The Unknown Terrorist Read Free Page B

Ocean.
    Along either side of the carpet that somehow joined all these disparate worlds, Billy the Tongan would set up the brass poles down which he ran an ornate gold-coloured rope. Inside, the true nature of the club began asserting itself. A strip of bare purple neon tubes ran like tracer fire down the half-dozen steps that led into the entry foyer. Here arose the deafening break-beat of doof music and the insistent scratching of the entrance cash register attended by a semi-naked woman charged with undertaking the first fleecing. Beyond this foyer, along a corridor and around a corner, was the main lounge with its scattering of purple felt-lined dancing tables, each replete with a brass pole.
    If in the dusty light of morning the club had all the charm and erotic allure of an Eastern European airline’s executive lounge, this too was for a purpose. For its dirty, dun-coloured tub chairs and its generic bar and its featureless tables, its unremarkable nature and meanness of finish pretended to be no other than what it was, more of the bland sameness that was the world of those who came and watched. In its familiarity it relaxed its customers, as in its meanness it reassured them. Its manager, Ferdy Holstein, knew that any attempt to alter this relentless dullness and ordinariness would be an attempt to raise the tone that could only prove an overwhelming commercial error.
    Ferdy claimed to come out of rock’n’roll, and frequently dropped names the Doll had never heard of. Ferdy wore Mambo shirts and thought it was fashion, not knowing it was middle age.
    The truth was that Ferdy had left his job at a pearl oyster hatchery in Broome a decade earlier with a bootload ofKimberley dope. He drove two thousand kilometres south, traded the dope and made enough to refill the boot with ecstasy he got through a contact in the Gypsy Jokers. He crossed the interminable length of the Nullarbor and made his way along the Great Ocean Road.
    He liked to say he arrived in Melbourne in a ’73 Charger and left it a month later in a ’96 Beemer, making his way in that same year to Sydney, where he bought a half-share and the job as manager of a run-down bar, and invested what was left of his new wealth on refitting the bar with felt-lined tables and brass poles in the manner of the pole dancing clubs that were then becoming so popular. He would later recall those early years with the tone of feigned humility so many self-made men feel necessary:
    “We had our hopes.”
    Hopes were unnecessary, for the times, as he frequently told his customers, were his. In the Broome oyster hatchery he had spent the first fifteen years of his working life as a technician breeding vats of microscopic algae to be fed to juvenile oysters. All that mattered in that job had been getting several constants right, and thereafter never varying them. Ferdy applied the same principles to his management of the Chairman’s Lounge.
    For he, a man come out of the red mystery of the Kimberley’s pindan dust into the blue certainty of the Kings Cross night, sensed in Sydney that the possibility of human community was a pointless dream, that cities revealed that men shared with algae the most natural destiny: meaninglessness confused by the inexplicable need to live. There were no words for any of it, but a pole dancing club seemed to him a better place than an algal fermentation vat to watch its crackedunravelling. That was what Ferdy felt. What he said, on the other hand, was banal, but not without its own related truth.
    “It’s all in the show,” Ferdy would say.
    And indeed it was.

8
    Until the moment, a little after 7 pm, that he walked along the red carpet of the Chairman’s Lounge, headed down past the purple neon tubes and pulled from his Armani pants’ pocket a twenty-dollar note to pay a smiling woman the entry fee, Richard Cody’s day had been unhappy. He had slept poorly, woken to yet one more argument with his wife, then been called out by Six’s