The Bat(118)

When he opened his eyes, though, he was still standing upright. A door was open at the other end of the room, through which he was fairly sure Toowoomba had made his escape. But he could also hear a clanking sound he was fairly sure was his gun rolling down the metal stairs. He decided to go for the gun. With a suicidal dive down the staircase Harry grazed his forearms and knees, but caught the gun just as it was about to bounce off the edge and plunge twenty metres to the bottom of the shaft. He struggled to his knees, coughed and confirmed he had lost his second tooth since coming to this bloody country.

He stood up and almost immediately passed out.

‘Harry!’ someone shouted in his ear.

He also heard a door being flung open somewhere below him and felt running feet shaking the stairs. Harry aimed himself at the door in front of him, saw the door at the other end of the room, half hit it and staggered out into the dusk with a sense that he had dislocated his shoulder.

‘Toowoomba!’ he screamed into the wind. He looked around. Before him lay the town, and behind him Pyrmont Bridge. He was standing on the roof of the aquarium and had to hold on tight to the top of a fire escape in the gusting wind. The water in the harbour had been whipped into white foam and he could taste the salt in the air. Below him he saw a dark figure on his way down the fire escape. The figure stopped for a second and looked around. To its left was a police car with a flashing light. In front of it, behind a fence, the two tanks of water that protruded from Sydney Aquarium.

‘Toowoomba!’ Harry yelled and tried to raise the gun. His shoulder refused point-blank, and Harry screamed with pain and fury. The figure jumped down from the ladder, ran to the fence and began to climb over. Harry realised at that moment what he was intending to do – to get into the building housing the tank, go out through the back and swim the short distance to the quay on the other side. From there it would take him only seconds to disappear into the crowds. Harry stumbled down the fire escape. He charged at the fence as if intending to tear it down, swung himself over with one arm and landed on the cement with a thud.

‘Harry, report in!’

He pulled the plug out of his ear and lurched towards the building. The door was open. Harry ran in and fell to his knees. Beneath the arched roof ahead of him, bathed in lights hanging from a steel cable over the tank, was an enclosed piece of Sydney Harbour. A narrow pontoon crossed through the middle of the tank, and a fair way down it, there was Toowoomba. He was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and black trousers and running in as relaxed and elegant a manner as a narrow, unstable pontoon would allow.

‘Toowoomba!’ Harry shouted for the third time. ‘I’m going to shoot!’

Harry leaned forward, not because he couldn’t stand upright, but because he couldn’t raise his arm. He got the dark figure in his sights and pulled the trigger.

The first shot made a tiny splash in front of Toowoomba, who seemed to be running with consummate ease. Harry aimed a bit to the right. There was a splash behind Toowoomba. The distance was almost a hundred metres now. An absurd thought occurred to Harry: it was like shooting practice inside the hall in Økern – the lights in the ceiling, the echo between the walls, the pulse in the trigger finger and the deep meditative concentration.

Like training on the shooting range in Økern, Harry thought, and fired for the third time.

Toowoomba plunged headlong.

Harry said later in his statement that he assumed the shot had hit Toowoomba in the left thigh, and that therefore it was unlikely to kill him. Everyone knew, however, that this was no more than a wild guess, firing as he had from a hundred metres away. Harry could have said anything he liked without anyone being able to prove the contrary. Since there was no body left on which to do an autopsy.

Toowoomba lay screaming half submerged in the water as Harry advanced up the pontoon. Harry felt dizzy and nauseous, and everything was beginning to blur – the water, the lights in the roof and the pontoon tilting from side to side. As Harry ran he remembered Andrew’s words about love being a greater mystery than death. And he remembered the old story.

Blood rushed in his ears, in surges, and Harry was the young warrior Walla, and Toowoomba was the snake Bubbur, who had taken the life of his beloved Moora. And now Bubbur had to be killed. By love.

In McCormack’s statement later he was unable to say what Harry Holy had shouted into his mike after they’d heard the shots.

‘We just heard him running and shouting something, probably in Norwegian.’

Even Harry was unable to say what he’d shouted.

In a life-and-death race, Harry sprinted up the pontoon. Toowoomba’s body was jerking. Jerks that made the whole pontoon writhe. At first Harry thought something had bumped into it, but then he realised he was being cheated of his quarry.