‘Don’t know.’
‘Yes you do.’
Sutton folds his arms, something mechanical in the gesture: it belongs to one whose core has been extracted by experiment. Rawson realises the glasses are empty so he rises and repeats the trip, Sutton’s safely delivered for a change. Some instrument from the radio piques Bloke’s fine hearing and he is heard to howl.
‘After the job,’ says Rawson. ‘Tell me then.’
‘Done.’
‘Unless it’s Rob. Or Steele. Because that would be a great fucken omen.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Nother?’
‘No.’
They shake and Sutton goes, a man and wolf that vanish into hinterland. Bobby Cobra watches them go from the doorway too small and calls at the moment their shapes become uncertain.
‘This plane ticket you got me. I’m up in Business, right?
18
—Saturday is two years, detective.
—A hundred and four weeks without justice. Off with our heads.
—Weekend Australian is running a feature about it. Six thousand words about who killed the judge.
—Careful, Lenny. They’ll steal your thunder.
—It’s that bitch Celia Corbie. She couldn’t write Fantales.
—She called me up, wanted an interview. Never did get back to her.
—Good girl. Trained you well.
—What does Ajax mean to you?
—God, this wine is good…It’s a soccer club isn’t it?
—He was the big one. At Troy.
—Yeah right.
—Come on, Ms Clarke. The traffic is two-way on this part of the course.
—Bob Mack never told you? Mock Hero club? All their codes and rituals?
—No: he didn’t. And now it’s getting late.
—Alright, keep your pants on.
—
—Coming up I had the Druitt Street round. Quite the education. Allocation is supposed to be random, but there’s something about that court, just always attracts the seed, the drama. The celebrity crooks went through it like a revolving door. Celebrity coppers, too.
—Blokes like Rawson.
—The world had more characters then. Rawse was second generation, second tier. He couldn’t match Cavendish for theatre, sheer magnetism.
—That’s a fair rap you’re giving Cavendish.
—Éamon had this dark charisma; it just hit you, wave after wave. Doesn’t matter what they say about him now, what they whisper, the fact is we were lucky. Lucky he was a cop and not the premier or a bloody QC. If he’d been a silk…
—Juries loved him.
—The juries, judges, other cops. Even the villains he was nailing to the wall. You know that tired line, He made me feel like the only person in the world? When you run into that gift the way Cavendish had it, you realise we’re all just little kids. And if someone comes along who makes us feel special…There wasn’t a woman in this town he couldn’t have.
—Handsome. Lady-killer.
—Interesting to look at, sure. Black Irish. But just a born wizard.
—And his Crew?
—It didn’t start out as anything formal. These things are organic—a nickname here, cut corner there. Blokes just gravitated, started reporting to him instead of their supers, asking advice, passing him the dirt they chanced on, all the secrets of the town. And the loyalty was fierce. They’d go around to his place until it became a kind of court. Half of them were only there to see Clem, but it was Cavendish who seduced them.
—Clem?
—His wife, Clementine. Most beautiful woman I ever saw. Was still that at fifty. It was actually creepy / she got more lovely with time. And was almost as good with them as Cav. She wouldn’t sleep with anybody, just had this way of managing the pull, making each of six blokes in a room feel like they were in with a red-hot go. If they could just bide their time, wait for these other five pricks to leave…
—Cavendish wasn’t the jealous type.
—I think he enjoyed the way everybody wanted her, loved seeing that power in action. Ultimately it all fed back to him. Clem was a gangster’s daughter, bred to the Cross, strip-club DNA. The last wave who came through, when the Crew got formal, she was like a mother. But a curdled mum, one who’d teach them things.
—Yuck.
—Blokes are easy. Just boys. He gave them code names and she baked them cookies, threw girls their way. Praise and reward, punish and control. One day you’re flavour of the month round there, golden boy. The next minute you’re a dog, on the outer, no clue why.
—What do you mean about the code names.
—Cav’s IQ was off the Richter, but he left school at fourteen so everything was self-taught. Reading meant a lot to him because he came to it late. Photographic memory, reciting full passages. His go was the classics.
—So…
—So McAllister was Jason and Peters was Heracles. Hardaway was Theseus. The Baster brothers: Castor and Pollux. Caron they called Narcissus.
—Caron?
—He bobbed up late in the piece, twenty-two or something, just a mascot. They knew his old man and liked him for his face. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like they gave him anything important to do.
—Define important.
—Dealing out backstreet justice when the courts fucked up. If a bad creep got a walk, they’d run him out of town. After a while that didn’t seem like enough. Said creep woke up in the harbour.
—Murders.
—Eliminations, yeah.
—Deep end of the pool.
—They were good at it, discreet. Cavendish sold it as a crusade, good men lining the walls when weak men wouldn’t. Later it got grubby, like it does.
—Right. Define grubby.
—Grubby is getting approached to avenge a rape, right, and you accept a little something for it, a per diem. Then you take out the trash and discover it wasn’t rape you were avenging. I mean he looked at her funny, sure, but that wasn’t the offence. The offence was dealing smack on the supplicant’s turf. Et cetera, et cetera. Do that often enough and you’re just muscle for hire. But good muscle: expensive, stuff-all fear of prosecution.
—Cavendish doesn’t sound like someone you’d want to manipulate.
—No one manipulated Éamon. Not ever. He saw everything ten moves ahead in perfect bloody technicolour. It was the boys who never knew the score. They started hitting underground games in the Cross, ripping off bosses because the bosses couldn’t call up to complain. The foot soldiers thought it was a front in the war.
—But it wasn’t.
—Nope: just a very handy way for Clem to raise market share. She had this sprawling mansion in Darling Point, everything paid for by hand jobs and heroin.
—Doesn’t sound very subtle of her.
—Sydney has a way of averting its gaze. You know, until somebody flicks a switch and then it’s all eyes: a million cameras, a thousand outraged voices.
—Not that any of this went public.
—Almost did. One of their operations went to shit. Steve Travis died.
—Travis.
—Perseus. New Year’s Eve, 1987. They hit a bank.
—Jesus, fellas.
—Yeah, but a crooked one. Mafia job. Dead cop, though—it triggered a chain. A few weeks later Bob Mack went up to the Mountain and it was over.
—Over how?
—I don’t know the details. Your ex might be the only one who does.
—Ex?
—Ex-boss. They reckon Bob walked in as game as you like, no gun, just a list of names on a page. Cavendish listened to what he had to say and shook his hand. Poured a double scotch and blew his brains out. The Crew broke up, faded away.
—I think scattered to the wind is the official expression.
—Accurate enough. Harden gassed himself in his Cortina. Paddy Conlon vanished; Paspaley too.
—Paspaley was Ajax.
—Rings a bell.
—What ab
out Rawson. Was he in it?
—Rawson was an outer moon.
—Bob said he hated them.
—Hated them, ran with them, told them to fuck off, ran with them some more. Keeping on the right side of Cavendish without getting sucked in was a full-time job. Pretty important one. Compromising yourself was the easiest thing in the world.
—Are you speaking from experience?
—More or less…For a while I was properly embedded, got confused where my loyalties lay. With the story or with the men? I made mistakes, sat on things I shouldn’t have and misreported others. Drank too much.
—That’s why you understand them. Blokes like Rawson.
—Mick and me were fellow travellers. In a low crowded room, sex and violence flying all over the place, he was the one I knew I could make eyes with. If something was off, or wrong, or funny, he’d clock to it the same way I did. Clem walked in one night, hardly a stitch on, drop-dead gorgeous and working her spells. Forty-seven years old and everything’s in the right place like she’s bloody nineteen. Rawson shakes his head and goes, There’s something rotten in her Denmark.
—Bobby Cobra.
—Yeah, what a waste. I mean, he nailed it, because there was something rotten. You’d look at her and get a hard-on, a lady one, but there was this shudder too, like if you peeled it all back there’d be something horrible underneath, some real bad Dorian Gray shit going on. She was borrowing against the next world at steep bloody interest. All the same, you were jealous.
‘Rust never sleeps,’ says Lenny, red of tooth and gum. Shiraz. ‘Neither does money. Neither does crime.’
‘Neither does Karen.’
Lenny laughs, merry with drink. ‘So, an illegal rust-rustling outfit, headed by you, exchanging rust for hard cash, laundering after dark—that would be the most sleep-deprived organisation in the history of the world.’
Karen’s smile of response is slow but complete. All of the exquisite wine is gone. ‘Crash here if you need to. I’ve got sleeping bags.’
‘I’m gonna lash out and cabcharge it. It’s been a big night.’
‘Sometimes they loiter at the clubhouse. Taxis.’
‘Sweet.’
‘I’ll come with, use the phone box.’
‘You don’t get signal?’
Karen gets signal, but not for this. For this she prefers a different line. ‘It’s patchy.’
No cab; at the club reception they summon one. The women wait kerbside and Karen gathers her hair in her hand, finds it lifeless and dry. She is the miserable before girl in a shampoo ad and says plaintive words to that effect.
Lenny has envy. ‘The moment I schedule an appointment at the hairdresser, bang—hair suddenly looks great. It’s like it hears you and starts to behave.’
‘I’ll give you a copy,’ says Karen. ‘Koestler’s book. But not yet.’
‘Deal. Where to from here?’
‘Visit Helen Appleton and see if she’s sober. Show her Paspaley’s mug and watch delighted as she picks him out, puts him at the house around seven-to-ten minutes before time of death.’
‘Nice. Then extradite said bastard off his fishing boat.’
‘After three minutes of questioning he breaks down. The Pardoner in tears, full confession.’
‘Chief Commissioner Millar.’
‘Paspaley goes away for life and you finish your book, sales through the roof.’
‘Walkley for me, corner office for you.’
‘Done. Dusted.’
The taxi that comes is a station wagon. The special gait of cabs in unknown climes: low gear, hesitant cruise. They say good night and Lenny is taken up, borne away, the light on top extinguished.
Karen weighs her change, forty pieces of counterfeit silver. Call somebody who cares. The number Li gave her is thick in her memory, a sign she’s supposed to use it. A person answers with heavy breath and zero words.
‘You know who this is?’
Always such a haunted voice. You have to go very far from yourself, feel like someone else, in order to get it done. ‘Yeah,’ says the man on the other end. ‘I do.’
‘Gotta pen?’
‘No. But I have a good memory.’
The receiver transmits a subtle hum into her flesh, the city one of those vast machines that loosens atoms in order to see what existence is made of. Loosens and rends: every breath feels broadcast, stalling Millar with a horror she cannot name. Then can: somebody somewhere is recording her voice.
‘South coast,’ she says. ‘Adventure Point Caravan Park. You’re half a chance to find what you’re looking for.’
‘Cool.’
‘Is that it?’
‘For now,’ says the man. ‘Someone’ll be in touch.’
The receiver is a sentient creature in her hand, a living-breathing link. But then the click of transubstantiation, Karen hanging up quick to rub the flesh that felt it die.
17
By midnight there are no jetliners left to distract the men in soulless overalls. For some the international terminal retains a glamour; even cargo services are constant visitors to cities they will never see. A screeching 400 that takes all afternoon to refuel will disappear and then, eight or ten days later, is found to be back again. It has been to Boston, Bishkek, Buenos bloody Aires.
The team leader has led the team for twenty years. He is a no-nonsense temperament who fuels himself on vast quantities of Turkish coffee. Algerian coastline, the dregs of a homeland he will not see again. No one has to tell him what Sans Souci stands for.
A call on the radio says they want him in the yard, the north-west corner where coaches rank in obedience. He walks out of the container office to traverse the metal balcony, yellow floodlights revealing numberless rows of Jap-stamped cars. The robotic worker drones that swarm them. One group, the furthest, is standing doing nothing. He mutters profanely / they give him bloody muppets.
Four-minute walk, the juniors dispersing when he nears. They pass half-hearted shammies across the noses of buses already ticked off, careful not to leave new marks or perform superfluous labour.
‘What’s up?’
The clipboard is passed across / the vacant space indicated.
‘One of these bastards is missing.’
—
‘Demain, je vais en Afrique,’ says the car.
‘Demon jevay Africk.’
‘Tomorrow I go to Africa.’
‘Tomorrow I…why the hell would I do that?’ Rawson hits eject. ‘What you reckon, Black Lips—wanna go to Africa tomorra?’
Bloke says nothing. Bloke does not like the retard Pintara / he does not like the waiting. Rawson agrees on every count but is trying to paddle calm.
The world a tomb, warehouses rearing high on every side to make the Pintara seem small. The Electro-Magnetic is verging on a declaration—We gotta bloody problem—when Sutton’s old girl of a truck rounds the turn, glides phantom towards them. Just the ghost of a pick-up, eyeless in the night, headlights dormant and the grill of her mouth gaping shark-like for eternity. Rawson breathes, aware for the first time that he wasn’t, not really.
Hours to go, but it’s a different story when no sleeps are left to divide you from the deed. Rawson alights and Bloke whines but the copper is deaf to his plea, blind to his full-body wriggle. Rawson applies a key to the roll-up door and lifts the lid on the locker, ten by ten by twelve.
‘Problems?’
‘None,’ says Sutton.
‘How was Bopper’s form.’
‘Coned off his nut.’
‘What?’
‘All good. Present and sober.’
Sutton walks past Rawson into the storage locker, surprised to find it neat. Items that could earn them time.
‘If I poke around.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Am I gonna find those guns.’
‘What guns.’
‘Glocks. Silencers.’
‘Told-ya,’ says Rawson, ‘threw ’em off a bridge. Are you backing her
in or what.’ He grabs the dolly from behind a locker and hauls out his big red toolbox. Sutton doesn’t move.
‘Where’d you get the canister?’
‘Sons of God. Velveteen Rabbit, came back with souvenirs.’
‘When was that, Velveteen Rabbit?’
‘About five years.’
‘And the rifle?’
‘Bought it, ’82, paid cash to a Moldovan.’
‘Any reason you were buying sniper gear in 1982?’
‘Rainy day, mate. Rainy day.’
The articles under discussion sit in plain view. Rawson picks up the canister and says, ‘Riot control.’
‘CS?’
‘What else? I’m not a fucken war crim.’
‘You look like one.’
‘What I look like is a man who used to screw a sheila in Bomb Squad. CS okay with you?’
‘I’ll have a cry.’
‘Fucken breath freshener.’
‘Wouldn’t go that far.’
‘Here. The remote.’
Sutton gets behind the wheel and backs the truck in tight, just enough space for a man to come and go. Sutton gets out and Rawson says Fuck me drunk / I thought this was lost. He is handling an ancient reel, a ragged end of film that flutters like a hanky. ‘The boys found it in the archives at Gore Street, bring it out at Christmas.’
‘If it’s that Blue Movie thing—’
‘No, fuck no. First ever TV performance. Hilton bombing.’
‘Strange thing to show at Christmas.’
‘They don’t do it for a laugh. It’s not funny ha ha / it’s funny peculiar. Some of the old heads, Macdonald and that, they thought they’d throw me to the wolves. I didn’t know the bloke who copped it.’
‘Why funny peculiar.’
‘Cos I’m raw,’ says Bobby Cobra. ‘Lacking so-phista-cation. Until you watch this stuff you don’t realise, but shit—talking to a reporter on the box? Nineteen seventy-eight? Life-changing. Sounded like an Englishman for some reason, talked like a child.’
Bloke elects this moment to talk like a child, utter a withering howl from the shitbox Pintara.
‘Better not let him out.’
‘No,’ says Sutton. ‘Not with this stuff.’
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