by Roland Perry
I wrote out a cheque for ten days work and added another thousand for expenses, which came to six thousand in all. Farrar seemed satisfied.
‘If it takes longer than that,’ I said, ‘I’ll mail another four thousand to you.’
He grunted and pocketed the cheque. He looked up, eyes darting. I glanced at the window facing Domain Road. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The same guy slipped past a second time.’
‘Police?’
‘Nar. It was one of the Frogs at the funeral.’
‘Which one?’
‘The skinny one who dresses like a poof. Name’s Maniguet.’ Farrar chewed on the word so badly that I got him to write it on a drinks coaster.
‘Works for a perfume company, called Vital. So does the other one, the bruiser. His name is Cochard.’ Farrar scribbled that out too.
‘You got onto them quickly.’
‘Easy. I checked out their vehicle registration. It was under the company name with two men authorised to drive it. I rang the company and asked the woman on the switch a few questions.’
Maniguet sauntered past the window again. It was six thirty and dark and he still wore sunglasses.
‘We’d better get out of here,’ Farrar said, downing his drinks like water.
We hustled out through the restaurant to an alley leading away from Domain Road and into Park Street, which was painfully familiar to me.
‘I’ll ring Hewitt tomorrow,’ Farrar said, shaking hands, ‘good luck tonight.’
I found the Rolls and got in. I felt alone and down as I drove off down Toorak Road. Traffic was heavy and we crawled along with many stops for lights. After a couple of kilometres I noticed a frisky red Fiat slipping in and out of the traffic. I lost it halfway home and thought nothing of it, except that I was plagued by the fear that the police, Maniguet, or even the night prowler could he following me. Any sudden movement in the traffic or the street put me on edge. Too much so. Twice I reached under the seat to touch the butt of the Heckler & Koch, which was taped under the driver’s seat. Its cold steel and plastic was minimal comfort.
I slipped up the driveway of my home and stopped as usual beside the tennis court. I fumbled round for my briefcase and by fluke glanced in the rear vision mirror. Did I see movement in the bushes by the court? I kept staring.
Somebody was out there.
It wasn’t Fui or Tomi; they would have greeted me. I bent forward and groped for the gun. In that split second a bullet exploded the driver’s window. Two, three, four more shattered the front window and the noise sounded like I was being attacked from everywhere.
I crouched under the steering wheel, pushed open the driver’s door and fired blindly at a shape that was moving towards me. I fired again. The shadow dived into the bushes. I fired a third time, started the car and reversed recklessly down the driveway. I could hear the Tashesitas shouting from the front door, but I didn’t stop backing until I was in the street and had done a reverse one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.
I sped up to Toorak Road, but was forced to brake hard behind a tram and manoeuvre to the right. The Fiat was in pursuit. I passed the tram the wrong way just as it started moving and caused oncoming traffic to swerve to avoid me.
The Fiat followed in a move more maniacal than mine. In the chaos I thought I saw two shapes in the front of the pursuing vehicle.
I wanted to dial emergency, but needed all my hand skills to negotiate traffic. I was still gripping the gun. The Fiat gained on me. A rifle was being angled out a window. I turned left along Orrong Road as a shot was fired.
It missed and the Fiat had careered on up Toorak Road. I gunned the Rolls until I hit Malvern Road but didn’t wait for lights and ran a red, much to the anger of cars all round me. I placed the gun on the passenger seat and tried to dial emergency. My fingers wouldn’t behave. They were good for gripping a wheel or a gun and little else. I wriggled the Rolls along several streets until I was near a railway station. It was Hawksburn and a street from the garage where the Rolls was serviced.
I held the gun in my lap and dialled emergency. After an agonising delay, a woman took details. I couldn’t wait more than a minute so I crawled the Rolls down to my mechanic’s yard and got out. There was a light on in the workshop. I banged on the tiny door. A man stopped whistling and dropped a tool on the concrete floor.
‘Yeah, yeah, I com’n!’
He played with the door. A grease-smeared face appeared. It was Bobby, a mechanic I had known for years. He went white when he saw the Heckler.
‘Mr Hamilton!’
I jumped in.
‘What’s wrong!?’
‘Someone’s been taking potshots at me. The Rolls is full of holes.’
He laughed nervously at my unintentional rhyme.
‘You want it repaired?’
‘Well yes . . .’ I said, stunned by his devotion to duty. His hand went out for the keys, which I gave him. A car sped down the street.
‘How do I get out?’ I said, already running into the heart of the workshop. Bobby ran after me. Car doors slammed. Feet ran down the pavement. A fist hammered on the door.
Bobby led me to a side door.
‘What am I gunna do?’ he said, terror-stricken.
‘Don’t let them in,’ I said, slipping away. A voice called ‘Police’, but I wasn’t in a mood to believe anyone. I raced down a narrow lane which took me up to the train station. A train was coming in. I jumped on. It shunted out and I had a view of the garage entrance, where I had left poor Bobby to deal with the visitors. They had been police after all. He was scratching his head and pointing at my mutilated vehicle.
As the train pulled away I saw the Fiat another eighty metres away. One of the occupants was standing, with both hands raised to his face. He had binoculars fixed on the train windows. I slumped back in my seat. When the train was well beyond the Fiat, I looked up. It was being driven off at speed. A woman was standing at the end of the carriage. Two young men carrying beer cans were annoying her. She stepped towards me with the two louts, both no older than eighteen, close at heel. She sat in my cubicle and sucked in breath when she saw the gun. I fumbled it into a coat pocket, but it was too big to be hidden.
‘It’s OK,’ I said, ‘you in trouble?’
The woman was too afraid to speak. She nodded. The louts were standing nearby, hovering oblivious of me. I stood up.
‘Leave this woman alone,’ I said. They were not even tipsy, just fired up enough to do a little train molestation, which five times out ten led to rape. They noticed my hand on the weapon which protruded from my coat pocket. Their manner changed. They retreated to the end of the carriage.
‘Get off at the next stop!’ I shouted. They were trying to open the door and jump out before the station appeared. My hands were shaking. The woman stared. She was about twenty, plump and dark-haired, with a Cleopatra fringe over her round, pretty face.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered nervously, still unsure if she had jumped from the frying pan into the fire.
‘I thought you were one of those train guards,’ she said. I coughed and laughed with a dash of hysteria. She laughed uncertainly at first and then more heartily.
The train pulled in at South Yarra station. About a dozen commuters got on the city-bound train. I watched the faces, even of women, although I didn’t think the attackers in the Fiat would have had time to reach South Yarra.
The train pulled out.
How would the attackers react? It would be better for them to speed into the city’s Flinders Street station and meet the train there. With luck they could beat it in. I had to get off before Flinders Street, and there was only one other stop, at Richmond opposite the football ground of the same name.
I waited for the train to stop. No one was getting off. I dashed for the door at the last second, only to see a figure doing the same thing in the next carriage. I tried to get back on. Too late. I dashed between waiting commuters and down steps.
Get the gun
out. Get it out!!
I ran past station guards who shouted after me. I kept going and glanced over my shoulder to see three guards tackling the person who had been chasing me. That gave me a vital few seconds break, but I was running straight towards the Fiat. It had pulled up on Brunton Avenue opposite the Richmond ground.
Cochard, the big Frenchman, was getting out of the vehicle. I dashed over the road and fired over the top of the car. He took evasive action across the front seat, and by the time he had recovered I was sprinting into the darkened MCG carpark towards that stadium.
The Fiat was in pursuit and the occupants were searching for an entrance to the carpark.
They’re going to run me down! Stop. Get your breath. Assess your position.
I could see them removing a wooden barrier to the carpark as I stumbled on. They had the lights on high beam. From the shouts and roar of the car’s gear shift, I guessed they had spotted me. I jumped a turnstile into the stadium and dashed up stairs to the top of the Olympic Stand. I could see the Fiat careering round aimlessly. It stopped after a minute and both attackers got out and ran towards the stadium directly beneath me.
I hurried along a corridor, trying doors. One opened into a kitchen and catering area. I slammed it shut, rammed home a bolt, and stayed motionless. My heart had never pounded so hard and it burned.
After twenty minutes I heard the familiar whine of the Fiat and ventured out. It was bumping its way out of the carpark towards the city. As I descended the stairs it occurred to me that they might be cunning enough to pretend to leave and have one of them stay behind.
I reached ground level and the walkway round to the Members Reserve. Something moved behind me. A door was opening. I propped and aimed the Heckler. An elderly cleaner dropped a bucket and raised his hands. Water spilled to the concrete and streamed towards me.
‘Sorry,’ I said lamely, ‘thought you were somebody else.’
I lowered the weapon and trotted down the corridor towards lights and the Members Reserve where couples were ascending stairs to the dining room. I was still mindful of the possibility of a trap as I tried to hide the gun in a coat pocket again without taking my hand off the handle. A surgeon would have to remove it later.
Two men were pushing out of a revolving turnstile. One said to his companion, ‘We’ve both had too much to drink. Better get a taxi.’
‘You’re right, but where?’
‘Just up ’ere.’
I watched them stagger towards cabs waiting outside the ground. I followed, ran past them and jumped in one before them.
‘Where to, mite?’ the driver said, putting down Truth and blinking his eyes at me. He was Greek, about thirty and muscular. The name on the dash was Taki Tirodakis.
‘Homicide HQ, St Kilda Road,’ I said.
‘Sure, mitey,’ he said, and glanced at me twice, ‘what’s the trouble?’
‘Nothing.’
He drove off.
‘You a cop?’ he asked with a worried frown.
‘No.’
It was eight p.m., the time I was supposed to meet Cassie Morris and two hours before my rendezvous with Benns.
We reached Homicide inside seven minutes and just as the taxi was cruising to the entrance I spotted the Fiat, sitting about fifty metres away on the other side from the police building. I slid down in the seat.
‘Keep going,’ I hissed, ‘keep moving!’
‘OK, mite,’ he said, ‘keep your shirt on.’
He kept giving me funny looks. When we were two blocks beyond Police HQ, he pulled the taxi up.
‘I want you out, mite,’ he said, pushing open my passenger door.
‘Not yet,’ I said, ‘get me right out of here.’
‘Out!’ he shouted and pushed me in the shoulder.
I pulled out the gun. He recoiled.
‘Take me to Caroline Street South Yarra, now!’ I yelled.
‘Sure, mite, sure, sure, don’ worry . . . please, I got a wife and kids . . .’ He tore a photo from a shirt pocket and dropped it in my lap.
I wasn’t about to create orphans. On the other hand I didn’t fancy being dropped too close to my tormentors in the Fiat. What if the occupants – Cochard and Maniguet – had a connection with Benns? I dismissed it, but the thought crept back. Farrar had said the police would be keeping a surveillance on me. Was it just possible that the French had been informed of my whereabouts? I tried to consider why I would be targeted for murder, but the possibilities seemed farfetched. Yet nothing explained how the Fiat happened to be waiting for me. Or was it waiting for me? I was sure it was the same car, after getting a glimpse of the registration, MUT 346, several times. Would it sit there for two hours? Would they he so smart as to anticipate me arriving early? They had, after all, out-thought me on the train journey.
As we slipped into Alexandra Avenue I couldn’t rule out the chance that there just could be a link between Benns and the French hitmen, which left me precisely nowhere. I had less than two hours to decide what to do and who to trust.
Right then I trusted no one, not even my new best friend Taki Tirodakis, who let me out in Caroline Street some two hundred metres from my destination in Lawson Grove. Taki didn’t want to take my fare. I insisted and gave him a twenty-dollar tip.
‘That’s so you don’t report me for pulling a gun on you,’ I said, still with the weapon in my hand, but not pointed at him.
‘Aw, no worries,’ he stuttered, ‘I tell no one. Promise, mite, promise.’
I waved the family photo at him and tossed it in his lap.
‘If you do,’ I said, mustering new-found menace and feeling a heel, ‘I’ll come after you. Got that?’
Taki paled and his forehead stretched. He nodded. My lack of trust in humanity at that moment made me unsure about Taki yet I had little choice but to wave him on his way. He burnt rubber escaping.
TEN
WHEN THE TAXI was round the corner leading up Caroline Street away from the river, I began to walk the other way and turned right into Lawson Grove. A little way into the street was a general store for the locals who were isolated from the fashionable shops on Toorak Road. I bought a newspaper and a Mars Bar, which I devoured in a few seconds. Apart from a guzzled cup of office plunger coffee, I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. I wrapped the Heckler in the paper and stuffed it back in my jacket pocket.
Number five was at the end of the cul de sac, and the night was quiet apart from the occasional vehicle swooping down Caroline Street and the drone of traffic on Alexandra Avenue.
A fog was settling in early over the city. I surveyed the block where Cassie Morris lived. It was a 1930s apartment building and would not have been out of place in Hollywood, San Francisco or even a Greek island with its stucco, campy architecture – early picture theatre. There was a concrete walk up outside staircase with landings at each level. Cassie’s apartment was on top. The handrail was slippery from the fog’s moisture as I stepped under a light at a wire door entrance, which led to another flight of stairs and her place. I looked back. The pea souper had crept over the river like a slow gas attack and was beginning to blanket buildings, but the Nylex clock could be just seen on the tower across the river. It said eight twenty-six. A second later the temperature flashed a chilly eight degrees, which I hadn’t noticed until now, because I’d been too busy getting hot running and dodging.
I pulled up my coat collar, and pushed the button to number five at the wire door. It snapped open and there was movement at the top of the staircase leading to Cassie’s apartment. Seconds later she appeared at her front door.
‘Come on up,’ she said, ‘I’m just watching Peter on TV.’
Walters was being interviewed on a news program. I stepped in and was enveloped by the warmth from a wood fire of split Mallee roots as she closed the door behind me. The walls were book-lined, and the the books were catalogued into medical and non-medical, the latter being again split into fiction and non-fiction. Signs of a tidy, well-read mind. Cassie
had on a tight-fitting crimson dress and she wore black high-heeled shoes. Her hair was still down and she had put on red lipstick.
She was having trouble keeping her eyes off the screen. She apologised, offered me a glass of champagne from a bottle already opened, and a seat. I sat watching her new lover. I didn’t know her well enough to be jealous. But I was envious. Walters looked handsome in a conservative, tailored charcoal-grey suit and his lean face was made for television. He didn’t have a dark hair out of place. When he smiled he could have been a mature model for denture paste, and he handled himself well answering questions about Cancer Week in Australia. The only sign of nerves came when he played with a large, ornate cufflink attached to a starched cuff. Walters was speaking about the chances of a breakthrough in cures for brain tumours.
‘We’re not there yet, but we’re close,’ he said. ‘We can retard their progress if we reach them early enough.’
Morris was smiling approvingly and nodding.
‘He’s good, isn’t he?’ she said.
‘He looks good,’ I said, ‘but is he saying anything new?’
‘Well, he can’t, I suppose.’
‘Sounds like a good politician,’ I said, good-naturedly.
‘I suppose he is, really. But what happened to you?’ she said, taking me in properly for the first time. ‘You’ve been cut.’
‘I’m a rotten shaver,’ I said.
The cuts must have been from the glass when the bullets went through my car window. I ran a finger round my collar. There was plenty of congealed blood. No wonder I had received strange looks from everyone on the circuitous route here.
The Walters interview was over. She flicked off the TV.
I stood up and looked out a window to a courtyard of an adjacent apartment block, half-expecting to see the Frenchmen creeping towards us.
‘I won’t be able to come out with you this evening,’ Cassie said.