Left Luggage

by Andrew Christie

  “What’s in it?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Rashid was one of Jorge’s friends. An Algerian. Betty didn’t know him that well, she saw him at the parties where all their fashionably left-wing friends talked romantically about revolution and imperialism. Betty was pretty certain that she and Rashid were the only ones who had seen the places the others were always talking about. Betty wasn’t a romantic, she had seen the torn bodies and heard the women crying. Neither was Rashid, he was always deadly serious. Even at parties, he’d be in a quiet corner talking with his small group of followers. Young men attracted to the mystery and secrecy, the sense of danger. Young women attracted by strength and beauty. Rashid was beautiful: brown eyes, curly black hair, a slim, hard body. And a brilliant smile, when he chose to use it. The men and the women who sat around him lived for that smile, worked hard trying to earn it.

  Betty couldn’t believe that Jorge hadn’t asked what was in the suitcase. “Don’t you care? You know he’s tied up with the Palestinians and those fucking Germans? Don’t you?”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I bloody well do.” Betty turned on her heel and walked through to the living room.

  Jorge followed her, wiping his hands on a towel. “He’s just—”

  “Why do you think he wants us to look after this? He doesn’t feel safe. Whatever’s in here,” she kicked the suitcase and it fell onto its side with a solid thump, “he doesn’t want to get caught with it.”

  “He said just a couple of days—”

  “Do you fancy the flics coming and finding it here? I certainly do not,” Betty shouted. “I will not have that terrorist storing his bombs here.”

  “It’s not a bomb.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s not a terrorist.”

  Betty just looked at him. “What is it that you think he does? Him and his creepy German friends?”

  “He said he didn’t have room ... It’s not a bomb.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Jorge held up his hands. “Calmes toi.”

  “I am calm. Call Rashid, or I’ll call the flics.”

  “No. You can’t do that, he’s a friend.”

  “Your friend, maybe.”

  In the end she didn’t have to call the police. The suitcase wasn’t even locked. She just undid the big thick belt and snapped the locks open, not sure what she expected to see. She just knew she didn’t trust Rashid.

  Jorge went white when he saw the machine guns.

  “Call Rashid,” Betty said quietly. “Make him take it away.” Then she left. Went out the door without a second look, without another word. That was the last time they spoke.

  She had walked for a long time, thinking, trying to be less furious. Wondering if she should leave Jorge. How could he be so stupid, so gullible? She didn’t go back. She spent the night with Marie Gabriac at her apartment in the Butte-aux-Cailles. If only she had stayed at home with Jorge. He might have lived.

  Next day, the police told her what had happened. The DST were following Rashid. Maybe he spotted them, they weren’t sure. When Jorge opened the door there seemed to be an argument, then Rashid started shooting. He shot Jorge first, and two of the cops in the street, before they killed him.

  Betty never stayed in that apartment again. When the police were finished with it, the concierge put everything in storage. Betty had been two months gone with John then. She didn’t mention the suitcase and neither did the police. She just presumed they had taken it.

  John slid the passenger seat forwards and looked at the suitcase. He had jammed it in behind the seats when he took Betty to the doctor’s surgery after she’d felt faint at the storage unit. With everything that had happened since then, he’d forgotten about it. And how heavy it was. He’d assumed it was full of books when he pulled it out of the storage unit, but after his mother’s revelations, the weight worried him. He carried it inside the house and put it carefully on a table. The suitcase was old, made well before suitcases came with wheels. The big steel clasps were spotted with rust and the leather patches at the corners looked mildewy. A thick strap was wrapped like a big belt around it, running through the handle. The leather was dry, cracking and creaking when he undid the strap. The clasps were rusty and stiff but they weren’t locked. The left one opened easily but the one on the right required the insertion of a screwdriver blade under the hasp.

  Under the lid of the suitcase was a dark grey blanket, stained with what smelled like machine oil. When he lifted the blanket off, John understood.

  He was looking at shiny black machine pistols. Five of them. Small things, with wooden pistol grips and curved box magazines. They had steel shoulder stocks folded forwards over their muzzles. He recognised the type. Škorpions, Eastern European; Czech, maybe. Indonesian special forces had used them too, may still do for all he knew. They were small calibre, but they were easy to conceal and very effective at close range. Good terrorist weapons.

  John got some rubber gloves from the kitchen; he didn’t want his prints on these guns. He picked up the top one – it was definitely real, not a replica. The safety was on, the breech clear but the magazine was full. Metal jacketed .32 ACP rounds. Wrapped in another blanket were five more magazines, all full, and six boxes of ammunition. He laid the guns and the magazines in the lid of the suitcase and lifted another blanket. “Jesus,” he muttered. The bottom of the suitcase was lined with bundles of US dollars in neat paper wrappers. Three bundles deep, twenty-dollar notes. He had no idea how much it was but it looked like a lot. In two cloth drawstring bags he found gold coins: Krugerrands. He didn’t know what they were worth either. This just keeps getting better and better, he thought. The suitcase was a terrorist kit, just add crazy and stand back.

  * * *

  Chapter 17

  Blue Shoes

  Large slammed his mobile phone on the desk. He’d had to call Jimmy to find out what had happened, the prick hadn’t had the balls to call him. Useless bastards, the two of them. He was going to have to get hold of the guns himself. There was no choice, Pike wasn’t going to accept any excuses, and Large had no intention of losing any fingers. He had considered the possibility of taking out Pike, but that would lead to a war with the Chiefs, and there was only one way that would turn out. No, he had to get the guns. And kill Lawrence. Revenge on Pike would be more complicated. It would have to wait.

  He opened the bottom drawer of the desk and pulled out a bottle, his Sig and a fat black tube. He took a swig from the bottle of Mount Gay rum and screwed the suppressor onto the muzzle of the gun. It doubled the size of the weapon, but meant he could fire it almost anywhere without drawing attention. The next time he saw Lawrence, he wasn’t going to fuck around, he was going to shoot first. From the shelf behind the desk he took a red and white Australia Post mailing tube. It had a red plastic cap on one end and a notch cut into the cardboard at the other. The silenced Sig slid neatly into the tube, leaving the grip and trigger guard free. He put the rig and a box of ammunition into a sports bag.

  On his way to the front door, Sharon got under his feet, scrabbling around on the polished floor, wanting to go out and chase the Davidsons’ cat. “Piss off, you stupid fucking dog,” he said as he shovelled it aside with his foot.

  “You going out, love?” Darlene called from the kitchen.

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Hunting,” he shouted back, but was drowned out by Sharon barking from the back of the lounge at the cat as it crossed the front lawn.

  “Can you pick up some milk?”

  “No.”

  John had just pulled the door closed behind him when a cab pulled up and Annette Morgan got out. Shit. It was a fortnight since she was last here. A fortnight since he had made a fool of himself with her. He had completely forgotten that she would be coming back today. After the last time, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she hadn’t come back. But here she was crossi
ng the road, waving and smiling, looking good, in a white T-shirt and short pink skirt. John smiled back.

  “Hi. How are you?”

  “I’m well.” She surprised him by coming in close and giving him a peck on the cheek. “How is your mum? I thought about calling but decided you probably had enough on your plate.”

  “Yeah it’s been ... complicated.”

  Annette gave him a sympathetic look and squeezed his arm.

  He looked down at her hand, resting on his forearm, suddenly very conscious of the HK tucked in the back of his jeans. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve totally forgotten you were coming today. I’m just about to go to see Mum at the hospital. Not sure how long that will take.” There was a lot he had to talk to her about.

  “That’s okay,” Annette said, taking her hand off his arm. “I’ll be fine here on my own.”

  “I’ll let you in and get you set up before I head off,” he said, unlocking the front door and holding it open for her.

  “Give your mum my regards. Tell her we need her to get better in time for the exhibition opening.”

  John smiled. “Sure. I’ll tell her you’re in town. That will get her attention. She likes the idea of having her own exhibition.”

  “And maybe you and I can get something to eat later? I don’t have to go back to Canberra till tomorrow.”

  Betty wanted a cup of coffee, a decent one. The coffee in the hospital was horrible, over-brewed muck. And all she’d had for breakfast was some limp toast that came with butter and jam in those stupid little plastic containers. It was always a struggle to get them open. She knew there were lots of cafés close by in Newtown. John had taken her there when they had gone to the movies, to see that young Audrey Tatou. What was the name of the film? She couldn’t find the words. They were just there. She could feel their shape, as if they were pushing against her brain through a membrane, but she couldn’t see them.

  Anyway, after the movie they had gone to a café. She’d had cake, a very nice orange cake. At least Sydney had decent cafés now. Not as good as Paris, but so much better than when she was young. Sydney was changing, she supposed, but it was so far away. So far from everything she knew, everything she loved. It felt as if her life had never happened. Here she was back again. Despite her successes, despite all the things she’d seen and done, here she was back again.

  After the nurses had been around to take her blood pressure and change the dressing on her head, Betty climbed gingerly out of bed. She was stiff and sore but was certain she would feel better if she kept moving. Lying in bed was just making her stiffer. She looked a fright in the bathroom mirror, with no make-up and a bandage on her forehead. Still, it felt good to be wearing proper clothes again. She found her handbag and her walking stick in the little closet beside the bed and set off.

  At the lifts, Betty joined the waiting crowd of nurses and visitors, listening to a conversation between two male nurses about a television show she had never heard of. When the lift came it seemed to be full but everyone squeezed up and the nurses made space for her between them. On the ground floor she walked out through the bustling lobby, past the café that she had been to with John the day before.

  On the street it was cool but sunny. The road was busy and there were a lot of people walking about. Betty watched them for a while, then turned left and followed a group of students up the hill towards Newtown.

  John arrived at the hospital with a bag of croissants and two cups of coffee jammed into a cardboard tray. He was going to have to ask his mother some hard questions and he wanted her in a good mood first. He needed to know about the guns and the Algerian. He needed to know if his mother and father had been terrorists too.

  The hospital room was empty. So was the bathroom. He left the coffees and the croissants on the table and went back out to the nurses’ station.

  “She was there half an hour ago when I changed her dressing,” said the pretty English nurse. “She can’t have gone far.” John went to the lift lobby while the nurses began checking the other rooms in the ward. The only people at the lifts were a man and his daughter, the little girl holding a string attached to a huge shiny orange balloon shaped like a fish.

  Back in the ward, the English nurse looked worried. She shook her head, “She’s not here. Not on the ward.”

  John didn’t wait for a lift. He took the stairs two at a time down to street level. She wasn’t in the lobby or the café. The smokers out in the forecourt shook their heads and shrugged – they hadn’t seen her. John walked out to the street and scanned up and down, then he crossed the road and checked again. Nothing.

  He went back up to the hospital room and examined it, moving through it quickly, just looking, not touching anything. There was no sign of a struggle. The bed clothes were pulled up and her nightdress was folded on the pillow. Her stick and her bag were missing along with the clothes he had brought in for her: a white top and blue slacks.

  He called Walker. “My mother has disappeared,” he said. “There are clothes missing. She might have just gone out on her own.”

  “Or she might not,” said Walker.

  “I’m going to Forest Court now,” he said, “to see if she’s gone there.”

  “How would she get that far?”

  “I don’t know. Taxi? She was walking all over the bloody hospital yesterday.”

  The house looked shut up when Large got to Camperdown. Same as last time he was there. He parked across the road and watched for a while, listening to the radio. Some guy talking about rising sea levels. Sounded like Bangladesh was fucked, and the Maldives would be even worse off. They’ll all be arriving by boat soon, Large thought. After ten minutes watching and seeing no signs of life, he got out of the car carefully and crossed the road to the house. He was carrying the Australia Post tube in two hands as if he was making a delivery.

  Large was about to ring the bell, his left hand reaching out for the button, his right still holding the Sig, when the door began to open. He didn’t hesitate. He fired through the end of the tube. Three shots, into the door, above and to the left of the handle. The only sound the gun made was a popping click, followed by the shells ringing as they bounced on the concrete pavement.

  The door stopped moving with the first shot. Large shouldered it open, pushing aside the body on the floor, stepping over it to check the hall and the front room. They were empty.

  The dead woman’s white T-shirt was soaked with blood. Small splinters of timber from the door protruded from the wounds in the centre of her chest. Large had no idea who she was, but he wished it had been Lawrence.

  Betty was tired and her legs were sore by the time she found the small café on King Street. She sat at a table in the window and watched the people on the street go past while she waited for her coffee and croissant. They were mainly young people, students maybe, and staff from the hospital. Some were even still wearing blue theatre gowns, or had stethoscopes around their necks.

  Betty had never been to university. It was something she regretted now. Too late, of course. She envied the young people. They were totally unaware of the freedom they had. Oblivious to the fact that age narrows your choices, the accretions of past decisions making it so much harder to change direction. She finished her coffee and picked up the last of the flakes of pastry, licking the end of her index finger and dabbing at the plate until they were all gone. It wasn’t too bad, better than she had hoped.

  Back out on King Street, she was surprised how many restaurants there were. None of them were French, of course. Australians seemed to have no interest in France these days; everything seemed to be Asian. Or Italian. Even the English seemed to be out of favour.

  There were a few clothes shops scattered between the restaurants, though none of them looked like the sort of place that would have anything that suited Betty. They were all full of T-shirts and pre-torn jeans. She did see some pretty blue shoes with nice low heels. A young girl with hair dyed bright blue helped her try them on, which was
just as well because it was a struggle for Betty to reach her feet these days. She was so stiff. The shoes were a good fit and the girl agreed that they suited her, so she bought them. Why not? The girl put her old black shoes in the box so Betty could wear the new ones.

  She kept walking along King Street, very pleased with her new shoes. They were comfortable, which was good, because it was turning out to be further to Glebe than she had thought. Eventually the shops petered out and the road became wider. She walked by the university, squeezing past a big crowd of noisy students waiting at a bus stop near the gates. One thing she liked about Sydney was the mix of races. There were so many Chinese and Indians now. Not so many Africans, but a few. It was a lot different when she was young. She hadn’t seen a Negro until she had gone to America. The suburbs she had grown up in had been all white. Italians and Greeks were the closest thing to people of colour in those days of careless racism.

  Beyond the university she followed a path through a large park, past lawns and big shady trees till she got to a duck pond. She sat down to rest on a bench beneath the branches of an enormous fig tree. Its buttress roots flowed out on either side of the bench, like arms. The ground beneath the tree was littered with fallen leaves and rotting figs that filled the air with a sweet fermented stench. Betty watched the antics of the ducks and water hens, and tried to ignore the noise of the traffic on Parramatta Road.

  His mother wasn’t at Forest Court. The apartment was just as John had left it on Sunday, nothing out of place. He went through all the rooms then locked up again, standing outside the door, looking around the courtyard. It was mid-morning but there was no one about. He checked the laundry, the drying area, the letter boxes and the common room. Nothing. He knocked on the doors of all the ground-floor units, disturbing those residents who were home. They came slowly to their doors in response to his banging and button pushing. Apprehensive women, late risers with hands clutching robes at their throats. Wary men, standing back from the still-locked screen doors. Mostly they smiled and relaxed when they saw it was him, but no, sorry, none of them had seen Betty. Not since last Friday.