Shooting Star (13 page)

I got dressed, dark clothes, went across the hall to Orlovsky’s room, opened the door.

‘What?’ said Orlovsky, wide awake.

‘I think we’ve got her. Dark clothes, quick.’

THE AGENT was a large, balding man in his fifties called Andrew. His cab smelt faintly of fish and chips. Angela Cairncross would not be pleased. McDonald’s yes, fish and chips no.

‘Young fella’s up the building,’ he said. ‘Call me if he sees anything more.’

I was in the front, looking at the quiet street, not a light on. Volvos, Saabs, BMWs, hard to believe that dock workers once lived here. The light from a street lamp came dimly to us.

‘We need to go in,’ I said. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘Place’s like a jail,’ Andrew said. ‘They left all the factory bars on the windows, front door’s solid as a brick shithouse. That’s on Deacon Place.’

‘How many entrances?’

‘Just the front door and through the garage. They bricked in the big door on Castle Street.’

‘We could just wait,’ said Orlovsky from the back seat, speaking in his voice of reason. ‘Nail him when he opens the garage door.’

‘The thought occurred to me,’ I said. ‘Could open it in three or four days’ time. I’d prefer a speedier end to this shit.’

Andrew pointed to the gloomy two-storey brick building across the intersection. ‘That one, the other bit of the factory, that’s empty. Haven’t tarted that up yet. Knock it down, probably. Might be able to get from that into the back. Dunno what you do then.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We might just drive by, have a look. Andrew, hang around, could want you keeping an eye on the place for a while.’

‘Can’t go beyond surveillance. Policy.’ He held my gaze, telling me something.

‘Of course.’

In his car, Orlovsky said, ‘Drive by?’

I nodded. ‘Take it slow.’

We drove around the corner. The old double-storeyed toy factory occupied the width of the block on our right, built on the boundary line. Once it was in two parts, probably a yard in between where a double garage now stood. Over its roof I could see the two upstairs lights.

‘Park in the garage,’ I said. ‘Reverse park.’

‘In the garage?’

‘This thing’s built like a tank.’

Orlovsky looked at me. ‘Jesus, you’re subtle. Hang on.’

We went up Conrad Street, beyond the garage doors, a good fifty metres beyond, slowed, stopped for a second, and then went backwards in a sweeping curve, not fast. At the last second, Orlovsky put his foot down.

We hit the electronic roll-up garage door full on, maximum bumper contact, knocked the door out of its tracks, went in under it so that it lay on us like a crumpled tin blanket. There was a small impact as we touched a parked car.

I was out, ran around the front of our car. Orlovsky was already trying the door into the house.

‘Locked,’ he said, stood back.

I kept running, hit the door with my left shoulder, painful impact against the torsion-box door, cheap but strong, splintered the lock out of the jamb, was in a short passage, kept going, two strides to open the door at the end.

Kitchen, light from the street shining off stainless steel countertops, huge copper rangehood.

Double doors, to the right, open.

Into a huge room, a sitting and dining room, stairs to the right, the original broad staircase, a landing halfway up, dim light coming from the floor above.

We ran up the stairs abreast, Orlovsky on my right, reached the landing, looked up.

Nothing.

Up the stairs. At the top a broad corridor, ahead a door open, light on tiles, mirrors, a bathroom. Door to the left, another one to the right, against the back wall, window in the centre of the wall.

Perhaps twenty seconds since we’d smashed open the garage door.

Orlovsky reached the door first, turned the handle.

Locked. Heavy four-panel door, break your shoulder first.

I looked around. A copper bowl was standing on a low table, thick crude top, stout turned legs, a stool not a table, a piece of poor farm furniture migrated to an ultra-smart house in the city.

I picked it up by a leg, bowl hitting the polished wooden boards with a hollow gong-like sound, tossed it to Orlovsky.

He caught a leg in each hand.

‘Panel above the handle,’ I said without needing to, he was already swinging.

The panel was solid oak, raised, hard as iron, resisted the first blow, the second. Orlovsky changed hands, swung a corner of the stool at the bottom righthand corner of the panel, knocked the whole thing out, sent it flying into the bedroom, dimly-lit room.

I reached through the opening, found a double-bolt deadlock, opened it, turned the knob, butted the door open with my sore left shoulder.

The light in the large room was from two brass lamps with heavy shades standing on tables on either side of a massive four-poster bed, a modern version of a four-poster, designed to be curtained, made of heavy-gauge black steel with brass fittings.

Pat Carson junior was between us and the bed, walking backwards, naked except for a broad leather belt. He was tall, built like a swimmer, big pectorals and rounded shoulders, with an immature face, now frozen in fright. His erection was dying, his scrotum had contracted to nothing.

The girl was on the bed, her thin back to us, naked. Her head hung down, her upper body was in the air, suspended from the bed’s steel curtain rails by ropes attached to leather cuffs around her wrists. Under her belly were cushions, her rump was elevated and her legs were spread, drawn apart by ropes from leather ankle cuffs tied to the bed’s foot posts. Even in the weak light, I could see the welts across her back, her buttocks, the backs of her upper thighs.

‘Lie on the floor, face down,’ I said to Pat. ‘If you want to live through this.’

He didn’t hesitate, went down on the carpet.

‘Anne,’ I said.

The girl didn’t reply, didn’t raise her head, didn’t turn her head.

I went across to the bed, the right of the bed, took her face gently in my right hand and half-turned it towards me.

Not Anne.

Not a fifteen-year-old girl.

Stephanie Carson/Chadwick, aged a girlish thirty-eight, last seen clasping her grandfather’s hand in the study.

A mature woman, a mother, engaged in sado-masochistic practices with her cousin, a cousin young enough to be her son.

I let go of her face. ‘Oh Jesus,’ I said. ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’

I looked at Orlovsky standing in the doorway, still holding the stool, shook my head, looked back at Stephanie.

‘You won’t be needing me any longer, then,’ Orlovsky said, the expressionless voice of a butler.

‘No.’

Stephanie turned her head, chunk of hair fallen over her face like Anne’s in the photograph. She was very fetching and she met my gaze. ‘You won’t tell anyone?’ she said. Her tone was pleading.

‘No,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be able to find the words. You need some new doors, starting with the garage.’

I walked out, flicked a glance at Pat Carson, face hidden in the thick woollen carpet, buttocks palely gleaming. ‘Don’t adjust the set, Pat,’ I said. ‘Normal transmission is resuming.’

We didn’t speak on the way back until Orlovsky said, ‘Calling off the surveillance?’

‘No. That didn’t tell us anything. Bright young fella like that can turn his hand to many tasks.’

‘His whip hand. What now? Tomorrow?’

Tomorrow? I didn’t want to think about tomorrow, which had already arrived. I closed my eyes, put my hand under my jacket and rubbed my sore shoulder and said, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

‘I love it when you quote Elvis,’ said Orlovsky.

BACK IN the Garden House, too wound-up to sleep, I slumped into an armchair in the downstairs room housing the television. Orlovsky came in, opened the liquor cabinet and found a bottle of Black Label, two heavy crystal whisky glasses and a bottle of mineral water. Without asking, he poured three fingers in each glass, splashed in water.

I took my glass, sipped the healing liquid. It went straight to the base of my spine and the tension began to lose its grip. ‘That kid’s getting one hell of a sex education,’ I said. ‘Impregnating at sixteen, Sam Stark, now this.’

Orlovsky was channel-hopping with the remote. ‘And learning the most interesting bits inside the family,’ he said. ‘That’s really old-fashioned.’

He settled on CNN, a casually-dressed man speaking earnestly against the backdrop of a rubble-littered and smoking street. ‘Ah, Serbia,’ said Orlovsky. ‘
Wie viele Todesmeister kann Europa ertragen?
My father won’t be watching.’

Orlovsky’s father was a Polish Hungarian, a teenage veteran of the Hungarian uprising against the Russians. He came to Australia alone and penniless, worked in the steel mills in Newcastle, saved money, learned English. He went to night school, went to university and did an electrical engineering degree, married a girl of Irish convict descent from Dubbo, fathered Michael and his sister, made lots of money. Then he packed them all up and went back to Europe to become a Cold Warrior, working for Central Intelligence Agency fronts and disappearing into Communist Eastern Europe for long periods. Orlovsky spent ten years in a German village outside Cologne, grew up to speak accentless German. Then they came back to Australia. He once told me that he’d accused his father of turning him and his sister into immigrants in their country of birth.

‘Can’t bear the news from
Mitteleuropa,
my old man,’ said Orlovsky. ‘Makes him feel his whole life’s been wasted. I was watching with him one day and this Serbian woman said she prayed every night for the old Communist days to come back. My dad went out and chopped wood for two hours.’

We watched pictures of military convoys passing through shattered villages, of sad-eyed and ragged women and children standing in hopeless queues, of strutting young men armed with the best the death merchants had to sell.

‘Ever think about Afghanistan?’ said Orlovsky, not looking at me. He had never raised the subject before, not once in the years since.

‘Yes. And I dream about it, pieces of it. The worst pieces.’

‘I never thought about it, never dreamed about it,’ he said. ‘Then this Defence bloke arrived at work one day, asked me if I’d talk to Cowper’s father, tell him about, y’know…He was going nuts with not knowing, the father. They didn’t tell them much.’ He drank some whisky. ‘I said sure, I’ll tell him. And I did. Nice bloke. He cried. Seemed to make him feel better. And then I went home and that’s when it started. Like I’d pulled a trigger.’

Orlovsky had been the one to come out of Afghanistan in the best shape. Like the rest of us, his military career was over. But he seemed undamaged, cheerful even. He started a new life immediately, did a four-year electronic engineering course in two, married a fellow-student, went to work as a civilian for a technical branch of the Defence Intelligence Organisation in Canberra. We spoke on the phone at least twice a month, late-night conversations, drinks in hand, laughing a lot, never mentioning the past that bound us, two men whose parachutes had once become entangled in pitch darkness and who had plummeted earthwards in a terrified embrace.

Then he stopped calling me. And when I called him, he was abrupt, terse, keen to end the contact. Then the phone wasn’t answered, his daytime number only took messages, all ignored. I rang his wife at work. She was reserved, said she’d left him, couldn’t live with him, he seemed to have had some sort of breakdown but he wouldn’t seek help, wouldn’t even talk to her. She thought he’d left his job.

On a Thursday in July, a doctor from a psychiatric ward in Brisbane rang me. Orlovsky was under observation, committed by a court. He’d walked onto a rich people’s beach at Noosa, thin, bearded, long-haired, filthy, and naked except for a belt. A concerned beach-front property owner suggested that he leave, tried to force him to depart. Orlovsky rendered the man unconscious. When two police arrived, Orlovsky was paddling in the shallows. They didn’t take any chances, the larger one showing Orlovsky his revolver. Orlovsky disarmed him, threw the weapon into the sea, did the same for the partner. More police were called, all the police in Noosa. Orlovsky suggested they shoot him, held out his arms like Christ inviting the cross. With a large crowd watching, the police declined. Instead, they netted him like an animal and beat him with batons.

I took two days off, flew to Brisbane, talked to him for half an hour in a scented tropical garden. He was clean shaven, shorthaired, clothed in a towelling outfit with matching slippers. I rang people, all the people I could think of. That afternoon, a pale Defence shrink who ceaselessly rotated a gold wedding ring, and a Defence lawyer, a major in uniform, arrived by military aircraft from Canberra. The major insisted on calling me Captain. The shrink talked to Orlovsky’s shrink, to Orlovsky, then the major went to see the Public Prosecutor’s office. Just after 6 p.m., we went to an out-of-session court hearing where the charges against Orlovsky were formally withdrawn. The two of us were on the 8.10 flight to Sydney.

On the plane, drinking whisky in business class, I’d said to him, ‘We’re quits, sunshine.’