Then, far beyond the normal mandate of a program like Live Wire, Jacko had got her talking about the growth of affection between Kremmerling and herself, and about her times at large, the years she was permitted to baby-sit and to contribute to the Kremmerling family income by working in a motel in Baker and a fast food place in Riverside. She had made Easter and birthday cards for Charles and Joyce. With what I would like to think of as a writer’s insight, I believed that this admission was utter proof of the validity of her story. For if, crazy from the dark as I had been after my electric shock (and she had received many such shocks from Kremmerling while hanging from the reinforced beam he had installed in his garden shed), you accepted that the Corporation governed all events of cruelty which befell you – if these were the sanctioned conditions of the planet you inhabited – then of course you would try to live within it, and be genial and send cards, and be an honest player!
Jacko must have agreed with me, otherwise he would not have risked evincing such information from Sunny.
But crasser and more respectable commentators than Jacko wondered if this, instead of validating her tale, disproved it. There was a lot of talk along these lines in the News and the Post, those arbiters of sensibility.
And now the County Supervisor didn’t want the matter prosecuted.
Inevitably, and almost as a means of absorbing the shock of this, Maureen and I began contrasting the American county-based systems of justice with the state-based system at home. If Charles Kremmerling had tortured Sunny Sondquist in New South Wales, the prosecution wouldn’t have been charged to the account of one particular hard-up region, but to the entire state.
This was in no way to pretend that there are not manifold problems in our own justice system. An Aboriginal actor we had known in Sydney had hanged himself rather than face trial for car theft. Earlier, in Western Australia, he had been briefly held in prison and had been beaten up by cops. He feared the way black prisoners were treated there prevailed throughout the entire country. He was probably right.
At home there was no uniform system of due process coast to coast, no Bill of Rights; only the patchy common law and a few scattered constitutional and statutory freedoms. But on the positive side, you would never get a situation like this San Bernardino one. You would never find a state treasurer pleading with the Attorney-General on the grounds of expense to ignore a case like the one against Kremmerling.
In the middle of the friendly little comparative law session Maureen and I were sharing, the door bell rang and I went downstairs to answer it.
It was Lucy Emptor. She looked just like a twice-shy New York woman in her navy-blue overcoat. A riotously coloured scarf at her throat seemed to be the only trace of spaciousness about her, the only remnant of the young woman in the Odeon on New Year’s Eve singing Advance Australia Fair in a helium-squeaky voice.
And, hello, hello, she said, in a weary big-city voice.
I said hello cheerily, as if an inflated greeting could assuage her. She knew I was privy to things heard from Jacko in confidence. I was the friend who had kept harmful things secret from her, whereas Joyce Kremmerling was a stranger who had made them plain.
I took her wrist and said I was sorry she’d had to go to San Bernardino. I did not dare tell her I had seen the film of her meeting with Joyce Kremmerling, not only on blatant Vixen Six, but in a private showing provided by Jacko a few days before.
—Yes, well eh, she murmured in reply to my trite words of condolence.
And even more than usual when faced with the suffering Lucy, I thought with shame of all the casual confidences I had received from Jacko – two of the brethren wryly considering the enigma of female intent.
I took her upstairs but then offered to go down again, and read or watch television in the spare bedroom. Lucy said there was no need.
It was a good New York night. You could hear the jazz saxophonist who graced Lower Broadway performing to the students of NYU who waited at the Bottom Line. Across Fourth Street, the lights from below hit the gargoyles and great empty windows of the proud but ill-kempt building opposite. This structure awaited only the end of a recession to become fashionable condos. The empty windows which showed its empty floors were still eloquent of the ghosts of nineteenth-century seamstresses and warehousemen. Looking downtown through the apartment’s southern windows, every commercial floor of the Trade Towers could be seen wastefully glimmering.
My wife and I intended, later in the evening, to hit Chez Jacqueline in MacDougall Street to celebrate the end of the final draft of my book. In China, a young English teacher from the West gets involved in the politics of dissent and falls for a Chinese woman who is under police surveillance, etc., etc. All the adventures, all the ideas, all the assignations now brought to a conclusion, ready for the printer! And the cheque for final delivery being processed in the publisher’s accounting department.
Lucy sat down still wearing her overcoat.
—I thought I’d better let you both know, she said, looking at the carpet. I’m going home.
We both exclaimed of course. But we didn’t really have to ask why. She supplied reasons just the same.
—I don’t like what this place has done to us. I still feel as if I was abused, like Joyce Kremmerling. Pretty mad eh? But I can’t get over it. Besides, the old stuff: Jacko believes I don’t let him breathe, and I feel like that also, but as if I can’t breathe. We had a talk this afternoon. He’s moved out to let me pack.
My wife rose and walked to where she was sitting and embraced her.
Lucy said, I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right. I’ll go back and keep studying the cello eh.
—This isn’t final, is it? I asked.
—I can show you the air ticket. Tomorrow night’s flight to LA, and then the Great South Land.
I could see my wife was particularly stricken. Maureen couldn’t imagine New York without Lucy. I went to comfort her.
I remembered Jacko’s account of the arguments with Dannie over the way implements of torture should be held, and their arguments over the method of interview to be applied to Sunny Sondquist.
I said, From all I know, Lucy, that Dannie business is well and truly over.
She gave her broad, hectic grin.
—This has nothing to do with l’affaire Dannie.
We all stared at each other. What could be said?
—You’ll come and see me in Oz, won’t you?
—God yes. Yes.
From being so content with this night, I wanted now the bite of that remote sun and the outrageous blue of the Harbour. Here all waterways, even the Atlantic, seemed too relentlessly dun.
We had a last glass of wine together. So hard to believe that New York could lose its hold on this woman! It was like a form of civic negligence. But she was already, perhaps, leaching the city itself out of her system. She said she could not join us at Chez Jacqueline.
—Packing, of course, she said.
My wife and Lucy hugged each other, and I walked her to the lift and took her downstairs and got her a taxi. For our demi-posh building, with its closed-circuit television in both lifts, was besieged by two dozen of New York’s most aggressive beggars, and, as justified as their spikiness might be, I believed she shouldn’t have to put up with it tonight.
Besides, these lifts were capable of their own surprises. I had been waiting downstairs in the lobby one day when the lift door opened and two cops wheeled out a skeletal, shrouded form on a trolley. A man had died in the very waiting room of the AIDS doctor on the fourth floor.
The lift – the elevator as the Americans grandly call it, bold Latinizers as well as bold abbreviators – was empty. While going down I said to her, Look, I think it’s just as well you spoke to that Kremmerling woman. No one else could have done that, no stand-in. They wouldn’t have had your human skills.
—Yeah but, said Lucy, what do you think of a country where you really find out about your husband from someone like dear old Joycey?
br /> I had nothing to say to that, and wondered again if it was an accusation. She looked directly at the television camera in the roof and then closed her eyes for it.
—D’you know, she said, Jacko expects to get marks for not being Charlie Kremmerling. A lot of you fellows are like that eh. Yeah but at least you can’t say I’m an axe murderer.
She laughed at this tendency, her old laugh, as if at some time in the future such male innocence might again seem charming.
Reaching the lobby we scooted past the pleasantries from the doorman on duty, a fine arts student from City College who must have wondered about our rush. We moved out onto Fourth, and then the mad corner of Lower Broadway, with its hordes of students and children from New Jersey looking for drugs, and its veterans of Vietnam and of psychiatric hospitals waving their white polystyrene begging cups at us.
Lucy said, You should know, he lied like hell to me. I felt very safe with Jacko. I don’t mean that he’s a liar as such eh. But he lied to me. I’m sure he told the truth to his good friends. But I suppose his mother Chloe taught him that it’s best to keep women in the dark, they’re so wild and out of order.
The normally savage, unloved and sullenly-driven yellow New York cab came along. Soon she’d be back with the cabs of Sydney, where you sat in the front with the conversational driver and all the doors were undented.
The hungry-eyed driver looked out at us – he might have been Pakistani or Bolivian, Haitian or Arab or Azerbaijani. To him and to his cab with its stuck back window, I committed sweet Lucy.
—Will we see you tomorrow?
—There’s no point, she said.
The broad smile again and for the last time.
—You won’t get any sense out of me until I’m back in Oz. Wait till then eh.
—Forgive me, I said.
—What for?
—I’ve been too attached to the high colour of the Emptors to give them the hard time I should. Same goes for Chloe. I’d really like to get Jacko now though and sort out his head for him.
—Don’t be silly, she said. Nothing to forgive anyhow with you. Sydney okay?
She was hauled off down cold Broadway to the melancholy plaint of the saxophone.
The following morning, by all signs the last of his marriage to Lucy Emptor, Jacko called me from the hotel up in the Fifties where he was staying out of sensibility, to allow Lucy a last unfussed, unfraught night and day. He wanted me to come up there for a drink. I was confused about what my demeanour should be, and the chances were that I would futilely lose my temper. So I raised the obvious objections – I had a dread of Lucy hearing somehow that as she was ordering the car to take her out to Kennedy, I, Jacko’s true friend, had been drinking with him at the city’s heart. What a malicious rite that might seem to Lucy!
—Aw, come on! he said. I’ve got to have a drink with some bastard who’s sensible.
There had been much public comment on his long, painful interview with Sunny Sondquist, and the television reviewer in the Village Voice had remarked on his unaccustomed sensibility. On that suspect basis, I decided to consent and go and see him.
Jacko was camped in one of the newer midtown hotels. The place had none of the atmospherically dim, lock-yourself-in-with-a-bottle-of-Scotch sort of feel of the Algonquin or the St Regis. It was not a bad place to come to do business, but it certainly was a depressing place to wait until Lucy packed her bags and left your loft in Tribeca vacant.
I could tell by the plastic glitter of the chandeliers in the lobby, by the egregious fountains of dyed water, that Jacko must be pretty depressed here.
As soon as I called his room, it was clear he didn’t want to come down and head west to Seventh and Eighth Avenues looking for squalid bars.
—Come’n up, matie, he growled at me sepulchrally. He spat out the room number.
I found him in a corner suite forty floors up. Opening the door, he massively occupied the hotel’s dainty bathrobe. He left me to close the door. Smoking at a rare rate, he prowled amongst the ice buckets which sat on the occasional table. His mini fridge lay emphatically open, as if he were wilfully mixing his drinks.
Blowing smoke from his meaty lips, he kept saying, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s a really good thing for both of us. I mean, mate, you must know I’ve been unhappy for a long time.
I thought of asking just who it was he’d been unhappy with: Dannie or Lucy? But smart-aleckry like that was not my style, and wouldn’t do much good today.
—But you could lose her, you know, I told him.
—No, mate, he insisted. I could bloody find her. She could bloody find herself. That’d be a bloody start.
I felt an edge of anger at the fact that he seemed so conventionally sad to see Lucy leave. I couldn’t help myself telling him.
—I never quite believed that stuff about her depending too much on you. About her frying her own fish. If you want the truth, that’s always sounded like nonsense to me.
He looked dismally at me for a moment.
—Well, mate, as our brethren here say, I can only call it as I see it.
—But you’re not so depressed about it …
—Of course I’m bloody depressed. I’m depressed and sad. Jesus, it’s her decision to go eh. For God’s sake, I’ve been rejected by two women in a week …
—Sorry to tell you, Jacko. Not too many people weep for you … You seem to be riding pretty high to me.
—Oh, he conceded. Professionally? Professionally things are jake. I agree with you. Dannie’s trying to tell people how incompetent I am. But generally eh, I agree. The man on the street won’t spend too much time being sorry for me.
—Especially since you pursued Lucy, Jacko. You say that yourself. She kept saying no. Maybe she could see the dangers.
—Oh God, all that’s true. Sometimes the greatest bloody reprobate gets a craze to get married. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s primal eh. And romantic. It’s men’s tragedy to be romantic about marriage, and women’s to be practical. I mean, we’re romantic in a seriously dangerous way. I certainly was.
—So, I challenged him, if you’re not depressed about Lucy going, what is it?
He sat down and was finishing some Scotch. He leaned forward.
—I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know where to go from here. For one thing, I’ve got Bob Sondquist and Sunny staying down the hall. Separate rooms.
I asked, Why ever here?
—Bob says being on the fourteenth floor at his place scared her. Agoraphobia. Opposite of claustrophobia. Stands to reason eh. Having her here on the fortieth floor isn’t necessarily the answer. But the drapes are drawn and we’ve got a plain clothes psychiatric nurse sitting with her.
I wanted to know what had happened? Why didn’t they draw the curtains and pull down the blinds in Bob Sondquist’s apartment block?
—They did. But they were besieged.
This fact really seemed to oppress Jacko. Lucy saddened him and her going was painful. But did it reach the core? This, this siege, just like the entire Sondquist affair, moved him in the spirit. He was pacing the space in front of the plundered refrigerator.
—I mean, at Bob’s place there were camera crews in the lobby, and people who wanted to ghost write her book, and feminist defence groups who wanted to succour her and pay her legal costs and take her in. What an item this is for them: woman tortured and raped and locked up in the bloody, bloody dark! I talked Durkin into putting our own security guards in there to manage the flow, but before we could Sunny had a sort of panic attack. Not one that makes you scream eh. The kind that makes you go utterly silent. And her pulse rate was impossible. Then, this morning, she was woken up at four o’clock by a camera crew in a cherrypicker imitating me. So nothing for it but to move them in here eh. Anyone getting off the lift at this floor is frisked by security.
—I wasn’t.
—I told them you were coming. Mate, you are in a contradictory frame of mind today.
/> —I’m grieving for you, you bastard.
He stopped in mid-stride.
—Okay, let’s stop this and go and see the poor bloody Sondquists.
Without allowing for further argument, he opened the door and held it to let me through. In the corridor, a man in a para-police uniform emerged from a room with its doorway permanently open – the base of security operations. When he saw Jacko in his bathrobe, he gave a half-wave of approval and disappeared.
Bob Sondquist answered the door Jacko knocked on.
—Mind if we come in, Bob?
With a body builder’s vanity, old Bob still wore the same sort of T-shirt he’d worn the morning Jacko found him on the fourteenth floor.
—Sure, said Bob’s miracle voice.
He led us in. His television was busily blathering: Judge Wapner and a Czech emigre arguing over damage a dog had done to somebody’s Astrakhan rug. Bob invited us to chairs placed around the little table by the window. The window of Sondquist père gave an unabashed view of the Avenue of the Americas and its berserk uptown traffic. One pane was ajar to let dusty, cold air in. Bob had no fear of the open day.
Jacko introduced me to the man.
—He’s a writer, Jacko said.
Bob Sondquist cast his eyes up.
—No, no, Bob. Not that sort of writer. He makes his own shit up, he doesn’t live off other people’s. I wanted to let you know. We’re just going in to have a look at the girl.
It was clear that Jacko’s tone towards Bob Sondquist had changed. Perhaps what had muted Jacko’s hostility a little was the admission of guilt and fallibility Bob had made on the telephone while negotiating his daughter’s fee. The massive betrayal still stood, but perhaps the primitive in Jacko believed Bob had paid away his voice in part expiation.