The Unknown Terrorist

by Richard Flanagan

  As Nick Loukakis waited for the storm to end and the traffic to start moving, he noticed a young woman with a shaved head for a moment haloed in red light up near the Cross Coke sign. Then he forgot her. His thoughts returned to Gina Davies and, for perhaps half a minute, he kept running through his mind all that he knew about her, and all that didn’t make sense about her story.

  And then in his mind’s eye he saw once more the woman with the shaved head, and the odd way she had been walking through the hail, not taking refuge, not hiding, but seeking something, heading toward some destination, some destiny.

  These things came to him dully, as thoughts tended to come to him in traffic jams. And then he jolted upright in his car seat. It was her, he realised. Her.

  Swearing at himself, he drove the police car up onto the pavement, opened the door and, with some difficulty, got out and began running. He was forty-three years old, twelve kilos overweight, and none of it came easy.

  The hail had turned the Cross white, the white was drumming madness, and his burning chest and his wounded heart, his past and his future, were coming together in that wild, deafening whiteness into which he was now lumbering.

  He made his way as quickly as he could up Darlinghurst Road, twice having to stop to catch his breath and once nearly tripping over a junkie lying on the pavement. Out the front of a chemist an Aboriginal trannie in a red vinyl mini and black croptop was wiping tears from her cheek when, upon seeing Nick Loukakis bearing down on her, she abruptly turned and started running away awkwardly in her stilettos.

  And so he continued deeper into the embrace of the Cross, of the city and the destiny that was eating them all, until at last a red carpet appeared to welcome him and in his pathway reared a large human figure, much larger than almost any bouncer he had ever seen, and his clothes were of the perfect whiteness of the hailstones that littered the city.

  93

  The Doll was very close now. She dropped her finger to the trigger, took up the tension. She wouldn’t miss. She wouldn’t mess up. She had fifteen rounds saved from Srebrenica. Fuck Srebrenica! Fuck terrorists! Fuck this world!

  She felt in control. The Doll realised that she hadn’t really known she was alive until she had felt bad enough to want to kill. How was it possible to say that being a murderer or a terrorist is something in this world now, but being the Doll was dying over and over? That she had been shut out of this world, so she had made another world? That when love is not enough, what else can someone do?

  Maybe guns allow a way back, thought the Doll. Maybe this is what people do when they get written out of this world, when they get turned upside down and remade into something people can only hate, into something people become afraid of, into something no longer themselves. Maybe that’s all anybody’s got left. It’s not right and it’s not enough, she thought, but then what is right and what is enough?

  She could hear Wilder telling her how you can have anything you want, only you have to pay the price. No one was going to pay the price for the Doll, no politician or journalist was going to speak for her. And all she had to speak with, to pay up with, was Moretti’s Beretta. It would help make it clear, if only for a split second before the trigger eased back and the chamber emptied, that she was herself and not an invention, a prejudice, a label.

  It was strange to her that he—who had said the worst things about her, who had called her a killer and an inhuman monster—did not know what she was going to do next. The Doll knew that she would never do so human a thing again in her life. It was all good. She raised the Beretta into view.

  “Krystal?” said Richard Cody. Yes, he thought, that was her name.

  BLAM! went the gun. Richard Cody’s chest tore open, his right arm kicked up and out, and he fell backwards. Someone screamed.

  The Doll’s eyelids were wet with sweat. She was very weary and wished to sleep. But she had things to do. In that quiet that follows catastrophe the only sound was something scratching frantically beneath her.

  She looked down.

  It was Richard Cody on his back on the floor, his feet flailing as he wildly attempted to push his body away. But his body wasn’t moving. All she could see were escaping rays of bright red sun. They shone in splatters and specks on people’s clothes. With her free hand she flicked the sweat out of her smarting eyes, then brought it back to the pistol. Then she could no longer hear her own heart banging, nor Richard Cody’s feet scratching away. All the Doll could hear in her mind was Chopin. She knew he understood. She could explain none of it.

  The Doll took two steps closer to where Richard Cody lay squirming on the ground. He reminded her of an upturned cockroach attempting to writhe away, with his limbs jerking, his repulsive fingers twitching. Though his tinted eyes danced with terror, his strange face remained oddly frozen, like an insect’s. As the piano rose to its final notes, other sounds began coming back—screaming, shouting—and she could feel the pressure of the Beretta’s trigger again growing as she brought the gun close to his head and once more eased her finger back.

  94

  Nick Loukakis was running down the steps, following the purple neon tubes, when he heard the first shot. His throat burnt, his side ached with a stitch and his calves felt as if they were made of lead. He could hardly hear over his own rasping breathing as he raced past the small entry table where a near-naked woman cowered into the wall.

  From the docile way the bouncer had behaved, Nick Loukakis had been sure nothing had happened. Even after the shot sounded, he wanted to believe that there was still time for him to save Gina. As he lurched and wheezed, he was praying, hoping he could set one thing right, that he could make one person safe from the horror, that he might make some reckoning, find some balance for the Vietnam vet he had killed all those years before.

  As he made it to the corner that led into the main lounge, he realised there was no music, no talk. He thought he could hear the human sound of breathing. He was listening, hoping, praying, trying not to think that the wolf might already be inside. How could he have known the wolf was him?

  95

  BLAM! went the Beretta again, the pistol’s handgrip pushing back into her palm like a jolted coffee cup, no more, no worse. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

  The Doll never heard Nick Loukakis then yell to drop her weapon, neither saw him raise his pistol nor heard his pistol by accident discharge as Billy the Tongan threw him to the floor. The Doll felt only the murky waters of a three-thousand-year-old swamp abruptly rising up over her body, saw simply the relief on the other women’s faces as she took their guilt, as she felt the hot metal that had slashed a thousand innocent women’s necks slam like a hammer into her head.

  She was once more with Tariq. Liam, now a young boy, slept peacefully nearby. Their hands did not find each other hungrily, clumsily; those awkward erotic gropings of a first coupling. Everything took a long time and time, which had always seemed a panicky confusion to the Doll, now stopped. There was time for everything, and when they were ready they came together and when they were finished it felt like they had only just begun.

  But in her final moment she realised all this too was just an illusion; there was no redemption, no resurrection. There was only this life from which she could feel herself ever more quickly leaving. The bullet was smashing apart bone, nerve fibre, memory, love, before it came out the other side of her head, leaving a hole the size of a ten-cent piece behind her left ear. She was twenty-six, claiming to be twenty-two, and she would never make twenty-seven.

  “Fuck you!” cried the Doll. “Fuck you all!”

  But she was already dead.

  96

  THE IDEA THAT LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH is a particularly painful one. Had the Doll, as she walked into the Chairman’s Lounge that fateful evening, understood what she was now going to do as arising out of love and its impossibility?

  Not at all. She simply saw a string of images—her father smiling, her son’s lidless eyes, a swarm of flies—that added up to a tale of forever leaving
and never arriving, the story of her life.

  As a story it did not have the scent of place, nor the hope of home. Nor did it offer the reassurance stories sometimes can have and perhaps ought to have. It is the ruffian on the stairs, and the ruffian may very well be you. Who can say what any of us might do if denied the possibility of love?

  For a split second, the Doll thought back on how only three days before she had been lying on Bondi Beach in an odd harmony with life. But the beach and the sea were the last things left in the city that reminded people that the measure of all things was not man made; the beach and the sea were not the city, were no longer of this world.

  The world had deliberately shed itself of all that reminded people of their impermanence, their fragility, their capacity and need for transcendence. The city was no longer the most marvellous of human creations, but the most oppressive. Nothing was left to balance the horror of life. Power and money were what were to be admired as life atrophied: except at the beach, beauty was to be despised and the contemplation of the world decreed as a sickness, depression, maladies.

  Power and money were to be all that remained, and politics was what ensured their primacy. Politics places man at the centre of life, and in permanent opposition to the universe. Love, to the contrary, fills man with the universe.

  As the Doll stepped forward into the light she could hear Chopin begin playing. In listening to what Chopin could not explain, she heard an explanation of her own life.

  Love is never enough, but it is all we have.

  At the Chairman’s Lounge the following night it’s business as usual. Salls and Jodie and Maria are called out and climb up the same metal steps onto the same purple felt-lined tables. As they take hold of the same brass poles, they give the same smiles, glad that once the same music starts they will have a few minutes before they will have to say something, anything.

  Outside, a crescent moon sits like a fairytale ending over a fairytale town. In her Redfern backyard, Wilder lights another joint, and turns the postcard of a bonsai plant over and back. It arrived that day, addressed to her. She stares at the back of the postcard, at a blank column. There is no message, nor name of sender.

  She feels anxious. She longs not to think. To forget, and not think. Finally she stops staring and sets the postcard of the bonsai plant alight. When it scorches her fingers, she drops it to the ground and watches it curl in slow flame. After a time, everything is ash.

  Down at the wharves a Chinese man awaits death in blackness. He is locked inside a shipping container he and eleven other men had been hidden away in a month earlier in Shanghai. Then they dreamt of many things. Now he hopes only for water. He tries not to think about the stench, the heat, the sight, thankfully lost in the darkness now his torch batteries are spent, of the other men dead. Because if he thinks about any of it he will lose his mind. One last time he bangs on the side of the container’s cruel steel walls with a can of Albanian tomato paste.

  The odd dull tapping carries up past the rising rows of stacked containers to the harbour beyond where motoring back on its once more silky waters is Tony Buchanan in his thirty-five-footer, trying to think of little else other than how chill, how sweet will be his first beer when he gets home. This is what he does, he thinks, attempting to feel pleased with his lot, this is who he is.

  But in his heart he feels there is something intolerable in continuing to live for an unspecified number of years more and the dominant, undeniable feeling in his soul is boredom. For a moment he fancies he hears a repetitive thud but he is too tired, for a moment he thinks it is his heart, or something falling apart in the Gardiner diesel below decks, but then the noises simply join back with all the other noises of the city, cries that once understood need no answering.

  Siv Harmsen continues working into the night, boosting his overtime readying fresh warrants for further arrests. Among them is one naming Sally Wilder, citing her for breaching the ASIO Act by twice telling others—one a known terrorist—of her arrest and interrogation the previous day. The case is clear-cut. He expects that the act will be applied in its full severity and is quietly confident she will be locked up for five years.

  He has a sticker above his monitor that reads: Family Values Value Life. He intends taking his family to Fiji for his fifteenth wedding anniversary. He has never fought with his wife; he loves his kids: his is an exemplary life. There is talk that he will be offered a post within the prime minister’s office. He cannot deny to himself the sense of intense pleasure the news of Gina Davies’ death brought to him.

  But that exquisite joy has evaporated. Though the heatwave is now over, the air in his office is heavy with something he finds unpleasant and incomprehensible. He will in the morning raise the matter of a bravery award for Nick Loukakis with the minister. This idea reassures him. Like every self-made man, he knows he deserves his success and happiness.

  The minister tells Zoe LeMay on Undercurrent how he wishes to add his tribute to the many that have been pouring in all day honouring a courageous journalist and great Australian, Richard Cody. He announces the government’s intention to establish in his honour a multi-million-dollar journalism scholarship scheme. He tells the nation that “Gina Davies’ murderous actions prove what we’ve been saying all along. We can only be grateful that the possibility of a far greater tragedy was averted by the courage of Detective Sergeant Nick Loukakis.”

  Nick Loukakis picks up a snakehead streetwalker in his Ford Territory, perhaps hoping in this final degradation to arrive at some truth. All day he has called Wilder, all day there has been no answer. He has watched from his car, he knows she is home, and he understands only that he loves her and that they will never talk again. He has resolved to live without love, one more resolution that he knows life will doom him to break. As the streetwalker unzips his trousers, he asks where God is and why he allows such a world. He no longer knows what he is going to do or whether he can continue and, unable to get hard, he pays her and lets her out.

  As the snakehead gets out of his car she looks up, and her body shudders. Driving past in the opposite direction is a shiny black BMW four-wheel drive with two men she knows sometimes work for Mr Moon. The two men go to the wharves, and from there steam out to sea in an old prawn trawler loaded with twelve corpses that need to be dumped, while police paddy wagons work the Cross, and the fallen and the wretched, the hopeful and the hopeless, those who need compassion and those who need to give compassion pass the evening in that run-down strip mall that bears too big a name for suffering so everyday.

  Everything takes its accustomed course even when life is at its most terrible, and people know, they always know, but life goes on and the excuses for doing nothing other than going on with it are made. Near the fountain, ten policemen circle one bearded man in a crumbling bomber jacket who brandishes a blunt Wiltshire kitchen knife. Tragedy happens while an order is placed for an Oporto flamed chicken burger, as twelve corpses dully slide into the sea, as ten policemen wait, as one woman beneath a blue neon light with bruised white legs and iced veins asks, “Hey, you want some fun? If you don’t want that fun, do you want to score?”

  And the men after something else again pass her by, on their way to the Chairman’s Lounge where the women wait, all of them creatures shaped by another light, the red light of blood—the blood that will never be completely steam-cleaned out of the still-damp carpet and tub chairs below; the blood that’s colouring the sky and flowing in rivers and filling the seas.

  They know only without understanding that they now must belong to some place, to some idea, to something; they understand without knowing that not far away, on an ever rising sea, the scattered corpses of those that don’t belong float for the shortest time like storm-tossed kelp leaves, before disappearing forever.

  Ferdy, his hair brighter than ever, looks up into the lights and for a moment can see nothing, neither the semi-naked women, awkward and waiting above him, nor the clothed men, relaxed and comfortable in the death-shado
wed darkness below. Then he fixes his face into a smile for all to see and claps his hands together.

  “Dance,” Ferdy says.

  Though he speaks in little more than a whisper, everyone hears his order.

  “It’s time we all got back to dancing.”

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wish to thank Baronessa Beatrice Monti della Corte, Bobbi (Bobbi’s Pole Studio), Larry Eaton, Arabella Edge, Brian Edmonds, Donald Graham (NSW Police), Wayne Hayes, Terry Hicks, Jo Jarrah, Sally Jooste, Sam Jooste, Aphrodite Kondos, Kate Law, Peta Murphy, Sally Novak, Paul ‘Canada’ Richardson (NSW Police), Deborah Rogers, Meredith Rose, Sarina Rowell and Geoff Smith; and make particular mention of my publisher of ten years, Nikki Christer, to whom I, along with many other Australian writers, owe much.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  I took this novel from everywhere—ads, headlines, gossip, bar talk, along with the grabs of politicians and the sermons of shock jocks—no-one, after all, was doing contemporary fiction better. While the bones of the plot I owe to Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), the sub-plot of stripping for a rich man though recognisable from Paul Cox’s Man of Flowers (1983) comes not from that film, but life, a story a woman once told me.

  Though art is mostly theft, larceny is no guarantee of worth. Whatever resonance this tale possesses, if any, must be rightfully attributed to those men and women who have created our own times. As Shakespeare—who rarely invented his own plots and so well quarried such sources as Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles—wrote in Henry V: