Jacko

by Keneally, Thomas

  He had then somehow found the will to starve himself, to make himself a tragic being, to launch himself against the corner of the Mulcahys’ glass-topped coffee table at Place de l’Opéra by the sea.

  After I had the inevitable row with Maureen, all the worse because now my behaviour looked ridiculous, she said, It’s a wonder no one ever looked for lymph swellings under his arms. But I suppose he never went near doctors, and it’s bad taste to ask a dying man if you can see his lumps.

  Chloe was right to be impressed by the heroic scale of Francis’s mortality play. He had hoped, said the prosecution, that the freight company and the police would back away from his mortal, cadaverous act. What sense and decency was there in prosecuting a ghost? Except that a little investigation showed that Francis took no treatment at the cancer centres and hospitals where the limo dropped him. Instead, he walked through the halls, out into the laneways, and was picked up there by a sole friend and confidant, a young painter who had shared a number of his trips to the San Francisco Opera in the salad days.

  He would often spend the night at the painter’s flat, returning to the hospital the next day or the day after that to be picked up by the limo.

  For Chloe’s sake, I went to court on the last day and was surprised to see Bickham there, shoulders hunched, face long and sallow, in need of air. Sacrificing so much of his remaining breath for Chloe. Led by Khalil, he would make the arduous escape from the television crews afterwards.

  Francis got eight years and a good talking to. Some misguided commentators, the judge told him, had thought this a stylish crime. But it took no style to exploit computers, at least temporarily. Thousands had done it, and thousands were in jail for it. And where was the stylishness in fraudulently evoking the pity of others, and the grief of the Emptor family?

  As I left, I heard one loose-tied journalist say to another. He won’t mind jail. He’ll be in root heaven.

  13

  There was a particular New York lunch Jacko invited us to. This was at the Grand Ticino, and Lucy and Jacko, Maureen and I (Our favourite older couple, said Jacko) were celebrating the second anniversary of a marriage ceremony they had gone through in New York, having earlier been married in Sydney. Francis was at that stage perhaps near the end of his second year of serving time in medium security, learning to paint, and teaching a class in music appreciation. He was not mentioned at the lunch, nor even our attempted abduction of him, which was, after all, a wonderful lunch reminiscence. Jacko, Lucy said, had written Francis off so thoroughly he didn’t even tell me.

  There was a less than charged ardour to this long lunch. I did not know exactly what to think of the anniversary. Lucy had confided to my wife that Jacko did not really want her to chase after any excellence in her own right, to develop her cello and join music schools, in which New York abounded, or to seek out a music teacher. She was thinking of art classes, since she painted sometimes and people who should know liked her work.

  Jacko, in turn, was still complaining to me that despite her even and casual public demeanour, Lucy depended on him utterly for her validity, was not driven to take the city on and to find for herself a name other than that of spouse of the Great Trespasser.

  One or both of them were badly and earnestly mistaken, and I felt that a murderous little smog of incomprehension hung over the anniversary feast. The balance of judgement had surely to favour Lucy, since there was nothing we could publicly see to contradict her general stance of tolerance and casual good sense towards Jacko. Besides, one night recently, leaving a dinner table we’d shared at an Italian restaurant in Tribeca, I’d met Lucy in the corridor on my way to the lavatory. Lucy stood, her face blurred with tears, by the telephone. She looked as if she’d forgotten her way back to our table.

  —Lucy, I said.

  She turned her eyes to me.

  —I hate this city, she told me. It makes me powerless. I’m a different woman in Australia. I can do anything. Start anything, you know. Here I can’t get started.

  I held her for a moment.

  —Have you ever written? I asked.

  The bright idea being that I could take her into my class at NYU. Bloody Jacko could afford it.

  —That’s kind, she said. But no. Music and a bit of painting. That’s all I’ve got. Just manual stuff.

  —Pretty good manual stuff!

  She smiled and wept then, and I uttered flat reassurances. She dried her eyes, went off to the women’s lavatory, and returned to the dining room ten minutes later, glimmering, smiling. Wearing the James Ruse High smile, saying whacko! and that’s the go.

  Now, at the anniversary lunch, we had barely finished the main course when a waiter came and said that there was a call for Jacko.

  —Good, said Jacko, as if he’d been expecting it.

  I thought it might be some act he had planned for her – say three or four Renaissance players in drag to play bagpipes and flutes and do some juggling at the table. Lucy, her long lips still fixed in a smile, cast her eyes up though. She expected nothing very startling.

  At this slack stage of the search for the Anodyne Kid, Jacko had interviewed a professor of psychology at Columbia for Live Wire, which, having devoted itself at Jacko’s urging to the search, now needed to find a result. The psychologist said that even on the slim evidence so far presented, there was a likelihood that the Anodyne Kid might very well coincide with Sunny Sondquist. A number of possibilities therefore existed. One was of course that Sunny had been taken by someone who had disoriented her in some way, had turned her mind. Like Patty Hearst, he said.

  And Maureen said to me, What would they do for an analogy if they didn’t have Patty Hearst?

  The other idea was that she was wilfully staying away from Bob Sondquist. It was not possible to guess what motivation, said the psychologist to Jacko, what perceived wrong any child might have for staying away from someone as genial and ill as Mr Sondquist seemed to be. Swallowing his news of what motivation that was, Jacko had bravely gone on asking the prosaic questions.

  Then in Baker, California, in what was called the High Desert, a bright little, middle-aged block of a woman who on videotape reminded me somewhat of Chloe, said she was sure she had worked in the past in a motel with Sunny, except that she called herself Ess. Ess lived with some family or other outside Baker. Occasionally; in the early mornings, a man in a station wagon brought her to work, but most of the time Ess ran to the motel and ran home, even at the height of summer. The habit of spelling under her breath? Everyone had noticed that about Ess. She spelt words as she jogged, and if you turned the vacuum off while you were cleaning a room, you heard her spelling as she washed the bath out. But if she was a victim of some sort, why didn’t she just tell someone? the woman asked. Why did she jog back home of her own free will?

  Ess was very private about the family she lived with. When she said they were moving and she was going with them, she gave away no details at all.

  The psychologist, consulted yet again, said, Well, someone might be keeping her under very steady mental and physical control.

  I presumed now that the telephone call Jacko got at Grand Ticino had something to do with all this; some other direction for the search for the pitiable Anodyne Kid.

  In Jacko’s absence, the waiter came, flirted casually and stylishly with Lucy, and took our orders for dessert and coffee. As the young man balletically withdrew, Jacko himself returned. He did not sit down. Instead he clenched both fists against his chest, like a child who could not contain his delight.

  —You won’t believe this, boys and girls, he announced.

  —Sunny? I asked.

  —Not Sunny. Something really big. Durkin’s just called me from the Perugia. Something’s happened in Berlin. People are walking through the Bornholmer Strasse checkpoint. It’s wide open. Durkin says they’ve just opened another five gates. People are milling in front of the Brandenburg Gate, right up to the Berlin Wall, and the Vopos are grinning down at them.

  Jack
o raised his hands in the air.

  —This looks like the end of East and West. This is the end of bloody, bloody Stalinism, brothers and sisters.

  He bent to Lucy and kissed her on the top of her head.

  —Darls, listen. We’ve already missed the start because we don’t have any bureau people there in Berlin.

  —Only got bureau people in cherrypickers in New York eh? Lucy remarked.

  —Touché, love. Sutherland’s authorized a flight of us anyhow. They’re assembling everyone up at the Perugia. All the Live Wire crew. Some rented useless bastards of technicians, including my old mate from the cherrypicker days. They’ve chartered a plane for us, leaving New Jersey as soon as we get ourselves together.

  Again he kissed the part in her blond hair.

  —Sutherland’s really insisting. You’ll let your old Jacko go, won’t you? History, love. Eh?

  Lucy looked forlorn for a second, but then revived. Although she did not answer him directly, she did not seem chagrined. She raised questions to do with shirts and toiletries. Not to worry, he said. He’d just duck round the corner and grab a few clean things and be off. He was sorry to run out on her.

  Then he turned to my wife.

  —I wonder, could I borrow your husband eh, Maureen?

  —You’re joking said Maureen.

  He turned to me.

  —You don’t have any classes till next Tuesday, do you?

  Accustomed to my compliance, he didn’t wait for me to answer. He appealed again to Maureen.

  —He’s got some sense of the history of it all, and no one else at Live Wire does. He wrote that piece on Poland for the New York Times, so he understands the Eastern bloc. And I bet he’d be a good interviewee, you know, right in front of the Wall. Spunky little Aussie, you know. Right there in front of sky-high falling bloody tyranny. Eh? Eh? What do you reckon?

  Maureen cast her eyes up, then turned them to me.

  —It’s up to you. You know you have those pretty heavy revisions to do.

  Lucy said, Jacko, you just want to include your friends in the big events!

  —Got it in one, hooted big Jacko. Mateship rules OK.

  —So, were you going to ask me to go too?

  Jacko grinned, choosing to treat this as a jest. Then he spoke to Maureen again.

  —Can he come? We can scare him up a fee – maybe as much as $10,000. But I mean, I’m not in the business of wrecking marriages …

  —Except your own, said Lucy with her broad James Ruse High smile.

  I was, of course, in a fever to go with Jacko to the huge moment. But I had to go through the normal Australian intermale ritual of declaring myself not up to scratch. Indeed, I was only barely up to scratch.

  —The New York Times piece was a bloody long time ago. Three or four years ago.

  Martial law, dismal Soviet apartment blocks, and the electrician Walesa in retreat.

  —Look, doesn’t matter. The New York Times is all we’ll have to say, and people will trust us.

  My demurrer so quickly dealt with by Jacko, he and I rushed shamelessly through the last courtesies of getting marital permissions, and left our two handsome women behind in the waning light. We deserved to be traduced, for, rushing to pack our bags and go raging uptown to the Perugia, we barely looked back.

  Jacko fetched his gear from Thomas Street first. When he returned from the loft to the cab on the corner of West Broadway, he was panting with cold and exertion.

  —Thank Christ, he told me. I can get away from that bloody old hypocrite with the squawking voice. But did you notice? Lucy’s not like Maureen. Lucy didn’t put up any sort of a fight, even though she was more against it than Maureen.

  —Do you really want a fight?

  —Better than nothing. She’s so scared of quarrelling though.

  —Jacko, I think it’s bloody ungracious of you … The girl kissed you goodbye. You’re an awful bloody man.

  —Oh yeah. No question about that eh … I don’t express myself well.

  While he waited in the cab, I fetched my things from our apartment high above the Ecuadorian singers and other gifted performers at Broadway and Fourth. I was by now so stimulated by the idea of the end of a great human phase that I did not stop to seek any chemical stimulus from the bottle of rare Irish malt someone had given me one Christmas.

  We found that the Perugia was, for all purposes, closed to the public. What Manhattanite would want to spend the cocktail hour at a bar where Durkin was answering seven telephones, performing a media triage? Dannie was already there and greeted Jacko with a distracted yet somehow promising kiss.

  —Listen, you’re the Wall.

  —What do you mean the Wall?

  —Al Bunker’s taking East Germany itself. They’re hunting up an East German in one of the bars uptown to take back for a reunion with his relatives. We haven’t found him yet. Whereas you’re right on the Brandenburg Gate.

  —Sounds bloody marvellous.

  —So you’re the wall and Bunker’s the East.

  —But aren’t you coming with us? Jacko asked her.

  —Durkin’s running it from here, said Dannie brusquely yet with her dark, casual, sumptuous manner. I might be producing your segments on the ground – if they can fit me in the plane.

  She gave us some papers, printouts which had come in on the wire.

  I heard Jacko ask Dannie, What’re you going to be wearing, love eh? If you come with us? What’ll you wear?

  —When? Dannie asked.

  —In Berlin, I mean.

  Behind her teeth she made the faintest tut and walked away. It wasn’t possible to know what any of it meant, but I felt that I was being made privy to something, some existing arrangement between Dannie and Jacko. And Jacko must know I could overhear. I might be being told perhaps, Don’t make a fuss.

  At one stage I went out to buy some toothpaste and beheld a fleet of limos backing and edging in the last of the wintry light outside the Perugia, emitting soft clouds of exhaust. The plan was to drive to Teterboro Airfield in New Jersey where the meter of the jet was already running against Basil Sutherland and Vixen Six. But we couldn’t leave yet. Durkin had us waiting for the arrival of the East German. One of the young production assistants had been sent to find him.

  Soon the girl was back, coming in aglow and leading the man she had found in a bar in Yorktown, a solid man with a red face and a boozy manner who may have been drinking all afternoon. She said his name was Gunter. He said Good evening but the effort of it seemed for a moment to deprive him of the ability to focus.

  He looked around and came to the presumption that Jacko was boss, and came up to Jacko and me as we read the latest printouts from Berlin.

  —God bless freedom! he told us.

  —No worries, Kamerad eh.

  —Do they serve Beck’s here? asked Gunter, speaking in such a measured way that it sounded like a question from an English phrasebook.

  Jacko asked one of the assistant producers to get Gunter a beer.

  —He looks like rent-a-Kraut, Jacko complained to me.

  Yet he was a good representative, I thought, of people’s imaginings of Eastern bloc man: somewhat high-cheek-boned and alien-looking. He had twisted teeth which I thought of as somehow connected with too much cabbage and not enough oranges. As Jacko and I watched him drink a Beck’s, in Durkin’s mind the last thing we would attend to before leaving for Teterboro, the young producer named Marian asked Gunter for his passport. It was discovered he didn’t have it with him.

  —My uncle’s house, he said. Over in Queens. Give me the goddam shiny car and I get it.

  Durkin covered his eyes with a hand and said, No mate, stay here, maybe have a sleep. We’ll send someone. Is it in your drawer? Top? Middle? Top! Okay, we’ll send Denise. Give us your uncle’s telephone number and we’ll tell him strange people are coming. Bugger it!

  While Denise fetched the passport in Queens, first one and then another of Basil Sutherland’s energetic employ
ees tried to find out from Gunter where his relatives were and who they were and what they had done for a living under Honecker’s fatal regime.

  His brother was a chemical plant supervisor in Bitterfeld, he told Durkin. One of the girls began looking at a map of East Germany and was relieved to find that Bitterfeld was perhaps as little as seventy-five miles south-west of Berlin.

  —How long since you saw your brother? Durkin wanted to know. Durkin was interested in a loving reunion long delayed by tyranny.

  Gunter said, I see the sonnerbitch three months ago. His daughter’s wedding. In Leipzig.

  —But you told Denise you hadn’t spoken to him for fifteen years.

  —I don’t speak to him. He’s a big sonnerbitch party asshole. Fifteen years ago he come into the factory I work in and toss his weight here and there. Bigtime party asshole!

  Like a small prayer, Durkin’s breath escaped him and he laid his forehead on his hands on the bar of the Perugia.

  —Oh dear, oh dear, he said. He seemed to sleep for a time before opening his eyes and gazing up at Gunter again.

  —You were back in East Germany three months ago?

  —Right, said Gunter.

  —Do you go back often?

  —Three, four times in the last year.

  Durkin looked around the room to see if everyone else had heard this debilitating information. Marian and the American journalist Bunker wanly received the news.

  —Gunter, I have to ask you, said Durkin. Are you a spy or a bloody drug-runner or both?