BECKER

by Gordon Reid

‘Darling, it’s winter. They don’t have pools in winter, do they, Harry?’

  ‘Addie! Please shut up and get in the car.’

  But it was too late.

  The Nissan was as at the gate. Becker went up and opened it for her.

  ‘Visitors?’ she said as she drove past him.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh, how lovely,’ she said. ‘Going to hop in?’

  ‘No, you go.’

  He closed the gate and followed the big four-wheel drive, trudging, head down. He was beaten, he knew. He was not the brightest bloke or the best at conversation, but he did try. Even if it were only to stay alive. In the faint hope that one day, things would turn out better. He had no other aspiration. He thought he’d found it at last—a good wife and a good home and good dog and good prospects. Suddenly, everything had gone wrong. The past had come back and bitten him.

  When he reached them, Robyn was alighting, showing one pretty leg, the Nissan being so high. And saying in her own kind Christian way: ‘So, you are Harry’s family? Oh, this is a surprise! Oh, how nice. Oh, what lovely girls. And you must be—’

  Chapter 19

  He was wakened two days later by a phone call. He felt like hell, not because he’d been drunk or sick or had eaten something bad or overeaten something good. But because of the noise. His good but overly good wife had pounced upon the tribe from Sydney. When she’d heard Becker was going to take them to Wagga and set them up in a motel she’d said: ‘Oh, no, no, they wouldn’t want to stay in a smelly old motel, when we have all this room here? Would you?’ She’d looked at Becker, who’d tried to argue. He could not endure one more minute with this kleptomaniacal bimbo, Adeline Atkins who once was, then Addie Becker, then Mrs Boris Kalash and was now a wandering and stateless and boring pain in the arse, who wouldn’t bloody well shut up. Going on and on in her little whining little-girl voice, hour after hour. About her struggles to keep body and soul and family and fortune together.

  Thanking Robyn for being so kind and understanding, her girls being delighted, chasing cows and climbing trees and ducking each other in the creek now running free, it having rained. It, she said, was lovely to be in a good, quite clean home. It was a joy, the fresh air, and the home cooking and such lovely things you have, Robyn.

  On top of which, the kids talking all night. Normally Wendy and Terry weren’t noisy at all, not at night anyway, but their juvenile visitors from Sydney wouldn’t stop arguing and hitting each other with pillows, which set off everyone laughing, including Nutty.

  For Becker it was a night—no, two nights—of hell. They had moved in. When he’d protested to Robyn that they had only three bedrooms, she’d said: Oh, we could rearrange things, couldn’t we, dear? Now, you and I in one room, Addie and Chesney in another, and Wendy and Kat in the third. When Becker had pointed out that would leave Terry without a bed, she’d said: Oh, that’s not a problem, dear. He can sleep on the verandah, in a sleeping bag, can’t you, darling boy? He wants to be a boy scout and go camping, don’t you, Terry? To which the stupid kid had said, his eyes lighting up, ‘Yes!’ He was all for sleeping out, so he could go hunting possums in the dark with a torch and a ging—ging being country boys’ lingo for a catapult.

  The racket, the arguing, the banging of doors, the flushing of toilets—there being only one, but it sounded like a dozen, the fights and demands for refreshments at all hours, banging of the refrigerator door and switching lights on or off, or not switching them off at all and wasting all that electricity. And then, in the middle of the night switching on the television. Two nights and two days of it. He felt like shooting someone.

  Becker picked up the mobile from a bedside table.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Am I too early, dear boy?’

  ‘Early? For what?’

  ‘News.’

  ‘What kind of news?’

  ‘Ah ha! Not on the airwaves. I’ll come out. What time’s breakfast?’

  ‘I think they’ve all had it, judging by the noise. Most likely there’s nothing left.’

  ‘You have visitors?’

  ‘Yeah, the relatives from hell.’

  Chook laughed. ‘I’ll be out in twenty.’

  ‘Ah, Christ,’ he said.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  ‘At the Hovell.’

  ‘You can sleep in that joint?’

  ‘It quietens down after midnight.’

  ‘I wish this place did.’

  Chook had hung up. Becker tried to go back to sleep for a few more minutes, but he could not. So he struggled out, grumpy and not his usual cheerful self. Or, if not cheerful, his usual polite and restrained self. At one time during the night, he’d dreamed he was in bed with a woman, who he thought was Robyn. And he’d rolled over and put an arm about her, and she’d stirred and smiled and said something. He couldn’t see the smile, but she was one of those gifted women who could smile with her voice.

  She’d yawned shortly and apologetically, a hand over her mouth, then breathed in, in a half awake and going off again sleep. Himself half-wondering: Why aren’t they screaming and shouting and turning on the TV and making one great bloody disturbance, when: Hullo, Harry? she’d said. Who is that? he’d asked. Forgotten me already, have you? Evelyn? Yes, darling. She’d never called him darling. Not such a woman, very reserved, careful, never giving an emotion away.

  Except when she’d broken down and cried in the living room at her place that second last night and said, “They are going to kill me, aren’t they?” Or words to that effect. On thinking about it, he was not now sure exactly what she’d said. But one thing was certain. They’d had to get out of Canberra, or someone was going to kill her. And if he, Harry Becker, got in the way, too bad for him.

  When he entered the kitchen, they’d all finished, thank God. And cleared out, yelling and screaming down by the creek, Nutty the worst of them, barking his lungs out with delight. Becker was surprised. Sitting at the breakfast table, long-legged and off-handedly yarning with her hostess, was Chook. Drinking coffee.

  ‘Your friend thinks we have a lovely place, Harry.’

  ‘Any coffee left?’

  ‘Coffee and toast and bacon and eggs and cereals if you want, also chopped bananas and orange juice freshly squeezed, and prunes if you feel you must. Coffee fresh coming up, as they say in the films. In America anyway.’ She never said movie, being an old-fashioned sort of woman, like her father. And her grandfather, the Anglican vicar. Who’d had a way with words, he having been an Oxford man. But that was long ago.

  He sat. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘No more than five.’

  ‘Sorry, I couldn’t get going.’

  He yawned, shaking his head. Chook was laughing. ‘What it is to be a father.’

  Robyn placed a cup before him, steaming. ‘There’s runny cream, if you’d like it, dear.’

  He did not reply.

  ‘What would you like to eat, dear?’

  ‘Is anything left?’

  ‘Oh, yes, lots of eggs. No bacon, however.’

  He thought about it. ‘We’ve got to get rid of them, Rob.’

  ‘You’ve had a bad night, haven’t you?’’

  ‘I’ll drive the whole lot of them to town this morning and force them, kicking and screaming if need be, into a motel, a five-star if there is one. I can’t take any more of that f—’

  Chook kicked him under the table. He felt guilty, never having used such a word before or to Robyn. But he was too fractured to refrain.

  ‘That birdbrain of a woman any longer. Her little-girl voice and the dim-witted innocence—’

  ‘Harry, please, the children are having such fun. They’ve not yet had anyone for a sleepover.’

  ‘They don’t go to sleep. They talk all night.’

>   ‘It’s so exciting for them. Addie was telling me she’s never had a place of her own—’

  ‘That’s a barefaced lie!’

  ‘That’s lasted more than a few weeks.’

  ‘She lost the house I slaved my guts out to pay off for her. Twelve hours a day at night. To get the money. It was part of the settlement.’

  ‘Poor, darling,’ she said. ‘I’ve burdened you with so much, haven’t I?’

  Afterwards, he and Chook strolled up the creek, past the kids running around, saying boo! and moo! to the cows and running away. Or saying, Gotcha! Gotcha back again! Gotcha you too! And throwing stones at birds in the trees, making cockatoos fluster and fly away in a great wheeling arc across the face of the morning sun. So you had to squint and blink and show your teeth, fresh in the morning air as you watched, the steam rising like a hovering host from the wet and warming fields, the cattle lowing. And swishing their long black and highly swishable tails.

  ‘What now, Chook. Sorry, I mean, Chuck.’

  ‘I prefer to be called Stacey.’

  ‘Stacey? Yeah, I know. I’ll remember.’

  ‘I’d really prefer to be called Anna, but I can’t for obvious reasons.’

  ‘What reasons?’

  ‘Polly’s name was Anna Polites.’

  ‘So it was.’ Polly had explained all that while they were driving him to the safe house, back in Canberra. The unsafe house, as it had turned out.

  She kicked at a stone. ‘Memories are hard to lose, aren’t they?’

  He almost said, Memories are driving me mad. But he didn’t.

  They walked on a few steps and stopped. Watching the rippling and chattering water bubbling over the stones, bringing down the leaves flattened in the midnight rain. On a branch by the creek, a kookaburra sat, thinking. The kookaburra always seems to be thinking, such quiet birds. Not real fishers at all, but big brown and creamy and dirty white birds, with huge beaks. Watching the ground for anything that moved, anything edible. Grab it in its big beak and fly back up to the branch and bash the critter to death. Then tear its catch apart, strip by strip. A very patient animal is the kookaburra. And not a sound out of it, except that maniacal laugh. Suddenly, earsplittingly.

  ‘Cosco has decided to talk,’ Chook said.

  ‘What! Did you have to break an arm?’

  ‘He saw reason, thinking about our offer. Either co-operate or we give the story to the press—the biggest story to hit the bush since they got Ned Kelly at Glenrowan.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We, in a sense, give him immunity. Not official, you see. He tells us who killed Polly and Evelyn—not held the gun but gave the nod—or he gets the big exposure, front page in The Area News. Also the Wagga Bulletin. The wire services will pick it up. Maybe front page of the Sydney Herald. The State cops would have to arrest him. On suspicion, at least.’

  ‘You mean you prefer to do a deal with Cosco? Piece of shit like that?’

  ‘How are we going to get a name otherwise?’

  Becker was angry. ‘He killed his own daughter!’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know.’

  ‘You should arrest him. Stick him in to jail! If I could, I’d kill him myself.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. But that’s what’s going to happen to him anyway.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Chook was leaning against a tree. She had one hand on the trunk, on the fresh grey bark among the bits a pieces of brown bark hanging off its sides. Like apologies for bark, droopy, sad. Unwilling to die, but die it must. Good bark. To fall and rot and return and be forgotten. But once beautiful. Hanging off a coolabah.

  ‘Let me spell it out, Harry. We can’t arrest him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He’d go to trial.’

  ‘So, he should.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t get that far.’

  ‘You mean someone’d kill him?’

  She shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’d kill a big man like that?’

  ‘Why not? Everyone’s expendable in the Mafia.’

  He thought about it. Angelina had said as much. If he talked, they’d kill him. That’s exactly what she had wanted. Her father to talk, so that they would kill him. A daughter contriving in her father’s murder. It sounded like some old-fashioned play by Shakespeare or something contrived by Mickie Spillane. Kill or be killed.

  ‘They don’t love each other,’ Chook said gently, as if speaking to a child. ‘There’s no love between ’em. The Mafia is like a corporation of crocodiles. As long as there’s something else to eat, they’re friends. If not, they eat each other.’

  Becker said nothing. He was thinking about the world. It was a dog eat world. He’d never eat dog, he was sure. But if he were starving, he’d eat dog, he was sure. But he would eat a dog he knew. Not Nutty. Or, he would eat him, but leave him to last.

  ‘And another thing,’ Chook said.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘If Cosco did go to trial, we’d have to produce Angelina.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To be cross-examined. The defence has that right. And if she did appear, she might be next. Do you want that?’

  ‘Ah, shit, no, no,’

  ‘That’s why we’re doing it this in a roundabout way, Harry. To keep her out of it. So, no-one can touch her.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I see.’

  ‘What’d Cosco say to all this?’

  ‘He stared at us for a long time. These peasants from down south are very slow thinkers. Afraid of anything that makes them look idiots in the eyes of their families. Big fellas like that. They can’t take it. Well, Cosco finally said something. Our ears pricked up. ‘Medich,’ he said. ‘Medich?’ we said. ‘The kid, he was Marko Medich,’ he said. ‘Some anale difetosso from Serbia.’ Which means anal defective, so I’m told. Which he was, as you may remember.

  ‘We know that already,’ we said. We already had his bike and its number and his name, thanks to your little cousin, Barry Barnes, who’d found the bike. ‘Come on Angelo,’ we said, ‘we know that. Who was the fat man?’

  ‘What fat man?’ he asked. ‘The one there at the lake with Adams. In Canberra.’ ‘I don’t know nothin’ about nobody called Adams. Don’t know nothin’ about no lake in Canberra.’ ‘Well,’ we said, ‘you can find out, can’t you? A man in your position. Being a big fella here in Griffith.’ He stared for a long time, considering his options.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Adams talk?’

  ‘No, he was scared shitless. I don’t think he’ll ever talk, or he might in a note he might or might not leave beside his body, if he can find something in jail with which to top himself.’

  ‘He’s still there?’

  ‘In Goulburn supermax. Well, we waited a long time, some looking at their watches, some whistling Dixie silently and others waiting for him to jump at us, so we had our hands close to our pieces. We had Angelo Cosco holed up in a room in the Capriano in Griffith, the one where you did the deal with Angelina.

  ‘We even had room service, beer for me and Dave and a gin-sling for Laura, it being touch and go. We suggested a Campari on ice for Angelo, seeing he looked a bit dry and yet sweaty at the same time. But he refused, possibly fearing it’d be doped with some truth drug—which we should have used to save time, if we’d thought of it.’

  ‘Did he give you a name? For the fat man?’

  ‘Yeah, Guido Caselli.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘An importer, down in Melbourne.’

  ‘What’s he import?’

  ‘Fish, from Italy.’

  ‘Do we import much fish from Italy?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘So it’s just a front?’

  ‘Seems like it.’

  ‘What’s the connection?’

  ‘Remember the old
geezer in the shop in Melbourne? The bras and girdles shop in Chapel Street? He’s in it too.’

  ‘Importing fish?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re joint owners.’

  ‘That guy’s name was Terracini.’

  ‘Yeah, and the Terracinis in Griffith are connected with the Cosco family.’

  ‘It all ties up, then?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘So, Caselli is the big boss?’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not.’

  ‘As it happens, our people in Melbourne have come up with this.’

  Chook pulled out a photo from inside her jacket. Becker took it, turned it to the best light. It was taken in a busy street, maybe in Carlton. Outside a restaurant, apparently through the front window of a car. Probably a police car. It could have been Gianelli’s where the kid had popped Ritzi Carbone. And ridden off singing, ‘Hi ho, Silver! Again, he was side on. Talking to a man with a long, hawkish face. Who was smoking a desperate cigarette, eyes closed, squinting. And thinking about things. It was Alfredo Scarafini. It must have been last year. Possibly just before Alfredo realised he had to get out of town.

  ‘Is this the fat man?’

  ‘The fat man?’

  ‘The one who killed Vincent Torrence by the lake?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I didn’t see him.’

  ‘You saw a fat man sitting by you and Evelyn in Manuka. Having coffee.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Becker turned the photo this way and that, trying to catch the light. The man in the photo didn’t look any better, no matter which way you turned him. He was only a fat man pointing a finger at Alfredo. Telling him something. Maybe he was saying: Be careful. Be careful about what? Maybe the people you talk to. Or else.

  ‘What are you going to do about him?’

  ‘Kill him.’

  ‘Kill him?’ Becker was shocked. ‘You are mad, Chook.’

  She was laughing, or half-laughing. Her eyes crinkly with mirth. She put an arm about his shoulders. He thought she was going to shake him. Or punch him. Or beat him up, just being friendly. But she did not.

  ‘Don’t worry, Harry. You worry too much.’

  ‘I’ve got a wife and kids.’