RUSHING TO TOWN with news of Burnside’s injury, wanting to be fast to save Chifley from Gus’s mercy, she careered all over the red dirt road, dragging the russet bottom of Gus’s ocean behind her in a cloud. Rattling over bullbars, opening and closing gates, restless and competent. So many saltbush miles to the frontage road, to the final gate. She felt that she had been so long cloistered from the normal offices of civil life that she wondered in what language she would speak to the police or the ambulance people. She would open her mouth and Aramaic might come out.
A band of cloud in the west had flattened the declining sun to a molten ingot. The world was full of still light. Light which waited upon an event. Something abominable was growling across the slant of the light. The sky descended to suck her up. She drove fast to evade it. Top gear. Seventy-five miles an hour and in something like terror. Rattling over culverts. The shadow of the sky passed over the windscreen and darkened her hands on the steering wheel.
A genuine but minor surprise, a blue helicopter, glittering, its navigation lights already switched on. Tentative, taking pains to be sure she would brake, it edged groundward in front of her. When she did slow it came to rest on the common pasturage along the side of the road, the strip where battling farmers grazed their sheep free of cost in drought time. It looked as sweet as a cerulean egg, this helicopter, O’TOOLE on its side, in serious white picked out with black.
The door of the thing swung open and Uncle Frank, tearing himself from its wind, wearing a black aviation jacket, delivered himself out of it. Hobbling to the middle of the road, he blocked her way to town.
It was O’Toole the undertaker, Uncle Frank’s friend, with hands white as the sacraments of Christ from committing to rest the souls of the faithful departed. He and Uncle Frank had known each other even before their arrival in Australia, that well-known missionary country. For they came from the same place in County Limerick.
She was somehow unsurprised to see Uncle Frank there in the road, in his paramilitary jacket. If Burnside’s intelligence could reach the back-of-Bourke, all the more so the not-so-Reverend Frank’s.
As she remembered him doing in her childhood he gestured vastly with his large soft hand.
—Come here now, the hand said.
An instructional gesture too. He needed to impart something to her, a little way away from the full blast noise of the rotors. Some mystery of faith.
She went up to him. Perhaps thinking it was still tender, he gently touched her shoulder and surveyed her. She saw his mouth make the sound of her name. Kate. Kate.
No question he wanted her to join him in O’Toole’s sky-blue contraption. In mime she tried to tell him the story of the business she was on. God knows if he understood. He shook his head, and then kissed her impetuously and wetly on the ear and roared into it.
—Bourke, Kate. No kidnaps, my darling! All aboveboard.
She had never in her waking life needed so much a means of flying over the earth. But she wasn’t sure this one was it. Just the same, it oddly pleased her to obey Uncle Frank. She eased her truck into a ditch and took the keys, leaving the windows open to the dusk. She climbed up into the cabin of the helicopter by means of the little stirrup step. There in the pilot seat was triple-chinned O’Toole in a flying jacket covered in far more militant patches than Uncle Frank sported. Skyhawk O’Toole. She wondered but blessed whatever vanity it was which led him to own a helicopter.
In fact O’Toole used it for rare ash scatterings over the sea, now that Catholics were permitted to cremate themselves. This had enabled him to get the whole thing off tax. It was another example of the way, because eight hundred years of rule had misused them, the O’Tooles and O’Briens practiced their anarchism.
In the days when Uncle Frank was in something less than climactic trouble with His Eminence Cardinal Fogarty, Archbishop of Sydney, he had done grief counseling for O’Toole and might even be doing it now, even under release on bail.
O’Toole’s sky-blue hearse came down on a football field by the Darling River, right on the white-limed halfway mark; like a referee from on high. Already Uncle Frank knew by yells and urgent gestures that there were matters to be attended to before they went into the question of Uncle Frank himself, or of how she had remade herself in the bush, changing herself to an extent in Jack Murchison’s frying kitchen and at Frank Pellegrino’s hearty location canteen.
At last O’Toole cut the engines. His rotors went on churning still, though he had switched off the power to them. All the racketing of the machine dropped to a mere whir.
Surprised by silence, Kate herself fell quiet.
O’Toole turned and said, Hello Kate.
He looked at her under his brows, in a way which he had developed from thirty years of facing the bereaved in the first full-blown frenzy of their grief.
—Mother of God, she heard Uncle Frank cry. Did you say to me—back there—Burnside?
Despite all the explosive force of their arrival, they failed to find a telephone and had to walk into town looking for police and ambulance. O’Toole dawdled behind, leaving Kate and Uncle Frank to their reunion. Needing of course to get back before Gus was well enough to murder Chifley, Kate walked too fast. Since Uncle Frank had never been a man for exercise and had recently spent some sedentary time in cells, he did well to stay on the pace. Long-legged though fat-hipped, he kept by her side, uttering sentences one and a half words at a time.
—Kate, he reassured her, I know you didn’t … understand … how thoroughly you … were persecuting us. Your parents got the word … from that nice publican in Myambagh, but before they did there … was eight hours or so of … anguish you couldn’t imagine. I tell you so you’ll … know that if you yourself … don’t believe in … your own existence … there’re people who do. No, no, Burnside isn’t the issue you think he is. If you killed that gobshite, we’ll all stand up for you. Mother of God, half Sydney will give you a testimonial dinner!
He told her too how he’d found her: through her theft of the white vestments. Missa de Angelis.
Earlier in the monstrous year, he had written to every parish in his old diocese, enclosing a picture.
—The boys still like me, Kate …
That young feller in Bourke had got the letter two months back and put it on his refrigerator with a magnet. It stayed there as things will, and he had gone from his kitchen to his altar that Sunday morning, and then to his sacristy, and there was the face from his refrigerator door, willing to do him harm and steal his vestments.
Still they found no phone box they could call from and the first sign of agencies of state was the chain fence of the police station. Within it a nineteenth-century sandstone building, the majesty of Britannia on a deep-set Aboriginal river, on a rainbow serpent named Darling. Victoria’s stone lion and unicorn still stood on the cornice of the police station.
Uncle Frank paused.
—I should tell you. I’ve had my experiences lately with these lads.
—I know.
She felt impatient and wanted to be inside now.
—I heard it on the radio.
—Kate, I want to tell you seriously to your face that I never bribed a single soul.
For Uncle Frank’s chief pride was in getting favors done out of love.
—Of course, she said urgently, shaking her head. Both because she did believe him and because she wanted to speed matters up, though to exactly what end for her she was not sure.
With a sort of divinely annoying expansiveness, Uncle Frank presented his bail documents to the police, straight up and as if he cherished the things.
—I’m playing straight with you boys …
He had been looking for his niece for some time, he told the senior constable on duty. A big man, up to Burnside’s weight, but more flaccid. Kate recounted her truth to him flatly, without any desire to engage her narrative skills, to extenuate or embroider. Burnside had been injured. It was on the Schulberger property. No, not at the main house. No. Not at his late brother’s. She would lead them in then, since they didn’t know it. Who hurt him? He hurt himself. He fell.
Arriving at the police station behind them, O’Toole explained that he would offer his helicopter, except that darkness was coming and he was not good at map coordinates.
After a lot of police drawling into radios and loud instructions, they were all at once on the road to Schulberger’s, traveling in a police car followed by an ambulance. Uncle Frank had his arm lightly around her shoulder, and she both welcomed that and didn’t. For again it showed how much was unaltered. It was a vanity, all this dream of transmutation. She was still the small Kate Gaffney, who had inherent in her the risk of becoming Mrs. Kozinski junior. Corpuscles of blame in the bloodstream hadn’t been altered into dull mute bush corpuscles.
If she took the blame for Burnside’s condition, she could get bail and then skip further west with Gus and Chifley. But she must be rigorous and travel a great deal if she really wanted to change. There was a furnace at the Centre that would alter her. She wasn’t the only one to harbor that suspicion. Though not a suspicion, a conviction. She believed it. She had sensed it just beyond the horizon of the bounding dreams.
So she had to try to do that. Make her way, breathing lightly, to the great renewing fire.
Meanwhile Uncle Frank’s arm, laid there carefully just in case the scar tissue still smarted, was pleasant enough in itself. It did not make a claim, as other arms in her family would have.
They saw a truck coming the other way. It was flashing its lights and even pulling into their path. By the last light you could see that its main color was red dust. Gus’s sister-in-law’s truck. Gus’s dismal eyes became visible by the police headlights. The police car and ambulance both halted and people got out, the ambulance driver, and Uncle Frank, Kate, senior constable and sergeant. Gus himself was waiting for them now on the red and black dirt road. The spike of his hair at the back jabbed the air dejectedly, like the plume of a defeated brave. He led them with movements of the hand to the back of his sister-in-law’s truck. On its tray lay a groaning human form wrapped in a tarpaulin, and naked to the air the still, shaggy-furred body of Chifley.
Uncle Frank later reported that he heard a mechanical noise from Kate, something like the shifting of a gear.
Her breath departed. With nothing to elevate her, she gave up to the magnetic drag of the things which had befallen her. Her vision closed off like the closing of a shutter. Coolly dying on a godless star, she knew that her uninformed legs were writhing in the red dust, giving a show of resistance. The limbs of one who does not want to ascend from the bottom of the sea.
First Gus shot the returning Chifley to deliver him from notoriety on the evening news. Next, convinced of the futility of rescuing Menzies, he tried to shoot the bird too. But Menzies, named for a survivor and narrower in the head and throat than Chifley, evaded the bullet through one minor repositioning of his neck. He fled of course, at the same pace which had competed with the heroine’s truck in Frank Pellegrino’s film. And so at last Gus gave up.
He wrapped Burnside in the tarpaulin and gave him water, which caused him to go into a fit. Then he set ablaze the Soldier Settler farm with its coral snake in a jar, its ancient furniture, its 1920s copies of the Sydney Morning Herald.
It is hard to say why he did this. It consumed the remnants of the Kozinski papers of course, or sent them flying charred out over the flat earth. It served as a beacon to draw his sister-in-law in, and as a sign of surrender. It served sentimentally as a pyre for Chifley.
So the naïvely treacherous sister-in-law saw the blaze, the black column of smoke so different in hue from the smoke of bushfires. She drove over in a panic. What she feared was that Burnside had set the fire.
When she got there she forced Gus to give her explanations through his smashed nose. That was how daunting her innocence was. She thought she was still entitled to every piece of information her brother-in-law could give her!
On the road between Bourke and Schulberger’s Gus knelt by Kate—so her uncle would later tell her—and he kissed her on the cheekbone, and in front of the hardened police of what could be called his home town, wept and said he’d never do anything to harm her. Uncle Frank had an eye for this sort of thing, but did not consider him a soul imperiled however. Kate was the soul imperiled, so convinced of it that she had begun swallowing her tongue. Uncle Frank did not understand the signs. The senior constable was trained that way though, and dragged her clenched jaws apart. He brought forward that same tongue which Chifley had cursed with language.
The police remarked that Burnside’s blood was visible on Chifley’s hind paws, the long opposed toe with the savage claw.
Though Gus was required further by them, Kate was not. Around sad Gus however there hung very little atmosphere of condemnation. He was simply asked about Jelly, and then about the beasts, and finally, the morning after he shot Chifley, released on his own recognizance.
Kate was not in Bourke to see this however, since Uncle Frank took her home—as Uncle Frank himself chose to call it—quickly in O’Toole’s helicopter. The killing media would pass her coming the other way in their light aircraft and in helicopters of their own. For what a story! Heiress divorcée of Kozinski, mother of dead children, thought once to have drowned in a flood of Myambagh, succored by Frank Pellegrino, involved in kangaroo injury to the notorious Burnside. Time for the kangaroo court of their own bludgeon headlines and frightful cameras! Imagine her destiny if they had found her in Bourke, with nothing to protect her except her conviction that she could no longer breathe!
—I wanted to warn Burnside, she would have pleaded with them. But he kicked me in the stomach, and I didn’t have the …
—Sorry, Mrs. Kozinski. We’re out of film … the batteries are flat … the light’s wrong … a plane’s going over … Could we just do that bit again?
For the flight home, she was stupefied with legal drugs, full of medicaments normally prescribed for epileptics, though probably she wasn’t one. Something heavy had to be used to distract her from her belief there was no air.
Gus was left to do all that press stuff, and he did it in grief, having lost his beast and his companion. But he was a dutiful interviewee. His directness won him support during the next week, while Kate lay drugged in a leafy, plain private sanatorium near wooded Kuringai Chase, beyond the normal range of scrutiny of Sydney’s frenetic press.
During her stupor, Murray visited her. So did her parents and, filling in his bail period and curing her soul, Uncle Frank. He was the one she noticed. In a brief wakeful period in which she did not speak, she was aware that he carried an airline bag, as if he had a gift for her. But he put it by the wall. He wanted her to be clearheaded to receive it.
Gus, since he did not even try, had the basics to become what the media call a folk hero. When he refused to sell his story to any newspaper, it made them double the price.
He served as a catalyst too. Feature articles appeared about Burnside and his repute for terror, and his long retainership to those prize Australo-Poles the Kozinskis.
In sympathy with Gus, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals raided the Wagga entertainment park which had featured the tableau vivant and served writs on the man from whom Gus had retaken Chifley and Menzies. People queued in newspapers and on television and radio to say they didn’t think Gus’s was the sort of prosecution on which taxpayers’ money should be expended.
His life has made him a practical, play-the-cards-you’re-dealt sort of man. His known Kate was the Kate of Murchison’s steak kitchen and front bar. His Kate was Jelly’s Kate. Not a woman of whom so many bewildering things were said: heiress (an old-fashioned term Gus had only ever encountered in books of a certain kind), Kozinski Constructions, shopping malls in California, tragedies on the Northern Beaches. Events on a yacht called Vistula.
He causes so much distress to the half-conscious Kate Gaffney that Mrs. Kate takes him aside and tells him it would be better if.
He is aware too of course that he has had his choice. He has chosen saving Chifley rather than take any notice of Kate’s idea of where her breath and phantom joy come from. A true lover, he accepted, waited out, served, handled gently all the beloved’s mad ideas, especially those about air and the uselessness of the human lung at certain points of history. But then, despite all that, he shot Chifley.
Kate, cleaned by experts and stunned medically in a sanatorium bed! She knows she is dead, but is never awake long enough to actually set her compass in that direction. It is clear to any observer that her ideas about air are utterly crazed and that she will go on living.
Kate now tends to see the same person in the room whenever she wakes. It is never her mother and father. It is never Murray, who is rarely allowed to be alone with her anyhow because of his part in her injuries. It is always Uncle Frank. It is clear that Uncle Frank waits on after others leave. He is looking for the moment that his airline bag can have its part.
But he always speaks to her too. He speaks at greater length than she has consciousness for. He understands that that is effective. She will sometimes answer him without knowing it, her mouth will clot with the few words she has to play with. She doesn’t know at any stage what she has said. Somehow she knows what Uncle Frank says though.
What most of his talk is about is still that he has never bribed anyone. Since it is his chief claim, the claim which in his mind qualifies him as comforter and guru, he is as desperate to tell her this in her sanatorium as he was amongst the pepper trees outside Queen Victoria’s remotest police station in Bourke.
SP (Starting Price) bookmaking. It was as old as the anarchic island continent and as ancient as convictism. It was harmless too, in some lights, part of the unofficial democratic rights of the Australian working men and women. Except that there were some rough boys and even some gobshites involved. The intention upon coming to Australia to serve the diocese of Wilcannia-Forbes and then the archdiocese of Sydney had been pure and he had involved himself in it. But he loved the races. If he hadn’t had a vocation—he still thought of himself as having a vocation, a better one than His Eminence Fogarty—then he would have certainly been a trainer or at least an owner.
And then love. He hadn’t come to Australia from loveless Limerick for love. Yet love was something he was not ashamed of claiming. The late Alderman Kearney had been in SP bookmaking since boyhood. When he died too young and left his widow, she appealed to her friend the not-so-Reverend Frank to help her to run things.
Kate probably knew—and if not he certainly told her during her convalescence—that you needed to be able to get phones on quick if you were a controller, the central figure of an SP network. You needed a bank of a dozen phones at least in a series of given locations. Just in case the authorities, with nothing better to do with citizens’ taxes, became concerned about the number of calls being made from an individual number or string of numbers. It was something they checked on. Hard to believe. But they did. So you needed a dozen or so in each place to bear the volume of traffic, and then alternate locations in case of raids.
If one of the controller’s offices came under threat—and say there was a friendly local inspector and he said, Frank, Fiona, I’m under pressure from above …! Or if Telecom investigators got close, using their spying methods … you moved your office to a new place lying ready, phones already installed. That was Frank’s idea. The eight hotels (or as some press reports said ten) were eight locations under Fiona Kearney’s (and Uncle Frank’s) control. They even had subcontrollers who rented the locations from them. And the central controlling office itself could be moved from hotel to hotel at will. So it depended on getting new telephones put in quickly and on having plenty in place.
And Uncle Frank could attend to that. He had friends who would do it for nothing, and thus—in his mind—it was clean business.
He had friends in the banking business too who would, if he asked them, as he sometimes did, let him use their own addresses as a home address on various accounts. To Uncle Frank these accommodations were the normal accommodations of friendship. She came to appreciate in her stupor that though he was a saint he had a profoundly criminal soul.
Again she would have liked to have argued with him over his peculiar idea of what corruption was. In his world it did not exist if it were amongst the friendly and the loyal and was a token of love. He was not ashamed, in fact shamefully unashamed, to ask for favors based on crucial words of consolation he had offered in some presbytery front parlor or at O’Toole’s. She was reminded of the minor graft of O’Toole’s hearse-helicopter. What it said was that government was a joke and deserved to be laughed at through the exhausts of cerulean helicopters, as through batteries of book-making telephones.
So prison would be futile for Uncle Frank, in a different way from the futility which applied to habitual criminals. It would not cure Uncle Frank of his tribal premises. She wondered where he had got his confidence in her: his belief that she would see the reason of his argument. As if in her childhood too she had seen the Black and Tans go by in their armored vehicles. As if she had not in fact spent her childhood in the Harbour’s utterly equitable sunlight and come to believe in law and order.
These questions lay idly and flat between Uncle Frank and herself though. They were not living issues for him. She did not have a living issue.
Whenever she woke, she was always amazed after an early flutter of breathlessness that the air went in, turned itself sour, was emitted again just as with any living beast.
Her skin felt altered, and she washed it with a tissue dipped in a water glass and found traces of cosmetic there, applied by her misguided mother.
She stayed awake long enough to greet Mrs. Gaffney as she came visiting:
—No cosmetics, she told her mother.
—Just to freshen you up.
—No. No cosmetics.
But then she lost her hold on the argument.
Once she woke and found that Mrs. Fiona Kearney was there, smiling. Kate thought, Yes, in some lights, a handsome and generous woman. A hostage Frank had taken back from the Black and Tans. A soul saved from the straitlace and the narrow way.
Kate found with regret of course that she was waking hungry. Instead of asking for food she might ask where Gus was.
—He’s been on television, said Uncle Frank as if that exempted her from further regard for him.
—You’ll be on television too, Uncle Frank.
—Yes, darling. But dead against my will.
She told him she wanted to see Murray, and she wanted to see Gus.
—Both at the same time? he asked her, trying to confuse her for the best of motives.
So Gus’s flower-bearing visit first:
He was anxious that there might be a scene, and he wanted to show her as fast as he could that he knew himself disqualified, that he understood it all without rancor.
—I might be going home soon, Kate.
—Nothing to stay down here for, she agreed.
—Well, I started going out with a widow. She’s one of those … animal liberationists. Not one of the mad ones though.
He smiled madly and touched Kate’s wrist.
—One of the ones that believe roos shouldn’t box, anyhow.
Gently he talked her into drinking a cup of tea with him. She looked around for something to give him. There were only two novels, which Jim Gaffney had brought and left there, believing that she would achieve focus imminently. It wasn’t going to happen.
—Will you take these, Gus?
He made all the polite refusals, but it was established he would take them, and would handle them reverently on the bottom of the sea beyond the Darling.
—We were just stumbling along, eh? Lost bloody souls.
Before kissing her goodbye. It was the last multisyllabic thing she would hear him say in the flesh.
Murray’s visit then. He came on the first day that she realized what day it was. She realized it was a Saturday. It was race day, but Uncle Frank was banned from all race tracks and so was there as well. He tried to linger in the room. Kate surprised herself by managing a warning look, something of more vigor than the mere warning looks that occur in most novels, one which threatened riot and exasperation.
After Uncle Frank left, Murray kissed her slowly and gently in the middle of the forehead.
—Has my mother put makeup on me?
—Oh Kate. How are your shoulders? How are your burns now?
—I don’t know. I haven’t referred to them.
He chose to take this as a little joke.
—For an hour or two, when the flood was on …
—I know, she said. I know.
He held her hand and seemed to get much from the experience. She herself felt little of it all. Her hand might have been a curio somewhere in the room. He had decided wantonly to cherish it.
—Kate, he said, I’m so pleased to have the chance to speak to you. I’m talking to you as a friend now. Your mother and father are all in favor of suing the Kozinskis to the limit. They’ve spoken to me of settlements in excess of twenty million. It isn’t greed. They want to see Paul pay for his bad behavior. In my opinion, you shouldn’t be persuaded by that. There’s a kind of intimacy about court hearings which you will find painful. And you know what they say: if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. In my opinion, you should settle with the Kozinskis for an immediate amount now, payments spread over a strictly limited period. There might be nothing left of Kozinski assets by the time you’ve been through the courts. They’re in considerable trouble with this inquiry into the building industry. Both father and son could face charges over improper practices of various kinds, from false prospectuses to extortion. As a matter of good sense and of self-respect, settle with them as soon as you can.
She was somehow tickled by his mixture of hard monetary advice and moral hauteur. She let him stroke her frazzled hair.
—I will marry you at any stage. Nothing that has happened to you frightens me away.
—That’s a boast, she said, and fell asleep.
She woke in the afternoon and Murray was gone. But Uncle Frank was sitting on a chair on the left side of her bed. From a small radio in his lap came the static of a race meeting turned down low. An Australian voice with that peculiar adenoidal twang of racing announcers was recounting the finishing order of horses Uncle Frank had now been forbidden to place bets on.
He saw her and seemed slightly embarrassed to be caught at his passion like this. He switched the radio totally down but not off.
He said, There’s a three-year-old, Diamontina. I tell you, it’s going to be one of those wonder horses. They’ve got it set to emerge in the spring carnival. Next Melbourne Cup, Kate, they’ll have to put a truck on its back to stop it. It’s a beautiful beast. Put some money on for me, Kate, if I happen to be unavailable for the purpose myself.
He laughed but his eyes were narrowing in a way which had nothing to do with hilarity. He was measuring her, as he’d measured her every day since their reunion.
He came to his conclusions and rose and went to the door where his airline bag waited. He unzipped it and produced a bottle. It was a vodka bottle, full, and it produced fear in her. Ah, she thought, he has drunk or lost or broken my bottle and now intends to pass off a substitute.
But the one he held up was the one from the house. She recognized the unforgettable tear in the label.
—I kept this at home. Faithfully, Kate. As requested.
The memory of the request gagged him for a moment. But swallowing he resumed.
—I took it out one night from the cabinet, for reasons to do with a kind of nostalgia, and I stared it hard in the eye and I noticed a yellowish tinge which didn’t seem right at all for vodka. I am after all a publican, they tell me. So I have this friend, a chemist with the police …
Another client of Uncle Frank’s talents of condolence. Or else a customer of the O’Brien-Kearney Starting Prices ménage.
—He says there’s a solution in this vodka of some great thumping amount of something called Vallergan. If you took two mild slugs of this vodka, Kate, you would be asleep within ten minutes, and you would sleep for ten hours or so. Mark what I’m saying. It’d be fanciful to say that this bottle was poisoned, Kate. But it was certainly heavily doctored.
At this news she felt the near-dead glands of her curiosity come to a peculiar chemical life. This was a strangely painful and delicious revival.
—Who? she asked. It was so hard but intriguing to believe in.
Uncle Frank shook his head, as if he were the one most afraid of knowing.
—It was hard enough telling you any of this, Kate, without saying who. But it does tell you something, doesn’t it? That you are free of blame. There are all sorts of stories, Kate, about your husband being overextended. He’s been on with that woman perhaps as long as three years, and something about her must have given him delusions. He financed all those malls in Southern California, and put up properties here at inflated valuation as security. You know the phrase heavily geared? Your husband has liquidity problems. That’s the background landscape, Kate, to what I’m going to say now. Two incomplete Kozinski Constructions development sites have had fires. While you were out on the road. Out of our midst …
Uncle Frank put the vodka on the bedside table, and the radio. Abandoning horseflesh for the day. Somewhere perhaps faithful servants were taking bets on behalf of himself and Mrs. Kearney. No, she had a sense of the hollowness of the man. He’d been closed down. But listen, she told herself. Listen. Come back to the question. It’s not his level of operations that’s the question at the moment.
—Remember, said Uncle Frank, how on the night he yelled, Why weren’t you here? He said, Your car’s here. Why weren’t you? And everyone forgave him because of the terrible time, Kate. But there is a device now, Kate, utterly combustible, which you can put in electric boxes if you have a mind to. Expensive, it overrides the circuit breakers. It causes arcing. It produces a merry bloody combustion.
Drugs did not confuse her now. She understood the reasoning. Since it had a familiar feel to her, it was clear that in some ways she had always understood it.
—The only thing in his favor is that he wanted you to go off without any pain.
—Aaaaaah, she said, before taking in more air than she needed. But there was a new and awful confidence in all her functions. As Chifley had given the certainty of breath, Uncle Frank had given her the certainty and high natural chemistry of hate.
Yet he had his hands up now, counseling against too strenuous a use of it.
—He’s in utter hell. Your successor in his arms, Kate, is said to be unhappy on two fronts: his drinking and the threat of his fall. And she’s not an evil woman, though it would be better if she were. And she wonders why he can’t be happy, apart of course from his loss. She’s told friends that she admires him for the intensity of his grief. But she knows it’s more than intensity, more than average, even for such a non-average loss. She knows there’s something grandly wrong with it. And so do you now. We can leave him to it, Kate. We can watch him die and go to hell.
She found herself half out of bed. One leg, limp as string, was searching for the floor.
—I want to see a chemical report, she said. She suspected the one done by Uncle Frank’s friend. Not in itself, but in its informality. She wanted a printout.
—I want a proper analysis done.
—Sure. We’ll send it to a commercial lab.
She groaned and shook her head. The weight of something new. It did need to be painfully accommodated now. She had not thrown her children away, as the old version told her. The point of the question, Why weren’t you here? had been reversed. She had not thrown her children away. They had been snatched. This unfamiliar equation made her sit up, chatter, cover her eyes. She could feel the strain in her skull. It was not the blessed gravity of air she stood to lose, but the gravity of blame.
Since loss and the drugs had so dried her out from the teeth down to the pit of the stomach that he could not understand what she was saying, Uncle Frank went and got her tea. She was asking, as it turned out, Who did it for Paul Kozinski?
Not the doping of the vodka: he had the stomach for that. Who put the arcing device in place?
Asking, but she knew the answer. Burnside. She was already used to vengefulness, it was as if she’d always lived with it. She wished she’d known all this on the day Burnside suffered. She wished Chifley had really struck, clawed Burnside’s guts out and strewn them across the bed of the sea.
When the tea came and she unlocked her tongue from her palate with a quick scalding mouthful, she asked, Are they open on the weekend?
—Who is that?
Uncle Frank seemed to be secretly listening again now to the fluttering and twittering voices of the tuned-down radio; for the signal that they were at the barrier for the next. It couldn’t be so. Though it would be in his nature to attend godlike with equal ear upon the flippant and the barbaric.
—The chemical labs, said Kate. The chemical labs.
She had made the words so precisely. The l and the b.
—Well, that’s an idea, Uncle Frank conceded. He took his attention right away from the radio and turned fully to her. He said he’d see to it.
—Don’t humor me, she told him.
—No. No. But I’ll check.
Kate, not being able to calculate what Burnside is owed, is soothed somewhat by Uncle Frank’s news: not only does Burnside walk with a stick, this taking the sting out of all his threat and all his manner, but he is as good as neutered too. She does not know if this last news is reliable, or if Uncle Frank has made it up to cosset her. But to have lost her signed release forms twice, she thinks, must be a torment to Burnside, and she takes satisfaction from it.
And then above all the walking with a stick. Murray has verified that for her. An enforcer with an inability to enforce. She savors this as she waits for the vodka to be analyzed, and for the chemical report to be made.
By contrast she knows that Paul Kozinski must be exactly punished, and she will apply herself to that question when the results arrive at her bedside.
So while she waits for the chemical analysis, Murray takes a day from work, collects her from the sanatorium and brings her to McCarr’s Creek, an arm of Pittwater. Waters familiar to the Vistula. But Murray has taken her on board a more modest boat today, one belonging to a friend. Thirty-two-footer. Very manageable. He uses the donkey engine to get them away from their mooring, and then he cuts it and hoists a foresail. It is wonderful, she thinks, how a little boat pitches so honestly in a slight swell with the breeze astern. How cleanly. She notices how delighted Murray is that she raises her chin to the sun. As if he thinks that, even though she knows now not to give herself up too utterly to that vicious, blazing star, once given a full reprieve she will sometimes risk her face briefly and without fear. Her hair is shampooed, since her view of entitlement to shampoo has been changed by Uncle Frank’s news. On her cheeks sits a mixture of makeup and sun lotion.
So Murray sits at the tiller and feels triumphant. He is aware too how itchy the world is for a photograph of Kate. News editors are utterly sick of the old stills. He relishes the idea that she is safe from cameras here. He has delivered her from the electronic snouts. He glows with frankness and with love.
Provisionally—subject to the chemical analysis—she recognizes this in him and is provisionally pleased. And on the same grounds she accepts the dazzle of these waters where she picnicked with her children and with Burnside and with girls hired by the Kozinskis to please those who would do them favors.
Murray has at home his collection of Paul Kozinski press clippings. He likes to think of each clipping as yet another leaf of the Polish onion boiling free and sloughing away.
The most effulgent recent addition has to do with Queensland, where a former state cabinet minister has told a government inquiry that he received a political gift of $250,000 as reward for building a bridge specifically to service a Kozinski Development Corporation’s shopping mall. At the time of the exchange of money, the mall had not yet been built, but the Kozinskis were careful planners.
In New South Wales, shamefaced union officials of the kind who sailed aboard the Vistula and lunged at the Kozinskis’ proffered girls, had already confessed to extorting gifts of money and kind from Paul Kozinski; and a political donation from Paul Kozinski had been put into the hands of a party official in the expressed hope of favorable decisions in the matter of a marina-hotel development at Tweed Heads.
These admissions have been made before various state and federal inquiries, including the Commission into the Building Industry, whose address Murray keeps close at hand, since there is some talk that Kate might be called as a witness. If so, he would like to mediate.
On top of this, the financial news. Kozinskis, père et fils, have had to go into meetings with bankers with a view of restructuring the Kozinski debt. The indignity of these meetings, Murray explains to Kate, is acute, particularly the fact that the press waits gloating at the door for reports.
But both father and son keep a composed demeanor. It is reported around Sydney that Mrs. Kozinski has frequently said that the only people not in trouble now are the Jews. It is Christian recklessness and spaciousness of soul which have brought her husband and her son to troubled times.
They tacked into Jerusalem Bay, where other boats were moored. People were lunching aboard, seated deeply in the stern, passing wine bottles. A woman’s birdlike laughter rose up the cliffs.
—No liquor for us. Though we gave it a shake in Fiji, eh? The hospital staff warned me. It won’t go with your medication.
These were Vistula waters also, though Murray could not be expected to know that. Siobhan, drifting in the water, had looked up at this stratified bush and said, Where are they going?
Murray went down into the galley to cut chicken up, as Kate used to do on the Kozinski craft. He kept an eye on her up through the hatch.
—Something I ought to tell you. Nothing to be concerned about. Burnside has taken an action against Gus Schulberger. Some form of criminal assault to do with negligent care of animals. A nineteenth-century Act of Parliament with twentieth-century amendments.
When she looked stricken he ran up the companionway.
—No court will give him a judgment. Honestly.
But the writ itself was an abomination.
—You told me to make a straight settlement with the Kozinskis?
—Well, that was personal advice. Though it’s not bad professional advice either. Take what they offer, while they have it. Sign their papers and forget them.
But of course Murray did not understand the size of their ill will, and how unforgettable Paul was.
—I want to make my own document. Could you draw up a document for me?
Of her own will and her own drafting, she wanted to hand over to the Kozinskis the assent Burnside had been neutered trying to gouge out of her.
She said, Very important. Very important.
—I can’t draw up a document for you. I’m too close to you, Kate. It could be challenged at a later date. Undue influence. After all, you’re in a sanatorium. And I’m showing kindnesses to you. That’s interpreted one way by us, but in court it looks like a plot. Besides, if I drew up a document like that, it would finish me with your parents.
She looked at him in a studied way, hoping there was a tremendous weight of demand in her eyes, like the weight of grievance in Connie Murchison’s.
—Well, I could send someone independent to talk to you and draw up a document like the one you suggest …
—The one I suggest … What you must do is send me someone who will shut up and write what I want. It’s all rubbish and it burdens my soul and my children’s souls. I want to return the whole shitty mess to the owners.
—Of course. But you have to think of your future welfare too.
—Go to hell, Murray. I’m very hungry actually. You should have seen me eat in the country. They know how to eat there. It’s different …
He brought chicken and unshelled prawns and orange juice up from the galley.
—Perhaps you should rest awhile after lunch. While I sail back. There are bunks below.
She repeated it.
—There are bunks below.
It was a sentence of sweet contours.
In the midst of shelling king prawns and dropping the carapaces over the side, he reached to her and kissed her, holding his arms open-handed and away from her, not wanting to mar her clothes with the rank sea smell of the prawns, clasping her shoulders with his wrists.
—I want nothing from them, she told him.
Murray tested that idea. You could tell he was thinking, What a concept for a lawyer to hear. I should say something. But he couldn’t manage it.
She said, Yes. I mean it, for Christ’s sake.
She smiled at her luck in finding such men. For the steak-eating woman, there could not have been better men than the sainted Jelly and then Gus. And Murray for the sanatorium patient. It was all beneficial for her purpose. She must be utterly quit of Paul Kozinski before she could begin to think of which way to punish him.
Uncle Frank did not turn up as often now. He had become busy—conferencing with his lawyers, as he liked to say. His telephone calls stood in place of his presence. He always sounded in good heart: she could tell he congratulated himself on having safely changed her idea of what had happened to her, all without damaging any of her tissue. His pride in this was at least as spacious as his pride in not having bribed anyone.
Kate was visited by a youngish lawyer, her age, but young in the way in which men to whom nothing has happened except the expected are young. She told him to be quiet and to take down to dictation her demands. Without consideration (she said) other than that no employee, casual or permanent, of Kozinski Constructions should take any action for damages against Mr. Gus Schulberger of Bourke, New South Wales, she released all her interests in and claims on all the Kozinski businesses. Specifically the writs issued by Mr. Burnside against Mr. Gus Schulberger should be withdrawn as a condition of the release.
She said she wanted him kindly to draft the letter in the terms she had given him. She wanted no argument. She would sign any exemption he wanted. If he would shut up and do it, she would pay him any price.
Old Kozinski would of course be cheered to receive such a document. He would not see anything but her sense of shame behind the lack of demands. Mrs. Kozinski would attribute the good outcome to the intercession of the Black Virgin of Czestochowa. But Paul would be arrested by it. Paul would correctly disbelieve it. What is she trying to say? he would ask himself.
A good thing.