No gent in his right mind had ever employed this door more than twice, in very quick succession: once on his uninformed way in; and once more, about two seconds after that, to effect an appalled and lifelong departure. For behind this door lay the most deplorable block of toilets on campus. Clearly, something had gone badly wrong in there. It was as though at some point the facility had been officially forgotten, had slipped outside the purview of whatever body or agency was meant to stand between such places and anarchy. Maybe during an administrative restructure it had vanished into the grey area between two spheres of responsibility. Maybe every cleaner in the university just assumed some other cleaner was cleaning it. In any case, it was beyond redemption now. The cubicle doors swung crookedly from busted hinges, like wounded soldiers being helped along a trail. The lights buzzed and flickered like dying flies. The anatomical scrawls on the cracked tiles were so frank, so uncalled-for, that they would have drawn a wincing shake of the head from Neville Claude Aggot.
And the stench … the stench was the stench of the jungle. No man who smelled it could possibly retain any of those frayed illusions concerning the supremacy, or even the adequacy, of his gender. But the really alarming thing about this reek was this: it kept getting worse. Which could only mean one thing. People kept contributing to it. Somewhere on campus there existed men who were still prepared to use this facility – men who thought it a fit venue in which to bare the most intimate parts of their flesh. Who were they, these men? Chillingly, they had to be out there in the general population, blending in, walking past you every day without your knowing it. Maybe they were your friends, your tutors. The guy with the mysterious grin who ran the bakery. The shuffling first-year with the bad skin and the walkman. Elderly professors who wore sneakers with their slacks and accused your essays of being “prolix,” hardy old campaigners who probably took broadsheet newspapers in there and settled in for the long haul. The insane. The incontinent. Fugitives from justice. The damned.
Some five hours after the going down of Operation Aggot, a young man who now belonged to the last of these categories, and almost certainly to the penultimate one as well, stole into this wicked facility. He did so with his head down, with a dour urgency of stride, like a priest entering a pornography store. It wasn’t long after sunrise. The yellow door swung shut behind him.
It was a quarter to four in the afternoon now, and still he hadn't come out.
He was seated in the last cubicle along, behind the only door with a still-functioning lock. The lid was down; his jeans were up. His elbows rested on his knees. His face was buried in his palms. He wondered when he had last slept, but was too tired to work out the answer.
Who was he hiding from?
Who wasn’t he hiding from?
For now, he had to assume he was hiding from was everyone. A more specific answer than that would have been nice to have, but when you fled the scene of a crime you forfeited certain rights. Above all, you forfeited the right to know how the crime turned out. Decamping from a crime scene, for all of its obvious merits, had that terrible drawback. The ending was left to your imagination: and Fenton’s imagination failed him. Even now, more than twelve hours after running away from it, he could still think of no plausible way in which the scene on Lego’s lawn might have resolved itself. Gus on the grass, immobilized and semi-conscious; Ivan Lego vigilant at the window … It was the most important scene of his life, and he had let it finish behind his back. And now he had nothing to go on but his imagination, and his imagination wasn’t up to it. All he knew for certain was this: it couldn’t possibly have turned out well. There were no happy endings for a scene like that. He was past the point where happy endings were possible.
His life as he knew it was over. That much was not in doubt. He had an incredible amount of explaining to do. That too could be safely inferred. But anyone who wanted to hear him do it was going to have to find him first. If his telephone had been ringing all day, he hadn’t been at home to hear it. If his front door had been repeatedly knocked on by senior members of the Major Crime squad, or by Gus, or by Ivan Lego, he hadn’t been there to admit them. At eleven a.m. he had declined to show up at the Union Bar, where the perpetrators of Operation Aggot had been scheduled to meet for debriefing. Nor, at six minutes past two, had he presented himself at Ivan Lego’s weekly lecture. By now the day outside must be almost fading, and still he had no coherent idea of what he was going to do next, or ever. All he had was a vague intention to stay in this shithouse for the rest of his life.
It was an odd sensation, awaiting one’s own arrest. Part of him was starting to wish they would hurry up and come for him, and make it end. Another part kept feeling that he should really be doing something. Fabricating an alibi. Fleeing the jurisdiction. Turning himself in, so they could see how much nicer he was than other criminals. Blowing the whistle on Gus before Gus could blow the whistle on him. But his body lacked the will or energy to do these things. All it felt able to do was sit here and wait. He felt the way Gus had looked on that lawn. Maybe in the future, while serving his life sentence, he would kick himself for having squandered these final hours of freedom. But for now all he could do was sit here, in this place of quiet tiles and soothing porcelain, and wait for whatever was coming.
Last night was falling down on him like a bomb – a nuclear one, with the power to ruin him many times over. This morning, in the cleaver-grey light of dawn, just before slipping out of his house for perhaps the last ever time, he had forced himself to listen to the morning news. He had stood sickly over his radio, waiting to hear the verdict read out. He had been ready to hear anything. Ready to hear that the police were in attendance at Lego’s home, investigating an overnight incident whose details remained sketchy. Ready to hear that a bearded paraplegic had been apprehended on the great man’s front lawn, and airlifted away for questioning. He had even been ready to hear his own description, to hear that a person of his exact height and weight and complexion was wanted in connection with inquiries. He had even, God help him, been ready to hear himself named. But instead he had heard … nothing. Nothing on the subject of Ivan Lego, anyway. There had been other news, of course. He would come to that in a moment. But on the subject of Ivan Lego, nothing. Not a mention.
It had been the most important scene of his life, and he had let it play out behind his back. Lego at the window, vigilant and unimpressed; Gus incapacitated on the grass. Things couldn’t have stayed that way for long. Something must have happened next. The silence of the radio didn’t change that. But what? Gus getting to his feet and completing the hit? No. The imagination baulked at that. Gus getting away clean? That too was infinitely hard to picture. Gus had been in no shape to do anything but lie there till morning. He was going nowhere, except into custody. Surely he’d been arrested by now, if only for vagrancy …
But here the imagination encountered an even thornier problem: the problem of Ivan Lego. Ivan Lego picking up a telephone and calling the police? It was unthinkable. One simply couldn’t picture the non-conformist sage doing something so conventional, so banal. Nor could you really see him striding out into the rain to perform a citizen’s arrest. This was the man who wrote entire books about society’s “invention” of the criminal. The man who spent whole lectures unmasking the so-called “law” as a mere construct designed to circumscribe the activities of the powerless, or something like that. How would such a man respond when he discovered a hatchet-wielding terrorist on his lawn? Would he have the audacity to involve the authorities? You’d like to think not.
On the other hand, what else could he have done? Just turned the lights off and gone to bed? That too seemed implausible. Fenton tried to put himself in Lego’s shoes. What had Lego actually seen? Two figures on his lawn in the middle of the night, making a failed attempt to get onto his roof. That was all. Penetrating gaze or no, he was unlikely to have discerned that their intention was to butcher him in the style of Neville Claude Aggot and write things on the walls in his blood. His gaze wasn’t that penetrating. Wasn’t he far more likely to have taken them for burglars, and fantastically incompetent ones at that? And who, in this day and age, called the police over a failed burglary? Even a normal person would think twice about it.
Was this what Fenton’s life had come to, then? To the hope that he would be mistaken for a mere nightstalking thief, as distinct from the would-be ritual murderer he really was? Was it vain to hope that he might still be taken for neither? Yes, it probably was. In truth, even the burglary thesis was probably too much to hope for. A hatchet and a meat cleaver: these scarcely ranked as classic tools of the housebreaker’s trade. If Lego had seen just one of these implements, let alone both, the jig was up. And then you had the death threats. Even if Lego had concocted the bulk of these himself, as a bizarre publicity stunt, you still had the first one, the one issued by Fenton. That threat at the very least Ivan Lego had genuinely received. And having received it, he was bound to assume the worst of any armed man attempting to get on his roof in the dead of night.
So how good a look at him had Lego got? This question had to be faced up to. Arguably, not a very good look. Maybe a five second glimpse of him in profile, from a good ten metres away, through darkness and rain and half-misted glass. And wasn’t Fenton, moreover, a highly nondescript person? Yes. Over the years this fact had been painfully brought home to him. He was a cipher, a nonentity. Ask her. Ask anybody. But here were circumstances in which his nullity might finally play in his favour! Of the two of them, Gus was by far the more memorable offender, particularly when sprawled full-length on a lawn clutching three metres of bent gutter. Gus was the suspect more readily described to a penri sketcher. Fenton was just a blur of departing desert boots, some tight black jeans moving rapidly the other way.
Then again, the man doing the looking had been Ivan Lego. This fact too had to be reckoned with. Of all the eyewitnesses in the world to be made by in flagrante, he had picked Ivan Lego: a man known internationally for the acuity of his vision. When Lego looked at something, it stayed looked at. Everyone knew that. At a very minimum, then – even if nothing worse happened – Fenton could quite clearly never allow himself to be looked at by Ivan Lego again. Which meant he was done going to the man’s lectures, done showing his face on campus, done as a student at this institution. And this was at a fucking minimum. This was the absolute best he could hope for. This was to take as wildly optimistic a view of the facts as one could, without actually crossing into madness.
His life as he knew it, and in retrospect rather liked it, was coming to an end. Last night was coming down like a bomb. The shadow of it covered him already. The full story of his shame was out there now. The radio, the newspaper … it was all out there in the public domain, just waiting for someone to piece it together. The whole watertight case for the prosecution, ready and waiting to be assembled. The cleaver and the death threat, rife with his prints. The horde of material witnesses. Lego with the crime-scene make. Browning, who knew about his authorship of the threat. Charmaine, who knew about almost everything, and was a loose canon now he’d told her that he loved her. Put their knowledge together and they had the full picture, like the blind men feeling the elephant.
And then there was Gus, who knew it all, and now had ample motive to take him down. Gus selling him out: now there was a scene he could imagine, all too vividly. Gus in a white room where the table was bolted down and the mirror was needlessly large, steam rising from his foam cup while he hung Fenton out to dry. It was an appalling image: largely because Fenton had always had it in the back of his mind to hang Gus out to dry, if he ever wound up in that kind of room himself. Yes, he had always believed that if the worst came to the worst he could simply cut a deal and give them Gus as the chief conspirator. But what if Gus was beating him to that right now, rolling over and giving them him as the ringleader, the brains, citing his hatred of Lego’s lectures and books as motive, urging them to look to the cleaver for physical proof …
Were they coming for him even now, roaming the campus with computer-generated likenesses of his face?
Jesus Christ, why had he not worn gloves? Why had he never worn gloves? He’d been afraid to, that was why. Right up to the last minute he had believed, or had wanted to believe, that nothing warranting the wearing of gloves was ever going to happen. To have taken a pair to the scene would have been to acknowledge that he was involved in something actual, something to which gloves were a far from adequate response. So he had never worn any, and his delusions had stayed intact, and maybe they were coming for him even now, split into teams of two, closing in, flashing his likeness to clusters of nodding students …
And what if Gus, in one final depraved coup, were to tell her about last night, and how Fenton had conducted himself in the line of fire? What if he were to use his one phone call to do that? By no means was that beyond him. Next to this thought the rest of it seemed somehow trivial, a disaster viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
Fenton cradled his skull. He dug his fingernails hard into his own flesh. He deserved it. What blasphemy it was to think about her here, now, in such a place as this! But he had to. What else was there to think about? Where else was there to go? If only he had five more minutes of freedom, guaranteed. Five more minutes in which he could move around the campus without fear, immune from recognition or arrest. Then he would go to her. He would find her before Gus could, and he would tell her the truth. Lying to her hadn’t worked for him, but maybe the truth would. The whole truth, the uncensored truth, everything he’d done and precisely why he’d done it. Then she would know how proper his actions had been all along, how he’d basically been dealt a shitty hand and had played it about as well as any decent person reasonably could. And if the truth didn’t finally make her love him, it would at least make her stop loving Gus. And that was the very least Fenton was prepared to get out of this whole sorry affair. Maybe it would all end without his getting to have her. He was just about ready to contemplate that now. But the notion that Gus might get to keep having her … that was intolerable. That he could not allow.
Someone else came into the toilets now, pushing the yellow door open, admitting brief sounds of freedom from the distant outer world. Footsteps came down the length of the urinal: and kept coming, making unwaveringly for the stalls. Arriving at the first door, they paused in appraisal; then moved on, resumed their sinister approach, an unseen pair of boots preceded by a vague shadow on the white tiles, the figure above as mute and grimly purposeful as a movie psychopath, a striding slayer of teens.
At the threshold of the second-last cubicle, the one next to Fenton’s, the shadow hesitated once more. Then it moved decisively inside. The door banged shut. The defective latch was briefly jiggled. A dumped bag or briefcase hit the tiles. The jangling of lowered jeans or trousers. The impact of rump on plastic seat. And then with an astonishing lack of pause or ceremony the next part was just massively in the middle of happening, with the fullest possible soundtrack of sighs and farts and aquatic repercussions.
Fenton closed his eyes. Well, at least the guy wasn’t a cop. Give him that. Nor, increasingly clearly, was he Ivan Lego. He was just another sick punter with no compunction about stripping his thighs in a place like this. Fenton kept his eyes shut, and didn’t move, and kept his breathing to an absolute minimum, and willed the guy to get on with it and get out. With this going on beside him, there was no prospect of clear or connected thought. Nor, under such circumstances, was it even remotely feasible to go on thinking about her. This was the kind of guy that gave defecation a bad name.
He wasn’t the first, either. Other gastric desperados had preceded him in the course of the long day, five or six of them, surging in without scruple through the yellow door, following their own evil shadows into this same adjacent stall. The last of these reprobates had been and gone about an hour ago. He had left behind him, among other things, an afternoon newspaper, forsaken on the tiles in such a way that the right-hand edge of the front page could be read from where Fenton sat. This much of the main headline had been legible to him: NIGHT OF FEAR. It hadn’t been hard to guess what the rest of it would be. With deep resignation Fenton had engaged the publication with his left boot, and dragged into his own stall. And this monster headline had greeted him:
RETIRED BUS DRIVER’S HARROWING NIGHT OF FEAR.
So yes, that part of the story was very much out there now. Early reports of it had already been filtering in this morning, as he stood sickly over his radio. And now the merciless coverage in the newspaper, the emerging details spilling over to the inside pages. One way or another she must have heard about the incident by now, and worked out roughly what it meant, and if she hadn’t hated him before she certainly would now. So in truth, it didn’t really matter whether Gus had got to her or not. She had all the main pieces of the puzzle anyway. His own moronic leaks had supplied her with most of them, while getting nothing out of her in return. And now the part about the bus driver was out there for her to hear about and misinterpret as she pleased, with him not there to give his side of it and talk her through its nuances and underline the key point that the bus driver had come through the whole thing in one piece, alive and uncut.
The guy in the next stall was still present, still at it. He pawed hungrily at the toilet roll, rattling the spindle with chimp-like abandon. At least he wasn’t a cop. A pig, indubitably. But no cop.
Fenton’s eyes fell again to the newspaper, spread before him now on the tiles. The long night of the bus driver: another crucial scene he had allowed to occur behind his back. But here at least he knew roughly how it had turned out. Here at least he knew the fundamentals, as told by the bus driver himself, via a small army of police spokespeople. And give this to the old fucker: he just might be, pound for pound, the most unpleasant jagoff in the whole business. It was a potent late bid. His name was Jack Durack. He was sixty-seven years of age, semi-retired, a widower. Here then it was, synthesised from the early report on the radio and the written account at Fenton’s feet: the story of Jack Durack. The story of the bus driver and his harrowing night of fear.
It was at approximately this moment that Jack Durack conceived his intention to shoot his visitor dead. He had long been a firm believer in a man’s right to defend himself with deadly force in his own home, or if necessary on his own front doorstep. And if this individual did not deserve to have deadly force applied to him, Jack Durack did not know what individual did. For starters, he had knocked on Durack’s door in the dead of night while wearing a balaclava. Then he had identified himself – falsely, in Durack’s view – as an escaped psychopath. Then he had asked for a cigarette when he was already smoking one. Out in his back shed, Jack Durack kept a number of fully loaded and carefully maintained firearms with which to shoot dead individuals of precisely this kind. The only trick was getting the individual to stay put on the doorstep somehow while he went back and got one, and returned to the front door with it, and shot the individual dead in the chest with it at point-blank range.
Withdrawing his unshaken hand, the individual tried a new approach. He asked Jack Durack if he had the time. Jack Durack declined to furnish an answer. He had already observed that the individual was wearing, was in fact looking at even now, an apparently functioning wristwatch. Durack’s intention to shoot him dead at point-blank range firmed. The only trick was getting him to stay put somehow while he adjourned to the back shed.
The individual now proceeded to offer a third story. He stated that his vehicle had run out of petrol just down the road, and asked if he might telephone for help from the interior of Durack’s house. Durack replied that this would not be necessary, as he happened to have some petrol and a siphon out in his back shed. The individual replied that his vehicle required premium petrol and therefore he had better come in and make the phone call anyway. Durack retorted that the petrol out in his back shed was premium. The individual shifted from foot to foot and said he would just as soon come in and use the phone anyway, if that was okay with the old man.
But Jack Durack, sixty-seven, adamantly stood his ground. By now he had become aware of suspicious occurrences out on his nature strip. A fiery red dot kept glowing intermittently through his hedge, suggesting that a cigarette was being smoked by someone crouching on the other side of it. Furthermore, a strange grunting noise could be heard emanating from the same area, akin to the sound of an inebriated male youth choking on withheld laughter.
On this basis Jack Durack formed the view that a second individual was present out on his nature strip, hiding behind his hedge. He resolved to gun down this individual too. He resolved to shoot him dead through the hedge as soon as he’d finished shooting the first individual dead at point-blank range in the chest on the doorstep. He planned to excuse himself from the front door very soon and hasten back to his cache of fully loaded firearms. He would return not only with a loaded double-barrelled shotgun but also with a substantial number of additional shells, in case one or both individuals failed to die instantly as a result of taking one barrel each to the chest area.
Now the individual on the doorstep made a series of crude attempts to lure Jack Durack out onto the nature strip. He asked if Durack would prefer to continue the conversation out under a streetlight. Durack cannily declined. Then the individual offered to show Durack where his broken-down automobile was. Durack provisionally agreed to have a look at it, stipulating that he would first need to get his reading glasses from his back shed. The individual replied to the effect that he happened to have a spare pair out in his car. Durack said okay, but in order to get all the way out there he would need to go and fetch his walking stick. The individual offered to carry him out there. As this exchange proceeded, further bursts of stifled male laughter could distinctly be heard issuing from the hedge area.
By now the individual on the doorstep had started to behave in a decidedly erratic fashion. He was repeatedly seen to be looking at his wristwatch, making a further mockery of his earlier claim not to have the time. He appeared increasingly agitated. Jack Durack decided that the application of deadly force to the individual’s chest area could be put off no longer. He slammed the front door in the individual’s face and hastened back through his premises and proceeded out the rear door to his shed. He sought and obtained his loaded Winchester. He crammed a number of additional shells into the pocket of his dressing gown. These actions took him approximately four to five minutes. Returning to the front of his premises via the side path, he prepared to open fire on the individual on the doorstep.
But the doorstep proved to be empty. The individual in the balaclava was nowhere to be seen. Evidently he had grown tired of waiting for Durack to come back, and had gone. He had left behind some parting words, written in chalk, on the shut front door. The newspaper rendered them thus: Stubben Old T–—. Below them was a signature purporting to be that of Neville Claude Aggot.
Incensed, Durack had proceeded to the nature strip in order to gun down the second individual. But the nature strip too was empty. The second individual had also vanished. There was no one left to apply deadly force to. Jack Durack sank to his knees in despair. A large black dog came along. Durack emptied both barrels into it. It died.
On this last action the police, called to the scene by a raft of concerned neighbours, frowned. Charges of animal cruelty had been laid against the old man, in addition to the obvious host of firearms charges. As for the rest of it, police spokespeople had been swift to reassure the public that the real Neville Claude Aggot was not believed, at this stage of the investigation, to have played any authentic part in the incident. Although forensic analysis of Durack’s doorstep and yard would continue, not a shred of physical evidence had yet been found to place Aggot at the scene. Police sources stressed this. Off the record, moreover, some investigators had pronounced themselves less than fully satisfied by Durack’s version of events. Doubts about the old man’s veracity, even his sanity, were already being voiced. As of this afternoon, a police spokesperson was refusing – pointedly refusing, said the newspaper – to comment on mounting speculation that Jack Durack had simply made up the whole bizarre story, in an effort to extenuate the shooting of the dog.
And yet something wasn’t right. The old man … It was wrong, all wrong, for a new character to come on the scene so late. It broke all the rules. It violated the order of things.
But what if that character had been around from the start, pacing irascibly around the fringes of the stage? What if he’d been present all along, staring you right in the face?
Fenton stepped uneasily away from the radio. He moved towards his front window, towards the shut Venetian blind. A few hours earlier, slinking home through the bruised pre-dawn light, he had seen something unusual. Something he hadn’t, at the time, given much thought to. Something on the nature strip of his next-door neighbour. The neighbour with the shed and the hedge. The old man who looked like Ed Lauter.
He forced himself towards the window, towards the shut blind.
What he had seen was a large black dog, sleeping in a highly unorthodox pose.
He stood off to one side of the blind, like a gunman. He parted, very briefly, two of its slats.
The dead dog was still out there all right. But now it was ringed by a cordon of yellow police tape. Two paddy wagons were parked up on the grass beside it. One of them had its rear flap folded down. Sitting on the edge of this was Fenton’s neighbour: veteran stacker of backyard sheet metal, ageing doppelganger of Ed Lauter. He wore a tartan dressing gown and a pair of brown slippers. His lower legs were startlingly white and hairless. His shivering shoulders were hunched in disgrace. A blanket was draped over them. A styrofoam cup smoked in his hands. Two uniformed young policemen stood before him with open notebooks. A plain-clothes guy wearing rubber gloves was prising things out of the wooden telegraph pole that the dead dog lay at the foot of, and catching them in a small plastic bag. A TV news crew was filming him doing it. Out in the street several large trucks or vans were parked, with upturned satellite bowls on their roofs. Further camera crews climbed out of them even as Fenton watched, their fat parkas stamped with network logos, their heads issuing musket-puffs of cotton-white breath into the glassy dawn.
Lauter! The singleted one! So he was a retired bus driver. That explained a lot. So his shed contained a massive stockpile of loaded firearms. That too was not inconsistent with the man’s day-to-day personality, as manifested over Fenton’s side fence. Retrospectively, and grudgingly, Fenton had to applaud Gus’s instinct for target selection. If anyone deserved a midnight visit from a death squad, it was his next-door neighbour. Five seconds on the wrong end of the man’s rake and Gus had seen that.
Fenton did his best, of course, to feel pleased that the old man had not in the end been terminated. On paper, this was a definite good. On paper, it was an outcome to be cherished.
But it had been hard to feel very enthusiastic about it, with half the state’s police force parked thirty feet from his front door.
He had left by the back one, wondering if he would ever be able to return.
“Hey mate.”
And now, at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the sanctuary of the Arts block toilets, the guy in the next cubicle was addressing him.
“Hoy. Mate.”
Fenton felt a great weariness descend on him.
“Chief. You in the can.”
It was Gus. The guy in the next cubicle was Gus.
“What’s going on in there? Why haven’t I heard anything hit the water?”
And really, why wouldn’t it be Gus? There were no cameos any more. Nothing happened just for atmosphere now. This was the business end of things. Everything now was pertinent, germane, part of the great pattern of his decline.
“Answer me you freak. You’d better not be facing the tank in there, you diseased bastard.”
So Gus was mobile, and at large. And Fenton found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he had no desire to run from him. Running away didn’t work. He knew that now. And anyway, he had to know. He had to know how bad things were. He couldn’t stand not knowing any more. Whatever else Gus had to mete out to him, he was ready to take it, as long as he got to hear what had happened on that lawn. He said:
“Gus, it’s me.”
“Fent?”
“Yeah.”
“No shit?” Gus said, in an affable way. “You wouldn’t read about it, mate. You’re just the man I wanted to see!”
Fenton probed these words for animus or bitter irony. He detected none. For some unfathomable reason, Gus was genuinely pleased to hear his voice.
Now Gus cleared his throat awkwardly into the silence. He said: “So how’d you get on last night?”
“Me?”
“After you shot through. Got home all right did you?”
“More or less,” Fenton cautiously said.
“That’s the shot, Fent.”
Another silence.
“That’s the shot,” Gus said again.
More silence.
Another nervous cough. Then: “Yeah look Fent. What I said out there – I said a couple of harsh things out there. As you were clearing off and that. I yelled out some pretty disgraceful stuff. And I want to apologise for that. The truth is mate, I wasn’t myself out there. You saw me. I was struggling, mate. I’d taken a knock to the head. I didn’t fully appreciate what you were up to. I was in no shape to think about the big picture. But you kept your head, mate. I can see that now. I’m glad one of us did. No sense in us both going down, was there?”
“No,” Fenton answered.
“Not when one of us could get away clean.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t get me wrong, mate: it hurt. Part of me still does. But you did what you had to do, Fent. For the good of the operation. And I respect that. I want you to know that.”
“So how did you get on?” Fenton asked him.
Gus said: “Mate, morally void natures like yours are going to be crucial in the days ahead.”
“What days ahead?”
“Exactly, Fent. Keep playing ’em that close to your chest and we’ll be fine.”
“What days ahead?”
“So hang on mate – we’re cool about that then? Me calling you a coward and so on. We’re cool about that?”
“Forget it Gus.”
“Cheers Fent. You’re a class act.”
“So what are the days ahead?”
“I’m coming to that, Fent. Bear with me” – you could hear him bending his bulk to the tiles – “while I break out this bong. As long as we’re settling in … Incidentally” – hauling his bag over, unzipping it – “from here on in, this thing is going to be strictly between you and me. Smithy and those other morons, they’re out of the loop now. This has gone way past the point” – he rezipped the bag, dumped it – “where we can involve morons like that. You’ve heard about this effort of theirs last night, I take it? Disgraceful. Fucking clowns! You know what irks me most, Fent?” Vaguely, his mind still half-devoted to the preliminaries of bong use. “The bus driver, this Durack character. He’s going to live. This awful old cock who’ll turn a shotty on a bloke just for knocking on his door! He’s going to live! Honestly – the arrogance of the old bugger. The self-importance of it, to assume that any fit young bloke who knocks on his front door at night must automatically be out to kill him. Granted, in the case of Col and Smithy he was right. But what were the odds of that? It was a freak of bloody chance mate. I’m telling you, old bastards like that – they don’t deserve to live, mate. They just don’t deserve to. But we had our shot at him. We had our one chance at him – and those boofheads blew it. I swear to God, Fent, when I catch up with those cretins …”
“Catch up with them?”
“I mean” – he flicked at his lighter – “who told them to write something on his front door? What were they even doing with a piece of chalk?”
“Didn’t they show up at the meeting?”
“And why was one of them wearing a balaclava, when I expressly asked any bloke that had one to bring it forward? I mean, here’s you and me running round in a couple of footy beanies. Making do with that. And meanwhile this pair of thickheads who can’t even knock off a bloody pensioner are running round with a proper bloody balaclava …”
“So how did you get on last night?” Fenton asked again.
Further flicking of the lighter. An agitation of liquid. A foul scent rising. A long hold. A long exhalation.
“Why would they show up at it?” Gus said.
“What?”
“The meeting. Why would they of come to it? Of course they didn’t come to it.”
“But … you went?”
“Fancy a hit, mate?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Of course I bloody went. He had me over a barrel, didn’t he?”
“He? Who?”
“You’re sure I can’t tempt you mate?”
“Positive.”
“Suit yourself. Yeah, well he had these bloody photos of me for a start. I could hardly say no to him, could I?”
“Who had photos? What photos?”
“Lego mate. Who do you think?”
“Jesus, you met with Lego?”
“Hang on Fent. You’re sure I can’t tempt you?”
“Gus, please. What photos? What photos are you talking about?”
“The photos of me lying on his lawn. The ones he took last night. I swear to God, when that flash started going off I thought it was sheet lightning or something. You’re sure I can’t tempt you, mate? I can just slip it under …”
“Gus.”
“You seem a little querulous this afternoon, Fent. I can sense it in your tone.”
“Well Christ, why don’t you just tell me what’s going on. Tell me what happened last night. From the start. From the moment I … the moment I …”
“Steady on, Fent. I’m getting there, mate. All will be revealed …” He worked his lighter some more. Another bubbly interlude. Then:
“And look at that little trick with the business card, Fent. It’s sublime. A lesser man would’ve written his message straight onto the polaroid. But Lego’s already thinking in terms of the paper trail, you see. He knows there can’t be any evidence of a link between us and him. So he writes the stuff on the business card, see, and he just clips it to the photo. Get it? By itself, Lego’s handwriting on a business card proves bugger-all. It’s only incriminating when it’s clipped to the photo of me – and anyone could have done that. I could have done that. So we can forget right now about trying to use any of this stuff as a counter-wedge on him. The guy is teflon, Fent. He’s always going to be one step ahead of us. And if you’re thinking the photo might have his prints on it, stop wasting your time. I’d wager the helmet of my own cock he was wearing gloves throughout the whole procedure. Same pair he was wearing today, probably. I’m telling you Fent, this cunt is diabolical. In a way, it’s going to be a pleasure working with him.”
Gus paused, as if Fenton might have something to say. But what could be said? Fenton just swallowed, and tasted something vile, a taste that spoke of being a long way from home, the taste of bad decisions allowed to pile up like unpaid bills.
“Anyway, Fent: as far as last night goes, that was pretty much it. By the time I found the photo on me he was nowhere to be seen any more. All his lights were off. I do believe the ice-cool bastard had actually gone to bed. So I figured that was it, and I just bailed. Got back to my feet and dragged myself back to the Kombi. With a bruise on my arse the size of … well, the size of my whole arse, basically.”
“The cleaver,” Fenton said. “The tomahawk.”
“Oh you haven’t heard the last of them, Fent, believe me. But to answer your question, mate: no. I didn’t pick ’em up, no. Christ my upper thighs are hairy! I’ve never noticed before how hairy they are. If you think the rest of me’s hairy, you should see my upper thighs …”
“Today. Two o’clock.”
“Yeah, I rolled up to his office, yeah. The irony being, Fent, that I knew all too well where it was, given all that recon work we did on it back when we were going to blow it up. And get this: his secretary wasn’t in, was she? She was awol. Meaning not a soul saw me go in. Or come out. Convenient that, eh? I repeat: he knows what he’s doing, this bloke. It’s like he’s done it before. So anyway, there he is behind this king-sized desk of his, leaning back in his big black chair. He’s expecting me. And like I said, he’s wearing gloves. See-through rubber gloves. Seldom a good sign, that. He tells me to close the door behind me. To lock it. Tells me to sit down. And then he comes right to the point. He doesn’t muck around, this bloke. Turns out he wants to get the whole thing over and done with in six minutes, because he’s got a lecture starting at 2.06. He starts all his lectures at six minutes past see, cause he – ”
“Yeah, I know. I know all that. What did he say?”
“Well, you’d be surprised by what you can get through in six minutes, Fent. You really would. Like I say, he got straight into it. He tells me he’s got the complete set of polaroids stashed in this envelope in his lawyer’s office. For the moment it’s sealed. But the lawyer’s got orders to open it in the event of any foul play occurring to Lego. He also tells me his lawyer’s holding the original death threat – which means fuck all to me, since we never sent him any. So I thought: given that, why not have a crack at the big lie? It was worth a go, Fent. So I played dumb. I told him we’d wound up on his roof by mistake. I claimed we got his address mixed up with some old lady’s place where we were supposed to clean the leaves out of the gutters for a funding drive. Like I say: it was worth a shot.”
“But it didn’t work.”
“Exactly. No sale. He wasn’t having a bar of it. He just opened up one of his drawers and lifts out this plastic bag. This clear plastic bag. And guess what’s in it?”
“Oh Jesus.”
“My sentiments exactly, Fent. The tomahawk and the cleaver. I told you you hadn’t heard the last of ’em, didn’t I? So he holds them up for a minute, just so I get the message … and then he drops them back into his drawer. And at that point I … I couldn’t help it mate. I cracked. I named names. Well I named a name, anyway. Yours.”
With the nonchalant deftness of the practised vomiter, Fenton stood, turned, lifted both the seat and the lid, and loudly articulated his disapproval into the toilet bowl. But his gut was dry and empty. His spasms roared aridly through it like a lawnmower scraping naked rock. Nothing was produced, save a few malodorous strands of dribble.
“Whoa, Fent!” Gus cried, not without amusement. “Relax! For a start I don’t even know your last name, so I could only give him your first one. But that’s beside the point. The point is, he doesn’t even want our names. He come right out and said that. He quite genuinely isn’t interested in them: yours, mine or anyone else’s. He said if things go smoothly, there’s no reason why he ever has to know them. He said if things go smoothly, there’ll be a handoff where I can pick up the weapons, the death threat, and the rest of the polaroids. Well, that sounded like a pretty fucking sweet deal to me. So I’ve said – you’ll love this, Fent – I’ve gone: ‘What can I do to make things go smoothly?’”
For the moment Fenton had closed the toilet’s lid again, and had sorrily resat, eyes closed, head bowed, a hand pressed hard to either throbbing temple.
“So he – well, first of all he wanted me to cough to this first bloody death threat. He was strangely insistent on that. Frankly, he seemed a bit obsessed with the thing. So fuck it: I said yeah, that was us. We sent the thing. And he seemed happy with that. It seemed like what he wanted to hear. So then he came out with the rest of it. Or actually, he didn’t come out and say it, not in so many words. What he did was, he said it all hypothetically. It’s quite clever the way he does it. Lets you know exactly what’s on his mind, without ever actually saying it. It’s the perfect crime. Technically, he probably hasn’t even done anything illegal. Like I tell you, he’s a class act. He’s got plausible deniability on the whole thing.”
“On what whole thing?” Fenton said, already half-knowing what it must be, hating the numb sound of his voice on the tiles.
“You’ll love this Fent. The irony of it’s palpable. He wants us to take out Robert Browning! The irony being that Browning was the very dude I wanted to whack in the first place, remember? So in a way, it’s all come full circle. That’s the beauty of this, from our perspective. Lego thinks he’s chiselled us into doing something we don’t want to do. And I say, let him think that. What the arrogant dick doesn’t realise is, this has actually been the gist of our plan all along. To take somebody out. I mean, the actual identity of the victim was never that paramount to us, was it? I mean, okay, I know you personally had your heart set on clipping Lego. I know that. And I’m sorry to see your dream die on that. I really am. He would have been a sweet kill, there’s no two ways about it. But I think you’ll agree, it’s just not a sane option any more. The guy’s simply got far too much on us. But try and look at the plusses, Fent. So big deal, we do Browning instead of Lego. At the end of the day we’ll still be doing somebody, and that’s the main thing. And Lego watching over us, that could be just the tonic we need to keep us moving forward. No more bungling. No more endless arguments about who, or when, or how. With this scary bastard breathing down our necks, we’ve got a red-hot incentive to get this thing done.”
Fenton swallowed again. “Aggot-style?” He had to know.
“No mate, the Aggot angle’s out. Too messy. He wants us to make it look like a suicide.”
“No. No. No. No. No. This is ridiculous.”
“Be that as it may, Fent, it is happening.”
“No. It doesn’t make sense. Why Browning?”
“We didn’t get into that, Fent. There’s certain questions you don’t ask in this type of situation. Believe me, it would have gone right against the vibe. It was strictly business in there. Besides, we never talked, did we? Officially speaking we never even met. So how could I ask him? My guess is, Browning’s a thorn in his side mate. He’s a disgrace to Lego’s department. Look at the guy’s methods. Look at the books he reads. He’s a dinosaur. He’s an irrelevance.”
“If he’s an irrelevance, why kill him?”
“Fent, do yourself a favour. The less we know about this, the safer we are. Focus on the fundamentals. Browning kicks it within the week, and we get back the photos and the weapons. Simple as that. That’s all we need to know. The why of it goes beyond our purview.”
“But it’s so improbable. I don’t see why he’d do it. Why would he risk everything to get rid of Browning?”
“Fent, have you been listening at all? He’s risking bugger-all mate. We’re the ones that’ll be in the firing line if anything goes wrong. Lego, he’s guaranteed to come out of it squeaky clean. And for some blokes, that’s motive enough. Some blokes just do things because they can get away with it.”
“Blokes like yourself,” Fenton said.
“Oh I wish, Fent,” Gus good-naturedly replied. “I wish. But blokes like you and me, we’re bush league compared to Lego. You and me, we’re just a couple of little guys with a vision. And if we have to spill a bit of claret along the way – well, that’s not something we particularly enjoy, is it? We do it because it needs to be done. We do it for the greater good. And there’s a rugged sort of integrity about that. A sort of gritty honesty. But Lego – he laughs at words like integrity! You’ve heard his spiel, surely. It’s all anarchy to him. He just does what he likes mate, because there’s nothing to hold him back. No structure, no morality. No ideals. And look, I object to that type of cynicism as much as you do. But when a man’s got you by the gonads, you don’t take issue with the cogency of his arguments. You just do what he tells you to do. So anyway Fent, he’s given us the name of this guy. Hypothetically of course.”
“What guy?”
“A guy who can hook us up.”
“With what?” Fenton naively asked.
“With a piece, Fent. With a handgun.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Relax, mate. It’ll be a clean one. Untraceable. That’s the whole point of getting it through this guy. It’ll be a totally sterile piece, you can rest assured of that.”
“That’s it. We go to the cops right now. We tell them everything, the whole truth. We give them Lego.”
“Forget it, Fent. I’ve told you, he’s teflon. It’s our word against his, and look at the credibility gap. He’s got total deniability on this. We’ve never even met.”
“Yes, but you did meet.”
“I’ll say it again, Fent: we met in the six minute window between 2 and 2.06.”
“So what? Who cares?”
“Don’t you get it, Fent? Officially speaking, Lego’s lecture started at 2pm. As far as the record’s concerned, Lego was standing in that lecture theatre the whole time we were talking.”
“Yeah but there’s two hundred students who can testify that he wasn’t, Gus.”
“Fent, there’s two hundred students who’ll testify that he got to that lecture dead on time.”
“But dead on time for Lego is six minutes late.”
“That’s what I’m saying, Fent. That’s exactly what I’m saying. The six minutes of him not being there is actually a vital part of the lecture. The not lecturing is in itself a form of lecturing. His absence is a form of presence mate.”
“Oh come on. You can’t be serious.”
“Fent, in a very real sense, the bloke was standing in that theatre while we talked.”
“But he wasn’t, for Christ’s sake.”
“It’s not like you to descend to petty word games, Fent.”
“I’m not, you fool. I’m talking what actually happened.”
“‘Actually,’ Fent? ‘Actually’? ‘Happened’? How can you sit through a whole year of this bloke’s lectures and still use words like that?”
“Because I don’t listen to him. It’s all bullshit. Surely you can see that?”
“Fent, look at it this way. If you and I can’t work out where he was at two o’clock, what hope has some poor bloody ill-educated copper got?”
“I can work it out.”
“Mate, these blokes are hard-pressed catching a common thief. What chance have they got of outwitting Lego? Trust me, these guys don’t need shit like this. Some of them are two days away from retirement. Their wives are on the brink of leaving them because – ”
“All right. Shut up. Just shut up, you great fool. Forget the police. We’ll go back to Lego.”
“Go easy, Fent.” Still Gus sounded serene, drug-buffered, impervious to the increasing vehemence of Fenton’s words. “It doesn’t work that way. I don’t know the guy. We never talked.”
“Lego knows you talked, you idiot. We go back to him and tell him we’re not going to do it. We tell him we’re calling his bluff. This is where it stops, Gus. It’s gone too far.”
“Too far? You must be joking. In case you haven’t noticed, Fent, it hasn’t gone bloody anywhere yet. Remember? We keep trying to make it go places, and we keep fucking it up. No, mate. This isn’t where it stops. This is where it starts. This is where it finally bloody starts.”
“No. No. It’s over. We call his bluff. We tell him we want the weapons and the photographs now, and the first death threat, or else we’re going to the cops.”
“I don’t think so, Fent. I’ve already given him my word on this. And my word is oak, pal. It’s fucking oak. If you can’t trust a man on his word, where are we?”
“So you’d rather shoot a man dead and make it look like suicide than go back on your word? That’s your version of integrity is it, Gus?”
Gus sighed. “Fent, we’re not supposed to like this. Jesus Christ. We’re being blackmailed, remember. This is the whole point of being blackmailed. You get forced to do stuff you don’t particularly want to do. You don’t get a bloody choice in the matter. You don’t get to quibble about it. This is the essence of getting chiselled. Anyway, it’s a bit late for second thoughts. At the risk of making you ralph again, Fent, the guy with the piece, he’s already in play. I’ve already activated him. The delivery’s going down tonight.”
“No.”
“We’re not in Kansas any more, mate.”
“What the fuck is that? This is what you’ve got to say?” Fenton felt months of hatred boiling up in him, threatening to make him say something unretractable. “You’re about to take delivery of an untraceable hand-gun, and this is all you’ve got to say? This brain-dead catchphrase that only some awful American halfwit … Are you just really dumb, Gus, or are you actually mad? Seriously. Are you? I genuinely want to know. Do you know how totally screwed-up you are? Do you realize it? Or do you honestly believe this is the way sane people talk?”
“Harness that aggression, Fent. Channel it. We need all the fire in the belly we can get at this point. We’re through the looking glass here.”
“Gus, just listen to me. Please. Focus. You’re talking about a real gun. You do realise that? You’re talking about shooting a real-life man. A man who’s maybe soiling his own pants – ”
“Aw fair dinkum Fent!” Gus squeamishly objected, still trying to keep things jovial.
“Yes, Gus: shitting his pants. Crying out for his mother. You’re talking about pointing a real gun straight into his face and pulling the trigger.”
“You don’t pull a trigger mate, you squeeze it. Surely you know that.”
“All right, you squeeze it, you fat bloody madman, you squeeze it – ”
“Just quietly, Fent, could you not call me fat mate?” At last Gus sounded struck, got to. At last Fenton had pierced his thick hide. “I’m fair dinkum a bit fucking sensitive about it if you want the truth.” Christ, did his voice flicker with emotion there? Was he suddenly about to cry?
“Gus, just listen. For Christ’s sake. You’re going to squeeze the trigger, and the gun’s going to go off, and a hole is going to appear in this man’s head. Okay? His skull is going to explode, Gus. You’re going to get sprayed with his brain matter. How does that make you feel? Does it make you feel anything?”
“Actually, I was kind of picturing you as the trigger man, Fent.”
“Oh were you?” Fenton said coldly.
For a long time Gus was silent. “Well, given that I’ll be driving the getaway vehicle …” he said at last. And now there was no question about it. A well of deep hurt quivered behind his words. He was about to cry. “Plus which,” he shakily went on, “I’m the poor prick who’s actually taking delivery of the, of the – ” Here he lost control, and actually began to weep. “Just lately, Fent,” he said distraughtly, between wet sobs, “I don’t – know – who you – are any more.” Freely and without shame he wept, as if he had a perfect right to, as if he were the wronged party in all this. “I’ve been having these th- thoughts about you mate. These – these suspicions … And I just can’t shake them off.” His words were at the mercy of the storm now, leaping around with random musicality on squalls of tears and mucus, gathering themselves in rapid clusters between his gulps and slurps and hitchings of breath. “I keep … Mate, I keep wondering about these death threats to Lego. I keep wondering if maybe you … Oh, it’s ridiculous, I know. But just lately … I mean, it seems like every good idea I put forward, you just pooh-pooh it. And then last night, last night, you just … You just took off! You just dead-set left me in the lurch! You didn’t even pause to flick the gutter off me! And I know Fent, I know that was a legitimate play … But still. Still part of me wonders. Maybe – maybe – I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. I just want these thoughts to go away mate. I’ve been waiting for you to do something that’ll make them go away. But instead you just … And then sometimes I wonder if … No. I can’t say it mate. I can’t even bring myself to say it. You don’t want to know how deep my fears go. You really don’t. All I know is, I need to see you pull that – I need to see you squeeze that trigger, mate. I need to see you do Browning. For my own peace of mind, I need that. For my own sanity. Otherwise these thoughts, they’ll just, they’ll just keep …”
So Gus knew. Deep down he knew. Fenton had always thought there would be violence, when Gus finally worked the whole thing out. A crisp and unambiguous act of physical violence. Instead there was this, which was worse. Behind Fenton’s face, in the mud of his eyeballs, in the dull core of his bones, the great weariness deepened. How tired he was. How very tired he was of everything. Maybe Gus was right about him. Maybe he was the one in the wrong. But did things like that really matter any more? It was all so nearly over now. It was all so close to being over. And maybe there was still some way it could end pretty decently, with minimal disgrace and gunplay. Maybe he could still bring it home in some semi-respectable way, a way that could almost be lived with, a way that would bring harm to no one who wasn’t harmed already. Maybe there was still some hope, if he stayed on the horse for just one more day. Or maybe there wasn’t. Maybe he just wanted the present moment to go away as quickly as possible. In any case, this is what he now said:
“Gus, you just get me that piece. It’s going to be all right. Everything’s going to be all right. You just get me that piece, mate, and everything’s going to be fine.”