It was hot when I got to Vincent Street and a sweet, sickly coconut smell was coming up from the water, as if the bay were full of copra. I parked and walked up to the Frenchman’s place; the crumpled wall had been tidied back on to the empty lot behind it, and soon the grass and weeds would be creeping up to the bricks and covering them like a winding sheet.
The Frenchman’s house is a tumble-down weatherboard on rotting stumps; developers and trendies eye it greedily, but Cressy has some kind of protected lease and will die there. I walked up the overgrown path, brushing branches aside and wincing as the movement hurt my head. A tattered brown paper blind moved in the window of the front room; I reached through the hole in the wire screen and knocked on the door. It opened and Cressy stood there in slippers, pyjama pants and a buttonless cardigan. Pendulous breasted, toothless and with long, whispy white hair, he looked like a witch. But the thing in his hand wasn’t a broomstick, it was a shotgun. He poked it through the hole so that it almost touched my chest.
‘Go ‘way’, he said.
I backed off a step. ‘Take it easy. I just want to talk to you. My name…’
‘I know you. Go ‘way or I shoot you.’
I looked at the gun; the barrel was acned with rust, it was green around the trigger guard and the stock was dusty; but that didn’t mean it couldn’t kill me.
‘Why?’
‘Don’t talk.’ He lifted the gun a fraction. ‘Just go.’
I was in no condition for side-stepping, ducking or for grabbing shotguns through wire screens. I went.
I was swearing, and my head was hurting as I drove back towards Glebe; if I’d had a dog I would have kicked it. I was driving fast down Cummins Street towards the turn up to Victoria Road, and when I touched the brake there was nothing there. My stomach dropped out as I pumped uselessly and started to flail through the gears and grab the handbrake, which has never had much grip. I fought the steering and felt the wheels lift as I wrestled the Falcon left at the bottom of the hill. The road was clear, the tyres screamed and I got round. I ran the car into the gutter, closed my eyes and shook; the tin fence at the bottom of the hill had been rushing towards me and what you mostly meet on the right around the corner are trucks-heavy ones. I felt as if I was walking on stilts when I got out to examine the car: there was no brake fluid in the cylinder. It’s not a good way to kill someone; what if the victim thumps the brake a few times in the first hundred yards? But it is a good way to scare a man, like pushing a wall over on him. The more I thought about it the angrier I got.
I flagged down a cab and went back to Vincent Street. There was a lane running down behind the Frenchman’s place, and I went down that and climbed over his decaying fence. The yard was a tangle of pumpkin vines, weeds and many, many strata of animal, vegetable and mineral rubbish. I crept past a rusting shed and almost whistled when I saw the back of the house: there were about twenty broken window panes on the glassed-in verandah, some smashed completely, others starred and cracked around neat holes.
I got my gun out and sneaked up to the side of the verandah; the Frenchman was sitting in a patch of sun at a small table with a flagon of red wine and a racing guide on it. A breeze through the bullet holes was stirring the paper and he moved his glass to hold it down. I couldn’t see the shotgun. I wrenched the door open and went in; the Frenchman barely moved before I had the. 38 in his ear.
‘Sit down, Frenchy’, I said. ‘I think I’ll have a glass with you. Where’s the popgun?’
He jerked his head at the door leading into the house and I went through into the kitchen, if you call a stove and sink a kitchen. The shotgun was leaning against a wall and I broke it open and took out the shell. I rinsed a dirty glass in rusty water. Back on the verandah the Frenchman was marking the guide with a pencil stub. He ignored me. I poured out some of the red and took a drink; it was old, not good old, stale old. It tasted as if it had been filtered through old tea leaves. I poured my glass into his.
‘Who did the shooting?’ I said.
He shrugged and made a mark with the pencil.
‘Don’t come over all Gallic on me, Pierre. I’ve had a wall drop on me, a shotgun pointed at me and my brakes taken out, and it all has to do with you.’
He looked up; his eyes were gummy and hair from his nostrils had tangled up with a moustache as wild as his backyard. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. The shotgun? I protect myself, that’s all.’ He put some of the red down his throat as if he liked it.
‘Protection? From me?’
He shrugged again. ‘He shoots my house all to hell and tells me don’t talk to you. So, I don’t. Now you have the gun, so I must talk to you.’
I put the gun away and sat on a bench under the window, then I realised what a good target that made me and I moved across the room.
‘Who told you not to talk to me?’
‘On the telephone, how do I know? Bullets everywhere, then the phone. Don’t talk to Hardy. Hardy is tall and skinny with bandages. So.’ He opened his hands expressively, they shook and he put them back on the table.
He was scared but he drank some more wine and got less scared. I offered him fifty bucks and cab fare to Central Station and he accepted. He said he could go to Gosford for a few days, and I said that sounded like a good idea. After I’d given him the money he got out a bottle of wine with a respectable label on it and we drank that. He gave me names of people who’d profit if Pat’s dogs lost. The names didn’t mean anything to me. I asked him if these men would dope dogs, and he smiled and said something in French. It might have been ‘Do bears live in the forest?’ but French was never my strong point at Maroubra High.
I spent the early part of the afternoon getting my car towed to a garage and persuading a reluctant mechanic to give it priority. Then I went home and rested; the red wine buzzed in my head as a background to the throbbing pain, but after a sleep and a shower I felt better. I collected the car and drove to Rozelle to confer with Pat and pick up Terry who was visiting there. Pat’s street is narrow and jam-packed with houses, but the blocks are deep, and Pat keeps his dogs out the back. He once showed me the kennels and the mattresses they sunbathe on and the walking machine they use when it’s too hot or wet for the roads; it was like a country club except that the members were thin and fit. I didn’t like them much and they didn’t like me; without their muzzles I liked them even less.
Terry was out the front chatting to the neighbours when I pulled up. They’d known her since she started knocking a ball against the factory wall opposite, and even though they saw her on television now their attitude to her hadn’t changed nor hers to them-it was that sort of street. Terry and I went inside to talk to Pat, who was drinking tea in the kitchen.
Pat is a widower of five years standing but his house-keeping is as good as the Frenchman’s was bad. Terry made coffee in the well-ordered kitchen; Pat tried to talk about my injuries but I wouldn’t let him.
‘The Frenchy gave me these names.’ I said. ‘What d’you reckon?’ I read him the names and he chewed them over one by one. He sipped tea and smoked a rolled cigarette: Pat is small, brown and nuggety, his wife was six inches taller than he and gave her build and looks to Terry. Pat must have contributed warmth and charm because he has plenty of both. He was loyal to the game he was in too; he ruled out all the men I named as non-starters in the doping stakes. Two he knew personally, one was decrepit he said, and another was too stupid.
‘It’s none of them, mate’, Pat said. ‘Could be some new bloke the Frenchy doesn’t know about.’
‘Yeah, I’ll have to check that angle. Takes time though; this’ll be costing you, Pat.’
‘Worth it.’ He puffed smoke at me and I coughed. ‘Sorry, forgot you were a clean-lunger, like Terry. Good on you.’ He drew luxuriously on the cigarette.