down. A woman was lying with one leg extended and the other tucked up under her. One side of her face was a dark, crumpled ruin. Flies were gathering around the dried blood. Her features were reconstructable from the undamaged side – thin mouth and high forehead. She wore a severe blue linen dress that looked expensive. As I reached for her wrist I heard a noise behind me and I turned bringing the gun up but I was too slow and the business end of a thin-bladed knife was tickling my ear while the gun was still pointing nowhere.
“Drop the gun.”
Two men with swarthy complexions, Italianate suits and stockinged feet were standing over me. They looked strange in the neat suits and socks but I didn’t feel like laughing. One of them, the taller, said something in Italian and his mate moved back out of the kitchen. He returned with their shoes and they slipped them on, the taller guy still holding the knife close to my head. My joints were creaking and I made to straighten up and felt the knife go into the ear flesh a fraction. I sank back.
The Italians had the build of men who knew how to move and what to do when they got there. Ideas of taking them were out of the question. They conferred in Italian and weren’t talking about pasta. I pointed at the woman.
“She’s dead,” I said stupidly.
They didn’t even look at her. The knife artist retracted the blade with a click and while I was listening to it the other one stepped forward gracefully and clouted me on the side of the head with something thick and black and hard. I slid down and then he hit me again and a bright flare of pain went through my skull and spread and took away the light.
11
I woke up inside a small gloomy room with points of light stabbing in through the roof. The floor was rough planking with heavy metal strips binding it down. The light was about the same as in a cinema just before they start showing the ads. The room was drafty. It was also moving. My head throbbed viciously when I moved and I dropped back down on the pile of sacking and carpet scraps where I’d been thrown. I closed my eyes and let myself adjust slowly to the surroundings. When the headache had settled down into sync with the noise of the engine and the wheels I admitted to myself that I was in the back of a small enclosed truck. I crawled and lurched about the cabin checking the walls and rear doors. Tight as a drum. Through a chink in the floor I could see the road rushing past at a steady pace, but there’s no way to tell from moving bitumen which way you’re headed. I pounded on the wall near the driving end of the truck and got no response. I was locked in as safe as the crown jewels and nobody was going to do a thing about it. I wadded up the packing, put my head down and drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed I was crushing rocks on the Long Bay rock pile and then I got over the wall and made it down to La Perouse. The crowd around the snake pit was immense; it flowed over the road and up the grassy slope towards the houses on the hill. I pushed my way through the throng which was mainly made up of blacks until I got to the fence. The pit was full of snakes of all sizes and hues writhing about and rearing up to strike at the audience. Penny was in the middle of the pit with a python coiled about her and she was screaming for help. I was trying to get over the fence and the people around me were laughing because a big black snake was waving its head in front of me, darting at me and holding me back. I yelled something and woke up drenched with sweat and clutching at the empty air.
I sat in the truck while it cruised along for what seemed like ten hours. My watch had stopped at eleven a.m. and if there’s any way to tell the time from inside a closed truck I don’t know it. The traffic noise picked up at one point indicating that we were passing through a town. I heard the rattle of a train a bit later – that still put us anywhere on the east coast. I was edgy from tobacco withdrawal and almost hallucinating from the effects of two hard blows on the head within twenty-four hours. Also I was scared; there were a few bodies in shallow graves, courtesy of the grass producers and I didn’t want to join them. I tried to quell the fear and kill the time by sorting out the parts of the case so far.
Noni was on the run, maybe semi-unwilling, with an unidentified man who was prone to violent solutions of his problems. What they were running to was a mystery. A woman named Trixie Baker was involved, fatally as it turned out. There was something in Noni’s past that connected her to the live man and the dead woman and I wouldn’t begin to unravel the affair until that secret was yielded up. I gave it away at that point and concentrated on my thirst. I thought about exactly what sort of drink I’d like to have in what circumstances and settled for a middy of old with a double Teacher’s on the side. The saloon bar of the Imperial Lion with Ailsa along for company would be nice. I went to sleep again.
The truck stopped suddenly and threw me against the wall. I swore and struggled to get up, then the doors opened and a blaze of electric light flooded and blinded me. I crawled to the edge of the tray and stopped there like a rabbit transfixed by a spotlight. I heard a snigger and then an accented voice told me to get down. I dropped off the end of the truck and my knees buckled when I hit the ground. I heard the snigger again and thought it would make a good target for a fist if I ever felt strong enough again to make one.
My eyes adjusted to the light and I took in that I was in a warehouse of some sort. The ceiling was high and the floor was hard cement. Two hundred-watt bulbs hung down close to my face like lit-up heads in nooses. Four men were standing near a new green Fiat sedan parked beside the truck. I’d seen three of them before, the two who’d taken me in Macleay and the one in the camelhair overcoat. He’d been in Trueman’s watching the Moody workout. The fourth man was dressed the same way as the others in a suit with highly polished shoes. He had a frizz of dark curly hair around a bald top. I didn’t know him.
The one in the two-hundred-dollar coat spoke with a guttural voice in an accent that was almost stage Italian.
“Mr Hardy, you’re putting me to a lotta trouble. Why you sticking your nose in my business?”
“What business would that be?”
“You’re smart, an investigator,” he drew the word out ironically, “you think it out.”
“You’re the olive oil king,” I said. “You’re going to rough me up for using peanut oil to fry my chips.”
One of the Macleay boys stepped forward and slammed me in the gut. I felt the breakfast of God knows how long ago rise in my gorge. I straightened up.
“I don’t know what your business is Mr…?”
He laughed. “That’s better. No jokes. Coluzzi. You were at the gym watching the black, Moody. You go to see Ted Williams, you see Sunday in La Perouse, then you go to Macleay.”
“I went to the toilet in between.”
He struggled to keep his hands and feet still. “I told you no jokes. Why you hanging around these people?”
“What’s it to you?” I was puzzled that he hadn’t mentioned the marijuana. He was prepared to use muscle on me but not to go all the way. He was talking to me for some reason rather than having me kicked into paraplegia – that gave me some leverage but it was hard to judge how much. I snapped my fingers.
“I’ve got it, you’re the boomerang king…”
The knuckle man moved again but I was ready for him this time. He swung his foot and I went down, got hold of it, lifted, twisted and flipped. His arms flailed and he went over and belted his head into the bumper of the truck. He groaned, rolled over and lay still. His mate exposed a knife but Coluzzi motioned him to stop.
“My business is fighters, Mr Hardy… one of my businesses. I’m interested in the black fighters. I want to put them in against my boys, the Italian boys. We would get terrific houses no? A lot of money to make.”
“Honest fights?”
He spread his hands apologetically. “We see. Maybe. You could do yourself some good.”
“How?”
“First, you tell me who you working for and what’s the angle.”
Some light dawned. Coluzzi figured he had competition and he wanted to know more about it. He was a shrewd guy who wanted to sew the whole thing up neatly before he put any time and money into it. Maybe he did have competition. In any case my skin seemed to depend on him continuing to think so.
“Did you have me bashed outside a pub in La Perouse?”
