by JR Carroll
When he was hurrying there, numb, nearly catatonic with dread, disbelief and self-loathing, he tried to get his mind around his immediate problem: how was he going to withhold all this from Patti? She had a job at another university now, so at least he was spared the humiliation of being exposed and thrown out in front of his wife. Crossing the busy street and entering the bar he could not imagine her response when she found out her husband was a closet junkie as well as a drunk and philanderer. Nick’s words rang in his ears. He knew if he was to have any chance of surviving he had to hold on to his marriage at all costs. Patti would have to be kept in the dark for a while, until things looked a bit clearer. So he didn’t tell her anything when he arrived home blind that night. Nor the next day, or the day after that. He left for work as usual each morning, taking his briefcase and sitting in a park somewhere reading the paper until the pubs opened their doors.
Two other events of major importance happened about this time. The first was that Robert’s mother, who had been showing signs of dementia, lost her remaining marbles in a dramatic way. Her trick was to suddenly appear nude in front of guests, tittering like a naughty schoolgirl, pointing at her vagina and then running away and hiding. She was shunted off to a five-star nuthouse. Robert was wrecked. She had been his mentor and guiding light right through childhood. At least she would never know what had become of her little prince, her Lochinvar.
The second thing was the economic crash of the late eighties, as a result of which his father lost his millions, both on the stockmarket and because of the subsequent collapse in property values. He had been very big on ‘leveraging’ during the boom, and was now forced to sacrifice everything to repay his massive borrowings – bank savings, shares, the family seat in Malvern, the Portsea house, the 12-metre yacht, the fleet of luxury cars, private boxes at all the major sporting events, membership of exclusive clubs. All finished. He was a ruined man – financially, physically and mentally. When Robert saw him some months afterwards, the flesh had fallen from his bones, he had developed stooped shoulders, and instead of striding out decisively in the world the way he used to he merely shuffled along in slippers with his head bowed. Robert could not believe this was the same person who had taken on and beaten the Japs in mosquito-infested jungles, then carved out a trucking empire with his own two hands, headed up boards of directors and hobnobbed with Prime Ministers and Governors. Now he was just a sad spectre – alone, insecure, almost destitute and quite paranoid. Instead of a mansion with liveried servants and the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce and Mercedes he had a basic one-bedroom unit in a nondescript suburb and an old rusted clunker, a Ford Cortina, which he was too nervous to drive. So there went Robert’s safety net – and his inheritance.
Inevitably Patti found out Robert had lost his job. This was two months after the event, when she phoned him at work only to be told by a surprised receptionist that he hadn’t been on the staff for some time. That was a big enough shock, but then she found a disposable needle and other incriminating items under the bed. She was out the door and far away long before Robert got home from his pretend work. He knew she was gone as soon as he was inside, even though she hadn’t even left a note. There was no mistaking the cold sensation that he was standing in a hastily and angrily vacated premises. He made numerous attempts to contact her, but Patti would not take his phone calls or respond to his blizzard of pleading letters, one of which was a long poem he had written for her – a modern version of Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. So much for women being stayers.
Life went into freefall after that. All his old buddies, even the one who had introduced him to his habit, disappeared off the scene. When he rang them they hung up. Robert Curlewis was pure poison. Even his father Atholl disowned him. He was rapidly discovering that no-one, but no-one, wants to know you when you’re on skid row. Naively, he had always imagined his friends would stick by him, but Nick had been right again: he was universally despised. In desperation he visited his mother at the nursing home and sat with her for an hour, sobbing and confessing to his failures and transgressions while she stared at him uncomprehendingly, not knowing who this raving lunatic was. Before long he was so broke he had to sell his beloved pad in Kew and move into basic rented accommodation, living on unemployment benefits and the proceeds from whatever he could sell. He would call on former friends at all hours of the night asking – begging – for money to buy drink and drugs, until every door was firmly and finally shut against him. Time and again he tried to quit his drug habit, without success, so in the finish he threw in the towel and gave himself up to the tattered remnants of his pitiful existence.
10
After a regulation canteen lunch of pie, veg and chips, Wolfgang Lutz spent the remainder of the day examining mugshots and stills from bank security cameras. There was little doubt in his mind that Gerald Kamp was the bandit in question – the one now known as the Beach Bandit after the raids along the Pacific coast. But you had to hand it to the mongrel, something Wolfgang hated doing: he was so-fucking-ingenious. An evil genius. Some of his disguises were so convincing they would never be able to pin the robberies on him purely on the video evidence – unless he confessed to them all, as most serial bandits ended up doing, to big-note themselves, once they knew the jig was up. Poring over one of the stills with a magnifying glass, Wolfgang was in two minds himself. Here was a bandit with a pudgy face who looked shorter than Kamp, holding the gun in his left hand instead of his right, wearing a striped rugby top over a big beer gut. Fine, he could make cosmetic changes, but how does he make himself shorter?
Wolfgang thought: Maybe it isn’t him.
Then: Bullshit, they’re all him. He only seems shorter. It’s the way he’s hunching his neck and bending his knees.
But Gerald Kamp could even do that: he could make himself shorter. He could turn himself inside out. He could sprout fucking wings.
He wasn’t your normal bandit.
Wolfgang looked across the desk at Alex Grimke, sitting there patiently with his jacket off, displaying a shirt the size of a circus tent.
‘That’s him all right,’ Wolfgang said.
‘All of them?’ Alex said, scratching an armpit.
‘All of them.’
‘You’re positive?’
‘I’m positive. But if you didn’t know Kamp you probably wouldn’t think so. To the untrained eye there are three distinctly different people in these pictures, but they’re all him.’
‘He’s that good.’
‘He is. The original, mate.’
Wolfgang leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head, thinking about Gerald Kamp. So he was out there somewhere in the big city. He probably already knew Wolfgang was in town. The cop and the crim, the good guy and the bad guy, gravitating around each other without making contact, drawn together as if they had no say in it, but Kamp had plenty of say in it. He was enjoying himself all the time. He’d be smiling right now. Wolfgang thought about the Yorkshire Ripper sending voice tapes to the papers and goading the detective in charge of the case, and of Jack Slipper and Ronnie Biggs. He felt sorry for Slipper, who retired from the force without ever getting his man, Biggs always laughing at him via the TV and the tabloids, sitting in some Rio bar: You can’t touch me, mate. You could make a career out of being obsessed with catching one criminal if you didn’t watch it. Of course he had plenty in common with Kamp, a factor which no doubt encouraged the astute Kamp to see them as allies beneath the skin: both lone wolves, both expert hunters and crack shots, both with military backgrounds. Wolfgang’s six-year stint as an infantryman in the regular army did not measure up to Kamp’s specialist training, but he had been in Special Operations, which was similar. But it went further than that: both had German heritage and, quite incredibly, their grandfathers both worked in the same Dusseldorf steel mill before emigrating to New Zealand in the same year, 1934, when Gerald and Wolfgang’s fathers were both nine years old. So it went on.
All this deta
il emerged during their many conversations over the years and Wolfgang had to admit there was more than a little curiosity on his part, even though he was a mechanistic, sceptical man. It had occurred to him many times that Kamp was cunning and devious enough to extract information from Wolfgang about his family background and concoct a similar history on the basis of it, as some sort of psychological tactic. Nevertheless there was no denying the sense that they were somehow connected, like it or not. They thought and planned the same way, reading each other like survey maps, second-guessing moves, seeing into each other’s hearts and minds, each drawing on gut feelings and practical experience. One Hun pursuing another Hun and Gerald Kamp, the bad one, the rogue soldier, always managing to come up trumps. That was understandable, since he had important advantages. He was on his own, travelling light. He didn’t have other people, officialdom or laws getting in his hair. He wasn’t restricted. He was a wild creature in its element.
Or maybe he was just plain smarter than Wolfgang.
According to Alex Grimke underworld contacts believed that Gerald Kamp was currently living somewhere in Melbourne. No-one could be absolutely sure, but three separate reports had him placed at popular table-top dance venues in the city, rubbing shoulders with businessmen and barristers, and a prostitute who worked at one of these clubs part time told police a man answering his current description put a hundred-dollar note inside her knickers and offered her another one to spend an hour with him when she knocked off. The woman declined the offer, she said, because the man made the hair stand up on the back of her neck, just by the way he looked and spoke. In her words he was a ‘creep’, and ‘scary to be around’. It sounded like Gerald Kamp. The trouble was that the trail was cold. He would not overstay his welcome in any one place, and he almost certainly looked totally different now. But the chances were he was still in Melbourne – it was a big city, big enough to lose himself in, and there were plenty of opportunities for a man of his talents to make a nice living, at least for a while, until the heat got too much. Police raids on these clubs did not produce Kamp, but since they did manage to come up with two underworld figures from interstate wanted lists it was not a wasted exercise.
At the end of the afternoon they were sitting in the squad room drinking beers and tossing ideas around. Gerald Kamp was partial to sex and unless he had acquired a girlfriend – unlikely – that meant he was visiting brothels or picking up hookers on the streets. He would not go without it for long and there was a fair chance he’d beat up on the lucky girl for extra kicks. So there were one or two avenues to follow up.
Wolfgang crushed his fifth can of VB, dropped it in the bin, glanced at his watch and said, ‘So where’s a decent place to get a feed around here?’
‘Take your pick,’ Alex said. ‘What’s your preference?’
‘I feel like a curry or some Thai food. Plenty of hot chillies and ice cold beer.’
‘No problem. I’ll go with you.’ He cast an eye around to see if there were any more takers, but it was seven o’clock on a weekday and most of those not on duty were heading off home to the suburbs. Alex had no problems with that: he lived in the suburbs too, at a picturesque but distant location called Goldstream, but his wife never expected him home before midnight, if then. Some nights he didn’t return at all, for work or other reasons about which she did not enquire. These days, with their two teenage sons pretty much independent, she had interests of her own and didn’t mind her husband’s absence. It was one of the few marriages in the place that survived life in the force and Alex was the first to admit it was mainly because neither he nor his wife cared enough to do anything about it. For all he knew she was fucking out of school, but Christ, who could blame her. Not Alex. He did the same thing himself now and then. That was just … life. He didn’t complain: he had a job he liked, staunch mates, respect from his peers. A price had to be paid for all those things. Live and let live, he believed. That was his one and only rule – except when it came to getting his meaty hands on crims.
They ended up in the Yew Tree, an upstairs Thai restaurant in an obscure lane off Little Bourke Street where Alex knew the maitre d’ slightly from police functions. Like Wolfgang he was fond of Asian food and was something of a living legend because of the vastness of his appetite. Alex Grimke did not dine at tables. He pigged out, silently and concentratedly consuming everything the waiters could bring as fast as they could deliver it and then reaching across and finishing off anyone else’s leftovers with a calm, methodical efficiency. The standing joke at work was that the only way you could ever make Alex mad as hell and put your life at risk was to place yourself between him and food.
After they had exchanged pleasantries with the maitre d’ and settled back, drinking Crown Lagers, Alex said conversationally, ‘So, Wolfgang, there’s a fair bit of feeling between you and Gerald Kamp.’
‘You noticed,’ Wolfgang said, grinning. ‘I hoped it wasn’t too obvious. Yeah. Mate, to me it’s like a fucking movie or one of those TV series that never ends.’
‘Right. Like The Fugitive.’
‘Yeah. But I tell you what, mate, if I ever got that cunt in my sights and there was no-one else around, no witnesses, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I’d put all his lights out, permanently, and then I’d know he was gone for fucking good. I’d make him disappear into the ether like the little white dot on the TV screen. Even then he’d probably come back to life, like the fucking Terminator.’
Alex was aware that the issue was personal to Wolfgang, but the raw passion in his words and the way the large vein down the centre of his forehead rose abruptly when he spoke about Kamp surprised him. He thought then: This guy is an obsessive. Could be a bit whacko.
‘I’ll try to forget you told me that,’ Alex said. ‘Just in case you get lucky.’
‘It won’t be luck,’ Wolfgang shot back over the rim of his beer glass. ‘Luck will have nothing to fucking do with it, mate. I’ll run the cunt down no matter where he is. I don’t care if he’s disguised as Phar Lap or Boy fuckin’ George. Kamp is mine. He’s taken chunks off me and laughed while he’s fuckin’ done it. My sister still can’t use her right arm properly, plus she’s a mental basket-case. Didn’t know that, did you? All down to Kamp. I don’t want him in the big house, mate, not even if they strap him up and stick him in a cage, like Hannibal fuckin’ Lecter. I want him buried, preferably fried, sliced and eviscerated and down a fuckin’ long way, ’cause then I’d be reasonably certain he wasn’t gonna show up again.’ He swallowed some beer, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. ‘But even then, you know, he’s just as fuckin’ likely to tunnel his way to Tibet, come out chantin’ and playin’ the bongos like a Hari fuckin’ Krishna on the other side. I’d chase him there, too, even if I had to crawl over the fuckin’ Himalayas.’
He wasn’t smiling, either, as he knocked back the contents of his glass with palpable relish, then topped it up again just as the head waiter arrived with their entrees.
‘Great stuff, chief,’ he said, clapping his hands with a bang like a gunshot, and the two of them dived straight into the deep-fried crab claws, stuffed chicken wings, spring rolls and the minced pork with lemon grass and cashews and the little bowls of chilli sauce on the side. Then the drinks waiter came and started pouring the first of several bottles of Brown Brothers sauvignon blanc.
When they left the Yew Tree they were happily half-stung, laughing a lot and trying to work out what to do and where to go next. It was after eleven, and by rights Alex really should have gone home then, but what the fuck. He knew he would regret this in the morning, getting out of bed at six and then sitting in traffic for an hour and a half not feeling flash, but that didn’t seem to matter right now. Wolfgang Lutz was a funny and unusual guy with a store of wisecracks and dirty stories and a way about him, as if he was saying things that were just being minted in his mind a split-second before they were shot out of the corner of his mouth. He wasn’t at all what Alex had expected, and not even much like a cop if it c
ame to that. He was more like a hunter down from the mountains, a steel-eyed bushwhacker full of rat cunning and sly, sideways humour – a man who applied the same laws of life whether he was upcountry tracking deer shit or in the big smoke sniffing out New Zealand’s most wanted. He looked the part, too, in his frayed army shirt, his watch with the snap-on brown leather cover over the face, his deeply creased outdoorsman’s hands that never stayed still while he spoke; the tan cowboy belt, worn smooth as a razor strop, with sheath knife attached on his hip, like a gun holster; the soiled moleskins with grass stains in them and the cracked R. M. Williams boots, which had clearly done more than their share of hard miles. Alex wouldn’t have been surprised to see him spit tobacco juice on the ground.
