Black Tide

by Peter Temple

  The vehicle is registered to a Melbourne company, Beconsecure International. Police have asked that anyone with information about the whereabouts of the company’s director, Mr Gary Connors, of unit 5, 23 Montcalm Avenue, Toorak, contact the Police Helpline.

  For a while, I sat in the comforting leather armchair, in the low light from the television, cold takeaway Chinese on my lap. I felt like going to bed, sleeping for a week. Instead, I dialled Des Connors. It rang for a long time.

  ‘Hello.’ He sounded far away and weak.

  ‘Des, it’s Jack Irish.’

  A cough, clearing of the throat. ‘Jack.’ More clearing. ‘Bit of a snooze. Front of the telly.’

  ‘Des, have you heard from the police?’

  ‘Police? No.’

  ‘They found Gary’s car today.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Gary’s car. They found it between Port Fairy and Portland. In the sea. Went over the cliff. No body found.’

  Silence. More throat-clearing.

  I said, ‘You all right?’

  ‘In the sea?’

  ‘At the bottom of the cliff. Place called The Teeth. Track runs along the coast from there. On private land. A farm.’

  ‘A farm, well,’ Des said. ‘Bit of a shock. Always thought he’d come to a sticky. Good thing his mum’s not here to hear this.’

  ‘We don’t know that Gary was in the car, Des,’ I said. ‘Could have been stolen, dumped. Happens all the time.’

  No-one stole a car in Melbourne and dumped it intact over a cliff near Portland.

  Des sighed.

  ‘The police will want to ask you some questions about Gary. If you like, I’ll talk to them in the morning, give them your number, get them to make an appointment to see you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  ‘Goodnight, Des. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.’

  ‘Goodnight, Bill.’

  I poured a glass of the open red, opened the envelope from Simone. A printout of a short item in the Capital City column of the Australian Financial Review, dated 27 July 1996.

  It was headed: HANSARD LOST FOR WORDS.

  Late on Wednesday, a somnambulant colleague found himself in the empty Press Gallery of the near-empty Senate chamber. The following exchange between conspiracy-fixated Independent Senator Martin Coffey and the Attorney-General, Senator Clive McColl, startled him from sleep:

  Can the Honourable Senator confirm that recently a combined Federal Police and Victorian Police operation called Black Tide was closed down under pressure from the highest level of government?

  Senator McColl: I take Senator Coffey’s question on notice.

  Could this have the makings of a story, our scribe wondered? The next day, to check his notes, he consulted Hansard’s account of proceedings in the Senate for 24 July. That verbatim record heard Senator Coffey ask:

  Can the Honourable Senator confirm that last year an important Federal Police operation was cancelled on financial grounds?

  Late yesterday, Senator Coffey’s office said that the Senator had no reason to dispute Hansard’s record of proceedings and that, after discussions with Senator McColl, he considered the matter closed.

  Simone had underlined the words Black Tide.

  Telephone ringing.

  ‘Jack, we talked on Wednesday. About your Canberra trip.’

  The tired man with the advice about Dean Canetti.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The person you were interested in. They found his car today.’

  ‘I saw that.’

  ‘He was in it when it took the dive.’

  ‘They didn’t say they knew that.’

  ‘No. Reasons for that. He was. They found the wallet. You don’t have to look for him anymore.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Yes. Thanks.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  I spent a distracted evening: not reading, not thinking, not watching television. Finally, I put out the lamps, went upstairs, stood beside the side window and looked down on the narrow street, streetlight gleaming on wet parked cars. Nothing moved. I went to bed. In the strange way of these things, I fell asleep instantly, slept like an exhausted child until 7 a.m.

  28

  For breakfast, I had muesli. Ancient muesli. Recovered muesli. It tasted as I imagined food found beside a mummy in a pyramid would. Then I drove out to Des Connors’ house in Northcote. Not much traffic, rain weeping out of a sky the colour of the best man’s tie.

  Des was up, saw me arrive and opened the front door before I got there. He was wearing a blue suit with wide lapels, a white shirt and a tie with red spots.

  ‘Come in, Jack,’ he said.

  ‘Not this time. Lightning visit. You’re looking pretty spruce.’

  ‘Havin lunch with the girls down the street. They don’t work Mondays. Vegetables only, she said. Dunno about that.’

  ‘Very healthy,’ I said. ‘I’ll be ringing the cops in about twenty minutes. When they come around, tell them you came to see me and we went around to Gary’s place, had a look to see if he might be away on a trip. That way they won’t get too excited if they decide to look for fingerprints and find ours.’

  Des nodded. ‘Just tell em what we did.’

  ‘That’s right. Those keys of Gary’s. I might take them, have another look.’

  He was back with them in thirty seconds.

  We went out to the gate. ‘Should be a grievin parent,’ he said. ‘Can’t find it in me, Jack. All I can think is I done me dough. Goodbye house.’

  I leaned over the gate, grasped his left arm. ‘Even if the dough’s done, Des, you’re staying in this house. Out feet first. In about fifty years.’

  He blinked a few times. ‘Sure, now?’

  ‘Give you my word, good enough?’

  He looked at me, some moisture in the eyes. ‘Reckon,’ he said. ‘Bill Irish’s boy.’

  The things we bring upon ourselves.

  I spent the day on the Purbrick library, cutting mortices. No hollow-chisel morticer in this workshop. A drill press, yes. Charlie wasn’t averse to amateurs like me getting rid of most of the waste with the drill press but he could do the whole job much faster with a chisel, a piece of steel honed to the point where it could take shavings off a fingernail.

  Early on, Charlie had shown me how to use the drill press to make it easier to get rid of waste in a mortice. But you sense things. It wasn’t that he didn’t want me to use the drill press. It was just that he didn’t show any enthusiasm for it. Some machines he loved. He loved the tablesaws, loved the big industrial planer, gave it a pat like a man patting a bottom, an incorrect man patting a female rump, a lingering feel in the pat.

  The message unspoken was that a person who took the occupation seriously would use a chisel to create a mortice. And when you’d felt dry, fine-grained timber succumb to the knife-edge, you agreed.

  We had lunch in front of the stove. My soggy salad sandwich was from down the road. Charlie had corned beef, mustard, homemade sauerkraut, bread baked by the husband of one of his granddaughters, a stockbroker called Martin something who specialised in mining stocks. Charlie brought in half a loaf for me from time to time. It was sourdough rye, dense, intense, exactly what a rich Harvard MBA would produce in his kitchen for relaxation. On Sunday, get in touch with the earth. Monday, get back to screwing the planet.

  ‘Six syringes outside today,’ Charlie said. ‘Coming to what, the world? Children. Shouldn’t be smoking, they stick needles in their arms. Who’s to blame? I ask you that.’

  ‘The blame question,’ I said. ‘They ask that a lot on the radio. And in the papers. Very good question. It can also be a very stupid question.’

  Charlie pondered this, staring at the last bite of sandwich in his huge hand. ‘Men make their own history,’ he said, ‘but not in circumstances of their own choosing. Karl Marx.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So some you can
blame on the past, on other people, some you can’t.’

  ‘I like the sound of that,’ I said, feeding my sandwich wrap to the fire. ‘How do you work out which bit you can blame on which?’

  ‘Think,’ Charlie said. ‘You think a lot.’

  He stood up, rehearsed sending down a bowl, and went off, mind now turned to the prospect of inflicting further humiliation on the teen set at the bowls club.

  It was darkening outside before I’d cut all the tenons, trial-fitted the pieces and was ready for the glue-up. Although Charlie had at least ten good reasons for not gluing-up near the end of the day, I loved to come into the workshop in the morning and take the clamps off a piece of furniture.

  Glue-up tomorrow? No.

  Cold hide glue for this job. You needed the slower drying time in case anything went wrong. I laid out the pieces on the low assembly table, used three brushes to apply the glue, worked at a steady pace. Then I fitted everything together, slid home the joints, applied the clamps, fifteen short and six long sash clamps, no metal touching wood. Next came fiddling with the clamp pressures, checking all corners with a square, measuring the diagonals with Charlie’s measuring stick invention to ensure squareness.

  Finally, I stood back and marvelled at my confidence, my cleanliness, at the fact that complicated glue-ups that had once terrified me more than my early court appearances ever did were now everyday matters.

  Weary, fingers second-skinned with glue, pleased with myself, I went home. It was raining steadily, but the discovery of Gary’s car had brightened my world. A dead Gary you didn’t have to look for. If I could find some way of securing Des in his house, the whole matter was closed. Everything. Whatever business Dean Canetti had with Gary, it was over. And whatever Black Tide was, it wasn’t any of my business.

  In my domain, cleansed, restless, I toyed with the idea of ringing Lyall Cronin, handsome and world-weary photographer, suggesting a drink, perhaps a meal. Had she been mildly suggestive at the end of our encounter?

  She’d been mildly pissed.

  My confidence failed me. Not for the first time.

  I was thinking about what to eat when the street gate buzzer sounded.

  Simone Bendsten, fetching in short red weatherproof jacket, rain beaded on her hair. Behind her, a dark Honda was double-parked, engine running.

  She held out an envelope. ‘This was in my letterbox, addressed to you. Mysterious. Got to run.’

  I shouted my thanks after her. Outside the front door, I looked at the envelope. My name and address, care of Bendsten Research. Under that, in capitals: PLEASE DELIVER BEFORE 8 PM TODAY. PLEASE DO NOT MAKE TELEPHONE CONTACT WITH MR IRISH.

  Inside, one sheet of A4 bearing a short message.

  29

  I sat in front with the driver. The taxi had picked me up on the corner of King William and Brunswick as the message said it would. Then the driver, a man in his sixties with the anxious look of a whippet, showed a talent for dawdling along, holding up traffic, then racing through traffic lights in the first second of red.

  We drove all over the place: down Brunswick, left into Johnston, left into Nicholson, down to Victoria, right, right again into Lygon, left into Queensberry, right into Swanston. Twice he pulled to the kerb for a minute or two, twice he did illegal U-turns. After the second one, at the Faraday intersection, he drove half-way down the block and pulled up next to a man in a suit leaning against a parked car.

  The man didn’t hurry, opened the back door of the cab and got in. ‘Evening, Jack,’ he said. ‘Left into Grattan, Dennis.’

  He was big, a few kilos over correct weight, full head of greying hair cut short, shelf of moustache underpinning a delicate nose.

  We crossed Rathdowne and went down Carlton Street beside the gardens.

  ‘Left into Canning, right on the other side of the square,’ the man said.

  He had the cab stop at the back of the small square, next to a dark Ford. ‘Give us twenty minutes, Dennis,’ he said. ‘Then pick up our guest on the corner. Let’s get out, Jack.’

  We got out.

  A wet and windy Melbourne night, a small square of balding trees and scuffed grass, around it the terrace houses blank, defensive, leaves drifting through the streetlight like falling pieces of the sky.

  He unlocked the driver’s door of the Ford, motioned me to the passenger side. I got in. New car smell.

  ‘Dave,’ he said, holding out his right hand, moving his buttocks, getting comfortable. ‘Smoke?’

  ‘No. Dave’s not enough. Not nearly enough.’

  ‘Cloak and dagger. Always make you feel a bit of a prick.’

  I said, ‘Who are you?’

  He found a wallet. I held it to the streetlight. He reached up and put on the interior light. Photograph. Commonwealth seal. Italic type saying the card served to identify the bearer as a member of the Commonwealth Office of Crime Intelligence.

  Light off. I gave the card back. ‘Don’t know why I bother,’ I said. ‘You can probably get these made in a booth at Kmart. I’m in your car for one reason, Dave. To give you a message. Listening?’

  He didn’t look at me, studied the misty windshield, nodded.

  ‘This is the message,’ I said. ‘Gary Connors, I don’t give a shit. Dean Canetti, the same applies.’

  He extracted a Camel filter from a packet next to the gear lever, wound his window down a paperback width, lit the cigarette with an old Ronson lighter, blew smoke sideways. It blew back.

  I said, ‘Thanks for the ride, Dave. I can manage the walk back from here. Goodnight. And goodbye.’ I felt for the door handle.

  He glanced at me. ‘Pissed off? I’d be pissed off. Read that Fin Review clipping?’

  ‘How do you know about that?’

  He ignored the question. ‘That’s the only public mention ever of Black Tide,’ he said.

  ‘Black Tide? Blue Omo? What the hell is it?’

  He didn’t look at me, looked at the windscreen. ‘There’s only a few people know.’

  I should have got out and walked home. ‘Listen, Dave,’ I said, ‘there may be some mistaken identity here. You may be mistaking me for someone who knits beanies for a living.’

  ‘The Fin Review piece,’ he said. ‘Senator Coffey changing his story. You get the point?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Think the media would follow that up.’ He smoked, a man born to smoke.

  I waited. ‘I’m listening. I shouldn’t be, but I’m listening.’

  Dave put his left hand on the wheel, curled the fingers around it. He didn’t look at me. I looked at his hand, a boxer’s hand, at his neat small nose. He’d got the punches in first, no-one had ever marked his face.

  ‘The point here, Jack,’ he said, ‘the point’s simple for an intelligent bloke like you. Change Hansard, shut up journos, that’s kinder stuff for these people. It’s nothing. Coffey, Senator Coffey, he got fed the question, didn’t know what he was asking about. Anyway, he liked the sound of it, he went on the fishing trip. A wall fell on the cunt. Integrity went south, just its little arsehole winking in the dark, once, twice, gone.’

  He still didn’t look at me, examined his cigarette. ‘For these people,’ he said, ‘getting their way is easy, it’s trivial. It’s just business. What’s the price? What’ll you take? Don’t want money, what do you want? They shut down the local jacks everywhere that way. Long ago, just peanuts for them, peanuts for the monkeys. The money, you can’t count it, there’s nothing they can’t buy. No-one. You’re dealing with people, they can’t buy you, they’ll load you up, kill your friend, kill your wife, kill your child, kill you, it’s all the same.’

  I was feeling cold inside now, winter inside and out. ‘I don’t think you should be telling me this,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to know it. I’m not involved anymore. I wanted to help Gary Connors’ father by finding Gary. I’ll find another way to help him.’

  Dave wound down his window, wet air came in, cold city air, on it the faint sound of music,
voices from somewhere. He tapped ash off the cigarette, had a last draw, sent the butt arching across the street to die in the gutter, wound up the window.

  ‘I can appreciate the way you feel,’ he said. ‘Things we’d all like to step out of, shut the door.’

  ‘I’ve stepped out,’ I said. ‘The door’s shut.’

  Dave turned his head and looked at me, the first real look. ‘No, Jack,’ he said. ‘That’s not possible now. They know you. Know your friends, your sister. Know you talked to Meryl. Help us see this thing through, find Gary, that’s the best chance you’ve got.’

  I was getting colder all the time. ‘Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck are they? Who’s tapping my phone? How do you know about the Fin Review clipping?’

  ‘Only twelve people inside Black Tide,’ he said, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘Waterproof to fifty fathoms, we thought. One-way valve system, stuff comes in, nothing goes out. What happens with these operations usually, there’s people upstairs want reports every second day, they pass them on, there’s leaks like half-time at the football. That’s why the other side’s only about a day behind you. Not Black Tide. No reporting till we were finished, that was the deal. So when we got shut down in ’96, we knew we had a dog inside. Dogs maybe. And we knew the pressure to squash us came from outside.’

  He took out another cigarette, lit it, opened the window a crack.

  ‘They,’ I said. ‘That part of the question. Who?’

  ‘Don’t worry about that part.’

  ‘I don’t even know why you want to find Gary. Why do you want Gary?’

  ‘Gary’s important to Black Tide. You don’t need the detail. It’s better that way.’

  ‘Detail?’ I said. ‘You call knowing who they are fucking detail? I’m not going on any expedition with you. I’m not a concerned citizen. I’m just the bystander. More or less innocent. And I thought you said Black Tide was shut down?’