‘More than thirty years later, and a thousand kilometres from his old turf, and I happen to walk past him — hardly a foot between us — in my retirement.’
‘Gangsters have to retire too, don’t they?’
‘Gangsters don’t retire, Peg. It’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle.’
‘Packing heat, was he?’
‘Packing heat? Not even old coppers say ‘packing heat’, Peg. I get the feeling you’re not showing the same level of concern as I am.’
‘So these things happen. You’re moving to the coast. A face you know passes by. Who cares? Maybe he was on holiday. Maybe he plays bowls and eats out on his pensioner’s card. How’s the house-hunting going, by the way?’
~ * ~
I slept poorly that night. A huge, rolling, boiling thunderstorm had swept over the hinterland in the west and headed out to sea. I had never seen storms like the ones I saw in Queensland. Vicious. Without a hint of humanity. Like some people I knew.
My little van shivered on its concrete apron, and as the thunder rumbled around me and the rain pounded the aluminium skin of the Viscount, I recalled the visit I had paid to the Boltcutter back in the Cross of the early seventies, when he was known as the rather ostentatious Dapper Dan the Antiques Man. He got away with the name. Things were different in the seventies.
Every now and then the underlings of 21 Division were sent out to check on the illegal casinos — not that we knew they were there, of course — as part of ‘operational procedures’. In short, we let them know we were watching them. I was young, stupid, and eager to get ahead, and during these ‘sweeps’ I would return with bottles of booze, bowls of fresh pasta, and even little brown envelopes as gifts to 21 Division.
‘That’s a bribe right there,’ I’d say to a senior officer, pointing to the gnocchi. ‘Should we proceed with the charge?’ I’d be laughed out of the office. The booze, food, and especially the cash, would always magically disappear.
Dapper Dan’s antique store had its entrance next to a French patisserie, its window shelves filled with strange, golden breads and exotic desserts and elaborate pyramids of biscuits dipped in chocolate. You could smell it on the street. To pass through that and into Dapper’s was like passing from life to death.
As I opened the door, a bell rang. The showroom was dim, reeked of mildew, and was packed floor to ceiling with old bureaux, mirrored wardrobes, suits of armour, hat stands heavy with felt and feather, dolls in clear perspex tombs, shop dummies dressed as ship captains and saloon madams, and whole shelves of stuffed rodents, dogs, birds.
‘Hello?’ I said loudly, and proceeded into the room. ‘Anybody here?’ My left ear was brushed by something and I jumped, startled, and lost my porkpie hat to the ground. It was the giant wing of a preserved American eagle, its talons fastened firmly around a motheaten mouse, its teeth bared in agony.
It took a while for my eyes to adjust, then the Dapper seemed to materialise in a rear doorway. He was a shadowed outline wearing a canary yellow suit complete with spats and a fob watch. He also wore white leather gloves.
‘May I help you?’ He did not move in the doorway. He had one of those voices that was so common in Australia in the forties and fifties. You could hear the English plum rolling around behind a still developing nasally and flat Australian vernacular.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
I shook his hand, and the glove felt fleshy and cold.
He did not ask me to sit. He did not offer me anything. I could barely see his face in the poor light, and the sunshine trying to pour into the shop front was blocked, diffused, slashed and hacked at by samurai swords, furniture, old clothes, photographs of forgotten faces and dust-coated chandeliers.
‘You live upstairs?’ I asked.
‘How is that any of your business?’
I could see behind him a narrow staircase leading up into complete darkness. Dapper wasn’t moving.
‘Is that all, constable?’
‘It’s senior constable.’
‘Oh. Pardon me. Will that be all?’
‘Yes.’
I left slowly and could feel him watching me. There are men in the world who pretend they are something else, and their personas slip and slide and chafe against each other. It makes them easy to spot, with all that chafing. And there are men who show one thing completely, imperviously, and are the absolute opposite underneath. What lies beneath is similarly diamond-hard and immovable. That was Dapper. And that’s what made him so frightening.
I knew he could handle a Faberge egg with the utmost delicacy with those soft white gloves of his. And I knew, too, he’d break your neck without compunction.
‘Good day,’ he said.
I ducked beneath the eagle’s wing and held my hat as I did so. I kept thinking of the tiny little green feather in my hatband. I entered the street and the perfume of freshly baked baguettes.
The next morning when I stepped out of the van, the world felt reborn, as it so often seems in Queensland after one of their end-of-the-world storms. The grass near my annexe felt cool beneath my feet. Peg was right. I was being a silly youngish-old man still treading suspiciously into the landscape that is retirement. Then I found a card had been slipped beneath the door of my tin home. It was one of those postcards you buy at art galleries, which depicts the works of artists housed by the gallery. This one was from the Queensland Art Gallery. It showed a painting by Ian Fairweather.
Written on the back was: ‘Time to visit your Fair Weather Friends’.
Attached to the card with a pretty piece of red ribbon was a shiny bullet.
Who said the Gold Coast wasn’t cultured?
~ * ~
4
It was time to pay Dapper Dan the Antiques Man, a.k.a. the Boltcutter, a.k.a. one of my Fair Weather Friends, a visit. At least I assumed the Boltcutter was the author of the note. I didn’t have many pals in paradise yet, just Verne and Abigail in the van park, Maisy and Bert in the van next to mine, Bob and Patsy behind the bar at the surf club, Geraldo the real-estate agent, and Pep the South American exchange student at the local bottlo.
I didn’t tell Peg about the bullet. And I knew I should not have acted on an assumption. But I was bored looking at houses. I was bored heading out in the tinny and bobbing about in the Broadwater with my own thoughts. I missed my old mates and my family. This retirement thing was not all it was cracked up to be. I needed to keep busy. I needed to stickybeak around a little, like I’d always done. I watch those big, dumb, dirty ibis poking their long beaks into rubbish bins and I think — yeah, we’ve got a bit in common.
One call to an old mate at the Sydney regional police headquarters and I was standing outside the door to a high-rise apartment in Paradise Waters.
The door was painted a shiny, understated black. No turquoise or peach, and no little conch-shell unit numbers for our Dan.
My only problem was that the elderly gentleman who lived in the apartment was not Dapper Dan the Antiques Man, but a tall, thin, black-robed geezer straight out of a Lon Chaney film. If that wasn’t bad enough, he called himself the Priest.