Brother Fish (117 page)

‘Well then, let's go and find her,' I announced, as if it was somehow the simplest thing in the world to do. I don't know how such a bloody stupid notion came to me, or why – perhaps it had something to do with meeting Pat Brand after so long, which was ridiculous, of course. If I'd wanted to meet her desperately enough, it wouldn't have been that difficult to have done so years ago. Whereas finding Nicole's daughter didn't fall within the realms of possibility. How many people in Hong Kong? A million? More? In Taiwan? Four million? It was one of those things you say but later would give anything to take back.

There was a silence and I desperately wanted to say, ‘Stupid idea, of course', but the words didn't come.

Instead, Jimmy said, ‘Thank you, Brother Fish.' So that was that. I knew from long experience that once Jimmy had decided to do something there was no turning back. We went to bed soon after and it took a fair while for me to fall asleep, my mind racing over how we were going to tell Nicole.

In the morning we had a leisurely breakfast before seeing the local lawyer named Don Pertano, who was handling the silent auction for the abalone licence. He was grossly overweight and of a rubicund complexion with a black pencil moustache that seemed at odds with his large frame. He kept us waiting half an hour despite the fact that we had an appointment and there appeared to be no one in his office. Even then the Ogoya Seafood Company was big time in the fishing industry, and I guess the chip on his shoulder had been exposed. When we were finally ushered into his office it wasn't hard to tell what he was thinking from the way he looked at Jimmy. It also wasn't hard for Jimmy to tell what
I
was thinking, either:
We don't do business with this bloke
. He told us what the last bid was, which was way over the top, and I asked for the name of the bidder, the usual practice to ensure that we were not being gazumped. He refused to answer. ‘Private bidder – bloke doesn't want his name mentioned.'

‘We'll be off, then,' I said, not arguing, and Jimmy and I both rose to leave. Normally I'd have given him a serve, but the trip to secure the licence suddenly wasn't important any longer.

‘Wait a mo!' he called, plainly surprised. But as far as I was concerned it was all over red rover. We had lunch at Le Marlin Café, where they played a cassette tape of Pat Brand singing, and we had a salad and cold roast beef, cray being the specialty of the day.

Halfway through lunch a bloke who looked to be in his mid-fifties walked into the restaurant. It only took a second to know he was a fisherman: Sunday best, light-coloured sports jacket with his yellow shirt turned over the lapel, chocolate-brown pants, slightly scuffed cheap brown shoes, hair cut short and combed in a fifties quiff stuck down with Brylcreem, skin the usual mottled patchwork of sun spots. We had a hundred deadset replicas of him on the island and he could have been Alf. If I hadn't learned how to pull things together a bit with the right haircut and gear, I'd be in the same parade.

He came over to our table and introduced himself. ‘Doug Twentyman. Mr McKenzie, could I have a word?'

‘It's Jacko,' I said, extending my hand. I indicated Jimmy. ‘And this is my partner, Jimmy.'

‘How yoh been?' Jimmy said, standing up to shake his hand.

‘Take a seat.' I gestured to a vacant chair. ‘Twentyman – that's an old fishing family round these parts, isn't it?'

‘Four generations, man and boy. Me grandson'll be the fifth.' He grinned. ‘If he turns out to be as big a mug as his dad and his grandpa.'

‘Beer, or a glass of wine, Doug?'

‘Yeah, beer'd be nice,' he replied.

We chatted while the waitress went to get the beer – the usual stuff, weather, boats, the fishing season. The beer came. ‘Cheers.' We raised our wineglasses, Doug his beer. ‘What can we do for you, Doug?'

I asked, now that the formalities were over.

‘It's about the ab licence with Don Pertano,' he said.

‘We're out of there, Doug,' I replied. ‘He may be your lawyer, but he couldn't lie straight in bed.'

‘Yeah, Safcol bloke come in yesterday, same thing.'

‘Same thing?'

‘Walked out, got in his car and drove off back to Eden, tyres spinnin'.'

‘So what are you saying, Doug?'

‘The flamin' lawyer. He don't know nothin' about fishing . . . fishermen.'

‘Why are you selling? Didn't you say you had a son in the game?'

‘Smashed the ute, broke his leg. I'm too old to dive – asthma.' Like most fishermen, he was a man of few words.

‘Broken legs get better.'

‘Yeah, right, but we can't fish 'til it do. We can't use all our quota units.' Then he added the real reason. ‘They say the ab licence price is gunna fall, can't keep goin' up.'

‘Does your son like fishing?'

‘It's all we know, mate.'

‘So you'll take the twenty grand or so and do what?'

‘Dunno – maybe buy a bit of a dairy farm.'

‘Know anything about cows?'

He grinned. ‘If they didn't have horns I wouldn't know the arse end from the head until it mooed or farted. But we're grafters – we'll learn.'

We'd seen it all so many times before – three generations of a fishing family scratching their arse in the hope of finding the Christmas-pudding sixpence. The abalone licence was the first opportunity, and probably the last, they'd ever had to make a buck. But they panicked over the imagined possibility of the bottom falling out of abalone, like everything else always does for fishermen. Along comes the smart-arse lawyer or con man: ‘Sell, mate, it can't last. Give me ten per cent and I'll do the deal for you, no problems.' What was on offer was more than they'd ever see again in their lives.

‘What's Pertano on – ten per cent?'

‘Nah, fifteen.'

‘Did you sign a contract?'

‘Yeah.' He pulled a contract out of the inside breast pocket of his coat, and handed it to me. I read through it quickly. Thank Christ there are still some stupid lawyers around – the contract stipulated that the licence alone was for sale, and made no mention of the quota units. The licence was worthless without them. Admittedly it was a technical point, but a good lawyer would make mincemeat of a careless operator like Pertano. He didn't know the fishing industry, which was pretty unusual, Bermagui being a fishing town.

‘How long's this Pertano bloke been in town?' I asked Doug Twentyman.

‘New. Come in about two months ago. Says he was in Melbourne.'

I pushed my chair back and ordered another beer for Doug Twentyman. ‘Okay, Doug, here are your options. Sell the licence and your quota units and go dairy farming – it's only slightly more risky as an industry than fishing. Don't sell your licence and keep the number of quota units your son can handle himself when he can dive again, but sell the rest. Safcol will buy them, or we will.'

‘Mate, what if the abs go bottom up?' he asked again.

‘The abalone industry won't – there are a few million Japs who'll crawl over broken glass to get the stuff, and we haven't even started with the Chinese. Your abalone licence and quota units are going to increase enormously in value – if you hang on long enough you could end up a millionaire.'

‘So, what do I do?' he asked, looking confused.

It's no wonder these poor bastards get taken for a ride. They're ripe for the plucking. ‘Mate, you've got to make your own decisions. Go home and talk to your son.'

‘Nah, he'll go along with me.' Then he asked, ‘Jacko, will
you
buy the licence?'

‘No, keep the licence and half the quota units – that's your superannuation,' I answered, but could see he didn't know what that was. ‘That's what will take care of your old age. Sell the other half to us, or to anyone else if you have to. But if you don't need the money, keep the lot – the price of an abalone licence is
not
going to go down.'

‘What about my son's leg? It's broke bad, and he can't fish for a year.'

I was trying not to become impatient. ‘We're bringing a boat up here with divers. Your son can come on the payroll as a deckie until he can dive again. That way we'll be more or less within the law and we'll take a small percentage of your quota for the diving operation and buy the rest from him at normal prices. When he can dive again you can make up your own mind what you want to do with your quota units.'

‘What about him, the lawyer bloke?'

‘Withdraw the sale. If you want to sell some of your quota units in twelve months we'll buy them from you at the going price at the time.'

‘He reckons he's got expenses over and above.'

‘What, Pertano? Greedy bastard. Tell him to sue you. By the time it gets to court your son will be making plenty and you can settle out of court. When that time comes, give me a call.'

‘Do yiz want a contract?'

‘Later maybe, when you decide what you're going to do. In the meantime, let's shake hands on the deal.'

After he'd gone, Jimmy laughed. ‘Why you gone do dat, Brother Fish? Twenny grand yoh got da whole caboodle!'

‘Mate, I kept seeing Alf. My dad died when he was around Doug's age, leaving us without a brass razoo to our name. He'd worked like a dog all his life and had nothing to show for it. The middle men, the fish merchants in Melbourne, were all driving around in Chevvies and Packards and living in mansions and we could barely put food on the table. Gloria had to take in washing. We're the bloody middle men now and I've got a house on the island big enough to turn into a rest home for the elderly. It's too late for Alf, but it's time to look after blokes like Doug Twentyman and his family. The poor bugger even looks a bit like my dad.'

Jimmy smiled. ‘Dat good. Anyhow, we gonna do jus' fine wid his abalone quota units.'

On the plane back to the island we told Wendy the plan to try and find the Countess's daughter. At first she wasn't all that enthusiastic about the idea. Let sleeping dogs lie, blah, blah, blah – that sort of argument. But Jimmy got to work on her.

‘Wendy, yoh gotta see it from two direction – da chile and da mama. Da chile, she want to know who is her mama. Da mama, she want to know how her chile she doin' in life. She can't say dat to no one, but what she thinkin', every day of her life, is dat she is guilty.' Then he clinched it, perhaps a bit unfairly, by saying, ‘Don't one day pass when I don't think somewhere in America der a black lady who my mama. How she doin'? She lookin' in trash cans or she doin' okay?'

The three of us chose an invitation to afternoon tea at Nicole's cottage to talk to her about the prospect of exporting abalone to China via Hong Kong. Seated in the garden, she listened carefully as I outlined the potential of the Chinese market, first having done all the sums and worked out the details. Like everything we put to her, I knew she'd think about it before venturing an opinion.

‘We'd be dealing with the Triads,' she said at last. ‘They control most, if not all, of the fish imports to Asia, with the exception of Japan.'

I was ready for this. ‘As you know it's the same in Japan, where we're already dealing with the agents of Yoshio Kodama, the godfather of the Yakuza. It's either working with them or forfeiting business with the Japanese.' I shrugged, trying unsuccessfully to look matter of fact. ‘I guess it's the same with the Chinese. We'd need your expertise – it's not something Jimmy and I could handle on our own,' I said.

A silence followed that seemed to last about ten years. ‘Jack, I'm sixty-seven years old and I woke this morning, as I do every morning of my life, with a knot of fear in the pit of my stomach. It's always the same waking thought –
today they are going to come for me
. I'm not even sure who
they
are. The past? Big Boss Yu? The CIA? The Triads? For goodness sake, Big Boss Yu would be in his mid-eighties by now, if he's not dead. Whatever happened with the Triads is long past. Even Smallpox “Million Dollar” Yang would be in his late-seventies. I tell myself I have nothing to fear from the Americans. The trumped-up evidence against me would have been long since lost in the Chinese court system, and besides, my case wasn't ever within American jurisdiction. So why the deeply ingrained fear of being found? When I came to Australia all I wanted to do was to find a safe place to hide. I looked on the map and saw Queen Island, a speck of a place in the middle of Bass Strait. I've never been able to shake the original fear. Ridiculous, I admit, emotional nonsense to be sure, but it all amounts to terror at the prospect of ever going back to find my daughter.'

As usual, Nicole had cut through the preliminaries and gone straight to the heart of the matter, realising that finding her daughter was behind the so-called business proposition to export abalone to the Chinese. I could see Jimmy was about to say something, but she continued. ‘If I'm being honest with myself, it's the fear of what I might discover. Several times in the past I've almost summoned up the courage to leave the emotional safety of the island to try to find her. But I always end up making excuses. I tell myself I don't even know her name. If she survived she'd be long past wanting to know who her mother was. She probably doesn't even speak English. She would bitterly resent me. She would have a life of her own that I'd only disrupt, without adding anything to it. I've convinced myself we would have absolutely nothing in common.' She paused, visibly distressed, then said quietly, ‘Or I'd discover she is dead and died in a horrible way. Or worse, she is a prostitute or living in abject poverty. But, in the end, it all boils down to my own innate cowardice.'