The first of the proper fishing boats goes by and they give it a hoy, Bloke barking at the larger vessel’s wake as it proceeds inexorably towards them. But the embrace, when it comes, is of no consequence.
‘Thought about it.’
‘Yeah,’ says Sutton.
‘In?’
‘No. I’m out.’
Rawson hunches over his fishing rod, a dark-purple ugly stick. He looks pinched, haggard, drawn, cold. A blanket drapes his handlebars as though he is persecuted by flu and when Sutton delivers the negation he only sniffs.
‘This spot is fucken dead.’
‘Language.’
‘Well it is.’
Sutton rips the engine into life, piloting the cervix of river. ‘I’ve got the gear,’ announces Rawson when they find a covert bend. It is not defiance / his resignation is plain.
‘No doubt.’
‘If you don’t do it I’ll have to use Bopper. And if I have to use Bopper then someone will die.’
‘Yeah. Him.’
Rawson gets a nibble but the bugger escapes. Sutton gets a bite and lands it, a good-size flathead.
‘That’s the friggin bandit who stole my bait,’ says the Incremental as they net him into the bucket. ‘I warmed him up.’
‘Yep.’
‘Hand us a bloody tin there would-ya.’ The telltale crack of metal on metal, the sigh of compromised can. ‘At least listen to what I put together.’
‘Why.’
‘So you can give me your professional opinion.’
‘Righto.’
Rawson rigs his rod and swivels, expelling Bloke from the boat’s middle section; he arranges the tackle box and spare reels on the cross-seat. ‘This is the branch, this is the truck. The rental—here—gets put into position nice and early. I’m talking seven a.m., bonnet up, note on the windscreen.’
‘When does the truck make delivery.’
‘Right on ten. Has to be a morning drop because of Leslie’s special order.’
‘It always use that spot?’
‘Yep, reserved.’
‘What about street cameras?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Fair enough. And where are you exactly.’
Rawson goes through it with slow care, a measured voice that addresses the contingencies. He talks for five or six minutes, they catch a fish, he talks for five or six more.
‘The key is the shooter when he pisses off. No speed, no screaming tyres. He needs to be effing composed.’
‘He needs to be a lot of things.’
Sutton re-baits, re-casts. The sun must be somewhere but it’s another day of unequivocal overcast. The stench of mangroves is a constant test.
‘What do you reckon.’
‘It’s fine,’ says Sutton. ‘In theory. But it never goes the way it’s supposed to.’
‘You think I don’t know that? I teach this shit.’
‘Then you should know better.’
Rawson lands a customer and finds himself in a bind. Delighted with the catch, childishly so, but also deeply committed to his bout of ill temper. He turns and dumps the fish in the bucket, pretending the feat too everyday for comment.
‘Take the money,’ says Sutton.
It flaps, death throes, the bucket too waterless and small. Bloke frowns at the commotion and stands, paces clumsily, steps on Rawson and tangles the reels.
‘Siddown dickhead!’
Sutton shakes his head. ‘Do you even like flathead?’
‘Fucken hate fish. You know that.’
Sutton tips the hostages back into the drink and twenty minutes later they are landborne again, heading for the chew-and-spew that makes their lethal breakfast.
24
‘It’s me. Have you heard about this thing in the Gong?’
‘Jesus, Kara. What time is it.’
‘Myrmidon. Industrial site at Illawarra.’
‘Oh my god.’
‘Come on—as if you were sleeping.’
Sounds like he was, actually. He croaks into the phone, I’m not going down there.
‘I thought you liked walking the site.’
‘I do,’ says the phone. ‘The way I like fishing. Do you know the last time I went fishing?’
‘Come on, Scull. Please?’
Red boots, champion hair: the geek in him adores the Supergirl, but his concession to love sounds tortured.
‘St Peters station. Twenty minutes.’
—
The woman who sits in the car in the carpark is just a woman. Just an accretion of cells, minerals, amino acids, electrolytes, electro-light impulses that register as memory, false memory. Like there’s any other kind.
—The chess set. Worked it out?
—I won’t haggle.
—Chris said we should work out a price.
—Did you hear what I just said?
—Chill, I know where you’re coming from. I can tell from your numbers.
—This really how you run things? Palms and tea leaves?
—I don’t read palms, Karen. I read people. As for the decisions, Chris makes those.
—Jesus, Li. You’re supposed to be in it for the money.
She hits fast forward, has excellent touch. The practice has made her perfect.
—Myrmidon calls us asymmetric. Do you know what Game calls us?
—Let me guess. You’re family.
—We’re a constituency. And when you have one of those your voice is heard.
—It sounds like a very high-minded entity you’re running over there. How on earth do you manage?
—By meeting core needs.
—Fuck, I’m so sorry I asked.
—Rawson. We want to know where he is.
—What?
—That’s the price.
—Piss off.
—Chris said you’d say that.
—Then he’s a very gifted reader of the situation.
—True.
Long silence. Possibly the woman is flustered, doing sums and hating answers. A budget is something you do until you’d rather do the dishes. Rawson is off-reservation, she says eventually. He isn’t something I think about.
—Then turn your mind to him. Or don’t.
—I haven’t the faintest clue where he is.
—Fair enough.
—Seriously, Li. Get fucked.
—We’re not going to hurt him. It’s the carpenter we want. You know the bloke I mean.
—This isn’t a fucking information exchange.
—No reason to be offended.
—Mate, I click my fingers and it’s on. The Murmurs would kiss my feet for a green light on you lot. Raids, assault squads, shutdowns in the Cross. We can squeeze until your nuts are blue in the face.
—Nothing happens to your colleague. We guarantee it.
—But it’s open season on carpenters, I take it.
—This is a good deal, Karen. A good transact.
—Give the corporate lingo a rest.
—Just don’t take too long to think about it. If we find him ourselves you’ve got nothing to pay with. That would be dumb.
—You’re sitting here asking a sworn member to help organise a hit. Forgive me if I don’t feel like the intellectually challenged person in this conversation.
—We actually used to rate the chippie. He was like us, asymmetric. But we have constituents to think about. It’s business.
—It’s out of the question is what it is.
—This phone number is good for three days. Like the offer. The man on the tape laughs. Myrmidon would kiss your feet, would they…I like that.
The woman in the car removes the cassette from the player. The device is expensive, miniature in scope, digital analogue to her emotional life. Protective mechanism: she teases out the ribbon and rolls a ball, chews and swallows like it’s a snack designed for robots.
—
Detective Millar gets a good run down King Street, but only because it’s five forty-two in the grey and
raining morning. Coming back it’ll be gridlock, the very worst thoroughfare in a bad-traffic town. No: coming back she’ll take a different route, needle up through the arse of Erko or Alex.
Look at that weirdo she says inside, pulling in behind a hazard-blinking milk truck that’s servicing a snack bar. Grubby neck of the woods, the weirdo in question goalpost-thin, draped in a trenchcoat and topped by an angler’s hat. He switches out of loiter mode and crosses, holding the vintage headwear tight to his head, loping while crouched as though braving the blades of a chopper.
‘I like your fancy cap.’
‘Hm?’
She thought he wore it because of the fishing remark—nice touch, nice acknowledgment—but the blankness in Scully’s bauxite eyes says different: it was just the thing he grabbed to put on his noggin on the way out the door. Tweed, studded with feathered hooks and elaborate lures, a shouted advertisement of eccentricity. Scientist minds don’t fathom cool—cool to them is meaningless data, readily discarded, flim-flam from the real world, the fake world.
Scully’s grumpy. ‘I thought you had a partner for this sort of thing.’
‘He’s tied up,’ says Karen. ‘They reckon there’s a sex pest working this end of town. Seen any perverts about? We think he’s wearing a trenchcoat and a funny hat.’
‘Oh, she’s firing on all cylinders today.’ He turns to glance at the back seat, its dishevelled array of stacked folders and corpulent boxes. ‘The modern workplace—spacious, secure, neatly arranged.’
‘I hate the clubhouse. You know that.’
‘Always pegged you for a neat freak. Look at this, bloody shocking what they let you check out these days.’
‘Check out? What’s that.’
‘Jesus, if someone steals this car you’re stuffed.’
‘Redirect your attentions to the glovebox, Professor. Earn your keep.’
He does as told, spots the zip-lock bag. Old friend, he says to the alphanumeric page. ‘Beaten it?’
‘My kid nephew did. The pieces are making letters.’
‘Don’t insult me.’
‘But backwards—and upside down.’
‘Wow…What did he do, run the moves in a mirror?’
‘Something like that.’
‘How old is this kid?’
‘Eight.’
‘Eight?’
‘More to the point, profoundly dyslexic.’
‘Ah.’ Scully quietly loves it—burning the highway and leaving Sydney behind, the woman of his dreams at the wheel and a fresh development in the swag. ‘He sees in ways that we cannot. Good kid?’
Liam? Liam is the best. ‘You reckon Myrmidon’ll let us on?’
‘Depends who’s there,’ he says.
‘I know Caron Daley.’
‘Know him? Is that what you call it.’
‘Get stuffed. One night, tequila. Can’t a girl live it down?’
‘No,’ says Scully emptily. ‘A girl can’t.’
Karen takes her eyes off the road, concentration dislodged by the morose in his voice. ‘Is something wrong?’
‘I’m thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘Lightning. Addiction.’
Human silence. The rubber on the busted highway goes voom voom voom. The car needs new tyres—and a new highway. A wheel somewhere is out of alignment.
—
‘Look at this shit.’
The louring sky was supposed to lighten and moderate, see reason, give way to cold but clear winter’s day. Instead it got cranky and resorted to spite, its best remaining power. As they hit the Shire it darkens and twenty minutes later it’s hovering about their ears, knocking at windows, converting itself like a drummer gone from jazz to rock. The wipers start out casual, on-call—then they get brisk and then manic and then unequal to the task. It’s bloody pissing down.
‘What’s happened here, then.’
Three-car smash at a principal intersection: people can’t drive when it’s dry, add sudden torrential and it’s gumbytown. The world before Engadine is just a wet sea plus brake lights, cars packed like pilchards, like the cans that pilchards come in. ‘Hope they’ve got the tents up.’
He means the techs on site; Karen visions a zombie arm coming out of the gravel, enlivened by the criminal rain. Random downpours are bad for traffic / worse for crime scenes.
It’s a nasty complication. ‘Myrmidon aren’t gonna let us on.’
‘No,’ says Scully.
‘Not even you?’
‘Doesn’t belong to me yet. Astronauts.’
‘Slane’s crew,’ she says softly. ‘I feel it.’
‘Witchy woman.’
A bolt of electricity. It varicose veins the sky, attended closely by a king hit of thunder, the unseen accomplice. Karen stares like catatonia and speaks in a barren voice. ‘Lightning. Addiction. Elaborate.’
‘It doesn’t let up. Not ever.’
‘Addiction?’
‘Lightning. There’s not a single minute when it isn’t hitting somewhere on the planet. Twenty million years without a break in the weather.’
‘What happened twenty million years ago?’
‘Nothing. Go further: thirty million, forty. How old is lightning? When was the last moment without it?’
‘It’s just energy.’
‘Everything’s just energy.’
‘Not me,’ says Karen. ‘I’m tired as fuck.’
‘No, Kara. You’re lightning.’
‘And addiction—what were you thinking about that?’
‘How it’s binary in nature. Zero and one.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘The space where it lives. The addict doesn’t want a thousand beers, a thousand lines. She just wants one.’
‘The next one. After that she stops.’
‘That’s how we fuck it up—one fag at a time. One phone call, one needle, one biscuit, one root.’
‘One kiss. One word.’
‘One clue.’ Scully looks at her with real tenderness, real sensitivity to
the strange slanted beauty of her. ‘Fenton saw you the other night.’
‘Is that so.’
‘Ja. Sleepwalkers. You were camped in the archives, all the way down.’
‘I didn’t spot him.’
‘Course not. Fenton’s a platypus.’
‘Duck-billed?’
‘Pathologically shy.’ Scully’s voice becomes accusatory. ‘It was two-bloody-thirty in the morning.’
‘Jesus, man—I was looking something up. If he was down there then I’m allowed to be.’
‘He doesn’t get up to go running at five, six, seven a.m.’
Lassitude: she breaks into pantomime sobs, putting it on like a toddler about to tantrum. A car ahead is painfully wedging itself into the slow convoy and Karen makes a decision, nabs the sudden park it left behind. She hangs her head when they come to rest, looking unconscious, looking tired, tired, tired. The low voice of the radio and the rhythm of the rain, the beat of Scully’s kind avuncular regard. ‘I’ll buy you breakfast.’ She nods robotically, accepting the offer, shutting herself tightly against the mercury-poisoned world. He says, ‘How did you know about this Myrmidon find?’
Reboot: the burning circuits in her eyes awaken in the gloaming of a grey car in a grey month in a grey city. Karen likes low cloud, winter rain: they make existence feel cloistered, immediate. Not like empty sky, direct sunshine: these induce the opposite sensation, the blank and idiot summer called eternity. Sun is the tyrant that takes you back to the agora at Rome, Athens, Corinth, Troy…what came before Troy?
‘Atlantis.’
‘Come on—it’s not that wet.’
‘Myrmidon threw Brendan a scrap,’ she says, still trance-like. ‘We’re supposed to be sharing.’
‘So you do have a partner for this sort of thing.’
‘He’s got Buckley’s. Would you let Brendan Tavish onto your restricted crime scene?’
‘I don’t know Brendan
Tavish.’
‘You don’t know anyone. You know Fenton.’
‘A bikie grave in Illawarra. What’s the link to Koestler?’
‘There isn’t one,’ says Karen quietly. ‘I just really needed to get the fuck out of Sydney.’
Scully goes again for the glovebox and the zip-lock. Now he is the fisherman, wading into parts of the fast-moving river that are not customary. ‘So, thanks to your nephew the pieces are making letters. What do they say?’
‘Nothing. White noise again.’
‘Show me.’
Karen unclips and turns, contorts herself, a human bridge to the chaotic back seat. The new scrap of paper she gives Scully isn’t zip-locked. Her own neat handwriting in block letters, zero spaces, six or seven hundred characters. Scully sighs. ‘It is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing.’
‘Codex One is really Codex Two. Antique cryptogram.’
‘Is that what codebreakers said?’
She nods. ‘We need the cipher—the password that unlocks it. Without it we’re talking five or six months. And that’s if they ask Uni to borrow the computer.’
‘Right. Better get the cipher then.’
‘I’m having a dip, mate, trust me. Here go—list of my attempts so far. A hundred and seventy-two and counting.’
‘Methodical; good girl. Enogitna?’
‘That would be the name of Koestler’s cat. Backwards.’
‘So we’re at that point are we.’
‘Oh, I’ve glimpsed it, Scull—insanity. The worst part is I liked it.’
‘I’ve got some contacts with the Feds.’
‘As in American ones?’
He nods. ‘Proper cryptos. Langley.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘Truth. I chaired a conference last year on bloodspatter. Pittsburgh. Now they send me the stuff that baffles them, reckon I’m a rockstar authority.’
‘Nothing would surprise me,’ says Karen, her tone of voice suggesting that really nothing would.
—
Dreams shouldn’t be literal. They should be hard to remember, hard to fathom. That’s how it goes in a healthy subject.
‘Coffee?’
‘Tea,’ says Scully to the waitress. ‘And two Big Breakfasts.’
‘How do you want the eggs?’
Winter Traffic Page 27