The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  At the top of the stairs were several doors. The one on the left Sharp knew to be a storage room. He opened the door on the right and they went into a smaller dining room with a central table. It was flanked on one side by a pinball machine and on the other by a television set.

  ‘A fuckin’ pinny—that’s all we need.’ Daltrey gave up any pretence of whispering. ‘That’ll be a fuckin’ nightmare if anyone’s playing during the meetings.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sharp said. ‘I didn’t know about that. Can we disable it somehow?’

  ‘How paranoid are these blokes?’

  ‘They’ll be pretty nervous if they’re the ones who ordered the bombings.’

  ‘Up to you, then. Might scare the horses, though.’

  Sharp pondered the problem before asking, ‘Can you do it so it looks like some piece of equipment just gave up, like every piece of electronics I’ve ever bought?’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Daltrey opened up the back of the machine and spent some time working on its innards before reappearing with a smile.

  ‘I reckon that’ll do it. Try turning it on.’

  Sharp found the wall socket and pushed the plug in. Nothing happened.

  ‘Dead as a dodo,’ he said.

  ‘Righto,’ said Daltrey. ‘It’ll take a while to repair that. I’ve been thinking about where to put the bugs.’ He tapped the side of the pinball machine. ‘Can’t put one in this because someone’s gonna have to open it up to repair it. They’ve got fluorescent lights in the ceiling, so there’s nothing hanging down I could rig up on. There’s no pictures or anything on the walls to hide a bug. It’d be pretty bloody obvious if I drilled a hole anywhere.’

  ‘So, what are you thinking?’

  ‘I’m thinking the TV set. But, of course, we’ll be fucked if they turn it on as a countermeasure. Wanna take the risk?’

  Sharp thought about it for a moment. ‘Do we have any choice?’

  ‘Nup.’

  ‘Okay, you’re the expert.’

  ‘Buggers can’t be choosers.’

  ‘Okay. Get going. I’m going back downstairs to find the phone for McCafferty.’

  Sharp located the phone behind the counter on the ground floor. He put the receiver to his ear and listened. Heard static and electronic scraping sounds. He spoke softly: ‘One two, one two, are you reading me, Bob?’

  More static. More scraping. Was he sending a signal? He repeated his first question, then started counting slowly. He reached twenty-four.

  ‘You can stop now.’ McCafferty’s voice was in his ear. ‘I’ve got you on my handset. The wires are tapped. We’re ready to go. I’m gonna turn the transmitter on and close this thing up. How’s it going upstairs?’

  Sharp gave him a quick account.

  ‘Well, Roger knows what he’s doing. If he’s gone for the TV, it must be the only option.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll see you back at the van.’

  The whole operation took thirty minutes. Both the phone and the room were now live. McCafferty had found a place for the van beside an abandoned warehouse nearby, concealed behind a gate and a fence.

  ‘This should be right for a while,’ he said. ‘We’ll lock up and leave her here tonight. So, back on shift tomorrow. What time?’

  ‘The problem is this meeting Jim Kelly’s called for 9 am,’ Sharp said. ‘He wants the whole team there, including us. I reckon the owner’ll be here around nine to prep the restaurant … We want his phone calls, obviously, in case someone rings to set up a meeting.’

  ‘Well, the recorders are voice-activated. How about we start at 11 am? Roger and I will rotate shifts in the van, but we’ll need that translator, right?’

  Sharp nodded. ‘That’s all set to go.’

  ‘We could be here for a long time,’ Daltrey said. ‘Hope he plays cards.’

  ‘It’s a woman, Roger,’ Sharp said.

  ‘Never put a woman on a surveillance op,’ Daltrey said. ‘Too distracting.’

  ‘No choice, I’m afraid,’ Sharp consoled him. ‘But I don’t want you two falling out over a woman.’

  ‘Oh, Bob won’t be bothered.’ Daltrey smirked. ‘He don’t care for ’em.’

  ‘Shut it,’ McCafferty snapped.

  ‘Foreigners, I meant.’

  ‘Pull your head in.’

  Sharp cut them off. ‘All right, let’s call it quits for tonight. Good job. Now we wait.’

  6.

  A persistent ringing woke Anna Rosen on Monday morning. She rolled off the office couch on to her knees and picked up the receiver.

  ‘At the third stroke it will be 7.45 precisely. Beep, beep, beep.’

  She yawned, lay back down again and closed her eyes, trying to reconnect with the lingering images of her dream.

  Marin Katich again. He was still there, deep in her subconscious. She didn’t need an analyst to tell her that she hadn’t shaken him off. But this dream had been the strangest yet. Marin had worn a black uniform as he walked across a field through long grass. And there had been something in his hand. A gun? A knife? The image had slipped away before she could recall the detail—something definitely bad there.

  She rubbed her face hard. The image had left her disturbed because it was so anachronistic. Marin had never worn the black uniform. That was his father, Ivo, the murderous old Nazi, and it had been way back in 1942.

  Thoughts of Marin Katich raised the same questions she’d been asking herself for two years. Why had he disappeared? Where the hell was he? She had strong suspicions. If they were right, he was most likely dead. Perhaps his ghost was haunting her dreams.

  Anna had decided early on not to tell her boss that she had a personal motive behind her interest in the Ustasha. Even before her indiscretion with him, she’d known Peter McHugh well enough to know he’d distrust her for it and might even pull her off the story.

  She looked over at her desk. The edit master was still there in its box. No gremlins or spies had run off with it in the night. At 4 am she had gone to the trouble of making a copy and had locked it away in a filing cabinet just in case. She wasn’t paranoid—no, ASIO really could be utterly ruthless. Anna and her whole family had ample evidence of that. They’d been targets of the security agencies her entire life, and ASIO came out of her story very badly.

  She held the box in her lap, her painstakingly gathered evidence. How harmless it looked—just a cardboard container holding a tape full of recorded words. Maybe Pandora had had the same thought.

  Sunken-eyed and bedraggled, Anna made her way back through the lower corridors. Shoals of dayshift workers were coming the other way. Some of them glanced at the dark apparition weaving through them like the last survivor of a rock concert.

  As daylight glimmered at the end of the final corridor, Anna put on her sunglasses. The morning sun lit her up like a spotlight as she stepped outside and met the unflappable old guard at the door to the car park.

  ‘Reginald.’

  ‘Up all night, love?’

  ‘Pretty much. Going for coffee. Want one?’

  ‘I’d kill for one, love.’

  ‘No need for that,’ she said, flicking him a peace sign.

  He had probably killed a few people in his time, old Reg. He was a veteran, like most of the guards and front-desk boys, all of them recruited by the same tough old bastard, a retired sergeant major who ran the Commission’s security. Reg once gave her the drum on his war in the minimalist way of real veterans: New Guinea. Lost some good mates. Fucking nightmare.

  She liked him.

  The car park sat above Darlinghurst, surrounded by a high chain-link fence. If the broadcaster were a hilltop fortress, these would be its ramparts.

  Anna descended a steep stairway to the lane below, where she stepped warily into a carpet of syringes. The smack freaks had scuttled off to dark places before the sun caught them out in the open. Now the bright light picked up swirls of red in the discarded fits, the counter flow of their life�
�s blood sucked back into the hypodermics.

  In her early days as a trainee Anna used to come in by cab at 5 am for the morning shift, lounging in the back seat and marvelling at her unfamiliar entitlement to a taxi docket. The hookers had still been around at that hour, shivering in the pre-dawn chill beneath the stone steps down to William Street. They’d stir listlessly at the cab’s arrival, hoping it might deliver them one final john. Simultaneously relieved and disappointed, they’d peer at her through pinned eyes and veils of smoke, then they’d cast their gazes downwards again, tapping ash into empty Tango cans. One might offer a desultory greeting: ‘G’day, love. Spare us ten bucks?’

  Anna always smiled and shook her head, climbing the stairs between them, as if part of the sisterhood. Their miniskirts were hiked over bruised legs, mascara melted on their anaemic faces, and she clocked their blank looks, their purple lips and their shuttered hearts. She hated that this life had fucked them up so badly.

  This morning, as she stepped over the evidence of last night’s misdeeds, Anna rehearsed, as she always did, the obvious questions. Who fed their habits? Where were the cops? The corrupt bastards were all on the take—most of them, anyway. So many stories, so little time.

  She walked up the laneway to the junction of William Street and Darlinghurst Road, gateway to the closed-down carnival of Kings Cross. Exposed to daylight, the Cross had a squalid beauty. The vast wall of neon, so diverting at night, now revealed as nothing more than vacuum tubes and scaffolding, tacked on to conceal the crumbling buildings. The upper floors were left to peel and rot above rusty awnings that shaded stinking chicken shops and milk bars and padlocked strip joints. A few US servicemen still lurched about these establishments, looking for sustenance at the butt end of their shore leave. Morning traffic rolled slowly through the newly washed streets. Kerb-crawling cabs scooped up the remnants of the night.

  Anna made her way through back lanes to the Piccolo on Roslyn Street, where Vittorio gave her a nod from behind the ancient Gaggia.

  ‘Ciao, Anna.’ He produced an espresso in a little white cup. ‘Se non fossi cosi snella saresti una bella ragazza.’

  ‘Too early, Vittorio. I need subtitles.’

  ‘If you weren’t so skinny you’d be beautiful.’

  ‘Una bella rag-azza?’

  ‘Si, buono.’

  ‘Mille grazie, I guess.’

  ‘Prego. But I need to feed you up.’

  ‘An omelette, a small orange juice, and another one of these in a moment,’ she said, holding up the coffee.

  ‘Go sit. I make you breakfast.’

  There was a copy of the Herald on the bar. Anna unfolded the paper and scanned the front page: ‘Yugoslavia to Protest on Bombings.’

  This was about Belgrade’s anger that so little had been done to stop Ustasha extremists. Ambassador Vidovic would meet senior government ministers today and deliver that message to his host country.

  Anna knew Vidovic well. He was a useful contact. The Yugoslavs ran their own network of agents and kept detailed intelligence files. Not exactly untainted information, but their knowledge of the Croat extremists was sophisticated. They considered them an existential threat.

  The Herald confirmed that detectives on the bombing investigation were convinced it was the work of right-wing Croats. Anna sipped the espresso. Well, that was blindingly obvious, unless you were the prime minister or the attorney-general. Sure enough, further down, she found the stock denials from Ivor Greenwood, the same old lines he had peddled in his interview with her: there was no evidence of a Croat terrorist organisation; the police had investigated every allegation of terrorist training camps and found no evidence of those either; if Labor had additional information they should just pass it on to the police …

  Anna was relieved. The paper had nothing new. Nothing that undermined her story and none of the fresh evidence she would air tonight.

  She flicked through to the inside coverage: ‘Croat Leaders Deny Bomb Plot.’ Again, the standard reaction from community leaders: if Croats were responsible for Saturday’s blasts, they could only be ‘sick individuals’.

  ‘Jesus-fucking-Christ,’ she muttered, shaking the paper so angrily that she spilt coffee on it. If you included the indoctrination of children in special schools, the widespread fundraising for Ustasha operations in the community, the secret training camps, the bomb-making classes, the men recruited here to join armed guerrilla incursions inside Yugoslavia and the covert backing of Ustasha priests in the Catholic Church, that was one hell of a lot of sick individuals.

  Then she discovered something she had missed. While she was travelling between Melbourne and Canberra, four hundred marchers had taken to the streets in Sydney for ‘Captive Nations Week’. Reading the account of it, Anna let out another cry of outrage.

  Vittorio arrived with her breakfast. ‘What is it?’ he asked, placing the orange juice and the steaming omelette on her table and handing her the cutlery. ‘Nothing to make you lose your appetite?’

  ‘No, no, I’m starving. This looks great.’ She smiled at him and pointed to the paper. ‘It’s a story about the Town Hall bombs. Two federal ministers are saying the whole thing’s a communist plot, that’s all.’

  ‘That’s what they do, Anna.’ Vittorio leaned in, sotto voce, a Renaissance conspirator. ‘Remember the Reichstag fire? That was a Jewish plot, right? Nothing changes.’

  ‘If you leave out the Holocaust.’

  ‘That’s why we got to stop the Nazis before they get going.’

  ‘Good point,’ she conceded.

  Vittorio raised a theatrical eyebrow to confirm the great significance of his comment and returned to the bar to serve a new customer. Anna drained her orange juice and started in on the omelette. Vittorio had never let her down and today was no exception. She felt her strength returning as she ate, enough to go back to the newspaper article.

  Accompanying the story was a picture of the marchers’ spokesman, the minister for Social Services, William ‘Billy’ Wentworth. Anna snorted. True to form, the crazy old bastard had emerged as the leading proponent of the conspiracy theory on the bombings: simply blame the evil communists, Yugoslav agent provocateurs who’d bombed their own country’s travel offices to blacken the name of the poor benighted Croats.

  ‘We recall that the communist terror had its origins in individual acts of civil violence,’ Wentworth had told the crowd. Anna effortlessly conjured up his maniacal, lisping delivery. ‘There is likely to be a parallel here with the Australia First Movement in the 1940s. That was a communist plot, but was presented as a right-wing group.’

  Then there was fellow marcher Dr Malcolm MacKay, minister for the Navy and another senior member of the government peddling the same conspiracy theory. MacKay claimed that people were ‘sitting ducks’ for the communists. By ‘people’ he meant good anti-communist Croats.

  ‘I am far from convinced,’ MacKay opined, ‘that the causes are solely or mainly on the area most obvious of blame.’ He demanded the police turn their investigation in the direction of the communists.

  Anna sighed. Captive Nations Week had once again flushed out the lunatic fringe. She was all for demonstrating solidarity with those people trapped behind the Iron Curtain. Even she, the daughter of a leading communist, could sympathise with that.

  Her father had led the push inside the Party to reject Moscow’s leadership after the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest way back in 1956. It wasn’t until new squadrons of tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring in 1968 that Frank Rosen won that argument. It was one outrage too many, and most of the comrades finally sided with Frank. The Party severed its ties with Moscow, but it was irretrievably split as a result.

  Anna despised the pro-Soviet nutters who’d torn the Party apart as much as she hated the right-wing nutters who’d hijacked Captive Nations Week. There were fascists at either end of the spectrum. But this was too much!

  She threw the paper down. Less than twenty-four hour
s after the worst terrorist attack in the city’s history, and despite the irrefutable logic of who was responsible for it, the hard right was already looking into the wrong end of the telescope.

  Anna was still fuming when Vittorio returned with her second espresso. She asked him for another coffee in a paper cup for Reg. Time to get back and knock this nonsense on the head once and for all.

  Detective Sergeant Jim Kelly, the head of the Special Breaking Squad, was a wily old coot. That was Al Sharp’s assessment of the man running the investigation into the Sydney bombings. Kelly was tall with a long, lugubrious face, like Chips Rafferty. He looked as if the sun had burned all the fat off him, like he was made out of wood and leather.

  Sharp had shaved and climbed back into the rumpled suit he’d worn on the surveillance op earlier that morning. He still felt shabby when he knocked on Kelly’s door to give him a quick briefing before the meeting at CIB Headquarters.

  ‘Morning, boss.’

  Kelly looked up from the pile of reports on his desk. He wore a crisp white shirt with braces, metal sleeve garters and a two-tone tie with a silver clip. His hair was slicked back. Sharp caught whiffs of Brylcreem and Old Spice.

  ‘Nothing here from you, Mr Sharp,’ said Kelly.

  ‘We finished at 3 am. I thought it best to brief you personally.’

  ‘Convenient, you mean?’

  ‘Expedient, I’d say.’

  Kelly produced a thin smile. ‘At risk of being a smart-arse?’ When Sharp didn’t respond Kelly continued: ‘So, brief me.’

  Sharp explained that the restaurant was now live for surveillance, with a listening device in place and a tap on its only phone.

  ‘How’d you go with the two eggheads?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘They’re pros,’ Sharp said. ‘As good as I’ve worked with. But their equipment’s old. If we’re going to be doing more of this, someone needs to spend some money fast to update their gear.’