A Family Madness (2 page)

Delaney raced from his cover among the gums and sprinted over vacant land and into the townhouse road. Constable Rammage turned to him a face almost transparent, so drained of substance it was no more than a filament.

“Oh holy Jesus, Delaney!” Rammage cried, beginning to weep. “Who are those people?”

2

Delaney first met Rudi Kabbel by the park one humid 3
A.M.
in January 1983. The southerly for which Sydneysiders always wait on humid nights had not arrived, but weathermen were assuring a desperate population that it would turn up late the following morning, flush the humidity away, and restore everyone to well-being. Delaney and his partner Stanton, though they worked separately, always met up in the small hours to share coffee from a thermos they took turns in providing.

Delaney and Stanton were responsible as officers of Castle Security for a range of properties, including a Subaru dealership and a Rural Bank. At least Stanton persisted in calling it a Rural Bank, the way he continued to call Westpac the Bank of New South Wales. “You can bank on the Wales,” said the old slogan of the New South Wales. “You can wank on the bales,” Stanton liked to say of the Rural, now renamed the State.

The Sun Ya Restaurant was also in the care of Delaney and Stanton, as were a trailer dealership and a yard full of swimming-pool liners. These last lay bluely on their sides like gigantic children's bathtubs, like—as Brian Stanton said—bedpans for bloody Gulliver. Within Castle's mandate there lay as well the premises of a licensed club. During his patrols, Delaney saw many a late-night inebriate enter his Commodore and drive away in perfect safety, at least until he reached the highway, where carnage was always a possibility.

On the night of their meeting with Kabbel, Delaney and Stanton emerged from the back lane behind Franklin's supermarket and saw Kabbel sitting in the park by the bandstand, his night-watch lunch spread before him, a picnicker in the abandoned shopping center. He looked so strange in his blue uniform—it was not the blue most security men wore, it was what Delaney thought of as a foreign blue. Delaney could tell too—by a sort of musk of hostility given off by his friend—that the man's tranquil mastication annoyed Stanton.

As they got closer, Delaney noticed that the top button of the man's collar was done up and that this added to his foreignness. On his collars were two brass badges of four circles arranged rather like the Olympic rings, though there were only two rings in the top row as in the bottom. Stanton approached the man in that jovially hostile manner he had picked up in the New South Wales police force.

“Enjoying our tucker?” Stanton asked.

The man was tall, Germanic-looking, bullet-headed, with spiky blond hair turning in places to a gray poll.

“Would you like some?” the man asked, pushing the packet of sandwiches toward Stanton, whimsically reducing him to the status of a beggar. Stanton said no thanks and moved his shoulders threateningly inside his blue shirt. But his authority seemed to Delaney to be debased by this muscle-flexing. It may have meant more had he still been a cop. It would then have conveyed to the citizen, even to this foreigner, that Stanton was thinking of a range of possible provocations and charges—resisting arrest, using obscene and indecent language, malicious damage to a police shirt.

“You work for Castle,” said the man, reading the label on their shirts. “I used to work for Ramparts. Such references to medieval fortifications! Now I'm in business for myself.”

The man took from his breast pocket a wad of business cards and peeled one off for Delaney and then one for Stanton. The business cards displayed the four rings. Below them was the name “Uncle Security” and below the name of the business, in larger lettering still, “Rudi Kabbel, Managing Director.” The card conveyed that if not quite a prince of the industry, Kabbel was at least local nobility. His office was in Parramatta and he employed a staff of five. In Penrith he had a number of automobile dealerships, a ship's chandler who supplied boaters using the Nepean River on weekends, and a timber yard.

“My real name is Radislaw,” said Kabbel, spelling it. “But Australians can't handle that.”

Stanton mellowed enough to try half a cup of coffee from Kabbel's thermos. “My sons, Warwick and Scott, work for me too,” the man conceded in return. A family business did not have the same credibility as one which employed total strangers.

“Warwick and Scott,” Stanton murmured. “Long way from Rudi, isn't it?”

“My wife wanted them to be given Australian names. We're divorced now, but the names linger on. My daughter though—she runs the control room—I dug in over that name. She's Danielle, after my mother. Danielle is a French name.”

“And this Kabbel, it's French, eh?” Stanton didn't entirely dislike the idea of the French. The people who had once knifed him belonged to a more southerly and swarthy race than that.

“It's Belorussian.”

“Come again?”

“Belorussia. Bela Rus. White Ruthenia.”

“Where's that when it's there?” Stanton asked.

“That is a land of milk and honey which has never been allowed to go its way,” Rudi Kabbel explained. “A land of plains and forests and gentle hills. You know Lithuania, you know the Baltic?”

Both Stanton and Delaney nodded, though their geography was not exact and the man knew it.

“It's east of Poland. If you want to invade Russia, as has sometimes been tried, you'll have to go through Minsk. Minsk is the capital.

“Oh,” said Delaney, whose sense of where everything in Eastern Europe was had been improved by an admiration for Lech Walesa. “You come from Russia?”

“The Soviets would say I do. I do not say I do. I am a Belorussian. We are different in language and religion. Some of us anyhow. If there was any international justice, we would be our own nation.”

“Like Queenslanders,” Delaney suggested. He could see Kabbel frown but then decide to yield to this small joke about Australian regional feeling. Whenever later he was debating the nature of Kabbel with himself, the question of whether Kabbel was a fanatic, Delaney would remember how in the humid night Kabbel had given in with a smile and allowed Bela Rus to be compared whimsically with Bananaland.

“You could say like Queensland,” Kabbel admitted at last. But, he said, at least the Queenslanders could make their own mistakes. They had the Barrier Reef, which they were ruining for themselves. They had the rain forests, which they were decimating and profaning. All the Belorussian treasures had been destroyed by other people, by the Poles, the Litvaks, above all by the Russians. For example, the Belorussians had and treasured a race of buffalo, of bison, like the American bison which Buffalo Bill had hunted. “Now you didn't know that, did you boys?” he asked Stanton and Delaney, winking once at them, a heavy comic-opera wink. Though Delaney confessed he didn't, Stanton wouldn't admit to any ignorance of Belorussian wildlife.

These bison were called
Zubr
. He wrote it down for them on the back of one of his Uncle Security cards. You found them in the forest of Belovezh. The Russians and the Germans, their two great armies, hunted them out in World War I and World War II. “What they know they don't own,” said Kabbel, “the Russians shit on. And what they did to the
Zubr
they have done to all the Belorussian treasures.”

“The Americans are bastards too,” said Stanton, not so much to back up Kabbel's argument but to balance the ideological scales. Stanton was in fact very pro-American but didn't want this clever alien to get away with being so expressive.

“They are both unjust kingdoms,” Kabbel conceded. He looked wryly at Delaney. “But if you were, say, a cosmic force and had to choose a side, which one would you?”

“America,” said Delaney, smiling as he played at being a divinity. “For a while at least. Give them a shot, I reckon.”

“Exactly, my intelligent friend,” said Kabbel. Delaney thought the man's tone patronizing. “For a time! No power gets eternal chances, chances that go on forever.”

He excused himself then. He had a free lance working nearby in the Mount Druitt area and had to look in on him.

“Do they all wear that turquoise bloody uniform of yours?” asked Stanton.

“It's the company uniform,” murmured Kabbel, firm but not doctrinaire. Delaney would remember that as well at a later date. “A looser cut of shirt. All very well for you blokes”—he pronounced it
blouks
—“your shirts hug the body and remind criminals of Robert Redford or some such. But our shirts allow a layer of air between the fabric and the body, and on such a night as this a layer of air is to be welcomed.”

Delaney sweated all the more at this talk of cool spaces beneath garments, and his shirt seemed to cramp his damp shoulders.

Terry Delaney was the husband of Gina Terracetti, the child of a sturdy Italian couple from Palermo. Aldo Terracetti was a market gardener who had left a tribal history of centuries of labor behind him in Sicily to labor just as hard, though to better profit, fifteen miles north of Penrith in a shallow farming depression called Bringelly, one of the few places in Sydney where in winter water left overnight in a bucket or a dog's dish would grow a crust of ice, and which in summer, day after day in the dog days of January and February, led the metropolitan maximum temperatures. Delaney loved the Terracettis because they had a composure that triumphed over temperature and because they had bred for him Gina, a good wife but not in the bruised, subdued manner of Denise Stanton. Gina was a robust person, a woman of opinions. Old Mrs. Terracetti—not so old in fact—said it was the Australian high school education—it turned women into harpies who challenged their husbands' authority.

Delaney sensed in old Terracetti an honest and ancient connection with the earth, something he had passed on to his larger-boned daughter Gina. Her skin was olive, sometimes reddish like terracotta—frequently he called her a squaw as a joke, but he never said it without a tremor of desire. Her features represented symbolically to Delaney the Sicily she and he had never visited—strong, with a tendency toward the craggy. In middle age, he supposed, they would be especially craggy, like her mother's. All of history, Delaney thought, from the Romans onwards, looked calmly out of those features. The Delaneys made love in the mornings, after Delaney had got back from his night patrols, before Gina went off to her work at a discount clothing store in St. Mary's. As often as not they ended with Delaney entering Gina from behind, from those well made flanks which somehow to Delaney signified the geography of the world. As they both cried out, Delaney had a sense of remaking and honoring the earth. He was sure he would not get that sense from anyone else.

He'd been unfaithful to her once, a public infidelity he could not find the words to convey to Gina, but which other men (and perhaps some of their women) you were likely to meet in Main Street knew about. It had occurred the previous October when the third-grade team—third grade being the lowest form of professional Rugby League play—had for the first time in its history reached the grand final at the Sydney Cricket Ground, playing a bloody defensive game which it lost 12 to 8 to South Sydney. After the grieving, the Leagues Club had offered the team a trip to Hawaii instead of a grand-final match payment. You had to pay your own accommodation, that was all, but it would be at discount rates. Gina insisted that he should go, even though she knew some of the wild buggers like Steve Mansfield, a second-rower who had an evil reputation for twisting the testicles of opposing forwards, would play the sort of merry hell for which he was notorious from Parramatta to the mountains.

One night at the Ilikai there had been a party in the adjoining rooms of Steve Mansfield and Chicka Hayes. The Maui Wow-ie the team had been smoking for the whole week suffused the air, an acrid sweetness which enlarged the brain. Chicka had filled his bath with ice in which sat dozens of cans of Primo, the Hawaiian beer of which none of the team approved, but on which, in the absence of Australian beer, they were willing to incapacitate themselves. As each of the guests arrived—various American girls and a few vacationing Australians—Chicka would hand her a freezing can of the stuff.

“Crook beer, love, but the best we can do!”

He sat in a chair in Mansfield's room, by the window, watching Diamond Head, which he had never thought he would see: a majestic slope and inside it a fort. The idea appealed to him. It was an example of American extravagance. Only the Americans would stick their forts inside ancient volcanos. He was smoking the stuff like everyone else. Such a thing was possible to confide to Gina. It would be a delight to see her scandalized. Delaney holidaying on the silvery fringes of narcotics. Delaney who watched large green headlands. At the far end of Waikiki! Imagine.

He could afterwards not clearly remember the face of the girl who came up to him. She was slighter than Gina. Her hair was brown, cut short for the heat. Her skin was fine-grained. She was what Delaney thought of as “un-ethnic,” showing no traces of any specific origins. Compared to Diamond Head she was not a primary object of notice. Nor was Mansfield's bed, on which the two wingers were rubbing gin from the refrigerator bar on the breasts of a Chinese-American girl and licking them clean. That sort of thing was to be expected. A Rugby League team on a celebratory journey had to create a store of outrageous events to take home. These tales—in the tradition of Rugby League clubs—should cover four aspects—sexual excess, excess of alcohol, jovial damage to such property as lobby fountains or alterations of the clocks behind the reception desk which told what time it was in Copenhagen and Tokyo, and peripheral encounters with local police. As arousing as some of the scenes might be, Delaney, inhaling the smoke, saw himself by temperament and marriage as a witness.