Dragons at the Party

by Jon Cleary

  Seville wished Australians were not so familiar, so matey, to borrow one of their own expressions. “Did you get the package?”

  “Sure, I got it here. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “The pigs are on to you. I was quizzed by one of ‘em this morning, about an hour ago, a guy named Inspector Malone. He asked me if I was gunna supply you with a gun.”

  Seville pushed open the door of the public phone-box; he suddenly felt very warm. Or at least he was sweating, something unusual for him. “Are they watching you?”

  “I dunno. I can send someone out to look.”

  “Do that. Stay by the phone. I’ll call at eleven-twenty.”

  He hung up and stepped out into the heat of the Rozelle street. A young girl brushed by him and went into the box; she dialled a number, then settled herself against the glass wall of the box for a chat. She lit up a cigarette and stared out through the glass at him as if challenging him to move on and leave her to her privacy.

  Seville looked at his watch, then decided to go for a short walk; he did not want to remain in the one place long enough to be observed and perhaps later identified. He could feel uneasiness weakening him like a virus: too much was going wrong with this assignment. He was not himself; but it was not the Swiss disguise that had altered him. Perhaps he had been at the game too long, perhaps it was the environment; everyone blamed the environment these days for all their ills. He was lost in these drab, sunburned streets where everyone looked so casual and unafraid. He felt more at home in terror-stricken Beirut.

  He stopped in at a newsagent’s and bought a paper. The Timoris were still page one material, though they were not the lead story. He had no feelings about Timori, his corruption and his downfall. He was totally cynical about men in general; some were just worse than others. He was, however, intrigued by Madame Timori: one met so few successful evil women. He had watched her on television and she had sexually stimulated him. Love-making for him had always been a risk, a gamble with betrayal; he worked on the principle that there were two places where a man was always vulnerable to attack, in bed and in the bath. On top of Madame Timori was one of the most vulnerable places he could think of.

  He walked back to the phone-box. The girl was still on the phone, one leg propped up against the wall opposite her, the box’s air thick with cigarette smoke. He looked at his watch: 11.18. He waited a minute, then tapped on the door. The girl took no notice of him: he could hear her chatter: “Nah, you know what he’s like, at it all the time. I dunno where I’d be if I wasn’t pinching Mum’s pills . . .” He knocked again and she glared at him, poking out her tongue. It occurred to him only then that she could have been no more than fourteen or fifteen, a child.

  He opened the door, smelled the smoke and the heat. “May I use the phone, please?”

  “Get stuffed,” she said.

  He felt the knife-sheath rub against his calf. “My mother’s very ill. I’m trying to call the doctor—”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I gotta go, Shirl, see youse t’night.” She came out of the box. “What’s the time?”

  “Eleven-twenty,” he said and stepped into the suffocating box, closing the door in her face. He dialled and Pinjarri answered on the first ring. “Well?”

  “There’s a pig up at the end of the street and we think there is another down the other way. What do I do? I just as soon forget all about it, Mick.”

  “You don’t want the five thousand?” He stared through the glass at the young girl; she was listening to the conversation, waiting to hear if he’d got the doctor. He lowered his voice. “Is the item dismantled and in a bag?”

  “Yeah, nobody’d know what’s in it unless I was picked up.” There was silence for a moment, then: “Have you got the five grand on you?”

  “No. Don’t you trust me?”

  “What if they pick you up after I’ve delivered the gun to you? What’s in it for us then, eh?”

  “I can give you a deposit of a thousand dollars in traveller’s cheques, American dollars. The rest I’ll see comes to you in a bank draft.” He would have to be careful with his money if this job dragged on. He had expected to be on his way back to Damascus by now, “You need the money, Mr. Pinjarri. You told me so. Trust me.”

  There was hesitation, doubt, on the line: it was tangible, one could almost feel it. Then: “Okay, a thousand dollars down. But I ain’t coming out with the bag in daylight . . .”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to. Ten o’clock tonight—” He had already chosen the meeting place from the street directory, had been there and scouted it. He had just expected the meeting to take place at noon, instead of having another long wait ahead of him. Timori might die of old age before he got to him. “Central Railway Station. Stand outside the cocktail lounge. If you can’t lose the police, don’t bother to turn up. Go home and I’ll call you at eleven o’clock.”

  He hung up and stepped out of the box, his nose dry from the smoke and his eyes smarting. The young girl, smoking another cigarette, snarled at him. “You wasn’t calling any fucking doctor.”

  “No, my dear. You’re going to learn that life is full of liars and cheats. Give my love to Shirl.” He sounded Australian in his own ears, but the girl, a true Aussie, just jerked her thumb at him and went back into the box.

  Seville went back to the hotel, sat in his room and watched television, read and slept. He felt safer there; he was losing his confidence, he even felt unsafe in his disguise. When someone knocked on his door and said, “Mr. Gideon?” he jumped; but it was only the publican’s wife asking if he was ill, would he like a cuppa coffee? He got up, opened the door and there she was with a tray.

  “It’s only instant, but it’s better than nothing. I was in Switzerland a coupla years ago, me and my husband—we go away every so often. You Swiss make beautiful coffee, I used to drink it by the gallon. There’s some iced vo-vo’s, too—they’re our national biscuit. You see? They’ve got our flag on them, for the Bicentennial. You’re all right?”

  “It’s just the heat. I’m not used to it.”

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t be, coming from Switzerland.” She wanted to stay and talk, to find someone different from the pub’s regular drinkers.

  He put a hand to his head. “I’ve got a headache. I think I’ll drink the coffee and then lie down again. Thank you, you’re very kind.”

  She smiled, a plump woman with prematurely grey hair and a friendliness to her that was genuine, not the professional bonhomie of a publican’s wife. She told him to take care and went back downstairs to tonight’s rock band, which was just warming up. He drank the coffee, which made him grimace, ate the biscuits, chewing on the Australian flag, and switched on the television again for the seven o’clock news.

  The celebrations were the main news, though the Timoris were the second item. Efforts were being made to find them a permanent haven: Holland, Switzerland and Singapore had said no. France, with Gallic bluntness, said it already had ex-President Duvalier and it was time someone else had a go. America was leading the effort to find them sanctuary, but offering none itself; sanctimony flowed out of Washington like the foetid air of two hundred years ago before the swamps of the Potomac were drained. Britain, a haven for everyone else, waited to be asked so that it, too, could say no; but Madame Timori, who had tried London once and found it frigid, climatically and socially, vetoed any suggestion about Britain. Australia, meanwhile, was stuck with them, though the ABC didn’t say that.

  A face Seville had seen once before on the news came up: Detective-Inspector Scobie Malone. “Are you still looking for the terrorist Seville, Inspector?”

  “Still looking,” said Malone.

  “You’re sure he’s your man?”

  “I’m never sure about any suspect. That’s why he’s only a suspect.”

  “Have you any leads?”

  Malone smiled: it seemed to Seville that he smiled directly at him, a challenge. “We’ll let you know.”

&nb
sp; Seville watched the rest of the news, but took none of it in. He switched off the set, but Malone’s face, that dry knowing smile, remained fixed in his mind’s eye. Timori was still the target, but he knew now who the enemy was.

  The rock music, like earth tremors high on the Richter scale of intensity, came up through the floor and drove him out of his room at eight o’clock. There was still light in the sky, but he was not afraid of being picked up; not yet, not till he had to approach Central Station in two hours’ time. As he walked away from the hotel he did not see the police patrol car pull up and the two officers get out and go into the hotel.

  In the bar the publican’s wife, Mrs. Brigham, shouted above the bombardment of the music, “What? A foreigner?”

  The two police officers, both young, jerked their heads and led her out into the private hallway. They showed her a copy of the photo of Miguel Seville; it had suffered in the reproduction and even his own mother might not have recognized him. If she had wanted to . . . “Is he staying here? Or someone resembling him?”

  “No, the only foreigner we have here is a Swiss gentleman. Mr. Gideon. He’s blond and wears glasses. Who’s this bloke?”

  One of the officers wrote down Gideon’s name. “A terrorist named Miguel Seville.”

  “Oh, the one on the news?” She took out a pair of rimless glasses, peered again at the photo: she looked like a schoolmistress checking a pupil’s drawing. Then she shook her head. “Nothing like him.”

  “Could we talk to him?”

  “He’s gone out, just a few minutes ago.”

  “Can we have a look at his room?”

  “You got a warrant?” She had once lost a good paying tenant, an SP bookie, by not asking the raiding police for a warrant.

  “No.”

  “Then no. Come back with a warrant, but I tell you now, you’re wasting your time. You want a drink before you go?”

  “We’re on duty,” said the young policemen, but waited with their tongues hanging out while she brought them a middy of beer each, low alcohol, of course.

  Seville wandered about the city for an hour and a half, stopping occasionally to watch the burst of fireworks over the harbour. He wondered what the fireworks bill would be for the celebrations; the country seemed to be going up in smoke. The city streets were thronged on this Sunday night; everyone seemed to be working up steam for the Big Day, the day after tomorrow. A crocodile of young people, half-drunk on equal parts of grog and nationalism, snaked its way down George Street, disrupting traffic. A Vietnamese boy stood at a kerb selling Australian flags, one of them wrapped round his head as a scarf. Two young men, everything tight about them, their clothes, their hair, their smiles, walked by hand in hand and were jeered at by two girls, who had everything loose, including one breast hanging out of a man’s blue singlet. A fire engine came up the street, siren blaring, and everyone clapped and cheered, thinking it was part of the celebrations. Seville was outside it all, though he smiled at strangers who, infected with friendliness—“We are all mates at a time like this,” Prime Minister Norval had told the nation at his last televised conference—smiled at him. But, with a few exceptions, most people in these crowds looked self-conscious about their gaiety. He remembered a Carnivale he had gone to in Rio de Janeiro, remembered the utter abandon. Suddenly he was homesick for South America again, even for a country that was not his own.

  The party would come to a climax on Tuesday. He had to kill Timori before then; there would be too many police available after Tuesday. He didn’t want to be caught in the cleaning-up, caught amidst the broken beer bottles, the husks of double-bungers, the condoms on the grass. He had to get the gun from Pinjarri tonight.

  He went uptown, approached Central Station cautiously, coming up the sloping roadway from Central Square to the station itself with its tall clock tower. The tower, like so many of the city’s landmarks, was flood-lit; the clock itself was a bright-faced full moon. It was 9.50, time for him to reconnoitre the station surrounds.

  He saw no police cars; nor any unmarked cars in which men sat or by which they stood. If there were any police staking out the station, they were well hidden. He went into the big building, passing through the deserted outer area under the wide awnings and coming into the almost deserted main departure hall.

  He stopped just inside the west entrance and surveyed the hall with its high vaulted ceiling. It looked as if it had been restored a year or two ago; late-Victorian stations usually didn’t look as clean and attractive as this one. A few people sat on the big semi-circular brown and orange benches; it was difficult to tell whether they were travellers who had missed their trains or homeless unfortunates waiting to bed down for the night. It seemed that all the trains had either left or arrived: there was no movement on the dark platforms beyond the glass entrance booths. There was also no sign of Dallas Pinjarri.

  Seville went back and round outside the building. He was under the huge canopy that covered the wide roadway where passengers were set down or picked up. Two taxis pulled up and some people got out of them and went into the station. The taxis drew away, leaving the area deserted again. There were half a dozen cars parked on the far side of the roadway and there was another car parked on the footpath just along from the entrance to the main ticket hall. Seville had passed it when he had come round from the west entrance, but had taken little notice of it. Parking on footpaths seemed to be an Australian habit.

  He went in through the ticket hall, came out into the main hall and looked along towards the cocktail lounge. He saw Dallas Pinjarri come out of the lounge carrying what looked to be another squash bag. He paused, looked around him, then set the bag down and leaned back against the wall behind him. At this distance Seville could not tell whether Pinjarri was ill at ease or not.

  Seville scanned the big hall: there was no sign of any police. He was about to step out into the open, turning towards Pinjarri, when the voice behind him said, “Sir?”

  He turned, every muscle tightening. The young policeman, in shirt sleeves, cap pushed back on his sweating head, gun still in his holster on his hip, was smiling at him. “Is that your car parked outside on the footpath?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure, sir? I observed you coming away from it.”

  Where had the young officer been? Seville hadn’t seen him; perhaps there were more of them observing him. He had glanced into the car as he had passed it, to check there was no one hidden in it; but he could not remember stopping by it. The police, later, would learn that the car belonged to a drunken station employee who had been about to drive it into the main hall, smashing through the entrance doors; only another employee, slightly less drunk, had stopped him. They had been caught up in the city’s party mood, had been drinking since last night and then this evening dimly remembered they were supposed to report for duty here at Central. The men were later reprimanded and docked a week’s wages, but by then the damage was done.

  “Would you mind stepping outside with me, sir?”

  Seville hesitated, looking around for the squad of police to emerge. But none appeared, and abruptly he knew what he would have to do. “All right, officer. It is mine. I’ll move it.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind, sir.” The young officer was in a good mood: he would be knocking off soon, going to his own party.

  “I’ll need a hand to get it started. The battery’s almost flat. If you wouldn’t mind giving me a push?”

  Seville’s mind was accustomed to working fast; it had never worked faster than now. They went back through the ticket hall and out into the setting-down area. An empty taxi drove up, paused, then drove on. The area was deserted again. Seville knew he would have to work fast, have luck on his side.

  Without looking directly at it, he was aware of the policeman’s pistol in its holster on his hip. He walked towards the car, going in on the driver’s side, between the car and the wall. He bent down and slipped the knife out of its sheath on his leg; he palmed it with the haft up his sl
eeve; he was thankful he was still wearing his jacket. He went to the back of the car and the young policeman followed him, coming round from the outer side.

  “I don’t think you’re going to have room to turn her around, sir—”

  Seville stabbed him in the heart, the knife going up under the ribs. It was another close-up killing; but Seville couldn’t turn his face away this time. He stepped back as the policeman fell on to the boot of the car and slid down to the ground. Seville grabbed him and dragged him between the car and the wall as another taxi pulled up.

  He crouched down over the body, heard the laughter and a shouted goodbye and the taxi was driven away. Between the car and the wall, as if through a narrow window, he saw a young man and a girl, arms round each other, go into the ticket hall. As they reached the door they paused and he stiffened, waiting for them to look at the car and then come towards it. But they just clung to each other, kissed and then, laughing again, went into the ticket hall.

  He let out a quick sigh of relief. Then he flipped open the holster and took out the policeman’s pistol. It was a short-barrel Smith and Wesson .38, good only at short range: no weapon at all for a long range assassination. But it was a weapon and he needed more protection than the knife could give him. He slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, took the extra six rounds of ammunition out of the pouch on the officer’s belt, then stood up and looked out past the car.

  No one had seen the killing. He moved out into the open and went back through the ticket hall. He pushed open the inner doors and stepped into the main hall and looked along towards the cocktail lounge. There was no sign of Pinjarri: he had disappeared.

  Then Seville saw Inspector Malone and two other men in plainclothes come into the hall no more than thirty yards away.

  IV

  The tail on Dallas Pinjarri had been lost. Clements, who had been relieved at noon and then came back on watch at eight o’clock, having spent the interim doing paper-work at Homicide, had seen the Aborigine come out of his house in Redfern at nine o’clock carrying a canvas bag. Pinjarri had walked up to Cleveland Street and then turned up towards the University. Clements had kept him in sight; at the same time he had kept in radio contact with the two junior men in the unmarked car that kept within range of him, but out of sight of Pinjarri, two hundred yards behind him.