Sydney Noir Read online

  “Don’t tell me what to do, you Laos cunt.” He stamped his feet to send his heart charging.

  This is it, I thought.

  * * *

  Prisoners were allowed to make calls from the wall phone by the guardhouse at the entrance to the wing. I knew the screws were listening in, but I wasn’t breaking any law. My call diverted from a fixed line on my desk in the office to an Android in my safe to a satellite phone in a Toyota Land Cruiser.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “And me,” he said.

  I could hear warmth and waves.

  “What’s it like in there?” he asked.

  “Like school,” I said. “Except worse. What’re you doing?”

  “Fishing.”

  “Caught anything?”

  “Sweetlip, cod, and mullet,” he said.

  “Sounds like a law firm.”

  “You should hire them.”

  “I already did,” I told him.

  He laughed. “Give my regards to Sweetlip. Stay strong. Love you, man.”

  “Love you,” I said.

  * * *

  Jesse arrived with a shoulder bag full of papers. There were prisoners talking to their lawyers in the rooms on either side of us, murmurs floating through the walls. Jesse looked into my eye, shot red through the iris and bruised blue around the socket. She raised a hand, as if she were about to touch my cheek, then let it fall into her lap. She was wearing a ring I had never seen before.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I couldn’t think of an intelligent reply.

  “Last night a remand prisoner got jabbed in the eye with an infected syringe.” She was telling me as a warning to keep safe.

  “Who did it?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t know. They never know. In prison, people’re always attacked from behind. Even when they’re stabbed in the face.”

  I liked it when Jesse acted world-weary and tough.

  “The terrible thing was,” she said, “he was only in here because he couldn’t make bail on a possession charge.”

  He could have. He didn’t want to. He came in to do me, then he would have miraculously raised the bail and got out.

  “He lost the sight in his right eye, Chevy,” she said.

  I was sorry. I genuinely was.

  “We’re going to get you out of here,” she promised.

  I smiled, although it hurt me to listen to her. Jesse was a beautiful woman and a lovely person. She was, however, a shithouse lawyer.

  * * *

  The Lion King was naked, except for a dirty towel draped over his crotch. His cell smelled of liniment.

  “Take off your pants,” he told me.

  I looked at his cellie, his biceps built on a construction site, his brow bashed down in a boxing ring. I knew I couldn’t fight him, but I might be able to back out of the cell before he could reach me. Then I felt the warmth of a third man behind me. I stepped to the side, to allow him to come past me, but he stayed in position, blocking my retreat.

  “Pants,” said the Lion King, and wiggled his ring finger.

  The third man walked into me, knocking me off balance, and closed the cell door.

  I thought about screaming.

  “Are you deaf as well as Asian?” asked the Lion King. “Drop your fucking pants.”

  I felt time slow down, saw my own body from above. “No,” I said.

  The Lion King laughed.

  The third man grabbed me and I threw him over my hip, like a judoka. Something like that only works for you once in a lifetime. His head smashed against the cell floor.

  The Lion King laughed again and clapped like a seal. “The slope does tricks!” he cried.

  The third man picked himself up, and wiped blood across his forehead. I knew he’d back up on me later, but he’d look weak if it wasn’t one-on-one.

  “Look,” the Lion King said to me, “I just want to see if it’s true. Drop your pants for me, and you’ll walk out of here a virgin.”

  I unbuttoned my prison trousers and let them fall. I stepped out of them and turned around.

  The Lion King reached out and stabbed my thigh with his finger. “And what the fuck is that?” he asked.

  Vasari must’ve seen it when we showered.

  “It’s an eco-tower,” I said. “It was designed to incorporate elements of Botany Bay’s maritime heritage. The twin Ts are supposed to mirror the shape of intermodal container-lifting cranes.”

  “It’s a fucking Tasman Tigers badge,” said the Lion King.

  “Everyone who worked on the building got the same tattoo,” I told him, “the night we won the National Architecture Awards.”

  “Take it off.”

  “It’s a tattoo,” I said.

  His cellie pulled a chef’s knife from his pants and offered it to me, blade first. “Cut the tattoo out,” he said.

  * * *

  I had a visit from Jack Roden QC, man of the people. He arrived in Long Bay with his Zegna suit, acquired ockerisms, and activist credentials. He noticed my limp when I walked in.

  “You okay?” he asked, and pointed to my leg.

  I didn’t know if I was okay. Probably not.

  He said he had come to see me as a mate, not a lawyer.

  I told him that was good, because I already had a lawyer.

  He hugged me when I went to shake his hand. “You’ve got to dump Jesse, mate.”

  I did not reply.

  “Eh?” said Roden. “Eh? Eh? Mate.” He was a brave man, but I had never liked him. “You stay with her and you’ll be stuck in here forever.” He wanted to refight the Free the Refugees campaign, the best days of his life.

  “I’m not a cause, Jack,” I told him. “I don’t need demonstrations.”

  Roden leaned forward, as if to confide in me. “Your mates aren’t going to let you fuck up your life for Jesse. Not again.”

  That hurt—the again part.

  Roden put on his court face. “When was the last time you saw her before this?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “A year ago. Maybe two.”

  “Now she comes in twice a week.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And she gets paid—it’s her job—to think about you.” Roden did not conclude his argument. He left it to the jury to decide.

  * * *

  Jesse was wearing her grave face—a cute frown, an angry pout. She had interviewed Mrs. Nassoor over baklava and dates. “She said it was you that told her to report Jamie missing. Why didn’t you report him missing?”

  “Do I look like his mother?” I said.

  That was a thing Jesse used to say to me, when I left beer bottles on the table, or roaches in the cereal bowl. Do I look like your mother? Yes, you do, a little. But you look more like my brother, that beautiful man. Tim? No, my brother from a different father. Show me a picture? I don’t have one. They’re all in my head.

  In truth, there were plenty of photographs, but when I looked at the first it made me remember the last.

  Jesse wanted to go through everything again, from the beginning. I sighed, because it seemed like we only ever had one conversation.

  “When did you last see Jamie?” she asked, as if she didn’t know.

  “Tuesday the sixteenth. In the car park at the New South Wales Golf Club in La Perouse.”

  “What time?”

  “Maybe half eleven,” I said. “We’d been drinking and the club had closed.”

  “Why did you go to the car park? You didn’t drive home.”

  “No,” I said. “I left the car there. We went to the car park to wait for a cab.”

  “What’re you not telling me?”

  “You know what I’m not telling you.”

  Maybe she blushed, or maybe I imagined it. “Don’t start that again,” she said. She fingered the golden Buddha on the collar around her throat.

  I wondered if she wanted me to start that again.

  “We don’t have an extradition treaty with L
aos,” she said. “You were leaving anyway. I don’t understand why you didn’t just get on a plane.”

  “Because I’m innocent, Jess.”

  She looked at me with eyes that I’d kissed. “There was a camera in the car park, Chevy. They’ve got film of the two of you fighting.”

  I’d wondered when they would find that. “We like to fight,” I said. “It gives us a chance to touch each other.” That was a joke, mostly.

  “I’ve seen it,” said Jesse. “You were directly in front of the camera.”

  “Did you see my left hook? The one that took him down?” That was a great punch.

  “He fell to the ground,” she said, “and out of the picture.”

  “And then he got up, got into a cab, and went home.”

  “Why isn’t that on camera?”

  “It sounds like the camera was looking at the car park,” I said. “The taxi stopped on the road.”

  “There’s a third person with you. Is that Tim?”

  “Yeah, he was the referee.”

  “And where is Tim now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

  “Tell me where he is, Chevy.”

  “He left the next morning. He was going on holiday. I can’t remember where.”

  “Phone him,” said Jesse. “E-mail him.”

  “I have. He doesn’t reply.”

  “Then I’ll find him.”

  “He’ll be in the surf somewhere.”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Jesse, sharply.

  Oh, for Christ’s sake! You can’t think . . . “I mean he’s probably gone surfing, Jesse, that’s all.”

  She wrote the word surfing on her legal pad. It was her only note of our meeting.

  “Roden came to see me yesterday,” I told her.

  “I know. I asked him to.”

  What were you doing when you asked him? Were you lying on your side? “I didn’t know you two talked,” I said.

  There had been a split in the movement, all those years ago. Roden had favored direct physical confrontation. Jesse was more of a Gandhi. Each side blamed the other when we failed.

  “We only talk about you,” she said. “We think you’re not doing enough to help yourself.”

  We? Fucking we?

  * * *

  I lay on my bunk thinking about Jesse and trying to imagine Vasari away.

  I had fallen in love with her when she was a second-year arts-law student and I was studying for a bachelor’s degree in building design. We were thrown into a police van at a demo against Pauline Hanson. It was the first time I’d been arrested and the only time I was guilty. The cops offered me a deal: if I agreed to take a kicking, they wouldn’t drag me to court. So I lurched out of the cell with two broken ribs and a clean record, and Jesse was released because she gave the sergeant a kiss. Jesse and I got together, but it didn’t last. She liked to be dominated but we could only fuck with her on top, because of my ribs. That was the story we told in public—all candid and modern and hip, and maybe even a little bit true—but it was an alibi for a heart full of painful secrets. I could always taste the cop on her lips.

  Jesse married a tennis champion, had a baby, and got divorced. She used to joke that she’d mated for eugenic reasons—so that her son Caspar would have his body and her brains. We reduced everything to a formula. Jesse thought I had a dark side—although, God knows, I never showed it to her—but she could change her mind, her mood, and her lover in the time it took to roll off a condom. I used to say I only loved four people—two of them were Jesse, one of them was Tim, and one of them was dead.

  Jesse could do almost anything. She sang in a jazz band, played soccer for the district, spoke Russian, French, and German, and wrote like an angel. She chose to become a criminal lawyer because she wanted to help people—like a beauty queen at a bikini pageant—but she only scraped through her exams and anyone could see she was in the wrong job. Roden had become a barrister in the time it took her to finish her articles. Jesse was never going to land a decent case.

  * * *

  Vasari had noticed Jesse among the visitors. He spent the morning drawing sketches of her, legs splayed, up against the wall or down on all fours, and the Vasari character fucking her with his giant dick. In the afternoon he took a nap. I watched him breathe softly as I raised my pillow over his face.

  He woke up with the pillow lying lightly over his nose and mouth, and his drawings—all of them, including his stupid grap-hick novel—shredded around his head.

  The next day, he put his name down for a transfer to another cell.

  * * *

  Vasari still passed instructions from the Lion King, but these days he spoke quickly and hurried away to play chess with the rock spiders. My leg had almost healed, but it hurt as if I had been branded. When I came into the Lion King’s cell, I stood close to his cellie and waited for him to give me his seat. The Lion King laughed and told his cellie to go to the gym, work out on the heavy bag, and imagine sticking his fists right through my Laotian gut noodles.

  “Bloke in here knows you from the outside,” said the Lion King, once we were alone, “but he didn’t know you were an architect. Thought you were a martial arts teacher.”

  “That’s just something people say about Asians,” I responded.

  “You used to organize late-night fights in car parks and tennis courts. Like in that film . . .” There was a long silence while the Lion King struggled to remember the name of the movie, and groped for the answer in his pants.

  “Fight Club?” I asked.

  “Pocahontas,” said the Lion King.

  He could be quite a funny guy, at times.

  “He says he’s not surprised you knocked a bloke. You used to fight like a werewolf.”

  I shrugged. “He talks like that because it makes him sound hard.”

  “You’ve only got enemies in here,” said the Lion King. “The Viets are going to try and get you again. They know about the leg. They reckon you’ll be slower now, easier to catch. They heard you didn’t cry out when you cut away the skin, so now they think it’ll take more than one of them to bring you down.” He pointed to an object rolled up in his filthy crotch towel. “You’ve earned this.”

  I took it and weighed it in my hand.

  “If you want real protection, you can come and work for me,” he said. “I’ll make you an honorary Aryan. We can invent some kind of ritual that casts out the slope.”

  I looked at the newspaper clippings on his walls, photographs of the bodies of his enemies after the Moorebank massacre, and the fourteen-year-old girl who had been killed in the crossfire. Above the head of each Tasman Tiger corpse was written, Ha-ha! The girl’s epitaph was Boo-hoo!

  “No,” I said.

  He flicked a wrist in the air. “Go, then. Fuck off.”

  I turned my back on the Lion King.

  “You’re a good-looking boy,” he said. “Nice arc.”

  * * *

  Jesse turned up in her best lawyer’s sweat, a film of condensation on her upper lip, damp patches under the arms of her blouse.

  NSW Golf Club spills down to the cliffs of Cape Banks, where formations of lost golf balls rest like banal coral on the bed of the Tasman Sea. A walking track leads from the car park to the cliff edge, skirting the perimeter of Sydney Pistol Club.

  “There’s a camera on the overhang,” said Jesse, “for suicide watch.”

  When we were students, I reminded her, we’d fought against the surveillance state.

  “It picked you up that night,” she said, “about ten minutes after the car park camera. The film shows you and another man—it could be Tim—carrying what looks like a rolled-up carpet to the edge of the cliff. You swing it once, twice, three times, then toss it over the ledge.”

  I scratched my nose.

  “What was it that you threw into the ocean, Chevy?”

  I told her it was a picnic rug.

  “Why would you throw a picni
c rug off a cliff, Chevy?”

  Why why why.

  “You’d believe I’d throw my best mate off a cliff, but not a picnic rug?”

  “Christ, you asked my firm to represent you because you thought we could help you. You asked for me—me, specifically—because you said you could be honest with me. You’ve got to tell me the truth, Chevy. The jury’s going to want a motive.”

  I laughed. “I don’t need a motive for throwing a picnic rug off a cliff. It isn’t a crime.”

  Jesse was becoming impatient, unprofessional. “What was in the rug?” she asked.

  “You,” I said.

  * * *

  I was on the lookout for an Asian, but it was two big Lebs who blocked my way to the yard. One of them was known as the Big Leb, like the Big Banana. He looked like a giant ferroconcrete statue of an Arab. He said, “We heard you knocked our brother.”

  Jamie’s name was printed in the paper that morning.

  “I never knocked no one,” I said, like a real crim.

  They told me I was dead, but I was used to hearing that.

  The Big Leb sent his forehead crashing into my nose. He broke a bone and brought tears to my eyes. As I raised my hands to curb the bleeding, the Lion King’s chef’s knife fell out of my shirt. The Big Leb picked it up and hurried off.

  Then I saw the Viets, mobbed up and moving toward me.

  I ran to the Lion King’s cell.

  A big cock is a status symbol in prison, and there’s a thing prisoners do where they sew a marble under their foreskin, to make themselves larger. The Lion King had two marbles, and they must’ve been dobbers. He was examining them like a jeweler, his right eye squinting, as if into a loupe.

  “Grouse, ey?” he said.

  The Viets had paused at the end of the corridor, unsure whether to follow me.

  “Let me in,” I said, “and I’ll work for you.”

  The Lion King looked to his cock for guidance.

  * * *

  “What do you mean?” asked Jesse. “Me?”

  “Don’t you remember that rug?” I asked, although she obviously didn’t. “It’s the one we used for our picnic in Scarborough that time.”

  Jesse’s eyebrows drew together. “What picnic?”

  “We had a picnic. You made falafel.”

  “I don’t know how to make falafel.”

  “Maybe you bought it,” I said.