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even the big man himself, as long as your donation is solid.’
    Charlie was grinning wider than was usual, causing Browne to break into a stream of raucous laughter. Browne waved a brown banknote at the bartender. ‘Pour my friend another.’
    Two hours and eight whiskies later, Browne lurched sideways off his barstool. He stared down at Charlie with unsteady concentration, swaying slightly on his shoes. ‘Come, sir! Before the pot-wallopers throw us onto the footpath.’
    Charlie stood up and followed Browne as he crashed onto the street, proceeding in a southerly direction to the Latin Quarter.
    The night was hot, the air as thick as formaldehyde and filled with the mysterious, though unmistakable, scent of fried onions. On the corner to their right a ghostly billboard loomed up, ‘Lafitte French Brandy … C’est Si Bon’. Off in the distance, Australia Square Tower thrust itself skyward like a white marble finger stretched out to the moon.
    Charlie peered tentatively down a black alley, past a howling cat, a stack of wooden crates labelled ‘Penfolds’, and other sorts of wreckage. He was surprised to see the rear door of the Latin Quarter fly open, and Sammy Lee, the mournful and lugubrious nightclub proprietor, ejected summarily through it, with Detective Sergeant Pigeye Donaldson hard on his heels. From his sprawling position on the asphalt, Sammy adroitly grabbed hold of a large hobnailed boot that Pigeye was sending his way, causing Pigeye to tumble and crash through a complete row of garbage cans. They tussled about among the slops and dead lemons for a minute until Pigeye punched the nightclub proprietor half-conscious, walloped him, kicked him repeatedly, blowing out a steady stream of epithets such as ‘wog’, ‘dog’ and ‘Yid’.
    Charlie turned back to his friend, thinking it better not to make their presence known at this point.

Five minutes after Charlie backed out of the alley to the rear of the Latin Quarter, Ducky O’Connor slipped up the front steps and stared at the crowds streaming endlessly out. Exhausted, he watched as they climbed into their pink and plum Holdens to begin their long journey home to the suburbs – the men anxious and nerve-ticked, the women shivering in red sateen and slithers of acetate, with make-up falling in hideous drifts from their faces.
    In his crumpled shirt and petrol-smudged trousers, it was obvious Ducky didn’t belong. He was better than them. He could do anything better than them. He’d been close to death – violent death – many times. But never this close. Never his own.
    Ducky had sent McPherson messages from Pentridge but each time McPherson had failed to respond. He’d sent him threats, said he would rip out his guts and blow his brains through his eyeballs, but still no one came.
    The jacks, the screws, the toffee-faced lawyer who bailed him out, they all thought he killed for no reason.
    He had reason enough.
    He pictured the woman standing on the fringe of the crowd with her dumb, frightened eyes. Her friends had treated him like dirt: ‘You’re less than a maggot that’s crawled off the slagheaps of Sydney’. Each time he thought of those round eyes he was seized with a wicked kind of amusement. He had killed for thesake of this … scum town. Its harbour slithering with inlets and rivulets, crammed with rust-bucket hulks and leprous boats spewing out garbage. Beggars ran free on its streets. Freaks wielding sawn-offs crawled out of its jerry-built hovels. Mould grew over its buildings in defiance of the sunshine. Sometimes he imagined the pollution soaking in through the soles of his shoes, moving up through his toes, filling his throat, oozing from his eyeballs. Then terrible things happened. Not the taking of a life, not the murder of another human being. He hardly gave that a thought. Violence inflicted in the carrying on of business was wholly