In her tiny room the Doll undressed and took two steps across the fire retardant carpet—so brittle and dry it felt like shreds of melted plastic—to the bathroom. She stepped into the acrylic bath, its anti-skid dots black with grime, and with the miserly biscuit of hotel soap only partly succeeded in washing off the stench of the evening.
After, she lay down on the bed. She tried to ignore the sharp odour of dry-cleaning chemicals; the cheap pilled nylon sheets that made her feel as if she were lying on hot glasspaper; the taut foam pillow on which her head rolled back and forth, up and down like a karaoke ball; she tried to calm herself by breathing deeply and slowly, but the air in the stuffy hotel room was sticky despite the air con and it was hard to breathe.
Above all else the Doll tried to pretend that what had happened hadn’t happened, that here she was safe. She tried to imagine she still lived in the Australia where such things didn’t happen. But as she lay in that wretched hotel room in the lucky country, the Doll was finding it ever harder to breathe.
She thought about Moretti’s story of the Dutch soldiers who betrayed the soon-to-be-dead of Srebrenica. And it seemed to the Doll that the Dutch soldiers meekly handing over their weapons were the same people as the politicians and the security forces and the journalists, who, instead of protecting people, also betrayed them.
And then she was gasping for air. She stood up and went over to the window, but it could not be opened. As she stood there, trying to calm her breathing, she saw herself reflected in the window glass and experienced a terrible revelation. Wasn’t she, after all, the same? Hadn’t she that very morning ignored the beggar with the raw face? And only a few hours ago had she not rushed past an old woman being tormented by kids?
To her horror she saw that, as she had never cared or wondered or questioned, nor now would anyone care or wonder or question the stories they heard about her. As she had helped no one, how could she now expect anyone to help her? And as she had in a chorus condemned others, how could she be surprised that others in a chorus were now condemning her?
And she saw that all the people following the story of “the pole dancing terrorist” were simply behaving as she had. When they were frightened by her story, had not she felt similarly frightened? And as countless others would now fall asleep in their lounge rooms after watching her fate unravel on tv thinking little other than that it was about something vaguely bad and opposing it was something vaguely good—national values, national lifestyle, national security—hadn’t she also dozed off at the end of a hundred other news stories thinking nothing?—nothing!
The Doll dropped two Temazepams, lay back on the glass-paper sheets and tried to imagine that she was not there and that it was all good. But it was not all good. As the drug took hold, she felt an immense weight build up behind her eyes as if sleep were imminent, but no sleep came.
Around her was gathering the most terrifying blackness through which she knew she must now travel alone, but it was not possible to move, it was ever more difficult to breathe, and in her heart a voice she had hoped to forget once more sounded. You killed Fung! it said. You killed Fung! You killed Fung! And in this way the night bore on, and even her truest friend, Temazepam, could no longer help.
55
Frank Moretti wanted to be part of life, to be part of Sydney, the two things being indistinguishable for him. With money, with lies, with grovelling, with threats, with bribes, with cheating, with charm, with determination and with spirit he would succeed; he had, and he would.
But he felt nauseous and the room suddenly seemed terribly overheated. He could feel sweat breaking out all over him. And accompanying these physical feelings was a sudden sense of shame and regret that only made him angrier, and his anger only made him sicker. Yet why did he now feel so fearful, so guilty?
Though he had tried all day, he could not stop looking at the newspaper. The photographs had not changed. It was him, Tariq al-Hakim, the programmer whom he had lately been using, twice to bring heroin out of Pakistan, once, more profitably, carrying coke from Kuala Lumpur; and with him, amazingly, that woman, the stripper Krystal. It was ludicrous, of course, or perhaps it wasn’t. It was hard to say. What was clear to him, though, was that it was only a matter of time now before the authorities came to him, only a short time before they went through him, looking at his accounts, delving deeper, and then it would all be over. They would work it out soon enough, he knew they would, find out who he really was and what he really did.
After all, it was Tariq al-Hakim, with ideas far above his lowly station, who had set up his meeting with Lee Moon, for whom, presumably, he had also done some mule work. And it was Lee Moon’s idea that Frank Moretti deal with the Sydney port part of his new operation, smuggling men into Australia in shipping containers, for Frank Moretti’s contacts there, who had helped him in the past with his other imports, were of the first order: reliable and trustworthy.
“Women we do other way,” Lee Moon had smiled. Frank Moretti knew well enough that meant bringing them in on educational visas to work in his chicken coops, which Lee Moon graciously invited Frank Moretti to make use of as his guest.
The deal was done, and Tariq al-Hakim had been meant to collect the cargo that morning, but all day had passed and most of the evening and Moretti had heard nothing. Worried, he once more tried to call him.
56
Nick Loukakis did not recognise the ring tone pulsing out from the car boot as Tupac Shakur’s “Thugs Get Lonely Too”. But even in the dim torchlight, clothes stretched taut by the body beginning to bloat and slow-moving maggots covering the temple in a twisting Turk’s-head knot, he knew who the putrid corpse had once been. He looked at his watch. It was ten-thirty at night and everything felt too late.
Earlier in the evening, after talking to his sons, he had gone out for a drive. Every station on the car radio seemed full of the terrorist scare. There were other recurrent items—some deaths of old people blamed on the heatwave; a fresh outbreak of race rioting in the southwest suburbs between white supremacists and Lebanese gangs. But mostly it was about the terrorist threat: where they might strike—the airport, train stations, beaches, the Bridge or the centre of the city—and how they were going to do it. There was a strong sentiment playing out over several stations that it would be a dirty nuclear bomb that would cover the centre of Sydney in radioactive fallout. He switched to a music channel and pondered the tv news report he had seen a few hours before.
It was only then that he had seen the faces of the terrorists—until then he hadn’t really taken much notice of the terrorist scare. But he knew straight away who they were. He was Tariq al-Hakim, a mule Nick Loukakis had tracked for a few weeks the year before, hoping he might lead them to Lee Moon’s syndicate. Instead, all they came up with was a small-time dealer called Frank Moretti, who seemed to run a few different rackets, but none so stupidly that there was ever enough to nail him.
She, on the other hand, he knew as one of Wilder’s friends, Gina Davies, a pole dancer. He had even once given her a lift back from Wilder’s to her home.
At first he had been shocked—not that both a suspect and a friend of a friend might be terrorists, but that he hadn’t twigged to it. He felt dumb as shit. How the hell hadn’t he worked it out himself? He knew Tariq al-Hakim had been to both Pakistan and Malaysia several times, but he had always thought it was simply in order to bring back drugs. No doubt ASIO and the Feds and everyone else knew a whole lot more than a lowly drug squad detective sergeant could be expected to know, but he was amazed he hadn’t picked up on any of it, and pissed off that no one had told him.
Nick Loukakis drove a long way away from Panania, but the night traffic was light and he made it to Darlinghurst in half an hour. He was retreating, as he always retreated, into his work.
He parked half a block away from the Doll’s apartment building, then sat in his car for a while, engine idling, air con running, mind racing.
“Interface with the cosmos,” said the car
radio. “Nokia. Not a phone. A revolution.”
Nick Loukakis switched the engine off, and got out of his Ford Territory. He wandered around the building in which the Doll lived. He was remembering when he’d first met her, how ordinary she had seemed to him, when walking past an alley he caught the odour of something very bad. His instinct in this, as it was whenever anything stank, was to seek to discover the cause of the stench.
But now, staring at Tariq al-Hakim’s corpse, thinking back on what he knew about Gina Davies and all that he knew about Tariq al-Hakim, it didn’t add up. It just didn’t add up.
He would need to call homicide. But he wouldn’t tell them everything. Not yet. First, he would drop in on Frank Moretti, about whom he knew one other odd fact that now seemed strangely significant: once a week Gina Davies used to go to his home and strip for him.
57
It was no mystery to Frank Moretti why he had taken up his small part as a subcontractor in people-smuggling. It wasn’t “My humanitarian hobby”, as he privately joked to himself, and sometimes even tried to believe, if only a little.
No; it was because his part was profitable. Easy and highly profitable: a few phone calls, some kickbacks, a hired people-mover and a man—Tariq al-Hakim—to let them out and take them away and deliver them.
With the exception of the women he paid for, Moretti rarely found human beings beautiful, but he was pleasantly surprised how trading in them could be so lucrative. Today another container had arrived, this time all the way from Shanghai, with its load of canned Albanian tomato paste—and twelve men. Why Albanian tomato paste would be coming out of Shanghai was a mystery to Moretti; it had been explained to him as old trading ties.
No wonder he felt unwell. What a night! First the stripper crazily calling, wanting God knows what, then after his dinner guests had thankfully gone and he was about to ring Tariq al-Hakim for the hundredth time, the doorbell rang.
A wave of fear and guilt broke over Moretti when he answered the door to a cop asking too many questions about the stripper. ‘And my crime?’ Moretti suddenly thought, ‘what is it, and how is it different from what so many of my neighbours do for their money? After all,’ he argued with himself, ‘how is what I do poles apart from what we are all told to do every day?’
Then he remembered how Lee Moon had smiled over his tumbler of Johnnie Walker Blue Label the day they had met, and told him how free trade agreements lied, how in truth some things weren’t exactly permitted, and some products were even officially disapproved of, but it was tacitly understood they too were part of the deal. Lee Moon was a pleasant-looking man who was always beaming, and reminded Frank Moretti of the Dalai Lama in an expensive dark suit.
“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.