Gilt Edge

Other titles by Ian Moffitt

- The Retreat of Radiance

- The Colour Man

- Blue Angels

- Death Adder Dreaming

- The Electric Jungle

Praise for Ian Moffitt

IAN MOFFTIT made an extraordinary fiction debut with his novel, The Retreat of Radiance. It was four months on the bestseller list, six weeks as No. 1. The Retreat of Radiance, Colour Man and Blue Angels, have all been published internationally.

U.S. Publishers Weekly said of The Retreat of Radiance. Graham Greene and Lawrence Durrell fans take note: the American debut of Australian Moffitt's novel is a treat. The New York Times called it a vivid, disturbing picture of the way East and West have profited from, manipulated and sullied each other, and the Kirkus Reviews hailed it as realistic, poetic and racy.

The Colour Man (published in the U.S. as Presence of Evil) was commended by U.S. Publishers Weekly for its elegant prose, swift plotting and fascinating characters. Of Blue Angels, Peter Corris said in the Sydney Morning Herald: The wartime scenes are as good as anything in Len Deighton . . . Impossible to recommend too highly, and Thomas Keneally praised Moffitt's sure storytelling and swift fire prose. The Guardian described Blue Angels as a thoroughly readable, highly mobile novel.

Moffitt, author of eight books, was a daily newspaperman in Australia, Asia and the United States before he began writing fiction as a fulltime occupation.

CONTENTS

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

PART TWO

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

PART THREE

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

PART FOUR

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Epilogue

Other titles by Ian Moffitt

PART ONE

Chapter 1

Kolnachov was scared to death. He shambled down the Esplanade, twitching, muttering to himself: a shabby White Russian from Harbin in an old grey suit he'd inherited twenty years ago, his trousers flapping around him, an open shirt collar twisted half out of his coat.

Nobody took much notice of him, and he seemed oblivious, as always, of others; head down, a soggy cigarette trickling smoke, he was little more than a grey shape flicking in the corner of an eye, already a faint rustle of memory as he passed. The sort who disappear for years before others notice they've gone.

A last neon sign, Reef Cruises, fizzed blue and white above him as he left a group of shops behind. He patted his pockets, blundered into a lit telephone booth and dialled Peter Lawson, peering through his glasses. Behind him, the orange sun slipped into the Coral Sea like a coin in a slot.

No answer. Good God Almighty! He tried Ted Craig again: not home either. Still muttering, he backed out of the box and trudged on, lighting a new cigarette from the one he was smoking. His thick fingers, even his chin, were stained yellow—about the colour his grey hair had been—but smoking was not his biggest worry. Even his vodka intake wasn't—more than fifty years of drinking in Manchuria, Shanghai, the Treaty Ports, Hong Kong and Australia; up to his gills every night inside a large bottle labelled Alexander Kolnachov, seventy, Odd Fish, Sometime Journalist. Everyone chose their own way.

No, he had bigger problems than cigarettes and the booze. For, click! his uncanny memory had just come up with an ancient snapshot that terrified him. And Craig and Lawson, his two oldest friends, Old China Hands like himself, were not on tap to save him from the past.

He scuttled across a side street. A car braked sharply; he flinched as the driver shouted Fuckwit! He also propped as a man emerged from a house up ahead. His heart was thudding. I'm too old for this, he mumbled.

Kolnachov was not usually afraid of life (or death); he preferred his own inner world, that was all, to the versions outside. He considered himself harmless, apart from his instant recall; he had curled safe in his lonely shell while wars and revolutions rumbled over his head, shattering more vigorous men, never looking for trouble. But trouble now had found him.

A woman stared at him from her front path. Everyone thought he was odd—Kolnachov knew that. He had never minded being odd; in fact, he'd been proud that he was eccentric, certainly one of the most eccentric in Cairns, the last anchorage on his long exile in North Queensland.

I'm a scholar, he liked to say, meaning that society's rules were not for him. Oddity was a badge proclaiming his genius; his most secret joy for decades had been the magnum opus he had been writing on history, a work ninety-nine per cent imagination, one per cent reality. His fatal mistake had been to abandon it to write about truth—in short, to examine the nature of treason. He should never have strayed from fantasy into fact . . .

Mumbling, he headed north along the Esplanade towards his home. Once (pondering great events which might or might not have happened, given this or that fluke of history), these conversations with himself had amused him. He had shaken and coughed with laughter, really giggled, his cigarette bobbing at each stroke of brilliance while wary strangers gave him plenty of room.

But now he was so jittery he could hardly think; jittery and jumping at every shadow. And there were plenty of shadows.

Above him giant cranes rose on new hotel and apartment sites along the Esplanade; each day the metal monsters grazed here on the rubble of old Cairns, shuffling closer to his home. They had disturbed him only vaguely before; now they towered above him with positive menace, dark fingers pointing up at the Russian Orthodox Heaven. He crossed the road to the grassy sea front and stood beneath a coconut palm, watching, cupping his cigarette in one soft hand.

He was studying the Markham Hotel site up ahead. It seemed deserted now, no big yellow car parked nearby. Two cranes jutted into the sky above the rising shell of the building, and the rainforest mountains behind Cairns were gazing down at it over a shrinking green carpet of sugar cane plantations.

The Markham was a symptom of a new disease which was creeping towards the cane: progress. The Japanese, especially, were buying in big.

Tourism was swelling, crushing the carapace of the old city under a glittering replica, squeezing out its original scents and juices, expanding each year. Kolly didn't care much about environmental issues—one domestic bolthole was as good as another at his age—but the Markham certainly startled him.

More precisely: the man in the yellow car outside the Markham site had startled him a few hours before. He never forgot a face—it was part of his cursed gift for caricature; some of his Kolly Kartoons had even been published in his youth in Asia. People had loved his Eiffel Tower de Gaulle. But this was a face to fear, not amuse; he'd last glimpsed it in Japanese Kempeitai headquarters in Hong Kong nearly fifty years ago. A European face.

Nearly half a century since their gaze had locked again that afternoon! And he knew now, standing under the palm tree in the violet dusk, that the war hadn't finished with him yet.

He hurried along the sea front for a few hundred metres before he crossed back over the road. His heart ached; he was clammy, perspiring badly in the heat . . . It had been bad enough before: the Markham wanted to expand, obliterating his home. Real estate agents had been pestering him (and his friends) to sell their property, thin charm leaking out of their eyes and lips on every refusal. Now the threats had started—shouts outside the bungalow at night, large men blocking them on the footpath. But this . . .

Herons stepped delicately on the mudflats beneath the Esplanade wall. He was more crab, bustling from danger back to his safe fissure in time: Alexander Kolnachov, student of the inconsequential, seeker of harmless historical untruth, who had obeyed—like a fool!—when Craig had directed him down a dangerous dead end into reality.

He lit another cigarette, dropping the old one in a shower of tiny sparks. The cranes hung behind him like gibbets; he fled as if from the shadows of the gallows.

He seemed the only geriatric abroad. On sunny mornings the Tropic Wings coaches rumbled along here to pick up tourists from the hotels—ancients, many of them, clumping out on boots of lead for a last flutter before they fell off the twig. Now they were safe indoors. All except him.

He opened the iron gate of a mock-Spanish bungalow with boarded windows. The stench of garbage made him look up as he entered; it was strewn over ten steps, set with green fleur de lis tiles, which rose to the front door. An upturned bin lay beside them. Obscenities in dripping red paint were daubed on the door and boarded windows.

The place looked deserted: barley sugar pillars each side of the porch had snapped, exposing rusted rods. But a pink glow seeping through several cracks in the boards told him that his friends, The Great Lacoste and his tiny French companion, M. Duvenal, were crouched inside, either praying or meditating. He'd told them already of the man he'd seen and they were almost as afraid as he was.

He scurried around the side of the bungalow into a cracked cement yard. It was time to lock himself in, too—he headed for a smaller building behind the bungalow. It was once a slaughterhouse, then a Depression dosshouse and garage/laundry. Now it contained his combined bedroom-study and one of the worst waxworks (created by The Great Lacoste) ever assembled in the modern world.

Kolnachov stopped in front of a poor effigy of Woodrow Wilson which dangled on a peg by the waxworks door. Spectacles were askew on the effigy's wax nose, and a cardboard notice fixed to its coat with a rusty paper clip spelled the president's name in straggly Biro capitals.

Kolly took a key from Wilson's coat and inserted it—he usually liked to think of it as the Key of Peace, but no peace filled his abode tonight. He closed the door with a sigh of relief that crumbled into a cough. Thank God this place hadn't been wrecked, too.

Only the old gang were waiting here for him, as always: Stalin and Churchill glaring at him through glass eyes, Stalin crouching in an old St Vincent de Paul suit too big for him, Churchill's cigar missing from his parted fingers; Max Schmeling and Joe Louis shaping up at each other in moth-eaten woollen Speedos; Hitler grimacing at Jesse Owens as he stretched over an imaginary tape. There was also, among others, a half-finished Groucho Marx.

He stood blinking around him, getting used to the gloom. In front of him stood a figure of The Great Lacoste himself, displaying his waxen muscles at the height of his fame as a strong man many years before, the strap of a swimming costume over one massive shoulder, his legs planted like ironbark trees.

What use are you now? Kolnachov murmured. Because he had never known him like this. This was a sort of portrait of Lacoste when young before his feet packed up—which, Kolnachov knew, was the main reason (until tonight, anyway) that he and M. Duvenal, a street photographer, sought inner strength through meditation.

These days the strong man could hardly walk. He was nothing like this indomitable wax giant. No protection at all.

He shuffled around Lacoste and groped towards his bedroom through a bizarre forest of misshapen wax bodies, ducking gestures like branches. Blowups of a series of Duvenal's photographs covered the walls: moody studies, hard to decipher, of a train filled with skeletal passengers who were lolling out the windows and draped over seats . . . He was home.

His bedroom was off one side of the waxworks. He switched on his light, shut his door and frantically began gathering up a manuscript and notes in green Biro which were heaped on his cluttered desk. All around him was chaos: open books and papers spilled over the desk, several wall shelves, two frayed grey armchairs, his narrow iron bed, a rickety card table, the worn lino.

He shrugged off his coat and dropped it behind him. On the walls hung a few Chinese prints to remind him of distant days, pale windows (the room had none) into an exotic period which had bleached long ago in his mind. He usually regarded them absently while pondering some conundrum, the Song peaks and temples, the austere scholars, looking down at his placid labours here on a much lower intellectual slope.

Now they looked down on a minor scholar in extreme fear. He shoved the half-finished manuscript into a red folder on which he had printed DIXON-CARR TREASON TRIAL, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA, 1946.

He pushed scribbled green notes and old newspaper clippings into a brown folder, and looked around him, wondering where to hide them, lighting another cigarette . . .

Once he froze, listening for noises outside in the waxworks. He imagined the rustle of the dummies' clothes, the creaking of wax limbs as they listened, too. He pictured them leaning away from him towards the waxworks door, their wax ears straining for the footsteps of a murderer.

Where is Lawson? Where is Craig? He waved his cigarette like a match until he realised that it was not a match. He crushed it, almost unsmoked, on his desk and looked for a match to light another.

He hid the folders at last. He closed the books he had been consulting on treachery and pushed them beneath piles of newspapers. Then he took his abandoned magnum opus from a bottom drawer and spread it prominently over his desk to confuse searchers. All being well, they'd assume that it, and not the trial, had remained his obsession . . .

He paused again. Was someone breathing out there? Was someone creeping towards him through the forest of wax?

Then a man laughed in the lovers' lane behind the waxworks. He heard a girl's injured squeal of mock protest. He opened his door.

Chapter 2

Ted Craig, owner of the Tropical Traveller and other tourist publications, was driving home from his office as Kolnachov scuttled from his bedroom to a wall phone in the waxworks.

Craig stopped outside his house to let a string of junior footballers run past his driveway. Their coach, Andrew Ramsden, a big fair-haired detective who lived nearby, waved genially as he jogged after them. The group radiated sunlit innocence in Craig's black gloom.

He turned into his driveway. The phone began ringing as he got out of the car. It was still ringing when he picked it up in the hallway.

Craig. He rarely wasted words.

Craig? Is that you?

It was Kolly babbling. He'd refused two calls from him at the office: Tell him I'm tied up . . . Tell him I've gone home.

What's up, Kolly? Through gritted teeth.

Where have you been? I've been trying to, what-a-you-call-it, get hold of you.

Working. Tall and gaunt, nearly as old as Kolnachov, Craig stared around him into empty rooms. He was like an old hawk who was shrivelling, his feathers dwindling, but body still erect. His hair was sparse, but still dark, shining with the brilliantine he had been using since his youth. Beads of it glistened on his scalp where his hair was thinnest.

I left messages at your office, Kolly said. Your secretary, she says—he always said says with a broad a, not sez—she says she'll tell you it's urgent.

Been flat out. Just got home. What's the trouble? He jiggled his keys, his hawk eyes gleaming. Kolly was the trouble.

I told her, I told her I wanted to give you some important information. I told her—

Where are you now?

I'm at home.

Hold on. Craig put down the phone, went into the living room, and poured himself a brandy. Dark age marks, like ink-blots, splotched the backs of his hands.

He grabbed a chair and plonked it down beside a small bookcase lined with high-tech thrillers. He'd developed a liking for high-tech space destruction in what he supposed was his old age. Blood in the air, blood under the oceans, blood anywhere but on the ground. He'd seen too much of it there.

Right, he said.

Is someone with you? Kolnachov asked. I don't want to be saying these things . . .

Nobody here. Just got myself a drink. Man needed a drink, nursemaiding Kolnachov on top of everything else. Years now, dragging the poor bastard around like an anchor. Giving him a purpose in life.

It goes back to the Japan time, said Kolnachov.

Craig stiffened, dismissing an image: Outram Road gaol, Singapore, World War II. A Japanese guard screaming two inches from his face. Wedged in one of the guard's blackened molars was a choice twist of meat.

Go on, he said.

Today I am walking along the Esplanade. Going downtown to do some business.

Cash his pension cheque, thought Craig. Suck a vodka. So what happened?

You know—just a minute, Craig. Stay there, Craig. Don't go away.

Craig sipped. I'm still here.

I think I hear someone outside the door.

Probably your mad friends. Craig heard himself speaking as if he were someone else. He'd just finished one of his hardest days since the war.

No. They never open the door at night, especially tonight.

Stick the lights on, then, and have a look.

The lights, replied Kolnachov, are . . . He trailed off.

Kaput, guessed Craig. Stupid bastard couldn't change a globe. He pictured him peering from the wall phone into the shadows between Stalin and Hitler.

Forget it, he said. Come to the point.

I am walking along. There is a big yellow car. He began coughing: lungs like tar bags by now.

What about it? Run you down?

No, it doesn't run me down. I am approaching the car when the driver gets out and walks around in the front of me.

So? Craig was mildly interested now.

I bump into him. I look at him and he looks at me. It is Kellerman.

Kellerman? Which Kellerman? Slowly, he placed his glass on the floor.

Kellerman. The Asia Exports Kellerman. The one who, what-a-you-call-it, did the disappearing trick.

Jesus. Craig straightened up. He was impressed despite himself.

You sure? he asked. But already he didn't doubt it. Kolly was never wrong.

Craig, I think he knew me too. I feel him looking at my back as I go down the street.

Did he say anything?

He says nothing, but we both know. I am sure of it.

Craig picked up his glass: his long search was nearly over, but he felt strangely detached, as if a glass wall had risen between him and the world. It was not the way he had imagined this moment.

What time was this? he asked.

About four o'clock. I always do my shopping at four o'clock.

Long time to remember. Craig stared into his brandy, wanting him to be wrong.

I don't forget that face. Craig, I am telling you . . . He is fat now, with white, what-a-you-call-it, silver hair. But I don't forget that face.

OK, OK. Was he with anybody?

With nobody. Just the big car.

You get the number? he asked. Silence. What make was it? More silence. Kolnachov didn't study cars, let alone number plates.

Craig switched tack. Did he go into a building? Somewhere you know?

Maybe Markham Hotel, somewhere there. New constructions all the way along here . . . Craig?

What?

We have to tell somebody tonight.

We do, do we? A sudden spurt of anger. Another problem to cap the rest of them.

I tell you, maybe he recognises me. Maybe he knows where I live . . .

Maybe, maybe, echoed Craig. Anyway, I'll get back to you.

What do you mean, Craig? Get back to me? You've got to protect me on this.

Kolly, I want this bastard more than anyone. But right now I've got a couple of other things on my plate.

Craig . . .

Listen, Kolly. His head was cracking. I'm buggered. You don't understand. I've got other problems.

But you are the one who dragged me back into all this again! And he knows me—he'll know about my evidence at the, what-a-you-call-it, trial . . .

Craig rested the fingers of one hand against his forehead. They jumped, as if he were transmitting tiny electric shocks.

Kolly, ring me tomorrow. No, wait. I might be in Brisbane. Ring me Wednesday.

Wednesday! Craig, I might be dead! I want to talk to you—

Wednesday, Kolly. Craig hung up and pulled out the plug. Then he finished his drink. He needed another one, now.

Black Monday. A sudden phone call from his estranged young wife before breakfast to tell him she was leaving town and confirming that she wanted a divorce. Lunch with a contact who told him that a major competitor was moving into North Queensland tourism publishing with unlimited backing (although he'd assured Craig he had no such plans). And now Kolnachov bobbing up in the middle of it—brandishing his mental snapshot of the man Craig hated most.

Kellerman, a wartime civilian collaborator (and murderer) who had been lying doggo for decades in the archives; so cunning, so entombed in the past, that everyone else had forgotten him, or assumed he was dead. Kellerman, an Australian businessman who had swanned around Asia on the loose during the war—and killed men in Sandakan, North Borneo, whom Craig still loved more than his wife . . .

His head thumped. Betrayal wherever he turned. Too much at once—the bloody roof falling in . . .

He took the brandy bottle onto the deck and sprawled in an easy chair overlooking the Cairns Botanic Gardens; they were as close to the jungle as he got these days. He began tapping his secret Morse on the arm as if he were still an Army signaller during the war: SOS, he found himself sending, SOS.

He stopped when he realised this. He never asked for help. He swirled his brandy instead, trying to find light in the darkness.

From the deck he gazed down through the black foliage into his past in Sandakan—into the Japanese POW camp from which he had (briefly) escaped in 1943; into the Kempeitai cells nearby where, amid torture, he had first learned the name Sam Kellerman . . .

And now Kellerman was back in Cairns—his fierce prayers had been answered. He raised his glass in a weary gesture at the sky.

After a while he got up and walked around the deck. The scent of frangipani drifted from a bushy garden which his wife had redesigned to fit around it. She'd redesigned the house, too—even tried to redesign him. And now she had gone for good.

He stood alone at the railing, jiggling his drink, looking down at the half-shadowed street. Alone with Kellerman . . .

Moonlight gleamed on the grille of a fluorescent green panel van almost hidden beneath a tree. It also shone on empty paving in front of the deck, and it struck through the French doors behind him onto his empty bed.

He drained his glass and went inside. He put the bottle on the floor by his bed, switched on a lamp, and lay down to think. The shadows shrank back inside his head.

Bastard never goes to sleep, murmured the driver of the van. He was late twenties, mid-thirties, Italian descent, well-built but pasta-plump.

He drummed his fingers on the wheel. The tattoo of a nude woman pulsed on his golden forearm. Fucking waste of time, all this, Angelo, he complained.

Shut up. Angelo curled beside him