Chapter 22
Detective Sergeant Roy Fitzgibbon sat back in his chair and stared at the calendar at the end of the office. It was one of those cheap nudes put out by tow-truck operators. Fitzgibbon was alone for a while. It was a temporary lull as detectives flowed in and out of the station at random. Covers draped precise rows of typewriters along last century’s walls made ugly with light olive paint and sticky-taped wanted notices and memos. It was a gaudy surreal projection of the men and women who worked in the room.
Roy Fitzgibbon heard the ring of the phone. He waited some time before answering it. He listened, his eyes staring into the distance like a ferry master’s in a fog. He grunted his thanks and replaced the receiver. His mouth formed an O as he pushed air from his mouth in an attempt at a whistle.
An hour later his young assistant strolled into the office with a spring roll hanging from his mouth. His polyester safari suit was crumpled where he had sat sweating against the hot vinyl car seat.
‘Aah! Rippov! Been waiting for you.’
The young detective removed the food from his mouth.
‘Good morning, sarge. How are you?’
Fitzgibbon ignored the greeting.
‘Get the car and meet me out front in five.’
The police sedan waited at the intersection as the duty traffic policeman urged the flow of vehicles to quicken their pace. There was a backlog as far as the eye could see and it was clear to Fitzgibbon that the uniformed man was new at his job.
‘Give him a blast!’
Constable Rippov pressed the horn and the traffic cop glared at the intrusion into his jurisdiction. He ignored the unmarked sedan and continued to wave his hands.
‘Fucking rookies!’ swore Fitzgibbon.
At last Rippov was given the signal to proceed. As the sedan moved into the intersection Fitzgibbon leant across the front seat and let fly with a torrent of abuse at the hapless young bloke doing his job.
‘Come on, let’s go!’ Fitzgibbon instructed with a deep sigh.
Rippov pushed the accelerator to the floor and the sedan leapt away from the intersection and sped along the road to the south. They pursued their course through the grimy littered streets of Redfern and crossed the bridge at the railway station into Darlington where the streets broadened and trees grew in defiance of all the laws of nature. Yesteryear’s grit covered houses and pallid kiddies played in parks. The road they followed continued alongside the railway line and dipped into the back streets of Newtown where dungeon houses squashed together in rows of awful monotony.
‘Fucking wogs!’
‘Sorry! What’s that, sarge?’
‘Look at the way they live, will you? In pigsties!’
‘Oh!’ replied Constable Rippov whose mother had recently moved into a tenement in nearby Camperdown.
They entered the street where the boarding house receded from the fence line by a few measly feet, so that pedestrians walking by could extend their arms and knock against the windows. Constable Rippov parked beneath a palm and carefully placed the accoutrement of his profession upon the dashboard. Usually a parking officer was bright enough to give the sedan a wide berth during rounds.
‘It’s pretty fair dinkum when you got to put up with fucking parking meters in these fuck-arse strings they call streets, eh?’ said Fitzgibbon as scorn mounted his face like a banner. He got out of the car and followed the young detective to the boarding house. A gravel-throated slattern confronted them as they wandered through the passageway.
‘Waddiyers wan?’ she asked with a cigarette stain moving with her mouth.
‘Police.’ Rippov stated proudly.
The bedraggled woman laughed with a cynical and tuberculous cackle. Her teeth were the same colour as her lips and her dressing gown exposed the creased breasts that had suckled many children. ‘Jesus! Any fool cudell yercoppers! Hoosit yawan this time?’
Fitzgibbon watched her carefully from his secondary position behind his young assistant who now riveted his eyes to hers and declared: ‘A mister Hans Dorfman, if he’s here?’
*
‘A life at the toe of a wol’s boot.’
Hans Dorfman had thus once described his existence. It was a favoured saying of his and many a cellmate over the many years had heard it. Hans Dorfman had become at home with his kind in the walled-in civilisation of the penitentiary. Almost like a different type of gentlemen’s club the gaol gave to its members an esprit de corps, a code of ethics and a sense of belonging.
In a different world, in a different time, he had gone to prison because of the code. He hadn’t informed on a friend. It was, ironically, Roy Fitzgibbon who had offered immunity to Hans to implicate his friend in a robbery. ‘Immunity?’ Dorfman had smirked at the policeman. ‘Against what, for fuck’s sake? I never poked my head into any fucking robbery!’ And it was Roy Fitzgibbon who assisted Hans into gaol for three years.
While inside the walls where armed men patrolled like panthers thirsting for blood, from the very second the court sentence begins, a coil starts to unwind, like a spring-clock, ticking away, releasing very slowly the debt demanded by society. The double-edged wound of Fitzgibbon’s perniciousness festered within Dorfman as the Coil of Honour that required his silence unwound, patiently, inexorably. Hans endured the wasted lonely hours, day and years. He reminded himself, as he had on previous excursions into the walled hell that the embalming of his spirit was temporary, and that upon his release his peers in the world outside would accord him the appropriate recognition. He constantly reminded himself that he was a member of a club, the elite who withstood the temptation to rat on a mate.
There was no way Hans Dorfman would admit of his part in the Tseridis affair, nor would he be the source of information whereby the likes of Fitzgibbon could trundle his accomplices off to prison. He was simply not that kind of person. And now with the one-eyebrowed policeman scowling at him from across a desk in the police station, Dorfman knew the pressures he was to endure. It mattered not a thing to him. It was all in the game.
‘Look, shitface!’ Fitzgibbon began on another gambit. ‘Don’t be a dill! You don’t want to face the bars again, do you? Just play the game this time and I’ll see what I can do for you.’
‘How’s your chicken farm, Roy?’ asked Hans with a straight face and a straight voice.
‘What? Chicken farm? What are you raving about?’
‘I dunno, Roy. Just about as much sense as your garbage, Roy.’
Hans Dorfman was charged with the murder of Nikos Tseridis on the basis of forensic tests on his Beretta. He was remanded without bail for trial two months hence. He was sent to the remand section of Long Bay State Penitentiary.
