In the queue, Tony said, ‘The Bombers, they’re my team.’
They looked at him.
‘The Blues are your team,’ said Villani.
‘No,’ said Tony. ‘The Bombers.’
He took off his scarf. ‘You wear this, Dad.’
Villani could never have done that to Bob. He could not do that to Bob now. It was a kind of bravery. Why didn’t he ever tell Tony that?
Pointless. He wouldn’t remember it. It would have no meaning for him.
Why didn’t Tony ever ring him? Scotland, he was in Scotland, a Scottish island. What would Scotland be like? The heather on the hills. What was heather? What was it like to be an nineteen-year-old Australian boy in Scotland?
He was eighteen when he took his first walk in uniform after the course, a country boy, open-mouthed, thrilled. Not dangerous the city then. Dope was the street drug, some smack, cocaine seriously sophisticated. Around midnight, the nightlife ended. You could drive home drunk, needed to ram a cruiser to be bloodtested.
The cop talk was all marijuana busts, armed robberies, illegal gambling, wogs fighting to control Victoria Market, wharfies fighting over who was allowed to steal what on the docks.
You didn’t notice the job change. More people on the nod, shooting up on the street, shopping centres, stations, parks, churches. More dumb burgs, brain-dead robberies, kids selling themselves to anyone for anything, dead in alleys, railway stations, tunnels, sewers, on the grubby beaches.
Villani remembered when the CBD was still safe enough to walk across on a Friday night. But once the chemicals took over, spread into the suburbs, cops regularly began to see things once rare-teenagers bashing old people, women and children beaten, the punching and kicking and stabbing of neighbours, friends, cab drivers, people on trains, trams, buses, strangers at parties, in pubs and nightclubs, the hacking at people with swords, road-rage attacks, bricks hurled at trams, train drivers.
Then they got rid of the old liquor laws. Civilising move, they said. Australia’s most European city needed more relaxed liquor laws.
In a short time, hundreds of all-night clubs and drinking barns opened in a few dozen blocks in the CBD, most of them owned by the same people who ran the poleholes and titmarts.
At weekends, thousands upon thousands of people flowed into the city, very European to come in from Donnie and Brookie and Hoppers with your mates, half wasted to begin with, swallow anything, get totally munted, walk around, no fucking fear, mate, the ice fever made you fight your mate, any cunt looks at you, take a spew, take a piss, take a shit, anywhere.
Mobile.
‘This a good time, boss?’ Dove.
‘Depends on what you say.’
‘There’s nothing at Preston. That’s prints, DNA. Nothing. They report signs it’s been wiped.’
‘This is not a good time,’ said Villani.
DEEP IN the freezer, he found a pizza encased in shrinkwrap. He microwaved it and sat at the monks’ table to eat. It tasted like food found in a glacier, locked in the ice for a hundred years, a memory of a pizza in which all the good parts were forgotten.
He stood in a large porcelain saucer to shower. On a hook beside the door hung a man’s thick white towelling gown. The property of the mystical lawyer arse from Byron Bay?
Naked, he crossed the dressing-room and lay on the low bed, a rock-hard mattress, probably a futon. Futons. Did they still sell futons? He studied his body. It did not please him. He touched the dirty marks, the purpling where Les caught him in the bottom ribs, a good place to catch someone, bend the rib into the cavity.
Anna hadn’t called.
Should he have left a message? There was a pad beside her telephone in the passage, he could have written a few words.
I love you. Stephen
He could have passed it off as a joke. Or not. If the response was favourable. Probably not. Definitely not.
What a stupid teenage prick he was.
Lizzie. They would call him if they found her, they had the instruction, any time, twenty-four hours. Somewhere with the streeters? In some crevice in the city, a tunnel, a half-built highrise, sleeping on the raw concrete? They found dead people in these places every day.
The Prosilio child.
The truck stop on the Hume. Swooshing highway, a hot night, airless. As you opened the car door, it would hit you: petrol, diesel, heated rubber, exhaust gases, chip-fryer oil, the smell of burnt meat. Overweight truckies coming out of the ablution block, wet hair, men shat, shaved, showered, shampooed.
The sounds of engines ticking, air-conditioners and extractor fans humming.
A girl coming out of the toilet block, Caucasian girl, speaking to a man in her own language. Not English. On her way to Melbourne, to the ugly fortress in Preston, perhaps a cheap nylon suitcase in the boot, hookers’ clothes, sexy bras, pants, suspender belt.
To have her life taken in the rich people’s building. They had not made one centimetre of progress towards finding her killer. They had been toyed with by the building’s owners. They had pointlessly made an enemy of a powerful man. They looked like idiots.
Mobile again.
‘Boss, I also wanted to say,’ said Dove, ‘I got the water usage there. No water used for the month leading up to that sighting on the Hume. Then it’s average for four people, a bit higher.’
‘Four people?’
‘Perhaps people who need to shower often.’
There was much more to Dove than extraordinary clotting power.
‘That’s a bit of a pattern,’ said Dove. ‘Over the last three years.’
‘Well, it’s interesting but it’s not taking us anywhere.’
‘And boss, that number, I’ve got…’
‘When I see you,’ said Villani. ‘Face to face. I like to observe your body language.’
‘In the morning then.’
‘Yes. Go home. Got a home?’
Why did he ask that? Stupid.
‘Got the bed, yes,’ said Dove. ‘The shower.’
He didn’t know anything about Dove’s life outside the job. Singo knew everything about people’s lives, he knew your kids’ birthdays, he could drop a reference to your wedding anniversary, show you that he knew. But Singo didn’t care.
Son, life’s got layers, the work layer’s on top. That’s my layer, that’s my business, that’s my duty. Under that, it’s personal, it’s your business. I don’t want to know. It’s not that I wouldn’t care. I would care. That’s the problem. So I just don’t want to know. See the sense?
Villani had seen the sense.
‘Breakfast meeting,’ he said. ‘Know Enzio’s? Brunswick Street?’
‘I can find Enzio’s.’
‘Seven-fifteen. Back left corner.’
Villani fell asleep and he dreamed of Greg Quirk, of crossing the filthy unit and seeing Greg squirting blood, of looking up and seeing Dance with the gun in both hands, smiling his canine smile.
VILLANI WOKE just after 6am, dull-headed, knowing where he was, full of dread in the way of the early Robber days. He lay, unwilling to get up, cross the threshold of the day.
The smallholding in the valley near Colac where Dave Cameron lived with his girlfriend came into his mind. Dave had put up a fight, the kitchen was chaos, blood everywhere, table overturned, crockery on the floor. He had been hacked with something, a big knife, a sword, deep cuts to his arms, shoulders, neck, head, before he was shot. Twice with an unknown weapon, twice with his own service weapon.
His girlfriend had been shot in the head, three times, with Dave’s weapon. She was found to be pregnant, Dave’s child.
They threw everything at it, the whole force, other investigations went on hold. They didn’t see Matt Cameron for weeks. Deke Murray, the SOG boss, was made head of the taskforce, he had started with Matt, they were like brothers, their careers marched together, they both became Robber legends. They even looked like brothers.
Deke had gone to the SOG before Villani arrived, but he came to Robber piss-ups, to Cameron’s parties, sometimes showed up on a Friday night at the pub. Matt quit the force when his wife Tania committed suicide, he had no family left. Deke quit soon after. The prime suspect, a hard case called Brent Noske, twice arrested by Dave Cameron in the months before the murders, killed himself, shotgun in the mouth. Noske was a cop-hater, they narrowly failed to get him for firing on a Geelong cop’s house with an M16.