picked up the hamburger and bit into it. The ‘bun’, the ‘meat’ and the ‘lettuce’ all tasted the same. I looked down to make sure I’d actually taken it out of its wrapper because it tasted like it was still in it.
In an attempt to take my mind off the hamburger I thought about why this end of town copped the sleaze while the other end did not. There were brash new buildings here, great cinema complexes, with bright lights winking you in. But other buildings were closed and dead, waiting for the developers’ magic to give them a new lease of life, or maybe just a new lease. Here very few suits walked by but up the other end of town—in Macquarie Street that the Premier looked over, the barristers’ chambers, the Opera House and Art Gallery—it was nothing but suits. And that was only the women. Up there was the Strand Arcade, camembert and salad greens on rye. Down this end it was hamburger and chips.
History, geography, connections.
People who frequent the other end of town live north and east with splendid harbour views, or in the extravagant real estate of the city itself. Down this end of town is Central Railway, surrounded by industries whose principal product is pollution. Central is the gateway to the west, inland away from the sea that connects us to the rest of the world, away from the chance of escape. Out there are the millions who didn’t make it east and north.
But in Sydney money buys status and is the greatest equaliser. Respectable businessmen rub shoulders with bookies, judges, and high ranking police officers. Commissioners are seen in night clubs with well-known crime figures, and I don’t mean statistics, crime figures who themselves are ‘respectable businessmen’.
These power links were forged in the early days of the colony along with entrepreneurial skills maintained and fostered as the colony grew into the city that is now the crime capital of the South Pacific.
It was a small community where men of power knew each other intimately.
One such man was Macarthur, enshrined, along with his sheep, on the two dollar note. Ironic that his is now the face of legal tender because it was Macarthur who bought up an American ship’s entire cargo of rum, then used it as currency. A rum currency indeed. This is not what the history books like to tell us about Macarthur. Macarthur who brought merinos to a land unsuitable for cloven-hoofed animals. Macarthur who introduced the plough to rut the virgin soil. When the ill-fated Bligh arrived to clean up the colony, the colony cleaned up Bligh. When he tried to put an end to the rum currency, Macarthur and his mates from the NSW Corps deposed him and put him under arrest.
The old boys’ network had begun.
Whilst musing on this I was steadfastly gazing at the video arcade where the Maori still stood looking up and down the street, looking at his fingernails, looking in at the players hooked up to their machines. One thing insurance investigation had taught me was never take your eye off the target, because the minute you do, something happens. So I didn’t miss Ronny O’Toole when he turned up. There was nodding recognition between him and the Maori, a few words exchanged, then O’Toole got back in the BMW and drove around the corner.
I sprinted across the road in time to see him turn into the alley.
THE BMW was parked behind a Customs van. O’Toole was leaning against the van smoking a cigarette.
He could have been a politician’s bodyguard, the head hardly moving but the eyes looking everywhere, never at the President himself but at places where the bullets might come from.
I stepped silently back into the shadows. In the shaft of light coming from the back entrance of the arcade I could see him clearly.
O’Toole assumed a more businesslike position as shadows loomed in the shaft of light. Out came two heavy men carrying an equally heavy object. A games machine. They loaded it in the back of the van then repeated the operation. Four times. Then they climbed in the back of the van themselves.
O’Toole threw his cigarette on the ground and closed the doors. In the light a thin spectral shadow appeared. A disembodied shadow, for nobody materialised. O’Toole went to the doorway and carried on silent conversation. Then he was handed a bulky envelope which he slid inside the leather jacket.
The door closed and both the light and the shadow disappeared. As O’Toole got in the van I slid into the LTD and watched the van move slowly down the alley and into the system of one-way streets leading onto the Western Distributor.
The traffic was thin at that time of night, the water under Glebe Island Bridge like ink. They crossed the bridge and turned into the container terminal. The van pulled up and a security guard got in.
I parked on the near side of a petrol tanker and climbed over the fence.
Though I passed the container terminal every day this was the first time I’d been in it. It had the irresistible fascination of all waterfronts. The sheer size of it, if nothing else. The few people that you ever saw down there were dwarfed by the huge orange containers arranged neatly in blocks like a miniature city of high-rise buildings; not the jumbled metropolis of Sydney, but a well-ordered geometric version, including the nooks and crannies created by such an arrangement. A great place for hiding, which was exactly what I had in mind. The huge cranes and associated paraphernalia rose out of this city like gods: strong, menacing and all-seeing. I hoped the occupants of the van weren’t the same.
I slid behind one of the blocks and watched. O’Toole and the others got out of the van. O’Toole removed the metal customs seal from one particular container. The container was opened and four games machines taken out and swapped. O’Toole then produced from his well-padded pocket another customs seal. As good as new. They all got back in the van and started to drive away. The security guard returned to his post.
All quiet on the western front.
I mentally photographed the position of the container and filed it away for future reference. For the moment I had a more pressing task: to get back to the car without being . . . Oh Christ!
The petrol tanker had disappeared.
But not the car.
My palms started sweating. The dry mouth came next and a strong desire to go to the toilet. Now I understood fully the significance of the expression ‘rooted to the spot’.
My eyes were flame-throwers aimed at the car. It lit up but did not burn away. It lit up because the headlights of the van were staring straight at it.
O’Toole and the others leaped out, going for their guns. The security guard was approaching, also with gun in hand. He signalled them to drive on: he’d deal with this little matter. They got back in the van. But O’Toole didn’t drive on. It looked like he was making a phone call.
The guard was now doing his duty. I’d never seen someone that size move with such agility. He was back at the container in a flash, prepared to rip it open if necessary. But it would not be necessary: all he had to do was shine his torch into the spaces in between and he’d have me. My hiding place had become a trap. In this miniature city I was up a dead-end street. My only chance was to take him by surprise. If my aim was true I’d kick him in the balls and when he doubled up, slice him in the jugular.
The torchlight came closer, i
nsidious as a shadow. I was lying down on the cold concrete, knees bent and ready, my whole body tight as a spring. When the torchlight came up this alley he wouldn’t know what hit him.
Suddenly there was light from another source. And voices. Breath swirled in the smoky light so close I could feel the dampness.
‘Boss said leave it.’
‘Yeah? Well my job’s on the line if I don’t sort this out.’
‘Your job’s on the line already if I make another phone call.’
There was silence. I guessed they were staring each other down.
The guard spoke first. ‘Where’s the bloody driver of that car, that’s what I want to know. What if he saw the whole thing?’
‘Relax. Forget it. What do you think that envelope was for? To make you forget. If you can forget you saw the van you can forget you saw the car.’
‘How’re you going to make the driver forget?’
‘It’s all taken care of. That’s a stolen car—went missing only this afternoon. The owner’s a friend of the boss. Funny it turning up like that now, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, hilarious.’
I heard the words but I also heard between them. I got the distinct impression that if it was up to O’Toole I’d be dead already.
I felt better and I felt worse. I was being pulled out of the frying pan. But what sort of fire was I being thrown into? Gun fire? Who was my ‘friend’ who was giving the orders? The spectral shadow at the arcade door?
I had a good idea what was in those containers and it wasn’t anything legal. People were killed for less than this. I could hand the matter over to the police but that would mean telling them what I was doing there in the first place. Was my mysterious guardian angel so sure of my silence? Or was he saving me up for something else?
The guard walked to the van with O’Toole and watched them drive off.
While the cat was away I moved swiftly out of my hidey-hole. And realised just how immense this container terminal was. Even if I ran, there would be an eternity of exposure between me and safe cover.