Good Money

by J. M. Green

  And there was Mabor.

  Right there. Mabor Chol, Adut’s younger brother, sitting in a booth across the aisle. Opposite him, sipping a cappuccino, was a man in a purple velvet dinner jacket, open-necked shirt, and aviator sunglasses. Normally, this would be amusing — deserving a chuckle, at least — but at that moment in time, my brain was incapable of humour.

  I slumped down to avoid him seeing me. In a semi-crouch, with my face down, and still holding my tea, I squeezed out of the booth and headed to the back of the restaurant. Then I doubled back and slid into the booth behind Mabor. If I glanced in the mirror on the opposite wall, I could see Mabor mangling the straw in his milkshake.

  Bits of their conversation drifted back to me.

  Mabor, fidgeting: ‘He has to fucking suffer. Like me and Mum and the girls. Like we all are suffering.’

  His companion looked pious, like a priest hearing confession. ‘Nobody wants it more than me, believe me.’

  ‘You could have done it, man. Before he went inside.’

  ‘It’s better this way. I told you that. I keep telling you. These things are easier done inside.’

  ‘You said you’d protect him.’

  The man reached across and smacked Mabor’s face. ‘Watch your tone.’ He sat back.

  Mabor didn’t move, or flinch or touch his face, but instead gazed coolly at the man.

  ‘How could I protect him?’ said the man. ‘He doesn’t do as he’s told.’

  ‘What are you talking about? He worked hard, man, worked the whole area.’

  ‘You heard.’ The man dressed like a gangster sat back and pulled at his cuffs, calming himself. ‘I had a little job for him and he refused.’

  Mabor thumped the table in front of him. ‘Bullshit.’

  The man sniffed. ‘Lots of snow coming down,’ he said. ‘On the hills. Heh heh.’ He leaned back in the booth, arms akimbo. ‘You should take advantage. Know how to snowboard?’

  Mabor stood and gathered several plastic shopping bags. ‘Do it. Soon. Okay?’

  ‘Don’t get ahead of yourself. I can’t work miracles.’ The man sniggered, like he could work one if he wanted to. ‘In this business, you need to be patient. I’ve lost people over the years. Money too. Cops rip you off. Lost a shitload in a deal that went bad. What you have to learn to do is wait, bide your time then … wham!’ He slapped a hand into his fist. ‘Take revenge.’

  Mabor was shaking, legs, shoulders, nerves twitching. ‘I won’t wait.’

  ‘He’s not going anywhere. Now, another — what was that? A frappé?’

  ‘I’m already late for school.’ Mabor hissed and scooted out of the booth, but he stopped and leaned into the man’s face. ‘Adut shouldn’t have got done, man.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got it now. Run along to school, and I’ll be in touch.’ The gangster pulled his phone from his pocket and started texting.

  So. Adut Chol had been dealing — that much was obvious. But there was something else. I had a little job for him and he refused.

  After a while, the gangster got up and dropped a twenty on the table. As he swaggered out of the café, I got a good look at the face.

  A sudden impulse seized me and I ran outside and down Racecourse Road towards the housing commission flats. Running, dodging the two women pushing prams, an elderly slow-coach with a walking-frame, I leapt the single chain slung between the posts and sprinted through the garden, past the playground and the skips and communal wheelie bins that were left strewn about after the garbage collectors had emptied them.

  I ran into the foyer, and started stabbing at the up button. An age later, I pounded on Mrs Chol’s door. She showed no surprise at seeing me, panting and leaning on my knees on her doorstep. She stepped back and allowed me to enter. ‘You came for some coffee? I’ll make coffee and I think perhaps you need a glass of water.’

  ‘What? Oh yeah. Sure. Coffee. And can I use your bathroom?’

  ‘Of course. You know where it is.’

  I went down the hallway and straight into the room Mabor had shared with Adut. I dropped to my knees and felt around under the bed. There was no book. I stuck my head down under there. It was dark, too dark to see, so I slid right under and spread my arms. Something soft brushed my hand and I flicked it away.

  ‘Here is your water.’

  I crawled out. Mrs Chol was standing in the doorway, her expression unreadable.

  ‘Thanks. I was just looking for a book of mine, er, that I dropped here.’

  Mrs Chol blinked but her face didn’t change. ‘You have fluff all over your jumper.’

  ‘Oh? Ha. Yeah. Not to worry.’ I brushed my front and clumps of grey floated to the floor.

  ‘Come with me, Stella.’

  I followed her out to the lounge room. She put my water on a low table and sat on the sofa, and I sat on the armchair. ‘Since the trouble with Adut I have not had the energy to clean.’

  ‘Jeez, that’s understandable — don’t even, I mean, don’t stress about that.’

  Mrs Chol’s eyes narrowed slightly. ‘But after the police told me they had arrested Adut’s killer, I cleaned all of his things out of his room. I did this for Mabor.’

  I nodded. ‘Right.’ All of Adut’s things. ‘What did you do with his stuff?’

  ‘I put it in the rubbish.’

  My smile was a tight stretch of lips. ‘Good.’ The rubbish had been collected. The book was gone, landfill. Any sane person would leave it at that — I, however, was now planning to sort through the refuse of the entire city, if need be, for a book.

  ‘The only things I kept were his books. Textbooks are so expensive. I gave them to Mabor.’

  ‘What about exercise books? Used ones?’

  ‘Even those, the books for writing, I gave them to Mabor. Adut’s school books had only a little writing in them and Mabor could still use them.’

  I was nodding furiously. ‘Good, good.’

  ‘But I did not find anything belonging to you.’

  ‘No? You might have confused my book for one of Adut’s. Can I go through them and check?’

  ‘Mabor has them with him. At school.’

  ‘He had some books on his desk. Maybe they’re still there?’

  ‘Let us go and see.’

  ‘Let’s.’

  We stood. At the same time, a wall-phone in the kitchen started ringing. Mrs Chol held my gaze. ‘Wait here for me, Stella.’ She went to the kitchen.

  ‘No need to trouble yourself,’ I called from halfway down the hallway. ‘I’ll only be a moment.’

  I ran to the bedroom and started sorting through the books on the desk. At the bottom of the pile was a stack of exercise books. I shuffled through them. Not there. I moved to the wardrobe; on one side, clothes were neatly folded on shelves, on the other, were some shirts on hangers. On the floor of the wardrobe were shoes lined up on top of some board games, Monopoly, chess. I pulled everything out onto the floor — and there it was, wedged between Scrabble and Cluedo. Adut Chol, Year Ten, English. I checked the back page. This was it.

  I curled the thin book into a tube, shoved it in my handbag, and hurried back to the lounge. Mrs Chol was in the kitchen; without speaking, she hung up the receiver and came towards me.

  ‘Got it,’ I called breezily. As I made my way out, I turned back to Mrs Chol. ‘See you round,’ I said.

  ‘Like a rissole,’ she answered, a look of bewilderment on her face.

  5

  WITH THE book safely in my handbag, I jumped aboard a passing tram. It took off, speeding along Racecourse Road, the wheels screaming on the turn at the Showgrounds. It stopped at the lights on Bloomfield Road. I glanced around at my fellow passengers; none of them took any notice of me. Why would they, a sleep-deprived middle-aged woman in a tatty jum
per, old jeans, and hair like a feral? No big deal, I’d looked worse. After a day of docking lamb tails, say, when a pile of tails stinking in the heat, bloody and covered in black flies, meant a good day’s work. Or that one time during the school holidays when it was my job to ride my motorbike through mobs of sheep to find the flyblown ones. When I found one, I had a tin of foul-smelling chemicals that I poured over the fleece and watched the writhing maggots flee. After that, having fluff on my clothes and a few bags under the eyes were nothing.

  Confident I was not being observed, I pulled the book from my bag, now curled and battered. I smoothed it across my knees and started to flip through it. Mrs Chol was right about one thing. It was mostly blank. There was a creative writing piece in the front about a boy with a flying skateboard who saves his family, and the world, from space monsters.

  The centre pages were filled with a table of badly ruled lines, with a column of initials followed by several columns of numbers. I fanned out the pages, shook the book a few times, but nothing dropped out. I turned each page separately, the whole book, all forty-eight pages. Not one mention of me, other than my address. Nor was there any reference to an event at a certain commission flat six years earlier, nor the two junkies who lived there and the amount of money involved. I checked the list of initials to see if I recognised anyone: I didn’t — nor did I see my own initials there.

  I sat back, not knowing what to feel. Relief? Disappointment? I was a bit hungry, I could murder a bacon sandwich and — wait, why were we not moving? The lights had changed more than once and the tram hadn’t moved. I craned my neck trying to see what the hold-up was. Cars had stopped at odd angles. Behind us another tram was backed up. I looked up at the sky, the low grey clouds, icy spit falling from them.

  I flipped through the book again, slowly this time, studying each page. Then I noticed something on the page opposite the one with my address; it was the word: Funsail. It was circled and had arrows coming off it, leading around the page to my address.

  Funsail?

  An employee of the transport corporation began herding us from our tram, across the intersection and onto a packed tram in front. As I trudged along with everyone else, I heard quite a lot of whinging from the other passengers. Sure, it was raining again, and the temperature could freeze the tears in your eyes, but there were worse things that could happen. Toughen the heck up, Melburnians, I thought. Toughen up yourself, they said back to me, with their red, frozen eyeballs. You know what you should do.

  Yes, I did.

  I shunned the tram and kept on walking. Twenty minutes later I entered the grounds of Ascot Secondary College. I went directly to the office, where a harried woman slid open the reception window.

  ‘Mabor Chol please, he’s in year ten I believe.’

  ‘What’s your relationship to the boy?’

  ‘Stella Hardy, I’m a social worker with WORMS.’

  ‘Gee, sorry to hear that,’ she chuckled.

  ‘Look, can you please just page the student Mabor Chol?’

  ‘Do you have clearance? Authorisation from a parent or teacher? We’ve had issues in the past.’

  ‘How about the student counsellor, she in?’ I asked.

  Still chuckling to herself, she slid the window shut and turned on a staticky mic. ‘Student counsellor to the office.’

  The waiting area was directly opposite the principal’s office. While I waited, I relived the trauma of high school, flashbacks of the hours of waiting for punishment, followed by my customary excuse: ‘But it was all Shane Farquar’s fault, sir!’

  The counsellor bustled up to me, in a bright orange, over-sized jumper. I launched in like a woman on a mission, which I was. ‘Mabor Chol. I need to see him.’ I held up both my WORMS ID and my Department of Justice ID. She gave them a nod and started writing on a clipboard at the office window.

  ‘Dear Mabor, such a good kid, you know? Really bright, hard working.’

  ‘He’s terrific, amazing. Look, this is urgent, can you hurry it up?’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘It’s a confidential matter.’

  ‘I’ll keep it confidential.’

  ‘It’s about … his brother. You are aware of his brother’s death?’

  ‘Yes. Tragic. Would you like me to be present?’

  ‘No, thanks. It’s all strictly … confidential.’ I was led to a room and told to wait again. Thirty seconds later, Mabor shuffled in. When he saw me, his eyes darkened with scorn. ‘What?’ he demanded.

  He watched me as I closed the door — then we were alone. ‘I’m not the enemy, you know,’ I said.

  A hint of a sneer. ‘You? You’re nothing.’

  ‘Then who is?’

  He shook his head and sat behind a desk. ‘What is this? Huh? What do you want?’

  ‘Are you in trouble?’

  His face was deadpan, but his thumbnail was gouging at a crack in the desktop.

  ‘Can you tell me what’s going on with you? Who are you protecting?’

  ‘You spying on me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not protecting anyone.’

  I considered my next move. ‘A long time ago, when you were just a kid, there was an incident at the flats, same building as yours. There was a young couple living a few floors down from you, and they were junkies. One night they overdosed and they both died.’

  He looked up, slightly bewildered. ‘So?’

  ‘I wondered if Adut ever told you about that.’

  His puzzlement was clearly not an act. ‘Adut? No, why would he?’

  ‘You sure he never mentioned it?’

  ‘What’s this shit you’re on about, huh? Junkies dying years ago — why would he care? Why would I? I’ve got enough problems to worry about.’

  ‘Yes. Well. You were only about eight at the time, but gossip gets around. I thought you might have heard about it.’

  ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘Because there were lots of rumours at the time. People said there was money in the flat — drug money.’

  ‘So of course you think me and Adut took it. If I was eight then he was ten; we were probably watching The Simpsons or some shit.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t take it.’ This was not going well.

  ‘I’m missing a science test for this garbage.’

  ‘Just one last thing, Mabor. What is Funsail?’

  ‘What?’ He looked at me for a moment, then he closed his eyes and sighed. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ I watched him stand and head for the door. Before leaving, he turned to me. ‘Stay out of things you don’t understand.’

  I don’t understand? The nerve of him, the little juvenile delinquent. I understood all too well. I considered the events of the morning. I considered the book. The gangster type in the coffee shop. Then there was also the exchange of a bag, probably belonging to Adut, passed through the window of a four-wheel drive in the middle of the night. Clearly, it was time to swallow my pride and go see Phuong. Time to tell her everything I had heard. She could refer me to one of the detectives working on Adut Chol’s murder. If that went well, maybe I could even show her the book, explain my reasons for taking it — after all, was it even a crime if the owner was himself a criminal? No, I could not tell her about the book. Never.

  I pulled out my phone. There was a text from Boss, asking where the hell I was. I replied that he should calm down, and that I had been doing a home visit. Then I took a deep breath and rang the Footscray police station. Eventually, someone picked up. I said, ‘Phuong Nguyen, please.’

  ‘She got transferred. St Kilda Road.’

  I hung up and checked my watch. Boss wouldn’t miss me for another hour or so. It was time for a visit to the St Kilda Road police complex.

  6

&n
bsp; THE DESK sergeant was short, with a wrinkled-up face, grey hair in a basin cut. He was old-school — not the kind of man who might, say, photograph his food. I signed in and he issued me a visitor’s pass. I was a little surprised that I was not required to reveal the contents of my handbag or walk through a metal detector. All that stood between me and about three hundred cops upstairs was a swinging metal gate, which opens when swiped with a security pass. Maybe they thought that, with so many cops around, no one would dare vault the gate and rampage around the building.

  Bowl-cut phoned upstairs while I hung around the foyer, studying the cop miscellany in a trophy cabinet. After a while, I sat on a bench and read a copy of yesterday’s Herald Sun. According to the weather forecast, it was rain and wind for Melbourne, with more snow expected on the mountains. Lake Mountain had opened its toboggan trails. Having scant feeling for snow, I turned to the celebrity news under the headline: EYE ON THE GLITERATI. My eye was drawn to a photo of a man and woman, arms around each other, both looking at a tall man with a moustache.

  … Prominent Perth socialite Clayton Brodtmann and his wife, Crystal, with South African mining tycoon Merritt Van Zyl appreciating the champagne at last night’s opening of the new Asian fusion restaurant at Crown, The Crouching Tiger …

  Mr Van Zyl was an odd fellow, judging from his outlandish, striped jacket and trilby. The moustache was circa 1970s Australian cricket team.

  I didn’t like the choice of name for the restaurant — Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was in my list of top-five favourite movies; the Lord of the Rings trilogy, of course, took up the top three. I looked at Bowl-cut, he was staring at his computer screen. Just as I was considering leaving and trying my luck tomorrow, the security gate opened and she came strolling into the foyer. She wore a white shirt and navy slacks, and was kitted with her spray, cuffs, and revolver. I had to admit I was nervous to see her after all this time. She smiled and extended her hand. I nearly guffawed. Did she really expect us to shake hands?

  ‘Chào bà,’ I said. ‘Chúc mừng năm mới.’