Shooting Star

33

We parked in the Carson House carpark and sat there for a while in the gloom, not saying anything. Then the lift doors opened. Graham Noyce and a burly man came out, saw us, walked over.

‘You cannot believe,’ Noyce said, ‘how hard it is to get used money. The banks don’t want to give you used money. It’s pure luck we’ve managed to get this sum.’

The burly man was carrying a briefcase: two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in old fifties and hundreds.

Orlovsky coughed, the cough of someone who wants to say something. ‘Knew the right people,’ he said, expressionless voice, ‘you could’ve bought this cash for a unit. Anywhere. Eighty grand unit.’

Noyce glanced at Orlovsky. ‘Knew the right people?’ he said. He looked at me. ‘We’d appreciate it if your associate doesn’t put this job on his CV.’

I took the briefcase. ‘It isn’t over yet,’ I said. ‘And when it is, no one may want to put this job on their CVs.’

The instructions at 11.30 a.m. had been clear:

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in used fifties and hundreds in a briefcase. Be on the corner of Little Lonsdale and Swanston Street at 3.30 p.m. and you’ll get your instructions by phone. When we have the money and know that you haven’t tried to trick us, we’ll call you and tell you where to find the girl. If you do anything else, try anything, she dies. Understand?

I said yes.

Orlovsky dropped me in Little Lonsdale and I walked to the Swanston intersection, conscious of the weight of the case. An early twilight was settling in, thin rain being blown down the tatty street, everyone hurrying to be somewhere else. I watched two haggard boys across the street making a drug sale to a lanky young man in a good suit: a hit to see him through the night shift in some twenty-four-hour office, hunched over a screen.

The phone vibrated at 3.29 p.m. my time.

‘Yes.’

‘Go to Museum Station now. Take the escalator down. Wait near the escalators at the bottom. Put the briefcase between your feet. Someone will approach you and say, “Anne sends her love”.

Got that?’

‘Yes.’

I walked up the street thinking, we haven’t been dealing with crazies or the Russian Mafia or the same people who kidnapped Alice. We’ve been dealing with small-time opportunists, people who somehow got hold of an advanced voice-changing device. They panicked at the MCG, realised that with the notice we had, we could trap them. Throwing the money to the crowd wasn’t planned. It was an improvisation.

Mid-afternoon, no rush for the trains yet, half an hour before the early leavers came out of the office blocks. It seemed no more than a day since I’d come up from the depths of Museum Station carrying Vella’s package. How long ago was it?

I entered the cheerless, echoing structure, paused only briefly at the top of an escalator, watched the iron stairway moving down into the cavern blasted from the rock. It was a long way down, and steep.

On the stairs, going down, the briefcase heavy in my hand.

No one waiting at the bottom. The person would be nearby, somewhere in sight of the escalators, waiting for a man with a briefcase.

I looked back, up the steel stream. No one had joined me on the escalator. They’d picked a quiet time, they knew this station, the table of its human tides.

Why did they want me to wait? Why not tell me to put the briefcase down, get on an up escalator? Thieves, that’s why. They’d lost the money at the MCG. It would be a painful thing for them now if some lurking kid saw me move away, leave the briefcase unattended, grabbed it and ran. They could hardly chase him. No. Better to have me wait, guard their money. Hard-earned money. Blood money.

I reached the bottom and stepped off, walked a few paces, stopped, put the briefcase between my feet, looked around.

No one coming my way.

They were watching, a final check to see that I was alone.

I turned back to face the escalators. People going up, the stairs I’d left still empty. At the top, far away, a tall person pushing someone in a wheelchair was looking down. Didn’t they have lifts for wheelchairs? It couldn’t be safe coming down this steep stairway, thousands of interlocked steel knuckles moving.

I looked around again. Where was the pick-up person? Looking at my watch, pointlessly looking at my watch, feeling a little tremor in my throat, looking back at the escalator, looking up, at the man with the wheelchair, it was a man, bearded, our eyes met in the way of animals, me on the canyon floor, him on the rim.

Our eyes locked and his mouth opened, opened in his beard, I could see the pink of his mouth, pink like a rose, and he shouted:

‘HERE’S YOUR LITTLE SLUT YOU CARSON BASTARDS!’

He pushed the wheelchair, pushed it and kicked it.

Pushed it into the canyon, pushed and kicked it onto the moving steel steps.

For a second, it was airborne, came down on its rubber tyres, bounced, lurched sideways, came upright.

I could see the person on it, someone in a heavy coat, camel-coloured, a coat with a hood, a duffel coat, you didn’t see duffel coats these days…

I didn’t think, ran, ran for the escalator, saw the wheelchair lurch forward, begin to topple…

Saw the person on it, the hood falling off the face. Dark glasses.

The dirty blonde hair, the lock falling forward…

I was running up the moving stairs, against the stairs, running towards the wheelchair coming down, an impossible gap to bridge, the chair toppling, hitting the side of the stairs, bouncing across to meet the other side, Anne thrown about, thrown forward, not falling out, held by something, dark glasses off her face, in the air…

Her eyes were open, pale eyes.

The wheelchair was in the air, one wheel on the rail, people shouting.

I could save her, stop her fall, if I could get there, get a hand on this chariot.

Running uphill, the wheelchair above me now, going into space.

I stumbled, falling, falling away from her, falling away from Anne, my arm out, my despairing, clutching hand.

And then I touched a wheel, grabbed it, pulled the chair down, pulled it on top of me, pain as it met my face, my teeth, my throat, going over backwards, holding on to it, sliding, pain in my back, agonising pain, sliding, under the chair, head lower than heels…

We were at the bottom, Anne and I, thrown across the threshold onto the tiles, the chair on my chest, screams, my scream, the screams of others, still in my ears.

I fought clear of the wheelchair, got onto my knees at her feet.

People still shouting.

The hood was over her face again, her head lolling.

Please God, not a broken neck, not now.

I put my hands to her head, pushed it up, my fingers too big, too callous, pushed the hood away from her face. I pulled away the scarf around her neck, a woollen scarf, blood-red.

Her mouth was open slightly, an unlipsticked mouth, pale, paler than her face. A child’s mouth.

And her eyes were open, held open, taped with transparent tape, only the whites showing.

I touched her face. Cold, cold beyond warming.

Behind me, close, a woman screamed, a scream that resonated in that cold canyon, went to the walls and multiplied, came back and went up to the far roof and there expanded, grew and grew and formed a parachute over us, a canopy of livid sound, gradually turning to echo.

I pulled the hood back over Anne Carson’s face, gently, gently over the lock of hair.

Then I sat back on my heels and began to cry, just small sobs, nose and throat sounds at first, soon the other sounds, the sounds we cannot make, cannot call forth, the sounds that make themselves, that speak of pain and horror and helplessness and injustice, speak of regret, of the regrets. All the regrets.

And so it ended, in a tiled space, pitiless light, pale people all around. A man and a wheelchair, a girl in the chair, bound to it, dead. The man on his haunches, weeping, keening.