with different phone numbers, as the spirit moved him. The women were available on call or for home services and there wasn’t much they wouldn’t, or weren’t obliged, to do. The drugs were supposed to ensure their loyalty, but one of the women had kicked loose and told me about the operation. Although not proud of the strategy, I’d been planning to use Noel to get certain messages through to Haitch back when I had him in my sights, until other events overtook me. That was yesterday, this was today.
I knew Noel by sight; he resembled his father in that he looked soft and mild. He wasn’t, but he hadn’t the direct hardcore toughness of Haitch. Noel’s style was more vicious and oblique. Courtesy of my informant, I’d learnt that Noel had an absolute obsession about the Citroen Goddess, never drove anything else, and kept several of them in a garage somewhere to recycle the parts.
‘His fuckin’ car’s the only fuckin’ thing he loves,’ she told me.
I drove to Marrickville, crossed the river into Earlwood, and drove up to the big block of flats occupying the whole of a high bluff overlooking the river, the Marrickville golf course and the quiet park where not long back one notorious drug dealer had shot another to death.
Resident parking was provided for in the form of steel-framed, perspex-roofed carports grouped at the east end of the building near a thick stand of wattle trees which had somehow survived the developer’s assault. There were twenty-four spaces, only seven or eight occupied-no Citroen.
I drove off and parked a few streets away under some plane trees that hung low over the road. Then I thought about car thieves and joy-riders and moved to a spot between two other cars that caught a bit of the street light. I locked up tight and walked back to the flats. One of the carports looked as if it hadn’t been used that year or last. The oil stains were old and faded and grass had broken through the concrete in several spots. I took up a position near a tree beside this spot and had a view of most of the other slots and a clear sight of the arrival of any car calling this place home.
I used the mobile to call Pete’s man.
‘The mobile telephone you have called is not answering. Please call again later.’
That could mean the phone was out of range or had been switched off or was subject to some kind of interference. It told me nothing and didn’t make me any happier.
Waiting more or less patiently is something I’ve learned to do but never enjoyed. I took out the Colt, leaned back against the tree trunk and prepared myself. I looked around, made sure I couldn’t be observed, and checked the Colt over, making sure the safety catch was on. There’s probably as much villainy in Earlwood as anywhere else, but the usual atmosphere is quiet. The last thing I wanted to do there was fire a gun.
Leaves fluttered down on me as I checked the gun and I reflected for the umpteenth time on how all the senses sharpen up for this kind of activity. I could feel the leaves hit, count them, and felt I could tell a difference in their weight. Nutty, but that’s the way it feels. Athletes talk about an adrenalin rush as if they actually experience it but I can’t say I ever have. With me it’s this honing-up of everything. It feels scary and good at the same time and there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s possible that I’m hooked on the feeling and will stay in this kind of work longer than I should. I don’t know.
Traffic zipped along the road and over the bridge; kids kicked a football in drug-death park; I could hear the tyre noise and the thump of boot on pigskin clearly. There was no activity on the river. Old-timers recall swimming in it, catching fish fit to eat in it, kids playing on its sandy banks, but that’s all long past. I was seeing things near and far with unusual clarity and could even spot a couple of golfers indulging in their peculiar masochism in the distance.
After fifty-three minutes of this I had something to watch. A tall, blonde woman wearing a miniskirt, high heels and a silk blouse, trotted across the concrete towards the brick pillars that marked the entrance to the area in front of the carports. She lit a cigarette and puffed on it as she adjusted her sunglasses, consulted something from her shoulder bag and tugged at her pantyhose. She checked her watch, readjusted the shades, looked back at the flats and waved and had trouble standing still. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other and, just as I’d done a while before, looked around to see if anyone was about. She couldn’t see me in the shadows. Satisfied, she blocked her left nostril with her little finger and sniffed hard. She repeated the action with her right nostril. Her head jerked back as she sniffed. A white Mercedes pulled up and she got smoothly into the front passenger seat- one of Noel’s girls for sure.
More leaves fell; the footballers left the park and the traffic got heavier as streams of cars headed into the suburbs. The golfers vanished into a soft, blurry haze. At twelve minutes past six a powder-blue Citroen Goddess purred through the gate, swung in an elegant arc and slipped into a carport about five spaces away in the area reserved for the occupant of unit nineteen. The driver got out, activated the alarm and ran his eyes appreciatively over the classic lines of his car. He bent and stared at the rear mudguard, straightened up, evidently satisfied, and strolled towards where I was waiting with an unlicensed gun in my sweating hand and not a legal leg to stand on.
14
‘Hello, Noel. Got a nice girl for me?’
I stepped out of the shadows and came straight up to him. He was wearing a double-breasted tan linen suit, chocolate coloured T-shirt, brown slip-ons. Five-ten, about thirteen stone, flab on him. He barely glanced at me. His round, pasty face was ill-tempered.
‘Fuck off.’
I was close enough now to bring my heel hard down on his shin and stamp on his foot. That got his attention; his head flew back and his shades slipped askew. I hit him harder in the ribs with a short left than I’d intended but his fat softened the punch. It winded him though and he sagged away from me. I grabbed his prominent right ear and let his whole weight pull against it. That brought him upright again, smartish.
‘We can do this a bit more or we can stop,’ I said. ‘Up to you.’
‘What the fuck do you want?’
He was trembling. Scared. Good.
‘A talk. I don’t want your money or your drugs or your girls but I’m very, very serious. I’ve got a silenced Colt on me and you can be face down in the bushes ten seconds from now and no-one the wiser if that’s the way you’d like it.’
‘Shit. I’ll talk to you.’
I released him, took the pistol out and used it to tap his sunglasses straight. I held it by the barrel so he couldn’t see that there was no silencer. But he was beyond such details, sweating into his smart T-shirt and giving off a sour smell I couldn’t identify.
‘We’ll go up to your flat, nice and quietly. With a bit of luck I’ll be off in half an hour or so and all you’ll have to worry about will be a bit of lost skin, some sore ribs and a red ear. The strides’ll need a dry-clean.’
He glanced down at his leg. Blood from where I’d raked his shin had seeped through his trouser leg, turning the tan linen dark brown. He turned a little paler himself. ‘Okay, okay. Fuck, who are you?’
‘No questions from you. Let’s go in.’
He hobbled a bit, leaned to one side, protecting the ribs and rubbed at his ear a couple of times, but I could sense that he was regrouping. He wasn’t fit and didn’t look agile, but the Henderson nastiness was worth a lot of that stuff. I judged that he’d be dangerous as long as he remained conscious. He used a key to unlock the heavy security door and had to produce another key to get us through the grille door at the top of a set of stairs. I was reminded of the security arrangements in Kirribilli and how they’d been of no use to Cy. Anger at that was a help. When he hesitated at the grille door, fumbling for the key on his heavy ring, I reached forward and took a grip on his longish, pale hair. I pressed his head forward until it touched the bars. His sunglasses fell off.
‘You’ve got a lot of keys there, Noel. Pimp keys, eh? I’ll stick them up your nose one by one if you don’t open that fucking gate and get moving.’
Noel’s flat was on the third floor. It was a large space, very light and airy with a wide balcony. Noel was living off the immoral earnings at a pretty high level. The furniture was expensive, over-ornate and there was too much of it. This late in the day the bar was tempting but I stuck to the business in hand. I shoved Noel down into one of his
