The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  ‘I understand,’ he said slowly, ‘that you were, until recently, the editor of a student newspaper.’

  ‘That’s right, Senator. I joined the ABC at the beginning of last year.’

  ‘The Tribe, was it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Greenwood’s expression darkened. All traces of the mild academic barrister were erased.

  ‘What a dreadful, subversive, pornographic rag.’

  ‘I’m sorry you—’

  ‘That’s just my view, of course. I blame the Liberals on campus for allowing you free rein. In my day we would have rallied and taken control of the paper from you.’

  ‘In your day?’

  ‘Melbourne University, 1947. We won back the SRC and wrested Farrago from the left. That’s democracy in action.’

  ‘In your day, Senator, there was no Vietnam War.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’ Greenwood gave her a sardonic smile. ‘But we did have men like your father to deal with, taking his orders from Moscow.’

  Now it was her turn to remain silent. Anna was face-to-face with one of the most powerful men in the country, and he was radiating personal enmity.

  Then Greenwood smiled, clearly aware of her growing discomfort. ‘Don’t worry, my dear. I may disagree with everything you stand for and, judging by the tone of your questions, I will certainly disagree with the conclusions I expect you to reach in your radio show. But I don’t dispute your family’s right to believe whatever they want.’

  ‘Prime Minister Menzies certainly did,’ Anna countered.

  ‘Go back and check. You will find that I opposed Menzies when he tried to outlaw the Communist Party. I said publicly that the referendum was contrary to everything liberalism stands for.’

  As the attorney-general stood to leave, Anna gathered her wits and said, perhaps too loudly, ‘Senator, you shouldn’t assume that I am a simple-minded follower of my father’s politics.’

  ‘Oh,’ he responded, ‘I don’t believe that you are simple-minded. Not at all. You’re a much bigger problem than that.’

  *

  On the flight to Canberra, Anna reflected on the interplay between the personal and the political.

  In Ivor Greenwood’s mind her father was an ideological enemy. To Greenwood’s credit, he did not countenance the idea of outlawing his political enemies; but that didn’t lessen his contempt for them. So what about the devil’s spawn? His final comment had been intimidating, to say the least, and Anna pondered what Greenwood had meant by ‘a much bigger problem’ as she flew towards his most serious political enemy in the Senate.

  Shadow Attorney-General, Senator Lionel Murphy, had agreed to meet her late in the afternoon at his home. Her cab brought her to a nice house on a large block in Forrest, one of Canberra’s most affluent suburbs. Anna rang the doorbell, waited for a while, and was preparing to ring it again when it swung open.

  In front of her was the famous man she had often seen on television. Murphy had always impressed her as a relaxed, laconic character with the incisive mind of a Queen’s Counsel. She had only seen him once before in the flesh, from some distance as he spoke at an anti-conscription rally. His had been the most rousing speech.

  ‘Senator Murphy, I’m Anna Rosen,’ she announced, shaking his hand.

  ‘Good of you to come,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me on a Sunday.’

  ‘Not at all, it’s been an eventful weekend. Shocking, really.’

  Lionel Murphy stood back from the door. ‘Come in. I’m sorry I took a while to get here. I was out in the greenhouse.’

  Anna smiled at him as she walked into the entrance hall. Murphy wore a crumpled white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and dark woollen trousers, which appeared to belong to a suit. Long strands of grey hair had fallen across his face and he pushed them back behind his ears.

  ‘I didn’t take you for a gardener,’ she said.

  ‘Oh no, I’m not a gardener at all. My wife does all of that.’

  He laughed and, as he did, his homely face was transformed. His eyes creased, the two dark arches of his eyebrows lifted and his ponderous nose was nicely balanced by a wide grin. Anna warmed to him.

  ‘I’m more of a scientist really.’ Murphy’s nasal voice had a deep, pleasing resonance. ‘Ingrid had the idea that we should grow our own strawberries and I’ve had a hydroponic system installed. Do you know what that is?’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Anna, although she did have a vague memory of hearing about hydroponics on a science program.

  ‘Well, I’d be happy to show it to you later if you have time.’ Murphy touched her elbow and led her further into the house. ‘Come through to the kitchen. Ingrid has gone out, but she left us some things for afternoon tea.’

  They sat in an alcove next to the kitchen, surrounded by windows overlooking a large, well-tended garden. It was not a house she would have associated with one of the leaders of Labor’s left.

  Murphy heated the pot of coffee and poured it into cups for each of them. There was a fresh strudel on the table and she accepted a slice at his urging. Murphy sipped his coffee and looked at her over the cup. ‘So, you’re Frank Rosen’s daughter.’

  Anna looked back at him. Was this to be the theme of the day?

  ‘That’s right,’ she said cautiously. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘No, we’ve never met.’ Murphy smiled regretfully. ‘I’d like to meet him. Frank’s an interesting fellow. I suspect we’d have a few things in common.’

  ‘He’s an internationalist. You have that in common.’

  Murphy nodded. ‘Yes, we could certainly agree on the need for world peace. But I mostly admire his stand against the Stalinists.’

  After the strange conversation with Ivor Greenwood, Anna was reluctant to go down this path. Long experience had taught her to clam up about her father. Frank Rosen had warned her too many times to be wary of being wooed by security agents, informers and journalists for her to ever be comfortable speaking to strangers about him or his role in the Party.

  She tried defusing it. ‘If you’d like to meet him, it could be arranged.’

  Murphy took another sip of his coffee and put it down.

  ‘And what about you, Anna?’ he asked at last, his voice oddly seductive. ‘Are you a Party member?’

  Anna’s hackles rose. ‘You mean, am I now, or have I ever been …?’

  Murphy laughed and his face lit up. He reached across and took a slice of strudel.

  ‘I really shouldn’t eat this. Do you like it? Ingrid made it. A recipe from her German mother.’

  ‘It’s very nice,’ said Anna, confused.

  ‘As it happens, my first wife was born in Russia,’ Murphy explained. ‘I tell you this so you understand that I have more than a passing interest in communism. And it does strike me that being a communist and working at the ABC would not be without its challenges.’

  ‘I’m not a member of the Party,’ said Anna. ‘I was in the Junior Eureka League when I was a kid. Does that count against me?’

  Murphy laughed again, ignoring her prickly response. His face radiated a puckish pleasure. ‘It doesn’t as far as I’m concerned,’ he said. ‘I know plenty of fellows educated by Jesuits who didn’t join the DLP.’

  Anna found herself warming to this oddly personable man. So much so that she was being drawn into a conversation about her least favourite subject: herself.

  ‘It was more about raising political consciousness than indoctrination,’ she said, thinking back to the Eureka League camps. ‘But what I mostly learned was how to play table tennis.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Murphy. ‘Will you teach me one day?’

  ‘Senator …’

  ‘Call me Lionel.’

  ‘Lionel, would you mind if I set up my tape recorder?’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ Murphy sounded apologetic. ‘You must be on a deadline.’

  ‘Well, I do have to get back to Sydney tonight.’

  ‘Go ahead and set
up your machine,’ he said. ‘But I have something here for you. You’ll want to read it before the interview.’

  ‘Something … on the bombings?’

  ‘On the Croats,’ he explained. ‘It’s a document. I think you’ll find it very interesting. I have a copy for you to take away. You can read it first, and then I’m happy to answer questions about it.’

  Anna sat there bemused, until Murphy stood up. He touched her shoulder and she felt a jolt of electricity pass between them.

  ‘I’ll go and get it,’ he said.

  Tom Moriarty sat in the late-Sunday darkness, watching the house. His car was parked under a tree that offered some concealment in the poorly lit street. There were lights in the back of the house, but none on the front porch.

  He held a Starlight Scope up to his eye. The whine of its machinery brought back memories of the blackest nights in Vietnam. The faint noise made the scope an imperfect tool for spies, but the targets were too far away to hear anything. Two visitors were still inside.

  He unscrewed the lid of a miniature whisky and downed it, probing the bruise around his right eye. As the swelling subsided, the shiner had matured into an ugly black ring. For two days he’d worn dark glasses.

  He tried to recall the woman whose boyfriend had king hit him. He was missing something there. His photographic memory was fogged by drunkenness. Her image was indistinct. Who was she? Why the sense of recognition? God forbid that she might be the wife of a colleague. Or a surveillance target … Could that be it? She had been Eurasian. A thought crossed his mind. Oh no! Junie Morosi? Could it have been her? He definitely had a thing for Junie, but then so did every man with a pulse.

  A light came on at the front of the house. He sat up and grabbed the scope as the door opened. The whine began again as its motor powered up and then three glowing green faces appeared in the doorway. The middle one was Ivo Katich. The other two were younger; they were strangers to Moriarty. Katich was a big man, but one of the others was a barrel-chested giant, taller and broader than him. Moriarty was sorry now that he hadn’t brought a camera.

  The men embraced Katich before leaving him at the door and walking out through the front gate. Moriarty sunk down in his seat, but they turned away from his direction. He followed them with the night scope as they climbed into a car at the end of the street. As it pulled out he memorised the numberplate and then wrote it down.

  When he turned back to the house the front door was closed, the porch light off. He unscrewed the lid from another miniature and settled back to wait.

  Eventually, all the lights in the house went out. Moriarty sat for another hour in the car, topping up with miniatures from time to time. Then he got out, slinging a small satchel over his shoulder and checking both ends of the street with the night scope. Nothing.

  He crossed the road and entered the front gate, stopping again to survey the yard through the scope. He crept around the side of the house and waited at another gate he encountered there. Soon he heard the dog sniffing around it. He took a plastic bag from the satchel, removed a bloody piece of steak and slid it under the gate. The dog yelped once, but curiosity quickly overwhelmed its instincts. He heard it sniff and paw at the meat before gulping it down.

  Moriarty sat for a further ten minutes, and then stood and slid his hand over the gate to release the latch. The dog lay unconscious on the concrete path. He examined it through the scope. It was so still he wondered if he might have overdone the dose. He hoped not—he liked dogs.

  After scoping the path to make sure there were no obstacles, he crept along the side of the house, stopping at the corner to check the backyard for any surprises. When he reached the back door he took the picks from his pocket, gently opened it and entered the house.

  He stopped in the kitchen, listening to the hum of the fridge and the juddering second hand on the wall clock. Then came a sudden noise from within—a broken snore, so loud that it seemed to leave silence in its wake.

  He reached into the satchel and felt the cold steel of the stubby revolver. He pulled it out; the weight of it was reassuring. It was an unauthorised weapon, but this whole operation was unauthorised.

  He scoped the space ahead for obstacles and then crept into the corridor, feeling with his toes for loose floorboards. When the loud snore started up again, he took quick steps to the bedroom door and opened it. Ivo Katich’s large green body was splayed out on the bed.

  He put the scope in the satchel and moved fast to the bedside. Pointing the revolver at the man’s head, he flicked on the closest lamp.

  Katich’s eyes flew open, blinking. ‘What? What is …?’

  ‘Stay completely still.’

  ‘What the fuck!’

  Katich struggled to sit up. Moriarty gave him a sharp hammer blow on the temple with the gun butt and he fell back on to the pillow.

  ‘Don’t move!’

  Despite the blow, Katich regained his senses quickly.

  ‘It’s you? Tom! What the fuck you doing?’ he roared.

  ‘Shut up or I’ll blow your brains out.’ Moriarty watched the man go still as he focused on the weapon. ‘Roll on to your stomach,’ he ordered calmly. ‘And put your hands behind your back.’

  ‘You’re making big mistake!’ Katich shouted.

  Moriarty’s hand whipped out and gave him a second hammer blow on the head.

  ‘Ahhhh!’ he cried. ‘Stop! I do it. I do it!’

  Katich rolled over and put his hands behind his back. Working fast, Moriarty took a roll of gaffer tape and a knife from the satchel and bound the big man’s wrists before standing back. ‘Roll over so I can see you.’

  Katich twisted back around and propped himself on the pillows. He was remarkably composed.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy, Tom? What is it you want?’

  ‘Who did the bombing?’ Moriarty asked quietly.

  ‘Go fuck your mother!’

  Moriarty cracked him on the head again, harder this time.

  ‘Ahhh! You bloody cunt!’ Katich shouted.

  ‘Answer my questions or this is going to get much worse.’

  A thin line of blood trickled down Katich’s forehead and into his eye. He turned his head, rubbed it into the pillow and looked back at Moriarty. ‘Someone beats you,’ he said. ‘Now you beat me. What is this?’

  Moriarty paused.

  ‘Your eye,’ Katich said.

  ‘What?’ Moriarty touched his hand to the swelling and realised what he meant. ‘Oh, that was about a woman. Forget it.’

  Katich regarded him slyly. ‘Why you’re not stuttering anymore?’

  ‘It goes away when I’m ready to kill someone.’

  ‘You don’t have balls for that.’

  Moriarty reached forward and pulled the bloody pillow out from under Katich. He wrapped it around the revolver and stood back, pointing the cumbersome thing at the man’s head.

  ‘Who did the bombing?’ he asked again.

  ‘Fuck you, cun—’

  A muffled explosion, mid-expletive, then a cloud of feathers filled the air between the two men. The bloodstained pillow had blown apart. Katich stiffened on the bed; there was a black hole in the wall beside his head. His eyes widened and fear had replaced the anger in them. Smoke and the stench of burnt feathers irritated the nostrils of both men.

  Moriarty dropped the pillow and sat close to Katich on the bed. He reached over and gently brushed stray hair from the man’s eyes. Katich flinched and pulled away.

  ‘Who did the bombing?’ Moriarty asked, almost sadly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re lying.’ Moriarty suddenly perked up, cocking his head and smiling. ‘How about this?’ he suggested. ‘How about we play some Croatian roulette?’

  He cracked open the revolver and tipped the bullets out on to the sheet. ‘Old Ustasha game, isn’t it?’ he asked, placing a single bullet back in and spinning the barrel. ‘Get the boys together, bottle of sliva, some poor f-fucker who crossed himself the wrong way.’


  Moriarty beamed a wild grin down at Katich.

  ‘Come to think of it …’ He pulled one of the miniatures from his coat pocket, twisted it open and downed it in one. ‘That’s better,’ he said, putting the empty back in his pocket. ‘Can’t be leaving evidence all over the place, can we?’

  There was no smugness in Katich’s expression now.

  ‘You’re crazy, Tom.’

  ‘That may be.’ Moriarty gave him the stare. ‘Off the r-reservation, anyway. Thing is, I’ve had it with you, Ivo. You’ve pushed it and pushed it, and now you’ve gone too far. B-blowing up civilians. You know what they say, mate? When the dog goes m-mad, you put him down.’

  Moriarty rummaged in his pocket, pulled out another miniature, downed it and again pocketed the empty. He winked at Katich and tapped him on the forehead with the barrel.

  ‘Who did the bombing?’

  ‘You know I can’t—’

  Moriarty pulled the trigger.

  CLICK.

  ‘Ahhhhh!’ Katich screamed.

  ‘Oh, sh-shit.’ Moriarty burst out laughing. ‘I really didn’t mean to do that. Hair t-trigger! I was going to give you another chance. That would’ve been so embarrassing.’

  ‘You’re drunk …’

  ‘Not at all, just a bit tipsy.’

  Moriarty unscrewed the cap from yet another miniature and took a long pull. Still holding the bottle, he pressed the gun hard into Katich’s head. ‘Let’s try again,’ he said. ‘Who did the bombing?’

  ‘Croatian Youth,’ Katich answered quickly. ‘Is a new group. Crazy men. I don’t even know them.’

  ‘You can do better than that.’ Moriarty took a sip and tapped Katich’s forehead again. ‘Don’t want to test this trigger again, do we? Who were those two blokes you had here tonight? That them?’

  ‘First time they come here. I never see them before.’

  ‘Come on, Ivo, mate. That’s bullshit.’

  ‘No bullshit. I’ve done nothing since Bosnia. Nothing. That was fucking disaster, Tom. Marin is still missing. You know that.’

  Moriarty considered this. ‘Marin. He volunteered, so I heard,’ he reminded Katich. ‘Anyway, he knew the r-risks.’

  ‘Only God knows if he’s capture now, maybe in prison in Belgrade.’ Katich had real tears in his eyes; the big head lolled around in self-pity. ‘Only God knows. Maybe they torture him. What do you know?’