Hammerhead

by Peter Nicholson

  When you knew what cruelties had been perpetrated in the name of that lot, it was liberating to see this outcome. I wondered if Anton had been involved. I hadn’t seen him for a while. Perhaps Thérèse would be able to tell me what was happening. I had seen her several times since we first met, but our relationship had stalled. She had a low threshold for men, having been burnt several times in the past. It was hard to read her moods, and she gave the organisation her highest priority. I thought that was only right.

  Still, I rang Thérèse and asked if I could see her. She said she would like to, so we chose a restaurant on the edge of town where we wouldn’t be noticed, we hoped.

  At my insistence, Herr Ober sat us in a quiet alcove. I had a chance to study her face away from the usual distractions.

  ‘That person I saw you taking notes for recently …’

  ‘Oh, let’s not talk about him. We are developing some plans that might, or might not, come off.’

  I guess we all had to be careful, but I thought Thérèse was being a little too circumspect, considering what we’d shared already.

  My riesling helped accustom me to Thérèse’s obstinacy. Well, I was obstinate too. Just as those infernal time-wasting to-ings and fro-ings in Brussels at the European Parliament had led, in reaction, to the development of The Hammer, so I felt our circling around each other was a preparation for further intimacy. We were of a kind. The warmth I’d felt weeks earlier in the lift was returning.

  I thought I might broach the subject of the Black Sea imbroglio. Thérèse told me Anton had been involved, but she didn’t know anything more. I guess that is the problem with a group such as ours; everyone was being doubly careful after our recent experiences.

  We finished with a brandy and somehow, without speaking or even trying to bring the matter any closer to fruition, back in my room, in a sudden overflow of need, we made love.

  The pearl of our desire silvered the afternoon, distancing those perilous lands where the agenda and the market exchange rate dominated. Here was some certainty against all that.

  Later we sat in bed watching the television. One of those crass talk shows was on, where the white and black trash audience behaved more than badly. How could people debase themselves to the point where their most intimate moments were turned into fodder for the viewing public. Thérèse said she thought these melodramas were scripted, but could you script these howls from the edge, where a person’s self-esteem was so vulnerable they didn’t hesitate to say things that should only be addressed to a single person, certainly not millions. These were the people Thérèse and I were defending. Were they worthy of our efforts? This question must have occurred often to my parents’ generation. I had my doubts as I watched the program reach a dismal end. The land of the truly free didn’t, at that moment, seem terribly well populated. I guessed I couldn’t afford the holier-than-thou option. I knew a Lincoln, a Biko or a Mandela were called on to make sacrifices certain of human mendacity. It was their knowledge of the heart of darkness at the same moment as their resistance to those forces trying to destroy them that made these people great. In the uncertain goldfish bowl of reflections we call historical perspective, what bloodstained currents wove among the fish featuring in the aquarium’s passing parade.

  Our transcendent mediocrity. Our kindness and goodness working against gnawing nihilism.

  Thérèse read the perplexed expression on my face.

  ‘Don’t try to work it all out. You will go gaga.’

  She said the word ‘gaga’ with such an absurd and endearing expression on her face that I forgot all about the televised wall of noise and fell into her arms again.

  Row, row, row your boat

  Gently down the stream.

  Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,

  Life is but a dream.

  I sang it softly to myself, and then a little more loudly. Thérèse joined in too. We must have sung it at least twenty times.

  How infectious her sense of the ridiculous was. At long last, I felt myself thawing.

  But since life isn’t just for pleasure we had to resume normal habits, which we did unwillingly, not wanting to let go of the last few hours. Time had slowed for us, the seconds only brushing our skin.

  As I accompanied Thérèse to the door I felt renewed. I kissed her gently. And then she was gone.

  And I still hadn’t really found out anything about that Greek gentleman she was assigned to.

  You could be happy. I didn’t aim for the kind of happiness that was always warding off untoward disturbing elements. That seemed dumb to me. Life was a struggle against the status quo. But Thérèse and I had been happy. I also remembered the briefest moment of exaltation, amid the panic and fear, when Shevchenko, Anton and I triangulated in the spiral stairway of Saint Stephans. I supposed that was not an appropriate feeling to have, but it was real. In former times, when I’d given advice to grey faces at drawn-out board meetings, I sometimes rebelled and told home truths, so complacent were expectations around the table. I had been lucky to get a ticket of leave from that hamodrama. I could see myself in thirty years, at the top of the pile in some institution, a slave to shareholders’ unreal expectations, my sclerotic opinions duly, dully noted in the local papers.

  But now I’d escaped all that. Properly employed at last.

  Joy. More joy!

  Anton returned from wherever looking pleased with himself and at the next debriefing he told us how he had engineered the demise of those bastards. This was a big success and everyone was feeling good. Clearly, this wasn’t a rerun of Judgment at Nuremberg. We were judge, jury and executioner in one. Dame Enid actually danced on the spot. With her forthrightness and managerial skills she could have taken over from Charles, but Enid made it clear that, politically, it wouldn’t be possible. Apparently this was the difficulty with most of those who were friendly with Charles. They were more than capable and very influential, but they couldn’t risk compromising their reputations, hard earned as each was. Also, they simply didn’t have the time to implement The Hammer’s ambitious agenda, willing as they were to help.

  Later, Charles said he wanted me back home to attend to another matter. I was hardly used to the idea of myself as a kind of European financial king pin, and now I was being sent back to Oz.

  Conflict diamonds from Liberia were making their way to Australia, and these diamonds were the cause of a financial frenzy emanating from that unlucky city, Monrovia. Diamonds. A crime cliché, but easy to move, and, of course, extremely valuable. Occasionally, business people foolish enough to visit on the promise of riches were enticed into neighbouring jungle, never to be heard of again.

  For whatever reason, Charles had changed his mind about my involvement in further operations. I was to impersonate one of these businessmen to find out as much as I could about the people involved, and then The Hammer would strike.

  Charles wished me well with a tone of ‘Stand not upon the order of your going.’ It was the way things had to be.

  I’d grown to love the atmosphere of Munich, here where there was genuine gaiety, not sentimental affection for past glories or unreal expectations of future splendours. Müncheners know how to enjoy themselves, the only difficulty for foreigners being an undeveloped taste for wurst coinciding with an abundance of smoky beer. Sometimes the results were not pleasant. But you soon accommodated even that dietary imperative, unless you were a vegan. Well, Munich was not the place for puritanical strictures, and in fact anything less like the outsider’s mistaken view of the German worker as some dour Aryan with severe work habits would be hard to imagine. This was, after all, the city that helped composer Richard Strauss to monetary Schlagsahne courtesy of his swooning opera scores and luscious tone poems.

  I celebrated my imminent departure at a nightclub with Thérèse, me, a down-at-heels Slim Shady. The throbbing dance music mirrored my own determination to get to the bottom of this diamond business.

  The meaning of all the iniquity I’d encountered
so far, and that I’d meet up with in the future, would stay blurred. Mine was the uncertainty principle.

  Exhausted, sweating, we returned to the castle.

  That was my present German coda. And so back home I went.

  II

  My Violent, Improbable

  World

  Below, on the shards of countries hugged by oceans, rough destinies collided as I sampled fine food and an impressive wine list. I gradually withdrew from my fellow passengers to consider the seriousness of what the world had become for me, veering into violence.

  Crops would soon take in the morning sun as water ran from mountain top to delta. With what splendour came incomprehensible lives; from bright nervelines of desire to the plump, crying torso; from defeated, arthritic decades into that looming and most uncertain renewal of all.

  Ideals were still possible. So the enveloping memories of my involvement with Charles and Roy, Anton and Thérèse, told me. What strange complicity could take hold of those ideals and turn them to good use, to defeat what would destroy us—or confirm the negativity that only repeated past failures.

  Over the Gulf states I saw the distant flares of oil wells dotting the dark horizon. Incalculable, protean energies; continental drift of mountain range and plain; the coming on and passing away of genus and generation: I felt this as we hummed to the Southern Hemisphere in our aluminium tube. I was changing into something more purposeful, perhaps more terrible too.

  But what were my purposes. Was I an incidental agent of destruction, a disposable element of The Hammer’s puritanism. Perhaps, but deep down I approved of this puritanism. Flesh should create its own freedoms, which it did at every moment, and those freedoms all seemed good to me. But the ethical domain, where one acted on principles, was not free. I would tell that to those who would say our organisation was absurd, our politics naive and our morality despicable.

  History. A pike through the chest, a guillotine blade falling. Terror then was visible, expected. Now, following on from the clouds of toxic gas and radioactive fallout, terror was in the air, through water, across land. The earth trembled with a deadly presentiment, invisible, but so very real.

  These speculations suddenly condensed around my chair.

  ‘Mister Mapleton, would you like something more to drink?’

  How did those flight attendants keep their composure as they dealt with the awful types you sometimes encountered at the front-end of the plane. We had someone a few rows up who was plastered and giving people near him a hard time. Everyone was forced to listen to embarrassing details of his private life. It reminded me of the couple I’d seen years ago in the front row of the Imperial box at the Wiener Staatsoper who behaved inanely through an entire performance of Figaro, as if to say—we are more important than Mozart. Pathetic.

  Gently, yet insistently, the errant passenger was calmed and finally laid to rest. It all happened in the early hours of the morning when I should have been asleep. But I couldn’t sleep, for at the back of my head I was considering whether I could carry the expectations others had of me. I thought I could. Besides that, I had other things to attend to, Celia and Chris for starters, my father, business odds and ends.

  My flying kangaroo saw in the morning skies over the Australian deserts, homeland of the Dreaming, solitude, dried-up riverbeds, exploratory broken promises; then swards of olive eucalyptus leading on to the magnificence of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House. Surely there was no more splendid panorama than that, Monument Valley and the view along the Champs de Mars notwithstanding.

  Being sniffed at by cute beagles was the usual greeting for those arriving at Sydney International airport. They were extraordinarily persistent creatures who made you believe in a different kind of intelligence. Rationalists wanted to classify all living phenomena and weren’t content to accept the majesty of dogness on its own account. But not even dogs could sniff out the ambitions of many who disembarked. I knew the lower depths came into view pretty quickly when it was a matter of prestige. In our world now, few were content to do a good thing well, and leave it at that; or not the kinds of people I knew. They wanted acclamation, baubles. They did not have the selflessness that will work through decades without the need for kudos.

  How pleased those dogs looked as they traversed swathes of skirt and trouser leg or a slew of baggage dumped after transcontinental uncertainties and tiredness.

  I was cleared easily enough and caught a taxi back to my unit in the city. I unpacked hurriedly and showered, then slept.

  The following morning I phoned Celia and said I’d like to visit. She was surprised as I hadn’t told her I was coming home. Well, I hadn’t known I would be returning to Australia myself until recently.

  My sister and her husband lived on the harbour in a sterile postmodern dwelling that said a lot about the pretensions of its owners and the content of their souls. Real estate in this city is the subject of a tiresome monomania. Everyone seems to be living on the never-never of promised spectacular returns. But what of the returns to the spirit. Where are the books, the music and art in the cavernous spaces filled with Australian harsh light. Celia’s house had been ‘architect designed’, something she let me know rather too often. But what did that mean. Weren’t all houses designed by an architect. I laughed at this pretension. It was always a good idea to spend a lot of time in the environs of places styled in this way before committing the cheque book. Sometimes ‘architect designed’ was code for ‘you will need to spend an awful lot of money to keep this place in good repair; your living quarters will either be too cramped (‘cosy’ in real estate advertising parlance) or strangely configured; you will have to fight for a parking space because, even with this fancy price, there’s no garage.’

  Celia seemed happy enough to see me and Chris was more than happy. He held my hand when I was inside, which I thought a bad sign.

  Then Celia embarked on a massive defamation of her husband. I’d heard it often enough before. What I had been involved in would have been of little interest to her, not that I could have told her. She imagined I was doing more of the same as in Sydney. Also, it irritated me that Chris was made to listen to all the intimate ups and downs of her marriage. Didn’t she realise kids weren’t supposed to hear such things. But in my experience, when a relationship isn’t working, children are often bartered in an emotional tug of war ending with divided loyalties and insecurity. I wasn’t a parent, but I knew that much.

  ‘Celia, don’t you think you might ease up on the abuse? It takes two to tango.’

  ‘Don’t you dare take his side!’

  She sounded disturbed in the vehemence with which she spat out the words.

  Over the years I had grown so used to Celia’s vituperation that I was able to mentally slip off to other tangents as she raved. For example, I could see the comic side of my recent experiences. Who would believe me if I told them what had happened during the last few months. Wouldn’t the whole organisation and its coterie strike the average person as folly. But I hoped some would approve of what we were doing. Surely they too were fed up with the torpor of politicians, the hideous death lists accompanying each political failure. My philosophical bent had encouraged me to become one of the proactive doers, not the armchair do-nothings whose major capability was scorn. Celia would never have been able to cope with the truth about me. The best she was capable of was a kind of morbid, hysterical defensiveness in the midst of her suburban idyll.

  Chris loved his mother, but how could he understand her. I promised again that we’d get away when we had the chance. He looked at me with a quiet affection that was heartbreaking.

  I left, not really thinking I’d helped things along much. When I got home I phoned Enid to advise her about the stocks we’d discussed. My expertise in this area was one of my few claims to fame that wouldn’t be disputed, even by my enemies. I seemed to have the sixth sense needed to make good profits in the stock market. But you can’t believe what anyone tells you about predictab
ility in the markets. Finance operates according to a kind of chaos theory. There might well be a patterning beneath the frenzied trading, but we would never see it, and brokers who told their clients otherwise were lying. How often I’d heard the horror stories of those who foolishly placed huge amounts of money on a single security, only to lose the lot. Every type of stock seemed to have its day in the market, but just when that day might come was uncertain. This didn’t stop a forest of literature getting published involving graphs and lists of figures whose reliability was dubious at best.

  Whether I was now up to visiting Dad was another matter. Celia seemed to assume I would be happy to carry this burden myself, which I was, but her manner was off-putting. As her husband reminded her often enough, she was selfish. You could spend a day looking through clothes and shoes in her purpose built wardrobe, but if you asked her to consider the person begging on a railway platform—not a place she frequented—she shuddered. She had little idea how other people lived and I often thought it would be good for her to spend a week doing some voluntary work for one of the charities so she could see how much pain there was outside her circumscribed environment, and thus modify her synthetic bourgeois spite.