The Big Fellow, page 18
She had, she told him dryly. “I’ve been learning quite a lot I didn’t know about my family in the last few weeks. Quite a lot.”
“And I suppose it’s made Hugh snitch up his nostrils, too, eh?”
“Hugh’s hardly mentioned it,” she said quickly. “He hasn’t any appetite for scandal.”
“No more have I.” He rose and paced about the room: he felt more in command of things when he was on his feet. He took a cigar from the pocket of his waistcoat, looked at it and put it back again.
“No more have I,” he repeated. “It’s all a buzzing of blowflies about a dead horse. I could shoot in a writ on the man who started it, but I won’t: why go after a house-rat with a machinegun? I’d like to know, though, what’s stirred it up now. Is it some little bunch after the Big Fellow? You used to have all the good oil about what was going on in the political world, Judy. Heard, have you, what’s behind it?”
“No,” she said indifferently. “I’m only concerned with the thing itself.”
“It doesn’t affect me more than a flea in the blankets,” Brian persisted, “but I’d like to know what’s behind it. If it’s political, there’s double-crossing going on somewhere. They’ve had my money, the opposition crowd; I can tell you that off the record. Not just a quid or two, but a thumping big cheque. If I liked I could make a showdown.”
She rose as a nurse came through the door and glided away again.
“How’s Adela?” she asked.
He looked at her sharply, divining that she was brushing him off.
“Adela’s all right. A bit inclined lately to talk as if she’s been left out on a limb. No good neighbours, not much chance of getting help about the house. But she’s jake. It’s only itchy feet makes her want to go back there.”
Standing there stiff-backed she let her eyes rest on him in frigid detachment.
“Pretty sure of your gift for diagnosis, aren’t you, Brian? I should think Adela ought to have a say … If you really want to know what’s behind this resurrection of the Mount Clutha affair, why don’t you go to the man responsible for it?”
“Who is he?” he flashed out.
“I don’t know, but his address will be on the paper he prints. There’s a copy of it here.”
She pulled out a drawer and fished a paper from the bottom of it. It was as if she was showing him the door. The telephone began burring, and she took up the receiver; he could hear her cool precise voice answering questions as he made his way out over the waxy floor.
Young Judy, he was thinking. This is what she’s become. As shut in tight on herself as the rest of them. Tied herself up with that fool of a Dinny and now spends her time wondering what broke over her. All those girls, smart as any in the town once and not bad to look at, yet not lucky enough to get a real man among the lot of them.
He ran his mind sourly over each of his brothers-in-law in turn—Dinny Blake, the McCoys, Macy Donovan. Was there one of them he could depend on seeing him through if the mischances of life brought him down and left him on his uppers? Was there even one he would enjoy letting in on a deal or going off with on a spree? No. He wanted to have nothing more to do with any of them.
The first glimpse of the Beacon office surprised him. It was tucked in at the top of a rickety flight of stairs in a building that smelt of stale ink, straw, and wet paper, and seemed as if it would fall to pieces any moment under the pounding of the printing-presses that went on in its heart. A sense of exhilaration flushed Hegarty as he stood at the head of the stairs. Nothing very formidable, he felt, could emerge from a junk-shop like this. It was like one of the old tubs he had bought at the end of the war, leaky, smelling of bilge, kept on the water because of the lack of transport, but liable to go to pieces as soon as a sea rose.
Inside the narrow den on the landing a young fellow with a green shade over his eyes was talking to a girl who sat at the end of his table brushing her cigarette ash off on a saucer. They looked at him with indolent unconcern. A cheerful grin spread over Brian Hegarty’s face. He was in a good mood. He felt as if he had run some small troublesome animals to ground in their burrow.
“Don’t know me, do you?” he began robustly. “My photograph doesn’t get spread around in the papers. Even you weren’t smart enough to get hold of one. I’m one of the men you’ve been plastering in that little rag of yours. Recognize me now?”
“Sit down,” Seyler said laconically.
The girl pushed a chair towards him and gathered up the coffee-cups, taking them off to some little hole at the back. Hegarty noticed when the young fellow rose to open the door for her that he dragged one leg a little. He was busy summing him up. A cropped square head planted on broad shoulders, and grey steely eyes set in a granite face. He might be a fellow who had done a prison term and was packed with resentful memories of it. His voice was clipped but had a deep note in it, and his figure was short and stuggy like a wharf-labourer’s.
“My name’s Seyler,” he said. “What’s yours?”
Hegarty grinned amiably. “You must have had a good deal of practice writing it down these last few weeks. It’s Hegarty—Brian Hegarty. They tell me you’ve had it in the headlines more than once. I don’t read that sort of flam: time’s mostly in short supply with me, and where I’m living the flying-foxes make such a hell of a row they drown most other sounds. But when I come down here I hear people talk. It seems to be a good yarn you’ve been feeding them with. Got the facts to back it up?”
Seyler was rolling a cigarette between his thick fingers. “Like to have a go at me for damages?”
Hegarty chuckled. “Damages? That’s a laugh. Where’d I get them when I won my case? I’ve been casting an eye around: the whole box of tricks you got here would hardly pay my fare home, let alone the lawyer.”
Seyler was regarding him with cold judicial eyes that betrayed no feeling whatever.
“I see. It’s money you’re thinking about.”
“No,” said Hegarty good-humouredly. “Not in the first place. But a verdict against a man’s no good to me if he can slide out of it by going bankrupt. What I’d be wanting is a thumping good penalty that would lay him stiff for the slur put on my name.”
“There’s criminal libel,” Seyler said coolly. “That ought to meet your case if the penalty’s your chief concern. It carries a fairly long stretch.”
“Eh?”
“It means that the Government would be prosecutor, not you. That might easily be wangled. Donovan’s a brother-in-law of yours, isn’t he? And he’s head of the State. All you’ve got to do is to tip him the word to bring the case before his Attorney-General.”
He spoke as if he were considering something impersonal. Hegarty had a feeling that the interview was getting away from him. He could make nothing of Seyler’s inscrutable face, though the eyes seemed to have a faint twinkle in them.
“Look here,” he said. “Let’s not get hot under the collar. I didn’t come here with a gun in my back pocket—I don’t do business that way. All I’m curious about is how you got hold of those bits of information you’re making a song over, and what’s behind this set-up. There’s a string of figures in this last number—the prices Vern paid for different consignments of ore when he was running the State smelters. Who was it gave you them?”
“What does it matter?” said Seyler. “No names, no pack-drill.”
Hegarty made a mocking, dramatic gesture, as if addressing an unseen audience.
“Ah, he’s holding out on me—he won’t come across.”
“What does it matter?” repeated Seyler. “The facts are the important thing, aren’t they? I don’t think the man who supplied this information would be looking for cover, though. He was pitman at the State smelters when your brother was running them; now he’s got a little shack down on the South Coast and spends most of his time fishing.”
Hegarty grinned. “Fishing in the sea or in political back-waters?”
“He’ll get nothing out of this,” said Seyler abruptly. “Not even so much a line.”
Hegarty’s eyes had a sardonic look.
“Nothing, I suppose, from the political mob that’s behind the pair of you? Nothing but a nice card at Christmas. That’s like the bloke’s yarn about breaking into the bank at night to get the tobacco-pouch he left lying on the desk when filling out a cheque. I’m not throwing any dirt, mind. Life’s a poker-game. If this fellow thinks he’s holding a good hand he’d be a mug not to play it. All I’m interested in is the crowd at the back of him.”
“You think there must be a crowd?” said Seyler.
“Well, I’m not a sucker. I know what politics are.”
“You do? Then tell me. I’d like to know, too.”
The bantering tone in his voice baffled Hegarty. He was uncertain how to approach this fellow, uncertain what his price was likely to be. It could not be high: he looked as if he lived in a back room and got his meals in Greek fish-joints. His soiled blue shirt was frayed at the collar and had buttons missing; on the wall behind him was a frowsy military greatcoat. His hands, too, looked as if they were more used to a pick than a pen. And the girl, who had come in again and was standing at the end of the table fingering some papers, had the air of a kept woman hovering round to protect her man. She was dressed in a green overall that hid the lines of her body, and her grey-blue eyes had a strained look; they glanced out defensively from the mat of tumbled fair hair that fell low over her forehead.
“I’ve no politics,” Seyler was saying. “Not what you’d call politics. There’s a fellow hanging round this paper who’d keep it going till the cows came home if I’d run it the way he wants. No direct subsidies, of course, no money paid over the counter. Oh no, nothing so crude. Just nice fat full-page advertisements from the companies he’s in touch with. I listened to him and told him to go to hell, that the Beacon wasn’t that sort of paper. You think that’s acting like a mug, don’t you, Hegarty? Perhaps you don’t believe it.”
Hegarty smiled. “Why not? I take what people tell me. I don’t ask them to swear an oath on the Bible. But all you say doesn’t make it any clearer just what you’re after.”
Seyler suddenly leant over the table, his eyes hard as agate.
“Listen, Hegarty: did you ever know a man named Gundersen?”
The complacent look passed from Hegarty’s face: it became wary and cautious.
“I could call up half a dozen fellows of that name if I thought back. Here and up north.”
“This man was a government geologist—adviser to the Ministry of Mines. It was his business to inspect all propositions put up to the Government—to recommend them or to turn them down. He was at Mount Clutha eight or nine years ago.”
“I remember him. A tall stoop-shouldered fellow the wrong side of fifty. He’d left his wife down here and was chasing another woman. Couldn’t take it when she turned him down—blew out his brains in a hotel room at Cairns.”
“That was the explanation put over at the time,” said Seyler. “Not everyone accepted it. One of them who didn’t was a son of his who was my cobber in Burma. We’d been together in Changi: we were drafted to work on that hell of a railway. And there wasn’t a thing in one another’s lives we didn’t get to know. Not just what we’d done or what had happened to us, but what came back to sit on our minds at nights when we lay on our bunks, sweating but chilled to the bone. Gundersen’s trouble was his father; the way he’d been led into giving crooked reports for the sake of a bit of extra money; the way, after he’d made his first slip, that gang of shysters had stood over him; the hell he’d gone through, worse than what we were going through on that devil’s railway, before he decided that the only way out was through the back door.”
Hegarty’s face was flushed, but he made a show of unconcern.
“This is a new one on me. Sounds like something the boy’s mother thought up to take the edge off things for herself. I happen to know it’s only a tale, though.”
“You do, do you?”
“It was the woman he was chasing that settled Gundersen—he was crazy about her. She was a flash redhead who wouldn’t have a bar of him. Now she’s keeping a hotel in Cairns. Gundersen’s not the only man who’s done his block about her.”
“I know all about her, too,” said Seyler dryly. “It was because he wanted money to spend on her that Gundersen was drawn into the trap. But there are some men, Hegarty, who can feel the loss of their integrity even more deeply than the loss of a woman. Gundersen was one of them. And the bedrock truth is that this redhead didn’t turn him down. No, she was still hanging on to him—faithful to him, wouldn’t they say?—when he took his life.”
It was the eyes of the girl, resting on him, that embarrassed Hegarty more than what was being said. They burned with a sombre fixity in her face, which had the grey of pumice, and her body had become still as stone. He had a sudden conviction that she was Gundersen’s daughter. It took all the spring out of him; he had a fear that her restrained quiet might collapse in a burst of hysteria. Such outbursts in women always gave him an uneasy deflated feeling. He drew a breath of relief when she turned and went out of the little door.
“Is this the big sensation you’re leading up to, this yarn about Gundersen?” he said, rising.
“No,” Seyler said. “It doesn’t need that, I guess. I can say all I want without turning up a grave. But you came here, didn’t you, to find out what was behind my interest in the business? Now you know.”
“I know you’re wasting what little bit of money you have in working a dud claim,” said Hegarty.
“You think so? That’s my funeral. If you had an interest in anything but your skin, Hegarty, I could have told you a bit more of what happened in Burma. Told you of how young Gundersen died, a wreck of skin and bone, still thinking of his father, still wanting the truth told about the men who’d destroyed him, feeling more bitter against them than against the Nips; and of how I swore that if ever I got out of that hell-hole my first job would be—well, to do what I’ve been doing.”
Hegarty said stubbornly, “It’s been a wash-out as far as I’m concerned. All your charges against me and Vern—they cut no more ice with the people I know than if you’d been talking down a drain. They’ve taken them as a joke—so have I.”
“Well, it’s Donovan’s turn tomorrow,” said Seyler. “The final story of his purchase of the Floretta mine for the Government. See if he’s got the same sort of hide.”
Hegarty looked at him sharply, then let his face expand into a grin.
“This is where the political crowd behind you get the worth of their money, I suppose.”
“If you like to believe that, you can,” Seyler said indifferently. “I’ve given you the truth. Anyway, I may as well tell you that this is my parting shot.”
“Eh?” said Hegarty, turning.
“Oh, yes—the last issue of the Beacon has been put to bed and the paper’s closing down. No requiems or flowers! I’ve done all I set out to do, and it’s for the people who’ve had the facts given them to do the rest.”
He turned his back, and Hegarty made his way down the rat-riddled stairs. He was feeling that he had made a poor showing, that this young fellow carried more guns than he had been led to expect, that he still might have something in reserve. You were at a disadvantage in a fight when you came up against a fellow like that for whom money didn’t count.
But with a couple of whiskies at the pub on the corner his assurance returned to him. There would be no more issues of the paper after the next one, he reflected, and no post-mortem on Gundersen. All the dirty weather was behind him. If anyone brought up the facts the paper had already published he could boast that he had closed its lying mouth.
Chapter XVIII
What’s come over the Big Fellow?” Donovan’s fellow Ministers were asking. “Has that last story about the Floretta mine got under his skin? Or is he thinking of giving up the game and buying a couple of racehorses? These days you can hardly get more than a grunt out of him.”
In spite of the light tone in which their comments were couched there was concern at the back of them, for now that Wardle had decided to remain in London, Donovan was definitely installed in the leadership; and though some of them had grudges against him, resenting his brusqueness and air of authority, they were acutely conscious of how much they depended on him. What other man among them had his gusto, his reserves of energy, his power of bringing the conflicting forces of industry together? Certainly not Geyl, with his slow mind and his flat-footed methods of debate; for all Geyl’s dull capacity as an administrator he was essentially a figurehead, set up chiefly to prove that the Ministry did not wholly consist of one religious group. He had once been a lay-preacher: he was ready to emphasize his origins by occasional outbursts against the liquor interests, starting-price bookmaking, bikini costumes on the beaches, and the tendency to make Sunday a day of sport.
Donovan’s appeal was quite different. When he rose to his feet in the House they could feel confident that no matter how devastating the attack on the Government had been it would not only be met but repulsed. Even the men who opposed Donovan enjoyed listening to him. Starting in a low guttural voice he would seem to be digging up words with difficulty from a limited store, till gradually a flow of feeling was tapped and they poured from him with the violent rumble of steers through a stockyard gate.
