Cheaters

by JR Carroll

  They shook hands and Wolfgang was grateful he wasn’t subjected to the bone-crushing treatment. It was a firm enough grip, just a brief, fleshy squeeze, and the impression Wolfgang had was that he was in the presence of a gentle giant. Compared to Wolfgang’s casual attire – disposals army shirt, faded blue jeans with a rip in the knee, tan Rivers bush-walking boots – Alex was pure cop from head to toe in his navy club tie, white button-down shirt and synthetic light grey suit.

  ‘How was the flight?’ Alex said as they made their way out of the terminal, along an endless stretch of what looked like new carpeting.

  ‘The flight? Oh, that flight? Fantastic, mate. Beautiful. Loved it.’

  Alex regarded him sideways and a slow smile came to his lips. ‘Whenever I get on a plane,’ he said, ‘they have to move a few passengers up the other end to maintain equilibrium.’

  When they were in Alex’s unmarked police car and picking up speed on the freeway, there were a few minutes of polite chat before Alex said, ‘So they gave you a bit of a rundown, did they? Oh, by the way. Sorry to fuck up your weekend. If I’d known you’d gone bush I would’ve waited until Monday. But I thought you’d like this.’

  ‘I do like it, mate. Fuck it, there are plenty more weekends. No, they didn’t give me much of a rundown except for what was in your fax. That there’ve been sightings of my old pal in your fine city.’

  ‘Yeah. He’s here and he’s active. That’s if it is him. No-one seems to know what he looks like – except you. We’ve got old pictures, but they’re fucking useless. May as well be kindergarten snaps.’

  ‘I used to know what he looked like. It’s been a while. Years.’

  Alex didn’t say anything. From the way he’d spoken he had the feeling Wolfgang was doing some time travel, nearly a decade’s worth, back to October 1989 when he had New Zealand’s most wanted man in his keeping and let him slip through his fingers. Something a cop never gets over, especially when the bastard in question rubs it in by sending him Christmas cards from all parts of the globe and even phoning his house once from a brothel in Rangoon – or so he claimed. He could’ve been around the fucking corner.

  ‘Anyway your boss seemed to reckon you’d be keen for another shot at him,’ Alex said.

  ‘I am. I dream about the bastard. He laughs in my face a lot. I blame him for the wife pissing off. I used to wake up and strangle her – I guess she got sick of it.’

  ‘Funny about that,’ Alex said, looking straight ahead, a frown thickening his brow. Traffic was banking up: work on the City Link project had reduced the freeway to a single lane, which moved ahead glacier-like.

  ‘We’ll give you a proper briefing if and when we get through this shit,’ Alex said, ‘but in the meantime … there’s been this string of armed robberies that you might have heard about. TABs, banks and suburban building societies – Coolangatta, Newcastle, Sydney, Albury, Melbourne – all the way down the coast, and what had us fucked for a while – apart from three different police forces being involved, and that’s a total circus, let me tell you – was that it seemed to be someone different each time. He had so many tricks up his sleeve: foreign accent, gammy leg, tatts, pinstripe suit, different facial appearance, different hair, build, you name it. Eventually the penny dropped and it became obvious that because every robbery was so different, it might’ve been the same guy trying to throw us, right? It all tied in with this bungled robbery at a TAB here that became a double-murder about a year ago, about which we couldn’t make head nor tail. That was the start. Fuckin’ amazing business.’

  ‘Do tell,’ Wolfgang said.

  The car was stopped; Alex turned and gave all his attention to Wolfgang. ‘The murder victims were the fucking bandits, right, but … who shot them? What happened in there? At first we thought there were three bandits, who must’ve blued with each other while they were doing the job. But the killer turns out to be one of the customers, would you believe. According to witnesses, most of whom didn’t see much because they were face down on the floor, or too terrified, one of the bandits half killed a bystander for no reason – he suffered permanent brain damage as a result – then picked on this old guy, who pulled out a cannon and wasted him, bang. What a fuckin’ mess. Then he chases the other bandit down the street and fixes him up too, bang, execution style, after which he evaporates. Guy about seventy, for Christ’s sake. We went through every inch of the security film, but there was no clear picture. He was always just out of frame, or there was just his arm, as if he knew where the camera was aimed. But we saw the murder weapon: a Webley-Vickers .45 revolver, a relic, used to be British services issue. Enormous bastard, and did it blow these two scumbags to the shithouse. But it’s a very unusual piece, not one we’ve come across before. A few collectors had them, but they were cleared later.’

  ‘So what made you think it was my mate?’

  ‘Well, it was only in retrospect that we thought that. None of our informants could give us any leads. Nothing. The man didn’t exist. But I remembered that case of yours very well. It was in all the papers and on TV. Sixty Minutes.’

  ‘Please don’t remind me,’ Wolfgang said.

  ‘Sorry, mate. Christ, look at this fucking mess.’ A near-stationary line of cars extended as far as the eye could see, to a bottleneck at an overpass where there were flashing arrows and amber lights and an array of heavy road-construction vehicles. They were trapped – the first exit was a long way ahead.

  ‘We could do a Michael Douglas,’ Wolfgang said. ‘Just … get out and walk away.’

  ‘I don’t think the commissioner would appreciate that somehow, Wolfgang.’

  Pause, then Wolfgang said, ‘I have to say it does sound like him. And it explains what he’s been up to all these years, apart from ruining my life.’

  ‘He’s violent. He’s a master of disguises.’

  ‘True. There’s nothing he isn’t good at, including the disappearing bit. If he wasn’t a crim he could have his own fucking TV show, like that David Copperfield.’

  ‘On Sixty Minutes – sorry – they compared him to Harry Lime, the guy that went down the sewers.’

  ‘Yeah. That’s where he fucking belongs, with all the other rats. And I would love nothing more than to be the one that drowned him in a river of shit.’

  Wolfgang gazed ahead at the bulldozers gouging chunks of rock and earth from an embankment, making room for the extra lanes that were going to solve the city’s traffic problems. A row of tip trucks were lined up, waiting to be filled, and workmen in hard hats were wandering around all over the place. Everything was a mess. When you see work at this stage, Wolfgang thought, you cannot imagine how it will ever be finished. Yet in the end it is. To him it was a miracle, like flying. Their car inched forward, stopping for long periods at a time. He didn’t care – at least they were on the ground.

  Gerald Kenneth Kamp. The name that was now a permanent part of both his conscious and unconscious self. Gerald Kenneth Kamp: like drum taps on the brain. Sometimes they were the first words that came into his mind when he woke up in the mornings, and then they would remain with him for the rest of the day, driving him crazy. It was a kind of slow, persistent torture, and often it felt as if it were being deliberately inflicted at a safe distance by the man in question.

  Gerald Kenneth Kamp. Drum taps. Slow torture. It all went together so naturally – an unholy trinity. Kamp, born and raised in Invercargill by middle-class, academic parents, defied them by joining the army at seventeen after a turbulent school career in which he had mostly distinguished himself by getting a girl pregnant at fifteen. Following his basic training he was posted to the infantry, where he trained to become a drill instructor. Gerald Kamp was a warrior without a war, a young man with a yearning for active service at a time when all troops did was play cards, drink, fight each other, maintain equipment or, occasionally, embark on exercises in the bush. He was a frustrated soldier who was known to have a violent temper. He had all the skills. A crack shot, he had come top
of his class in most areas: marksmanship, map reading, bushcraft, PE, unarmed combat. Then, bored with square-bashing, an unchanging routine and bastardising raw recruits, he applied for and was accepted into the elite SAS regiment. Kamp was now right in his element. Even though there was no war, he could carry on as if there was. During the highly demanding training period he excelled in every department: parachuting, night patrolling, survival in the bush, infiltration, sabotage techniques involving the use of plastic explosives, knife-fighting, coping with intense physical and mental torture, psychological warfare, interrogation – the full gamut. Kamp relished the SAS. After graduating he settled into regimental life for a time, living in the barracks while most of the men – those with wives or girlfriends – went home after work and at weekends.

  At that time, still in his early twenties, Gerald Kamp had no romance to speak of in his life, and was not known to socialise much. He seemed to prefer the spartan barracks life, the discipline, the camaraderie, the uniform. The regiment was everything to him. If there was no action or no-one about after hours he was content with his own company, busily cleaning his array of weapons, polishing his brass and boots until they gleamed and in general keeping his gear immaculate. Because he was rarely seen with a girlfriend there were those who said he was a closet homosexual, but never to his face – there were limits even to a commando’s bravery. Even though he was quiet compared to most soldiers, there was ample evidence that he would be the wrong man to cross. It was just a feeling you got from being near him.

  The fact was that Kamp was lying low. There was a wife in the background, the product of his spirited, cock-driven youth, and from whom he was now seriously estranged. The courts had placed him on a good behaviour bond and issued a restraining order preventing him from knowingly being within a hundred metres of her – a small detail about which he was anxious for the army not to know.

  Gerald Kamp had a history of bashing females and his wife, a slinky vamp named Kitty, had sought the restraining order on the grounds that he assaulted and raped her virtually whenever he pleased, both during and after the marriage. Gerald Kamp got high on violence and Kitty was his regular fix. In the end she just got sick of it. She was masochistic, but not that masochistic. Police had beaten a path to their home to quell his savage outbursts, but he always managed to talk her out of pressing charges. To his advantage he possessed an outwardly charming, roguish manner that unfailingly won over women, even after they had experienced his brutal side many times. This he exploited to the full. A physically attractive man with a wicked grin, a supremely fit body and intense, dark eyes, he had a cavalier attitude to life, threw money around like confetti and was, by all accounts, something mighty special between the sheets. That counted for a lot. Gerald Kamp prided himself on his expert swordsmanship and, apparently because of it, women were prepared to forgive his lapses. In form he was a laugh a minute and unpredictable – at times wildly reckless – to be with. He would jump from the roofs of moving cars, he was adventurous, he knew no fear. But he had his deeply malevolent side, which seemed to surface in cycles. At times he could go completely crazy. He was not exactly short-tempered, but tended to seethe and turn quiet when a black mood set in, and then it just took anything at all – a door being banged shut, a passing remark – for him to cut loose. The demon within would then wreak havoc – smash the place up, kick the TV in, grab a gun and threaten blue murder – after which Gerald Kamp the charmer would try to patch things up. In this way he went through a series of de facto wives. Kitty, however, remained his favourite, even years after their divorce became official. She was the first and only real love of his life, the one who had, in his words, fucked like a runaway train right from the off. She was the kind of girl who used to watch porn movies by herself to learn some new moves, which she would then try out on Gerald. When he was blueing with later girlfriends he used to put them down by calling them nuns and virgins and telling them they couldn’t hold a candle to Kitty.

  In time he became a member of a select, shadowy group known as the Golden Condor, members of which left the country for days or weeks at a time for destinations unknown, then returned and resumed duties as if nothing had happened. After one of these mysterious absences, Gerald Kamp came back with several machine-gun bullets deep in his stomach, and spent a long time recovering in hospital. The wounds would not heal properly, resulting in internal bleeding, bowel problems, suppuration of his stomach tissue and external weeping of bodily fluids, which caused him great discomfort and inconvenience. Added to which he gave off a rancid smell. It seemed that the bullets, which had struck bone and shattered into minute fragments, had seriously infected him. Only heavily administered drugs prevented gangrene setting in, and death. As it was, he slipped into a coma. For months it could have gone either way, but Gerald refused to give in. When he was finally discharged from hospital he was a ghost of his former self, and a morphine addict. Half his bodyweight had fallen from him, he could barely walk, the colour had drained from his face. Only the wicked grin remained, although he had little to grin about. He needed to wear heavy bandages at all times because of the weeping, and without the constant medication his stomach was a ball of fire. He went on indefinite sick leave, convinced that his days in the beloved SAS were over.

  When he came back he had improved quite a lot. He had kicked the morphia habit, was back to his usual weight, seemed cheerful and positive and was ready to resume normal regimental life. There was still a problem with his wounds, but it appeared he just had to learn to live with that. It was an irritation, he claimed, nothing more, requiring him to change the dressing every few days. But apart from that he considered himself fit and ready for active service. The medical staff and the CO disagreed, however, and he was offered a training job – or a pension. Gerald was rocked. It was as if he’d been struck in the chest with a chain-mail fist. Here he was, still in his early thirties, in his prime, and washed up. Fucked. The regiment did not want him. He was a reject. He felt like pulling the pin then and there, punching out the colonel, but instead swallowed hard and said if it came down to that he would take the first option. Sir.

  Not long after his return to work Gerald snapped, king-hitting a sergeant in the mess who had apparently made some crack – or so Gerald thought in his semi-paranoid state – about has-beens in the ranks. For that Gerald was court-martialled and sentenced to some time in a military prison, after which he was discharged. In the RSM’s office on the day he was told to pack his gear he slammed his fist clean through the plasterboard wall and had to be physically removed from the base, screaming, by a phalanx of armed guards.

  After that he went right over the edge, getting into fights, racing police cars on the highways in his beloved Mark 2 Jaguar, breaking into the local cop shop and stealing weapons, taunting authorities. One night in a pub he was badly beaten up by a team of Maoris, and he responded by burning down one of their homes while some people were asleep inside. That earned him some serious time. Upon his release he turned to armed robbery, holding up service stations and convenience stores before turning to post offices and banks. When committing these robberies his procedure was to coolly wait for his turn in the queue, then smile at the teller, produce a withdrawal slip and a firearm. Because of this he became known as the Happy Bandit, but none of his victims was in any doubt that he would have shot them with pleasure if they had not immediately complied with his demands. Finally he took some hostages at a remote farmhouse and threw down the gauntlet to police. A firefight ensued, during which one of the hostages died – although it was never determined whether police or Kamp fired the fatal shot – and he was finally chased and run to ground half-naked in the bush.

  Wolfgang Lutz was part of the special response squad that captured Kamp that wet, misty day. This was just the start of their association, although at the time Wolfgang thought it was the beginning and the end of it. Gerald Kamp went back to jail, and during his maximum-security incarceration he made full use of his commando train
ing and skills to shield himself against the hardships and deprivations of life on the inside, and to develop a cold, hard temperament in place of the fiery one. Gerald could take punishment, he could take pain. These people, his jailers, didn’t know what pain was. To prove it he deliberately re-opened his old wound, necessitating an urgent visit to hospital, and that was when he made his famous break.

  While pretending to be unconscious and out of his mind, Gerald was in fact busily planning the escape. He sized up the hospital, which had bars on the windows and padlocks on the main doors at night, but which was not otherwise secure. Why would it be – it was not a prison hospital. One stinking hot night after he’d been there for a week, his chance came when most of the slack graveyard shift went AWOL for a nude swim at a nurse’s home nearby. Gerald slipped noiselessly from his bed, made his way into the canteen, climbed to the ceiling using makeshift ropes slung over beams and escaped through a skylight. His absence was not noted until hours afterwards, by which time Gerald was long gone, and there were red faces all round.