The Unknown Terrorist (29 page)

80

As they were leaving the pub, Tony Buchanan offered a final defence of Nick Loukakis. They were standing in the shade of the pub awning, pausing before having to once more move in the heat.

Out on the pavement a short, stocky man, clad only in board shorts, came hurtling along on a large skateboard pulled by a dog in a harness. He was travelling at such speed that a woman stepped back into a pavement table to get out of his way. Tony Buchanan looked up and shook his head. Siv Harmsen yelled out, “Fuckwit!” then turned back round.

“Listen, Tony, even if you’re right,” he said, “you couldn’t
change any of it. This story, you know, it serves a bigger purpose, the big picture, right?”

Tony Buchanan watched as Siv Harmsen used his fingers to extract a shred of steak from next to his eyetooth, and then swallowed the rag of recalcitrant meat.

“Let’s suppose we’re wrong,” said Siv Harmsen, closing in now. “Just for a minute, let’s suppose that. You with me?”

“Guess so,” said Tony Buchanan.

“And you know what? It’s still important that the public know these bastards are out there. That this is going to happen here. And that they need people like us to stop it. It’s important that the public know they have people like us looking over them. That’s very important. I’m sure you can understand that. How bad would it look if we were wrong? What a victory for bin Laden’s bastards that would be! People out there don’t understand all the threats, all the issues, how we have a war between good and evil happening here. How can they? People are fools, and we need to give them lessons as to what is important and what isn’t, don’t you think?”

“I think people need to know the truth, Siv.”

“Look, mate, I went to Bali. I saw what the arseholes did. That’s truth. But Australia didn’t see that truth. Not the bits of charred goo that was someone yesterday. The terrorists want to turn all our cities into Baghdad. It’s bloody fright-ening, Tony, and people need to be frightened. And that’s part of our job, too.”

“I thought you just said people were already frightened,” said Tony Buchanan.

“Not enough,” said Siv Harmsen. “Never enough.” He sprayed some breath freshener into his mouth, put the spray
back in a trouser pocket, then extended his hand to shake farewell and smiled. “People are fools. It’s the Rohypnol rape decade, Tony. People can’t remember anything. They just have a vague idea something bad’s gone down. Stiff titties. Unless they’re terrified, they won’t agree with what we do and why we have to do it.”

A strange and terrible thought formed in Tony Buchanan’s mind.

“Those three bombs, Siv,” he said. “Who did make them?”

“What are you talking about?”

“The truth,” Tony Buchanan said, surprised to hear himself repeating what now sounded a trivial point. He realised his voice sounded thin and unconvincing.

“Anything is better than another Sari Club,” Siv Harmsen said evenly. He gave a strange smile, an expression of weariness and knowledge that unsettled Tony Buchanan. “Australia feels like me, Tony. Just think about it.”

And so Tony Buchanan shook hands and went back to work. He did think about it. The air con was off, the office a furnace. He had a new wife, an over-extended mortgage and alimony payments. He had a new thirty-five-foot yacht. He had taken out a second line of credit for it, secured against his Elizabeth Bay home, debt chasing debt. He was still a chance, distantly, it was true, but still a chance for an assistant commissioner’s position sometime in the next five years. He would do nothing, he reasoned to himself, for what else could he do?

And then he had the answer.

He would go sailing on his next free afternoon. The thought of sailing always calmed him, and he imagined himself out on the water, thinking how beautiful Sydney was
and how so few people really got to see its full charms, and how lucky he was to be able to enjoy it.

Yet something made Tony Buchanan ring Siv Harmsen one last time. He had been thinking of Tariq al-Hakim, how his murder was said to be the work of the woman, how Nick Loukakis had thought it an underworld job, but now he could see another darker, far more sinister explanation.

“Who killed Tariq al-Hakim?” he asked.

There was a strange laugh at the other end of the line, a
how-fucking-dumb-are-you?
laugh, and then Siv Harmsen said, “I would say people with an interest in terror did that. Wouldn’t you, Tony?”

“There’s always a paper chain, Siv.”

Siv Harmsen said nothing. Tony Buchanan recognised the old interrogator’s trick, of Siv waiting for him to implicate himself in a nervous rush of words. But this wasn’t an interrogation.

“Always documents.”

“I was an altar boy, Tony, you know, a child of God. Did I ever tell you? And the needs of the state, Tony, are like they used to say about God: everywhere apparent and nowhere visible.”

“Always a record, something, Siv, that connects the highest to those who have to get their hands dirty.”

“Once upon a time,” said Siv Harmsen finally, “maybe. I wouldn’t know. But now, mate, there’s just people like us. We don’t even have to share our knowledge verbally. We just have to share an understanding.”

Tony Buchanan felt himself filling with terror.

“You get me?” asked Siv Harmsen. Then he hissed one word that suddenly sounded so sinister. “
Mate
.”

And Tony Buchanan finally connected with Siv Harmsen
at some deeply buried place where he understood that to share power was to share guilt.

“This heat,” said Tony Buchanan, pulling at his collar.

“Yeah,” said Siv Harmsen. There was another long silence. Then Siv Harmsen spoke again. “There’s drinks at the minister’s office next Thursday. Why don’t you come?”

“It’s getting unbearable.”

“Yeah,” said Siv Harmsen, his voice as flat as Bankstown. “Unfuckingbearable. Six pm. I’ll send a car for you.” He hung up.

Yes, of course, thought Tony Buchanan, that was the solution: he would go sailing, not sometime soon, but now, today, this very evening. In such stinking heat the harbour would be particularly glorious. It was extraordinary how many millions of people lived in Sydney and yet never used the harbour. If only they knew how foolish they were! He would let the spinnaker out, feel the sail belly, the yacht yaw like a great beast waking, and as the yacht pulled forward toward Shark Island its acceleration would push him slightly back and he would feel the salt breeze on his face. Life was beautiful in this most beautiful of places where it was possible to forget everything.

He smiled to himself, leant back in his chair, dreaming of sailing, dreaming of passing Sydney by.

‘No doubt about it,’ thought Tony Buchanan, ‘people are fools.’

81

The café’s air con seemed to be freezing the sweat that coated the Doll into frost. A newspaper scattered over her table said
that they had sold out of gasmasks in the Blue Mountains. The television was singing “I Still Call Australia Home”, but Australia no longer felt like any sort of home to the Doll. Australia felt like a war. It wasn’t the war against terrorism that everyone kept talking about, but some other war that nobody was talking about, and the Doll had ended up on the losing side.

A radio from the café kitchen said: “Nissan Maxima. Wow!”

It was a war against everyone, and it didn’t matter whether you were Muslim or Christian, a Leb or a lap dancer—there was only this war and whatever you were, whatever you thought: nothing like her; something like Wilder—you were going to be sucked into it no matter what.

The paper said: “Learn strategies to build up your wealth
and
self-esteem! Call us now!”

But the war was vague, thought the Doll, difficult to nail down, camouflaged in words and messages that wearied you and seeped into you like the ceaseless heat.

“What kind of scumbags?” the radio asked. “Islamic scumbags.”

The tv said: “Four hundred mill Pantene Pro-V. $4.95. Today only. We’re the fresh food people.”

The radio said: “And it’s not politically correct to say it, but I’m saying it.”

“Yeah, I’m with you, Joe. My uncle was in the war, and he said the only language they understood when he was in Syria was a good boot up the arse.”

“Maybe we should listen more to our old people who fought for our freedom.”

“You get me, though, Joe?”

“We all get you, Trev, and, what’s more, I think we’re all
with you. We’re the land of the fair go, but these troublemakers who come from elsewhere need to know that’s not the same thing as weakness. And if the government won’t do it, sometimes it’s up to the people to show what our standards are, to make it clear what discipline and punishment mean. And if that’s beyond us as Australians I don’t think we should be living here either. I’m Joe Cosuk and this is
Australia Talking
on 2FG. Now, my friends at Toyota have come up with a beauty …”

Out on the street, a woman with her head out of a car yelled abuse at the car in front of her.

The Doll felt everything blurring, and taking her away from some understanding she had momentarily known. She was unable to recall what it was she had been thinking just a few seconds before. The noise of radios and tvs, the sight of endless magazines and catalogues and papers that spilled over the café tables were like Temazepam, setting her adrift from reality and heading her back down a deep tunnel.

“Fucken elites,” a thin, bearded man was yelling outside, so loudly that it cut through the radio and the tv and chatter inside the café. Startled out of her thoughts, the Doll turned and looked out, and by accident caught his eye. He stared at her. “Fuck you!” he yelled even louder. “FUCK YOU!”

The bearded man gobbed, and smeared on the glass at the Doll’s head level, not an arm’s length away, was a green scallop of mucus. As the man disappeared along the street the phlegm slithered slowly down the glass like a snail, and then stopped level with the Doll’s mouth.

Her thoughts scattered like snow.

82

The Doll walked outside and, simply to escape, opened the door of a parked taxi. When the driver asked where she was going, she said, “Darlinghurst,” because it was what she mostly said to cab drivers. But she had no intention of getting out there. No, she would just drive around for a while and compose herself, confident in taxi drivers’ utter lack of interest in any customer. But he too had his car radio tuned in to another talkback show.

“Well, that’s what I reckon, Ron,” a caller was saying. “She’s as guilty as sin. You know, if you sleep with terrorists, if you look like a terrorist, and, look—I’m no racist—I have Aborigine friends …”

She would drive around and then return to the Retro Hotel. Although she knew it was highly likely the police would have tracked her there, the Doll now merely wanted to agree with her destiny, not fight it. She wanted an end to her own fear, and submission seemed the best way of ensuring this. It was fine to be free, but free to do what? To go mad? To endlessly hear your own name being talked about with horror and fear? To know that whatever you did, wherever you went, you were doomed? And besides, where else could she go? She was weary, so heavy and weary with it all.

“Some of my best mates are Aborigines,” the shock jock’s honeyed voice oozed in. “Jimmy Little. Mark Ella. It’s not racist, Terry, to speak honestly—”

“—well, she’s dark, isn’t she?”

“Here will be fine,” the Doll said to the taxi driver, trying to control the quaver in her voice. “Please, just here.”

Walking, she thought, even in this intense heat, would help
calm her. But it didn’t help. To the contrary, almost everything was panicking her now. When she heard a rolling whoosh coming up from behind, she overreacted, jumping backwards and knocking a café table at which two women sat.

A short, heavily muscled man, wearing only Quiksilver boardies and leather belts tied around his oiled torso, rolled by on a large skateboard, dragged along at a clip by a pit bull terrier to which the board was harnessed.

“Fucking Ben Hur,” said one of the women with a scowl. She had an upended apricot Danish stuck to her skirt. Two men talking intensely at the pub’s entrance looked up and one swore before returning to his conversation. The Doll put her head down and walked on. She made her way through some back streets, and was cutting through the Cross, trying to think of nothing, when her path was blocked by a small crowd gathered outside Happy Hockers.

Two young men were kicking a body that lay curled on the ground. One of the young men wore Industrie three-quarter pants and a Morrissey t-shirt, while the other had a neat Mambo singlet and Billabong boardshorts. Both had sunglasses and baseball caps on, both, thought the Doll, were hotties, with the well-cut arms and calves of gym junkies.

The body on the ground moved with their blows like a heavy mattress. It made no sound other than the dull groan each kick forced from it. The body—its rags, its crumbling bomber jacket, the plastic shopping bags stuffed with trash that lay spilled around it—was clearly that of some beggar or another.

Though most people walked quickly around the scene, anxious not to become involved, a small crowd had gathered.

“Leave him alone!” yelled an old woman.

The men stopped momentarily and turned their aggression onto the onlookers.

“What the fuck are you going to do about it?” said the shorter man, his handsome face wet with exertion, his splendid biceps moist as if freshly waxed and oiled.

Realising nobody was going to do anything, he took a step toward them. He took off his Diesel baseball cap, his Revo sunglasses, wiped the sweat off his forehead like a man unnecessarily challenged in the middle of a necessary labour, then thrust his gleaming head forward and scanning the dozen or so spectators, looking each one in turn in the eye, sneered:

“Well, what the fuck are you gunna do?”

The crowd was going to do nothing. They stepped back, and began dispersing.

The Doll looked down. The scabs, the thin, ratty hair, the bomber jacket: it was him, the beggar she had given money only a few days earlier. His face was covered in blood and filth. His blue eyes were open and caught hers. They asked for nothing.
That is how it is
, they seemed to say.