Dragons at the Party

by Jon Cleary

“Would you leave us alone for five minutes, Sergeant?” Leeds waited till Clements had moved away, then said, “The PM would like us to have hands-off as much as possible.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Don’t get testy with me, Inspector—”

  “Sorry, sir. But why?”

  “Politics. You and I have run up against them before. I understand the dead man, Masutir, had a bag of emeralds in his pocket, a pretty rich packet.”

  “I wouldn’t even guess—none of us knows anything about gems. I could ask Madame Timori. Sergeant Kenthurst, from the Federals, said she grabbed them as soon as she saw them.”

  “She’s not going to tell us anything about them. That’s part of our problem—they’ve landed out here with what seems like half the Paluccan Treasury. The RAAF who brought them out of Bunda also brought six packing cases. Customs went up to Richmond last night, to the RAAF base, and went through the cases.”

  “I thought the Timoris would have claimed diplomatic immunity.”

  “They would have, if they’d known what was happening. It wasn’t a ministerial order. Some smart aleck in Customs, one of the left-wingers, overstepped the mark. The cases were opened and the contents down on paper before the Minister got wind of it. You know what happens when something goes down on paper in a government department. It becomes indelible and then multiplies.”

  Malone grinned. “I thought that’s what happens at Headquarters?”

  “Do you want to finish up as the constable in charge of a one-man station in the bush?” But Leeds allowed himself a smile; then he sobered again: “The Timoris brought out an estimated twenty-two million dollars’ worth of gold, gems and US currency.”

  Malone whistled silently and Leeds nodded. Though there was a considerable difference in rank, there was an empathy between the two men. Twice before they had been caught up in politics, with Malone as the ball-carrier and the Commissioner, in the end, having to call the play. Malone began to wonder how far he would be allowed to carry the ball in this game. Perhaps he should send for Thumper Murphy and his sledge-hammer.

  “There’s a rumour they have a couple of billion salted away in Switzerland. It’s no wonder the Americans didn’t want them.”

  “How did we get landed with them?” Malone said.

  “I thought you knew. Madame Timori was an old girl-friend of the PM’s.”

  Malone could feel the ball getting heavier. He looked over Leeds’ shoulder and saw that Madame Timori, in white slacks and a yellow silk shirt, had come out on to the veranda of the house and was gazing steadily at him and the Commissioner.

  “Well, I’d better get it over with. Just routine questions?”

  “Unless you put your foot in it again, like you used to.” Leeds buttoned up his blazer. The morning was already hot, the temperature already in the eighties, but he looked as if he might be in his air-conditioned office. “Your tie’s loose.”

  “Yes, sir.” Malone tightened his tie. “I’m afraid Madame Timori may want to hang me with it.”

  “Don’t look for me to cut you down. Good luck.”

  He went out of the gates and Malone was left feeling alone and exposed. Twenty-two years ago, in his first representative game for the State, he had gone in as the last-wicket batsman to face two of the quickest bowlers in the country. One of them had hit him under the heart with his first ball and he had gone down like a pole-axed steer. He had somehow recovered and seen out the rest of the over and on the last ball, foolishly, had scored a run to bring him to the other end. There he had been hit twice in the ribs by the second bowler and he had found himself wondering why he had taken up such a dangerous sport as cricket. The bruises had taken two weeks to fade.

  He walked towards Madame Timori wondering how long the bruises she would give him would take to fade.

  2

  I

  MIGUEL SEVILLE hated Australia and Australians. Not on political or ideological grounds; it was difficult to take seriously the parish pump policies of this backwater. No, he hated the country, or anyway Sydney, because it was so brash, materialistic and uncultured compared to his own Buenos Aires; he hated the people for the same grating faults. He had been here once before at the secret invitation of an Aboriginal radical group; he had found the blacks as objectionable as the whites. Loud, brash, with opinions on everything: nobody wanted to learn, especially from a foreigner, even an invited one. With the disappearance of Carlos, he had become the top man in his trade; but the Aboriginal radicals had wanted to argue every point with him. In the end he had walked out on them and gone back to Damascus.

  That was where he had been two weeks ago when the phone call had come from Beirut. He had gone down to that ruined city and in an apartment in the Muslim quarter met the man who had phoned him.

  “You will be paid one million American dollars.”

  Seville tried to show no surprise; but it was difficult. His price was high, but it had never been as high as this. All at once the recent dreaming might come true: he could retire, go back to Argentina and be amongst his own again.

  “Less my ten per cent.” Rah Zaid was a thin, thin-faced, thin-eyed man who always, no matter what the weather or the time of year, wore a neatly-pressed black silk suit and an Arab head-dress. He had a husky voice that suggested over-exposure to desert sandstorms; the truth, less romantic, was overexposure to American cigarettes. He was smoking now, almost shutting his eyes against the smoke. The air in the apartment was acrid, but that could be the after-effects of the Christian shell that this morning had wiped off the balcony beyond the living-room’s french doors. “As usual.”

  “The client is also paying you commission, I suppose?” Seville didn’t resent what Zaid made out of the contracts; he was the best contact man in the trade that employed them. Utterly amoral, he was nevertheless utterly to be trusted. If he were not, he would have been dead years ago. Seville could have been the one to kill him.

  Zaid smiled thinly behind the cigarette smoke: everything about him seemed to be squeezed tight to make the least possible impression. “We have an understanding.”

  “Who is the client?” Seville knew better than to ask, but he always did.

  Zaid shook his head, “In this case you aren’t to know. Even I don’t know. You are to kill President Timori either in Bunda or, if he abdicates and leaves Palucca, you are to follow him and kill him at the first opportunity.”

  “I thought only kings abdicated?”

  “I gather he thinks of himself as one. If he does, they have no idea where he’ll go. Nobody wants him, not even the Americans.”

  Down in the street there was a burst of automatic gunfire, but neither man flinched or got up to investigate. Beirut now had different everyday sounds from those of other cities. A breeze blew in from the bay but there was no smell of salt air, just cordite.

  “When do they want me to leave?”

  “Immediately. Things will come to a head this week in Bunda.”

  “How will the money be paid?”

  “Half a million to your usual account. The rest on completion of the job.”

  “Did you nominate the price or did they?”

  Zaid gave another thin smile; Seville, who had been happy as a child, wondered if the Arab had ever laughed aloud, “I had to do some bargaining, but that’s what I enjoy.” Seville could imagine the bargaining: it was second nature to an Arab. “These people, whoever they are, hardly quibbled—their go-between came back to me within ten minutes. They must be desperate to be rid of him.”

  “But if he abdicates, why kill him?”

  Zaid shrugged, lit another cigarette. “Perhaps it is the Americans. It would save them the embarrassment of having to give him political refuge.”

  It was Seville’s turn to smile. “I don’t think so. They would pay someone a million dollars to kill me.”

  “The client doesn’t know who you are. I was just asked to find an assassin.”

  Seville got up and walked to
the french doors. He walked with a slight roll, like a man who had spent a long time at sea; but he was no seaman, indeed he hated it. He had a knee-cap that had once been broken by the Argentinian secret police; it gave him little trouble now, but it had affected his walk. He was good-looking in an anonymous way; he grew on women slowly, which was the way he preferred; women, for more than just professional reasons, should always be approached cautiously. He was slim and of medium height and had a cool air to him that was often taken for quiet arrogance and rightly so. He had contempt for a good deal of the world and its citizens.

  He looked out across the Bay of St. George to the steeply rising mountains. This had once been the most beautiful city in the Levant, a mixture of influences laid like a diorama of history, from the Phoenicians to the French and now the Syrians, on the slopes between the mountains and the sea. Now it was a battlefield, a city of ruins that, if the present madness prevailed, might never be rebuilt.

  “Once I thought of retiring here.” He had wanted to retire for at least a year; he had tired of the game. But there had not been enough money to retire on; there was no pension fund for freelance terrorists. Indeed, there had been very few commissions for him in the past year; the terrorist groups had started to employ expendable fanatics who cost nothing. He had been fast approaching the point where he would be in debt, an Argentinian national habit but one which he had never indulged. Of course there was the family money, but he would have to wait till his mother died before he could claim any of that; and that would not be easy, because half a dozen police forces would do their best to follow the trail of money to him. It might be years before he could collect it.

  Now this windfall was being laid in his lap and he could think seriously of retiring. “But I’ll be in my grave before Beirut is peaceful again. Don’t you think so?”

  “Yes,” said Zaid, who preferred not to talk of the grave. No commission ever came out of a cemetery.

  “What happens if something goes wrong? Whom do I contact?”

  “I promised them nothing would go wrong.”

  Seville shook his head, smiled almost as thinly as Zaid. “You know I try to be as near perfect as possible. But something can always go wrong, especially if the target doesn’t co-operate. You may not know it, but there were six attempts to kill Queen Victoria, but something always went wrong.”

  “Assassins have improved since then—the technology is better. You won’t fail, Miguel. Just think of the million dollars.”

  Seville drew an advance from Zaid, went to a local bank and bought $3,000 worth of traveller’s cheques; he did not believe in over-loading himself with money. Police had a bad habit of confiscating money when they picked up a suspected terrorist. He did not sign the cheques, because he could never be certain what name he would be using when it came time to cash them. The bank knew better than to insist that he sign them; in Beirut money was always being withdrawn for reasons better left unqueried. As he came out of the bank a car bomb exploded at the far end of the street. He stood watching the black smoke vomit up in slow motion; then the terrified figures came running out of it. A man was jumping towards him on one leg, the stump of the other streaming blood behind him; suddenly he stopped, balanced like a dancer on the good leg, then fell over. There were screams and shouts and, as if it had been waiting just round the corner for the call, the wail of the siren of an approaching ambulance. He turned and walked away, wondering who the one-legged man had been and why, even as he walked away and the man was behind him, the image of him should be so clear in his mind. He could not remember taking any notice of the victims of his own bomb plantings. Was he to be haunted by memories in his retirement?

  He had returned that night to Damascus, going up the Aley road and down through the Bekaa valley through the Syrian troops’ roadblocks. He left Damascus the next day as Michele Rinelli, the sales manager of an Italian computer firm, and, going via Dubai, arrived sixteen hours later in Singapore. There he checked into the Raffles; he preferred the older style of hotel, they reminded him of the hotels in Buenos Aires. He wondered what the hotels were like in Bunda.

  Then a contact in the Singapore police told him he had been sighted and a watch posted at Changi airport. He had moved out of the Raffles into a small hotel and lain low for a week; then the news had come through that the situation in Palucca had worsened and President Timori was expected to flee to Australia. Seville had shaved off his moustache, dyed his dark hair blond, donned steel-rimmed spectacles and got out the passport that fitted his new identity. He had waited till it was certain that Timori was headed for Australia. Then he had bought a business class ticket for Sydney, gone through passport control as Michel Gideon, a French-speaking Swiss businessman, and boarded the crowded Qantas jet. He had been aware of the two plainclothes officers standing in the background as he passed through passport control, but they had not stopped him. Eight hours later he had come undetected through Immigration in Sydney; visitors were flocking to the city for the bicentennial celebrations and six 747s had landed within a few minutes of each other. He had collected his two bags, one with the dismantled rifle hidden in a false bottom, and, having nothing to declare, had been waved through by the over-worked Customs men.

  The Timoris and their entourage arrived twenty-four hours later. The local press, with a fine disregard for security, had already told Seville where they could be found; they were tired of stories about the bicentennial celebrations, this was an entirely new subject to Australians. The country for years had been a haven for refugees, but they had always been of the lower orders; no President had ever asked for asylum. So they—welcomed the unwanted bastard with banner headlines.

  Seville had scouted the surroundings of Kirribilli House and decided he needed the top floor of the block of flats across the street from it. He had checked the number of the top-floor flat, then checked the name against the number on the mail-boxes: Kiddle. On the afternoon of the Timoris’ arrival he had stood amongst the already present crowd of demonstrators and watched the small convoy of Commonwealth cars, trailed by the newsreel vans and cars, come down the narrow street and swing in through the iron gates. Madame Timori, mistaking the demonstrators for glamour-loving fans, had waved and been roundly booed. The waving hand had stopped in mid-air, looked for a moment as if it might turn into a two-fingered salute, then dropped out of sight. The gates had closed behind the cars.

  Seville went back to the suburban hotel where he was staying, looked up Kiddle in the phone book, then dialled the 922 number. “Mrs. Kiddle?” he said to the woman who answered.

  “Miss Kiddle.” It was an old woman’s voice, he judged. “Yes?”

  “This is Security at Kirribilli House. We are just checking that the demonstrators are not worrying you?”

  “The demonstrators? Oh, is that what they are? No, no. They are noisy, but they’re not worrying me. Has President What’s-his-name arrived yet?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She sounded as if she wanted to give the President her regards. “We’ll be in touch, Miss Kiddle, if the demonstrators get too noisy.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. If I were younger, I’d join them. Tell President Timori to go home.”

  Seville smiled and hung up. He could not imagine his mother, God damn her soul, saying that; she would be out there waving a flag for President Timori, for any President. He packed the Springfield in the squash kit-bag he had bought that morning, added the length of stout cord he always carried, put in his black kid gloves and zipped up the bag. He dressed in jeans and a navy-blue tennis blouson, put on dark glasses and went out to kill.

  The day was hot and the crowd of demonstrators listless; the police watching them were equally listless. No one stopped Seville as he pushed through the crowd and walked along towards the block of flats. He went into the cool hallway of the old thick-walled building and climbed to the top floor. There was no lift and he wondered how Miss Kiddle, if she was old, managed this climb.

  There was a security grille door guardi
ng the front door of the top flat. It took him less than a minute to pick the lock; a man who carried a dismantled Springfield rifle carried other tools as well. Seville was a professional: he knew better than to gamble on doors being left unlocked.

  Then he pressed the bell beside the door. There was no answer and for a moment he hoped that Miss Kiddle had gone out: he had an aversion to close-up killing, such as a strangling. Then a voice said, “Who is it?”

  “It’s Security from Kirribilli House, Miss Kiddle. We called you an hour or so ago.”

  “Oh yes—just a moment.”

  There was the sound of two locks being snapped back, then the door was opened. Miss Kiddle stood there, white-haired and frail; somehow he had expected someone more robust. He smiled at her, then pushed against the door and stepped into the flat, kicking the door closed behind him. She didn’t look frightened or startled by his abrupt entrance; she was smiling at him when he took the cord from his blouson pocket and wrapped it round her neck. She died without protest, but he stood behind her, his head turned away till she went limp.

  He laid her out gently on the floor, pulled a shawl off a grand piano and covered her with it. He opened the front door, locked the security door, and closed the front door again, locking it. Then he looked around the room in which he stood.

  It was a big room and it reminded him of his mother’s house in Recoletta in Buenos Aires: the antique furniture, the grand piano with the shawl on it, the dark drapes aimed at keeping out the too-bright sun; Miss Kiddle, like his mother, had preferred to live in the past. He crossed to one of the windows and at once looked down on Kirribilli House. Trees obstructed part of the view, but he couldn’t ask for a perfect situation: assassins, by the nature of their trade, rarely do have perfect situations.

  He put the rifle together and sat down to wait till the opportunity presented itself to kill Timori. It might be a long wait, but sooner or later Timori would emerge from the house. Twice the phone rang, but he ignored it, though he sweated through the second ringing, which went on for almost two minutes. He felt in need of a leak after that and he got up and went into the bathroom off the main bedroom.