The Bear Pit (35 page)

Then through the oleanders he saw the figure on the other side of the wire fence. He was not sure that it was August, but, again, who else could it be? He yelled, “Drop the gun, John!”

He was answered by a bullet that splintered the windscreen of the car behind which he crouched. He straightened up, took quick aim, fired and dropped down again. He had no real hope of a hit: he was still thirty or forty metres from August and he knew it was only Clint Eastwood who could hit a man at that distance, quick firing with a police pistol.

He yelled again at August and was answered by another shot. Back across the parking lot Maureen had run across to the entrance to the main building, shouting at those who had come out to see what all the hullabaloo was about; they stared at her, then abruptly scuttled back inside. The man who had just driven his car into the lot had got out and stood looking at Malone as if wondering if this was an action scene from some future telemovie.

Malone, still crouched behind a car, saw August searching for him through the screen of oleanders. August began to work his way along the fence towards the road, ending up in the angle of the fence and opposite the security gates. He was exposed for a moment beyond two oleanders, but he was too far away for a safe shot from Malone.

Malone lifted his pistol, held it with both hands, took careful aim. He saw August staring towards him; then abruptly he turned and ran back into the trees. Malone waited a moment, then started running, bent over, towards the gates. He was in reasonable condition for a middle-aged man, but this was a young man's game. He came to the spot where the fence turned at right angles and ran back down the side road. He paused, took a deep breath, steadied himself, then turned the corner.

August all at once had lost the urge to kill; the fury ran out of him, turned to despair. He raced down the inside of the fence, came to the opening he had cut, pulled back the wire and slipped through.
Then
the wire caught on his jacket, held him firmly; it was as if the absent Mr. Milo had put a restraining hand on him. He struggled, heard the jacket rip, slipped through and outside the fence, then turned back and saw Malone only thirty metres away, gun raised and aimed.

“Drop it, John!”

August looked down at the Tikka, as if he had forgotten it. There was one cartridge left in the magazine. He stared at the rifle, then he raised it and put the end of the barrel in his mouth.

“Don't, John! Don't make it worse for Lynne!”

V

“Why did you stop me?”

The two of them were seated in a small office that Malone had commandeered from the studio. There were large photos on the walls of actors from the channel's soap operas, all with smiles a mile wide. A young uniformed officer stood just inside the doorway and Malone was waiting for Greg Random and some of the task force men to arrive. Maureen was in her producer's office, he suddenly solicitous of her, while they waited for a doctor and a counsellor who had been summoned. Channel 15 had got an exclusive on the arrest of John August, the fugitive hitman, and the producer was trying to persuade Maureen to front the camera and report the item. She was refusing, something that her father, at the moment, did not know, but for which later he would hug her as he had not since she was a child.

“John, I've been with women who had to identify their husbands who'd committed suicide. You wouldn't have wanted that for Lynne, not with the top of your head blown off.”

August thought about that for a long moment, then nodded. “I guess not. Is this an interrogation?”

“No, that'll be done back at Police Centre, by senior men to me. No, I'm just keeping you company till my boss arrives. You glad it's all over?”

Again the long pause: “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Who paid you, John?” The question was almost too casual.

August
smiled, but there was no humour to it. “That's just it—I haven't a clue.”

“Come
on
, John—”

“No, true
. I don't know
.”

“Who paid you the money? Was there a middleman?”

This time there was a little more humour to the smile. “I think he thought of himself as an agent. But I'm not gunna give you his name. Like you said, it's over.”

“It isn't, John. Not till we find who wanted the Premier killed.”

“Well, don't expect anything from me. I went into this with my eyes open. I give you someone's name, you think it's gunna help me?” He shook his head. “What d'you reckon I'll get?”

“Probably life, never to be released. You killed a political leader, John. Every politician from the PM down is going to want you to get the maximum, in case you've inspired someone else to have a crack at one of them.”

August sat quietly for a while, then he said, “I'm sorry I tried to kill you and your daughter. I was just so shitty about what you were doing to Lynne.” He was silent again for a moment, then he said, “Tell Lynne—”

“Tell her what?” Malone's voice was kindly.

“No, I'll tell her myself.” Then he closed his eyes and the tears ran down his cheeks, not for himself but for her.

12

I

“YOU'RE NOT
gunna nail this to anyone,” Clements had said two days after August's arrest. “We've checked bank accounts of everyone. Nothing, no big withdrawals, except for Bev Bigelow buying ten thousand shares in Telstra.”

“Nothing on Kelzo?” Clements shook his head and Malone said, “What about Billy Eustace? He's the heir.”

“Mate, do you go and ask the Premier and Police Minister permission to look at his bank account? In any case, I don't think he'd be vicious enough to have someone shot. He might stab ‘em in the back, but that's no crime.”

And so the murder of Hans Vanderberg went into the files and now the Sydney Olympics are about to be opened. Around 110,000 people, including 24,373 official guests, are waiting for the final runner to come into the stadium with the torch to light the Olympic flame. Who will it be? everyone is asking: an athlete, a swimmer, a boxer, an IOC official running from corruption? The human brass on the official dais, polished for the occasion by anticipation, shines with blinding self-esteem.

The Malones, all five of them, have good seats, courtesy of Lisa's role with the City Council. Malone looks for Police Commissioner Zanuch amongst the brass, but the glare is too much. He does see Billy Eustace, who appears to be waving individually to the 110,000 spectators, some of whom are voters.

Bygones have become history, as Socrates or his mouthpiece Peter Kelzo said. Labor won a crushing victory at the elections last March and Billy Eustace is now acknowledged as more than just a stop-gap. Ladbroke and the image-makers have scrubbed him and shaped him and occasionally he looks and sounds like a leader. His personal stinginess is now tolerated as economic rationalism and the Big
End
of town picks up tabs as if they were redeemable. He has just collected the first six months' interest on the seventy-five thousand dollars he lent Jerry Balmoral's private company, Ambition Proprietary Limited, when Jerry wanted a second mortgage on something or other.

Gert Vanderberg still runs the Boolagong electorate with a firm but benevolent hand, pushing Barry Rix through the political traffic as if he were in a perambulator. She still misses Hans, but in her thoughts he is still alive, still bigger and better than those still in the Bear Pit in Macquarie Street.

Jack Aldwych and the Olympic Tower consortium have been promised their casino at Coffs Harbour and Aldwych is waiting for the day when he and Jack Junior interview Janis Eden. But he is feeling his age now and reads the obituaries before he reads anything else in his morning newspapers. He has begun to appreciate the sweet irony that as one approaches one's own death one becomes more interested in the departures of others.

John August, still on remand in Long Bay and waiting to be brought to trial, still refusing to say who brought him the hit fee, watches the Olympic opening on television and wonders if there is someone in the crowd who paid the money. Once a month Lynne Masson comes to visit him and they both weep when she leaves. She is working as an aide at the Clontarf Gardens nursing home, finding the elderly more calming than the infants.

Peter Kelzo made Greek meatballs of his opponents in the March election. He is now Minister for Multiculturism and has introduced Socrates, Demosthenes, kaccavia, moussaka to Chinese, Lebanese and a dozen other assorted nationalities in his domain, not all of whom are appreciative of the cultural hand-out. George Gandolfo and Joe St. Louis are working in Macquarie Street with him, where Joe St. Louis has established a new standard as a minder.

Norm Clizbe and Jerry Balmoral are running a stronger, better financed Trade Congress and are often seen in the company of the Minister for Multiculturism. Balmoral also pays private visits to the Premier. Still occasionally impatient but learning to take the long view, he has a new girlfriend, a lovely Italian girl whose grandfather is a ‘Ndrangheta
capo
in Calabria and, says his granddaughter, takes a deep interest in politics. Balmoral does not correspond with him.

Malone
is still in charge of Homicide. Lisa is still at Town Hall, but will within the next two weeks be no longer in charge of Olympics public relations. Claire and Jason are engaged, Maureen now works as a researcher on
Four Corners
at the ABC and Tom is getting merit passes in Economics and girls and is in the State cricket squad.

There is still no one in the country, whether university-educated or illiterate, who can make a statement without two points of reference: basically and at the end of the day. There are several websites that refuse to accept messages that do not begin with: Basically . . .

Sydney went off the rails for two weeks, but the rest of the world did not notice. The voters have lost interest in who paid for Hans Vanderberg to be shot and their interest, more lively, more focused because it is on sport, is on who will bring the torch into the stadium . . .

“Here he comes! Who is it? Who is it? Ohmigod, isn't that incredible? It's—”

THE
END

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PREVIEW OF THE NEXT SCOBIE MALONE MYSTERY:

YESTERDAY'S SHADOW

1

I

THE PAST
is part of the present, if only in memory. But memory, as Malone knew, is always uncertain testimony.

The first body was discovered by a fellow worker of the deceased at 5.08 a.m. The second body was found by a housemaid at 9.38 a.m. Two murders in one night did nothing to raise the hotel's rating from two and a half stars to three, a pursuit of the management over the past three months. An earthquake would have been more welcome, since insurance was preferable to bad publicity.

The Hotel Southern Savoy was one of several on the square across from Central Station, Sydney's terminal for country and interstate trains. The station itself had been built on an old burial ground, an apt location, it was thought in certain quarters, for some of the deadheads in State Rail. The Southern Savoy's clientele was mixed, but one would not have looked amongst it for celebrities or the wealthy. It catered mainly for country visitors and economy tour parties from Scotland, Calabria and the thriftier parts of Vermont. It had little or no interest in its guests, so long as they paid their accounts, and was discreet only because it was too much bother to be otherwise. It had had its visits from the police (two deaths from drug overdoses, several robberies, a prostitute denting the skull of a customer with the heel of her shoe), but it had always managed to keep these distractions out of the news. But murder?
Two
murders?

“The manager is having a fit of the vapours,” Sergeant Phil Truach told Malone, ringing on his
mobile
and out of earshot of the manager. “He seems a nice guy, but he's a bit frail, if you know what I mean.”

“Phil, put your prejudices back in your pocket. Have a smoke or two. Before I get there,” he added.

Truach smoked two packs a day and had been told by his doctor that he had never seen such clear arteries, that Philip Morris could drive a truck through them. “I'll have them empty the ashtrays. The media are already here. I think that's worrying the manager more than the corpses.”

“The bodies still there?”

“The guy, the hotel worker, he's been taken to the morgue. The woman's in her room, the ME's examining her. Crime Scene are still here.”

Normally Malone, head of Homicide, would not have been called in on a single murder till the circumstances of it had been fully determined. But two murders in the one hotel on the same night, one a male worker, the other a female guest, called for his presence. The homicide rate in the city was rising and everyone who was literate, from Opposition MPs to letter-writers to the morning newspapers and callers to radio talk shows, was demanding to know what the government and police were doing about it. Zero tolerance had become a mantra, even with voters who had never come within a hundred kilometres of a violent crime.

He went out to the main room of Homicide where Russ Clements sat at his desk, which, startlingly, was bare of paper. Usually it looked like the dump-bin outside a paper mill.

“What's the matter? You not accepting any more paperwork?”

“This is what they call—is it a hiatus? I dunno if the system's run outa paper, but I'm not, as they say, gunna make any enquiries. It'll start up again, soon's my back is turned. In the meantime . . .”

Malone and Clements had worked together for more years than they cared to count. Over the last year or two, as Homicide and Serial Offenders, part of Crime Agency, had expanded, they had worked together less and less out of the office. Clements, as Supervisor, the equivalent of general manager, had become trapped at his desk. Computers had proved to be just another form of land-mines, hemming him
in.
The diet of reports, reports, reports had put weight on him, turned muscle to fat. He was a big man, a couple of inches taller than Malone, and though he had never been light-footed, his tread now was heavy. He was a prisoner looking for parole.