Читать книгу Straight Jacket - Adrian Deans - Страница 14

Detective Sergeant Peter ‘Blacksnake’ Fowler stared in fascinated revulsion at the severed hand wrapped in the snap-shut plastic bag. It didn’t matter how often he saw this kind of thing, he never got used to it. Neither could he understand the macho mentality of some of his colleagues who would find it a big laugh. Eddie Renton, for example, would be trying to stick the hand down the shirts of the women PCs, or pick his nose with the index finger (which was extended accusingly in rigor mortis). Of course, in the presence of the grieving relatives Eddie’s professional piety would come to the fore, and he would be quietly aghast and grimly determined, leaving Mr and Mrs Victim with a powerful sense that the Forces of Righteous Vengeance had the matter completely under control.

Fucking Renton.

Fowler turned his attention to the nervous little man across the desk. He was glad the other was nervous — it made it easier for him.

‘Have you touched it?’

‘The hand?’

‘No … the plastic bag. Are your prints on the bag?’

‘Shit … probably.’

‘We’ll have to print you as well then … you got a problem with that?’

‘Why? I’m not a suspect am I?’

‘No … but we need to distinguish your prints from whatever others might show up.’

‘Fair enough. What about the letter … I can print it, right?’

The little man lost his nervousness, and was suddenly hard as nails. On the desk, between the two men, beside the blue/grey hand, was a typed piece of paper.

‘The letter is evidence,’ said Fowler, trying to make it sound like a threat. ‘But I suppose you’ve got a photocopy?’

The little man was Ed Bartini, shareholder and editor of The Northern Advertiser and Shore Gazette. Trained in the fine arts but forced to scratch a living in the impecunious press, he had the habitual scammer’s innate knowledge of his rights, and wasn’t easily daunted by a suburban detective. And he knew a goldmine when he saw one.

‘It may be evidence, but it’s also my property. The letter was sent to me, Peter … with the express intention of being published. I think that much is clear.’

‘What’s clear to me,’ said the detective, ‘is the protection of the public. This bloke has some kind of ‘Jack the Ripper’ complex … he craves publicity. If we publish the letter we’re pandering to his warped ego. That might just inspire him to go on killing … to stay in the headlines.’

‘And if we don’t publish his letter he might go on killing to make us take him seriously.’

‘Well that settles it,’ said Blacksnake. ‘If he’s gonna go on killing either way, it doesn’t matter what we do. So I’m banning it.’

‘Fuck, Peter! Do you know how often a local rag gets this kind of opportunity … to be the focus of news for the entire city?’

‘Not often, I’d reckon.’

‘Never … is how often. But for some reason, this maniac has chosen the Northern Advertiser as the pipeline to his public. The whole of Sydney … the whole of fucking Australia … will want to keep up with the story. This’ll put us on the map … we need the business.’

‘Are you telling me more murders would be good for business?’

The little man stared at the detective, contemplating a lie, then shrugged.

‘Murder is news,’ he said, with a roll of his eyes. ‘You don’t sell papers … or advertising for that matter … without news.’

Only three weeks before, Bartini had convinced a meeting of creditors to give him a little more time — three more months to trade his way out of trouble. But this morning, everything had changed. As he walked up the back steps to open the office he had come across a shoebox. Inside, was a letter addressed to him and the decomposing hand in its snap-shut plastic bag.

He sat there remembering, even now bile reaching a beachhead at the back of his throat, but he had to be strong. The letter was dynamite — a pressman’s dream. He had to convince the detective to let him publish.

Either that, or he’d just publish anyway — damn the torpedoes and double the advertising rates.

•

All I wanted was a quiet morning, but Mandy Gore was waiting for me. As I said, she was usually affecting some tragic pose, but in her element she ruled the open plan office like a great fat Persian sunning itself on a divan, occasionally laying the tip of a whimsical claw against the throats of the lesser creatures at her mercy.

‘Morgen …’

I pretended not to hear her and kept walking down the corridor to my office. I dumped my briefcase onto my conference table, slumped into my chair, and realised that Mandy had followed me.

‘Oh, Mandy. What I can I do for you?’

‘Sorry to bother you, Morgen.’

She just stared at me with that interminably ‘hurt’ expression worn by Persian cats and disappointed, middle-aged women, waiting for me to read her fucking mind.

‘What is it, Mandy? I’ve got a lot to get through this morning.’

Without waiting for an invitation, she slid gracelessly into one of the chairs facing my desk.

‘I’m trying to organise Feargol’s retirement dinner. Do you think you’ll be able to make it?’

‘Of course I’ll be there … why wouldn’t I be?’

Now she looked really hurt.

‘I’m sorry Morgen … it’s just that you don’t always show up for social things. And under the circumstances …’

She continued to stare at me with those purple eyes, expecting me to understand.

‘Under the circumstances … what do you mean?’

‘Well,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘I hear that Don Affridge is going to be head of our department …’

‘Since when was that announced?’

‘Don’t get angry, Morgen … it hasn’t been announced. It’s just what everyone’s saying.’

‘I’m not angry, Mandy. I’ll be very pleased for Jock if he’s appointed … and I would consider it puerile in the extreme not to show up for something as important as Feargol’s dinner because of some petty, testosterone-driven office politics.’

Mandy looked only vaguely chastened. In fact, she had the gall to give me another of her knowing semi-smiles.

‘Why do you call him Jock?’

‘Doesn’t everyone?’

Her smile deepened, and there was a warning there.

‘I’ve never heard anyone call him Jock … except you, Morgen.’

She continued to smirk at me in a manner suggesting that my game was utterly transparent. It was clear I was going to have to get her onside.

•

The four of us sat in the boardroom waiting for Feargol.

The sweet fume of Affridge’s specially imported Beljean coffee graced the room like a benediction and Affridge himself sat there with contrived dignity, basking in the glow of his imminent destiny. And I had to admit, for a comically cranial caricature, he was looking pretty good.

The two others present were Jai Molloy and Louise Lumley — the most senior of the junior lawyers in the department and neither of them losing any time in sucking up to the new boss. No announcement had been made, but they hung on Jock’s every word as though pearls were dripping from the beard of some latter day Bentham. Did they not realise how obvious they appeared — vying with each other to laugh quickest at his jokes and paraphrasing his words in order to reach the same wise conclusions with apparent independence? Then it struck me that perhaps they wanted their sycophancy to be obvious — to let him know they were on his side.

Jock was quoting from The Art of War by Sun Tzu. What the fuck would he know about it?

‘Your enemy is always most vulnerable,’ declaimed Jock, with a fair attempt at an inscrutable smile, ‘to the weakness he doesn’t know he has. Learn your enemy’s weakness and time your strike for when he is least prepared to defend it.’

‘Interesting,’ said Jai, with a glance at Louise.

‘Very interesting,’ she agreed. ‘I think we could apply that principle in our work here.’

‘You might just have something there,’ encouraged Jock, a buck-toothed grin bisecting his head and rather detracting from his suave Confucian pose. He savoured the aroma of his coffee once again and took a delicate sip.

‘That coffee smells lovely,’ said Louise. ‘Beljean is it?’

‘Beljean, indeed,’ smiled Jock. ‘Exclusively available to those with friends in high places … so good it should be a crime.’

The other two laughed in obsequious admiration, but we were spared more of Jock’s drivel when the door banged open and Feargol made his usual cyclonic entrance. I knew what was coming, so thought I might as well make the best of it — for the present.

‘I think we all know why we’re here,’ said Faecal, sitting a little self-consciously at the head of the table. ‘I’ll be finishing up at the end of the month. I’m staying just long enough to clear up a few odds and ends, but then Don Affridge will be taking over as head of Legal Compliance.’

Immediately, I leapt to my feet and commenced the speech I’d prepared in the shower that morning. ‘Congratulations, Don.’ (And I shook his hand.) ‘I know you’ll be saddened, as we all are, by the fact of Feargol’s departure, but let’s face it … Feargol couldn’t be leaving us in better hands.’

The four of them looked at me a little quizzically — Jock especially — wondering if I was taking the piss, but none of them interrupted.

‘As for the reason for Feargol’s departure … he’s going travelling. He’s racked up the points in the first half, so he can afford to coast in the second … and I stress that this is only half time!

‘When cancer picked on Feargol Lukic … it bit off more than it could chew. I’ve never known a stronger … more resilient team player. And Feargol, I reckon you’re gonna kick the shit out of cancer, mate.’

They all laughed, as I resumed my seat, and Faecal grinned at me gratefully. Jock was delighted with my apparent attitude, but the other two were deep in thought. They’d obviously assumed I was going to be isolated as some kind of hard-done-by opposition figure, but my endorsement of the new regime had taken them by surprise. They had to think about what that might mean for the future structure of the department.

Don Affridge seemed to sense that something gracious was required from him, and he rose in turn.

‘Thank you, Morgen … fine sentiments. Fine sentiments, indeed.’

He bared his tombstone teeth once again, took an elegant but ostentatious sip of his aromatic Beljean coffee, and continued: ‘I, of course, would also like to wish Feargol the best of luck at this … difficult juncture. But I would also like to thank him for the vote of confidence in me … and I just thought I’d take a few minutes to outline my plans for the future of the Compliance Division.’

He took another sip of his coffee and grinned at Faecal — a little nervously, I thought.

‘Now, don’t take it amiss, Feargol … I’ve learnt a lot under your leadership and I hold your legal brain in high esteem, but I’ve been thinking for a while that we could be doing things a bit more scientifically. I would like to introduce a new management philosophy whereby we measure our performance against industry benchmarks in order to encourage an environment of continuous improvement.’

Feargol looked a trifle confused and there was the merest hint of anger in the edge of his voice.

‘What am I supposed to take amiss, Don? That all sounds fine to me.’

Ah Jock, you’re such a prick. I could really have gone for the jugular at that point, but as Sun Tzu says, timing is everything. I leapt to the defence of my new captain.

‘I don’t think Don was being critical, Feargol. What I understood him to say … is that he’s learnt a lot from you. We all have. But because he doesn’t have your years of leadership experience, he needs to put a system in place, which will quickly give him a more structured and scientific appreciation of the work of the whole department. Is that right, Don?’

‘More or less,’ confirmed Jock, nodding eagerly and gratefully. It’s amazing how someone so dangerous inside a courtroom can be so vulnerable outside. I suppose Jock must be one of those inherently sporting types who never know the battle has commenced until they hear the starting gun.

Jock took another sip of his exclusive and non-criminal Beljean, and then shattered the mood of the chamber with an almighty sneeze that took him unawares. Clutching his coffee and unable to cover his face in time, he sprayed the table with damp shrapnel.

‘I think we might end on that note,’ said Feargol, rising from the table and striding from the room with typical vigour. Jock and his two cronies rose more leisurely and left the room without a backward glance, once more lauding the theoretical applications of ancient Chinese wisdom …

While I sat staring at the centre of the table, where a bright red nostril hair had landed.

•

I seemed to work late that night. At any rate, I was last to leave the office.

I took a taxi to Oxford Street in Darlinghurst — my favourite part of the city. What I like about Oxford Street is the anonymity. You can really be yourself, and no one is likely to care, or even notice. I strolled the northern curb breathing garlic, sweat and stale beer, gazing through shop windows intriguingly blanked out or tastefully overdressed. Most of the crowd around me dressed in black and kept to the left — bohemians and faux bohemians with secure jobs still debating Kafka after all these years. In among them were the tourists — identifiable by their more colourful clothing and their diffidence. But buried deepest in the crowd were the trolls — the blackhearts who no longer belong in the mainstream but float along partly submerged in the greater currents of our times, a danger to all shipping.

For the bourgeois, they are hard to see — it’s always darkest under the lamp after all — but you can find them if you know what to look for. For a start, they have lost all self-consciousness. They are concerned only with the sharp reality of life in Subterrania and their eyes are ever focussed there. They know that human beings are nothing more than opportunities to be exploited and they roam the channels picking out marks, acknowledging each other with professional nods above the heads of the docile flock — wolves in shepherds’ clothing.

The tourists and faux bohemians are a resource to be farmed — to be nurtured and grown, and defended from other predators. But for all their care, only rarely do the trolls rub shoulders with the bourgeois. And, though Oxford Street is teeming with people, the faux bohemians, the tourists and the trolls somehow sense each other’s sonar and avoid each other like bats in a cave.

One such cave was the CinnaBar at the Mercury Hotel. Briefly trendy in the gentrified push of a few years back, it had become too scary for the faux bohemians and had returned to its traditional role as a haunt of criminals and the genuine fringe. As was my wont, I sat across the road in a café, watching the various comings and goings for half an hour. Then, approaching the appointed time, I slipped back into the crowd and navigated my way through gutter creepers and shoals of shoppers flitting about in uncanny unison — browsing, but ever-conscious of threat.

I passed under an archway obscured by two large potted palms into a narrow wet lane leading down to another arch surmounted with pink and purple neon and more palm trees, like a tiny enclave of Copacabana in the pit of Sydney.

At the threshold, I was immediately confronted with the familiar dank, which for all its unpleasantness, I always find strangely soothing. Breathing deeply, I entered a dim room with a greenish light like an ancient aquarium. Only a few were present, mainly clustered round the two pool tables in the centre of the room. The rest were distributed evenly about the darker edges of the chamber in ones and twos, whispering conspiracies and glancing up at me as I made my way to the bar.

The barman handed me a Perrier (with a twist of lime) without waiting for my order. Just as I like to be stoned among the bourgeois, I prefer to stay straight among the trolls.

I nodded my thanks, then turned towards the lone figure in the Che Guevara beret sitting in front of the banks of poker machines in the far corner. It looked like one of the labours of Hercules — one man versus Vegas — but as I approached he reached for his wallet and discovered it was empty.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ muttered Hercules.

‘How’s it going, Xeno?*’

^{* pronounced Geno}

His head snapped round, all ringlets and imminent violence, but then he relaxed and favoured me with a slow reptilian smile.

‘Morgen! Fuck, am I glad to see you.’

Xeno didn’t really fit into any of my broader categories. He had the scamming genius of the trolls, but the appearance and the self-regard of the faux bohemians — a true bohemian, perhaps? Xeno had a foot in both worlds, and for that reason, he was useful to me — useful, but dangerously unpredictable, like a dormant funnelweb pulled from the bottom of a pool. Tonight he was done up like one of Alex’s droogs in A Clockwork Orange, and his incorrigible gambling addiction made it almost a certainty that at some point later in the evening the resemblance would be more than just visual.

I handed him fifty dollars, which he immediately fed into the machine and hit the maximum bet — a loser.

‘Leave it there, Xeno.’

He hit the maximum once more — another loser — then left the machine and followed me to the nearest table, where he could keep an eye on his investment. In fact, he reminded me a little of Jock — so vulnerable, but absolutely invincible in his element.

‘Okay … what’ve you got for me?’

Xeno pulled a notebook from his pocket. ‘It’s mainly been pretty quiet,’ he said, with a longing glance at his poker machine. ‘He’s just trying to get his life back on an even keel, I guess. But he’s had a letter from Lucy.’

‘Divorce papers?’

‘No … I think she wants him back.’

‘Really?’

Xeno and I shared a grin, and I handed him another fifty, which he stuffed into his top pocket for easy access.

‘Did you keep a copy?’

‘Of course.’

He presented me with a two-page photocopied letter from Lucy Millet to her estranged husband, Gavin — the subject of my most recent life sculpture — and I felt my grin stretching as I read.

‘I think you’re right, Xeno. Despite everything, it’s clear she still loves him. But what to do … what to do?’

Ever since Xeno had obtained copies of the Millets’ house keys, it had been possible for me to take life sculpture to unprecedented levels. Not that I broke into their houses myself, of course — but Xeno brought me information and implemented my instructions in a manner which enabled me to apply my justice so profoundly that they never suspected that the evil and misfortune in their lives was not their own.

Sometimes I felt like Napoleon, surveying and ordering the battlefield of Gavin’s life from the plateau. And sometimes I felt like Louis Pasteur, observing the culture of his existence under the microscope. But mostly I felt like Rodin, taking his destiny in my hands and shaping it in ways that might both astound and instruct — to balance good luck with bad, fortune with misfortune, anticipation with disappointment. To create an experience that compelled philosophy as Gavin struggled desperately against the pavers I had laid over his life.

But now he’d found a crack, and my intervention was necessary, once again, to head off these feelings of nostalgic sentiment which were plainly evident in Lucy’s latest letter — it was getting towards Christmas after all, and no one likes to be alone at that time. She was ready, it seemed, to forgive and forget his many transgressions (of which he was mostly innocent).

‘Has Gavin seen this?’ I asked.

‘Nope … I’m still holding the original.’

‘Okay … let him have it. We’ll let them have a couple of weeks to rediscover each other … but then the whole thing will go tragically astray on the night before Christmas.’

Xeno shook his head and laughed. ‘Why are you being such a cunt to this bloke?’

‘I’m not going to explain it again.’

‘Oh, that’s right … your special sense of justice,’ he scoffed.

‘Morgen the superhero … the Black Prince wreaking vengeance for the little guy.’

‘I’m not the Black Prince, Xeno … I’m a friend of the Black Prince. And fuck the little guy if he’s a cicada murdering homophobe.’

‘Well, who’s the Black Prince?’

‘Never you mind. Anyway … don’t you want to get on with your gambling?’

I handed him a few more fifties, and immediately the judgment faded from his face. He turned back to his poker machine.

‘Xeno.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ve got another job for you.’

‘Oh yeah?’

I counted out another ten fifty dollar notes.

‘I need you to get me some heroin … and a couple of packets of Beljean coffee.’