‘Hello, Noel. Got a nice girl for me?’
I stepped out of the shadows and came straight up to him. He was wearing a double-breasted tan linen suit, chocolate coloured T-shirt, brown slip-ons. Five-ten, about thirteen stone, flab on him. He barely glanced at me. His round, pasty face was ill-tempered.
‘Fuck off.’
I was close enough now to bring my heel hard down on his shin and stamp on his foot. That got his attention; his head flew back and his shades slipped askew. I hit him harder in the ribs with a short left than I’d intended but his fat softened the punch. It winded him though and he sagged away from me. I grabbed his prominent right ear and let his whole weight pull against it. That brought him upright again, smartish.
‘We can do this a bit more or we can stop,’ I said. ‘Up to you.’
‘What the fuck do you want?’
He was trembling. Scared. Good.
‘A talk. I don’t want your money or your drugs or your girls but I’m very, very serious. I’ve got a silenced Colt on me and you can be face down in the bushes ten seconds from now and no-one the wiser if that’s the way you’d like it.’
‘Shit. I’ll talk to you.’
I released him, took the pistol out and used it to tap his sunglasses straight. I held it by the barrel so he couldn’t see that there was no silencer. But he was beyond such details, sweating into his smart T-shirt and giving off a sour smell I couldn’t identify.
‘We’ll go up to your flat, nice and quietly. With a bit of luck I’ll be off in half an hour or so and all you’ll have to worry about will be a bit of lost skin, some sore ribs and a red ear. The strides’ll need a dry-clean.’
He glanced down at his leg. Blood from where I’d raked his shin had seeped through his trouser leg, turning the tan linen dark brown. He turned a little paler himself. ‘Okay, okay. Fuck, who are you?’
‘No questions from you. Let’s go in.’
He hobbled a bit, leaned to one side, protecting the ribs and rubbed at his ear a couple of times, but I could sense that he was regrouping. He wasn’t fit and didn’t look agile, but the Henderson nastiness was worth a lot of that stuff. I judged that he’d be dangerous as long as he remained conscious. He used a key to unlock the heavy security door and had to produce another key to get us through the grille door at the top of a set of stairs. I was reminded of the security arrangements in Kirribilli and how they’d been of no use to Cy. Anger at that was a help. When he hesitated at the grille door, fumbling for the key on his heavy ring, I reached forward and took a grip on his longish, pale hair. I pressed his head forward until it touched the bars. His sunglasses fell off.
‘You’ve got a lot of keys there, Noel. Pimp keys, eh? I’ll stick them up your nose one by one if you don’t open that fucking gate and get moving.’
Noel’s flat was on the third floor. It was a large space, very light and airy with a wide balcony. Noel was living off the immoral earnings at a pretty high level. The furniture was expensive, over-ornate and there was too much of it. This late in the day the bar was tempting but I stuck to the business in hand. I shoved Noel down into one of his plump armchairs and stood over him as he peeled the blood-soaked trouser leg away from the wound.
‘Let me wash this,’ he said. ‘I could get an infection.’
‘You are an infection. You can wash your whole body later. You might have a few more wounds to take care of if you don’t talk to me.’
The blood flowed again and soaked into his silk sock. He held his foot so it wouldn’t drip on the pale carpet. ‘I said I’d talk to you. What the fuck about?’
‘Your dad.’
‘Haitch? I haven’t seen him in… ‘
‘I have seen him. I know how close you two are. You know where he is, Noel, and you’re going to tell me.’
This was the hard bit. I’d been told that Noel was deeply attached to his father and terrified of him as well. He was scared of me, too, and that had got me this far, but it was a matter of which fear was the greater. I watched his face process the alternatives. The older fear won out. Noel summoned up his small reserve of grit. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ he said.
Someone told me once that obsessions are the strongest things human beings experience-stronger than fear, love, hate, lust. I was being given a chance to put the proposition to the test.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said. ‘Stand up and take off your jacket.’
‘What?’
‘Do it, or I’ll start knocking out your teeth one by one.’
‘What’re you, some kind of queer?’
He was getting braver the way an unimaginative person can. I kicked his lacerated shin. He yelped, stumbled up and shrugged out of his jacket. I took it from him and shoved him hard back down into the chair. His car keys and the remote control locking device were in the left-hand pocket. I took them out and dropped the jacket on the floor. He stared up at me as I juggled the keys in my hand.
‘Unless you tell me where I can find Haitch I’m going to take that flash car of yours and bang it into everything I can find. Pieces’ll fall off and I’ll drive over them. Then I’ll break every bit of glass in the fucking thing and redo the upholstery with my Swiss army knife. Not sure what after that, but I’ll think of something. When I finish with it you’ll have to pay someone to take it away.’
He might not have been able to imagine much, but this got to him. His eyes moistened and he shook his head slowly from side to side.
‘You wouldn’t,’ he whined.
I grinned at him. ‘Revenge for the Rainbow Warrior?
‘What?’
‘Remember the Greenpeace ship that got blown up in Auckland harbour by the French spooks? Remember that, you dumb shit? I’m a dolphin lover. I don’t like the French that much and I don’t like French cars. I’ll do it with pleasure.’ I juggled the keys. ‘Your choice, Noel.’
‘You might fucking do it anyway.’
I had him. That amounted to an admission that he knew where his father was. He just needed playing a little more.
‘No. We’ll go there in the Citroen. You can show me what a great car she is. When I’m sure it’s the right place, you’re on your own and Haitch never knows you put him in.’
He licked his loose lips and his eyes moved around the room. I judged that he was reassuring himself that he was a man of substance, a man with things to protect, his own man. The phone rang and his answering machine picked up the call. Probably more money. He couldn’t afford to sit here protecting someone else, anyone else.
‘OK. Let me listen to my messages and make a few calls, have a drink. Then I’ll take you there.’
‘No calls. No drink.’
‘Fuck you! How the fuck are you going to tell if he’s there or not, smartarse? What about that?’
I thought about it for a split second. All I had to go on was the glimpse of the green Honda and the possible identification of half of the number plate. Haitch could have changed cars, or plates. But I couldn’t let Noel see anything from me but total confidence.
‘I’ll know, Noel,’ I said. ‘Don’t you worry about that. Tell you what, I’ll let you clean up your leg. One good turn deserves another.’
An hour later the Citroen was eating up the kilometres heading west towards Rooty Hill. Noel was an aggressive, inconsiderate driver and I’d several times had to snarl at him to drive like a human being. He was one of those people who shouldn’t drive, the way some shouldn’t drink or play poker machines. No control. He clearly loved the power he thought he had at his command, but it was commanding him. After we’d struck our deal, he’d smoked three or four cigarettes in quick succession, but he didn’t smoke in the car. You don’t shit on the one you love.
I’d forced him to tell me where we were going by the simple strategy of poising my Swiss army knife over the superbly designed bonnet of the car. Truth was, I admired these vehicles myself, but I’d have made like Zorro on the duco if I’d had to. I’d kept an eye on Noel while he cleaned himself up in the bathroom and I’d seen him take something from the cupboard that didn’t have anything to do with his leg. But what the hell? He seemed a little more cheerful for it and when he told me that Haitch was living where he kept his spare Citroens, I was inclined to believe him. If he was still worried about Henderson twigging to who’d fingered him it seemed to be low on the list. Put it down to the pills.
Rooty Hill is a suburb that retains something of the look of a country town. The main street has trendy paving and some of the amenities we can no longer live without, like patisseries and bottle shops, but the corner pub has a peppercorn tree in the side yard just like country pubs did in the old days. The housing is a mixture of good but ugly and not so good and more ugly. Some of the low-grade houses had three and four cars parked in the drive and out in front, indicating adult kids living at home. When I was young, working children living at home paid board; now, I understand, they only connect the word with the surf.
‘At the end of this street,’ Noel said, pulling in to the side of a dirt road he’d turned onto.
The light was fading but there was at least twenty minutes more of good visibility. The road sloped steeply down. ‘How many ways in?’ I asked.
‘Two. This is the back way.’
‘I know about the green Honda, Noel,’ I said. ‘If it’s there you can piss off, if it’s not, we wait.’
Noel nodded, resigned ‘Have to get a bit closer, but I don’t want to get too fucking close.’
‘You can roll it if you like,’ I said. ‘Just remember, any funny business… ‘
‘I know.’ Noel released the handbrake.
‘I’ll torch your spares, too, if you fuck me around.’
The Citroen rolled for a hundred metres and stopped. Noel’s hideaway was a fibro structure that might once have served some useful purpose as a works depot or warehouse but now it was weed-choked and derelict-looking with a sagging roof, stained walls and slumped foundations. I felt disappointment and rage run through me and struggled to restrain the strong impulse to hit and hurt him.
‘You lying little prick,’ I said. ‘Haitch wouldn’t hole up in a dump like that and you wouldn’t keep your precious Citroens in it either.’
Noel smirked. ‘That’s all you know. What you can see is just a fucking shell. It’s all fixed up inside. Cost me a packet to do it.’
‘Is that right? Then you’d better tell me about the alarm system.’
The smirk disappeared; he hadn’t counted on this. I reached across and pulled the ignition keys from the lock.
‘No!’ he yelped.
‘Your choice.’
He told me about the sensors, and where they were located. I nodded and released the handbrake. The heavy car shot forward and slewed towards the rocky edge of the road. Noel swore, yanked the wheel around and hit the brake.
‘Why the fuck’d you do that?’
I squinted into the gathering gloom. From this position I could see a flat area near the back of the building. I pointed towards it and dropped the keys into Noel’s lap.
‘That looks like a Honda Accord to me. I’ll say goodbye now, Noel. But if a telephone rings down there in the next few minutes, my offer stands.’