The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  None of this predisposed Richard Cody to the notion of her innocence. They were merely problems to overcome. His instinct was to create a story in which he more and more believed, in order to allow him to further create that story. He did not say to himself: “Although there is no evidence of any guilt or wrongdoing, I am going to stitch this woman up with concocted assertions.” He did not think any such thing, because he would have despised himself if he had ever thought himself capable of making up such monstrous lies.

  Rather, as he talked to others on his phone, as he heard from the ASIO spook Siv Harmsen of the capacity of terrorist suicide bombers “to kill many hundreds of people at, say, a major sporting event”, he was rightly horrified.

  “It is horrifying,” Siv Harmsen agreed, “and we need stories that remind people of what horrifying things might just happen.”

  Richard Cody knew there was no need to remind Siv Harmsen of the last story they had worked on together, when Siv leaked him some documents that brought down a police minister with allegations of corruption—allegations that had in that particular case later been shown to be of no particular import or relevance to the police minister, though not without benefit for Siv Harmsen.

  “Can I count on you?” was all he needed to say.

  “I think we can count on each other,” said Siv Harmsen. “Don’t you, Richard?”

  He went on to say that whoever the woman was, she didn’t necessarily have much to do with any of it, as she had never showed up on their surveillance before.

  But the more Richard Cody listened to Siv Harmsen, the more persuaded he became that he was on to something. He didn’t tell Siv Harmsen he knew who the woman was. If the spooks still hadn’t worked it out by the following evening, that would be his first exclusive story.

  Once more he could see the pole dancer naked, the bomb belt wrapping around her waist. His horror at the possibility of such an act was as genuine as his smile of jubilation, for the puzzle was coming together, the pieces mostly there, and all he needed now was to persuade Jerry Mendes to give him a special to take such an amazing story to the country.

  It was, he told Jerry Mendes, now a race between Six and Gina Davies as to who got the story out first—her with her bombs or them with a tell-all current affairs special. Richard Cody, looking up at a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with Bill Clinton from when they had done a tv special together, could sense Jerry Mendes’s growing interest as he began talking about which night would have most impact on the ratings.

  Even before Jerry Mendes had said, “Okay, Richie, half-hour prime time, this Tuesday night,” Richard Cody had already pointed his finger revolver-like at the Arkansas charmer. Cocking his thumb and smiling, Richard Cody said to himself, “More than one Comeback Kid, Bill.”

  “Three conditions,” said Jerry Mendes, who liked talking at such times in dot points. “One: the special has to be about them both, the terrorist and the pole dancer. Call it ‘Al-Qa’ida’s Bonnie and Clyde’ or something. Two: I have to clear it with the big boss—he’ll want to make sure none of his Canberra mates have a problem.” The big boss was the chairman of the nation’s largest print and electronic media company, Amalgamated Press, and owner of the Six Network, Terry Frith, generally referred to only as Mr Frith.

  There was no Three.

  Richard Cody agreed—how could he not and why would he not?—knowing the lack of lead time would only help him bend the show his way, knowing also that his name would work like KY Jelly when Mr Frith talked with the government. After all, he had devoted his life to never offending anyone powerful.

  When he went to bed his wife was still sitting up watching tv with headphones. A Harvey Norman ad was playing. He watched her lips mouthing the words of the ad’s jingle in eerie breaths. He turned over on his back and was soon asleep.

  That night in his dreams, Richard Cody was on the stage accepting his fourth gold Logie as tv personality of the year, and all around him people fawned and flattered as they had before, all seeing in him qualities of the greatest intelligence and exceptional humanity as they always had.

  “Above all,” said a faceless host, “his work in uncovering a terrorist network in Australia showed Richard Cody to be not only Australia’s foremost journalist but its most fearless.”

  And it was only natural to Richard Cody that everyone loved him, and the question of whether anyone meant what they said was irrelevant, for once more he was the centre of everything that mattered, life was as it was always meant to be and life existed only for him.

  36

  The Doll, too, was dreaming that stifling night. After lying on a mattress on the hot floor of Wilder’s lounge room for over an hour, she remained wide awake. It was too quiet for her, the low ceiling felt ever closer, the room ever smaller, the air ever stuffier.

  Then she must have dozed off, for suddenly she was looking down on herself. She was alone and naked, being lowered into the earth and, as the dirt began piling up over her, as she saw the leering half-drunken faces of the drones and the suits, the creeps and the pervs, looking down at her like a photo that had been thrown into a garbage bin, she summoned all her strength to wake, to rise, to stand up and not abandon herself to that terrible fate of being alone and naked.

  The Doll crept into Wilder’s bedroom. Wilder slept quietly, a sheet pulled up to her waist. The only sound in the room was the slow rattle and rush of an old air con vent above the bed head. As gently as she could, the Doll slowly lifted the sheet and slid into the bed next to her friend.

  They both lay on their backs, not touching, Wilder asleep in a suitably Wilderish way, hands under her head. The Doll turned and breathed in slowly and deeply, just so that she might smell Wilder and be reassured. She thought how there is some secret of this life in the smell of those you love.

  And the Doll stretched out her hand until she could reach Wilder’s arm, just so she might touch it. There is a need, thought the Doll, such need in us all and no one can say what it is, and no one can admit that they are dying over and over every day for that need, that wanting, not being answered.

  The Doll felt Wilder’s arm come to slow life, and Wilder—awake? asleep?—moved one hand out from under her head and gently took the Doll’s hand in hers. And in this manner the two women slept, and for a time the Doll’s sense of worry passed and was replaced by another feeling, that the world was beautiful and good, that evil and stupidity were not its dominant, necessary forces, and all this was so if one could just hold on to it the way she now held on to Wilder’s hand, just hold on and hold on and never ever let go.

  MONDAY

  37

  THE DOLL AWOKE to a warm, slightly sour smell. It was Wilder.

  “Oh God,” Wilder said.

  Wilder sat up in the bed, and the Doll felt the heat of her body billow up from the wrinkled sheet that lay over them. Wilder was beautiful waking, like a cobra disturbed, her broad head darting up on her long neck.

  The ageing air con rattled on above the bed like an old friend that had travelled through the long night with them, and with them somehow making it through the darkness. The Doll felt rested and safe. It was some minutes before the events of the last two days began to trickle into her mind, a slight headache that could be ignored.

  “Ten past seven,” Wilder said, and with that she was out of the bed and gone from the room.

  The Doll dozed for a few minutes, but beneath the air con’s asthmatic whir she could feel the vibration of peak hour traffic rising through the room and summoning her. She got up and followed the sound of a radio to the small galley kitchen where Wilder was getting Max ready for school.

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Wilder, as she stirred the porridge she insisted on making for Max even in the middle of a heatwave, “you’re right. You should go to the police this morning. I’ll come with you. Clear this shit up. It’s ridiculous.” And then she smiled. “It’s funny, though. Gina the terrorist!” And they both laughed, and when Wilder handed her
a coffee, the Doll could feel that already the morning and life itself were once more turning out to be good and pleasant.

  The Doll’s thoughts swung to her day. She had her weekly private with Moretti that morning, and there she would earn the last three hundred dollars she needed for her deposit.

  “D-Day,” the Doll said. But then the news came on the radio, Max yelled for his mother from the bathroom, and Wilder left the Doll with the task of making Max’s lunch.

  The radio rumbled on with reports of more deaths from another suicide bombing in Baghdad. There was the crash and squeal of a garbage truck outside, Max was crying in the bathroom that he didn’t want to go to school, and the radio newsreader was talking of how police were seeking the companion of the suspected Middle Eastern terrorist who was photographed by a security camera entering his apartment two nights earlier, before eluding a police raid.

  The Doll stopped buttering the bread.

  “A police spokesman said they needed the woman to assist with their investigations,” the radio continued. “He refused to speculate on rumours that the woman was also part of the terrorist cell that planted the three bombs at Homebush Olympic stadium on Saturday.”

  The Doll looked up from Max’s sandwiches and saw Wilder staring at her.

  “These terrorists are subhuman filth,” a politician was now saying over the radio. “The government needs to be doing more to ensure they are hunted down and eliminated.”

  “Oh, Gina,” said Wilder. That was all.

  For as long as the Doll had known her, Wilder had been a landscape gardener. Wilder dealt with palettes of pavers, trucks of concrete, tonnes of loam, acres of grass, irate electricians, crazed dogs, cuts by power tools. She transformed stubborn elements of clay and plant, rock and debris and wood, into forms and shapes and shades and colours and sounds that would bring pleasure and arouse admiration. It wasn’t in Wilder’s way to be intimidated by life.

  But when the Doll, margarine and Vegemite-smeared knife in hand, looked at Wilder that morning, as the radio went on about how unnamed security sources had linked the family of the male terrorist to Islamic fundamentalist groups in the Middle East, Wilder, for the first time that the Doll had ever known, looked frightened.

  “What were you saying?” asked Wilder.

  “I’ve got Moretti this morning,” said the Doll, who had been saying nothing. Her mouth had gone oddly dry and words rolled around in it like marbles. “I’ve got to do it. I’ll go and see the cops after.”

  Wilder seemed uncharacteristically confused.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” That was all. No strong opinions or plans or certainties. Just “okay okay”.

  The Doll went to the bedroom, found her Gucci handbag, downed a Stemetil, her last two Zoloft and a Valium 5 all together. Even so, it was several minutes before the shaking stopped.

  When she came back to the kitchen the news was over.

  “Why?” the radio asked. “Because you’ve worked for it. Because you deserve it. Talk to your BMW dealer today.”

  38

  Richard Cody turned the radio off and answered the phone as he swung his Mercedes S600 out of the morning glare and down the ramp into the welcome cool cave of Six’s underground carpark.

  “Richie,” said Jerry Mendes, filling the car cabin with his unmistakeably chipped voice as Richard Cody pulled into his personal parking spot. “I managed to get hold of Mr Frith’s PA and I’ve been told Mr Frith can’t see a problem. He’ll be lunching today with the secretary of the prime minister’s office, so if there are any issues, they’ll get back to us. Okay?”

  And before Richard Cody could reply, Jerry Mendes had hung up. The only sound that remained in the car was the very low hum of his seat’s massage function.

  39

  Though high above the Doll the sky was emptying of cloud and taking on a pitiless blue intent, in the streets below, the shadows were still long and the breeze still that pleasant cool which foretells a scorching day to come. Yet as she walked to Redfern railway station, the Doll felt inexplicably hot and unable to breathe, as if that cruel sky were bearing down on her chest like a great weight.

  She was telling herself to keep going, that it would be all right, reminding herself that today was the best of days, the day she had so long dreamt of, when near the entrance to the railway station she came upon a beggar sitting amidst the commuter traffic. The woman’s filthy face—not so much lined as gouged, and in places raw and weeping—stuck out of her dirty clothes like a rotting carrot out of a garbage bag. She held up both hands to the countless people walking past and her wretched face nodded up and down as she mumbled something or other, hoping for help.

  Still spacey from all the pills she had taken that morning, the Doll slowed and then stopped, and she began to think how, if she could help the beggar, then someone might help her. In the Doll’s mind her fate and the fate of the beggar became one and the same. ‘She’s desperate, I’m desperate,’ thought the Doll as people poured past. ‘We’re no different.’ And perhaps overly influenced by Wilder’s vague ramblings about karma, the Doll grew excited and happy, for now it seemed clear that somehow in helping the beggar was the solution to her own problems.

  But when she stepped closer to the beggar and was about to lean down to talk with her, she found the woman stank terribly of stale piss. Up close it was as if the skin had been peeled away from her face and dirt smeared in its pus-filled sores. The Doll felt queasy. It was so revolting that instead of stopping and giving her some money, as she had intended, the Doll reeled back, turned, lowered her head and quickly walked away. And because her revulsion had so abruptly overwhelmed her empathy, she found herself thinking how someone else—people in authority, or charities, or government departments—should be helping such people, not her.

  As she made her way toward the station entrance, the Doll’s feelings continued changing, from being annoyed to being angry. She drew the sweet smell of fumes from the crawling cars and heaving buses deep into her chest to be rid of the sour stench of the beggar. ‘What was I thinking?’ the Doll admonished herself. ‘I’ve got enough on my plate. Besides, once I’ve seen the police it’ll be all over anyway, so why do anything? My life will soon be back on the up.’

  And though in her heart such thoughts seemed to her somehow wrong, even cruel, she concentrated on not thinking about the beggar at all, and to her surprise she found it not so very hard. By the time she got off at the Circular Quay ferry terminal the Doll had succeeded in completely forgetting about that awful face and the weird way it had made her feel.

  Sitting on a bench seat on a finger wharf, she waited for the welcome prospect of a cooling ferry trip across the harbour. The PA system was broadcasting a radio talkback show.

  “Thanks for letting me on your show, Joe,” a caller was saying. “I just want to talk about that poor little girl in the paper today all dressed up in the veil and all that garbage and her family making her go to school looking like an alien, well, what’s that all about, Joe? They won’t integrate, you know.”

  And hearing this the Doll remembered how the old man in the shopping centre had said exactly the same thing the previous day when she had sworn at the woman in the burkah.

  She tried to block out the talkback and lose herself in looking out from the welcome shade of the ferry terminal to where the sky was now a blue kiln ceiling baking and beating everything back down. The Shangri-La tower reflected the sun like a flaming torch, and to avert its glare the Doll’s eyes wandered back inside the ferry terminal.

  On one side of the bench on which she sat was a woman wearing hot pants, her right leg black with tattoos. On the other side a man was reading a newspaper. Its front page headline read:

  TERRORIST LOVERS

  SYDNEY READIES FOR ATTACK

  The man shook his head, and muttered:

  “They should shoot the bastards.”

  And the Doll remembered that these were exactly the same words she had used less than tw
enty-four hours earlier. Hadn’t she similarly shaken her head when she happened to read a worrying headline? Only now it was Tariq and her he was condemning! Everything she had tried not to think came rushing back. She stood up to get away from the man with the newspaper and walked a few metres, but then had to grab a pole to steady herself.

  “I’m sure she’s pretty underneath all that,” she heard another radio caller say.

  “I’m sure she is,” replied the shock jock.

  “Well, that’s my question, Joe,” said the caller. “Why do they do it?”

  “Joey-fucking-Cosuk,” said the woman with the tattooed leg. “Shitty talkback show and they treat him like he’s fucking king of fucking Sydney.”

  “Well, I’ll just say this,” said Joe Cosuk. “There are more ways than war to conquer a country. Take a look at the front pages of today’s newspapers and I think you’ll see what I mean.”

  A man was yelling at the ferry’s drawbridge: “Anyone else for Mosman?” The Doll had to let go of the pole.

  40

  The Doll walked through the ferry’s air conditioned cabin out to the open stern deck where there were fewer people who might look at her, and as the ferry turned in a tumbling churn of dirty water, she sat down, adjusted her sunglasses, and looked out at the harbour. The boat moved gently, and the city sparkled in the intense light, its towers radiant, its great roads beautiful, the harbourside mansions splendid.

  And yet everywhere the Doll looked she knew people daily endured humiliation and pettiness; saw hate and greed triumph; saw death and stupidity prevail. Worse, they willingly chose to accept it and live their life as a lie, agreeing to everything that was disagreeable, tolerating all that was intolerable, in the hope that they might just be left alone—only now life would not leave her alone. The Doll knew she would still accept everything because, she reasoned, what else could she do? And wouldn’t everything then finally turn out all right? If she just accepted enough, swallowed enough, and continued smiling the smile that was not her smile, perhaps it would all end as abruptly, as illogically, as it had started, and life would go back to normal.