The Unknown Terrorist (12 page)

Yet, as always with such stories, when he began thinking about it he realised that there were key dramatic elements lacking. By degrees, Richard Cody came to see that what
was missing was what was unknown: the life of the pole dancer.

The man was obvious—a Middle Eastern name and a no-doubt predictable past—and, from what the news reports were saying, a known terrorist. But the pole dancer was different: an Aussie turning on their own—an unknown terrorist. Because there was no doubt now in Richard Cody’s mind that Gina Davies was a killer. The more he thought about her, the more inescapable and logical his thinking was. Just looking back on the time he had spent with her the previous night he could see now that something hadn’t been right about her. Hadn’t she been secretive when he asked her about her private life? And when he put to her a more than generous proposal wasn’t she unpleasantly aggressive? ‘No,’ thought Richard Cody, ‘something was wrong with her—very wrong.’

And the more he thought about it, the more it all made sense, and what at first seemed ludicrous—a pole dancer an Islamic terrorist!—now seemed insidious and disturbing. What better cover? After all, hadn’t Christine Keeler slept with both the Russians and Profumo? And wasn’t the Chairman’s Lounge popular with the influential and powerful? It was obvious what was going on, and it was up to him, Richard Cody, to expose what was happening. And what a story it would be! What ratings they would get! It had everything—sex, politics, even bombs! ‘No doubt about it,’ thought Richard Cody, ‘it’s a killer.’ He reached for his phone and dialled another number. There was no time to lose.

34

It was too hot to cook, so Wilder and the Doll walked a hundred metres down the street and entered a small and undistinguished restaurant that sat on the corner of the crossroads, Max leading the way, still in his Spider-Man jocks.

Johnsons was an unpromisingly named ethnic restaurant of a type that had disappeared almost everywhere else in Sydney. It still had cheap chairs with torn vinyl seats, and its plywood panelled walls were decorated with flyblown black and whites of early television stars, long lost to death or the even more relentless obscurity of supermarket magazines, autographed with the doomed flourish of those condemned to Sydney celebrity. Though its colours had long since disappeared with time, a framed photograph of Lebanon also remained, as enduring in adversity as the nation it depicted. For Johnsons was, as a proudly displayed restaurant review from a 1966
Sydney Morning Herald
reported, Sydney’s first Lebanese restaurant, recommended for the adventurous diner.

It was empty, save for two late middle-aged Lebanese men who, though dressed in waiters’ black trousers and white shirts, sat in a corner quietly drinking short Arabic coffees and playing dominoes. On seeing Wilder and Max, their faces lit up.

“Mr Maxie! Mr Maxie!” they cried, and Max walked up to them like a caliph returning from exile, acknowledging their attention with a shy smile. He disappeared into the kitchen in the arms of a large, elderly woman.

The Doll began telling Wilder her story in full after their second red wine, but the more she talked the more her fears seemed far-fetched—so improbable and so impossible—and
she worried that she was beginning to sound a bit crazy, as if she was spinning fantasies out of a few newsflashes.

The Doll could sense that Wilder felt she had become a little hysterical and that this was now a somewhat boring story. Worse, to the extent Wilder had any interest, she seemed to be suggesting that the Doll might in some manner have brought this on herself, and in some strange way therefore be guilty.

“So this Tariq,” Wilder said, “how do you know he was Tariq? Didn’t you ever ask what his full name was?”

And perhaps, thought the Doll, it was a very stupid thing to go to a strange apartment with a man you barely knew and whose name you had no proof of, and not ask for ID, but how else does one go to bed with a man?

“And you were drunk,” said Wilder, “and had done some coke …”

And perhaps, thought the Doll, it was the height of folly to sleep with a stranger in such a state.

“He had an accent,” said Wilder, “and he’s dark and he’s foreign and you never asked where he came from?”

The Doll had been curious, and had perhaps harboured the secret hope that in the future she would discover more about Tariq. But on the night his droning on about raster graphics had merely confirmed to her that, like everyone else, there was a large part of Tariq’s life that, far from being illegal, was simply humdrum dullness, hardly worth knowing about. For one evening two people simply had fun together. Questions had seemed intrusive, unnecessary; questions had been superfluous, because for one night they had found something beyond the answers of home and history—maybe
something easily broken, maybe not serious, but perhaps all the better and truer for being only about the moment.

But now that something seemed to her the opposite. It seemed small and trivial and stupid, and it made her feel small and trivial and stupid. And all those questions she never asked and all the answers she never got now appeared to matter so much, all the information that might have saved her from the shit she now felt buried in.

“I mean, Gina—
hello
? You get on the gear with a teatoweller and give him a blow job? I mean, I dunno, but Christ almighty …” Wilder shook her head, waved a hand in dismissal, and didn’t even bother finishing what she was saying.

In the middle of the Doll describing to Wilder how the police had staked out the apartment block, Wilder struck up a conversation with one of the waiters on the best way of making baba ghanoush. It was, the Doll felt, as if Wilder thought she was overly obsessed with the problem.

“But why me?” asked the Doll at one point. “Why are they doing this to me?”

And Wilder smiled at her like she was some foolish child who, having done wrong, remains confused as to why they are being punished.

“Look, tomorrow you’ll wake up and it’ll all be over,” Wilder said. “There’ll be some new story—another bomb, another water crisis, another country being invaded by the Americans, Shane Warne discovered writing a postcard. It’s just a bizarre thing. It’ll pass.”

The Doll laughed. And it was true that there was nothing to be frightened of, because it was, as Wilder pointed out,
simply a ridiculous series of associations, and these mistakes would be cleared up quickly. Terrorism was a serious thing, no doubt about it, Wilder said, and that’s why the people dealing with it were experts who weren’t about to chase a pole dancer, not when there were real monsters out there.

“Do you seriously think they’re going to storm through the door of Johnsons,” said Wilder, “the most forgotten restaurant in the world, just to arrest you? I don’t think so.”

The Doll began to feel better, safer. No one was after her. Here, with Wilder, the Doll finally felt secure. Wilder went off on one of her stories, and it warmed her, the gentle Lebanese food, the soft red wine they drank with it, and Wilder’s tales.

“When they find out where you work, they’ll be the ones who are going to feel stupid,” Wilder said after a while.

“Perhaps I should go and see the police,” the Doll said. “In the morning, maybe?”

“Yeah, whatever,” said Wilder, as though everything were known and not worth knowing at the same time.

“Yeah, whatever,” the Doll wearily repeated, trying to sound convinced.

“It’s all a joke,” said Wilder, again bored, gazing at the curling photos on the wall.

The matter of Tariq remained a mystery.

“Would a terrorist know how to merengue?” the Doll asked Wilder.

And though she didn’t say it, the Doll didn’t think his behaviour in bed suggested a devout Muslim, but then her experience of bedding devout Muslims was nonexistent.

“And the picture of the bearded man they keep showing
on the television,” said the Doll, “that they say is Tariq but doesn’t look like him.”

“He could have lied,” said Wilder, her eyes returning to the Doll.

The Doll was quiet for a moment.

“Or he could be a mistake,” she said finally. “Like me.”

35

From what Richard Cody could gather from his phone calls there was no motive. Far from being a Muslim, there was no evidence that Gina Davies knew anything about Islam. As much as anyone knew, she had never received any terrorist training.

None of this predisposed Richard Cody to the notion of her innocence. They were merely problems to overcome. His instinct was to create a story in which he more and more believed, in order to allow him to further create that story. He did not say to himself: “Although there is no evidence of any guilt or wrongdoing, I am going to stitch this woman up with concocted assertions.” He did not think any such thing, because he would have despised himself if he had ever thought himself capable of making up such monstrous lies.

Rather, as he talked to others on his phone, as he heard from the ASIO spook Siv Harmsen of the capacity of terrorist suicide bombers “to kill many hundreds of people at, say, a major sporting event”, he was rightly horrified.

“It is horrifying,” Siv Harmsen agreed, “and we need stories that remind people of what horrifying things might just happen.”

Richard Cody knew there was no need to remind Siv Harmsen of the last story they had worked on together, when Siv leaked him some documents that brought down a police minister with allegations of corruption—allegations that had in that particular case later been shown to be of no particular import or relevance to the police minister, though not without benefit for Siv Harmsen.

“Can I count on you?” was all he needed to say.

“I think we can count on each other,” said Siv Harmsen. “Don’t you, Richard?”

He went on to say that whoever the woman was, she didn’t necessarily have much to do with any of it, as she had never showed up on their surveillance before.

But the more Richard Cody listened to Siv Harmsen, the more persuaded he became that he was on to something. He didn’t tell Siv Harmsen he knew who the woman was. If the spooks still hadn’t worked it out by the following evening, that would be his first exclusive story.

Once more he could see the pole dancer naked, the bomb belt wrapping around her waist. His horror at the possibility of such an act was as genuine as his smile of jubilation, for the puzzle was coming together, the pieces mostly there, and all he needed now was to persuade Jerry Mendes to give him a special to take such an amazing story to the country.

It was, he told Jerry Mendes, now a race between Six and Gina Davies as to who got the story out first—her with her bombs or them with a tell-all current affairs special. Richard Cody, looking up at a framed photograph of himself shaking hands with Bill Clinton from when they had done a tv special together, could sense Jerry Mendes’s growing interest
as he began talking about which night would have most impact on the ratings.

Even before Jerry Mendes had said, “Okay, Richie, half-hour prime time, this Tuesday night,” Richard Cody had already pointed his finger revolver-like at the Arkansas charmer. Cocking his thumb and smiling, Richard Cody said to himself, “More than one Comeback Kid, Bill.”

“Three conditions,” said Jerry Mendes, who liked talking at such times in dot points. “One: the special has to be about them both, the terrorist and the pole dancer. Call it ‘Al-Qa’ida’s Bonnie and Clyde’ or something. Two: I have to clear it with the big boss—he’ll want to make sure none of his Canberra mates have a problem.” The big boss was the chairman of the nation’s largest print and electronic media company, Amalgamated Press, and owner of the Six Network, Terry Frith, generally referred to only as Mr Frith.

There was no Three.

Richard Cody agreed—how could he not and why would he not?—knowing the lack of lead time would only help him bend the show his way, knowing also that his name would work like KY Jelly when Mr Frith talked with the government. After all, he had devoted his life to never offending anyone powerful.

When he went to bed his wife was still sitting up watching tv with headphones. A Harvey Norman ad was playing. He watched her lips mouthing the words of the ad’s jingle in eerie breaths. He turned over on his back and was soon asleep.

That night in his dreams, Richard Cody was on the stage accepting his fourth gold Logie as tv personality of the year, and all around him people fawned and flattered as they had
before, all seeing in him qualities of the greatest intelligence and exceptional humanity as they always had.

“Above all,” said a faceless host, “his work in uncovering a terrorist network in Australia showed Richard Cody to be not only Australia’s foremost journalist but its most fearless.”

And it was only natural to Richard Cody that everyone loved him, and the question of whether anyone meant what they said was irrelevant, for once more he was the centre of everything that mattered, life was as it was always meant to be and life existed only for him.

36

The Doll, too, was dreaming that stifling night. After lying on a mattress on the hot floor of Wilder’s lounge room for over an hour, she remained wide awake. It was too quiet for her, the low ceiling felt ever closer, the room ever smaller, the air ever stuffier.

Then she must have dozed off, for suddenly she was looking down on herself. She was alone and naked, being lowered into the earth and, as the dirt began piling up over her, as she saw the leering half-drunken faces of the drones and the suits, the creeps and the pervs, looking down at her like a photo that had been thrown into a garbage bin, she summoned all her strength to wake, to rise, to stand up and not abandon herself to that terrible fate of being alone and naked.

The Doll crept into Wilder’s bedroom. Wilder slept quietly, a sheet pulled up to her waist. The only sound in the room was the slow rattle and rush of an old air con vent
above the bed head. As gently as she could, the Doll slowly lifted the sheet and slid into the bed next to her friend.

They both lay on their backs, not touching, Wilder asleep in a suitably Wilderish way, hands under her head. The Doll turned and breathed in slowly and deeply, just so that she might smell Wilder and be reassured. She thought how there is some secret of this life in the smell of those you love.