The January Zone

by Peter Corris

  January fiddled with the ends of his tie. ‘What if he knew about it and wouldn’t go along with it?’

  ‘Fuck,’ Karen said. She’d evidently learned a thing or two since private school.

  January looked at her. ‘Who bombed Airey Neave if that’s the way it was?’

  ‘The British spooks,’ Karen breathed.

  ‘Right,’ January said.

  6

  I slept late and awoke physically and mentally uneasy. January and Karen Weiner had stayed a while longer and I’d had a brandy or two as the talk went on. Karen had turned out to be one of those can-do people you read about but seldom meet. She was all for tackling the problem head-on—calling in the top intelligence men and the top police and putting pressure on all over the place to squeeze out the truth. All this came out in a passionate stream. January had looked at her with amusement.

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard of rocking the boat?’

  She’d looked at him blankly. That’s when I had the first brandy; the other two refused.

  ‘What’s wrong with kicking a few heads?’ I’d said. ‘It’s one of the skills of the trade, isn’t it?’

  ‘It could be anything. It could be designed to discredit me and a panic move in the wrong direction could do that. It could be a long-range operation to set me up in some way. This could be just a softener.’

  Karen had given up passionate argument in favour of physicality. She’d moved over to his chair and grasped his arm, pulling it close to her body. The thing between them was real.

  ‘So what can you do, darling?’

  January had stroked her hair. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m paranoid, but I think I need Hardy to circle around and sniff.’

  I didn’t mind the dog imagery. Dogs are tenacious and loyal and no dumber than most people; very few of them drink brandy before going to sleep. When Sammy Weiss called a bit before 11 o’clock I wasn’t feeling stimulated. Weiss sounded fine, as if he’d gone to bed early with a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking.

  ‘You’re going to do lunch with Tobin at the Bourbon Brasserie at 12.30. Smart work, eh?’

  ‘Do lunch?’

  ‘A Yank expression. Hollywood. I’m using it in my stuff. Think it’ll catch on?’

  ‘No,’ I grunted.

  ‘Got anything for me?’

  ‘Come on, Sammy. It’s only half an hour since we met.’

  ‘I hear January was out with a woman last night. He gave some reporter the slip but there’s a pic. Know anything about that?’

  ‘January out with a woman isn’t news.’

  ‘Depends on the woman. I’d like something on this, Cliff.’

  The phone suddenly felt tacky in my hand. In my line of work the rules are usually clear: protect the client’s confidentiality all the way to the prison cell door. Stop there and think about it. I’d stepped into a new game by working for January and it had already put me in line for penalties such as an ‘information exchange’ relationship with Weiss. I wished I was on a beach up the north coast with Helen. But wasn’t that a part of what this was all about? I felt confused.

  ‘We’ll see,’ I grunted. ‘How come you were able to set it up so easily?’

  Weiss paused, then he spoke too quickly. ‘Like I said, we’re close.’

  I laughed. ‘Bullshit, Sammy. I get it. Tobin wanted to see me. Thanks, Mr Weiss. Stay in touch.’

  I hung up and went off to shower feeling marginally better. It’s all a lot easier with cops. They don’t expect to meet honest men, ever. If you are reasonably honest you’ve got an edge.

  The cat jumped up outside the bathroom window and made a noise. I rubbed mist off the glass and looked at it as I showered. It’s a black cat with some grey in it. I combed my wet hair and saw the resemblance.

  As I opened a can of cat food I tried to calculate the age of the cat using the formula which translates human years into cat years. I was rusty on the formula but, as near as I could judge, the cat and I were the same age. It ploughed through the food in the saucer.

  ‘Eat slower, you’re not young.’

  It rubbed itself against my leg once or twice and then went out to sleep on the bricks. The sun was getting high and the backyard was heating up. Morning dew was rising from the bricks all around the cat in little, gentle puffs of steam.

  ‘Stay close, cat,’ I said. ‘We’ll do dinner.’

  After I’d scraped my whiskers flat I went upstairs to put on a clean shirt and pants, my old loose Italian shoes and a light sports jacket Helen had bought me. I also put on the .38 Smith & Wesson Police Special I’d bought myself. January’s dark tie was lying on a chair in the living room. I contemplated putting it on just for a joke but decided against it: Tobin might get the wrong idea. He might think I’d learned how to behave myself and do what was expected of me.

  The weather was holding the way it does in Sydney in September—it holds either good or bad. Today there was a light breeze to keep the pollution moving and enough cloud to keep the heat down. From behind dark glasses the houses and trees and shops along Glebe Point Road all wore a more respectable, affluent air than they had in the days when I’d moved in, and it wasn’t just the glasses. The bookshop where I got my paperbacks was expanding; a butcher had become a boutique and the community seemed to be holding its breath waiting to see what was going to happen to the closed-down timber yard.

  Things change at the Cross too, but the essentials remain the same. I parked in Victoria Street and walked along Orwell into Macleay Street. The Fitzroy Gardens, that once were more cracked and bubbling asphalt than gardens, are now more brick terrace than gardens, but the fat cops are still strolling through with their lunch bags. The drugs are changing; crack is on its way according to the papers which might be good news for the junkies if it puts them out of their misery earlier.

  A pair of them were sitting on the low brick wall around a struggling tree. Young men, not yet 20, they were in dirty singlets and jeans, heavily tattooed and sharing an innocent cigarette. They smiled at each other as if they also shared a secret. I wondered what it was; I didn’t think it was a way to make an honest living or what to do with nuclear waste. It might have been a vision of God.

  The girl outside the Bourbon Brasserie had something to sell rather than share. She was wearing a leather miniskirt, high white boots with heels, and a see-through white blouse. As I approached she moved out from the wall, lifted the skirt up a fraction more and pushed her chest forward; all her wares were on display. Her bright smile, under the heavily made up eyes and the fluffy blonde hair, seemed to be painted on rather than something that came from her face muscles.

  ‘Hello, sir,’ she said, ‘wanna go along?’

  ‘Not today,’ I said, ‘but good luck.’

  The lips moved behind the smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  I took the glasses off as I went up the carpeted steps to the head waiter’s desk. The place is decked out in a heavily masculine style with a lot of brass, sporting prints and mirrors that make it look bigger that it is. There are tables at the front just above the street and big glass windows that slide back so that you could drop ash onto the footpath if you wanted to. Back from there tables are placed far enough apart to let people have a private conversation. A big bar with stools and the sort of tables you drink at rather than eat at occupies a lot of space downstairs.

  The head waiter was Chinese, not young but slim and hard and able to wear a dinner suit at midday without looking silly.

  ‘The Tobin table,’ I said. I felt sure it’d be called something like that. The man nodded and snapped his fingers. Another waiter appeared and indicated that I should follow him. Tobin’s spot wasn’t in the window but more like the centre of the room. I fancied there was more clear space around it than was logical, but that might have been my imagination.

  Two men sat at the table; neither moved when the waiter brought me up.

  ‘Sit down, Hardy,’ Tobin said. ‘You look the same—as
if you could do with a haircut and a shave and a new shirt and it still wouldn’t make any bloody difference.’

  ‘Tobin.’ I nodded and took a seat. He must have put on nearly five stone since he’d been a flashy sergeant in Balmain. He’d had glossy black hair and sideburns and suits with too much stitching on them. A good deal of the hair had gone now and what was left looked to be touched up on top. The sideburns were smaller and grey. His belly bulged out to touch the table and his neck hung down over the collar of his silk shirt above the silk tie. His dark double-breasted suit was discreet and hadn’t been tailored anywhere local.

  ‘I can’t say the same for you,’ I said. ‘You must live here.’

  ‘A smartarse,’ the other man said.

  ‘Hardy’s the original smartarse, Ken,’ Tobin said. ‘D’ you know that I once had him with a gun and a stiff in a park in Balmain and I couldn’t do a thing to him. Know why?’

  Ken shook his head. He was younger than Tobin, thin and angry-looking with short-cropped mousy hair and the scar from a mended hare lip on his mouth. He lifted his glass of beer to the scar and sipped. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  Tobin drank some red wine. The bottle was on the table; the label was white and the writing in it was small which meant that the wine was expensive. ‘Hardy had a mate. Name of Evans. Now he has a mate name of Parker.’

  ‘Frank Parker?’ Ken said.

  ‘The same. Hardy has a knack of being matey with rising coppers. That’s handy in his business.’

  ‘Evans went to Victoria,’ Ken said.

  ‘That’s why he switched to Parker.’

  I reached out for the wine and poured myself a glass. It was smooth and ripe, the sort of stuff that slides down and beckons to you from the bottle. ‘I’d forgotten you liked the sound of your own voice, Tobin. Must be something in your childhood. I know, you weren’t allowed to talk at the dinner table so you ate too much. That’s why you’re so fat now and like to talk.’

  Tobin’s dark face flushed red and the flesh on his neck quivered. He fought for control and his voice grated with the effort. ‘Let’s eat,’ he said. ‘You’re paying, Hardy.’

  ‘I’ll pay for you and me,’ I said. ‘Ken’s on his own.’

  Tobin looked at me for what seemed like a full minute, then he nodded and the other man stood up. He drained his glass and curled his damaged lip at me. Tobin nodded again and he walked away.

  ‘You’ve made an enemy there,’ Tobin said.

  ‘I don’t think we could ever have been friends.’

  Tobin ordered soup, a steak and chocolate mousse. I had a ham salad but I helped him out with the wine, both bottles. His jaws moved rhythmically and he’d learned to talk around his food without being disgusting—presumably through long practice. He also nodded from time to time and shot quick looks to left and right. I caught a fleeting movement here and a still presence there and gathered that the chief of the anti-terrorist squad took no chances about his personal security. It made me feel anxious about mine.

  ‘You’ve seen all that crap January gets in the mail?’ Tobin asked.

  I nodded and speared asparagus.

  ‘What d’you make of it? Your line of country, isn’t it?’

  I thought about it while I ate. I’d dealt with threatening letters, suicide notes, ransom claims. I thought I could tell the mildly nutty from the truly mad but that was about all. ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Look, Tobin, I’m here to ask you about the bomb—what kind it was, what sort of experience behind it, that kind of thing. I’m buggered if I know what you want from me.’

  He put down his knife and fork for the first time since the meal started. ‘I need a result. A real result. This is the first decent thing that’s come along. I need nasty faces, the more political the better as long as they’re of the right stamp. You follow me, Hardy?’

  ‘You’ve got the facilities for the job, haven’t you?’

  He shrugged and started eating again. ‘Who knows? Who knows how to do the bloody job? Who knows if there’s a fuckin’ job to do even?’

  ‘What about the spooks?’

  He almost choked on a bit of steak. A waiter hovered nearby while Tobin coughed and plunged. I saw movement by the door and a pale face peer anxiously through the smoke. ‘I’m all right, all right.’ Tobin waved the waiter away. ‘They’re the biggest headache of all. Top secret this, fuckin’ top security that. Some of those bastards literally can’t talk, can’t tell you their own names. I don’t know what they’re thinking.’

  ‘Mostly about their pensions,’ I said. If Tobin hadn’t been Tobin I might have told him about January’s suspicions, but the time to start trusting people like Tobin was when the priest was saying nice things about him over the grave.

  ‘I don’t like you, Hardy, never did. And nothing’s changed. Your mate Evans did me a bad turn and I was lucky to get out from under. But that’s not your fault. I don’t like Parker either.’

  ‘You’d have liked my Mum,’ I said.

  ‘Your smartarse talk’s another thing I don’t like. But I think we can do each other some good on this. You’d be on a good screw from January and the longer you can keep the job going the better for you. And I’m in no hurry. You follow me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Suppose you get a line on who planted the bomb. You tell me. We mount surveillance, tap phones, use all the technology crap they’ve given me and really make a circus of it. You’re on a daily rate and expenses. I can help you out a bit there. We move when we’re ready and we both look good. What d’you say?’

  I had to keep eating although I didn’t have any appetite. Tobin had gone up in his world which meant that he’d got smoother and slimier than when he’d wanted to used the rubber hose on me in Balmain. Eating concealed expressions I didn’t want him to see.

  ‘What about the bomb?’ I said.

  ‘Standard sort of thing—gelignite, not much of it. Battery and timer.’

  ‘Planted when?’

  ‘Within 24 hours.’

  ‘By a pro?’

  ‘Not necessarily. They tell me there’s books you can learn this stuff from.’ He laughed and spooned up some chocolate goo. ‘D’you know we’ve got a whole library at the unit? They fitted us out with all these books—biographies, technical manuals, novels even. I haven’t read one of ’em and I don’t think any of my blokes have either.’

  ‘Ken didn’t look like a reader.’

  ‘I’d rather have Ken with me than…Max bloody Harris at some of the interviews I go to. You want a brandy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I will.’ He lifted both hands and made a series of rapid movements with his fingers. Then he slumped back in his chair, belched loudly and laughed. ‘Got a deaf ’n dumb waiter here. You gotta learn the sign language for brandy and coffee. Funny, eh?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, hilarious. So that’s all you’ve got? No leads? And the thing could’ve been put together by an HSC student?’

  ‘Hey, that’s an idea.’ Tobin unwrapped a fat cigar and watched approvingly as the brandy was poured into a ballon glass. The waiter lit his cigar and he puffed luxuriously. ‘The bomb could’ve been meant to kill the girl—planted by a jealous kid at her school.’

  ‘You’re disgusting, Tobin.’

  ‘Have some coffee, Hardy, and climb down a bit. Why’re you working for a politician except for the money?’

  He wasn’t dumb, he’d hit the spot. I sipped coffee and tried to think objectively, professionally. ‘What do you think of January?’

  ‘He’s okay, good in fact.’

  ‘What?’ I couldn’t believe I was hearing something unqualified and positive from Tobin.

  ‘January’s okay. All that peace and no bombs and missiles stuff is shit of course, but compared to most politicians he’s a prince. He doesn’t go around spreading the dirt on his mates. He doesn’t pump you for more dirt than he already has.’ He waved the cigar and lifted the ballon. ‘You should see how most of ’em carry on. Cunts!’
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  You’d know. I thought, but I drank some more coffee and didn’t say anything. Tobin drank his brandy and drew on his cigar. He did some more nodding at the shadows and then folded his napkin. He leaned forward across the table and I could smell all the sweet, strong, corrupt flavours on his breath.

  ‘You haven’t responded to the proposition, Cliff,’ he said quietly. ‘But I know you’ll see it my way.’

  ‘Why?’

  He started to ease his bulk up and away from the table; it was going to be a long, slow process and I thought he might even need the waiter’s help. ‘Because whether you come through or not I have to find the guilty party. And who knows who the fuck it might be? It might be that good-looking Bell woman January and you and everyone else including me would like to screw. Or it could be you.’

  7

  I spent the next few days checking on the material in Trudi Bell’s file. I phoned organisations and snooped around their premises. I tried to unscramble acronyms like CLAOP (Committee for the Liberation of All Oppressed Peoples) and I did a tour of the area around January’s office looking at all the graffiti on the walls. I checked on everyone who’d had an appointment with the Minister in the last month and had come to the office. I drew blanks on everything.

  I asked Trudi Bell what contact she’d had with Tobin and she shuddered. ‘Ugh, don’t call it contact.’

  ‘Has he been around much?’

  ‘Not much. He rang a couple of times to talk about nothing. He asked me out to dinner.’

  ‘I had lunch with him the other day. I don’t think I could’ve survived dinner. What did you say?’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He implied I was screwing Peter. I let him think what he liked.’

  ‘How is the Boss? I haven’t seen him for a few days.’

  ‘Nor have I.’ She looked at her watch. The weather was getting warmer and she was wearing a T-shirt and white denim skirt. There was a faint trace of last summer’s tan on her arms. ‘He’s due in. He’ll be late, but not very late.’