Babylon South (7 page)

He was taken in to see the manager, a square-faced, square-minded man who was out of place in a King's Cross bank. He longed for a transfer to head office, where the chances of being held up or getting AIDS or having a passbook presented that looked like something off the sole of a shoe were practically nil.

“You
are
Charles Dural?”

Dural produced his old driving-licence, just as greasy and tattered as the passbook.

The manager looked at the licence. “That's years out of date, Mr. Dural. I guess you were driving an FJ Holden then?”

Dural wondered if he had already sent for the cops; but he humoured the smug bastard, “It was a 3.8 Jaguar, actually. Look, Mr.—” He glanced at the name-plate on the manager's desk. “Mr. Rosman, just between you and me I've been in prison for the last twenty-three years and a bit. I had a cheque account here at this branch—I suppose you'd of still been in high school then—and when I knew they were gunna send me up for a long time, I changed over to an interest-bearing account. I dunno what interest I been getting—if you ever sent me any statements, I didn't get „em. This book says I left £3,202 in it when I went in. You oughta owe me quite a bit of interest, right?”

“I suppose we do—” The bank manager looked uncomfortable. “The truth is, Mr. Dural, in this area we have to be, well, extra careful. You have no idea some of the types come in here. I've got three bag-ladies as depositors—” He stopped, as if afraid that one of the bag-ladies might be Dural's mother. “Well, you know what I mean. We just have to be
careful.”

“I'm glad to hear it.” Dural was surprised at his own patience; in prison he'd have blown up if he'd been interviewed by a screw like this uppity bastard. “Now could you let me know how much you're holding for me?”

It took ten minutes to reveal that he was now worth 23,332 dollars and 22 cents. It seemed to him that he was suddenly wealthy, but the bank manager didn't appear impressed with his rich client. “It doesn't go far these days, Mr. Dural. Perhaps you'd like us to invest it for you? Interest rates are still high.
Unit
trusts are the thing.”

“I'll think about it.” He had heard the talk in gaol amongst the white-collar crims that this was a boom time. He had wondered why, if everything was booming, so many of them were doing time. “I don't wanna rush into nothing.”

He drew a hundred dollars, got his new passbook and went out into the street again. He hadn't walked more than a hundred yards (he still thought in yards, feet and inches; he'd never get used to the metric system) before he was aware that this wasn't
his
Cross, not as he remembered it. It had always been an area where there were more sinners than saints; now it looked sleazy, a corner into which had been swept the dregs and grime of the city. Sex had always been sold in the Cross, but, as he remembered it, there had been a time and a place for it; now, even in early afternoon, there were girls in doorways and on street corners. He was shocked at how they were dressed; in the old days the cops would have run them in for indecent exposure. A police car drifted by, the young cops in it looking out at the girls with plain boredom.

One of the girls accosted him. She was about sixteen, her ravaged face ten years older than her body; she wore a gold body stocking and black fishnet panty-hose and smelled as if she had fallen into a vat of Woolworth's perfume of the week. “You want a bit, luv?”

“How much?” He wasn't really interested, except in the price of nooky these days.

“Fifty bucks.” She saw the look of surprise on his face. “You from the bush or something? What you expect, something as cheap as doing it with a sheep?”

“It's twice what I used to pay. And the sheep didn't answer back.”

“You want a cheapie, try the Orient Express down there on the corner, the Filipino. She'll give you a quicky, a knee-trembler for ten bucks.”

He shook his head and walked on, more and more disillusioned with every pace. The traffic was thicker and quicker. He stepped off on to a pedestrian crossing and was almost run down by two young men in a Toyota with two surfboards strapped to its roof. One of the young men, earring flashing, his snarl just as bright, leaned out of the passenger window.

“
Why don't you look where you're fucking going, dickhead!”

Dural took two paces to his right, grabbed the young man by his long bleached hair, pulled his head halfway out of the window and punched him on the jaw. Then he shoved the unconscious youth back into the car, leaned in and said to the startled driver, “Okay, smart-arse, move on!”

He stepped back and heard the clapping behind him. He turned round and there was a bag-lady, standing beside her loaded pram, clapping him. “Good on ya, mate! We need more men like you! Good on ya!”

Dural grinned, then went on across the street, feeling a little better: he had done something for the old Cross where decent crims like himself, not today's shit, used to hang out. He passed a group of kids who looked as if they had spent last night in the gutter; they glanced at him and sneered, but said nothing. The sharper-eyed amongst them had suddenly recognized the brutal toughness in his face, the muscles under the too-tight suit. All at once he hated everyone he passed, the sleazy strangers on what had once been his turf.

A taxi cruised by and he hailed it. He got in beside the driver, a kanaka, for Chrissakes. “The Cobb and Co.”

“What's that, mate?”

“A pub. Where you from?”

“Tonga.”

They had told him in Parramatta that the place was now overrun with wogs, slopeheads and coons. He was beginning to feel like that mug in the story, Ripper van Winkie. “One time you used to have to pass a test before you got a taxi licence, be able to know every street in the city. Especially the pubs.”

“Mate,” said the Tongan, “you wanna sit here and discuss Australia's history, it's gunna cost you money. The meter's running.”

“You're pretty bloody uppity, ain't you? Who let you in here?”

“Your government. I'm studying economics and you taxpayers are paying for it. We're the white
man'
s burden. Now where's this pub?”

“The corner of Castlereagh and Goulburn.”

The driver thought a moment, then shook his head. “Not any more, mate. That's where the Masonic Temple is now. You don't look like a Mason to me.”

“Jesus!” Dural slumped back in the seat. “Okay, take me into town and drop me anywhere.”

“Put your seat-belt on.”

“Jesus!” He clipped the seat-belt across himself, felt he was locking himself into some sort of straitjacket; there'd been no seat-belts when he'd last driven a car. He began to get the funny feeling that he had been freer in prison.

An hour of the inner city was enough for him. He was amazed at how much Sydney had changed; the much taller buildings than the ones he remembered seemed to arch over his head, blocking out the sun. The face of the crowd had changed, too; where had all the Aussie faces, with their long jaws and narrow eyes, gone? As Heinie Odets's bodyguard (they called them minders now, so he'd been told) he had been a student of faces; it was one way of staying ahead of trouble, Heinie had advised him. He couldn't get over the number of Chinks of some sort he saw; it was like being in some part of bloody Asia. And the black-haired wogs; there had been a fair number of them in Parramatta, but here on the outside (how long would he go on calling it that?) they seemed to make up half of those in the city streets. He was the stranger come home to a strange land.

He caught a taxi back to the rooming-house. As he stepped in the front door, two young Vietnamese came down the hallway and passed him with shy smiles. When they had gone out into the street he saw Jerry Killeen peering at him from a half-opened door.

“You see „em? The bloody Viet Cong. You wanna come in for a cuppa?” His desire for company was pathetic, it hung on his wrinkled face like a beggar's sign.

“I gotta take a lay-down,” said Dural. “Maybe later.”

The old man looked disappointed, but nodded and went back into his room, closing the door without another word. He reminded Dural of some of the pitiful old lags in prison, the ones who would
always
be lonely even in the close company of a thousand men.

Dural opened the door of his own room, picked up the newspapers lying just inside it and sat down on his bed. Then he glanced at the still-open door, frowned, got up and closed it. For so many years he had been accustomed to someone else closing the door on him: the sound of good-night was the clanging of iron on iron.

He leafed through the newspapers, but none of the news meant anything to him. He knew the names of the major politicians, but they were irrelevant to him; he was like an African heathen arriving in Rome, wondering at the importance of bishops and cardinals. The sports pages had a few names he recognized (sport had never been censored on the gaol's TV and radio; football brawls and thuggery were enjoyed as much by the prison officers as by the prisoners), but the cricket season was starting and he had never been interested in cricket. The financial pages were a foreign language to him; once, in the prison library, a white-collar criminal had tried to explain to him how the financial world worked, but Dural had just shaken his head and said he would rather remain dumb. The newspapers, he decided, would lead him nowhere, at least nowhere that he wanted to go.

He was about to drop the papers on the floor when he remembered why the little old bloke next door had shoved them under his door. He leafed through the pages again, came to the six-inch item at the bottom of one of the inner pages of the
Telegraph.
There it was: his name and that of Sir Walter Springfellow, the released prisoner and the skeleton in the Blue Mountains bush. A strange coincidence, they called it: fucking reporters, they were always looking for an angle. He re-read the story, but there was no guts to it; even he could see that. He threw the paper on the floor and lay back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling and the single electric globe with its yellow paper shade. He had cursed Springfellow in court on the day the judge had sentenced him. The cold, stuck-up bastard had chopped him down, slice by slice, with words that had rung in his ears for months afterwards. He had raved for a couple of years against Springfellow, but in the end he had realized he was just shouting into a wind that blew back his abuse like piss in a gale. The rage and the wind had died down a long time ago and now, here, in this bare, lonely room there was only stillness. Only the skeleton in the bush could have been lonelier.

It
suddenly came to him that he was lost.

III

Mosman was a suburb that, to an outsider, never seemed to change. It was a good address from end to end; unlike other parts of Sydney, it had no
poor
end. The houses, even the smaller ones, were solid and had their own gardens; the few semi-detached cottages had a shy look about them, as if their owners knew they were being tolerated only so long as they behaved themselves and kept themselves neat and tidy. Blocks of flats, known in the estate agents' argot as home units, as if they were just cards in a game of Monopoly, were lumped about the district, but high-rise development was forbidden. Mosman prided itself on its conservatism; it was a suburb not given to spontaneity, at least not in the streets. Swingers from the eastern suburbs might have called it dull, but under the dull facade there was old, real money; and real money is never dull, least of all to the swingers from the eastern suburbs. Mosman was sure of its place in the sun; it was the suburb, its residents knew, where God would have resided if ever he had emigrated to Sydney from England. A thought that God had probably never had.

Clements parked the car in Springfellow Avenue and looked around at the houses at this end of the dead-end street. “Respectable, aren't they? You can smell it from here—respectability. You think they make love with their clothes on?”

“You look as if you do. Why don't you come over some night and let Lisa run the iron over you?”

“I'm always reading about the heights of fashion. Why doesn't someone write about the depths? I see you're wearing your best suit today. Is that for Lady Springfellow?”

“Wait till you meet her. You'll wish you'd been to the dry cleaner's.”

Clements grinned, uninsulted, and got out of the car. He was not dirty in his habits; he was a regular at the dry cleaner's. He just had the knack of being able to turn a suit into a mess of wrinkles within ten minutes of donning it. He had put polish on his shoes only once since buying them ten months ago, though he occasionally rubbed the toes of them on the bottoms of his trouser-legs. He
straightened
his tie and patted down the ends of his collar. “How about that? Bewdy Brummell.”

“Bewdy,” said Malone, and couldn't have wished for a better sidekick.

Malone had only a faint memory of his first visit to the Springfellow house, but he couldn't remember any security guards in those days. But there was one now: he came down the driveway to the big iron gates when Malone tried to open them and found them locked electronically. Malone introduced himself and Clements and the security guard switched on his walkie-talkie and spoke to someone in the house. Then he unlocked the gates.

“Is this usual in Mosman?” said Clements.

“I dunno,” said the guard, an overweight, middle-aged man who looked as if he had borrowed a smaller man's uniform, “I come, I do me job and I go. That's all I'm paid for.”

“Just like us,” said Clements. He had a cop's dislike of security guards; they were growing into another police force.

“I thought you'd be in pink and grey,” said Malone, and the security guard just refrained from jerking his thumb at the mug copper.