Peter Temple - An Iron Rose

Ken Berglin was in his mid-thirties when I went to work for him, but to me he seemed to be of my father’s generation. He was tall and gaunt, bony-faced, with colourless thinning hair combed straight back, and he always wore a dark suit with a white shirt and dark tie.

On my first day back from training in Chicago, waiting to go undercover, we met at the War Memorial at opening time. It was autumn in Canberra, cold, the flaming leaves changing the colour of the air. We were looking at a World War I biplane in a towering near-empty gallery when he said to me in his hoarse voice, ‘So you seen all the shooting galleries and the crack shops?’

I nodded.

‘They tell you you can’t do this work without a sense of moral superiority?’

‘They mentioned it in passing,’ I said. ‘Few hundred times. I’m shit-scared to tell you the truth.’

‘Always will be. That’s the job. Listen, Mac, this moral superiority, holding the line against the forces of darkness stuff, that’s useful out there. Like a swag full of arseholes. Believe me. I know. I’ve been there. Let’s have a smoke.’

We went out into a courtyard. I offered him a Camel.

‘There’s some good comes from the Yanks,’ he said. The air was still and the blue-grey smoke hung around us like a personal mist.

Berglin studied his cigarette. ‘You live with the scum,’ he said. ‘One of them, in their world, they can buy anything, buy anyone. You forget what you are. Some of them you even like after a while. Then you start to think like them. The whole thing starts to look normal. Like a business, really. Ordinary business. Like being a man buys and sells fucking meat. So the vegetarians don’t like the business. They don’t even like to look in the shop window. Half a chance, they’d put you out of business. You think, what the fuck does that matter? There’s plenty who want a thick, juicy steak. And all these friends of yours are doing is selling it to them. Should that be a fucking crime?’

Berglin paused and looked at me inquiringly. ‘Making sense to you, this?’

‘So far.’

Something caught his eye. He pointed. ‘Eagle,’ he said. We watched it for a while, bird all alone in the vast blue emptiness, dreaming on the high winds.

‘Anyway,’ Berglin said, ‘when you start thinking like the other side, you’re on the way to changing sides. And that will make you a worthless, faithless person. Agree?’

It was hard not to. I nodded.

Berglin took a deep drag and blew a stream of perfect smoke rings, like a cannon firing tiny grey wreaths.

‘Worthless, faithless, that’s bad,’ he said. ‘But there’s worse. Dead is worse.’ He stood on his cigarette butt. ‘Let’s have a look at Gallipoli. My favourite.’

He led the way to a gallery that featured a huge diorama of the disastrous Gallipoli landing. Two young Japanese tourists in expensive ski wear were studying it, faces impassive.

‘Always have a look at this,’ Berglin said. ‘Bloody marvellous, not so?’

We admired the huge scene.

‘You think you’re scared?’ he said. ‘Consider these poor bastards. Boys led to the slaughter.’

It occurred to me that our meeting place was more than a matter of convenience.

The Japanese left. They were holding hands. ‘Dead, Mac,’ Berglin said again. ‘One inkling that you’ve moved across, you’re just a picture in an album. And we’ll know, believe me. You cross over, you can’t go home anymore. Know that line? American book. This is like marriage except that when we say “Till death do us part”, we mean it. And it’s you who’s dead. You religious?’

I shook my head.

‘No. Me neither. They say it can help with the fear. I deeply fucking doubt that. Well, we’ve got to talk some details. Got a little room here I sometimes use.’

Later, before he sent me off, Berglin said, ‘How to be a halfway decent person. That’s the main question in life. The work, the job, it’s on the side of the fourteen-year-olds. Get a few free tastes-two years later, they’re in the cold filing cabinet, tracks all over ’em like a rash. This scum, they are way over on the other side. Across the dark river. Keep it in mind, Mac. Won’t, of course. Wouldn’t be any fucking use if you did.’

He was absolutely right. I never gave it a thought over the next few years, living under the gun, sweating on the moment of discovery. But I often thought about that meeting with Berglin later. And I thought about it again, driving home from talking to Dr Crewe.

I parked outside the smithy and went to have a piss in the bathroom alongside the office. Still thinking about Berglin, I was in the room before I heard the shower.

Allie was in the big open shower stall facing me. She had her head back under the spray, arms raised to shampoo her hair. Before I backed out, I registered sleek pubic hair, flattened breasts with prominent nipples, defined ribcage, long muscular thighs.

I was in the smithy, shaken, lustful, looking at a sketch of gateposts a hobby farmer outside Wallace wanted when Allie came in, shiny clean, spiky, no make-up.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘No truck. Didn’t occur to me you’d be showering.’

‘That’s okay,’ she said without a trace of embarrassment. ‘They told us at school to lock the cubicle. I was feeling filthy. Alarm didn’t go off this morning, twenty minutes to get to the job.’

‘Where’s the truck?’

‘Lent it to Mick. Met him in the pub at lunchtime. He’s broken down other side Newstead.’

‘Overloaded with furniture ripped off the rural poor,’ I said. ‘That’s the first time I’ve seen you naked.’

She smiled. ‘You only had to ask.’

We looked at each other for a moment, a trace of awkwardness.

‘You working?’ she said.

‘Gateposts for a bloke at Wallace.’ I handed her the sketch the man had given me.

She whistled. ‘Gateposts? These are gateposts? What is the place? Some kind of agribrothel?’

‘Hardiplank house on two acres. He says his wife saw gateposts like this in America. Went to Disneyland with her first husband.’

Allie scratched her head. ‘Disneyland and Cape Kennedy, Cape Canaveral, whatever it’s called. Does he see that they look like two giant wangers?’

‘Wanger? That’s the current term is it?’

She nodded. ‘This week’s term. Wanger.’

‘He’s under no illusions,’ I said. ‘I suggested to him that they looked like a pair of pricks and he said, there’s been two of us. When my wife marries again, she can come around and get you to make a third prick.’

‘No illusions,’ Allie said.

‘Any idea how you’d make something like this?’

She shrugged. ‘You work behind closed doors. Then you transport them at night, under a tarp. And you don’t have anything to do with their, ah, erection.’

When we stopped laughing, we went over to the office and worked out how to make the posts and what to charge.

‘Add twenty percent to cover embarrassment and possible prosecution,’ Allie said.

‘We may have priced ourselves out of the market here,’ I said.

‘For this kind of work,’ Allie said, ‘we are the market.’

I rang the man and gave him the quote. When I put the phone down, I said, ‘Didn’t blink. Wife wants them up in time for the Grand Final. They have a big gathering every year.’

Allie frowned.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Stop now.’

We went out into the rapidly chilling day to inspect the steel store.

‘MacArthur John Faraday,’ Berglin said. ‘Nothing for four years, then twice inside a month.’

I could picture the long, sardonic face, the narrow black shoes on the desk, the cigarette dangling from the jaundiced fingers.

‘Twice?’