I read, watched television, ate and used the knee exerciser. Hilde didn’t come home; she doesn’t always. I took the analgesics again and read Hemingway in the wee small hours. Tough luck, Scott, tough luck, Ernest. I thought about the Singer case and decided I’d handled it all wrong. I should have tried to find out in detail what sort of man Singer was; what he thought, what he did hour by hour. Then I might have been able to judge what he did to himself or what was done to him. But it was too late for that and the water was muddled. My present strategy was a Judas goat approach. I didn’t like it, but it was all there was. Of course I could pull out altogether, declare a no-contest, but that wasn’t on; I’d done it before and it left me with that feeling of being unable to recall a fact, but magnified a thousand times and intolerable.
Hilde came home in the morning and I sent her out to do a little shopping for me. It took her most of the morning and when she got back she poured herself a hefty glass of wine, a rare thing for her to do before six.
‘Some men are watching the house,’ she said.
‘That’d be right. What do they look like?’
‘I only caught a glimpse-moustaches and longish hair.’ She touched the back of the collar of the shirt she was wearing. She had her hair up in a tight bun.
‘That’s okay,’ I said. ‘They’re cops. It’s the ones with the short hair and suits you have to worry about.’
She sniffed and drank some wine. I had a glass with her just to be companionable. I flexed the knee and thought it felt a bit firmer.
‘What’s happening, Cliff? Is it dangerous?
‘Moderately. I’ll take you out for a sauerbraten when it’s all over.’
‘I don’t like sauerbraten.’
The second team of cops came on duty in the early evening; Frank had been better than his word. I rang Roger Wallace.
‘Freddy’s keeping it rural. He might be sighting in rifles, of course. One of his boys went into town and stomped around the beaches for a bit.’
‘Is he back yet?’
‘No.’
‘I think there’ll be action when he gets back. Let me know.’
He called back an hour later. ‘Moving,’ he said. ‘Freddy and three others, two cars, heading for town.’
‘Thanks, Roger. Send me the bill.’
Hilde had gone out to a film. She phoned as I’d asked and said she thought there were at least two suspicious-looking cars parked near the house. I asked her what film she was going to.
‘Gallipoli.’
‘My grandfather was there.’
‘On which side?’ she asked.
I got out the knee brace that Hilde had brought that morning. It was a revolting object with straps, flesh-coloured plastic and padding. It nauseated me to look at it, which was part of the idea. I slit the padding and tucked the little cylinder away, positioned so that I could get at the switch and look as if I was scratching my knee. The brace stiffened the knee and hurt, but all great planners have their problems. Think of Napoleon and his piles.
There was no point in putting it off. I left the house and limped along the street, trying to keep the end of the stick out of the dog shit. I made it to the Toxteth and had a beer in the half-empty bar. The television was on with a news report that a certain known criminal had been shot and killed by a certain known policeman. Everyone seemed to know everyone else- the crim’s brother knew the copper who knew the crim’s girlfriend.
‘LA again?’ the barman asked.
‘Please.’
‘What’d you do to your leg?’
I thought of saying, ‘A ski-ing accident’, and then I saw my face in the mirror behind the bar. The two grooves that ran down beside my nose seemed to be getting deeper and when I squinted to see better the crows’ feet cracked and fissured beside my eyes. It wasn’t a ski-ing face; it was an amateur boxing face, a square-bashing face, a worrying-about-the-prostate face. Hell, I thought. I am putting it off.
The street beside the Toxteth hotel is narrow and dark and leads down to the water. Not a very nice stretch of water. I was halfway down it when the car pulled in a few yards ahead of me. A man jumped out of the back seat and went behind me; the driver moved in to block me off. He had a good-sized gun in his hand; it was a bad light for shooting but the range was perfect. Unless I did a Fosdick flop over the car, they had me.
‘Get in the car, Hardy,’ Bob said.
He’d wanted to fight me way back on day one, and now he looked a little embarrassed to be holding a gun on a crippled man. He shoved it in his pocket and flexed a couple of muscles instead.
‘How’s Sharon?’ I said.
He jerked his thumb rudely and I moved towards the car, which was a Commodore, not as roomy for my leg as the Caddy. I leaned on the stick while the second man opened the back door. He gave me a little push and relieved me of the stick as I stumbled in. He swung the stick and broke it on a brick pillar; the broken end snapped up and hit him in the face. I laughed and he swore. We weren’t off to a good start, him and me.
He got in beside me, still swearing, and the gunman got behind the wheel.
‘Where are we going?’ I said.
My companion in the back told me to shut up. He had bad body odour and I was already sweating with fear. If we went very far, the back seat would smell like a truckie’s crotch.
We rolled sedately down to the water and took the back way to Bridge Road. Bob picked up speed a bit around Wentworth Park and swung out fast into Wattle Street. He was driving over the speed limit, but not fast enough to raise a five-point alarm. I knocked my knee on one of the turns. Bob kept one eye on the rear vision mirror.
I reviewed my plan as he did his stuff and the atmosphere in the back of the car got richer. People like Ward, Singer and McLeary inhabit a world of their own. It has its own society and rules, meeting places and established procedures. You don’t find out anything about it by hanging around the edges; you have to dive right into the middle of the steaming pile. I planned to accuse McLeary of killing Singer; if he took it seriously, that would mean something. Ward was already taking it seriously; the trick was to stay alive and to work out what the reactions meant. I had the cops and the bleeper as a safety net. It was crude, but so was Jack Dempsey’s left hook.
The hard part was the fear. One part of me rejected all this and wanted escape via a magic lantern and three wishes. That part said, To hell with Ward and McLeary and all the other scum that floats in the city. This was the part that wondered why I didn’t have the things other men had-degrees, a wife, superannuation. Against that was the vanity I’d told Ann Winter about, the strong fear of showing fear. And I couldn’t really see myself as Clifford Hardy, MA, father of two and due for his long-service leave. I didn’t need it. The fear was uncomfortable, but it suited me better to fight it than to give in to it.
The Commodore went faster in Chippendale as we headed up towards Anzac Parade. Bob flicked the wheel and we suddenly shot left down a one-way street. He went down a lane, turned and went back across Cleveland Street through a red light. He did another quick series of turns and I could see the lights of the Parade up ahead of us and the dark blankness of Moore Park off to the right.
‘Lose ‘em?’ the smelly one asked.
Bob nodded and lit the cigarette he’d been carrying in his mouth the whole time.
That was the first thing to go wrong.