Chapter 24
Milan went alone to the house named ‘H’. Basil Horgan met him immediately and led him to the library. The room was cool and a Christmas tree shone gaudily beside the cocktail bar. Basil Horgan fixed drinks while Milan settled onto the corner stool. They toasted knowingly and sipped slowly. Then Horgan laughed a rare laugh, like a rueful swallowing of a tasteless joke. He knew his humour was convoluted; it had to be in his society.
‘You performed admirably, Milan.’
‘Thank you, Basil.’
When their drinks were done they sauntered through the French doors and into a weakly frosted glass atrium where azaleas and orchids were on brazen display. Horgan spoke of his hobby and of his hours with flowers. ‘I often bring work home with me, Milan, and take it in here. You know, I would have been a gardener had not I won a scholarship at school. Bloody university. I sometimes wonder if my life on the bench is nothing more than atonement for those days. Frankly, I do admit of my preference for the bizarre.’
Milan’s wizened face exploded and clouded in a brief moment. He sucked hard at a Sobranie and noticed with a start that the jurist was quietly studying him.
‘Tell me about it, Milan!’
The Tseridis affair was explained.
*
‘He didn’t blink an eyelid!’ Rane was laughing as the cold shower beat down upon them both. ‘Pops his head up, takes a look, says a few words and pisses off. He saw, Juno, and he saw good.’
Juno pouted as she lathered the soft soap in the hair between his legs. She could feel his heat in her fingers despite the chilly shower. He had ejaculated three times and she knew there was room for more. Both her hands held him tightly as the suds washed away. The skin of his scrotum was wrinkled and firm and the oval worlds within the pouch were hard and ready to detonate again.
‘Let’s see if this hairy fellow blinks his eye.’
She crouched and tasted his flesh.
Rane relished the warmth of her mouth and the gentle tingle of her teeth upon his stiffened organ. He closed his eyes as he lifted his face to the hard sting of the shower. He breathed through clenched teeth as his chest expanded and collapsed with each surge of her head. It was a hundred-metre sprint and his pulse raced with him to the finish.
Rane was confused. It was the voice of complaint and ecstasy. Not now, he cursed from the back of his mind, not now. Through heavy lids Rane saw the squat man. A patchy stubble grew on his craggy face. His eyes were ravaged by alcohol and his hands shook violently. As the squat man spread his lips back from his teeth, Rane arched his body and came awake from a disturbing time. Then he calmed and his eyes came out of hiding.
They switched off the tap and dried themselves. Juno applied liniment to the skin where her teeth had etched thin scratch-lines. It was limp and sorry-looking, like a prisoner whipped for assault.
‘Don’t worry about it, Juno.’ smiled Rane as he tucked himself into his togs.
‘What happens to the scabs when your prick stretches again?’
‘Dunno!’
‘I don’t believe you!’ she accused with mock sincerity.
‘I was a virgin when I woke up this morning.’
‘God!’
*
‘Games within games, Milan’ Horgan used his juristic tone and his favourite Havana. ‘If it weren’t so, then societies, governments, businesses and organisations could chart their ways through life without suffering the maladroit exigencies caused by quirks and foibles of human nature. Isn’t that so, Milan?’
Milan nodded stiffly. The equality he craved was a structure controlled by those more equal than he. Though they shared certain economic and philosophical perspectives they also shared a certain wariness of the other’s private and secret agenda. Milan was dubious about the concept of the so-called ‘private man’, as if the fact of being home altered the cunning and adversarial nature of the professional beast.
‘Who was the arresting officer, Milan?’
‘Fitzgibbon.’
‘Fitzgibbon?’ Horgan visibly relaxed. ‘That dolt! He’s notoriously inept you know, Milan. Still a sergeant I believe.’
‘We can’t risk the chance of Roy’s having a good day in court, Basil.’
Basil Horgan was generous in speech. Like many people who worked with the language and used words copiously he became lost within the pictures he conjured and often the listener had to wait for him to emerge.
‘No, of course not. Roy? Yes, of course. It’s coming to me now. Doubtless your man refused to co-operate? Yes, I see it now.’
A rouge of alcohol spread across the jurist’s face and reached into his eyes. Horgan adjusted his thick horn-rim spectacles with his pudgy forefinger. He was of medium build, not so tall, and his thinning black hair was heavily greyed. Formerly of the Family Court he had recently stepped across the aisle to the State Supreme Court. He justified his reputation for conservative views for he applied his philosophy from the bench with almost puritanical fervour.
‘Another drink, Milan?’ Horgan asked as he poured again. Milan shook his head with a hint of impatience. ‘No? Alright, yes, I must remember you are driving home. I could, if you wish, have you driven. No? Alright, well then, yes, even we are susceptible to the rigours of the Act.
‘I bring to mind the time when His Honour approached me to discuss the Chapter. In all honesty I thought the old judge was senile. To me he’d always been aged, beyond his years, like a relic to be treasured and wrapped up in cotton wool and put away in a safe place.
‘But that old man, who is, incidentally, the hallowed orchestration of the spoken word, and doubtlessly the finest man in silk, once instilled in me the caution necessary to conduct the bench without interference from such surreptitious political and economic goals as are established by our Chapter. Caution, Milan, is what is now necessary. We are not a group of backroom boys who connive to thwart the law.’
Milan kept silent. A price was being asked. He had the means to pay but the cheque would be drawn elsewhere.
‘What is our gambit, Milan?’ the jurist finally asked.
Smoke from the Sobranie danced from his mouth as he hummed a Brazilian song. The smokescreen did not hide from Horgan’s scrutiny the hint of pleasure on the little man’s lips. The steady trained eyes of the jurist remained in focus with Milan’s. Horgan knew the entrepreneur with the pixilated appearance was capable of the most audacious acts of skulduggery. Horgan respected Milan’s unequalled qualities of brinkmanship, this wily self-educated advocate of laissez-faire could advance a concept farther than most, and he had the determination to succeed.
‘I have planted the seed.’
Milan paused to relight his Sobranie. He spoke not to Horgan but to images in his mind, chess pieces dancing about his world, manipulating.
‘You have been practising your speeches again, Milan.’ Horgan smiled genially.
Milan returned the humour and laughed. His face screwed into a terrain of incredibly twisted valleys and ridges. He spoke of his plan. Afterward, they refreshed themselves at the bar and Horgan walked Milan to his car.
*
The afternoon sun burnt brightly. Sprinklers caused hundreds of tiny rainbows to colour the garden. The conspiratorial use of the word ‘our’ by the jurist pleased him. He nevertheless warned himself against swimming alone on a dark and dangerous beach.
Basil Horgan watched the limousine glide from the house into the poplars. He was thinking of his peers on the bench and how apoplectic they would be if they understood the coagency between a respected jurist and an immigrant whose lifestyle conjured up various fantasies of rapacity.
Horgan returned to the bar and refilled his glass. The eyes that swam in claret struggled to focus as he spared a quick glance at the empty library room. He said, as if to an assembly, ‘If only men of principle had the humour and the principles of the Underworld.’
Horgan sighed into his hands, his body leaning on the bar. His eyes looked old for the moment.
