Peter Corris - The January Zone

‘Do lunch?’

‘A Yank expression. Hollywood. I’m using it in my stuff. Think it’ll catch on?’

‘No,’ I grunted.

‘Got anything for me?’

‘Come on, Sammy. It’s only half an hour since we met.’

‘I hear January was out with a woman last night. He gave some reporter the slip but there’s a pic. Know anything about that?’

‘January out with a woman isn’t news.’

‘Depends on the woman. I’d like something on this, Cliff.’

The phone suddenly felt tacky in my hand. In my line of work the rules are usually clear: protect the client’s confidentiality all the way to the prison cell door. Stop there and think about it. I’d stepped into a new game by working for January and it had already put me in line for penalties such as an ‘information exchange’ relationship with Weiss. I wished I was on a beach up the north coast with Helen. But wasn’t that a part of what this was all about? I felt confused.

‘We’ll see,’ I grunted. ‘How come you were able to set it up so easily?’

Weiss paused, then he spoke too quickly. ‘Like I said, we’re close.’

I laughed. ‘Bullshit, Sammy. I get it. Tobin wanted to see me. Thanks, Mr Weiss. Stay in touch.’

I hung up and went off to shower feeling marginally better. It’s all a lot easier with cops.

They don’t expect to meet honest men, ever. If you are reasonably honest you’ve got an edge.

The cat jumped up outside the bathroom window and made a noise. I rubbed mist off the glass and looked at it as I showered. It’s a black cat with some grey in it. I combed my wet hair and saw the resemblance.

As I opened a can of cat food I tried to calculate the age of the cat using the formula which translates human years into cat years. I was rusty on the formula but, as near as I could judge, the cat and I were the same age. It ploughed through the food in the saucer.

‘Eat slower, you’re not young.’

It rubbed itself against my leg once or twice and then went out to sleep on the bricks. The sun was getting high and the backyard was heating up. Morning dew was rising from the bricks all around the cat in little, gentle puffs of steam.

‘Stay close, cat,’ I said. ‘We’ll do dinner.’

After I’d scraped my whiskers flat I went upstairs to put on a clean shirt and pants, my old loose Italian shoes and a light sports jacket Helen had bought me. I also put on the. 38 Smith amp; Wesson Police Special I’d bought myself. January’s dark tie was lying on a chair in the living room. I contemplated putting it on just for a joke but decided against it: Tobin might get the wrong idea. He might think I’d learned how to behave myself and do what was expected of me.

The weather was holding the way it does in Sydney in September-it holds either good or bad. Today there was a light breeze to keep the pollution moving and enough cloud to keep the heat down. From behind dark glasses the houses and trees and shops along Glebe Point Road all wore a more respectable, affluent air than they had in the days when I’d moved in, and it wasn’t just the glasses. The bookshop where I got my paperbacks was expanding; a butcher had become a boutique and the community seemed to be holding its breath waiting to see what was going to happen to the closed-down timber yard.

Things change at the Cross too, but the essentials remain the same. I parked in Victoria Street and walked along Orwell into Macleay Street. The Fitzroy Gardens, that once were more cracked and bubbling asphalt than gardens, are now more brick terrace than gardens, but the fat cops are still strolling through with their lunch bags. The drugs are changing; crack is on its way according to the papers which might be good news for the junkies if it puts them out of their misery earlier.

A pair of them were sitting on the low brick wall around a struggling tree. Young men, not yet 20, they were in dirty singlets and jeans, heavily tattooed and sharing an innocent cigarette. They smiled at each other as if they also shared a secret. I wondered what it was; I didn’t think it was a way to make an honest living or what to do with nuclear waste. It might have been a vision of God.

The girl outside the Bourbon Brasserie had something to sell rather than share. She was wearing a leather miniskirt, high white boots with heels, and a see-through white blouse. As I approached she moved out from the wall, lifted the skirt up a fraction more and pushed her chest forward; all her wares were on display. Her bright smile, under the heavily made up eyes and the fluffy blonde hair, seemed to be painted on rather than something that came from her face muscles.

‘Hello, sir,’ she said, ‘wanna go along?’

‘Not today,’ I said, ‘but good luck.’

The lips moved behind the smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

I took the glasses off as I went up the carpeted steps to the head waiter’s desk. The place is decked out in a heavily masculine style with a lot of brass, sporting prints and mirrors that make it look bigger that it is. There are tables at the front just above the street and big glass windows that slide back so that you could drop ash onto the footpath if you wanted to. Back from there tables are placed far enough apart to let people have a private conversation. A big bar with stools and the sort of tables you drink at rather than eat at occupies a lot of space downstairs.

The head waiter was Chinese, not young but slim and hard and able to wear a dinner suit at midday without looking silly.

‘The Tobin table,’ I said. I felt sure it’d be called something like that. The man nodded and snapped his fingers. Another waiter appeared and indicated that I should follow him. Tobin’s spot wasn’t in the window but more like the centre of the room. I fancied there was more clear space around it than was logical, but that might have been my imagination.

Two men sat at the table; neither moved when the waiter brought me up.

‘Sit down, Hardy,’ Tobin said. ‘You look the same-as if you could do with a haircut and a shave and a new shirt and it still wouldn’t make any bloody difference.’

‘Tobin.’ I nodded and took a seat. He must have put on nearly five stone since he’d been a flashy sergeant in Balmain. He’d had glossy black hair and sideburns and suits with too much stitching on them. A good deal of the hair had gone now and what was left looked to be touched up on top. The sideburns were smaller and grey. His belly bulged out to touch the table and his neck hung down over the collar of his silk shirt above the silk tie. His dark double-breasted suit was discreet and hadn’t been tailored anywhere local.

‘I can’t say the same for you,’ I said. ‘You must live here.’

‘A smartarse,’ the other man said.

‘Hardy’s the original smartarse, Ken,’ Tobin said. ‘D’ you know that I once had him with a gun and a stiff in a park in Balmain and I couldn’t do a thing to him. Know why?’

Ken shook his head. He was younger than Tobin, thin and angry-looking with short-cropped mousy hair and the scar from a mended hare lip on his mouth. He lifted his glass of beer to the scar and sipped. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

Tobin drank some red wine. The bottle was on the table; the label was white and the writing in it was small which meant that the wine was expensive. ‘Hardy had a mate. Name of Evans. Now he has a mate name of Parker.’

‘Frank Parker?’ Ken said.

‘The same. Hardy has a knack of being matey with rising coppers. That’s handy in his business.’

‘Evans went to Victoria,’ Ken said.

‘That’s why he switched to Parker.’

I reached out for the wine and poured myself a glass. It was smooth and ripe, the sort of stuff that slides down and beckons to you from the bottle. ‘I’d forgotten you liked the sound of your own voice, Tobin. Must be something in your childhood. I know, you weren’t allowed to talk at the dinner table so you ate too much. That’s why you’re so fat now and like to talk.’