I turned when I heard the door to the bar slapping shut. I suppose I’d expected Sunday and had arranged my face in a grin but it slid away when I saw who’d come in and what they were doing. Ted Williams was slamming home the top bolt on the door. His companion was making shoo-ing gestures at the barmaid. She ducked under the bar and went out through a back door. I heard a key turn in its lock. Williams’ mate was an Aborigine, very dark and not young. He couldn’t have been more than five-foot-six tall but he must have weighed fifteen stone. He had massive shoulders and a chest like a grizzly bear. He was wearing thongs, jeans and an outsize black T-shirt; his black, wavy hair was slicked down with water as if he’d got out of the shower in a hurry. Williams hadn’t changed a bit which meant that he was still a black Goliath. The only difference was that he’d left his smile in Redfern. I opened my mouth to say something but Williams cut me off.
“You said your name was Tickener mate. Now it’s Hardy. We don’t like gubbs who hang around bullshitting us, do we Tommy?”
The bulldozer shook his head and shuffled forward a few inches.
“No suh, wese don’t.”
I tried to smile but the joke wasn’t for me and my mouth was desert dry. I backed off towards the bar with my near-empty glass in my hand. I wished it was a gun. I wished I were somewhere else. Tommy looked me up and down and came forward again, this time with the light, balletic step of a trained fighter. His massive arms swung loose at his sides and he turned them over like a man cranking a car engine. The bar top ground hard into my spine and there was nowhere else to go.
“Who’re you?” I croaked. “I was expecting Jimmy Sunday.”
He grinned and slammed one fist into a palm.
“Jimmy’s busy,” he growled, “I come to take care of you meself.”
“You know Jimmy?” I was desperate, using Sunday’s name as a talisman.
He moved closer and from the way he moved I could tell that he wasn’t planning to waste any more breath on words. It wasn’t a negotiable situation. I wished I had Carlo’s blackjack. The glass in my hand felt as useless as a yo-yo. His eyes under heavy bushy brows were focused on my hands and feet the way every bar-room heavyweight knows to do. To hell with the look in the eyes – if you know your business that’s going to be fear. I slid along the bar just to stop myself from freezing up and to give him a moving target. But I had to stop somewhere and I did so where the bar met the wall. I let him get within punching distance and made a shaping-up gesture with about as much threat in it as a pas-de-deux. His punch came in hard and fast but he was a little bound up by fat and I leaned away from it. He lost balance for a fraction of a second and I clipped him on the ear as hard as I could while on the retreat. If I thought that’d win me a little respect I was wrong; he rushed at me like a bull crowding a matador into a barrio. He half-caught me but I twisted free and ground my elbow into the same ear. It didn’t seem to bother him; he circled with his arms outstretched and seemed to cut off half the room.
I backed away and cornered myself again over by the table where the elders had been playing cards. I stumbled against a chair and he came forward and threw a right at my belly. He was more than half a foot shorter than me and the punch was straight and full-forced. I rode back from it a bit but it knocked wind out of me and jellied my legs. He came on and I cocked my right for a haymaker to the head. He couldn’t have cared less and kept coming. I braced myself and swung my foot short and hard up into his crotch. He doubled over. He’d expected a fancy fist fight and I didn’t give him a chance to correct his mistake. I shuffled fast and delivered the foot again to the same spot. He started to crumble and I bunched my fingers and drove into his fleshy neck below the ear. I felt the muscle under the skin resist and then the knuckle bit into the veins and cartilage. He dropped in a heap and crashed his head on a table edge on the way down. As he fell, the breath wheezed out of him and I had a flash of memory about the sound. It was like the noise I’d heard in the car in the split second before my head caved in.
Williams hadn’t moved from the door. I eased my way out from the table and went across to the bar. I reached over it and pulled up a schooner glass which I filled with beer from the tap-gun the woman had left lying on the rusty tray. I took a deep drink and waited for my heart to settle back to a normal pace. Tommy was lying with his feet drawn up to his bulging belly. I set the glass down next to him. His eyes were open and he was concentrating everything he had on his pain. His dark skin had a yellowish tinge and some veins had broken in the whites of his eyes making them a murky pink. The harsh breath was coming regularly but with enormous effort. I was safe from him for at least ten minutes. A sound behind me made me turn as the barmaid came through her door at the back of the bar. She stared down at the man on the floor and then up at me with a new respect.
“Jesus,” she breathed. “What did you hit him with?”
“This.” I held up my fist which was swollen from the neck-punch and bleeding around the knuckles from the earlier tap.
“Jesus, do you know who that is?”
I looked at him again and tried to imagine him years younger and without the fat, as a chunky welterweight perhaps. But I couldn’t place him.
“No. Fighter was he?”
“That’s Tommy Jerome,” Williams said quietly.
I let out my breath in a whistle and felt back for the support of the bar. The jelly feeling had come back into my legs and I suddenly felt very, very tired. Tommy Jerome had killed two men in the ring and had beaten others so savagely that he’d run out of opponents. He was number one contender for the Australian welter and middleweight titles for a couple of years but he never got a shot at the titles because no fight manager wanted his meal ticket wrecked that badly. The championships changed hands a couple of times while Jerome sat there at number one. I’d read that he’d gone to England and lost a few fights there which could have only one explanation. That was ten or more years ago and he’d gone to seed badly. Still, I was glad I hadn’t known who he was before I hit him.
“I got lucky,” I said to the barmaid. “He thought I’d fight fair.”
“Lucky? Fair or unfair, you’re lucky to still have teeth.” She lit a cigarette and looked across at Williams. If it was a challenge he wasn’t taking it up. There’d been enough talking, now I had to get something done. I reached for my change on the bar and detached two dollars. I went around the bar and made her a gin and tonic and pulled a middy for Williams. I gave them the drinks and dropped the money on the till. There was a rattle at the locked door but we ignored it. Neither Williams nor the barmaid was happy with the situation but they seemed to have run out of ideas. They took the drinks.
“Right. Now I want Jimmy Sunday. Where is he?”
They drank but didn’t answer.
“Look,” I said to Williams. “I gave you a wrong name. OK, I’m sorry but I had reasons. Get Sunday here and you’ll see what I mean.” I jerked my thumb at Jerome who was lying crumpled and still. “What do I have to do, eat his kidney fat?”
“I’ll get Jimmy for you.” The barmaid moved off to the phone.
“Where is he?”
“Sharkey’s.”
“Call him.”
She did. A voice came on the line and I grabbed the phone. Sunday didn’t sound surprised to hear me and said he’d come straight down to the pub. The barmaid had picked up a cloth and begun polishing glasses. She was humming “Get me to the church on time”. I went over and slid down the door bolt and opened the door. Sunday was jogging easily down the street and I stood back with the door open and waved him in. The barmaid flicked some money out of my change and pulled a beer. She slid it along the counter to Sunday who grabbed it and went over to look at Jerome. He’d straightened up a bit and was trying to prop his back against the wall. He made it and massaged his crotch with both hands. A vein was throbbing hard in his forehead and there were bubbles of saliva at the corner of his mouth. I stepped quietly across and handed him the two-thirds-full schooner. He wrapped a big, dark hand around it and lifted it to his mouth.