Jacko (33 page)

She laughed at this tendency, her old laugh, as if at some time in the future such male innocence might again seem charming.

Reaching the lobby we scooted past the pleasantries from the doorman on duty, a fine arts student from City College who must have wondered about our rush. We moved out onto Fourth, and then the mad corner of Lower Broadway, with its hordes of students and children from New Jersey looking for drugs, and its veterans of Vietnam and of psychiatric hospitals waving their white polystyrene begging cups at us.

Lucy said, You should know, he lied like hell to me. I felt very safe with Jacko. I don't mean that he's a liar as such eh. But he lied to me. I'm sure he told the truth to his
good
friends. But I suppose his mother Chloe taught him that it's best to keep women in the dark, they're so wild and out of order.

The normally savage, unloved and sullenly-driven yellow New York cab came along. Soon she'd be back with the cabs of Sydney, where you sat in the front with the conversational driver and all the doors were undented.

The hungry-eyed driver looked out at us – he might have been Pakistani or Bolivian, Haitian or Arab or Azerbaijani. To him and to his cab with its stuck back window, I committed sweet Lucy.

—Will we see you tomorrow?

—There's no point, she said.

The broad smile again and for the last time.

—You won't get any sense out of me until I'm back in Oz. Wait till then eh.

—Forgive me, I said.

—What for?

—I've been too attached to the high colour of the Emptors to give them the hard time I should. Same goes for Chloe. I'd really like to get Jacko now though and sort out his head for him.

—Don't be silly, she said. Nothing to forgive anyhow with you. Sydney okay?

She was hauled off down cold Broadway to the melancholy plaint of the saxophone.

The following morning, by all signs the last of his marriage to Lucy Emptor, Jacko called me from the hotel up in the Fifties where he was staying out of sensibility, to allow Lucy a last unfussed, unfraught night and day. He wanted me to come up there for a drink. I was confused about what my demeanour should be, and the chances were that I would futilely lose my temper. So I raised the obvious objections – I had a dread of Lucy hearing somehow that as she was ordering the car to take her out to Kennedy, I, Jacko's
true
friend, had been drinking with him at the city's heart. What a malicious rite that might seem to Lucy!

—Aw, come on! he said. I've got to have a drink with some bastard who's sensible.

There had been much public comment on his long, painful interview with Sunny Sondquist, and the television reviewer in the
Village Voice
had remarked on his unaccustomed sensibility. On that suspect basis, I decided to consent and go and see him.

Jacko was camped in one of the newer midtown hotels. The place had none of the atmospherically dim, lock-yourself-in-with-a-bottle-of-Scotch sort of feel of the Algonquin or the St Regis. It was not a bad place to come to do business, but it certainly was a depressing place to wait until Lucy packed her bags and left your loft in Tribeca vacant.

I could tell by the plastic glitter of the chandeliers in the lobby, by the egregious fountains of dyed water, that Jacko
must
be pretty depressed here.

As soon as I called his room, it was clear he didn't want to come down and head west to Seventh and Eighth Avenues looking for squalid bars.

—Come'n up, matie, he growled at me sepulchrally. He spat out the room number.

I found him in a corner suite forty floors up. Opening the door, he massively occupied the hotel's dainty bathrobe. He left me to close the door. Smoking at a rare rate, he prowled amongst the ice buckets which sat on the occasional table. His mini fridge lay emphatically open, as if he were wilfully mixing his drinks.

Blowing smoke from his meaty lips, he kept saying, I think it's a good thing. I think it's a
really
good thing for both of us. I mean, mate, you must know I've been unhappy for a long time.

I thought of asking just who it was he'd been unhappy with: Dannie or Lucy? But smart-aleckry like that was not my style, and wouldn't do much good today.

—But you could lose her, you know, I told him.

—No, mate, he insisted. I could bloody find her. She could bloody find herself. That'd be a bloody start.

I felt an edge of anger at the fact that he seemed so conventionally sad to see Lucy leave. I couldn't help myself telling him.

—I never quite believed that stuff about her depending too much on you. About her frying her own fish. If you want the truth, that's always sounded like nonsense to me.

He looked dismally at me for a moment.

—Well, mate, as our brethren here say, I can only call it as I see it.

—But you're not so depressed about it …

—Of course I'm bloody depressed. I'm depressed and sad. Jesus, it's her decision to go eh. For God's sake, I've been rejected by two women in a week …

—Sorry to tell you, Jacko. Not too many people weep for you … You seem to be riding pretty high to me.

—Oh, he conceded. Professionally? Professionally things are jake. I agree with you. Dannie's trying to tell people how incompetent I am. But generally eh, I agree. The man on the street won't spend too much time being sorry for me.

—Especially since you pursued Lucy, Jacko. You say that yourself. She kept saying no. Maybe she could see the dangers.

—Oh God, all that's true. Sometimes the greatest bloody reprobate gets a craze to get married. I don't know where it comes from. It's primal eh. And romantic. It's men's tragedy to be romantic about marriage, and women's to be practical. I mean, we're romantic in a seriously dangerous way. I certainly was.

—So, I challenged him, if you're not depressed about Lucy going, what is it?

He sat down and was finishing some Scotch. He leaned forward.

—I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where to go from here. For one thing, I've got Bob Sondquist and Sunny staying down the hall. Separate rooms.

I asked, Why ever here?

—Bob says being on the fourteenth floor at his place scared her. Agoraphobia. Opposite of claustrophobia. Stands to reason eh. Having her here on the fortieth floor isn't necessarily the answer. But the drapes are drawn and we've got a plain clothes psychiatric nurse sitting with her.

I wanted to know what had happened? Why didn't they draw the curtains and pull down the blinds in Bob Sondquist's apartment block?

—They did. But they were besieged.

This fact really seemed to oppress Jacko. Lucy saddened him and her going was painful. But did it reach the core?
This
, this siege, just like the entire Sondquist affair, moved him in the spirit. He was pacing the space in front of the plundered refrigerator.

—I mean, at Bob's place there were camera crews in the lobby, and people who wanted to ghost write her book, and feminist defence groups who wanted to succour her and pay her legal costs and take her in. What an item this is for them: woman tortured and raped and locked up in the bloody, bloody dark! I talked Durkin into putting our own security guards in there to manage the flow, but before we could Sunny had a sort of panic attack. Not one that makes you scream eh. The kind that makes you go utterly silent. And her pulse rate was impossible. Then, this morning, she was woken up at four o'clock by a camera crew in a cherrypicker imitating me. So nothing for it but to move them in here eh. Anyone getting off the lift at this floor is frisked by security.

—I wasn't.

—I told them you were coming. Mate, you
are
in a contradictory frame of mind today.

—I'm grieving for you, you bastard.

He stopped in mid-stride.

—Okay, let's stop this and go and see the poor bloody Sondquists.

Without allowing for further argument, he opened the door and held it to let me through. In the corridor, a man in a para-police uniform emerged from a room with its doorway permanently open – the base of security operations. When he saw Jacko in his bathrobe, he gave a half-wave of approval and disappeared.

Bob Sondquist answered the door Jacko knocked on.

—Mind if we come in, Bob?

With a body builder's vanity, old Bob still wore the same sort of T-shirt he'd worn the morning Jacko found him on the fourteenth floor.

—Sure, said Bob's miracle voice.

He led us in. His television was busily blathering: Judge Wapner and a Czech emigre arguing over damage a dog had done to somebody's Astrakhan rug. Bob invited us to chairs placed around the little table by the window. The window of Sondquist
père
gave an unabashed view of the Avenue of the Americas and its berserk uptown traffic. One pane was ajar to let dusty, cold air in. Bob had no fear of the open day.

Jacko introduced me to the man.

—He's a writer, Jacko said.

Bob Sondquist cast his eyes up.

—No, no, Bob. Not that sort of writer. He makes his own shit up, he doesn't live off other people's. I wanted to let you know. We're just going in to have a look at the girl.

It was clear that Jacko's tone towards Bob Sondquist had changed. Perhaps what had muted Jacko's hostility a little was the admission of guilt and fallibility Bob had made on the telephone while negotiating his daughter's fee. The massive betrayal still stood, but perhaps the primitive in Jacko believed Bob had paid away his voice in part expiation.

—Okay. You won't wake her?

—No way, Bob.

—Can't get rid of that goddam sleeping bag she had at Kremmerling's, he complained. You'd think she was homesick.

—Well, he buggered up her mind, Jacko explained to Bob.

Sondquist was still looking at me with suspicion, and so Jacko put his arm on my shoulder.

—Look, Bob, he's my best friend eh. Involved in this search from the start. He doesn't want anything from Sunny. Okay?

—I take your word, said Bob, so competent in speaking that you could not see any preparation of the diaphragm muscles.

—Mind you, I only
think
he's my bloody friend. He's pretty cranky with me at the moment about my wife.

—Okay, said Bob, as if this were another explanation of why I was entitled to get a glimpse of his sleeping daughter.

On the screen the Czechoslovak emigre said, I know the judge is doing the best he can according to his lights. But justice this isn't.

—Yes, said the
People's Court
interviewer. But as you must know, there are countries where you wouldn't even be allowed to complain …

With Bob's blessing then, Jacko and I went to Sunny Sondquist's room. Jacko knocked on the door, and a handsome young woman wearing street clothes softly opened it. Jacko asked if we could come in for a second. This was his friend, he said pointing to me.

The woman said with a broad cautionary smile, You're not trying to make a freak out of her, are you, Jacko?

—No, listen, he's my best friend. He's known about this case all along. I want him to be a witness to the way she is now.

Vixen Six had provided a spacious room for Sunny. There were two double beds, and a little alcove with a settee and coffee table and second television. That television was also playing softly, on the same station as the one Bob Sondquist had been tuned to.

—Don't
any
of you ungrateful buggers watch Vixen Six? Jacko whispered to the nurse.

On the floor, between the second double bed and the window, lay small, scrawny, scraggy-haired Sunny. She wore a track suit and socks on her feet, and lay foetally on a much worn and not very clean, opened sleeping bag. She had no pillow. Obviously, since the room abounded with pillows, this was from choice.

—That's the sleeping bag Joyce gave her. During the time she was working for the fast-food place and minding the kids, she was allowed to sleep in the bathroom on that. But then she had that sodding sleeping bag in the box with her and in the pit with her. How's that for a sequence eh?

Jacko shook his head. The mystery of all Kremmerling's shifts of tyranny would never leave him.

Jacko turned to the nurse.

—Is she still muttering?

—Not a lot. Sedated. She's as well as you'd expect. But very dependent. I think I'll have to be her friend for life.

—What's your name? Jacko asked, looking down at the nurse from beneath his brows.

—Delia.

—We'll all have to be her friends for life eh, Delia, said Jacko.

This was admirable, of course, and said with great determination. It made me wonder though where Lucy would go for friends.

Jacko put his arm around me.

—So you can tell the bloody beak you saw this.

—Beak? whispered Delia.

—Judge, said Jacko. We can tell the judge we saw this. A lot of silly pricks would have us believe that the way she clings to that sleeping bag is a sign she enjoyed the past. But let's hope the prosecution will have experts by the score to say the obvious.

—Well, we all cling to our chains, Delia said robustly. At the end of the Civil War, there were old slaves who didn't want to leave the plantation.

—Listen, Jacko asked her, why don't we have dinner downstairs tomorrow night? Bob can sit with Sunny for a while.

—Okay, said Delia with an arresting smile. That'd be okay. But let's just be straight about certain things.

—I know what those things are, said Jacko.

She then pushed us out into the corridor, laughing softly. In the hallway, Jacko sighed.

—The trial, you know. I really doubt she'll make it through all that. No way she could stand that particular hurly-burly. But a funny bloody thing: when she wakes up she asks them about the trial, as if she can't wait for it. She won't get off that bloody sleeping bag till then, anyhow. Come and have another drink. Then I've got to get dressed for the airport.