See You at the Toxteth

by Peter Corris

  Some of it wasn’t hard to understand. The job was a hijack with no honour among thieves. Kevin and the boys were going to be under surveillance; Carpenter was putting up the money. Three things were unknown: what the cargo was, why Follan had called it a ‘cowboy’ operation and why Kevin hadn’t been in touch with Cathy. She wasn’t green; she would probably have driven the prime mover for Kevin if he’d asked her. The biggest question of all was—what was I going to do about it?

  The first move was to get in touch with Kevin, and I didn’t fancy doing that by driving up to the door. I sent him a telegram—to the name Kevin Vincent at the address in Enmore. I asked him to phone me and to keep everything under his hat; Kevin’d like that—there was an old-fashioned streak in him. His call came at a bit after five.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a bit, Cliff. Have you still got all your hair, boyo?’

  ‘Yes, Kevin. And your phoney brogue’s as bad as ever. But I’ll play along—why do you ask?’

  ‘Because you’ve got a lot to keep under your own bloody hat and I wondered if there’d be the room, like?’

  ‘Knock it off, Kevin. You’re about to do something very silly.’

  ‘What would you know about it?’

  I thought about telling him but decided against it; Kevin was inclined to be irrational when he was angry. ‘It stands to reason. You’ve got a job lined up.’

  ‘How’d you get on to me?’

  ‘A whisper. Cathy asked me to look for you. She’s worried and she’s got good cause. She says she’ll wait for you to serve the five or six.’

  The laugh that came across the line wasn’t the old feckless Kevin laugh. It was harsh and bitter, and had not a shred of amusement in it. A prison laugh, maybe.

  ‘Wait? Cathy? Her idea of waitin’s to only be taking on one at a time.’

  I didn’t say anything; I was more interested in listening.

  ‘Well, Cliff,’ he said. ‘You can tell her I’m in the pink … shut up!’ I heard a short laugh and a scuffling sound, then Kevin went on in a steady voice. ‘And I’ll be in touch soon. She’s not to worry.’

  ‘Oh yeah, great! She’ll eat that up, Kevin. That’ll fix everything.’

  ‘Soon means soon.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Jesus, I thought, it’s tonight.

  ‘Now, Cliff, you just get yourself a bottle of something good and settle down for a quiet night with your books. You hear me, Cliff? Get nosey and you’re history. Got it?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He rang off, and I sat there holding the phone and thinking it had been one of the least productive conversations of my life. The three unknowns were still unknown and I still didn’t know what I was going to do. I phoned Cathy, couldn’t get her and chased her unsuccessfully through four telephone numbers, leaving urgent messages for her to call me.

  The temptation to do as Kevin suggested, hit the bottle, was immense but I fought it. I had one big Scotch and left it at that. I spoiled some eggs trying to make an omelette of them, ate the mess and felt bad. Towards the back of my brain a voice was telling me to call Frank Parker, but I kept getting a picture of Kevin with his beard and dyed hair and I couldn’t do it. When the call came I nearly hurdled a chair to snatch up the phone. It was Cathy; she told me to wait until she came over, which would be in about an hour. She sounded steady and she didn’t want to hear anything I had to say.

  It was after ten when she arrived—in a black velvet jacket and white silk pants. Her face was unnaturally pale and her eyes were over-dilated and bright. She had a bottle of Black Label Scotch with her and she invited me to pour her a big one before she draped herself on the couch in my living room. She lit a cigarette and stubbed it out straight away, as if she didn’t want to obliterate the odour of sex that clung to her. She drank some Scotch and arched up her shoulders and wriggled.

  ‘I’ve been screwing my brains out,’ she said.

  ‘Is that right? It made you hard to find—I spoke to Kevin today.’

  She drank some more, then she put the glass down and assumed a mock demure pose; she half-closed and dimmed her eyes and pressed her knees together. It disconcerted me; I wondered if she was drunk, but her coordination seemed perfect and she appeared to be under tight control.

  ‘Tell me everything about it.’

  ‘Well, he’s in Sydney … and, ah … he hasn’t been in touch for a good reason. He thought the cops’d be watching you and …’

  ‘I’m a sort of decoy, is that right?’ She said it brightly but with an edge of hate.

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘It’s not so bad.’ She picked up her drink and took a hefty belt. ‘I always liked you, Cliff. Why don’t I just slip into your shower and then nip into your bed? You know, I can make it seem like I never did it before.’ She laughed. ‘Or only once or twice. What d’you say?’

  Any other time I’d have been tempted. I can be a sucker for fantasy and I hadn’t been to bed with a woman that month or the month before. But the ulterior motive was just a bit too obvious.

  ‘Cut it out, Cathy. This is a serious situation.’

  Her mood changed instantly. She knocked off the rest of the Scotch and stood up abruptly. ‘I’m going to have a shower anyway, to wash off the last of you bastards.’

  Water ran; she had an instinct for where bathrooms were. I put some more Black Label in my glass and waited for her to come back clean and explain to me. I seemed to do a fair bit of that—waiting to be explained to—and it sometimes made me feel like a foreigner with an imperfect grasp of the language.

  The make-up was gone when she came back; her hair was damp and she’d pulled the exotic clothes on as if they were a sweater and jeans. She looked, without the gloss, tough in a different way. She made herself another drink and got a cigarette going.

  ‘I know all about it,’ she said.

  I stared at her.

  ‘I mean, I know about the job. Five Dock?’

  I nodded. ‘How?’

  She drank and her smile reminded me of Kevin’s laugh over the phone—no fun in it. ‘I knew you were good, that you’d find something, but I wasn’t sure you’d be straight with me. So I had someone not as good as you trailing you around. He reported in to me this afternoon—all the details. It wasn’t hard to work out what the job was. D’you know what they’re lifting?’

  I shook my head.

  She gave that smile again and held up both hands. ‘This, and this—booze and smokes. It’s a hot load, going to get hotter. So you don’t have to worry about honest citizens getting hurt.’

  ‘How do you know all this?’

  ‘Wasn’t hard once I knew it was trucks and who the Queensland money was.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s a pretty dumb game though—bloody well-guarded that shipment’ll be. You did some good snooping, Cliff. The other bloke was impressed—you didn’t spot him?’

  ‘Maybe. Just at the end. Couldn’t be sure. Cathy … did you try to talk Kevin out of this?’

  She shook her head and drew on her cigarette.

  ‘Why not? I did.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Not interested. Seemed very sure of himself.’

  She consulted her watch again.

  ‘Why d’you keep doing that?’

  She got up. ‘You won’t go to bed, least you can do is take a girl for a drive.’

  We were rolling past the Leichhardt Town Hall when she told me. ‘You won’t be able to get too close,’ she said. ‘It’ll all be staked out. I told the cops.’

  ‘God, Cathy! Why?’

  She didn’t answer; she just sucked on her cigarette and stared ahead through my dirty windscreen.

  It was near midnight and a mist was rising off the canals and grass. Wednesday night, quiet, a good night for crime. The question of getting close never arose because it all happened as we skirted the park. The highway turn-off was in full view and I saw the high shape of a semi-trailer heading down the r
oad. Then lights pointed crazily to the sky and there were flashes and flares out of the darkness. There was a sputtering of bright orange from up the hill where I’d seen the two heavies reconnoitring. The truck seemed to meander slowly down the grade, then pick up speed abruptly. Too abruptly: it skidded, lurched and rolled. There were dark shapes moving fast from the park and pairs of headlights suddenly cut through the dark mists. I stopped and braked without knowing it; the whole thing seemed to take an age with each separate part occupying its own bit of time, but in fact it must have been all over within a couple of minutes.

  Cathy sat still and stared, and then she jumped and swore as her cigarette burned down to her fingers. She jerked open the door.

  ‘What’re you doing?’ I reached across for the handle.

  ‘I want to see. I was the fizgig, I’ve got the right!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool! You don’t know what’s going to happen. Who’s dead, who’s alive. You know what’ll happen to you if they find out you put them in.’

  She broke my grip on the handle and opened the door. ‘Who cares?’ she said.

  I got out and followed her down the road and across a broad strip of grass. We were challenged a hundred yards from the scene by a shape that rose up from behind a bush. Cathy walked unblinkingly towards the gun.

  ‘I want to see Matthiesson,’ she said.

  The cop fell in behind us and we went the rest of the way to the overturned truck and the cars each with flashing warning lights and one blue eye blinking tracers of light over still and moving figures.

  Matthiesson was a bulky man in a flak jacket and bullet-proof gear. He held an automatic rifle and let its muzzle point to the ground when he saw Cathy.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here,’ he said. ‘And who’s this?’

  ‘A friend,’ Cathy said dully. ‘Where’s Kevin?’

  ‘He was hit. I’m sorry. I told you I couldn’t make any promises.’

  ‘Yes, you did. I want to see him.’

  Matthiesson guided us across behind the truck. One of its wheels was turning slowly and bits of gravel were still falling from it. The overturned truck smelt strongly of liquor, and there were rivulets running from it and soaking into the small, dark, twisted shape on the ground. Kevin was on his back; his face was blotched with blood and one eye socket was a brimming pool. He looked like the death photo of Bugsy Spiegel. Cathy looked down at him and the tears started and fell down her face and onto the body. She just stood there, slightly bent over, and looked and wept. I moved over, put my arm around her and gently eased her away; she went, on feet that moved in a slow, hobbled shuffle.

  Sirens started howling and the ambulances arrived and a team came to right the truck. There was a lot of swearing and one scream of pain as someone with bullets in him was moved. I got Cathy back to my car, gave her a cigarette and drove back to Glebe. She resisted nothing, accepted everything. Her shoes had blood on them and I made her kick them off at the door. I sat her down and wiped her face and made us both a drink. She drank it in a gulp and held out the glass for more.

  ‘You asked why?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I went there to see him this afternoon. To Enmore. Just as I got there this girl came out. Great tall thing, all in pink. Kevin always liked them tall, pink’s his favourite colour. Kevin came out with her. His hair was different and he had a beard. He shaved it off, did y’see?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘He came out with her and I watched.’

  ‘Cathy, you couldn’t be sure. She might have been with one of the other blokes. Anything …’

  ‘She copped his special big feel just before she got into her car. I should know. I know what it meant.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘That’s why.’

  THE DESERTER

  From Man in the Shadows (1988)

  ‘I want you to find my son, Mr Hardy,’ Ambrose Guyatt said to me. ‘He’s a soldier.’

  An image from Rambo flashed before my eyes—gaunt men in rags screaming inside a bamboo cage. I’d watched the movie on a flight from Honolulu to Sydney because I’d finished my book and couldn’t sleep. I’m over forty and carry a few unhealed physical and emotional wounds, which make me unfit for that kind of action.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘I should say he was a soldier. He went absent without leave.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘It’s not clear. Some weeks.’

  ‘Then he’s a deserter.’

  Guyatt shifted his well-padded behind on the unpadded chair I have for clients in my office. What’s the point in making them too comfortable? They might decide that everything’s all right and go away. Guyatt didn’t. ‘Technically, perhaps. You were in the army yourself, I believe. Malaya. You don’t look old enough.’

  ‘It went on longer than people think. If your son’s a deserter, Mr Guyatt, the military and the police’ll be looking for him. I can’t see … ’

  ‘Julian didn’t desert, or if he did he had a good reason. He’s not some little guttersnipe; he’s educated, he’s got background.’

  I held the smile in; I’ve seen backgrounds fade into the far distance and guttersnipes come up with the goods. I got out a fresh notepad and clicked my ballpoint. ‘You’d better tell me all about it, Mr Guyatt.’

  Like most people feeling their way into a subject, he found it easiest to start with himself. Ambrose Guyatt ran a very profitable business that had blossomed from paper and stationery into printing and copying. He told me that some years before he had worked twenty hours a day keeping abreast of things and making the right moves. ‘That was when Julian was growing up,’ he said. ‘Naturally I didn’t see much of him.’

  I nodded and got ready to make my first note. ‘How old is he now?’

  ‘Twenty. He joined the army nearly two years ago. He was a champion athlete but he … didn’t finish school.’

  Guyatt was a short, stocky man with a balding head and a high colour. I’ll swear he almost blushed when he admitted his offspring was a dropout.

  I nodded again. ‘Didn’t finish the army stint either. Is that his problem, Mr Guyatt? That he can’t finish anything?’

  ‘I really don’t know. It’s a terrible thing to say but I can’t claim to know him very well. We hardly spoke in the last years he was at home. Well, he wasn’t really at home. He came in for clean shirts and money, which his mother gave him.’

  ‘Would you have given them to him?’

  ‘He avoided me. Never came when I was going to be around.’

  I sighed. Young Guyatt avoided old Guyatt; old Guyatt avoided questions; I wondered what Mrs Guyatt avoided. ‘Was he on good terms with his mother?’

  Guyatt nodded.

  ‘What does she have to say about it?’

  ‘She’s distraught. She says Julian loved the army and would never desert.’

  I got a photograph of Julian, the licence number of his blue Laser, a few details on his pre-army life and the last date he had performed his duty at Waterloo Barracks. I also got the telephone number of one Captain Barry Renshaw.

  ‘Step by step, how did it happen?’

  ‘Julian didn’t do anything about his mother’s birthday. That had never happened before. She rang Waterloo Barracks and was told that he was on leave. That was a lie.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Julian had told his mother he was going to New Caledonia the next time he got leave, even if it was only for a week. He couldn’t have gone. His passport’s at home.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘I rang and was told that my son had been posted as a deserter.’

  I looked at my notes. ‘You spoke to this Captain Renshaw?’

  ‘No, someone else. I didn’t get his name. Renshaw’s been handling it since, but we’ve really heard nothing. Something has to be done.’

  ‘I charge a hundred and fifty dollars a day and expenses,’ I said. ‘If I work on thi
s for a month you’ll be up for over four thousand dollars.’

  ‘Do it. Please.’

  I accepted his cheque. After he left, I stared at the photograph until I would have recognised the owner of the strong features, low-growing dark hair and steady eyes anywhere there was enough light to see by. Lately I’d done more debugging and money-minding than I cared for. It was good to have something to do some legwork on. Julian Guyatt hadn’t been in the army quite long enough to throw off civilian contacts. I checked at his last two jobs, hung around the pub he’d frequented and spoke to a girl he’d taken out for a few months. The response was the same everywhere: ‘Like we told the man from the army, we don’t know anything.’

  That left Captain Renshaw. I telephoned him and stated my business.

  ‘I don’t think I can help you.’

  ‘Don’t you want to find him?’

  ‘Of course.’ The captain clipped his words off as if they might straggle and sound untidy.

  ‘I’ve found a lot of people. I might get lucky.’

  ‘We’ve tried, so have the police.’

  ‘You and the police have procedures, Captain. You treat all cases the same, cover the same ground. I can treat it as unique. I can feel around and try to find the handle. D’you follow me?’

  ‘One silly young man. I hardly think …’

  ‘That’s what I mean. To his father he’s more important than all your Leopard tanks put together. Give me some of your time, anywhere you like, please.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I felt I was losing him. I spoke quickly. ‘You tried to find Guyatt by looking into his civilian life, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There you go. You need a fresh approach. You’re an institutional man and you trust the institution.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I drew a breath, the next bit was risky. ‘I’d check on his army life. Discreetly. I was a soldier myself.’

  ‘Were you? Vietnam?’

  ‘No, Malaya. Don’t laugh, I’m not Methuselah. Captain, I’m going to look into this one way or another. I don’t leak things to newspapers and I don’t write books. Apart from the bare outlines, my files are in my head. You see what I’m getting at?’