The Big Drop

by Peter Corris

  The Holden was parked outside a low, iron roofed, concrete workshop carrying a sign, hand-painted on a sheet of tin, that read TOP SPOT PRINTING. I parked fifty metres up the street and came back with the .38 in my waistband and a slowly dawning idea of what was happening. It seemed to be my night for creeping around buildings; I stayed in the shadows and worked my way to the back of the workshop. It was a run-down place with grass sprouting from the foundations and broken windows sealed up with wood and tin. At the back I stacked a couple of boxes on top of a pile of pallets and looked through a high window.

  There were three men in the single room, one working at an offset press, another at a heavy-duty guillotine and stapler and Henry was unfolding boxes, stacking the product into them and sealing them with heavy tape. The briefcase he’d brought from Petersham was standing on the floor near him—he glanced down at it from time to time and so did the tall, skinny guy at the press.

  The trimmer and stapler was a freckled redhead, young and nervous-looking. He worked fast until he’d got ahead of the pages being fed to him, stopped, and lit a cigarette. Henry shouted something and the kid snarled back and marched over to the rear door about a metre from where I was standing. I dropped down and went around the nearest corner. Light flooded out through the open door and the kid puffed his cigarette angrily. He flipped the butt out and I heard a voice say ‘Leave it open.’

  He did and that suited me because I sneaked back to the doorway and could hear most of what was said inside. After the noise of printing and packing stopped, they fell to arguing about money. The youthful voice I took to be the redhead’s; it must have been Henry who spoke next because he said he’d gone and got the bloody money, hadn’t he?

  The skinny guy said what was going to happen to the fuckin’ painting and Henry said that was his business and he was taking the risks by keeping it at his place.

  The redhead said: ‘Well, let’s have some bloody cash now and you’d better come up with some more.’

  Henry said not to threaten him and the other guy told them both to shut up. I heard the sound of money slapping down on a table and some quiet counting.

  ‘That’s for starters,’ Henry said. ‘There’s plenty more to come. We’ll make the first delivery tomorrow. I want you both here at 10 o’clock with your cars. And don’t get on the piss tonight.’

  There was some grumbling and I had to nick around the corner again as one of them slammed and locked the back door. The lights went out and I heard three motors start and the cars drive away. The street was quiet and not particularly well lit. There were a number of small factories, vacant lots and only a few houses some distance from the print shop. A light, curiosity-deterring rain started to fall. Boldness seemed to be indicated; I put my car in front of the building, got out the tools and broke in at the back. I turned on the lights and opened the front door. Nothing stirred in the street.

  The photographic plates were set up on the press. They showed the thirty-seven sections of the scroll in full colour and slightly muzzy detail. A drawer in a desk contained slides and other photographic preparations that preceded the making of the plates. I broke open one of the eight boxes and took a look at the result of all this activity. It was a fifty-page stapled book, printed on rough paper and entitled Tibetan Love Positions. The colour was variable; the most explicit of the sections had been crudely reproduced and touched up to form the cover of the book. Even in this shoddy form the beauty of the drawings was remarkable and the sexual acts shown were varied without being perverse or contorted. The pleasure on the faces of the participants hit you in the eye and made the crude captions lettered in underneath all the more offensive.

  I took the plates out of the press, collected all the stuff from the drawer—including a copy of the book that hadn’t had the captions stripped in—and the eight boxes and stowed the lot in the car. I turned off the lights, closed the front door and drove away.

  On the drive back to Petersham I went carefully on the wet roads and wondered if Henry had taken his own advice and settled down for a quiet, sober night. It looked that way. The Holden was parked neatly in front of the house and all the lights were out bar one in the toilet at the back. No music, no dogs, no television. I climbed over the back fence and went in through the back door which had a light lock that took me less than a minute to open.

  The house was shabby inside and very untidy. It looked as if renovations had started and stopped; the bedroom downstairs was crammed with timber and had no floorboards. The other rooms weren’t much better. The stairs were sound though, and I picked my way up them using a thin torch beam to negotiate the bends. Henry was in the front room asleep all alone in a double bed. He lay on his back and snored; lank dark hair fell forward on his face which was fatter than in the photograph I had seen.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, put the muzzle of the .38 in his mouth and rapped hard against one of his back teeth. He jerked awake and I dug the gun in between his front teeth and upper lip. His eyes were wide in shock. I kept the gun wedged firmly in and worked the slide to cock it. The sound in the quiet room was like a door falling in. It must have sounded even worse to Henry.

  ‘Where’s the scroll, Henry? I’ll take this out to let you tell me. If you don’t I’ll put it back and when the first train goes by you get a bullet going upwards.’ A train rumbled past; the house shook and rattled. I grinned at Henry. ‘You get the idea?’

  He nodded and terror shone from his eyes.

  ‘Okay. Make it quick, you get one chance.’ I took the gun out and saliva ran down from his mouth. I held the small dark hole level with his right eye.

  ‘Under the bed,’ he said shakily, ‘Box . . .’

  ‘Get it!’

  I eased back, and he came up trembling and having difficulty moving his limbs in the right sequence. I followed him with the gun like a movie camera panning as he rolled forward and scrabbled under the bed. He pulled up with a heavy metal box with a hinged lid. I gestured for him to open it; he put his hand inside the neck of his T-shirt and drew up a small key on a chain. The fingers holding the key shook and he scratched around the lock before he got it open and and took out the scroll. It looked like the real thing—right dimensions, light fabric rolled around a slender piece of wood. I nodded and he put it back in the box which I tucked under my arm.

  ‘Who’re you? You want bread?’

  I shook my head. ‘No questions, Henry. No answers.’

  He lay back on the bed and didn’t show any signs of getting braver. Maybe he could reconcile himself to losing the scroll so I thought I should tell him just how bad things were.

  ‘I’ve got the books too,’ I said, ‘and the plates and the negs.’

  There was a new level of fright in the dark eyes now.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘I’ve been paid . . . I paid out . . .’

  I smiled at him. ‘I know you did, mate. I was there. I was sorry to see you do that.’

  ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘I suggest you take a trip, Henry. No one’s going to miss you.’ I levelled the gun at his chest and got off the bed. ‘Roll over on your front and stay there until you hear the next train. That way you can think about your next move and I won’t have to shoot you.’

  Down the stairs and out the front door. A train rushed past as I made the turn out of Terminal Street. It was well after midnight but it’s never too late for good news. I rang Kangri’s number and he answered, sounding strained and tired.

  ‘I’m sorry to call so late.’

  ‘It’s all right, Mr Hardy. I cannot sleep.’

  ‘You can now, I’ve got the scroll.’

  He made a yipping sound and I would have liked to have seen his face. There might even have been a smile on it. I drove out to Vaucluse through the drizzle and ran the Falcon up the drive and in beside the Jag. Kangri was there waiting for me, wearing his suit. Mrs Tsang was there too, in a dressing gown. I managed to give her an encouraging nod when Kangri was examining the scroll.
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  ‘Wonderful, Mr Hardy. Undamaged. Wonderful. Thank you. A bonus, most certainly.’

  I said a bonus would be nice and dragged out the box I’d opened. I handed him one of the books.

  ‘My God,’ he said, ‘Appalling. Who. . .?’

  I shook my head. ‘Sources, Dr Kangri. Don’t ask.’ I gave him the plates and other stuff.

  ‘The boil is lanced, then?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah.’ I got out the other boxes and stacked them by a wall.

  ‘I will get you a cheque.’ He rushed off towards the house.

  Mrs Tsang wrapped her elaborately embroidered dressing gown tightly around her and looked up at me.

  ‘Henry?’

  I nodded. ‘He’s okay, untouched. But he’s in big trouble with his partners. I think he’ll be going away for a while.’

  Kangri came back and handed me a cheque. He was almost bubbling and he forgot himself enough to put his arm around Mrs Tsang as he spoke to her.

  ‘We will burn this rubbish, eh, Mrs Tsang?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  I said goodnight and backed out leaving them standing close together, caught in my headlights. A gilt dragon coiled around Mrs Tsang’s slim body.

  Dr Kangri’s bonus was pretty quickly spent and when his book came out it was in a limited edition and cost a thousand bucks a copy. But I’ve still got the uncaptioned copy of Tibetan Love Positions—it’s one of my more stimulating souvenirs.

  The Mae West Scam

  Mr Joseph Thackeray was a literary agent. That made both of us agents, me being a private enquiry ditto. The first thing Mr Thackeray did after informing me of his profession and seating his narrow frame in one of the sagging chairs in my office, was ask me how much I charged.

  ‘One hundred and twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses.’ I said. ‘How about you?’

  He looked annoyed. ‘Ten per cent of my client’s earnings.’

  ‘Handy if you’ve got David Williamson—have you?’

  He looked still more annoyed. ‘No, but I’ve got Carla Cummings, at least for now. Are you always this flippant, Mr Hardy?’

  ‘Yeah, always, don’t tell me you take agenting seriously?’

  His prim little mouth pursed up, and he brushed wispy hair back from his high forehead. The narrow shoulders and the silly bow tie made him look like a lightweight but he had an incongruously deep and forceful voice. I’ve got better shoulders and don’t wear bow ties; my voice isn’t much but then, I do most of my agenting on the street rather than on the phone.

  ‘I certainly do,’ the strong voice from the weak face said. ‘I consider myself a facilitator of literature.’

  ‘At ten per cent.’

  He drew in a deep breath, which made his Adam’s apply move in his scrawny neck but made his voice more resonant. ‘I’ll persist because I’m told you’re good at this sort of thing. Talented, someone said; although I can’t think how the word applies.’

  ‘Let’s hope you will see when we’re through. You’ve got a problem with Carla Cummings?’

  ‘I can see you listen when you’re being spoken to, that’s good. Yes, a problem.’

  It was the first approving word he’d spoken; we were getting along famously already. I leaned back in my sagging chair and let him tell it.

  Carla Cummings was a country girl, born in Dubbo, who’d worked as a nurse and written thirty novels before her thirty-first was published. She was only thirty herself at the time, so she’d averaged better than three unpublished novels per year for ten years. The Crying Gulls made it all worthwhile. The book was a three-generation family saga set on the north coast of New South Wales. According to Cummings’s own account in the many interviews she gave after the paperback rights were sold for two million dollars, she’d constructed the book to make it ideal for abridgement, extraction and serialisation. It was abridged, extracted and serialised everywhere, and the hard cover edition sold out and was reprinted three times. It was a million dollar movie property, and heartily loathed by every reviewer who touched it.

  ‘She hasn’t written a word since she finished Gulls,’ Thackeray said.

  ‘Can’t see what I can do about writer’s block.’

  ‘That’s only part of the problem. She’s drinking, she’s neurotic, gambling, falling out with everyone.’

  ‘With you?’

  ‘Especially with me.’

  ‘You’re worried about your ten per cent.’

  He sighed. ‘I have to assume that this aggression, this . . . boorishness is your stock in trade. Yes, I’m concerned about my income and my reputation both—I assume you’re concerned about yours?’

  ‘Yeah. Fair enough, Mr Thackeray, didn’t mean to ride you. What’s troubling her? Not money? Not the bad reviews?’

  He laughed a laugh that would have sounded good over the phone, rich and amused. ‘I doubt if she read them. She was such a carefree creature—scatter-brained you’d have said. She was the easiest of clients.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘Oh, she’d talk to anyone, wouldn’t haggle about every little detail—not like some of them.’

  The few writers I knew were drunks and fragile egotists; it was refreshing to hear about a carefree one.

  ‘Is she a good writer?’ I asked.

  Thackeray plucked at his bow tie and looked past me through the dusty window out over rooftops to a dull, leaden sky. He shook his head.

  ‘Terrible,’ he said.

  We did agenting things like writing and accepting cheques, and I undertook to follow Miss Cummings around for a while and check on her friends and see if I could find out what was on her mind and stopping her from writing another blockbuster.

  Thackeray had given me Cummings’s schedule for the next couple of days and I planned to pick her up that night after a book launching in a city bookshop. The first thing I did after depositing the agent’s cheque was go to my favourite bookshop in Glebe Point Road for a copy of The Crying Gulls. I usually buy my second-hand Penguins and remaindered sports books there, so the proprietor gave me an odd look when I handed over six bucks for something that felt like a house brick.

  ‘You’ll hate it,’ he said. ‘It’s slop.’

  ‘I’ll use it to work on my pecs then.’ I needed both hands to carry the book and I waved aside the five cents changed he offered. ‘Give it to a poet,’ I said.

  The book’s cover featured a sunburnt country scene with three figures standing on something reminiscent of Ayers Rock. The figure in the middle was a woman who looked like Olivia Newton-John dressed to boogy; the man on the left was a stockman who looked a bit like Clint Eastwood as Rowdy Yates; the man on the right resembled Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. A banner read: ‘Their love was thunder, their hatred was fire’. Great cover. I tossed the book into the Falcon and drove home for a drink.

  Six hours later I watched from my car the unedifying sight of the bookshop disgorging the launchers. Some of them were pretty well launched themselves. I recognised a batch of well-known writers and a heroin addict artist. There were a couple of journalists I’d drunk with on odd occasions—men and women with a keen eye for the free glass.

  A woman answering Thackeray’s description of Carla Cummings was one of the last to leave. She was small, nothing over five feet in her high heeled shoes and she wore a tight, short black dress and a big red wig. She staggered a little and hailed a cab. Two men staggered with her. Cummings’s glittery dress and wig and the white overcoat one of the men had thrown over his shoulders made them look stagey and unreal, like figures in a rock film clip.

  If there’s any work more boring that watching other people having a good time, I don’t know of it. Carla Cummings and her two mates had some people’s definition of a very good time. I followed the taxi to the Cross where it dropped the threesome at a nightclub cum restaurant that boasts a fifties atmosphere. I parked illegally and when I got back Cummings was tucking into a huge dish of pasta. She ate sloppily and dropped her for
k; she kept talking and her youngish companions, both well built, one dark one fair, kept laughing. That was the most fun she had. After drinking most of a bottle of red wine she went upstairs and danced with the men in turn. For someone as drunk as she was she danced pretty well, but I saw the strain on the dark guy’s face as he half-held her up. After that they walked—her very unsteadily—along the street eyeing the whores. No one got many giggles out of that so they took a cab to a high-priced apartment block in Potts Point. I sat in my car and listened to the movement of the water as lights went on and off three floors up. The water kept moving but the windows stayed dark and I drove home.

  I was back in Pott’s Point at 8 a.m. and after an hour’s wait I was rewarded by the arrival of a silver Honda Accord, driven by a sleek character with a cravat, a yachtsman’s blazer and the trousers and tan to go with it. They drove to a breakfast place in the Cross where you can sit among the bricks and trees and watch the previous night’s crap being swept up and carried away by the lower classes.

  The yachtsman looked to be doing some serious talking in the car so I got a table within earshot of the pair and ordered coffee. In surveillance you can work this close just once.

  Cummings ordered an iced coffee and the yachtsman had a straight black, like me. When the orders arrived the writer proceeded to demolish a pale brown structure that looked like a model of Mont Blanc. She also had a plateful of croissants on the side. Her hand was shaking and she dropped some of the mixture on her dress where it joined last night’s food and drink stains.

  ‘I’ve been thinking it over, Leslie,’ she said.

  Les sipped coffee and didn’t speak.

  ‘He’s irritating and moralistic, but he did a wonderful job for the first book.’