The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  One night early in their friendship Wilder, given to discovering revelation in cliché, told the Doll that power corrupts people, and then paused, as if this were some profound new insight, before saying:

  “I believe that, you know, I really do.”

  But at the Chairman’s Lounge, where she had been working for a short time by then, the Doll had already seen how people would do most anything for power and money. The Doll saw it was people who made these things, who thought these things mattered, who made these things important. And so she said:

  “I dunno. Maybe it’s people who corrupt power.”

  Wilder laughed so much she spilt her drink. The Doll realised she had said something both naïve and foolish. She felt very stupid and, not wanting to feel so very stupid ever again, the Doll let Wilder do more and more of the talking as the years rolled on.

  But what at first seemed clever came with the passing of time to sound to the Doll almost pompous, even ignorant. In the same way, over the years, what was initially captivating became repetitious, while what seemed insightful and wise began, like cheap paste jewellery that flashes brilliantly when new, to grow dull and even tawdry. And what at the beginning appeared an exotic, exciting private life increasingly came across as simply messy.

  Wilder had had a string of relationships with men who often seemed as crazy as she was. The most recent, with a married cop, had ended only three months earlier, because, according to Wilder, he wouldn’t leave his wife.

  “He just didn’t get it,” Wilder had said. “I thought our love would see us through everything.”

  The Doll thought that the certainty of Wilder’s opinions came from having in some way never quite grown up, while Wilder thought the Doll’s blank incomprehension of many of Wilder’s opinions was a consequence of not having gone to university. But Wilder liked the clarity of the Doll’s directness, and the Doll liked the enthusiastic profusion of Wilder’s contradictory thoughts. They frustrated each other and they could not bear to pass more than a few days without seeing each other.

  “We’re mates, eh, Gina?” Wilder would frequently say. She would hold out her hand with the neatly rolled joint that was never far from her lips and point it in the Doll’s direction as though it were a judge’s gavel, “I know nothing will ever pull us apart.”

  And when the Doll didn’t bother replying to such declarations—because the Doll wondered how Wilder could know such things, and both hated and envied Wilder her certainty—Wilder would end, as she ended so many of her conversations, by saying:

  “I believe that, you know, I really do.”

  And somehow that always seemed to seal the matter.

  Wilder believed in so many things: the Labor Party, trade unions and the Sydney Morning Herald; the therapeutic effect of porridge in the morning and gin and tonic in the evening. She believed in politics and that the world could be made better, that Australians were good people, the best of people, kind and generous. She believed in belief. And the Doll found all Wilder’s beliefs at once reassuring and annoying, for the Doll felt certain about nothing, and had come to believe in little other than what she made of her own life.

  Wilder and the Doll went out and sat in Wilder’s small backyard. There was a trellis and a grapevine and a bougainvillea that seemed as weary as the world felt that night. There was a brick side wall along which Wilder had placed rocks and where she kept her bonsai plants in a miniature garden. Most were dead.

  “My poor darlings,” said Wilder. “This heat was the end for them.”

  Wilder had believed in her bonsai garden, but, she said, when things are not fated to be, they are not fated to be. The Doll knew Wilder to be as careless with her plants as she could sometimes be with her friendships: the lack of regular watering she suspected had as much to do with their demise as destiny. But she said none of this, and they talked for a time about trivial things, and it suited the Doll to lose herself in such triviality.

  “People are good,” Wilder said at one point, “and in the end goodness comes through. I believe that, you know, I really do.”

  32

  Wilder was always out to convert the Doll to goodness. Whether it was the merits of organic food or the wrongs of globalism, whether it was refugees or minke whales or trade unionists or some other endangered species, she was always seeking to sign the Doll up to good causes, lending her DVDs, books, magazines, all of which the Doll never looked at until Wilder asked for them back and she had to find them, lost amidst an ocean of decorating and fashion magazines.

  “Even Athens,” she said, referring to the cop boyfriend of whom she had only spoken of violently since they split up. “Even he was a good man, you know. In his way. He gave me that bonsai there,” Wilder said, pointing to some dead twigs sticking out of a dried piece of peat in a blue china dish.

  Wilder was drunk now, and Wilder was lost in all that she believed was good, in the power of good, and this left the Doll feeling only more scared. Wilder relit her joint, took another sip from her can of gin and tonic, then, giving up on the weary joint, butted it out in an ever overflowing Bakelite ashtray.

  “No Tanqueray, I’m afraid,” Wilder continued, “only this shit. Kiwi corn syrup with industrial alcohol and some artificial essence of gin. Where was I …? Yeah, people, like, people think they can’t do anything against the world. But you watch: their goodness will out.” She fixed the Doll with a smile. “Even Athens, you know, even him.”

  “He was kinda cute,” said the Doll, who wasn’t displeased at the conversation going elsewhere, and her mind with it.

  “When I met him,” said Wilder, rolling another joint, “I thought he was real cute. We talked a bit—it was that wanky bar in town, the Art Bar—and first it was good, but then he got going on about justice, how there wasn’t any.”

  “‘All these young cops,’ he says, ‘I tell ’em, I say, just one bit of advice, just one: Don’t ever think it’s fair. And then in five years they come back to me about this or that, and they say, it’s not fair. What’d I say? I say.’”

  She went on about Athens then telling her how in his early days as a cop he had been a sniper in their special operations group. One night, they had to stake out a Vietnam vet holed up in the bush out of Newcastle. There was a long siege that ended with Athens getting told to take the vet out, a double tap, one bullet for his heart and one for his head. He shot the vet dead as ordered.

  The Doll had heard some of this before—she had known how Wilder had met Athens, and how Athens had been a sniper, but she didn’t know that he had killed someone. Not the least pleasure she took in Wilder’s company was the way old stories were at odd moments reinvigorated with such fresh, remarkable details.

  “And then,” said Wilder, “in the middle of the bloody bar Athens’ eyes just fill up with tears. He’s pissed, I mean, he’s really pissed.

  “‘You know,’ he says to me, ‘I didn’t feel bad. That’s the worst of it. I felt really good. Pumped, you know. You’d think it’d be hard and bad, but it wasn’t. I never felt so alive.’

  “‘That’s not right,’ I said.

  “‘Of course it’s not fucking right,’ he says. ‘Nothing’s right. Nothing’s fair, that’s what I tell all the young cops, I say’—and then he was off again, and it was just the same shit over and over. But you know what? He had me after that.”

  And her story told, Wilder seemed suddenly deflated, as if it was all that had kept her going. “I was down the street just before, and I was thinking about Athens and turned to look at something in a chemist’s doorway and I knocked over a whole stupid sunglasses stand,” Wilder said. “Fell everywhere. You know that feeling, Gina, when things just won’t stop falling?”

  33

  Richard Cody was not given to consciously thinking out his desires and ambitions. He would have been offended if anyone had suggested to him that he used people to his advantage, or that he had ever hurt anyone in order to better his own situation. And yet, when confronted with t
he fact of his humiliating demotion on the one hand, and on the other with his recognition of the shadowy face on the television news as that of the pole dancer who had insulted him the night before, his first instinct was to begin to make contact with a range of people, most of whom he had had nothing to do with for a long time, but for whom he now felt a suddenly renewed fondness.

  He opened his wallet, took out the card Ferdy Holstein had given him the night before, and rang him. Richard Cody stressed the confidential nature of their conversation and how, if Ferdy were to keep quiet, it could work well for him.

  Ferdy Holstein told Richard Cody what Krystal’s real name was, but went on to say that he knew little else about her. If he was curious as to why he was being called, he gave no inkling of it.

  “She’s a loner,” said Ferdy Holstein.

  Perhaps he too had seen the footage, thought Richard Cody, and was keen to put some distance between him and the dancer.

  “You want to know what she thinks?” said Ferdy Holstein. “You never know what she’s thinking.”

  Over that long Sunday evening, Richard Cody wandered his Vaucluse home with his phone, piecing together not so much the truth of Gina Davies’ life as rehearsing the story he would present about it. He remembered with pride how he had held the table at Katie Moretti’s with his tales of the three bombs and terrorists and evil. He wanted to do the same again, but this time mesmerising not a dozen people, but millions. And so he saw the story as if he were sitting in a lounge room watching his own plasma screen as the shocking tale slowly unfolded.

  Yet, as always with such stories, when he began thinking about it he realised that there were key dramatic elements lacking. By degrees, Richard Cody came to see that what was missing was what was unknown: the life of the pole dancer.

  The man was obvious—a Middle Eastern name and a no-doubt predictable past—and, from what the news reports were saying, a known terrorist. But the pole dancer was different: an Aussie turning on their own—an unknown terrorist. Because there was no doubt now in Richard Cody’s mind that Gina Davies was a killer. The more he thought about her, the more inescapable and logical his thinking was. Just looking back on the time he had spent with her the previous night he could see now that something hadn’t been right about her. Hadn’t she been secretive when he asked her about her private life? And when he put to her a more than generous proposal wasn’t she unpleasantly aggressive? ‘No,’ thought Richard Cody, ‘something was wrong with her—very wrong.’

  And the more he thought about it, the more it all made sense, and what at first seemed ludicrous—a pole dancer an Islamic terrorist!—now seemed insidious and disturbing. What better cover? After all, hadn’t Christine Keeler slept with both the Russians and Profumo? And wasn’t the Chairman’s Lounge popular with the influential and powerful? It was obvious what was going on, and it was up to him, Richard Cody, to expose what was happening. And what a story it would be! What ratings they would get! It had everything—sex, politics, even bombs! ‘No doubt about it,’ thought Richard Cody, ‘it’s a killer.’ He reached for his phone and dialled another number. There was no time to lose.

  34

  It was too hot to cook, so Wilder and the Doll walked a hundred metres down the street and entered a small and undistinguished restaurant that sat on the corner of the crossroads, Max leading the way, still in his Spider-Man jocks.

  Johnsons was an unpromisingly named ethnic restaurant of a type that had disappeared almost everywhere else in Sydney. It still had cheap chairs with torn vinyl seats, and its plywood panelled walls were decorated with flyblown black and whites of early television stars, long lost to death or the even more relentless obscurity of supermarket magazines, autographed with the doomed flourish of those condemned to Sydney celebrity. Though its colours had long since disappeared with time, a framed photograph of Lebanon also remained, as enduring in adversity as the nation it depicted. For Johnsons was, as a proudly displayed restaurant review from a 1966 Sydney Morning Herald reported, Sydney’s first Lebanese restaurant, recommended for the adventurous diner.

  It was empty, save for two late middle-aged Lebanese men who, though dressed in waiters’ black trousers and white shirts, sat in a corner quietly drinking short Arabic coffees and playing dominoes. On seeing Wilder and Max, their faces lit up.

  “Mr Maxie! Mr Maxie!” they cried, and Max walked up to them like a caliph returning from exile, acknowledging their attention with a shy smile. He disappeared into the kitchen in the arms of a large, elderly woman.

  The Doll began telling Wilder her story in full after their second red wine, but the more she talked the more her fears seemed far-fetched—so improbable and so impossible—and she worried that she was beginning to sound a bit crazy, as if she was spinning fantasies out of a few newsflashes.

  The Doll could sense that Wilder felt she had become a little hysterical and that this was now a somewhat boring story. Worse, to the extent Wilder had any interest, she seemed to be suggesting that the Doll might in some manner have brought this on herself, and in some strange way therefore be guilty.

  “So this Tariq,” Wilder said, “how do you know he was Tariq? Didn’t you ever ask what his full name was?”

  And perhaps, thought the Doll, it was a very stupid thing to go to a strange apartment with a man you barely knew and whose name you had no proof of, and not ask for ID, but how else does one go to bed with a man?

  “And you were drunk,” said Wilder, “and had done some coke …”

  And perhaps, thought the Doll, it was the height of folly to sleep with a stranger in such a state.

  “He had an accent,” said Wilder, “and he’s dark and he’s foreign and you never asked where he came from?”

  The Doll had been curious, and had perhaps harboured the secret hope that in the future she would discover more about Tariq. But on the night his droning on about raster graphics had merely confirmed to her that, like everyone else, there was a large part of Tariq’s life that, far from being illegal, was simply humdrum dullness, hardly worth knowing about. For one evening two people simply had fun together. Questions had seemed intrusive, unnecessary; questions had been superfluous, because for one night they had found something beyond the answers of home and history—maybe something easily broken, maybe not serious, but perhaps all the better and truer for being only about the moment.

  But now that something seemed to her the opposite. It seemed small and trivial and stupid, and it made her feel small and trivial and stupid. And all those questions she never asked and all the answers she never got now appeared to matter so much, all the information that might have saved her from the shit she now felt buried in.

  “I mean, Gina—hello? You get on the gear with a teatoweller and give him a blow job? I mean, I dunno, but Christ almighty …” Wilder shook her head, waved a hand in dismissal, and didn’t even bother finishing what she was saying.

  In the middle of the Doll describing to Wilder how the police had staked out the apartment block, Wilder struck up a conversation with one of the waiters on the best way of making baba ghanoush. It was, the Doll felt, as if Wilder thought she was overly obsessed with the problem.

  “But why me?” asked the Doll at one point. “Why are they doing this to me?”

  And Wilder smiled at her like she was some foolish child who, having done wrong, remains confused as to why they are being punished.

  “Look, tomorrow you’ll wake up and it’ll all be over,” Wilder said. “There’ll be some new story—another bomb, another water crisis, another country being invaded by the Americans, Shane Warne discovered writing a postcard. It’s just a bizarre thing. It’ll pass.”

  The Doll laughed. And it was true that there was nothing to be frightened of, because it was, as Wilder pointed out, simply a ridiculous series of associations, and these mistakes would be cleared up quickly. Terrorism was a serious thing, no doubt about it, Wilder said, and that’s why the people dealing with it were experts who weren’t about to
chase a pole dancer, not when there were real monsters out there.

  “Do you seriously think they’re going to storm through the door of Johnsons,” said Wilder, “the most forgotten restaurant in the world, just to arrest you? I don’t think so.”

  The Doll began to feel better, safer. No one was after her. Here, with Wilder, the Doll finally felt secure. Wilder went off on one of her stories, and it warmed her, the gentle Lebanese food, the soft red wine they drank with it, and Wilder’s tales.

  “When they find out where you work, they’ll be the ones who are going to feel stupid,” Wilder said after a while.

  “Perhaps I should go and see the police,” the Doll said. “In the morning, maybe?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” said Wilder, as though everything were known and not worth knowing at the same time.

  “Yeah, whatever,” the Doll wearily repeated, trying to sound convinced.

  “It’s all a joke,” said Wilder, again bored, gazing at the curling photos on the wall.

  The matter of Tariq remained a mystery.

  “Would a terrorist know how to merengue?” the Doll asked Wilder.

  And though she didn’t say it, the Doll didn’t think his behaviour in bed suggested a devout Muslim, but then her experience of bedding devout Muslims was nonexistent.

  “And the picture of the bearded man they keep showing on the television,” said the Doll, “that they say is Tariq but doesn’t look like him.”

  “He could have lied,” said Wilder, her eyes returning to the Doll.

  The Doll was quiet for a moment.

  “Or he could be a mistake,” she said finally. “Like me.”

  35

  From what Richard Cody could gather from his phone calls there was no motive. Far from being a Muslim, there was no evidence that Gina Davies knew anything about Islam. As much as anyone knew, she had never received any terrorist training.