17
It was hard work appearing confident to Lambert. If he’d known how desperate things really were, he’d probably have risked Mountain’s ire by calling in the cops; and if he really knew his business, he could have made a deal with any other agent Mountain might defect to. That sort of thinking made me wonder what Mountain would do if he knew Erica was a hostage-maybe he’d do nothing, maybe he’d just write about it, adjusting his program whatever that was, or maybe it would send him crazier than he was already. Mere speculation. I had no way of telling him about it, and if he was close enough to the action to know I’d be running into him soon.
On the drive back to Glebe, with the folder on the seat beside me, I realised that I hadn’t asked Lambert about the delivery or posting of the outline. There might have been something to learn from postmarks or dates. Probably not, but I clearly wasn’t at the top of my form. I had the bad feeling of being manipulated by events, and a worse one of being flat out of ideas.
I had had the sense to look for a tail on the drive to Haddington in case Grey thought I was about to do something decisive and I checked again on the way back. No tail. I didn’t like the idea of Grey spooking Lambert into handing over the synopsis, and it would have been a pity to let Peroni get to work on the bone china.
The cat was out, the letter box was empty, there were no dishes to wash-there was no excuse for delaying an inspection of Bill Mountain’s opus, or outline of opus. I made myself a sandwich and took it, the folder and a flagon of wine out into the imitation of a backyard. Hilde had introduced some plants and done something with bricks and planks of wood, which meant that there was somewhere to sit out there other than on the toilet which had been my pre-Hilde perch. A couple of the plants looked sick as if they missed Hilde too. The afternoon sun was warm; I took off my shirt, poured some wine and got to work.
The note was unremarkable; Mountain was a neat, accurate typist:
Dear Keith,
This synopsis will give you a cockstand. The first draft is well underway; I’m not drinking and I’m writing thousands of words a day. Read it, talk to publishers, but don’t show it to anyone. Put together the best deal you can. Say one word to the police and this is all you’ll ever see of it. Ten per cent of zero is zero. Do it the way I say. I’ll be in touch. yrs.
The signature was a scrawled ‘B’. I drank some wine, ate some sandwich and began to read the typescript.
I’m not the fastest reader in the world, and synopses are not the easiest things to read. I’d had to plough through a lot of them in my brief career as a law student and I never found them much fun. It took me an hour and several glasses of wine to work through Mountain’s forty pages. When I’d finished I was sitting in shadow and should have been cold, but I didn’t notice. The book was a knock-out.
Here and there Mountain had inserted short passages of dialogue and descriptive bits among the bare bones of the story. To my jaded and untutored eye the writing seemed crisp and dramatic but unobtrusive. It wouldn’t hold up the action, and there was plenty of that. The protagonist, as Lambert had called him, was a thinly-disguised version of Mountain himself, except that he was a film-writer, not a TV hack. More marketable, see, right off the bat. His name was Morgan Shaw. This writer gets drawn into the car-stealing business more thoroughly than he wanted. Initially, he was just doing some research for a script. Shaw writes the movie in scene break-down form as he lives it-including the taping of the instructions and the filming of the car pick-up. He gets addicted to the danger and baits his employers by leaving a taped message himself in the locker at Central Railway, where he picks up the papers that secure him the Audi.
In Mountain’s book there was to be a long chapter on the killing at Blackheath where Morgan Shaw had gone to indulge his two great weaknesses-women and booze. The killing was in some way cathartic.
All this, except the catharsis, was pretty familiar territory, but a new element entered the story-a journalist whom Shaw contacts to get information about heroin in Sydney. This character, given the name of Andrew Hope by Mountain, is full bottle on the subject, and the source of technical detail on the opium poppy, processing and marketing, as well as local colour, a la Forsythe and Elegant. The travel to Marseilles, Nice and along the Riviera would be there as a strong selling point, and a harrowing ‘lost weekend’ section where the writer kicks the booze.
I found myself reading and re-reading passages with interest and enjoyment. Mountain had made Morgan Shaw a more attractive character than himself, wittier and more compassionate. Ruthless and capable too, but the Mountain I knew and disliked seemed to be scoring pretty high on those counts. The sample scenes from the movie included in the outline were dramatic and direct, and held the thing together. Another selling point-it was half way to being a movie already.
The most alarming thing was that the manuscript ended with Shaw back in Sydney with a large supply of pure heroin and cocaine and some useful contacts. He has a plan to establish a drug empire and use the profits to fund pornographic films, rock bands and counter-culture communes. But the writer himself becomes addicted to heroin very quickly, and the signs were of a disintegration of some kind being held together by fantasy. The last scene broached a new subject:
‘He looked at the heroin for a long time. There was enough for him to make his exit through a tunnel of warm pleasure. He’d have time to sit in a padded chair and say a long, sweet goodbye and wait for the flash that would mean the doors to the tunnel were opening.’
The warm pleasure was being imparted by various women whom Mountain must have conjured up partly from his imagination and partly, if Erica had it right, from memory. At the point where the outline broke off, our Morgan had a lot of irons in the fire; he was plotting the set-up of his network, still baiting the car thieves with copies of false documents and real tapes, and playing around with the idea of suicide. Lambert, reading the stuff as autobiographical, must have been able to hear his knees knock. His ten per cent couldn’t have seemed very safe.
I flicked through the pages looking for clues, slips, conscious or unconscious signposts to where Mountain might be. No luck. Place names were potent and well-chosen, but fictitious. The typewriter he was using had a correcting function, so that if he had had second thoughts about identifying places too closely and made changes there was no record of it in the typescript. It was like reading a deposition by someone who had sworn to tell the truth but had no inhibitions about committing perjury. On the last page, Shaw was in a hotel not far from the heart of a major city, which could mean that Mountain was in a private house somewhere in the backblocks.
I made a list of the apparently important things in the manuscript, and checked it against other information I had. Nothing happened; there were confirmations of the obvious things like the alcohol cure and the heroin purchase, but nothing on the movements or locations or the suicide idea. Small comfort in that. Next I listed the characters, and entered the few remarks and descriptions allotted them in the synopsis. This amounted to little more than a thumbnail sketch in most cases, but provided more confirmation. Mai was recognisably there as ‘Eddie’, the writer’s first contact with the criminal world; poor Miss Mountain was there, her fragile, suburban respectability brutally etched. Other characters were either heavily disguised or fictitious but the portrait of the journalist, Andrew Hope, rang some bells. My notes on him read: Andrew Hope, 35, dark, heavy build, journalist, ex-football player, practical, joker, gambler, experimental drug user.
Arthur Henderson was fifty-two, not thirty-five: he was short and fair and had been a good tennis player. But he was a freelance journalist, said to be the first man to take cocaine on television (accounts differ on whether the substance he had sniffed on The Jimmie Martin Show really was cocaine), and his idea of a joke was to balance a bucket of piss over a door and sit back to watch the result.
I’d had some dealings with Henderson, but I didn’t have a way of contacting him. As it turned out, doing this was like trying to read the label on a turning record-you can almost do it but not quite. The first few calls I made got me nowhere except from one blank wall to another. There was no other course open than to add another favour to the long list I already owed Harry Tickener. Since Harry became deputy editor of The News rather than its star reporter, he sees and hears less than he used to, but still more than most. He took my call, but I had the feeling that he had at least one other phone to his ear.
‘Hi, Cliff, I’m busy. How’re you?’
‘Trying to be busy, Harry. When did you last see Arthur Henderson?’
‘Who?’
‘Artie Henderson-when did you last see him?’
