Holden's Performance (38 page)

Seated on the next bed the American looked down at his feet, like a boxer between rounds.

Seeing in Shadbolt a ready listener Rust rattled on, not looking at him, looking everywhere but. In this way he resembled some of the typesetters, suggesting to Shadbolt that something in all men of Rust's short stature and pale complexion released hurried words.

‘The Colonel had us keeping tabs on you for months. There was always someone on your tail. I can't say it was difficult. You never look over your shoulder. Not that you have much to hide. Do you want to know how many times you had a shit in the month of April? I have it written down somewhere. That sister of yours: I suppose you know she's been mucking around with Mister McBee? There are no secrets here. We know all about your shenanigans at Manly. We have to know these things. How did you latch onto that one? We know all about her. She's trouble. She used to be married to some joker who ran a picture theatre. The Colonel's only interested in reliability—reliability and up yours too, Jack.'

Moving over to the metal cupboard he unlocked the door.

‘Has the old boy been bashing your ear? I bet he has. Christ, he's full of garbage sometimes. Bill's all right though, once you get to know him. He's got a job to do like everybody else.'

He tossed onto the bed a belted raincoat, sunglasses, sunburn cream and a bottle of Goanna oil.

‘Sign a chit for these.'

‘What's this for?'

Rust held up the gov. issue athletic support. ‘Did you hear that? He doesn't know what this is for.'

Someone snorted.

‘You'll find out soon enough,' the American turned away.

Often while driving Shadbolt had passed Prime Minister Amen seated in the Cadillac, incongruous bulbous car, but which allowed him to wear a hat in the back reading
The Times
. Now that he thought about it Shadbolt had seen the PM plenty of times. One afternoon he'd almost tripped over him sitting on a park bench gazing at the British Embassy; another time he saw him queuing up like anybody else for an afternoon cricket match. And not once had he noticed a bodyguard nearby. The Colonel's ideas on protection were based on unobtrusiveness. Besides, as Stan Still shrugged, no point in making Australians think their PM was anyone special. ‘Who'd want to ping off a mug-politician anyway?'

As for Irving Polaroid, whenever he saw the twelve-year-old Cadillac he said, ‘I used to drive one of them back home.'

The arrival of Shadbolt coincided—on Polaroid's written recommendation—with a step-up in local security. Prime Minister Amen had only just scraped home in the last election, and that can lead to frustration ‘in certain'—Polaroid's term—‘quarters'. There were cranks all over the place. He pointed to Castro going berserk in Cuba, blow-ups in the Congo, President Kennedy using adjectives far too eloquently, you could never trust the Indonesians. People were having trouble these days distinguishing between a bullet and a ballot box. The periods of darkness in world history occurred in waves, as in economics, grain futures, the frequency of famines and hurricanes. World-powers inevitably suffer exhaustion and are replaced by others. Polaroid concluded by reminding that Australia was ‘no longer an island', a point Vern would have disputed straightaway on technical grounds.

Visiting autocrats from allied powers and others with unpronounceable names from less than friendly or tinpot powers had always been given ostentatious security treatment, akin to street theatre. To be surrounded and jostled by anxious bodyguards made them feel indispensable, and to have a picture of it screened back home never did a leader any harm. Now the same ‘cluster' technique would be tried on the Prime Minister.

Colonel Light made the announcement at the lookout on Mount Ainslie. Forming a semicircle Shadbolt and the other clean-shaven men looked so expressionless they appeared to be a bunch of misfits. With their complexions of concrete they blended in with the open space, and one or two almost disappeared side on or into the obscene shadow cast by the coin-operated telescope. To one side wearing wire-framed sunglasses Irving Polaroid made a point of standing casually with his hands in the pockets of his drip-dry suit, indicating he knew it all.

From that vantage point above sea level Light had his right arm and forefinger outstretched, pointing down to the extent of the problem. There's the ground they would actually have to traverse on foot: the long shadowless avenues, the nausea-inducing orbs and crescents, and the irregular intrusion of tree cover. He indicated the distance from the Prime Minister's lodge to Parliament House, and from there to the various embassies and the fogbound aerodrome with its corrugated-iron terminal. He seemed to be confiding to Shadbolt, the totem pole standing in dusty shoes at his elbow; nobody else could have heard his words. And it provoked in Shadbolt an upsurge of loyalty which actually scraped his feet slightly.

‘The street is the only valid field of experience,' the Colonel explained, a line he'd picked up somewhere (certainly not from the Everyman library). ‘You're wide open down there. You're going to be on your own. It's going to test all your reserves of endurance.'

As he remained pointing a pigeon or a crow mistaking him for a statue dropped a whitish splash first on his head and then his arm. God knows what Polaroid must have thought! This kind of thing would only happen in the backblocks. But in other hot countries to the north it was considered a sign of good fortune. Keeping his arm outstretched, Light clicked his fingers, and Shadbolt whipped out his handkerchief and wiped the mess off.

The Colonel had plenty on his mind. Looking down alongside him Shadbolt could see how a large horizontally moving figure in double-breasted pinstripes could pose an infinite number of catastrophe combinations; thing was of course to prevent it before anything happened. The real trouble would be when an African or Asian leader did the grand tour weighed down with medals and wives and the tribal problems back home. And what if the President of the US decided to make one of his flying visits? Even with the full back-up of the lean-looking Secret Service men with their skulls shorn to resemble the purity of mid-west wheatfields, they'd have their hands more than full. ‘We'll jump that ditch when we get to it.' Impressed by Light's single-mindedness—still pointing down like one of Vern's statues—Shadbolt was disconcerted when he turned and saw the others strolling about and looking in the opposite direction. If anyone was at risk it was the Colonel; and Shadbolt became extra-attentive, protecting him.

Each and every man was supposed to think-eat-sleep body-guarding, and before Shadbolt could venture on the streets he had to familiarise himself with all kinds of fancy equipment. As in any profession—printing, dentistry—special tools, often of the most ingenious simplicity, had been handed down over the years.

Some of this equipment was in need of updating.

The elastic in the typesetter's eyeshades had perished, and the walkie-talkies manufactured under licence in Sydney by Hoadley & Sons Loudspeakers had attention-waving aerials, cream ear-plugs which superimposed a deaf-mute appearance on the users, and an irritating habit of producing throat-clearing static whenever they passed a woman wearing a silk dress. The cardboard periscopes were of no use to Shadbolt, while the flesh-tinted anti-fly ointment manufactured in Western Australia to prevent the sudden hand movement had the old giveaway reek of Californian Poppy. Shadbolt found an ordinary tennis ball was used to measure inclines, and during the reconnoitre before an outdoor appearance of the PM, a high-powered telescope was disguised as a theodolite, and on the morning of the big day itself a homemade drosometer consisting of cartridges of chalk, needle-gauge and the worn heel of a plimsoll was rubbed over the moist footpaths, the stately lawns and the marble plazas. Another prop was the plywood plinth carefully handpainted to look like granite. Placed in position, a man could stand motionless in a soldier's uniform or English explorer's jodhpurs at the centre of any possible trouble spot, ready to spring—there were many different ways to skin a kangaroo. Not a bad idea; but when Shadbolt put his full weight on it, testing, testing, it splintered into chevrons of kindling.

He examined these things as useful objects. (Pencil torch with flat batteries, Swiss ankle knives, umbrella with—.) As he turned them over in his hands a look of concentrated solemnity enlarged his nostrils and neck, verging on clumsiness.

They had dogs out the back: not the usual German shepherds, a squad of patriotic dingoes. No one quite knew what the dogs were for. It was Jimmy Carbon's domain. Nobody went near them. Vicious beasts: straining at the ends of rusty chains their paws circumscribed a perfect circle in Canberra's hard soil. Shivering and slavering under Jimmy's spell they could sniff out a Chinese hand-grenade hidden in a carcase of merino meat. With a snap of the fingers Jimmy could put them all to sleep. It had been the Colonel's idea to fit them out to carry microphones. ‘Their full potential,' he said with a keen look, ‘hasn't been realised yet.'

At his own expense Light had published two pamphlets,
The Art of Seeing without Being Seen
, accompanied by his own watercolour sketches, and
Phrenology of an Assassin
with its dubious diagrams of skull measurements and an interesting footnote on assassin's etymological link with hashish. Light wanted them digested down to the last florid adjective. No problem for Shadbolt. Throughout the training he found it both necessary and simple to block everything else from his mind. He enjoyed many of the tests. Identifying the silhouettes of known radicals flashed onto a screen, as in aircraft spotting, was a breeze for Shadbolt; same too pointing to the possible psychopaths in a football crowd, magnified on the screen. And even Irving Polaroid had to ask himself if he had come across anyone in the Northern Hemisphere who could assemble with his eyes shut recognisable faces from Identikits. Shadbolt's one lapse occurred while listening to Light's tape recordings of explosions, the idea being to distinguish between paramilitary, industrial, ceremonial cannon and British motorcycle. A stick of gelignite exploded from a safe distance reminded Shadbolt of the lazy afternoon blastings at the caramel-coloured quarry in the Hills overlooking his youth, and amid the twig-snaps of rifle fire and the splintering of Molotov cocktails of the Colonel's recording, he pictured the flat streets of Adelaide laid out in the haze, and wondered what Vern just then was up to—saw the perpetually talking face—and how his best-friends Wheelright and Les flies—their shadowed eye-sockets—were going.

Light booted him on the ankle.

‘I was just thinking…' Shadbolt started.

‘Leave the thinking to me. You're here to perform. Thinking is only going to throw a spanner in the works. You're not going to have time for second thoughts. Follow me and no frigging about.'

With a varnished ruler the Colonel pointed at the town plans of Canberra and the other main cities. Directions of motorcades were traced. Escape routes discussed: cul-de-sacs, deep culverts and high walls registered. Local knowledge was put to good use. Anyone could raise their hand. The way the others interrupted and loudly argued with Light surprised Shadbolt.

He enjoyed being part of a group, though to one side, and keeping to himself. It was a new experience for him. And the Colonel had been right: he was born to this line of work. Everything had led up to it. The pattern and direction of streets ran in his blood. And he felt a naturalness in the accumulation of factual knowledge; it was natural too that the men whose screened images had become established out there should be protected. It all made sense. There was a job to do. He learnt how to give autograph hunters the brush-off. He threw himself into the techniques of bringing down an assailant in a rugby tackle; how then to twist his/her arm without breaking it; and the proven way to hold back a) ecstatic crowd b) ugly crowd. And when Stan Still, the expert with the small arms, finally faced Shadbolt full on to make himself seen, and passed the .38 in the tan shoulder holster to the Colonel, who slowly, reverently, handed it butt first to Shadbolt, he accepted it casually, without any of the heavy breathing or the awestruck lump in the throat. Only later examining it as he would a car part did he notice it was coated in rust and the cartridges green with patina.

His first operation was set down for a Sunday morning at Sydney's airport. An African leader called what's-his-name—Shadbolt never forgot a face but had trouble with names—Uno!—arrived for a state visit. To show once and for all to the world at large that he had nothing against a jet-black man from Africa, Prime Minister R. G. Amen gave orders for the red carpet to be rolled out, and wearing his most sombre suit waited out under the blazing sun and greeted the man warmly (shook his hand), as he stepped onto Australia, the soil often kissed by returning expatriates and every bit as ancient as Africa's, even if it was covered there in twelve inches of concrete. Flashbulbs were still used in the early sixties, and squirming entablatures were formed by skinny operators supporting heavy movie cameras.

R. G. Amen bracketed his lips into an indulgent smile, although he was unable to control one eyebrow rising. He never had much time for the press. Taking Uno's elbow like a long-lost friend he steered him towards his own car, and gave him a lift to the poshest hotel in town.

A police escort had trouble kick-starting his BSA and eventually manoeuvred to the front.

From behind a pole Light gave the nod and Shadbolt began running alongside. That was the plan. After x number of minutes Stan Still would take over when the scenery turned industrial; Jimmy Carbon with several of the dingoes would then do the run through the back streets of Redfern.

Touching the Cadillac's nascent tail-fin with his fingertips to keep at arm's length, and staring ahead and left and right for the slightest sign of funny business (adjectives on placards, glint of weapon—) Shadbolt settled into stride. The PM was squashed sideways against the door. In his efforts to display camaraderie he'd clean forgotten Uno's broadbeamed wife number three with the crocodile-skin handbag, who never left her husband's side, and the strain of sharing the one seat showed through the glass, as if the PM was smiling underwater.