3
‘In the old days having so many wires attached to my arm meant someone was trying to get at my secrets. A lie detector test. Even the KGB had a go. And I’ve still got a few left – secrets, I mean. But no one’s looking for them anymore. Just as well because there isn’t space on my arm for any more wires.’
The voice hadn’t changed one bit. In fact, if the lights were off that voice could have been a time machine back to the days when he was the hardest man on the force and that intimidating growl had branded itself into psyches on both sides of the law. But now there was no more heat on the prod. Sergeant Antonio Bolizia, his hardness forged by thirty years on the city’s toughest beats, was now just a shadow of his former self. No matter what fluids and medicines were being pumped into his body through that web of tubes, they were not filling the hole created by that invisible, tumorous drain through which his brawn, identity, essence were being lost. But now, to the surprise of his black-suited, forty-something bedside visitor, he found a new way to express himself: he smiled.
‘I can still keep a secret,’ he said. ‘Do you still have room in your book - the Red Line Files?’
‘There is always room for your kind of secrets but the doctor has made me promise not to get you excited,’ replied the visitor, handling his own voice with the care of a live weapon. It was Riley, the head of the Rogue Intercept Police. He was a fit looking man of average height and bronzed skin - a lithe body shaped by his passion for ocean swimming. It had shaped his calm disposition as well, for he swam in cold waters and had learnt to persevere in the face of currents. ‘But when you’re feeling a bit better, I won’t let you off so easily. You’ve always been the best cop in the business.’
‘Thanks, but I’d prefer it if you referred to me in the past tense. It seems like I had better get used to it.’
‘You’re doing okay.’
‘Yeah?’ Bolizia looked from one side of his bed to the other. ‘Good luck trying to sugar coat this. But at least there are no regrets. If I had my time over again I wouldn’t do anything differently – except there was that bullet I think I would have preferred to dodge.’
This was Riley’s third visit to the Alfred Hospital’s Cancer Unit in the past month and it was like playing Chinese Boxes with his friend’s skeleton, each time another layer of life seemingly being removed. It occurred to him as he stood there that cops were guaranteed their own private hospital rooms and prison cells and generally to die alone as well. That was the life. Despite the best efforts of Internal Affairs and those lie detector tests, Bolizia had at least managed to dodge the cell.
This room had a view of the Melbourne skyline that Bolizia could be wheeled over to on his better days. The clearest views, however, were in his dreams: probably too biographical to qualify as nightmares. They might have explained why the nurses were unusually nervous whenever they entered: relationships, after all, had ended due to the shouting in his sleep.
‘Think we made the city any cleaner, Riley?’ Bolizia murmured calmly now.
‘Cities are the same as rooms,’ replied Riley. ‘If people live in them, they’re going to get dirty.’
‘Three million of the wrong kind of people and they start getting filthy.’
‘And you’ve had such a filthy career.’
‘Some of the old timers have been dropping in. They tell me you’ve finally got yourself a bona fide departmental blind spot.’
Riley wasn’t thrilled to hear he had been thrown in as fuel on the gossip campfire though obviously a dying cop was clearly not going to be appeasedwith the weekly sports roundup.
‘I’ve found a niche,’ he admitted.
‘A niche? That’s all you’re going to give me?’
Riley shrugged.
Bolizia shot out a look as stiff as the grey pillow propping up his head. ‘Someone in my condition isn’t getting no last meal, last request or Heaven forbid a last cigarette. The best I can hope for is a last confidence. That would mean something.’
Riley puckered out a sigh. A sports update really wasn’t going to do it.
‘Well, it seems if you up the education requirements of your recruits eventually you’re left with a zoo of political animals. That’s what our police force has become.’
‘Tell me about it,’ said Bolizia sardonically.
‘A lot of cases were getting mishandled or simply ignored because of their politically or socially sensitive nature. Every cop these days wants to make detective or at least a retirement pension. Drug-heads, sure take em’ down. Pedophiles are like the candy they give the kids. But you get a high ranking diplomat’s son off the rails and no one is going to touch him. Not the way it needs to be done. So, the top brass came to me with the idea of creating a unit devoted to these kinds of cases. I was flattered even though the brass may have been implying I didn’t have a career worth saving.’
Bolizia licked his dry lips with an even drier tongue. ‘There was a time we wouldn’t have needed a unit like that. They called us police pigs because of our fondness for the mud.’
‘We’re a magnified version of that. The Red Line Files has found a home.’
‘The Rogue Intercept Police? Well, congratulations. I’m sure you’re going to exploit it to the full.’
Envy in a man wracked by cancer was not particularly hard to come by but in his highly esteemed mentor grimly uplifting. Standing over him, Riley felt as though he was ready to graduate at last.
‘The Red Line Files are thick with all the things the politically correct world is afraid of,’ he said. ‘Rich pickings.’
‘Danger money to the cent.’
‘Yes, you’re probably right.’
‘And you’ve got some people willing to call that a career path?’
‘I’ve got some people who don’t know the meaning of the idea.’
‘That’s what I was getting at.’
‘You can meet them if you’d like. I’ve summoned them here for a briefing. We’ve got a job sanctioned by the Prime Minister himself. A real stinker.’
‘Killing two birds with one stone – efficient as always. Where are you meeting them?’
‘On the roof.’
Bolizia tilted his head tiredly towards the window and said with a haunted look, ‘Thanks for the offer but I’ve had my time and I’m struggling with the realisation that the people who benefit most from cops are the ones who have nothing much to do with us, including family members.’
Riley’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket; he snapped it open and scrutinised the number. ‘They’re here now. I’ve got to go.’
Bolizia, however, had already left, withdrawing through the shadowy doorway of his medicated memories. Riley put a hand gently on his shoulder and walked out the room.
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