2

There had been a lot of murders. First, it was Danny Chubb. Hardly a soul in Sydney knew Danny existed until he ceased to exist, but the manner in which he left life gave him — in passing — some status. Danny left life in unusually public fashion. Shot dead, gunned down if you like, in the street. Right in front of his mum’s home. And no attempt to clean up the mess. It was an ill wind, and a harbinger of a tempest of death. A vital convention had been broken — removing and disposing of the body. That should have told us something. Danny Chubb was, like any man who carried such a numbing name, small fry. But as a career criminal, he deserved to have his body catered for by the killer, or killers. Leaving him for the morning newspapers and news crews was, well, new. New for Sydney Town.

His death rated no mention at The Australian, a newspaper that concerned itself with politics, the union movement, business, sport, and increasingly, to my despair, fashion. Australia’s national daily was above such things as common murder. This mighty organ had employed me for some fifteen years, and I had written for most sections of the paper, excluding fashion.

Wise now, after the event, I might have reflected that, as Danny was a criminal, and the Sydney underworld had a fine tradition of disposing of its victims while sparing the public such grisly sights, something had changed in the town. The criminal fraternity would catch and kill their own, as they were proud to say, and we all felt that included the disposal side of things. Disposal is not such a difficult thing, and a variety of caterers provided the service.

There was The Chicken Man, who would wrap a body in chicken-wire mesh, through which he wound tiny pellets of dynamite. The body would be taken out to Sydney Harbour and tossed overboard, where the pellets would explode with faint puffing sounds. The sounds of these tiny explosions were lost in the wash of the water, but the flesh was extracted from the bone. The Chicken Man did not feed the bodies to the sharks, but to the fishes. He was respected for his skill in calculation. The wire mesh carried the bones through the fathoms to the harbour floor. The Chicken Man’s occupation came to an end with the extension to Sydney’s International Airport. By the time the concrete pours stopped, the new runways had been laid upon the bones of those who fell from favour in the criminal fraternity. Today, as your 747 touches down at Sydney Airport, it is landing upon, or above, the remains of those who had done that which they should not have done, or had not done that which they should have done. Rumour has it that The Chicken Man himself is encased in the runway’s concrete, a mass grave for men who thought they could outsmart the crime bosses.

At The Australian, we managed to ignore the next public murder, even though it occurred in a better part of the city. A third slaying followed, a few days after, and then a fourth. Les Hollings, our editor-in-chief, meandered towards my desk on the day of the appearance of a fifth stiff in our fair streets.

Les was not a clever man, but he was wise. He was thin of frame, a Yorkshireman by birth who had escaped the north of England for a job with a newspaper in Wales, and had ended his career in New South Wales. His time was almost up. The time of the wise was gone, and the clever were taking charge. He wore a long grey cardigan that lesser men mocked. He spoke slowly, at the speed of his thoughts. He was now a very powerful man in Sydney, and a man of influence across the nation. His shoulders had stooped under the weight of his importance.

Les suggested there ‘might be something going on with all these murders’, and perhaps I should take a look. He seemed to credit me with some sort of understanding of the criminal mind. Apart from being charged with inciting a riot in an anti-war, anti-apartheid, and Aboriginal rights ‘Day of Rage’, twenty years before, I had no record. Les suggested that my familiarity with the trade union movement gave me some special insight into criminality.

‘You will be talking to the same people,’ he said.

He didn’t really mean that the leadership of the Australian trade union movement was responsible for the carnage, but he suspected, with some reason, that certain members or certain unions might be worth, as my favourite spy inside organised Labor would say, ‘a chin wag’.

The murders, I soon learnt, were only faintly related to the trade union movement. As I began scratching around for an angle, another body fell, literally, by the wayside. Having determined that the local crime bosses were equally unhappy with the carnage, my suspicions were directed, naturally enough, to the police. In those days, it was generally assumed by the crime writers that the Vice Squad ran vice, and that the Drug Squad did likewise with drugs, so there was reason to speculate that the Homicide Squad was responsible for homicide. But the cops appeared as mystified as the robbers. Organised crime was becoming very disorganised.

Unhappily, Les had such confidence in my investigative powers that he had allowed the advertising department at News Ltd to promote my coming exposé on radio and television. This came to me as a shock. I had no idea that they were promo-ing my article, and was surprised to hear someone on the radio informing the nation that I would expose all in the following edition of The Weekend Australian. I looked at my paper and checked the day. Wednesday. The weekend paper went to bed Thursday night, and I had only the faintest idea of what was happening. I remain, to this day, as do the judicial authorities, ignorant of what exactly caused these events.

But I had found a crack. I had visited some unsavoury pubs for a spot of fishing, and discovered that a man who had tried to pull a gun on me years before in Melbourne had arrived in Sydney. Rumour had it that he was pulling and shooting guns as part of a war in the underworld, and seasoned gangsters were becoming less seasoned by the day. The story was a bit thin, but I drew the bow wide, and produced for the weekend paper a piece plausible enough to cause the Murder Task Force to raid the newspaper in search of my files.

The cops arrived early on the day following my ‘exposé’. I was sound asleep, it being my Sunday off. My colleague Lynch, who most called Lunch, was acting chief of staff. He woke me with a telephone call explaining that ‘the cops are all over the place’. Demanding files.

I assured Lynch that I was not in possession of a single file (I did have notes), and suggested that he tell the cops to leave the building before our lawyers were called into play. They had no warrant, and this was the headquarters of News Ltd, the father company of News Corp, owned by the most powerful man on earth, and in all of human history, Rupert Murdoch. Having heard Lynch tell the cops they should ‘fuck off and find some criminals’, I returned the phone to its bed, and slept.

Monday morning dutifully arrived, and I met Lynch in the foyer. Another body had been found, and there was a distinct possibility that something I had written might have been cause for the tragedy. I was flattered at the thought that my analysis might have been studied by a lot of people who do not, as a rule, buy a respectable paper like The Australian. As we rode to the third floor, Lynch told me the cops had turned tail at the very mention of our lawyers — as well they should. We made our way to our desks, and I noticed Les weaving his way past the desks that separated us hacks from our betters.

‘David,’ Les said. He took about five seconds to pronounce my name, but there was a kindly touch to his north English drawl, ‘You are supposed to investigate murders, not cause them.’

Coming from a man who was a stranger to flattery, these words rung rich in my ears, and I beamed as he turned and went his way to attend to the task at hand — bringing out the next day’s newspaper.

Lynch and I went to the pub, where we remained till darkness fell and we had to retrieve our coats. The iron law of journalism is ‘You are only as good as your last story’, and if that story led to someone being killed, it was a good story. One could live off the story for a few days. Some did for the rest of their careers.

Then we returned to the office, and I determined that, as I was riding high, I would spring my plan to escape Australia — with the approval and support of my editor-in-chief. After three months apart, I would join my beloved, who had just been commissioned to write a screenplay for Disney in Los Angeles about some uncouth Australians.

I had accumulated some thirty weeks of holidays, but would request unlimited leave to travel to America to help with the project. Like most journalists, I considered myself essential to the working of the paper. Les, my heroic editor-in-chief, seemed to think otherwise. He immediately granted my request with an enthusiasm I felt could have been more restrained. But the word was out that the crime war was close to being settled, and Les was of the opinion that younger journalists should expose themselves to as much of the world as possible. I expect he doubted I would be gone any longer than the leave that was my due.

My self-esteem lifted when I visited the pay office and was handed a grand cheque. When I returned to the newsroom, Jenny, Les’s secretary, gave me a letter of introduction from him to the authorities of the New World.

Although armed with the ringing endorsement of the editor-in-chief of my nation’s most influential newspaper, I made my way through customs with some dread. The dread was a vague one, but dread it was. I had been warned by half of Sydney’s journalists about the dangers of Los Angeles.

Inevitably, amongst the gifts thrust upon me as I bade goodbye, was a copy of The Loved One. But mostly, I was showered in warnings. LA, all agreed, was rather like Africa when discovered by the White Man. A good life and great wealth could be had, but the price was living with dangerous savages — and that was just the film industry. Stan Deadman, a distinguished sub-editor on the Telegraph, took a grim view of the place. Stan was taking a grim view of life in general at that stage, so I carefully weighed his words.

Thrown out of his home, he had taken to sleeping on the couches of the Journalists’ Club while he contemplated his next move. While making his way from his happy home to the train station a few weeks before, Stan had noticed the local office for the registration of animals and, though running a little late, found time to register his wife as a dog. For the sum of twenty dollars, Mrs Deadman was duly registered as ‘a short-haired, long-nosed mongrel bitch’. Stan forgot about this lark for a week or so, but the people to whom he had given his twenty dollars did not, and the wheels of the city began turning. Stan’s wife was surprised to receive a certificate of registration in the mail accompanied by a name tag to hang around her neck, and Stan was even more surprised to discover that he was no longer the master of his domain.

Having experienced the shortcomings of life on the outside, he pleaded with me to reconsider my own folly and abandon my plan to move to LA. People I hardly knew joined him in urging me to reconsider.

‘Hirsty,’ Stan said, staring through the film of his eyes, ‘you are mad. Fucking crazy, mate.’ Bernie Leo, chief sub-editor on the Telegraph in those days, a man whose struggle with the demon drink was as ferocious as Stan’s, nodded agreement. Kerry, an old hack, issued an earnest warning.

‘Don’t wear jewellery over there, Hirst. They’ll cut off your hand to steal a ring.’

This seemed odd advice, as I never wore jewellery, and did not even possess a wristwatch.

‘They would be cutting off my hand to spite my arm,’ I replied.

The gift of The Loved One proved a mixed blessing. It was not particularly useful as an introduction to modern LA, but turned out to be a distraction from a nuclear physicist that the fates had implacably placed beside me on the long flight to the New World. I hadn’t read the book in years, and set about the task with the enthusiasm of a schoolboy assigned homework.

As we soared above the Tasman Sea, and I began my studies, the nuclear physicist introduced himself, and wondered what occupation I enjoyed.

‘I’m a journalist,’ I replied, instantly regretting it. For not only was the professor at my side a nuclear physicist, but he was of a singular mind, and was devoted to the cause of nuclear energy. The prospect of having a journalist as a companion for the seemingly millions of miles that stretched before us brought a brightness to his eye that journalists learn to be wary of.

I had studiously avoided the subject of nuclear power (except during a brief stint years before when I was acting foreign editor, and things went horribly wrong in a place called Chernobyl), but my companion had not. Indeed, he was a champion of nuclear energy, and by the time the first drinks arrived I knew that this would be a painful trip. My new acquaintance was acquainted with all that is known about atoms and other things that are too small to be detected by the naked eye. I, on the other hand, had never had the slightest interest in things that cannot be seen, except for viruses, and even then only exotic ones like Ebola and foot-and-mouth.

The professor spent an hour or so explaining the dangers of fossil fuel, and the joys of fission or fusion, or both. He reached for his briefcase, and in merciful relief I returned to The Loved One, noticing that while we had travelled a distance that an early seafarer might have covered in a full week, I had only reached page five. As the book began on page three, it was not much of a start.

‘But if I could just get back to my book,’ I murmured.

I looked urgently for the drink cart. Some years back, a stewardess on an Air New Zealand flight had confused her medication and become so excitable that she ended up sitting, sans-culottes, on the face of a first-class passenger. This novel gesture of in-flight hospitality led to Air New Zealand henceforth being known as ‘The airline that gives a fuck.’

Aeroplane service has deteriorated since then, in my opinion, but in those not-so-far-off years, the mere wave of the hand would procure a glass, even a bottle, of something from Hawkes Creek — a decent Chardonnay — or a bold red from the Hunter Valley. Or perhaps one of the fine white wines from the north of Tasmania. The sky was the limit. I managed to obtain a drink, but all the wines of Australia, and all the beer in Mexico, could not have made my companion companionable.

By the time the video screen indicated we were approaching Fiji, I had promised to dedicate my life to the nuclear cause. An hour later, I would have happily handed my mother over to the Nazis just to shut this man up. Though I stared determinedly at the pages of my book, the professor, powered by some inner reactor, ploughed on. He neither slept nor used the toilet. Like the great physicist he no doubt was, he would not be distracted by human demands.

Finally, I excused myself, and took The Loved One to the bathroom and read much of the volume. When evidence grew apparent that the plane was waking and that others needed my seat, I returned to my seat. My friend was delighted to see me. He had just located an article that proved that Chernobyl was not the human catastrophe that I knew it to be. But we were about to land at LAX, where my girl awaited me, and nothing could restrain my spirits.

Nothing but some nasty immigration officers, who took one look at me and decided that I should get what they probably call The Treatment. Free of my physicist friend — he had been caught short and forced to repack his papers — I had breezed past the regular officials, and was about to find Boo on the other side of the line when a man in a uniform suggested I come with him. The man had some friends; they also wore uniforms, and it was soon apparent that I was in the company of an elite drug squad customs force determined to rid LA of the scourge of dope by searching the most private parts of my body. I was already glad I wasn’t wearing jewellery.

As I was led into the sparse room, where one is dehumanised by strangers who take pleasure in such things, I asked what they thought I might be bringing into LA from Sydney.

‘Guns?’ I wondered, out loud. ‘I would hardly be bringing guns into LA,’ I said, with the best I could muster of a sneer. ‘Or drugs? I believe there are plenty to go around already.’

I was ordered to remove my boots, which I will concede had rather large Cuban heels. As I took them off, I suggested they read my letter of introduction from my editor-in-chief, but Les’s influence clearly stopped at the border. They responded by twisting my boot heels one way and another, and I asked whether Max Smart was still popular on local TV.

That must have been deemed an insult, because I was thrust against the wall and ordered to stretch my arms as high and wide as possible and my legs as wide and low as I could. I was thoroughly searched. Nothing was found. I asked for my boots back with an air of anger poisoned by a touch of fear. Instead, the bloodhounds decided on an even fuller search — a search that involved cavities. The cavity they seemed most interested in was the one surrounded by my bottom.

Although I had spent four or five hours in the toilet escaping the nuclear physicist, I had not actually ‘gone’ to the toilet. This extraordinary juxtaposition of internal events had caused me to build up a considerable amount of wind, in and around the posterior. My desire to relieve that wind while in flight had been ‘swallowed’, as Bernie Leo might say, by consideration for my fellow travellers.

My boots were off, my jeans were removed, and I was straddled against the green paint of their little cell. Two of the officers bent behind me while the others kept watch.

One began to remove my underpants, an act of folly no man has succeeded in. After hours of tension and restraint, my back passage began to make ominous sounds, and had smoking been permitted we would all have been subject to a flash of blue methane that might have interested the nuclear physicist. But the only flash was of my interrogators as they fled their positions and allowed me to march past all hurdles, into the home of the brave and the land of the free, and the arms of my beloved Boo.