Jacko (11 page)

I watched Lucy teasing Jacko and wondered if she could be so wise so young, or whether it was naiveté, whether she was still in the playground of James Ruse High in the west of Sydney, kidding about love as they say. Her high school was named after a convict, James Ruse, a sheep thief who had nonetheless learned farming in the west of England and who became, on a ticket of leave land grant, the continent's first private agriculturalist. A man no doubt less serpentine and less full of cunning than
Dann-ie
.

6

On the evening of my writing classes at NYU, I would allow myself an hour of television, Judge Wapner or
Superior Court
or
Jeopardy
. During this indulgence and at the height of Jacko's search for Sunny Sondquist, I would see Vixen Six promos every half hour.
Is Sonny Sondquist the Anodyne Kid? Have you seen her? Join Jacko Emptor in his quest
…

Despite all the noise, I had already heard from Jacko that in some sense the quest had reached a halt. There was, to use Jacko's terminology,
viewer excitement
, but no more credible sightings.

At a loss, Jacko had interviewed Bob Sondquist again. Returning from this interview, he called me and asked could I meet him at the usual place, the Odeon on West Broadway.

As always, I should have been pleased that Jacko was filial enough to consider me a fit client of the place. But I needed to teach that night and was not in the frame of mind for a bar where everyone drank Finlandia vodka and spritzers and boutique water. The old problem: there were few ugly or aged Odeon clients, and my taste today was for the ugly and aged.

—Come on, he begged me in a tone I had never heard before, however familiar the idiom was. Be a sport. I've had a shit of a day eh. Depressing as hell. I need to wash my damn mouth out with some honest vodka.

And so I ran down to the corner of Lafayette and found a disgruntled cab driver headed uptown, who didn't want to go around the block and who was even more outraged when I told him, No, not Broadway itself.
West
Broadway.

As I arrived, I was pleased to see that the young, rich, immortal and fragrant had not yet turned up in pernicious numbers at the Odeon. Jacko sat alone at the bar, and he half turned and watched me come in. He had little more than a grimace for me, and his greeting was mumbled.

—I might get some sleep tonight, he told me then. It was such a rare proposition to hear from Jacko's mouth!

His mannerisms were abnormal. He put first his chin and then his brow in his big hands. Then he raised his head, blinked, took up his vodka, and sipped briskly and medicinally.

—Well, I asked. What's the matter?

—What's the matter, he repeated. And he drank again and told me.

Dannie, he said, had put a research assistant onto scanning microfilm of regional newspapers for the period of Sunny Sondquist's childhood. During Bob's military career the Sondquists had lived in Florida, in Page, Utah, and in Connecticut, and Dannie had got from the military records the dates of all these postings. She had done it because she just didn't feel that four-square Bob with his competent use of his new throat box was the good citizen he affected to be.

—That's Jewish, you see, Jacko told me. If you present them with a good WASP, trim-bellied and square-bloody-shouldered, they just won't take him on face value eh. They've been slaughtered by that sort of bugger since the crack of history. They know there's got to be something wrong.

Another sip.

—Why do people have kids? he asked me, without expecting me to respond, even though I had a child of my own. He certainly didn't wait for an answer.

—So Dannie found it there. These awful bloody stories in the Salt Lake papers fourteen years back. Bob was in the quartermaster corps. And he was cooking the books some way. He had deals going with contractors
and
the sort of people who supply arms in quantity to paramilitary idiots of various bloody stripes. And his company commander knew all about it, for years, but took no action. And the question all the investigators asked was why he took no action eh. Was he in it? You know. Was the bugger in it? He
did
receive sweeteners from Bob, in part monetary. But you couldn't guess what the main sweetener turned out to be?

—No Jacko. I couldn't.

Though I did repent of my brusqueness when I saw no smile from him, saw him simply pinch his left eyebrow with his forefinger and thumb. Such serious fastidiousness of gesture had its own weight.

—The main sweetener, said Jacko in his resonating murmur, was that Bob gave his company commander his own beloved daughter, Sunny. Honest to Christ! She must have been eight or nine years old.

I was struck to silence. I listened to the riot of innocent traffic beyond the Odeon's glass walls.

—Can you imagine that scene? asked Jacko. Can you imagine it? I'm such a bloody innocent, I think that Dannie promising to dress up as an SS woman and screw my ears off is the big bad world. But
this stuff
is the really big bad world. Christ's blood, mate … Christ's blood hasn't reached some of these bastards. Nor has poor bloody Sunny Sondquist ever been out of the big bad world eh. Can you imagine what he said to her while he drove her round to the captain's place? All the normal fatherly advice turned on its head eh – like
Be a good girl
.

Jacko shuddered and, of course, drank again. He dropped his voice lower still.

—Why did Bob approach you like this? I asked. Well, not you … the other people at CBS or NBC or whatever? When he had this in his background?

—He thought we wouldn't research him. And let me tell you, others wouldn't have. That's Dannie for you eh. Dannie's work. I tell you there's such bloody evil in this country. No way I'd raise kids here. I just wouldn't. There are zones of bloody, bloody evil in this place. They believe the founders were the Pilgrim bloody Fathers. I think the founders might've been fucking Satanists. Why here, mate? Why the Bermuda bloody Triangle of malice?

If his sadness hadn't had such authority, I would have raised – not for the first time – the old, tired, always valid argument about whether
Live Wire
, and television as a whole for that matter, didn't feed into the unspeakable triangle he was speaking of. Was television the tree from the old garden, here as nowhere else? Did television make evil by daily raising the possibility of evil? Did it provide an up-till-now unthought-of option? Did it say, Lock up your women. Above all, guard your children! Even, and particularly, from yourself!

Or then again – a defence Jacko but, above all, the networks put up – did it act as a crucial valve on the pressures within the soul? Did it burn up the accumulations of methane which people like Jacko believed to rise in mad clouds off the swamps of the nation's Calvinist and obsessed-with-destiny spirit?

—So, Jacko breathed, Dannie and Durkin want me to hang on to this nifty little bit of info and save it for later on in the search. For now, they've made me go up there and talk to Bob about what sort of kid she was, and how she got her flare for bloody spelling bees. Well, I can tell you now how she got it. I can imagine the poor little bugger spelling for all she was worth on the way
to
and on the way
from
that bloody captain in the quartermaster corps. Northern Utah? It's right there, right in a big zone of bloody malice. No wonder she only visited that old bastard Bob Sondquist when he was flat on the recovery table and couldn't speak.

His dejection had an unaccustomed weight of its own, and I respected it. I reached my hand to his arm and caressed it. This was a gesture of extraordinary warmth for an Australian male. Beyond my own shock, I even looked forward to telling my wife about Jacko's, given that, on sound evidence, she doubted Jacko's humane qualities.

At last I needed to go. The graduate writers would already be gathering, sipping their coffees, opening the two bottles of wine they took turns to bring. I apologized about leaving, but Jacko rose and came with me anyhow. Why didn't he talk about these matters with Lucy? I wondered. Why was I the confidant?

It's just about the truth to say I had to lead him to the corner of Thomas Street and direct him home to his loft. But he delayed me on the corner of West Broadway by the big Korean grocery.

—What am I going to do, mate, about this mad Jewish sheila?

I said, You know what I think.

—Yeah.

He closed his eyes.

—Just go over that stuff about television again.

—It sounds so bloody pious.

—That's okay. I'm used to it from you. You know what I mean …

—Well, you know … I think television demands great saintliness of its practitioners. The medium, since it deifies men and women … it forces the necessity on them to live calmly or else destroy themselves.

—Live bloody calmly? With little Dannie after a bloke's kidney fat?

—I think I'd go home to Lucy, Jacko. You're not saying, are you, that you don't know how to tell a young producer to get lost? Well, you've got the force of character to tell Dannie to get lost.

—How do you know?

—Because it seems to me you've got enough character to be appalled by the Sondquist story. Not just as television material. Appalled by the history.

—Oh mate, he said in a near whisper. That's different. The poor bloody Anodyne Kid eh.

He opened his eyes again and considered me.

—You're like everyone. You're in love with Lucy.

I didn't feel any threat in this accusation.

—Not the way you are with Dannie.

—Come on, mate. No fantasies?

—Jesus, I protested. I suppose I was being punished for my advice. If you want to know, she's off limits in my mind. Forbidden degrees of relationship.

—Okay. You're a mad bastard. You're not telling me you were always ridgey-didge with Maureen. Loyal in all bloody circumstances, mate.

—I wish I could. We're so happy now, and if you can't see that … Well, if my work was better, I'd be globally happy. And drink less with yobbos like you.

—Okay, okay. No more challenges to you tonight. Look, I've got to go, and you've certainly got to go. Back to your happy home. Why does good old Maureen put up with you?

—I wake up at night with a nearly crippling regret for some of the pain I've inflicted in the past. That's what's ahead of you if you don't watch out.

—Thanks for the fucking cheery forecast.

He lumbered past the plastic and deal-encased annexe where a Korean with an axe cut kindling for sale and trimmed the flowers his family sold. What a weapon in a hold-up that tool might become.

Even now there was the chance that Jacko would seek a final comfort with the First Precinct cops at Coghlan's or with the sentimental Irish in Mary O'Reilly's.

The mystery of Jacko's not being happy with Lucy continued to exercise Maureen and me. My wife told me Lucy's version of why she did not travel with him on his
Live Wire
weekends. They fought when she did. In the end she offered to stay home, hoping he wouldn't take her up on it. He said that was probably wise. He gave her the usual promises about his behaviour – this still my wife's version of Lucy's version! Lucy spent the weekends going to galleries and concerts, more often than not with Maureen. Maureen and I were becoming the parents of these two dislocated children.

Maureen argued that it was Jacko's culpable choice
not
to be content. He had, she said, the air of a man who hadn't yet come to rest. I defended him of course. I argued that he was as bemused about it all as any of us.

And whatever the women (if they'd known) might have made of Dannie's stated desire, it seemed to me to have little meaning to Jacko one way or another. It delayed him not a second longer on the corner of Thomas Street or sent him home not a second earlier.

The following night I watched in cringing fascination as old Bob Sondquist squawked away to Jacko on
Live Wire
about Sunny and spelling bees, about how, in the pattern of her childhood habits, when she disappeared she had been studying linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His enthusiasm for the vanished girl seemed, in the light of what Jacko had told me, so fraudulently poignant. The unjust father redesigning his own daughter's childhood, working up into some sort of effigy the ashes of the burned years. All this to accord with the culture's lust for that wholesomeness, that sheen of redemptive niceness, which habitually – at least in Jacko's zones of malice – covered monstrous sins.

It was ghastly viewing, but I viewed it just the same.

7

Some time after my first visit to Burren Waters, I made accidental contact in Sydney with Jacko's younger brother, Francis Emptor, through a friend of mine, Oscar Mulcahy. Oscar was an operamane, a member of the Board of the Australian Opera, headquartered as it was beneath Joern Utzon's great white ceramic sails on Bennelong Point.

Oscar was a big-boned, beefy, generous and polemical sort of man, deriving perhaps from the same hulking Scots-Irish-farmer gene pool as the Emptors. People often said his shoe manufacturing business was the largest in the country, but Oscar would tell you it was the only and the last. Imports from Asia, he robustly declared, were killing him.

With an elegantly thin wife he had nicknamed Hefty, Oscar lived on the upper floor of a beautiful art deco apartment block above Elizabeth Bay. The Mulcahys' was one of my favourite places for a party. From its windows you could see the beautiful mid-Harbour, the Heads and, close in, the little green island on which vegetables had been grown by a lovesick lieutenant of Marines called Ralph Clarke during Sydney's first few starved years as a British gulag.

There was also the excitement inherent in the fact that next door to the Mulcahys lived the greatest Australian diva since Nellie Melba, Dame Roberta Murdoch. A large-boned, pleasant woman, widowed some years past, as iconic as Michael Bickham but more open. Less terrifying to the beholder, she was occasionally found at Mulcahy parties. A great part of the year she lived in Switzerland, from which she had access to the great opera houses of Europe and where – according to sniping opinion – she found a more congenial tax regime than she might enjoy in Britain or Australia.