Red Herring (16 page)
Authors: Jonothan Cullinane
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Contemporary Fiction
“Hang on a tick,” said Molloy, cutting her off. “Vince isn’t having us followed, is he?”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic. How would he have us followed? I’m probably the only person he knows with a motorcar.”
“Then hang on to your hat,” said Molloy, stepping on the accelerator.
The car shot forward. Caitlin jerked back against the seat. “You all right?” he said, keeping one eye on the rear-vision mirror.
Caitlin looked at him and then back over her shoulder. There was a set of headlights gaining on them.
“Who is it?”
“No idea,” he said, suddenly pulling the hand brake and spinning the wheel. The car glided round forty-five degrees. Molloy tapped
the foot brake and the vehicle straightened and shuddered across the tram tracks towards the intersection with Ngatea Street.
“See them?” he said, as the pursuing vehicle overshot and continued up Great North Road.
“Big American car. And it’s turning, I think.”
Molloy changed gear and sped up the narrow street and round a corner.
“Do you know who it is?” Caitlin asked.
“I do,” said Molloy, turning another corner and suddenly jumping on his brakes. “Watch out!” he yelled, as they spun around and ended flush with a high wooden fence. The street was a dead end.
He pushed open his door and got out. “Come on.”
“I can’t!” Her door was jammed against the fence. Molloy reached back in and she somehow folded into him and slid from the car just as the Plymouth came around the corner and slewed to a halt, full beams blinding them both. Molloy put Caitlin down. Doors slammed. Sunny and Lofty stepped into the light. Sunny was holding an axe handle, smacking it into the palm of his hand.
“I told you,” he said. “I bloody told you.”
“She’s got nothing to do with this,” said Molloy, moving in front of Caitlin. “I just met her.”
“Lucky you.” Sunny skipped forward, his leather soles scraping on the ground, bringing the handle up over his head like a club. Molloy raised his arms to protect himself but Sunny changed his swing to a crosscut motion, like Bert Sutcliffe taking care of a short-pitched delivery wide of off-stump.
The handle smashed into Molloy’s ribcage, but his jacket was hanging away from his body where he’d lifted his arms, and his wallet was in his inside pocket. Both absorbed some of the blow, so
it could have been worse. It was certainly bad enough. He slammed against the car.
Caitlin cried out, covering her mouth with her hands, eyes bugging. Lofty grabbed her. “Not like the pictures, is it?” he said. He pushed her towards the Plymouth and into the back seat.
Sunny jabbed the handle into Molloy’s chest and lifted it so the point was under his chin. “Get in the back with your girlfriend, buster,” he said. “We’re going for a ride.”
The Black Death came to Sydney in January 1900, when a flea hopped off an infected rat and bit a deliveryman named Gavin Mbali. The following month Sydney was declared a plague-infested port. A Plague Department was established. All drains, gullies, sinks and outside toilets in an area around Darlinghurst were flushed with hot water, then carbolic water, then lime chloride. All household rubbish, food scraps, ash, stable straw and horse manure was removed and burnt. Rat catchers were paid tuppence per rodent. Photographs show groups of nonchalant, moustachioed men in bowler hats, some wearing bow ties, hands on hips or holding metal buckets and mesh traps, standing by piles of dead rats three and four foot high. By October, 108,308 rats had been caught, 1759 people had been quarantined and 103 people had died.
The conditions that brought bubonic plague to Sydney — ships, rats, overcrowding, the haphazard collection of rubbish — were equally present in Auckland. A decision was made in 1903 to build a destructor, sited in Freemans Bay, a giant furnace complex with a brick chimney ten storeys high. This was in the days before Cameron Brewer. By 1951, 120 tons of refuse a day was being burnt in the furnaces, which had an operating temperature of 2000ºF, several hundred degrees hotter than a crematorium.
From the outside at night the building seemed to glow. Sunny spun the Plymouth into the entranceway at speed, the car fishtailing up the heavy wooden ramp to the tipping platform, whitewalls thudding on the traction rails. Molloy and Caitlin were thrown across the back seat.
Spilled light from dull electric lamps set high on concrete walls picked out the edges of machinery and the heaving outline of thirty-foot piles of God-knows-what. Burning rubbish fuelled two huge, howling Babcock & Wilcox boilers. The place shimmered with rats, countless pinpricks of red light, and there, hat on, coat off, was the biggest rat of all. Fintan Patrick Walsh.
Sunny and Lofty opened the rear doors and pulled Molloy and Caitlin from the car.
“Who’s the girl?” said Walsh, yelling above the noise.
“She was with him,” Sunny yelled back.
“She’s not tied up in this,” said Molloy, before Caitlin could answer.
Walsh turned to Molloy. “Is this the fella who was told to stay away from Frank and didn’t and now poor Frank’s dead, God rest his soul?” said Walsh. “Is this him?”
“That’s him.”
“You know who I am?”
“I know who you are,” said Molloy.
“Then you’ll know what I’m capable of. The stories you’ve heard aren’t even the half of it, you foller?” Walsh grabbed Molloy’s shirtfront. “What’s your game, you nosey bastard? And none of that bulldust about solicitors in Napier.”
“What solicitors?” said Molloy.
“Oh, Jesus,” said Walsh, waving a hand. “Sunny.”
Sunny slung Caitlin over his shoulder and swung open the furnace door. The roar was like an aeroplane engine, ten times
louder than before. It was an evil sound and its heat and force knocked them backwards.
Caitlin screamed. Sunny swore. Walsh shaded his eyes, his face glistening. Caitlin kicked her legs frantically and Sunny almost dropped her. “Give me a hand here, Lofty, you useless bugger!” he yelled.
Lofty wrapped one arm over Caitlin’s legs and then grabbed her ankles. Sunny took her wrists. They started to swing her, like children in a playground, getting closer and closer to the raging furnace.
“Johnny!” she screamed.
“It’s an insurance job,” Molloy shouted.
“Keep talking,” said Walsh, flaming shadows leaping and dancing on the walls behind him. “And you two keep swinging.”
“O’Flynn rorted an insurance company in California and faked his death. I was hired to find him.”
“Who hired you?”
“A Yank called Furst. He’s staying at the Auckland, that flash pub in Queen Street.”
Walsh looked hard at Molloy. “What do you think, Sunny?” he said. “Is he telling the truth this time?”
“I think he could be.”
“I agree,” said Walsh. “Drop her.”
They did.
“See, son,” he said to Molloy, flicking open a white handkerchief and wiping sweat off his face. “You’re not as tough as you think. Not by a long shot. But I am.”
Lofty opened a storeroom and pushed Molloy and Caitlin inside. He slammed the door and crashed the bolt into place. Molloy felt round for a light switch. There was a bare bulb in a copper fitting above the door. The room was small with a concrete sink and a single tap. A shelf held paint tins and stiff brushes. A worn broom stood upside down in the sink. In one corner was a rust-speckled forty-four-gallon drum with a skull and crossbones label on the lid. The floor was wet and water dripped from a skylight which was set in a sloping roof.
“Come here,” Molloy said, and Caitlin fell into his arms, sobbing. He put an arm around her.
“My God,” she said, eventually. “Would he have done it?”
“He was bluffing,” Molloy said, not believing a word.
He took a handkerchief from his pocket, and Caitlin wiped her eyes and put on what her aunt would call a brave face. “What now?”
“I’ve got to warn Furst before they get to him.”
He looked around and up at the skylight. There was a rope on a pulley attached to the wall. He pulled it. The skylight opened.
“This isn’t Colditz,” he said. “Just a matter of getting up there somehow.”
“I’ll do it,” said Caitlin, blowing her nose.
“Come off it.”
She took a couple of deep breaths, formed her mouth in a circle, and blew away her doubt. “I won the Blessed Jo Rice Shield for gymnastics three years in a row at Baradene. This is a piece of cake.”
She took off her shoes and threw them through the opened skylight. They clattered on the corrugated-iron roof. Molloy pushed the drum into position. He climbed onto the lid, the effort burning his bruised ribs, and pulled her up. They were very close.
“Squat down,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’ve got very good balance.”
She climbed onto his shoulders, one hand lightly pressing the side of his head.
“Ready?” said Molloy.
“Chocks away,” she said.
He stood slowly. The soles of her feet eased upwards as she straightened her legs.
“I feel like an heiress on a bi-plane,” she said, her arms outstretched.
“Don’t be a dope.” Molloy could feel her balancing on her toes. “Are you there?”
“I can’t quite get my fingers on the ledge.”
“What about if you stand on my hands and I push you up?”
“Let’s try.”
She put one foot and then the other onto the heels of his hands. He lifted her up like a circus strongman, trying to ignore the pain in his ribs. He could feel her take her own weight as her elbows went through the gap and rested on the frame.
“Et voilà!”
she said, and then she was on the roof.
“Try to walk on the nail lines if you can. It’s probably rusty.”
Molloy could hear corrugated iron groaning as Caitlin moved delicately along the roof. Silence. “I can drop down to the street.”
“How far?”
“Not far.”
“Find the night watchman,” he said.
“What should I tell him?” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. What would Martha Gellhorn say?”
A concrete parapet about a foot thick ran along the edge of the building overlooking Drake Street. Caitlin sat on the ledge, her legs dangling over the side. The paving stones seemed a long way down. She took a deep breath. She put her hands across her body, gripped the inside edge of the parapet, and swung around so that now she was facing the building and hanging by her fingers. Hoping for some pommel horse magic, she lost out to gravity and dropped, vaguely aware of scraping down the wall, and then landing, crumpled, on the footpath.
She lay there for a while. Then she got up onto her hands and knees and somehow stood, leaning against the wall for support. She tried a few steps. Nothing felt broken. Amazing. I’m made for this, she thought.
She walked down Drake Street, keeping close to the wall. Hot air came out of an entranceway. She stopped. She could hear furnaces roaring. She took a few steps up the ramp. Across the vast hall she could see the boilers. There was no sign of the Plymouth.
She forced herself to think about what had happened earlier. Lofty had taken them across the floor to a metal stairwell. She walked over to it. There was light at the bottom. She eased down the stairs, her hands on the rail. A corridor led off to the right.
A burst of laughter sent her back against the wall, mouth dry, heart pounding. A door opened and a middle-aged man with a
sweat-stained face and a dirty brown dust-coat came out of a doorway, hoicked onto the floor and swung up the stairs, his hobnail boots clanging on the metal treads just above her head. One of the night-shift men going to check the boiler?
Who else was laughing? Walsh and his cronies?
Now what? The only way forward was past the door. Caitlin could hear pieces of conversation. She leaned against the far wall, in shadow, and slowly moved her head to see inside. Two men in overalls were sitting on opposite sides of a long table, playing cards.
“Good game’s a fast game,” said one of the men. He was about eighteen, tall and skinny, bony chest visible where the top few buttons of his overalls were undone, the dirt stopping at his pale white skin.
“Bugger off,” said the other man, reordering his hand. “I like to take me time.” He was English, his accent northern and thick.
“You’re telling me,” said the boy. He reached for the tea pot in the middle of the table and began topping up his enamel mug.
Caitlin was weighing up the best approach when a voice said, “Hello-hello.”
She jumped. Her head snapped around. It was the workman who had gone up the stairs a few moments earlier. He was not much taller than Caitlin, big bellied, and sweet faced under the dirt.
“Hey, you blokes. We’ve got a visitor.”
The card players turned and looked at her. The younger one stood. Well brought up, she thought. Hopefully.
“Young lady like you doesn’t want to be in a place like this. Especially at night,” said the man in the dust-coat.
“You all right?” said the Pom. “You don’t look too good.”
“Oh. I fell, and . . .” said Caitlin, pointing vaguely.
“How did you end up in here?” he said.
“Well . . .” she began.
Something slithered across her shoe.
A rat.
She screamed.
“Caitlin!” Molloy’s voice not too far away.
“Crikey,” said the boy, with a laugh. “It’s like blimmin’ VE Day.”
“Oi,” said the Pom. “Lady present.”
But Caitlin was already running down the corridor.
“Molloy?” she yelled.
“Here!” yelled Molloy.
She slid the bolt and opened the door.
“About time,” he said.
The barman put a DB coaster down in front of Furst, placed a glass on it and stood back.
Furst studied the cocktail. “Okay,” he said. “Number one, that’s not a martini glass. Martini glass is shallow, comes in at an angle.” He demonstrated with his hands. “Puts you in mind of a voluptuous woman, see?”
The barman, round-shouldered with long teeth and liver spots on his hands, nodded. Furst took the slice of lemon floating on the top of the drink and held it up. “You don’t want that,” he said. “You want an olive. Or if you’re from New York, maybe an onion.”
