‘What would you know about it?’
I thought about telling him but decided against it; Kevin was inclined to be irrational when he was angry. ‘It stands to reason. You’ve got a job lined up.’
‘How’d you get on to me?’
‘A whisper. Cathy asked me to look for you. She’s worried and she’s got good cause. She says she’ll wait for you to serve the five or six.’
The laugh that came across the line wasn’t the old feckless Kevin laugh. It was harsh and bitter, and had not a shred of amusement in it. A prison laugh, maybe.
‘Wait? Cathy? Her idea of waitin’s to only be taking on one at a time.’
I didn’t say anything; I was more interested in listening.
‘Well, Cliff,’ he said. ‘You can tell her I’m in the pink… shut up!’ I heard a short laugh and a scuffling sound, then Kevin went on in a steady voice. ‘And I’ll be in touch soon. She’s not to worry.’
‘Oh yeah, great! She’ll eat that up, Kevin. That’ll fix everything.’
‘Soon means soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘Tomorrow.’
Jesus, I thought, it’s tonight.
‘Now, Cliff, you just get yourself a bottle of something good and settle down for a quiet night with your books. You hear me, Cliff? Get nosey and you’re history. Got it?’
‘Yeah.’ He rang off, and I sat there holding the phone and thinking it had been one of the least productive conversations of my life. The three unknowns were still unknown and I still didn’t know what I was going to do. I phoned Cathy, couldn’t get her and chased her unsuccessfully through four telephone numbers, leaving urgent messages for her to call me.
The temptation to do as Kevin suggested, hit the bottle, was immense but I fought it. I had one big Scotch and left it at that. I spoiled some eggs trying to make an omelette of them, ate the mess and felt bad. Towards the back of my brain a voice was telling me to call Frank Parker, but I kept getting a picture of Kevin with his beard and dyed hair and I couldn’t do it.
When the call came I nearly hurdled a chair to snatch up the phone. It was Cathy; she told me to wait until she came over, which would be in about an hour. She sounded steady and she didn’t want to hear anything I had to say.
It was after ten when she arrived-in a black velvet jacket and white silk pants. Her face was unnaturally pale and her eyes were over-dilated and bright. She had a bottle of Black Label Scotch with her and she invited me to pour her a big one before she draped herself on the couch in my living room. She lit a cigarette and stubbed it out straightaway, as if she didn’t want to obliterate the odour of sex that clung to her. She drank some Scotch and arched up her shoulders and wriggled.
‘I’ve been screwing my brains out,’ she said.
‘Is that right? It made you hard to find-I spoke to Kevin today.’
She drank some more, then she put the glass down and assumed a mock demure pose; she half-closed and dimmed her eyes and pressed her knees together. It disconcerted me; I wondered if she was drunk, but her co-ordination seemed perfect and she appeared to be under tight control.
‘Tell me everything about it.’
‘Well, he’s in Sydney… and, ah… he hasn’t been in touch for a good reason. He thought the cops’d be watching you and…’
‘I’m a sort of decoy, is that right?’ She said it brightly but with an edge of hate.
‘I knew you wouldn’t like it.’
‘It’s not so bad.’ She picked up her drink and took a hefty belt. ‘I always liked you, Cliff. Why don’t I just slip into your shower and then nip into your bed? You know, I can make it seem like I never did it before.’ She laughed. ‘Or only once or twice. What d’you say?’
Any other time I’d have been tempted. I can be a sucker for fantasy and I hadn’t been to bed with a woman that month or the month before. But the ulterior motive was just a bit too obvious.
‘Cut it out, Cathy. This is a serious situation.’
Her mood changed instantly. She knocked off the rest of the Scotch and stood up abruptly. ‘I’m going to have a shower anyway, to wash off the last of you bastards.’
Water ran; she had an instinct for where bathrooms were. I put some more Black Label in my glass and waited for her to come back clean and explain to me. I seemed to do a fair bit of that-waiting to be explained to-and it sometimes made me feel like a foreigner with an imperfect grasp of the language.
The make up was gone when she came back; her hair was damp and she’d pulled the exotic clothes on as if they were a sweater and jeans. She looked, without the gloss, tough in a different way. She made herself another drink and got a cigarette going.
‘I know all about it,’ she said.
I stared at her.
‘I mean, I know about the job. Five Dock?’
I nodded. ‘How?’
She drank and her smile reminded me of Kevin’s laugh over the phone-no fun in it. ‘I knew you were good, that you’d find something, but I wasn’t sure you’d be straight with me. So I had someone not as good as you trailing you around. He reported in to me this afternoon-all the details. It wasn’t hard to work out what the job was. D’you know what they’re lifting?’
I shook my head.
She gave that smile again and held up both hands. ‘This, and this-booze and smokes. It’s a hot load, going to get hotter. So you don’t have to worry about honest citizens getting hurt.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘Wasn’t hard once I knew it was trucks and who the Queensland money was.’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s a pretty dumb game though-bloody well-guarded that shipment’ll be. You did some good snooping, Cliff. The other bloke was impressed — you didn’t spot him?’
‘Maybe. Just at the end. Couldn’t be sure. Cathy… did you try to talk Kevin out of this?’
She shook her head and drew on her cigarette.
‘Why not? I did.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Not interested. Seemed very sure of himself.’
She consulted her watch again.
‘Why d’you keep doing that?’
She got up. ‘You won’t go to bed, least you can do is take a girl for a drive.’
We were rolling past the Leichhardt Town Hall when she told me. ‘You won’t be able to get too close,’ she said. ‘It’ll all be staked out. I told the cops.’
‘God, Cathy! Why?’
She didn’t answer; she just sucked on her cigarette and stared ahead through my dirty windscreen.
It was near midnight and a mist was rising off the canals and grass. Wednesday night, quiet, a good night for crime. The question of getting close never arose because it all happened as we skirted the park. The highway turn-off was in full view and I saw the high shape of a semi-trailer heading down the road. Then lights pointed crazily to the sky and there were flashes and flares out of the darkness. There was a sputtering of bright orange from up the hill where I’d seen the two heavies reconnoitering. The truck seemed to meander slowly down the grade, then pick up speed abruptly. Too abruptly: it skidded, lurched and rolled. There were dark shapes moving fast from the park and pairs of headlights suddenly cut through the dark mists. I stopped and braked without knowing it; the whole thing seemed to take an age with each separate part occupying its own bit of time, but in fact it must have been all over within a couple of minutes.
Cathy sat still and stared, and then she jumped and swore as her cigarette burned down to her fingers. She jerked open the door.
‘What’re you doing?’ I reached across for the handle.
‘I want to see. I was the fizzgig, I’ve got the right!’
‘Don’t be a fool! You don’t know what’s going to happen. Who’s dead, who’s alive. You know what’ll happen to you if they find out you put them in.’
She broke my grip on the handle and opened the door. ‘Who cares?’ she said.
I got out and followed her down the road and across a broad strip of grass. We were challenged a hundred yards from the scene by a shape that rose up from behind a bush. Cathy walked unblinkingly towards the gun.