Jacko (28 page)

—She must tell Jacko, I said. And then the police.

—Give her a little time, said Maureen. She will. She doesn't have to act on calls that might have hoax written all over them, like Frank Emptor's stunt.

Just the same, during that week I felt my own and my wife's dread, guilt and bemusement grow as a shadow of Lucy Emptor's. Even New York had not prepared us for the idea of these frightful confidences.

Jacko got back on Monday at dawn from a weekend of Los Angeles interviews, and Lucy at last broke down and gave him the information about the dungeon master's wife. Lucy had struck on a median course for saving her own dignity and delivering Sunny Sondquist.

—Now, she said, we can tell the police.

Jacko argued against it. What had the police done so far? They'd found nothing, pursued nothing. Meet the woman, Jacko told Lucy, and we'll film it. And then the police.

She told him that she would not meet this woman, real or hoax as she might be. Since Dannie wished to be Mrs Emptor, here was her big chance. Let her have breakfast or lunch in some dismal corner of Southern California with the wife of the pit-digger, and trade mutual fears of betrayal with her.

At that time I suffered my own minor confusions regarding loyalty. Jacko asked me to another afternoon's drinking session with him at the Odeon. At last New Year's Eve celebrations, Lucy had worn her party-piece black miniskirt with tassels. She looked magnificent in it, and, for what I hope were avuncular teasing purposes, I called it her ‘waistband'. At our table, Jacko had had us all inhale helium and sing the Australian national anthem. The Odeon always carried that redolence for me – Lucy with her long lipped, vivid smile singing in the voice of Minnie Mouse:

—In history's page, let every stage

Advance Australia Fair.

Today when I arrived at the Odeon, Jacko's big Burren Waters backside spilled defeatedly over either side of a bar stool. Seeing me, he spoke with a throaty mournfulness. That morning – as I knew from my viewing – he had taken the Harvard Glee Club to a house uptown and had them perform in some Bulgarian refugee's kitchen.

—Lovely, lovely boys with so sweet voice, the Bulgarian woman had cooed.

All the electronic enthusiasm of that encounter had, however, vanished from Jacko now.

So I had to hear again, as if for the first time, how a woman who claimed to be the enslaver's wife was talking to Lucy on the telephone, and that Lucy was pretty pissed off with him at the moment. She had made it clear she was passing on this news only for the vanished girl's sake. Jacko too – even as one who had seen everything, who had met racketeers' children with aftershave collections, who had watched men with freshly lopped digits sipping Veuve Clicquot in Paterson, New Jersey – expressed amazement. He too was astounded by a woman who called another woman and, in the most normal tones, sought compassion and understanding on the grounds that her man was digging further holes of detention, as men will, not being monogamous that way!

Lucy, he told me, refused to meet with the woman and be filmed from a distance by a
Live Wire
crew. She said that she was not part of the circus. Dannie was part of the circus. Dannie would not look silly if the woman turned out to be a hoax. If Dannie were worried about looking silly, Lucy had told Jacko with rare acerbity, she wouldn't work for Vixen Six.

Lucy wanted to call the police, but
did
seem to accept the idea they would mess things up. Maybe better to have the woman filmed, and then get in the police!

Jacko complained to me that the woman's tale about Dannie and himself hung on the question of whether the woman herself was authentic or not. Jacko felt cheated somehow that Lucy was willing to consider the idea that the woman was a hoax, yet not willing to believe the tale of Dannie and himself could also be false. This, he kept telling me, was the usual irrational stuff he'd got used to from the astral Logan sisters.

Then, said Jacko, Lucy reversed her principles, the stylish, casual attitudes which had marked her till now, and struck a deal that if she travelled to California and did the meeting with the woman, then she wanted thereafter to travel with Jacko all the time!

—You'll have nothing to do though, protested Jacko (according to his own account).

She said she'd knit or read. Or write a book, as I had suggested to her.

—You should let her do it, I advised Jacko. Let her travel with you everywhere.

—I'd feel too crowded, he pleaded. It's the truth. I'm not designed for closeness.

—Then you ought to stay away from Dannie. She intends to strangle you pretty comprehensively.

—The two things have nothing to do with each other, Jacko complained. Dannie and whether Lucy comes with me on bloody weekends. Nothing in common.

I'd got weary of Jacko's wrongheadedness, his wilfulness in marriage. On the other hand, Lucy's presence might leave Jacko fewer occasions with Dannie in the short term, but might encourage them in the long.

—I just don't want to see her demean herself like that, he told me sombrely. Keeping an eye on me. Being a watchdog. It isn't her nature and it'll turn her sour.

As we drank, it was hard to tell which of Lucy's two present aspects most grieved him: that she now had an idea of Dannie's plans; or that she would not consent to play the
Live Wire
game. I felt an obligation to bring him back to the essentials.

—Can't you reassure her, Jacko? I asked him. Can't you offer anything? She's genuinely distressed.

—How do you know? Did she say anything to you?

—Not her. Dannie said something though. She warned me off. In the lift in Berlin.

—Oh Jesus, I feel like a bloody football field, and both teams are tearing me up. I suppose you're barracking for Lucy eh.

—Listen, melodrama doesn't become you, Jacko. What's wrong with Dannie doing the meeting? You implied before we flew to Berlin that she likes dressing up and acting parts …

I could see that he was stung. He took two sips of his drink to still the anger.

He said, It wouldn't be the same eh. If Dannie put on a blonde wig and did it. There wouldn't be the same amount at stake. It'd be fantastic television with Lucy.

—Are you willing to film the part where the woman tells Lucy about Dannie and you?

—That's not germane to the question, mate. We'll edit that out because it's not exactly of public interest.

—I suppose you would edit it out.

—Go easy. Dannie and I aren't news. Lucy and I aren't news.
I'm
not keeping anyone in a bloody dungeon.

There was an angry silence in which I thought, To hell with you, Jacko! Until at last he could trust himself to look at me.

—Lucy's not the right woman for me. I need a dangerous, bossy little sheila like Dannie. I realize these things too late, like every other dumb bugger.

I said, If you talk Lucy into doing it, it could be the end of things, Jacko.

He conducted an invisible chorus with his left hand, a chorus whose voices were an echo of my voice. Conducted it in one sense; dismissed it in another.

—I know what everyone says. I give more of a bugger about a girl whose picture is all I've seen than I do about dear Lucy, the prize cellist of James Ruse High, whom I've got at home and everybody loves. Guilty, cobber. Guilty, guilty, guilty. But we still come back to the main question. I just hope Lucy does it. That's all.

There were further visits by Lucy to my wife. Jacko was still pressing her, but the dungeon master's wife had not rung back. Lucy hoped she wouldn't, that the question of a meeting would now pass. But both Jacko and Dannie, who had a nose for these things, knew that the pause was brief and that Lucy should hold herself ready to meet the woman and speak persuasively.

In the interval, without telling Jacko she was doing it, Dannie herself went to visit and reason with Lucy about a meeting with the woman.

Judging by what Lucy told my wife, the conversation hadn't been a happy or even friendly one. Though it was no surprise to me, Lucy thought it an outrage that Dannie could begin so strongly, taking the moral advantage, speaking of Lucy's obligation to Sunny Sondquist. It was of course clear that Jacko had been complaining to Dannie about Lucy's reluctance.

Dannie proposed it to Lucy in these flat terms: any mistrust Lucy felt shouldn't be an excuse for her failing her duty to the lost girl and to
Live Wire
. Let's all be professional and responsible about this whole thing, said Dannie.

I could see, just by watching Lucy's face when she came in our door, that Dannie had succeeded in turning her into a new kind of woman, the sort of aggrieved territorial woman you saw wearing an embittered mouth on any Manhattan bus.

For the second time in a few days I went to the Odeon, to hear from Jacko – again as if it were fresh news – that he and Lucy were quarrelling. The trouble was, he argued, she was using marriage, as well as her uncertain American visa situation which didn't let her get a job, as an excuse for sinking all she had into him, Jacko. Also, she deliberately avoided answering the phone. He found it hard to understand or overlook this evasion. Okay, it was all right to be ambiguous about tabloid television … but Jesus, Sunny was a
real
girl,
really
vanished …

He told me he was losing his respect for his wife.

Firmly, I put her case as I knew it at second hand from my wife. I argued that first he took away her self-respect, and now blamed her for having none. A pretty low trick, I told him.

Jacko weighed this and again dismissed it.

—No, he said, unreally certain. We've all got to keep self-respect no matter what other buggers do to us.

—Come on, Jacko, I said. This is Manhattan, not Burren Waters. Lucy hasn't fallen off a horse. Or if she has, Dannie pushed her.

But Jacko had the magisterial sadness of a man who has found both his professional and personal justification.

—For God's sake, I appealed to him. It's not like you to be so bloody pompous. You're talking like one of those CBS anchormen you say you despise. It isn't right to make Lucy feel that refusing to be televised makes her an accomplice to kidnapping and enslavement. She didn't kidnap her. And before that it's good Bob Sondquist who set a pattern of enslavement, and the kidnapper brought it to fullness. But it sounds as if you'd rather blame Lucy for the whole bloody mess.

He looked away, as he did frequently now, and punched the zinc top of the bar.

—What's bloody got into you tonight? Listen, I admit it'll be a circus when we find her. What do you think it would be if the cops found her eh? And anyhow, it isn't a question of a circus. It's a matter of cosmic bloody forces …

And he began to distract me by speaking of his old theory of zonal cockpits of evil.

At this stage, when Jacko and Lucy and Dannie were arguing over the pit-digger's wife, I was distracted from the question by a call from upstate New York. An institute in Albany, who had money from the MacArthur Foundation, asked if I could get in contact with Michael Bickham for them. The man who made the call, a celebrated American novelist in his own right, said the institute was willing to fly Bickham and a companion first class from Australia and pay him $10,000 for a lecture and a reading. They realized he was a reclusive man, the novelist told me, but Bickham had always felt he got better reviews in the United States than in Australia, and his visit would be highly publicized and put him back in contact with his American readership.

I advised the man that there was very little chance that Bickham would come. There was first his emphysema, but perhaps more important than that, his temperament, his terror of and contempt for audiences.

—That's why we thought we should contact him through a fellow Australian, the novelist told me. Through someone he trusted.

To refuse would have required me to spend a long time explaining myself to a man whose intentions were full of kindness and regard. It struck me halfway through that perhaps I could take a middle course and sound out his confidante, Chloe Emptor, first.

Early evening in New York is morning in Australia, and so, after the evening edition of
Live Wire
, I called the number I had for Frank Emptor's terrace house in Woollahra.

The phone rang a long time, and I could feel the emptiness which surrounded the pealing. Frank was in jail, but where was Chloe?

At last the phone was picked up and I heard a thin voice say hello.

—Oh, I said, I must have a wrong number. Is that the Emptors'?

—Chloe here, said the voice, and I could hear now that it
was
a thinned-down version of Chloe.

—It's me, I yelled at her with forced joy.

—Good to hear, she said.

I asked the normal questions and told her I'd seen plenty of Jacko and Lucy. Then I asked her how Frank was.

—Plump as a bloody fart, she said. He's in medium security already, the little bugger, and he runs a class in music appreciation. He's all set up eh. I'm the one in bloody disarray. On my way back to Burren Waters. The mongrel bastard's playing up, as you'd expect, and that's nothing compared to my bloody daughter and her boyfriend.

I seemed to remember the daughter's name was Helen, and that she had left the Emptors in Burren Waters and was now living with an anthropologist in Perth. The sublime to the ridiculous, if you ever heard of it!

—Some of the bloody Wodjiris have a land excision claim on part of Burren Waters. And you know who the counsel for the Wodjiris is? My bloody useless daughter's bloody paramour, the anthropologist. So I'm going back to whip the old bastard into shape, and then make sure the excision thing doesn't go anywhere. But honest, I'm so bloody tired of the whole pack of them. All I'd need now for total bloody disaster would be for useless bloody Jacko to dump the only decent thing on our useless bloody horizon eh. That Lucy.