by Marele Day
‘I think murder takes precedence. Just pretend you never heard me say how I got in there.’
‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘You can. You didn’t get to sit behind that big shiny desk by always doing it by the book.’
She spread well manicured fingers along that desk. ‘Your long term memory, as always, is impeccable. But may I remind you, Ms Valentine, that I am sitting behind this big shiny desk and you are in front of it. So before I throw you to those lions out there, shall we get down to business?’ She’d come a long way from Bankstown.
She leant back in her chair and asked for more precise times and layout. Then she sent two cops round to the arcade.
‘You don’t expect the body to still be there, do you?’
‘Not really, specially as no-one’s reported it. But there should be signs.’
‘Got a search warrant?’
She sighed. ‘Yes, Claudia, we’ve got a search warrant.’
‘If Lavender’s involved you’ll need it.’
‘Lavender’s been lying low lately.’
‘Beautiful alliteration, Carol. Old Copperhead would be proud of you.’
She smiled, nearly chuckled, in spite of her well-tailored suit and big shiny desk. Then her work face came back on.
‘Why would he have his own man killed?’
‘Because of Macmillan. The Jumper’s bringing Lavender more publicity than he wants right now.’
‘So you’ve heard the rumour.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard the rumour.’
‘Hmm. There’s something that intrigues me,’ she said, carefully placing her fingers together. ‘You know how much exercise the Jumper needs to keep fit. How come, if he’s been following you, you haven’t had any aggravation?’
‘I wouldn’t exactly call last night a tea party! I was set up for that.’
‘Before that. He was already dead when you had your “tea party”. If you’ve been nosing around Lavender’s business, how come you’re still alive? Maybe he’s sick but he’s not dead.’
My brain was tugging at my skirts to go home, like a child unable to cope with the adults’ conversation.
‘That’s what I’d like to know. Could be he’s saving me up for something special.’
‘It doesn’t look good, Claudia, I’m telling you now.’
‘Maybe that’s what they’re aiming for. To make me not look good. Hoping that given enough rope I’ll not only hang myself but trip over it in the process. They’re not stupid and they’ve had plenty of opportunities.
‘Can I go now? I’ve got some rest to catch up on.’
‘I think it’s best if you stay. At least till my sergeants report back. You can lie down in the cell if you like.’
‘No thanks.’ I knew how comfortable the bunk in the cell would be, and I wasn’t going to let myself be tricked into going behind bars. ‘Not unless you want to arrest me.’
‘Hopefully that won’t be necessary.’ I’d been joking but Carol wasn’t. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘A lobotomy would be great but I’d settle for a couple of Panadol.’
She opened a drawer and produced a packet. ‘Glass of water?’
‘I’ll wash it down with the coffee.’
‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff. I never touch it.’
‘At least it’s a change from water. I woke up in water this morning and I’ve had enough for one day.’
‘Very amusing,’ she said, decidely unamused. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I’ve go work to do.’
Maybe I was imagining it but for some reason my presence here was annoying the shit out of Carol. I was too far below par to wonder why. I’d think about it later. Think about it all later.
We sat in heavy silence. I leafed through a glossy magazine for businesswomen and Carol got on with her work. Paper work.
The silence was interrupted by the quiet buzz of her telephone.
‘Detective Rawlins speaking.’ She had pen and paper at the ready.
‘Hmm, how convenient.’ . . . ‘Didn’t think so but we could get someone to check it out.’ . . . ‘Break in from upstairs, eh?’ she said, shooting me with her eyes.
‘Who did you speak to?’ . . . ‘And there was no-one else there?’ . . . ‘Uh-huh. And the office?’ . . . ‘Uh-huh.’ . . . ‘OK, come and see me when you come back.’
She replaced the receiver and spread her hands out on the table. It was getting more like the headmistress’ office every minute.
‘They came, they saw, but they didn’t conquer. There was evidence of a break-in but nothing else.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘That’s right. No body, no nothing. The office as neat as a pin. Doesn’t look good, does it?’
‘But I saw it! I was ringing you about it!’
‘Was that before or after the Scotch?’
The remark pierced as sharp as the pain in my head.
‘Carol, I told you what happened! Would I be calling you about murder if there wasn’t any body?’
‘You didn’t call,’ she said dryly.
‘For God’s sake, Carol, I was on the phone to you when I got hit on the head by an unidentified blunt object. Do you think this mess is self-inflicted? What about the bloodstained carpet?’
‘There was no carpet.’
‘Well that proves it, doesn’t it? Away getting the bloodstains removed.’
‘Not necessarily. Don’t you ever send your rugs away to be dry-cleaned?’
‘I don’t own rugs,’ I said defiantly. ‘Do you?’
‘I have the odd one or two.’
‘Of course! You must be doing all right on your detective’s salary.’
‘I am.’
The silence roared like thunder.
‘C’mon Carol, it’s obvious. They’ve removed the body and they’ve removed the evidence.’
‘What may be obvious to one person is not necessarily obvious to another.’ she said evenly.
‘Carol! I can’t believe this. Do you think all this is a bullshit story?’
She sighed. ‘No, Claudia, quite frankly I don’t. You never were a very good liar and you’re sticking pretty closely to your story. I just wish it hadn’t landed in my lap. I’ve got plenty to do without this sort of trouble. Anything to do with Lavender is a can of worms. And you know what worms are used for. Bait. How very convenient for Mr Lavender that he’s out of town at the moment.’
‘Out of town?’
‘According to the woman who works at the video arcade he’s holidaying at Noosa.’
‘No murder reported, no-one knows anything, and the boss is away. Doesn’t it all seem a bit too convenient?’
‘Precisely. Once again as far as Harry Lavender is concerned we are boxing at shadows. He’s got more security and protection around him than the Pentagon.’
‘Yes, but the Pentagon has been broken into. By a ten-year-old child.’
‘You know any children who are going to break Lavender?’
‘Maybe.’
She was smiling and shaking her head.
‘Go home and get some rest, Claudia. I’ll get someone to drive you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it. And Claudia . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Try and stay out of the sort of trouble that brings you to my office.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Claudia, I’m serious. You go after Lavender, you’ll get swallowed up without a trace. Leave it alone.’
‘OUT all night and you arrive home mid-morning in a cop car. There must be a story there.’
‘There is, Jack, but after. At the moment I have some pressing business to attend to.’
I looked at the phone and I looked at the bed. The bed won. I could never understand how Philip Marlowe and those guys, from one end of the story to the other, got shot, beaten up, and sometimes laid, without ever going to bed.
I STAND ON top of my city and see the shape of the
future. It is a circuit board, the microchip buildings connected by filament roads. My address in the city is The Beehive. This name is no accident. From the central processing unit I see my empire stretch out. And its form is not unlike that of a beehive, the image of the electronic future. The hexagonal cells store information that feeds the system. A pattern as perfect as a circuit board, the chips themselves like silicon bees relaying information. Like the computer, bees have a binary language system. They dance the information, the direction of the pollen and its distance from the hive. Direction and distance is all they need for their world of honey. The sticky gold that also traps their enemies. My world can be reduced to direction and distance. To a binary system of zeroes and ones. On off. On off. The computer manifests our thought patterns. We cannot help but create in our own image. All artefacts are mirrors.
Drones like Johnny the Jumper are expendable. They are merely acting on genetic orders, following instructions on direction and distance to arrive at the pollen that is transmuted to honey back in the hive. There are thousands like the Jumper. In the world of the hive deviation is not tolerated.
Then there is the queen bee who generates the world of the hive, the motherboard that holds all the other boards that make up the computer box. It holds in its body the heart: the central processing unit. Here instructions are executed, decisions taken and the whole system coordinated. In other parts of the system data can be relocated but never changed. Only in the heart can data be changed.
Especially if the heart has an electronic implant. It all comes down to pulse, the rhythmical throbbing of arteries, the throb of life. And death. The successive contractions of the heart as the electronic pulse is quickened. Just a little at a time. Just enough to keep the subject in a state of ‘readiness’. On edge so that when the time comes the heart is in critical condition. Autopsy would find no suspicious traces. Examination of the pacemaker would reveal a quickened pulse but this would be put down to exertion. Never would they know that the quickening had been controlled and manipulated from the start.
The motherboard also holds ROM and RAM, Romulus and Remus, the twins suckled in the wild that created the Roman city, the ROM city. RAM is read/write memory. Information can be read out of and written into this memory, and can be changed at any time. ROM is read only memory. You cannot put your own program into ROM: it holds a prerecorded program. With ROM nothing can be written into the memory, it cannot be changed. The motherboard holds the memory of the city. The everchanging program, the buildings, lives, destroyed and created, the new coats of paint over old, the interpretations of history, the overlays. It also holds the unchangeable program, the history etched onto the hologram of time and space, the pattern produced by interference between coherent light-beam and light diffracted.
The motherboard holds the pattern of light that appears on the screen. The flickering dots that form words and images. The signs, the superficialities. The features of the face of the computer, the screen, where the operator can see work in progress. This is a fragile state because nothing is yet recorded, everything is in flux. Messages hover subliminally for a split second and can then be erased. But already the suggestion has been implanted, beyond the surface of the screen, through the optical fibres into the irretrievable limbo files.
The motherboard holds the board which connects to the keyboard and hard-copy terminal. This orchestrates input and output, the fingers tapping keys which translate and translate into the zeroes and ones, the binary system of the computer brain. Then out again, up from the depths of zeroes and ones, translations back up the chain of command to the printer tapping hieroglyphs onto paper.
The motherboard holds the disc controller which allows information to be stored outside the computer, far enough away so that all connections disappear. A disc is a piece of throwaway plastic, precarious as paper and just as easily destroyed, as meaningless as a sheet of music in the hands of a layman, but coaxing and revealing to the eye attuned to it. The computer eye.
Regrets? Only one. That I will not live long enough to witness and enjoy the full impact of the electronic future. The horizon stretches infinitely. Technology is light years ahead of ethics. I have extracted more gold from the electronic revolution than from the euphoric flowers of Asia or all the rest of my business interests put together. Ironically the old principles apply: know your terrain, fight with what you’ve got, slip through the interstices.
The computer game par excellence.
Know the system, slip between the gaps when computer time is suspended. Rearrange a few binary digits. Write a self-destruct clause so that the program deletes itself when the operation is completed. Six million dollars in less than a month. Should my associate in the bank be discovered and the rearrangement traced to him he will probably be promoted. He shows initiative, enterprise, why not give him something more interesting and challenging to do. There will be no prosecution. The bank’s security system is inviolable. Money is involved and ethics are deleted. And what has he done after all? The customers’ accounts are in order. Has he stolen? A thimbleful of time and electricity. Has he broken and entered? Broken a code and entered a system. There is no damage to property, no loss of life.
My life and the list of my crimes have been long and illustrious. The motherboard could last forever but the casement of flesh is crumbling, dragging down with it the central processing unit as the program runs amok. The chips are down, turned into post holocaust insects running rampant in a system where only insects survive. Uncontrolled growth spreading and recurring.
I will go gently into that dark night, not rage against the dying of the light. I will survive death as I survived the holocaust of childhood. My mountain of gold, my cancerous city, my life and crimes will enter into the unalterable hologram of time and space.
IT WAS 4PM when I woke up, my body ready for a fresh assault on the concrete and glass jungle but my head not keeping up with it. There were messages on the Ansafone but I was already being bombarded with too much information. My aching head was trying to tell me something.
Something that didn’t fit into the pattern. I swallowed some vitamins, a few Panadols, then opened the french doors and breathed in a couple of lungsful of pollution, the breath of the city, of Harry Lavender’s city.
That’s what didn’t fit into the pattern—the overt headache, the cheap thriller violence. Lavender played cat and mouse. Worked on the nerves, seduced the victim into the game, made you think you were ahead when really he was rattling you to death. Pointing the bone and playing on the death wish. He was a legend but he was also a man. The legend was untouchable but the flesh and blood of the man could be pierced. One pebble from a slingshot could hit him right between the eyes. If I could find his eyes, the windows, the grimy shopfront windows to his human soul.
The night at the video arcade was a bad dream. I’d been watched but untouched. Then I’d been clobbered. And set up. Harry Lavender loomed so large but there were other people in the world. Other people who might want to black me out. The Maori for instance. It was the Maori who’d put the lights out for me. Who could see in the dark.
The paranoid makes connections between signs that the ‘normal’ person doesn’t. Everything is grist to the mill.
I am not paranoid, I just have a god-awful headache.
I showered and washed my hair. Washed blood out of it. Swirling down into the bath and away to some point off Bondi.
Bondi and blood.
I couldn’t believe Robbie was dealing. Or even using. A one-way street, he’d said. He looked so . . . nice, so clean-cut and fresh.
So had Mark Bannister.
I swallowed hard and turned the taps on full pelt, drowning the blood, my blood, the blood of dead boys, in water.
It felt better. The ionising shower pummelled my head and body. Or maybe it was just the numbing of the Panadol.
I turned on the Ansafone and got the voices of ‘normal’ people.
First there was Otto. Could I meet him ton
ight at six? Then there was a voice out of the blue—Mrs Levack, thinking the Ansafone was my secretary and hanging up. I hoped it was for more than just a cup of tea. Then there was Steve Angell.
Steve Angell. Still alive and not hysterical. At least not on the Ansafone. Of all the people who’d had contact with Mark Bannister he was the one I’d seen the most of. How had he managed to slip through the net? What was he trading to save his exquisite skin?
If I could just hear his voice I would know. But I’d just heard his voice and I didn’t know. The phone voice wasn’t enough. Impersonal. Blanched. I wanted to see him. To forget the lavender cancer growing in my brain. Wanted to drink champagne and watch the dawn. To get drunk, laugh, to be in the sweet embrace and have the earth shift under me, the city shift under me, the continental plates shift and immerse me in deep oceans.
‘Steve? It’s Claudia.’
He was the same as ever. As if nothing had changed. But something had changed. The magic light of dawn had become a hot burning glare.
‘I’ve been . . . busy.’ . . . ‘Tonight? I’m not sure . . . . . . ‘Nothing. Everything’s fine, just fine.’
My mouth relaxed into a smile. Tonight, he said. Key in the letterbox, champagne in the fridge and hot water in the bath, just in case.
Deep oceans of hot water, champagne, the sweet embrace. How could I ever have doubted him?
‘Hmm, sounds great, Steve, I’ll be there as soon as I can. See you.’
There was something else.
‘Yes?’
He’d just been notified about the death of a patient.
The new recipient of Mark Bannister’s pacemaker.
I froze. Hard and cold.
Bloke from Orange. Collided with a semi. The pacemaker was irretrievable.
No way to check now if it had been interfered with. No way at all.
My head started spinning. No, no, this can’t be true, no, it is not happening, the coincidences are too great. TERMINAL ILLNESS THE LIFE AND CRIMES OF HARRY LAVENDER. The life terminating illness of the crimes of Harry Lavender.
‘Yes. I’m still here. Where do you get the pacemakers, Steve?’ I said, spitting out his name. . . . ‘Which manufacturers?’