The Unknown Terrorist (15 page)

“Yes—yes—yes.”

And the Doll would know it was something else.

How sad the world was! Doof music lied: it told the girls and the men that they were still young, that youth was forever, death always tomorrow, energy boundless, and that life was as relentless, as insistent in its promise of momentum for the better as the one hundred and forty beats per minute of the track playing. She could strip to a lie, because it gave her a mask. But Chopin brought her soul rushing back into her body, no matter how she fought to keep it out. With Chopin she knew the terrible, wretched truth: she was naked and alone.

When she had finished her undressing and parading, Moretti would leave and she would not see him again. The Doll would get back into her clothes, walk out through the main lounge room, and into the hallway. There by the wall opposite the Miró painting was a Louis XV side table on which was displayed a framed photograph and a blue ceramic tray.

One day she had picked the photograph up and looked
closely, trying to square it with what little he had told her: a head-on collision with a tip truck in the early morning. The black and white was of a young man with a magnificent body, muscled thighs bulging out of the tight shorts fashionable in the 1970s. The beach she recognised as the favourite of the west, Cronulla, and it always struck her as an odd place for a child of the rich to be. But it was the body that she could never reconcile with that of the hideous, mutilated remains of the car smash that she knew as Frank Moretti. For the young man was beautiful.

If the photograph intrigued the Doll, it was the three one-hundred-dollar bills lying in the blue ceramic tray waiting for her in payment as she left that compelled her weekly attention. Such was their arrangement, such was their strange ritual, as regular as morning tv and just as pointless, though, for the Doll, at least more lucrative.

But that day she had not even finished her routine when Frank Moretti’s mobile bleeped with a text message. He looked down at the phone, grunted and, without a word, disappeared into his office. The Doll waited, and when after some time he had still not returned, she dressed and went into the kitchen to get a drink of water.

Next to the fridge, a small LCD screen that slid out from a cupboard at chest height—Moretti height—was on, with a television infotainment program running. The Doll poured herself a glass of water. The tv’s burbling transformed into an advertisement for magnetic mattress covers. The Doll could sense the drugs wearing off and she was feeling scratchy. She needed to feel zonked again, she told herself. She was shaking so much that she spilt the water.

“Yes, that’s right, Holly,” a voice on the television was saying as the Doll mopped up the spill, “we have a national exclusive tonight on
Undercurrent
, here on Six.”

The Doll glanced up at the screen to see a man, slightly twisted to the camera in a way that seemed familiar, doing some sort of outdoors broadcast, constantly touching with his index finger a coiled wire running into his ear.

“Tonight,” said the man, “we’re able to reveal the true identity of ‘the unknown terrorist’ as she has become …”

Then she recognised him: it was that creep, Richard Cody.

43

When the Doll came back to her senses there was some amateur footage of a man—or was it a woman?—swaddled in black, brandishing a machine gun on the tv, followed by other scenes she recalled as being from the massacre of school children at Beslan. And trailing in the wake of these was a series of images that had almost nothing to do with each other, but which to the Doll felt somehow inescapable—as if there were a logic in their ordering that demanded a yet unknown conclusion; as if they were the opening quick cuts summarising a series’ shows prior to its cataclysmic finale. On the screen, child’s body after child’s body was laid out; and this was followed by some of the things she had already seen—one of the kids’ backpacks being unzipped to reveal the bomb inside, the armed police taking up position around Tariq’s apartment block; the bad photograph of a bearded man in Arabic-looking dress who may or may not have been Tariq;
the slow-motion grainy, dark images of she and Tariq hugging each other.

Richard Cody was talking again.

“Incredibly,” he was saying, and here the camera zoomed out to reveal him standing in Kings Cross, with the Chairman’s Lounge behind him, “in what may just be the cover of all covers, it turns out that this possible ‘unknown terrorist’—I stress possible—is no other than a lap dancer at this club right here, behind me, who was known as—and wait for this—the Black Widow! Now, as we know, this is the same name given to militant Islamic women prominent in suicide attacks in Russia.”

It couldn’t be, thought the Doll. It wasn’t possible. It was a dream, a terrible dream. The television cut back to the anchor, a woman with improbable cheekbones.

“This sounds incredible, Richard. What it does mean in terms of national security?”

There was a long pause while the woman just continued staring out of the television. The Doll felt something dry and round like a pebble on her tongue that she tried to swallow but could not force down her throat. Richard Cody reappeared, touched an earpiece with his index finger, and started talking again.

“I’m sorry, I just lost you there, Holly. Yes, incredible is the word. The Chairman’s Lounge is a very exclusive establishment and the Black Widow would have had access to some of Australia’s top political and business leaders there. And we will be revealing all this,
and
the lap dancing terrorist’s true identity, here, tonight, on
Undercurrent
.”

The Doll turned away and, as she did so, felt a strange
dizziness rise inside, as though she were on the verge both of falling into some terrible void while at the same time being that very emptiness. She leant against the sink to steady herself.

“And here at Six,” said the woman anchor, “we’ll be keeping you up to date with the latest breaking news on this story as it comes to hand.”

‘Oh God, oh God!’ the Doll panicked, ‘there’s no way out of this!’ Her mind raced through the many things she might do and on reflection not one seemed a good idea. The police, if she turned herself in, were not going to believe her; she worried that the media, if she approached them, would set her up, while killing herself seemed attractive but painful and difficult. And so she hoped that something outside of herself would change and prove her innocent, just as something outside her had changed and seemed to be turning her into an outlaw.

Moretti was still talking on the phone. The Doll knocked on his office door. He looked up and she waved a farewell. Without a word or expression Moretti looked back down and resumed talking.

On her way out, she paused in the entrance hallway in front of the Miró. Her phone began ringing. She was shaking. She looked at the phone but it was no number she recognised. She dropped the phone back in her bag and let it ring out. Everything seemed to be swaying as if there were an earthquake: the Miró, the blue ceramic tray, the table, the room … and the Doll momentarily tensed her legs so that she might not fall. But the hallway was moving around her, rising, sloping, dropping and shifting, no matter where she stood or how she held herself.

‘Focus on the money,’ she said to herself, as she had so often said to herself in the past when some aspect of life had gone against her. ‘Three hundred dollars will give me … will give me … makes …’ But the world was whirling and once more her phone was ringing. Her mind could not do the simple maths. She did not know what it would make, and not knowing what it would make, it became unclear what the money might actually mean.

The Doll snatched up the three one-hundred-dollar notes from the blue ceramic tray, tried to hold on to them, but they were just pieces of dry paper, they were leaves in a park that children chase in the wind and can never catch, and a hundred-dollar note fell out of her trembling fingers onto the floor. She dropped down, snatched it up, and put the cash in her purse as her phone began ringing yet again. ‘Focus on the money,’ she told herself, as she fumbled for her phone and turned it off. ‘Just the money.’

When she stepped outside, the heat hit her body, held her throat. The Doll walked back down the road, concentrating on moving, not hoping, not fearing, but walking, getting on, trying to think of money. But her mind would not work: she couldn’t remember whether it was $49,700 she had saved, or whether it was $47,900; if it was $300 left to save or $2,100, or if it was $21,000 that was her target. She couldn’t calculate whether it was another three weeks of the man who ate the sun eating her arse out with his eyes, or one week, or several months before she could stop this, be free of it forever.

It was all a blur, everything was a horrible blur of numbers that no longer had any meaning. So instead the Doll
tried to see the hundred-dollar notes covering her body and imagine where she would place these next three notes, but all she could see was the wind blowing the notes everywhere and she could not bring her mind to heel and make the wind stop blowing. She tried so hard to see her body slowly disappearing as if by magic, money papering over it. But her body would not disappear, she was naked, the earth was blowing away in a cyclone, and still she was naked.

44

The Doll got off the ferry at Circular Quay. If she was still bewildered by all that was happening, the boat trip had at least been good in helping her mind settle on one thing: she would—she had to—go to the police. But how and where? She paused for a moment under the cool shadow of the Cahill Expressway, trying to think, to decide on some clear course of action.

But as the traffic’s violent rumbling seeped into her from the great iron-clad causeway above, her mind returned to its previous turmoil and all certainty abandoned her. For a moment she again toyed with the idea of not going to the police. But, she then thought, if she didn’t go they would hunt her down. With their guns and helicopters they would find her anyway and they would kill her.

No, no, she then reprimanded herself, this was just allowing herself to panic. She had to stay cool, she had to go to the police, for only in this way could the nightmare be ended. But she would not turn herself in to the next cop she saw on a street corner, no, she didn’t want to be alone with
a cop. Far safer, thought the Doll, to go to a cop shop where there were too many witnesses for anything awful to happen. And somehow she felt a certain security in the idea of going into the cop shop as a free and innocent woman.

But as she began walking into town toward the city police station, she started to remember stories about bent Sydney coppers. She began to fear that she would be framed and locked away forever. And in the heat that built the further she got from the harbour and the deeper she went into the city, she found herself beginning to slow and dawdle. But it was only when she turned into George Street that she took fright.

She had walked straight into a police cordon. There were cops and cars and lights and a sense of slight panic everywhere. For a moment—when a big biker cop in jodhpurs turned and stared at her with his thuggish face—she was convinced she was about to be shot dead. It felt to the Doll that they were waiting for her, that it was an ambush. It took all her self-control not to turn and run.

“Anthrax scare,” he said to her in a surprisingly soft voice, but it was too late. As she retreated into the heart of the crowd rather than trying to skirt it, she saw through bobbing heads white-suited emergency workers walking beneath portable showers. Staying in the middle of a throng that broke off from the main crowd, she headed away as quickly as she could.

Still, she pressed on. She had to, she told herself, trying to ignore her body that was somehow quivering as she walked. She skirted the edge of Chinatown, past Chinese girls with bleached hair and Chinese punks in bright nylon trackies in
spite of the stinking heat. She turned into a narrow street and headed down a hill toward Darling Harbour. At its intersection with a main road was the city cop shop—a wedge-shaped building, mirror glassed down to its ominously black-tiled bottom storey. It reminded the Doll of a chain-mailed fist. ‘What goes on inside?’ she wondered. ‘Why can’t you see in?’ Her stomach began churning.

But she stuck to her purpose and walked to the police station’s public entrance. Inside was a small waiting room full of people, and, apart from a confectionery and drinks dispenser, devoid of furnishings. A man who seemed off his face on something was gibbering beneath a domestic violence poster, a Chinese girl was quietly sobbing near the drinks dispenser, a few others were chatting, while a lone drunk was swearing and mumbling to himself. Behind the counter a couple of uniformed cops and a receptionist were trying to sort the confusion into some order of official documents and formal statements.

She welcomed the strange crowd, seeing in it a disguise and, in the waiting it imposed on her, a final chance to ready herself, to prepare in her head what she would say. A man stood two in front of her in the queue for the counter. He was middle-aged and burly, dressed in big boots, shorts and a t-shirt, covered in concrete dust. Occasionally he turned around and she could see his eyes, bright red from irritation, like vivid make-up against his grey-dusted face. He looked like the ghost of a tradesman. The Doll caught him saying something about a restraining order his wife had out on him. The woman behind the counter was polite. A little later he began yelling how he just wanted to see his kids. The woman
remained calm, even, thought the Doll, gentle, and tried to quieten him down, but he only yelled louder.

“I’m the victim here,” he yelled. “Not that bitch.” A cop came out of a door and was walking up to him, when the man pulled a knife out of his shorts. “Why can’t I see my kids?” he yelled. “I just want to see my kids.”

And then there were cops everywhere, spilling into the room, some with drawn batons, shoving the waiting room crowd away from the man, who was now waving the knife back and forth, while one pulled a revolver and was shouting,