“Just get in,” said the taxi driver. His bead seat cover clacked as he waved an arm at the open door, seeming to resent the draught of hot air that accompanied the Doll into his cab. He was an overweight man whose red face was covered with crusty patches and his blue shirt with flakes of skin, like the scales of a fish.
“Rookwood,” said the Doll. “I’ll direct you.”
Inside the taxi a radio announcer declared that they were “now going direct to the press conference being given by Police Commissioner Ben Holmstrom”. The taxi driver turned on the meter and pulled out. On the radio a voice coughed, and then said:
“Well, I can confirm that we found a large sum of cash in the flat, along with a small amount of cocaine.”
The Doll wanted to ask him to change the station, but didn’t dare. She wanted to be invisible. She didn’t want him to look at her, think about her, remember her. So she had to keep listening, as there arose a confusion of shouts from the media pack.
“Do you believe there is a connection between Islamic terrorism and drug running?”
“We are pursuing all avenues of enquiry and working with the appropriate government agencies,” said the voice the Doll guessed belonged to the top cop.
“Is it true that this was the flat of the woman the media are calling the Unknown Terrorist?”
“The flat was rented in the name of Gina Davies.”
“Is Gina Davies the same woman who works as a lap dancer at the Chairman’s Lounge under the aliases Krystal and the Black Widow?”
“That is our understanding, yes.”
“So there is a link, Police Commissioner? Can you confirm that the cell was financing its terrorist activities through drug running and the sex industry?”
“I can only repeat what I said a moment ago. But clearly these are disturbing developments.”
The driver mumbled bitterly, as if all this were somehow personally directed against him, while at the press conference a different, distant voice rose above the clamour to ask:
“How much money did you find?”
In the all-pervasive heat even the air in the taxi was a clammy torment. The Doll tried to focus on the hoarse whisper of the car’s air con vents battling a world that could no longer be cooled down. But when the cop said, “Close to fifty thousand dollars in one-hundred-dollar notes,” she was unable to ignore the radio any longer.
“Stop!” she suddenly called. “Here—just pull into that hardware store there and wait for me.”
The Doll stood for a moment on the street, trying to calm her breathing.
‘My money! My money!’ thought the Doll—and she knew it was all gone. Wilder had not got there in time and now could never retrieve it. It was all her savings, and she would never ever get it back. She could not prove she had earnt it legally and they would claim it had been obtained illegally. All those shitty, never-ending nights she had suffered for it; all those arseholes she had smiled at and cooed to; all that crap she had swallowed; all that money with which she had, bill by bill, slowly sought to put an end to her nakedness, all of it had been for nothing!
She felt giddy, made herself walk into the hardware store though the floor was rising and falling away at the same time. For gone with the money was her dream of a home, and with the home, her dream of leaving dancing and starting a new life.
Then, as she searched up and down the aisles with a plastic shopping basket in her hand, she tried to find solace in her new situation. As she put a kitchen knife into her basket, as she took down a tin of Brasso and found a scrubbing brush, she tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, that she could start again. She stopped and steadied herself by leaning against a Makita power tools display.
Perhaps, she thought, if she gave herself up, told them everything—including how the money had been made, how she had worked hard and honestly for it—then they would understand, clear the mess up and give her money back. She entertained this idea for some minutes; her desire for her money and the idea that the money was freedom was so strong that it for a short time overrode her fear. At the counter she added a bouquet of flowers to her basket, paid, then walked out and got back in the taxi. But as the taxi drove on, the Doll knew all that she was thinking was just so much dog shit.
“Grew up not far from here,” the taxi driver said, as he spun the steering wheel, and the taxi swung off the highway and past a sign advertising the largest cemetery in the southern hemisphere.
“Seven hundred acres of it,” the taxi driver said, scratching furiously at his raw chin. The Doll tried not to notice the pieces of his face falling away. “They called it Necropolis then. City of the dead. Like something out of a frigging Batman movie.”