‘How do you feel?’ Roth asked.
‘It’s not so bad,’ said Bronson. He coughed and blood ran from his mouth. Bronson saw the blue sky above him and that was all there was to see. ‘So much bluer than at home. The sky is a lot higher here,’ he said, and then he was gone.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Roth’s gun still hung loose in his hand when he turned towards the Ironclad, ignoring Ford standing in the shade of the verandah and squinting towards Wu, who hadn’t moved from the doorway. Wu’s eyes darted from Roth to the crumpled body of Bronson, and then sideways to Ford. Ford caught his eye and Wu held his gaze, as if gauging the threat from him, then returned his attention to Roth in the street.
Roth raised his gun but by the time the barrel was level, Wu had slipped back into the darkness of the hotel, leaving Roth to point his pistol at the empty black rectangle of the doorway.
Ford took a couple of slow steps sideways to take himself out of Roth’s field of vision, then stepped out into the street. He walked slowly towards where Bronson lay, keeping his hands in plain sight, trying not to look at Roth. When he got to the middle of the road he stood over Bronson, keeping the fallen body between him and Roth, and waited. Roth kept his gun raised, sighting along it to the door of the hotel.
Bronson lay on his back, his eyes still open, staring blind at the sun. A halo of flies circled his head, and his face wore a serene expression. His arms were spread wide and the Glock was on the ground near his hand, next to the baseball bat. His tie was still straight and his top button done up, but his white shirt was stained red, bright roses blooming from the two holes in his chest. His jacket and shirt had ridden up, exposing his tattooed belly, the grip of the old Webley protruding from his trousers and the hem of his shirt stained with oil. Ford went down on one knee and reached for the Glock.
Roth turned his head slightly to glance at Ford. His gun never moved. ‘I don’t think you just wait for bad luck to hit you,’ he said. ‘I think you keep your eyes open, ready to move into the path of the lightning bolt as soon as you see a spark.’
Ford picked up the Glock by the barrel, keeping his arm outstretched, away from Roth. ‘This gun I’m holding isn’t for you,’ he said. The gun was hot and Ford winced at the pain but kept hold of it, turning his face away from Roth.
Roth nodded slowly. ‘If I’d thought it was, I’d have laid you out next to the big man.’
Ford stood up and took a step away from Bronson, turning towards the Ironclad. He watched the door.
‘We could go in there together,’ said Ford.
Roth took his time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll let you and the cop finish this.’ He let that hang in the air and waited, giving Ford time to decide on the next question, how to put it.
Ford sighed. ‘This is what you wanted all along,’ he said.
‘You think you’ve got it all worked out?’
‘No,’ said Ford. ‘I have no idea what you’re up to. But ever since you stranded us at the airfield I’ve been trying to figure out why. You knew we’d be able to walk out of there.’
‘I’ve always been impressed by your resilience.’
‘You told us you would leave the gold behind in the bunker. You cleaned out the cash and the bonds. I’d lay a solid bet that you’re going to tell McCann that the police confiscated everything, not just the gold. Keep it all for yourself.’
‘Did you get a little something while you were in there?’ asked Roth.
‘Bronson reckoned you were working your own angle. Right here and now, I’m going to agree with him.’
Roth thought about that for a moment. ‘I like your watch,’ he said.
Ford looked down at the Omega. ‘It’s not working.’
‘You must have been in the briefcase,’ said Roth. ‘Did you get yourself some diamonds?’
Now it was Ford’s turn to stay silent. He turned the gun around in his hand, held it by the grip and pulled back the receiver to check there was a round in the chamber.
‘There was a big red stone in that case,’ said Roth. ‘It was the single most valuable object in the bunker. Very rare stone. So rare they gave it a name. They call it the Phoenix.’
Ford allowed himself a glance sideways but Roth still had his gun on the hotel. Wu’s head appeared in the doorway and Roth fired two quick rounds. Wu had disappeared before the bullets splintered the wood of the frame.
‘Don’t fire through the doorway,’ said Ford. ‘My family is in there.’
‘So go in there and get them,’ said Roth.
‘Does McCann know you’re stealing from him?’
‘He doesn’t know that you’re stealing from him.’
‘But the Lau family think you’re working for someone else.’
‘The Laus always start from the assumption that anyone they do business with is likely to rip them off.’
‘You don’t want Wu telling them or McCann what you’ve been doing here?’
‘You’re still trying to put this together, huh?’
‘I reckon you’re going to tell me why you’re not taking the stone back.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Roth said. ‘You can keep it, but you’ll never be able to sell it. When you need money, bring it to me. I’ll sell it for you.’
‘Friends in the diamond trade?’
‘Maybe,’ said Roth, ‘but you’re going to have to earn that stone.’
‘I had a feeling this was coming.’
‘Go in there and finish this.’
‘Wu will have run off by now.’
‘No, he won’t. He’ll have promised them that he’ll stay with your wife, get her clear.’
‘So go in there yourself.’
‘She’s your wife,’ said Roth. ‘I need to leave. By the time you’re finished in there, I’ll be gone, and I don’t want that cop chasing after me.’
‘You don’t want Diane to leave,’ said Ford. ‘That’s the other reason I could think of for letting us live, so that we’d make her stay. You want her to give evidence against McCann.’
‘She’ll be trying to use information on Alan McCann as leverage,’ said Roth. ‘If she thinks that the Laus are going to protect you and her, then she’s even dumber than you are. They have used her to get at McCann and they’ll continue to do that until they’ve used her up and then they’ll get rid of her. They’re not going to let her do anything that might screw up their deal with McCann.’
‘She asked me to go with her,’ said Ford.
Roth smiled. ‘That would be you stepping into the path of the lightning bolt.’
‘And me walking into that hotel, what would that be?’
‘It would be you deciding that you’d rather your wife stayed in Australia.’
Ford looked down at the Glock in his hand. He pulled back the receiver and checked the chamber again, the same bullet staring back at him.
‘You know how to shoot that?’ said Roth.
‘Didn’t I just hear you ask Bronson the same question?’
‘Yes,’ said Roth. ‘He said he did, but he was wrong.’
‘I shot you, remember?’
‘You had a sawn-off shotgun, at close range,’ said Roth, ‘and you didn’t kill me.’
Ford raised the gun, holding it in front of him with both hands, elbows slightly bent, and crept towards the door. Roth put his own gun in his holster and turned to go.
‘Sometimes it takes a woman to bring out the best in a man,’ he said.
‘There are two women in this pub,’ Ford called back.
‘Then you’ll be twice as good.’
TWENTY-NINE
Ford still had the gun raised when he stepped through the doorway, trying to copy the stance Roth had used, his elbows bent, legs apart, his knees soft. The cool air on his face was a relief. He took three steps into the room and stayed still for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the gloom and feeling the sweat evaporate from his forehead.
Wu was standing in front of the arch to the back room, his
arms hanging straight, the umbrella held level across his body as if to block the way. He nodded at Ford, a formal bow from the neck, raising his head slowly and opening his eyes to stare at him. Diane was in the room behind him, carrying Grace in her arms and keeping her daughter’s face turned away from the room. Diane looked over Wu’s shoulder at Ford, trying to tell him something with her eyes, but the only message he got was one of confusion.
Emily had not moved from her place on the couch, sitting upright with her hands resting in her lap, alert, watching Ford with a smile on her face as if she was enjoying the show.
Muddy and Dussell were on their bar stools, mugs of coffee in front of them. They looked over their shoulders at Ford and then turned back to their drinks. Reynard was behind the bar with Charlie the cook. He held a wet towel to the cut on his head and his eyes shifted nervously between Ford and Wu.
Ford saw Kavanagh last. She had her back pressed flat against the wall beside the door where he had come in, close enough for him to smell her sweat. He tried to look at her out of the corner of his eye, not wanting to take his eyes off Wu.
‘Where’s Roth?’ she said quietly from behind him.
Ford shook his head.
Reynard took the towel from his head and checked it for blood. ‘You were standing out there so long, we wondered if you were ever going to come in,’ he said. He put the towel flat on the bar and scooped a handful of ice from a bucket on the bar. He wrapped the ice in the towel and pressed it back onto the cut. ‘If you were out there any longer we were going to barricade the door and run up the Eureka Flag. Have ourselves a little siege.’
‘Roth has gone,’ said Ford. ‘I was waiting, thinking maybe I’d give Wu time to step out of the front door, or maybe hoping he’d run out of the back.’
‘All that time you were out there,’ said Reynard, ‘we’ve been trying to get Charlie to explain to our Chinese friend that the place is in lockdown. The only way out is the front door. The back gate is locked, and there’s no way on earth I’m going to unlock it.’
Ford looked at Charlie. The cook was still in his apron. ‘You solved the language problem?’
‘Sure,’ said Charlie. ‘I just did the usual Aussie trick. Talk slowly and loudly. Eventually I could understand his Cantonese.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said he finds Australia degenerate,’ said Charlie. ‘Lack of social harmony is a major problem, but also political fragmentation with strong political factions based on strongly competing ideologies of social democracy and neo-conservatism.’
Wu said something under his breath to Charlie, flicking his head towards Ford, telling the cook he wanted his words translated.
Charlie hesitated, and Wu shouted this time. Charlie looked at Ford, his eyes creased in an expression of apology. ‘He wants you to step away from the door,’ he said. ‘He wants to go collect the body of his brother and then they will leave. He says that was the agreement you made with your wife.’
Ford shook his head and waved the barrel of the gun at Wu. ‘The situation has changed,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to translate that. I think the gun speaks for itself.’
Ford took another step into the room and halted. He glanced quickly at the men by the bar. ‘You lot going to help me?’
They all looked down at their feet, except Muddy, who was grinning broadly. ‘You’re the one with the gun, bro,’ he said. ‘I figured you’d got it all under control.’
Kavanagh was at his shoulder. ‘Give the gun to me,’ she said. Ford shook his head and took a step away from her. He was in the middle of the room now.
Muddy climbed down from his stool. ‘I hear that the gold claim has been pegged for the Chinese now,’ he said. ‘Reverse colonialism, that. You’re all going to be white coolies working for the Chinese mining companies. See how you like having your land taken away.’
‘So you’re just going to stand and watch that happen?’
‘I got no loyalty to any nation,’ said Muddy, ‘except the imagination.’
Dussell gave Muddy a nudge in the ribs with his elbow. ‘He’s the Aboriginal sage, this one,’ he said. ‘Fuck knows, they need a few.’
Ford tried to shut out the men at the bar. He looked at Wu and thought about the forces that had brought them together. He asked himself what loyalties had brought Wu to this place, and what he would do to honour that loyalty.
Wu was smiling now. He looked down at his umbrella, and slowly pulled back his right hand, the handle coming away from the body of the umbrella and exposing a bright steel blade. When Wu had withdrawn the sword he let the umbrella clatter to the tiles and whipped the narrow rapier through the air, before pointing the tip towards Ford.
Ford looked past Wu to his wife, attempting to read the emotion in her eyes and gauge how much of it might be for him.
Ford wondered whether there was any love that was not built on some sort of self-delusion. He felt that all the fears he had borne since Grace’s birth, and all the grief he had been afraid of, had backed up like a huge wave behind him and he felt it pushing him forwards, like it might break over him at any minute.
He looked at Diane and made a motion with his eyes, trying to tell her to step away from behind Wu. She looked confused, but Muddy saw his gesture, and stepped past Wu, pushing Diane and Grace towards the back door and out into the yard. Wu turned his head slightly, enough to see them leaving, then turned his attention back to Ford, the sword held perfectly level in front of him.
Ford took another step forward, and was now within striking range of Wu’s sword. He set his feet shoulder-width apart and rolled his neck, taking a deep breath and settling himself. He had done enough to pass the decision to the man in front of him.
When Wu moved it was even quicker than Ford had expected. He lifted the tip of the blade and thrust the point towards Ford’s head. He ducked his head low and lunged, and had only taken a single step when Ford shot him. The bullet hit Wu in the top of his head and he stumbled and fell. Ford stepped out of the path of the sword and Wu sprawled onto the tiled floor.
There was no sign of where the bullet had entered Wu’s head; the entry wound was hidden in the mass of black hair on the top of his head. There was no exit wound and no sign of blood except for a dark wet sheen to his hair.
Ford stared down at him, the gun still pointing at the fallen man’s head, and felt no sense of victory. It worried him that he felt so bankrupt, that whatever values he used to have had fallen away.
Kavanagh stepped up silently behind him and put her hand over his, taking hold of the gun. When she pulled it away he didn’t resist. She put the gun in the waistband of her jeans and grabbed him by the shoulders, turning him and pushing him through the front door and out on to the verandah.
‘That wasn’t necessary,’ she hissed. ‘We could have taken him in together.’
‘I couldn’t let Wu leave.’
‘Did Roth tell you that? Get you to do this for him?’
‘Wu wasn’t going to let Diane walk away.’
‘Neither was I,’ Kavanagh said.
This snapped him out of it. He turned to face her and there were tears in his eyes.
‘I don’t need you anymore,’ he said.
‘And I don’t need you, and yet here we are,’ said Kavanagh. ‘I’m doing what needs to be done. I’m going to take her up to the station, release Saxon and get him to arrest her.’
‘You doing this to hurt me?’
‘What is there between you and me? You spend one night with me and then expect me to help you jump-start your marriage? There is nothing between us, and never can be while your head is full of that woman. You can call it jealousy; I prefer to think I’m doing you a favour. You can’t make up your mind, I’ll make it up for you.’
‘She said she’d give up McCann,’ said Ford. ‘There’s no need to arrest her.’
‘You still holding on to that?’ asked Kavanagh. ‘You really think she won’t bolt with your daughter the first chan
ce she gets? Maybe you’re crazy, but that woman isn’t. I don’t think she makes a single decision in her life without first working out how it’s going to benefit her first and foremost. Roth left us alive out there. He wanted me to arrest Diane. He wants me to hurt McCann. I don’t know why, but I’m happy to do it.’
Ford’s eyes were glazed. He looked across the street at Bronson’s body and the black cloud of flies around it. ‘It’s like looking at the corpse of my marriage.’
‘I’m going to do this to protect you. If she is serious about rekindling your marriage then she’ll wait until the courts have decided her role in all this.’
Ford turned and looked into her eyes, but they were blank, as if she had barricaded herself behind them. ‘You can fall in love with yourself through someone else’s eyes for a while,’ he said, ‘then you see yourself as you really are and the illusion vanishes.’
‘Come inside,’ she said. ‘You need to take care of your daughter.’ She took his elbow and guided him back through the door.
Diane was standing in the middle of the bar now, holding Grace by the hand, watching the door for their return. ‘You need to come with me,’ Kavanagh said to her. Diane looked at Ford and he nodded and tried to smile. She let go of her daughter’s hand and he took Grace’s hand in his before she could protest.
Kavanagh grabbed Diane by the wrist and pulled her towards the door. She looked down at Wu’s body on the floor, a trickle of blood now snaking across the tiles. ‘I’ll send Saxon down here to deal with all this,’ she said.
On her way out, Kavanagh spotted her straw hat sitting on the bar. She reached over to pick it up and noticed the flower stuck in the band.The pink petals had closed, the flower reduced to a tight bud, drying out and turning brown at the tips. She plucked it from her hat and laid it on the bar, then turned away without catching the eye of anyone in the room. They all watched as the two women disappeared through the doorway and out into the bright sunshine beyond.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was written as part of the inaugural mentorship program of the Fellowship of Australian Writers Western Australia, under the mentorship of Pat Lowe. I’d like to thank Pat for being a constant source of advice and encouragement throughout the writing of this book, and for counting my hero’s drinks.
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