‘Prince of Wales.’
‘And he has a big house where?’
‘Clovelly.’
‘So, he goes between them in his BMW. It doesn’t sound so hard.’
‘Harkness works hard and plays hard. He’s a billiards nut, a golfer, and he likes to drink whisky. He also goes in for bushwalking and climbing mountains. You might find it a bit hard to keep up with him, Cliff.’
I grunted. My whisky drinking isn’t what it used to be, but I play snooker and I’ve climbed the odd rock. Maybe I could teach the professor to surf. I said so.
Sangster grinned. ‘Your first problem is getting Harkness to agree. He doesn’t want to hear about having a bodyguard.’
‘Who’re you?’
The man moving towards me was short, about 175 centimetres; he was squarely built with wide shoulders and a thatch of thick grey hair. He wore a white doctor’s coat over jeans and an open-necked shirt; his teeth gripped a curved pipe and his voice was like a pop riveter, working hard.
‘I’m Cliff Hardy, professor. I’m…’
‘Oh, yeah. The private detective. I thought I told Ian Sangster and those other fuckin’ old women I didn’t need a bodyguard.’
The Ophthalmology Department was in a big old stone building in the grounds of the hospital. It was nothing flash, just a small lecture theatre and a collection of offices where work seemed to go on. We were standing outside the department secretary’s room. The adjoining door to Harkness’ office was open and I could see crammed bookcases, piles of papers, several coffee mugs and a set of golf clubs.
“Things have changed.’ Lowering my voice, I added, ‘It looks like word has got out that the man’s in Sydney.’
‘Shit. You’d better come in.’
The secretary, a slim, good-looking, dark-haired young woman, was on the phone. Harkness winked at her and we went into his room. He pulled off his coat and dropped it on a filing cabinet, waved me into a chair, sat behind his desk and began excavating his pipe. ‘Ever been to Bougainville?’
I shook my head.
‘Cunt of a place, a lot of it. Some beautiful bits. Good people-tough and smart. Jonas is a good guy. None of this Catholic or traditionalist bullshit. He wants the place to go ahead, but he reckons turning the Buka Strait into a sewer isn’t the way to do it.’
“That sounds right,’ I said.
He tapped ashes out of the pipe into a metal wastepaper bin, packed it from a tin of Erinmore flake and lit it with a match. Puffing, he said, They’ve got a lot of eye problems up there- cataract, bit of follicular trachoma and diet-related things. A couple of good regular clinics with operating teams could clear it up pretty quickly but those pricks in Moresby don’t give a stuff. Jonas’ mob does.’
‘That makes him important,’ I said. ‘So it’s important that you operate on him without interference. Where’s it going to happen? Not here, at the hospital?’
‘Shit, no. This place is run by medical bureaucrats who never put a finger up a bum in anger. We’re going to do it in a little private joint in Bondi. What’s your background — not an ex-copper, are you?’
‘No. Army for a bit, insurance investigator, then into this. You’ve got something against the police?’
‘Plenty. Used to see them use Redfern as a training ground for the heavy squads. And I got the piss beaten out of me a few times on demos and that. I suppose some of them’re all right. What did you do in the fuckin’ army?’
‘Fought in Malaya. Have you got something against the army, too?’
The smoke was coming out in short, quick puffs. ‘Mostly a waste of time and money. The medical corps paint wounds on people and practise washing them off. Bullshit. But the army did some bloody tremendous work for us on the Aboriginal eye health project. Set up these field hospitals in the bush. Great stuff.’
‘I read about that. And I knew one of the blokes you used in liaison work, Jacko Moody.’
‘Great guy. Did you ever see him fight?’
I nodded. ‘He could’ve gone a long way. Still, maybe it’s good he didn’t. He’s got all his marbles.’
‘I fixed his retinas. He came close to the white cane. What’re you looking at?’
I was gazing over his head at a picture on the wall. It showed Harkness in bathers, looking chunky but firm fleshed, on a beach with a blonde woman and two snowy-haired children.
Harkness screwed around to look at the picture. He put down his pipe and massaged the bridge of his nose where there was a red indentation. Suddenly, he looked his age, which was fifty-six, and tired. ‘I sent them down to Victoria for a while.’
‘Good,’ I said. “That was smart. Why not be smart about yourself, too? What’s that mark on your nose?’
He stopped the rubbing. ‘It’s where you strap on the magnifying apparatus for operating. You’re observant, Cliff. D’you play billiards?’
‘Snooker.’
‘Better than nothing. Drink whisky?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Over the next few days I drank a little whisky with Frank Harkness and played some snooker with him-on the table in the basement of his house-but what he mostly did was work. The man was a tiger for it-early morning ward rounds, lectures, clinics, consulting, operations, administration. He was at it from 6.00 a.m. to nine o’clock at night and how he had the energy to lift a glass or a cue was beyond me. But he did, and when he went up to bed I noticed that he took sheaves of papers and journals with him. He was brusque and abrasive at times, extraordinarily patient and kind at others. I quickly found out that the thing to do was to stand up to him. Toe to toe, he’d listen to a contrary argument and sometimes take notice. Otherwise, he went completely his own way. I judged that he was a man who’d made mistakes, but not very often.
I almost made one myself on the third night. I was sleeping in one of the spare rooms in the house and, before going to bed, I checked all the doors and windows. I was in bed, reading the paperback of Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, which I’d found on Harkness’ shelves, when something began to niggle at me. My. 38 was on a chair near the bed; I was sleeping in a light tracksuit and had a pair of slip-on sneakers at the ready. The front gate was locked; the cars were locked; the doors were locked, but something was wrong. I put the book down, pulled on my shoes and went out into the passage light was showing under Harkness’ door and I could smell his pipe. That jogged my memory. We’d been playing snooker in the basement and the fug from the pipe had got to me. I’d opened a small window onto a light shaft and had forgotten to close it. Just a small aperture, but enough. I padded down to the basement and closed the window. Harkness was standing at the top of the stairs when I returned. He wore a striped, knee-length nightshirt. His calf muscles bulged.
‘What?’ he rasped.
‘Nothing.’
He nodded and went back into his room but I could tell that he was edgy. So was I.
The call came the next day. My job was to get Harkness, in the mid-afternoon, to an address in Bondi without anyone knowing where he was going to be or following us. Harder to do than it sounds-Harkness’ day was mapped out in half-hour grids, but we managed it. I had to hope that the people looking after Buckawa were doing the same.
The place was a small cluster of two-storey, cream-brick buildings set behind a high fence. It looked like a garden furniture factory, with all the chrome and plastic chairs scattered around, but in fact it was the William O. White Private Hospital.
‘Supposed to be closed for renovation,’ Harkness said as we mounted the front steps. ‘But it’s got a good working theatre.’
‘How many people to do the op?’
Harkness took a last suck on his pipe and knocked the ashes out into a flower pot. ‘Just you and me.’
He laughed at my reaction and we went through the front door into a tiled lobby where Ian Sangster was waiting with three black men and one black woman. Ian did the introductions but the only name that stuck with me
