by John Dale
“No, I don’t know him, never met him,” he smiles, “but everyone knows Lynchie.”
“Yeah, best halfback Australia ever had.”
“Yeah . . . look, I heard something, uncle.” The kid looks serious. “Cowboy Cassidy drank with Lally every morning at the Anchor, the early opener. Cowboy’s a dealer. He’s a bad cunt, uncle.”
* * *
The Anchor Hotel is one of five Sydney early-openers that cater to the inner-city blue-collar shift workers. Of course there are the twenty-four-hour clubs, but Lally would never be allowed in those because often he’d arrive loaded. The Anchor was his favorite, according to his mum, and the closest to their place.
A barman is flushing the exterior walls and footpath of the Anchor with a garden hose as I approach. These types of places are tiled inside and out, like bathrooms, easy care, as often patrons could not keep their drink and fatty pub food down.
“Yep, I know Lally,” the slim barman replies to my question as he keeps flushing. “Haven’t seen him for a while. Is he okay?”
I tell him.
“Fucking hell!” He shakes his head.
“Do you know a bloke called Cowboy Cassidy?” I ask him straight-out.
“Cowboy?”
“Cowboy Cassidy.”
“Oh, I know Cowboy pretty well, from the bush, a rodeo rider.”
“Is he a dealer?”
“Yeah, but you didn’t get that from me.”
“Was Lally dealing?”
Slim turns the hose off and looks at me like I’m a kid. “D’you know Lally at all, mate?”
“He’s my cousin.”
“Ya cousin?” He stares into my face in disbelief, and speaks softly: “He’s been dealing for fucking years, mate.”
“I knew he smoked a bit . . .”
“Smoked? He was into fucking everything.”
I watch his lips move as he rattles off the range of merchandise that Lally handled, which included handguns. I didn’t know my cousin at all.
Slim tells me Cowboy comes in every day around eight. It’s seven. I have an hour to kill. I slip him a twenty and we part.
I walk the few blocks to the busy wharves at the quay. The ferries are unloading their people cargo in the center of the city. The sun is shining. It is a crisp winter day. I sit near the jetties, mesmerized, watching the sparkling sunlight on the surface of the water, eating hot chips from a cardboard carton. I wonder what life would have been like for the blacks living here before the British landed. Aboriginal people claim they’ve always occupied this land and never migrated here, as most academics say. The blackfellas simply reverse the logic—if people could walk south over the so-called land bridge which joined Australia to Asia, then surely they could also have walked north. After all, the most ancient evidence of human habitation has been found right here.
Just then, an unassuming aboriginal man carrying a long, elaborately painted didgeridoo takes up a position next to me. He peels off his shirt, reaches inside a carry bag, and pulls out several small jars of body paint. A few people stop to watch. He applies the paint in long stripes, first to his torso then to his arms, crimson oxide, yellow ochre, and white. The crowd swells to more than twenty. Now he paints his face using colored dots and concentric circles.
The crowd has increased to around fifty. He slowly secures the paint jars, takes up his instrument, and begins to play. The droning music from the hollow log reverberates through the quay. He closes his eyes, totally absorbed in the melancholic drone, oblivious to the coins and notes being placed in his large upturned cap.
I finish my chips and walk behind the busker and across the historic cobblestone road back to the Anchor Hotel. It is five after eight.
I perch at the end of the bar away from a pack of noisy desperates arguing with each other, barely able to sit. The thin barman recognizes me, acknowledged by a head nod, then he comes down.
“He’s not here yet. Want a beer?”
“Yeah, sure, Tooheys New, a schooner,” I say without meeting his eyes. I am busy looking about.
I pull out my phone.
“Hi, Lynchie here, mate.”
“I’m following a lead, a name, meeting with a bloke that might know something.”
“What’s his name?”
“Cowboy Cassidy . . . Do you know him?”
“Never heard of him. Who’s the informant?”
“A young kid from the football club.”
“What’s the connection?”
“Drugs, he says.”
“Okay . . . get back to me after you talk to him.”
As I hang up, Slim arrives with my beer and spins away without breaking stride. I glance about the bar. It is dim, hard to tell what time it is, not much daylight in this place. It is 8:20. The television is tuned into a sports betting channel; somewhere in the world there is always a horse or dog race to bet on, to lose your money on. Most pubs in Australia are licensed to take bets on any televised event. I couldn’t help watching, there’s something about a live race. I choose horse number two as they jump out of the starting gates; he settles behind the leading pack of five bolters, makes a race of it, down the final straight, he charges at the leaders, shit, can’t quite make it, comes in third.
Slim slides off his stool by the cash register, looks my way, and rolls his eyes at the double doors. The short guy who enters is not what I expected. He is gray-haired, wears a long winter coat two sizes too big with his sleeves rolled up; he is tough-looking, a pug, an ex-boxer for sure, but you know, really, he is an old man, seventy easily, maybe seventy-five. He takes a stool at the bar near the rabble. I sort out my options, how to play this, writing scripts in my head like I’m in a movie. He takes a beer from Slim and makes his way down the bar to me.
“You looking for me?”
“Maybe, yeah. Are you Cowboy?”
“That’s right.”
“I have a small location that I want to enlarge.”
“I’m not into real estate, sorry.” He turns to walk away.
“Me neither. I have a good few medicinal patrons in my location.”
He stops and shoots me a smile. I try not to stare at his rotting yellow-and-brown teeth. “Where is your location, mate?”
“Redfern.”
His eyes narrow. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“I don’t think so.”
He takes a deep breath. “I got weed, hash, ice, all kinds of uppers and downers. It’s good Aussie weed, I know the growers, from Griffith.” He pauses. “What do you need?”
“I’ll take your weed to start with.”
“How much you want?”
“How much will two thousand dollars buy?”
“A suitcase will set you back two. That’s for twenty kilos. It’ll retail for four after you rebag it.”
We have an agreement within a minute. I’ll bring two thousand, he’ll bring a full suitcase. He wants to meet that night at one a.m. in the cul-de-sac at the back of the Chippendale brewery. Oh shit.
He walks away, didn’t drink his beer, not one sip, leaves it on the bar. He waves at Slim and is through the double glass doors in double-quick time.
I call Lynchie straightaway to bring him up to speed.
“So you want to meet with him, do the deal?”
“Fuck yeah!”
“Okay, just asking. You reckon he’ll be alone?”
“My feeling is yes, but I’m not ruling anything out. This bloke works for the Griffith families. He can’t fuck up.”
“But he might only be interested in your cash with no trade . . . freelance.”
“That occurred to me too.”
“And two thousand dollars is chicken feed, surely.”
“Yeah.”
Lynchie goes into cop mode: “Okay, I’m gonna get there early, about eleven, and blend into the end of the street. And I’m gonna sign for a pump-action, just in case. I’m not fucking around with this bloke.”
* * *
It’s
after one a.m. I caught four hours of sleep and now I’m standing at the corner of the Chippendale cul-de-sac under a streetlamp. I see Cowboy coming toward me wheeling a big tourist-style suitcase. I nod as he gets closer, then I walk up into the alley. I look at the pile of trash at the end of the lane where Lynchie is hidden, nothing suspicious there. Cowboy stops ten paces from me.
“You got the two thousand?”
“Yeah, it’s right here.” I pull a bulging envelope from my coat as Cowboy steps away from the suitcase.
“Put it on the case,” he says.
I move the few paces to the case slowly, not taking my eyes off him. Immediately as I place the money on the case, he lunges at me with a steel pipe in both hands, gripping it like a baseball bat. The sucker punch. First swing, he breaks my arm as I shield my face. I fall. I yell. He is quick to belt me on my shoulder and up the side of my face. He belts me again on my neck. Fuck, I’ve had it here! I think, or maybe I say it.
“You cunt!”
He runs at me with the pipe over one shoulder. I can only put both arms up to shield my head and kick at him, then BLAM! The whole alley gets lit up from the explosion rushing down the barrel of Lynch’s shotgun. BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! Cowboy falls to one side midstride; his chest is ripped open and blood gushes through his shirt. I pass out.
* * *
Next I’m being treated by medics. The alley is filled with police cars and lit by their headlights plus the red, blue, and whites rotating, plus an ambulance and coroner’s van. Lynchie is sitting on the ground, spent. He is being interviewed by cops.
I call out, “It was a justified kill.” I say this over and over. “It was a justified kill.” I’m in shock. “A justified kill.”
It is around two a.m. and dark behind the old Chippendale brewery, back to normal. It is simply a dangerous place to be at night. The same goes for most other cul-de-sacs in the aboriginal enclave of Redfern at night. Black.
CHINAMAN’S BEACH
by P.M. Newton
Mosman
A text message: WE MUST TALK. COME TO MY HOME. NOW. PLEASE.
It’s the please that stands out.
The old man never says please. You’ve spent a lifetime lifting rocks just to see what crawls out, cramped nights in cars watching the windows of his house, afternoons following him round the bookmakers’ ring at Randwick, pressing up behind him, so close you can hear the click of his tongue when he settles on a bet, and yet you’ve never heard him say please. Not once. Not to anyone.
I sit at the traffic lights and stare at my phone. That please sits mute and strange. A horn blast from the rear tells me the lights have changed. A slow grind forward, but we don’t go far. The rat run past Military Road on a Saturday morning is as choked with traffic as the main road. I come to a halt, still sandwiched between a Range Rover and the horn-happy bald bloke in an iridescent-red convertible. Sunlight catches Mr. Convertible’s Ray-Bans, classic Aviators of course, and bounces off the helmet of perfect blond hair on the woman next to him.
I know what I should do. Call it in. That’d be the sensible, proper course of action. I even snap to my contacts, scroll through, and hover, but then I let the phone drop back into my lap.
Almost make it to the bottom of Spit Road before the bridge goes up. Nothing for it but to switch off the ignition and wait. The deck swings open. The tips of masts glide through the gap. All those oversized yachts heading out for a day’s racing on the harbor. Never into boats, the old man. Middle Harbour Yacht Club almost on his doorstep and he’d never spent a cent buying friends and status down here among the deck-shoe mob. That’s what racehorses were for. A more forgiving crowd at the track. More fluid. Punt up, pay up. Buy fast horses. Win big races. And watch the doors fly open all over this town.
Great place to give your money a tub too. The track, that is. A rich man once likened yacht racing to standing under a cold shower tearing up hundred-dollar bills. The track and the bookmakers, well, they’re a lot kinder to money that might have a bit of dirt under its nails.
The Saturday Spit Road traffic inches down the hill to merge and crawl across the bridge. High sandstone and scrub to my right, a deadly drop down to blue water on the left. A crane, tall enough to build an office tower, rests on a platform of concrete just off the footpath. It lowers the makings of a new harborside palace down the escarpment like a big metal bird lining a big metal nest. Cost of a suburban Sydney apartment right there just in the tool hire. Weekend rates too.
The switchback off Parriwi, past large old houses with larger leafy gardens, safely enclosed behind walls of stones and security cameras, runs down to Cyprian and into McLean. The road cuts back and forth, revealing glimpses of tennis courts, pools, rockeries, and ferns.
The old man had gone for something more classic than a glass-and-pile shard clinging to the side of a cliff. A big house, behind a big electric gate, at the end of a cul-de-sac. I like to think I sent him here. The old mansion in Balmoral was where I’d sat outside and watched him from my car as he’d go from room to room, shuttering the blinds against me. He’d been well-settled there in Balmoral. Christmas drinks with the neighbors by invitation only, grudging respect turning to abject envy once they spied the jade, the silk rugs, the museum-worthy antiques. Hard-earned, that respect. I’d chipped away at it. Evidence to various commissions, the ones that compel you to talk then lock you up for lying but rarely, oh so rarely, ever charge anyone with the dirt that gets uncovered. Reputation ruiners, coupled with the odd drop of gossip to a hungry journo. Auto-da-fé by headline. No smoke without fire. The RSVPs dwindled. And then the old man who never said please sold up and moved.
It was still Balmoral. Technically. A little pocket of park and beach and a thin golden strip of sand washed by the tide of Sydney Harbour. Safe for toddlers and waders. Quiet. Secluded. Chinaman’s Beach.
The subbies had had a bit of fun with that. If you look on a map, Cobblers Bay is written over the blue bit, Rosherville Reserve over the green bit, but everyone knows the yellow bit in between it is Chinaman’s. There’d been market gardens back in the day, parkland now where dog walkers and fitness instructors drill their charges. A perfect little piece of paradise, where the neighbors keep their thoughts to themselves and the old man keeps himself to himself, and that’s how everyone likes it.
The old man’s security gate is metal of some kind, the color of sand, inobtrusive. A security camera looks on as I roll down the window and press the intercom. The gate melts away. A walled driveway curves to the left, trees and undergrowth block any other view. The seclusion of the rich and the dangerous. I raise my foot from the brake and the car rolls through in automatic, starts dragging itself forward over the gravel. The gates swing shut behind me. Silently.
Last chance to call someone. But I dismiss it. Call who? Say what? Hi, thought I should let you know I’ve accepted the invitation of the crook I’ve been stalking for close to twenty years?
The move to Chinaman’s hadn’t changed that, my stalking. Not once I found the ruin. Great old house caught up in family hatreds. Millions of dollars’ worth of art deco and views left to molder while relatives brawled over the estate of an old woman in a dementia unit. Chain wire around it. Graffiti on every wall. It was a top spot for young Balmoral kids to hide their bongs and dream of putting on a dance party.
For me, the climb up the once-grand, now-slimy concrete staircase to the turret provides an excellent view of the old man’s hideaway. Those walls. That driveway. The shrubs and trees lull him into sloppiness. A pair of binoculars and a nightscope borrowed from a tactical unit who’d left their kit bag unattended, and I can watch the old man shuffle around his back terrace in his slippers, hawking a night’s worth of phlegm into the gardenias. When his son visits, they sit for hours at a time beside the pool, papers and laptops spread around them. Occasionally the old man jumps in and strides up and down, performing some kind of angry aquatic tai chi. He’s built like a wiry old piece of teak, the kind of body that speaks of h
arder violent times. The old man’s wife is rarely more than a shadow moving behind curtains. Only the presence of the son ever draws her outside, to deliver tea, water, to rest a hand on his shoulder, to stand behind him stroking his head. I’ve never seen her touch the old man.
Magpies and currawongs call warnings and threats to each other from the trees when I get out of the car. The cedar door opens immediately and the figure behind it beckons me in. First time I’ve seen him up close without the benefit of a search warrant, a courtroom, or a commission, a wall of lawyers.
He’s older. Smaller. Bare-handed. In his thin knit sweater and light cotton trousers he looks ready for a round of golf.
“Thank you for coming so promptly, detective. Please come into the lounge room.”
First time he’s ever spoken to me, directly. Formal and polite, he ushers me into a light-filled room where a small woman sits on the edge of an antique ebony Chinese stool. She faces the door, a small automatic pistol in her hand, pointed at us. The gun looks heavy. She looks tired. I freeze in the doorway.
The old man’s voice comes over my shoulder, reassuring, soothing. It’s like the please—it doesn’t fit. “I do apologize, detective. But my wife is not feeling very well. I assure you that if you do what she asks, you—that is we—will come to no harm.”
I risk a glance back at him, the question, What do you mean we? forming. Sweat beads his upper lip and his forehead, and there is a small tremor in his hands as he smoothes down the sides of his pants.
I focus again on the woman. She’s sitting primly, neatly dressed in a suit, stockings, high heels, makeup in place, knees pressed together. She’s got the gun in both hands, which rest on her upper thighs. She sits on her stool, on either side of which sit two large suitcases.
I try for an unthreatening tone, inquiring, not interrogating: “What’s the problem, ma’am?”
The woman turns her beautifully outlined eyes on me. Behind the makeup they’re not so young and they’re filled with pain. “My son,” she says, and gestures with the gun at the suitcases.
