‘Cookie and Spanner have been here a lot longer,’ I ventured.
‘Son, some people will never amount to anything.’
He sat looking at me and I became very uncomfortable but I met his eye. This was not a simple conversation about taking on a greater role. It never was. Nothing about Palmenter was straightforward.
‘We got a problem, Son. That double-crossing son-of-a-bitch Newman wants out.’
At some level I didn’t see a problem with that. Like me, Newman seemed to have little to do. He arrived with each import in the chopper but exactly what his role was I didn’t know. But I knew the reality. No one left this place.
‘Do we need him? What does he do?’ I asked. As I said it a wave of nausea came over me. What had I just suggested? That we drive out to the pit with him like we did with Arif? What had I become? I sat most days in my little office off the back verandah and had little to do with the people. By hiding in my office, shuffling numbers and invoices around in neat columns, I could avoid thinking about all that was. The deaths. The murder. The refugees. Guilt and compassion pushed aside by keeping busy.
‘Unless we do something he’ll take us down. Threatening to spill the beans. He wants to set up a rival operation.’
Behind him across the compound I could see the faded sign on the canteen. Hotel California. I remembered the day I first arrived, when I saw that sign and heard the music from inside.
Palmenter had said something and pushed a gun across the table to me. The dark metal had a presence, a here and now insistence that drew me back to Palmenter who was looking at me for a response.
‘Son?’
‘Spill the beans?’
‘You should know what that means.’ It was a threat.
‘Can we do anything about it? Can we talk him out of it?’
I said ‘we’. I had to. I had the feeling he was setting me up to act alone.
‘Already talked to him. He’s a cunt. He’s going to set up his own operation. Dob us in and set up his own operation, and unlike us he’s got no reason other than to make money. The money-grabbing double-crossing arsehole. You used one of these before?’
He pushed the gun closer.
‘Sure,’ I lied. To avoid looking at him I picked the gun up. It was cold and heavy.
‘When he comes in, he’ll demand money. Cash. He won’t trust me but he’ll trust you. Get him out to the pit. Wait until after he’s refuelled and then drive him out, tell him you are taking him out to where we hide the cash.’
He was telling me to shoot Newman. To do to Newman what he did to Arif. I continued to turn the gun in my hands.
‘Don’t do it till you are out there. Not before. You understand, Son?’
I felt sick. I might have nodded.
‘You sure you used one of these before?’
‘Sure.’
I lifted the gun and aimed across the compound at the Hotel California sign. I squeezed the trigger.
BANG!
‘Jesus, Son.’
‘I didn’t think it would be loaded.’
‘Jesus, Son, what you doing?’
‘Bullseye.’ I signalled the sign across the way. He turned to look. I had no idea if I’d hit the building, let alone the sign, but he turned to look. His bull neck was sweaty. I saw wispy grey hairs and folds of fat and ugliness. He grunted, like a pig. That was the last thing he ever did.
I talked. I became even more incoherent with beer and exhaustion but also strangely aware, as if I was a person outside of myself watching a group of fishermen trying to make sense of my garbled words. I saw the camp guide become increasingly worried that he could not raise Spanner on the radio. Had they not believed me about the crocodile? When a helicopter – not ours but a small black one – flew in low from the east and disappeared towards the main camp his mood changed and he pulled out the satellite phone, but I did not care because I was in the middle of telling them about Cookie and Judy and their kid playing and laughing and ‘Finish up here’ and muffled gunshots under the sound of the chopper and they were now dead and I was sobbing. They never had a chance. Maybe Charles and Simms got away. At least down at the waterhole Ingrid and Sally would be okay. But then I thought of all the others, those five unnamed, and Arif, and then how many more? People who had escaped from one crisis to build themselves a second chance, only to have Palmenter take it away.
And as I watched myself see all of this, I remembered Spanner. We were talking that time when he told me about the extra bodies in the pit. How hard had it been for him to discover that, and then to tell me about what he had seen? That was the moment we decided we had to escape to Perth. At the end of that conversation he had carefully poured his beer out in that considered way he did so many things. But the way he did it, watching the flow of beer dissolve into the earth, it was like it was the end of one thing and the beginning of another. As I remembered that, I came back into my exhausted self and then I poured my beer slowly and deliberately into the sand.
Great reads from Fremantle Press
Conway inhabits an apocalyptic future in a continent caught up in a violent struggle for control of water. On the run from the Water Board flunkies who hate him, but who need his water divining skills to survive, Conway dreams his way back to the arrival of Europeans in Western Australia when Captain Charles Fremantle chooses to throw off the mantle of Empire and join the Nyoongar people.
‘Docker conjures up a tantalising vision of what might have been.’
— Sydney Morning Herald
It is 1968. All around the world people are marching, protesting, fighting for freedom and free love.
Jack Muir arrives in the islands fresh out of Grammar School: a failure, a virgin, and a reluctant employee of The Colonial Bank of Australia. Life in the islands is raw, sensuous, real. Here, the white man takes what he wants. But the veneer of whiteness is flimsy, and brutality never far from the surface.
‘...a relentless rawness ... that make its moments of tenderness hit their mark even more keenly.’
—Bookseller+Publisher
Cambridge linguist Edvard Tøssentern, presumed dead, reappears after a balloon crash. When he staggers in from a remote swamp, gravely ill and swollen beyond recognition, his colleagues at the research station are overjoyed. But Edvard’s discovery about a rare giant bird throws them all into the path of an international crime ring.
‘Evocative writing, in which the science is an essential character. The ideas stimulate and mesmerise.’
—Robyn Williams, ABC Radio National, The Science Show
For six special people, reality is about to become a bit more real.
Without their knowledge, Kathy, Mario, Garry, Hannah, Robert and Julia are about to participate in the ultimate game of manipulation. A stranger brings them together, but can this ruthless puppeteer really be held responsible for the choices they make?
In the end, who is to blame for their actions: for their deceit, infidelity and crime?
At the heart of this thought-provoking novel lie questions of fate and self-determination.
First published 2014 by
FREMANTLE PRESS
25 Quarry Street, Fremantle 6160
(PO Box 158, North Fremantle 6159)
Western Australia
www.fremantlepress.com.au
Also available as a print book.
Copyright © Martin Chambers, 2014.
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Consultant editor Georgia Richter
Cover design Ally Crimp
Printed by Everbest Printing Company, China
National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
/> Chambers, Martin, author.
How I became the Mr Big of People Smuggling / Martin Chambers, author.
9781922089557 (eBook)
Jackeroos—Australia—Fiction.
Ranches—Australia—Fiction.
Human smuggling—Fiction.
A823.4
Fremantle Press is supported by the State Government through the Department of Culture and the Arts.
Publication of this title was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling Page 24