vulnerable in any other way? What are you working on now?”
“A missing person case.”
“Sounds safe enough. Good, even. A little acceptable privatisation of law and order. Keep your books in shape, account for your expenses. Write up your notes every day.”
“My name card fell off the door.”
“Get a proper plate made. Screw it to the door. You need to look solid.”
Just hearing him say it made me feel all the more fragile. He got the date of the hearing and had me spell the name at the foot of the fateful letter: G-r-i-f-f-i-n. He told me he’d get back to me when he had some news. I think he expected another crack about LA Law but I disappointed him. My head was buzzing again and the torn paper, turned-back carpet and battered pizza box were depressing me. I added the documents I’d collected to the Madden file, put the police pamphlets on top of the filing cabinet and gathered up my meagre belongings. I freed the door lock, turned out the light and left the office. I went down the stairs quietly and carefully, but no one was lurking in the shadows. So if my guardian angel was hovering around he had nothing to do for the present. I stuck the key back in the wall, drove home and went to bed.
In the morning, after eight hours’ sleep, with only a slight headache and the cat for company, things seemed a lot clearer. I had a one-thousand-dollar fee to earn and a licence to protect. “Keep busy, that’s the secret,” is what my Irish gypsy grand-mother used to say. She made it to eighty-plus and keeled over while building a drystone wall. It was good advice, applicable to me at forty-plus, although the only physical labour I did these days was carrying out the garbage tin. As I told the cat, it was very simple. “Work on the Madden case in the daytime and the Lenko matter at night. Keep busy.”
I washed a couple of days’ worth of dishes and swept a fortnight’s dirt from the floor. Then I shaved and stood under a shower, letting the warm water massage my bruised head. The bulldozers hadn’t made their moves on the next two houses yet, and I was dreading the day. For the moment they stood empty, and my end of the street was unnaturally calm and peaceful. No Joni Mitchell from Soames, no revving Yamahas from number 63. I missed them both. The cat missed them more. Soames’ cat was a wimpy part-Persian that offered no competition to mine. The bikers-the house seemed to harbour a shifting population of leather-clad males and females-were an endless source of hamburger, pizza and souvlakia scraps. The cat’s calories were cut drastically when the places were sold. It drank its milk sullenly, curled up in a patch of sunlight and was through for the day. “Have a good one, sport,” I said.
I allowed myself a few minutes to sit in the sun and try to recall every nuance of the attack the night before. Nothing much came: male almost certainly, from an impression of size, and a smoker. No one who has given the habit up ever fails to detect the smell on hair and clothes. No Hercules-the blow hadn’t been delivered with enormous power. But then, that might have been compassion. There’d been no sound, no speech. At a guess, a million or so citizens of the city could fill the bill.
I told myself this was a challenge. Keep busy. By the time I was sitting in my car, turning the ignition key and putting on my sunglasses, I felt almost normal. If you can call a man who talks to cats normal.
5
I was driving to Milson’s Point to sniff around Brian Madden’s neighbourhood, get the feel of the man on his own territory, so I should have been thinking about that. Madden in the daytime, Lenko at night. Instead, I found myself thinking about Rhino Jackson. He’d be about ten years older than me, I reckoned, out of the police force for going on twenty years and into almost every other related field of activity you could name-security guard and courier, bodyguard, private inquiries, security consultant for right-wing political figures and organisations and, I’d often heard it rumoured, part-time spook. I’d run into him every few years or so in the course of my work, and he always went out of his way to be nice to me. He even apologised once, when he was drunk, for the short count. I’d forgotten about it until the apology reminded me. I found it impossible to like him for no very good reason. Now I had a reason.
I took the first exit off the Bradfield Highway and cut back towards the water. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen Jackson. It had been a few years ago, not long after my final break with Helen Broadway. I couldn’t remember anything about the meeting, except that Jackson had been drunk. Maybe I’d been drunk too. Back then it wasn’t too uncommon. The thing about Jackson was that he was good at what he did. He was an alcoholic, but it never seemed to impair his functioning. He changed course so often not because he was incompetent but because he got restless. I’d been told that or had worked it out for myself. It seemed I knew more about him than I realised, but I didn’t know why he was called ‘Rhino’.
I waited at a red light behind a truck which blocked out the water view I’d been looking forward to, one of the rewards of driving around Sydney. Indecision washed over me. Which was more important- finding Brian Madden or protecting my licence? Also, which was easier? I knew lots of places to look for Rhino Jackson. The light changed and I made the decision to stick to the plan. Tune out the static and put up the antennae, I thought. You might get lucky and find Madden this morning.
The truck turned left and I got the view I’d been waiting for. It’s quite an eyeful- across the sparkling water to the shining city. The water seems to sanitise things, to make it seem that a city blessed with such a setting couldn’t possibly be a bad and dangerous place. We know better, of course; perhaps it’s the tension between the appearance and the reality that make the town exciting. I’ve said these things to people in loquacious moments and a common reply has been, “If you feel so hot for the water view, why haven’t you got one?” That’s a new Sydney sort of question. I give the old Sydney answer: “Because I like to look at it doesn’t mean I want to buy it.”
Milson’s Point is bisected by the Bradfield Highway. Madden’s flat was in the western sector at the high end of a short street with a view out over Lavender Bay. As in all older areas with a high proportion of flats, there wasn’t much space to park in the street. The residents, who haven’t got what the real estate agents call O.S.P., leave their cars at home and catch ferries and buses to work. They use their cars to go to shopping centres, beaches and football grounds at the weekends. I got a space across the road and down the slope from Number 27 and sat for a while to pick up the atmosphere of the street. Also, my head was still hurting and the view was restful. A few people came and went, mostly middle-aged or older. A motorcycle courier roared up, left his motor ticking and ran across to a small block of flats. He scanned the letterboxes and went up a short flight of steps three at a time. He was back and performing a tight U-turn within a minute. I should have taken his registration number-the next time I needed to send something by courier I wanted him.
I locked the Falcon and strolled across the street. Number 27 was a white stucco building of somewhat unusual design. It housed three flats, on top of each other facing the street; another flat at the back ran at right angles to the others. This one was on two levels and rather bigger. On the lower level there were French doors opening onto a small garden. The effective entrance was on the upper level, reached by a set of iron steps. Good view of the water from here, sliver of bridge, slice of Opera House. There was a small, tiled area at the top of the steps under a wooden pergola. Great place for breakfast-some weathered garden furniture, a few hardy vines in tubs and one black plastic flowerpot. If you were hoping for a secreted door key, this was the place to look.
I bent, lifted the pot and picked up the rusty key to flat 3. I knocked on the door and waited, as is only polite. Nothing. The key turned easily in the well-worn Yale lock, and I stepped into a short hallway which led to a series of smallish rooms which were dim because the blinds were drawn. The place had that closed up, no one-around- for-a-month smell that starts to soak into the carpets and curtains if it hangs about for much longer. I raised the blinds as I went quickly through the rooms, getting the feel of the place. There was a sitting room, a bedroom and a bathroom upstairs; downstairs was the kitchen, a smaller bedroom and a study. The flat was neat but not obsessively so- books and magazines sat on shelves and surfaces without their edges lined up; a few clothes hung over chairs in the main bedroom; there were papers on the study desk and rinsed but not washed dishes in the draining rack.
“Normal,” I said to myself, “very normal.”
On my second tour I paid more attention to detail: I examined the clothes which tended towards the casual but included a couple of good-quality suits and an ex-pensive overcoat; the books suggested an interest in modern
