Black Tide (9 page)

I went to bed to confront The Mountain from Afar: Men and their fathers. Before I could approach the mountain, however, I had to make the bed, turn down, tuck and tauten the twisted sheets.

It seemed so pointless.

It was so pointless.

11

I was in Meaker’s eating a sandwich of grilled ham with lettuce, tomato and gherkins and reading the Sportsman when the floor moved and I lost a lot of my light.

Kelvin McCoy, reformed smack freak, unreformed drunk, gifted poseur in the plastic arts, former client, lowered his bulk into the chair across the table. McCoy had taken over the lease on the sweatshop across the road from my office and was using it as a studio/residence. If people didn’t believe he had any talent as an artist, they generally kept it to themselves: McCoy was built like a street-cleaning machine. He had a shaven head, stoved-in nose, small eyes the colour of candlewax, and he kept himself formidably dirty. About fifteen huge canvases a year came out of his studio under such titles as Patriarchy’s Dialectic and Rituals of Hegemony. A man who taught something called cultural studies at Melbourne University provided the names. Inexplicably, rich people rushed to buy McCoy’s dark and sinister messes of paint and hair and toenail clippings and unidentifiable but worrying substances. His gallery shark allowed him a small portion of the proceeds, which he made speed to redistribute.

‘Good day,’ I said. ‘You’ll find something to read in the basket next to the door. In your case, look at.’

‘I see your customer’s here,’ McCoy said, putting a hand into his armpit to scratch. I’d as soon put my hand into a used-syringe bin.

‘What?’ I kept my eyes on the paper. You didn’t want to encourage McCoy at this time of day. At most times of the day.

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‘Miss Clean Living over there.’ He flicked his eyes. ‘Looking for you. Knocking on your door. Invited her over to look at my work but she wasn’t keen.’

‘That’s showing aesthetic judgment,’ I said. ‘Which one?’

‘Jesus, Irish, take a guess.’

I looked around. McCoy appeared to be suggesting that it would be unusual to call anyone in full bike leathers with three-tone hair and noserings Miss Clean Living. That left the woman in the left-hand corner reading the Age. She was in her thirties, dark hair pulled back to show her ears, lightly tanned, tweed sportscoat with a soft leather collar.

‘That is probably a serious person in need of the services of a professional,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t know much about that, McCoy.’

McCoy smiled. It involved his lips moving sideways and three deep creases appearing in his cheek. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I remember being in need of the services of a professional. And all I got was the service.’

I took a sip of my coffee. ‘That’s wounding, Kelvin. You do know that whenever two or three lawyers get together, they still talk about the defence I mounted for you.’

‘That so?’ he said. ‘When your old clients get together, in the exercise yard, they still talk about how they got mounted.’

I looked at the huge charlatan with respect. Nicotine, dope, hash, barbiturates, speed, acid, smack, Colombian marching powder, ecstasy, alcohol in every form, all had entered the massive frame by some route and in quantities guaranteed to lay waste to the collected brains of three Melbourne universities or eight in Queensland. In theory, a scan of this man’s skull should reveal a place as grey and still as Kerguelen Island in winter. Yet from time to time there were clear signs of electrical activity.

‘Client loyalty,’ I said thoughtfully, studying a hand- written advertisement on the wall for a play called The Penis Knife. ‘What do you have to do to earn it? Offer to fellate magistrates?’

‘Fell eight, fell nine,’ McCoy said. ‘Whatever it bloody takes. Now here’s something more my speed.’

He left me for the company of the large manager of the tapas bar up the street on her coffee break.

The woman in the corner had to pass my table to get to the cash register. ‘Simone Bendsten?’ I said.

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She nodded, wary, bringing a square brown leather briefcase around to protect her pelvis.

‘I’m Jack Irish. I gather I missed you at the office. Didn’t realise you’d be this quick. I’ll be back there in five minutes.’

I’d been in Meaker’s earlier, in the cold, dark early day, black rain bouncing off the tarmac outside, sitting in the window reading the Tax Office’s report on Gary Connors’

income. Stale cornflakes at home and black coffee in the cafe, the place empty except for two young men, not together, both badly on the nod, scratching and snuffling.

In my office, I’d remembered the letter and business card, found them in the righthand drawer: Bendsten Research. At 8.30 a.m., I rang. A woman answered, a person with the calm and rested voice of someone who’d had extensive experience of good, demonless sleep. I told her what I wanted.

‘Public companies obviously aren’t a problem,’ she said. ‘Private ones can be difficult.

How much detail do you want?’ She had a faint accent, hard to place.

‘What, where, owners if it’s private, that sort of thing.’

‘The report will be delivered,’ she had said in a formal way.

We left Meaker’s together.

‘I’ll see you there,’ she said.

I watched her go. She had long legs for someone so small.

At the office, I’d just sat down when she knocked. There isn’t a receptionist, a reception area. You open the door, look left and there I am, behind the table on which the tailor who had worked here for fifty years sat crosslegged to sew his seams.

She sat in the client’s chair, briefcase on her lap.

‘Any luck?’ I said.

She shrugged, opened her briefcase, took out an A4 envelope and put it on the table.

‘With two exceptions, as far as I can tell, these are all shells. Three of them share the same address in the Caymans. Following them up gets you nowhere. They’re owned by companies who are owned by other companies, and so it goes on. Like Russian dolls, one fits inside the other.’

‘The exceptions?’

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‘One’s called Klostermann Gardier. A private bank in Luxembourg. The other’s a company called Aviation SF registered in Dublin. I ran all the names through the local databases and only Aviation SF came up. Last year, an Australian company called Fincham Air won a coastal surveillance tender. It listed among its assets 80 per cent of Aviation SF. Fincham itself is partly owned by a company called CrossTrice Holdings.

And one of CrossTrice’s directors is a man called Lionel Carson.’

Reading my face, she paused. ‘Know the name?’

I shook my head.

‘Carson used to be a director of Consolidated Freight Holdings. TransQuik Australia is their biggest company. He’s not active in CFH anymore but CrossTrice owns about 25

per cent of it.’

TransQuik. Gary Connors’ employer after his departure from the force. And, at a considerable remove, still one of his employers.

Simone looked around the bare office. ‘That’s it. It’s all in the report. You could have done this yourself, you know. The information’s all available.’

‘No, I couldn’t. What do I owe you?’

‘The invoice is with the report. An hour’s work. Seventy dollars.’ Her eyes flicked around the place again. ‘Well, say fifty-five.’

‘Seventy’s fine. Been doing this long?’

‘Second month.’

‘How’s business?’

She looked at the ceiling, at me, quirky smile, shrug of the thin shoulders. ‘They’re not delivering the money in dump trucks.’

‘Yet. Word will spread. Your accent…’

‘We came out from Denmark when I was thirteen. Complicated by doing my postgraduate work in Boston.’

‘It’s nice.’

‘Thank you. Well, if you need anything else…’

‘I have no doubt that I will.’

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I saw her to the door and admired her all the way to the corner. Then I got out the telephone book and found TransQuik’s head office.

12

The pilot of the six-seater Cessna looked to be about sixteen. He was wearing lean purple dark glasses, a huge multicoloured jumper of the kind teenagers once used to lose within a week of receiving from their grandmothers, and a peaked cap with Crapdusters Australia on the front. Facing backwards. In themselves, these things would have occasioned no more than deep unease. What induced the panic was that, waiting for take-off clearance, he appeared to be singing along to rap music in his headphones.

Harry was next to the pilot, looking at him with calm and scholarly interest. Cam and I were seated behind them. Behind us was a long-nosed, melancholy track rider from Caulfield called Mickey Moon. He’d been the leading apprentice in his last two years but he had fat genes.

Cam had his laptop open, studying bar graphs of horses’ times. Today, for going to the country, he was dressed like a corporate lawyer: navy suit, white cotton shirt with spread collar, blue and white checkerboard silk tie. In the city, he seemed to favour tight washed-out moleskins, boots and fine-check shirts.

‘Cam, shouldn’t this, ah, pilot be listening to the control tower?’ I said.

Cam looked at me, looked at the pilot’s back, went back to the screen. ‘Like jockeys,’ he said. ‘Out of the mountin yard, got your money on em, just pray they know what they’re doin.’

Immensely reassured, I closed my eyes and fell to doing breathing exercises recommended to me by a priest I’d defended on pornography charges.

‘Tricky breeze,’ said the pilot, his first utterance. ‘Bloke flipped a little one here last week, identical conditions. Couldn’t handle it. Dork.’

I didn’t open my eyes until, after what seemed to me to be a prolonged and vibrating resistance to Wilbur and Orville’s idea, the aircraft was on its side and much too close to the roofs of outer Melbourne’s brick-veneer sprawl.

To my mind, the pilot was fighting for control of the aircraft.

‘Got a CD player?’ asked Harry.

‘Absolutely,’ said the pilot.

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‘Stick in this,’ said Harry.

The pilot took a break from struggling to keep us airborne, let go of the controls and leaned across Harry to put the disc in a slot, punch buttons, adjust volume.

Willie Nelson, singing ‘One for My Baby’.

‘Hey,’ said the pilot, making rhythmic shoulder movements. ‘Saw Willie. Saw Waylon.

Nashville. Might try that head thing Willie wears.’

‘Bandanna,’ said Cam without looking up. ‘Could be a good fashion look for pilots. Stuff the cop cap. The bandanna. Rebels, outlaws. “Listen, sunshine, the Boein’s not goin till I finish this fifth of Jim Beam.’’’

The frail barque lurched. Would Cam’s words be the last thing on the black box?

‘Bring anythin to eat?’ asked Mickey Moon.

Cam found his briefcase and took out a family-size bag of barbecue chips, tossed it over his shoulder. ‘Just tie it on like a feedbag, Mick,’ he said.

Mickey ripped the packet open with his teeth, horse teeth.

We gained height, slowly, agonisingly slowly, and the alarming noises became less pronounced. In minutes, the city dissipated. Time went by, my shoulders lost some tension. Beneath us the landscape, seen through floating vapour, was green, dots of trees, Lego houses, small rocky hills, dams glinting, sheep, horses, some cattle. For a while, the Hume Highway was to our right, an unbroken chain of gleaming objects.

‘Halfway between Echuca and Mitiamo,’ said Cam. ‘Draw a bead on Gunbower, you’re right over the top of the place.’

The pilot found what looked like a Broadbent’s touring map and opened it. ‘Gunbower,’

he said. ‘Now, where is it? Know a bloke landed in a kind of swamp up that way.’

Cam closed the laptop, reached around and found a piece of paper in his suit jacket.

‘He says easiest is hit Mitiamo, turn right, road’s dead straight, then there’s a little elbow left. Round that, then first left, you’ll see the old track on your right. Put her down in front of the grandstand. Remains of the grandstand.’

‘So this is how modern aviators find their way from place to place,’ I said. ‘A road map and directions written on a bit of paper.’

‘Mate of mine got lost up there near Wanganella,’ said the pilot. ‘Lookin for this property, it’s bloody hopeless. All flat as buggery. Lands on the road, motors in to this 63

petrol station, one pump. Bloke comes out, doesn’t blink. Yeah, he says, bugger to find.

Come in, have a beer, draw you a map.’

‘Be a bit iffy when it gets dark,’ Cam said.

‘Up there, yeah. Not around here,’ said the pilot. ‘Worst comes, start lookin for the bloody Hume. Lit up like a Christmas tree at night.’

A snore. Harry was asleep. I closed my eyes and thought about planing a long edge with one of Charlie’s pre-war Hupfnagel 24-inch planes. Properly tuned and on a good day, you could take off a near-transparent ribbon the full length of any board. Planing with the right instrument, a rock-solid body holding a precisely aligned heavyweight blade honed like a samurai sword, is the sex of joinery. All the rest is mere companionship, satisfying but not ecstatic.

I woke up with the aircraft sharply tilted.

‘Bit of rain here,’ said the pilot. ‘Had a sorry on a strip like this up in Queensland.

Looked good, nice grass. Potholes like bomb thingies under the stuff. Can’t see the bastards. Arse over kettle bout seven times. Well, three. Shakes you a bit. Rang the boss, he goes, “How’s the kite?’’ I go, “Bad, comin home on a truck, boss.’’ He goes,

“Fine day for travellin, Donny.’’ Didn’t know that meant the arse. Liked that job.’

I closed my eyes again, resumed Father O’Halloran’s breathing exercises. Take-off had been hard enough. Landing tested every fibre. And found each and every one wanting.

I opened my eyes when we stopped. We were on an old racetrack, derelict grandstand on our right, patched up old rail to the left, all around us flat stubble lands.

‘Anythin else to eat?’ asked Mickey Moon.

‘Here to ride not eat,’ said Harry. ‘This McCurdie’s ready for us. Healthy sign.’

We got out and walked over towards the derelict grandstand where a Toyota four-wheel-drive and a horse truck were parked. Three horses were out, saddled: a big grey being walked by a plump young woman in jeans, two smaller animals in the care of teenage boys.