The Unknown Terrorist (21 page)

“Yes, yes!” said Lee Moon, and his smile opened his face up further into what seemed delighted astonishment. “Organs of vanished backpackers, virginity of Mai Chai children—yes, yes; Frank, you know, yesterday I was offered
collagen harvested from the skin of executed Chinese convicts to distribute here in Australia. Yes, yes! Is remarkable!”

And indeed it was. Lee Moon laughed. How funny it all seemed! Frank Moretti laughed.

“You know, Frank,” continued Lee Moon, “what matters is not all these regulations—do this, can’t do that—no,” and here he held up a finger and leant forward. “No, it’s the spirit of free trade, of this great globalised world, that is what matters. Yes, yes. The spirit of the age: buy and sell, Frank; everything exists to buy and sell. Even us! Yes, yes.”

Frank Moretti laughed. Lee Moon laughed.

“Us!” said Lee Moon, raising his whisky.

“Us!” said Frank Moretti, raising his whisky.

And Frank Moretti had the momentary sensation of being strangely joined in this toast not just to Lee Moon, but to something vast and cruel that loomed over them both like a cold shadow of this world. He involuntarily shivered, but he knew this bad feeling would quickly pass, that more money would soon flow, and that before long he would forget this unsettling sensation. He drained his tumbler and with a smile shook Lee Moon’s hand.

Looking back, thought Frank Moretti, what Lee Moon had said was true. That we exist to be bought and sold. That our natural laws, our destiny, our biology, amount to our capacity to cut a deal. That the world is a bazaar. And all this Moretti felt he had signed up to and lived in accordance with.

Yet worried as he was about his own situation when the cop came calling, Moretti found himself lying when the cop asked him about the stripper—not to protect himself, but to
protect her, the crazy stripper—so strangely had he lied to try to save her. He said she hadn’t been there for a month.

The cop had a Greek name and was smart enough to be friendly, and Moretti, rather than shut the door on him and call his lawyer, felt it wiser to appear helpful. It was, in any case, his way with authority, his Sydney way: to smile, help, offer hospitality and friendship.

And so when the Greek cop said yes to a late-night drink, they had one, then another, and the single malts led to a fine grappa and that in turn led to Moretti—when complimented on his art—growing a little proud and unable to resist taking the cop on a quick tour of the house and its more interesting treasures. And so—and not without a collector’s desire to impress with their more exotic collections—he had the Greek cop open up the hallway cabinet to show him what was gathered there. He had already started in on the Beretta story when the cop looked down at him with a curious expression.

“It’s missing,” said the Greek cop.

Though shocked, Moretti recovered quickly, realising his obvious astonishment was an asset in proving his own innocence. He agreed with the Greek cop that it must have been an inside job—a tradesman, a waitress, one of several nurses who attended to him daily—but there were so many, he continued, it was hard to remember all their names. But when asked directly, he replied that it couldn’t have been the stripper, for she had not been there for so long. It was such a stupid lie, and yet he persisted with it.

“And besides,” said Moretti, “she has no idea what’s in the cabinet, far less where the key’s hidden.”

He agreed with the Greek cop it was a mystery, such a strange mystery, and he knew the Greek cop didn’t believe a word he said, and yet he hadn’t betrayed her. It was inexplicable.

“Nobody knows what moves anybody,” the Greek cop tried one last time as he was about to go. “You sure it couldn’t be her?”

After the Greek cop left, Moretti realised that had he been taken into custody and grilled, perhaps he might have confessed what he had done, told them about all his many businesses—the forgeries of Aboriginal paintings and company memoranda, the phoney antiques, the smuggling of drugs and people—and even how he had done it; but it would have been the explanations as to
why
that would be impossible to give and, Moretti felt, impossibly annoying.

How could Moretti tell the cop that he had divined in the stripper the same passions that had led him to this house, these possessions, and this life of deception? For he too, after all, was what he had never told her: not rich, not from the eastern suburbs or the north shore, not from an established family of Italian vintners, but just another westie on the make, a westie who reinvented himself after his car smash with a new name for his new body and a desperate desire to rise. He had always hated wogs, and it seemed right to take on a wog name for the hideous mess of flesh he had been left to live in.

He should have told the cop all he knew about her and admitted it must have been she who had taken the gun. But how could he say she was him before his smash, and he couldn’t betray her? He had agreed when Lee Moon said
everything exists to buy and sell. But what if it wasn’t true? What then?

He put on a CD of Dinu Lipatti’s recordings of Chopin’s Nocturnes in an attempt to calm himself, to remind himself once more of beauty and art. Once it began, he spun his wheelchair and was about to head over to the sideboard on which the phone sat, to call—but he had the oddest sensation. Everything felt unexpectedly heavy, and every movement became the most extraordinary feat.

Something was creeping over his body, at the same time as something else was emptying out of it. What was it tingling up and down his arm, numbing his fingers as he tried to find the controls of his wheelchair? Who was it pushing in his ribs? Who was it crushing his chest? Sitting on his lungs? Who was it tightening their fingers around his neck, pushing his tongue back, choking him?

“
No! No! No!
” he suddenly cried, terribly, terribly afraid. He began to panic, realising he must do something, anything. But all his concentrated effort to move only resulted in a rocking of his torso that grew ever more pronounced until he came so far forward that, losing his balance, he was unable to throw himself back.

He toppled out of his wheelchair onto a Renaissance chair with ivory inlay. But the fine pinpricks all over the chair, similar to those in much of his other antique furniture, were not some unusual finish but borer holes, so much dust waiting to be released from the mirage of taste in which it was imprisoned. One leg, rotten with woodworm, snapped as Moretti’s small, heavy body pitched onto the chair seat. He slid sideways and fell to the floor, the side of his head
smashing heavily and, the coroner would later determine, fatally, on the bottom shelf of a bookcase, and Moretti would never be conscious of rising in this world again.

All that could be heard in the house was the sound of felt-covered hammers attacking wires strained within a wooden box to an almost unbearable tension, as Chopin’s piano notes continued playing over Moretti’s dead body.

58

Richard Cody sat in his home study late that night, staring at the PC on which he had Googled his own name. His Vaucluse house had about it the sumptuous hush of truly large and rich homes. He could have been in a space station, with only the whispered assent of orderly machines for company, so remote it felt from life. On the screen there were several million entries. It should have been enough—his home, such calibrated celebrity, this comeback and its promise—but the more he rose, the more his spirits seemed to sink, and the greater his success the worse he felt.

He had introduced his famous and powerful friends to Australia’s living rooms, preached about Australian wisdom and espoused Australian goodness and embodied Australian decency, led Australia keening at Australian disasters and Australia cheering at Australian sporting success, hosted telethons and Christmas carol specials, to say nothing of the several prominent Australian charities of which he was patron. But there was no peace at all. It was not enough, it had never been enough, and what was, what might be, he did not wish to know.

With his second wife Richard Cody had as perfect a marriage as it was possible to have with a woman he no longer shared anything with other than large debts, social ambitions and an adult son who worked in a hairdresser’s—how did one talk about
that
at a dinner party?

There was, Richard Cody sensed, something about this world that would not allow him to do other than hurt. For a time he rued it, for a time he revelled in it; now, he simply accepted it as his skill for which he was rewarded. There was no peace, that was all. He wished he were able to talk with his son.

The image that came to him at such times was a childhood memory of a fallen seagull jerking in the sand. He had been at the beach, throwing stones at circling seagulls and with a lucky shot felled one. His heart rejoiced as the bird dropped out of the sky like a rock, then he watched with horror as the other birds dived on its still-writhing body and tore it to bloody rags.

“No peace, no peace at all,” he muttered over and over to himself as he stood over the lower bathroom’s sink and washed and washed his hands clean of the keyboard. Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer, thought Richard Cody, but no one knows that he fears the cancer is him.

At such times he felt he had somehow transformed into that fallen seagull writhing before his eyes. There had been a woman he never slept with—she died in the mist of a Manhattan winter years ago—while he continued living in the bright light of Sydney. Each—her death, his life—seemed to him pointless. Ambitions, he had concluded, were largely pathetic fevers. He feared his greatest longing was for oblivion. How he wished to talk with his son.

He turned off the tap and, to avoid contamination from the towel, stood in the dark shaking his hands dry.

59

In the room next door a phone rang and would not stop ringing. The Doll, still unable to sleep, switched on a small Panasonic television that sat in a chipped woodgrain Laminex cupboard. A cable station was showing the perfectly preserved body of a three-thousand-year-old woman. The body had recently been found in a peat bog in Sweden. The fossil woman had been drowned, weighed down with stones tied to a noose around her neck. Her head had been shaved. A ritual death, a German expert said, for some crime that no one could now know.

Still the phone next door rang, and still no one answered.

As the Doll watched the documentary, she felt other women would have been mixed up with it—she could see all the women together, telling tales and getting high and mighty and het up—because they were scared too; scared that if they didn’t accuse someone else, someone else might accuse them. There would have been some kind of crime, of course there would, just like she was called a terrorist now, and maybe back then she’d have been called a witch, but it was all untrue.

She could almost hear them—talking like they did in the club’s changeroom, talking like they did on the talkback, talking about how wrong and how bad that woman had been even as she was drowning. And the worst thing was that the Doll knew she would have been one of those accusing
women. She was, after all, a survivor and had done a lot of things to get by; she knew she was capable of far worse if forced.

She changed stations. A news channel was running a story on her by a smiling woman journalist with a vaguely American accent. For the first time she heard her name being used, following on, she guessed, from Richard Cody’s story earlier in the evening. They also had several recent photos of her. And at that moment she felt sick: she didn’t want to be the terrorist on cable; didn’t want to be another bog woman drowning in some shitty swamp; didn’t want to be the French woman she had seen in the book in Moretti’s library with women laughing at her as they shaved her head.

But maybe, thought the Doll as she lay on her miserable hotel bed watching the tv, there was some need people had to hurt others, some horrible need, that hurting one woman in some way might make others feel safe and good and happy, like the smiling French women, like the smiling woman journalist.

And maybe she had to accept that she should be hurt, that maybe these things happen for the common good?

She turned the television off.

No, she thought, she couldn’t accept that she should be hurt, she couldn’t just give in and give up. She didn’t feel hungry, but it mattered that she kept going. She ate a small pack of cashews and a Chokito bar from the bar fridge and washed it down with a Stoli mini mixed with tonic. And though at first her throat and stomach resisted, the nuts and chocolate tasted so very good, better than they should, and
her body calmed with even such poor food as this, and the Doll realised how hungry and exhausted she truly was.

At some point long after, she must have drifted into a wretched, skipping sleep. She was vaguely aware of car horns and sirens wailing far below; of cries and shouting, and sometimes of people running.

Her dreams were claustrophobic, she was suffocating, images flickered back and forth in her mind ever more rapidly: the French woman unable to pull her head away from the open scissors; the bog woman screaming into filthy water; flies crawling from between Tariq’s dead lips …

Some force from outside continued to rumble all the way into her room, and she found it harder than ever to breathe, and still a phone kept ringing and what was its message? What was it?

60

Though he slept well and hated being woken in the night, no news could have been more welcome to Richard Cody than the phone call that woke him shortly before midnight.

“I know it’s late but I wanted you to be the first of our media friends to hear,” said Siv Harmsen.

Richard Cody got up, and went out to the stairway landing.

“We’ve found Tariq al-Hakim,” said Siv Harmsen. “Neat as a felafel in a roll, dead and stuffed into a car boot.”

“My God,” said Richard Cody, not because he was shocked, but because there was significance to this news and to the call that in his sleepy state he didn’t fully understand,
and which he needed to draw out of Siv Harmsen. “Any leads?”