The Shadow Game (5 page)

Self-consciously he glanced into the foxed mirror. A beaten face glared back, bloodshot eyes etched deep with the bitter past. He propped his hands on the basin, then straightened and rolled back his shoulders.

‘Where did you go, mate?' His voice held a tremble. The one-time political huntsman was ashamed of what he had descended to.

He picked up a pair of scissors, caressing its blades, sharp and somehow comforting.

While he'd not touched alcohol for a week he worried that he still ached for its false comfort. The strength that he'd left behind was returning slowly to his wiry frame, as was a sense of balance and calm. Last night he'd slept well, waking just once to challenge the dark.

Food was no longer the enemy. His appetite was returning and he'd gained a kilo or two.

And that morning he'd taken his first tentative steps around the seminary's spacious grounds that rolled over four hectares, sloping gently from Mary Street to Tarban Creek. Planted at the heart of some of the most expensive real estate in this overpriced city, the land alone would be worth tens of millions.

The estate was a lush and secret garden dotted with one-and two-storey sandstone buildings, scarred by a couple of grey bunkers that hailed from the 1970s. What struck Harry Dunkley was that the old sandstone stood grand and timeless, while the more recent concrete monstrosities had aged badly.

The Marist fathers had been the area's first white settlers, arriving in 1847 when land was cheap and Sydney was a boat ride away. The French community of priests had vowed to bring their Christian God to the Pacific and Hunters Hill was their first permanent supply base for their missions to far-flung islands.

Now the Catholic Church was in seemingly irreversible decline in the post-Christian West. Like this land, it was a relic of the past. Hunters Hill was to be the Marists' graveyard as they prepared to administer the last rites on their venture in the Pacific.

Harry breathed out slowly, clouding the mirror in front of him. He was surprised by his sympathy for the Marists and wondered whether it involved a kind of self-pity, a recognition that his best days were also past.

Dunkley had scant understanding of the priests' beliefs, but it was clear they had toiled, within their lights, to make the world a better place. He respected that. As for their many flaws, who was he to judge?

Carefully he pulled at the greying beard and let the scissor blades shear off a large clump of hair. He held the matted fibre in his left hand, rubbing it between his fingers before letting it fall to the floor.

Twenty minutes later his face was clean and raw. A razor had taken off the last of the stubble and he'd splashed warm water on his freshly shaven cheeks, watching as thin red rivulets snaked around the sink.

He raised his eyes to a new face reflected in the small mirror. It held the same haunted eyes, but even they seemed a touch brighter.

‘Welcome back,' he mumbled.

The borrowed clothes were far from stylish, but they were clean. A makeshift belt tethered the pants to Dunkley's thin frame.

His upstairs bedroom was in a two-storey accommodation block built in 1975, the same year as the Dismissal. It resembled one of Harry Seidler's tombs and bore signs of concrete cancer, but it was functional, warm and dry.

Harry was ready to face the day, to reconnect with a humanity that he'd been avoiding. Already he yearned for conversation.

He ambled down a staircase and through a glass door into a brilliant Sydney morning. Nearby stood the imposing main building, its sandstone facade fitted with rectangular windows and graced with five ground-floor arches. A trio of chimneys jutted from a red tile roof. The building was grand and neatly kept, but there was little sign of life.

The refectory was empty, as usual. As Harry walked past tables stacked with chairs, the only sound was the pad of his shoes on the timber floor.

Once this place had pulsated with life as dozens of zealous young men gathered to prepare their meals. Now just a handful of aged priests remained, eating their meals in a small room adjacent to the kitchen.

‘Father.' Dunkley nodded to a priest who'd been particularly kind during his first days at the seminary. They were the only ones there and he set about making coffee and toast in silence.

A suite of newspapers was laid out neatly, feeding the priests' old-school media habits. Familiar feelings stirred in Dunkley as he picked up
The Australian
, the reassuring weight of newsprint like a balm, but they were tempered by a pang of loss that he no longer had a hand in filling these pages.

Still, for the first time in months, he was taking an interest in the latest political crisis. He had always suspected Elizabeth Scott would struggle, but even he was amazed by how quickly her prime ministerial star had fallen. He turned to Sydney's screaming tabloid, which was revelling in her most recent blunder.

‘RIGHT ROYAL FOOL' the
Daily Telegraph
thundered in hundred-point font.

Dunkley whistled and imagined how he might have written about this epic balls-up. He looked up at the priest. ‘The PM's in all sorts of strife. But I guess you're a traditionalist, Father, and wouldn't mind a few new knights and dames.'

The priest gazed at Harry over the rim of his glasses.

‘Why would you say that, Harry?' His grizzled face was slashed by a wry grin as he contemplated Dunkley. ‘The Marists were originally French and we all know what happened to their nobility. I'm from Irish stock, a lifelong Republican and Labor to the bootstraps.'

Dunkley laughed.

‘ALP or DLP?'

The priest stopped smiling.

‘Harry, I thought you knew your politics.' His voice held a mock gravity. ‘It was the Victorian archbishop Daniel Mannix who backed Santamaria's Movement that split Labor. There was no split in New South Wales, thanks to the peerless skills of Joe Cahill and the unflinching support he got from Cardinal Gilroy.'

The old man took a sip of his tea as Dunkley tried to guess his age. Mid-eighties? His mind was razor sharp and his hands were steady.

‘And I like to think that it was my influence that won a young, impressionable Martin Toohey back from his Grouper father.'

Dunkley poured the last dregs of coffee into his mug from a small glass plunger and looked around at the large uneven sandstone blocks of the dining-room walls.

‘Father, it's not so bad this retreating from the world. I could spend a bit of time here. Not praying like you. But reading, thinking.'

‘I read and think a bit too.' The priest held Dunkley in a long gaze. ‘By all means, take the time you need to heal, Harry. You are a welcome guest. But don't misunderstand what this place was built for. We trained men to go out and take on the world.'

The priest took off his glasses, pointing the frames at his younger charge.

‘When you are strong again, you must leave. There is a lot of work left in this world for you. Harry Dunkley, you might just be our last missionary.'

‘Morning, Harry. Welcome back to the real world.'

Martin Toohey grinned as he walked briskly up the path. He'd arrived in a taxi from the city as the time edged towards 11.30am. The two men shook hands awkwardly.

‘How're you feeling? You look a million dollars . . . well, a few thousand anyway.'

‘Thanks, Martin, you always were rich with the compliments. C'mon, let's have tea with the ghosts of your old comrades.'

Dunkley led Toohey into a favourite sitting room. Soft light shone through windows covered by patterned curtains. Comfortable lounges and armchairs in yesteryear print lined walls painted light grey. Framed portraits of austere-looking priests in dog collars and black soutanes pointed to a prouder past, before the church's reputation had been forever stained by the sins of the fathers.

‘Any of them look familiar, Martin?' Toohey was studying the fading faces closely.

‘Yeah, I remember him. Father what's-his-name. Nice old bugger. Taught canon law, from memory.'

Dunkley snorted. ‘Now locked up by the Royal Commission, for kiddie fiddling, no doubt.'

‘I see you haven't lost your cynicism, Mr Dunkley. Yes, the church has a lot to answer for, but these were good men,' Toohey said. ‘You wouldn't get it, but this is . . . was . . . a very liberal theological campus. A religious society is part of the church, but not part of its ruling hierarchy. Few of the teachers here would have had any truck with the arch-conservative types who became bishops.'

They sat quietly for a moment, then Dunkley asked a question that had been burning for days.

‘Why, Martin?'

‘Why what?'

‘Why did you of all people reach out to me? Get me out of jail. Bring me here. After everything I'd done to you over the years; the front-page hatchet jobs. You and me, we were hardly mates at the best of times.'

Toohey rubbed the back of his neck as he contemplated an answer.

‘Harry, they teach some strange things in this place. But the nub is this: do unto others what you would have them do unto you.'

Then he laughed.

‘And taking a cricket bat to the
Oz
's editorial HQ, now that's a very Australian act of revenge. I couldn't let them put you away for that.'

Dunkley smiled as Toohey paused and closed his eyes, as if searching out a painful moment of his own.

‘Remember when you cornered me in parliament on the way to Question Time?' Toohey asked.

Dunkley's smile faded. ‘Yeah, you told me to piss off and one of your goons got up close and personal.'

Toohey's eyes flashed open.

‘You said that I'd been set up, that it was the Americans, not the Chinese, behind those three cyber attacks.'

‘Yeah,' Dunkley said. ‘Then I teamed up with your old mate Bruce Paxton to show that the man behind that little war was Sir Jack fucking Webster. I had proof he was the mastermind behind the Alliance, those conniving puppeteers working in the shadows of government. But did anyone believe me?'

Toohey slowly shook his head, then surprised Dunkley by slamming the palm of his hand down on the armrest of the lounge.

‘That was an attack on Australia, designed to mislead the elected government. My government.' Toohey's face turned scarlet. ‘It was the straw that broke my back. It was a coup.'

‘Yep.' Dunkley gave a mock salute. ‘Australia's Allende, come on down. At least they didn't shoot you. That fucker damn near killed me.'

Toohey stood up and paced about the room.

‘Harry, I've thought about that conversation every day since I lost office. I didn't believe you then, but I believe you now.'

‘Excellent. You can put it in your memoirs. I can even give you the title. Webster's code name for the deception was “the Lusitania Plan”. You'd appreciate the historical allusion to the Churchill conspiracy: let one of your own ships sink to suck America into World War I.'

Toohey turned to Dunkley, his voice now soft and pleading.