I got out the knee brace that Hilde had brought that morning. It was a revolting object with straps, flesh- coloured plastic and padding. It nauseated me to look at it, which was part of the idea. I slit the padding and tucked the little cylinder away, positioned so that I could get at the switch and look as if I was scratching my knee. The brace stiffened the knee and hurt, but all great planners have their problems. Think of Napoleon and his piles.
There was no point in putting it off. I left the house and limped along the street, trying to keep the end of the stick out of the dog shit. I made it to the Toxteth and had a beer in the half-empty bar. The television was on with a news report that a certain known criminal had been shot and killed by a certain known policeman. Everyone seemed to know everyone else- the crim’s brother knew the copper who knew the crim’s girlfriend.
‘LA again?’ the barman asked.
‘Please.’
‘What’d you do to your leg?’
I thought of saying, ‘A ski-ing accident’, and then I saw my face in the mirror behind the bar. The two grooves that ran down beside my nose seemed to be getting deeper and when I squinted to see better the crows’ feet cracked and fissured beside my eyes. It wasn’t a ski-ing face; it was an amateur boxing face, a square- bashing face, a worrying-about-the-prostate face. Hell, I thought. I am putting it off.
The street beside the Toxteth hotel is narrow and dark and leads down to the water. Not a very nice stretch of water. I was halfway down it when the car pulled in a few yards ahead of me. A man jumped out of the back seat and went behind me; the driver moved in to block me off. He had a good-sized gun in his hand; it was a bad light for shooting but the range was perfect. Unless I did a Fosdick flop over the car, they had me.
‘Get in the car, Hardy,’ Bob said.
He’d wanted to fight me way back on day one, and now he looked a little embarrassed to be holding a gun on a crippled man. He shoved it in his pocket and flexed a couple of muscles instead.
‘How’s Sharon?’ I said.
He jerked his thumb rudely and I moved towards the car, which was a Commodore, not as roomy for my leg as the Caddy. I leaned on the stick while the second man opened the back door. He gave me a little push and relieved me of the stick as I stumbled in. He swung the stick and broke it on a brick pillar; the broken end snapped up and hit him in the face. I laughed and he swore. We weren’t off to a good start, him and me.
He got in beside me, still swearing, and the gunman got behind the wheel.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
My companion in the back told me to shut up. He had bad body odour and I was already sweating with fear. If we went very far, the back seat would smell like a truckie’s crotch.
We rolled sedately down to the water and took the back way to Bridge Road. Bob picked up speed a bit around Wentworth Park and swung out fast into Wattle Street. He was driving over the speed limit, but not fast enough to raise a five-point alarm. I knocked my knee on one of the turns. Bob kept one eye on the rear vision mirror.
I reviewed my plan as he did his stuff and the atmosphere in the back of the car got richer. People like Ward, Singer and McLeary inhabit a world of their own. It has its own society and rules, meeting places and established procedures. You don’t find out anything about it by hanging around the edges; you have to dive right into the middle of the steaming pile. I planned to accuse McLeary of killing Singer; if he took it seriously, that would mean something. Ward was already taking it seriously; the trick was to stay alive and to work out what the reactions meant. I had the cops and the bleeper as a safety net. It was crude, but so was Jack Dempsey’s left hook.
The hard part was the fear. One part of me rejected all this and wanted escape via a magic lantern and three wishes. That part said, To hell with Ward and McLeary and all the other scum that floats in the city. This was the part that wondered why I didn’t have the things other men had-degrees, a wife, superannuation. Against that was the vanity I’d told Ann Winter about, the strong fear of showing fear. And I couldn’t really see myself as Clifford Hardy, MA, father of two and due for his long-service leave. I didn’t need it. The fear was uncomfortable, but it suited me better to fight it than to give in to it.
The Commodore went faster in Chippendale as we headed up towards Anzac Parade. Bob flicked the wheel and we suddenly shot left down a one-way street. He went down a lane, turned and went back across Cleveland Street through a red light. He did another quick series of turns and I could see the lights of the Parade up ahead of us and the dark blankness of Moore Park off to the right.
‘Lose ‘em?’ the smelly one asked.
Bob nodded and lit the cigarette he’d been carrying in his mouth the whole time.
That was the first thing to go wrong.
24
It was Rushcutters Bay; the water slapped against the pier and the boats and it was expensive water. Expensive to live near and very expensive to sail on. It was cheap to swim in, but the expensive boats’ fuel and wastes had fixed it so no-one would want to swim there. I thought of swimming as they herded me through a concrete car park into a lift that ran up into the body of a big apartment block. It was hard going without the stick and with the knee brace and I lurched and grabbed at things to steady myself. One-legged swimming would be no fun, especially with my hands tied. The guy who had a raw streak on his face where the broken stick had hit him laughed when I fell in the lift. I heaved myself up and wondered whether an off-balance punch into the middle of his face would be worth what I’d get in return. I decided it wouldn’t.
We stepped out onto thick carpet and walked between creamy walls with tasteful paintings economically spaced. At suite twelve Bob knocked and brushed down his clothes. Sharon opened the door. She was wearing a pink jump suit, was stilted up on four-inch-heeled gold sandals and looked about sixteen, just. She inclined her head, her platinum hair bounced and my escorts bustled me down a short parqueted passage into a room with thicker carpet than the hallway and worse paintings.
A man was sitting at a table in the middle of the room. The table was covered with take-away food-cartons of chicken, two medium-sized pizzas, Lebanese bread and meats and chipped potatoes. He was eating with his fingers, stuffing the food in and wiping his hands with a paper napkin. He was bulky, built square and unmistakably the man who had parked his cadillac outside Marion Singer’s apartment building.
‘Hello, Mac’ I said.
There was a nervous hiss of breath from Bob. Smelly sucked his teeth and went our of the room.
‘Sit,’ Mac said. ‘Drink?’ He was drinking beer from a pewter mug but there was a bar in the corner of the room under a painting of horses.
‘Scotch.’
Mac combined more chewing with a nod and Sharon, who wasn’t legally old enough to sniff the stuff, made the drink. She had a drink herself, something greenish. Bob wasn’t invited to sit or drink, but he didn’t seem to mind. I took the drink and made a close study of my host.
He was about five foot six, I guessed, and must have weighed sixteen stone. Some of the weight was in his belly, but most of it was meat and muscle packed high up on his chest, around his shoulders and into his thick neck. He had small blue eyes, a very high colour and silver hair brushed back. He had on a white business shirt with a light line in it, the dark trousers of an eight-hundred-dollar suit and black oxfords with a high gloss. He had no jewellery, no tie; white hair sprung out at the neck of the shirt. He looked about sixty and good for twenty more years if his eating habits changed.
‘Why are you telling lies about me?’ His voice was fiat and neutral. He shook his head and spoke again before I could. ‘Nothing but lies.’ He gave the ‘nothing’ a touch of ‘nothink’- a Christian Brothers boy, maybe.
I drank some of the scotch and rubbed my knee; my fingers slid over that disgusting plastic. ‘I’m like that. I tell lies to find out the truth.’
Mac up-ended his pewter pot and held it out to Sharon, who was sipping her drink. I finished the scotch and stuck my glass out too.
‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ Mac said. ‘And I’m not giving you any more free drinks.’ Sharon ignored me and
