Shooting Star (15 page)

‘Who knows? Encouraging you to go down fruitless avenues, I suppose.’

I didn’t understand. ‘What about Mark? Is he above suspicion?’

‘I think it’s crossed Tom’s mind that Anne’s kidnapping may be—how shall we put it—related to Mark’s activities.’

I wanted this spelled out. ‘Are you saying Tom thinks Anne’s kidnappers might be people Mark has had dealings with? But not the current deal?’

‘Not thinks that. Crossed his mind. And not the current deal, no.’

In the cold street, I hesitated, walked several blocks to the shoeshine stand and had my disreputable shoes polished. ‘Frank,’ said the Chilean, ‘you don have the right attitude to shoes. You got contempt for shoes.’

‘Contempt?’ I said. I was looking at four office workers out of their building for a smoke, all facing outwards, not dressed for the street, pulling at their cigarettes quickly, not talking, just addicts. ‘Contempt’s too strong, Ramon. I just don’t look down often enough.’

I GOT on at Museum Station, sat in the second row from the doors. Just before Flagstaff, Vella sat down opposite me. He put a Myer carrier bag between his feet, looked at his reflection in the train window, fiddled with his tie. I looked at his reflection too, examined his long-nosed face, eyes and hair and suit too black to show up against the underground darkness outside.

‘What the fuck’s this you’re doing?’ he said, barely audible.

‘Making ends meet, that kind of thing.’

‘Out of ten-year-old kidnaps? Someone’s paying?’

‘Not the kidnappers. I’ve taken a decision not to work for kidnappers.’

‘You should be inclusive,’ he said. ‘They’ve got their rights.’

We were cruising into Flagstaff, a soft hand on the brake. A young woman sitting opposite us got up and hung on the bar, hips canted. She was wearing high heels, a red suit with a short skirt, and pantyhose that gleamed like the skin of a fresh flesh-coloured fish. Vella looked at her, lechery betrayed only by long fingers stroking the hair on the back of his right hand. Her eyes flicked to him, held, she tossed her head, if a movement so minute could be a toss. Then she concentrated on the door.

The train stopped, the doors opened and she got out. But, on the platform, she turned her head and looked at Vella, lifted her chin, winked at him, a wink an audience would be able to see on a stage. It was an audacious wink, sexy. Then she was gone.

‘See that?’ said Vella.

I nodded.

‘What’s it mean? I jump off, go up to her, what?’

The doors closed, train shrugged and moved, gained speed. I said, ‘You tell her you’ve got a loving wife, two lovely kids, but, hey, what about a drink or something, we can just talk. That’s one possibility. Or…’

‘One’s enough,’ Vella said. He looked around. There was no one close, mid-morning lull, the commuter frenzy far away. He pushed the carrier bag over to my side with a foot, leaned forward, put his head down. His shoulders came up like a big black bird roosting.

‘Frank, getting this, offence number one, is taking my life in my fucking helpless hands. Giving it to you, number two. They will blow me away. There won’t be a foreskin to bury.’

I was grateful, but an unbeliever. ‘That bad? Shit, just the other day any prick could buy a file in a pub in St Kilda.’

He shook his head and pulled a face, looked around. ‘A file? A file? You think this is a file? There’s no file to get. There’s no paper. Files like this are history. I had to get you the whole SeineNet.’

‘The what?’

‘SeineNet. It’s what used to be ZygoNet.’

‘I thought they scrapped that.’

‘They did. Threw money at it and it couldn’t do half of what it was supposed to, so they canned it. Then it turns out they’ve been reinventing sex. Some secret Defence outfit in Canberra’s already done something much better for the Feds, version of a military logistics program.’

‘That’s not a promising pedigree,’ I said. ‘So now ZygoNet’s SeineNet. What does it do?’

The train was easing into Spencer Street.

‘Organises this massive abduction and missing persons database. Brought together after the Chee girl and the other one, forget the name. Took fifty million man, woman and person hours. Everything’s in it, known offenders, statements, interviews, doorknock sheets, every warrant, every suspect’s bio, all known addresses, bank statements, phone records, gas bills, electricity, you name it.’

He leaned closer. ‘But the bad news is it doesn’t come with a manual. So this may be of limited use to you. Whatever the fuck it is you’re doing.’

‘I’ve got better than a manual,’ I said.

Vella got off at Flinders Street. I went all the way back to Museum, rode the almost empty escalators up, everyone going the other way, black- and grey-clad people, faces pale in the hard underground light, people taken ill at work, going home early, going down towards home, an aspirin and a good lie-down.

‘JESUS CHRIST,’ said Orlovsky, staring at the large computer monitor. ‘I know this software.’

We were on the sixth floor of Carson House in Exhibition Street, in a huge work area, alone except for two women and a man looking at three-dimensional views of a tower building on a wall-mounted computer monitor.

‘My contact says it’s based on an army program for keeping track of how much the cooks, the clerks and the storepersons are stealing. The Feds are using it.’

Orlovsky made a noise of contempt. ‘Correction, the Feds would be using it if they could work out how to.’

‘Does that mean you know how to?’

He shook his head in pity. ‘Frank, it’s my software. I worked on it for fucking Defence. Two years of my life. This is what I was doing when…anyway, it’s mine. Partly. Largely.’

He concentrated on the screen, loaded and unloaded CDs. ‘Christ there’s a lot of data here,’ he said. ‘Text, program files, image files. Compressed to buggery.’

‘All we want is the Carson kidnap,’ I said.

‘Got the grunt here to run the whole thing.’ He hummed. ‘There’s a lot of sweat gone into this.’

‘It’s a sex substitute for people like you, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘Caress the keyboard, instant response, feelings of power and dominance.’

He didn’t look at me, tapped. ‘Sex add-on,’ he said. ‘For people like you, it could be a healthy substitute. But there’s nothing like real power and dominance is there, Frank? You should talk to Stephanie Chadwick. She’d understand you, your special needs.’

‘Sometimes,’ I said, ‘I think I should’ve left you snivelling in that tropical swamp, wearing your little blue towelling pyjamas and those nice slippers.’

‘Tropical paradise,’ he said. ‘Pure paternalism, Daddy knows best. I was happy there. Free drugs and some intelligent people to talk to. You ripped me away.’ He tapped. ‘We can do this. Yes.’

He looked happier than I’d seen him in years. ‘So what do you want to know? Captain.’

‘What can it tell me?’

‘Depends. Try something.’

I said, ‘See what it’s got under Carson.’

Orlovsky looked at me and shook his head. He tapped and the heading CARSON, ALICE and a date in 1990 came up, followed by menu boxes, dozens of them. ‘Be a bit more specific.’

I was reading the menu over his shoulder. ‘Crime scene.’

He tapped. ‘Stills or video?’

‘Video.’

More tapping. Almost instantly, we were watching film shot by a police camera inside a brightly-lit four-car garage, two cars in it. The camera panned around the space, walls, the floor, went up to the nearest car, a BMW with driver and front passenger doors open, circled it, looked into the driver’s side, into the footwells, along the dashboard, everywhere, came back to the passenger side and did the same. Then the camera left the garage through an open door and went slowly, painfully slowly, down a driveway, filming the brick paving, the verges, around a bend to a gateway with open spear-pointed steel gates. It filmed every square centimetre of the entrance and the pavement and gutter outside.

‘That’ll do,’ I said. ‘Records of interview.’

‘Who do you want?’

‘Alice. And the witnesses. I assume the driver of the car was a witness.’

He tapped again, produced a sketch, a view from behind of the BMW, both front doors open. A man wearing a balaclava was pulling a small schoolgirl out of the passenger side. On the other side, another man, short, also hooded, was pointing an automatic pistol at the driver.

‘Only witness,’ said Mick. ‘Dawn Yates. The nanny.’

He typed in her name. Her driver’s licence picture appeared, a woman in her late twenties, thirtyish, short fair hair, square jaw. She looked like a tennis coach or a gym instructor. Mick scrolled and her biographical details came up, her work history. She had been a nurse and a part-time karate instructor before taking the Carson job. Then a diagram appeared, a complex relationship diagram: Dawn’s family, family friends, their friends, Dawn’s friends, their families, their friends, all annotated with ages and jobs. Of the dozens of names, three were starred.

‘What’s that mean?’ I pointed at a star.

Mick tapped the asterisk on the keyboard. Three driver’s licence pictures appeared, two men and a woman, names, biographical details.

The woman was Dawn’s cousin’s wife. She had worked for an arm of the Carson empire in 1985–86. The men were both Carson employees, one an architect in Sydney, the other an office manager in Brisbane.

‘What about that bloke with the key next to his name?’

Tap, tap. Another face. ‘Did eighteen months in New South Wales for fraud. Her father’s cousin.’

‘Jesus, they shook Dawn’s tree,’ I said. ‘Can you print this stuff ?’

‘Gee, that’s a hard one.’

‘Print Alice’s interviews, will you?’

When he’d issued the command, Orlovsky said, ‘That’s it? That’s all you want? They give you a banquet and all you want is a fucking cocktail sausage roll?’

‘I’m tired, Mick. Brilliant inquiries will come to me. Can you get into the system from outside?’

He gave me the kind of look I’d once given him, the look that said, shape up Sunshine, the day’s just beginning, it can only get worse from here, looked away, started fiddling with the computer.

Happy now, in charge, happy as he could be. Who could know how happy that was?

‘First I’ve got to make it hard for anyone else to get into,’ he said.

I went over to the printer, watched the paper being spat into the collating trays, felt the ache growing in my back, the pointmen of pain advancing down my legs.

IN ORLOVSKY’S car, just after 9 p.m., the long night before and the whole of Tuesday felt in the spine, crossing the Yarra bridge, smart Southbank glowing on the right, people eating and drinking there, lots of other people about, the city alive, the water not its daytime mud-grey, now a surface that reflected and glittered. The city’s Arno, romantic. Behind us, Flinders Street station, the first of the night people on the steps: prey, predators, and the guardians, young cops from nice families in the suburbs, from the country towns, getting their taste of the real, their eyes getting harder every night.

The studio was in South Melbourne, not too far from the premises of Cairncross & Associates, whose operative had reported both Pat Carson and a woman in a red Alfa leaving Conrad Street not long after we did. Pat had gone home and hadn’t moved today. I’d called them off.

I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, opened them to see the technician behind the glass saying things I couldn’t hear into the black stalk in front of his mouth. He looked down at the console in front of him, then his voice was startling in my ear.

‘They’re ready if we are, Mr Calder. Try not to look away to right or left or down for too long. It’s disconcerting for the other party. Ready, are we?’

I nodded at him. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking at something else. ‘Ready,’ I said.

A young woman appeared on the big monitor on the wall, her right hand at her right ear. She was looking straight at me, a thin, intelligent face, no makeup that I could see, short dark hair in no style, just combed back, straight line of eyebrows, almost meeting, ungroomed.

It was just after 9.30 a.m. for her and Alice Carson, kidnap victim, almost a murder victim, was looking at me on her studio monitor somewhere in London. She looked fresh for someone who had been woken by a telephone call from her father at 5.30 a.m.

‘Good morning, Ms Carson,’ I said. ‘I’m Frank Calder. Your father’s told you who I am and the reason for this. May I call you Alice?’

She seemed startled by the question, nodded. ‘Yes, yes, of course. Good…evening.’ She was nervous, you could see it in her mouth.

‘I know this is difficult for you,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t think about asking you to do it if it could be avoided.’

She nodded again. ‘That’s all right.’ She paused. ‘I’m in a bit of shock at…at the news. I don’t really know Anne well, but…’ She tailed off, blinking rapidly, said, ‘I don’t know what I can tell you that…it’s so long ago. I try not to think about it.’

Across half the world, we were looking at each other as though we had eye contact. We did have eye contact. I could see her swallow, see the cords in her neck move. I smiled, she responded, smiled back, a tight smile.