THE DEVIL IN THE RED DIRT: DIVIDED IN LIFE. UNIFIED IN MURDER

by Michael Smith

  Chapter 22

  If Harris was to flee the city, he had to speak to Prince. Fitzpatrick’s Lodge was too out in the open. The dining room at the Kelly Hotel was too obvious. Harris was sure he would find his mentor and surrogate father figure, the King of Sydney’s Underworld at the Hippodrome. He’d assumed he’d find him there, sitting at his desk as though nothing had happened. His bodyguards would be sat outside guarding the corridor, his desk covered in a stack of papers that hid a sawn-off shotgun. The casino floor would be crawling with would-be executioners, hoping to catch sight of Harris, Prince, Ned, or the recently departed Gallagher. Hoping to make a murderous name for themselves.

  Harris was wrong. The casino was hauntingly quiet, there was barely a soul on the floor. The barman was idle. Croupiers stood around chatting. There were, however, two men standing at a roulette table. Harris recognised them immediately. One was a low-level member of Watson’s mob, the other a Queensland hard man. They looked everywhere other than the wheel they gambled at. Harris kept his eyes on them as he slipped through the rows of fruit machines. The rattle of the wheel brought forth thoughts of Boethius and the Rota Fortunae. History is a wheel. Those who rise up on the wheel will in turn be cast down into the depths. Both the good and the bad are fleeting in nature. Change, therefore, is our adventure and misadventure alike.

  “Prince?” Harris whispered to the barman as he took cover behind a poker machine.

  “Not here,” the barman spoke far more loudly than he needed to.

  “Keep your fucking voice down,” Harris hissed. “Why’s it so quiet?”

  “Bloke walked in earlier. Pulled out a magnum. Took a shot at one of Prince’s bodyguards.” Word was out, it was open season. The customers likely wouldn’t come back until this was resolved, one way or another. This was the last place Harris wanted to be.

  “Ned’s in the office. He said to send you in if you came by.”

  “Whisky…” The barman poured him a drink and Harris downed it.

  As Harris walked through the door into the office, a gunshot sounded. A wall lamp just above his head shattered and covered him in broken glass. He looked up to see Ned, the accountant, holding a smoking hand cannon. With a frayed sense of security and an itchy trigger finger, he’d misfired.

  “Jesus Christ, you big dumb Pom. You scared me senseless.”

  Harris brushed shattered glass out of his hair. “I scared you? You damn near blew a hole in my face. Thank God your aim’s shit.”

  “I’m not cut out for this.” Ned was beyond stressed as he began furiously massaging his temples to sooth his tension. ‘He’s just given up.”

  Harris walked over to the desk and reached out to take the gun from Ned. It was unlike the obnoxious weapon Harris had mocked previously. This was a cold, silver steel piece. It wasn’t made to be showy. It was made for one reason alone. Harris placed it into his belt, “Stick with your calculator and they’ll leave you alone. You’re too useful.”

  “Are they out there now?” Ned asked.

  Harris nodded. “Two of them at a roulette table.”

  “How do you stay calm? They’re here for you too…” Ned’s attempt to calm himself landed flat.

  “I’m not calm. I’m leaving town.”

  “I’m just an accountant.” Ned gestured down to the paperwork on his desk.

  “They know that. You’ll be fine.” Harris looked down at the tumbler of whisky in his hand, surprised that he hadn’t spilled a drop. “Where’s Ron?”

  “The fucking pictures.”

  Inexplicably, it was at the Cinema Grand where Prince had chosen to hole up. It wasn’t secure, but it was a beautiful establishment. It had previously been the jewel in the crown of Sydney’s theatre scene. Then, sometime in the early to mid-20th century, that particular artform just died. Theatre, the medium of Shakespeare, the art of Sophocles, the greatest writers to have ever lived, was lost to the world forever. Sure, you had the likes of Arthur Miller who lamented a failure you attain the American Dream while he slipped one to Marilyn Monroe every night, and a group of middle class Angry Young Men bemoaning life in the working class from behind their mahogany desks but beyond them what remained was a pale imitation. No more than a shadowy husk of the former glory that had captivated audiences at the theatre of Dionysus some three thousand years earlier. Like poetry and cave paintings, theatre is sat upon the scrap heap, having been condemned to what we now call history. Novels would follow soon after. Sculpting and fine art, well they died centuries ago. Of all the old familiar faces, only music remains. That’s if you consider what the kids are making now a kind of music.

  Prince’s bodyguards were flexing their muscles outside the door to the cinema screen When Harris got there, one of the men stretched out his arm and placed it on Harris’ chest as he went to pass. “Laurel… Hardy.” Harris nodded to each and smiled menacingly.

  “He’s not to be disturbed,” came the gruff reply.

  “Then you better not scream when I break every bone in this fat fucking hand of yours.” Harris didn’t like the two men, he never had; they were mercenaries. And mercenaries move with the prevailing wind. If there was trouble, they would fall like a house of cards in a hurricane.

  Harris found Prince in the middle of a sea of empty seats. Or at least, Harris could see a cloud of thick cigar smoke gathering where he assumed Prince was located. It seemed that Prince had certainly given up maintaining his hardman image. He was watching a Disney cartoon.

  When Harris entered the smoggy ring around his old friend, Prince looked delighted to see him. “Sit down, old boy.”

  “What’s this?” Harris inquired incredulously.

  “The Sword in the Stone,” Prince answered, without dragging his eyes from the screen.

  “Can we talk?”

  “After this.” Prince wasn’t about to look away from the screen. Harris would have to wait patiently.

  A young, cartoon Arthur ran through his castle and pulled at a heavy door. Outside a crowd chanted, “Long live King Arthur.” A clearly flustered Arthur stumbled around the castle with a talking owl named Archimedes. This wasn’t Arthurian legend as the Englishman recalled it.

  Harris watched on in bemusement; perhaps you needed to see the start of the film for context. To someone who hadn’t, it all appeared a little ridiculous. This would have been a good time to catch a little sleep. Unfortunately, sleep didn’t come easily to Harris. Not without opiates.

  On the screen, a burst of light shone through a castle window and Merlin appeared. Again, unlike in the Arthurian legends Harris knew, the wizard was dressed in garish modern beachwear. As anachronisms go, it was a whopper. Or maybe not. “Oh, Merlin! You’re back from Ber… Ber… Ber…”

  “Bermuda? Yes, back from Bermuda and the 20th century, heh-heh. And, believe me, you can have it. One big modern mess!”

  Harris had tried to stay awake, but as the film came to a conclusion he nodded off for the briefest of moments. The fanfare accompanying the end credits woke him with a start. The lights came on. It hadn’t been a pleasant refreshing rest. In fact, he felt frustrated more than refreshed. When he closed his eyes, he’d seen Belsen’s starving, diseased and dying prisoners of war. It was always the case when he fell asleep naturally. That was why he chose, every night, to fall asleep with heroin instead.

  Harris stood to leave and looked down at Prince as if to say “Let’s get going.”

  Prince sat there calmly. “Sit down, Jimmy.”

  Harris sat back down and, now the lights were on, he took the opportunity to look. As he did, he whistled in appreciation at the place. It looked like it should have been the home to the conflict of Faust and Mephistopheles, not the modern mess he’d just witnessed.

  Prince laughed, he could see exactly what Harris was thinking “No imagination, that’s your problem.”

  It was Harris’ turn to laugh. “I’ve got bigger problems than that.”

  “It’s all I had as a kid… Back in Snow Hill, in s
unny Birmingham. My imagination. We didn’t have money. We lived in a slum. My family moved over during the potato famine. They were looking for a better life. All they found was the Digbeth poor house. My old Mum was a good woman, but she just couldn’t provide. She was only young.”

  “She’s been like a mum to me, Emily has.”

  “You remind her of home,” Prince said. “The English accent. I came over too young to keep mine. I’m not English. I’m Australian.She came over here on a bride ship after the second Boer war with nothing but a letter from my old man saying he’d meet her at the docks. He never did. She stuck around this place thinking he’d come for her. Silly old girl. I looked him up years later. He was strung out on dope.

  “As a kid I used to stand on the street outside and watch kids walk in and out of sweet shops, sometimes with their dads, they’d head into the theatre excited and walk out elated. It never bothered me. Because I had my imagination. I knew, one day I’d own all the fucking sweetshops. I’d own the cinema. This is where it all started for me. As a scrawny shoeless little kid, I sat on the curb and built my empire off an empty stomach.

  “This is where it started. This is where it ends. You shouldn’t have come here to tell me to get out of the city.” Prince looked Harris in the eye. “Because I’ve built something here. Something special. I won’t ever leave. I’ll live and die on these streets, Jim. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You’re unsettled, a restless spirit, but this is my home.”

  Harris stayed quiet. There was no talking Prince out of going down with his ship.

  Prince smiled, “I never had a son. I guess it wasn’t to be.”

  “I’m driving up to Alice tonight. I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

  “You do what you need to do. I’ll do what I need to do.”

  When Harris got up to leave, the pair looked at each other with a warmth seldom displayed by men in their profession.

  Harris took a moment to sit in Lescott’s car on the street outside. He knew that would be the last time he saw Prince. It was a strange feeling; he’d been working for the man for a decade. He’d started off on the doors, then he’d worked the rackets, and after a couple of years he’d become Ronnie’s right hand. In Sydney that might as well have meant he was the right hand of God. But that was then, and this was now.

  A flash of light on the street snapped Harris out of his distracted state. Given his recent brush with fame, he was wary of cameras. He looked around for a photographer, but saw nothing. He put it down to a flickering streetlight.

  Harris shivered as a chill permeated through the air. Somewhere in the night’s sky, the heavens opened. Torrential rain began to pour. Summer was gone.

  Chapter 23

  Next on Harris’ to-do list was a brief stop at Harrington’s Brewery. If he was going away for what might be an extended period of time, he needed cash. He’d left himself some walking-around money, but the bulk of his ill-gotten gains had been sunk into the brewery.

  The Englishman’s private eye business was more a hobby than anything else. It rarely paid well, and it never paid on time. Most of his clients were cuckolded wives and this was the 1960s. Women didn’t tend to control a family’s finances beyond the weekly grocery spend. Imagine how well it went down, when Harris sent his invoice to the husband he had tailed, photographed, and snitched on. He tore these men’s lives apart, then charged them a day rate, plus expenses. At first, his best hope of receiving payment had been them blindly paying their monthly bills without much thought. Then he got clever, and he began to invoice under the name “Woollahra Hair and Nails Salon” - easier to digest for these soon-to-be divorced men. He’d had a logo made up and everything.

  The brewery floor was humming as he entered. Any time he walked into that place, it brought a smile to his face. He was a complex kind of character, you see. He couldn’t get his head around modern capitalism or consumerist values. But people dedicating their life to toiling in the name of providing the public with inebriants. Well, that was just fine by him. Really, he ought to have been owner of a poppy plantation in Afghanistan. He’d have done very well out there.

  His partners were on the brewery floor overseeing production when he arrived. They always were. They, along with that switchboard operator in the newspaper offices, are perhaps the only bona fide hard-working people in this entire tale. Harris held their work ethic in the highest regard. He hadn’t seen hard work since his childhood in Salford, where his father had worked on the canals. He’d spent sixteen hours a day at work, six days a week on a canal-side shipyard. On his day off, always a Sunday, he would fill the old tin bath, scrub himself down and leave the grubby water for the rest of the family. He’d put on his best suit, his cloth cap, a clean white silk scarf, and he’d go down to Old Trafford. In the years between the wars, Manchester United were a hardly-fancied side bouncing between the first and second divisions. Come rain or shine, win or loss, Harris senior would be there. He was a good, honest, hardworking man. It hadn’t rubbed off on Harris who, at a young age, experienced more trauma than the average man can handle. After that, he always took the path of least resistance.

  What comes next goes very much against the enlightenment of recent years. This was a time of machismo and ignorance. For that, forgive me and forgive the brewery workers. When they saw Harris enter, they cheered derisively, blew loud, piercing wolf whistles, and theatrically mimicked a limp wrist. They’d seen the article. On any other day, Harris would have set them straight, but not that day. He was running out of time. Instead, he strode across the shop floor and took the stairs up to the office two at a time. In the office, he opened the safe and began emptying its contents into a duffle bag. “‘Ere love, how’s your Frankie?” A mocking, but friendly voice asked from behind. It belonged to Alfie, he was something like the ringleader at Harrington’s. As such, he should have known better.

  “I need a place by the beach to take the wife for our anniversary, do you boys do a cooked breakfast?” Paddy, the brewmaster asked in his thick Scottish accent.

  Harris turned to the group of men to shut them up. As he did, they burst out laughing and pointed over to a wall upon which a framed copy of the newspaper hung. To them, it was all a funny joke, they clearly had no concerns about the content in the article. It softened him slightly. Alfie popped open a beer at the table and patted the empty chair next to him. “Sit next to me, buttercup.”

  Harris shook his head, “I can’t stay.”

  “One for the road then.” Paddy tossed him a bottle of the new beer they’d been working on in recent weeks.

  Harris opened it and took a sip, it was delicious. “What’s this?”

  “It’s an English-style Winter Ale,” replied the brewmaster from the doorway. “It’s called ‘The 10 Pence Pom’.”

  Harris laughed and took another sip. It was dark, malty and sweet. The men might currently have been about as funny as necrosis, but put them in a brewery, with access to malt barley, hops, yeast and water; he’d laugh at them like they were Charlie Chaplin. “I’m going away for a while.”

  “We figured as much when we saw it. What does that mean for us?”

  “It might get a little bumpy for a while.” Harris reached into his duffle bag and pulled out several handguns, he placed them in the safe.

  “We’re not gangsters.” Alfie shook his head.

  “You don’t have to be. Just be men who look after their interests.” The men nodded in reluctant agreement. Alfie considered pointing out that this was precisely the kind of situation they had brought him in to stop, but Harris was clearly stressed. “And stick a case of Pom in my boot.”

  I didn’t make it as far as Gippsland with Clarke’s family. The kids would not stop crying. I dropped them somewhere outside Wagga Wagga. Just as well as I did, as I walked through the door into my townhouse to the sound of a phone call. Harris, who I was in no mood to do any favours for, asked me to meet him at his flat. He said he’d make it worth my while, so I softened my
stance somewhat. I knew the bloke as well as any drug dealer knew any of their customers, as he’d been buying from me for the past six years. I’d surmised it might be a bigger purchase than usual.

  On the few occasions I sold a bit of cocaine to George Watson, he demanded mate’s rates. It wasn’t a practice I went in for, but it got the ugly encounter over with. It meant seeing him wasn’t just an unpleasant waste of my time, oftentimes I actually ended up paying for the displeasure of his company. My relationship with Watson didn’t last long. There’s no prizes for guessing where my unspoken, but robust, hopes for the oncoming war for control of Sydney’s underworld lay.

  I met Harris on the street outside his apartment building. He wasn’t pleased to see me downstairs. “Too many eyes on the street.”

  “Jim, God loves you, but I don’t. I like you at very best,” I said. “I don’t think I want to go up there. It’s quiet, and there’s no witnesses who aren’t smacked out of their mind. It’s the perfect place for a gunfight. And I don’t want to get into a gun fight. I’ve seen all the Westerns; those shoot-outs always end badly for people like me.”

  “You a Cherokee or something?” Some people didn’t like Harris’ sardonic humour; I usually found it amusing, but not that night.

  “What do you need?” I asked.

  “Everything you’ve got.”

  “I’ve got a kilo.”

  Harris’ eyes opened wide, “What the fuck are you doing with a kilo of heroin down your trousers?”

  “I need the padding down there. It makes me look really manly.”

  Harris opened his duffle bag and I reluctantly placed a brick of the good stuff in there. There must have been a better place to carry out that particular kind of transaction. We were awash in the neon lights of a peep show behind us. Harris left the bag open while I took my payment. As I rummaged around, he kept his eyes on the street. He was the trusting type. “Needles?”