I marched him deeper into the woods. I could see the river through the trees. I sat his quivering body down and stood above him.
‘Let’s start again. The business card.’
The muzzle was now a foot in front of his face. It’s amazing the effect it can have, seeing the little unblinking eye at the end of a gun barrel.
‘I’m a Queenslander through and through. I love Queensland,’ he said.
‘Save it for your Queensland Day honours speech.’
‘I’m passionate about its history. It’s that — the history -that made us what we are today.’
‘And what is that?’ I kept in check my rising patriotism for New South Wales, despite being a relatively new Queensland citizen. I was a Blue through and through, but in my dotage, who knows? I might be persuaded to turn Maroon. As Dale advised, don’t criticise, condemn or complain.
‘Proud. Optimistic. Never say die.’ He glanced at me quickly when he said ‘die’, and did not linger on the word. ‘This state is booming. It’s the envy of the rest of the country. It’s finally becoming what we all knew it could be — economic powerhouse, cultural dynamo, the promised land. Our history made it that. And it’s our job, at Historica, to keep that history in check.’
‘How the hell do you keep history in check?’
‘We make sure it’s preserved. Laid out and etched in stone. These history wars that have been raging for the past few years. Were Aboriginals massacred, were they not? Can history become the instrument of government power and ideology?’
‘Are you asking me these questions, or being rhetorical?’
‘Changing history can be extremely damaging — to an economy, a society, to individual people. That’s my hobby. To keep history out of the present and where it belongs — in the past.’
I shook the gun in his face.
‘You’ve told me exactly nothing I needed to hear. The dead farmer. Explain.’
The millionaire lowered his head and seemed to stare at his now soiled Italian loafers. They were probably worth more than my annual pension.
‘He had come across something — a body — that just might have disrupted the history I was telling you about.’
‘I think I know that body. We had a few hours together in an icebox. What sort of body could possibly derail a state’s history?’
‘Honestly, I don’t know who it is. Was. I just got a call and was told to pick it up.’
‘Out near Wivenhoe. Decomposed. Vest and buttons. Big round window blown into the forehead.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Who called you?’
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘Can’t or won’t? Not very Queensland of you. I thought in the new Queensland there was no such word as “can’t”.’
‘Historica has been going for more than a century. It has deep roots. Most of the members don’t even know who the other members are. When you get told to do something, from someone in the Index, you do it.’
‘The Index?’
‘The upper tier. The inner chamber. Whatever you want to call it.’
‘History. Index. How cute. You get told by a stranger to murder a complete stranger and you don’t even question it?’
‘Of course I dooooooo.’ He was back to wailing again. ‘We went out there to the property. The man wasn’t cooperative. That was that. We left a card, in case he changed his mind. We had our sources. We knew he was sitting on something the Index was interested in. Late one night when the guy wasn’t there, we removed the old corpse. A little while later the guy turns up dead. It had nothing to do with us, honestly.’
‘Maybe the Index is feeding you a load of codswallop.’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘Look it up in a book,’ I said. I was getting annoyed with him. ‘So where’s the old corpse now?’
‘It vanished, I swear to God.’
‘This is a very dexterous corpse.’
‘It was in the freezer, then it was gone.’
‘I don’t believe you. In fact, I’m finding your retelling of events historically inaccurate. Who’s Collison?’
‘I’ve never heard of a Collison.’
‘That geezer in the John Oxley Library, the Johnny Cash look-alike. Who’s he?’
‘Who?’
‘Come onnnn,’ I said. ‘Ringo Starr. Black bob. Likes a full-breasted jacket.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’re telling me you’ve been a history aficionado since you were a kid; you’re in some secret society called Historica, which has an inner-sanctum called the Index; you’ve at one point had a human relic stashed in one of your restaurant freezers; and you don’t know who one of the primary patrons of the John Oxley Library — only Queensland’s most important historical receptacle — is? You’re pulling my bookmark here.’
It was then I pressed the gun hard against his forehead. So hard I could see the skin indent.
Tears sprang down his fake-tanned cheeks.
~ * ~
You can imagine my surprise two days later when I opened the local newspaper back home on the Gold Coast and read a story about the body of a Noosa millionaire who’d been found half-buried in sand at the end of that fabled beach. Drowning, they said, though a curious circular contusion had been discovered in the centre of his very dead forehead.
The Index, it seemed, had deep and violent roots indeed.
But it wasn’t half as surprising as his ultimate answer to my question about the identity of our man in black at the library. It continues to rattle about in my brain.
Who is it? I had asked.
And I thought he was being physically sick when he finally said. ‘Logan. I only know him as Logan.’
~ * ~
12
While Walt Whitman was inside the John Oxley Library on a special mission for me, I waddled across to the Gallery of Modern Art and spent some time with Andy Warhol.
What’s not to like about Andy? I was hip to Andy in the sixties when I, in fact, saw myself as hip. (Though I was far, far from hip.) I thought he was a big New York advertising executive who worked for Campbell’s Soup. What did I know, putting away jugs of VB at the South Sydney leagues club on a Friday and Saturday night? Perusing the GoMA exhibition I understood, as a retired old geezer now, that Andy the artist had become sort of quaint. His work, once so modem, had also aged along with the rest of us, and become of a period. Yet Andy never seemed to age. I guess he would have liked that.
While Whitman — who had become a friend of the John Oxley archivists, having spent many years pecking away at their collection in his quest for all references to the city’s water history — set about handwriting copies of certain pages of Captain Logan’s journal for me, I drowned myself in the Warhol exhibition.
Leaving the gallery, I wondered what sort of art Andy might have made if he’d lived in Brisbane, and not New York. What might he have done with tins of Golden Circle pineapple? (Far more interesting than Campbell’s soup cans.) Or the granite melon of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen? Instead of Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor, might we have seen a huge, rouge-lipped print of Abigail or Sonia McMahon? I shuddered at the lost possibilities of Andy.