It was 3 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon, traffic in Alexandria was light and that made it a halcyon time of day. Alexandria seems to live on hope; the city and airport bound traffic moves through its broad and narrow streets like a cancer, but the area has been promised a park, a big project park. Acres of industrial land, including a bricking quarry and factory, have been slated for development as a park to rival Centennial. People were hanging on to their slum terraces and the real-estate operators were waiting for the park like a kidney patient waits for a donor. Meanwhile, the place is home to a few different ethnic groups and some restaurants to match-most of the restaurants will survive the park, most of the people won’t.
I parked only three blocks away from the Sportsman Club, almost back into Erskineville, but that’s nearby parking in Alexandria. At 3.30 the club already had a quota of drinkers-some of them afternoon specialists, some for whom the morning session had dragged on a bit, some for whom the evening had started early. I had to wait by a flyblown receptionist booth while my name was sent ‘upstairs’. After I’d spent 10 minutes comparing the fly spots on the glass of the booth to the blackheads on the nose of the girl inside it, Harvey Salmon came down the stairs to escort me into the precincts.
Salmon was tall and heavy with thinning brown hair and an expression that suggested things were bad and getting worse. I’d never met him but his picture had been in the papers at the time of ‘Pilot’ Wrench’s departure; in the flesh he looked heavier, thinner on top and even less sanguine. But gaol changes a man. He stopped a couple of steps from the bottom and studied me carefully. He wore a pale grey suit, white shirt and dark tie, suede shoes; I had on sneakers and jeans, an open-neck shirt and a leather jacket. I wondered which of us was dressed right. Salmon hopped down the last couple of steps with fair agility, gave me a nod and put two dollars between the sliding glass panels of the booth.
‘Thanks, Teresa.’
Teresa didn’t even glance up from TV Week. ‘’kay,’ she said.
I went up the short flight of stairs with Salmon, through a smaller drinking room with fewer poker machines than the one below, and into an office that was dark and musty. The only light was struggling in through some Venetian blinds and the only places to sit were on the desk or on a rickety chair behind it. I sat on the desk and Salmon moved towards the chair. He also cleared his throat to speak but I got in first.
‘How about a drink?’
‘What? Oh yeah, sure, sorry.’ He moved back and opened the door; for a minute I thought he was going to yell his order across to the bar but he didn’t. He went out and I had about a minute and a half to study the room before he came back with two schooners. A minute and a half was plenty and I hadn’t drunk schooners of old for years. It wasn’t such a good start.
When he was settled behind the desk and his glass, Salmon cracked his knuckles-I hoped he wasn’t going to do that too often.
‘I need someone around for two days.’ he said.
‘Try downstairs. If you’re good company you shouldn’t have any trouble.’
‘I need someone who can handle a little trouble, if it comes up. Not that it will.’
‘You never can tell,’ I said. ‘Especially in your game.’
He ignored me as if he had a set speech to deliver and was going to do it, no matter what. ‘I was all set to fly out today, that was the deal.’ He paused, maybe to see if I was shocked. I wasn’t. ‘But there’s been some screw-up over the passport. I’ve got two days to wait, and I’ve got enemies.’
‘Book into the Hilton, watch TV and wait.’
He ruffled the thin hair which made it look even thinner. ‘I don’t want to do that. Am I going to do that for the rest of my life? The cops say they’re keeping an eye on me and also on certain people. But I don’t know. Who can you trust?’
I drank some beer and looked at him; he wasn’t sweating and he didn’t look afraid, but maybe he just lacked imagination the way he, apparently, lacked a sense of irony.
‘Where are you going?’ I asked.
‘R… South America. Same thing, see? The cops say they’ve squared it over there but I want to get a feel of what it’s like. I’ll have to get someone over there, but I want to do a few things while I’ve got those couple of days. Jesus, I’ve lived here fifty years, I don’t want to spend the last two days in a hotel room.’
An appeal based on the pleasure of Sydney will get me every time. Salmon could see he had me and he took a confident gulp of his schooner before giving me the details. He had the use of a flat in Erskineville for the next three nights and expected to catch his plane on Saturday afternoon. He had a few places to visit, a woman to see. He wanted to have a few beers here and there; he wanted to go to the trots and the beach. He wanted me to stay in the flat and tag along with him. He’d give me five hundred now and five hundred on Saturday. I said I’d do it. Truth was, I was getting rather bored with party-minding and money-escorting.
We finished our beers and stood up together-the Sportsman wasn’t the kind of place you wanted to stick around.
‘Got a gun?’ Salmon asked.
‘Yeah. Got the money?’
‘In the flat. Let’s go.’
We left the glasses on the desk and went out of the office and through the bar. A couple of the drinkers looked at us but not with any particular interest that I could detect. Still, it’s never too early to start doing a job well. Teresa had got to Wednesday in the TV Week; we went past her and out to the street. Salmon looked up and down it nervously.
‘Where’s your car?’
‘Here’s where you start living like a free man. It’s about half a mile away.’
We walked down Margaret Street which was fairly busy with shoppers and strollers and turned into a quiet side street. Salmon didn’t seem furtive but he wasn’t introducing himself to people either. I noticed that he had a reasonable tan and not a gaol pallor and I asked him about it.
‘I did some gardening.’ he said.
‘I’m surprised they’d let you grow anything.’
He slowed down and gave me what passed for an amused look; the downward drooping lines of his face squared up a little. ‘You’d be surprised what grows inside.’ He patted down his wavy hair with a brown hand.
When we got to the car he hesitated.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘What year is it?’ he said.
‘What does it matter? It goes.’
He got in. ‘It goes with the flat anyway.’ he muttered.
He directed me through the streets to one of the less grimy parts of Erskineville and we pulled up outside an ugly block of red-brick flats. I remembered that Harvey Salmon’s address used to be given as ‘of Point Piper’ but he approached the building unconcernedly.
‘It’s not much,’ he said. ‘Cops reckon it’s all they can afford. They reckon they’ve got a couple of the flats in the block so it’s safe. What d’you reckon?’
We went down a narrow concrete path to the back of the block and a narrow set of concrete steps that was flanked by a rickety wrought-iron hand rail. Salmon got a bright shining key out of his pocket and unlocked the door. The flat was one of three with doors giving on to a skimpy walkway: no balconies here, no window boxes even.
Inside, the decor was nondescript, new but not very new, and bought from a catalogue rather than according to anyone’s taste. I told Salmon to stay by the door while I checked the rooms: the small kitchen and smaller bathroom were empty, so was the bedroom. There was no one in the toilet. Salmon motioned me into the kitchen with a head movement. Out there he opened the fridge and got out a bottle of Reschs. I shook my head; he opened the bottle, poured a glass and drank it straight off. He poured another.