Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  Lenny shrugs and gives herself a moustache. ‘The whole world thinks you’re crazy asking for Mick.’

  ‘Like I said, that shit doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘But I think it’s genius. You recruit the one bloke who’s known for stuffing the investigation in the first place. Imagine how amazing you’ll look if you get an arrest with baggage like that.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Caught up with Holden?’

  ‘We brunched, it was nice.’

  ‘Him and Michael used to be tight.’

  ‘I get the feeling that Rawson used to be tight with everybody.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s a pity how things pan out.’

  ‘I can understand why Holden doesn’t rate him, though. Witness tampering. I wouldn’t appreciate it either.’

  ‘Witness tampering.’

  ‘Yeah. On Koestler.’

  ‘That’s not the reason they don’t like each other.’ Lenny sips and watches Karen avidly, an elder cheetah at the watering hole. ‘Look, I can tell this isn’t your cup of tea—but you can’t be Tony’s darling if you hate the politics.’

  ‘I’m not his darling. I’m his pawn, remember?’

  ‘If you don’t want a bar of this, fine—the arrangement I have with Tony is just that. But it’s only fair I lay my cards on the table. I’m writing a book about the case, got publishers lining up. You have to admit the material’s pretty juicy.’

  ‘Sounds dangerous.’

  ‘You have no idea. It’s called an advance because that’s what you bloody spend it in. Still, if it all plays out the way I think—’

  ‘And how might that be?’

  ‘Perversion of justice,’ says Lenny. ‘Corruption in the halls of power.’

  ‘Lurid.’

  ‘I saw the crime scene, Karen.’

  ‘Yeah? And who let you do that.’

  ‘Rexy Faulkner. He’s a mate.’

  ‘How about Holden, friendly with him?’

  ‘Ish.’

  ‘Roger Paspaley?’

  Lenny reels. It’s like her sweetheart niece has dropped the c-word in her earshot: a wretched Styx of a thing, a river you can’t uncross. ‘Where did that come from?’

  ‘Nowhere,’ says Karen. ‘Just trying to place you.’

  ‘In what? The Book of Fucking Evil?’

  ‘I keep hearing these names, these whispers—Cavendish and his lot. It’s like I’ve come in halfway through the story and can’t catch up.’

  Lenny’s face says she knows the feeling. ‘Paspaley was the one they called in when they didn’t like somebody.’

  ‘Really? I thought they called him the Pardoner.’

  Lenny cocks her head, looking at Karen like Karen’s retarded. ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Bringing up shit you know nothing about.’

  Karen folds her arms. King’s Indian. ‘I think it’s called police work.’

  The player across from her loops a finger through her hair, curling it, giving it an excuse it doesn’t need. ‘People ask me about cops. You know—what makes for a good one. I always tell them it’s the wrong question.’

  ‘So what’s the right one.’

  ‘What makes for a good force? And the truth is, it takes all sorts.’

  ‘The Paspaleys. The Bercovitches.’

  ‘And the Millars.’

  The Millar looks into her drink. Should have ordered a triple. Morris Hopgood is having his drinks tonight and Bob is sure to be there. Slurry Hills. ‘I can’t share what I haven’t got. Half of zero is zero.’

  ‘Even if I believed that, it isn’t the point. You’ve got to step lightly.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s taking half a book to market.’

  ‘Touché.’

  Karen’s over it. Tonight she’ll run herself back into condition—look for a classy runner on the esplanade and draw up behind, let his ears fill up with the echo of her superior rhythm. Some guy that takes it serious, high-cut shorts and two-hundred-dollar runners. Then break him, a ravishing breeze, You’ve Been Chicked on the back of her shirt in bright invisible ink. ‘If you write about Koestler, you’ll make Rawson look like shit.’

  ‘Why, because he fucked Holden’s interview?’

  ‘Because of everything.’

  ‘That’s not my intention. But he’s a big boy.’

  ‘Boy is right. Why the warning?’

  ‘Because you’re better off working with me and grabbing yourself a bit of exposure. If you get close to cracking this thing, Bercovitch’ll mug you in broad daylight. His name in lights, you walking a beat in Coffs Harbour for the next six months.’

  ‘I like Coffs Harbour,’ the detective says emptily. ‘Nothing happens.’

  Lenny extends her card again and this time Karen takes it. She scans, hypnotised by the font. ‘Pawns shouldn’t gang up on bishops,’ she says in a strange voice.

  ‘They should if they trust each other.’

  ‘I see—us girls have to stick together.’

  ‘Forget that shit,’ says Lenny’s jaguar smile. ‘It’s every man for himself.’

  08

  Your answering machine is pregnant, a cipher flashing three or five or nine. It carries the noises of women long ago, girls you roomed with, went to law school with, asking you out for drinks.

  Those invitations are a dying generation, fatally neglected, manifesting less and less. Already the story behind each name is remote in your memory. They don’t seem to get it—until they do.

  Police run with police. Interbreeding. Your tribe is chosen and the choice irrevocable. For better, for worse…

  Then again, maybe you’ll chuck it in. Maybe you’ll embrace the law, get snapped up by a firm, foster a social life and go courting, have dates and friends and kids and marriage.

  Ha ha ha.

  08

  ‘The road not travelled,’ says Bob Mack.

  The target turns and they shake on it, Rawson the incumbent, relatively drunk, a serious bloody drinker at the best of times. ‘Every time I see you,’ he says, ‘I’m surprised you’re not cuffing me.’

  ‘Ease up, Mike. How’ve you been?’

  ‘Mike. No one calls me that. Still like it over there?’

  ‘I don’t know that I ever liked it,’ says Bob.

  ‘No—but you were made for it. The single best appointment I ever saw. The man who broke the spell, removed the wizard. I think I saw Paddy Conlon in before.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘There’s Caron fucken Daley. The Silver Wobbler! How dare he show that perfectly crafted face?’

  ‘Wish I was as pissed as you.’

  ‘Well there’s the bar, mate. You know how it’s done.’

  Bob is about to heed the advisory but his phone rings and is somehow heard above the din. He fishes it out and peers at the number. ‘They given you one of these yet.’

  ‘Fuck no,’ says Rawson. ‘Too reachable as it is.’

  ‘I’ve heard it all.’ Bob puts the device to his ear like a beach shell as the Incremental drifts away, a piece of plankton in the wide deceased. ‘It’s Karen,’ says the phone.

  ‘Whereabouts.’

  ‘Outside. In the park.’

  ‘Where the addicts sit?’

  ‘They’re finished for the night.’

  Are they? Bob weighs. ‘Alright. Give me a mo.’

  —

  She sounded small down the line and she looks small from a distance, spotlighted by a moth-infested nimbus, back-and-forthing on the unsafe swing. His presiding thought is how cold she must be.

  ‘Didn’t want to come inside?’

  Karen shakes her head. She folds her arms and leans back, extending her legs and crossing her ankles. She looked like a kid and now she looks like a teenager. Won’t look at him. Tanqueray, ten-to-one on. Bob Mack drapes his jacket around her shoulders and she doesn’t move a muscle. He says, ‘The Blue Mover’s in there.’

 
‘Of course.’

  ‘Is that why?’

  ‘Come on. Was I ever that social?’

  ‘No,’ says Bob Mack. ‘It’s what I like about you.’

  ‘The only thing?’

  ‘Don’t.’

  She slaps him hard, rising fast to do it. He cops it without alarm, averting his face but slightly, and when her mouth closes over his he takes her about the shoulders. Bob lifts and places her away as though he is a crane, she a parcel.

  ‘Behave.’

  ‘Get fucked.’

  ‘We’ve been through this.’

  ‘You’ve been through it. I’m still going.’

  He turns and walks and she grabs him roughly at the wrist: Bob could break the bond but he can’t. He dislikes the light, feels jealous of the dark at hand. A roar from the Shakespeare, even and dull, but no prying eyes. That is a tavern turned inward at every hour.

  ‘Do you forgive me?’

  ‘I never took it personal,’ he says. ‘You know that.’

  ‘I don’t know that. I begged you to take me and you said okay. But it’s a one-way ticket.’

  ‘I tell everyone that, K. Because it is.’

  ‘Only you let me go. And you weren’t supposed to do that.’

  ‘You were too good to stay.’

  ‘That isn’t the reason you signed off.’ She sounds gutted, accusing. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about Cavendish.’

  Bob Mack looks at her sharply. ‘That’s an odd thing to say.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The man was dead when you joined. Why would I talk about him?’

  ‘He doesn’t feel dead.’

  ‘Where’s this coming from.’

  ‘I’ve been doing a bit of reading.’

  ‘Old papers?’

  ‘Yeah, right. Is that what you do, B? Get your news from the paper?’

  ‘If there’s something you—’

  ‘The Cavendish Crew. They did things, didn’t they.’

  ‘They did all sorts of things.’

  ‘Was Rawson one of them?’

  It looks for a second like he might leave her there, dangling. But he sticks. ‘Rawson hated them.’

  ‘But he ran with them.’

  ‘Rawson’s complicated.’

  ‘No, he’s not. You are.’

  ‘Me? I’m simple.’

  ‘Yeah—simple Bob Mack. The pure one. Loves his wife, wouldn’t ever cheat, except maybe just the once…’

  Together in the deep field. He sways, filled with the invisible lightning of past decisions, blind turns missed in the dark. Over in the grass—is that a dying bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue? ‘I’m sorry, kid. I gotta go.’

  ‘Don’t call me kid.’

  ‘Let’s put you in a cab.’

  ‘Question,’ she says. ‘Answer.’

  His eyes shutter like they didn’t want to hear it. Back in the day he would quiz her about cases, commencing always this same way: Question, Answer. Thrown now in his face like well-deserved sulphuric. ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘William Meath conviction. Sophie Dance. Was it crook?’

  ‘Never came our way.’

  ‘That isn’t what I asked.’

  He looks at the ground and goes further than the crust, clasping the back of his neck as though his own misbehaving puppy. She knows it as his thinking pose, full-hearted and sincere. ‘Beowulf was an unhappy family.’

  ‘Right. And you know what Tolstoy says about them.’

  He really doesn’t. The grass beneath his feet that winter killed, that revolves like a carpet conveyor belt to take him away, mercifully away. A bruising altercation that has cost him his jacket; he knew it would cost him something. The lights of the Shakespeare swim like buoys and the park is a harbour now, not quite a haven, and it is strange that she doesn’t call or make another chase. Perhaps she is content to be alone now, returned unto the native state. Bob Mack realises with a sick gush that he can’t go back in the Shake, not with this smell of blood earth upon him, the residues of all the dead and broken country. Instead he drifts leeward on the empty tide, anchorless, a cat that had its whiskers cut, and passes away entirely.

  07

  Surry has been Gomorrah, a wretched slum in which the lean-tos piled four or five high, sewage drizzling from the joint above your head. Drip drip drip said the wretched concentration camp, every suited man sporting scars across his face, blades upon his person. Cocaine was the trade and the gangsterism total and the typhoid roamed in backstreets like a crier. You have seen that clan in Gore Street photos and been shaken to the bone, rattled by a citizenship no force might police. That tribe was rat, their infestation total, the rat was their brother species.

  —

  They encourage you to see it as a land in constant crisis. The brass, the media. News is only ever about the wickedness in people—their failings, the disasters that befall them. Either way the moral is clear: your innocent are daily crushed.

  Cops exist on-site, at the daily exchange of that particular information. The coalface. Strange that every constabulary is emblemised by a shield.

  No—you only come in once the crime is committed, once the opportunity to protect is past. The sworn are just hunting dogs, retributionist, our logo should be a big spiked club.

  —

  The names, the faces: they cannot be mapped. No cartography can answer the brief, who did what and where, all of it charted back through time until you know your nation truly, its every shocking parliament. A city is not a city, just a Codex Infinite of things gone wrong, a palimpsest of murder and robber, liar and rape.

  And what are you? Just another fucking Sleepwalker, coming in late to catalogue the fucked-up happenstance. Your private landmarks submerge in the traffic, more vivid and intense because awful. A stabbing here, a strangling there, the Book of Fucking Evil made of papers on your desk.

  07

  Karen hates the Basement. Prefers the morgue. At least the dead are sterilised, processed, shipped away. The morgue feels clean because there’s so much traffic.

  Not this place. The stink of death is not in the death, it’s in the static. Dust and elongation, time measured in months at its merest increment, particles that fill your hair and mouth with the slow atomisation of a million unloved files. Karen breathes the paper mites and they breathe her back, settling in her lungs like hard fact gone to dirty air.

  Cold cases, the unavenged, connections missed and the leads not followed. All the malfeasance that self-committed and got away with itself. Suck it in, scrub it off, shit it out, shit it away.

  They do not call the morgue the morgue. They call the Basement the Morgue. The morgue they call the Freezer or the Fridge.

  —

  Scully is bespectacled, chews gum, looks at objects with unsparing intensity. He never relinquished his obsession with the conundrum: what holds it all together? A pencil is more fascinating than a man, a paperclip than a woman. To solve the deep mystery of any one thing would be to solve the Lot. He stands above her vanilla book with a presiding air, turning a page with a pair of tweezers. Scully looks like a hairdresser between appointments, consulting New Idea. He looks like a praying mantis with a pure maths degree.

  ‘Is it Koestler’s writing?’

  Scully nods without looking up. ‘Confirmative.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘It’s shit. The whole, ahem, science.’

  ‘Did the judge write that thing or didn’t he?’

  ‘Of course he did. But there’s a page missing. Extracted—see here? Look at the seam, Kara. A very careful penknife.’

  ‘Significant?’

  Scully frowns. ‘This is serious paper, Florentine vellum. Not the kind of thing you slice and dice.’

  ‘What about the content.’

  The alteration in her tone doesn’t move him. ‘I didn’t read it.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘No interest.’

  ‘But it’s evidence.’

  ‘From the human
side,’ he says. ‘And I don’t deal in that. What’s the genesis?’

  ‘Chris Slane gave it to me in the back of a cinema.’

  ‘Wasn’t asking about your love life.’

  ‘Boom-tish. Whose prints are on what?’

  Scully handles the journal back into its zip-lock with white cloth gloves. ‘Koestler’s all over it. As for this’—he indicates the outer envelope—‘we have Kara’s grubby mitts, plus those of the aforementioned Christopher Slane.’

  ‘I didn’t know we had Slane’s on file.’

  ‘We don’t. So know it—but don’t use it.’

  ‘Exactly what the fuck can I use?’

  ‘Ooh, she’s tetchy.’ Scully walks across and triggers the intercom. ‘Fenton? The yellow folder on my desk—bring it down would you.’ Karen watches him return to the table with an arctic gaze, one the scientist refuses to notice.

  ‘I thought you understood,’ she says, sounding dangerous. ‘Why do you think I come here after hours?’

  ‘Why—all the better to seduce me.’

  ‘Who the hell is Fenton?’

  ‘Trainee, very efficient. And deeply incurious if that’s what you’re concerned about.’

  ‘Meaning he doesn’t give a shit about the human side?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  The silence that follows is awkward. Scully likes it least. ‘Shouldn’t you be out drinking somewhere?’

  No—she shouldn’t. She drank last night and it was a rolled-gold disaster. ‘Why, because everyone else is?’

  ‘You gotta live, girl. Otherwise, what’s it for.’

  ‘I’m planning a hot get-together with Rex Faulkner one of these nights.’

  ‘I do worry.’

  Fenton enters, weedy and red of hair, everything you’d expect of a kid called Fenton. He parks the yellow folder and departs, doesn’t look at her. Scully busies himself with a beaker of something blue.

  She starves to touch it but that would be taking the bait. Scully is toying with her, punishing her want of trust. Karen looks around at the low ceiling, the dim fluorescence and elongated sinks. ‘Place looks like a science room.’

  ‘I like to think so.’

  ‘You know what I mean. Like high school.’