The Unknown Terrorist (18 page)

And as parts of her day began coming back to her—the politician on the radio saying terrorists needed to be eliminated; the sight of Cody on the telly at Moretti’s saying he knew who she was; the way on the plasma screens at the shopping centre they made her look like something off a porn movie—the Doll’s voice began rising.

“But it’s not true, Wilder. It’s not true. And now, every hour, it’s growing, like slobbering dogs they are, and now it’s not even—”

The Doll was about to say Tariq’s name, but then it all came flooding back—the phone, the alley, the Corolla and the tinkly Chopin and the vibrating flies and the boot lid bouncing and the stench rising, that stench that seemed to be welling back up in her nostrils now, and she couldn’t bear to tell Wilder what she had seen. Once more, panic was gripping her.

“It’s all changed,” the Doll said. “Can’t you see? It’s me they’re after, Wilder.” And then she cried out, “They’re going to kill me!” and the Doll could no longer hold back her sobbing.

“Don’t be stupid,” Wilder said, pulling the Doll’s face into her shoulder to stifle her so she wouldn’t wake her sleeping son, and bustling her out of the doorway and down the hall. “That sort of thinking is good for nothing.”

“It’s good for this—” the Doll said, pulling her head away from Wilder, “now I understand life. People aren’t good or bad, Wilder, they’re just weak.” And with that, she dropped her gaze to the floor and repeated the word as if it were one she had never heard before. “Weak?” she said, “Weak … weak…”

Then the Doll’s mind seemed to clarify and she looked back up at Wilder and, her voice now louder and clearer, said: “They go with power—you understand me? What else can they do? What the fuck else can anybody do?”

She scruffed hold of Wilder’s shirt and pulled her in so tight and so close that Wilder could feel her shouting as damp wind on her face. Wilder tried once more to quieten
her, running her hand through the Doll’s freshly cut bob as if she were a child. The Doll jerked her head away.

“No, Wilder, no. You’ve got to listen to me,” she continued, her voice edgy and brittle. “People like fear. We all want to be frightened and we all want somebody to tell us how to live and who to fuck and why we should do this and think that. And that’s the Devil’s job. That’s why I’m important to them, Wilder, because if you can make up a terrorist you’ve given people the Devil. They love the Devil. They need the Devil. That’s my job. You get me?”

But it was clear Wilder got none of it. For her there was goodness and only goodness, and the Devil didn’t exist in her view of the world, and any talk of him or evil was just so much superstitious claptrap.

By now the Doll was hysterical. She had never thought such things before but having said them they seemed at once inescapably true and terrifying, and she felt as if some evil force were burning up her veins.

“I’m the Devil!” she was crying, and tendrils of hot snot ran out of her nostrils and rose back up with her sobbing breathing. “I’m the Devil, don’t you get me?”

Wilder tried to calm her, saying it was all right, that everything would be all right, not listening to what the Doll was trying to tell her.

But nothing was all right anymore. Part of the Doll wanted to say to Wilder that it was all too late, that this was some sort of reckoning. She wanted to say that she did not disagree with such a reckoning or object to its justice or its injustice, its truth or untruth; no, the Doll realised that now all she wanted was to escape, but it was not clear how that
might happen. And that was when she broke down completely and told Wilder that Tariq was dead.

49

Wilder was talking, but the Doll wasn’t listening. The Doll no longer had any sense of what was the right or wrong thing to do. The inexorable chain of events that she had not initiated and that bore less and less relation to her life invited a certain fatalism. To do something or to do nothing, it made no difference: whatever was going to happen would happen.

Wilder had sat her down, saying,

“It can be fixed.”

Wilder had brought her food: takeaway Pad Thai noodles she had found in her fridge and reheated, saying,

“You have to look at your options.”

Which struck the Doll as not the same thing at all. The Doll had options, but none of them fixed anything. The Doll forced herself to eat, but after a few forkfuls she stopped. She was without hunger. Food seemed in some way an impediment, something that might slow her down should she suddenly have to run.

The first option, according to Wilder, was for the Doll to give herself up. But both agreed that the original problem was worse now: who was to say the police would believe the Doll or that they wouldn’t frame her? The Doll pushed the noodles this way then that on the plate.

The second option was to do a runner. Everyone knew faking ID was easy, said the Doll, until you had to fake it, and without it she couldn’t get out of the country. Wilder was
unsure how you might do a runner when it was clear from television series and movies that the police could track credit and bank cards.

“Luckily I’ve never had them anyway,” said the Doll.

But nor, as Wilder pointed out, did she have her cash.

The third option was to stay at Wilder’s and wait until they found her. Both were sure it would only be a matter of time before the police came knocking on Wilder’s door with questions. Or with guns. They would come, the Doll thought, as she was sure they had come to find Tariq, in black and with their high-powered rifles, ready to kill him. And who was to say they hadn’t? Who knew whose gun had fired into his poor head?

“They shoot to kill!” the Doll suddenly cried out, dropping her fork and bursting into tears. And she would have sobbed for a long time, but some instinct told her she couldn’t and mustn’t.

Both women were quiet for a few minutes.

“My money,” the Doll said then. “I’m not going to lose my money.” On this, if nothing else, the Doll was determined. And as money had once been the solution to her life, now it would be the solution to her problems.

“With my money I can buy my way out of this,” the Doll said, admitting in the next breath that she didn’t know how she would do such a thing, but do it she would.

Wilder reasoned that if the Doll was too frightened to give herself up and even more frightened of waiting, if she was too frightened of fetching the money herself, then she should find somewhere else to hide tonight, and in the morning Wilder would go to the Doll’s flat and fetch the money for her.

But where else to go? A hotel would be good, some busy fleapit where she was unlikely to be recognised. Wilder disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared.

“Here,” she said, handing across a Visa card. “Take this. You’re not going to get into a hotel just with cash. They’ll want a card for security, and we don’t want you putting across mine.”

The Doll looked at the card. Punched in awkward block lettering across the plastic was the name Evelyn Muir.

“My mum,” said Wilder. “She remarried not long before her death, that’s why she’s not Evelyn Wilder. But he died, then she died, and I got lumbered with the funerals and the credit card bill. I never got round to closing it down, and for some reason—maybe because she was buried as Evelyn Wilder—the bank never shut it down. The statements kept arriving, and I thought maybe one day it’ll be good for something.”

They got out the phone book and looked for a hotel. Although Wilder thought it might be safer, she knew her friend well enough not to suggest something out in the west, and she instead searched for something closer to the city. They made a few calls, got a few prices, and settled on a hotel near Double Bay that was surprisingly cheap. Wilder booked a room there for the next four nights, arguing that any longer might appear suspicious.

After a good half-hour wait, the Doll said goodbye and eased herself into the back seat of a taxi that smelt of aerosol deodorant and vomit. In front of an air vent a toy propeller spun pointlessly, for the obese taxi driver, encapsulated like some Jurassic embryo in the taxi’s protective Perspex egg,
seemed to absorb most of the air con’s breeze as some cryogenic blessing, while exuding an ammonia-like odour as a flower does pollen.

In an attempt to expose as little of her thighs to the sticky vinyl upholstery marbled with Kaposi’s sarcomas of oily grime, the Doll propped herself on the seat’s edge. And at that moment as she sat forward, a thought, a vision of a person, a course of action, and a sense of relief all rushed into the Doll’s mind and merged into one overriding purpose. Of course, she thought, changing her mind now would involve certain humiliations, yes, there would be no doubt of that, but she was up for it. It was still a solution.

“Forget Double Bay,” the Doll said to the obese taxi driver. “I’m going to Mosman.”

50

There would be a price, always there was a price, but as she rode over the Harbour Bridge, the Doll now realised that whatever it was she was only too willing to pay. She would go and see Moretti, the sooner the better; she would tell him of all that had befallen her, she would hustle and he would help her.

And having made a decision, life felt better—for the Doll believed that now there would be a path out of this mess. As the glomesh stilettos that were the North Sydney high-rises fell away behind her, she thought how soon she would be back to covering her body with money and buying her own piece of the city. She would be happy and she would be free. She just had to do whatever it took, and if it took
Moretti and whatever revolting things he might ask for, well, so be it.

But when the Doll arrived at Moretti’s mansion, it was not dark and quiet as she had envisaged. Nor was he alone. All the lights were on and there was a black BMW four-wheel drive and two Mercedes parked out front.

The Doll no longer felt quite so sure what exactly she would tell Moretti, or what she might ask him to do—how did someone explain all that had happened? Her situation seemed so extreme, so ridiculous, that for a moment she doubted herself. And wealthy though he might be, what, after all, could someone like Moretti do? Even if he understood, even if he believed her—what on earth could he do to help? And everything that had seemed plain and obvious only a few moments before now seemed complicated and idiotic.

The Doll would have turned and run at that moment, except that in her confusion she had already rung the doorbell, and a woman with bandy legs beneath a blue apron was there answering—some sort of servant, the Doll guessed from her dress.

Because she had to speak, the Doll said:

“Could you just tell Mr Moretti that Krystal is here.”

The woman looked at her closely.

“What name?”

“Krystal,” said the Doll.

The woman looked at her blankly, and the Doll felt humiliated when the woman repeated:

“Crystal?”

“Thank you,” said the Doll, smiling at the lousy bitch.

The woman disappeared. From inside came the chilling laughter of the invited. After some time, the Doll heard the whir of an electric motor and Moretti came around the corner.

“Yes?” he said, not even bothering to say her name. Moretti’s manner was the opposite of when she came on Monday mornings: it was cold and annoyed. Behind his red Porsche glasses his eyes no longer looked large and dopey, but small and sharp as lasers.

“I’m sorry, Mr Moretti,” the Doll told him, because she had to tell him something.

And as she stood in front of his elegant cedar door, looking down at him in his wheelchair, her mind gridlocked. It was as if everything that had happened to her in the last few days appeared again all at once and her brain jammed and she could find no words to make any of her memories move.

Her own life felt to her only an ever more inaccurate reflection of what the media was saying about her. And maybe instead of fighting this, she began to think her real role was to find a way of agreeing with the television, the radio, the newspapers, not fighting and denying them, not coming here to Moretti’s hoping to escape them. After all, it was important to agree and obey. One had to conform, that was what mattered, even with a new role she hated as much as that of terrorist.

And standing there, throwing herself on the mercy of a miserable fuck like Moretti, she realised this was madness, but then what wasn’t? To agree with the world, to disagree—what was she to do? Something the Doll could not understand had happened, something so vast and so horrible
that she had no words for it, but this thing had happened and somehow she was to blame. Standing in front of Moretti, she was simply aware of suddenly feeling strangely and terribly guilty. Perhaps what was wrong was not the world, she thought, but her in not agreeing with the world, and it was this of which she was guilty.

She needed to tell Moretti all these contradictory things, ask for his explanation of them as well as his protection. But her mind remained frozen, and still she had not one word for any of it.

“Your time is Monday morning,” Moretti said. “If I want you any other time I’ll tell you.” He gave the cedar door a feeble push to shut it.

Realising she had to do something, the Doll put an arm out to stop the door shutting.

“I’ve lost my wallet,” she suddenly exclaimed. She felt her mouth smiling and though her voice was trembling, she heard herself smoothly lying as if it were just another night in the club. “I think I may have left it here.”

“I have seen nothing,” Moretti said.

“You mind if I come in?” she smiled. “Quickly look?”

“I have guests,” Moretti replied, his meaning clear.

The Doll said nothing, but nor did she turn to go.

“All right,” Moretti said, finally relenting. “Let yourself out when you’ve finished.” His wheelchair arced in a semicircle as he turned to leave, then swivelled back around. “You’ll need more than hair dye to save you,” he said. “Consider our arrangement ended and this our last meeting.” And with that he spun around and whirred back into the dining room.

The Doll remained standing in the doorway. She felt a slut; a lousy, stinking slut. She knew she should not have been there. She realised now that even if she had known how to tell Moretti about what had happened, he would not have helped, for clearly he knew a bit of it and his only concern was to cut her adrift.