Peter Temple - Shooting Star

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.’

He’d looked at me, thought about it. ‘You’re getting off bloody lightly,’ he said.

Now we sat in silence. I sensed that he wasn’t finished with the subject of Afghanistan.

‘What do you feel about it now?’ he said.

‘Guilt.’

‘For what?’

‘For not being able to save them.’

‘Inquiry didn’t think you could’ve done anything.’

‘Inquiry wasn’t there. I could always have done something.’

‘That’s bullshit.’

‘Yes. But it’s my bullshit. What’s your problem?’

He sniffed his whisky, drank half the glass. ‘I haven’t got a problem. I had a problem, a minor problem.’ He opened the old briefcase on the coffee table and fiddled with the laptop. ‘Been thinking about something else,’ he said. He put a speaker plug in his left ear, tapped keys.

The electronic voice from Saturday:

Becoming less stupid. Learning to do what you’re told and…

‘What’s that mean?’ he said. ‘Less stupid than when? Nothing done before that.’

‘Probably just a way of speaking.’

‘You don’t think he means less stupid than the last time? The first kidnap?’

‘I’ve said this before. I don’t see people waiting seven years for another try.’

‘Maybe they would if it’s for revenge. People who want to punish the Carsons, make them suffer, they might wait.’

He tapped again, listened, tapped: