The Unknown Terrorist (6 page)

“It’s all good.”

But when the Doll returned to the security of the brass pole at the centre of the table and turned back around, the fat suit was gone and it was hard to believe anything was good. The Doll held on to the pole, which at moments like this felt the only solid thing in her world, and slowly twirled around, scanning the room for a loaded man.

She spied a lone, middle-aged man coming down from the bar toward the tables. He had a short, keg-like build, wore a flash light-grey summer suit—it had to be Italian—and his face seemed somehow familiar. ‘A suit like that,’ thought the Doll, ‘will either tip with fifties or be tighter than a fish’s arse.’

16

Drink in hand, Richard Cody wandered deeper into the enveloping cavern of the club and found a tub chair close to a table on which a topless brunette was dancing. Her rounded arms and real thighs and splendid buttocks seemed a relief after the exposed musculature of the other women. As he took in the spectacle of the woman on the table he thought he recognised something familiar about her. Her name—was it Tiffany? Or was that the one at the Minx Club? Anyway, he thought, what did her name matter? She had a great arse.

He sat down and leant back and felt an odd and deep pleasure—all the sweeter for being familiar—take hold of him. He was thinking of how, for an eternity, people had thought paradise was somewhere else, whereas now it was here; of course, one had to pay, but then whatever pleasure you wanted was yours and you never needed to find out what their names were.

‘Ah,’ he thought, ‘how sweet! How sweet!’

And he leant forward and raised his hand, holding out a twenty-dollar note in his extended fingers. Though a little taken aback when the Doll deftly plucked the note from his hand—for he had not intended to part with it quite so readily—he still felt momentarily enchanted; life no longer seemed so bad, and it was as if the world spun its peculiar way merely in order to ultimately please him.

If Richard Cody had no idea who she was, the Doll, now she could see him clearly, recognised him. He was Mr TV, Richard Cody. In the way of a pine furniture catalogue, Richard Cody was dully reassuring: always the same and telling you what you already knew. He made you feel comfortable. But he seemed a little unreal, even spooky, sitting there in front of her, tipping her, talking to her.

The Doll had heard from Maria that he had become something of a regular in recent months, though normally only on a Tuesday night early in the evening with a few tv executives. The Doll had never been working when he was there, and this was the first time she had seen him in the club. Jodie had turned a trick with him a few weeks before. She said that he had a flat fat cock like a crushed Coke can, and that it was so awful she charged him double, telling him it was her going rate.

“You’re a gentleman,” said the Doll, smiling as she slid the twenty-dollar note down the side of her knickers. “I like to dance for real gentlemen.”

Holding his eyes with her own, the Doll then swung round and fell to her knees, so that her buttocks were very close to Richard Cody’s face. She looked over her shoulder
at him, and as her arse slowly rocked above his nose, a drink appeared beneath it.

“Compliments of Mr Holstein, the manager,” said the topless waitress indicating, with a slight flick of her head, Ferdy, who was standing over at the bar with a circle of five fatgutted businessmen. Ferdy raised his glass to Richard Cody.

Unlike the businessmen, Ferdy Holstein was small in both height and girth. He had originally been a budgie of a man who, after years of weight powders, steroids and the dreary round of gymnasiums, had transformed himself into a barrel-chested budgie of a man. Though nearly bald, he had bleached what hair remained a bright blond. For all that was ludicrous about him, he was still able to manifest menace.

A piece of bright icing, Ferdy peeled off from the doughnut of suits and walked over.

“I’m a great admirer of your work, Mr Cody,” he said, “as I’ve noticed you’ve become of ours.” He reached into an oversized pocket of his baggy jeans, pulled out a business card and handed it to Richard Cody. “If ever I can be of help, let me know.” As he spoke, a slight spume of white saliva gathered at the edge of his mouth.

Richard Cody looked at the card. “Ferdy Holstein,” he mused, then looked back up. “You’ve been in the news, Ferdy,” he said, pocketing the card.

“Unfortunate event,” Ferdy Holstein said.

“That drug rape trial, wasn’t it?”

“I was just a witness,” Ferdy Holstein said. “As far as I could see, it was consensual sex between my business partner and the girl. But I never said I saw everything.”

“Unfortunate,” Richard Cody repeated. And then he lit up:
“Terrible thing to be tangled in a trial, Ferdy—you know what the Thais say? ‘It is better to eat dog shit than to go to court.’”

“They’ve got a point,” Ferdy Holstein said, taking Richard Cody’s hand. “It’s good to meet. Like I said, if I can assist you with anything, let me know.” He stressed the “anything”. “We’re a misunderstood industry and we like to help our friends in the media, Mr Cody. Otherwise we all end up eating dog shit.”

Yet when Richard Cody flashed Ferdy the briefest of smiles, it was Ferdy who was left feeling both oddly complicit and slightly fearful. Ferdy looked up into the light and, finding the Doll, indicated Richard Cody with a motion of his head.

The music track ended. As the next dancer was announced and the inescapable beat started pushing again, the Doll stepped off the purple felt-lined table and made her way to where Richard Cody once more sat alone.

Later, the Doll would think back on that strange half-hour she spent in one of the private rooms with Richard Cody—two shows in a row, paid for not by him but by Ferdy. At first Richard Cody simply wanting her to fondle her breasts in front of him as he mumbled obscenities. How confident he was—so unlike most men, who, no matter what their bluster, were often like lambs once they were alone with a naked woman: hopeless, lost lambs. But not this man. At one point he even quite cheerfully insulted her, saying:

“Isn’t it humiliating?”

“What’s humiliating?” said the Doll, picking up her drink, knowing full well what he meant. “Drinking a vodka with tonic rather than straight?”

“Ho ho,” said Richard Cody, without smiling. “No.” He
opened his hand outwards, extending his little fingers—the tiny fingers of a child, slight, soft and without strength—as though he were a magician who had just conjured a dove out of the air and released it from his palm. The Doll looked down at his hand and felt revolted.

“This,” he continued. “Being here. Doing …
this
. You are an interesting woman. You could do anything you wanted.”

“And your job, my friend,” said the Doll, “that’s not humiliating?”

Richard Cody made a noise somewhere between a dismissive laugh and a hiss.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Now—let’s see your arse.”

And the Doll smiled the smile that Ferdy had taught them all to use, trying so very hard not to be upset by having to continue dancing naked above this man. And as she danced once more, as he again chanted how he wanted to slide his cock up her arse and then into her mouth and then into her arse, the Doll felt betrayed by her own words.

Why hadn’t she shut up, just kept playing the ditz, keeping herself hidden, safe, so that this shit would just pour off her as it normally did? And at that moment, the control, the sass and the front—which at other times seemed so potent and almost second nature—stretched to paper thin, and the Doll felt somehow deceived by life.

At the end, as she was putting her clothes back on, the Doll noticed him pull a small bottle out from his jacket pocket, pour some fluid into his hands and, in a strange ritual, wash them. She felt as if she were filth being flushed down a sink.

17

At the bar Ferdy pulled out a red ledger—no recoverable, traceable hard drives for Ferdy—opened it, ran his finger down a short column of figures, and said:

“Seven hundred and twenty dollars.”

He turned the book round, pushed it toward the Doll, and passed her a pen.

“Not bad for an early night, Doll.”

While he went to the cash register and from a drawer beneath it pulled out the cash, the Doll checked the figures. When she was sure they were correct, she took out her black Prada Saffiano leather chequebook wallet from the Gucci handbag she now hated, and opened it. The six credit card slots were empty, as was its chequebook compartment. The Doll had neither bank account nor credit rating: the chequebook wallet, she believed, helped convey a different impression. To the eight hundred dollars in its cash compartment, she now added the notes Ferdy handed her, though not before quickly thumb-counting them.

“Good for now, Ferdy. A few years ago we would all have been a little disappointed.”

Once outside, the Doll was hit by the pungent, sticky heat of the night. Everywhere there were people, far more people than usual. The Doll walked to the edge of the road and held out a hand.

Inside the Chairman’s Lounge, Richard Cody had had enough. Leaving the club, he nodded to Billy the Tongan at the head of the red carpet, then looking up saw the dark dancer, the one with the great arse, now fully clothed, standing by the road trying to flag a taxi. The street was busier
than at peak hour, choked with traffic, and the pavements were thick with people, all sorts of people: tourists, families, gays dressed wildly. Richard Cody was thinking how, when he got home, his wife wouldn’t be in any mood for sex, and here he was, feeling fit to burst.

Whistles were sounding and a thousand different songs seemed to be erupting from streets not far away. It was, Richard Cody suddenly realised, the night of the Mardi Gras parade. Everyone, he thought, gets sex on Mardi Gras night, and he didn’t see why he should miss out.

He casually strode the way of the dancer, and came up behind her.

“Well,” Richard Cody said, “if it isn’t Tiffany.”

“Hello,” the Doll said, but avoided his gaze, keeping her eyes firmly fixed on the traffic, holding her hand out more forcefully now, to make her intention clear.

He smiled, his best, most charming smile, turning slightly so she would see him in profile from his left side. As a joke a cameraman had once told him it was a far more handsome profile than his right.

“Tiffany,” Richard Cody said, reasonably sure it was her name, and reasonably sure that if it weren’t it wouldn’t matter: “I pay well for a good blow job.”

The Doll turned to him. She noticed his head was twisted in a strange way.

“You’ve got the wrong idea, my friend,” she said, and then walked quickly past him and up to where a cab was pulling in, adding an aside over her shoulder: “Arsehole.”

18

A minute later, riding through the crowded, sweating city, the Doll had forgotten about the creepy tv man. Around her the streets surged with colour and sound as Mardi Gras got into full swing. The chaos was exacerbated by the presence of security everywhere—cop cars, uniformed cops, dogs, cordons and spot searches of bags. Pedestrians outnumbered cars and cars were moving slower than people as the taxi shoved through the crowds, crawling the short distance to the Doll’s flat in Darlinghurst. The Doll enjoyed the vibrant anonymity of it all. A great city is a great solitude, and the Doll, above all else, liked being alone.

When they became ensnared in a traffic jam, she left the taxi and walked the last block to her flat, past the side lane where an abandoned blue Toyota Corolla continued to accumulate parking tickets as it had done for the past several days—so many that it now looked to be covered by a leaf storm. She turned into the entrance of a dirty and undistinguished brick apartment block.

By the exorbitant standards of the inner city the Doll’s third-floor flat was cheap, but for the same reason that its rent was low—its small rooms, its dilapidated kitchen and squalid bathroom—she rarely let anyone come back there. One day she would have an apartment, a real home that she would bring people back to, and everything would be designer—the Alessi sugar bowl, the La Pavoni espresso machine, the Philippe Starck toilet. Until then, she bought the designer products that mattered—the ones other people saw—and that was clothes.

The Doll put both radio and tv on—she hated the flat silent and found any noise preferable to none—undressed,
showered in the crappy shower that dribbled like an old drunk, and then naked, preferring not to towel herself but to stay wet in the heat, the Doll went to her bedroom.

With one foot on her bed between the two Garfields with whom she slept, the other balancing on a precarious pile of
Renovating Today
magazines that sat on a bedside table, the Doll stretched her arms up to the low ceiling. She peeled a Beyoncé poster off its Blu-tack, revealing a hand-sized hole in the ceiling, from which, not without difficulty, she pulled out a bulging silk bag decorated with batik patterns.

The Doll lay on her bed, undid the bag’s drawstring and took out a fat roll of banknotes bound with a brown rubber band. The Chairman’s Lounge paid well, but they paid cash, and she didn’t want to get caught by the tax office. And so none of her money went where it could be traced, and all of it went into the batik silk bag.

She had learnt to survive by making the most of the small things of life. The Doll wanted what she could hold on to and that was this fat roll of cash—what she knew without counting to be four hundred and ninety-two one-hundred-dollar notes. To that roll she now added five hundred-dollar notes from her Prada Saffiano leather wallet, for it was her way to always keep a grand in her wallet in case she saw something she wanted.

If pressed, if drunk, if unguarded, she might have confessed to longing for dreams, feelings, sensations that never appeared in a catalogue or a magazine and which no one had ever paid cash for. But as to what these things were, she had neither words nor even images; they were as mysterious as the cloud that had entranced her at the beach that morning, about
which she could later not recall one detail. No one remembers a cloud. But $49,700—who could forget that?