It was after six o’clock, but King Street was still crowded and the shops were open. I hadn’t seen a paper or heard a radio for days and had lost track of the week. It was Thursday-late-night shopping. The road was full of cars crawling along and spewing fumes, but no one seemed to mind. If you can’t take car fumes, you don’t live or shop in Newtown. Brown was a quick walker; his purposefulness cut a path through the strolling shoppers and I recalled reading somewhere that this was a characteristic of successful Americans-purposefulness. I was finding it irritating.
‘Where the hell are we going?’
‘You’ll see.
Brown cut across the path of a woman pushing a laden shopping trolley and pushed open a door. I followed him into a long, dark room. Some soft music was playing and, as my eyes adjusted to the concealed lighting, I saw several low tables with cushions laid out geometrically around them.
Brown’s nostrils flared. ‘Smell that.’
I sniffed. I could smell seafood, spices, sesame seeds, chilli.
‘This is the best Korean restaurant south of Seoul,’ Brown said.
A waiter came out of the nether darkness and, after a lot of hand-shaking and bowing and Korean palaver, we sat on cushions with our legs under us or under the table. The dishes started to arrive and Brown identified them for me. Ku-jeol-pan came in a box with compartments that held fish, meat and vegetables and small pancakes; kimche was a very hot pickled cabbage; nakgibokeum was braised octopus with spicy sauce. Brown ate quickly but delicately; I picked along in his wake. We drank Korean beer from green bottles.
‘Barnes and me came here all the time,’ Brown said. ‘We’d eat this great food and get high on the beer and talk about old times.’
‘The war?’
‘Sure. What else?’
‘Bob Mulholland told me about an accident you had when you were clay shooting with Barnes.’
Brown gulped beer and speared up some kimche. He chewed it with relish. A few strands of the stuff had nearly taken the lining off my mouth. ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s right. Damn careless. But there was no harm done. Were you at the Han?’
I didn’t answer. I was still unsure of him, but getting surer. A few more customers had arrived and soft conversation blended with the clink of bowls and glasses. The waiter brought more beer.
‘They bring it till you tell them to stop,’ Brown said.
I drank some beer and told him that the closest I’d ever been to Korea was Malaya. I told him Bob Mulholland’s story about the US captain and his threat to Barnes.
‘You thought I might be him?’
I shrugged. ‘I think Barnes was murdered. It was something I had to check.’
Brown went on eating for a while. He drank more beer and belched. ‘I know all about that, but I never thought I’d have to talk about it.’
‘I think you have to now, Mr Brown.’
‘Yeah, well, he’s dead. What harm can it do? There haven’t been any real war heroes for a long time.’
I said nothing and waited for him to order his thoughts and memories. When he spoke, he sounded much older than the go-get-’em businessman, much more tired. ‘The sergeant got it wrong, Hardy. I was there. The sergeant couldn’t see a thing and Barnes ‘n me stage-managed it all. What could we do? It was get down that fuckin’ road or die.’
‘What happened?’
Brown looked around him as if the walls might become his accusers. He guzzled a glass of beer and shook his head. ‘We shot people to get through. All kinds of people. You had to be there to know what it was like. The panic was like… like cancer racing through everyone. Someone had to do something. We weren’t the only ones.’
‘What about the American captain?’
Brown sighed. ‘That guy was a coward. He kept going in the space we opened up. Bleating about human rights the whole fuckin’ time. Shit, the Chinks would’ve cut off his human rights where his legs met. The top brass wouldn’t have understood. No one who wasn’t there could understand. We did what we had to do.’
I had had enough military experience to know what he meant. ‘A scapegoat?’
Brown nodded. ‘The guy was courtmartialled. He died in Leavenworth pretty quick. Cancer, I think.’
My image of Barnes Todd was in fragments, although I knew that was a naive reaction. I couldn’t find any words. I drank some of the tepid beer.
‘What can I say?’ Brown growled. ‘It was a shitty war. Everyone who died in it was just plain dumb.’
I knew he was talking a kind of brutal, pragmatic sense. Despite what the promoters and medal-givers say, the main thing about war for the participants is survival. I tried to concentrate on my reason for seeking Brown out in the first place. I located it finally among the ruins of my stupid illusions. I gave him a quick resume of the case as I understood it. ‘So forget history,’ I said. ‘Any clues on why anyone’d want to kill Todd?’
Brown had listened attentively. He shook his head. ‘Can’t help you, I’m afraid. On the business level, all I know is I wanted Barnes to come in with me. He wouldn’t. No hard feelings. We met, we ate, we drank, we talked about the good times. That’s all.’
‘I see.’
He gave me one of his hard, tight-jawed looks. ‘That’s not a bad idea about the memorial, though. Why don’t we do something about that?’
I nodded.
‘Have some more kimche,’ Brown said.
17
Marshall Brown paid the bill. He drove me back to my car and wished me luck. I watched the Volvo until it turned at the end of the street. Brown had handled himself well; if he was lying he was the greatest actor since Olivier. I sat in my car with the thin beer and the exotic food inside me and ruminated: here I was, slightly dyspeptic, fairly sure that a flawed man had been murdered, sexually involved with that man’s wife and teamed up with a gaolbird who could be playing some weird Irish game of his own. It’s a strange way to make a living. I was aware of one big consolation, however-I was thinking less and less about Helen Broadway and all that pain.
I didn’t want to go back to Glebe just yet, either to wait for O’Fear or to find him already there with a bottle and the blarney. Suddenly my mood changed-maybe it was the nakgibokeum. In fact, I told myself, I was doing pretty well on this job, complications aside. I had eliminated the American captain and probably the threat-from-the-art-world theory. The danger to Barnes Todd had come from whatever he had been doing on his nocturnal perambulations with O’Fear. And there was physical evidence of that-photographs and something heavy in a plastic garbage bag. Those things were still being looked for by the opposition, and so could be found. I stared through the windscreen, which had picked up some salt from the spray at Maroubra. I saw fences and buildings and roofs stretching away forever. A set of photographs and a gar-bag suddenly didn’t seem so easy to find.
I started the car and drove without purpose. It was almost dark and I switched the lights on automatically, checked the rear vision mirror for a tail, automatically. I found myself heading for Bondi, drawn towards the sea, as almost everyone as if they’ve ever lived near it for a significant period of time. I cruised down Hastings Parade and parked outside the building where I could live and work, mortgage-free, if I chose to do so. It was part of the estate of a grateful client from the past, now dead. The heirs were still grateful, and I could have the place for a song. It was white, freshly painted. I couldn’t see the water from the street, but I knew that all of the windows along one side of the apartment afforded an eyeful of the Pacific.
This wasn’t sleazy, beachfront Bondi; this was a land where exterior woodwork was painted every year, two videos per household territory, compact disc country-suburbia-by-the-sea. Do you really want to live and work here, out of the smog?