BECKER Read online

Gently, Becker got her to her feet.

  ‘What’s your name?’ She tried to say something, but it meant nothing. ‘I am police, you understand? Police?’ She nodded. ‘Are they hurting you? Do you work in that place?’ He pointed at it.

  She did not reply, scared stiff as she was, glancing about rapidly like a cornered fox. For a moment Becker thought she was going to run, anywhere to escape. But she did not, especially as he spoke as slowly and soothingly and sympathetically as he could. ‘Do you need help?’

  She didn’t seem to understand. ‘You want to go back there?’ He pointed at the house.

  Now she seemed to get the message. Shook her head. The poor kid, probably fresh off an aircraft from Hong Kong a few days ago, thinking she was going to get a good job in a Chinese takeaway, instead found herself in a place of ill-fame.

  ‘You want to go with me?’ He pointed to the car, the lights still revolving. ‘Go car with me?’

  She seemed uncertain, then nodded.

  ‘You want police help?’ Probably she didn’t understand a word he was saying. But the car, it got her. ‘Keep back,’ he said.

  The boss man and the woman tried again to grab her.

  Becker tapped his sidearm, hard. They jumped back.

  Cautiously he led the girl to the car, opened it. Told her to get in. Or indicated to get in. She hesitated. The woman in the long dress was snarling at her.

  For the first time Becker noticed that the woman was holding a small black mobile.

  The girl hesitated for a moment then got in, almost dived in.

  ‘The party’s over,’ Becker said to the small crowd. ‘Break it up!’

  He was about to slam the door on the girl when something screamed at him.

  It was a single blast from a car, an angry blast. It had come hurtling out of nowhere. Not a marked patrol car but unmarked.

  Next thing Becker knew, Whitford was bearing down on him.

  Torrence was at the wheel. Torrence took his time getting out, as if in no hurry. And grinning in his habitual way as if everything was a great big joke.

  But Whitford, he used his full weight, not only physical weight, or weight of authority, but personality. Which was vicious when he was in the mood. And he was in the mood that night.

  He barked at Becker. ‘What the hell’re you doin’? What the fuckin’ hell?’ This was trouble, Becker knew. ‘What are you doin’ with that girl?’ Whitford demanded.

  ‘Taking her to the station, sir.’

  ‘What the fuck for?’

  ‘She asked for help.’

  ‘What do you mean, help?’

  Becker froze.

  He’d worked for Whitford for a year or two then—a good-natured boy from the bush, who believed in the rule of law. But Whitford was a law unto himself.

  ‘Get that girl out of that car at once!’

  Becker baulked, but obeyed. He sensed what had happened. The woman in red had phoned Whitford. It was a private deal. If you ever have any trouble with the police, call me on this number. He’d made a lot of money that way, although Becker had not known then how much.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He opened the door and indicated for the girl to get out.

  She was startled, afraid. Something had gone terribly wrong. Australia was not what she had expected. Everyone comes to Australia and makes lots of money. She was going to make lots of money, but not for herself. She’d get a few dollars and a bowl of rice each day.

  Respectfully Becker waited for her to get out, a hand to an arm. He felt rotten. It shouldn’t be this way. The woman in red came forward, took control. The girl was terrified, but fatalistic.

  The Chinese, he thought, were like that. You did what you were told, even in Australia.

  He watched as they took her back. Slow steps, head down, probably fighting fresh tears. Not screaming now, no fight left. Whitford followed them to the steps, having a word with the operators. Then he returned to Becker and took him by an ear.

  ‘Never do that again,’ he said. ‘If you’re ever called to intervene in anything like that, call me first. Understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Get back on the road. There’s a bloodbath on Darlinghurst Road—one football team stuck into another.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Through all this Torrence had been standing back, smiling, a hand on his weapon. He was a cool customer. Becker said to him: ‘What’ll become of her?’

  Torrence shrugged. ‘A pretty girl in a cheongsam? She’ll be fucked to death in two or three months,’ he said. ‘Or, if not actually dead, she’ll wish she was.’

  Becker did nothing about it. He’d failed to do a lot of things back in those days at the Cross. He couldn’t forget it. The Cross was with him for life. He could do nothing about it. The Cross was his own cross. He’d got fed up with it, the corruption. He’d decided to go to the top and report what he’d seen and heard. But one night, while taking out his trash, he’d been shot. Whacked in a shoulder, his right shoulder. He’d survived. But he’d been kicked out of the force for his troubles.

  A voice was calling him. It was her voice. His wife was calling from the back door, and chuckling, embarrassed. He woke up, but too late. He’d been cleaning the Winchester on the back porch, but had not finished cleaning it. In fact, he’d forgotten it. He must have been holding it in mid-air for several minutes, an oil cloth in the other hand. Immobile.

  ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘what are you thinking about? Sitting there, frozen like a statue.’

  He jumped. He was like that, he knew. Always thinking about something.

  Always thinking of the Cross and what had gone wrong here.

  Or, it was Canberra and what had happened there. What had happened to Evelyn.

  Or, it was about his mother and what she had said to his father, because he was going back to Vietnam. He didn’t know what she’d said. That was years ago, when he was a kid.

  Robyn came and sat beside him. Leaned against him.

  ‘A penny for your thoughts,’ she said.

  Chapter 8

  He practised nearly every day with the rifle. He had plenty of room, a whole square mile. He’d go right up to the back fence, hide behind a few trees and blast away at tin cans, bottles and even a crude target he’d made out of a few pieces of deal board he’d found in the shed, nailing it to a tree. There he’d blast away, usually missing at first.

  The manufacturer claimed the 94 was fast to the shoulder and comfortable. But Becker didn’t find that to be so. He was right-handed but slow. Any impact on the right shoulder hurt. On an impulse, he tried the left side. Surprisingly, that was a lot better. He could use his right hand to work the lever and the trigger, one-two, one-two, one-two, getting faster each day until it was automatic. You had to sight and fire instantly. Becker was not sure he’d ever get it right, get it perfect. To save himself, or at least save someone. He didn’t matter all that much, he knew.

  Eventually he took Terry with him. A cheeky kid, as bright-eyed as a budgerigar and as chirpy. He begged to be allowed to have a go with the big rifle, but Becker refused. Robyn would have been horrified. They began to range far afield, hoping to spot a rabbit or pot a crow. Which they did. But they never saw a wild dog, not that they really expected to do so, such animals being very wary of humans and tended to appear at dusk. Some of them were part-dingo, the native dog, very aggressive and known to attack small children.

  School had broken up for the long summer vacation—six weeks in which to do nothing in particular. Robyn had tentatively asked whether they were going to do anything during the school holidays. Like what? he’d asked. Well, dear, I thought you might like to go somewhere, like Canberra. That’s not far from the coast, is it? We could go down there and the kids could run on a beach and splash and sun-bathe and make sand castles and, well, enjoy themselves.
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  He didn’t wish to return to Canberra so soon, even if he would be going back a very different man, a fortunate man, thanks to Evelyn Crowley. Who had left him half the money she’d inherited from that devious little husband of hers, who couldn’t take it any longer. He’d been moving millions for the Calabrian mafia thorough the Royal Bank, of which he was a big shot. Moving the stuff in such a way that no-one could work out how he was doing it or where it was going, not the Federal police and not even the Carabinieri. He’d gone for the high jump, eight stories down to the pavement in downtown Canberra. Surprising the shoppers landing at their feet, splat!

  Left him half her money in bonds and shares and property and paintings, the sense of which Evelyn had thought was not there on the walls of that posh house in quiet and comfortable Forrest, where nothing ever happened that you’d want to write home about—except the killing of a lovely girl, Christine, only seventeen and longing to meet her birth mother. The other half was to go to Christine, but she died a day before her mother. It ended up going to the girl’s adoptive parents instead. That’s how Evelyn had changed it, as they were trying to flee Canberra.

  To meet her, embrace her, kiss her and admire her.

  He might see her, even though she was dead, once again in Garema Place, the occasional gusts of cold wind unravelling her rich-brown hair. Like a fruit cake just out of an oven, luscious. She, standing and twisting on a caballero heel, at the same time delicately pulling strands away from her face with her long and elegant Italian fingers and saying, almost shyly: ‘Would you like to dine with me?’

  Becker said: ‘Not Canberra.’

  ‘Sydney, then?’

  ‘Not Sydney either.’

  ‘Because of Adeline? And the kids down there?’

  ‘No, not that.’

  She was propped up on one elbow in the pearly darkness, watching him, lying flat on his back, one hand behind his head, his nose and chin and Adam’s apple being silhouetted against the hall light intruding through the open door. It was always open to hear one of them cry in the night, the boy in particular, crying out, Dad! Although he had not seen the conflagration, he seemed to know something awful had happened to his father in the truck going south on the Hume Highway that day two years ago.

  ‘Harry, six weeks is a long time for kids to muck around, even on a farm. And it gets so hot, the poor things.’

  ‘Kosciusko,’ he said, pronouncing it as it is spelt and not Kosciosko, as a nation of indolent yobs, even educated professors, would have it. Although, according to an out-of-work Pole he’d met in a bar in Canberra one lonely night, it was pronounced ‘Koshyoosko’ in Poland. You couldn’t expect even a professor to know that or, if he did, would not pronounce it correctly—because no-one in this lackadaisical country cared a fuck about getting anything exactly right. Every university student he’d ever met was interested in one thing. How to make a motza in the fastest time possible. Who cared about the English language or any other language? Who cared who Kosciusko was named after? You can’t eat History, can you?

  ‘Kosciusko?’ she said. ‘Why Kosciusko? In summer?’

  ‘It’s cool up there, thousands of feet up.’

  ‘There’s no snow in summer.’

  ‘You don’t need snow in a place like that. I’ve been there more than once. It’s grand. The valleys are high and wide and echoing. And the chair-lifts, they go all day, the kids thrilled to be soaring hundreds of feet up, up and up and up to Crackenback.’

  ‘Crackenback?’ She’d never heard of the place.

  ‘It’s a range, six-thousand feet up.’

  ‘Is it near Kosciusko?’

  ‘About twenty-five k’s from Jindabyne. But, you can drive most of the way.’

  ‘What do you do, then?’

  ‘You walk, nine kilometres.’

  ‘Nine kilometres to the top of Australia?’ she said, flopping back on her pillow. ‘We could never walk that distance. Not there and back. I mean the kids couldn’t.’

  ‘There’s a lot more to see,’ he said, turning over. He’d been thinking of Barnes, trying to calculate what a resentful little thug like him would do.

  The bastard was sure to ask around, among cops he knew, about Becker. Hoping to discover something on him, something dirty. Something he could use. He was sure to hear about what happened in Sydney. And in Canberra too. Try again to get his hands on fifteen-thousand dollars, and never have to pay it back.

  ‘Oh, Harry, how wonderful,’ she said.

  She lay there with an arm over her eyes, thinking about it, the fun and the echoes and the chairlifts. It was too good to be true. She had a considerate husband. Even now, after four months, she couldn’t believe her good luck. Being kind and smart and willing to accept a stranger at a checkout in Canberra for what he was—a decent sort of chap, a bit shy and perhaps none too happy, smart in a rough way, not well dressed. But his face had lit up when she’d said, ‘Hullo?’ And smiled at him. And said before he could reply, ‘How are you today?’ As though she knew him well, if only from a distance or casually or incidentally for some reason. He had registered with her. And he’d smiled as though he couldn’t believe she had actually remembered him and was willing to chat, as she’d flashed his stuff at the barcode reader and handed it to him. Which had happened a few times, developing a rapport, if that was the right word.

  Until the last time, when he’d asked her to have coffee with him. And, surprised, she’d said, ‘All right.’ Which she’d done that afternoon when she knocked off. She always knocked off at two, so she’d be home well before for the kids. She’d liked him. There was a certain gentleness about him. And a sorrow.

  They’d gone to Gus Petersilka’s place on Bunda Street, where she’d had to keep an eye out in case Martie walked in and caught her—because he thought he owned her. That’s what he’d said last time. I own you, Robbie, so don’t you forget it.

  She reached out a hand to touch him. ‘Harry, thank you.’

  He did not respond; he was asleep. Or, to put it another way, he was both asleep and not asleep. Even dead to the world, he couldn’t stop thinking about Barnes.

  They went to the snowfields after Christmas. They couldn’t go before Christmas, they had obligations. Most of all, to her parents. Bob and Muriel Elliott had had a place at Wybilonga, out past Lockhart, well past, out in the broad wheat lands, at the end of a railway line. Before you reached the town, you could see tall and slowly deteriorating concrete silos, three rows of them, built nearly one-hundred years ago, rising up into the bleached and furious and relentless sky, which was never quite blue out there on the plains, but a smeary sort of nothingness, in which you might make out a cloud or two way up high, or not so much a cloud as a nimbus, which some angry apology for a cloud God had tried to rub out but had failed. This was the land of failure, especially in summer.

  Old Bob had had a place out there, a mile or so south of the creek which seldom ran. In fact, in the old days, when Bob was a kid, you could drive a horse and buggy over it. And the dust and heat in summer terrible. The place was called The Pines, which was a bit of a joke, the pines really being a clump or copse or cover of she-oaks about an acre in area, which were not oaks at all but casuarinas. If you know that variety of tree, it’s not much good for anything, not timber or firewood of even shade. Its leaves are not leaves but a scruffy and desiccated bunch of needles, among which hung clumps of hard, thick, knobbly seed pods—much like something dead caught up there, perhaps a bat or a bird or even a cat someone had shot in a moment of rage. And that smell, the smell like rotting wood and some sort of spirit, perhaps turpentine. No, not that strong. It was the smell of slow but inevitable and yet dignified disintegration.

  Whenever Becker had them to tea or, on one occasion, to lunch, they reminded him of that smell. Not that they were a smelly old couple. Muriel smelled like soap, fresh Lifebuoy, and Bob smelled not so much of tobac
co, which he smoked after every bite or sip, but of a wheat field when it’s golden or just past golden. Something of the earth, which is changing slowly and sinking back into its sandy brown past.

  After lunch, well into the afternoon, he found Bob sitting on the eastern verandah, out of the sun and watching the cows, the long black shadows creeping across the grass to catch them up in their own kind of sensual darkness. And Bob was smoking.

  ‘I want to thank you, Harry,’ he said.

  ‘We love to have you. The kids love to see you.’

  ‘For what you’ve done for her,’ he said.

  ‘She’s worth it.’

  Bob thought about his next words. ‘Has she told you yet?’

  ‘About her husband? All I know is he had a smash on the Hume, heading for Melbourne—’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And went to sleep at the wheel.’

  Bob simply said, ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘You don’t think so?’

  ‘There were no skid or brake marks, you know.’

  ‘There wouldn’t be if he was asleep.’

  ‘And there wouldn’t be if he were awake.’

  Becker was surprised. ‘You mean he could have deliberately driven it into a tree?’

  ‘Could have.’

  ‘Jesus, Bob, why would a man do a thing like that. Burn himself to death?’

  ‘Yes, why?’

  ‘You think it was deliberate?’

  Bob did not answer. He was more than seventy. He must have been, because Robyn was born when he was forty and she was now thirty-five. He’d had other children, but no mention was made of them. Bob did not look all that old. He must have been a handsome man once. Had a good head, almost patrician, and thin, white hair carefully combed across his scalp. But he’d been well exposed, a farmer all his life. When he turned and looked at you, you could see the bumps on the whites of his eyes and the yellowness in the corners. Too much sun. Too much hard yacker. And too much faith in the goodness of the Lord.

  He’d walked off five years ago, during the drought. There always was a drought, every seven years, according to the Bible and every seven years according to conventional wisdom. Walked off with only a few bob in his pocket, after paying off the bank and buying the small weatherboard in Wagga, up near the railway station and the rattling trains in the night. A good man, one you could depend on, even if it cost him an arm and a leg. A softly spoken man, with an edge of good diction to his voice.