Читать книгу The Dragon's Skin - Ross Gray - Страница 6

‘What’s he on?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I find that hard to believe – a gutless wonder like Benny Bovell. He’d have to be revved on something to pull a stunt like this.’

‘Ben isn’t gutless, just raised in menageries that kept sharks in the bath water. Made him a little tentative about … things. If he’s high, he’s high on desperation.’

‘Jesus, spare me the pop psychology. From you, it’s as palatable as a shit foccacia.’

‘You invited me to contribute.’ The gaze was steady, the slight smile self-effacing, the only movement was his shoulders in an almost imperceptible shrug.

‘I didn’t invite you. Let’s make that clear. The invitation came from Benny. You’re the only bastard that dumb-arse will talk to.’ He tried to skewer him with his cold, hard, don’t-fuck-with-me stare. ‘Shit!’ he said, and looked around at the Critical Incident Unit brains trust: the leader of tactical response, the negotiator from the Behavioural Analysis Unit, the explosives expert, the emergency coordinator, technical support, the silver tongue from police media, lads in uniform and lads not. As the situation dragged on unresolved the numbers in the room had crept up like a mortgage. They all looked right back. The silent consensus seemed to be that this bastard was still their best hope of pulling the faggot out of the fire. He turned to him again. ‘Alright. Did the little shit tell you what he wanted?’

‘He wants something I can’t give him.’

‘Oh? Something you can’t give him? Well maybe amongst all the people Benny has gathered here today,’ he swung his arm in a wild arc that took in the room, ‘we might find someone who can give him what he wants. What the fuck does he want?’

‘He wants me to “take care of” someone.’

‘So?’

‘He also used “get rid of”.’

‘As in eliminate?’

‘I believe so.’

You could hear the dust mites thrashing through the carpet pile.

‘If he meant “kill” why not bloody say it?’

‘That’s not the kind of word Ben likes to use. A bit too … concrete.’

They were in the centre of field operations, which, in this instance, was a front room of a double-fronted federation weatherboard in a quiet suburban street. It was a large room, a dining room intended for entertaining, but it didn’t look as if it had done much of late. It had the faint, musty aura of a tired museum showcase. The sunniest room in the house they had been assured, repeatedly, by the older Mrs Aldaker, who occupied the premises with the younger Mrs Aldaker, widows whose husbands, father and son, had been taken from them in the same misadventure some ten years before. Her assurances were redundant on a day like today. It was mid-July in Melbourne. If the sun’s rays penetrated the soggy, matted shag that slumped over the city, they would still drown in the grey, persistent drizzle. What’s more, the neat bungalow across the road was pregnant with a hazard that might remove the roof at anytime. The two Mrs Aldakers had been relocated to a safe distance protesting that they would be far more valuable making sandwiches and tea for ‘our brave young men’. And they had baked only the day before – Lamingtons and date scones!

The team was assembled around a large dining table, its area expanded to maximum by extension leaves. It had been stripped of lace cloth and flower vases and knick-knacks, and was now covered with maps and plans and laptop computers and binoculars and various kinds of communication device. Senior Sergeant Donald Collison stared at the man across the table. He was standing a little apart from the rest of the group, weight on one leg, hands in his trouser pockets, relaxed, just a pleasant afternoon with the boys. He’d removed the damp, police-issue waterproof and the armoured vest. He was wearing a cardigan for Christ’s sake. There was something vaguely distasteful about someone like him wearing a cardigan.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Collison said. ‘He said if you bring him someone’s head on a platter he’ll down tools and come out?’

‘He wants a promise.’

‘He wants you to promise to murder someone and he’ll come out?’

The man in the obscurely offensive cardigan nodded. ‘He was a tad circumlocutory, but that’s the gist.’

‘Believe him?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you said?’

‘I’d think it over.’

Collison hooted quizzically. ‘Well shit, that’s big of you …’ he began.

Gareth Nile from the Behavioural Analysis Unit, the official police negotiator, interrupted. ‘I think he did the right thing, Don.’

Collison blistered him with a warning glare. Affable over a pot or two – at the pub later with the team he’d buy the first and last rounds – the sergeant was brusque and abrasive when he was at the business end of these situations. His subordinates suffered any collateral humiliation without grudge because he was organised, efficient and experienced and, perhaps more importantly, he didn’t take cover behind his desk every time the shit and the fan might intersect. But today he wasn’t just brusque: he was bristly. It was the presence of the man in the cardigan – simply because he was an outsider, or was there a history?

Gareth brushed back the thick, long tuft of black hair that sprouted from atop his forehead and nowhere else on the smooth crest of his cran­ium. Useless as a comb-over, but his kids liked to plait it into a unicorn’s horn. And he liked them to plait it. ‘Bovell,’ he ploughed on, ‘would be suspicious if anyone agreed too readily to what – no matter his present mental state – he must be aware is an outrageous request. His reluctance to speak plainly is a …’

He was ambushed by the sergeant’s reaction.

Collison’s eyes narrowed as if to conceal some illicit knowledge. His smile was brittle and biting. ‘Jesus, Gareth,’ he breathed, words dripping with condescension. ‘Why do you think Bovell will talk only to bugalugs here? Him and no one else?’ He turned to the subject of the discussion. ‘As Gypsy Rose Lee’s mum said, promise him everythin’ and give him nothin’, and let’s get the silly prick out of there.’

‘It’s not that simple,’ said the other. His pose didn’t change but his head moved in a leisurely arc as his eyes glided calmly over every face at the table and back to Collison’s. Their gazes tangoed for a few beats then Collison scanned the table in a swift mirror movement.

‘C’mon in here,’ he snapped, spun on his heel and strode to a door directly behind him. The other man smiled in brief apology to the room and followed.

In the electric hush of their wake a whisper was clearly audible. ‘Who the hell is this guy?’ breathed a young uniform. An older uniform craned towards his ear, one hand cupped to his mouth.

Collison, in the act of opening it, spun on them from the door. ‘The Senior Constable doesn’t know who he is, Constable. And if he ever did, he’s forgotten.’ His eyes flashed around the room. ‘What’s more, this man,’ hooking his chin at the passing cardigan, ‘is not here today. In fact his very existence is a matter for conjecture. Am I clear?’ He stared balefully at the targets of his tirade until he heard a chastened, ‘Yes, boss.’ Then he stalked through the doorway and closed the door, firmly, behind him.

They were in a bedroom. It was much darker than the room they’d left, its only window shadowed by the verandah. The dry musk of pot pourri struggled in the gloom with the cloying sweetness of perfume. They almost masked the faint, metallic sourness of urine. The older Mrs Aldaker’s room – arguably.

‘A bit hissy these days, Don. Gargling soap or just watching it?’

All Collison could see was the dark shape of the other man silhouetted against the muted light from the window. ‘I find it ludicrous that you, of all people, have scruples about this,’ he said. ‘Can’t bear to tell a fib? Or hate to break a promise? Cross your bloody fingers if it’ll make you feel better.’ He jammed his fists on his hips and breathed deeply. ‘What’s so bloody complex?’

‘If I promise to kill this person I’ll have to do it.’ It came flatly, matter of fact, out of the shadow. Collison was momentarily at a loss for words.

‘Why the fuck …?’ he spluttered eventually.

‘You said it yourself, Don. Why will Ben talk only to me? One: he believes I will do what I say I’ll do. Two: he believes I’m capable of doing what he wants me to do.’

‘So? Poor, old, disillusioned Benny can cry himself to sleep in his cell at night.’

‘Exactly. If I promise Ben and don’t keep to it, the entire prison population will know …’

‘Who’s gonna take any notice of a no-hoper like Benny …’ Collison began before the absurdity of their dialogue’s tangent struck him. ‘You arrogant prick,’ he spat. ‘This is about your precious integrity. Jesus Christ! What the fuck have you become?’

‘You’re snug in the citadel, Don. I’m out here where the wild things are.’

‘Buy a bumboy and move to Bali.’

‘My word’s my Kevlar: that’s all I’ve got. Bad faith’s bad for business.’

‘Business?’ Collison’s voice kangarooed in pitch. ‘Business …? There’s a four-year-old girl over there that …’

‘That’s the point, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘Did you hear anything that was said?’

Collison shook his head. ‘Wire was lousy, we lost every second word.’ Now he suspected that wasn’t an accident.

The shadow turned toward the window and moved the lacy curtains with a fingertip; the planes of his face were marbled by cold, liquid light. ‘Ben’s not the most coherent communicator at the best of times, but, when you sort out the dross, I think what he really wants is to protect Briette.’

‘Blowing her to smithereens is a funny way of doing it.’

‘We’d have a crater over there if that was his plan. But, whatever fate he wants her saved from, he obviously thinks it’s worse than death. He’s screaming for help.’

To an old campaigner like Collison, that was axiomatic. The trouble is, if you can’t convince the poor bastards that help is on its way, they may resort to the final solution – or dissolution. ‘Is that who he wants you to bump, someone who’s a threat to his daughter?’

‘I think so. He won’t give details until I agree to do it.’ He turned his face from the window and his features were darkened, but Collison could see the small shadow-etched curl in his left cheek that betrayed a smile. ‘He assures me it’s someone who deserves to die.’

‘Oh good,’ said Collison. He appraised the dark form embroidered in the lace of the curtain. ‘Is there anything else I need to know but they,’ thumb over shoulder, ‘don’t?’

‘You know Ben. All over the place like aunts at an Italian wedding.’ He moved the curtains aside once more and stared thoughtfully through the window. ‘Today he’s as focused as the mother of the bride, no doubts how this day will end – for him.’

They stood in the false gloaming of a dimly lit room on a wet afternoon in silent contemplation, of each other, of their own doubts and fears, of the consequences of the next utterance. A buzz of voices and activity reached them from the other room. The man by the window suddenly spoke.

‘You know the ring-a-rosy: Ben loses job, Ben steals, gets caught, goes to gaol, Sharon shacks up with someone till Ben gets out – anything to protect the kids. She didn’t go back to him last time. That was about four months ago.’

‘Shit. It’s not Sharon …?’

Cardigan man shook his head. ‘No. Then Sharon’s dead, Ben’s in gaol, what happens to the kids? Ben is terrified his kids will end up like him, in institutions and foster homes. Dysfunctional parents they may seem, but they love those kids. The day Sharon realised she was pregnant they stopped using hard drugs – both of them – just like that.’ He chuckled softly. ‘Found larceny a lot harder to kick; but, they had mouths to feed. Anyhow, Ben says he has open access to them, so that’s not the issue. And he worships Sharon the lover, but she was a gift he always expected the gods to snatch back. No, he’s lost faith in Sharon the mother. Ben thinks she’s into something that puts the kids in jeopardy. That’s my guess.’

Collison accepted the point with a grunt. ‘Why not do the job himself?’

‘C’mon, Don – Ben? Carry out a killing? He’s an echidna not a boxing kangaroo. He’d have to steal the price of a hitman, and his larceny’s strictly small change. He’s violence phobic – if he was going to commit suicide he’d use a Freudian slip.’ He smiled sadly.

‘Blowing up a day-care centre is passive protest, is it?’

‘Ben and Briette are the only two at risk.’ He turned and gazed thoughtfully through the window towards the centre across the road. When he turned back to the room he seemed to have resolved something.

‘Why not just ask you? For old time’s sake,’ said Collison.

‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘Maybe he’s more perceptive than I thought,’ he added, as if to himself. ‘I can get them out, Don, no dents, no scratches. If I can’t persuade Ben or find an opportunity to take him cleanly, I’ll make the promise.’

Collison lofted his chin and scratched his neck as he considered the words. ‘Let’s give the caucus a little background, so they don’t sulk. And then do it,’ he said. ‘Lay the warm and fuzzy stuff thick. You know boys: take the toys out of the box and they want to play with ’em before they put ’em back.’ He swung abruptly towards the door, then hesitated and glanced back. ‘If you have to make a promise will it be one you intend to keep?’ he asked.

‘I think it’s in the best interests of us both if I don’t answer that. Don’t you?’

Collison snorted.

‘Oh, and Don? No wire.’

‘Just bugger this one the same way you did the last.’ He jabbed a blunt finger at the other man. ‘But leave the fucking phone over there on speaker!’

‘And no body armour.’ He hooked his thumbs in the soft wool of the cardigan. ‘It gives me a … cuddly look.’

Collison held the man’s gaze, trying to penetrate its languid blue surface. ‘Your funeral,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Tell me something. You’ve gotta be shittin’ yourself, but you act like you’re going to tea with a maiden aunt. What’s the gimmick? Or don’t you give a stuff?’

‘I die before I cross the road.’

Collison’s eyes dug at him to unearth any irony, then, ‘How very Zen of you,’ he snarled. ‘Anything else I can do to protect and serve?’ he added and yanked wide the door.

‘May I borrow an umbrella?’ asked the man in the cardigan as he passed by.