‘She’d know if she was the one who alerted Kristos that I was coming. I told her I was.’
‘I haven’t heard anything of this. Setting a trap, were you? You still don’t trust her.’
The coffee was good and I was tired after the day’s comings and goings. I drained the cup and he poured me some more-black with sugar.
‘Trust can fuck you,’ I said.
‘That’s one of the most cynical things I’ve ever heard, and I’m in a game where there’s almost nothing but cynics.’
I shrugged.
‘I’ll answer your earlier question, Cliff. You don’t know much about me, do you? Well, I’m older than I look. I was in Rwanda and Bosnia and Sierra Leone, and after seeing things there I got a different perspective. I mean, what happens here in Oz is a sideshow, really. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be here and happy to survive being close to all that civil war, ethnic cleansing shit, but it’s still a sideshow.’
‘What about Jane?’
‘I know she’s got her own agenda. No idea what it is but I trust her. No, make it that I trust my instinct about her.’
He was an experienced, perceptive man, and I had nothing solid to put up against what he was saying.
‘Well, she’s got the call,’ I said.
‘Yeah, one thing she said worries me most though. She reckons there’s no way she can nominate the meeting place. Perkins’ll have the say on that.’
‘Can’t see how that’ll work.’
‘Jane says she’ll have a veto and they’ll have to negotiate. She says she’ll rule out obviously dangerous places, but we’ll have to settle for the least worst.’
That ‘we’ almost amused me. By ‘we’ he didn’t mean him and me, he meant him and Jane. It reminded me of the way boxing managers talk about their fighters’ performances, and the famous line from manager Joe Jacobs after his fighter, Max Schmelling, lost to Jack Sharkey in a notorious hometown decision: ‘We wuz robbed. We shoulda stood in bed.’
I asked him about the technical details and he said that Jane would have about her person a digital device no bigger than a pea that would pick up everything that was said over a wide range. No worries about cigarette packet-sized receivers taped to the body.
‘The… event… meeting can be filmed with absolute clarity and soundlessly from a fair distance,’ Townsend said.
‘How far?’
‘About a hundred metres.’
I remembered situations I’d been in when wearing a wire did involve taping something to the body with a high risk of discovery, and when remote-controlled videoing had to be done at close range and was anything but noiseless.
‘Sounds all right,’ I said. ‘So we sit and wait for her to contact you tomorrow about the time and place?’
‘That’s it.’
Another evening and night to fill in, I thought. Without Lily or the prospect of Lily.
Townsend’s mobile was on the table. I didn’t recognise the ring-tone. He snatched the phone up.
‘What? God! Yes, yes. Okay.’
He put the mobile down. ‘It’s tonight,’ he said.
‘Good, sooner the better. Less time for things to go wrong. What was that ring-tone?’
He was suddenly so intensely focused that my question caught him on the hop. ‘What?’
‘The ring-tone, what was it?’
‘Why?’
‘Just curious.’
‘No you’re not. You’re just showing me how cool you can be under pressure. It’s Mahler.’
‘Paul Keating’s favourite composer.’
‘You like Mahler?’
‘Lee,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t know Mahler from Marley.’
25
I asked the only two questions that mattered: ‘Where and when?’
‘Eleven thirty, Balmoral Beach.’
‘Is that the best she could do?’
‘Give her a break, she’d have been treading on eggshells.’
‘Where precisely?’
‘The rotunda. Where else?’
I tried to bring it to mind. I’d only been to the beach a few times and not recently. I seemed to remember a green belt between the road and the sea wall bordering the sand, with some sort of folly in the middle-round with white pillars. There were trees around and a building I vaguely remember-white again, and big.
‘How is it for you?’ I asked.
‘A while since I’ve been there. Okay, I guess, depending on the weather.’
‘Meaning?’
‘High winds can interfere with the pick-up, also crashing surf
‘It’s a fucking harbour beach.’
He flared, ‘Bugger you, I’m just-’
‘Okay, okay, we’re both on edge. I’m glad to see you’re human.’
‘I was wondering the same about you. I’ll let you in on something-she told me not to tell you, not to bring you along.’
I laughed. ‘Some chance. Where’s she coming from, to say that?’
‘You’ve rubbed her up the wrong way, obviously.’
‘It’s mutual. So how do we proceed?’
‘I’ve got an offsider to handle the filming. We can’t be seen to be reconnoitering, right?’
‘Right.’
‘But Jacques cab drive by a bit earlier and look the place over. Work out where we can take up positions.’
‘Jacques?’
‘He’s number one. Are you anti-French?’
‘Hell, no. I’ve got a frog squatting in my family tree back there. Escaped from Devil’s Island, they say. Probably bullshit. I’ll go along with Jacques and drop off where I think best. He can tell you what to do.’
‘I don’t know about-’
‘This is her show, your show and my show. I’m playing it my way. Lee, I’ve been in on sieges and ransoms and exchanges before. I think I know how to handle it.’
He sighed, looked at his Rolex. ‘Okay. It’s just gone eight. Plenty of time. Forty-five minutes to get there at the most. Jacques’s on standby, he’ll be here in a couple of minutes after I call. Is there anything you need?’
‘A map’d help.’
He got on the web, Googled, and before long had a printout of information on the beach and a map. The building I only half remembered was a temple built by religious crazies in the 1920s who thought the second coming would be at Balmoral. Now it did the same job as the Bondi pavilion-changing rooms, function spaces, cafes.
‘Anything else?’ Townsend said.
It had been quite a few hours-not since I’d left home. ‘Just a good long piss,’ I said.
