It was Rushcutters Bay; the water slapped against the pier and the boats and it was expensive water. Expensive to live near and very expensive to sail on. It was cheap to swim in, but the expensive boats’ fuel and wastes had fixed it so no-one would want to swim there. I thought of swimming as they herded me through a concrete car park into a lift that ran up into the body of a big apartment block. It was hard going without the stick and with the knee brace and I lurched and grabbed at things to steady myself. One-legged swimming would be no fun, especially with my hands tied. The guy who had a raw streak on his face where the broken stick had hit him laughed when I fell in the lift. I heaved myself up and wondered whether an off-balance punch into the middle of his face would be worth what I’d get in return. I decided it wouldn’t.
We stepped out onto thick carpet and walked between creamy walls with tasteful paintings economically spaced. At suite twelve Bob knocked and brushed down his clothes. Sharon opened the door. She was wearing a pink jump suit, was stilted up on four-inch-heeled gold sandals and looked about sixteen, just. She inclined her head, her platinum hair bounced and my escorts bustled me down a short parqueted passage into a room with thicker carpet than the hallway and worse paintings.
A man was sitting at a table in the middle of the room. The table was covered with take-away food-cartons of chicken, two medium-sized pizzas, Lebanese bread and meats and chipped potatoes. He was eating with his fingers, stuffing the food in and wiping his hands with a paper napkin. He was bulky, built square and unmistakably the man who had parked his cadillac outside Marion Singer’s apartment building.
‘Hello, Mac’ I said.
There was a nervous hiss of breath from Bob. Smelly sucked his teeth and went our of the room.
‘Sit,’ Mac said. ‘Drink?’ He was drinking beer from a pewter mug but there was a bar in the corner of the room under a painting of horses.
‘Scotch.’
Mac combined more chewing with a nod and Sharon, who wasn’t legally old enough to sniff the stuff, made the drink. She had a drink herself, something greenish. Bob wasn’t invited to sit or drink, but he didn’t seem to mind. I took the drink and made a close study of my host.
He was about five foot six, I guessed, and must have weighed sixteen stone. Some of the weight was in his belly, but most of it was meat and muscle packed high up on his chest, around his shoulders and into his thick neck. He had small blue eyes, a very high colour and silver hair brushed back. He had on a white business shirt with a light line in it, the dark trousers of an eight-hundred-dollar suit and black oxfords with a high gloss. He had no jewellery, no tie; white hair sprung out at the neck of the shirt. He looked about sixty and good for twenty more years if his eating habits changed.
‘Why are you telling lies about me?’ His voice was fiat and neutral. He shook his head and spoke again before I could. ‘Nothing but lies.’ He gave the ‘nothing’ a touch of ‘nothink’- a Christian Brothers boy, maybe.
I drank some of the scotch and rubbed my knee; my fingers slid over that disgusting plastic. ‘I’m like that. I tell lies to find out the truth.’
Mac up-ended his pewter pot and held it out to Sharon, who was sipping her drink. I finished the scotch and stuck my glass out too.
‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ Mac said. ‘And I’m not giving you any more free drinks.’ Sharon ignored me and took the pewter mug across to the bar, where she poured half a bottle of Cooper’s ale into it. Mac ate some chips and took a big scoop of the hoummos up with a shovel of bread.
‘I’m trying to find out what happened to John Singer.’
‘He drowned.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Two years ago.’
‘Maybe.’
He looked interested but not fascinated; his priorities at the moment seemed to be the food, the beer, Sharon and me. When she brought the beer over, she bent over and let him see down the front of her suit. I saw a bit too. I paired them mentally- with him on top you’d see her feet and forehead sticking out at either end. The idea amused me.
‘I wouldn’t smile if I was you, shithead,’ Mac said. He took a big pull on the beer. ‘Why’re you going around saying Freddy Ward killed Singer and putting it on me?’
‘Oh, that. I was just trying to stir things up. Actually, I think you probably killed him.’
‘I thought you were a bullshitter when I first heard about you and now I know. Why would I kill John?’
‘Ward’s moving shop. With Singer gone, you’d control the game.’
He smiled around a big mouthful of pizza. I remembered that I was supposed to be trying to gauge his reactions, but it was hard with his face full of food. Also, I had the feeling that he was only half paying attention, that he was off on a tangent of some sort.
‘Just like that?’ he said.
‘Well, you’d have to work things out with Marion.’
That ruffled him. His hand jerked and he almost spilled beer on his pants. ‘You don’t know her!’ he spluttered. ‘It’s taken me…’ He broke off and pushed his lower lip out under the upper in a ‘what the hell’ gesture. ‘Well, that’s no bloody business of yours. I didn’t kill Singer. I don’t think anyone killed him. There’s nothink in it.’
‘Why did you have me picked up, then?’ I tried to put some aggression into the question, but I wasn’t feeling at all aggressive. The session was very unsatisfactory. I was getting no change out of McLeary and all my experiment had got me so far was a broken walking stick.
I asked the question again, which only made me sound as nervous as I felt. I sneaked a look at Bob; he was leaning back against the wall, but not looking as bored as he should have been. Neither was Sharon; a little bit of tongue about the same colour as her suit was showing between her small, white teeth and her eyes were wide open and keen, as if she was watching something good on TV. Only Mac looked appropriately bored, and that could have been because he’d finished eating. He had a toothpick out and was excavating and sucking down the results. His baby blues were half closed and he seemed to be thinking. He dropped the toothpick into the remains of the hoummos and asked Sharon for a cigar. She got one from somewhere near the bar, brought it across and he lit it himself with a Dunhill lighter. He seemed to have forgotten my question. I felt very nervous and leaned forward to scratch my knee.
‘Why do you do that?’ Mac asked.
‘It hurts.’
‘Let’s see it.’
I didn’t move. Bob came up and touched me on the unbandaged ear with something hard and warm. It was the gun, which he must have been wearing somewhere nice and close to his armpit.
‘Do you want him to pull his pants leg up, Mac, or should he drop them?’
Sharon sniggered and Mac gave a slight smile.
‘Up,’ he said. ‘Don’t want to excite Sharon too early in the night.’
The trousers weren’t tight. I rolled the leg up past the knee to show the brace. In that comfortable atmosphere, composed of the food smells and the rich aroma of Mac’s cigar, the device looked hideous. The plastic shone pink with a blue tint, like the skin of freshly cleaned rabbit. It was a reminder that flesh could be torn and bones broken.
Mac puffed out a billow of smoke. ‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘Broken?’
I rolled the cloth back down. The cylinder was still inside the padding, but there didn’t seem to be much point in sounding the alarm. I still didn’t know what was going on in Mac’s mind and for all I knew the cops could still have been circling the Nimrod Theatre. I could throw my glass and try for Bob’s gun and the odds on that coming good were about the same as for Braddock beating Louis. It looked as if my only hope lay in some good talking. My tongue felt stiff and only half-linked to a sluggish brain.
‘It’s twisted,’ I said. ‘This guy in Bronte kicked me, and your offsider here broke my stick. Do you know Freddy Ward’s heavy named Rex?’
‘I know him,’ Mac said.
‘He’s tougher than this bloke and I took him.’
‘How was your leg then?’ Bob asked.
‘I’ll look out for you when the leg gets better.’
It was thin stuff and not making any impression. The sweat of fear jumped out on me when I realised what an empty sound my last words had had. There was no response to them. The knee wasn’t going to get better. Their faces wore the curious, dispassionate look of the judges at the Nuremberg trials. Wheels were in motion, inexorably.
Sharon spoke for the first time in a tinny, sick little voice. ‘She might like that, the knee.’ What she said made no sense to me, so I ignored it.
‘I don’t understand why you picked me up,’ I said.
Mac waved his cigar hand expansively. ‘You will, mate. Forget about Singer and all that. There’s someone who wants to see you again.’
A door off to the right opened and Smelly came in with some sticking plaster across his face. He held the door wide and a smallish, dark figure glided into the room-Mary Mahoud.