Peter Temple: Black Tide

She said, no change of tone, around the mouth a small inclination to smile, ‘We can’t mend. All we can do is pay.’

I looked into her eyes and I saw nothing. She stooped and picked up the document box, still open, the tapes pinned by the spring clip.

‘Take this with you,’ she said. ‘Less for the cleaners to do.’

Looking at each other. Pain in the side building up now, quickly.

‘Tasmania,’ I said. ‘Know about that?’

Black eyes. Giving away nothing.

‘Come this far, Jack,’ she said, ‘do what you have to do.’

The woman doctor who cleaned the wound looked like Ava Gardner in Bhowani Junction. She wasn’t impressed with the injury.

‘Call this a gunshot wound?’ she said. ‘I’ve seen worse from knitting accidents.’ She pointed at my old scar. ‘Now that’s a gunshot wound. Are you a dangerous person?’

‘This is called blaming the victim,’ I said. ‘The people who shoot me are dangerous.’

‘I’ll give you some painkillers. Come back and have the dressing changed tomorrow. Always the chance of foreign matter in there, dirty cloth fragments.’

‘Steady on,’ I said. ‘These are Henry Buck’s fragments. I paid top dollar for them. And the shirt’s one hundred per cent Australian cotton, nothing foreign about it.’

We didn’t go to the Hyatt. We went to the penthouse apartment, not talking, coming down. In the study, I slotted one of Stuart’s videos into the player, pressed the button.

On the big screen, a man appeared, out of focus at first, then sharp, a man with cropped hair, just stubble, a handsome, ravaged face. He was sitting in an armchair, long-fingered hands lying on the arms.

Lips hardly moving, he said in a soft, cultured voice:

Of course, Stuart, this isn’t some little smack operation, bunch of clever chaps, few kilos in statues of the blessed virgin, in the coconut milk tins, in some mule’s bowels. This is an international business run by Americans. Ex-CIA, ex-army, well connected. That’s why they called themselves The Connection, I presume. And we ended up, because of our greed, unforgivable greed, we ended up as the Australian arm of it.

A voice off-screen, faint American accent:

Just for the sake of the record, Brent, when you say we, you mean…

Lyall said, ‘That’s Stuart.’

The ravaged man said:

I mean me and Steven Levesque and McColl and Carson, of course. Led by Steven but willingly led, not an innocent among us.

I looked at Lyall. She raised her eyebrows. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘This is the grail,’ I said. ‘Stuart’s news story from heaven. It killed him. Now the trick is for us to stay alive.’

‘The media,’ Lyall said. ‘Go to the media.’

I could hear Dave at our first meeting, sitting in the car in the little square, watching the leaves blowing in the cold, wet wind.

The point here, Jack, the point’s simple for an intelligent bloke like you. Change Hansard, shut up journos, that’s kinder stuff for these people.

He was these people. He knew.

‘No,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to be the media ourselves.’

I rang Eric the Geek, told him what I wanted to do. He arrived twenty minutes later with a laptop and a suitcase of electronic gear.

‘Streaming video,’ he said, a gleam in his eye. ‘Always wanted to do this.’

It took the rest of the night and the first hours of the day. At 8.30 a.m., Eric, exhausted but happy, went home. Lyall was asleep in the big white bedroom, head beneath a pillow. At 9 a.m., I rang the newspaper.

‘Editor, please,’ I said. The secretary came on. ‘Jack Irish to speak to Malcolm Glasser. He knows who I am. Tell him it’s his son’s lawyer.’

He came on. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘I wish you wouldn’t identify yourself that way.’

I said, ‘Malcolm, I’m going to give you a website. Ring me back inside half an hour. If not, I give it to everyone. You’ve got a tiny edge on the rest of the world here. Tiny.’ I gave him my number.

Glasser was back in ten minutes.

‘Utterly unbelievable,’ he said. ‘Jesus, story of the decade. Bigger than that, much bigger. How the hell do you fit in here?’

‘I don’t. You running it?’

‘Fuck, yes, fuck the risk.’

‘There’s no risk, Malcolm.’

At 11 a.m., I began to ring television stations, radio stations, other newspapers, giving them the website.

My fleshwound was aching, but I didn’t mind. I ache, therefore I am. Alive.

Could be much, much worse than that.

By the end of the day, the whole world was reading the story of Steven Levesque and TransQuik, watching the haggard and dying Brent Rupert telling his electri- fying stories about a transport empire founded on drug money, money provided by Klostermann Gardier of Luxembourg. Klostermann Gardier, banker to The Connection, an invisible organisation run by people with high-level American military and intelligence connections.

The audiences learned about massive drug importations, about bribery and murder, about Steven Levesque’s ability to stop prosecutions, derail police investigations, and control politicians and bureaucrats at the highest levels.

They learned about how TransQuik, through the cousins’ travel agencies, even laundered the cash that flowed into the hands of the people to whom they sold drugs in bulk.

A full-service company.

And Brent Rupert, often visibly weary, sipping something colourless from a small glass, had total recall. He named the names, put dates and places to everything. Names high and names low. Including Gary’s name, as the go-between, the carrier of messages, the arranger, TransQuik’s Mercury.

It was dark outside, raining, the city a smear of lights, when Lyall woke up, came to the door of the study and stood with her hands in her hair, pushing it back.

‘I didn’t know where I was,’ she said.

On the television screen, the 6 p.m. news was ending with shaky footage of Steven Levesque shot from outside a moving car. He was seated between two large men, averting his head.

She came over and stood behind me, put her hands on my shoulders. ‘What’s the time?’ she asked.

‘Bollinger time,’ I said.

On a cold, clear Wednesday, high and pale winter sky, whiplash wind, we went to Moonee Valley racecourse.

Wootton was leaning on the mounting yard rail, looking like an advertisement for what upper-middle-class men should wear to the mid-week races. Not far away from him, I recognised Cynthia, his head commissioner. She’d had her hair cut short since I’d last seen her and she was looking inconspicuous in an off-white trenchcoat and a drab scarf.

Lyall and I watched the horses being walked. Vision Splendid came along, accompanied by Karen Devine’s jagged-haired strapper. The big grey looked good, unfussed by the crowd, tight as a proper bullboar sausage, but with bandages on all legs.

‘The grey,’ I said. ‘Vision Splendid. That’s the one we’re here to see.’

‘What’s wrong with its legs?’

‘Nothing. That’s why they’re bandaged.’

She gave me a look. ‘Can I ask you again? What exactly do you do for a living?’

I looked back, looked her over, took my time. She was worthy of study: colour in her face from the cold, hair tied back loosely, big tweed jacket, man’s white cotton shirt, corduroy pants. ‘Suburban solicitor, with all the breadth of cultural and other interests that the term conveys,’ I said.

‘And we are talking broad.’ She took the Age out of my hand. It was open at the form.

Cam came down the rail, dark-grey suit and black polo-neck, elegant and insolent-eyed as ever. He joined Wootton for long enough to say a few words, light a cigarette with a match from a paper matchbook, blow smoke over the man’s head and tuck the matchbook behind the triangle of red handkerchief in his top pocket. Marching orders delivered. Harry never handed them over until the last minute.