Babylon South (31 page)

He and Clements went out to Kirribilli, to the air-conditioned view from Fortague's office. It seemed, from the ASIO chief's demeanour, that he had turned up the cold air in his room.

“
I'm afraid the black-out remains on Uritzsky. The file was closed a month after he disappeared.”

“Why are you defending a Russian? Did he come over to our side and have you given him a new identity?”

“I can give you no explanation. The matter has been marked Top Secret.”

Malone and Clements looked at each other. Every bureaucracy has its secrets. The Chinese, who invented bureaucracy, understood the reasons for secrecy: it is the sauce that makes dull work palatable. Sometimes, of course, it makes corruption palatable. The two detectives had dealt in secrets of their own, but that didn't make them sympathetic towards ASIO and its clandestine frame of mind. Murder was a public affair, or so the policemen thought.

Clements said, “Then did Springfellow defect? If he did, why was he shot?”

“I told you, I can tell you nothing.” The air-conditioner hummed in the background, getting chillier.

“Let me tell you something,” said Malone, coolness creeping into his own voice, “we're working on the possibility that there was a contract out on Springfellow, that he was killed by a hit man.”

“Who put out the contract? Uritzsky?”

Malone grinned. “For the moment, that's Top Secret.”

Fortague was silent for a moment, head cocked as if listening to the air-conditioner; its humming seemed softer, as if someone somewhere else in the building had decided the chill was too much. Fortague must have decided the same.

He smiled. “We're playing games, aren't we?”

“I guess we are,” said Malone, relaxing; he could tell when a man was going to talk. Twenty years of interrogation teaches you a lot about the looseness of the human tongue; its natural function is to say something. Fortague, whose trade was secrecy, was only a little different from all the other men with whom Malone had sat in rooms, waiting for questions to be answered. “But we're on the same side, aren't we?”

Fortague
nodded. “I should hope so. Look, I can't tell you everything I know—you appreciate that. Furthermore, I don't know
everything.
I'm 2 i/c of ASIO, but I doubt if I'll ever know, not unless I get to be Director-General.”

“Tell us what you do know. We've got to put the lid on this case one way or the other. The newspapers aren't going to let us alone.” It was an empty threat.

“Stuff the newspapers,” said Fortague. “If we took any notice of them, we might as well go out of business . . . All I can tell you, because there was talk of it at the time, it was no secret, at least not then, was that Uritzsky had a girlfriend. Her name was—Jennifer—” He turned over a small pad on his desk. “Jennifer Acton.”

Malone remarked that Fortague had had the name at hand: he must have been half-prepared to make a concession or two. The room had warmed up a little. “What happened to her?”

“She hung around Canberra for several months after he disappeared, then she moved to Sydney. She was a very pretty girl, but apparently didn't have much up top. She was a hostess, he met her in some restaurant. I don't think his interest in her was serious, he just liked to go to bed with pretty girls and she was the most available. Evidently she was in love with him.”

“Have you kept tabs on her?”

“We did up till about ten years ago. By then she'd married and had kids and forgotten all about Uritzsky.”

“What was her married name?”

Fortague looked at the pad again. “Mrs. Clive Ventnor. He was a truck driver.”

“A flash name for a truckie,” said Clements. “I thought he'd be at least a banker with a monicker like that.”

“No, this guy was a tough one. A wife-beater.”

“So are some bankers.”

Fortague looked surprised, as if he thought bankers were like spies, gentlemen through and through. “Well, I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world.”

Malone
wondered if the world of spies was much smaller than he had imagined. “Where was Mrs. Ventnor when you last heard of her?”

Fortague once more looked at his pad. “She lived out at Paradise Valley. It's a Housing Commission estate out past Mount Druitt.”

“She still there?”

“I couldn't say. We gave up surveillance ten years ago.”

Malone stood up. “Thanks, Guy. Tell me something—why did you decide to be on our side and tell us about Mrs. Ventnor?”

Fortague was tearing up the sheet from his pad, dropping the tiny pieces into his waste basket; from there, Malone guessed, they would go into a shredder. “I decided to show you and Russ that we're human. Not all of us think that you and the rest of them out there—” he waved at the window “—are a mob of subversives. I don't think you're going to find Uritzsky by interviewing Mrs. Ventnor, but at least you can't say I was a totally obstructive bastard.”

“Oh, I never thought of you as that,” grinned Malone.

Fortague's rugged face broadened in an answering grin. “Thanks. Incidentally, Alexis Uritzsky was a grand-nephew of the Petrograd chief of the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB. He was shot in 1918.”

“Is that what the KGB did to our Uritzsky?”

The ASIO man's grin was now enigmatic. “I wouldn't know, Scobie. Good luck.”

Fifty yards up from where Clements had parked the police car was a phone-box. Malone walked up to it, found the phone-books inside it were intact; Kirribilli must be an area that vandals hadn't yet discovered. He looked up the Ventnors: there was a C. Ventnor at a street in Paradise Valley. Then he called Jack Montgomery at the
Herald.

“Jack, did you know Alexis Uritzsky had a girlfriend called Jennifer Acton?”

Montgomery drawled an obscenity; Malone sometimes wondered if his farmer's image was an act. “I'd forgotten all about her. Yeah. I tracked her down once, but I didn't get much out of her.”

“
She was a restaurant hostess, pretty but on the dumb side.”

“I wouldn't know about the dumb bit—I can never fathom women.”

“You should read your women's pages. Jack, keep turning your memory over. If you come up with something,
anything,
let me know.”

“If
you
come up with something, let
me
know.”

“Don't write anything for the moment, Jack.”

“Scobie, have I ever stabbed you in the back? Okay, I'll keep mum. But if anything breaks, you owe me.”

“You'll be the first to know, Jack.”

He went from the phone-box back to where Clements waited in the car. “The bloody airconditioner's gone on the blink again,” said Clements. “We going back to the office?”

“We're going out to Paradise Valley.”

“The bloody Outback? Burke and Wills died out there.”

They drove out to the far western suburbs, into heat that seemed to increase a degree for every kilometre they covered. They went beyond Parramatta, out along the Western Highway and at last turned off and drove several kilometres across gently rolling terrain where drab houses seemed to crouch exhausted beneath the burning heat. Then they came to Paradise Valley, several hundred acres of planned living that had never come to life. Houses that had all the charm of large packing cases stood in tiny plots where grass struggled to punctuate the hard yellow-brown earth; a few householders had tried to cultivate gardens, but the flowers and shrubs had the withered look of those in untended cemeteries. The police car drove through a small shopping centre, but the shops looked deserted; two of them had For Lease signs plastered across their windows. Malone caught a glimpse of a poster in the window of a video shop—ESCAPE . . . He couldn't read the rest of it and he didn't know whether it was the title of a movie or a shout of desperate advice. There was no McDonald's, no Pizza Hut, no sign of a cinema or a community centre. The planners, secure in their inner-city environment, had lost either their enthusiasm or their imagination before the pioneers had moved into Paradise Valley for the new life that died at birth.

The
Ventnors lived in one of the drabbest of the packing cases, on a plot where no attempt had been made to grow a lawn or start a garden. A battered, dirty Toyota, wheelless, squatted on blocks in the narrow space beside the house. A mongrel dog under the car growled at the two detectives as they came in the wire front gate, but was too listless to come out and challenge them. Maybe nothing and nobody inside the house was worth defending.

Jennifer Ventnor opened the door to their knock. She looked at the two tall men and Malone at once saw the apprehension in her hazel eyes.

“Police? Is it Clicker? Is he hurt? In trouble?”

“Clicker?”

“My hubby. Clive.” She spoke in gasps, as if the heat was too much for her. “You
are
coppers, aren't you?”

Malone produced his badge and introduced himself and Clements. “No, it's nothing to do with your husband, Mrs. Ventnor. Could we come inside?”

Despite the heat women had come out on to the front steps of the houses on either side. One of them, tall and thin, with a thin, high voice, called out, “You all right, Jenny? Everything all right?”

Jenny Ventnor just nodded, turned and led Malone and Clements into the house. “Shut the door, I'm trying to keep the heat out. I'm having a cuppa coffee. You want one?”

The small house was a mess: Jenny Ventnor was no housekeeper. Children's clothes and toys cluttered the front room; Clements trod on a doll and it protested with a thin squeal. The kitchen was a far cry from the kitchens one saw on TV commercials: there was no Persil sparkle, no Sunbeam blender whipping up a soufflé, no mum who oughta be congratulated. Malone, remembering Mrs. Leyden's kitchen in the Springfellow house, thought it looked like a garbage tip.

A radio was playing, some housewives' friend making a comment on the day's news; Malone wondered why all these battling women made heroes of these richly-paid, right-wing gurus. Spread out on the table, from which the breakfast dishes hadn't yet been cleared, was the
Good Living
supplement from the
Herald.
Malone wondered what escapism Jenny Ventnor found in a supplement written by well-paid
journalists
for supposedly well-heeled readers. A food critic recommended a $60-a-head restaurant for a reasonable night out.

Jenny Ventnor made three cups of instant coffee and they all sat down at the cluttered table.

“Well, what's it all about?”

She had been pretty once, but it had all faded behind the dusty windows of the years. Once she might have had a good figure, but now she was fat and unhealthy-looking. She had the voice of a crow: from shouting above the crying of her kids, from yelling at her husband who came home from work and turned deaf as soon as he entered the house. It takes a sensitive ear to recognize that a whine is sometimes a cry for help. At the moment Malone was not attuned to Jenny Ventnor.

“Some time ago, twenty-one years ago, you knew a Russian man named Alexis Uritzsky.”

She suddenly frowned and shook her head, looking at him with a hurt stare as if he had struck her. “Aw, Jesus, why—? Is he back here in Australia?”

“We don't know,” said Malone. “Nobody's had any trace of his movements since March 1966.”

She nodded, the hurt look slowly disappearing from her plump sad face. “Yeah, that was the last time I saw him. I dunno the exact date, it wasn't the sorta weekend I wanted to remember. He was all sorts of a bastard in a way. But I—we were in love.” She looked at them as if pleading with them to believe her. She then looked down at herself, at her fat body sloping down like a steep hill under the faded blue sun-dress she wore. Her work-worn hands rested on an illustration of a $700 dress: the slim beautiful model smiled out at her with smug superiority. On the opposite page an article began:
As you talk with your husband or live-in lover over your Sunday morning coffee and croissants
. . . “I was good-looking then, believe it or not. I was a size twelve. Now . . .” She closed her eyes, put her hand over her quivering mouth.

Malone and Clements looked away; neither of them, despite the years of experience, had ever learned to feel comfortable with a woman's tears. Malone looked out of the kitchen window: a breeze had sprung up from somewhere and a Hills clothes hoist turned slowly, creaking like a windmill, the children's dresses and the man's shirts fluttering like defeated banners. This is battlers' territory, he thought, a sunburnt Siberia.

Out
of the corner of his eye he saw Jenny Ventnor wipe her eyes with her hand; then she croaked, “Sorry. I haven't thought about him or any of that in years. My hubby would kill me if he knew.” Without thinking she caressed a dark bruise on her fat upper arm. “I'm just glad he's not home now, while you're here.”

“He need never know we've been here. If your friends next door—” He knew the dangers of next-door neighbours; they could kill with curiosity as well as kindness. “If they ask who we were, just say we were from Social Welfare, but everything was okay, there'd been a computer mistake. You can always blame anything on computers.”

“They wouldn't believe me.” She suddenly smiled, the ghost of the girl from the past came out of the plump plainness. Her teeth were still good, white and even, and her eyes for the moment were no longer full of pain. “If you stay longer than ten minutes, they'll think I've been having a bit on the side with both of you.”

“Well, at least they won't tell your husband
that,”
Malone returned her smile. “Tell us about Mr. Uritzsky.”

She looked out of the window as if looking for 1966 on the hot blue screen of the sky. “He didn't wanna go back to Russia. He was gunna defect, he told me, take me with him and we'd start a new life somewhere here in Australia, Queensland maybe. He liked the heat. I only half-believed him. I wasn't as dumb as he thought I was, like a lot of people thought I was. I only got to be dumb later on, when I . . .” She looked back at them, then at the messy kitchen. Malone began to wonder what Clive, Clicker, Ventnor was like. “I think Alex was gunna disappear on his own.”