The Big Whatever (41 page)

I said, “Can't beat the old FJ you-beaut.

They go forever.” Terry looked at me but made no comment.

“I know. It's a shit heap,” I said. “Funny, until now I thought it was a pretty good car. Listen Tez, I need a few bucks too.”

Terry said, “Ah, it's all right,” gave me the keys to the panel van and peeled some twenties off a roll. We shook hands and I was gone. At four in the morning I pulled off the Hume somewhere south of Sydney and slept.

The next day I took it slow, even though the panel van was like a rocket ship after the clapped-out article I'd been driving. I made it as far as Albury easily, slept by the river.

At ten the next morning I was in northern Victoria, knocking on Helen Messenger's door.

She was fifty or so. Blondie-grey haired. You could tell she'd had looks, but she was sad and careworn now, living alone.

“Vic was here,” she said, after we'd got the introductions out of the way, “And he wants you to talk to you. Said for me to give you his number in Melbourne.”

“What's he want with me?”

“He said your friend Max is still alive. That he wrote a book, even. Vic wants to find him.”

“So does everyone.”

“I don't,” she said. “That bloke was nothing but trouble. I wish Vic would keep clear of him. He's better off with the tambourine-bangers in Sydney than with that shithead.”

“I thought you'd taken a shine to our Max,” I said.

She shook her head. “That mad old greybeard collywoggle?”

I looked hard at her. “When did you last see Max?”

“Eh?”

“You heard me.”

She looked at me for a long moment then said quietly, “About six months ago.”

“What did he want?”

“He was trying to get in touch with young Mark.”

“Did you tell anyone you'd seen Max? Have you told Vic?”

She shook her head. “Didn't want him to get mixed up in all that again. I still don't.”

“Where's Mark now?”

“I let him stay here for a while. He was a nice boy, really. He left with Max.”

“Did you tell Vic that?”

She shook her head. “Where are they now?” I said.

She looked at me and shook her head, her mouth tightly closed. She knew.

“I went looking for him in Wee Waa,” I said. “Only found a place that Max had been, but ages ago.”

“They're around there somewhere,” she said quietly. “On some farm.”

“‘Plain View'?”

“Eh?”

“The name of the property.”

She shrugged.

* * *

It took me two and a half long days of driving north, back up the guts of New South Wales.

On the third day I pulled into the wreckers at Wee Waa where I'd bought the water pump. The same kid was there behind the counter.

He looked up when I walked in. No recognition.

“I was here a few months ago, bought a water pump.”

He said, “Yeah?” apathetically.

“There was some crazy old bloke out the back there, mumbling to himself. Didn't talk English.”

He brightened. “Oh yeah. The old bastard.”

“You told me then you didn't know him.”

“I didn't. But after you asked about him, I sort of remembered him the next time he came in. After that I kept noticing him around the district. Strange, eh?”

“Know where he lives?”

He shook his head. “Last I saw him he was driving an old shitheap out on the Spring Plain Road.”

I spent the next day driving around north of town. Drove the length of the Spring Plain Road, then down every track that ran off it. I asked a cocky on a tractor if there was a mad old bloke lived somewhere out this way, he shook his head.

The country was dead flat, with only a few scraggly trees dotted about, but the soil looked brown and rich. There were billabongs and meandering creeks, some muddy bogs here and there. The paddocks were big. Cattle, cotton, sheep, wheat. All high and ripe. Some big harvesters working paddocks, but most of the crops were already done.

I pitched my tent next to a billabong, drove further south the next day. The rich soil gave way to sand, and suddenly I was in a thick forest of cypress pine. The Pilliga. I turned around and headed back into open farm country. I camped by a creek that night, and first thing next morning continued criss-crossing the countryside.

Around nine o'clock I passed an old, half-wrecked, once-fancy gate, big brick pillars either side. Arching above it was an old sign in rusty wrought iron with the name ‘Plain View.'

I reversed back and drove slowly down the muddy track, through a stand of coolabahs and past some older trees into a neat parking area. There was a house and some orderly outbuildings, a couple of dusty cars parked in a shed.

A bent, craggy-faced old bloke with stringy grey hair was fiddling with a pump mounted on the back of a old Dodge truck.

The geezer from the wreckers. He scarcely glanced my way as I drove in.

I pulled up, got out of the Holden and walked over to him. He was still stooped over, mumbling to himself. He didn't look at me.

“You look like shit,” I said.

He looked up, stared emptily at me for a few seconds and said, “You took your fucking time.”

He
nearly
went. His tongue lolled back in his head, his eyes closed. I had his scrawny frame pinned to the dirt beneath me, my thumbs deep into his windpipe. He'd stopped fighting back.

Then I was waking up in the dirt, dizzy and nauseous. Max lay limp on the ground ten feet away, with a young guy and a well-dressed older fellow bending over him. The young guy was trying to pour water into his mouth. Max coughed a couple of times then started to retch.

I propped myself up on one elbow. There was a shovel lying next to me.

“Let the prick die,” I said.

I sat up. They ignored me. The back of my head hurt like crazy. I put my hand to it. A wet bump. Blood on my fingers, but not too much.

Max opened his eyes, put his hand to his throat. He mumbled “Jesus fuck” in a raspy voice and started coughing again.

The younger guy turned around to me and said, “Bloody hell. You nearly choked him.” He sounded almost hurt.

“It was a spur of the moment thing,” I said. “If I'd been thinking straight, I would've just shot him.”

The older man stood up, still looking at Max. “He'll be all right,” he said, his voice clipped and precise.

He faced me then. Round-faced and tanned. Little black mo, dark hair oiled and brushed back. A little swarthy. Sports shirt and pressed trousers. A neat and no-nonsense sixty-something.

I got to my feet, brushed the dust off me, and faced him.

“You must be the Old Cunt,” I said.

He laughed richly and put his hand out to shake. “Charles – Charlie – will do,” he said. “Pleasure to meet you, Bill.”

We shook.

The younger one stood up. A thin, rangy lad in his twenties. Dusty work clothes. A little weatherbeaten and hunted-looking. Longish fair hair. Not unlike Dennis Wilson.

“And you're the Boy Wonder,” I said.

“Mark, actually.” We shook.

“You ever do any acting?” I said.

He shrugged, which could've meant, Yeah, a bit. Or, Who cares? Or, I don't understand you. “You sure did a job on the old boy there,” he said, nodding in Max's direction.

Max stood up slowly, still rubbing his neck. He looked at the three of us and smiled. “No real harm done, I suppose. Charlie, how about a pot of coffee for us all?”

“No coffee,” I said. “No tea and scones. No talk. No nothing. Give me the money and the smack, and then I'm gone.”

Max was nodding, too fast, too enthusiastically. “Yes, yes, of course. You've got the shits. I understand, I understand. Jesus, after everything? Yes, yes, only natural. We're going to get the stuff, sure thing, no risk. A hundred percent,
yes
. And the money. Oh boy. So glad you made it. But it
did
take you a fucking long time, you'll have to admit—”

I rushed at him again, but he quickly backed away and the other two stepped in front of me.

Charlie said, “Max. Shut up, will you?” He turned and said to me, “Come inside.” And to Max and the kid, “I think we'd
best show Bill the money.” He waited.

Mark looked at Max and said, “Fair enough.” Max nodded. They got in the truck, Mark in the driver's seat, and took off out the front gate.

“Let's get inside,” said Charlie. “They'll be an hour at least.”

It was closer to two hours before I heard the truck return.

Mark dragged a very full army kitbag into the kitchen, Max trailing behind him. He tipped it up, and a pile of neatly tied bundles of ten- and twenty-dollar notes tumbled onto the lino.

He stood back. Max hovered behind him, looking sheepish and hopeful. I sat and stared at the hill of money. I couldn't begin to guess how much was there. A hundred thousand? More.
Hundreds
of thousands. Enough. I could feel the eyes of the other three on me, waiting.

They would each be claiming a piece. In my head I cut the pile in half. That could be mine. The other half could be split between the three of them. My half would still be a good whack. A get-out-of-trouble whack, with plenty left over.

Maybe they'd argue for an even four-way split. Not so good, but a quarter of the whole would still be a lot. Get me out of trouble, invest a little something, and with luck a year or two of no work.

“More than you let on in the book,” I said to Max.

“Jimmy gave me the bulk of the loot to look after. When I split from the others.”

I turned back to the mountain of money. Maybe Max and Mark had already taken out a nice sly share anyway.

“Is this it?” I said.

Shocked looks on all their faces.

“Isn't it
enough
?” said Max. “Of course it's
it
. The whole fucking lot.”

I looked around at the three of them.

“What about the smack?” I said.

After a bit of back and forth it was decided all four of us would go, in two cars. Max and Charlie in the Dodge, Mark and I
following in my panel van. Late morning we drove off the farm, back down the dirt road and onto the potholed bitumen. A mile along we passed a council truck and a pair of linesman boiling a billy. We saw no one else on the road.

Mark didn't seem inclined to start a conversation, just stared ahead, his lank hair hiding half his face, smoking roll-your-owns.

“So it was you who took the manuscript to Gould?” I said, after we'd been driving for ten minutes.

“Yes. That was me.”

“Did you also put the book in the cab for me to find?”

“Yeah,” he said, glancing at me, smiling slightly. “That girl Steph, Gould's offsider, she pocketed a few copies, slipped some to me.”

“That's way more money back there than Max lets on in the book,” I said.

“What he told me, when they made the getaway from Melbourne, day after the Moratorium, and Max decided to bail – well, Jimmy had the flash idea of splitting the swag, for safety's sake. The big bit ended up with Max. When they all got killed, everyone figured the robbery money had gone up in smoke at Violet Town.”

“Old Max is full of surprises,” I said.

“Wait till you see the smack,” he said.

“The compressed brick?”

He shook his head, smiled. “The
suitcase
. The suitcase
full
of compressed bricks.” He turned to me, grinning. “So Max says.”

“Do you know where it is?”

He shook his head. “I've never been there.”

We were silent for a few minutes, then I said, “Who's Charlie?”

“He owns the property. What Max had in the book about coming out of his blackout, driving the tractor, not knowing who he was – that's pretty much how it really happened, he says. He took some liberties, obviously.”

An hour along the bitumen, we turned onto a dirt track towards a row of hills. The track wound into the rises, through a
gate, and another. Then the Dodge pulled over. Max and Charlie got out. We did likewise.

Max got a shovel and a mattock off the back of the truck and smiled, “We'll need these.” He turned and marched across the paddock towards a low saddle between two hills, two hundred yards away. The three of us followed through the long grass.

Max, twenty yards ahead of us, got to the ridge first. And came to a halt.

We caught up. The hillside dropped away a little more steeply on the other side, down into a gentle natural depression. A D8 excavator was parked at the bottom. The natural rill draining the two hills had been dug out recently, and the many tons of black dirt piled at the low end to make a dam wall. The new dam was large, but the wall hadn't been levelled off yet. For a hundred yards either side, the entire hillside was torn up by the caterpillar tracks.