The Unknown Terrorist (3 page)

For he, a man come out of the red mystery of the Kimberley’s pindan dust into the blue certainty of the Kings Cross night, sensed in Sydney that the possibility of human community was a pointless dream, that cities revealed that men shared with algae the most natural destiny: meaninglessness confused by the inexplicable need to live. There were no words for any of it, but a pole dancing club seemed to him a better place than an algal fermentation vat to watch its cracked
unravelling. That was what Ferdy felt. What he said, on the other hand, was banal, but not without its own related truth.

“It’s all in the show,” Ferdy would say.

And indeed it was.

8

Until the moment, a little after 7 pm, that he walked along the red carpet of the Chairman’s Lounge, headed down past the purple neon tubes and pulled from his Armani pants’ pocket a twenty-dollar note to pay a smiling woman the entry fee, Richard Cody’s day had been unhappy. He had slept poorly, woken to yet one more argument with his wife, then been called out by Six’s news producers to anchor the live crosses from a terrorist bomb scare at Homebush Olympic stadium.

There was a new makeup girl who had made his hair look ridiculous, then the OB van kept losing contact with the studio on the live crosses, and the whole story in any case quickly grew repetitive, then pointless: three bombs had been found, each in a kid’s backpack. The crowd was evacuated, the area sealed off. Nothing else would happen now.

He had continued saying the same thing over and over with his stupid hair and the studio dropping in and out, while a string of so-called experts—mostly consultants wanting a job as an expert in security, terror, politics—commented on each other’s remarks, which in turn repeated and elaborated the few brief comments made by the police and government spinners, all pretending that in this vortex of nonsense might be found some sign predicting what might next occur.

Only his Armani summer suit didn’t let him down, enduring the heat without crease or crumple. In middle age he had taken refuge in elegance, even when the temperature had not dropped below thirty-eight for five days and the humidity was stuck at ninety-four per cent. As his body thickened and leathered, as his hair thinned, Richard Cody believed his fine clothes helped assert a persuasive idea of himself as charming, sophisticated, clever: in short that his agreeable clothes helped the world concur with his agreeable idea of himself.

After the 1 pm cross, Richard Cody had had enough, and the best of excuses. He had been invited to a lunch at Katie Moretti’s home by the boss of Six’s news and current affairs division, Jerry Mendes, who had been a not unimportant aspect of Katie Moretti’s divorce. Richard Cody was secretly pleased that Jerry Mendes had invited him. It proved, he felt—not least to those to whom he let drop news of the invitation—who was still the senior journalist at Six.

When he finally arrived, Katie Moretti ushered him inside her home—a Double Bay mansion gained in her divorce and refurbished in the contemporary manner of a corporate foyer—and introduced him to her other guests. They came, he learned during the introductions, from advertising and finance and the law. There were also two McKinsey vice presidents—is there anyone, he wondered while shaking hands and smiling, who works for a modern corporation who isn’t a vice president?—a Labor Party senator and a graphic designer. You could have greased a hundred barbies with their conversations.

Still, the food had been exquisite, much good wine had
been drunk, and a very fine Armagnac had gone around the table several times. The new furniture and the new paintings and the new crockery and the new caterers all deserved the compliments they received; the view from the dining room over the harbour had rightly been celebrated in several major magazines; and there had even been two wonderful Romanian musicians, a violinist and an accordionist—
my
gypsies, as Katie Moretti called them—earlier in the afternoon. Yet somehow it all seemed tedious, overwrought and as much effort to endure as a day at work.

No one really cared overly about anything; but they still felt the need to repeat what they had read in the
Sydney Morning Herald
which repeated the opinions of people at dinner parties such as the one they were now at, all feeling slightly dizzy with the familiar dullness of everything.

So many ideas to parade, films to have watched, books to have read, exhibitions and plays to have seen, so much to have to have greedily gobbled—and unless you were a glutton and had swallowed the world whole, you were an ignorant fool, unqualified to say anything.

But all these subjects existed only to lard the hard truth of the lunch: the gossip that traded knowledge for money and power; the finessed probings of position and status; the sly seeking of alliances and linking of chains of patronage; the constant aggrandisement of self, as necessary as a bull elephant seal’s bark.

Richard Cody would have left even earlier than he did, had it not been for the graphic designer. She was dark, with curly black hair and was wearing a short dark brown dress with a low neckline partly covered with black lace. The lace made
the curve and shape of her plump breasts look particularly enticing. Her name was—but what her name was, Richard Cody, for all his interest, was unable to remember.

Still, even without being able to refer to her by name, Richard Cody flirted in a way he believed would not be noticeable, but which he thought would only seem to others like the courtesy someone would show a stranger.

The day dragged on, the graphic designer seemed at first uninterested, and then politely irritated by Richard Cody’s attention, and when Jerry Mendes took him aside, ostensibly to admire the view from Katie Moretti’s new deck, but rather in order to speak to him in confidence, Richard Cody was both relieved and excited. Perhaps a new program? A promotion? Money? It could only be good, he thought, as he laughed wholeheartedly at some of Jerry Mendes’s wretched jokes.

Jerry Mendes was a fat man with a bad complexion. He appeared to have been assembled out of chipped billiard balls. His reputation was as an arse licker, he never seemed to have much to say, and what he said was uttered in an unpleasant voice that was both resonant and high pitched, and always sounded to Richard Cody like one billiard ball hitting another—
clack
—and rebounding onto yet another—
clock
. Still, Richard Cody felt rather important being invited outside for a private chat, and he thought how, in spite of what people said, he was really quite fond of Jerry Mendes.

On the deck the heat was like a weight. The sun was so bright that there was no view, only blinding shards of white light ricocheting off the water like shrapnel filling the sky, slashing at the vision of any who looked. They screwed their
faces up to narrow their eyes to slits. Like reptiles waiting to strike, they gazed out on Australia, unable to see anything.

9

“Beautiful, eh?” Jerry Mendes said.

“Exquisite,” Richard Cody replied, his head already beginning to ache from the inescapable glare.

“Gotta fag, Richie?”

Richard Cody loathed being called Richie. He wearied of Jerry Mendes always asking this same question and him always giving the same answer: he didn’t smoke. He longed for shade.

Jerry Mendes went inside and returned with a lighted cigarette, took one big drag and, as the smoke meandered out of his mouth, flicked the cigarette over the deck and into the blinding white light of Sydney.

Then he turned to Richard Cody and told him that exciting things were afoot at Six, that the board was keen to spend more on current affairs in the chase for ratings. He waited for Richard Cody to say something, and so Richard Cody said something, but it was like telling Jerry Mendes he didn’t smoke, for Richard Cody knew whatever he said at this point was irrelevant.

Jerry Mendes then told Richard Cody that he was being transferred from his job as anchor for the network’s flagship weekly current affairs program,
This Week Tonight
, to their nightly current affairs show,
Undercurrent
, but not as the anchor, which Richard Cody would have found acceptable, but as “senior network correspondent”. He was
being replaced at
This Week Tonight
by the young ABC newsreader Zoe LeMay.

Jerry Mendes used all sorts of empty phrases—
reinvention … new demographic … we are all family … synergy
—to dress up what they both knew to be a demotion. All Richard Cody could hear was
clack-clock-clack
and the sound of something sinking. Zoe LeMay! A bimbo even blondes looked down on! It was his face, his age, he knew it. He went to protest, but Jerry Mendes cut him off:

“Well, Richie, if you want it different, you’re going to have to get off your arse. Take some responsibility for yourself. Work your way back.”

Richard Cody completely forgot how only a few moments earlier he had been rather fond of Jerry Mendes, for now he hated him from the bottom of his heart, hated him completely and utterly, and loathed his grasping mistress, Katie Moretti, and all their awful, dull friends. What made it even worse was that Jerry Mendes, finally weary himself of his own nonsense, had abruptly changed the subject and was now, his repulsive hand on Richard Cody’s shoulder, philosophising about journalism as if they were brothers in arms.

“These fuckwits who think it’s about the truth, you know where they go wrong?” Jerry Mendes said, neither waiting for nor wanting an answer. “They think the truth has power, that it will carry everything before it. But it’s crap. People don’t want the truth, you know that, Richie?”

Richard Cody knew he was meant to say nothing. He said nothing.

“People want an exalting illusion, that’s what they want. Find that sort of story, ginger it up with a few dashes of fear
and nastiness, and you’ve hit gold. True gold.”

This time Richard Cody knew he was meant to say something. He searched for what he hoped was the right note of irony.

“Truth is what we turn into gold, Jerry,” he said.

Jerry Mendes laughed so much his laughter turned to wheezing and then a thin, high-pitched choking noise that was only alleviated by an inhaler he wrestled from a trouser pocket. He sucked on it as if it were a giant lollipop.

“Journalism, Richie,” said Jerry Mendes when he was once more able to speak, his voice now thin and oddly shrill, “is the art of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.”

10

Walking the length of the Nullarbor Plain did not offer a more dispiriting prospect to Richard Cody than staying one more moment at Katie Moretti’s lunch party. And yet, he stayed in order to impress Jerry Mendes that he was a remarkable man who deserved better, so that he would not be thought to be doing what he now desperately wished to do—leaving in a rage. To distract himself he went back to flirting with the graphic designer.

The talk had swung to the mandatory detention of refugees. At first Richard Cody felt compelled—albeit in a qualified manner—to agree that the government’s position was less than praiseworthy, but the graphic designer didn’t seem to be that interested. Then Richard Cody began putting the other side of the argument, at first tentatively, quoting several sources high up in Foreign Affairs.

And when the graphic designer seemed no more interested than before, Richard Cody began inflating several stories he had heard of “dangerous Islamic types” who had been allowed into the country, playing up a few well-known names with whom he had, if he’d been honest, only the vaguest connection.

And though the graphic designer still appeared no more interested than before, slowly the table began to come round to Richard Cody’s views, which seemed like so much common sense from a man who, as a prominent journalist, really had seen something of the world.

“I mean,” Richard Cody said, “it’s not as if we are Nazi Germany.”

“That’s what I keep saying, Ray,” said the Labor Party senator, who had aioli from the crayfish smeared on his jowl and Richard Cody mixed up with Ray Martin. “We’re Australia.”

Others murmured their agreement with the senator. There could be no doubt about it; they were Australia and, looking around Katie Moretti’s grand dining room and its new furniture and its splendid view, it was readily apparent to them all what Australia was, and all of Australia was as splendid as it was obvious—it was them! It was their success and their prosperity; their mansions and apartments! Their Porsches and Bentleys and Beemers! Their getaways in the tropics! Their yachts and motorcruisers! Their influence, their privileges, their certainties! Who could doubt it? Who would question it? Who would wish to change any of it?

The graphic designer finally seemed engaged; she looked Richard Cody’s way, smiled briefly, and leant forward. Richard Cody was relieved. He smiled back.

“Say what you like about the Nazis,” the graphic designer said, and Richard Cody noticed that she had an attractive dark mole on her left breast, “but they understood design.”

She leant further forward as she spoke, and a heavily ornamented crucifix she wore teetered out from the cleavage that Richard Cody found so appealing, then tumbled out of the pocket between the black lace and her breasts.

“Look at that SS uniform,” said the graphic designer. “Now, that’s sex in black jodhpurs.”

For a moment no one spoke. The crucifix swayed like a talisman in front of them all, beating slow time in that empty space, and the more the crucifix swung, the more Richard Cody looked, and the more he looked the more he imagined her breasts underneath and what her nipples would be like erect, and the more he felt compelled to agree. The swastika was great branding, he said, quickly adding that it wasn’t a brand he liked, but that wasn’t the point.

Richard Cody was draining another glass of the ’97 Moorilla Pinot Noir when the graphic designer got up to leave, and though everyone protested, none more so than Richard Cody, she was going, and going with her was her black lace and her swaying, taunting crucifix and her black-moled breast and her now unknowable nipples. Richard Cody realised that all through that impossibly long lunch she had been bored with them all, not least him.