WHEN IT ARRIVED, the chemical analysis was twelve pages in length. Inside a cover blue as O’Toole’s helicopter. According to its summary, some 450 milligrams of Vallergan, trimeprazine, had in fact been dissolved in Kate’s vodka. Trimeprazine was an antihistamine of extreme potency; the maximum recommended dose of thirty milligrams produced in a male of average height, weight and age an extreme drowsiness followed by profound sleep. The effects of the drug would be—to quote the analytic summary—potentiated by its mixture with alcohol.
A mixture of vodka and trimeprazine would have produced in the first instance a clear solution, and only over a time could the substance react with the clarifying agent to produce a faint yellow coloration.
And so Kate remembered the ballet class. Denise’s job to take the small dancers. Vodka time for excellent mothers.
Kate’s first impulse on reading the report’s summation is a motherly one, a strange onset of futile tenderness toward Paul. She can see him locking the door on the boardroom and beginning to experiment with sedatives and glasses of vodka from the corporate cabinet. Mrs. Kozinski’s junior chemist. One drug turns the vodka immediately blue. Another alters it green or yellow. He may even have had to make notes: he couldn’t have had such a success without bringing methodologies in.
Burnside would have without question got a whole battery of sedatives for him. Since there were kingdoms and fortunes involved, Burnside would have been paid exorbitantly for the service.
The problem of the chemical analysis for Kate is that having painlessly yielded up to the Kozinskis all that Paul had tried to achieve through mixtures and then through sending Burnside to the bush, how could she punish him without entering the whole mean question once again; debasing herself and sacrificing her breath?
She wishes of course that Uncle Frank was there. She would like him to sit down and relieve her with talk about three-year-olds and the spring carnival. When she wakes at the end of an afternoon’s sleep, her body prickles and is covered with hives. Only the scarred shoulders are exempted from this panic of the flesh. They coat her in lotion, but then the heat of it all enters her mouth and she begins to gag, and they have to put her on a drip of adrenaline.
When she woke the next morning, Uncle Frank was found to be standing at the end of her bed reading the chemical report—his own copy. He had written neatly on it: The Reverend F. O’Brien.
—Heard about your episode, Kate. A rash …
As if accusing her of sending obscure messages, he shook his head.
—I want you to get well, Kate. Because in two days the madness will start. Cameras will follow me and Fiona Kearney everywhere. Going to court, coming.
He sighed. A put-upon Irishman.
—I don’t think I can do much for you or anyone just now.
She inspected her arms and saw that they were white and clear of blemish.
—Your man Murray tells me you have given everything back to the Kozinskis. It could turn out to be wise, Kate. By one view you’ve doubled his wealth. By another, you’ve doubled his indebtedness. You can’t give a damn about how the man feels. He’s put himself beyond.
—Then how can I touch him? If he’s beyond?
—Kate, he’s pretty thoroughly touched himself. Except … to be honest … Michael Collins would never have let a man like that live.
One of Uncle Frank’s ambiguous saints: Michael Collins. Director of operations in the old days, when the IRA had all been good people and Ireland was facing its indisputable destiny. The best of men with the blessing of most of the clergy upon their heads, except for a few pre-Fogartys in the west who tried to excommunicate them. In those days they went to the church after ambushes and prayed for the repose of the souls of the Black and Tans they had just felled, the British agents they had just shot in the head.
So she wondered was Uncle Frank arguing Paul Kozinski had moved out of the zone of civil justice into the militant zone? Summary punishment appropriate? Uncle Frank a possible participator in the militant?
—I want to forget it all, she rushed to lie. You have your own case to settle, Uncle Frank.
—Mother of God, do I!
He walked the room, hitting his arm with the rolled-up chemical report. On it, that perfect copperplate: The Reverend F. O’Brien.
—I wonder if His Eminence Fogarty will abrogate my damn suspension to permit me to say Mass in Long Bay.
She smiled.
—I think he might let you.
—The apostle to the crims of New South Wales. It won’t be the first fooking time a priest has worn chains in this place, let me tell you!
That was his saving delusion again: that he was some sort of political prisoner, a saint of anarchy, a successor to the rebels of 1798. Someone kind should deliver him of that notion so that he could have a tranquil old age. Or someone cruel should. She didn’t have the space or strength to do it herself.
—Are you going to wear your canonicals in court?
The glory of his black alpaca and his virgin white collar.
—Of course. I don’t yield to the gobshites, Kate. I’m as much a priest as the next feller.
She had been thinking of trying to argue him out of this perhaps inflammatory mode of dress. But she imagined him in a plain man’s lounge suit, and the idea lacked such credit that she said nothing.
She was aware of thinking of her mother too, in an unlikely, intimate way she thought she had sworn off for life; in a way her shame for the lost children had until recently invalidated for her. Her mother was not well; suffering from lack of sleep and complicated family shame. The shame of the tragedy; the shame of Kate’s vanishing and return; the shame not of Uncle Frank’s crime but of a society, sober when it suited it, that judged her brother to have behaved illicitly.
They had arguments though about whether Kate would go to court. For Uncle Frank had told Mrs. Kate Gaffney that her daughter shouldn’t go. Uncle Frank said Kate wasn’t ready to leave the place yet, and his authority with his sister hadn’t been lessened just because he was facing charges under the Gaming Act.
—Murray will take me, Kate argued. Murray will protect me from the press.
—And then the press will say, Missing heiress Kate Kozinski with her friend Murray Stannard and the whole world will be left to guess what friend means. Including the Kozinskis.
Mrs. Kate Gaffney didn’t understand that they were all now free of the Kozinskis.
Mrs. Gaffney left and Murray arrived, Kate asking him to stay on in her room after dark to watch the footage of the not-so-Reverend Frank and Mrs. Kearney walking into the New South Wales District Court. The woman commentator said, Still wearing his clerical costume …
Nothing much seemed to have happened after that, the day apparently spent on legal palaver. The big news: Uncle Frank’s clerical collar.
No sooner did the news item end than she and Murray began devising a time for her to go to court. Early afternoon on Thursday say, when after lunch the press would be less vigilant. By 2 P.M. too her morning dosage of sedatives should have partially worn off and left her less thick-tongued in case the unspeakable took place. She would in any case sleep all morning to prepare herself.
Early in the week a member of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, a one-time parishioner of Uncle Frank’s, founded a Father O’Brien Support Group, all the more startling a body given that no one doubted the not-so-Reverend Frank could well afford his own legal fees.
This development helped to generate in the bright winter’s day through which pale Kate and Murray walked bravely hand in hand an atmosphere of favor toward Uncle Frank.
They waited for the lift amongst the melee of solicitors and barristers, many of whom nodded to Murray and murmured his name. Their eyes flicked too across the face of Kate’s sunglasses. The barristers wore their wigs and gowns with the same amourpropre she’d seen in academics. Yet you’d think they must be used to it by now. Perhaps the presence of Murray, a woman’s hand uncustomarily in his, had set them off, reminded them somehow of who they were and how they were different from him. Look at me, some of them might have been suggesting to Murray. Acned and uncertain in law school, now at least a wigged barrister if not a silk.
It was a modern court. Imperial red fabric and Australian hardwood paneling. Late-twentieth-century architects had reversed the trouble their nineteenth-century counterparts had gone to and tried now to make the courts look no different from a fashionable accountancy firm. In this milieu, as they mounted the stairs to Uncle Frank’s courtroom, Kate and Murray were ambushed by a single young journalist, perhaps a sentry.
—Mrs. Kozinski, the young man addressed her.
Murray dealt with him briskly. He pushed her through into the court. Protected ground. Sanctuary. With a red and blue carpet.
Three open galleries surrounded the pit of the court.
—Theater in the round, Murray whispered.
The hearing was already in progress. The prosecutor muttered about something procedural. Murray bowed to the judge, a token of reverence in which Kate didn’t feel bound to join.
Two of the galleries were occupied by a scatter of spectators and interested parties and press. Mr. and Mrs. Gaffney were not amongst the interested spectators. In the third, the police who guarded the court and who were there to protect Uncle Frank and Mrs. Kearney from the impulse to escape, lounged. Everymen. Orta Recens Quam Pura Nites on their shoulders.
Tight in under a gallery facing Uncle Frank, the jury. Seven men, five women. One of the men had a Polynesian face. Two of the women looked Greek. No necessity that they would share Uncle Frank’s comprehensive view of what morality was.
The not-so-Reverend Frank wore the milk-white jacket which Roman clergymen reserved for social occasions. It set off the pure black breast of his clerical stock. Its appearance here was a kind of bravado. Elegant clergy from the North Shore wore that sort of coat on visits to Rome in the European summertime.
Above the judge sat the lion and unicorn. The kangaroo and emu who sat above normal Australian institutions were excluded from the court. It was under the lion and unicorn that all Irish heroes had been sentenced. Uncle Frank therefore was at least given a pretext to consider himself one in the line of Robert Emmet, Wolfe Tone, Michael Meagher of the Sword, Padriac Pearse, James Connolly, all of whom had been savaged by the lion and gored by the unicorn.
A youngish man in a gray suit was ready to give evidence to the prosecutor and had been sworn in. Uncle Frank, his face animated but in a thoughtful kind of way, was in the process of passing a note out of the dock to his lawyer Eric Tandy, Q.C. Uncle Frank looked up, saw Kate, winked once sagely—to an outsider it could have been a tic—and returned his attention to the witness in the gray suit.
The prosecutor began asking questions of the gray-suited witness.
—Mr. Teece, you were till recently the assistant manager of the Mortdale branch of the Eastern Australia Bank?
Mr. Teece said yes.
—You are acquainted with the accused?
—I only know Father O’Brien.
Mr. Teece was very nervous. He had an old-fashioned working-class face and his freckles blazed, and the white between them was quite slick with anxiety. What did the anxiety mean? That was the question on which she could see that Uncle Frank’s attention was fixed.
—So how did you meet the accused O’Brien?
—I first met him when my youngest aunt died. She was only thirty-seven. A husband. Two children …
—So the Reverend O’Brien first approached you in the role of a comforter?
What a stupid question Kate thought that was. As if it were a role which made blame all the more certain.
—He was very kind to our family, said Teece staunchly.
—And he kept contact with you after he met you?
—Yes. We had a bit of a wake. Father O’Brien and I got on well. He was exactly the right sort of priest for that sort of thing.
Yet Kate feared, a bubble of panic rising in her throat, pricking the roof of her mouth, that Teece spoke as if he would soon switch gear and render a different picture of Uncle Frank.
The prosecutor asked, Did the Reverend Frank O’Brien seek any special favors from you?
Teece took pale thought.
—One day Father O’Brien called and wanted to see me. I said I was available. He came in and asked if he could open a bank account in the name of Edith Timms. He said it was an unregistered trust, and there were problems in using his regular accounts. I didn’t ask him too many questions about this. I had no reason to. I thought he might be just wanting to open an account for a widow or for someone injured …
There was indulgent laughter from the press and, Kate was comforted to see, the women in the jury in particular.
—And you know, he didn’t want to go through the legal fuss with founding a trust. And then I asked him what address this Edith Timms account should be in. He hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t want it to be his address. He was looking perplexed. So I said that if he wanted he could use my address for a time.
The prosecution acknowledged that this was very generous of Mr. Teece and asked how much ultimately came through the account.
Teece said, About thirty-seven thousand dollars.
The prosecutor remarked tritely that this was something more than a widow’s mite. Mr. Teece said it was not beyond the bounds of possibility for a trust based on donations to raise as much money as this, if raffles and dinners were held.
—But you never knew who this Edith Timms was?
Teece said, No.
—Even though the address of the account was yours?
—I thought that was a technicality.
—Did your superiors ultimately point out to you that it was more than a technicality?
Teece admitted that they had. He did not seem utterly shamefaced about it. But he admitted he had been suspended.
Would Mr. Teece have been surprised to know that a number of accounts under the name Edith Timms had been established at other branches of various banks, that they had been established by Mrs. Kearney and that all of them used his address?
Teece shook his head. This is where he thought the Reverend Frank had let him down a little. He’d been ignorant of all this.
So—in a way—was Kate. Ignorant of the style and cunning and scope of Uncle Frank’s operations. Astonished by it and overtaken by a kind of wonder.
The chief question then:
—And you say that the defendant O’Brien offered you no direct inducements for this service you had done him?
A month after the account had been opened, Teece remarked, the Reverend Frank—who knew he was a keen punter—called him and gave him three telephone numbers. Father O’Brien said that if Teece called any of these numbers, he would discover that he had a credit of three thousand dollars.
Did Mr. Teece think this was a bribe?
No, said Teece. He knew the Reverend O’Brien was a wealthy man. It wasn’t such an astounding thing for him to give another punter a little credit.
—So it wasn’t an inducement, Teece said. It was a gift.
Through this, Fiona Kearney kept thin and composed, but she wrote no notes to Tandy Q.C. She was an old-fashioned woman and had taken her direction from Alderman Kearney and now from her spiritual director and lover, the not-so-Reverend Frank. It was Uncle Frank who held his head on the side, seeing at every step the trick behind the prosecution’s drift and firing off the notes to Tandy.
—Are bank officers encouraged to accept gifts from wealthy clients? asked the prosecution.
—Not in theory. But it happens.
When it came to Mr. Tandy Q.C.’s turn, he seemed to understand Uncle Frank’s disposition as thoroughly as Kate herself did. He asked Teece the right questions, or at least the questions which Uncle Frank wanted asked.
—When the Reverend Frank O’Brien told you of the three thousand dollars credit, did you consider it a reimbursement for your having let your address be used in this way?
—No.
For Teece as for Uncle Frank, it was all in the spirit of the premature burial and wake.
—Did you consider the extension of credit as connected with your duties as a bank officer in any way at all?
—No.
—What did you consider it?
—A gesture of friendship. From a generous sportsman.
Happily Teece’s ignorance remained as invincible as Uncle Frank’s. The next witness called was however so likely to be damaging that Murray suggested they leave now.
—Soon, said Kate. Soon, Murray.
This witness was older, a former manager of a bank in Milperra. He had a jovial, beefy look, but was wearing an old-fashioned brown suit. For he was serving a sentence for embezzlement, a matter quite separate from the matter before this court. He had however received visits during his banking career from Mrs. Kearney and the Reverend Father O’Brien. He had opened accounts in the name of Edith Timms and Edmund Kelly.
—Did you have any reason, the prosecutor asked, to believe the names were fictitious?
—Well I wondered about Edmund Kelly. In view of the fact it’s the name of the bushranger.
Ned Kelly, hanged in the Melbourne jail, in Uncle Frank’s worldview another victim of the lion and unicorn.
—What address was used for these accounts?
—There wasn’t any actual account. I kept the amounts informally for Father O’Brien and Mrs. Kearney.
—What do you mean by informally?
—Well sometimes—temporarily—I’d keep them in my bottom drawer, or else in my office safe.
—Was bank interest paid on these amounts?
—No, said the fallen manager. I was doing it as a favor.
Kate noticed with a pulse of fear that when the witness said this, Uncle Frank had nodded. Good answer! Good lad! Judgment might come as a vast surprise to Uncle Frank, a terminal confirmation of the lack of civil good humor everywhere on the planet.
Tandy Q.C. spoke to the witness.
—How did you first meet the Reverend Frank O’Brien?
—My wife approached him. She was worried about my gambling.
—Did she have cause to be?
—I wouldn’t be serving a sentence if not.
—Why would your wife go to the Reverend Frank O’Brien, who was known to be something of a gambler himself?
—My wife believed that Father O’Brien was the beau idéal of gamblers. He had his gambling under control.
This caused the jury and the press to guffaw, and Kate was grateful that her mother was not there.
For Tandy and the judge did not laugh.
—Did Father O’Brien ever give you any advice?
—Yes, said the fallen bank manager. The Reverend O’Brien sent me to Gamblers Anonymous. Just as an observer at first. To get the idea. Even though it was all meant to be anonymous, I didn’t want to declare myself in case word got back to Head Office. So Father O’Brien gave me three telephone numbers. He said I’d better ring those if I had to bet. He said that I would find that I had ten thousand dollars credit if I called those numbers.
—At the time of your arrest, how much did the people who answered those telephone numbers tell you you owed them?
—They told me I owed them $17,737. I spoke to Father Frank about it and that was the last I heard.
Seeing the prosecution rise in a way she thought predatory, she asked Murray if she could go. After all it was an odd minute, when again the press might not be so watchful. But it was painful for Frank’s sake to be a witness to this—the drift of judgment. Even his friends were—with the greatest respect—condemning him, and he construed it as praise.
Murray helped her as she struggled upright urgently.
Waiting for the lift outside, he said, This is a remarkable family you belong to, Kate. You are yourself a remarkable woman.
She said nothing. She was palpitating for Uncle Frank.
—I never thought I’d be mixed up with a family like this.
He began to laugh.
Two barristers appeared, talking secretly to each other and nodding at Murray. Murray too spoke as in a conspiracy when he turned to her.
—Come and live with me, Kate. Now. I’ve been a negligent friend. But I’m very patient. If that’s what you like. My first wife couldn’t stand it.
—I have to get out of the so-called sanatorium first.
—Come and live with me when you do.
As they were leaving the building, a press photographer in wait took their picture. As it appeared in the next morning’s Packer tabloid, they seemed designed for each other by their parallel thinness.