The Washington Club

by Peter Corris

  More leaves fell; the footballers left the park and the traffic got heavier as streams of cars headed into the suburbs. The golfers vanished into a soft, blurry haze. At twelve minutes past six a powder-blue Citroen Goddess purred through the gate, swung in an elegant arc and slipped into a carport about five spaces away in the area reserved for the occupant of unit nineteen. The driver got out, activated the alarm and ran his eyes appreciatively over the classic lines of his car. He bent and stared at the rear mudguard, straightened up, evidently satisfied, and strolled towards where I was waiting with an unlicensed gun in my sweating hand and not a legal leg to stand on.

  14

  ‘Hello, Noel. Got a nice girl for me?’

  I stepped out of the shadows and came straight up to him. He was wearing a double-breasted tan linen suit, chocolate coloured T-shirt, brown slip-ons. Five-ten, about thirteen stone, flab on him. He barely glanced at me. His round, pasty face was ill-tempered.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  I was close enough now to bring my heel hard down on his shin and stamp on his foot. That got his attention; his head flew back and his shades slipped askew. I hit him harder in the ribs with a short left than I’d intended but his fat softened the punch. It winded him though and he sagged away from me. I grabbed his prominent right ear and let his whole weight pull against it. That brought him upright again, smartish.

  ‘We can do this a bit more or we can stop,’ I said. ‘Up to you.’

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’

  He was trembling. Scared. Good.

  ‘A talk. I don’t want your money or your drugs or your girls but I’m very, very serious. I’ve got a silenced Colt on me and you can be face down in the bushes ten seconds from now and no one the wiser if that’s the way you’d like it.’

  ‘Shit. I’ll talk to you.’

  I released him, took the pistol out and used it to tap his sunglasses straight. I held it by the barrel so he couldn’t see that there was no silencer. But he was beyond such details, sweating into his smart T-shirt and giving off a sour smell I couldn’t identify.

  ‘We’ll go up to your flat, nice and quietly. With a bit of luck I’ll be off in half an hour or so and all you’ll have to worry about will be a bit of lost skin, some sore ribs and a red ear. The strides’ll need a dry-clean.’

  He glanced down at his leg. Blood from where I’d raked his shin had seeped through his trouser leg, turning the tan linen dark brown. He turned a little paler himself. ‘Okay, okay. Fuck, who are you?’

  ‘No questions from you. Let’s go in.’

  He hobbled a bit, leaned to one side, protecting the ribs and rubbed at his ear a couple of times, but I could sense that he was regrouping. He wasn’t fit and didn’t look agile, but the Henderson nastiness was worth a lot of that stuff. I judged that he’d be dangerous as long as he remained conscious. He used a key to unlock the heavy security door and had to produce another key to get us through the grille door at the top of a set of stairs. I was reminded of the security arrangements in Kirribilli and how they’d been of no use to Cy. Anger at that was a help. When he hesitated at the grille door, fumbling for the key on his heavy ring, I reached forward and took a grip on his longish, pale hair. I pressed his head forward until it touched the bars. His sunglasses fell off.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of keys there, Noel. Pimp keys, eh? I’ll stick them up your nose one by one if you don’t open that fucking gate and get moving.’

  Noel’s flat was on the third floor. It was a large space, very light and airy with a wide balcony. Noel was living off the immoral earnings at a pretty high level. The furniture was expensive, over-ornate and there was too much of it. This late in the day the bar was tempting but I stuck to the business in hand. I shoved Noel down into one of his plump armchairs and stood over him as he peeled the blood-soaked trouser leg away from the wound.

  ‘Let me wash this,’ he said. ‘I could get an infection.’

  ‘You are an infection. You can wash your whole body later. You might have a few more wounds to take care of if you don’t talk to me.’

  The blood flowed again and soaked into his silk sock. He held his foot so it wouldn’t drip on the pale carpet. ‘I said I’d talk to you. What the fuck about?’

  ‘Your dad.‘

  ‘Haitch? I haven’t seen him in . . .’

  ‘I have seen him. I know how close you two are. You know where he is, Noel, and you’re going to tell me.’

  This was the hard bit. I’d been told that Noel was deeply attached to his father and terrified of him as well. He was scared of me, too, and that had got me this far, but it was a matter of which fear was the greater. I watched his face process the alternatives. The older fear won out. Noel summoned up his small reserve of grit. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ he said.

  Someone told me once that obsessions are the strongest things human beings experience—stronger than fear, love, hate, lust. I was being given a chance to put the proposition to the test.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘Stand up and take off your jacket.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do it, or I’ll start knocking out your teeth one by one.’

  ‘What’re you, some kind of queer?’

  He was getting braver the way an unimaginative person can. I kicked his lacerated shin. He yelped, stumbled up and shrugged out of his jacket. I took it from him and shoved him hard back down into the chair. His car keys and the remote control locking device were in the left-hand pocket. I took them out and dropped the jacket on the floor. He stared up at me as I juggled the keys in my hand.

  ‘Unless you tell me where I can find Haitch I’m going to take that flash car of yours and bang it into everything I can find. Pieces’ll fall off and I’ll drive over them. Then I’ll break every bit of glass in the fucking thing and redo the upholstery with my Swiss army knife. Not sure what after that, but I’ll think of something. When I finish with it you’ll have to pay someone to take it away.’

  He might not have been able to imagine much, but this got to him. His eyes moistened and he shook his head slowly from side to side.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ he whined.

  I grinned at him. ‘Revenge for the Rainbow Warrior?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Remember the Greenpeace ship that got blown up in Auckland harbour by the French spooks? Remember that, you dumb shit? I’m a dolphin lover. I don’t like the French that much and I don’t like French cars. I’ll do it with pleasure.’ I juggled the keys. ‘Your choice, Noel.’

  ‘You might fucking do it anyway.’

  I had him. That amounted to an admission that he knew where his father was. He just needed playing a little more.

  ‘No. We’ll go there in the Citroen. You can show me what a great car she is. When I’m sure it’s the right place, you’re on your own and Haitch never knows you put him in.’

  He licked his loose lips and his eyes moved around the room. I judged that he was reassuring himself that he was a man of substance, a man with things to protect, his own man. The phone rang and his answering machine picked up the call. Probably more money. He couldn’t afford to sit here protecting someone else, anyone else.

  ‘Okay. Let me listen to my messages and make a few calls, have a drink. Then I’ll take you there.’

  ‘No calls. No drink.’

  ‘Fuck you! How the fuck are you going to tell if he’s there or not, smartarse? What about that?’

  I thought about it for a split second. All I had to go on was the glimpse of the green Honda and the possible identification of half of the number plate. Haitch could have changed cars, or plates. But I couldn’t let Noel see anything from me but total confidence.

  ‘I’ll know, Noel,’ I said. ‘Don’t you worry about that. Tell you what, I’ll let you clean up your leg. One good turn deserves another.’

  An hour later the Citroen was eating up the kilometres heading west towards Rooty Hill. Noel was an aggressive, inconsiderate driver and I’d severa
l times had to snarl at him to drive like a human being. He was one of those people who shouldn’t drive, the way some shouldn’t drink or play poker machines. No control. He clearly loved the power he thought he had at his command, but it was commanding him. After we’d struck our deal, he’d smoked three or four cigarettes in quick succession, but he didn’t smoke in the car. You don’t shit on the one you love.

  I’d forced him to tell me where we were going by the simple strategy of poising my Swiss army knife over the superbly designed bonnet of the car. Truth was, I admired these vehicles myself, but I’d have made like Zorro on the duco if I’d had to. I’d kept an eye on Noel while he cleaned himself up in the bathroom and I’d seen him take something from the cupboard that didn’t have anything to do with his leg. But what the hell? He seemed a little more cheerful for it and when he told me that Haitch was living where he kept his spare Citroens, I was inclined to believe him. If he was still worried about Henderson twigging to who’d fingered him it seemed to be low on the list. Put it down to the pills.

  Rooty Hill is a suburb that retains something of the look of a country town. The main street has trendy paving and some of the amenities we can no longer live without, like patisseries and bottle shops, but the corner pub has a peppercorn tree in the side yard just like country pubs did in the old days. The housing is a mixture of good but ugly and not so good and more ugly. Some of the low-grade houses had three and four cars parked in the drive and out in front, indicating adult kids living at home. When I was young, working children living at home paid board; now, I understand, they only connect the word with the surf.

  ‘At the end of this street,’ Noel said, pulling in to the side of a dirt road he’d turned onto.

  The light was fading but there was at least twenty minutes more of good visibility. The road sloped steeply down. ‘How many ways in?’ I asked.

  ‘Two. This is the back way.’

  ‘I know about the green Honda, Noel,’ I said. ‘If it’s there you can piss off, if it’s not, we wait.’

  Noel nodded, resigned. ‘Have to get a bit closer, but I don’t want to get too fucking close.’

  ‘You can roll it if you like,’ I said. ‘Just remember, any funny business . . .’

  ‘I know.’ Noel released the handbrake.

  ‘I’ll torch your spares, too, if you fuck me around.’

  The Citroën rolled for a hundred metres and stopped. Noel’s hideaway was a fibro structure that might once have served some useful purpose as a works depot or warehouse but now it was weed-choked and derelict-looking with a sagging roof, stained walls and slumped foundations. I felt disappointment and rage run through me and struggled to restrain the strong impulse to hit and hurt him.

  ‘You lying little prick,’ I said. ‘Haitch wouldn’t hole up in a dump like that and you wouldn’t keep your precious Citroens in it either.’

  Noel smirked. ‘That’s all you know. What you can see is just a fucking shell. It’s all fixed up inside. Cost me a packet to do it.’

  ‘Is that right? Then you’d better tell me about the alarm system.’

  The smirk disappeared; he hadn’t counted on this. I reached across and pulled the ignition keys from the lock.

  ‘No!’ he yelped.

  ‘Your choice.’

  He told me about the sensors and where they were located. I nodded and released the handbrake. The heavy car shot forward and slewed towards the rocky edge of the road. Noel swore, yanked the wheel around and hit the brake.

  ‘Why the fuck’d you do that?’

  I squinted into the gathering gloom From this position I could see a flat area near the back of the building. I pointed towards it and dropped the keys into Noel’s lap.

  ‘That looks like a Honda Accord to me. I’ll say goodbye now, Noel. But if a telephone rings down there in the next few minutes, my offer stands.’

  15

  Sneaking up on a place that’s got good security and is housing an armed and dangerous man isn’t a lot of fun. In the First World War they used to fill the troops up with rum before sending them over the top. The way I was feeling, that didn’t sound like a bad idea. I was out of practice at this sort of thing. My days of jungle fighting in Malaya were well behind me and, as I moved down towards the building, using trees and high grass for cover, I felt as if I was carrying a sign saying ‘Intruder Coming’. Every twig I put my foot on seemed to crack like a .22 shot.

  But I had the increasing darkness on my side and I made it to the rusted cyclone fence where Noel had said the sensors were planted. There was just enough light for me to confirm something of what he’d said. The wire was rusted in spots but it had been strongly patched by more wire painted brown to look rusted. The uprights were solidly anchored in concrete and, although there were rusty strands and mended ones, the barbed wire on top of the fence would do the job it was intended to do.

  Haitch had driven through double gates and locked them behind him. I had to assume that the whole perimeter was protected by the sensors and that any disturbance of the fence would set off an alarm. Fair enough. In Malaya they taught us to turn the enemy’s strengths into weaknesses. Sometimes we managed to do it. There was a lot of rubbish lying around outside the fence and I located a three-metre length of rusted iron pipe as well as some dried-out cardboard boxes and a rotted mattress. I made a pile of strips torn from the boxes and stuffing from the mattress, along with leaves and sticks, and set fire to it. When the blaze was going strong I upended the pipe and let it crash down on the fence.

  An alarm sounded inside the ramshackle building; light came on and Haitch Henderson stuck his nose out through the front door. He came a little further out, far enough for me to see that he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun. I saw his reaction as the fire spread, consuming grass near the fence and leaping up to lick at the dry grass caught in the wire. It must have looked pretty alarming from where he stood. He disappeared, the alarm stopped ringing, and I ran forward to take up a position near the gate, hunched down behind a straggling oleander bush. Haitch came out again with the shotgun in one hand and a fire-extinguisher in the other. He unlocked the gate, ran towards the fire and sprayed foam over it. I slipped through the gate and sprinted for the tacked-on front porch with its overhanging iron roof.

  Haitch soon had the fire out. He stood and looked at the pipe, shook his head and came back through the gate. He locked it and tramped up the cracked concrete path. I had to make a judgement as to whether to take him inside the building or outside. Outside was dark but familiar after standing there for a few minutes; inside was an unknown quantity. When his foot hit the first step I thumbed the safety off, stepped out and let him see the Colt.

  ‘Put the shottie down, Haitch, and the extinguisher. You won’t need them.’

  I could see his face in some light coming from the side of the building. He was fatter than I remembered, and the hair worn long over his missing ear was grey. He dropped the extinguisher.

  ‘Hardy, you cunt. What’re you doing here?’

  ‘Telling you to drop the shotgun.’

  ‘You haven’t got the guts to shoot me.’

  It all happened very quickly. I heard what he said and for a split second I thought it might be true. I knew he had the guts to shoot me and when he swung the shotgun up that ended all thinking. I shot him twice in the chest. Impossible to miss at the range and I was braced for the kick of the pistol. The two shots sounded like one and anyway were drowned out by the shotgun blast. He’d squeezed one off with the last movement he’d ever make. The shotgun flew out of his hands and into the long grass. Haitch almost left the ground himself; the impact blew him back, flicked him around, and he melted down into the crumbling concrete path with his back towards me.

  ‘Jesus,’ I gasped, ‘why did you do that?’

  I lowered the pistol, went forward and checked him the way I had Cy Sackville, with the same result. The two bullets had punched through him and his life was over. It wasn’t much of a life but I was sick
ened by taking it. I squatted down and felt the sweat that had broken out on me at some point cool and dry. I realised I was muttering to myself, though what I was saying made no sense. I sucked in deep breaths of the air that smelled of wood smoke and cordite and looked around me. That feeling of fine-tuned senses that had been with me throughout was still there. I felt I could hear every sound for miles around and somehow it registered that there were no sirens, there was no noise at all. The faint light glinted on the casings from my shots, lying on the concrete just below the steps. Crucial evidence, vital signs. I got to my feet, moved forward, bent, picked up the bits of metal and dropped them into my pocket.

  I must have realised what I was going to do when I tampered with the evidence like that, but I wasn’t conscious of any thought-out procedure. It just seemed to flow naturally. I went into the building and saw what Noel had meant. The facade was exactly that. The inside had been lined, rewired, painted, redesigned. There was a large slab floored workshop where three motor bodies sat up on blocks. They were covered with tarpaulins but the shape was distinctive. Being careful not to touch anything, I moved past the cars and a big roller door to an area at the back of the place that had been wired and plumbed and fitted out as living quarters.

  This was more Haitch Henderson’s style. There was a mid-size bed, an easy chair and TV with built-in VCR. No greasy gas ring for Haitch; the room had a microwave oven, bar fridge, pop-up toaster and electric snack-maker. There was Scotch, vodka and gin on a tray on top of the fridge. A man can only take so much. I tore a paper towel from the roll in a wall rack and used it to hold and open the bottle of Haig. I took one long swig and swallow and then a shorter one, tasting the liquor this time. I realised when I set the bottle down that I’d been shaking slightly the whole time. The whisky helped, but I resisted the temptation to have some more.