We stood together gazing at it and it was then I felt his massive stillness.
“So you’re the country boy,” he said. “Then tell me: why wouldn’t a big fire burn all the oxygen inside?”
“That’s a curtain. They wet it down. The tunnel will be L-shaped.”
“Ah, you’ve been in there?” I recognised a peculiar poker face from those long-lost days when I was agonising over my plans for Drivetime Radio and we played cards and drank all through the night.
“Why would I do that?”
He grinned as he took me by my upper arm and locked me tight. I thought, the Angel is in there. I’ll get my interview.
“I should feel sorry for you,” he said, dragging me bodily towards the entrance. Suddenly I was afraid. I kicked at his knee and almost put my back out, and it was at that moment—just as the faint light of his flashlight reached the rusty canvas—that the magpie swooped. It hit as the white-backed males always do, with a rush of wings, a loud thwack, landing with sufficient momentum to jolt Woody’s head a good eight centimetres forward. A moment later the assassin was back up his tree, indistinguishable from his brothers and sisters, safe from the passions he had unleashed below.
I have suffered the brutality of magpies all my life. In England, I am told, their magpie is a gentle creature. In Bacchus Marsh, in magpie season, kids would return from their run to the outside lavatory, heads streaming with blood, most of them in tears, while the more timid remained in the classroom, shitting in their pants rather than suffer the terrors of assault.
But lord, I never witnessed anything like this: Woody Townes, a hundred and thirty kilograms of meat, fell to his knees. Blood washed his forehead and filled his eyes he bawled like a heifer in a barbwire fence.
It is amazing, I thought, how such a large strong man, a beast electrified by his own barely suppressed violence, has so little tolerance for pain. He was left like the blinded Cyclops, his fluorescent feet all dusty, swinging his fat fist at what must have been my shadow.
Celine, of course, came running, 100 percent in character, black-eyed, barefoot, swinging her first-aid kit.
“Be still,” she told the fallen man.
There was a war between kookaburras and magpies above our heads. I could hear the clacking of their beaks. Celine drew on a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves and separated the strands of Woody’s hair.
He bellowed. Celine raised her hands.
I glimpsed a deep meaty gouge from crown to brow.
Celine said: “All I’ve got is methylated spirits.” And she was pouring it, straight from the bottle, drenching his scalp before he had a chance to stop her.
“Shit. Lay off will you?”
“You need stitches.”
“Piss off.” He wiped his eyes and left his wrist a bloody mess. “It’s just a magpie.”
“Listen my love,” Celine said, way too tenderly. “You are losing too much blood.”
“Bullshit.”
“Yes, but let’s get you to the car.”
The argument was interrupted by Dobbo and his gang and their impatient boots, their long investigative noses, their professional judgements: “That’s not a magpie wound.”
“All due respect, Sergeant, but allow me to know what hit me. It was a bloody magpie. I got swooped.”
“Was it carrying a hammer and chisel?” said Dobbo. “It must have been.”
“Come on Sergeant,” Celine said urgently. “Help me please.” She had her hands under Woody’s armpits and was attempting to help him to his feet.
“I can do it myself,” cried the patient. “My legs still work.” At which his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed on the dirt.
“Sergeant,” cried Celine, which was the first moment I began to think about the mother plover, the habit of dragging her wing as if wounded.
Dobbo stood with his hands on his hips looking at Celine with unsympathetic amusement. “You know why we can’t even get the car up here, Mrs. Baillieux. Because you’ve broken the law.”
It was at this point, I marked later, that Celine became completely manic. “You have to help,” she said.
I thought, why is she antagonising him like this? She dug her hands under Woody’s armpits again and showed herself ineffectual to an alarming degree.
“All right, darling,” Dobbo said, “get out of the way.”
“No,” said Celine.
“Go on,” said Dobbo. “Off.”
I did not think, not for a moment, that I was dealing with an actress, so I was alarmed to see her panic, to follow the fraught procession through the paperbarks, down into the blackberries, across the creek to Woody’s computerised Mercedes-Benz. He regained consciousness for long enough to refuse to let anyone else drive, but when he was safely in the back seat Celine took a paper towel and wiped his indignant eyes and held a wad of red tissue against his wound. It was not pleasant, to see this tenderness invested in a man who had hurt her. The engine fired, and the black monster lumbered slowly down the corrugated road. Celine waved, although I doubt anyone was looking.
“Holy Christ,” she said.
WOODY’S HUNDRED-DOLLAR FLASHLIGHT lay abandoned in the sunlight. Behind it was a lower part of his assassin’s iridescent beak, clean ripped away. Behind this, was a small hexagonal nut and I spat on my finger to make it stick. It was only then that I saw, in the black mouth of the tunnel, my source. She was luminous with cloudy-climate skin and tangled wheaten hair. She wore a grubby singlet. Her collarbone was pooled with darkness. Her bare arms were folded across her breasts.
No-one introduced her. She stepped out to the light, and I saw she was not quite as symmetrically pretty as I had expected, also shorter, thicker waisted, sturdier than she had seemed on CNN. She looked me directly in the eyes.
I nodded but all the niceties, the civilities, everything superfluous had been rubbed off her and she was left with that isolated, glass-cased quality, that sheen and distance that so often accompany power.
“Sweetie, did you have to use that thing just now?” Celine said.
“Who is this?” she demanded.
“If they were suspicious, now they’re certain.”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Felix Moore.” I turned towards Celine only to understand she was a junior officer, dismissed, already walking back towards her house. There was no time to feel anything except: I had the interview. I would be worthy of it. My subject led the way and I was mentally recording: dancer’s walk, shoulders back. The pocket of her jeans was torn. I followed into the earthen gloom, to a back wall supported by rough-cut planks—incontestably solid, clay showing between the timber. It swung smoothly open and I was admitted to what was arguably, at least from the viewpoint in Langley, Virginia, the most dangerous place on this earth. I remember my entry like a car accident, awash with adrenalin, very slow and very fast. The covert world smelled like a pottery, but also a teenager’s bedroom. It was illuminated by computer screens, small video monitors beneath the ceiling which I would not really see until I was out in the air again: spooky black and white images, gum trees swaying, a car travelling along a dirt road, that same white feather of clay dust left by the police. I stumbled then tripped on an orange power cord. There was an indoor toilet, definitely, many small green lights, and a young man with the build of a bodyguard. His eyebrows were mad and heavy, his curling black hair explosive, and he stooped a little, as if he would not quite fit in the box he came in. He stood stiffly, his arms pressed against his sides like a schoolboy in short pants.
“This is Paypal,” she said.
I reached to shake his hand, an offer not accepted.
“Paypal. This is him. He’s famous.”
If this was a story about hackers I was laughably ill-equipped. I had never heard of Paypal. I had never heard of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, or even the lowly practice of “carding,” the criminal process of using or verifying phished credit numbers.
When Paypal seated himself
at a cluttered card table and fitted a jeweller’s loupe beneath his hairy eye, I did not think this particularly strange.
“Your mother had this place waiting for you?” I asked Gabrielle Baillieux.
She hooded her eyes. “Here is what you’ve got to know about my mother. OK? She’s got to own the story. Whatever danger I am in she has to be in worse herself.”
There were two plastic milk crates on the floor between us. She kicked one towards me. “You can’t upstage my mother, that’s the point.” As she sat, her jeans rode up and there was no evidence of the controversial anklet which had been a condition of bail.
She set a small black tape recorder on a milk crate. Of course. She was famous. She was accustomed to control.
“Don’t you take notes?” she asked.
“No.”
She switched on her recorder. I thought I would have to instruct her, later, about the dangers of this game whose rules she did not know. There was no tape recorder ever manufactured that could protect her from a journalist, but she clearly thought there was, and her broad expanse of forehead had a tense uneven surface like wet tidal sand.
“You just asked your mother who I was. But you clearly knew already.”
“Yes. You’re someone working for someone who wants to sell something.”
“That’s unfair.”
“It’s normal.”
“But not for you.”
“No, I’m a soldier.”
“You’re also a person with a life.”
“Duh.”
Of course I had interviewed far ruder people, but not one of them had been in such extreme danger. Earlier she had decided to trust me but now I was here she baulked. She loudly worried that a book would jeopardise her further.
“I wish you’d read my work. You’d know I’m not just some slimebag who will pretend he’s on your side then knife you. I won’t be cheap or reductive. I won’t ask you about politics and then leave out everything you want to say.”
The frown remained the same, but the eyes narrowed.
“Here’s what I think,” I said. “You want the world to actually understand you. You have put your life at risk, but for a rational reason. You are a sort of equation,” I said, not dishonestly, but not knowing exactly what I meant. I paused.
“No, go on.”
“Every life has a logic. Following the logic can be persuasive. Wouldn’t you prefer to be understood in your own terms?”
Her face, in considering me, was totally expressionless but I trusted that feeling in my gut.
“You’re trying to see if I’m wearing my anklet?”
Actually I had been touched by her little oblong feet, the chipped polish, all the toes of equal length.
“The Department of Justice is cost-cutting,” she said. “So they buy the anklets from K5C who source them in China.” She affected weariness, as if no single thing would be understood by anybody else. “They’re crap, of course. They break down all the time. Then K5C hires a mob of amateur hackers and recidivists to watch the monitors. The pay is shit and the kids are high and the monitors fuck up almost every day. When a monitor goes on the fritz they assume it’s just a false alarm. How you fix a false alarm is wait for it to fix itself. Do you want the technical details? Would you understand them? Do you know what a Faraday cage is?”
“Not yet.”
“Maybe this is not a good idea.”
“I’m here to help you.”
“It’s Paypal you should talk to. He transferred my anklet to a dog. They monitor the dog’s progress. They think the dog is me.”
I thought, Woody Townes did not come out here following a dog. “Someone stands to lose a lot of bail money,” I said.
“That big slob didn’t buy me, if that’s what you mean.”
“Do you know who he is?”
“He’s a pervert. I’ve known him all my life.”
In the corner of the dugout Paypal seemed to be soldering a circuit. He was so big and stiff it was hard to imagine him doing anything precise.
“Give me back the beak,” he said, not looking at me.
Gaby took the beak and passed it to him in a gesture somehow so familial I had no doubt that they were lovers. He lifted an inert magpie from the bench, then ejected something, a black metal battery or perhaps a motor, from the bird’s underside.
“You actually made this?” I asked him.
“We own it.” Gaby said. “They made it.”
By “own” I thought they had hacked it. Was “they” a corporation or our favourite nation state? I looked to Paypal but he turned his back on me. She also seemed to be in retreat.
“What exactly have you been hired to write?”
“Gabrielle, you agreed to this already. That’s why I’m here.”
She shrugged.
“My job is to make you likeable,” I said. “They want me to make the case for your good character.”
She almost smiled.
“Your mother is trying to save you from extradition. I can help with that.”
“Fear is not helpful to anyone.”
“You think I’m afraid?”
“Celine is shitting herself.”
“What if I simply wrote the truth?”
“People wouldn’t like my equation. You won’t either.”
I thought, she’s a nightmare. No-one can control her. I have a contract, but not with her.
“You think you’ll like me, but you won’t.” She smiled and for a moment I didn’t understand that this sweetness was for the idiot who had the unmanned aerial magpie hovering above his desk. The machine rose vertically like no magpie ever born. I thought, you’re a waste of hope and time.
“My mother is a bad introduction to our situation,” she said. “She’s defeated by them before she even starts. It does not occur to her that we might possibly defeat them.” I thought she sounded paranoid and grandiose but she clearly did not give a rat’s arse about what I thought. She was smiling at the curly-haired man-child as he elevated the drone almost to the ceiling. I heard the high-pitched whine of an engine but when I felt my hair lift in the breeze I would not look.
“Them?” I asked her. “Who is them?”
The machine dropped, like a catastrophic phone book, on my head. Maybe I cried out. Who wouldn’t? Whatever I did, they fell around laughing like a pair of clowns. It was not my own fright that pissed me off, but their carelessness of who they were. I had a higher opinion of them than they did themselves.
“It was just a joke.”
There are many journalists, most journalists, who could be auditioned and mocked and still do a more than decent job. This juvenile behaviour would be a gift to them, not me. My head hurt. My hands throbbed. Fuck it. I stood. “This won’t work if you want to fight against me.”
“Oh, take a joke,” she said, but I was truly pissed off. This was what our great historian would call the flaw in my human clay.
“You’ve got plenty of enemies,” I told her. “Go fight with them. Or find out who I am and get in touch with me.” And that was my character, how I normally fucked my life.
She smiled at me then, and touched my arm. I had heard she was casual with her hygiene. No-one had mentioned she was charming.
“Mr. Moore, I am not nice, but I do know exactly who you are. Really I do. I first read you when I was still in high school.”
I tried very hard to disguise my pleasure, but knew that my smirky little mouth would be a traitor to my cause. “Sleep on it,” I said.
“OK but I don’t need to.” She put her small warm hand in mine and I shook it and thought, dear Jesus Christ, she reads books. I’m saved. I said goodbye. I had done a good day’s work. I emerged from the dugout as king parrots sliced the bush with their low trajectory, flashing their pretty sunlit colours above the darkness of the ridge tops. I filled my lungs with clean fresh air. I stretched my spine. I finally noticed, above the dugout entrance, in the tossing umbrellas of the gum trees, dozens of tiny whirling
fans, each one camouflaged with mottled paint and strapped in place. Were there power cables? Yes, there, travelling towards the earth like careful lizards, down the dark side of the trunks into the exclusive story by Felix Moore.
I HAD NOT, previously, been thought of as the kind of writer who might make a difficult character loveable. My most notable work of fiction, Barbie and the Deadheads, had been a satire. As a journalist it was my talent to be a shit-stirrer, a truffle hound for cheats and liars and crooks amongst the ruling classes. These pugnacious habits had served me well for a whole career but the story of this young woman demanded I become a larger person, a man who had it in his heart to love our stinking human clay.
If I had been Tolstoy himself, I could not have been granted more than this, my almost vascular connection to the drama and its actors, a privileged role where I might be both a witness and participant in a new type of warfare where the weapons of individuals could equal those of nation states. I was a failed novelist but I saw I had the novelistic smells I needed (from shit to solder), the pixelated light, the women with related cheekbones, the great Australian bush rolling on out past Kinglake, ranges like ancient animals asleep, slender upper branches turned pretty pink by afternoon.
I had a lifetime of hard-won technical ability, but was my heart sufficient? Could I transcend my own beginnings as that stinging little creature who had been the object of Sando Quinn’s pity? Did I have the courage for something more than a five-column smash and grab? Did I, along the way, truly wish to make myself a conduit for the corrosive hurts and betrayals of a guilty mother and an angry child? My own daughters would judge I had a better chance of chopping down a tree.
As I came to the top of Celine’s steps I saw, high on the ridge tops, a magpie glide exactly like a hawk, New hatched to the woeful time, or words to that effect.
Then I sat at Celine’s long table, drinking Jacob’s Creek through a straw while she very kindly re-dressed my throbbing hands.
There was a large blister on one palm and a vicious lesion on the other. My fingers were scarlet and my nurse observed that I would not be typing for a while. I did not comment. She cooked, early. At an hour when Melbourne’s office workers crossed the Swanston Street bridge on their way home, we ate. And then we sat before a mellow bed of coals, toasting bread and slathering it with jam and butter.