The Bat (39 page)

“Yes.”

“Between the crafty little sod we call Fiddler Ray and the big sea turtle, well, we’ve moved her now, and we’re going to make a pool so that we can have a few freshies—”

“I know where she is. This is urgent, Ben.”

“Right. If you’re fit and not too jittery, you can jump over the plexiglas in the corner.”

“Into where the crocodile is?”

“It spends most of its time half asleep in the pool. From the corner it’s five or six steps to the door we use when we wash and feed Matilda. But you’ll have to be nippy because a saltie’s incredibly fast. It’ll be on you, all two tons of it, before you know what’s hit you. Once we were going to—”

“Thanks, Ben.” Harry broke into a run and people scattered to the side. He folded his lapel and spoke into the mike: “McCormack, Holy here. I’m going to check behind the crocodile pen.”

He caught Lebie by the arm and dragged him along. “Last chance,” he said. Lebie’s eyes widened with alarm as Harry stopped by the crocodile and took a run-up. “Follow me,” Harry said, jumping onto the Plexiglas wall and swinging himself over.

As his feet hit the ground on the other side, the water in the pool began to ferment. White froth rose and as Harry headed for the door he saw a green Formula One car accelerating out of the water, low-slung, with small lizard feet on the sides whirling round like rotary whisks. He kicked off and slipped in the loose sand. From far behind him he heard the roars and from the corner of his eye he saw the raised bonnet of the racer. He was up again, sprinted the few meters to the door and grabbed the handle. For a fraction of a second Harry’s mind dwelt on the possibility that the door might be locked. The next moment he was inside. A scene from
Jurassic Park
appeared at the back of his mind and made him bolt the door behind him. Just in case.

He unholstered his gun. The damp room stank of a nauseous mixture of detergent and rotten fish.

“Harry!” It was McCormack on the radio. “First of all, there is a simpler route into where you are now than straight through that beast’s food bowl. Secondly, stay right there, nice and calm, until Lebie’s walked round.”

“Can’t hear … bad re … ion, sir,” Harry said, scratching a nail across the mike. “I’m … go … n alone.”

He opened the door at the other end of the room and emerged into a tower with a spiral staircase in the middle. Harry guessed that the stairs led down to the underwater tunnels, and decided to go up. On the next landing there was another door. He peered up the stairs, but there didn’t appear to be any more doors.

He twisted the handle and pushed the door open carefully with his left hand while keeping the gun trained ahead of him. It was as black as night inside, and the stench of rotten fish was overwhelming.

Harry found a light switch on the wall inside the door, which he operated with his left hand, but it didn’t work. He let go of the door and took two probing steps forward. There was a crunch beneath his feet. Harry guessed what it was and retreated soundlessly to the door. Someone had smashed the bulb in the ceiling. He held his breath and listened. Was there someone else in the room? A ventilator rumbled.

Harry slipped back onto the landing.

“McCormack,” he whispered into the mike, “I think I’ve found him. Listen, do me a favor and call his mobile phone.”

“Harry Holy, where are you?”

“Now, sir. Please, sir.”

“Harry, don’t make this a personal vendetta. It’s—”

“It’s hot today, sir. Will you help me or not?”

Harry heard McCormack’s heavy breathing.

“OK, I’ll call now.”

Harry nudged the door open with his foot and stood legs akimbo in the doorway, his gun held in front of him with both hands, waiting for the phone to ring. Time felt like a droplet that would never fall. Perhaps two seconds passed. Not a sound.

He’s not here, Harry thought.

Then three things happened at once.

The first was that McCormack started talking. “He’s switched off …”

The second was that Harry realized he was silhouetted against the doorway like a wild creature in flight.

The third was that Harry’s world exploded in a shower of stars and red blotches on his retina.

Harry remembered fragments of Andrew’s boxing lessons from their drive to Nimbin. Such as that a hook performed by a professional boxer is normally more than enough to knock an untrained man unconscious. By moving his hip he gets the whole of his upper torso behind the hook and gives the punch so much power that the brain short-circuits instantly. An uppercut placed precisely on the point of the chin lifts you from the floor and sends you straight into dreamland. For certain. Also a perfect straight right from a right-handed boxer leaves you poor odds for being able to stand upright afterward. And most important of all: if you don’t see the punch coming, the body won’t react and swerve away. Just a minor movement of the head can considerably soften the impact of a punch. It’s very rare for a boxer to see the decisive blow that knocks him out.

The only explanation for Harry not being unconscious must therefore have been that the man in the dark had been standing to Harry’s left. Because Harry was standing in the doorway he couldn’t hit him in the temple from the side, which according to Andrew in all probability would have been sufficient. He couldn’t throw an effective hook or an uppercut as Harry was holding his arms with the gun in front of him. Nor a straight right, because that would have meant standing in front of the gun. The only option remaining was a straight left, a punch Andrew had dismissed as a “woman’s punch, most suited to irritate or at best bruise an opponent in a street fight.” Andrew may have been correct about that, but this straight left had sent Harry flying backward down the spiral staircase where his back had met the edge of the railing and he had almost flipped over.

When he opened his eyes, though, he was still standing upright. A door was open at the other end of the room, through which he was fairly sure Toowoomba had made his escape. But he could also hear a clanking sound he was fairly sure was his gun rolling down the metal stairs. He decided to go for the gun. With a suicidal dive down the staircase Harry grazed his forearms and knees, but caught the gun just as it was about to bounce off the edge and plunge twenty meters to the bottom of the shaft. He struggled to his knees, coughed and confirmed he had lost his second tooth since coming to this bloody country.

He stood up and almost immediately passed out.

“Harry!” someone shouted in his ear.

He also heard a door being flung open somewhere below him and felt running feet shaking the stairs. Harry aimed himself at the door in front of him, saw the door at the other end of the room, half hit it and staggered out into the dusk with a sense that he had dislocated his shoulder.

“Toowoomba!” he screamed into the wind. He looked around. Before him lay the town, and behind him Pyrmont Bridge. He was standing on the roof of the aquarium and had to hold on tight to the top of a fire escape in the gusting wind. The water in the harbor had been whipped into white foam and he could taste the salt in the air. Below him he saw a dark figure on his way down the fire escape. The figure stopped for a second and looked around. To its left was a police car with a flashing light. In front of it, behind a fence, the two tanks of water that protruded from Sydney Aquarium.

“Toowoomba!” Harry yelled and tried to raise the gun. His shoulder refused point-blank, and Harry screamed with pain and fury. The figure jumped down from the ladder, ran to the fence and began to climb over. Harry realized at that moment what he was intending to do—to get into the building housing the tank, go out through the back and swim the short distance to the quay on the other side.
From there it would take him only seconds to disappear into the crowds. Harry stumbled down the fire escape. He charged at the fence as if intending to tear it down, swung himself over with one arm and landed on the cement with a thud.

“Harry, report in!”

He pulled the plug out of his ear and lurched toward the building. The door was open. Harry ran in and fell to his knees. Beneath the arched roof ahead of him, bathed in lights hanging from a steel cable over the tank, was an enclosed piece of Sydney Harbour. A narrow pontoon crossed through the middle of the tank, and a fair way down it, there was Toowoomba. He was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and black trousers and running in as relaxed and elegant a manner as a narrow, unstable pontoon would allow.

“Toowoomba!” Harry shouted for the third time. “I’m going to shoot!”

Harry leaned forward, not because he couldn’t stand upright, but because he couldn’t raise his arm. He got the dark figure in his sights and pulled the trigger.

The first shot made a tiny splash in front of Toowoomba, who seemed to be running with consummate ease. Harry aimed a bit to the right. There was a splash behind Toowoomba. The distance was almost a hundred meters now. An absurd thought occurred to Harry: it was like shooting practice inside the hall in Økern—the lights in the ceiling, the echo between the walls, the pulse in the trigger finger and the deep meditative concentration.

Like training on the shooting range in Økern, Harry thought, and fired for the third time.

Toowoomba plunged headlong.

Harry said later in his statement that he assumed the shot had hit Toowoomba in the left thigh, and that therefore
it was unlikely to kill him. Everyone knew, however, that this was no more than a wild guess, firing as he had from a hundred meters away. Harry could have said anything he liked without anyone being able to prove the contrary. Since there was no body left on which to do an autopsy.

Toowoomba lay screaming half submerged in the water as Harry advanced up the pontoon. Harry felt dizzy and nauseous, and everything was beginning to blur—the water, the lights in the roof and the pontoon tilting from side to side. As Harry ran he remembered Andrew’s words about love being a greater mystery than death. And he remembered the old story.

Blood rushed in his ears, in surges, and Harry was the young warrior Walla, and Toowoomba was the snake Bubbur, who had taken the life of his beloved Moora. And now Bubbur had to be killed. By love.

In McCormack’s statement later he was unable to say what Harry Holy had shouted into his mike after they’d heard the shots.

“We just heard him running and shouting something, probably in Norwegian.”

Even Harry was unable to say what he’d shouted.

In a life-and-death race, Harry sprinted up the pontoon. Toowoomba’s body was jerking. Jerks that made the whole pontoon writhe. At first Harry thought something had bumped into it, but then he realized he was being cheated of his quarry.

It was the Great White.

It raised its white skull from the water and opened its jaws. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion. Harry was sure it was going to take Toowoomba, but it couldn’t get
a proper grip and only succeeded in dragging the screaming body further into the water before having to dive again.

No arms, Harry thought, recalling a birthday with his grandmother in Åndalsnes a long, long time ago when they were doing apple bobbing, trying to grab apples with their mouths from a tub of water, and his mother had laughed so much she’d had to lie down on the sofa afterward.

Thirty meters to go. He thought he would make it, but then the shark was back. It was so close Harry saw it roll its cold eyes, as if in ecstasy, as it triumphantly showed its double row of teeth. This time it managed to catch hold of one foot and tossed its head from side to side. Water shot up in a jet of spray, Toowoomba was flung through the air like a limbless doll and his screaming was cut short. Harry arrived.

“You bloody monster, he’s mine!” he wailed through tears, pointing his gun and emptying the magazine into the pool in one burst. The water was suffused with a reddish color, similar to a red squash drink, and down below Harry saw the light of the underwater tunnel where adults and children were thronging round to see the finale, a genuine drama in all its true horror, a feast that would compete with “The Clown Murder” for tabloid event of the year.

Gene Binoche looked and sounded exactly like what he was—a guy who had lived a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle to the full and didn’t intend to stop until he was at his journey’s end. And he was well on the way.

“I guess they need a good tattooist down there too,” Gene said, dipping the needle. “Satan appreciates a bit of variety when he’s torturing, don’t you think, mate?”

But the customer was plastered and his head was drooping, so he probably couldn’t comprehend Gene’s philosophical observations or feel the needle puncturing his shoulder.

At first Gene had refused to deal with this bloke who’d entered his little boutique and slurred his request in an odd sing-song accent.

Gene had answered that they didn’t tattoo people in his condition and asked him to return the following day when he’d sobered up. But the bloke had slapped 500 dollars on the table for what he reckoned was a 150-dollar job, and to tell the truth business had been a bit slack in recent months, so he took out his Ladyshave and Mennen stick deodorant and started the job. But he refused when the bloke offered him a swig from the bottle. Gene Binoche had been tattooing customers for twenty years, was proud of his work and
in his opinion serious professionals didn’t drink on the job. Not whiskey at any rate.

When he’d finished he taped a bit of toilet paper over the rose tattoo. “Keep out of the sun and, for the first week, wash with water only. The good news is the pain will subside this evening and you can take this off tomorrow. The bad news is you’ll be back for more tattoos,” he said and grinned. “They always come back.”

“This is the only one I want,” the bloke said and staggered out of the door.

The door opened and the roar of the wind was deafening. Harry crouched down on his knees by the opening.

“Are you ready?” he heard a voice shout in his ear. “Pull the rip cord at four thousand feet and don’t forget to count. If you haven’t felt the chute within three seconds something’s wrong.”