Reckless, p.1
Reckless, page 1
PRAISE FOR
Reckless
‘A remarkable true story that reads like fiction because of the quality of the writing. Enthralling.’
Michael Robotham, author of Lying Beside You and When She Was Good
‘True crime adventure, bold memoir and investigative masterclass, but above all a breathtakingly original story.’
Robert Drewe, author of The Shark Net and The Bodysurfers
‘Marele Day’s Reckless has the pace of a great thriller with the heart of the most beautifully crafted memoir. Both riveting and touching, Reckless is truly a gift. I feel so privileged to have read this gorgeous book.’
Mirandi Riwoe, author of Stone Sky Gold Mountain and The Burnished Sun
‘Reading in parts like the crime fiction that made Marele Day so famous, Reckless is an extraordinary story of dramatic adventures spanning continents and decades: international fugitive and benevolent thief Jean Kay is as good a character as any crime writer could invent.’
Debra Adelaide, author of The Household Guide to Dying and The Women’s Pages
‘Not only the strangest true crime story you’ll read this year, Reckless is also the most beautifully told.’
Geordie Williamson, chief literary critic of The Australian
‘Reckless is about a woman who transforms the paralysis of unexpected grief into an adventure so dazzling that readers may have to remind themselves to breathe.’
Brenda Walker, author of Reading by Moonlight and The Wing of Night
‘Reckless is a book that takes you on a journey with a writer at the top of her game, trying to piece together the story of a man, a friendship, and a crime that she’s been so inescapably linked to for a lifetime. Revealing and personal, I loved being let in to the journey of a writer who I’ve long admired, making peace with the ghosts of her past.’
Sarah Lambert, award-winning writer and producer
‘Reckless is an astonishing tour de force, a tale riven with so many unforgettable characters, exotic locations and plot-twists that it could have come from the novelist Day’s own electric imagination, but it’s all true. Day’s memoir is as gripping as any thriller. It’s also a brilliant meditation on love and loss, ageing, grief, memory, and the craft of writing itself.’
Matthew Condon, author of Three Crooked Kings and The Night Dragon
‘Little did I suspect that crime queen Marele Day had firsthand experience of an international fugitive, part French Robin Hood, part Shantaram seeker. Every page of her crazy youthful adventure at sea and her later attempt to follow the trail of her mysterious mercenary-turned-champion-of-the-poor skipper bristles with danger and fizzes with tension as she tries to unravel an international heist that made headlines in France. Fraud, glamour, friendship, loss and betrayal create a heady cocktail as the trail heats up from Australia to Brazil. Sometimes, fiction just can’t match fact, seems pale by comparison. This is one of those stories.’
Caroline Baum, author of Only
Come to the edge.
CHRISTOPHER LOGUE
Are you going to join me, little sister?
JEAN KAY
Contents
Title Page
1. Wandering Eye
2. Season’s Greetings
3. Before
4. Truck Stop
5. Adventures in Paradise
6. Rendezvous
7. On the Road
8. On the Road Again
9. Leaving on a Jet Plane
10. Home
11. Palais de Justice
12. Refuge
13. Safe
14. Grand Larceny
15. Palais de Justice Redux
16. The Long Hot Summer
17. Rue de Belloy
18. Losing Jean and Danielle
19. The Job of a Lifetime
20. A Landmark Day
21. The Famous Dossier
22. The Trial
23. The Lawyer
24. All Over the World
25. Living in the 70s
26. A Blue Fear
27. The Fox
28. Born to Be Wild
29. Brazil
30. Year of the Dead
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
1.
Wandering Eye
STAY INSIDE THE FENCE. Don’t play on the road. Don’t get into cars with strange men. The world was a dangerous, fearsome place, full of dangerous, fearsome people.
And now look what was happening—my mother was not only taking me into the world but leaving me there. Instead of abandoning me in a forest like Hansel and Gretel’s parents, she was leaving me at a hospital—St Vincent’s in Darlinghurst, a notorious part of Sydney back then.
I needed an operation to correct my wandering eye. It wouldn’t hurt, Mum assured me. I wouldn’t even feel it, because the doctors would put me to sleep.
Put to sleep? That’s what the vet did to the cat next door. We never saw Smoky again.
Mum made a gargled sound, like a cry dressed in a laugh. ‘You’ll be in hospital for a little while then I’ll fetch you home again. I’ll come and visit you every day.’ She gave me one more big hug and kiss before handing me over. ‘Be a brave girl,’ she said. It did not occur to me that a mother leaving her three-year-old daughter might be the one who needed to be brave.
The hospital was as grand as a fairytale palace. I stood on the balustrade—something Mum would never have allowed—two storeys up, one hand on the cool solid majesty of a Roman column, the other doing a regal windscreen wiper wave like young Queen Elizabeth. No doubt I was in the protective custody of a nurse but it was so exhilarating, so exciting up here looking out at everything that I barely registered her presence. The world was wondrous. Not dangerous or fearsome at all.
Mum stood waving from the park on the other side of a road busy with cars driven by strange men. There were men in the park, propped up against trees, drinking from bottles in brown paper bags. Some women too, though not nicely dressed in ‘best’ clothes like Mum.
Mum started to walk away, still waving. As she grew smaller and smaller, then disappeared into the shadowy trees on the far side of the park, it felt like I was the one leaving. Sailing away on a big ocean liner.
Then—carbolic stench of the operating theatre, black mask of oblivion with its cargo of choking chloroform, waking into the perpetual darkness of eyes blinded by bandages. This, too, was the world outside the fence.
In the darkness that followed the operation, I became bigger. Found new parts to myself, new skills. Deprived of sight, I reimagined the world through other senses. I came to recognise the distinctive footfall of different nurses, the swish of nuns’ habits along the floor. I saw the world through my fingers—traced the outline of the kangaroo on the one-penny coin, felt the rough or smooth texture of skin as hands held mine and the fluffy ears of my toy koala, the reassuring oval pad of its nose. I smelled the swampiness of barely warm gravy at dinnertime; the soft blur of face powder that signalled my mother’s daily visit; the sharp Brylcreem sweetness of Dad making one of his rare public appearances.
I was brave. The nurses said so; they even told Mum as much.
One morning a new patient came to the ward—a five-year-old boy who had stuck scissors in his eye. ‘Marele, sit up and show him what a brave girl you are.’
Did they think I was an exhibit? ‘I’ll sit up at lunchtime.’
My childhood was punctuated by three more operations, humiliating stints of wearing a brown paper eye patch (why didn’t I tell those taunting kindergarten kids that my parents were pirates?), and visits to the orthoptist—a word I loved, a word with double chins and a serious manner—but the deviant eye always looked elsewhere, was never brought into alignment with the ‘good’ eye.
I learned other serious words, ones that made your voice go deep when you spoke them—strabismus (squint), amblyopia (lazy eye). In the orthoptist’s office I sat in front of the amblyoscope, my chin on a chin rest, hands on the handles of the machine, trying to get the cartoon bird into the cartoon cage, or Minnie Mouse next to Mickey. My eyes followed the orthoptist’s pen around the room. On her instruction I looked up, down, left, right. At home the exercise was to focus on my finger slowly approaching the tip of my nose. That eye wasn’t lazy; it could have run marathons.
Fifteen years later I had grown past childhood but the condition still persisted. A new state-of-the-art specialist determined the problem lay not with the eye itself but the neural pathway to the brain. Two eyes, two images. Normally the brain superimposes one image on the other. Mine didn’t. I had double vision (diplopia), I lacked binocular vision. The ghost image from the wandering eye hovered like a transparency. Perhaps another operation? It wouldn’t correct the condition but would make the eyes appear to be more in alignment.
That was my last visit to the eye clinic. I’d had enough of people trying to correct me and bring me into alignment. I was determined to follow the wandering eye that always looked elsewhere and see where it took me. Go outside the fence, play on the road, get into cars with strange men.
2.
Season’s Greetings
YESTERDAY—CHRISTMAS DAY 2012—I emailed my friend Jean a photo: swathes of vibrant red flowers on the poinciana tree outside my house. Jean and I have been exchanging photographic season’s greetings for the last couple of years and I was expecting a snowy wintry one from him. At first I hardly notice that the reply is from Jeanne Kay, rather than Jean Kay. And it is in English, not French.
Dear Marele,
I’m Jeanne, Jean Kay’s daughter, and I’m writing to you with terrible news. My father died in the night of 23 December. He had a heart attack and was only found in the morning. I am really sorry to bring this news to you. You were a dear friend of his and he talked about you often.
I am at the moulin now with my sisters and a memorial service will take place tomorrow. I went to see him at the funeral parlour today and he seemed peaceful. This was very unexpected. We are very much in shock and beside ourselves with endless grief.
Much love,
Jeanne
I’m in the study—my writing room—when I open the email. On the shelf above the computer are the books Jean wrote about his adventures, starting with his youthful hijacking of an international flight to get medical supplies for Bangladeshi refugees.
The nearby cupboard contains one and a half kilograms of French newspaper clippings about Jean, a few letters in his distinctive chiselled handwriting, my diary of the sea voyage we shared more than thirty years ago that ended in near shipwreck, and a more recent unfinished manuscript. My French honours thesis, with its lingering smell of old-style photocopying chemicals, is in the pile too. If I open the cupboard even a little bit, it will all come gushing out. But I won’t open that Pandora’s box. Not yet. Not ready yet for the old wound to take another hit.
I can’t avoid seeing the photo pinned to the cupboard door: Jean’s Christmas greeting from last year—a rose, a single carmine flower blossoming brightly, its stem staunch and brave in face of the European winter to come. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Good health, said the message. I’m sending my best wishes on the wings of thousands of birds and with the last rose before the snow.
I go outside, where there are no reminders of Jean. It’s Boxing Day, still early morning. Only joggers and dog walkers are up and about, plus a few kids trying out new bikes or heading down to the beach with enormous white swan floats.
Pink-and-grey galahs are linedancing on the electricity wires and generally behaving like . . . like galahs. Reminders after all. There was a pair of galahs at the moulin—Jean’s watermill home—the last time I saw him. Caged birds, peaky. Feathers ruffled. I couldn’t imagine Jean keeping any creature caged. ‘A gift from Jeanne,’ he explained.
Between the announcement of death and its impact—after the arrow leaves the bow and before it lodges itself in the target—hangs a brief period of grace. I live in a small coastal town in northern New South Wales, 17,000 kilometres from the end of the valley in south-western France where Jean’s body lies. The arrow has to leave the valley, travel over oceans and continents, the equator that we crossed together, and pass through seasons, from the darkness of midwinter to this bright blue antipodean midsummer day.
A good death, Jean—suddenly, in the senior years. In your own bed; not in prison, not on a battlefield. Not at sea.
A couple of galahs land in the grass beneath the poinciana tree and start pecking. They are moving freely, preened and perfect, not a ruffled feather in sight. Are they part of the convoy of birds bearing Jean’s wishes? Jean himself paying me a visit, assuring me all is well? One of the galahs looks up, fixes me with its cynical eye. It seems to have read my thoughts and is answering—miraculous in itself, but, even more so, it’s speaking French. ‘Little sister, do you really think I’d turn up in the afterlife wearing this ridiculous pink-and-grey outfit?’
A few days later obituaries start appearing in the French press:
French adventurer, writer and ‘friend of the poor’ Jean Kay has died peacefully at his home in the Toulouse region, aged 69.
Born in Algeria in 1943, the second youngest of five children, Jean Kay’s formative years were marked by the early loss of his mother to cancer, a strict Catholic upbringing and the rigorous discipline of a military father. While still in his teens Jean Kay himself served in the French army then subsequently as a mercenary in Lebanon, Yemen, Biafra and Angola. It was in Biafra that Kay witnessed at close hand the effect of war on civilian populations. A desire to alleviate human suffering would motivate later actions.
The best known of these was Kay’s attempted hijacking of a Pakistan Airlines flight in 1971 to obtain medical supplies for Bangladeshi refugees. He served eight months in prison before being released with a suspended sentence of five years.
Kay made headlines again in 1976 for his part in the embezzlement of eight million francs from aeronautical magnate Marcel Dassault. Sentenced in absentia he became a fugitive, sailing around the world under various aliases.
In 1983 he married his third wife, American heiress Fiona Field. The couple travelled to Calcutta and set up soup kitchens for the poor and homeless. After being deported from India they spent several more years at sea before finally settling in France.
The ‘hijacker with a big heart’ was without doubt one of the last of his kind and his generation, the embodiment of the adventurer and committed fighter of the 20th century. The former mercenary maintained that his engagement was never motivated by money but ‘to defend Christian values, to fight against misery, corruption, and injustice’. If the life of Jean Kay wasn’t always perfect it was nevertheless colourful and lived up to his ideals of honour and courage.
Jean Kay had climbed the craggy cliffs of elsewhere, stood on the edge, and seen beyond the horizon. Hijacker, embezzler, soldier of fortune, shapeshifter. Jean Kay, the strange man I once hitched a ride with. It was on a boat, not in a car, but that didn’t make it any safer.
3.
Before
BEFORE JEAN, BEFORE THE rest of my life, before everything that followed, there was Tony. That started with a boat ride too—not beyond the horizon, just a Friday night jazz cruise around Sydney Harbour. It was the early 1970s, I had recently returned from my first trip overseas, got a part-time job teaching English as a second language to migrants, and, in my mid-twenties, enrolled as a ‘mature age’ student at Sydney University.
On that harbour cruise Tony was noticeable. Younger than the jazz stalwarts, he had long hair and flowy clothes—like me. We chatted, listened to the music, moved around, lost sight of each other. Bright city lights illuminated the Harbour Bridge and the newly completed Opera House. What a city Sydney was. At the end of the night Tony found me and asked if I wanted to go and watch the possums in a park near his place in Woollahra. I wasn’t sure what ‘watching the possums’ entailed (as it turned out, it actually meant observing nocturnal marsupial activity) and said no.
A few weeks later Tony turned up at a party at my share house. We spent most of the night sitting on the couch crossing and uncrossing our legs, watching everyone else get drunk or stoned. Occasionally our arms brushed. Heat, a frisson of electrical charge. He had the right skin. I’ve never been able to define exactly what it is—texture, smoothness, pliability, the way it slides over the muscles?—but I recognise it as soon as I feel it. Sometimes I can tell simply by looking. Maybe it goes back to my eye-bandaged days, when sight and touch fused together in some sort of synaesthesia.
‘Come over again,’ I invited when he finally left about 4.30 am.
Tony dropped in a few days later but I wasn’t home. I instructed my housemates to give him our phone number if he came again. He did. They did. But he didn’t call. Finally, the third time he dropped in, I was at home.
A group of us—my three housemates and another friend—were in my room, which caught the afternoon sun, drinking beer and playing poker when the doorbell rang. The nearest person went downstairs to answer it and brought Tony up the stairs.
He sat on the floor with us. We were betting with matchsticks, but after a few rounds Tony said: ‘You can play with this as long as you give it all back at the end.’
He tipped up his shoulder bag and $3000 in cash spilled onto the floor. You could buy a whole house in the inner city for $35,000. ‘Courtesy of my favourite horse, Paleface Adios.’ It was like a scene out of a movie in which bank robbers get to their hideout and throw the money around like confetti.
The gesture was impressive. It wasn’t the money so much as the panache. How cool was this guy, wearing Tibetan boots and batik pants, walking around with all that cash in his hippie shoulder bag?
