If one of the controller’s offices came under threat—and say there was a friendly local inspector and he said, Frank, Fiona, I’m under pressure from above …! Or if Telecom investigators got close, using their spying methods … you moved your office to a new place lying ready, phones already installed. That was Frank’s idea. The eight hotels (or as some press reports said ten) were eight locations under Fiona Kearney’s (and Uncle Frank’s) control. They even had subcontrollers who rented the locations from them. And the central controlling office itself could be moved from hotel to hotel at will. So it depended on getting new telephones put in quickly and on having plenty in place.
And Uncle Frank could attend to that. He had friends who would do it for nothing, and thus—in his mind—it was clean business.
He had friends in the banking business too who would, if he asked them, as he sometimes did, let him use their own addresses as a home address on various accounts. To Uncle Frank these accommodations were the normal accommodations of friendship. She came to appreciate in her stupor that though he was a saint he had a profoundly criminal soul.
Again she would have liked to have argued with him over his peculiar idea of what corruption was. In his world it did not exist if it were amongst the friendly and the loyal and was a token of love. He was not ashamed, in fact shamefully unashamed, to ask for favors based on crucial words of consolation he had offered in some presbytery front parlor or at O’Toole’s. She was reminded of the minor graft of O’Toole’s hearse-helicopter. What it said was that government was a joke and deserved to be laughed at through the exhausts of cerulean helicopters, as through batteries of book-making telephones.
So prison would be futile for Uncle Frank, in a different way from the futility which applied to habitual criminals. It would not cure Uncle Frank of his tribal premises. She wondered where he had got his confidence in her: his belief that she would see the reason of his argument. As if in her childhood too she had seen the Black and Tans go by in their armored vehicles. As if she had not in fact spent her childhood in the Harbour’s utterly equitable sunlight and come to believe in law and order.
These questions lay idly and flat between Uncle Frank and herself though. They were not living issues for him. She did not have a living issue.
Whenever she woke, she was always amazed after an early flutter of breathlessness that the air went in, turned itself sour, was emitted again just as with any living beast.
Her skin felt altered, and she washed it with a tissue dipped in a water glass and found traces of cosmetic there, applied by her misguided mother.
She stayed awake long enough to greet Mrs. Gaffney as she came visiting:
—No cosmetics, she told her mother.
—Just to freshen you up.
—No. No cosmetics.
But then she lost her hold on the argument.
Once she woke and found that Mrs. Fiona Kearney was there, smiling. Kate thought, Yes, in some lights, a handsome and generous woman. A hostage Frank had taken back from the Black and Tans. A soul saved from the straitlace and the narrow way.
Kate found with regret of course that she was waking hungry. Instead of asking for food she might ask where Gus was.
—He’s been on television, said Uncle Frank as if that exempted her from further regard for him.
—You’ll be on television too, Uncle Frank.
—Yes, darling. But dead against my will.
She told him she wanted to see Murray, and she wanted to see Gus.
—Both at the same time? he asked her, trying to confuse her for the best of motives.
So Gus’s flower-bearing visit first:
He was anxious that there might be a scene, and he wanted to show her as fast as he could that he knew himself disqualified, that he understood it all without rancor.
—I might be going home soon, Kate.
—Nothing to stay down here for, she agreed.
—Well, I started going out with a widow. She’s one of those … animal liberationists. Not one of the mad ones though.
He smiled madly and touched Kate’s wrist.
—One of the ones that believe roos shouldn’t box, anyhow.
Gently he talked her into drinking a cup of tea with him. She looked around for something to give him. There were only two novels, which Jim Gaffney had brought and left there, believing that she would achieve focus imminently. It wasn’t going to happen.
—Will you take these, Gus?
He made all the polite refusals, but it was established he would take them, and would handle them reverently on the bottom of the sea beyond the Darling.
—We were just stumbling along, eh? Lost bloody souls.
Before kissing her goodbye. It was the last multisyllabic thing she would hear him say in the flesh.
Murray’s visit then. He came on the first day that she realized what day it was. She realized it was a Saturday. It was race day, but Uncle Frank was banned from all race tracks and so was there as well. He tried to linger in the room. Kate surprised herself by managing a warning look, something of more vigor than the mere warning looks that occur in most novels, one which threatened riot and exasperation.
After Uncle Frank left, Murray kissed her slowly and gently in the middle of the forehead.
—Has my mother put makeup on me?
—Oh Kate. How are your shoulders? How are your burns now?
—I don’t know. I haven’t referred to them.
He chose to take this as a little joke.
—For an hour or two, when the flood was on …
—I know, she said. I know.
He held her hand and seemed to get much from the experience. She herself felt little of it all. Her hand might have been a curio somewhere in the room. He had decided wantonly to cherish it.
—Kate, he said, I’m so pleased to have the chance to speak to you. I’m talking to you as a friend now. Your mother and father are all in favor of suing the Kozinskis to the limit. They’ve spoken to me of settlements in excess of twenty million. It isn’t greed. They want to see Paul pay for his bad behavior. In my opinion, you shouldn’t be persuaded by that. There’s a kind of intimacy about court hearings which you will find painful. And you know what they say: if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. In my opinion, you should settle with the Kozinskis for an immediate amount now, payments spread over a strictly limited period. There might be nothing left of Kozinski assets by the time you’ve been through the courts. They’re in considerable trouble with this inquiry into the building industry. Both father and son could face charges over improper practices of various kinds, from false prospectuses to extortion. As a matter of good sense and of self-respect, settle with them as soon as you can.
She was somehow tickled by his mixture of hard monetary advice and moral hauteur. She let him stroke her frazzled hair.
—I will marry you at any stage. Nothing that has happened to you frightens me away.
—That’s a boast, she said, and fell asleep.
She woke in the afternoon and Murray was gone. But Uncle Frank was sitting on a chair on the left side of her bed. From a small radio in his lap came the static of a race meeting turned down low. An Australian voice with that peculiar adenoidal twang of racing announcers was recounting the finishing order of horses Uncle Frank had now been forbidden to place bets on.
He saw her and seemed slightly embarrassed to be caught at his passion like this. He switched the radio totally down but not off.
He said, There’s a three-year-old, Diamontina. I tell you, it’s going to be one of those wonder horses. They’ve got it set to emerge in the spring carnival. Next Melbourne Cup, Kate, they’ll have to put a truck on its back to stop it. It’s a beautiful beast. Put some money on for me, Kate, if I happen to be unavailable for the purpose myself.
He laughed but his eyes were narrowing in a way which had nothing to do with hilarity. He was measuring her, as he’d measured her every day since their reunion.
He ca
me to his conclusions and rose and went to the door where his airline bag waited. He unzipped it and produced a bottle. It was a vodka bottle, full, and it produced fear in her. Ah, she thought, he has drunk or lost or broken my bottle and now intends to pass off a substitute.
But the one he held up was the one from the house. She recognized the unforgettable tear in the label.
—I kept this at home. Faithfully, Kate. As requested.
The memory of the request gagged him for a moment. But swallowing he resumed.
—I took it out one night from the cabinet, for reasons to do with a kind of nostalgia, and I stared it hard in the eye and I noticed a yellowish tinge which didn’t seem right at all for vodka. I am after all a publican, they tell me. So I have this friend, a chemist with the police …
Another client of Uncle Frank’s talents of condolence. Or else a customer of the O’Brien-Kearney Starting Prices ménage.
—He says there’s a solution in this vodka of some great thumping amount of something called Vallergan. If you took two mild slugs of this vodka, Kate, you would be asleep within ten minutes, and you would sleep for ten hours or so. Mark what I’m saying. It’d be fanciful to say that this bottle was poisoned, Kate. But it was certainly heavily doctored.
At this news she felt the near-dead glands of her curiosity come to a peculiar chemical life. This was a strangely painful and delicious revival.
—Who? she asked. It was so hard but intriguing to believe in.
Uncle Frank shook his head, as if he were the one most afraid of knowing.
—It was hard enough telling you any of this, Kate, without saying who. But it does tell you something, doesn’t it? That you are free of blame. There are all sorts of stories, Kate, about your husband being overextended. He’s been on with that woman perhaps as long as three years, and something about her must have given him delusions. He financed all those malls in Southern California, and put up properties here at inflated valuation as security. You know the phrase heavily geared? Your husband has liquidity problems. That’s the background landscape, Kate, to what I’m going to say now. Two incomplete Kozinski Constructions development sites have had fires. While you were out on the road. Out of our midst …
Uncle Frank put the vodka on the bedside table, and the radio. Abandoning horseflesh for the day. Somewhere perhaps faithful servants were taking bets on behalf of himself and Mrs. Kearney. No, she had a sense of the hollowness of the man. He’d been closed down. But listen, she told herself. Listen. Come back to the question. It’s not his level of operations that’s the question at the moment.
—Remember, said Uncle Frank, how on the night he yelled, Why weren’t you here? He said, Your car’s here. Why weren’t you? And everyone forgave him because of the terrible time, Kate. But there is a device now, Kate, utterly combustible, which you can put in electric boxes if you have a mind to. Expensive, it overrides the circuit breakers. It causes arcing. It produces a merry bloody combustion.
Drugs did not confuse her now. She understood the reasoning. Since it had a familiar feel to her, it was clear that in some ways she had always understood it.
—The only thing in his favor is that he wanted you to go off without any pain.
—Aaaaaah, she said, before taking in more air than she needed. But there was a new and awful confidence in all her functions. As Chifley had given the certainty of breath, Uncle Frank had given her the certainty and high natural chemistry of hate.
Yet he had his hands up now, counseling against too strenuous a use of it.
—He’s in utter hell. Your successor in his arms, Kate, is said to be unhappy on two fronts: his drinking and the threat of his fall. And she’s not an evil woman, though it would be better if she were. And she wonders why he can’t be happy, apart of course from his loss. She’s told friends that she admires him for the intensity of his grief. But she knows it’s more than intensity, more than average, even for such a non-average loss. She knows there’s something grandly wrong with it. And so do you now. We can leave him to it, Kate. We can watch him die and go to hell.
She found herself half out of bed. One leg, limp as string, was searching for the floor.
—I want to see a chemical report, she said. She suspected the one done by Uncle Frank’s friend. Not in itself, but in its informality. She wanted a printout.
—I want a proper analysis done.
—Sure. We’ll send it to a commercial lab.
She groaned and shook her head. The weight of something new. It did need to be painfully accommodated now. She had not thrown her children away, as the old version told her. The point of the question, Why weren’t you here? had been reversed. She had not thrown her children away. They had been snatched. This unfamiliar equation made her sit up, chatter, cover her eyes. She could feel the strain in her skull. It was not the blessed gravity of air she stood to lose, but the gravity of blame.
Since loss and the drugs had so dried her out from the teeth down to the pit of the stomach that he could not understand what she was saying, Uncle Frank went and got her tea. She was asking, as it turned out, Who did it for Paul Kozinski?
Not the doping of the vodka: he had the stomach for that. Who put the arcing device in place?
Asking, but she knew the answer. Burnside. She was already used to vengefulness, it was as if she’d always lived with it. She wished she’d known all this on the day Burnside suffered. She wished Chifley had really struck, clawed Burnside’s guts out and strewn them across the bed of the sea.
When the tea came and she unlocked her tongue from her palate with a quick scalding mouthful, she asked, Are they open on the weekend?
—Who is that?
Uncle Frank seemed to be secretly listening again now to the fluttering and twittering voices of the tuned-down radio; for the signal that they were at the barrier for the next. It couldn’t be so. Though it would be in his nature to attend godlike with equal ear upon the flippant and the barbaric.
—The chemical labs, said Kate. The chemical labs.
She had made the words so precisely. The l and the b.
—Well, that’s an idea, Uncle Frank conceded. He took his attention right away from the radio and turned fully to her. He said he’d see to it.
—Don’t humor me, she told him.
—No. No. But I’ll check.
Kate, not being able to calculate what Burnside is owed, is soothed somewhat by Uncle Frank’s news: not only does Burnside walk with a stick, this taking the sting out of all his threat and all his manner, but he is as good as neutered too. She does not know if this last news is reliable, or if Uncle Frank has made it up to cosset her. But to have lost her signed release forms twice, she thinks, must be a torment to Burnside, and she takes satisfaction from it.
And then above all the walking with a stick. Murray has verified that for her. An enforcer with an inability to enforce. She savors this as she waits for the vodka to be analyzed, and for the chemical report to be made.
By contrast she knows that Paul Kozinski must be exactly punished, and she will apply herself to that question when the results arrive at her bedside.
So while she waits for the chemical analysis, Murray takes a day from work, collects her from the sanatorium and brings her to McCarr’s Creek, an arm of Pittwater. Waters familiar to the Vistula. But Murray has taken her on board a more modest boat today, one belonging to a friend. Thirty-two-footer. Very manageable. He uses the donkey engine to get them away from their mooring, and then he cuts it and hoists a foresail. It is wonderful, she thinks, how a little boat pitches so honestly in a slight swell with the breeze astern. How cleanly. She notices how delighted Murray is that she raises her chin to the sun. As if he thinks that, even though she knows now not to give herself up too utterly to that vicious, blazing star, once given a full reprieve she will sometimes risk her face briefly and without fear. Her hair is shampooed, since her view of entitlement to shampoo has been changed by Uncle Frank’s news. On her cheeks sits a mixture of mak
eup and sun lotion.
So Murray sits at the tiller and feels triumphant. He is aware too how itchy the world is for a photograph of Kate. News editors are utterly sick of the old stills. He relishes the idea that she is safe from cameras here. He has delivered her from the electronic snouts. He glows with frankness and with love.
Provisionally—subject to the chemical analysis—she recognizes this in him and is provisionally pleased. And on the same grounds she accepts the dazzle of these waters where she picnicked with her children and with Burnside and with girls hired by the Kozinskis to please those who would do them favors.
Murray has at home his collection of Paul Kozinski press clippings. He likes to think of each clipping as yet another leaf of the Polish onion boiling free and sloughing away.
The most effulgent recent addition has to do with Queensland, where a former state cabinet minister has told a government inquiry that he received a political gift of $250,000 as reward for building a bridge specifically to service a Kozinski Development Corporation’s shopping mall. At the time of the exchange of money, the mall had not yet been built, but the Kozinskis were careful planners.
In New South Wales, shamefaced union officials of the kind who sailed aboard the Vistula and lunged at the Kozinskis’ proffered girls, had already confessed to extorting gifts of money and kind from Paul Kozinski; and a political donation from Paul Kozinski had been put into the hands of a party official in the expressed hope of favorable decisions in the matter of a marina-hotel development at Tweed Heads.
These admissions have been made before various state and federal inquiries, including the Commission into the Building Industry, whose address Murray keeps close at hand, since there is some talk that Kate might be called as a witness. If so, he would like to mediate.