27

Delaney could tell there was a window ajar at Dyson Engineering. Beyond a yard littered with trailer bodies and the frames of caravans—Dyson’s business—stood a two-storied brick blockhouse, and the window that was open declared itself, on the top floor by the stairs, in a faint stutter of metal venetian blinds. Delaney stood in the deep shadow of a compressor and considered the window. There was something like a shimmer of light up there, but whether it came from inside or was reflected from a distant source across the rooftops he could not decide. This degree of inspection was called in the industry a “perimeter survey,” and unless someone emerged from the window carrying Dyson Engineering’s petty cash box, patent drawings, or photocopier, he would be justified in holding this position until the police came.

After ninety seconds of further observation, he walked back to his car in the alley and switched in the base. There was the huskiness of sleep in Danielle’s voice when she answered. He pictured her, blanket dropped around her bare ankles, leaning toward the mike. In the cold car he intoned, “My bride!”

“That place is alarmed,” she told him. “Something should have shown up here on the computer.”

“The wiring could be out,” he said. Love talk, he thought.

“Or the intruder disconnected it. Terry, stay clear. I’ll call Saint Mary’s police.”

“I love you better than anyone living,” he said. Because she never mentioned Gina he was liberated to speak fantastically, the way he had always wanted to. Ti mon seul desir. I love you better than anyone living. But he never heard back from her any wild utterances, nothing like that. And she never used his name. She used his name in sentences like “Or the intruder disconnected it.”

He knew that she was the most strange woman, that when he married her people would say that behind his back.

He let himself inside the gate again and stood in the shadow of the compressor. He knew that from the outside, from the point of view of a perimeter survey, his intention to marry Danielle Kabbel made him a deadshit, a despicable bastard. Even Stanton would use such terms. Double bloody deadshit to string Gina along, to play at being married when a stench of indifference filled the house in Forth Street, threatened to warp the timbers and poison the lemon-scented gums by the roots. He thought that if he waited, there might turn up a kinder way to let Gina know than he could think of today. But he couldn’t think anyhow. All his mind went into Danielle Kabbel, his mind was absorbed and jangled. Like the monster’s brain sitting in a glass retort in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, his sat and waited in Danielle Kabbel’s schoolgirl bedroom. He spent his time at home joking, singing, sometimes slapping Gina on the hip or shaping up to her like a boxer. Rowdiness—he wanted to fill the house with it to cover for his lost head. On his nights off he sheltered in the bathroom until Gina had fallen sourly asleep. Soon it would be the Sunday after Corpus Christi, the date of the elder Terracettis’ marriage in Palermo. Their son and daughter, with spouses and children, were required to visit the tomato farm in Bringelly and drink grappa and eat sweet cakes. How would he occupy a day like that? With a confused and suspicious Gina in the shadow of the Terracettis’ monumental marriage.

Still no one appeared at the upstairs window. Delaney saw a police Commodore rolling toward him down the alley with only its parking lights on. He slipped out the gate to meet it. It held two young constables wearing the sort of mustaches favored by American police on television. He trailed the two of them up the outside stairs and watched them wriggle up through the open window in their tightarsed navy blue trousers. He followed, himself, feeling the residual damage in his shoulder during the second his wrists took his entire weight on the windowsill. Delaney and the constables now stood in an outer office. There were three desks and the usual dowdy office furnishings. A small indefinite light shone through from the boss’s office. The cops did not bother to tread softly. They strode over, and one of them threw the door open.

Looking past the cops and through the door, Delaney could see that the light came from a two-barred electric radiator sitting on the floor. Within its small nimbus was a two-thirds-full flagon of red wine and two plastic cups. Beyond them, in the direction of an old three-seater sofa, violent movement could be seen, and Stanton, wearing only the Uncle Security shirt Denise had tapered down for him, stepped into the light cursing, his hands joined over his genitals. One of the cops now found a switch and turned a full and merciless light on the office. A woman sitting on the lounge reached, her arms cramped across her breasts, for pieces of clothing. “Turn the fucking lights off!” roared Stanton. The young policemen considered him. “Turn the bloody lights off till the lady gets dressed.”

Delaney recognized the woman, a tired-looking but pretty widow who worked at Franklin’s. There were cruel dimplings across her abdomen from the children she had borne for her late husband.

Delaney said, “Turn off the lights, Constable. It’s one of our blokes.”

“Jesus Christ,” said the one near the lights, who whistled and, in his mercy, switched the lights off. The shabby seduction venue returned to an appropriate and kinder dimness. Stanton could no longer be seen as he had a second before, the humiliatingly swarthy legs and blue prick. “Jesus, Delaney, did you call the bloody law?”

One of the police asked without any malice, “Do you blokes bring sheilas to your clients’ premises all the bloody time?”

“Do you expect me to hire a fucking suite at the Regent?” asked Stanton.

Delaney found himself weeping. The phenomenon terrified him. He made no sound and covered his mouth. Tears for his friend’s humiliation, or perhaps for his own desperate and joyous situation. Swallowing away furiously in the doorway, he managed to stop the flow. “There’s no need to take any action on this,” he heard himself saying. “I’ll keep special watch on the place and we’ll rewire the alarm in the morning.” It didn’t sound authoritative, so he said, “Brian here is an old copper himself. He’s got kids—”

“Frig you, Delaney!” shouted Stanton, savaging his trousers, throttling them, the belt buckle tolling against his knees and a shiver in his voice, desire and claret and a two-bar radiator no longer adequate for the biting night. “He fucks the boss’s daughter,” he told the constables. “But they let him do it at the office.”

Delaney felt the blood burning in his face and heard the widow from Franklin’s crying softly behind Stanton.

The constables surprised Delaney by remaining lenient, as if they accepted Stanton’s proposition that we’re all sexual comics sooner or later and that it was uncomradely to put too much stress on the discovery of an old cop with his pants down. Both young men accepted a glass of the claret. The woman was excluded from this general absolution. Her shame went unrelieved. She dressed quickly in the toilet in the outer office and vanished. It was to a closing outer door that Stanton called futilely, “Let me see you to the car, sweetie!”

“She never takes anyone to her place,” he explained to the cops in her wake. “Doesn’t want her kids to know.”

He cleaned up quickly and left the premises, as they were called in industry and police terminology, locking up as he went. Delaney, the silly bugger who’d called the police, was a fringe member of the fraternity which flourished briefly in the dark yard of Dyson Engineering as Stanton, no longer foolish, the flagon held frankly in his hand, thanked them for everything. They had even helped him pick up the trail of tissues the widow had left. They would make a report, and it was agreed Delaney would too. Some kids had broken in and done no damage. Delaney would tell it that way to expiate for calling the police before checking up on whether it would make his friend feel stupid.

“Listen, mate,” one of them called to Stanton from the doorway of the patrol car, “next time better make it the back seat of your Holden.”

The Commodore crept away. Stanton might never have to face those two young coppers again—they might be transferred to Botany or Brewarrina. Delaney however was a friend. Every night he could bring to work, willfully, an image of bare-arsed Stanton and his blue phallus exposed by fluorescent light.

“Well, thank you, cobber,” said Stanton. “Thank you, high-class fucker!”

“How do you know?” Delaney asked. “Danielle and me. How do you know?”

“Read it in the bloody Sydney Morning Herald.”

From his years of football, Delaney had learned the game’s butt end range of skills. He liked to depend on penetration and speed, but there were as well eye-gouging and ball-crushing, winding and knees in the back, the clenched arm across the shoulder blade and the uppercut on the referee’s blind side. From this underworld of Rugby League Delaney produced an elbowing action which left Stanton gagging and devoid of breath.

“What do you mean, they let me do it at the office?”

Stanton laid the bottle down, gasped for a while, and said like a man with laryngitis, “Do you think the old Rudi doesn’t know? You think you creep back at midnight and root his daughter and he doesn’t know? He knows who the chicken king’s fucking but he doesn’t know about Delaney? You stupid prick! He wants you in. He wants another son. Good God help you, you poor bastard.” His breath had revived now. He stood upright and spoke calmly, as if all the spite he felt as an interrupted lover had evaporated in an instant. “I know what I’m doing. A poor lonely checkout bitch and a flask of red ned. You don’t know what in the bloody hell you’re doing.”

This was worse, pity from a recent shirttail crackler, a trouserless goon. Delaney hissed at him—stuff about Stanton having enough disasters of his own without worrying about Delaney’s. This is the end of all friendship, Delaney thought.

In the morning, signing off his .38, he asked Danielle to follow him to the car. “Does your father know?” he asked. She stood blinking in the sunlight. He had never seen her before with the sun in her eyes. It was one of those sharp, sunny winter mornings. The world’s best winter! said promoters of Sydney, not always exactly, since it could rain like a hose.

“Does your father know?” he repeated. And Warwick? Who had listened calmly to the erotic chat of the chicken king.

“He knows I make my own decisions,” she said. She bravely raised her jawline to the sun. He would long remember both the claim and the gesture. She said, smiling beneath her lowered eyes, “You never think other people are catching on. But they do.”

“We ought to get out of the house. Out of your room. We ought to go somewhere else.”

“Where would that be?” she asked.

“I’ll look around.” It was impossible to see himself and above all Danielle booking into some motel. The Travelodge? The Pasadena? The Rio Bravo? (Here in the west of Sydney motels seemed to be named after Clint Eastwood movies.) It was impossible to see this pair of lovers disconnecting the alarms at Dyson Engineering and climbing through a window to the mean comfort of an old sofa and a two-bar radiator.

“What I turn up with will be all right with you?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. She considered her hands and smiled again. “Yes. Within limits.”