Authors: Peter Temple
Cam knew too. He finished his glass, poured for us, for himself. ‘Just run-through boys,’ he said, his face expressionless. ‘Too clever for banks, too lazy for drugs. Somebody told em about Cyn, one of her troops would be right. We’ll get there, sort it out.’
We wouldn’t. Cam and I had already been over Cynthia’s troops. All we found was that one had gone to Queensland suddenly. So did we. We joined the woman at her ailing aunt’s bedside. She was so shocked and showed so little evidence of new-found riches that Cam slipped her two $100 notes when we left.
‘Won’t make any quick decision,’ said Harry. ‘Nothin comin up, sleep on it for a bit.’
We finished the bottle and didn’t move on to the customary second one. Harry came to the front gate with us, out in the blustery night, trees thrashing, held me back, fingers like a bulldog clip on my left bicep.
‘Two knocks in a row, Jack,’ he said, ‘you’ll be hurtin. Not a write-off, though. Get twenty-five, thirty cents in the dollar back, thereabouts.’
‘Can’t drop it, cop it,’ I said. ‘Isn’t that right?’
He squeezed my arm, more pain. ‘Remember the Bank of Strang, cash advances for the creditworthy. Also, a little legal matter, need some consultin. Next week suit?’
‘Day and night,’ I said.
‘Cam’ll make a time.’
He let go. We looked at each other. ‘Harry,’ I said, no mental activity preceding what followed, pure emotion. ‘Cynthia. We’ll take care of that.’
The front door of the house opened. Over Harry’s head, I saw Lyn Strang, short, strong, warm peach-coloured light on her hair and shoulders, a carpet of peach laid around her shadow on the broad verandah. ‘I wanted to say goodbye. I was upstairs,’ she said, something in her tone, not relief but something like that.
In the street, beyond the high red-brick wall, Cam started the transport we’d come in, a much-modified vehicle apparently known to some as an eight-bore streetslut. It made a feline noise, the sort of sound a prehistoric giant sabre-toothed tiger might have made.
I raised my hand at Lyn. She waved back.
‘We’ll fix it,’ I said to Harry, repeating the stupid, unfulfillable promise.
‘Wouldn’t surprise me,’ Harry said, no confidence in his voice. ‘Pair of bright fellas like yerselves.’
Cam drove me to my place of residence, the old boot factory in North Fitzroy, early Saturday night traffic. Lots of taxis, sober people going out for a good time. He double-parked outside, turned down Bryan Ferry on the eight-bore’s many speakers.
‘The big man’s a worry,’ he said. He lit a Gitane with his Zippo, rolled down his window. ‘Seen it comin for a while.’
Cold air and the pungent Gallic smoke sent a tremor of craving through me. ‘There’s nowhere else to go on Cynthia,’ I said.
‘Cyril,’ said Cam. ‘Come at it from Cyril’s end.’
We dealt with Cynthia through Cyril Wootton, professional middleman, dead-end and cut-out, collector of non-enforceable debts, finder of witnesses, skips, shoot-throughs and no-shows, and my occasional employer.
‘Cyril’s deeply shonky,’ I said, ‘but this, no.’
Cam sighed smoke. ‘Can’t leave him out,’ he said. ‘Can’t leave anythin out.’ He turned his head and looked at me, black eyes saying something, wanting me to agree to the unsaid.
I opened the door. ‘I’ll talk to him tomorrow.’
‘Me too?’
‘No.’
I was getting out when Cam said, ‘Jack, this trot, it’ll end, don’t be shy.’
He too was offering to lend me money.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Could come to that.’
I watched him drive away, slowly in the quiet street, the deep, feral sound of eight cylinders entering the bloodstream, agitating it.
There wasn’t anything else to do but light the fire in a clean grate, prepared on a nervous race-day morning with scrunched paper, kindling, a few sticks of bonedry wood, cut and split and chopped and delivered by Harry Strang’s man in Avoca. He was the owner of a calm grey mare called Breckinridge, a horse now burdened only by the weight of children. It had been four lengths clear when it won the Ballarat Cup at 30–1, and from then on some people got their wood free and I got mine at a discount.
There was a time when I thought I’d never go back to the boot factory. Having your home blown up by people who want to kill you can have that effect. But when the time came to decide, I couldn’t let an explosion rob me of the place I’d shared with someone I loved beyond the telling of it. I packed my bags and left the converted stable I’d been living in, grown used to, and went back to where I’d kissed Isabel goodbye on the day a mad client of mine murdered her in a carpark. I walked up the stairs, unlocked the front door, went down the passage to the big, empty living room, looked around, opened a window, and I was home.
Ignite the fire, watch that Avoca kindling go up like a cypress hedge. Now, to the kitchen. What follows Bollinger and oysters in champagne batter? Perhaps a slice of sirloin, a thick slice, moist and ruddy in the centre, served with a cream, mustard and finely chopped caper sauce, some small vegetables on the side. Yes, but the kitchen wasn’t going to run to that. Next. Open the fridge. There was a piece of corned beef. A corned-beef, cheddar and pickle sandwich and a glass, glasses, of Heathcote shiraz, that was what it was going to run to.
How old can corned beef get before it kills you? I sniffed and pondered, studied the iridescent surface of the chunk of meat and, sadly, decided that risk outweighed reward. Now it was cheddar and pickle, mature cheddar, not mature when bought but now most certainly. And then it flashed through my mind that it was bread that made the Earl of Sandwich’s innovation possible, you needed bread. Next.
I thought briefly about getting out the Studebaker Lark, agonised, then rang Lester at the Vietnamese takeaway in St Georges Road. Lester answered, a non-committal sound with which I was familiar. He was a client. I’d sorted out a small matter that troubled him. For an immoderate fee, in cash, a woman lawyer in Richmond had done the paperwork needed to bring his aged mother into the country. Then a man came around and told Lester that it would cost $150 a week, also in cash, to keep his mother from being sent back. The money would be passed on to a corrupt official in Canberra.
Lester had been paying for three years when he consulted me, referred by someone he wouldn’t name. I made some inquiries, then spoke to the Richmond solicitor on the telephone. She had no idea what I was talking about, she said, highly offended and haughty. I didn’t say anything for a while, then I said I’d appreciate a bank cheque for $23,400 payable to Lester, delivered to me by hand inside the hour.
She laughed, a series of starter-motor sounds. ‘Or what?’ she said.
‘Or you can practise law in Sierra Leone,’ I said. ‘How’s that for an or?’
A silence. ‘Your name again?’
‘Irish, Jack Irish.’
Another silence. ‘Are you the one who killed that ex-cop and the other guy?’
My turn to be silent, then I said, ‘I wasn’t charged with anything.’
The cheque arrived inside an hour. I took it around to the takeaway and gave it to Lester’s wife.
A few days later, Lester knocked on my office door. He was carrying a sports bag and he didn’t appear overjoyed. ‘How much?’ he said. ‘You?’
I wrote out a bill for $120. He studied it, looked at me, studied it again. Then he unzipped his bag and put wads of notes on my table, fifties, twenties, perhaps five or six thousand dollars, more, in used notes.
Temptation had run its scarlet fingernails down my scrotum. What did it matter? A success fee, that’s all it was. Merchant bankers took success fees. But I wasn’t a merchant banker. People like that grabbed what they could within the law. In my insignificant way, I represented the law. I was a sworn officer of the court. I was a thread in an ancient fabric that made social existence possible.
I was the law.
Sufficiently psyched up by these thoughts, I leaned across the tailor’s table, plucked two soiled fifties and a twenty, pushed the rest back his way.
‘Lester,’ I said, ‘not all lawyers are the same.’
Now I said, ‘Lester, it’s Jack. Any chance of Bruce dropping off some food?’
‘How many?’
‘One.’
‘Fifteen minutes,’ he said. ‘Jack, you want prawns?’
‘Lester, I need prawns.’
A glass later, the buzzer sounded and I went downstairs and opened the door to bright-eyed Bruce, the elder of Lester’s two teenage sons. He’d come on his bike, cardboard box on the carrier. I tried to give him some gold coins but he was under instructions. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘My dad says no-one’s allowed to take money from you.’
Virtue may be its own reward, but there are other possible spin-offs.
I said, ‘I wish that were a universal principle, Bruce.’
He smiled, he got it. No shonky lawyer was ever going to get fat on this new Australian.
Upstairs, the phone rang. I made haste up the old, squeaking stairs, both hands on the food box. Lyall had been known to ring on a Wednesday night, Thursday night, any night, from any time zone, usually from some troubled place, satellite phone borrowed from the CNN person or a UN person or, once, from the head of the Chechen mafia.
‘Irish,’ I said, winded. It was a handy name, you could say it as a sigh, one syllable, a longer surname would have had to become double-barrelled.
‘Jack, Jack,’ said Cyril Wootton, his resigned voice. ‘Whatever became of obligation, of sense of duty?’
My breath came back in a reasonable time. Recently I’d been running around Edinburgh Gardens in the early morning, going up Falconer Street and down Delbridge to Queen’s Parade, running and walking, limping really, streets empty, sometimes a dero lying on the pavement, clenched like a fist against the cold, the occasional pale young man with dark eye sockets and a stiff-legged walk, and always the three women at the tram stop, head-scarves, smoking and talking quietly, perhaps the last sweatshop workers to live in the gentrified suburb.
‘Got no idea, Cyril,’ I said. ‘I don’t follow the greyhounds. Never bet on anything that’s trying to catch something else, that’s the principle. Good names, though.’
In the moment before he spoke again, I heard the sounds of his midweek haunt, a pub in Kew he stopped off at to slake the thirst he developed after leaving the Windsor in Spring Street.
It was a raffish spot for Kew: two financial advisers had once fought to tears in the toilet, and the legend was that three pairs of women’s underpants were found in the beer garden after a local real-estate agency’s Christmas party in 1986.
Wootton expelled breath. ‘There is considerable anxiety,’ he said. ‘I am under pressure to produce results. And you cannot be contacted.’
I felt some contrition. I hadn’t done any serious looking for Robbie Colburne, occasional barman.
‘Feelers are out, Cyril,’ I said.
‘What feelers?’
‘He’s not using his vehicle, that narrows things.’
‘Narrows?’ There was no belief in Cyril’s voice. ‘Are you saying he hasn’t gone anywhere?’
‘Within limits.’
The trawl through the airlines hadn’t produced the name but that meant nothing. You could give any name if you paid cash to fly or you could travel by bus or taxi or a friend could give you a lift or you could ride your bicycle out of town, rollerblade, run, walk, limp.
‘Quite,’ he said in his assumed Coldstream Guards officer’s voice. ‘Is he spending?’
‘He’s a part-time barman. What would he have to spend?’
‘So you’ve got nothing to show for three days?’
‘Cyril,’ I said, ‘I’m probably being over sensitive, but, at this moment, my inclination is to say bugger off, get someone else. Silly, but that’s my state of mind.’
While Wootton weighed up his options, I listened to a surf of witty real-estate and financial-advice banter, the women shrieking, the men baying like hounds, randy hounds.
‘Jack,’ he said, ‘it’s serious.’
Even against that background of happy parasites at play, I recognised a Wootton plea.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said. ‘My total attention to this matter.’
He caught my tone, knew that I was in earnest. ‘Yes. Give me a ring, old chap.’ I’d be giving him more than a ring. I’d be paying him a visit, and the thought gave me no pleasure.
By ten, I was in bed, betwixt fresh linen sheets, steaming Milo on the bedside table, classical FM on the radio. In my hands, I held a novel about young Americans undergoing rites of passage in Venezuela.
All alone at the end of the day. Lyall no doubt in some godforsaken country.
Outside, a cold rain was falling on the city. I didn’t need to go out to know that. I could feel it in my heart.
I woke before daylight without need of an alarm, splashed my face, put on the saggy old grey tracksuit and went shuffling through the park, around the streets. In Delbridge Street, an insane Jack Russell terrier threw himself against his front gate with a hideous bark-shriek, catching me by heart-stopping surprise for the fiftieth time. The dog would have to die. There was no other way.
Back home, I lay in the huge cast-iron bath for an hour, drinking tea, tapping off cold water, running in hot, reading the
Age
, ruminating on creeping flab and aching knees and other matters of the corpus. Then I dressed in sober business clothing and drove to Meaker’s in Brunswick Street for breakfast. Meaker’s had been the writing on the wall for working-class Brunswick Street when it opened in the late 1970s, serving breakfast at all hours to people with vague artistic leanings who didn’t know what time it was and couldn’t afford to eat at home because of the infrastructure required. Now the whole street provided that service and lots, lots more.
‘The look I like,’ said Carmel, the newest waiter. Despite having the appearance of a fourteen-year-old waif, she had been married twice and now, sensibly, had retired from dud men, any men, and was the companion of a sleek home-wares buyer for a shop called Noir. I knew this because she had told me, unbidden and unencouraged, when we met by chance early one evening soon after her debut at Meaker’s. Much has been learned, not all of it life-affirming, at the Brunswick Street laundromat. Something about the place – its tropical warmth, the sullen chugging of the machines, the way the newly cleansed garments swirl and flirt and twine in the perforated stainless-steel drums – encourages intimate revelations.