by Peter Temple
You didn’t notice the job change. More people on the nod, shooting up on the street, shopping centres, stations, parks, churches. More dumb burgs, brain-dead robberies, kids selling themselves to anyone for anything, dead in alleys, railway stations, tunnels, sewers, on the grubby beaches.
Villani remembered when the CBD was still safe enough to walk across on a Friday night. But once the chemicals took over, spread into the suburbs, cops regularly began to see things once rare—teenagers bashing old people, women and children beaten, the punching and kicking and stabbing of neighbours, friends, cab drivers, people on trains, trams, buses, strangers at parties, in pubs and nightclubs, the hacking at people with swords, road-rage attacks, bricks hurled at trams, train drivers.
Then they got rid of the old liquor laws. Civilising move, they said. Australia’s most European city needed more relaxed liquor laws.
In a short time, hundreds of all-night clubs and drinking barns opened in a few dozen blocks in the CBD, most of them owned by the same people who ran the poleholes and titmarts.
At weekends, thousands upon thousands of people flowed into the city, very European to come in from Donnie and Brookie and Hoppers with your mates, half wasted to begin with, swallow anything, get totally munted, walk around, no fucking fear, mate, the ice fever made you fight your mate, any cunt looks at you, take a spew, take a piss, take a shit, anywhere.
Mobile.
‘This a good time, boss?’ Dove.
‘Depends on what you say.’
‘There’s nothing at Preston. That’s prints, DNA. Nothing. They report signs it’s been wiped.’
‘This is not a good time,’ said Villani.
DEEP IN the freezer, he found a pizza encased in shrinkwrap. He microwaved it and sat at the monks’ table to eat. It tasted like food found in a glacier, locked in the ice for a hundred years, a memory of a pizza in which all the good parts were forgotten.
He stood in a large porcelain saucer to shower. On a hook beside the door hung a man’s thick white towelling gown. The property of the mystical lawyer arse from Byron Bay?
Naked, he crossed the dressing-room and lay on the low bed, a rock-hard mattress, probably a futon. Futons. Did they still sell futons? He studied his body. It did not please him. He touched the dirty marks, the purpling where Les caught him in the bottom ribs, a good place to catch someone, bend the rib into the cavity.
Anna hadn’t called.
Should he have left a message? There was a pad beside her telephone in the passage, he could have written a few words.
I love you. Stephen
He could have passed it off as a joke. Or not. If the response was favourable. Probably not. Definitely not.
What a stupid teenage prick he was.
Lizzie. They would call him if they found her, they had the instruction, any time, twenty-four hours. Somewhere with the streeters? In some crevice in the city, a tunnel, a half-built highrise, sleeping on the raw concrete? They found dead people in these places every day.
The Prosilio child.
The truck stop on the Hume. Swooshing highway, a hot night, airless. As you opened the car door, it would hit you: petrol, diesel, heated rubber, exhaust gases, chip-fryer oil, the smell of burnt meat. Overweight truckies coming out of the ablution block, wet hair, men shat, shaved, showered, shampooed.
The sounds of engines ticking, air-conditioners and extractor fans humming.
A girl coming out of the toilet block, Caucasian girl, speaking to a man in her own language. Not English. On her way to Melbourne, to the ugly fortress in Preston, perhaps a cheap nylon suitcase in the boot, hookers’ clothes, sexy bras, pants, suspender belt.
To have her life taken in the rich people’s building. They had not made one centimetre of progress towards finding her killer. They had been toyed with by the building’s owners. They had pointlessly made an enemy of a powerful man. They looked like idiots.
Mobile again.
‘Boss, I also wanted to say,’ said Dove, ‘I got the water usage there. No water used for the month leading up to that sighting on the Hume. Then it’s average for four people, a bit higher.’
‘Four people?’
‘Perhaps people who need to shower often.’
There was much more to Dove than extraordinary clotting power.
‘That’s a bit of a pattern,’ said Dove. ‘Over the last three years.’
‘Well, it’s interesting but it’s not taking us anywhere.’
‘And boss, that number, I’ve got…’
‘When I see you,’ said Villani. ‘Face to face. I like to observe your body language.’
‘In the morning then.’
‘Yes. Go home. Got a home?’
Why did he ask that? Stupid.
‘Got the bed, yes,’ said Dove. ‘The shower.’
He didn’t know anything about Dove’s life outside the job. Singo knew everything about people’s lives, he knew your kids’ birthdays, he could drop a reference to your wedding anniversary, show you that he knew. But Singo didn’t care.
Son, life’s got layers, the work layer’s on top. That’s my layer, that’s my business, that’s my duty. Under that, it’s personal, it’s your business. I don’t want to know. It’s not that I wouldn’t care. I would care. That’s the problem. So I just don’t want to know. See the sense?
Villani had seen the sense.
‘Breakfast meeting,’ he said. ‘Know Enzio’s? Brunswick Street?’
‘I can find Enzio’s.’
‘Seven-fifteen. Back left corner.’
Villani fell asleep and he dreamed of Greg Quirk, of crossing the filthy unit and seeing Greg squirting blood, of looking up and seeing Dance with the gun in both hands, smiling his canine smile.
VILLANI WOKE just after 6am, dull-headed, knowing where he was, full of dread in the way of the early Robber days. He lay, unwilling to get up, cross the threshold of the day.
The smallholding in the valley near Colac where Dave Cameron lived with his girlfriend came into his mind. Dave had put up a fight, the kitchen was chaos, blood everywhere, table overturned, crockery on the floor. He had been hacked with something, a big knife, a sword, deep cuts to his arms, shoulders, neck, head, before he was shot. Twice with an unknown weapon, twice with his own service weapon.
His girlfriend had been shot in the head, three times, with Dave’s weapon. She was found to be pregnant, Dave’s child.
They threw everything at it, the whole force, other investigations went on hold. They didn’t see Matt Cameron for weeks. Deke Murray, the SOG boss, was made head of the taskforce, he had started with Matt, they were like brothers, their careers marched together, they both became Robber legends. They even looked like brothers.
Deke had gone to the SOG before Villani arrived, but he came to Robber piss-ups, to Cameron’s parties, sometimes showed up on a Friday night at the pub. Matt quit the force when his wife Tania committed suicide, he had no family left. Deke quit soon after. The prime suspect, a hard case called Brent Noske, twice arrested by Dave Cameron in the months before the murders, killed himself, shotgun in the mouth. Noske was a cop-hater, they narrowly failed to get him for firing on a Geelong cop’s house with an M16.
What happened to Deke? He’d resigned. Where had he gone?
Villani shook the thoughts away, rose, showered, dressed, went into the big room and switched on the radio.
Bruce Frank, the morning man on the ABC, was talking his usual drivel, he had a voice that shifted in tone, from gruff to shrill in the same sentence. Villani sat in an armchair with the battery razor, head back, eyes closed, the machine wasn’t up to the task but it was soothing.
He registered the word police and thumbed the shaver off.
…leader of the Opposition Karen Mellish on the line, she’s called in. Up bright and early, Ms Mellish.
I’m a farmer’s daughter, Bruce. And a farmer’s wife. We don’t loll around in bed. There’s work to be done.
A case can be made for
a bit of lolling in bed, surely? I mean the birthrate isn’t what it should…
No frivolity please, I’m ringing about your caller’s comment that my party takes pleasure in knocking the Victoria Police. That is absolutely and completely wrong and…
You’ve said a few hard things about the police recently, haven’t you? Bit more than a few.
Bruce, our job is to speak out against incompetence where we see it. And we see it everywhere under this shoddy government. But take pleasure in denigrating the police? Never. No. We want to see our police force given the numbers and the leadership to do what they are quite capable of doing, which is to make this city and this state the most inhospitable place on earth for violent hoons, drug dealers, career criminals…
A big ask that. I have no doubt the government…
To wake without the hangover feeling took a holiday of at least a week. The first two or three days were detox, twitchy, irritable, aware of feeling tight in the shoulders, in the neck, in the back. The second week, he lost interest in organising.
Two weeks? Not since Corin was fifteen.
Surfers Paradise was going to be a week alone, the two of them, kids in safe hands. He thought they could patch things up, start again. That Laurie suggested going was hopeful, the matter of Tony’s friend’s mother was still close.
Catering customers, television people, offered their holiday unit. Laurie’s company was by then catering for lots of shoots.
She went ahead. Villani remembered almost missing the plane, falling asleep before take-off, finding a taxi, standing on the narrow balcony of the beachfront tower looking at the sea, the beach far below in deep shadow, lace-frilled waves unrolling, people walking on the wet sand.
He fell asleep on a sofa in the sitting room while Laurie was on the balcony, talking on her mobile. In the small hours, a cramp in his left calf woke him. He could not believe the pain. He thought: the deep-vein thing. He put his feet on the floor, frantically massaged the muscle, pummelled it, tears came to his eyes, he stood up, shook his leg, stamped his foot.
The pain gave way to numbness. He slept for a few hours, woke in the dawn, hungry. Nothing to eat in the place, he smoked a cigarette on the balcony. There were a few dozen surfers out, scattered, it was playschool, the wind in the south-east, nothing happening, two-footers.
Villani took the lift down, left his shirt and towel on the sand. Walking out through the warm shallows with two young women surfers, girls, he eyed himself unhappily, pale chicken-breast skin, flab on his hips. It was a long swim to where he could catch a wave, the girls were ahead of him, paddling, in no hurry.
He wasn’t the world’s greatest swimmer and he hadn’t been to the gym for a while. He had to push himself, the girls looking back at him—pityingly, he thought. When he reached the deep water, he was winded. Hundreds of thousands of people swam off this beach every year and he found himself alone.
Joe Cashin taught him to surf. Cashin was junior to him, a reserve about Cashin, a little smile, no friends among his peers. At Carlton, they became friends, both much smarter than most of the people around them. When they were not working in daylight, they went to Rye or Portsea in Villani’s Falcon. It was tame for Cashin, he’d surfed since he was a kid, he mucked around, walked up and down on his board, turned his back to the shore. But he put up with it until Villani was ready for proper surf, ready to be trashed in the breakers at Bells.
At Surfers, Villani floated on the swells, back to the shore, trying to get his breath, then he saw the first wave of a set. He rose with it, with the bigger second one, turned and swam for the third. Head down, arms threshing, he caught it, hunched his shoulders. He felt its power take hold of him, enter him, he was not propelled by the wave, he was the wave, he was the power, arms tucked in, body arched, he was the lovely bouncing force.
Then the wave obeyed some secret command, betrayed him. It hollowed, it dumped him, his forehead hit sand, he thought his neck was broken, the force rolled him, rolled him, tumbled him, pulled down his Speedos, he swallowed water, water went up his nose, he did not know where up was, he was drowning.
His head broke water and it was over, nothing special, he was in the foam, bodysurfers copped dumpings like this as a matter of course—they snorted out half a glass of salty snot and swam out for the next round. But he was done.
He walked in, looked down and saw the blood drip from his chin onto his chest, into the sand stuck to his shiny black stomach hairs. Putting on his shirt, he saw the bleeding burns on his forearms and elbows.
Laurie was up when he got back.
‘Jesus, what happened to you?’
‘Nothing. Got dumped.’
‘You need something on that.’
No concern in her voice, she knew blood, she ran a big catering kitchen, they cut themselves all the time, bled into the yellowfin tuna, the Wagyu beef, the swimmer-crab meat, the twice-cooked duck, they added blood of all groups to the finger food, an exquisite coin-sized portion cost five dollars.
In the shower, he studied his knees, his forearms, his elbows. He found antiseptic cream in the medicine cabinet, put it on, winced.
They had breakfast at a café—cold scrambled eggs, cold bacon, cold toast, lukewarm terrible coffee. They read the papers, talked about the kids in a listless way, he remarked on things, she wasn’t interested in his views. She had been once. He tried to remember when that was. They bought food at a supermarket, at a delicatessen. Laurie suggested the beach. He said no. One humiliation a day was enough.
She changed, went down, and he sat on the balcony and switched on his mobile—a dozen messages. It took more than an hour to sort things out. He switched off, dozed in a chair.
Laurie came back in the early afternoon, she hadn’t taken a key, she rang. He opened the door. She was in shorts and a T-shirt, skin pink beneath a film of sweat, oil, nineteen again.
She looked and his right hand moved to her cheek.
She pulled her mouth in distaste. ‘God, you look like you’ve been in a fight,’ she said.
As his hand fell, he knew to the millimetre how far apart they were.
He turned away. The afternoon passed. Laurie went out twice, made calls. They started conversations several times, her mobile rang.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘If I can, you can kill that fucking thing.’
‘You think I don’t want to?’ she said. ‘Chris’s got the flu, Bobby’s on a job, there’s no one there knows what to do.’
In the hot, still afternoon, a north-easter came up, the horizon vanished and rain came in short, violent bursts.
He went out, walked along the beachfront, got wet. On the main strip, he found a gambling barn—half-pissed young men in board shorts and T-shirts, bead necklaces and gold chains, budgie-eyed old men, brown-bread ruined skin, caps and long socks, they all sat in the flickering air-conditioned gloom reading the screens: Murray Bridge, Kembla Grange, Darwin, Alice Springs, Bunbury, New Zealand. He boxed favourites with no-hopers, the longer the better, threw money away. A young man with long tipped hair tried to strike up a conversation. Villani didn’t give him any help. He persisted. Villani gave him the long fuck-off look, the man went away.
At the unit, towards evening, bored, twitchy, on his fourth beer, he switched on his phone, looked in cupboards.
‘Scrabble,’ he said. ‘Want to play?’
Laurie was lying on the couch, flipping a magazine. ‘Not really,’ she said.
‘Come on. I’m stir crazy.’
His father taught him to play. For Bob, it was a game of speed, you put down the first word that came to mind, there was no rubbish about trying for maximum possible scores.
That hot dripping late afternoon, in the box in the sky, he lost patience after fifteen or twenty minutes. He began to nag Laurie. ‘Let’s get a move on here, can we, haven’t got all day.’
She said nothing, concentrated on her letters, earned big scores.
He kept at it. ‘Come on, come on, get on with i
t, will you?’
Without warning, she rose, tipping the board on him, letters fell on him, went everywhere, she said, quietly, in control, ‘You stupid bully, it’s just a game. Ever asked yourself why Tony wouldn’t play anything with you?’
Villani put the board back on the table, squared it. He looked down, saw the letters on the carpet, the perfectly smooth pale wooden squares on the green nylon. He pushed back his chair, went down on his hands and knees.
His mobile rang. He answered without getting up, kneeling on the floor.
‘Villani.’
‘Steve.’ Singo, soft voice. ‘Bit of shit here.’
‘What?’
‘Cashin and Diab. Bloke rammed them. Diab’s dead, Joe’s touch and go. Life support.’
‘Jesus, no.’
Laurie said, ‘What, Steve? What is it?’
To Singo, Villani said, ‘I’ll get the first plane, boss.’
‘Ring with the number,’ said Singo. ‘Somebody’ll meet you.’
Villani closed the phone, put it in his shirt pocket.
‘What?’ said Laurie. ‘What?’
‘Joe,’ said Villani. ‘On life support.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My God, no.’
They flew home together on the last direct flight and they spoke no more than a few dozen words then and on any given day thereafter.
…intelligent leaders and enough troops, Bruce. Together they move mountains. And intelligent leaders come first. Can I say here, can I commend the Homicide Squad over their work on the Oakleigh killings? Not every day does a senior officer, he could be sitting behind a desk, he goes out and puts his life on the line. We salute him.
Sorry, not up with this, that’s a bit of a personal Oops, who are you…
Inspector Stephen Villani of Homicide. I’ll say no more.
Yes, well, on another tack, Max Hendry’s AirLine project, where do you…
I love Max. Only Max could try to get away with something like this, with not putting any figures on the table. His major problem in getting AirLine to fly is Stuart Koenig, the infrastructure minister. Koenig’s told the Labor caucus the sky will be dark with pigs before Max Hendry gets government support…
