Blood Is a Stranger

Allen & Unwin's House of Books aims to bring Australia's cultural and literary heritage to a broad audience by creating affordable print and ebook editions of the nation's most significant and enduring writers and their work. The fiction, non-fiction, plays and poetry of generations of Australian writers that were published before the advent of ebooks will now be available to new readers, alongside a selection of more recently published books that had fallen out of circulation.

The House of Books is an eloquent collection of Australia's finest literary achievements.

Roland Perry is one of Australia's best-known authors. Born in 1946, he began his writing career at
The Age
newspaper in Melbourne, starting in 1969. After five years spent in the United Kingdom making documentary films, he published his first novel,
Program for a Puppet,
which was an international bestseller, in 1979. He has since written over twenty more books, many of which have gone on to become non-fiction bestsellers, including
The Don,
the definitive biography of Donald Bradman,
Miller's Luck, The Changi Brownlow, The Australian Light Horse and Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War.

HOUSE
of
BOOKS

ROLAND PERRY

This edition published by Allen & Unwin House of Books in 2012

First published by William Heinemann Australia in 1988

Copyright © Roland Perry 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone:    (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:     [email protected]

Web:       
www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

www.trove.nla.gov.au

ISBN 978 1 74331 375 6 (pbk)

ISBN 978 1 74343 082 8 (ebook)

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Epilogue

To my son, Anton

May you enjoy this story before too long

Ken Cardinal didn't want to look
at the body. He could feel the chill in the ante room of the morgue, and he fought hard to control himself. The trolley was pushed towards him and the three men from the US Embassy by the coroner and an assistant. The sheet was pulled down. Cardinal grimaced. The face had been blasted away.

The more he looked, the more his fears surfaced. The height, the colour of his hair, and the shape of the body confirmed the Embassy people's claim, based on fingerprints, blood type, and dental records, that it was Harold Ian Cardinal.

He examined a scar on his son's right shoulder caused by an operation after a football injury and searched for another mark from a fall on his right elbow when he was only twelve. It was there, thin, long and almost indiscernible. He noticed a gold ring on the small finger of the left
hand and examined it. It was engraved HIC. Cardinal stood back and nodded.

‘You're sure?' the coroner said.

‘Yes,' Cardinal said, making an effort to keep his voice steady.

‘The police will want you to be certain,' Bob Paton, the Embassy man from Canberra said to Cardinal. ‘Take your time. If you have any doubts, we can come back later.'

Cardinal shook his head.

A police officer who had entered the room behind them said, ‘You have no doubts at all?'

‘It must be him. The records say . . .'

‘I'm not concerned with the records,' the officer said.

‘I want to know what you think.'

‘It's him.' Cardinal nodded again.

The police officer eyed Cardinal and the Embassy men around him. He seemed agitated. The coroner's assistant began to cover the body.

‘You said there were other wounds,' Cardinal said, glancing at Paton.

‘He was also shot in the back,' the coroner said as the sheet covered the body again. Cardinal stared at the coroner.

‘I want to see it,' Cardinal said. The assistant whipped the sheet back and flipped the body over. There was a hole about two centimetres in diameter near the base of the spine. Cardinal leaned over it and noticed other marks he had forgotten about. The birthmark like a tiny map of the US just under the right shoulder blade; the mole in the small of his back.

‘He was shot by two people?' Cardinal asked, looking at all the other faces.

‘Most likely,' the coroner said. Cardinal watched as the sheet went over the body once more.

‘It seems he was shot by two weapons,' Cardinal said. He undid the buttons on a tight-fitting sports jacket to reveal the beginnings of a middle-aged paunch, against
which even solid daily exercise was losing the battle. He turned to the officer. ‘The head looks as if it took a shotgun blast. But the spine wound is from a smaller gun.'

The officer nodded. ‘At about five paces,' he said. ‘The head wound was at point-blank range.'

‘The shot in the back must have been first,' Cardinal said, running a hand over his face. His ruddy, vein-streaked complexion became palid.

‘We haven't ascertained that yet,' the coroner said.

‘You don't blow a person's head away,' Cardinal said, ‘and then shoot him in the back!'

‘There's no telling with terrorists,' Paton mumbled as he took Cardinal by the arm.

The trolley was pulled away as he and Paton walked towards an elevator.

‘There are a few details,' Paton continued intimately, ‘but the most important is what you want to do with your son. You can either send him to New York or have him cremated here.'

‘I just don't know,' Cardinal said huskily. ‘What's normal?'

They reached an elevator.

‘It's better if he is cremated here,' Paton said. ‘Having the body flying all over the place can be distressing for the family.'

The lift came, and Cardinal found himself alone with Paton.

‘Funny isn't it?' Cardinal said. ‘Harry was born twenty-five years after me. It's wrong.'

‘We're doing all we can,' Paton said, staring blankly at the floor numbers as they flashed on and off.

‘We had little in common,' Cardinal continued, ‘but in an odd way we were close. We fought a lot, but there were no grudges.' He glanced at Paton who was trying to look sympathetic. ‘He was headstrong. He was probably doing something crazy when he . . .' Cardinal paused.

‘We think he was doing something courageous,' Paton
said. ‘He was trying to stop the abduction of one of his colleagues.'

The lift stopped.

‘Have you any friends here you want us to contact?' Paton asked.

‘Not really,' Cardinal said. ‘There were a couple of Aussies I fought with in Korea.'

‘Do you remember their names?'

‘Willow Wilson and Ernie Stone,' Cardinal said. ‘They both lived in Melbourne. But, hell, I haven't been in touch with them for thirty years.'

They stepped out of the building into brilliant spring sunshine. Cardinal strode off, and the short, podgy Paton had trouble keeping up with him.

‘I could brief you now if you wished,' Paton said. Cardinal shook his head. He had not slept for forty hours, and he wanted to be alone to think. He wandered back to the Sheraton Wentworth Hotel in Elizabeth Street.

His restless mind darted over what he knew of Harry's work in search for some clues. Harry had been approached by some people from the federal government for an assignment in Australia, but he had shown perverse delight in keeping the details from his inquisitive father.

After several teasing conversations, Cardinal gleaned that some US Strategic Defence Initiative – Star Wars – contracts had secretly gone to Australia. Harry was to be involved in a clandestine venture using his expertise in lasers. It meant a minimum of two years based in Sydney and work at the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor. But after a year, the Australian government changed, and the Star Wars contract was dropped. It seemed the prodigal would return home. It was about this time that he began to have money problems. He asked for help, and his father obliged to the tune of about five thousand dollars over a few months. Cardinal then feared that Harry might return to
his drug habit, which he had started when he was at Stanford. He had been using cocaine heavily for some time and had drifted into drug dealing to pay for his costly habit. But then the pleas for money in letters and reverse charge calls from Australia stopped abruptly. Harry boast' ed about a new – unspecified – job, still at Lucas Heights. He mentioned a salary increase and some new play things: an expensive sports car and a power boat. There was even talk of his buying the seven hundred thousand dollar house he was renting in Bronte.

Cardinal thought about his confused feelings for Harry, his only child. They had been drawn together eight years earlier when Cardinal's wife had died of cancer. But, even then, it was a battle. They were polarised on so many issues that Cardinal had joked that Harry could not possibly be his progeny. Politics, particularly, was a sore point. Cardinal was apolitical but voted Democrat; Harry made Reagan look like a Marxist.

Cardinal had pushed him into Radley, a leading British private school, for two years and had made sure that he travelled widely through Europe. Just when Harry's views seemed to have been tempered, Thatcher launched Britain into a nasty war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.