Parked at the top of the hill, last-quarter moon and high scudding cloud, we could see the chook farm Gary loved. Painter’s little chook farm, place of memory, girl of memory.
Not so little. Not a farm either. A battery operation: huge barn that would house the living egg machines, another barn about a third the size, a small building, probably the office. About two hundred metres from the chicken barn, up a track, a small house sat on a level patch of hillside.
We had driven past it, gone a long way, beyond earshot, waited, come back, driven beyond hearing again, turned, crept back, barely twenty kilometres an hour.
‘A SWAT team is the way you’d do this,’ said Dave, ducking his head to light a cigarette, left and down below the dashboard.
He came up, cigarette shielded in his palms like a sixties schoolboy. ‘Intelligent SWAT team. But since that’s a contradiction in terms, you’d end up with a dead Gary. You always do. They might as well write you a guarantee the bloke’d be dead.’
He was matter-of-fact. We could have been studying the pictures on the illuminated menu in a McDonald’s drive-through for all the excitement he was showing.
I returned to the point where I’d fallen asleep. ‘What was the reason given for shutting Black Tide down?’
Dave looked at me, blinked, as if he’d forgotten all about the subject. ‘Oh. Jeopardising success of a major national operation in progress. Endangering lives of undercover operatives. Bullshit. Major national operation no-one knows anything about. The ghost ship of criminal operations. The phantom. All bullshit.’
‘That’s some nerve you touched.’
‘Very powerful reflex action.’ He sighed. ‘Right from the top. Cabinet-level reflex.’
‘Levesque?’
‘Gary’ll tell us that. That’s why we went after Gary.’
Another sigh. ‘Anyhow, the shut-down, that’s why we knew it was Gary, our interest in him. And we really knew bugger all about him.’
‘But you didn’t give up. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘That’s right,’ Dave said. ‘We just waited. When the chance came, we fired up Black Tide again, a different kind of Black Tide this time, not official, but not without friends. And we went for Gary. The first time, we were playing it by the book, we’d probably never have got to him. This time, dog and goanna rules. Rolled the prick, rolled and boned him. In Thailand, loaded him with half a kilo of smack, he’s looking down the barrel at twenty years, thirty bodies in a four-man cell, rats crawling up his arse. Canetti did the job, did a great job. He’s got the lingo, spent time in Thailand, knows the locals. Then he had two illuminating hours with Gary, a scared Gary, videoing his memoirs. Couldn’t take more time. Gary was just there on a stopover. But Canetti got plenty to start with. The rest, that’s a few days’ work, going over the details. But first we wanted Gary back in the country, everything as usual, no suspicions aroused that we’d rolled him.’
‘What did Gary tell Canetti in Bangkok?’
Dave ducked his head below the dashboard, took a deep drag, came up, expelled smoke. ‘That’s the fucking problem. We don’t know. Canetti rang from Bangkok, he’s highly excited, he says, wait till you see this, you’ll cream your jeans, it’ll hang Mr S. That’s all he said.’
‘Mr S?’
‘Levesque. Mr Smartarse.’
‘How did Gary get back here?’
‘Everything had to be normal. Gary flew on to Melbourne, direct. He was coming from Europe. Because Canetti’s got his testimony on video, Gary’s with us now. Doesn’t behave, he’s on “Australia’s Funniest Home Videos”. And he can’t go to his bosses, say: “Sorry, I told people about you cause I didn’t want to go to jail in Bangkok for twenty years.’’ They’d kill him on the spot.’
I was starting to understand.
‘There was a risk,’ said Dave. ‘What if he gets straight off the plane, onto another one, he’s gone, out of the country, vanished? But we knew he didn’t have a cash stash anywhere, not enough put away to hide out in Ethiopia, Bangladesh. Anyway, nothing like that happens. He gets the Audi, drives home. We pulled our bloke off him then, too risky otherwise. A third party spots her, it’s over, Gary’s dead, we’ve got a video of a dead man telling stories. Maybe we shouldn’t even have tailed him home, who the fuck knows. Looking back, why the hell did we? Either Canetti had him by the balls or he didn’t.’
He glanced at me, ducked his head, drew on the Camel. ‘Anyway, that’s the last we saw of him.’
‘And Canetti?’
‘We didn’t want him to fly with Gary. Too risky also. He came back on the next flight. We know he was on the plane, know he got off. That’s all we know. That’s when the looking for them both started.’
‘He wasn’t met?’
Dave looked at me, scratched the dense moustache with the index finger of his left hand. ‘Meet him? Canetti was the only cleanskin we had. You didn’t go near Canetti. Nobody knew Canetti except three of us. We waited for Canetti to finish the Gary interrogation and call us.’
He picked up his cigarettes, weighed the packet, looked at me again.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that was Black Tide. Started with twelve. And tonight Black Tide’s more or less me and you, Jack.’
‘I don’t recall being asked to join,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘No. Me neither.’
We sat in silence for a while.
‘What we’ll do,’ said Dave, ‘we’ll just freewheel down there, lights out, pray some pointy in a truck doesn’t come along. Stop around the corner, walk back, up round the side to the house.’
‘Dogs,’ I said. ‘Looks like a place with dogs.’ In an instant, the adrenaline was running again, I wasn’t feeling tired and old, wasn’t feeling scared. It occurred to me that this was probably a bad thing.
‘Dogs we can handle. A few dogs.’ He opened the glovebox and took out a flat foil-wrapped package, the size of a large bar of chocolate.
‘What I’m going to do here,’ Dave said, ‘is try to bluff the boy out. Had a bit of success with this. Which means fuckall. Still, avoids some prick shooting him, shooting other people, possibly innocent people. Doesn’t work, we’ve got a problem. But. Same problem if there’s two of you or fifty-two testosterone-crazed arseheads with guns. Important thing is Gary alive.’
I said, ‘What do I do?’
He touched my arm, the big fingers. ‘Jack, only thing is Gary alive. Gary dead is everything gone. Black Tide one and two finished, total waste of time, bent bastards win. Again.’
‘I do what?’
‘Put the light on him, get the cuffs on. You’re the cuffman. Apart from that, nothing. You know his old man. It might help. The bluff fails, we creep away, try something else. What, I can’t think at the moment. Might come to me.’
He coughed. ‘Also might not.’
‘The bluff?’
‘Just a bluff. Pray the phone’s on. Pray the fucking mobile network’s got this part of pointyland covered. They say it has.’
He was looking into the valley, at the dark buildings. ‘Dean Canetti,’ he said. ‘Ordinary bloke, not big, more guts than John Wayne. If John Wayne was real.’
I didn’t owe anything to this man, didn’t even know his surname. Far from it. It was courtesy of him that I had gone so far up the sewage creek in an unsuitable vessel. He had managed to get me into the canoe and then to convince me that disembarkation was not an option.
He deserved nothing. But he was a man doing the right thing, a brave man. I felt a warmth towards him.
Dave raised his elbows, flexed his shoulders. ‘Well, let’s see how it goes.’
‘Shouldn’t I be armed? He’s killed three people if I read this thing right.’
He released the handbrake. We began to move. ‘One man with a gun’s plenty,’ he said. ‘You might get excited.’