The Unknown Terrorist (32 page)

“No, no,” shouted the taxi driver, who seemed genuinely worried for her. “No charge.”

The Doll could only guess what he was saying from his lips and his action in flicking off the meter, because neither he nor Chopin nor anything else could be heard above the roar of millions of hailstones smashing the city. The Doll held out her last hundred-dollar note, still slightly powdery.

“Too much,” the taxi driver mouthed, shaking his slender-fingered hands in front of her. “Too much.” He pointed to the meter. It showed the fare as $8.20. The Doll took his fingers and folded them around the money, flashed a smile, and stepped out of the car.

For a moment she looked back toward the city down the long strait of William Street. The hail had temporarily halted. At the street’s far end, she saw the sun sinking into Sydney as if it were being swallowed, a huge and blinding presence framed between two tower blocks that rose like black entry portals to the city’s heart.

A murderer’s light spilled out from the sunset. It flooded William Street with its ruddy glow and ran beneath the blue-black hail clouds and up the boulevard like hot blood. The hail was already melting on the street, and the steam that rose passed through this strange light to create a red mist that the Doll could feel filling her lungs.

89

The Doll shivered, turned back to the Cross and began walking quickly, a strange, skating walk, for in order not to lose her footing she had to slide her feet in under the hailstones that, in places, rose up to her ankles. Her scarlet body chased her lengthening shadow up the hill, heading into the faded ochre bars and swirling white lettering of the Coca-Cola sign.

Behind her a police chopper was arcing up the street, shuddering the ravine of William Street with the relentless blows of its rotor blades. There were sirens sounding ever closer. The hail began falling again, quickly growing heavier. Pole banners broke loose and were shredding. People were running for cover. Cars were sliding and smashing. The Cross looked as if it were covered in snow, but no one any longer looked. There were screams, distant. No one regarded them.

The Doll took shelter in a doorway. She saw that she was standing in a brothel entrance on the doorway of which was a small notice advertising for workers.

Ladies required killed at pleasure
.

The Doll burst out laughing; she thought how she must tell Wilder about it—but then she remembered what she intended doing and how she might never see Wilder again. ‘No,’ thought the Doll, ‘nothing is funny. Everything is about hate. The world only exists to hate and destroy. Every joke, every smile, everything happy exists only to cover up this truth.’

And then, as if in confirmation of what she had just been thinking, directly opposite her, beneath the awning of Centrefolds Sex Show, two beggars oblivious to the storm were quarrelling, pulling a piece of bedding back and forth.
From doorways and shop alcoves a small crowd of the ragged watched, some laughing, some egging their favourite on, everyone happy to observe such a pitiful spectacle solely to be amused. ‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘even beggars make war on other beggars—that’s life.’

She broke cover and began running.

She ran past Club X, her breath even, her stride strong, accelerating around the few people still out on the street, deftly skirting obstacles. She ran past the Spice Bar. Fuck hotels. The World Famous Love Machine. The Pleasure Chest Cruise Area. Maddonas. The chemist with “Nite Lady Sandals” on special out front. She could not hear her own cries above the huge roar of the storm smashing into the city.

As the hailstones thrashed her bare arms, her shaven head, the Doll felt life and her separating. She felt a growing distance from everything around her, even her own body. She observed her pain as she was now observing so much, from some strange, detached other place. And part of her welcomed the pain, the hurt, the way in which her agony finally could be faced and felt as something real, and every blow, every frozen ball hitting hard as a rock, seemed to her necessary and good and cleansing.

She saw hailstones forming a gravel garden around a Big Mac wrapper, and next to it a dark-complexioned woman lay on her side on the pavement, back to the wall. The woman had the most beautiful black hair. It trailed away from her head and lay strewn over the pavement, flecked with white hail. At the corner of one of her burning dark eyes a fly waited.

Run, Doll, run
, she told herself.

There had to be a judgement. She understood that. There had to be a sacrifice. She understood that too. She had always understood it in some way. The bog woman. The French woman.

She felt something warm running down her cheek. Then the salty taste of blood came into her mouth, and she realised a hailstone had cut her head. Yes, it was clear what had to happen. Blood had to be spilt.

There was no point in asking why. It was a need, that’s all. Everyone felt it. Everyone agreed. No one these days wanted to admit to it, but that was simply part of the deceit of the age. It was nothing. She was ready. Her shaven head felt cold; her shaven head felt good. It no longer contained many conflicting thoughts, only a single purpose.

Run, Doll, run
.

She wanted to live … how she wanted to live! But the things that held her to life seemed to her to be falling behind as she ran further down the street and deeper into the Cross, and with each controlled pant, something else seemed now gone and forever irretrievable … her father … her son … her home … her money … her friend … and then the Doll lurched to a stop, put her hands on her hips, and took some deep breaths.

She did not know what she was going to do, only that she was always going to do it, like the ending of a movie she had seen before but could not remember. She did not realise until then that she had the Beretta, that it was the revolver’s metal warming in her palm as around her the world iced over. But she understood she was always going to end up here, going back to where it all began, her finger on the trigger, and that
everything else had been as unavoidable as it was now inevitable.

The only thing she was unprepared for was how calm and peaceful she felt. For the first time since she had woken alone in Tariq’s bed, she was not filled with a panic that left her unable to make even the smallest of decisions. She lifted her head up and smiled.

“A good night, my friend?” she said.

And with that walked up the red carpet between the brass poles and the fancy rope towards the great white-clad figure who kept guard outside the official entrance of the Chairman’s Lounge.

90

“We are lucky gods,” Richard Cody was telling some Six executives with whom he was drinking inside the Chairman’s Lounge. He was working hard at changing his own rather bleak mood. “Why, just look at our world! A more wondrous variety of food and wine in one suburban supermarket than Nero could have found in his whole empire—and all that just for another evening meal!”

As wonderful a week as Richard Cody was having, he was still troubled by something that he reasoned should not have troubled him at all. The day before, he had overheard one of his producers, a young woman who Richard Cody felt had a lot to learn, talking about him with a research assistant, another not unattractive young woman.

“Not an idea in his head,” she had said.

And yet it had been a remarkable week, and today had
been particularly glorious. Why, only that evening, after watching the special at the studio, he had just been about to come to the club when Mr Frith himself had called.

Mr Frith said he personally wanted to pass on to Richard Cody the news that “those who matter at the highest level” had already rung to congratulate him on the special. Six, Mr Frith had been told, was helping not only the government but the nation and freedom itself. It was something, Mr Frith felt, that would not go unnoticed when the contracts for the next government advertising campaign on a welfare clampdown or a new tax regime was apportioned among the media conglomerates; nor when the laws concerning media ownership were reviewed. And nor, Mr Frith added, would he personally forget Richard Cody’s part in it all.

But it was hard to take pleasure in that memory when all he could hear in his mind were the two women talking.

“Know why they call him Shitcart?” said the research assistant—“Screw him into a septic tank one end and watch the shit stream out the other!”

And they had both laughed and laughed.

“We live far longer than anyone before us,” Richard Cody continued, quoting almost verbatim from an article he had read online only the night before: “We have wondrous machines doing our bidding, we look better and we can look at better things”—here he raised his eyebrows, and the other men laughed as they surveyed the high breasts and wide smiles of the women who wandered the room semi-naked.

But all Richard Cody could hear in his mind was the sound of the two women’s tittering and their voices saying:

“Shitcart! Oh my God! That’s hilarious! Shitcart!”

And while Richard Cody continued in the lounge with his philosophy of a wondrous west, outside the Chairman’s Lounge Billy the Tongan’s dark eyes came to life. Even with her shaved head he had no trouble recognising her.

“People been round, Krystal,” Billy the Tongan said, his snub nose spreading even wider as he spoke. “Asking questions.”

The hail was easing, but it was still hard to hear anything over its cacophony.

“People always asking, Billy,” the Doll said loudly, still catching her breath, knowing she needed to humour him, to have him onside and not suspicious. “Only they don’t stop till you give them the answer they want.”

Billy the Tongan smiled. He raised a great white arm, gesturing with his open hand to the door. As the Doll walked past, he didn’t look at her but away, up and down the street. It was something he had learnt when he had been a bodyguard.

Keeping the Beretta hidden behind her handbag, the Doll marvelled at how it felt little more than a toy, something Max might play with. Only its compact weight in her hand reminded her otherwise.

91

She walked on down the neon-arrowed steps, around the corner and past the cash register where Maria was on duty. Maria—who told anyone who would listen how she “was, like, blown away” when she found out Krystal was “really a terrorist, you know, a real celeb”—broke into an excited grin and waved. The Doll gave a small smile and continued on, halting for a moment at the entrance to the main lounge.

The deafening noise of the hail was gone and here in the dark and doof music it was any time, any season, any place. Looking through the swirl of light she picked out some of the usual crowd, a few casuals and, sitting at the bar’s far end with Ferdy and a few other men, just as Jodie had said, there was Richard Cody. The men were all laughing, as men always laugh.

It was then, as Richard Cody was finally beginning to forget the overheard taunt and fill with the particular joy of his life and world, as he began taking some pleasure in his success that week, that he sensed something going on in the bar other than his own conversation. He twisted around on his bar stool and looked up at the exit. All he could see was black.

And then, for the last time, the Doll emerged out of the darkness. With her bald head and glistening face, blood smeared, she looked more beautiful than Richard Cody remembered. Far more beautiful and more delicate—almost a child’s body—than the crude, pixelated images that had in a few short days filled tv screens, posters and newspapers.

He stared at her for what seemed to the Doll a very long time. He opened a hand, extending his fingers—those awful, fleshy fingers—outwards. But his face made no expression, was—though the Doll could not know it—rendered by Botox incapable of expression. And it was this perfect, terrifying blankness that now convinced the Doll that he had never believed a word of what he had said on television, because if he had, he would have been afraid.

A suit next to Cody seemed to sense something and pulled his stool back toward the bar. Ferdy had disappeared, and the Doll knew he would already be phoning the police.
She didn’t mind: he had to. He needed protection, friends, publicity. He needed them, they him. The Doll knew she had only a short time before the cops arrived, but it was more than enough for the little she had left to do.

Someone had turned the music off. Everyone was watching. The Doll began walking toward Richard Cody. Covered by her handbag, she felt her fingers flick off the ambidextrous safety catch.

“Well, look who’s here!” said Richard Cody in a loud voice to the lounge, spreading his arms wide.

No one else said anything. Richard Cody laughed. A few laughed with him and then stopped.

“Jesus,” someone stammered.

For a moment the Doll had no idea why she was standing there in front of Richard Cody, nor why it wasn’t just another night when she would smile, uncover herself and make money and go home and cover herself back up with hundred-dollar bills. Nothing made any sense, not the club, not her life, not the last three days, least of all the stranger sitting in front of her, smiling, a man whom she had exposed her body to just a few days before.

“Well, well,” Richard Cody said. “If it isn’t the unknown terrorist.”

And then the Doll remembered why she was there.

92

Nick Loukakis had been driving down William Street, heading back to work from his home, trying to make some sense of Gina Davies’ world, trying to think what she might think,
trying not to think about what had just happened at his home, when the traffic snarled in a hailstorm.

He had told Diana it was all over, and she had simply stood up, walked out of the house and driven off. Though he had wanted them to do it together, he alone told his sons he was leaving. He said that he still loved them and not to worry, that love was for keeps.

“Yeah,” said his eldest son, then returned to gaming on his Sony PlayStation. “Whatever.”

And his son was right—this love didn’t help Nick Loukakis because he had no words really, no words that would do, no words that might explain a life or justify what was going to happen. It should have been better, different, but his love had betrayed him and destroyed him and would, he feared, for ever after poison all their lives. He tried to find something they could all hold on to, to bring them all through. But there was nothing. He could think only of a sea of plenty transformed into a poisoned desert.