Then Barrie Barry started to cry. Not loudly. Just small, short, stabbing sobs into the hands he’d rested his face in. I patted him softly on the back.
He recovered himself.
‘They’d found it in the early stages of digging the ventilation shaft. Surprisingly well preserved. The worker told me to keep it safe. That it contained something powerful enough to enable the tunnel naysayers to call a halt to the project, or at least delay it for a substantial period of time.’
‘What was inside?’
He didn’t hear me. He was off and away with his monologue — an unpunctuated, sincere confession, which he had to get out in one hit.
‘I panicked,’ continued Barrie Barry. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I brought it to Father Dillon. He hid it. He told me where he’d put it. But word was getting around. That something had been retrieved from the soil at Gibbon Street. Something big enough and profound enough to halt the tunnels. It would gain the attention of the entire country. Maybe the world. Then, when Father Dill was ... was murdered ... I went and got the box. I knew where he’d put it. I knew it was important. I knew what I had to do. I couldn’t let it get into the wrong hands. It was a question of faith ... O God. ‘
He broke down again.
We were attracting some attention in the gardens with all his sobbing. I had the distinct feeling we were being watched.
He calmed down again, and went on. ‘I figured if I could secure it safely until the tunnels were finished, then we could reveal it to the world. It would be too late for them to use the box for their own selfish reasons. I have been threatened. I am afraid for my life. I am just a humble council engineer —’
I grabbed his shoulder before he could cry once more.
‘Barrie. Barry. I need you to listen to me very carefully or I can’t help you. What is in the box, and where is it?’
I heard the City Hall clock dong away in the near-distance. It was midday. Between the twelve dongs Barrie Barry told me about the miracle of Gibbon Street. He told me where he’d stashed the box. He told me if I met him at his office later that evening he would take me to it and show me the contents. He walked back alone to the skillet.
My mobile rang. It was Jack.
‘Hello, son.’
‘Hello, Dad.’
‘What’s new?’
‘I need you to get on to Twitter, Dad.’
‘Why is that, son?’
‘Because your friend is driving me nuts with the cryptic quotes.’
‘For whom the bell tolls? What’s the latest?’
“‘Nice spot on the grass with your little bald friend.’”
‘No, no, son. What’s the latest twitch?’
‘Tweet, Dad. And that was it.’
‘What?’
“‘Nice spot on the grass with your little bald friend.” Then, “As the clock strikes midday, let the madness begin.” Then, “Bye bye, Barrie Barry Barrey Barry Barrie Barrey.” Dad? Dad? You there, Dad?’
~ * ~
9
Thank goodness for Tex Gallon. Tex Gallon gave me comfort. Tex Gallon gave me shelter. Tex Gallon also knocked me out with his horse.
To know Tex Gallon was to love him. No, he was not some whisky-soaked country and western hack who played out his life in remote Australian RSL halls singing songs about other whisky-soaked hacks who cried into their bourbon in remote RSL halls pining the loss of a woman, a dog, a horse, a ute, whatever. No, Tex Gallon was the city hall reporter for The Courier-Mail and I’d met him a year ago at the funeral of my old friend Westchester Zim. And yes, Texaco Gallon was his real name. His father, a one-time oil rigger in the States, had named him after an oil can.
Tex lived in Brisbane, but he had a property on the Queensland-New South Wales border, and some time ago he’d invited me there for some R and R and a chinwag about journalism and police. Really, he just needed someone to give him a hand cutting back the noxious weeds on his little ponderosa. It was just me and Tex in the bush. For three days, and in something of an alcohol-related stupor, we told stories around an open fire, and played games with sharp hunting knives, and lassoed cattle (at least I think they were cattle, groggy as I was) and plaited his horse Bingo’s mane. Surprisingly for a big man, Tex could fashion a very delicate plait. He rarely went anywhere without Bingo. Sometimes he stabled Bingo in his house in inner-city Brisbane. Tex wasn’t married, and he didn’t mind the smell of horse manure, the two necessary qualities a cowboy has to have if he’s stabling a horse in his city pad.
On the afternoon Jack phoned me to say I was being spied on in the Roma Street Parkland by a person or persons unknown, I didn’t know what to do. I rushed towards King George Square, noticed the statue of King George V astride his horse, and thought of Bingo. I went straight into City Hall and asked an attendant for the press room. As I walked down a long, dark corridor I could hear honky-tonk music. It had to be Tex. And sure enough, there he was squeezed inside the impossibly small closet of a room, leaning back in his chair, his briar and teal-coloured Buckaroo boots up on the desk.
‘Hey, pardner!’ he hollered. Sometimes, it has to be said, Tex slipped into stereotype. ‘You look like you just found a rattlesnake in your rhododendrons. What’s up?’
I spent the afternoon with Tex, who had nothing better to do. Council wasn’t sitting.
I told him I was very concerned for the welfare of my friend Barrie Barry.
‘Say that again?’ he said.
‘Barrie Barry.’
‘You pulling my cowpoke?’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Council engineer, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll make some calls. First, I want to show you something.’
Tex gave me a guided tour of City Hall. He pointed out the water-damaged walls. We went up to the former library and he gave me a lengthy dissertation on its cracked concrete beams. Then he took me downstairs, through a low doorway and down another set of wooden stairs into a small, gloomy room. He lifted a little hatch set into the floor.
‘Take a look,’ he said, pointing down.
‘Is that water?’ I said.
‘Yes, siree,’ he replied.
It was a metre or so deep. Black as ink. No wonder the place was going down. Thousands of tonnes of copper, glass and sandstone were sitting on a sponge.
‘One last thing,’ Tex said. He took me through a maze of corridors to a storage-room door. He swung the door wide open.
‘Bingo!’ I said.
There she stood — Tex’s horse — polishing off a large bale of sweet hay. The room reeked of the digested product of the hay, which had dropped out of Bingo’s rear end.
‘She’s going to be a star,’ said Tex, patting her flank. ‘She’s in a friend’s daughter’s school Christmas pageant tonight in the main auditorium.’
‘Don’t you have donkeys in Christmas pageants?’ I asked.
‘You know how much it costs to hire a donkey in Brisbane these days?’
No, I didn’t. But Tex did. He knew those sorts of things. Still, I was pleased Bingo was making her debut.
Later, back in the press room, I ran a few things by Tex.
‘Ever heard of a lunatic called Alan Beechnut?’ I asked.
‘Scarborough Tram Society,’ he said immediately. ‘He sends me two dozen emails a week. One was fifteen thousand words long. A treatise on the Brisbane tram. Not long ago he sat outside the mayor’s office eight hours a day, five days a week, for a fortnight, dressed as an old-fashioned tram conductor. A silent protest. I couldn’t write about it. Too pathetic. Editor’s sick of Beechnut too. He gets more emails than me. No tunnels! Ban the car! Bring back the trams! Editor didn’t even run the picture of Beechnut dressed up as a tram in the city a few years ago. Police arrested him in the Mall. Didn’t know where to cuff him, all tucked up inside that cardboard tram of his. Mayor’s worried, too. He’s had his car tyres slashed. Threatening letters. Then there’s the sabotage in the tunnels. And the red lin
es.’
‘What red lines?’
‘Started about eight months ago. This nutball started painting red lines down the centre of a few roads in Paddington and Toowong. Then more appeared in other suburbs. People were waking up to find a bright red line down their street. This kept happening in the dark of night, see? Nobody knew what to make of it. They had a few vague sightings but that was it. But now they’ve worked out what the fruitcake is doing.’
‘What is the fruitcake doing?’
‘Painting the entire old Brisbane trams route map on the roads.’
‘That’s not just peculiar. That’s insane.’
‘Could be Beechnut. Who knows?’
‘Smells like Beechnut,’ I said, knowing a bit about that.
It was getting late. I’d successfully hidden myself from my enemy, had had no more details about tweeting from my son, and was due to meet Barrie Barry out the front of City Hall at eight that evening. So to kill some time I waited with Tex and Bingo backstage at the Christmas concert. It was heart-warming to see the little children dressed as Mary and Jesus and the Three Wise Men. Made me feel Christmassy all of a sudden. Then the children poured onto the stage, and finally Tex and Bingo. Tex was dressed as Santa, and Bingo was wearing some antlers.
‘Break a leg, Tex!’ I said. Which is exactly what he did about a minute later. For while I was peering from backstage at the wondrous spectacle, I was suddenly enveloped in an invisible cloud of very expensive perfume, and before I could turn around, the cold steel of a handgun muzzle was pressed against the back of my neck.
‘Ding-dong,’ a sultry voice whispered.
And I said the first thing that popped into my mind was: ‘Avon calling?’
‘Ding-dong,’ the voice repeated, ‘you’re dead.’
With astonishing agility, I sprang onto the stage from a standing start. The children howled and screamed with joy, thinking I was some demented surprise element to the show. I stepped to the right, then the left, trying to dodge a bullet that never came. I was bamboozled by the lights, the squealing of small children, a Wise Man I had sent flying in my panic. I slipped. And that’s when my forehead connected with Bingo’s bony knee. When I hit the knee, Bingo apparently reared up (I would only find this out later, as I was unconscious, again, before I hit the stage floorboards) and tossed Tex for six, fracturing his ankle. The pageant had become a horror show. I was out onstage. Tex was howling, grabbing his leg above his left Buckaroo boot. Bingo was limping casually amongst the traumatised Jesus, Mary, Joseph and Wise Men. And my killer was somewhere backstage probably having a good laugh.
When I woke up I was lying on the floor in the Red Cross room of City Hall, a bandage on my head. Sitting in a chair beside me was Barrie Barry.
‘That was some performance,’ he said.
‘How’s Tex?’
‘You mean Santa? Santa’s gone to hospital.’
‘How’s Bingo?’
‘You mean the horse? She wandered out into King George Square, couldn’t find any grass, and came back in. We’ve got her temporarily housed in the press room.’
I sat up with difficulty.
Barrie Barry checked his phone and smiled.
‘What is it? I could do with a laugh,’ I said.
‘You’re famous. They’re tweeting you.’
‘What? Who?’
‘The kids in the audience. The staff here. They’re tweeting all their friends. You’ll be a viral smash hit by tomorrow. ‘
‘I see,’ I said. I didn’t know what ‘viral smash hit’ meant, but it sounded nasty. And the ‘s’, when I said ‘see’, came out strangely. I’d chipped a tooth. The ‘s’ came out suspiciously like a little birdie’s tweet. ‘To be honest, Barrie, tomorrow can’t come soon enough.’
It came soon enough for Barrie Barry. In just over a week I would face eternity, strapped inside the bell in the clock tower. But tomorrow, tomorrow, they would find my little bald council engineer friend naked, his body painted completely red, dead atop the unfinished Go Between Bridge. Go figure.
‘First, I need to show you something,’ Barrie Barry said, helping me to my feet.
And that’s when I went back down into the bowels of City Hall, and found God. Oh, and the first stop on my short tram ride to hell.
~ * ~
10
Lashed inside the giant bell in Brisbane’s City Hall clock tower, the timepiece about to be redecorated with my brains, I could smell that cigar smoke getting stronger and stronger.
Yes, I was about to meet my killer. The last person I would see as the old year folded into the new. The last person I would see, full stop.
As the Monte Christo grew more pungent, I thought of Peg and Jack wondering where I was (or not); the laundry tub back home full of party ice and cheap champagne, a few friends, the air a’twitter with fresh starts, with New Year resolutions.
I had a few. I vowed to trust our house cleaners, even if they did constantly lose my remote control and hoover my booze. I vowed not to get knocked unconscious and turn up naked in the back of the Kombi ever again. I vowed to steer clear of public-transport fanatics with shell-shaped ears. I vowed to investigate this Twitter thing now that my own teeth twittered and tweeted, and to send inoffensive messages to my Twitter friends such as, ‘Just had a piece of lemon meringue. Numnumnum.’ I vowed to be a better husband. And to be nicer to God.
Then my femme fatale was standing below the bell, looking up at me.
‘Happy New Year,’ she said, dragging casually on her cigar. The tip glowed a menacing red. Her greeting came out ‘Appy Nu Yee-har.’
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Monte Christo,’ I said. ‘We have met before, haven’t we, Mont?’
‘We ‘ave?’ she said in her strange, Euro-trash accent. She was wearing a black cocktail dress, high heels and diamonds twinkled on her ears. ‘Am not sure eef we ‘ave. Your face, zough, eet rings a bell.’
‘Now that’s a knee-slapper. You’d get along very well with my wife. Hey, why don’t you let me down so we can have a decent chinwag and sort this out. ‘ I was losing circulation to my feet. Half an hour ago they’d been tingling. Now I couldn’t feel them at all. Her elaborate rope work would have won her a badge in the Scouts.
I couldn’t see her face properly from my elevated position. But she looked tiny. Embarrassingly so, having had my physical measure on each of our encounters, though I guess she wasn’t responsible for my forehead connecting with Bingo’s knotty knee.
‘Don’t theenk so,’ she said. ‘Not until I have ze box. No box, no deal.’
‘What is this, a game show?’
‘Is no game,’ she said. ‘Give me ze box.’
‘Then you get me away from big clock donger?’ I said, adopting her truncated Eastern European patter.
‘Box first, zen maybe no donger for you.’
Could I have ever imagined being stuck in a life-threatening situation in a dark clock tower with a pocket-sized assassin saying ‘Maybe no donger for you’ when I first moved to Queensland to retire? I won’t answer that.
‘You know Beechnut?’
‘What nut you talk of?’
‘Alan Beechnut?’
‘Allah who nut?’
‘You decked me in his house.’
‘Ohhhh,’ she giggled. ‘Smelly man. I just following you. I not know smelly man.’
‘Why you want box?’
‘No business of yours.’
‘You kill me for box and it no business of mine? Ding-dong, you are joking. Tell me why you want box first.’
I was getting tired of speaking like a Romanian potato grubber. And I was getting tired of hanging around. Literally.
I had seen the holy box, of course. Oh yes. That poor shmuck Barrie Barry had taken me down into the deep, dark foundations of City Hall, a place he knew like the back of his hand, and removed it from an old brick cavity, where he’d stashed it. The box was pitted with rust. But its contents were remarkably well preserved — a
small diary, a sheaf of letters, a set of wooden rosary beads and the porcelain statue of a small bluebird, all wrapped in a sheet of soft leather. I sat beside that moist, damp, dank subterranean foundation wall beneath Brisbane and read the diary entries and letters by torchlight. What I saw convinced me — oh he of little faith — that Mary MacKillop would become the first Australian saint. South Brisbane. 1870. Not far from Gibbon Street. A boy kicked in the head by a carthorse. And Mother Mary kneeling beside his still warm corpse. I won’t go any further. You’ll read about it in the future. But this was dynamite. This was of major theological and historical importance.
The Toe Tag Quintet Page 24
