Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  Faulkner exhales. A genie in the air, struggling to form, to come alive and grant wishes. But it’s not that sort of environment. ‘The bloke is a Supreme Court Justice. They’re not going to send a pair of gadgets.’

  ‘You made him feel important, listened to.’

  ‘Sure. Like the bosses wanted.’

  ‘The car show up?’

  ‘From memory. Too exotic to move. The muppet probably didn’t realise what he’d lifted.’

  ‘Dumped, was it.’ Faulkner shrugs again; this time it isn’t so tiny. ‘Small world,’ she says, ‘you ending up as primary on his murder case.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Must be fewer Homicide detectives in this town than I thought.’

  ‘Yeah—and fuck-all worth the title.’

  Nicely landed. Karen changes, becomes the notebook checker, the reader out loud of words she did not write. ‘Afternoon: visited in chambers by three detectives. Rex Faulkner, Roger Paspaley, Ajax.’ Faulkner waits, makes her say it. ‘Who’s Ajax?’

  ‘Haven’t the faintest,’ he says. ‘The way I remember, it was just the two of us.’

  ‘Sure about that?’

  ‘Pretty fucken.’

  ‘Strange how it says three.’

  ‘I’m a gun,’ says Rex. ‘Worth double.’

  Again no modicum of offence. Life has bled him dry. Or maybe he was always like this: ghostly, deprived of vivid internal colours. Maybe he became actual via the wife’s electricity and that is why he loved her.

  ‘Did it give you the shits, running round town for a stolen car?’

  ‘A stolen Daimler.’

  ‘Yeah—I heard. Owned by a Supreme. Where can I find Paspaley?’

  ‘Christ knows.’

  ‘Scattered to the wind?’

  ‘Sure. Like all that crew.’

  ‘You mean the Cavendish Crew. Holden part of that?’

  ‘You’re stretching the friendship now,’ says Faulkner. ‘Keeping track of who ran with who was never really my hobby.’

  ‘But you running with Paspaley is strange to begin with. You’re both Homicide, but different commands.’

  ‘Scrambled at random. Just happened to be up at St James that day.’

  ‘Coincidence,’ says Karen. ‘It’s a powerful force.’

  ‘Most powerful one there is, I reckon.’

  She nods. Somewhere, above and beyond, a Friday Night City is in effect. But down here it’s nothing, no time or space, just a fixed and single point. She stands and raps the desk in farewell: knock-knock, only this time it’s a wrap. ‘Sorry I bothered you. Thanks for the help.’

  ‘No sweat,’ says Faulkner.

  Not a truer word spoken.

  03

  You don’t have anything profound to say. You hope it doesn’t occur to you to try. Liam’s teacher says that words are ‘systems’. That must be what they’re peddling these days.

  Well, you work inside a system.

  You know exactly what it’s good for, what it’s worth.

  —

  Liam. The only person who matters that you never tape. What need? A moment with him feels memorable forever. The weight of him in your lap, never so uncomfortable that you would want him off. The press of his warm skin—always such a hot, such an overheating child—and the tidal feel of kindred blood.

  No, kindred beyond blood: Liam is not a biological relation. But from the moment you meet him as a gasping baby, you feel actually that he is yours. You are twenty-five years old and knowing for a long time that you want Robert out of your life. But then the kid arrives, Holly’s one meaning ful gesture, and suddenly—Gawd strewth—you’re in it for the haul.

  03

  ‘Did you ever arrest somebody you knew was innocent?’

  The man who asks the question is named Edward. Karen was invited to call him Eddie, but that is a like a Tasmanian PM or Queensland Sheffield Shield: it’s never going to happen.

  ‘Why the hell would I do that.’

  Edward’s shrug is even-handed. ‘Leverage, maybe.’

  ‘Leverage?’

  ‘I’m not judging, just trying to understand.’

  ‘Understand what.’

  ‘We all have difficult decisions to make. Moral hazard, et cetera.’

  This is him being sympathetic, fraternal. This is him comparing what he does all day to what Karen does all day. Edward is a stockbroker who specialises in off-shore derivatives. Holly, the hostess, walks in with a bowl of green salad and wonders who needs a drink.

  ‘Me,’ says Karen.

  ‘That wine working out for you?’

  ‘Not as yet.’

  —

  Dinner at her brother’s. Ambush. She should be better than that. Edward works with Robert and the two are hard to tell apart. Money as a game, a concept, a residue they do not try to swab. They don’t seem actual.

  She only came to see Liam and Liam has gone to bed. He is almost seven, and his pyjamaed goodnight was said to the adults when the football kicked off. Now the game is muted in the background and Karen keeps an occasional eye on the score, thinking of Brendan Tavish in the stands with his boy. She hopes they’re having a better time than she is.

  They’d bloody have to be. Robert always looks so pleased with himself and Karen always stares at him sidelong, obliquely curious, wondering how and why.

  —

  ‘That thing we talked about,’ says Holly. ‘Did you look into it?’

  The other reason she came. Had to get it out of the way sometime. Couldn’t bear a secret session, some dopey mid-morning brunch in a Crows Nest café.

  ‘Yeah,’ says Karen. ‘I did.’

  Her and her sister-in-law in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher. The volume has been turned up on the game and the menfolk, the male children, are glued to it. They are rugby types, not league followers, but blokes will watch anything if it’s live.

  ‘Well? The suspense is killing me.’

  Karen likes Holly but she can’t respect her: Holly’s choice in men is too suspect. ‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘He isn’t cheating on you.’ Holly closes her eyes—the relief of a kept woman—and files away a dessert bowl using muscle memory. Then she doesn’t move at all for a bit.

  Such a pretty girl. Could have had her pick. But the world was so frightening and Robert was so sure.

  ‘This is definite, yes?’

  ‘I used a pro,’ says Karen—and in a strange flash sees Million Percent beneath the searching examination of Dapto lights. ‘Trust me.’

  Or maybe it isn’t relief: the look on Holly’s face has no precedent and Karen doesn’t know what to call it. The wife speaks in the dead voice made for confessing, used by informers. ‘He thinks you don’t like him.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Robert.’

  Always such a haunted voice. You have to go very far from yourself, feel like someone else in order to get it done. ‘Can I borrow the study? I’ve got some work stuff to take care of.’

  Holly smiles assent. Karen walks briskly away from that dog-track desperation, a rabbit motored onward by cowardice and lie.

  —

  ‘What are you playing?’

  The space is masculine. Robert’s idea of class is Encyclopaedia Britannica plus a big globe that dwarfs everything else in the room. Pseudo antique, the little light bulb inside. This is what they thought it looked like in 1650, no Australia whatsoever.

  Karen looks up and her smile is full, instinctive. Liam in the doorway, small for his age, a silhouette against the backdrop of hallway light. She puts a finger to her lips and motions him closer. He’s not alone, he’s got his bear.

  ‘You okay, love?’ Liam nods. He is curious. ‘This is my work,’ she says. On the desk, Robert’s chessboard is being put through its paces. You can tell a lot about a man from the set he chooses to buy and never play. It’s sizeable—almost heavy enough to kill someone with—and vulgar with expense. Pieces that look like glass but are crystal. ‘Come on, sit on m
y lap.’

  Next to the board is Koestler’s secret piece of paper. Codex One, all the frenzied chess. Or non-chess: Karen has spent a week puzzling the directions, making the pieces move. It don’t mean nuthin.

  ‘You okay, buddy?’

  ‘Are you really my auntie?’

  ‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Karen kisses his head. Johnson & Johnson, the cleanest hair she’ll ever meet. ‘Have you been talking to mum?’

  Liam nods the way little kids do—with unashamed conviction. Karen shifts a rook the way no rook was ever meant to be shifted and thinks about her next move.

  I love you, kiddo. We are family forever.

  ‘You’re making letters,’ says Liam, and knocks the big globe sideways.

  02

  The wind, handmaiden of the cold, the cold more acute because the city doesn’t look it. Crisp sun, clear sky: Sydney tries hard to look the same in every season. A tourist could picture postcard it for relatives in distant countries and they’d mistake it for summer, for paradise. Facts come second when you’re proving how much character you’ve got.

  Now they’re putting the hat around for Charlie King. You don’t know Charlie but you know the story. Last year’s shooting, the one that made a celebrity out of Sphinx Avenue, a sworn member dead and another one maimed. Padstow: it’s in the news all over again, regurgitated for public consumption, the District Court sentencing the heroin kid what done it.

  No, not a kid—they tried him as an adult. Nathan Derrick, behind bars now and for eternity to come. Grand Theft Oxo. Just a shitbag, really—small time, disappointingly so.

  Come on, Charles—if you’re gonna get nailed out there, get nailed by a Name, a Face, someone who makes you talked about forever, your spilt blood coupled with their toxic fame. Not some bloody Nathan just casually off his head, guilty of nothing before the day you met except for crimes against himself.

  —

  Brendan offers you half his spaghetti. You tell him you’re sweet.

  —Come on, Kaz. A girl can’t live on Berocca alone.

  —She can try, die skinny.

  —Bullsugar. You eat what you want, all that running.

  His instincts are not mistaken: you did not eat today and now the day is done. When you turn the corner for the carpark you are smashed by a bitter headwind, a stinging newsfront about hunger and alone.

  Relief: Carmel Waters is close at hand, a fridge full of food and a blanket that works. So lucky. So much more luck than Nathan ever had. At seventeen just a shitbag, true—but not at twelve when he went to live under the bridge, earn his PhD in hunger and alone.

  —

  When Charlie’s hip begins to ache, he takes a double scotch and projects a world without Nathan. So do They.

  Fuck that.

  Fuck utopia and fuck cashless. Fuck thumbprint scan and fuck retina. Fuck world without crimes, world without secrets. Fuck life with our souls turned inside out, bleached clean, broken into cohorts. Fuck chat and fuck records. Fuck leaders, fuck convenience, fuck sensible, fuck systems, fuck you.

  02

  Thou still unravished bride of quietness. Lenny can’t come to museums without thinking of it—not when she sits like this, darkened in a darkened wing, airless and air-conditioned, climates perfect for stillness. Perfect for feeling that you would be more true and more beautiful if only more patient, more antique in your approach. Like that softly lit urn behind the glass over there, its immortal knack for being solely about itself.

  —

  She looks like the Helen Appleton of Karen’s imagination: frizzy hair, brown clothing. Karen watches her root around in an overlarge handbag, its straps looping an arm that extends high and wide like scaffolding, not part of her body at all. Her free hand and entire head are lost within, nosing and foraging, apparently in vain. She looks like a bag lady, like an overgrown Womble, like the opposite of Karen in every conceivable way.

  —

  ‘Lost something?’

  Lenny surfaces. Blinking, exasperated. ‘My fucking mind.’

  ‘Sounds serious.’

  ‘Swore I brought the other purse.’ Lenny surrenders and lets the scaffolding disintegrate; the bag drops, no safety net, and sprawls on the floor like a mob hit. ‘Give me caffeine or give me death.’

  Karen sits on the divan, armless and cushioned, next to Lenny but facing the other way. ‘Sorry for the late notice. Where’ve you come from?’

  ‘Blue Mountains,’ says Lenny. ‘Faulconbridge.’

  ‘Fair haul. ‘

  ‘Maybe it’ll be worth my while. How bout you?’

  ‘I’m over at Five Dock. Apartment.’

  ‘Solo?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Half your luck,’ says Lenny. ‘I’m in with three males. All they do is sleep and eat and fight.’

  ‘Teenagers?’

  ‘Cats. Has something happened?’

  Ten-fifteen. Lenny would have got the page about six. No one gets up earlier than that on a Saturday except the yoga crew, and she doesn’t belong to that. A homebody, her and the felines, incessant cups of tea and a worshipped fireplace. Once upon a time the office behaved itself, but then it ran free, overflowed, became a raging Volga of books and folders, mags and press clippings, a house-wide inundation of words whose reading-day shalt never come. Lenny would have left about eight. She could have called and rescheduled, begged for recess, but she didn’t. Got herself together and down to the station.

  Or almost together. Brought the wrong purse.

  ‘Rawson’s gone to ground,’ says Karen. ‘Vapour trail.’

  ‘AWOL?’

  ‘Sort of. He fed Bercovitch some crap about us being involved. Romantically. On the back of that, Tony gave him leave. This was a week ago and no one’s seen the bastard since.’

  ‘Gawn fishin. Did you talk Tone around?’

  ‘Fuck Tone. He swallowed it, hook line and sinker. Threatened me with suspension.’

  ‘What was Mick’s go, just being a prick?’

  Karen shrugs. ‘I’m pretty jack of the walls these blokes put up. Last start was your man Faulkner. Had to put my manners aside.’

  ‘He push you back?’

  ‘That would require a show of energy.’ Karen doesn’t look at Lenny, doesn’t want to see the wry amusement I-told-you-so dresses up in. It would annoy her to see that. ‘This Koestler book you’re writing. Got a title?’

  ‘The Sicilian Offence.’

  ‘Ah, so you know about that.’

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘It’s not original.’

  ‘I’m happy to pay Rawse commission.’

  ‘His, is it?’

  ‘Yeah. What a wag.’

  ‘Tell me what you know about him.’

  ‘Rawson?’

  ‘Koestler.’

  Mastermind without the bright light: Lenny doesn’t need a studio audience to feel it, the pressure to perform. ‘Is there something riding on this?’ ‘I’m interested in your take.’

  ‘Fair enough. Given names, Angelus Klaus. Born 1926 in Rome, son of a diplomat. Parents fled Europe when he was eleven. Skinny kid with a bad stammer; German surname, Italian accent. Not a real flash look circa 1938.’

  ‘Eesh.’

  ‘Educated at King’s, boarder, then on to Sydney. Pauline, Classics and Law, piano plus a spot of cricket—the inevitable Rhodes. He graduates with a Master of Jurisprudence in 1954 and spends the next two years clerking for Owen Greywater, some kind of big-deal achievement. Admitted to the bar in ’58, the year that sees him engaged to Rosemary Delahunty—she of the Darling Point Delahuntys. Rose dies suddenly before they’re married, blood poisoning, and legend has it that he never looks at another woman again.’

  Karen’s clap is slow but admiring. ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Dodgy on the dates, probably.’

  ‘Sounded spot on to me. But you’re a bit like his diary, telling me everything and nothing. I ask you again, Ms Clarke—what’s your take on the victim?’

&
nbsp; Lenny, mildly stung. She stills herself and concentrates, looking into space, past glass, past the fossil of the prehistoric weevil. ‘Aesthete, loner, highly cultured. Public intellectual in the European sense. You know—the drive to duty, community service. And a collector.’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘Anything. But maybe that’s too vague to earn a mark.’

  ‘No,’ says Karen, ‘you’re right. Koestler was eclectic. If it was old and in good nick he was interested. See anything you like?’

  Lenny straightens her back and crosses her legs. Reads again the unassuming plaque, a pane of bronze against the dark maroon.

  Lonardi Collection

  By anonymous donation, April 1991

  ‘Nice gear,’ says the journalist. ‘Mixed bag, though.’

  ‘Staff here call it the Magpie Room. The interesting thing is that it’s mostly hot. Syria wants the tablet back; the Japs have a claim on the cameo. And let’s not forget my personal favourite, silver grenadier with inlaid timepiece.’

  ‘French?’

  ‘British Museum. They reckon it went missing in ’83.’

  ‘Swag. Where’s this going?’

  Karen stands and approaches the glass. Grecian urn. It’s good that they’re alone. ‘I had a chat with the curator yesterday. He bought me lunch, three courses.’

  ‘With wine?’

  ‘Margaret River all the way.’

  ‘Jesus. Did he spill his guts?’

  ‘Not exactly. The donor’s anonymity is watertight. In fact, the board here reckons the paperwork must have been drawn up by, quote, a legal genius.’

  ‘Fuck. Me.’

  ‘Six or seven governments are suing for returns but the whole thing’s a mess. Sovereignty issues, injunctions, squabbles over jurisdiction.’

  ‘April ’91,’ says Lenny. ‘That’s the month before Koestler died.’

  ‘As opposed to the month after. This treasure was given up, not left behind.’

  ‘A lifetime’s work. You think he just handed it over?’

  ‘Willing to slide in that direction,’ says Karen. ‘Was he nostalgic about his childhood?’

  The journalist nods. ‘The mother came from money. Italian countess. The villa, the servants.’