A Family Madness (6 page)

“Have you boys heard there is trouble with Castle? Please, I do not wish to alarm you. But Castle has been forced to consider a bid from Vanguard, and if Vanguard comes they will bring their own people.” Kabbel lowered his voice in the vacant park. “Let me know if anything goes wrong for you. I have a new and rather fascinating contract. Working for me you would join a family.”

“Would we have to wear your bloody baggy uniform?” Stanton asked. But it was a sort of automatic or reflex irony. Delaney knew his friend was hollowed out by Kabbel's whisper, that it challenged the chancy equity he held in life.

“You could have your wife take in the waist,” said Kabbel, laughing, “if you want to resemble a hot Steve Mc-Queen.

“Winter is on its way,” said Stanton.

Delaney's car was at the repair shop. Driving him home, squinting into a diffused but vast rising sun, Stanton at last began to speak. (In the few hours since they had met Kabbel, he had been mostly silent.) “You know how much you're worth by what you hear and who you hear it from. If you hear from the bloody chairman you're being retrenched, it's a different matter from hearing it from a bloody Bisonrussian in the middle of the fucking night.”

It was Stanton's whimsy to call Kabbel a Bisonrussian. Delaney said the obvious thing: that it might not be true.

“I don't want to be in that bugger's family. I'd rather be a cog at Castle than a member of
his
family.” Stanton braked in front of Delaney's white house. The recently planted lemon-scented gums stood still and, he like to think, vigilant in the first mild yellow light. He was guilty at the elation he felt. The end of Castle forced him to take new chances, the chances he knew he should take while he still could. He kept his lips firmly clamped down on this excitement. He knew Gina was asleep inside. She slept seriously, thoroughly. It was his daily task sweetly to rouse her.

For Brian Stanton, wearing the scars of an earlier foundered career, Castle was all the breath and bread he and his womenfolk could expect.

Delaney got out but leaned in through the window. Stanton let off the brake and put the car into gear. The activity seemed to cause him pain. “Sometimes you feel like you're just a whisker away from being nothing, sweet bugger-all. Kiss your ethnic sheila for me.”

When he drove away, Stanton emitted not so much exhaust as a dangerous musk of disappointment. It seemed to Delaney that it was a stench which might attract a predatory destiny.

On the next payday the pink slip turned up in Delaney's pay packet. There was one in Stanton's too. Even to Delaney it came like the announcement of an expected death and was just as stupefying. “Two weeks severance, a month's accumulated leave,” said Stanton. “I'm not going on the dole. I'm not going to trot down to the Advisory Financial Service in the bloody park and work out how to organize my bloody poverty. That's a particular bullshit sonata I'm not going to play. I'll rob bloody banks first.”

There was in Stanton a dark capability for holdups. The management of the company's firearms had been cavalier, and Stanton hoped he would be able to take his .38 with him when he left. He would then have it in his drawer at home: an option. Delaney was relieved when the new supervisor proved finicky and wanted all weapons and ammunition accounted for.

Delaney began to apply for the jobs he'd always desired. “Somewhere in the bullshit industry,” Stanton described Delaney's projected ideal employment. “You need to be Mel Gibson with an arts-law degree,” Delaney confided to Gina, on the verge of tears in her arms after a week of talking to personnel managers.

Stanton shopped himself around less high-flown establishments than the sports institutes and PR outfits where Delaney had been trying for a foothold. Men without jobs, said Stanton, were savages. He was a bloody savage. He would have killed for such tear-arse piecework as unloading crates off trucks at the rear of supermarkets, or free-lancing on a per-delivery basis for a furniture removalist. “They should have saved the building of the bloody pyramids till the 1980s,” Stanton said. “I would have signed on.”

Early in the third week they set their alarms for 2
A.M.
and went down to the park to see Kabbel.

6

Rudi Kabbel's business was run from a control room in the front of his old house in Parramatta. The room was brightly painted and had an air of welcome. To come in there after a few weeks of being jobless was a bit like coming home; even Brian felt that. It looked like a professional place too, a good place to bring potential clients in the daytime and say, “This is where we operate.” There were some easy chairs, a Spanish-style table with copies of
Guardian
on it—the Association magazine. At one end of the room, on a proper computer table, was a computerized alarm receiver already switched on. The code numbers of various clients showed up iridescent in yellow on a black screen. A wire led from the computer to a discreet white siren set high up on the wall. In the corner stood a radio transmitter. On the wall opposite the ornately barred window, a sturdy arms cabinet was fixed.

Driving down to Kabbel's earlier, Stanton had said, “I hope to Christ this doesn't turn out to be hole-in-the-corner operation, with a two-way radio stuck in the corner of a bloody garage or a laundry.” Delaney had feared it too. Businesses like that came and went. Winged ants in September were less transient. Kabbel's house though, double-brick, Federation style, looked like a permanent seat of business.

Kabbel welcomed them eloquently and showed them round the room. The two Kabbel boys came in in their turquoise blue uniforms, the one named Warwick, whom Delaney and Stanton had met recently over a pile of BMW hubcaps, and his younger more compact brother. They signed the gun register and took their weapons for the night. The young one took the normal .38 service revolver, but Warwick loaded and put in his holster the weapon which was an infallible sign of gun-happiness—a Magnum .357.

“Danielle,” said Kabbell, “is still packing the washing machined.” Stanton and Delaney looked at each other. “My daughter,” said Kabbel. “She keeps the office. A wonderful girl. The boys are, as I told you, named with hard-core Aussie names, but Danielle bears my mother's name. My maternal grandparents were Francophiles—they loved the French.”

“I know what it means,” said Stanton. “You don't have to explain every second bloody word for my sake.” (“I was a
Croato-bloody-phile
,” Stanton would say on the way home.)

Kabbel began to explain the scope of his business. Two hundred and twenty clients, but most of them in the twenty-five-dollar-a-week range. Now he had taken on a chain of fast-food chicken franchises—Golden Style. They were concerned about systematic damage to their premises, were certain it was engineered by a competing company.

“Damage?” asked Stanton. He didn't like the word.

“Minor gestures—tipped garbage bins. The car park of the branch at Rooty Hill strewn with refuse. A stone through a window. It's guerrilla warfare at that lower end of the chicken market. Golden Style feel that their former security company failed to patrol energetically enough, and that's all they ask of us—surveillance and energetic patrolling. It is not required, Mr. Stanton, in a world where so many genuine causes exist, that you endanger your life for Golden Style.”

It was with the flavor of those words in his mind, the redolence of “Golden Style,” one of those perfect names which are so much richer than the product they attach to, that Delaney first saw Danielle Kabbel. She came in carrying a hardcover book and a notepad, as if she habitually studied while manning—
womanning, personning
, whatever the feminists wanted it called—the radio. Like the younger of her brothers she bordered on being small. Like him she was perfectly made. And blond—the family of the Kabbels had that blondness gene in a big way. There was a delicate and beautiful furze on her lower arms. Golden Style.

Kabbel performed the introductions.

“Reading?” Delaney asked her, awkwardly but in a way that indicated—he hoped—a sympathy for books.

“I'm taking a novel course at the WEA,” she told him perfunctorily, and then showed how their system worked. If an alarm was activated on any of the client premises the computer screen displayed the code for that particular client; and in case she was asleep (Delaney had an image of her cheek down on her book, seated sleeping at the computer desk) or in case she was out of the room, the siren on the wall went off. She then called one of the patrolmen on the radio and he inspected the particular site. If a peripheral inspection indicated an intruder, she said, then she called the police and the owner. And that's it, she told Delaney and Stanton. The glamorous side of the business.

“And when do you sleep?” Delaney wanted to know.

“Generally between three o'clock and dawn,” she told him, placing a hand over her smile to keep her privacy. “I'm like my father,” she said. “Belorussians never sleep. It's metabolic.”

“We're like that bison I mentioned, gentlemen,” said Kabbel. “We sleep on our feet.”

“Oh,” murmured the girl, looking up from the radio, “he's already pushed Belorussian wildlife down your throats.”

On the way home, Stanton looked out at the sulphurous lights burning above the expressway. They always reminded Delaney of migraine. “A nice little piece, that Danielle, eh?”

PART TWO

7

137 Ave de Suffren
,

75724 PARIS

Cedex 15

August 3, 1982

Dearest Radislaw, Radek, Rudi, or whatever they call you there, I hope this letter is not too unwelcome. I was moved to write it after I met Frau Zusters—remember her?—in Berlin this summer. Albert has an interest in a string of supermarkets in West Germany—“Tante Marthe” they're called. If a housewife spends more than 65 marks she is given a blow-up plastic model of a cozy-looking woman called “Tante Marthe.” Albert got the idea from a chain in California in which he has an investment
.

Here we are, brother and sister, and haven't written to each other in years, since Father died, God help him, and I talk about inflatable damned dolls, as if it were the purpose of the letter. The doll came up though because of its resemblance to my memory of Frau Zusters. I am now older than widow Zusters was when we were sheltered in her house and I still consider myself a desirable woman—you'd say that's always been my problem. I make the point only as a reflection of the fact widow Zusters then probably still saw herself as a woman in her prime, even though my memory of her bears a close resemblance to a silly
Tante Marthe
doll
.

So during our Berlin visit this summer it played on me: Who was in that house these days? Was it still there? Perhaps the Russians destroyed it in those last few days? It's age, I think, working on me, and it's made worse by the fact we had lived through too much fatal history before we were fifteen. I could imagine myself now going back to see the DP camps at Michelstadt or Regensburg the way people go back to an old school. Fortunately those two
alma maters—
or
almae matres—
see how well Herr Hirschmann and Miss Tokina taught me before, in their different ways, they both “went east”?—fortunately Regensburg and Michelstadt, with all their camp spivs and operators, no longer exist. All the Displaced Persons have been Placed; Europe is finished with that particular piece of its gardening. I can still however make a fool of myself and go looking for Frau Zusters
.

The old house is what passes these days for an easy limousine drive from our hotel near the Europa Center. And you know, I found her without any trouble. The house is divided now, not into two apartments as in our day when half Berlin was bombed out, but into four. Frau Zusters occupies one and rents the other three out to young lawyers and businessmen and their growing families. She has been widowed a second time, so perhaps the dear old thing was a faster mover than she seemed to us to be. Her mind is clear as crystal. She reminded me of the day when we all went and lined up for her 300 grams of meat and that squad of kids turned up and dragged the dentist out of his surgery and beat him up for being defeatist. She told me that I sat on the park fence that day yelling, “I'm going to go and live in Paris.” “And you
do,”
she said. “You
do.”

She took me to the cellar because she said she had something to give me. She had kept in a trunk all Father's journals. She apologized that the cover of two of them had grown a little mildewed. I didn't tell her I was ignorant of the fact that Father had been a diarist, but I realized immediately he was exactly the sort of fellow who
would
write up a journal. He was vain enough—no, I'm not being a bitch, I use the term forgivingly—and really believed that he lived on what he would have called the cutting edge of history. And he thought we'd be all coming back through Berlin pretty soon, when the Allies turned on the Soviets. He'd pick them up on his way through back to Minsk
.

I took the dozen or so leather-covered notebooks she gave me. I had to. To refuse would have been an insult to her fidelity. I feel no curiosity about them. I suppose I remembered enough. On the other hand, I didn't want to burn them. He thought I was a bad daughter, but if he went to so much trouble to make special provision for them it wasn't my business to turn them to ash. You were the one he considered his heir. I became forever the adolescent whore who went off with the French sergeant in the DP camp. You were his little Belorussian survivor, and it is up to you now what is done with the journals
.

As well as this there is the problem, given that the Allies did not turn on the Russians and recapture Minsk and Staroviche, that Europe may not be a safe place for such memoirs. The names of your godfather Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and other Belorussian leaders appear often in histories of that period. There is a book published recently and written by an American intelligence officer of the era which complains that these men were given undue protection by the American Central Intelligence and by the British and French, that Ostrowsky and Abramtchik and Stankievich and all the others are war criminals and should be tried as such. In books of this nature Papa always merits at least a footnote because of a certain massacre carried out by Belorussian police and the SS on the Staroviche-Gomel road in 1941
.