shots plus experience. It didn’t matter. Beaumont blew him away in under an hour with a mixture of power and guile.
Featherstone turned up at my shoulder as I was loading sun-dried tomato and cheese onto a biscuit. The second glass of white wine, out of a bottle with a label, had gone down well. ‘Impressive, huh?’
‘Definitely. I’d like to see him up against someone his own age, especially a runner.’
‘Not next time up. He’s got a qualifier who can scarcely believe he got through the first round. But if the other matches go according to the seeds and he keeps on like he started, he’ll meet Rufus Fong in the semi. He can run.’
Cambo, as the papers had decided to call him, advanced to his semi-final with Fong. I went along, found a seat in the shade, and witnessed the most devastating destruction of a top-liner by a newcomer since the unseeded Boris Becker won Wimbledon. Fong hadn’t won a Grand Slam event but he’d come close, and had more than a dozen other titles to his credit. He could run all right, but he couldn’t hide. Other players made the mistake of giving him angles. Fong’s speed allowed him to run the balls down and his strength permitted him to return the angles with spades. Beaumont hit straight at him with extraordinary power. Fong had to either get out of the way or play defensively, moving back and off balance. No contest. Beaumont volleyed away Fong’s weak returns with ease, dispatched his serves, and never went to deuce on his own serve.
Beaumont was demonstrative on court, lamenting his occasional misses-never on crucial points-and giving himself the odd triumphant fist. But he had charm. He applauded his opponent’s few successes with sincerity and shrugged off the several bad line calls he got. At the net, having won, his handshake appeared genuine, and he chatted with Fong all the way to the umpire’s chair. No chucking away of sweatbands, just a courteous wave to the crowd and the signing of a judicious number of autographs.
In the final, Beaumont played an American hardcourt specialist who gave him some trouble. The American dropped the first set but came back strongly to win the second in a tie break. Beaumont served some double faults and appeared rattled. But he was his old self in the third. He broke serve early, held his own easily, broke again and held and the American wilted. Beaumont won the match 6-1 in the third and that’s when I started to go to work.
Beaumont must have checked out of his hotel in the morning because, after the victory ceremony was over and he’d had some obligatory interviews and photos taken, he changed his clothes, loaded his tennis gear into the back of a beat-up 4WD, and took off. Thanks to my pass, I was close by in the privileged parking area and I dropped in behind him as he left the car park, picked up the motorway and headed west. Not the coast then, but there was nothing wrong with the mountains at that time of year.
Beaumont drove fast but well. His 4WD laboured a bit on the hills and I had no trouble keeping tabs on him in my recently serviced and tuned old Falcon. Daylight saving was a week or so away and the light started to fade quickly in the late afternoon. He stopped in Katoomba, went to an ATM for money and then spent up big on groceries. The carton of cigarettes surprised me, as did the bottle of brandy and the six-pack of beer he bought at the pub after showing his ID. I didn’t have to show mine to buy a half-bottle of Bundy. I had a sleeping bag and a donkey coat, but if I was going to spend a night in the mountains I thought I might need some internal heating as well.
Beaumont drove as if he knew the back roads well. We were soon on dirt, winding through the bush. There was no traffic and I had to hang well back, keeping tabs by the flashes of his brake lights. Eventually, after a hill climb, a descent and another climb, he pulled up outside a cabin set back from the track and shielded by a long stand of she-oaks. By then I was on foot watching this from a sheltered place. I’d stopped a hundred metres away when I heard his noisy engine turn off.
We were at a decent elevation and it was cold. I wrapped the coat tight around me and watched as Beaumont came back to his car to unload the supplies. The cabin opened and a tall man stood in the dim light-at a guess from a Tilly lamp-inside. Beaumont handed him a box and scooted back for another. The two went inside and the cabin door closed. The windows were curtained but I could see another light coming on and silhouettes of the figures moving inside.
It was cold but quiet, and I managed several hours of fitful sleep with a few periods of wakefulness in between. The extra chill just before dawn woke me and I got out to piss, stamp around and get the stiffness out of my limbs. No mail, no neighbours for kilometres-a perfect hiding place. For what? For whom?
I had gym clothes in the car-sweat pants and top, T-shirt, sneakers. I changed into them and equipped myself with a couple of the tools of my trade-binoculars and a good camera with a zoom lens. I’d had nothing to eat since some canapes back at the tennis while Beaumont was accepting his horrible crystal trophy and his no doubt very welcome cheque. My stomach was growling as I took up my position and saw wisps of smoke from the cabin chimney drift up into the clear blue sky. I could smell the eucalypts and the scents of all the other trees and bushes whose names I didn’t know. One of the names for us PEAs is snooper. I was one now and, in this setting, quite happy about it.
They came out around eight o’clock. I got a good long-range shot of the man. He was fortyish, shorter than Beaumont but more strongly built. Both men carried tennis rackets and Beaumont had a string bag full of balls. Keeping under cover I followed them to where there was a clearing about half the size of a tennis court. Beaumont’s companion was smoking. He puffed away while Beaumont did some stretches and warm-up exercises. For the next thirty minutes Beaumont had balls belted at him, aimed high, low, left and right, at very close range. He missed only two, getting his racket solidly onto them and knocking them clear of the other man-except one which caught him on the shoulder and spun him round. He dropped his racket and a spasm of coughing erupted from him. Beaumont comforted him with an arm around his shoulder. When he recovered the session began again. They must have had fifty balls in the bag and Beaumont darted around picking them up from the ground and in the thin scrub around the clearing when they’d all been used. Then they started over again.
After that Beaumont chopped wood at the back of the cabin for an hour. There was a pile of old railway sleepers in a lean-to shed. He carried them out, chopped through them, making half-metre lengths, and then split the lengths with a block buster. I’d done something similar as a punishment fatigue in the army, and I knew how hard that old weathered wood could be. It made me tired just to watch him.
The day warmed up and the insects buzzed and birds sang. I snapped a few more photos in a better light and with a better background. As a city man born and bred, a few hours in the country goes a fair way with me and I was getting tired of holding my position behind a tree. Beaumont’s host brought out two mugs of tea or coffee. They squatted companionably near the chopping block. The man smoked and spiked his mug with brandy. He also had another coughing fit.
Beaumont changed into shorts and a singlet and set off along a fire trail into the bush. He was away an hour and came back moving at the same speed as when he’d left. I was about ready to call it quits. The relationship appeared to be somewhere between fraternal and professional. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t going to do the boy’s tennis career any harm.
I ducked down suddenly when I saw the man moving towards where I was hiding. I was working mentally on a paparazzi story when he stopped a few metres away. He looked quickly back at the cabin, sucked in several deep breaths, bent over and vomited heavily into a pile of leaves. He recovered, used a stick to clean up, and went back to the cabin. I got a much better look at him then and he was somehow familiar. I’d seen him before, or his photograph, but I couldn’t remember where or when.
I went straight to the office, hooked the camera up to the computer and printed out copies of the photographs. I picked out the best shot of the mystery man and made a couple of blown-up copies. I studied the face intently: square jaw, thin mouth, heavy brows, straight nose, thick grey hair worn long. No scars. I looked at it too long so that in the end the feeling of familiarity had gone.
The FBI or the CIA could no doubt have run it against the millions of other faces they have digitally recorded and search for a match. Not an available facility for a one-man operation in Newtown. My best bet was Harry Tickener, a journalist who has worked the streets, boardrooms, courts and parliament in Sydney longer than he likes to recall. Harry’s up with the technology, but he receives so many emails a day you’re lucky to hear back from him within a week. I took one of the photos and went to see him in his Surry Hills office where he runs an online newsletter that prints stories others are afraid to touch.
Harry groaned when he saw me walk in the door carrying two styrofoam cups of coffee. ‘Jesus Christ, there goes an hour’s work,’ he said.
