I wondered if she wanted me to start that again.
“We don’t have an extradition treaty with Laos,” she said. “You were leaving anyway. I don’t understand why you didn’t just get on a plane.”
“Because I’m innocent, Jess.”
She looked at me with eyes that I’d kissed. “There was a camera in the car park, Chevy. They’ve got film of the two of you fighting.”
I’d wondered when they would find that. “We like to fight,” I said. “It gives us a chance to touch each other.” That was a joke, mostly.
“I’ve seen it,” said Jesse. “You were directly in front of the camera.”
“Did you see my left hook? The one that took him down?” That was a great punch.
“He fell to the ground,” she said, “and out of the picture.”
“And then he got up, got into a cab, and went home.”
“Why isn’t that on camera?”
“It sounds like the camera was looking at the car park,” I said. “The taxi stopped on the road.”
“There’s a third person with you. Is that Tim?”
“Yeah, he was the referee.”
“And where is Tim now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
“Tell me where he is, Chevy.”
“He left the next morning. He was going on holiday. I can’t remember where.”
“Phone him,” said Jesse. “E-mail him.”
“I have. He doesn’t reply.”
“Then I’ll find him.”
“He’ll be in the surf somewhere.”
“What do you mean by that?” asked Jesse, sharply.
Oh, for Christ’s sake! You can’t think... “I mean he’s probably gone surfing, Jesse, that’s all.”
She wrote the word surfing on her legal pad. It was her only note of our meeting.
“Roden came to see me yesterday,” I told her.
“I know. I asked him to.”
What were you doing when you asked him? Were you lying on your side? “I didn’t know you two talked,” I said.
There had been a split in the movement, all those years ago. Roden had favored direct physical confrontation. Jesse was more of a Gandhi. Each side blamed the other when we failed.
“We only talk about you,” she said. “We think you’re not doing enough to help yourself.”
We? Fucking we?
I lay on my bunk thinking about Jesse and trying to imagine Vasari away.
I had fallen in love with her when she was a second-year arts-law student and I was studying for a bachelor’s degree in building design. We were thrown into a police van at a demo against Pauline Hanson. It was the first time I’d been arrested and the only time I was guilty. The cops offered me a deaclass="underline" if I agreed to take a kicking, they wouldn’t drag me to court. So I lurched out of the cell with two broken ribs and a clean record, and Jesse was released because she gave the sergeant a kiss. Jesse and I got together, but it didn’t last. She liked to be dominated but we could only fuck with her on top, because of my ribs. That was the story we told in public — all candid and modern and hip, and maybe even a little bit true — but it was an alibi for a heart full of painful secrets. I could always taste the cop on her lips.
Jesse married a tennis champion, had a baby, and got divorced. She used to joke that she’d mated for eugenic reasons — so that her son Caspar would have his body and her brains. We reduced everything to a formula. Jesse thought I had a dark side — although, God knows, I never showed it to her — but she could change her mind, her mood, and her lover in the time it took to roll off a condom. I used to say I only loved four people — two of them were Jesse, one of them was Tim, and one of them was dead.
Jesse could do almost anything. She sang in a jazz band, played soccer for the district, spoke Russian, French, and German, and wrote like an angel. She chose to become a criminal lawyer because she wanted to help people — like a beauty queen at a bikini pageant — but she only scraped through her exams and anyone could see she was in the wrong job. Roden had become a barrister in the time it took her to finish her articles. Jesse was never going to land a decent case.
Vasari had noticed Jesse among the visitors. He spent the morning drawing sketches of her, legs splayed, up against the wall or down on all fours, and the Vasari character fucking her with his giant dick. In the afternoon he took a nap. I watched him breathe softly as I raised my pillow over his face.
He woke up with the pillow lying lightly over his nose and mouth, and his drawings — all of them, including his stupid grap-hick novel — shredded around his head.
The next day, he put his name down for a transfer to another cell.
Vasari still passed instructions from the Lion King, but these days he spoke quickly and hurried away to play chess with the rock spiders. My leg had almost healed, but it hurt as if I had been branded. When I came into the Lion King’s cell, I stood close to his cellie and waited for him to give me his seat. The Lion King laughed and told his cellie to go to the gym, work out on the heavy bag, and imagine sticking his fists right through my Laotian gut noodles.
“Bloke in here knows you from the outside,” said the Lion King, once we were alone, “but he didn’t know you were an architect. Thought you were a martial arts teacher.”
“That’s just something people say about Asians,” I responded.
“You used to organize late-night fights in car parks and tennis courts. Like in that film...” There was a long silence while the Lion King struggled to remember the name of the movie, and groped for the answer in his pants.
“Fight Club?” I asked.
“Pocahontas,” said the Lion King.
He could be quite a funny guy, at times.
“He says he’s not surprised you knocked a bloke. You used to fight like a werewolf.”
I shrugged. “He talks like that because it makes him sound hard.”
“You’ve only got enemies in here,” said the Lion King. “The Viets are going to try and get you again. They know about the leg. They reckon you’ll be slower now, easier to catch. They heard you didn’t cry out when you cut away the skin, so now they think it’ll take more than one of them to bring you down.” He pointed to an object rolled up in his filthy crotch towel. “You’ve earned this.”
I took it and weighed it in my hand.
“If you want real protection, you can come and work for me,” he said. “I’ll make you an honorary Aryan. We can invent some kind of ritual that casts out the slope.”
I looked at the newspaper clippings on his walls, photographs of the bodies of his enemies after the Moorebank massacre, and the fourteen-year-old girl who had been killed in the crossfire. Above the head of each Tasman Tiger corpse was written, Ha-ha! The girl’s epitaph was Boo-hoo!
“No,” I said.
He flicked a wrist in the air. “Go, then. Fuck off.”
I turned my back on the Lion King.
“You’re a good-looking boy,” he said. “Nice arc.”
Jesse turned up in her best lawyer’s sweat, a film of condensation on her upper lip, damp patches under the arms of her blouse.
NSW Golf Club spills down to the cliffs of Cape Banks, where formations of lost golf balls rest like banal coral on the bed of the Tasman Sea. A walking track leads from the car park to the cliff edge, skirting the perimeter of Sydney Pistol Club.
“There’s a camera on the overhang,” said Jesse, “for suicide watch.”
When we were students, I reminded her, we’d fought against the surveillance state.