the railway, would take care of a pursuing car.
One of the plusses for my car is that it can look abandoned. I sat in it, hunched down, about four houses and two rusty galvanised iron fences away and watched the house. Two kids who should have been at school wandered past and looked incuriously at me. A dog helped things along by pissing casually against the front wheel, rubbing himself briefly on the tyre and ambling off. After a while a car pulled up outside the house, two men alighted and went inside. Pretty soon they all came out: Carpenter, the two new arrivals and three other men, one of whom was Kevin Kearney.
Kevin had grown a beard, lost weight and dyed his hair three shades darker, but his cocky walk, compensating for the fact that he was only five foot six, and the aggressive set of his shoulders was unmistakable. The party split up between the wagon and the car with Kevin riding separately from Carpenter. I had a moment’s worry, but it passed-the cars followed the same route.
We drove in convoy to Five Dock. They pulled up within sight of the Great Western Highway intersection at a place where the canal goes under the road and there is a wide dividing strip and big grassy stretches on either side of the road. Houses are few and back where the priorities of highway and park have pushed them. I drove on and took a turn after the canal so that I could come back on the other side of the water and watch the group safely from pretty close quarters. The two parties coalesced, then split again. Carpenter and Kearney went towards the highway; Carpenter looked to be talking fast. The others broke into two pairs and moved around on opposite sides of the road. The two men who’d arrived later in Enmore went up a grassy bank to a high point above the road. A concrete bridge crossed another loop of the canal up there and they stood by it, looking down at the road and Kevin’s two mates who smoked, glanced up and down the road and looked anxious.
Carpenter and Kearney joined them and Kevin did some nodding. Where they stood was a collection of yellow and black striped council gear-uprights, reflector lamps, long wooden bars-just the stuff for traffic diversion and road blocking. Carpenter turned and looked at the two by the bridge and Kevin’s eyes followed his.
The two hill climbers came back down, the smokers stamped out their butts and everyone climbed aboard again for the ride back to Enmore. Carpenter’s car peeled off and headed towards the city but Kevin and his mates were delivered safely home just as the westbound 12.45 rattled past their front door.
I was pushing my luck by trailing the other pair once they’d deposited the fugitives, but I risked it. They drove to Annandale and disappeared into a trucking yard. The sign on the fence said that interstate and international freight was handled there. The curious thing was that I had a sense of having picked up a tail myself on this run. I tested the feeling around an Annandale block or two, but I was either wrong or it dropped off. It was something else to think about on the way back to Glebe for a late lunch and a very late drink.
Some of it wasn’t hard to understand. The job was a hi-jack with no honour among thieves. Kevin and the boys were going to be under surveillance; Carpenter was putting up the money. Three things were unknown: what the cargo was, why Follan had called it a ‘cowboy’ operation and why Kevin hadn’t been in touch with Cathy. She wasn’t green; she would probably have driven the prime mover for Kevin if he’d asked her. The biggest question of all was-what was I going to do about it?
The first move was to get in touch with Kevin, and I didn’t fancy doing that by driving up to the door. I sent him a telegram-to the name Kevin Vincent at the address in Enmore. I asked him to phone me and to keep everything under his hat; Kevin’d like that-there was an old-fashioned streak in him. His call came at a bit after five.
‘Haven’t seen you for a bit, Cliff. Have you still got all your hair, boy?’
‘Yes, Kevin. And your phoney brogue’s as bad as ever. But I’ll play along-why do you ask?’
‘Because you’ve got a lot to keep under your own bloody hat and I wondered if there’d be the room, like?’
‘Knock it off, Kevin. You’re about to do something very silly.’
‘What would you know about it?’
I thought about telling him but decided against it; Kevin was inclined to be irrational when he was angry. ‘It stands to reason. You’ve got a job lined up.’
‘How’d you get on to me?’
‘A whisper. Cathy asked me to look for you. She’s worried and she’s got good cause. She says she’ll wait for you to serve the five or six.’
The laugh that came across the line wasn’t the old feckless Kevin laugh. It was harsh and bitter, and had not a shred of amusement in it. A prison laugh, maybe.
‘Wait? Cathy? Her idea of waitin’s to only be taking on one at a time.’
I didn’t say anything; I was more interested in listening.
‘Well, Cliff,’ he said. ‘You can tell her I’m in the pink… shut up!’ I heard a short laugh and a scuffling sound, then Kevin went on in a steady voice. ‘And I’ll be in touch soon. She’s not to worry.’
‘Oh yeah, great! She’ll eat that up, Kevin. That’ll fix everything.’
‘Soon means soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘Tomorrow.’
Jesus, I thought, it’s tonight.
‘Now, Cliff, you just get yourself a bottle of something good and settle down for a quiet night with your books. You hear me, Cliff? Get nosey and you’re history. Got it?’
‘Yeah.’ He rang off, and I sat there holding the phone and thinking it had been one of the least productive conversations of my life. The three unknowns were still unknown and I still didn’t know what I was going to do. I phoned Cathy, couldn’t get her and chased her unsuccessfully through four telephone numbers, leaving urgent messages for her to call me.
The temptation to do as Kevin suggested, hit the bottle, was immense but I fought it. I had one big Scotch and left it at that. I spoiled some eggs trying to make an omelette of them, ate the mess and felt bad. Towards the back of my brain a voice was telling me to call Frank Parker, but I kept getting a picture of Kevin with his beard and dyed hair and I couldn’t do it.
When the call came I nearly hurdled a chair to snatch up the phone. It was Cathy; she told me to wait until she came over, which would be in about an hour. She sounded steady and she didn’t want to hear anything I had to say.
It was after ten when she arrived-in a black velvet jacket and white silk pants. Her face was unnaturally pale and her eyes were over-dilated and bright. She had a bottle of Black Label Scotch with her and she invited me to pour her a big one before she draped herself on the couch in my living room. She lit a cigarette and stubbed it out straightaway, as if she didn’t want to obliterate the odour of sex that clung to her. She drank some Scotch and arched up her shoulders and wriggled.
‘I’ve been screwing my brains out,’ she said.
‘Is that right? It made you hard to find-I spoke to Kevin today.’
She drank some more, then she put the glass down and assumed a mock demure pose; she half-closed and dimmed her eyes and pressed her knees together. It disconcerted me; I wondered if she was drunk, but her co- ordination seemed perfect and she appeared to be under tight control.
‘Tell me everything about it.’
‘Well, he’s in Sydney… and, ah… he hasn’t been in touch for a good reason. He thought the cops’d be watching you and…’
‘I’m a sort of decoy, is that right?’ She said it brightly but with an edge of hate.
‘I knew you wouldn’t like it.’
‘It’s not so bad.’ She picked up her drink and took a hefty belt. ‘I always liked you, Cliff. Why don’t I just slip into your shower and then nip into your bed? You know, I can make it seem like I never did it before.’ She laughed. ‘Or only once or twice. What d’you say?’
Any other time I’d have been tempted. I can be a sucker for fantasy and I hadn’t been to bed with a woman that month or the month before. But the ulterior motive was just a bit too obvious.
‘Cut it out, Cathy. This is a serious situation.’
Her mood changed instantly. She knocked off the rest of the Scotch and stood up abruptly. ‘I’m going to
