Babylon South. Jon Cleary
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Patti had still been writing to him; the girls, Arlene and Ava, had been – what? Five and six? Patti, Arlene and Ava: it had been like going home (when he had gone home at all) to a movie (though he had called them fillums in those days), a cheap movie in which he had never been the hero.
He put the photo on the varnished whitewood chest of drawers and stared at it. He had been a real bastard in those days, an absolute shit. Patti had told him so, though she had never used four-letter words. No wonder she had finally left him to rot in prison and had gone to Western Australia. ‘I’m going to WA, Charlie, to try and start a new life for myself and the girls. I hope that in time the girls will forget you and I hope I do, too …’
He had gone berserk when he had got the letter and had bashed up a screw. He had tried telling the prison superintendent that he had gone out of his mind at the thought of losing his children; but the plea hadn’t washed. The superintendent had known him as well as he knew himself. He cared for no one but himself and his anger had come from nothing more than the fact that, at long last, Patti had put something over on him.
Five years later she had written to him, giving no address, that she had met another man (“a good man, Charlie, he loves the girls like they were his own”) and she was filing for divorce (for the girls’ sake, Charlie, don’t fight the divorce. For once in your life, think of them’). He hadn’t fought it; by then, Patti was no more than a sexual memory. The girls were even dimmer in his mind, small fearful shades who had never rushed into his arms as kids did in fillums. The girls would be grown up now, probably married with kids of their own, kids who would never be told that their missing grandpa had once been the notorious Chilla Dural, stand-over man, bash artist and general thug for the biggest crim in Sydney.
He had gone to prison because of Heinie Odets. A smalltime operator had been trying to muscle in on Odets’s drug territory; he had been warned but had ignored the warning. Dural had been given the job of eliminating the stupid bastard and had done it with his usual finesse: a blow to the head with an iron bar and then the body dumped in the harbour. Unfortunately, the murder had been witnessed by an honest off-duty cop, a species Chilla Dural hadn’t believed then existed in Sydney.
Odets had hired the best criminal barrister in the State, but it had all been to no avail. Nothing had gone right; they had even copped the most bloody-minded judge on the Bench. Mr Justice Springfellow had poured shit all over him, though in educated words, and then sentenced him to life. Odets had promised to look after him when he finally got out, but Heinie had never been a sentimental man. It had not taken Chilla Dural long to wake up to the fact that, once inside, he was forgotten.
He had been inside seven years when he had killed another prisoner. Dural, by then, had been king of his section of the yard; the newcomer had had ambitions to be the same. He had made the mistake of challenging Dural and war had been declared. It had been a fair fight: each had had a knife and each waited till he thought the other’s back was turned. Dural had got another seven years, having the charge reduced to manslaughter, and his parole had been put back indefinitely. Heinie Odets had sent him a card that Christmas, hoping he was well, and that was all.
Odets was dead now. He had been buried last year in holy ground and several politicians and retired police officers from the old days had turned up at the funeral. Half of Sydney’s criminal elements had been there, showing only the backs of their heads to the media cameramen. An elderly priest, who knew how to play to his congregation, had found qualities that nobody, least of all Heinie, had ever suspected in Heinie Odets. The congregation had sat stunned at the revelation that someone, especially a priest, could do a better con job than themselves. All this had been told to Chilla Dural by someone there that day who, a month after the funeral, had arrived at Parramatta to do a seven-year stretch for being, in his honest opinion, no more dishonest than the priest. Sin, he told Chilla, was a fucking class thing.
Dural put away the rest of his belongings, looked around the room again and decided he had to spend as little time as possible in it. It was clean, but you couldn’t say much more for it; he had changed one cell for another. Even the single window had bars on it, something he had never had on the windows of the Macleay Street flat. The view from this room was terrific: four feet away was the blank wall of the house next door. Even at Parramatta he had always been able to catch a glimpse of the sky beyond the bars.
He put on his jacket and went out of the room, locking the door behind him. He was halfway down the narrow hall to the front door, aware now of the smell of the house, when the little old man came out of another room and looked at him like a suspicious terrier.
‘G’day. You the new bloke? Waddia think of the place?’
Dural could be affable when he wanted to be. ‘Bit early to tell. Plenty of smell, though, ain’t there?’
‘That’s the bloody Viet Cong upstairs. They’re always bloody frying rice. Me name’s Killeen, Jerry Killeen.’
Dural hesitated. But he couldn’t let go of the past; all he had left was his name. ‘Dural. Chilla Dural.’
The old man raised an eyebrow. He was thin and bony, all lined skin and a shock of white hair; but he would take on the world, he was afraid of no one. He looked at this hawk-faced, balding man with the muscles bulging under the cheap suit and nodded his appreciation. ‘Oh, I read about you. I read the papers, every page from go to whoa. There was a little piece about you this morning, about you getting out. Something to do with that feller’s skeleton they found up in the mountains.’
‘What feller was that?’
He hadn’t looked at a newspaper since he had left Parramatta yesterday morning. He had never been a reader and he hadn’t wanted to find his way back into the world through a newspaper’s cockeyed view of it. He would do that through a TV set, where the view was just as cockeyed as the commercials, but you got the comic liars like politicians and union bosses.
‘Springfeller, Sir Walter Springfeller.’ Jerry Killeen had a photographic memory for names; he could even remember the names of strangers in the births and deaths columns. His circle of friends was those he met in his newspapers. ‘You going out now? I’ll leave the Herald and the Tele under your door. I’ll shove ‘em under so the bloody Viet Cong don’t pinch ‘em.’ He jerked his thumb towards the stair at the back of the hall. ‘They’d steal the bridle off of a bloody nightmare. You wanna come in for a cuppa?’
Dural thanked him, but said maybe some other time. He left the little old man and went out of the house, glad to leave behind the smell of frying rice and other odours he hadn’t identified. There had been smells in prison that he had never become accustomed to: the b.o. of dirty bastards who didn’t wash, the overnight bucket in the corner of the cell … He stepped out into the narrow street and filled his lungs with what passed for fresh air in the traffic-clogged city.
He walked up the street, passed a narrow-fronted shop that looked faintly familiar. Suddenly he remembered: this had been El Rocco, another cell but where you had been free to come and go, where he had come to listen to the best jazz in Sydney. Jazz had been his sole musical interest and he still had a good ear for it. He would have to find another club where it was still played. He had no time for what passed as music these days.
He went to his old bank. As soon as he stepped inside its glass walls that looked straight out on to the street, he saw there had been changes. Everything inside here was exposed to the street; any stick-up artist would be playing to the passers-by. Not that sticking up banks had been his caper; Heinie Odets had always told him that was for desperate mugs. Rob banks, yes; but at night or on weekends, taking everything that was in the vaults. Heinie had masterminded one job like that, with Dural acting as driver and look-out, and they had got away with £200,000, big money in those days. His share had been £20,000 and he had blown the lot in a year on horses, cards and women.
He took his place in the queue and worked his way along the guide ropes; he felt like a ram in a sheep-fold. At last he reached the counter and presented his passbook. The girl teller looked at the greasy, ragged-edged book as if it were a cowpat.
‘Sir, when did you last use this book?’
‘The