Another man standing. In the shadow of the house, not far away, weapon in hand, weapon that had taken away the man’s grey eye, weapon still pointing at him.
Lyall was on the ground, getting up. I walked over, not a sure walk, put out a hand to her, pulled her up, very little strength available. She rose, came to me, put her head on my chest, a person unharmed, and I was grateful beyond measure.
The man came out of the shadows.
A man in black. Short hair, lips parted.
Lipstick on the lips. Dark red. Gleaming teeth.
Not another man standing.
A woman standing. The clergyman’s partner at Taub’s, the woman with the TV commercial teeth and the black Smartie eyes, the tiny male cleft in her pale chin, the fingernail pressed into dough.
She walked over to us, putting the weapon into her armpit, looked me over, calm eyes, cold eyes, looked at Lyall, patted her on the shoulder like a coach, looked at me.
‘All right?’ she said.
I couldn’t speak, didn’t want to speak.
‘You’ll live,’ she said. ‘You’re on your feet, you’ll live.’ To Lyall she said, ‘Take him to St Vincent’s casualty. Thing’s probably out the other side, touched nothing. Luck. Like the movies.’
She took a wallet out of a hip pocket, held it to the light, found a card, gave it to Lyall. ‘Give them this. Anyone. Tell them to phone the number. Then book into the Hyatt, stay as long as you like, bill’s not your problem. We’ll clean up here. You stay away for a while.’
At me. ‘It’s not over, Jack.’
I looked at the man lying near the corner of the house, the man who tried to kill me, the big black pool spreading around his head, looked down at my shoulder, pulled myself together. ‘It’s over for this suit,’ I said. ‘Can’t find anyone to invisibly mend bullet holes anymore.’
She said, no change of tone, around the mouth a small inclination to smile, ‘We can’t mend. All we can do is pay.’
I looked into her eyes and I saw nothing. She stooped and picked up the document box, still open, the tapes pinned by the spring clip.
‘Take this with you,’ she said. ‘Less for the cleaners to do.’
Looking at each other. Pain in the side building up now, quickly.
‘Tasmania,’ I said. ‘Know about that?’
Black eyes. Giving away nothing.
‘Come this far, Jack,’ she said, ‘do what you have to do.’
50
The woman doctor who cleaned the wound looked like Ava Gardner in Bhowani Junction. She wasn’t impressed with the injury.
‘Call this a gunshot wound?’ she said. ‘I’ve seen worse from knitting accidents.’ She pointed at my old scar. ‘Now that’s a gunshot wound. Are you a dangerous person?’
‘This is called blaming the victim,’ I said. ‘The people who shoot me are dangerous.’
‘I’ll give you some painkillers. Come back and have the dressing changed tomorrow. Always the chance of foreign matter in there, dirty cloth fragments.’
‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘These are Henry Buck’s fragments. I paid top dollar for them. And the shirt’s one hundred per cent Australian cotton, nothing foreign about it.’
We didn’t go to the Hyatt. We went to the penthouse apartment, not talking, coming down. In the study, I slotted one of Stuart’s videos into the player, pressed the button.
On the big screen, a man appeared, out of focus at first, then sharp, a man with cropped hair, just stubble, a handsome, ravaged face. He was sitting in an armchair, long-fingered hands lying on the arms.
Lips hardly moving, he said in a soft, cultured voice:
Of course, Stuart, this isn’t some little smack operation, bunch of clever chaps, few kilos in statues of the blessed virgin, in the coconut milk tins, in some mule’s bowels. This is an international business run by Americans. Ex-CIA, ex-army, well connected. That’s why they called themselves The Connection, I presume. And we ended up, because of our greed, unforgivable greed, we ended up as the Australian arm of it.
A voice off-screen, faint American accent:
Just for the sake of the record, Brent, when you say we, you mean…
Lyall said, ‘That’s Stuart.’
The ravaged man said:
I mean me and Steven Levesque and McColl and Carson, of course. Led by Steven but willingly led, not an innocent among us.
I looked at Lyall. She raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘This is the grail,’ I said. ‘Stuart’s news story from heaven. It killed him. Now the trick is for us to stay alive.’
‘The media,’ Lyall said. ‘Go to the media.’
I could hear Dave at our first meeting, sitting in the car in the little square, watching the leaves blowing in the cold, wet wind.
The point here, Jack, the point’s simple for an intelligent bloke like you. Change Hansard, shut up journos, that’s kinder stuff for these people.
He was these people. He knew.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to be the media ourselves.’
I rang Eric the Geek, told him what I wanted to do. He arrived twenty minutes later with a laptop and a suitcase of electronic gear.
‘Streaming video,’ he said, a gleam in his eye. ‘Always wanted to do this.’
It took the rest of the night and the first hours of the day. At 8.30 a.m., Eric, exhausted but happy, went home. Lyall was asleep in the big white bedroom, head beneath a pillow. At 9 a.m., I rang the newspaper.
‘Editor, please,’ I said. The secretary came on. ‘Jack Irish to speak to Malcolm Glasser. He knows who I am. Tell him it’s his son’s lawyer.’
He came on. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t identify yourself that way.’
I said, ‘Malcolm, I’m going to give you a website. Ring me back inside half an hour. If not, I give it to everyone. You’ve got a tiny edge on the rest of the world here. Tiny.’ I gave him my number.
Glasser was back in ten minutes.
‘Utterly unbelievable,’ he said. ‘Jesus, story of the decade. Bigger than that, much bigger. How the hell do you fit in here?’
‘I don’t. You running it?’
‘Fuck, yes, fuck the risk.’
‘There’s no risk, Malcolm.’
At 11 a.m., I began to ring television stations, radio stations, other newspapers, giving them the website.
My fleshwound was aching, but I didn’t mind. I ache, therefore I am. Alive.
Could be much, much worse than that.
By the end of the day, the whole world was reading the story of Steven Levesque and TransQuik, watching the haggard and dying Brent Rupert telling his electri- fying stories about a transport empire founded on drug money, money provided by Klostermann Gardier of Luxembourg. Klostermann Gardier, banker to The Connection, an invisible organisation run by people with high-level American military and intelligence connections.
The audiences learned about massive drug importations, about bribery and murder, about Steven Levesque’s ability to stop prosecutions, derail police investigations, and control politicians and bureaucrats at the highest levels.
They learned about how TransQuik, through the cousins’ travel agencies, even laundered the cash that flowed
