Jacko (32 page)

—Let me talk to him, Dannie raged at Jacko's elbow. Crazed with sleeplessness and having already taken enough rubbish from Jacko, she was ready to flay Bob Sondquist.

—Bob, said Jacko calmly, and again his tone infuriated Dannie, since this was certainly an hour to fulminate, and all he was doing was chatting.

—Bob, you can certainly get $100,000 from one of the networks. You might get more. But they'd want a share of book and movie rights as well. Does she want all that? Do you want it for her eh? They'd pay her a heap, mate, but use her to death. They'd have her making fucking sneaker commercials eh. But it's not what she needs. We're giving her maybe $60,000 for one long interview, no other rights involved. I'm sure you wish, like me Bob, that she could buy some time back with it. But one long interview, and then she'll never have to mention it again to anyone unless she wants to.

—That isn't what the agreement will say, Dannie whispered.

An agreement transmitted by Durkin was already on its way by fax.

Bob Sondquist said he wanted to talk to an entertainment lawyer.

—What? What is he saying? Dannie asked.

Jacko covered the mouthpiece, told her briefly, but did not wait for a reply before addressing Sunny's father again.

—Bob, he reasoned, by all means speak to an entertainment lawyer, but ignore everything the bugger says. Because when it's all said and done, what are you going to tell him? Are you going to tell him you traded your kid to that captain at Page Air Force Base?

Bob Sondquist uttered an electronic protest down the line from New York.

—See, Jacko persisted, in some terms that would explain what happened to poor bloody little Sunny, wouldn't it? It would show how she was set up to take as normal the sort of rubbish that bastard Kremmerling tried on her. It'd explain – wouldn't it eh? – how she was ready for any old rubbishy story. Because she'd already heard them all from you, Bobby, old son.

After weeping for a few seconds, as so many people had in that night of tears, Bob gathered himself. He began to argue in his unearthly diction that Sunny was entitled precisely because of all that! His affliction did not allow contrition to be audible in his voice, and maybe that was both his punishment and his deliverance. For he might be able to reassure himself secretly that the man with the cruel squawk was not the same man who'd sold his child.

She deserved compensation from him, said Bob, and from others. But television had helped make the world crazy, and they should pay their share.

Jacko found himself laughing, and consumed by a great impatience.

—Listen, listen to me, Bob old mate. You've got the California State Victims' Fund to go to. And we'll give her solid money. You sign on with us, and one interview and she'll become a forgotten woman, as she should be eh. When the trial comes up, of course, it'll be a different matter, poor little bugger. But I'm telling you this straight up, the alternative is, we trump whatever the networks do with this story with one about
you
, about cozy old Bob on the fourteenth floor and what a dead shit he was when his daughter was a kid. I'll do it, mate. I tell you I'll bloody do it.

By these means, it was established quickly enough that Jacko and Vixen Six would reap the ratings inherent in Sunny Sondquist, Charles Kremmerling's hapless slave.

Bob asked again to speak to his daughter.

So Jacko stormed to the fax machine at the police station, seized the agreement from Durkin, and with Dannie looking on and protesting, ran a line through all the subsidiary rights Vixen routinely and hungrily desired a share of – the film, book, comic book, electronic image, television drama and physical representation (T-shirt and coffee mug) rights.

—You've gone fucking psycho! Dannie cried.

Agreement in hand, saying nothing while Dannie raged, Jacko sat outside the lieutenant's office, waiting for Sunny to emerge and sign.

17

There was a disturbing news story I saw one night in New York, soon after Kremmerling's arrest, a story in which the San Bernardino County Supervisor questioned whether the county could afford the trial against Charles Kremmerling. It could cost, he said, five hundred thousand dollars, and this could mean some forty or so county workers would need to be retrenched.

—Here we have, he announced, a case which will be long-winded: an alleged victim who was allowed to go jogging and who was taken to New York by the supposed perpetrator, and even held a job for a time, and never took her chance to escape! To make the case stick, the county will need to use expert witnesses and all that's highly expensive …

He sternly argued that the District Attorney's office should weigh the chance of a conviction against a possible loss of forty family incomes.

This plea arose in the wake of Jacko's curiously touching two-part interview with Sunny. She spoke in a neutral voice, a voice so drained of feeling that some people thought she was lying, and only those who had had a glimpse of victimhood saw it as the voice fit for her condition and her tale. She mousily confessed to having been kidnapped, enclosed in a head box, then in the body box, then in a pit; to having been suspended by the wrists or else stretched on a cunning table Charles Kremmerling had constructed; to having been forced to perform intimate favours and undergo intimate sufferings for her dominator. And throughout, Jacko seemed stricken. It was as if he felt the terrors as closely as I had during my startling nightmares in St Vincent's.

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?

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
.