Atomic City

by Sally Breen

  Who would have thought the man with a predilection for page-three girls would be reading Crisp?

  Yeah, it’s amazing what you pick up in jail.

  Everyone except the Dealer laughs again. Jade raises her hips on the couch. A move that’s sudden. She wants his legs off her again. The Dealer swings them down, trying to ignore PJ’s voice. He sits, perched on the edge of the couch, wanting to move but wanting to watch her. She lifts herself up, like she’s hot for him, the Dealer thinks. PJ continues.

  But if you want something from Wilde I can give it to you.

  Go ahead.

  He said that recreation, not instruction, is the main aim of conversation. And that the truth is rarely pure and never simple.

  The interviewer laughs again, slightly uneasy.

  Well, this is quite the English lesson. But what about you? How do you feel about those people you might have damaged?

  That’s the thing, see. That’s what I’m trying to say. Lying, if you want to call it that, only applies to words. You can’t be held responsible for someone else’s lack of comprehension.

  Jade jumps up off the couch. Punches the air with her fist.

  Brilliant, she says, looking wide-eyed at the Dealer. Fucking brilliant.

  The Dealer leaves the room, disgusted. Jade doesn’t care. She doesn’t even follow his back. Such simple manoeuvres don’t work here. She knows he’ll come back to her. He always does.

  THE DEALER

  We are holed up in our apartment, still our favourite tower, a curved white palace that looks like a Mediterranean dream. The place we use for our carpet joint and the place Jade uses to sleep with the police. Jade acquired the apartment by pretending to be one of them: an officer with the CJC. I remain her decoy, a voice on the other end of the phone vouching for her worth and her legitimacy, wondering for how long the management will buy it.

  Jade doesn’t look like a CJC officer. She tells the managers she’s working undercover, which goes some way to explaining me. The line covers the late-night jaunts and when she brings the real cops in it all looks clean. Cops are always cops whether they’re in uniform or not.

  The garb Jade uses to attract the police isn’t exactly a staple uniform of honesty but some of them like a bit of wayward downtime. The ones she chooses are generally cadets, young men with big arms and dead-fish eyes drawn to a bit of errant R&R. Young men fired up on the power and sexiness of their own muscle. Jade tells me dealing with them is hard work. They speak in staccato. They are not amused by the things she is. She sticks to the loud corners in dark places and lets her body do the talking. She tells me they come in two types. Efficient or kinky.

  I look at her next to me, at her hair sticky on her head, piled up in a loose bun with the box peroxide; the colour of the thick blue liquid starts to fade to white. She’s going for that cool acid-blonde thing, the platinum beacon. If you want to get things moving you can’t be subtle in this city. You need to pull focus, to reel them in quickly. This is not an image I think Jade will get away with easily, but she does. And it reminds me of a documentary I saw once on Marilyn Monroe. Not the hair exactly, or how she’s holding herself, but how she can turn the light on. Jade has this chameleon ability, this internal switch. But I guess selling sex is never as difficult as selling anything else.

  The policemen Jade brings here are not aware of her impersonations; they think she’s easy, but edgy enough to turn them on. And just like all Jade’s manoeuvres, what she’s offering them works for us in a number of ways. These boys are tired of the usual red houses. Jade offers them free tricks for protection. They’ve seen our wheels in here, they’ve seen my table, some of them even play. When they fuck Jade it’s like having sex and not paying, because turning a blind eye is better than choosing from the same old line. It feels like a date. It feels mutual, and Jade acts like she likes it.

  She’s developed a fascination with being very close to their law.

  Once she got a copper so pissed she stole his badge and was able to convince him he must have lost it and while he was sleeping she took the last fifty bucks he had, just for the fun of it, out of his wallet. And I bet that guy thought twice about another loose night on the juice. But the badge comes in handy. She flashes it a lot. Sometimes she even uses it to go through people’s bags. We created a Special Forces ID from the one in the dickhead’s wallet. We scanned the document in, changed some of the details, the division and the section, and up close you can tell it’s dodgy but not many people have actually seen a copper’s ID let alone a CJC officer’s up close, so it passes under a vague eye. Even under the watchful gaze of moron caretakers and management-rights holders the ID works well enough. Doors open. Doors unlock.

  The other less tactical reason we’re here is because the girl Jade was living with kicked her out. Jade’s newfound associations with cops made her uncomfortable. But she’s not the only one our charades are pissing off. Word gets around quickly. We’re eating in on a lot of turf – exactly whose turf is something we never mention. But I’m aware of it and Jade’s aware of it. Lines to PJ run underneath every decision we make. We’ve got our own reasons, but every goal we set has got his lining on it.

  Sometimes Jade and I amuse each other with ideas of getting out, talking like neither of us remembers why we’re here.

  Once we’ve hit two mil’, she’ll say. Or when the town starts closing in.

  We never defer to another agenda.

  I tell Jade we should head to another town where no one knows us. Another town like this one. We’ve talked about Miami, Los Angeles, Las Vegas. We’ve talked about that paper trail, a trip overseas, a way around the world, in fast-money towns, in all those fresh new frontiers.

  STATE OF PLAY

  These are the nights. Full of the unseen. High up in the tower, the Dealer ring-leads. The punters who form the arc around him are all of a kind. No sharks, no slickers, no silver tongues. He and Jade aren’t looking to run a premium house, they’re looking to fill a void. A nice up-and-up carpet joint for those who feel funny about being forward in public. Jade always makes sure the mix is just right. Couple of paranoid pollies, rich kids with straight parents, married men, public people, famous figures. The kind of people who gamble with everything but shouldn’t be seen doing it. A shaker of respectables that need catering to. Cashed up but hard to hold on to and even harder to please. The night must be right. Win or lose, the night must make them want to come back.

  This crowd wants a show. Real rollers would be happy with a high minimum, a fresh deck and a wide-open game, but these people want the full trade. They don’t care what they’re playing. They want the bright lights, the range, the rush, and someone well put together or someone big-time to raid. They want the private game. And like everything else in this town, word about good downtime options in the right circles gets around. So Jade and the Dealer serve up the cut with enough noir style to conjure cool and enough edged-up naughtiness to reel it in. And reeling isn’t hard. These people might be rich, but in the end they’re cheaper – just a collection of low rollers, monkeys and hunch players.

  Jade and the Dealer meet demand. They bring in a couple of rookies as wheel-rollers and some young blood to stir the room. The Dealer is the only card cutter. They don’t trust anyone else. The eight seats in front of him are coveted, available only on request, lending one-night kudos and gravity. Generally the women, hired or hovering, prefer roulette. Two wheels roll on either side of the Dealer’s table; whether it’s the poker table or the blackjack table, roulette is the catalyst.

  Tonight Jade is casing, circling the room, all worked out, the scene set, humming, with effortless control. She takes a moment to the side, to watch. The Dealer looks over at her, at her young flesh obvious and outlined against the black of her dress, against the wide night behind her and the balcony. In the foreground she is light yellow skin, the light yellow light flickering in the city beyond. He smiles. Jade can see herself shimmering, a faultless apparition, a clean sh
een in the window. A perfect world caught by the light in the glass.

  Gazing, as if out to the city, she watches the Dealer standing reflected, the practised dance of his hands, the red-black whir of steel wheels on either side of him as they spin, the movement of women in shiny dresses, jewels flickering, male hair slicked and heads turned, everything burnished, everything lit, captured and overlaid on the pane, on the black of the night sky and the dark empty sea.

  Jade steps back into the circle. She sidles up to the roulette tables, takes the young guests one by one by the arm, leads them to the room adjacent where the toys get laid out. She offers them a kind of friendship, a camaraderie, a sense of quiet ritual before she offers the drugs. It’s important the moment has some class. Clean line mirrors produced from heavy drawers and powder spilt from antique boxes, cut with Jade’s deft hand. Already-halved tabs if they prefer. The portions are always non-threatening, always small. Jade gauges, as the night wears on, not how much they want but how much they can take. They mustn’t lie on the floor, they must remain upright, they must remain able to play. The invitation to enter the room means Jade controls the dish. If she left the treats as self-serve, then the underlying sense of decorum they require for a few good hours’ play would slip away. Jade knows who’ll come into the room and who’ll prefer the juice, delivered with much more verve. Because what goes on at the top of this tower, and in what ways, always depends on who has come up to play.

  Sometimes Jade will cue the bartender to slip in some amphetamine residue. It’s usually the politicians, the bosses, the professionals, the self-made, the people under too much pressure, with too much power, the people who secretly hate the daily garbage-compact of their lives, who tend to get too pissed. Jade and her girls keep them buzzing unawares. Jade pays her tight crew well. Tells them to keep their mouths shut, their legs open or their dicks hard on request. They must like everyone. And their motto: some people need to be shown. Great parties and great profits are always about super orchestration.

  Jade creates the play, proffering subtle and not-so-subtle distractions. The Dealer works the players. His tactics, like Jade’s, will depend on the weaned and weakened positions of the privileged. He outs all the tricks. Belly-stripping, trimming cards so some of them are wider at the centre than they are at the ends. And the mark is so tiny only his expert hands can register it. Sometimes he writes the signals he needs onto the decks blocking out sections on face cards or in turn embellishing designs. Sometimes, if he knows the players coming are fast or instinctually good, he’ll prepare a cold deck. Arranging cards in a certain order for the purposes of switching later for the deck in play. All his manoeuvres will depend, in equal parts, on bunny-eyed players, Jade, and his unique sense of facile grace and faultless preparation.

  No one ever wins by accident.

  Jade is in bed with another rookie cop. She has no need to remember his name or anything about him. His tanned body, nice to look at, the skin and the muscles under it all carved and sharp, but impenetrable she thinks, cold and hard to break, like refrigerated chocolate. She is asking him questions about PJ. She is asking the questions as if this young man’s delusions of grandeur, his naïve leanings towards PJ’s capture, mean something to both of them and are what she wants to hear. She is working this soft moment after fucking, the moment closest to human concession and injury, and this cop will never forget her. Years later when he’s ensconced in a three-bedder in Robina with a rock garden, neatly kept bushes, a wife, two kids and a peach-coloured automatic garage door, after all that stuff he’ll still recall her and she will have forgotten all about him long ago. He will remember how she fucked him sitting on him backwards and how much he liked it. Not knowing she chose the position so she wouldn’t have to look at him. And her listening like she is now, front up and both efforts so convincing. This cop will always have a weakness for young girls breaking laws.

  Jade will ask him where PJ lives. She will ask him when he’s telling her about PJ’s house how big it is, how they know where it is, how he’s always right there under their nose. She will ask the questions innocently and he will tell her, explaining and saying, you know the one?

  And Jade does but only from the outside. The first time PJ fucked her he’d chosen one of his apartments, which Jade has since learnt are usually empty. Returning to the scene of the crime hasn’t helped her find him. The fact PJ hasn’t returned any of her calls since the day she met him should prepare her for the brush-off but when Jade goes to PJ’s house and presses the buzzer she finds he is not in. The voice that informs her is male and brusque. The not-slow-in-coming-forward type of voice that speaks for him. Jade knows PJ’s there but she concedes. Her presence is not enough. PJ watches her leave from the upstairs window, intrigued. By her persistence, her new hair, the trashy strangeness of her. On her second visit Jade is armed with a spiel. She’s realised she’s got to give PJ something other than herself if she wants to get inside. She’s got to give him what she thinks is something big.

  She gives him the Dealer.

  She tells the voice that she’s working for the Dealer, that she has some information about what went down all that time ago between PJ and him and what the Dealer’s thinking.

  The door slides open.

  Jade tells herself walking in that giving PJ the Dealer is not a real trade. That because the information is kind of a lie, because the history is only surmised, then the deal makes her move smart and less of a betrayal. She tells herself selling the Dealer down the river will be worth the pain, that in the end she and the Dealer will win.

  She tells herself all these things because when that gate opens and she is walking down the long curved drive looking up at PJ’s house full of wide window panes and eyes her mind is changing. She isn’t thinking about endings or consequences, she is thinking about getting inside, getting listened to and getting time. Right now, standing in front of his colossal white wood and frosted glass door, she isn’t thinking about how she has sold this new play to the Dealer, how easy it was to convince him, in his new boundless and limitless state, that taking revenge against PJ was absolutely necessary. The building of their reputations in certain circles depended on it. Jade isn’t thinking about the money or even how she is going to set up the sting, she is thinking about what sitting across from PJ is going to feel like, imagining the force of a giant spotlight, Hollywood grade, when she holds the cards and what he thinks might be something on him.

  They have the meeting alone, in PJ’s study with the clear glass wall holding up all the blue sky behind his head and PJ knows enough this time to act convinced, to act like he gives a shit, acting like he has enough acquiescence to make her feel special. He lets her think this time he’s in, he’s interested, she’s got him and that maybe he was always waiting for her to come back, that he’s been thinking about her when he hasn’t, that he thinks Jade being here was only a matter of time. He listens. When Jade is finished he asks her what she needs. PJ looks at her square in the eye and for a moment she thinks he isn’t going to buy what she’s offering but he stands, making a move towards her. He shakes her hand and then he takes it, leading her slowly out of the study, opening up the door, saying something about things between him and the Dealer remaining unfinished. He wants more than what her hand has offered him. He nods at the voice and then he takes Jade to bed.

  Later when PJ emerges from the bedroom, minutes after Jade has gone, he says: Nice girl. Follow her.

  And the voice knows exactly what he means.

  HARVEY

  Jade never bragged about money but very slowly things would slip out like: Oh, my parents own a couple of those.

  Somebody actually looked at her bank account, which backed it up because it was independent and said she had a ten-thousand-dollar balance. They asked her for her cash card to get some money and they were whispering saying: She’s got ten grand in her bank.

  She would never ever boast about anything, you know, just a normal person, normal car. Bit by
bit it turns out that … I mean, I’ve jumped a bit, this came out slowly over a period of a couple of months, it wasn’t as if she ever said: Oh, guess what my father does?

  But supposedly they were among the wealthiest people in Australia. Two sets of parents; they split up when they were very young. She said that her mum and dad were married, had her, then met this other couple and they swapped partners and one went off and married one and one went off and married the other and they’d been together ever since.

  This is not true. They have separated, that was true, but the fact that they met these other partners and swapped and that kind of thing was just another pointless lie. That’s the scary thing. We all lie under pressure from time to time but just to invent pointless stories …

  So, it’s all come out to the level that she would talk about business deals that needed ten million dollars and she’d be on the phone. I’d listen because I’d be with her and she’d talk about moving millions around, supposedly helped out by her family or these people who she knew through her family and ten million was no big deal. They could just have it spare. She would talk to all these imaginary people with me in the room and in the end it was just nobody. There was nobody there. Jade was just talking to a dead phone.

  None of that stuff about her family is true. There is no money anywhere. Her parents are just normal people. She said among other things that they owned the property called The Dalton, a famous Australian property. They did actually live there, but they managed it, they never owned it, right? So they own that, the largest property in New South Wales, and her father ran a building company here that was ridiculously, ridiculously huge. Okay? And she had, among other things, spent a year in France modelling with her friends. She had gone and seen the 1995, whatever it was, World Rugby Cup finals in South Africa. She had spent a month there. Long in-depth stories about the parties, what South Africa was like … She’s never been there, never been. She’s never even left Australia. Um…about the final, David Campese coming up to her and telling her all this stuff. About in France the little café they used to go to for breakfast. Not just, I’ve been there, but long, really in-depth details. I mean, she made out that Tim Horan and the rugby boys, the rugby union guys, grew up together on these properties, properties next to each other, and they were like brothers. I guess there might be some truth in that but Jade certainly never knew them.