Tailed?
I had been out of my clothes for sometime in the theater. Arnold could have slipped a pinhead mike and bleeper into the weft of my trousers – the tiny things could defy an hour of search without a detector.
I scribbled a note and passed it to Arry. I may be bugged. He thought about it and nodded, understanding that I could not report to Nick until I was clean. Worse, if I skipped the barracks and went to Mum in Newport, the trail would lead straight to Kovacs.
I wrote again: Give me a password for Richmond.
He saw at once where Richmond fitted, tracing my moves in his mind, testing each one before he agreed. He wrote: Say you have a message from Arry the Sprat for Top Nick. Tower Eleven.
I replied: Warn Nick.
He put the scraps of paper in his pocket. I believe that later he shredded them into confetti and let them flutter into the river. The most ardent operator could not have collected and collated the sodden scraps.
I asked, aloud, because it was something any listeners to my hypothetical bug would expect me to ask, ‘What will happen to you?’
He held up crossed fingers. ‘Nothing much, I reckon. Good physicists are scarce. I’m good.’
He did not sound wholly confident of that. I know now that he had begun to have second thoughts. But he did get a message through to Nick.
4
I went back to barracks and missed the evening meal through snatching two hours of sleep while the day faded. What I had to do needed darkness but the lost meal was a regret; the night could turn out long and active and the effects of that horrendous fever were still with me.
I stripped off everything I wore and combed my hair out thoroughly; pinhead mikes could be planted in the hair. Then I dressed in minimal Swill clothing, a sleeveless shirt and a pair of thin shorts which were in fact old trousers cut off halfway down the thigh. They were appropriately filthy but did not smell; I took a small stink spray for use when the time came. Over the Swill gear I pulled long trousers and a sleeved shirt, added sockshoes and a throatband and was at once a randy young feller preparing for a night with a girlfriend.
I called Carol and arranged to meet her at her Admin Section in East Melbourne. She would be upset when I failed to show up but if computer snoops were monitoring me, the rendezvous would make my movements plausible. East Melbourne is halfway to Richmond.
I signed out for the evening and walked into City Center, wondering if a bug in my clothing back at barracks was holding surveillance at a halt or whether I was being physically tailed. I made no attempt to check but walked straight up Flinders Street toward East Melbourne with the old disused railway yard on my right, ten or fifteen meters below street level. The river regularly overflowed here to cover the rusting lines and some lonely rolling stock that had rotted there for half a century. Rotted was the word, for the area smelled foul when the water shrank to quagmires between floods.
I headed for the point where the old West Richmond line splits off from the main yard and runs for a mile or so through a cutting. There are big, spreading, ancient trees where the line runs beneath the road to enter the cutting; I was able to stand motionless in their shadow for ten minutes, watching for sign of a tail. It was just after eight, which is not a shift-change hour, and few people were on the footpaths on this edge of City Center. What few there were seemed intent on their business and none were loitering. I decided that the moment was safe and went over the picket fence and into the railway cutting.
The cutting was six or seven meters deep here and thick with weeds and shrubbery growing almost impenetrably wild, but the line was on an upgrade and free of water; in the noiseless sockshoes I made good time by stepping on the rotting sleepers to avoid the sharp stone filling. I thought I should reach West Richmond station undetected.
The line surfaced in the middle of the weed-grown, abandoned Jolimont Park but the shrubbery along the fences was thick enough for cover. I passed the tumbledown, forgotten Jolimont station, weed-smothered and buried under its fallen veranda, without incident and entered the long tunnel that runs under the hill to emerge near West Richmond.
Walking in the dark was slower but I was well into the tunnel when I saw the pale gleam of a masked torch and heard wooden sabots crunching on the stone filling.
I should have realized that this easy ingress to Richmond would be to the Swill an easy egress for night foraging in City Center. I backed out of the tunnel at speed, scrambled up the bank, dragged off my Sweet overclothes, doused myself with stink spray, threw away the can, shoved the discarded clothes out of sight among the weeds and scrambled back to the line. All that took less than a minute.
Barefoot, in torn shorts and shirt, I waited in the middle of the line, arms spread in the signal meaning friendly stranger.
Sudden silence said they saw me. Then they were all around me, a dozen or more of them. One lifted the muffled torch and peered into my face. I had not shaved and a two-day beard was something no Sweet would wear.
‘Whoya?’
The voice was not inimical; quizzing a stranger was routine. I said, ‘Newport feller. Matey.’
‘Goin?’
‘Richmon.’ Tah ’leven.’
‘Who dere?’
‘Top Nick. Knowin’ Billy Kovacs.’
They had heard of Kovacs, a legend among Bosses.
‘So?’
‘I got info to Top Nick.’
‘What info?’
I shook my head violently. ‘No tellins. Tellins Top Nick, not youse.’
They grumbled but took refusal better than I had hoped. Old Nikopoulos apparently commanded some respect and nobody was anxious to interfere. Still, they played safe: three were detached to walk me to Tower Eleven, one holding each hand in the dark and the third coming behind. And so I got to Richmond Towers.
The Richmond Enclave had a powerful advantage over Newport: it was above the floodline. It was a decade older than Newport, built on a slightly different plan and notably lower than the monsters erected later, when crumbling economies had ruined the working majority and deepened the gulf between rich and poor. Those were surface differences: the walls were smothered in the same graffiti and the smell of drains and crowded humanity was equally present. An addition in Eleven was a pungent odour of decay on the ground floor; I guessed that Top Nick was in trouble with his garbage disposal and that tonnes of rotting matter clogged an overloaded destructor system. I wondered briefly if Kovacs had a specialist who could be ferried across on an aid mission.
The Nikopoulos flat was located on the ground floor, the old man had less demanding strategic ideas than Kovacs.
My escorts held my arms until the door was opened, taking no chances with a stranger. A skinny, teenage girl with furious Greek eyes peered through the slit-opened door and cased me with inquisitive impudence before she let it a little wider. I think I was approved for later attention but we never came to grips.
She screamed, ‘Grampa!’ and continued her inspection under the eyes of my grinning warders until an old, craggy, bald and testy man with unmistakable Nikopoulos features shoved his face into mine as though hostilities should begin at once and demanded with cracked menace what I wanted.
I asked, ‘You’m Top Nick?’
‘S’me. S’wot?’
‘Got ’ot talk fum Arry ter Sprat.’
From inside Nick’s voice called, ‘That’s my boy. Let him in, Poppa.’
Top Nick said evilly, ‘Nunna fu’n copper!’ and to my escort, ‘Piss it!’
Not one to be gracious to guests or doers of a kindness, Top Nick. (I found later that he was all bawl and bluster, flattering himself that he was still the all-powerful Tower Boss while the family operated without consulting him.) The escort gave me parting stares that added up to Lucky youse we din case youse copper, while I tried not to make it obvious that my heart was coming down out of my mouth after an uncertain hour.
The Nikopoulos flat resembled the Kovacs’ in that it plainly housed more people than it
could reasonably hold but unlike theirs it was dirty. I had seen much filthier places in my brief entries into the Newport tower and Top Nick’s was probably about par for people who had given up most kinds of pretence; it took a Kovacs with social climbing instincts to battle the odds in parading a gimcrack gentility.
Nick said, ‘About time you showed up.’
Another man was with him, also in Swill rig, a copper whom I knew by sight but not by name. Nick introduced me to his father, who nodded with a graceless assumption of superiority. His son might be a copper and might have vouched for his assistant and myself but that did not mean that he enjoyed having us in his home. Taking advantage of the bastards was one thing but entertaining them strained good Greek protocol.
Nick did not introduce me to the other PI man, who also was defying regulations by being here. No names, no reprisals.
Only the five of us were present, speaking Swill because, it soon appeared, old Top Nick had trouble understanding Sweet English. Then there were only four because Nick said to the girl, ‘Piss it, Lissa!’ She protested that she was sixteen and fit for family councils, until Top Nick pushed her to the door and repeated his son’s ‘Piss it!’
Nick told me that Arry had contacted him through a chain of intermediaries, enough of them to cover his tracks, and that he had come straight here to wait for me. The other PI man spoke not a word during the entire meeting.
Nick got down to business right away, making me reproduce every word spoken by Arnold and his boss. Recall training had sharpened a natural ear for dialogue to the point of being near eidetic – there was no problem there. Arnold’s talk held no interest for him but to one of the boss man’s statements he came back time and again: One, the immediate origin of the doctored narcotic is known and drying up to the supply is in progress. For your interest it is brought in from over the border. The Indons also are infected and the ultimate source is uncertain . . . There is some fraternization between border patrols which is difficult to prevent.
Top Nick understood little of this foreign tongue but pretended alert comprehension while Nick had me repeat it to terminal boredom as he examined every word.
‘Can you give me his voice, Teddy? The accent, the sound?’
The boss man’s neutral quality was less easy to imitate than an individual tone would have been; it took me a dozen attempts before I felt I was somewhere near it. Nick cocked a glance at the other PI man, who shook his head, not recognizing it.
Nick asked, ‘Do you think he was telling the truth?’
‘It was a give-nothing-away tone – truth and lie would have sounded much the same.’
‘So he was probably lying. I want to identify him. Describe him.’
I went through the major points – sallow skin, grey-green eyes, wide mouth, thinnish lips, flat ears, basin crop, deep lines at the mouth corners.
‘Long face? Wide? Narrow?’
‘Square face with a puffy jaw.’
The anonymous man sketched rapidly on a scratch pad and turned the result for me to see. Nick asked, ‘Like that?’
‘Something. Higher forehead. Jaw a bit rounder. Mouth wider. Cheekbones very high. Mouth lines much deeper – very deep.’
The second sketch contained definite elements of the man but only elements. The PI artist began again, creating an Identikit. I had seen this done with superimposed basics on a computer screen but had never considered it possible by hand. This man sketched at lightning speed, never fudging a line. At the end of twenty minutes we had a portrait as nearly like the boss man as my memory could construct.
Nick said thoughtfully, ‘That identifies him. He can be big trouble.’
I asked, ‘Do you really think he was lying?’
‘Yes and no. He’s one who believes that truth is whatever serves the State. A patriot of sorts, but an honest patriot? If so, why did he tell you those things?’
As usual he expected an answer. ‘So that I’d repeat it to my superior, who would then conclude that there was no point in PI continuing to interfere.’
‘What if he lied?’
‘To cover up something? Same result – to make PI drop its interest.’
‘And if he thought PI might identify him and suspect that he lied?’
‘Then it would be a warning to PI to lay off.’
‘Lay off or else?’
Or else what? I had no idea what administrative revenge could encompass; the State seemed to be housed in boxes with little communication between them.
‘But why,’ Nick continued, ‘should our prodding worry them so?’
All the possible answers to that were as unreal as triv plots, I could only say, ‘We’ll never know if we stop now.’
‘So?’
‘We carry on.’
He should have cried Good man! or some such, straight from the triv scripts, but what he said was, ‘Make sure Billy knows just what he’s getting into.’
‘I don’t think he’ll pull out.’
Nick did not bother to answer that. One of his less lovable traits was his conviction that we would always do as he wanted. We always did.
He sent the lightning sketcher away with an escort Top Nick called up for him. After midnight he said to me, ‘Come on,’ and we slipped out of the tower with a scavenging gang. With them he made arrangements for me to be passed across the city, from group to group, to Newport, knowing that neither of us would be safe so long as I was visible in barracks.
At the last minute I asked who was the boss man but he shook his head and would not tell me. The less I knew . . .
The Swill who passed me from Enclave to Enclave in a wide quarter-circle around City Center, through Kensington to Newport, did not pretend friendliness; they were doing a reciprocal job for a known PI contact whose reputation guaranteed the necessity of what he asked, but that did not include loving the bastard. The trip, about ten kilometers on foot, opened my eyes to the ways of traveling unseen through the city, via Fringe areas and Sweet areas and Enclaves, using back lanes, forgotten railway cuttings, transport tunnels, factory areas where little but automation moved, public gardens, overgrown allotments and some unsuspected and ghostly blocks of ancient, mildewed, tumbled, abandoned houses.
They turned me loose in Newport just before dawn and turned back without farewell. I was tempted to go to Mum’s place for a shower and a sleep but I had to assume that my identity was known by now and that covert closed. ‘They’ might connect me there with Kovacs, but winkling a man out of a tower, one protected by a Boss, could cause precisely the public uproar – involving an army peacekeeping squad – that ‘they’ would wish to avoid. I could be safe with Kovacs for a few days before ‘they’ found a means of flushing me out, time enough to get our soldier and our information.
So I went downhill to the riverside levels where river and sea combined to keep the streets permanently under a half-meter of water, and splashed my way to Twenty-three. Climbing the twelve flights to the Kovacs flat left me close to exhaustion; Arnold’s cookery had taken more out of me than I had guessed.
Vi answered the knock, mountainous in a dressing gown and bedraggled with sleep. ‘Thought it might be you. Been up all night by the look of you. What about the bug?’
‘I’m clean.’
‘Just as well. You’ll have to doss on the floor.’
In the middle of the day Kovacs came home and shook me awake and sat by me on the floor, three-quarters naked as he usually was in the flat, spidery and knobbly and worried.
‘What’s this about, boy? What’re you doing here?’ Before I could answer he asked, ‘What about the bug? You got it or not?’
‘I had it but Med Section has a cure. Rough but quick.’ When I described it to him his relief was so genuine that I wished I could think as well of him as he wanted me to. At times the wolf beneath the skin seemed an illusion but it was never far away. A caring wolf was still no fireside pet.
I told him the story of my day and night, ending as Nick had instructed, ‘He
said I should be sure you knew what you were getting into.’
The risks were not on his mind. He said, ‘The Med man – that’s if he was Med – says the Indons are passing the stuff to the border patrols. Right?’
I thought over the wording as I had repeated it for Nick. ‘Not exactly. He suggested it. He said they are sick with it, too, so perhaps it comes from somewhere else. But I’m not sure I believe it.’
‘Nor me.’ He was suddenly somber. ‘But why don’t you?’
‘Why did he bother to tell me anything? It might have been just a blind to stop further questions from PI.’
‘So where does it come from?’
I knew what was in his mind, his ‘cull’ bugbear, and I didn’t want to get into an argument over something that only seemed wilder the more you thought about it. I said I had no idea and he let it drop.
Vi gave us soup for lunch. Soups formed a large part of Swill diet because everything had to be used up – wasting food was the unforgiven sin, unused scraps were unknown.
All that Wednesday and the next day I stayed in the flat, browsing among Kovacs’ old books, very curious some of them, that he kept stacked under the beds, all the time wishing for word from Nick though common sense dictated that he should lie low.
On the Thursday night, late, we picked up Bettine, all self-important with her role as femme fatale scheming to bring the scheming soldiery undone, and went out into the night – Bettine and Kovacs and I plus Gordy and Jim, Kovacs’ streetwise, fight-wise twin sons, sixteen years old, burgeoning replicas of their father.
From the moment we stepped into the water at the foot of the tower stairs we knew we would be wading all the way, save for what we hoped would be no more than a minute or two on the assault course. The youngsters, tough-soled through a lifetime on concrete and in water, went barefoot; Kovacs and I wore rubber shoes. The moon was high but dim behind drifting clouds. Once in the street we depended on the youngsters for guidance and they were as unerring as homing birds.
The Sea and Summer Page 31
