skylight instead of windows. The afternoon light fell on Belfrage; who was standing inside, leaning against the back wall.
‘Well, well, you did something right for once.’
Gibbons stepped forward, he held my gun in his hand and he waved it crazily. ‘Listen Harry, stop riding me. I won’t take anymore of it. He’s here, now get off my back.’
Stewie came in then which made five of us in the shack. Ginger pulled up a packing case and sat down to work on his fingernails with the knife. Stewie sat on an old sea chest and gave me dirty looks. His lip was puffy and he worked with his tongue at a bottom tooth as if it was loose. That left three of us standing; Belfrage was mean, Gibbons was angry and I was scared.
Belfrage lit a cigarette and coughed as he drew on it. Veins stood out in his face and he let his belly go even slacker when he coughed. He was in bad shape. ‘Okay, Tommy’, he said. ‘Take it easy. Where’d you get him?’
‘Where d’you think’, Stewie growled. ‘At that prick Dempsey’s place.’
Belfrage blew smoke in my face, ‘All right, you. You snoop around here, you spy on my boys in the pub and you hang around with Dempsey; what the fuck are you doing?’
I shot a quick, uneasy look at Gibbons and tried to look shirty. ‘Well, it’s hard to say, couldn’t just you and me have a talk about it?’
Belfrage laughed. ‘Bullshit. Stewie, why don’t you show him that I don’t like bullshit.’
Stewie got up slowly and took up his position about three feet in front of me. I felt sick and regretted the sandwich; being hit by blokes like Stewie is no picnic but it was something I had to go through. I swayed away from the first punch and ducked the second but his third swing got me high on the cheek. I felt the skin open and I went down harder and more clumsily than I needed to. Stewie stood over me rubbing his knuckles and grinning crookedly with his battered mouth.
‘What d’you say now, smart arse?’ Belfrage said.
I got up, swayed a bit and rounded on Gibbons. ‘You bastard’, I snarled. ‘You’ve got the gun, use it for Christ’s sake?’
Gibbons’ jaw dropped and he looked down stupidly at the. 38 in his hand. ‘What’re you on about?’
It was too much for Stewie who didn’t react at all, Ginger stopped excavating and looked at Gibbons. Belfrage was getting that over-heated-look again. ‘What’s this?’ he snapped. ‘What’s this?’
I put my hand up to my bleeding cheek and tried to look abject; I was on thin ice and it wasn’t hard. ‘All right Mr Belfrage, I’m a spy, I admit it. Dempsey hired me. But I’m not the only one. Dempsey’s got inside your show properly. He knows everything, Gibbons is working for him too.’
Gibbons gave a forced, throaty laugh. ‘What crap, Harry that’s bull.’
‘Hasn’t he gone easy on Dempsey twice?’ I said quickly. ‘Didn’t you tell him to put Dempsey right out of it this time?’
Belfrage looked at Ginger. ‘Well? You were there, what d’you say?’
Ginger didn’t know which horse to pick- Belfrage in fury or Gibbons with the gun. ‘I dunno, dunno’, he stammered. ‘Tommy went sorta easy but…’
‘He’s Dempsey’s brother’, I said. I’d measured the distance to Stewie’s crotch and reckoned I could get to Ginger before he could do anything with the knife. ‘He’s his older brother, and he’s a commie as well. They’re going to screw you, Belfrage.’
‘No’, Gibbons said weakly, ‘no, it’s not true.’ But he looked at me, and Blind Freddie could see that he was lying. Belfrage was almost purple now and he bent down and picked up a length of pipe from the floor.
‘Harry!’ Gibbons threatened him with the gun. ‘Harry, listen!’
‘I can prove it’, I yelped. ‘I scrabbled in my pocket and pulled out the clipping. ‘Look!’ I held it out to Belfrage. ‘That’s him on the picket line.’
‘So what’, Gibbons sneered. ‘I’ve done a lot of things, Harry.. ’
I checked my distances again before I said it. ‘That clipping came from Dempsey’s mother, Belfrage. She kept it till the day she died.’
‘Died!’ Gibbons voice was an anguished groan. ‘Died, no…’
Belfrage swung the pipe, I put my right foot into Stewie’s groin and nearly tore Ginger’s head off with a roundhouse left: the. 38 cracked twice and a sharp, acrid smell filled the shack. Belfrage went back, buckled and went down. Gibbons let the hand holding the gun drop to his side. I bent and looked at Belfrage; one bullet had taken him in the throat and the other had gone through his jaw and up.
I took Gibbons arm at the elbow and shook it gently; he dropped the gun. ‘I couldn’t kill my brother’, he said.
‘I know’, I said. ‘Why did you stay here?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know, Harry paid well. I’ve done time. I made a fuckup of everything. I thought I could discourage Bill, talk to him later maybe… I don’t know.’
Ginger was unconscious and Stewie was holding his balls and not taking much interest. Gibbons had a glazed, resigned look and I remembered the proud austerity of the father, the warm hopefulness of the sister.
‘Get moving, Robert’, I said. ‘I’ll give you an hour. I’ll have to tell them you shot Belfrage but I’ll put it in the best light I can, maybe there won’t be too much heat. Go north, go a long way.’
He nodded and went out of the shack. I sat there for half an hour chatting to Stewie and Ginger. When the flies started to settle on Belfrage we went off to look for a telephone.
I told it to the cops pretty straight, leaving out the connection between Gibbons and Dempsey. After our little yarn about assault and abduction Stewie and Ginger were content to let me tell it-Stewie hadn’t understood what happened too well anyway. William and Rosemary Dempsey and I got together over some Black Label, and a couple of policemen interrupted us and it took a while to sort things out. The upshot was that Belfrage was officially unmourned for various reasons as much as I was unwelcomed. I got a much better welcome from Zelda; she forgave me for being work-obsessed that morning and we went out to eat and back to her house for a short session with the bottle and a long session between the sheets. Turned out she was work-obsessed too and we left it that I’d go down again to do some swimming when the weather was warmer.
I drove back to Sydney, and Rosemary and Bill came up to have a pow-wow with Susan. They paid me my fee but I never got to make my report to old Hiram: he went into hospital while I was away and the news was that he was in a coma and sinking fast.
Susan came to deliver the cheque in person; she was elegant but subdued, which made her look even more elegant.
‘What will you do with the land?’ I asked.
‘Keep it, Robert might come back.’
‘Yeah’, I said. ‘He might.’
Mother’s boy
It was one of those fifty-fifty days in Sydney; half the sky was grey, half was blue and it might rain or the temperature might hit thirty. Just then, in my office, which has spare lines as to furniture and a draught under the door it wasn’t hot, but my client was sweating. Mr Matthews was the sweaty type-his suit was a bit tight for his early middle-age spread; he carried too much flesh to be comfortable except perhaps in the bath or in bed. Still, there were no holes in his shoes and he was my first client in eight days.
‘He’s like a leech, Mr Hardy’, he said. ‘Like a vampire.’
The two descriptions didn’t line up for me, did he mean something slug-like and fat or a sleeker, classier bloodsucker? But I got the idea and he was the client, he could use whatever similes he liked. It was his old mum he was worried about.
‘I’ve been told that you’re good’, he said nervously. ‘I mean.. ’
