Last Drinks

by Andrew McGahan

  I took out the card that Detective Lewis had given me. It was the same.

  It was a strip club. Something we’d never bothered with, fifteen years before. They existed, they were legal, even in those days, but the money wasn’t there. Cheap rooms with tables and chairs strewn out in front of a stage, the only audience young boys too nervous, and old men too poor, for anything else. Watching dancers who were only one step up from working topless bars.

  Perhaps they pretended to a little more class now, but even so . . .

  Why did Detective Lewis want me to come here?

  A car pulled up behind me. I turned and watched two men climb out, both in suits. They didn’t so much as glance at me, just marched straight through the door.

  But I stood transfixed, the night around me, the storm and rain and the long hot day forgotten in a moment. He was ten years older, the hair was thinner, the stomach bigger—but I recognised the face, and without even thinking I was reaching for my wallet and following the men through the door.

  One of them was Lindsay.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lindsay Heath, the Invisible Man.

  The money man, the bagman, the accountant, the working manager, the one who kept all the wheels turning, night by night.

  I hadn’t seen him since the day the whole thing first hit the papers. As far as I knew, no one had, not even Marvin. He vanished—interstate, some said, overseas according to others, to England, to Spain, to anywhere. And behind him he’d left a pile of paperwork which clearly placed Charlie as the legal guardian of the whole enterprise—Charlie’s name on all the licences and leases and pay cheques, Charlie’s bank accounts full of unexplainable and untaxed money. Charlie himself was hardly pleading innocent. He’d broken the law, he knew that, had always known that, and he was prepared to admit to what he thought was fair. The licensing dodges, the bribery, some of the responsibility for the clubs. But his name, and his name alone, was on everything. Stuff he never even knew about. All Lindsay’s little schemes and sidelines. And there were a lot of them, stretching back through the years.

  He’d started out, not surprisingly, as a policeman, following in his father’s footsteps, and already knowing, no doubt, all the tricks. His law enforcement career was brief but typical of the day, rolling quickly through the key sections like the old Consorting Branch, which extorted money from prostitutes, and then into the old Licensing Division, which extorted money from everyone else. Like Marvin, however, Lindsay saw soon enough that the real rewards were not to be found in petty bribery. He quit the force and set himself up as ostensibly a security specialist, but actually as consultant to a host of illegal interest groups. For a fee he would broker deals either with the police force or, later in his career, directly with the government. He represented SP bookies up and down the state. He represented gaming companies that wanted to sneak dubiously legal slot machines into clubs and pubs. He represented property developers who needed approval for criminally destructive projects without the scrutiny of any environmental agencies.

  He represented anyone. And as so many of his interests coincided with the fields in which Marvin was working, it was only natural they formed a relationship. They rose hand in hand, one of them in public, the other in private. Eventually hundreds of thousands of dollars were flowing through Lindsay’s fingers each week and on to Marvin, to other political figures, to public servants, government boards, councils and, of course, the police—and a percentage of it all was his to keep. No one knew just how rich he was. Certainly not me. Most of it I learned only at the Inquiry, and I was appalled. To me he’d always just been the man who knew how things worked. Perhaps outside the law, strictly speaking—and weren’t we all?—but one of Queensland’s key criminal figures? That I didn’t know. He wasn’t the only consultant of his type in the state, nor was he the biggest, but if anything placed the rest of us squarely on the uglier side of the underworld, and doomed Charlie to prison, it was Lindsay.

  What had the detectives told me about him?

  Don’t you worry about Lindsay. We know it wasn’t him.

  But I’d never thought to ask them how they knew. I’d assumed they’d had word of him in Argentina or somewhere— somewhere safely out of reach and suspicion. Never would I even have conceived that he might be back in Brisbane, that I would come across him walking the streets, entering a strip bar. He was like an apparition from history.

  And for the first few moments, an apparition was all he might have been. By the time I paid the cover charge, got past the front desk and entered the club, Lindsay was once again nowhere to be seen.

  I stared around the room. It wasn’t what I was expecting. There was no stage, no tables, no spotlight set up on the back wall. Instead it was a confused space of different levels and dim lighting, with deep couches and high booths and rooms opening off to the sides, all focused around a central pool of light, a revolving dance floor. Music pulsed from a console, and there was a naked woman on the dance floor, draped about a steel pole. No one was watching her. In the dimness all around were what seemed to be dozens of other women, all of them in lingerie, some of them with men, some of them alone, moving restlessly. And off in the booths, and glimpsed through doorways, naked women swayed privately over tables and couches, or the laps of the men who sat in them.

  I stood in the doorway, unsure what to do. None of the men appeared to be Lindsay, but it was so dark. Women watched me, waiting. I couldn’t simply stand there. A bar ran along one side of the room and automatically my feet took me in that direction. I was at the counter before I even remembered I no longer drank.

  ‘Yes?’ said the barman.

  ‘Iced water,’ was all I could say.

  He nodded, scooped ice into a glass and slid it my way. I reached for my wallet again and he shook his head. ‘No charge.’

  I sipped water and leant on the bar, feeling flushed with heat, as if the storm had never come. I gazed around, trying not to let my eyes linger anywhere, and yet searching. He was in here somewhere . . . in whatever this place was. Nothing like anything from my day, that was certain. This was something less than a brothel, but more than a strip club. I felt strangely innocent. I was seeing nothing I hadn’t seen before— admittedly not for a full decade, and that alone would perhaps have made me an outsider—but it was more than that. There was a new culture operating here, a new understanding I’d missed out on. So close to sex, and yet not sex. More languid somehow, less cheap, but also more distant, more aloof. I didn’t get it at all.

  A woman edged up to me. She looked young and serious, jet-black hair curved over half her face, her lace underwear glowing faintly in the neon light. There was nothing about her that reminded me of the working girls I’d known in the old days.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, a brief smile.

  And I didn’t know the routine any longer, the rules.

  ‘I’m just here to meet a friend,’ I said.

  Her eyes held nothing but good will. ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Male. Um . . . so what’s the deal here?’

  ‘Up to you.’ She nodded towards the woman revolving on the platform. ‘The entertainment is complimentary. If you’d like something more personal, however, then we could go to a booth.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Thirty dollars for half an hour, fifty for an hour.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I can touch you, but you can’t touch me.’

  ‘I see.’

  I was sweating, uncomfortable. Even if I’d been looking, I couldn’t do this sort of thing now, not sober, not so much older. I wanted her to go away. She was too poised, too cool. It had always seemed easier in my day, almost thoughtless, just a roll on a bed somewhere in the drunken careen that was the night. I peered through the shadows. Lindsay wasn’t anywhere. I noticed that the woman who was draped around the steel pole had a pubic mound that was perfectly shaven. The skin there looked as smooth and soft as if a razor had never touched it, as if hair had never grown. And suddenly
I remembered from one of my own nights a beefy country girl tugging at her hefty chunk of pubic hair and shrieking with laughter at the very suggestion.

  ‘I’m just going to look around,’ I told the woman next to me.

  She nodded. ‘I’ll be here.’

  I moved off, glass of water in hand, and worked my way through the crowd. There seemed to be plenty of men, but even more women. The men were mainly in suits and looked like business types, but it was not like my time. The suits were of a better cut now, the lapels narrower, the ties thinner, the haircuts shorter. And for the women, the lingerie was less garish, the high heels more subdued, and there was no eye shadow, no outrageous waves of hair. I couldn’t remember, had I realised how tasteless we all were back then? It didn’t matter.

  The music thumped. I couldn’t see Lindsay. I edged along walls and peered into booths. Naked thighs slid along the zips of black suit-pants, men stared up as breasts swung before their eyes. Why? To what end? I still didn’t understand it. Men glanced sideways at me and I moved on. Women approached me and smiled, and I moved on. A hallway led to more booths and rooms. In the darkness it was like a maze. Could sex be happening in here somewhere? Would anyone see? Was there an extra charge you could pay?

  I wound up back at the bar. A new woman was dancing on the revolving floor. The first woman I’d spoken to was walking away with another man.

  I ordered more iced water from the barman.

  ‘You don’t drink?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You might want to pick yourself a woman then.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They won’t like it if you don’t spend money one way or the other.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I scanned the bar behind him. All the old bottles, the old companions, glistened there as if I’d never left them. I could always order a drink, leave it sitting on the counter. I could trust myself that far, surely. Hold a drink in my hand again, feel the weight of it, hear the ice clink against the side . . .

  And then there he was. Across the room a curtain in a doorway swung back and he came through. It was him, there was no doubt. Older, much older, more then ten years’ worth. But it was him. He glanced about the room, his expression harried, his eyes darting over me as if I wasn’t there, and then he hurried straight across the floor and disappeared through another curtain. The women all ignored him.

  And I understood. He owned the place. That’s why Detective Lewis had sent me here. He knew I would meet Lindsay. It was just a game, a parting joke to play . . .

  I turned back to the barman, pointed to the curtained doors.

  ‘Does Lindsay Heath own this place?’

  ‘Sure he does. Why?’

  ‘I need to talk to him.’

  The barman shrugged. ‘He should be back out later.’

  ‘Please. I need to talk to him right now.’

  He went to a phone that hung on the wall. He picked it up and spoke into it. After a time he looked at me.

  ‘Why do you want to see him?’

  ‘I’m an old friend. From years ago. George.’ I had a sudden fear he wouldn’t remember me, or wouldn’t care, wouldn’t want to see me anyway. A flash of inspiration came. ‘Tell him I’m looking for Marvin McNulty.’

  The barman spoke into the phone again, waited, spoke some more and then hung up. He nodded at me. ‘Just wait a minute.’

  I turned and faced the second doorway again. Around me the music pulsed and the women sauntered to and fro, but I was hardly aware of any of it. Time passed. A minute. Two minutes. Five. What was taking so long? Finally the curtain parted and two suited men emerged. They looked like bouncers, young and clean-cut and bulging. They came over to the bar, and the barman nodded towards me.

  ‘This way, sir,’ one of them said.

  I followed them across the floor. They paused at the curtain and parted it, waiting for me to go through. Beyond the curtain all the luxury and carpeting ceased. I was in a bare cement hallway, and suddenly my arms were pinned behind my back, and an arm was around my neck.

  ‘What the—’

  ‘Hold fucking still,’ a voice hissed in my ear.

  I was in shock. I didn’t understand what was happening. Even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t move. My feet were almost off the ground, and the grip on my neck was tight enough to be choking. I could feel nothing but the raw muscle holding me, and hands as solid as bricks moving over my body, inside my shirt and pants. It dawned on me, amongst it all, that they were looking for weapons.

  ‘I don’t have anything,’ I gasped. ‘I’m just a friend.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ the voice in my ear said.

  I was lowered minimally and shoved along the hall, my arms still locked behind me. This was crazy. We came to a door and one of them moved ahead to open it. I was pushed through. I caught a glimpse of an office—a desk, chairs, filing cabinets, an overflowing ashtray, all cheap. Then I had a bouncer on either side of me, each holding an arm, and there was Lindsay. His eyes were narrow and surrounded by deep, fleshy bags, and there was no recognition in them.

  ‘You must be fucking suicidal showing up here,’ he said.

  ‘Lindsay,’ I got out, ‘it’s me. George. Remember? Charlie. Marvin. All of us.’

  The eyes peered at me, and for a moment I thought I had it all wrong and that I’d never known him and he’d never known me, no matter how clearly I knew otherwise.

  ‘Well, fuck . . .’ he said. He shook his head. He stared some more and laughed. ‘Let him go, fellas. This isn’t him.’

  The grip on my arms disappeared.

  Lindsay was still laughing. ‘George, you dumb bastard. I was about to fucking kill you.’

  And, legs gone weak, I sank into a chair.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  I’d never liked Lindsay.

  It was a drinker’s suspicion, possibly, of a non-drinker. Lindsay drank, but he wasn’t like the rest of us. There was no love affair with the alcohol, no shining path opening in his mind the way it did in mine, no drunken night extending off into infinity. He was a money man. And the money was always the reason he was with us.

  He sent his bouncers away, patted me on the back. ‘It’s okay, George. Take a second.’

  But there was no friendliness in him. He’d never liked me either.

  I gulped in air. Lindsay sat behind his desk, stared at me a moment, then shook his head and reached for a cigarette. Up close he was harder to recognise than he’d been from a distance. He’d taken off his jacket and his shirt was wrinkled and sweat-stained. He looked unhealthy, pale and overweight, and tired. His naked scalp shone. There was a coarse, veined sheen to his face, and his eyes were sleepless. He cupped his hands around the lighter, sucked in, then snatched the cigarette away from his mouth impatiently.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I asked when I had my breath back.

  He exhaled a tight jet of smoke. ‘We thought you were someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I gave my name.’

  ‘So we got it wrong.’ The cigarette tapped against the ashtray. ‘What are you doing here, George?’

  ‘Me? What are you doing here? What are you doing in Brisbane, in Australia even?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘But when did you get back?’

  ‘Years ago.’

  ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘I hardly made any public announcements.’

  His voice was different too. When I’d known him, he’d had the calm and steady air of the ex-policeman. Now he sounded hoarser, less convincing. And irritated. Like a harried public servant, lower management, after a lifetime’s career in a cramped little office that reeked of tobacco, dealing with a client he had no interest in seeing.

  ‘And they let you come back . . . after everything?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not?!’

  ‘I fixed it, George. That’s all that matters.’

  ‘B
ut then . . . why come back at all?’

  He stared at me like I was mad. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Jesus, a million reasons.’

  ‘I didn’t see it like that.’

  I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation. This was Lindsay . . . I’d even heard a rumour once that he was in Iceland.

  ‘But where were you all those years?’

  His gaze moved away, restless. ‘Around.’

  ‘That’s it? Around?’

  ‘Well, what about you? I heard you hid out in the fucking mountains.’

  I gave up. Wherever he had been, he was back. I looked around the room. ‘And you’re still . . . in the business?’

  He relaxed a little. ‘More or less.’

  ‘I didn’t see your name on the door. They’d never give you a liquor licence, surely?’

  A thin smile. ‘I’ve got partners.’

  ‘Silent partners? Like Charlie?’

  I was still in shock, perhaps. Lindsay was the one with two bouncers waiting outside, not me, and I wasn’t fooled by his appearance. He was not a man to insult lightly. Though I’d never seen it—or at least, I’d never come close to it until a moment before—I knew he was capable of violence. How much, I didn’t know. There were stories of beatings in his police days, and worse. And for all its amateurish, chaotic ways, people did get killed in the Brisbane underworld of the ’80s. No one I ever knew, and nothing had ever suggested to me that Lindsay was involved in anything like that. But on the other hand, as I’d learned in the Inquiry itself, he was involved in everything.

  He only shrugged again, breathed in smoke. ‘I had nothing against Charlie.’

  ‘It didn’t seem like that.’

  ‘It was just the way things went. We all made money for a while there. You too, far as I remember. And Charlie.’

  ‘He’s dead, you know.’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘I didn’t see you at the funeral.’

  A shake of the head. ‘What are you doing here, George?’