by Jon Cleary
Fat chance, he had thought but didn't voice it. Unless Kunishima offered to pay the ransom, then reneged on it once he was turned over to them. Then, he knew, his life wouldn't be worth ten cents. He trembled at the thought and almost wet himself.
He began to wonder where he was being held. Obviously somewhere in the bush; the outside silence told him that. Occasionally the silence would be broken by the squawk of parrots, something one didn't hear in the apartment at Circular Quay; once he thought he heard a cow or a bull bellow, but he wasn't sure. He was not and never had been a bush person; Centennial Park was his idea of the Outback. He was not interested in conservation nor in the welfare of endangered species. Once, when approached for a donation, he had asked an animal rights lover if she felt deprived, materially and emotionally, because there were no more brontosauruses. He had been shocked when she broke his nose with her flailed backpack. It had cost two thousand dollars to repair the damaged nose and from then on he had steered clear of anyone remotely connected with the bush.
The door opened, letting in some daylight from the hallway. Corey Briskin, anonymous inside the blue hood, came in. “You wanna go to the dunny?”
“I could do with another leak.”
“You got a weak bladder or something? This is the second time in an hour.”
“I'm scared of you lot. You'd be pissing, too, if you were in my place.”
“Relax, sport.” Corey undid the straps. “We're not gunna do you. What would you be worth dead?”
Magee didn't know whether it was the relaxed attitude of this kidnapper or whether it was just that they were having a conversation, of sorts; all at once he felt less scared. “Nothing. I think you're going to find out I'm not worth much more alive.”
Corey chuckled inside the hood. “Wrong thing to say, sport. Okay, on your feet. No funny stuff or I'll have to clock you.” He held up a bunched fist. For the first time Magee noticed the tattoo on the back of the hand: a woman's lips opened in a smile, the teeth yellowed by the hand's tan. “I'm not squeamish about it.”
“I can believe it,” said Magee and managed to make it sound complimentary.
Corey led him down a short hallway to the bathroom. On the way Magee remarked that the house seemed sparsely furnished; so this wasn't where they lived permanently. Corey said, “When you're wearing a dress, do you sit down to pee?”
“Till I was brought here, I'd never had to pee when I was in a dress.” He lifted the front of the dress and relieved himself.
“You're not a poof. What makes you go in for that sorta thing?”
“I dunno. Like you say, I'm not a poof. I don't even think I'm weird. It's just—I dunno.” He shook the dress back into place, then looked down at it. “You got something you can lend me, I can change into? If Kunishima comes up with the ransom money, I don't want to be turned over to them in this.”
Corey smiled inside the hood. “That'd be something in the Financial Review, wouldn't it?”
Magee remembered reading once about the relationship that had grown between kidnappers and kidnappees in the terrorist days in Beirut. He had been in London then and there had been a Lebanese working in the same office whose father had been kidnapped and killed. So there could be a relationship verging on friendship, yet it could still end in murder.
He couldn't imagine himself ever becoming friends with this lot, but the atmosphere had certainly improved since this morning. Maybe it was just this one guy; the other one, who had sounded younger, was another case altogether. Mum had sounded as cold and hard as any woman could get to be; and he had known a few in his time. The younger woman (these guys' sister?) had sounded as if she might have a sense of humour. The atmosphere might improve, but he was kidding himself if he thought they would be friendly. With him, who had never encouraged friendships.
They went back to the room. “Do you have to tie me up?”
“Sport, we're in business. Do you trust people in business?” He hadn't, but he wasn't going to say so. “Most of the time, yes.”
“Not here, sport. Sorry. Here—” Corey had gone to an old-fashioned wardrobe, taken out a pair of jeans and an old wrinkled football jersey—“get outa that dress.”
Magee pulled on the jersey and jeans. “South Sydney?”
“My old man played for them years ago. Don't get any ideas about trying to trace us. A thousand guys played for Souths. You follow league?”
“No, I'm not a football fan. I'm not sports-minded.”
“How come you know that's a South's jersey?”
“I-Saw did some research for the lawyers when they were trying to wind up Souths.” The club had been dropped by the league's administrators and there had been huge demonstrations by the club's supporters. He had not understood the supporters' anger, but he was sure his parents would have. His father, though not a rugby league fan, would have been writing letters to the newspapers decrying the death of real sport. “I wish you'd believe me. I-Saw is broke. Skint. If you hadn't grabbed me, I'd be on the dole next week.”
“Errol—” Corey was tolerant, like a master to a pupil. He began to tie Magee up again. “I think you're having us on. Don't stretch your luck. If that bank of yours don't come good, you're in the shit, sport. There. Comfy?”
“Up yours,” said Magee, suddenly brave out of desperation and despair.
Corey chuckled behind the hood. “That used to be South's old motto.”
He went out, closing the door again. Gloom settled on Magee and the room.
Out in the kitchen Corey took off his hood. “Mum, what we gunna do with him if, like he says, there's no money?”
Shirlee Briskin was making corned-beef-and-salad sandwiches. She had once worked in a delicatessen, when Clyde had been doing time again, and she made sandwiches with professional skill. “If he gives us trouble, we'll have to get rid of him.”
Corey, occasionally, had trouble accepting his mother's approach. He had dug the pit in the timber up behind the house and buried his father after his mother had poisoned him. He had never had any time for his father, but he would never have killed him. He might have beaten him up and told him to get lost, but he would never have murdered him, certainly not with arsenic fed to him over two days. The police had never come near them, because the family had never reported Clyde's disappearance. Some of the family's friends had asked what had happened to Clyde and they had been told that he, you know what a bastard he was, had gone off with another woman and Shirlee, dry-eyed, was glad to see him go. One or two of the women friends had nodded and said, good riddance.
He remembered the agony, spread over two days, in which his father had died. It had been messy, with vomiting and diarrhoea, but his mother had attended to all that, telling his father he must have eaten something and should be more careful. Clyde had wanted to go to a doctor, but Shirlee had said, no, she'd get the doctor to come to him. The doctor, because he wasn't called, never had.
When Clyde was dead, Shirlee had cleaned him up, wrapped him in his best suit, and told Corey to go up into the timber and dig the grave. Pheeny, only sixteen then, had helped him, silent and puzzled, asking no questions, just doing what their mother ordered. Then they had carried the body up to the grave and dumped it in it. Their mother had followed them, lugging a suitcase and with other of Clyde's clothes slung over one arm.
“Bury them with him,” she had said. “I'm gunna tell people he's left us and run off with some woman. You keep your traps shut, understand?”
“What we gunna tell Darlene?” Corey had asked.
Darlene had not come down to the house that weekend. She, like Corey, had no time for their father, but Corey doubted she would have stayed in the house while their mother killed him.
“We tell her the truth. She'll understand.” Then Shirlee had looked down at the body lying crumpled at the bottom of the pit. “I dunno why I ever married him.”
“You had us,” said Corey defensively.
She turned her head towards him and Pheeny, but in the
darkness he couldn't see her face. “Yeah. I suppose I owe him that.”
“Thanks,” Corey had said sourly and walked off down through the timber. “You fill in the hole, Pheeny.”
That had been four years ago. Shirlee had told Darlene the truth about their father's murder, making no excuses, telling it flatly, take it or leave it. Darlene had taken it; Corey had been unable to read her face. She had never talked about it with him or Pheeny and gradually their father had faded from memory, a ghost who never haunted them.
Mum had kept them together ever since. He looked at her now, as domestic as any mother could be, and said, “I'm not gunna be in any killing of that guy in there. I decked that maid of his, I didn't mean to kill her, and I've got that hanging over my head. You wanna get rid of Mr. Magee, you and Pheeny and Darlene can do it. Count me out.”
She arranged the sandwiches neatly on a plate. “Please yourself. How's he behaving himself?”
“Still trying to tell us he's broke. I'm beginning to think if we'd snatched his girlfriend, insteada him, he wouldn't of come good with the money. I think we might of been sold, whatdotheycall it, a pig in a poke.”
“I don't think so,” said Shirlee emphatically. “Chantelle knows where the money is. Here, have a sandwich. You want tea or coffee?”
Corey put two of the sandwiches on a second plate. “I'll feed him.”
Shirlee looked at him shrewdly; sometimes she wondered how much of herself was in her kids. “You're not starting to feel sorry for him, are you?”
“No,” said Corey and wondered if what he felt was regret for his own life.
IV
Malone looked at Clements across the roof of their car.
“You go back to the office, keep digging into Kunishima. I'm going down to the Ritz-Carlton, see if I can have a word with Mrs. Magee.”
“What's she like?”
“I think she'd have saved the Titanic if she'd been there. Controlled, I think is the word.”
“She's all yours, then. Right now I'm in the grip of a controlled woman. I tried to call her at lunchtime, but they said she'd gone out to lunch with Mrs. Malone.”
“They're conspiring against us. No, not us. You. Lisa will be talking to me when I get home about husbands, no names, no pack drill, who lose thousands of dollars on shonky investments.”
“She wouldn't, would she? My friend Lisa?”
Malone grinned. “Don't expect me to defend you, mate.”
Clements gave him the middle finger and Malone, still grinning, went off down Macquarie Street to the Ritz-Carlton. The sunshine was still bright, the passers-by seemingly unworried. Half a dozen of them, strangers to each other, came towards him, all of them identical, water-bottles to their mouths, mobiles to their ears. Nobody, it seemed, could remain unconnected to someone, anyone, for longer than five minutes. I'm getting old, he thought, and felt no regret, just a comfortable smugness.
“Yes,” said the clerk at the Ritz-Carlton, “Mrs. Magee is in. Who shall I say is calling?”
“Detective-Inspector Malone.”
The clerk nodded as if detective-inspectors came to the hotel all week long. He spoke to Caroline Magee on the phone, then gave Malone the room number.
Malone rode up in the lift, sorting out what questions he would ask and finding them a jumble.
Caroline was waiting for him with the door open, smiling like a good hostess. “Inspector, come in. I didn't expect to see you again so soon.”
“You expected to see me again?”
She led him into the room, taking her time. It was not a suite, just a bedroom with a small lounge space that looked out across the Botanic Gardens to the distant harbour heads. Malone could only guess at the price: five hundred dollars a night? Caroline Magee, it seemed, was not short of a quid or two.
“Naturally,” she said at last as she sat down and motioned him to take a seat. “Isn't that the way the police work? Always coming back?”
“It's the only way we know. Persistence.”
“Plod, plod, plod?”
“We try to be a little more light-footed than that. You've had experience of the police before this?”
“No-o.” He noticed the slight hesitation; then she went on, “Only for traffic offences. In the UK.”
“Never out at Coonabarabran?” he asked with a smile.
She returned the smile. “Never. I was just a young girl then, never in trouble.”
Then he pitched a beanball: “When Errol asked you to come out here, did he tell you he had something like forty million dollars salted away somewhere?”
She didn't duck; nor looked surprised. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Oh, we have it on good authority. He stole it.”
“The Kunishima Bank? Well, well.” She rolled her eyes, only slightly, at her ex-husband's rash cheek. “Forty million?”
“You knew nothing about his plans?”
“Plans?”
“He knew I-Saw was going down the gurgler, so he must've been preparing for it for quite a while. You don't grab forty million just like that—” He snapped his fingers. “Not unless you're holding up a bank or one of the armoured-car companies that service banks. What plans were you going to discuss with him, if he was planning to do a bunk?”
“Am I under suspicion or something?” She gathered chill round her like a wrap.
“What makes you think that, Mrs. Magee?”
She gave him another smile, this time no more than a dental inspection. “All right, you are just covering every possibility. No, Errol told me nothing about stealing money or doing a bunk anywhere. I thought I was coming out here to help him salvage something from the wreckage. All I knew was that everything was in a hell of a mess.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No, but I guessed. Too much optimism, over-expansion. It's an IT disease, Inspector. Dotcom spread quicker than Spanish ‘flu. Or Hong Kong ‘flu or whichever is the latest strain. Everybody wanted in, whether they knew anything about it or not. Errol was—is a salesman, not an IT genius. He sold himself, and the world out there was full of suckers. I-Saw was a good idea, but Errol—and he wasn't the only one—he thought it a Vision, with a capital V. It wasn't. It was just a good idea.”
“Was he a ladies' man?”
“You mean was he charming and sexy? No, he wasn't. But he always had girlfriends, even during our marriage. I told you, he was a salesman.”
“What did you see in him?” She was a remarkably attractive woman the more one looked at her; some women never improve beyond one's first impression of them, but Caroline Magee seemed to gradually show a different facet of herself, like a dancer unwrapping veils. Malone had seen a photo of Magee and he could not help but wonder what she had seen in the small, nondescript man.
She gave him the dental display again. “Have you ever asked your wife what she saw in you?”
He considered that for a long moment; and was surprised at the answer: “No-o. No, I haven't.”
“What women see in a man, outside the obvious—I don't think you can put a finger on it. I thought I saw something in Errol, but I was wrong—and I knew I was wrong in the first twelve months. He was a pain in the arse to be married to. Why do you ask if he was a ladies' man?”
“There's a woman involved in the ransom bid . . . Whom did you work with in London?”
“A firm of stockbrokers, Greenfield and Co.”
“And you resigned to come out and help Errol out of his mess? You must be a bit narked, now. Giving up your job—”
“No, I took extended leave, two months. I knew Errol well enough not to give up a good job on the basis of a promise.”
“What was the promise?”
“A bonus, plus salary, if I helped him work out his problems.”
“A big bonus?”
“Big enough. But it's all just a busted bubble now.”
“You'll stay till we find Errol?”
“Of course. I just hope you find him—” A slig
ht hesitation: “Alive.”
“I hope so, too. We may want to charge him with murder.”
If she was shocked at that, she did not show it. “The maid? I don't think Errol would have done that. He's a coward at heart.”
He couldn't help the barb: “And you still loved him?”
She wore a breastplate: “No, I didn't. I thought I did.”
He looked around the room, then back at her. “You'll be staying on here?”
“Only till the end of the week.” The smile this time was friendlier. “I had hoped to stay in Errol's apartment. But I don't think Miss Doolan would agree to that. We have shares, as it were, in Errol, but I don't think we're partners.”
The smile widened, the chill gone now, and he found himself liking her.
“You'll go back to England?”
“Of course.”
“You don't think this is the Lucky Country?”
“Of course it is. Lucky it has prospered as much as it has, considering the idiots who run it.”
“You've become a Pommy.”
“No, just someone far enough away to get the big picture. Or the capital B, capital P, Big Picture. I'm long-sighted, I take the long view.”
“So do I. I stay at home and try to convert the ones who don't see beyond next week or the next election.”
“How much success do you have?”
“Very little. But I'm Irish, we're used to banging our heads against the wall.” He stood up. “Will you wait till we've found Errol?”
She looked at him, a half-smile now. “I don't love him, Inspector. But I'm not heartless.”
“Sorry. When you leave the hotel, where will we find you? Back at Coonabarabran?”
“No, that's a long way behind me.”
“No folks? Parents or siblings?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
“It's our nature, otherwise we'd never get any answers.”
“I have a brother, but I've lost touch with him. There's nothing to keep me here.”
“Except Errol.”
