How I Became the Mr. Big of People Smuggling (23 page)

‘Son, you're doing a good job with the bookwork.' He waited a while to see my response.

‘Things seems to be going pretty smoothly,' I replied carefully. A compliment from Palmenter was always the prelude to something.

He grunted assent.

In fact, during musters I didn't have a lot to do as the imports didn't come into the station anymore. The usual thing now was that Palmenter and his cowboys would arrive on the first chopper and take the vans out to somewhere off-site. Newman and Rob would refuel several times during the day and after it was all over Palmenter would reappear to drive off with Margaret and the girls who had been flown in a few days earlier.

‘I know I can trust you not to speak out of place. Soon we might see about you taking on an even bigger role. Oversee some of the trips. International stuff.' He was working up to something big. ‘Make you manager of the station, put you in charge.'

‘Cookie and Spanner have been here a lot longer,' I ventured.

‘Son, some people will never amount to anything.'

He sat looking at me and I became very uncomfortable but I met his eye. This was not a simple conversation about taking on a greater role. It never was. Nothing about Palmenter was straightforward.

‘We got a problem, Son. That double-crossing son-of-a-bitch Newman wants out.'

At some level I didn't see a problem with that. Like me, Newman seemed to have little to do. He arrived with each import in the chopper but exactly what his role was I didn't know. But I knew the reality. No one left this place.

‘Do we need him? What does he do?' I asked. As I said it a wave of nausea came over me. What had I just suggested? That we drive out to the pit with him like we did with Arif? What had I become? I sat most days in my little office off the back verandah and had little to do with the people. By hiding in my office, shuffling numbers and invoices around in neat columns, I could avoid thinking about all that was. The deaths. The murder. The refugees. Guilt and compassion pushed aside by keeping busy.

‘Unless we do something he'll take us down. Threatening to spill the beans. He wants to set up a rival operation.'

Behind him across the compound I could see the faded sign on the canteen.
Hotel California.
I remembered the day I first arrived, when I saw that sign and heard the music from inside.

Palmenter had said something and pushed a gun across the table to me. The dark metal had a presence, a here and now insistence that drew me back to Palmenter who was looking at me for a response.

‘Son?'

‘Spill the beans?'

‘You should know what that means.' It was a threat.

‘Can we do anything about it? Can we talk him out of it?'

I said ‘we'. I had to. I had the feeling he was setting me up to act alone.

‘Already talked to him. He's a cunt. He's going to set up his own operation. Dob us in and set up his own operation, and unlike us he's got no reason other than to make money. The money-grabbing double-crossing arsehole. You used one of these before?'

He pushed the gun closer.

‘Sure,' I lied. To avoid looking at him I picked the gun up. It was cold and heavy.

‘When he comes in, he'll demand money. Cash. He won't trust me but he'll trust you. Get him out to the pit. Wait until after he's refuelled and then drive him out, tell him you are taking him out to where we hide the cash.'

He was telling me to shoot Newman. To do to Newman what he did to Arif. I continued to turn the gun in my hands.

‘Don't do it till you are out there. Not before. You understand, Son?'

I felt sick. I might have nodded.

‘You sure you used one of these before?'

‘Sure.'

I lifted the gun and aimed across the compound at the
Hotel California
sign. I squeezed the trigger.

BANG!

‘Jesus, Son.'

‘I didn't think it would be loaded.'

‘Jesus, Son, what you doing?'

‘Bullseye.' I signalled the sign across the way. He turned to look. I had no idea if I'd hit the building, let alone the sign, but he turned to look. His bull neck was sweaty. I saw wispy grey hairs and folds of fat and ugliness. He grunted, like a pig. That was the last thing he ever did.

I talked. I became even more incoherent with beer and exhaustion but also strangely aware, as if I was a person outside of myself watching a group of fishermen trying to make sense of my garbled words. I saw the camp guide become increasingly worried that he could not raise Spanner on the radio. Had they not believed me about the crocodile? When a helicopter – not ours but a small black one – flew in low from the east and disappeared towards the main camp his mood changed and he pulled out the satellite phone, but I did not care because I was in the middle of telling them about Cookie and Judy and their kid playing and laughing and ‘Finish up here' and muffled gunshots under the sound of the chopper and they were now dead and I was sobbing. They never had a chance.
Maybe Charles and Simms got away. At least down at the waterhole Ingrid and Sally would be okay. But then I thought of all the others, those five unnamed, and Arif, and then how many more? People who had escaped from one crisis to build themselves a second chance, only to have Palmenter take it away.

And as I watched myself see all of this, I remembered Spanner. We were talking that time when he told me about the extra bodies in the pit. How hard had it been for him to discover that, and then to tell me about what he had seen? That was the moment we decided we had to escape to Perth. At the end of that conversation he had carefully poured his beer out in that considered way he did so many things. But the way he did it, watching the flow of beer dissolve into the earth, it was like it was the end of one thing and the beginning of another. As I remembered that, I came back into my exhausted self and then I poured my beer slowly and deliberately into the sand.

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