The Rhino had been in Darwin for three months and in that time he’d done no more than establish the flimsiest toehold. The free port was one of the busiest, most kinetic places he’d been to since the Disappearance. Vast flows of money and people passed through here, and the power structure of the city was constantly shifting, protean, moving in time with the erratic tidal changes that the fall of America had sent washing around the globe. As much as the presence of thousands of US servicemen and women created the impression that Seattle was the big dog around here, the Rhino knew differently.
We’re just the dumb muscle, he figured, like a boxer who’s taken too many hits to the head. They’ll keep us around until they don’t need the help, and then we’ll get flushed like a used condom.
The real power here took the form of Indian money-changers and the former Chinese Communist Party bosses, legions of them, who’d survived the civil war and transformed themselves into princes of the middle kingdom’s coastal megacities. These old CCP chiefs rarely appeared on the streets on Darwin. But the city seemed to clench in on itself whenever they arrived in numbers. They flew in and choppered straight out to the rooftop landing pad of the new Mirvac Mirage Hotel in the old city, there to contend for the mountains of coal, iron ore, gold and uranium being raked out of the earth’s oldest continent. And, perhaps even more crucially, to bid for the crops of one of the few reliable large-scale food exporters left in the world.
The Rhino rubbed a massive paw over his face, flicking droplets of salty sweat onto the dirt in front of him. Traffic crawled along the gravel road, raising a miasma of red dust that slightly dulled the fierce sunburst glinting off chrome and tinted windshields. He grinned at the plight of two black stretch Hummer limos trapped in the slow-moving snarl. Small flags hung limp from their aerials: the new red and gold ensign of the South American Federation. Newcomers in town and utterly clueless with it. He wondered what had brought them all the way here. It wasn’t as though Roberto’s operation lacked for resources. Sprawled across the territories of half-a-dozen former states, the Federation was ridiculously wealthy, at least in potential. It remained a prison camp, however, with the Colombian gangster-turned-dictator still smashing his fist down wherever he thought he detected the slightest opposition.
Although he knew it was foolish, even a little conceited, the Rhino faded away from the gutter and back into the crush of the crowd, not wanting to be seen by the occupants of the diplomatic convoy. They were probably just in town to negotiate with a few of the local mining companies, offering a generous cut of the profits if the Australians, or increasingly the South African companies who were moving here, would assist in restarting production at any one of the Federación’s hundreds of projects that had imploded during the general collapse. It was also possible that they were here to see about joining the Alliance – but he didn’t think the current member states would be game for that. Seattle still had enough clout, just barely, to block any membership bid.
The Rhino had witnessed part of the collapse first-hand, when Acapulco, the Mexican port on the southern fringe of the Wave, fell apart. And almost certainly alone among the masses of people swarming through Darwin, he’d played a small role in the rise of el Presidente por Vida, Roberto Morales. In those days – an age ago in less than five years – Roberto had been nothing but a small-time local hood, fortunate enough to score a sweet deal providing muscle to a couple of the more expensive resorts, such as the Fairmont. Fortunate because he had lucked into a crew run by one Miguel Pieraro, a man who had, in the Rhino’s opinion, probably shot dogs with more highly developed codes of honour than Morales.
The Rhino had no idea where Pieraro was now, of course, but he wished him and his family well. He knew they’d spent some time in the refugee camps outside Sydney when they’d got off Miss Julianne’s boat, and that they’d applied to move to America as part of President Kipper’s resettlement program. Roberto meanwhile was ensconced in his newly constructed Presidential Palace in Caracas.
The traffic snarl edged forward, gradually taking the two Hummers away as the Rhino rounded the corner into Perrett Street, a wide, sprawling boulevard that had been a boggy salt marsh five years ago. Or maybe the town dump. He’d heard that a couple of blocks of New Town lay over the city’s former garbage dump, rumoured to be the last resting place of a dozen or so Javanese gangsters who’d tried to take over the waterfront markets in the fearful confusion following the Disappearance. Probably bullshit. In his experience, frontier towns loved their own creation mythology so much, they tended to its growth like a pot-addled hippie with a bumper crop of hand-raised weed. There was no shortage of that here either, if a Rhino were so inclined. As it stood though, he’d never acquired a taste for the stuff, preferring his cigars. And those, sadly, were hard to come by these days, at least any of appreciable quality.
The smell of wood smoke in the air, mingled with the meat of the nearby barbecue pits drew him on. He was glad the rib joint was only a few steps away now. Further up Perrett, where the three official casinos had spun off a dense cluster of parasite businesses, such as the Korean and Thai brothels, the crowds were neutron-star dense. If the hookers didn’t flick your bic, or if you’d already had it flicked, you could try the slots, some blackjack or maybe poker at the unlicenced gaming houses. When you got hungry, you had your choice of corn-dogs, pretzels, yakimandu and gaegogi from the food carts. Street walkers and black-market dopers draped themselves around canvas stalls selling cheap Nike and Reebok knock-offs. The path through was nearly impassable to most, but merely a nuisance for a determined Rhino.
For now, only a dozen or so hungry fans were pressed up against Blue Smoke’s small serving window, including a few sailors trying to get a taste of a home that no longer existed. Later, when the dry-rubbed baby back pork and Texas-style beef ribs came out of the barbecue pit, the kerbside here would be gridlocked with his fellow countrymen, bidding up the price of everything by four or five hundred per cent. Including the cone full of buffalo wings he was about to buy with a fistful of local currency.
Much as it pained him, he accepted payment in anything except the newbie these days. He still kept a stash of ‘noobs’, though, in the hope that maybe someday they just might be worth something. If things ever got real tight, he could sell some to the speculators, who were forever trying to keep the street price down or praying for a rapid rise. But things weren’t that tight for the Rhino, not just yet.
He could only shake his head at the business smarts of the two smokehouse assholes who’d come up with the idea of auctioning off their wares during peak hour. A couple of guys from Houston, who’d already moved down under long before the Wave swept away their hometown, they’d run a successful barbecue joint in Sydney and expanded in a big way when the first American refugees poured into the camps there back in ’03. Assholes didn’t even work the grill anymore. They’d franchised and retired about a year after coming up with the idea of swapping set menu prices for a bidding war during the busiest hour of service – just after they opened up the pits for lunch. The Rhino didn’t know whether he resented them for making their baby back pork ribs so prohibitively fucking expensive that he could never afford to eat them, or because he hadn’t thought of some similarly cunning idea to enrich himself out of the end of the world.
All he’d managed was to get his ass nearly shot off in New York on a wild fucking goose hunt for some asshole who didn’t even exist, except as a lure for some other asshole who wanted him dead simply because he’d helped Miss Jules get out of Acapulco alive . . .
The cast-iron doors of the smoker swung open and an employee reached in with tongs to pull the ribs out. He held a batch of pork ribs up for all to see while the initial price went up on a chalkboard. Hands full of currency were in the air as the shouting began. Casting a sideways glance at the sailors, the Rhino saw their crestfallen faces as the price soon soared out of their reach.
He’d moved to the head of the line – or rather, the front of t
he crush – while he’d been contemplating his sorry lot. Well, at least he was still drawing breath. He hadn’t Disappeared, leaving behind a puddle of meaty gruel and stained clothes. He hadn’t gone down screaming in the great die-off that followed. He hadn’t been turned into radioactive glass in the Mid East.
Or been stomped to death in a food riot. Or gone into a mass grave in China.
He hadn’t been gunned down during the Paris intifada either. Even pirates and great storms in the Southern Ocean hadn’t come close to seeing off Rhino A. Ross.
He was still here. And by God, he was going to enjoy his goddamn buffalo wings. If he could just get his hands on some.
‘The tangled fucking webs we weave . . .’ Rhino muttered, approaching a second window, devoted to poultry. A stocky Korean leaned out to take the Rhino’s order.
‘A dozen hot wings?’
‘Fifteen dollars,’ the Korean said in impeccable English.
‘Ten?’ Rhino asked, hopefully.
‘No, no, American. Fifteen or nothing.’
‘Fuck, what happened to haggling! How about twelve?’ He knew he had some change in his pockets.
The Korean grinned. ‘Thirteen fifty. Final price.’
‘Fucking rapists,’ the Rhino grumbled, holding out the greasy dollars and mining his pockets for change. He found a couple of local two-dollar coins. They looked like tiny gold dubloons. ‘ Kamsahamnida, compadre.’
The shopkeeper blinked. ‘Cheonmaneyo, American.’
*
The Korean had been generous, adding a couple of extra wings to the Rhino’s order. He was still licking the thick, tangy sauce from his fingers when he arrived back at his boat, at the Gonzales Road Marina. Like so much of the city, the marina was a recent addition, a temporary floating dock, not much more sophisticated than the jerry-rigged Mulberry harbours they’d used after the D-Day landings. Except that this one had lasted three years rather than just a few weeks, in spite of Darwin’s spectacular tropical storms. It had grown, unregulated and unplanned, over the mouth of a wide inlet that ran north from Frances Bay towards an older, more established canal development.
An almost incoherent system of locks supposedly allowed boat owners further up the river to negotiate passage out into Darwin Harbour, but the arrangements were so arbitrary that most of those with the money had long ago berthed their vessels elsewhere, while those without had simply given up. Rhino had never seen the locks open, and a couple of supposedly mobile stalls that had set up shop on one of them, selling dry goods and small marine supplies to the boats tied up at Gonzales Road, had taken on a very permanent appearance. As he squinted into the glare, he noticed for the first time that a dredge had pulled up on the marsh flats across Frances Bay, on the edge of the small national park over there. Perhaps the mooted extension of the crowded marina across and into the park was going to happen after all.
The floating walkways undulated beneath his deck shoes as he stumbled home, the latter being a small cabin cruiser he’d liberated from the ghost town of Winchester Bay, a couple of hours south of Seattle. He and Jules had salvaged the boat upon hitting the West Coast after a two month cross-country hell drive. Piloted it across the Pacific with no intention of ever making the return voyage. Not after New York.
He nodded to a couple of his neighbours, other Americans mostly, although there was also a small community of displaced Mexicans at Gonzales Road, refugees resourceful enough to have bought, fought or simply sailed their way out of the post-Wave collapse and into the safe haven of Sydney. His immediate neighbours, the Gueros, had owned a sizeable fishing company in Mexico before the Disappearance, and had come north after escaping to Sydney, hoping to break into the industry here. The fact that they were his neighbours spoke poorly of their success.
He was still groggy from the beer, although the buffalo wings had helped steady his spinning head. The pontoons bobbed around enough, however, to make him careful of his step. Although he knew he’d pay for it with a headache later, the Rhino figured on getting some shut-eye before chasing down Hughie for his pay. If they’d scored well at the fish markets, he might even have enough to buy into an honest poker game he knew of back in New Town.
Perhaps that’s all he needed. One good break, a decent score, and he could set himself up with something a little more substantial than casual deckhand work. Maybe even enough to buy a shrimping sub-licence from one of the Chinese combines, or enough to lease a fast boat to make a few undeclared runs out to the fishing grounds off Papua. Their patrols were a lot less trouble to avoid than the Aussie Navy and Customs guys.
The Gueros were at home, cooking fish on a grill made from a collection of 55-gallon drums. He made his way down the last turn into his row, at the farthest reach of the floating dock, sizing up his chances. The scent of sizzling garlic and lemon set his stomach to grumbling again, in spite of the food he’d picked up at Blue Smoke. Although, to be fair, even the much-reinforced cone of chicken wings was grossly inadequate fare when it came to feeding a hungry Rhino.
He didn’t much fancy getting caught chewing the fat with Carlos Guero, and Lord knew there was no such thing as a quick chat with the man. That said, Carlos was a generous soul, as generous with his grill as he was with his conversation, and the Rhino did feel as though just a little more eatin’ might set him up well for his afternoon siesta. All the better to sharpen mind and body for an evening out in New Town.
‘Buenos tardes, Señor Carlos, Señora Juanita,’ he called out, very much aware of how tipsy he felt, and thinking he must look like a staggering drunk as he veered back and forth with the rocking of the pontoons. ‘Permission to come aboard?’
‘Ah, Mr Ross. Come, come, we have barramundi fish – a large one. Come, and I shall make you a fish sandwich.’
‘Mighty kind of you, neighbour,’ he called back. Saliva squirted into his mouth as a sluggish breeze off the bay carried the smell of Guero’s grill to him.
Juanita Guero produced a round of flat bread from within a foil packet at her feet and passed it to her husband. Unlike him, she rarely spoke to anyone outside the family. They had three teenagers, who were lucky enough to have places in one of the open-air schools run by the Catholic Church. The kids would not be around until much later in the day. As payment for their tuition, they worked for two hours every afternoon in the church market gardens. The Rhino wondered why Carlos wasn’t over at the seafood markets like Hughie, but he knew better than to ask. Everyone in Darwin knew better than to ask about each other’s affairs. You just took people as they came.
‘Muchas gracias,’ Rhino said, accepting the warm, flatbread roll from Guero. He had stuffed it generously with the char-grilled, meaty flesh of the barramundi and a few scraps of salad.
‘There was a lady looking for you this morning,’ said Carlos as he squeezed some lemon juice over a fish roll for his wife.
The Rhino was instantly on guard. ‘Official, was it? Migration or Customs? Brown-shirts maybe?’
‘Oh no, I do not think so. She was an English lady, pretty, but not at all official. She would not tell me what she wanted you for. Would not leave a name. She was very evading of my questions. She wished to know which boat was yours, but I am afraid I would not tell her. I hope that was the right thing.’
The Rhino chewed slowly and nodded. An English lady? He didn’t ask; the less said, the better. ‘Anybody else?’ he wondered aloud.
Both the Gueros shook their heads. ‘We have not been here all day,’ Carlos explained. ‘I was delayed this morning awaiting a call from the Fisheries people. My licence, Mr Rhino, it is to be approved this week.’
Guero was beaming as he spoke, and his wife nodded and smiled as though a burden had been lifted off her chest.
‘It is only a small operator’s licence,’ he continued. ‘Two shrimp trawlers, when once I had a fleet of factory ships, yes? But I did not start with a fleet, my friend. Not then and not now. This is good news, and so we have come home to celebrate. I shall open a b
ottle of wine tonight and . . .’ He glanced across at his wife and smiled fondly. ‘And I was wondering if we might prevail upon you, my friend. The children – I wonder if they might visit with you this evening, just for a few hours? I would normally ask the Carascalaos to mind them, but they are working late at the cathedral tonight. Helping the father with the new arrivals.’
Most of what Carlos had said passed right through the Rhino’s skull without lodging, but when he realised the Mexican was after a favour, he pulled himself out of his reverie.
‘Oh, sure thing, Carlos . . . Sorry. I was pondering pretty English ladies come to visit. But sure – hell yes, send your kids over. I have somewhere to be later in the evening, but not until way later.’
‘Excellent. I shall send them with a bottle of beer, and my thanks. And some dinner, of course. More fish – if you have the appetite for it?’
‘That’d be fine, Carlos. I’ll look forward it, and congrats on your news. That’s excellent, buddy. But if you don’t mind me dining and dashing, I’d best get back to my berth. I’d like to make a few calls, find out who this pretty lady was. There are not so many pretty ladies in my life that I can afford to let them get away these days.’
The other man nodded. ‘Of course, we will talk later. Perhaps I might have something more to offer than beer and fish after tonight.’
Carlos waved him away. Juanita smiled, a little bashfully, then busied herself with preparing the next piece of fish for the grill. They seemed to have a cooler brimming with fillets.
The Rhino folded the rest of the sandwich into his mouth as he walked down the end of the row to his boat. The pretty English lady was almost certainly Miss Julianne, although her calling on him could not be good news. They’d agreed after escaping the States and Henry Cesky’s vengeful reach that it would be better if they parted ways. The last he’d seen of her, she’d been walking away from him, up George Street in Sydney. They hadn’t parted on bad terms, despite the epic fuck-up in New York, but if Cesky had men looking for them, Jules and he were much more likely to stand out travelling in a pair than they were on their own.
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