17

No later than half an hour past midnight the total manpower of Uncle Security Services had encircled the Blacktown branch of Golden Style. The way this had been achieved made Delaney uneasy. After all his speeches about not involving them in this sort of direct operation, Kabbel had offered Stanton and Delaney double time and asked them after all to take part, to make up the numbers. “After all,” he said lightly, “it’s no more dangerous than the standard business of being a member of the species Homo sapiens.”

Now in the shadow of the railway bridge sat Rudi Kabbel’s Toyota, Scott in the back hunched between the seat and floor, armed with Polaroid and flash. Warwick Kabbel, whom Delaney and Stanton had now privately and innocently nicknamed the Censor, sat appropriately alone in the middle-aged Datsun in a corner of the Franklin parking lot where the fronds of one of those stocky Queensland palms that resembled pineapples caused any vehicle parked there at that hour to look like the car of lovers or of someone staying late at a nearby party.

The back of Golden Style was separated by a narrow ditch from the Blacktown Workers’ Club, a red brick palace of Babylon. In the parking lot, a short step from the ditch, Delaney and Stanton waited in Delaney’s Holden. Arrived at his station, Delaney now began to enjoy himself. The Workers’ was redolent for him of grand political excitements. When he was eleven his father had brought him here for the launch of the political campaign of the Labor demagogue Gough Whitlam. They had stood in a packed gallery for two hours and had seen Gough’s speech only on a television screen, but the crowd, in a strangely un-Australian ecstasy, a frenzy more appropriate to some other and less stable nation, kept the younger Delaney agog. Later the hulking leader appeared below the gallery on his way to the bar—political assassinations were unknown in Australia and politicians could safely drink with any of their fellow Australians.

Whitlam had fallen bloodlessly three years later, half the people rejoicing and half choking with nationalist shame. But the excitement of his rise would always be associated with this unlikely building, and its memory tonight was augmented for Delaney by the likelihood of Stevo’s nearing discomfort. These were lesser elations though; they were nothing beside his greater Danielle obsession.

Stanton slept. His daughter, this time the one who was always calmed and hypnotized by television, had been home all day with a violent stomach virus. He had argued with Denise. He was very pleased with this chance to lie still. “What do you reckon the Kabbels talk to each other about when they’re on their own?” he had asked earlier. “Bloody Rudi and the Commonwealth Censor? Do you think they talk about bloody Russian buffaloes?”

But he had not wanted to pursue the matter. “Police work!” he murmured, already half asleep but quoting Rudi. “This isn’t bloody police work’s backside.”

What did Rudi say to Danielle? Delaney asked himself as Stanton tossed and slumbered awkwardly in the back seat. Their conversation couldn’t be imagined. As he attempted to imagine it, the earth cooled around him until he was shivering, the smells of the day’s exhausts and fried food congealed in the shopping center’s sulphurous night and he felt berserkly happy.

Some time after two a station wagon crawled across the Workers’ parking lot and halted a few hundred yards from Delaney and Stanton. Delaney woke Stanton. Like cops in television dramas they sat low in their seats. From the station wagon appeared a large and, by the sharp light from the street, jowly man of middle age and two ratty-haired blond young men. Stevo, according to Kabbel, had a pool of employees who all drank at the Station Hotel in Parramatta. By the blare and fluctuating light of such rock bands at Split Enz, Flaming Hands, Australian Crawl, Stevo did his interviews and set the terms of employment.

Stevo opened the back of the wagon and took out the raw materials of his trade—some heavy hessian bags of broken glass. The big blonds lugged them across the ditch into the parking spaces of Golden Style and emptied them on the macadam, spreading the fragments with sweeping movements of their feet. To Delaney their work seemed leisurely. Leisurely, Stevo shook the can of spray paint in his right hand and wrote SHIT TO EAT on Golden Style’s side wall.

Two honks from the direction of the railway bridge told Delaney and Stanton it was time to move in. As they left the car and jumped the ditch, one of the blond boys had taken up a rubber-coated mallet for eventual use on the windows. Stevo strode to the front of the building to write a further slogan, this time on the paved and tabled area set aside for al fresco devouring of chickens. Delaney felt wonderful and deliciously waited before crying out his prepared sentence: “Fixing the site, gentlemen?” He had in his line of vision both the oblivious blonds and Stevo the professional vandal.

Before he could speak he saw Rudi and Scott Kabbel appear behind the man. There was a sharp burst of light from the camera in Scott’s hands. Then the whole event, as Stanton would later pungently detail it, burst open like a garbage bag dropped from a height. One of the blond boys began to run back toward Stevo’s station wagon, and Delaney brought him down with a classic head-behind-the-hamstrings tackle, as if it were turf and not gravel and tar which were waiting to receive them as they fell. Delaney slid painlessly across the glass-strewn surface of the parking lot. He heard cries of pain however from the boy he had felled and saw him lift to the streetlights the cut pad of his right hand. The damage was not enough to stop him from retrieving the mallet and bringing it down on Delaney’s shoulder, emitting as he did it a grunt worthy of the martial arts. As Delaney rolled on his side and vomited onto Stevo’s pavement graffiti, he could hear the evil breathless screams of someone savagely hurt rising behind him. It happened that Stevo had sent a blast of acidic paint straight into Scott Kabbel’s eyes.