In the lull between arguments, I gathered more information about the girls. Ashley Benfield was the one who didn’t fit—hadn’t been born, at least, into the kind of life that encouraged recklessness like the other two. Keely Manning had grown up much like my murdered girlfriend Martina—a grimy face in a loud brood, each distinguished only by whether or not her particular crimes for that day would interrupt dinner. Martina told me that she enjoyed the sensation of being bad, liked to be hated because when she was hated she was being noticed, being heard. I wondered if Keely sought the arms of strangers because, besides the money, for once she was the focus of someone’s attention even if only for a few minutes. From what her sister told me, something had been missing in Martina almost from the beginning. She never slept. Constantly swirled through violent emotions, even as a child. Would strangle her siblings until they turned blue in the face and then seconds later want their affection.
But Ashley. Ashley was different. I listened to her parents while the crowd around us sniped at each other. Ashley had been everything her mother ever wanted. An artist. An academic. A perfect little angel. The Benfields had plenty of photographs of the little girl performing in dance classes, receiving awards on the assembly stage, adding bi-carb of soda to a model volcano to make it erupt pink foam for a science fair. She was gentle, they said. Giving. Was I looking for Ashley now because she had tired of that perfect life? Had someone come along and convinced the girl, as so many bad boy figures do, that everything her parents had put into her had been to benefit themselves only?
I didn’t have any kids. I’d come close. But I had no idea what kind of trouble teenage girls could be. Runaways were not my department. All I got to see were the girls who had been found too late and the bad boys with their masks off, crying their eyes out in piss-stained jail cells. I looked at the pictures of bright-eyed Ashley and wondered what she’d been thinking.
The meeting taught me little about Rye and what had made the girls head out to his farm. But I said my good-byes at least knowing a little more about who I was looking for. I stepped out onto the porch where the boys were standing and stopped, flipped my notebook shut. Maybe it was instinct, or the angry dog look I’d copped from the Manning boy when I’d arrived, but he offered me a cigarette and I took it.
“Got email?” he asked. He looked inside. I glanced in after him, blew smoke respectfully over my shoulder.
“Yeah.”
“Might email you something.”
I gave him my card. He examined it as he spoke. There was a great nasty ulcer just inside his mouth. One of those that makes it hard to eat.
“I’ll email you something I don’t want going no farther than your inbox.”
I was going to tell him I couldn’t guarantee that, but he pulled open the screen door, took his cigarette from his mouth, and walked inside. I lifted my eyes and got a cop-hating good-bye stare that burned me all the way to the car.
J
ackie Rye was at breakfast when Eadie arrived. She’d slept badly again, the scratchers and crawlers and wandering things that lived inside her caravan somehow sensing the tension in her body and increasing the volume of their night orchestra. She woke sometime in the middle of the night to the feeling of the camera’s black eye watching her like an owl and some long-legged thing crawling in her hair. She pulled it out and hurled it toward the darkness at the end of the bed. Made a promise to herself to block the drains, tape the windows. When Skylar thumped on her door at sunrise she felt pain in the act of waking, a dread so real and deep it made her bones ache.
Jackie’s presence at the edge of the men’s table made it all worthwhile. He was talking to Nick. Everyone turned when she approached. By now her news had passed on every set of lips. Some laughs. Some scowls. Some assessments based on the new information. Suddenly her long, manly gait meant something. The squareness of her shoulders and her rare smiles. How could they have missed it? Eadie put toast on. Skylar went for the eggs lying hard and dry in a dirty corner of the grill.
“People been saying things,” the girl said. Eadie hadn’t heard her usual scared-cat sprint to the door that morning. The girl’s lips were restless, being chewed.
“I imagine they have.”
“Is it true?”
“Jesus, Skye,” Eadie laughed. The girl looked up, relieved. “It’s not terminal cancer They didn’t just announce the end of the world.”
“Some people think so, though. It’s like, city stuff. City people are like that. Not out here.”
“People are like that. City people. Country people. People on fucking islands in the middle of the Pacific. People on snowy mountains. Eskimos. Around here, they
move
to the city. But before they move, they walk among you.” Eadie wiggled her fingers in the girl’s face. She cringed away.
“There ain’t no fucking gay Eskimos.”
“How many Eskimos you met?”
“Jesus.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Spose.” Skylar sucked air in the side of her cheek, made a click sound like she was trying to attract a horse. “Don’t really care that much myself, to be honest, I’m just telling you how it is. I’m more worried about who’s gonna win
Master Chef
. You watch it?” Her elbow in Eadie’s ribs, high, bruising.
“No.”
“Tonight we’re watching it at yours then.” She nodded to confirm her decision. “Jackie hates it. I’ll bring chips.”
She tottered off to the women’s tables. Eadie set the kettle to boil. The morning was heating and the dogs that had taken up their places in the shade of the foldout tables were being harassed by flies gathered on the humps of their backs and behind their ears. Sucking at scratch wounds.
Eadie imagined the police raiding this place, when she had finally pinned down whoever was responsible for the missing girls, black-clad officers knocking over these tables, kicking dirt in these snarling faces, throwing open caravan doors and rifling through possessions, making piles of them in the sun. Because that was what they would do when it was over, secure the killer and make everyone else’s lives a misery simply for being here, for being in the company of a monster, whoever it was. Some youth worker would get Skylar off in a corner and listen to her cry and ask when she and Jackie had first had sexual intercourse, assess whether charges needed to be pursued. Someone would probably round up the dogs and send them off to a vet. She watched them squirming as she stood at the table waiting for the kettle, watched the flies walking in the blood. She didn’t feel bad.
Eadie didn’t notice the men leaving the table until they were all around her, scraping char off the barbecue, opening cupboards, slamming them, emptying the tiny bar fridge of butter, sauce, bowls of onion. Round two. Eadie stiffened as Nick passed behind her. She felt his breath on her neck.
“Look at this. It’s Rye Farm’s newest hand,” Jackie said, leaning on the edge of the barbecue, his thin arms folded. “How’s the working life, Eadie?”
“Fine, Jackie, thanks.” Eadie poured the sugar. Grabbed for the kettle. It was gone. Nick adding to it, meeting her eyes over the sink, through the fine steam. She’d got his left cheekbone with the frying pan, right where the flesh was at its thinnest on the bottom rim of the eye socket. It would have hurt. The handle hadn’t left a mark, but she’d likely crushed something in there, left it rubbing, angry, hard to swallow. There were capillaries burst in the corners of his eyes.
“Bet the hard work’s helping you rest easy,” Jackie said.
“Sure is. Slept like a lamb.”
“Everything nice and . . .” the small man licked his flappy lips, glanced at Nick, “secure over there in your van?”
“More now than it was,” Eadie said.
“Good. Good. You never know what creepy crawlies might come wandering in at night.”
Jackie squinted at the sun, seemed to want to say something more, selecting the best words, like a man choosing the pig that would be slaughtered that day from the dozens of wide-eyed squealers waiting in the stalls. She watched him and felt Nick at the end of the table, tapping his fingers on the plastic surface, watching the water bubble up around the temperature gauge.
“I’m glad you’re feeling happy here,” Jackie said. “Glad you feel like you fit in. I’m not sure everyone feels that way. I’m sure some people around here feel like you’re a . . . square peg, I guess they call it.”
“Nothing wrong with being a bit square, Jackie.” Eadie shrugged off her jacket and folded it in her arms, over her breasts. A loving bundle of denim. She felt a muscle tighten in the corner of her left eye, the only thing in her body that reacted to the tension in her mind.
The kettle clicked. Boiling point. Eadie heard a clunk behind her, felt the earth shudder under her feet as the tabletop slid onto its side and she was stalled like a horse between the table at her hips and the table at her backside. She met Nick’s eyes as he tipped the kettle, knocked it good and hard from the side, no room for error, flushing the tabletop with scalding water. Eadie dropped her denim jacket on the table in the half a second it took for the burning water to reach her, pressed it with her hands, made an instant dam. The water rushed around the jacket and fell at the sides of her body. She felt it splashing on her ankles, the burn of tiny droplets that would do hardly any of the damage the full kettle would have done to her stomach, her hips, her thighs, her crotch. The men around her sent up a yowl of apparent surprise. The women nearby turned, stepped away from the benches they leaned on, curious.
Nick’s eyes. The cold black eyes of an insect.
“Ho!” Jackie laughed, clapped his hands. “Look out. That coulda been really nasty.”
“Jesus, Nick,” someone said. “Watch what you’re doing.”
“Clumsy fucker.”
“You’ll have to be quicker next time,” Jackie laughed, folding his arms, watching Nick’s face. The tall man said nothing.
Someone slapped Eadie’s shoulder in appreciation. She fought the impulse to grab the hand and crush it in her fingers. Eadie took the soaked jacket, still hot to the touch, and slid out from the trap between the two tables, wrung it onto the dirt. Skylar came bounding toward her.
“Man! What happened?”
“Just an accident. Someone trying to give me a bath.” Eadie shook the jacket off, walked over to hang it on a string connecting the two carports. People at the barbecue were laughing. Jackie demonstrated what happened to the women, the rush of water with his loose hands, those hands tightening around an imaginary bundle. Jackie grinned and winked at Eadie as she walked away toward the stables.
People called him the Dogboy of Darlinghurst and stopped calling him Heinrich altogether. For a couple of years it was the Bear and his Dog who arrived at the back doors of suburban houses in the early morning hours to whisper in kitchens with women about what this poison would do or that one, how long it would take husbands or bosses or mistresses to start coughing or choking or turning blue, what those moments would be like for the ones who had to watch and explain.
It was the Bear and his Dog on Sunday mornings on the front doors of terraces in Redfern and Chippendale with the whomping stick and the list of names, Bear and Dog on the logs down by the pier in Woolloomooloo watching the navy boats and eating Harry’s pies, Bear and Dog picking a path through crowded bars to the back booths to talk to dark-eyed foreign men about the girls at the house.
The Night of Teeth and Tearing always seemed to come up during these meetings. Heinrich would sit, folding coasters into squares, with one ass cheek off the booth because that’s all that would fit beside Bear. The eyes would fall on him in the lull of words and someone would say, “Hey, isn’t that the dog-killer?” Bear liked to tell the story, to rub Heinrich’s head with his oven-mitt hand until his hair was all messed up.
He did this even when Heinrich was fifteen, or what he guessed was about fifteen, when his shoulders spread out and his knuckles developed calluses and his nose had been broken enough times that no one took pity on him when it happened. Heinrich had noticed that—the slow disappearing of pity, and care and affection, particularly from the women, the gradual change in those creatures who once only wanted to put clothes on him and now only seemed to want to take them off. Heinrich was just warming up to the idea of letting these giggling, whispering, lip-licking beings have their way one of these days when Bear pulled him aside in the hall and told him not to shit in his own nest, whatever that meant.
And even though he was the Dogboy of Darlinghurst, the boy was always landed with tasks given to someone who hadn’t accomplished anything. Bear would tell him that these were the things he needed to do to make sure he kept his feet on the ground. Heinrich was still the runner on fight nights and he was still kept away from the dog training. He still had to read to Bear in the greenhouse, even though he was pretty good at it by now and even liked reading in his own time. And he was still responsible for all the cleaning work that went on back there, sweeping out the dirt and hosing the floors and watering the seedlings and labeling the bottles. Heinrich was still the carrier of messages, the keeper of keys, the filler of glasses, the protector of coats and hats. But he didn’t mind. It meant he never missed anything.
Over the years the boy began to understand just how much of a hold Caesar had on every person he came into contact with, from the girls at the house who couldn’t leave because they had no families and no money and couldn’t read, to the junkies wandering Darlinghurst Road who couldn’t go too far because Caesar was the only one who could get them what they needed even when they couldn’t pay for it up front. You couldn’t even get out of his grasp by killing yourself because Caesar got to know everyone you’d ever loved before he gave you a penny, so that he could hold them all in his hands like mice when you couldn’t pay as they tried to claw and squirm their way out of his big fingers.
When you came to Caesar you left with a stain, even if you didn’t know it yet, a tiny ink spot on your cuff or your palm or your shoe, something that would grow and spread overnight, a cancer dancing over skin. And his reach went everywhere, no matter how low down you tried to crawl into the dark, no matter how high you climbed or who you dragged in front of you. Caesar sent the Dog and the Bear to clamber through the hatches of navy ships to pick up bags of guns, to talk to men in bunks and engine rooms, to stand on the bridge and look at the city and talk to angry men in white. He sent them into warehouses to walk through streets and alleys of machinery parts, cameras, televisions, blenders, costumes, leather jackets, fur coats, shoes. Bear would sit in the car with the boy and his list, rubbing his hands to keep them warm.
“Know where these came from?” Bear would ask, holding up one of the cameras, turning the thing in his hands. Heinrich always felt a little sick around cameras but couldn’t remember why.
“Where, Bear?”
“Vietnam. Bet you can’t tell me where that is.”
“Sticking out the side of Cambodia.”
“Sure is. Crazy shit going on over there right now. Boys killing boys your age. Younger. Going mad and hacking them up like fish.”
“Doesn’t sound any good, Bear.”
“No good at all, boy. We got eight thousand boxes here, six cameras a box. How many is that, young scholar?”
“Bout forty-eight thousand, I reckon.”
“I reckon, too. Never miss a thing, Heinrich. Never let anyone give you a job unless you know what it is, what they’re going to make from it, and whether or not you’re getting yours, fair and square. Someone tells you they’ve got a hundred gold necklaces, you count them. Someone tells you they’ve paid the dealer, you call up and check. Someone tells you a guy’s dead, you call his mother and ask when the funeral was. Always watching, always listening, always checking. You get it?”
“Got it.”
There were rare times when Heinrich missed things and it was only ever when the forbidden man was involved. Heinrich had learned that his name was Savet and that he was a detective sergeant, but nothing more. When Detective Sergeant Savet arrived at the house Caesar would look at the boy the way that a man looks at a collarless dog wandering in his yard, trying to decide if it deserved brutality or could afford to be ignored. Heinrich would wander away, find girls to tease.
Bear always got angry when Savet was around. When Heinrich would ask what was going on, Bear wouldn’t answer. It wasn’t often that Bear didn’t answer something. He had answered so many questions when Heinrich was little, even tried to tackle things he couldn’t know—like where had Heinrich come from, what had happened to the people in the burning house.
“They were probably good people,” Bear would say. “One of them was probably short.”
From what Heinrich could tell, all Savet wanted to talk to Bear and Caesar about were boats and planes and maps of Vietnam. Heinrich didn’t know if the man had been in the war or what. He walked with a limp and had the same hard-edged look that Heinrich had seen in boys coming back from the Nam, the sideways glance and quick turn of someone who had been crept up on a few times too many and couldn’t sleep properly because of it.
The thing that worried Heinrich most about Detective Sergeant Thomas Savet was that he was sure the cop had the Silence in him. Once he watched Savet being run off by Bear when Caesar wasn’t at the house. Savet had stood on the path at the bottom of the steps and looked up as the big man yelled and threatened and his face had been placid, calm, unhearing.
“You really hate that guy,” Heinrich said afterward as Bear stood panting on the porch looking at the empty street.
“Warmonger. Filthy . . . greedy troublemaker.”
“Why’s he keep hanging round here?”
Bear grunted, kicked a cat off the porch that had been whining and wandering around his feet.
“You know that Kingsley kid that went missing? In the papers?”
“No.”
“Neutral Bay kid. Rich. Volleyball.”
“Oh yeah, yeah.”
“He solved that.” Bear pointed to where Savet had been standing. “They’re telling us this lazy ignorant fool solved that.”
Bear looked at the boy as though the very fact that Detective Sergeant Savet had solved a murder made something very clear but, as often happened in his life, Heinrich found himself on the very edge of understanding without really knowing what was going on. He didn’t like the feeling. He was more comfortable following directions, staying out of the way, keeping his head down.
Heinrich opened his mouth to offer something, some half-committed line that would assure Bear that he wasn’t an idiot but not reveal the crushing emptiness in his knowledge. But before he could do it Bear walked inside the house and slammed the door.