Dragons at the Party (34 page)

He needed a car now; public transport no longer would be safe. The police would be scouring these streets in just a few minutes. It took him only a minute to find the car he wanted, a nondescript brown Mazda. This was an area for more expensive cars, but most of those, he guessed, would be equipped with alarms. He opened the door of the Mazda in seconds, connected the ignition wires and drove away with the canvas bag and brief-case on the seat beside him and a feeling of a job well done. As he came down to the traffic lights on the main road and waited for them to turn green, two police cars, sirens screaming, came speeding up the main road and turned into the street where he waited. The lights turned green and he drove on. He would head for the airport and be on his way home before the news of Timori’s death hit tomorrow’s headlines.

Kingsford Smith airport was almost deserted when he arrived there. He parked the car in the near-empty car park. He took the Sako .270 out of the canvas bag and put it under the driver’s seat; he then put the two police pistols under the passenger’s seat. That left the canvas bag empty, but he would fill it with shirts and underwear when he got inside to one of the airport shops. He had his two return air tickets, one to Singapore and the other from Singapore to Damascus, and several hundred dollars’ worth of traveller’s cheques. And a million dollars waiting for him in his bank account in Zurich.

He went into the overseas terminal carrying the canvas bag and his brief-case and was shocked to see nobody about. It was as if it had been cleared because of a bomb alert; he had once caused the same effect at Rome airport. The airline counters were closed and so were the shops. The Departures and Arrivals boards were blank; the sky, it seemed, had been closed for the night. He saw two cleaners at the far end of the hall and he hurried towards them.

“What has happened to the planes?”

One woman was an Asian and the other a Turk: their English was barely basic. “Eh? Planes? They finish.”

“You mean they aren’t flying? The crews are on strike?” He had heard about the Australian
fetish
for strikes: it was a national occupation.

“Strike? Where?” The women downed their tools, ready to be called out: they were basic Australians.

Seville turned away in disgust, saw the security officer coming towards him and automatically reached for the gun that had been in his jacket pocket. But it wasn’t there and he felt a surge of relief that he had left it in the car. He must see that he didn’t panic.

“Something wrong, sir?” The security guard looked as wide as he was tall, able to block a whole crowd from advancing; he had a jovial face that he had tried to make stern with a thick dark moustache. “Are you lost?”

“I think I must be,” said Seville, careful to be polite; he had been brought up to be polite and often in the past he had appreciated the camouflage of it. Men in uniform liked to be deferred to; it was one of the perks of the job. “I was expecting to be able to catch a plane . . .”

“Where to?”

Anywhere out of Australia; or anyway Sydney
. “Singapore. I hadn’t booked . . .”

“We have a curfew,” explained the guard; he looked as if he might shake his head at the ignorance of foreigners. “No planes out of here after eleven p.m.”

“Why?”

“People under the flight paths can’t sleep with the jets coming in over them all night. It’s a civilized custom,” he added, as if he would like to be home asleep himself.

“No planes to anywhere? Melbourne? Perth?”

The guard shook his head. “Nowhere. The first plane will be at six tomorrow morning, over at the interstate terminals. There’ll be nothing out of here before nine.” He looked up at the blank indicators. “Around nine, I think. I’m off duty by then.”

Do you live under a flight path? How do you sleep?
But he was too polite to ask those questions. “Then I shall have to come back in the morning.”

“There’ll be plenty of planes then. You can go anywhere you like.” He grinned behind the
barricade
of his moustache.

Seville went back out to the car park, cursing a city that stopped dead at night like a Syrian hill village. As he went out past the airline counters he saw a sign: Air New Zealand; and in small letters beneath it: Agents for Aerolineas Argentina. Suddenly he wanted to go home, to hear Spanish spoken, to walk in Palermo Park, even, maybe, to visit the big dark apartment in Recoletta where his mother sat with her needlework, her snobbery and her prejudices, waiting to join her illustrious ancestors in the family mausoleum in the Recoletta cemetery, the only place where one could be properly buried according to one’s station in death.

He took the rifle and the pistols from beneath the seat and put them back in the canvas bag. He was not sure why he did it; it was a form of housekeeping. He started up the car again and drove out of the airport and back towards the city. On the way he passed two police cars, lights flashing and sirens screaming, going in the opposite direction; it was a warning not to come back to the airport in the morning. Over to his left the outer city’s lights lit up yellow clouds that could have been rain clouds or just smoke. As he drove he thought of Timori falling face down away from the window in the Hickbed house.

He had no remorse about taking the man’s life. He had never felt remorse, not even when innocent people died in the bomb attacks he had organized. In any war there had to be casualties amongst the innocents; how many had been guilty amongst the casualties in London and Dresden and Hiroshima? There had been less of that when he had belonged to the Tupamaros; except for the police torture, that had been a simple, almost innocent war compared to those he had joined later. He had not examined the whys and wherefores of the Paluccan situation, but it was still a war of sorts. Any struggle for power was a war and he drew no distinctions.

He switched on the car radio, as much to keep himself awake as anything else. He was all at once bone tired, mentally as well as physically; he would sleep for a week when he got home to Damascus. The radio was playing some middle-of-the-night music, a group he hadn’t heard in years: Dave Brubeck and his quartet. He knew the number, “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be.” It brought back memories
of
his first year at university, when he and the varsity jazz club would sit far into the night playing Brubeck, Mulligan and the other Americans who excited them then. He began to hum the melody.

Then the music stopped and the announcer said, a little breathlessly: “We’ve just had a news flash! President Timori, of Palucca, has just been shot! He’s been admitted to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he is in a critical condition. That’s all we have at the moment. More later . . . Now back to Dave Brubeck . . .”

Seville snapped off the radio and thumped a hand hard on the steering-wheel. They were faking: the man was dead! He knew it—
dead
! He could not have missed: the back of the dark head had been squarely in the centre of his sight. The range had not been extreme, his aim had been steady, the bullet at that distance could not have failed to do the ultimate damage. They were faking, hiding the truth for some political reason.

But he would have to stay on in Sydney now to be sure. He had been consumed with pride in a job well done; which might not, now, have been done well or at all. Besides, there was the matter of the million dollars. He wondered if his client would pay pro rata, if Timori should survive and he could not get to him again. Half a million was better than no bread at all.

The city was quiet, though there were people in the streets, a good many of them drunk or at least merry. Some of them had been partying since the beginning of this long weekend; the weekend would end tomorrow, Tuesday, the last day of the second century of the founding of this colony. A few people, mostly young, looked as if they had been celebrating since the end of the first century; they leaned against lamp-posts and threw up their insides, their dignity with it. Australians, he decided, were the worst sort of drunks; but he thought with Latin prejudice. He had never seen, only read about, the English and Scottish football fans. Once again he wanted to be gone from this uncouth country as soon as possible. For one mad moment he wanted to take out the Sako and mow down all the drunks as a contribution to civilization. He had his standards.

He dare not go looking for a bed in a hotel, if any could be found. He had seen a headline in a weekend newspaper:
NO ROOM AT THE INN
. He would stay in the car, let it be his hotel for the night. He
drove
through the midnight streets down towards the harbour, carefully negotiating the drunks, came out on to the waterfront and saw the Harbour Bridge towering above him like a giant Meccano set. Cars were parked end to end along the kerbs of the road that ran back under the bridge; he drove under the giant arch and along past a wharf which had been turned into restaurants and souvenir shops. The restaurants were still open, their owners having decided that tonight there would be enough business to warrant staying open all night. The crowds were gathering for tomorrow’s sail-past, getting in early for the best view of the harbour. Cars were still arriving and, though Seville passed several parked police cars, he felt safe. No policeman would be looking for a stolen car in this confusion.

He drove on along the wharves, found no parking spot, turned round and drove back. As he passed back under the bridge a car pulled out in front of him on the waterfront side of the road. He swung into the vacant space at the kerb, bouncing one wheel up on the pavement and down again as he squeezed the Mazda in between a van and a BMW. He disconnected the ignition, letting the motor die, then looked up to see the burly policeman coming towards him. His hand went into the canvas bag.

The policeman stopped by the open window of the car, bent down. “How lucky can you be, eh?” He grinned and walked on.

Seville leaned back in the seat, his body turning to jelly. He had felt like this only once before. He had flown from Tripoli in Libya to Tokyo, arriving worn out by jet lag, only to find that the Red Army group which had sent for him were expecting him to engage with them at once in the kidnapping of a Cabinet minister. Everything had gone wrong through no fault of his; the planning had not been right, the execution too hasty, his own tiredness too strong. He had collapsed after it, escaping only by the skin of his life, and he had never forgotten the experience. He was weak now and he lay for a few minutes trying to recover some muscle and bone. Then he realized he was also desperately hungry: he hadn’t eaten anything since the sandwich on the cruise ferry.

He couldn’t leave the car and go along to one of the restaurants; he had broken the lock on the driver’s door and he did not want to leave the canvas bag with the guns in it in the car, not even in the boot. Then he saw the lighted van parked on the opposite side of the road, a line of ten or twelve people
queued
beside it. He got out of the Mazda and on unexpectedly weak legs, so that he staggered the first couple of steps, he crossed the road to the van. Five minutes later he came back with two meat pies and a carton of coffee that tasted as if it had been brewed in a dish-washing machine.

The burly policeman came back as he reached the car. “Pies, eh? Best bloody meal there is. Enjoy it, sport.” He went on, handing out camaraderie as on other occasions he would hand out warrants.

Seville ate his supper, drank the coffee, then settled down for the night. The crowd had quietened down, sleeping on the pavement or in their cars or vans, storing up their energy for the Big Day tomorrow. Seville thought about Timori, wondered whether he was still alive or had died in the hospital; but he was too tired to care. Timori, dead or alive, could wait till tomorrow. He slept and dreamed: he was climbing the Perito Moreno glacier in Patagonia, but the ice kept breaking off beneath him, falling away with a loud crack into the lake below him while he leapt from one foot-hold to another on the towering blue-white wall.

He woke stiff and still tired, blinked at the sun coming straight in on him through the windscreen. He sat up, twisting his neck to take the crick out of it. He felt dirty and sweaty and wanted nothing more at the moment than a good soaking bath. Well, yes, there was
something
he wanted more than a bath or anything else: news of Timori. He connected the ignition wires again, then turned on the radio.

He was lucky: the on-the-hour news was just beginning: “President Timori, of Palucca, who was shot last night in the home of Sydney businessman Russell Hickbed is still in intensive care in St. Vincent’s Hospital. After an operation lasting four-and-a-half hours, doctors say that his condition is still critical. Police are searching for his alleged assailant, Miguel Seville, who is believed to be still in Sydney . . .”

Seville switched off the radio, then disconnected the wires again. He sat for a moment staring out at the harbour, its waters just a golden lake under the rising sun. Small private boats and early morning ferries were dark moving shapes on the golden glare; the shells of the Opera House seemed about to take off into the yellow sky. He turned his head and looked back under the bridge and saw the
yellow-
brown pall of smoke spreading from the west. The bushfires evidently were still burning.

He got out of the car and stretched his limbs. He would have breakfast—the pie-van was still parked across the road—and then he would head out of Sydney for some other airport, there to catch a feeder plane that would connect with a plane for Singapore, Hong Kong, anywhere. He would settle for half a million dollars; he would leave Timori to the doctors. But it would always be a festering sore that he had not done the job properly.

He crossed the road to the pie-van, stood at the end of the queue that was even longer than last night’s. He idly glanced up the grassy slope that run up from the roadway and under the bridge. It was already packed with spectators for today’s big event; it seemed that most of them had been there all night. Then he saw the group of twenty or thirty Aborigines and the big calico sign, supported by two poles dug into the ground, that hung above them: GIVE US BACK OUR LAND!