No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  He turned to his seat mate and said, ‘Looks like we just dodged a bullet,’ and his seat mate agreed, saying, ‘Did they put ice on the runway or what?’

  One of the flight attendants came on the intercom and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Sydney,’ and then, ‘Please be careful opening the overhead lockers as some items may have moved during flight – and during that landing.’

  The passengers laughed, Roger included.

  The bloke next to him said, ‘No kidding!’

  Roger gathered up his things – iPhone, keys to the Audi, wallet – and put them into the pockets on the inside of his suit jacket. He was thinking about making a stop on the way to Krystal’s place. He had in mind buying her some lingerie. He’d been watching the hostess – the airline attendant – and he could see quite clearly that she was wearing suspenders under the silk dress.

  He was thinking he’d like to get something like that for Krystal, something with five inches of lace at the top of the thigh, a bra and matching knickers, all of it in red or black or . . . no, definitely in red or black.

  Women loved lingerie, didn’t they?

  They loved it.

  Roger had been visiting Krystal in Sydney for more than a year, and he was reasonably familiar with the city, but that didn’t stop him asking the hostess where he might find a shop where he could buy some sexy lingerie for his lady friend.

  He was showing off, and the flight attendant knew it.

  She asked him where in Sydney he was headed, and Roger said, ‘Bondi; my girlfriend’s got a place by the beach,’ and the stewardess said, ‘Lucky her,’ and Roger knew that it was meant to mean lucky her for having an apartment in Bondi but also lucky her to have you as a boyfriend.

  She said, ‘You know there’s a new place, Surf City. Big shopping complex. It’s down by the beach.’

  Roger said, ‘Do you think I could find something nice there?’

  She said, ‘What kind of thing are you looking for?’

  He said, ‘Oh, you know, something hot. Something sexy. Bra and panties, with lace. I bet you know what I’m talking about.’

  The flight attendant didn’t look offended. She was smiling, like she was delighted. Roger had that effect on people. He was smooth. She said, ‘They have a place on the top floor. Cups and Saucy. They’ll have what you want, I’m sure.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  It’s not possible to find yourself in the middle of a police operation and not think about how it must feel for the people on the other side of the fence. The people that got stuck inside Cups and Saucy – Mouse and Mitchell, Kimmi K and even Roger – must have felt at times like the police weren’t doing much to get them out.

  From where they were sitting or, in Mouse’s case and in Roger’s, from where they were standing, they would have been able to see the command centre through the glass door. We were directly opposite them, on the opposite side of the atrium. They would have been able to see the bomb shields between us and them, which must have been terrifying. They were able to look over Ali Khan’s head – he was still slumped in front of the door – at the ERT guys in their jumpsuits, at the soldiers, the explosives experts. There was even an army dog.

  I doubt that they’d have been able to see me, which was fine. It’s odd what seeing a priest – if anyone even knew I was a priest – can do to some people. So many times, I’d been assured by everyone at whatever scene I was at that I was welcome, but with my very presence, I felt like a harbinger of doom.

  Who needs a priest, unless somebody is going to die?

  As for how things looked on our side of the atrium, we could all see Ali Khan – or at least we could see the back of him through the glass door, and we could see his face on the computer screens. People have asked me if the people in the shop were panicking, but there was no panic and I suppose that’s because, for the most part, Ali Khan didn’t move.

  He started the siege slumped against the door and for a long time, he appeared to be doing no more than resting. Maybe it would have been different if he’d been jumpy and agitated. His eyes would droop, and it was like he was going to drop off, but then they’d snap open again. He had his legs stuck straight up in front of him. Having unzipped the hoodie, he’d left it open, so everyone in the shop could see the tin box resting on the towel that was draped around his neck.

  It was clear to everyone that the box was leaking. The petrol stain on the towel was spreading. That was frightening but at least there were no wires and no ticking. Wires and ticking would have been terrifying.

  I wish now that things had been more dramatic. Maybe then Wolf would have had his team storm in.

  Also, the people caught inside Cups and Saucy weren’t cut off from us. They could see us and we could see them. When they called out, we could hear them, like you can hear somebody on the intercom when they’re at your front door. From time to time, Mouse would shout, ‘What’s going on?’ not in a scared way, but in a frustrated way. Wolf would get back on the intercom and say, ‘We’re working through things slowly.’

  To Ali Khan, he said, ‘To the gentleman by the door, will you tell us your name, and what it is that’s upset you? We’d like to get everyone out safely, you included, but you have to tell us what you want.’

  Ali Khan never answered, so police had to find other ways to figure out who he was, and why he was there.

  The first step was to lift one of the fingerprints Ali Khan had left on the brass balustrades, back when he was running around the atrium. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds because the brass balustrades were covered in fingerprints, and who could say which were his? In the end, police decided it would be easier to take a palm print off the floor of The Bondi Cruiser, where Ali Khan had slipped before taking off down the hall.

  The fact that Ali Khan had left so many fingerprints, and the palm print, as he made his way through Surf City troubled Wolf. He said to me later, ‘A normal criminal – a shoplifter or a bank robber – would be wearing a balaclava and silicon gloves; they’d be shying away from the CCTV cameras, and they’d have taken one of the poles from those clothing racks and smashed the shit out of the CCTV camera when they found themselves locked in the shop. This bloke had done none of those things.’

  It was like Ali Khan didn’t care whether he got caught, and if he didn’t care about getting caught, did he also not care about the consequences, meaning whether or not he got out alive?

  Once police had the palm print from The Bondi Cruiser’s floor, they ran it through a computer. That alone was interesting for me to watch. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with young criminals, accompanying them to court and to prison, and it used to be that they’d take every person they’d arrested and physically roll their fingers over an ink pad to get a print. Now it’s all done on a scanner, and if you want to find a match, you just run your print through a hand-held machine that’s connected to the National Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or NAFIS. There are more than ten million sets of prints on the database, but the machine can identify one of yours in seconds.

  Wolf was first to be told what the machine had said, which was basically: the print you’ve sent us belongs to a Tanzanian refugee who goes by the name of Ali Khan. He’s been in Australia quite a few years. He lives out in Sydney’s west. We don’t have any next of kin.

  More to himself than anyone else, Wolf said, ‘Can this be right?’

  A fingerprint expert, which used to mean a bloke who understood the whorls and patterns and scars, but which now means somebody who knows how to use the technology, came over to the LiveScan machine and said, ‘It’s definitely a match.’

  Wolf said, ‘But it makes no sense. The machine is saying this guy is a refugee from Tanzania. The bloke in that shop is white. Can we call somebody? This makes no sense.’

  The call was made, with Wolf saying, ‘The machine is telling me that my suspect is a Tanzanian refugee, goes by the name Ali Khan, but the bloke I’m looking at is whiter than me.’


  The experts on the other side said, ‘You sure you’ve got the right fingerprint?’

  Wolf said, ‘I’m pretty sure; it’s the palm print he left when he fell on the floor of one of the shops here.’

  The experts on the other side said, ‘We’ve got a copy of the passport photo here – he doesn’t look that dark. Want us to send it through?’

  Wolf said, ‘Do that, please,’ and a few seconds later he was looking at a photograph of Ali Khan’s passport.

  There was no doubt that the man in the picture was the same man as was in the shop. He had the same sunken skull, the same crater in his head; the white buzz cut; the thick lips; the same droopy eyes with the pink rims, like a bloodhound.

  ‘If he’s an African refugee, how come he’s white?’ said Wolf. Some people are going to think that’s racist but I understood: like most cops, he’d spent a fair bit of time trying to keep the peace between warring tribes in some of the more mixed suburbs. African refugee meant Sudanese or else Somali and, by rights, they were tall, thin and black.

  Another police officer said, ‘Do they have white people in Tanzania?’

  Again, it makes people sound silly but not everyone knows everything.

  Wolf wanted to keep the fact that Ali Khan was a refugee from the media. That’s a nice goal but, in the digital age, an impossible one. Cops can’t just go up to the journos anymore and say, ‘Listen, guys, keep this out of your reports, will you, at least until we figure out what’s going on, but the bloke we’ve got, it looks like he’s a new arrival?’ The news broke, as news does these days, on Twitter: ‘UNCONFIRMED: man holding hostages at Surf City is an asylum seeker.’

  That was dead wrong. Ali Khan wasn’t an asylum seeker. He was an Australian citizen, but you know, never let the facts get in the way of a good story, especially not on Facebook or Twitter or wherever else you’ve got rank amateurs trying to upstage each other by being first with the news.

  The first tweet got re-tweeted, meaning passed around, about 1000 times, and it was read out on the radio half a dozen times before police could get one of their media liaison officers to explain the actual situation, which was that, yes, somebody was holding hostages but no, he wasn’t an asylum seeker.

  ‘There’s a certain amount of information leaking onto social media and it’s inaccurate, and that is making our work here more difficult,’ the spokesman said.

  We were watching the press conference live on one of the TVs they’d dragged out from Harvey Norman, and on one of the laptops. One of the radio reporters said, ‘It’s all over Twitter that he’s a boat person.’

  The police spokesman said, ‘That’s false; he’s not a boat person,’ which was true because the information Wolf had from the passport office was that Ali Khan had come to Australia by plane.

  The radio reporter said, ‘But he’s a refugee?’

  The police spokesman said, ‘He’s not a refugee, no. He’s an Australian citizen.’

  The radio reporter said, ‘But he came out as a refugee? Where did he come from?’

  The spokesman said, ‘Look, I’m not authorised to give out that detail. There’s a very sensitive operation underway here. The suspect –’

  He didn’t get to finish, because one of the reporters said, ‘Come on, you must know where he’s from. Is it Afghanistan? How do we know he’s not a terrorist?’

  Another reporter, warming to the theme said, ‘Are you concerned that this may in fact be one of a wave of attacks we might see today?’

  We could all see where the rumours were headed: Ali Khan was a terrorist. He’d taken hostages as part of a grand plan to terrorise Westerners in the world-famous suburb of Bondi. Wolf needed to kill that idea dead before the whole city went into panic mode. He spoke to the media liaison officer through his walkie-talkie. The press waited patiently.

  ‘Okay, the suspect isn’t from Afghanistan. He isn’t from the Middle East,’ the spokesman said, when Wolf had finished briefing him. ‘We have no reason to believe that this is anything other than an isolated incident, a very serious operation, but one confined to Surf City. We have no reason to believe it’s part of a coordinated effort. We don’t yet understand what has motivated this . . . this individual to come to Surf City today. What I can confirm at this stage is that he is not, as is being reported on social media, a boat person, and he’s not an asylum seeker.’

  I remember thinking there were so many digital recorders and so many fluffy microphones gathered under the police spokesman’s chin, and some were so close to his mouth that he was at risk of swallowing them. He quit the press conference and returned to his post outside Cups and Saucy.

  Within minutes, the first news updates began to appear on websites: the person who had taken hostages at Surf City wasn’t a boat person but police had indicated that he might be a refugee.

  It’s fair to say that the public wasn’t thrilled to hear it. Many still had Muslim refugees in mind. Let’s not muck around and pretend that doesn’t make people nervous. Some members of the public started calling the radio stations to vent their frustration: ‘Why do we let these people in? They cannot accept our way of life. All they do is bring problems with them.’

  That’s not actually true. I’ve worked in those communities long enough to know that new arrivals are just like you and me: making the best of it, and trying to have a happy life. When Mum was still compos mentis and living in her own home, she used to have a couple of Sudanese neighbours. I remember when they moved in, she was quite surprised to discover that they were, as she put it, ‘very Catholic’, meaning they had statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary all over the house.

  ‘I can’t go near the front door without being invited in,’ she said. ‘They want to ply me with food.’

  Mum was – or is, I suppose, since she’s technically still with us – a bit of an old-fashioned Australian: happy with a cup of tea and an Iced VoVo, but too polite to ever turn down an invitation. So she went over, and they all sat around on the concrete driveway in those cheap outdoor chairs, and the men served up a spicy stew.

  ‘There were bones in it,’ she told me later, ‘but not like chicken bones. These were like knuckles. They didn’t tell me until later: it was goat.’

  Anyway, I’ll be honest and say I wasn’t sure that the police spokesman was being all that straight with the reporters when he said that police thought Ali Khan was working on his own. The police didn’t know whether Ali Khan was part of a bigger plot to blow Surf City sky-high, but it couldn’t be ruled out.

  Making out that I cared about the public relations strategy, I asked the spokesman, ‘The main thing for you is getting the fact that Ali Khan might be a boat person out of the media – that was the main thing, wasn’t it?’

  He said, ‘Look, Father, the media likes to make a big issue of these things, and having it spread around that this is a boat person, which it isn’t, can’t do any good. We’ve got a bloke wearing what looks like a bomb sitting on the floor of a lingerie shop in Bondi Beach, with the whole world tuned in, and the last thing I want is unfounded rumours taking hold.’

  I took his point.

  ‘What do we know?’ I said.

  He said, ‘We know that Ali Khan arrived here years ago. We’ve got his passport application and the papers he used to apply for refugee status. We’ve got his last known address, but he’s been there only six weeks. And we’ve got no next of kin that’s actually related to him. The next of kin on his passport form is a UN worker: the woman who signed his papers, back when he was in the refugee camp.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ I said. ‘Is she Australian?’

  ‘Of course I’m Australian!’ said a voice from somewhere in the pack behind me. ‘I’m the next of kin. I’m Cate Carmichael and I know that man. Please don’t shoot him. He’s a really troubled kid.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘How did you get in here? Who did you say you were?’ Wolf was on his feet, looking straight at Cate.

  ‘I w
as in the car, and I heard it on the radio,’ Cate said. ‘People were saying there was refugee from Tanzania holding people hostage. I was like, a refugee? Which refugee? Because that’s my business. I’m an advocate for refugees. I pulled over and called up the news on my iPhone. There were all these pictures of Nudie . . . I knew I had to come.’

  Wolf said, ‘Nudie?’

  ‘That boy in the shop – his name is Nudie,’ said Cate, pointing in the direction of Cups and Saucy.

  ‘Not according to our information,’ Wolf said. He had one hand in the air, ready to signal the SWAT team to remove Cate from the scene. ‘How did you even get in here, anyway?’

  Cate held up her photographs. They were the old-fashioned kind, not on her phone, but on actual glossy paper.

  ‘I went home to get these,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think anyone would let me in without them. I didn’t know Nudie still had me down as his next of kin.’

  Wolf stepped forward and took the pictures. It was Cate alright. She was ten years younger, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in a blue CARE baseball cap and matching polo shirt, standing and smiling in some kind of camp in Africa.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said, pointing at herself. ‘And that’s Nudie.’

  I looked over Wolf’s shoulder. Cate wasn’t lying. There she was in the photograph, her arm around a skinny, ugly, pale kid with a bandage around his head – Ali Khan, but younger.

  ‘You’ll have his name as Ali Khan,’ she said. ‘That’s the name we put on his passport. I figured he’d go back to his own name once he got here.’

  ‘His own name being? Here being?’

  ‘He’s Nudie,’ she said. ‘Nudie – it’s Nduwimana, actually. It translates as “I’m in God’s Hands”. He’s from Tanzania.’

  Wolf still had his hand in the air as if ready to signal, but his arm had come down a bit.

  ‘How are you his next of kin?’ he said.

  She told the story: ‘I was a volunteer in the refugee camp where he lived. This was years ago. We were close. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him. I didn’t know what happened to him, once he got here. He probably thinks I abandoned him.’