The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  ‘They put you up to this?’ Kelly stared at him for a moment, considering the request. ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘Get me a budget in writing as soon as possible. It’ll be approved. The top brass is ready to throw everything at this.’

  Kelly stood up and grabbed a well-pressed grey jacket from a hanger on the back of his door. On its hook he left the black pork-pie hat with its colourful feather. Hanging below it, Sharp could now see, was an empty shoulder holster. He assumed the revolver was locked away somewhere in the office.

  Kelly shrugged into the jacket and turned to Sharp. ‘I’d like you to join me at the briefing and meet the whole squad. How soon can you organise your own briefing for the detectives?’

  ‘On the Croats?’

  ‘Obviously.’ Kelly looked at him as if he were an idiot.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Sharp. ‘I thought you might have been talking about the surveillance op, but I imagine that’ll be on a need-to-know basis.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We didn’t have a warrant.’

  Kelly flashed a sly smile. ‘Don’t you worry about that, Al … What I want you to do is to brief the detectives on the targets, the main suspects and their organisational links.’

  ‘I’ve asked for a projector. I’ll be ready as soon as it arrives.’

  ‘Good,’ said Kelly, pleased. ‘Make that a priority. Let’s go—they’re waiting.’

  The hubbub from the squad room went instantly quiet the moment Jim Kelly’s wide shoulders cleared the doorway. Several dozen men were positioned around the room, sitting on chairs and tables, or standing with tea mugs and cigarettes in each hand. Smoke hung in the air.

  Typewriters, telephones and notebooks littered the tables, along with ashtrays, dirty mugs and takeaway-food wrappers. A man with a napkin tucked into his collar was munching on a Chiko Roll. In the open space in front of the desks large noticeboards were pinned with photographs of the bombsites and charred parts of the devices. Enlarged street maps indicated the targets and the distances between them. Mugshots of suspects, some of whom Sharp recognised, were also stuck up in neat rows.

  He scrutinised the front ranks of the Special Breaking Squad and implacable faces stared back at him. They wore the habitual expressions of detectives: uncompromising and cynical, or else blank and unreadable. He sniffed at the air. The collective odour was not sweet, like Kelly’s Old Spice—it was something chemical that leeched from their pores, the hormonal stench of latent violence. They’d been recruited from the toughest and best investigators in the homicide and armed hold-up squads. Some of the younger ones had been brought over from 21 Division, the training ground for hard men.

  At the back of the room, separate from the detectives, he saw his team from the Electronics Unit, Daltrey and McCafferty. They looked tired and pissed off, but neither of them had the intimidating aura of the detectives. Sharp caught Bob McCafferty’s eye and nodded to him, receiving only the smallest jerk of the head in response. Around them was a small collection of other men who, either by their manner of dress, their hairstyle or their demeanour, faintly radiated eccentricity. These, Sharp reasoned, were perhaps from forensics.

  Jim Kelly took up a central place in front of the noticeboards and addressed the room in a booming voice.

  ‘On Saturday morning, some cunt walked right into our patch, waltzed down George Street with two huge fucking bombs and set them off without any regard for human life,’ he roared with a real anger. ‘It’s a miracle no one was killed. There’s a ballet school above one of the targets. It’s a miracle none of those little girls was blown apart. Any of you have daughters?’

  A few of the men mumbled assent.

  ‘When this murderous cunt blasted those people and those buildings, he also blew a huge hole in our credibility. We didn’t see it coming. We don’t know who did it. The lunatic is still at large. If we don’t catch him, he could do it again tomorrow. As far as the public is concerned, and as far as the press is concerned, we were caught with our pants around our ankles, our dicks in our hand and our thumb in our mouths. Does anyone disagree with that?’

  Kelly stared around the room belligerently. No one said a word.

  ‘I didn’t think so …’

  He picked up the cudgels again, effortlessly shifting into the blistering anger of a coach whose team has let him down badly.

  ‘We are all in fucking shame. All of us. And we will be in fucking shame until we catch this cunt. That’s why you’re all here now. You’re supposed to be the best of the best in whatever squads you belong to. From now on, until we lock these bastards away, you are all members of the Special Breaking Squad. Whatever else you’ve been working on, drop it! Put it aside or hand it over to someone else, because this is your only job from now on. We will find this cunt and we will break him, and we will find the cunts who ordered this cunt to do it and we’ll break them too, and then we’re going to break the cunts who donated money to run their murderous fucking organisations and we’re going to break those organisations. They have no right to bring their evil to our country. No fucking right. It’s un-Australian! Any questions?’

  One of the younger detectives spoke up. ‘We’re assuming this is political, are we? All other motives ruled out?’

  Kelly peered down at him, not unkindly. ‘I’m not ruling anything out, son. If you come to me with evidence of another motive, I’ll take it seriously. But this fits a pattern. There’ve been sixteen politically motivated bombings against Yugoslavian government targets in the past few years. That’s got to be our starting point. I’ll have more to say about that shortly.’

  Now one of the front rankers piped up. Sharp recognised him from press coverage of his antics as Bill Lonergan, a notorious homicide detective.

  ‘I’ve dealt with some of these Yugos before,’ said Lonergan. ‘They’re hard nuts. Fucken tribes that stick together. Never come across a reliable informer among ’em. You accuse ’em of something, they act like they don’t understand the language, or they say some other wog in a different tribe done it.’

  ‘Well, Bill, first thing’s first. It’s obvious that no one will talk to you at all if you call them wogs.’

  ‘Wog’s a wog, isn’t it?’ Lonergan called back insolently. ‘Like a spade’s a spade.’

  That drew a few laughs from the front rank until Kelly cut them off. ‘Carry on like that, Bill, and you’ll be out of this squad on your ear. Want a neutral term? Call them cunts!’

  That brought more laughter, and even Sharp found himself chuckling.

  ‘On your other point: it’s true, they are hard nuts to crack, so we have our own operating instructions, right from the top. Not to be repeated outside this room. From the commissioner himself, the instruction is to do Whatever It Takes. We are going to get these cunts under the Whatever It Takes rule.’

  Sharp stared at Kelly. A chill went through him. What the hell was he talking about?

  Lonergan, who seemed to be the unofficial spokesman for the older detectives, piped up again. ‘Short of murder, right?’ he cried out. ‘Some of us are paid to investigate those.’

  Kelly reined him in again. ‘Yes, Bill, short of murder. And short of fitting up some poor bastard … You, of all people, know what I’m talking about.’ He stared pointedly at Lonergan, whose reputation in that regard was legendary. ‘The last thing I want is to turn some dumb migrant into a patsy, like the bloke they pinned for Kennedy.’

  ‘Oswald!’ someone called out.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Kelly. ‘So what do I mean by Whatever It Takes?’

  Sharp leaned forward. His future in the squad now hung on Kelly’s answer to his own rhetorical question.

  ‘I mean that we will not wait for warrants before questioning a suspect. I mean that with these hard cases the normal rules of engagement do not apply. We need to rattle their fucking cages. On my orders we will pick people off the street or take them out of their homes, and we will interrogate them under my rules. We will tap their phones
and we will bug their homes and their meeting places, and we won’t wait for warrants to do it. Our authority to do this comes from the commissioner and, beyond him, from the minister. You should know that surveillance is already under way—operations began last night.’

  Sharp caught his breath. That was his operation or, more precisely, his unauthorised operation—the one he thought was meant to be top secret.

  ‘We’re not alone in this investigation,’ Kelly continued. ‘Mr Sharp, will you come forward?’

  He beckoned and, with no option, Sharp walked over and stood next to him, facing the whole squad, focusing his eyes on a point high at the back of the room.

  ‘Al Sharp has been seconded to the Breaking Squad from the Commonwealth Police—’

  An audible groan came from the front rank.

  ‘He’s their leading expert on Croatian terrorists and I’ve asked him to give you all a briefing later today on the organisations, their links to criminal violence and the individuals who give the orders.’

  Bill Lonergan could not restrain himself. ‘You’re fucken kidding,’ he called out. ‘We’ll be doing Whatever It Takes and the Feds will be here watching us from the inside? I don’t know about the rest of you blokes, but I haven’t got a suicide wish.’

  ‘As always, Bill, I can rely on you to be the naysayer.’ Kelly addressed the detective with undisguised condescension. ‘So let me put your mind at rest. Yesterday Mr Sharp came to me with information about a key premises where leaders from the most suspect Croat organisations conduct regular secret meetings. On my authorisation, he led a bugging op last night. It was our first action under the Whatever It Takes rule. So, Bill, Mr Sharp here is not an outsider in this squad. He’s well and truly one of us.’

  Sharp looked down at Lonergan and met an expression of undisguised contempt. He glanced at the head of the Special Breaking Squad, who beamed back at him. All’s well with the world, Kelly seemed to imply.

  Sharp was left to reflect on the prophetic accuracy of his initial assessment. Jim Kelly was a wily old coot, that was for sure. And now he had Sharp by the short and curlies.

  Anna Rosen raced back from the Cross to Forbes Street, careful not to spill Reg’s coffee. The commissionaire took the paper cup gratefully, holding it in two hands as if the receptacle itself was designed to warm him.

  ‘Bewdy,’ he said. ‘Nuthin’ better. This from the eye-tie?’

  Anna narrowed her eyes. ‘Si, Regiano,’ she said. ‘Uno espresso Italiano.’

  ‘All right, love. No need to go all continental.’

  ‘Eye-ties, Reg? Really?’

  ‘It’s what we called ’em in the desert war. They were the enemy.’

  ‘And now they make the best coffee.’

  ‘Can’t argue with that, love.’

  Anna left the old soldier contemplating national migration policy and made her way back to her office. The plan was to meet Peter McHugh at 9 am to review the final cut of her program. She hadn’t seen him since she’d left his apartment on Saturday morning and she wasn’t looking forward to it. She had put the whole messy business out of her head while she had been engrossed in the edit, but it came back to her now and made her tense about the meeting.

  As head of Talks, McHugh had commissioned the Ustasha project and mentored her through the two months of investigation. He was a risk-taker, one of the few editors who would even consider commissioning an untried reporter to do a major investigation. His decision to pull the program forward for broadcast tonight had compounded the risk.

  Perhaps it had all been about getting into her pants, but Anna also knew that McHugh was prepared to back obsessive pursuits when their goals lined up with his own political philosophy. He seemed impressed with the body of evidence Anna had assembled to show that Croatian extremists had thrived for decades under the secret protection of ASIO. McHugh had long believed the organisation was an illicit branch of conservative politics.

  Anna looked up at the wall clock in the common room. 9.20. Peter McHugh was late. She recalled his comment about the charming Murphy. I know he’ll like you. You know what we call that, Peter? Pots and black kettles come to mind.

  ‘Anna!’ A boisterous call broke her reverie. ‘How did you go?’

  She looked up to see McHugh bounce into the room like an excited labrador. She was surprised to find she was pleased to see him; the tension dissipated.

  ‘Very well, especially with Murphy,’ she said. ‘But I am a bit concerned about that.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He gave me a document which completely undermines the attorney-general. It makes Greenwood look like a liar or a fool, or both. The question is, can I use it?’

  ‘What’s the document?’

  ‘It’s a memo to Greenwood from the Commonwealth Police Bureau of Criminal Intelligence. It’s dated July last year and details more than fifty serious incidents in the last ten years—bombings, murders and assassinations. The BCI concludes that all of them were planned and carried out by Ustasha-controlled organisations.’

  ‘Well, you have to use it.’

  ‘This has come from the Labor Party.’

  ‘It could also have come from your police sources.’

  ‘But it didn’t.’

  ‘So what, then? You left it out?’

  ‘No, Peter, I put it in. But I feel like I’ve been used.’

  ‘Get used to it, Anna. He’ll only give it to someone else if you don’t run it,’ said McHugh, and then he grinned. ‘I told you he’d like you.’

  ‘I’m not too comfortable you keep saying that,’ she snapped back.

  ‘You’re a sexy girl, get used to it …’

  ‘Stop calling me a girl or we’re really going to have a problem.’

  McHugh put up both hands, a gesture of surrender. ‘Is this about Friday night?’

  ‘Of course it is, you idiot.’

  ‘I didn’t mean anything by it—’

  ‘Then stop talking about me like I’ve become an in-joke.’

  ‘You mean Murphy?’

  ‘You make me sound like a whore to be passed around middle-aged men!’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Anna, that’s the last thing I meant!’

  ‘I’ve told you what I think. Let’s forget about it.’

  ‘I think we need to talk.’

  ‘No, we don’t. We really don’t. Let’s go listen to the edit.’

  Anna watched him walk off. He was offended. Well, he’d get over it soon enough. There were plenty of women who seemed to hang on his every word, though not so many of them close to his own age. Perhaps they knew where his predilections lay.

  She felt a wave of sadness again. At the core of it was this deep, unfathomably deep, sense that she had betrayed something—the invisible something with the invisible man.

  But there was sadness too for what she knew was going to be a lost friendship with McHugh. She should never have fucked him. And she knew she’d gone too far in what she’d said just now and probably screwed up her working relationship with him as well, but it had had to be said.

  That thought bothered her because she had plenty of reasons to be grateful to McHugh. He had helped her out of the doldrums after two excruciating years.

  7.

  Nineteen-seventy was the worst year of her life. That year could have broken Anna Rosen. She sometimes thought it very nearly did.

  It had been her final year at university. Alongside her extracurricular work for the anti-war movement and the many hours she devoted to editing The Tribe, she was working on her honours thesis—an analysis of the betrayal of the Vietnamese independence movement by the imperial powers after World War II. ‘Fucking Churchill,’ she’d rail at anyone who would listen. ‘He rearmed the surrendered Japanese troops and used them to fight off Ho Chi Minh’s independence forces until the French arrived to reclaim their colony. He should have been tried as a war criminal!’

  She was dealing well with these competing demands, and it all would have bee
n fine had she not managed to fall in love at the same time with a young man of Croatian heritage called Marin Katich. Her housemate Pierre Villiers, who regarded Marin as a right-wing thug, called it the ‘most counterintuitive love affair in human histowy’.

  But how could Pierre ever understand what had happened, what unfathomable alchemy of chemistry and fate had come together that day when Marin stormed into the office of The Tribe demanding to see the editor? There was an irony to this too, since it was Pierre, as Anna’s deputy editor, who had sent an insulting note rejecting the article submitted by one M. A. Katich. Marin’s piece was a cri de coeur denouncing the anti-war movement’s open worship of ‘Uncle’ Ho Chi Minh. Marin had detailed Uncle Ho’s purges of party enemies; his suppression of political opposition; of religion; of landowning peasants and small-business people, as a consequence of which hundreds of thousands had fled south to escape his communist regime.

  ‘So you’re the editor against free speech?’

  Those had been Marin’s first words when she looked up to see an imposing figure looming over her desk. He was tall, straight-backed and well made, with the bearing of an athlete.

  ‘Sit down if you’ve got something to say to me,’ she said, refusing to be intimidated.

  He did so meekly enough, and she caught something in his green eyes, amusement perhaps? Certainly not the rancour or the outrage she would normally associate with an ideological enemy. She admitted she had not read his article, although she recalled that Pierre had mentioned it in disparaging terms. And so began a debate between the editor and the author that went on for hours, thrust, parry and feint, but without anger. They were like a pair of fencers who found themselves entranced at the contest, unwilling to end it.

  Against her own preconceived judgements, Anna was warming to the young man’s brain. Marin was a contrarian, a quality she had long admired in others. His central argument was against communist totalitarianism, and that strand, at least, she had sympathy with. At some point she rolled a joint, and as they got stoned the debate unravelled. Of course she would publish his article. She might not agree with a word of it, but he was entitled to make his case. They found themselves laughing together, both recognising that the spark of attraction was mutual.