The Twentieth Man

by Tony Jones

  Detective Sergeant Ray Sullivan responded with three clicks, indicating he and the other three armed police were ready on the hill above the dwellings. Sullivan knew the layout better than Sharp, having been to the property previously to interview Petar Katich. It was his assessment of the man’s deteriorating state of mind that Sharp had passed on to Anna before she drove down there.

  *

  Sharp had been surprised when Anna had contacted him on her way back to Sydney and asked for an urgent meeting after her confrontation with Petar. That was what he’d asked her to do, of course, but he knew plenty of journos who would have sat on the information she had uncovered.

  ‘Honestly, I’m really worried about him, Al,’ Anna confided when they met at the Kings Cross café. ‘He’s in such a bad way he’s either going to kill himself or someone else.’

  She had made him a copy of Petar Katich’s journal. The closely written scrawl made him think of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, but without the talking dogs. He reluctantly agreed she could keep the original journal, on the proviso that if he found it contained actual evidence of criminality she would have to hand it over.

  ‘I’ve been through it line by line,’ said Anna. ‘Mostly it’s a long rant about historical injustice. It’s pretty incoherent, but towards the end the tone changes. That’s after he gets sent the documents and photos that I told you about—from Marjan Jurjevic in Melbourne.’

  Sharp nodded. ‘Have you spoken to Jurjevic about how he made contact with Petar?’

  ‘Not yet, but I have a theory. It’s important that Jurjevic is a Croat; I don’t think Petar would have paid any attention otherwise. But here’s another Croat telling him that his father’s been lying about his wartime history since Petar was a kid.’

  ‘Ivo Katich is a murderous old bastard,’ said Sharp. ‘I can’t imagine he was a kindly father.’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Anna agreed. ‘Petar’s full of resentment and old grievances. He’s the younger son. He’s small and fragile, and far less capable than his older brother. He’s convinced that the old man thinks he’s a worthless weakling. You can imagine what it’s like growing up with a father like that. Then suddenly Petar gets evidence that Ivo’s not only been a brute to him but was also a dyed-in-the-wool war criminal responsible for terrible savagery. I reckon this all rang true to Petar and that’s when the guilt kicked in.’

  Sharp considered this as he sipped his coffee.

  ‘It’s a bit of a cliché, isn’t it?’ he mused. ‘Sins of the father and all that. But it would help explain the downward spiral he’s in.’

  Anna pulled out the copy of the diary; she pushed aside Sharp’s half-full cappuccino and the ashtray and laid it on the table. She flicked through to the pages she’d marked.

  ‘It’s all in here,’ she explained. ‘Petar starts fantasising about what Ivo and his Ustasha brothers really did during the war—especially that demon, Branko Kraljevic. Then you get this section I’ve marked for you. Here, I’ll read it out: “I think of the two of them, young men, mates together in the uniform, Ivo’s arm over Branko’s shoulder, Branko’s over Ivo’s, and then I remember the bodies lying on George Street. I think of those people a lot, bleeding and twitching on the pavement. That’s how the day starts. Every day.”’ Anna stopped and looked up at Sharp.

  ‘Christ on a crutch!’ he spluttered. ‘I remember the bodies lying on George Street! It’s almost a confession.’

  ‘Almost, but not quite.’

  Sharp considered this. ‘Circumstantial, I suppose. He could say he was talking about newspaper photos. Is there anything else in there?’

  ‘No.’ Anna shook her head. ‘There’s nothing else like that, but he said something when I first got to him, after he fired the rifle over my head …’

  ‘That was foolhardy by the way,’ Sharp cut in to admonish her. ‘I told you not to go alone.’

  ‘He’d have never spoken to me otherwise. Your people got nothing out of him, did they?’

  ‘No, that’s true.’

  ‘Anyway, when I got to him he was hysterical. Raving about how his father thinks he’s a worthless nothing, and then he says: But I showed him what I could do. I showed them all …’

  ‘Did you ask him what that was?’

  ‘Never got the chance,’ Anna replied. ‘He passed out cold.’

  ‘You think he was talking about the Sydney bombs?’

  Anna shrugged and looked down at her hands. ‘There’s one last thing I haven’t told you. I managed to drag him back into the house and got him on to a bed. He was pretty much comatose, so I searched his room.’

  ‘You’re more like a spy than a journalist.’

  ‘I’m not proud of it, but this fellow had just shot at me, right?’

  ‘Sorry, go on. What else did you find?’

  ‘In the drawer of the bedside table there was a tourist brochure for the city of Zagreb.’

  ‘Maybe he was planning a trip to the old country.’

  ‘There was a sticker on the back of the brochure. It was from the Adriatic Trade and Travel Centre, on George Street.’

  Sharp straightened his aching back. He grabbed his cigarettes, lit one and drew deeply.

  ‘Agatha fucking Christie you are, saving the crucial piece of evidence to the last.’

  ‘Still circumstantial, though.’

  ‘What did you do with it?’

  ‘I left it where I found it.’

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘Don’t call me a girl.’

  Sharp’s teams had now surrounded the farmhouses. Amid the morning birdsong, he heard the ringing bellbirds Anna had talked about. From somewhere nearby a rooster crowed. Nothing else. No sign of life from the houses.

  The teams hit the buildings simultaneously. His men took the larger of the two where Petar Katich had his bedroom. Methodically entering room after room, the armed team called out: ‘Clear! Clear! Clear!’

  Sharp went out on to the veranda between the farmhouses. Ray Sullivan emerged from the doorway of the smaller house.

  ‘Nothing,’ he called. ‘Not a sausage.’

  ‘Fuck,’ said Sharp. ‘He’s in the wind. Turn the place over, Ray. Every nook and cranny.’

  ‘And here was I thinking we’d just have cheese on toast and go home.’

  ‘Smart-arse.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Sullivan smiled. ‘At least the hup hup boys didn’t get a chance to ventilate the place with those fucking cannons they brought along. They were psyched up for it, ready for the Last Stand at Glenrowan.’

  ‘Can’t be too careful, Raymond.’

  ‘Could’ve ended badly, is all. Get one of those jockstraps to make us a cuppa, will you? Kitchen here’s empty. Actually, the whole place looks like it’s been stripped clean.’

  Stripped clean? This bothered Sharp. He went straight back into the bedroom he knew to be Petar’s. The mattress was bare. There was an old rocking chair, a couple of bedside tables, an empty cupboard, and nothing else. Nothing on the floor. No sign someone had been living there.

  He opened both the bedside tables. Empty. Anna had said she’d found the Zagreb brochure in one of them and left it there. It was gone. The photos and documents sent by Jurjevic. Gone. The piles of old newspapers she’d mentioned. Gone.

  He flipped the mattress. On the underside he found a large, nasty-looking brown stain. Forensics would have to check it, but he knew dried blood when he saw it.

  He told his men to search everywhere for the rifle and ammunition. They came up with nothing. There were no letters, not even a utility bill. No notes, nothing in writing at all—in fact there was nothing to even write on. No paper, no notepads. No bottles of Balkan hooch, full or empty. No remnants of drug-taking. No old syringes, no burnt spoons, no rubber strap, no cotton wool. The place was so blank, so empty, he could come to only one conclusion. It had been systematically cleaned of evidence. Everything was gone except the bloodstained mattress.

  Petar Katich might be in the wind. He
could just as well be in the ground.

  No Name read a small sign above the Chapel Street doorway. Entering it, Anna Rosen climbed a narrow staircase to a big, overly lit room full of laminex tables. She spotted Peter McHugh across the room, pouring a drink from something that resembled a urine bottle for the bedridden.

  She knew that the piss-coloured wine it contained would be no better than it looked, but McHugh didn’t seem to mind. He professed to love this place, with its unchanging blackboard menu and Italian working-class ambience. It could have been a cafeteria in a regional Fiat factory.

  His face was transformed by a wide grin when he saw her. Waving the dubious carafe, he cried, ‘Anna! Sit, sit. Some wine?’

  She saw that, mercifully, the piss bottle was at a low ebb.

  ‘No, thanks. You finish that. I’ll have some red.’

  ‘Righto,’ McHugh said and drank from his glass to make space for the last of the wine. In the unflattering light his cheeks glowed reddish pink.

  Anna took it all in. Something was not right. ‘You celebrating?’ she asked him.

  McHugh poured more wine and drained half the glass before answering.

  ‘No, not at all. Well, lunch as an institution, I suppose. Lunch with you as a special treat. That kind of thing. I’ve hardly seen you outside of the office since … You know, since that night.’

  Anna recognised the plaintive look and knew then that he’d been fortifying himself for the long avoided talk.

  ‘It’s been a crazy few weeks,’ she said cautiously.

  ‘I ordered pasta for both of us,’ he said. The presumption was so typical of him that she smiled, glancing up at the blackboard to see what she might otherwise have chosen for herself.

  He followed her eyes. ‘It’s just the entree,’ he said defensively. ‘You were a bit late, and I thought I should get in before the crowd.’

  ‘I’m not late, Peter. You were early.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right. Making sure we got a good table.’

  ‘And having a few drinks.’

  ‘That too. That too. Settling the nerves. Who’d have thought it at my age.’

  ‘Peter …’

  ‘Don’t say anything yet. Just hear me out, will you?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I want to start over with you. I stuffed things up. That bad joke about you being the kind of girl Lionel Murphy would like—that was just stupid.’

  ‘Forget about it. I told you what I thought when you said it. That’s done.’

  ‘You made me feel like a lecherous old fool.’

  ‘Sorry for jumping down your throat.’

  ‘So, is that the reason you don’t want to see me again?’ McHugh paused, looking around to see if anyone was listening. ‘In that way?’

  ‘You mean the reason I won’t fuck you?’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Anna!’

  He would have gone on; but a waiter interrupted, sweeping in over his shoulder to lay a large plate of spaghetti bolognese in front of him, then swivelling to put a second one in front of Anna. Then the waiter plonked a bowl of grated parmesan on the table and turned to her.

  ‘You like somethin’ to drink?’

  ‘Una caraffa di vino rosso, per favore.’

  ‘Va bene.’

  McHugh waited until the waiter was out of earshot, then he bent in so close she saw the burst blood vessels in his eyes.

  ‘I can’t get you out of my head.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Peter. I really am. I just woke up the next morning and it all felt wrong. I can’t help that. That shouldn’t stop us being friends, or affect our work …’

  ‘It’s affecting everything.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘I just can’t look at you across the room and pretend it didn’t happen—’

  Again the waiter interrupted him, reaching in to place two glasses on the table and then pouring the wine, while McHugh sat slumped, elbows on the table, hands covering his face. He didn’t look up until the waiter had gone.

  ‘I know, I know. I’m not a pretty sight. Behaving like a besotted teenager.’

  Pity and contempt jostled as Anna’s emotional response. She started to reach out a hand to him, but stopped herself and took up the wine glass instead.

  ‘We should eat, you know,’ she said, spooning parmesan on to her spaghetti. ‘Pasta waits for no man.’

  McHugh twirled spaghetti in a desultory fashion. He ate a few mouthfuls before dropping the fork. ‘I don’t want to feel like this, Anna. I thought we had something.’

  Anna stopped eating, annoyed now, having discovered how hungry she was. She drank some wine and stared at him. ‘Has no one ever said “no” to you?’

  ‘Not like this,’ he confessed. ‘Normally I have time to get used to the idea.’

  ‘It was one night, Peter.’

  ‘I just keep wondering what went wrong. All I did was say that other men would find you sexy.’

  ‘It’s not about that. I gave you a rap over the knuckles because you sounded like an old chauvinist. I’d already told you it was wrong to fall into bed with you. I told you that the next morning.’

  ‘At the risk of being pathetic, I need you to tell me why it was wrong.’

  ‘Why can’t you just leave it alone?’

  ‘Because I can’t.’

  Anna took a deep breath. She felt cornered. ‘There’s someone else, Peter. There’s someone I can’t get out of my head. Honestly, I wish I could sometimes. That’s the problem. I can’t be with you because I want to be with him.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you with anybody. You’ve never mentioned a boyfriend.’

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s not in the country.’

  ‘Where is he? Is he coming back?’

  ‘That’s too many questions. I told you it’s complicated. Look, is this going to be a problem?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want me to go and work somewhere else?’

  ‘No, of course not. Fuck, I’m really sorry. I feel stupid.’ He ran his hands absentmindedly through his hair and left it looking like an overgrown hedge.

  ‘I’m being an idiot,’ he said, and Anna nodded.

  ‘A village idiot with your hair like that.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ he said, smoothing it down. ‘Go on, eat your lunch. Have a drink. Look, we can talk about your story. Where are we at with the mad, fucking Katich family?’

  Anna sat still, said nothing.

  Oh, Peter, if only you knew.

  Contempt rose in her throat like bile. She looked down at the plate of pasta, at the bowl of cheese, at the red-lipped wine glass, at the stained butcher’s paper, at Peter’s liver-spotted hands. Over his shoulder babbling diners sat laughing, clattering utensils and roaring in their complacency.

  How to reconcile this avalanche of trivia with the disappearance of Marin Katich? Was he lying dead on a mountain in Bosnia? Was he rotting in a cell in Belgrade? Was he being tortured by Tito’s secret police?

  ‘Anna?’

  McHugh interrupted her thoughts and she stared at him. There was no way she could talk to him about this. She knew that he’d use it against her. She foresaw all his arguments, foresaw that his rhetoric would be fuelled by the indignation of the spurned lover: she’d been dishonest; she’d kept critical information from him; her journalism was compromised; and this, in turn, had compromised him and his program and the ABC. On and on it would go, until he had had his revenge.

  ‘Are you okay?’ asked McHugh.

  No, she wouldn’t tell him.

  Then she had an epiphany. There was only one man to whom she could talk about this. One man who might be able to answer her questions. Only one man with whom she could be honest. But, even if he agreed to see her, he would almost certainly lie. That was a perverse fact.

  Anna pushed her chair back from the table. ‘I have to go,’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Wait.’

  ‘I can’t, Pet
er. I just realised there’s something I have to do.’ She stood up and dropped her napkin on the table. ‘Can you fix this up?’

  ‘Sure, of course, but—’

  ‘Sorry, there’s no time to explain,’ she said. ‘I’ll speak to you later.’

  She left the restaurant. The one man who could answer her questions was the patriarch of that mad, fucking Katich family: Marin’s father. It all started with Ivo, and it ended with him. He was at the very heart of it all.

  Anna hailed a cab and gave a Dawes Point address. The taxi dropped her at the end of Lower Fort Street, close to the harbour’s edge. Beneath the span of the bridge’s southern approach she saw the naked Opera House sails, now denuded of the spindly cranes that had overshadowed them for as long as she could remember. She paid the driver and climbed out.

  Above her was one of the massive granite-faced pylons that seemed to anchor the steel arch of the bridge as it vaulted the harbour to the city’s north. The bridge’s maintenance crews were based inside this, the south-west pylon, and she knew that all the men who crawled over the great structure twenty-four hours a day accessed their workplace through it. The pylon was fenced off by a high chain-link barrier, which also enclosed the workers’ car park.

  There was a sleepy guard at the gate. She talked her way through by explaining that she had an urgent message for one of the workers about a sick child. She was directed to the staff entrance, a human-sized door next to an arched wooden gateway locked and barred but big enough for a giant.

  She entered a cavernous space filled with the sounds of industry. It was so gargantuan in its dimensions that she stopped and stared up into its heights. A steel stairway with suspended gantries rose nearly fifty metres up the interior stone wall into the dimly lit reaches. From the top, she counted twelve steep flights down to the vast and noisy maintenance area on the ground floor.

  She was still transfixed when a man in blue overalls approached her.

  ‘First time in here then?’ he asked loudly, breaking the spell.

  ‘Yes, it’s—’

  ‘Fucking humungous.’

  ‘It really is.’