23

Jack looked down at the gun in Beaumont’s hand, held in close to the body, about hip high. He stared, expressionless now, almost devoid of thought, except for a fucking hell that briefly lit up the billboard in his mind and flashed a couple of times, blinding him. He re-focused. Okay. It was Monday morning, a quarter to ten on the wall clock. This was happening. In a city of over four million people, right now not one of them was walking down Market Row. It was just the two of them there. He stepped back.

Beaumont came inside and pulled the door shut behind him. The wind was squeezed out and a kind of silence returned to the storeroom: ominous, heavy and full of blood, like a heartbeat in your ear. Jack tried to read the look on Beaumont’s face but the print was too small.

He said: ‘How goes the undercover financial-crime business?’

Duncan Beaumont was unshaven, crumpled, his eyes red and wired. Pale-faced, especially against the black biker’s jacket. Black jeans and boots, too. He looked like he had just finished an all-nighter out on the town, still half cut and now bitten blue by the cold after standing around waiting for a cab that never came. Beaumont ran his hand through his hair and breathed hard. The hairstyle resumed its one-hundred-dollar salon style. His wet, stone-blue eyes narrowed on Jack.

‘We meet again, Susko.’

Jack frowned. ‘The fuck are you, Dr Fu Manchu?’

Beaumont ignored him and moved a little to his left, then half turned towards the door. His legs were wide apart and slightly bent, his arms out wide and curved as though around an invisible wine barrel. Jack wondered what the hell he was doing. Some kind of karate? Jesus.

‘Don’t move.’

‘Sure. Fine,’ said Jack. ‘I’ll just watch.’

Beaumont glanced at the lock, then brought his eyes to the front again: he shifted himself slowly back towards the door and reached behind for it. There was another click and the door was locked once more.

‘You’ve done that before,’ said Jack. ‘I can tell.’

Beaumont pointed his chin over Jack’s shoulder. ‘Anybody in the shop?’

‘Detective Sergeant Keith Glendenning is just browsing. Something for the wife, they’re having difficulties. Oh, and he’s got a gun, too.’

‘It’s not pointed at you though, is it?’

There was nothing to say to that. Jack’s mind fumbled through some options. The storeroom was small and box-tight, with just enough space to walk through carrying an armful of books; or some cigarettes, a lighter and maybe a glass of wine when the shop floor was quiet. The rear door was no chance with Beaumont in the way. Think. What about back into the shop and out the front? Bring a stack of boxes down on the guy, then run like the Flash? No good. Each box was full, weighed about twelve to fifteen kilos. By the time Jack reached up and tried to topple them, there would be two or three bullets adding bloody nipples to his chest.

‘I’ve been waiting outside,’ said Beaumont. ‘Freezing my arse off.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I was worried somebody might see me. I … I haven’t slept for two days.’

Jack heard a note of despair in his voice. ‘Where have you been?’

Beaumont stared at the floor for a moment, lost to a thought. Jack eyed the gun, wondering if he could grab it while Beaumont was distracted. Too far to dive. Then he noticed the make. ‘Is that a real Luger?’ Old Commando comics from his childhood flashed through his mind.

‘What?’ Beaumont came back. He saw where Jack was looking and brought the gun up higher. ‘Yeah, it is.’

‘I wouldn’t have picked you for a World War Two buff.’

The guy’s brow dug in hard between his eyes. ‘Kippax’s idea. He thought it was funny. He wanted me to shoot Brandt with something authentically Nazi. Bought it at an auction. Used to belong to some high-ranking SS arsehole.’

Jack hesitated. The guy had brought up the shooting as easy as the weekend sports results. ‘So what happened?’ he said. ‘You missed.’

Beaumont looked away, his face wracked with some kind of inner turmoil. ‘I wasn’t going to do it. I thought I was and I wanted to, but then … then I couldn’t.’

Jack remembered a time when a gun had been placed in his own hand, along with a beaten man in the back seat of a car and two simple instructions: Get rid of it, Jack. All of it. The idea was nothing compared to the moment itself.

‘That woman who drives for Ziggy Brandt?’ continued Beaumont, remembering, the talk coming easy now, almost with relief. He probably had not spoken to anybody about it yet. Lucky Jack. ‘She came out of the elevator first and saw me. I was just standing there, thinking that I wouldn’t do it, that I wasn’t going to. She pulled a gun, I couldn’t fucking believe it. Bam! Bam! Bam! like Lethal Weapon or something. I dived behind a car. Ran. Can’t even remember how I got out of there.’

Jack pictured Astrid striding cool and magnificent and no doubt terrifying.

‘And now as well as Brandt, Kippax wants to give it to me,’ said Beaumont. ‘He’s got Florez on my tail.’

‘What about the ASIC evidence you’ve got against Kippax?’ said Jack. ‘Can’t that protect you?’

‘How do you know about that?’

‘Claudia told me.’

Beaumont’s hand clenched the gun. He looked down at it, then at Jack again, his eyes determined, just like the night he came round to Leinster Street — but the anger trickled out of him, like he was too full of holes to hold it anymore. ‘He’s got it,’ he said.

‘You gave it to him before the job?’ So what the hell was Kippax after that he was willing to pay Jack five thousand dollars for? Just the guy, in the flesh? Something for Mick to play with on his days off?

‘Yeah,’ said Beaumont. ‘For the gun and the set-up. And the getaway cash for after.’

‘How much?’

Beaumont grinned. ‘Fifty grand. Part of the deal.’

‘He wants the money back, huh?’ said Jack. There was his little job offer.

‘Yeah, well, he owes me another five-oh. I figured if I was going to do it anyway …’ He paused, maybe recalling the attempted deed and how the hell he had got there and the shit he was in now. ‘But I missed, so he wants the cash. And my neck for the shiv in his boot.’

‘Oh yeah.’ For once, Jack Susko was not the guy in the room with everything all the way up to his earlobes. But the old feeling washed over him for a second.

‘Well,’ said Beaumont. ‘I still got the gun.’

‘What are you doing here, then? Why don’t you go round and point the thing at him?’

‘Don’t worry. It’s my next stop.’

A truck drove by in the laneway, whooshing loudly past the back door. Beaumont jumped. He sounded about as convincing as a five-year-old. Jack wondered how much of a grip the guy had on what was going on. ‘So Ziggy,’ he said. ‘Why?’ He could sense Beaumont wanted to tell. And better a story than bullets flying around Susko Books.

Beaumont rubbed his face, sat down on some boxes. Leaned forward, elbows on knees, gun in hand, but hanging it casually between his legs now. ‘The short answer? Because Brandt killed my father. Not with his own hands, of course, the fuck. He simply crushed him from a distance. Like a fucking ant.’

‘How?’

‘My father had a big chunk of land up in the Hawkesbury, near a place called Brooklyn. All by the water, acres and acres of prime real estate. It is now, anyway. He lived there in a little fibro shack, just a weekender, nothing. He moved there to —’ Beaumont stopped, as though trying to decide something. ‘To get off the booze. He was sick. The shack, it had been in the family for years, since my great-grandfather’s time, just sitting there. My father was alone, my mother was dead. I was overseas. Brandt got him to sign it all away for … for, Jesus, I don’t know, a bottle of fucking sherry. By the time I got back, he was living at a homeless shelter in Surry Hills. Talking to himself in the fucking TV room. Not long after, he was dead.’

Thelonious Monk was still playing and his piano spilt in lightly from the shop. ‘Sweet and Lovely’. Everything this story was not. Jack wondered how long Beaumont had nurtured his hatred of Brandt and what it had eaten up inside him. Reality was probably the first thing to go.

‘Why now?’ said Jack. ‘You could have tried a hundred times before.’

Beaumont’s mouth was a straight line, lips bloodless. Claudia all over his face like a bleached Super 8 home movie, flicking away over the sharp angles and dark crevices. ‘Opportunity. Kippax and the investigation and the money and … I could see it, you know? Do the guy, get Kippax to wear it, and then me, I’m gone.’ He looked hard at Jack. ‘And because of you,’ he said. ‘Because of you, Susko.’

‘I didn’t do anything.’

‘He stuck you in there. Right between us.’

‘Yeah, that’s right. Brandt did that, not me.’

‘He couldn’t have done it with anybody else. He knew she still loved you.’

Jack felt a little stab in his side, which may or may not have been a splinter of guilt.

‘No,’ said Beaumont. ‘It was you. Because that was when I knew that Brandt knew about me. How much time do you think I had before I got buried under one of his construction sites?’

‘Barangaroo, huh?’

‘Yeah, fucking Barangaroo. It’s what this whole thing is about anyway. Kippax and Brandt, wanting each other out of the picture. Jesus, you know how much that motherfucker is worth? Prime chunk of harbour foreshore, it’s the eye fillet, man. Nobody’s even sure who fucking owns it, the council, the government, they’re all slugging it out …’ Beaumont was getting a little colour back. ‘And then these two big shots trying to hammer each other out of the way. I thought with all the smoke, you know, I could get at Brandt and … and …’

He looked up at Jack, grinning, his face twisted and unhinged. ‘You can see it too, can’t you, Jack? Great fucking plan, huh?’ His grin stretched wider, a sick joke smile splitting his face. ‘Except now it’s different. I see me in the reinforced concrete and Ziggy naming the spot Beaumont Point!’

‘Not with Claudia in the picture,’ said Jack. Clear now. That was why Brandt wanted him to get in there. No blood, because it was his daughter: rather an old flame stoking disharmony. Jack the fool sent in to flush Beaumont out. All the moves mapped. Christ. The man would have given Bobby Fischer a run for his money. Maybe Jack ought to have taken the Mosman Bay apartment: something to at least live in after he did his three to five for getting involved in this mess. Like Beaumont, he appeared to have worked hard to end up with nothing.

‘I told her, you know,’ said Beaumont. ‘I told her everything. She understood. She said it was okay. That she still loved me. She said I hadn’t done anything wrong.’ He shook his lowered head, heavy with remorse. ‘Until now.’

‘You didn’t kill him,’ said Jack, just laying out the bare fact.

‘And what good does that do me?’

‘There’s no blood on your hands.’

He looked at them, as though to reassure himself. No blood, but a gun. His shoulders slumped. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore.’

‘What about Claudia?’

‘I can’t …’

‘She wants to see you. She asked me to find you for her.’

‘What?’ Beaumont’s head jerked up, his face a worn yellow map of anxiety.

‘Don’t let Brandt win.’ As Jack said it, the words surprised him, like it was somebody else talking.

‘I can’t … I …’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve got to get me out of here! Hide me someplace, I just need a little time.’ His eyes darted around the storeroom, as if there was a spot right there. ‘It’s over, everything’s over. Help me, Susko.’

‘Yeah, right.’ Jack was losing patience with Beaumont’s blues. He had enough for a trumpet solo of his own. Everybody seemed to want his help, but only as far as he could take their place in the stocks. ‘Just give me the Luger and I’ll go drop everybody that wants to kill you, and then you can live happily ever after.’

‘No, I didn’t mean —’

‘Aren’t you the guy with a goddamn assault charge pointing at me, as well as that gun?’ Jack had never wanted in on this story and yet Brandt had slipped it around him like a slow tide. And now Beaumont was here asking him to stay in it and get really wet, because, after all, it was Jack’s fault anyway. ‘What the fuck do you think I’m going to do?’

Beaumont stood up. Something cold and desperate on his face now, his skin breaking out all blotchy over the neck. His gun hand came up slowly. ‘You’ll do anything I tell you to fucking do.’

The voice was steel but Jack saw the doubt in his eyes, like people peering out through a curtain in a window. How to play it? But before he could decide, there was an almighty crash right behind Beaumont.

‘I can hear you in there, Susko!’

Beaumont swung around and took a step back towards Jack, the gun now directed at the door. ‘Jesus! What the —’

Another crash. The door shook and timber cracked as though a truck had rammed it. A third boom, then a fourth, and Jack was pretty sure that somebody was taking to the door with an axe.