Blood Is a Stranger

by Roland Perry

  Richardson looked over at his men about twenty paces away as they hacked and sliced into the buffalo. Strip after strip of thick steaks destined for human consumption from Tehran to Hamburg were piled in a metal box.

  ‘Chief,’ Richardson said, lowering his voice so that the conversation could not be heard by his or O’Laughlin’s men, ‘I’m very disappointed in you. Get your facts right. You can’t start wrongly accusing a member of the Indonesian cabinet of desecrating Aboriginal sacred land. It could precipitate a crisis, especially with that crazy General Utun as its president. He has so many problems at home, he would just love to have an incident to focus on abroad. You know, a little scuffle on the frontier with Papua New Guinea or Malaysia, or with us . . .’

  ‘I don’t need a lecture from you on international affairs,’ O’Laughlin said. ‘The Aborigines have what sounds to me like pretty legitimate grievances.’

  ‘They’re all full of shit!’ Richardson bellowed. His men stopped work. ‘The whole fuckin’ lot of them have had one corroboree too many!’

  ‘You’ve been seen on Brockman,’ O’Laughlin said, pointing an accusing finger. ‘You destroyed an Aborigine’s telescope. Many tribespeople have seen your people on the sacred sites at night. It’s my job to investigate their accusations.’

  O’Laughlin was concerned to maintain his authority without going too far. To be seen to crumble in front of Richardson’s men would be to invite anarchy in Darwin.

  Richardson’s temper dissolved as quickly as it had come. He smiled and put a hand on O’Laughlin’s shoulder.

  ‘Tell old Jimmy Goyong we’ll pay for his telescope,’ he said in a conciliatory tone, ‘and if any of the boys have strayed onto the sacred areas, I’ll see it doesn’t happen again. With the big drill coming, there has been a bit of excitement around the place.’

  O’Laughlin glanced at the team of moustached butchers who had resumed their work.

  ‘I wanted to talk about the drill,’ he said. ‘The Bididgee fear you are bringing it to start a mine under Brockman. If they find evidence that this is so, then there is no way I can have my men escort it onto the reserve.’

  ‘No one is going to take the word of a demented old booze artist.’ For the benefit of his bruisers he said loudly, ‘Everyone knows Jimmy’s a booze artist.’ This elicited the obligatory guffaws.

  ‘I haven’t made myself clear,’ O’Laughlin said. ‘I won’t let you take that drill onto the reserve if evidence is found. Is that clear enough?’

  Richardson’s expression contorted into a mock frown. ‘How can there be any evidence, Chief? No one, especially a black, is allowed on the sacred sites. Who’s going to collect non-existent evidence?’

  His men had finished their handiwork and were cleaning knives.

  ‘You know the trouble that can brew if the Aborigines believe you’ve been on those sites,’ O’Laughlin said. ‘Just keep your bozos off! I will not allow confrontation on my watch in this territory! Understand?!’

  Richardson nodded almost imperceptibly. O’Laughlin held his gaze for a moment and then grunted a farewell. As he strode back to the police car, dingos and wild pigs were gathering not forty metres away ready to devour the buffalo’s remains. O’Laughlin told his men to get in. Just before he slipped into the driver’s seat, he glanced up at the sky. Black birds of prey were circling.

  A thunderstorm crashed over Sydney bringing torrential rain and hail from a black, frenetic sky. Cardinal stood at the window and watched as the Harbour, which hours earlier had been tranquil enough for the myriad sails, was turned into a whirlpool that halted all shipping except for irrepressible tugs.

  Cardinal wanted to get the cremation over with and leave Sydney. He had no doubts now that someone planned to kill him.

  He looked at his watch for the umpteenth time and reached for a tie. It was time to go to the crematorium. He dreaded it.

  The taxi took forty-five minutes to make the trip. The wall of rain, driven by a north wind, swept towards the city and made it difficult to see cars more than twenty metres ahead. Even the police were halted for five minutes. The rain turned to hail and drummed car roofs. They reached the tiny crematorium at McMahon’s Point just north west of the Bridge with a few minutes to spare. Cardinal waited in the taxi and watched elderly mourners leaving the little chapel.

  Everyone has a right to die but not at twenty-five, he thought as he paid the fare and hurried to a concrete area next to the chapel where wreaths were laid. There was a big wreath from Rhonda. The large flower arrangement from him was also there. Cardinal had to bend down in the bucketing rain to read the card inscription he had found so tough to compose: ‘Always treasured, forever in my heart. All my love, Dad.’

  It brought tears to his eyes when he wrote it and again as he read it. Another wreath caught his attention. It was from the American Embassy. Nothing from Kim Lim. He had tried to contact her again and had sent her a telegram with the funeral details. He read the inscriptions on four other wreaths but recognised no other names.

  He entered the chapel dripping wet and was surprised to see ten people already seated. Cardinal was greeted by an ageing minister with a white mane who chatted aimlessly with him and showed him a recorder with the US national anthem in it. It was the best he could do to fulfil Harry’s wish that it should be played.

  The service began. Cardinal didn’t really hear, and would never remember, the minister’s ramblings, which were interspersed with his chronic coughing.

  The mercilessly short service ended with the scratchy rendition of the anthem. It boomed out from the recorder held aloft by the minister.

  Cardinal felt very much alone as he left the chapel. Other mourners chatted briefly and then moved off. Someone touched his arm. It was Rhonda.

  ‘I didn’t expect you,’ Cardinal said.

  ‘I was due to fly out this morning,’ Rhonda said, ‘but the storm was so bad they cancelled all flights.’

  ‘Who were they?’ Cardinal asked, as he pointed to a group of mourners getting into two cars.

  ‘They were from Lucas Heights,’ Rhonda said. ‘I tried to talk to them, but they were not going to tell me anything.’

  Cardinal watched forlornly. Rhonda scribbled down car number plates as the vehicles were held up by a funeral line coming in the front gates. ‘I should have tried to speak with them,’ Cardinal said.

  ‘Not now, Ken,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow is another day. Besides I can reach one of the drivers. He was about Harry’s age. He recognised me and seemed to want to talk.’

  ‘How would you get to him?’

  ‘I know a cop who can find out the car owner’s name and address. If that fails, I can wait outside Lucas Heights for that man and follow him.’

  They waited as the new procession was almost inside the crematorium grounds. The rain had eased for the first time in three hours, but the wind was still strong enough to bend small trees.

  ‘They were all from Lucas Heights?’ Cardinal asked.

  Rhonda nodded. ‘Except for one tall guy with a turd for a tie-pin,’ she said. ‘He arrived late in a limo just after I did. He stood at the back of the chapel and ducked out just before the end.’ She craned her neck. ‘See, there’s the limo driving out the gates now.’

  Cardinal leaned forward and instructed the driver to catch it. ‘What did he look like?’ Cardinal asked as yet another procession coming in held them up.

  ‘Tall, about your height and rather snooty. I didn’t like his eyes. He saw me looking at him, and he sort of glared.’

  ‘He recognised you?’

  ‘I always think people do when they stare. Many forget they’ve seen me on TV and think I’m somebody they know.’

  Cardinal urged the driver to move, and his taxi forced some of the oncoming cars to swerve and slew on the muddy lawn. Minutes later they caught the limousine but were disappointed to see it had blacked-out windows. The bridge traffic moved more freely because of the improved weather and all lanes had been re-opene
d. They were soon close enough to the sleek grey vehicle to read its registration number.

  ‘US Embassy plates!’ Cardinal said.

  The limousine cruised at a gentle speed and slowed up near the Menzies Hotel in the city behind George Street. Out jumped a well-dressed man.

  ‘It had to be,’ Cardinal whispered. ‘That’s Donald Blundell!’

  3

  The sea of crushed emeralds around Darwin made the city and its environs appear cool and seductive from the air after the four-hour trip across much of Australia’s flat semi-desert, which covered two-thirds of the continent.

  Cardinal had been driven by the desire for justice. Rhonda had supported him. He was aware that her motives were professional, and that there were dangers in becoming a pawn in her plans for an expose. He had seen her ambition, yet he was grateful for her support. She had made him see that if he did not follow up now his guilt and anger would never leave him.

  Rhonda had arranged a meeting with Burra and had helped him concoct a suitable cover for trying to meet Bull Richardson. She had used a similar scheme before.

  Cardinal had rung a close friend in New York who ran an investment company and cajoled him into letting Cardinal claim he was a representative of the company doing research for big US corporate clients. Initial calls to Richardson’s Darwin base and his property in Arnhem Land had failed to get a response.

  The instant Cardinal stepped out of the plane at Darwin airport, he was aware of how deceptive his vision of a cool paradise had been from the air. He was struck by dripping humidity and a temperature that was melting the edges of the tarmac. More than ever he appreciated his ‘Bogart’ hat. He collected his luggage and bustled out of the airport lounge to find a taxi. The lethargy of the locals, who glided about like slugs, was bemusing.

  He approached a taxi. The driver indicated the one behind. Cardinal began to get in, but he too jerked his thumb and grunted what sounded like ‘Yabba’. Cardinal worked out that this translated as ‘the Abo’. He became frustrated by the end of the line where there was a taxi with all its windows down. It was empty. He marched to another driver and asked if he could take him to the Casino Hotel.

  ‘Like to help you, mate,’ the hirsute man said as he rolled a cigarette, ‘but I’ve been booked.’

  Cardinal turned again to the last taxi. An Aborigine had appeared in the driver’s seat. Cardinal approached him and repeated his request. He struggled into the backseat, and the driver drove off into the city.

  Turn-of-the-century churches, pubs and homes for derelicts were giving way to casinos, hotels and spotless arcades. Darwin was being rapidly transformed and sanitised for the tourist trade. Once known as the Gateway to China, the city had become the Japanese window to the outback. Its population had doubled in a decade, but it was still just one hundred thousand – only a speck in the surrounding Asian landscape where two and a half billion people lived.

  He watched the driver’s face in the rear-vision mirror. Cardinal had never seen an Aborigine before. The man would have been no older than twenty-five, but his deep-sunken eyes reflected ten thousand years. Cardinal remembered stories about local blacks. They had left the city days before the Japanese had bombed it in World War II. This kind of evacuation had been repeated just before Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin in 1974. They had warned the whites about both dangers and had been laughed at.

  Cardinal paid the driver when they reached the gaudy green awning of the twenty-storey Casino Hotel. The taxi crawled off as if the rest of the day was going to wait for it. The driver had neither looked at his passenger nor said one word.

  Cardinal was relieved to enter the air-conditioned lobby. He checked in at the same time as a bus load of Chinese oil industry people, all over-dressed in lightweight wool suits.

  The hotel pool beyond the lobby looked tempting, and Cardinal was considering a swim there until he reached his room on the eighteenth floor. He could see the Arafura Sea just two hundred metres away; this was far more enticing. He changed into shorts, headed for the beach.

  The sand scorched his feet through his sneakers as he hurried to the water’s edge. He stripped to his swimming trunks, and noticed that there was not a soul in sight along the vast strip of sand. He could not wait to drench himself in the cool surf and only hesitated to look for shadows of sharks, which he had been told were thick around Darwin.

  He was about to plunge in when he heard yelling. He turned to see the taxi driver sprinting towards him waving a stick. Cardinal stood perplexed as the man rushed in up to his thighs and launched the stick at an underwater target. The Aborigine retrieved the stick and held it aloft. On it was impaled a small octopus-like creature that he flicked on the sand. Cardinal squinted at the water in front of him and could see countless others. The man beckoned him out. Cardinal didn’t need a second invitation.

  ‘One sting,’ the man said, ‘and you’re paralysed in seconds.’ He turned up several suckers. ‘In minutes you’re dead.’ He stabbed it once more and hurled it into the water. Cardinal watched it sink in slow motion.

  ‘Man-O-Wars,’ the Aborigine added. ‘Nobody swims here for months. They should have told you at the hotel, even if you went out the rear exit.’

  Cardinal felt foolish. He thanked the man who turned to go.

  ‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘Burra will see you.’

  Rhonda finished pitching to her producer, bespectacled, forty-year-old Jenny Dunstan, for an Indonesian trip and relaxed in the chair to let the make-up girl ply her trade. Rhonda was about to anchor a weekly live TV programme on current affairs.

  ‘It’s too hot,’ Jenny said, playing with the fringe of her short-cropped hair. ‘With that ‘D’ notice tagging it, we would never get it to air.’

  Rhonda was annoyed. ‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘I’m sure I can get Cardinal to appear!’

  ‘What would you ask him?’

  ‘I would get him to tell it how it is. He would say he arrived to identify his murdered son. We wouldn’t say where he was murdered. Then we would say that Harry Cardinal worked at Lucas Heights and that a work companion of his disappeared in a hurry. We would name her and explain what her field had been.’

  ‘Then you’re violating that government notice, Rhonda! Don’t you understand? We can be in a lot of trouble for that! No matter what the merits of our thinking it’s in the public interest!’

  ‘Even if we explain what Hartina’s work was? I thought the ‘D’ was just to cover the murder.’

  ‘Look! We could get you to put this Yank in front of the camera and bleed his heart out. It would be marvellous stuff. We could get you to explain what Hartina was doing at Lucas Heights. Then our lawyers would move in. They would get the management to consult the government. That would end it. I know. I’ve been there before.’

  Rhonda had been jerking her head around so much that the make-up girl complained.

  An anxious director poked his head in the door. ‘Christ, Rhonda! You ready?’ he hissed. ‘All your guests, including Her Majesty’s First Minister, are seated, but we haven’t got our host and anchor. You’ve got two minutes!’

  Rhonda waved a hand as the director disappeared. ‘You win, Jenny,’ she said, ‘but I still want a trip to Jakarta this week.’

  ‘It’ll have to be a damned good reason.’

  ‘Give me one.’

  ‘I could only justify it if you could . . . I don’t know, get into see . . . well, it would have to be big.’

  ‘Like an interview with President Utun.’

  ‘Yeah. Afraid they wouldn’t buy anything else upstairs.’

  Rhonda jumped out of the chair with her make-up not quite finished. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she called, again taking off the director’s hiss. She made a dash for the studio.

  Cardinal rang Richardson’s Darwin business number and delivered his lie again about being a US investment adviser. This time a male receptionist took details and said they would be in touch. Cardinal had the feeling his story would be check
ed.

  He swam backstroke and freestyle in the hotel pool -it was his favourite exercise — and relaxed further with a Japanese massage. He took a salad lunch and returned to his room to find there had been calls from New York and Richardson. Cardinal returned the New York call first and was told by his consultant friend that Richardson’s people had gone to the trouble of finding his private number. They had asked questions about Cardinal.

  ‘They started selling mining investment opportunities on the phone!’ Cardinal’s friend told him.

  He rang Richardson’s number and was surprised to get through to him.

  ‘I’m flying a couple of German geologists around this afternoon,’ Richardson said. ‘Be at the airport in an hour.’

  Before Cardinal could reply he had hung up.

  Cardinal found Digex’s hangar where the company’s private jets, light planes and helicopters were housed. He introduced himself to Richardson, who asked him to climb into a two-engine Cessna. Inside were the two geologists who were apprehensive about Richardson piloting the plane. With a minimum of words they were soon speeding along the runway and airborne.

  A strong wind bounced the light plane as it climbed to eight hundred metres above the Arnhem Highway, which led to the Aboriginal reserve and the Digex Ginga mine. A snake of stationary trucks could be seen parked at the start of the highway.

  ‘They’re mine,’ Richardson said, glancing at Cardinal.

  ‘When do they roll?’ one of the geologists – called Herman – asked. He was tall and muscular, with a crew-cut that contrasted oddly with an unkempt dark beard. It could not hide an out-sized jaw.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Richardson said. ‘They’re going to deliver the biggest drill you ever saw to my mine. They’ll return loaded with super-yellowcake.’ The Germans laughed.

  ‘I’m fair dinkum!’ Richardson said. ‘Normal yellowcake refers to uranium ore that has been milled once at a mine. It looks like yellow sand. But we use a special process to concentrate it. It feels more sticky, although it is still like gold grain. That’s why I have buyers lined up all around the world. We have the best high-grade uranium you can buy.’