“Take a guess,” I said.
“You . . .” He looked distant, eyes flickering over the wallpaper peeling beside me. “You sent it out west with the truckies. You paid a cleaner. You fed the fish. You dug a hole. They were putting flash apartments up on the North Shore like they were walling off the coast against the fucking Japs. She’d be someone’s concrete mix.”
I slapped my notebook on my thigh. There was no way I was convincing North Shore Metro to start digging under the houses of millionaires.
“Girl like Sunday. Man, it’d be a stretch to bother. You’d have tossed her out into the street.”
“Hmm,” I said. “No one did, though. I’ve got no Jane Does that even come close.”
Bobby looked at the girl sitting on the bed, examining her split ends. “Bridget here’s gonna settle your bill.”
I got up. Bobby saluted me as he headed toward the door. He went through it, then leaned back, squinted at me.
“Think she had a little sidekick named Kimmy or Jimmy or something. Some little short ass with a big mouth always talking. Might be able to point you somewhere.”
I was going to tell him thanks, but he disappeared. I headed after him to leave and Bridget the girl with the impressive cold sore put a hand on my chest.
“Oh, right, yeah.” I dug out my wallet.
“He said five.”
“Right.”
She smiled at me, tucked the notes into her back pocket. I knew she’d hold back a few notes but Bobby had probably factored that in. She put a finger into the gap between my shirt buttons and tickled the eagle on my chest. “You in a rush to go?”
“Desperate rush.” I took her hand down, gave it a little squeeze, and slipped around her. “But you be good, baby.”
“Never,” she laughed. I jogged down the dark stairs.
T
hey took lots of breaks on Rye’s Farm. Eadie liked it. There was something comforting in the monotony of her tasks—the shoveling, shoveling, shoveling, carrying, carrying, carrying—the way her breathing would synchronize to the task, come fast or slow as her limbs worked like the cogs in a clock. Pea gave Eadie instructions and she followed them. There were no decisions. She could see the appeal of this kind of work for someone who disliked pressure, deadlines, the weighing of options and outcomes.
The breaks fueled those tired hours, gave her mind coal to burn. Eadie kept her eye on the men and women who walked by her stalls, stopped to check the animals, led cows through for checkups or borrowed bits of rope. A look. A sigh. The fiddling of fingers. Eadie began to make a catalog of twitches. She was in no way attached to the idea that Jackie and Nick were going to hand her the key one of these idle afternoons when they’d had enough of being her prey, so she kept the pendant camera trained on anyone who passed, made excuses to go out into the bays to record conversations, snippets, jargon, nicknames. She knew any of the girls or boys in Jackie’s happy family could be the game-changer, the loose-lips, the Big One.
Eadie knew that being a successful killer was mostly due to sophisticated acting skills. The same organization, discipline and order required to make it in Hollywood. Most of the killers she’d found difficult to hunt—either for her night-time games or her day job—were such convincing actors that even the last seconds of their lives had made her question who the real person was behind the mask.
Eadie knew the game was hard to play and that it couldn’t be played forever. She needed her weekend to slip away, to let her mask fall, to release a little of her bloodlust on a worthy foe, Harry Ratchett. But whoever had killed the girls was here, on the farm, and they couldn’t keep up the game forever. She was determined to catch the slip when it happened. A laugh hacked up too late. A tear faked or a crooked smile.
So for that reason Eadie followed whenever Pea came and banged on the side of the shed she was working in, walked over the dirt toward the sunbaked picnic tables in the wake of the old woman’s squat frame. The first three or four breaks of the day were smokos only. She would bum a couple of tokes from Skylar if she was around or sit peeling labels off the beer bottles while the others talked, picked at each other, laughed. Ramble on. Eadie would see and record it all.
There was an awful lot of reminiscing going on among the people on Rye’s Farm, Eadie noticed, as though they were in the wake of some great party and all the guests of honor had packed up and left. There was a lot of talk about high school, the last great event in their lives, when no one had developed a habit and power was something seized through weight and strength alone—and not by money. Eadie would listen, cleaning under her fingernails with a corner of a plastic label, letting the pendant do the looking. Someone would get an iPhone going with music. Pearl Jam. Always Pearl Jam.
Today the topic seemed to be people who had come and who were gladly gone. Eadie edged onto the very end of the bench, one ass-cheek all that was needed, and started digging a hole in the dust with her boot, grinding the lumps of green manure falling from the grooves in her tread.
“. . . with a fucking beard,” someone was saying, words forced through dry laughter. “A fucking blond beard, real light, from here to here. Boys were calling her the Pirate.”
Everyone sniggering. Eadie wondered whether she should snigger along, then decided it was best to attempt to remain invisible. Pea sat down across from her and struggled with a lighter, fat hands quivering, the shakes.
“That foam hair removal shit is ten bucks a bottle. Fuck. There’s no excuse. No fucking excuse.”
“Keely was blond like that. Furry blond arms.”
Eadie perked up, managed a glance at the speaker. A woman of many layers. Metallica T-shirt over tank top over neon-colored Kmart sports bra. Checkered boxer shorts beneath denim shorts beneath layers of chain and leather and cotton holding things up, pulling things down. Eadie thought her name was Maz. A name cutup and beat down and given to an undersized infant who grew into an oversized woman. Most of them had one-syllable names. Except, of course, for her. The outsider. The rug-muncher.
“Keely. Ooh. Ooh,” Maz gave a shudder. Everyone laughed.
“Not your all-time fav, Maz.”
“I so regret not getting that girl’s teeth,” Maz smiled. “All I wanted was her fucking teeth. I just wanted to be able to say she never got away from me. At least not in one piece.”
“God, you’re bad.”
“You’re a bad, bad girl.”
“What did she do?” Eadie asked. Everyone turned. Eadie squinted in the light, tried to feign humility.
“She was an uppity little slut who never knew when to keep her mouth shut.” Maz leaned as she spoke, showing gray teeth. “Not unlike some little blow-ins I’ve met of late.”
“Keely borrowed a few of Maz’s things,” someone sniggered. “Borrowed them, fucking, forever.”
“Slippery fingers. Nobody likes a slippery finger.”
“Well, maybe some people do.”
Everyone laughed. Eadie felt a nudge and only just managed to keep herself from falling off the edge of the bench.
“I should’a borrowed a piece of that girl’s brain while I had the chance. Borrowed it permanently.”
“I saw something on the news about her,” someone frowned. “Like they’re after her. The cops. They want to talk to her.”
Eadie cracked her knuckles, one at a time. The speaker was a waif named Sal, one of the cleverer of the bunch. Eadie wasn’t surprised Sal had watched the news. She had the intelligence to be interested in it. But if Eadie were lucky, Sal wouldn’t be the type to watch regularly, wouldn’t have put together the pieces and calculated that three of Jackie Rye’s past residents were missing, ask why the police hadn’t been sniffing around. Eadie had been banking on the residents of Rye’s Farm being so transient that few of them would have been there at the same time as all three missing girls. It was better if no one knew the police were looking for the missing girls. Whoever was responsible might decide to burrow or bail before Eadie had managed to get hold of them.
“Keely was on the news?” Maz frowned.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I think they said, like, she’s missin’ or somefink.”
Eadie wiped at a bead of sweat on her temple.
“Missing? Since when? Since she took off from here with my fucking DVDs?”
“I don’t know. Didn’t watch that close.”
“I hope she’s dead.”
A moan of appreciation went up from the table, broke into laughs.
“Aw, come on. No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Not really though.”
“Don’t tell me what I fucking mean.”
Eadie chewed her knuckles. There was no denying Sal had a few more biscuits in her packet than the other girls at the table, but that didn’t count for much if her basic danger warning system was faulty. Sal was wandering into dangerous territory, and only Eadie, it seemed, could see the water rippling. Warning Sal was impossible. She glanced at the breakfast sheds and saw Jackie and Nick there, hunched and smoking.
“I wonder if she’s in trouble or someone’s reported her gone.” Sal picked at the splintered tabletop, oblivious.
Maz had a bone and wasn’t letting it go. “I’m really fucking interested in how you think I’m some kind of dog no good for her word. Because I’ve never done nothing to make people think that. I always follow through.”
“Yeah, you know, but people talk sometimes.”
“You saying I’m all talk?”
“Jesus, you need to calm down a bit.” Sal squinted in the light.
“I mean what I say I mean.” Maz boasted. “They say they know where she is?”
“No. They just said they’re looking. There was a mug shot. A description. A reward, maybe. I dun remember.”
“Dead. Dead in the ground.”
“Oh, Maz!”
“What?”
“Well, what if she is dead? And you said you wished it?” Sal pleaded.
“Then I hope that. I hope that and worse. I hope some fucking piece of shit from out the back of fucking Bankstown put her in a van and gave her what she needed and then put her in the ground and gave the world what it needed.” Maz looked around for encouragement. The women laughed. Pea gave up on the lighter, threw it over her shoulder into the dirt, and held her hand out to the girl beside her.
“No, you don’t.”
“Oh my God. Somebody put a leash on this bitch, please.” Maz’s face was taut as nylon.
“Plenty of people steal shit,” Sal said. “You don’t know what made her do it, maybe she, like, she had some kind of reason, you know, that nobody knew about . . .”
“You’re stealing my good air right now, Sal,” Pea said, exhaling blue into the thin white air. “You need to give it up before someone knocks your block off.”
An interesting move by Pea, Eadie thought. She’d got the impression so far that Pea enjoyed a good bullying session. No one was as they appeared. Sal herself had perked right up to her full height, the bones in her throat shifting up and down as she swallowed, apparently excited by the challenge of exerting her morality onto the group.
“You know sometimes you have to, like, give people the benefit of the doubt. People, you know. People can . . .” Sal was on the edge of something, Eadie could see. Something prophetic. Opinion changing. Something informed. But she didn’t have the words. Hadn’t been raised with the words. All she had in her mind were pictures of fairness and hard work and reward. Moving pictures, mental films she had made of a better world. “Maybe, like, she. Maybe if you’d forgiven her, you . . .”
Eadie watched Maz attack Sal, and to prevent herself from getting up, going for Maz, stopping the brutality and blowing her cover, she took pains to catalog just how very many tiny gestures and surrenders and facilitations were needed in the other women at the table for Maz to be able to do what she did to Sal. Eadie counted, one, two, three, nothing moving but her eyes, as the woman between Maz and Sal swiftly got up and stepped back, clearing the path. She watched as Pea leaned to her left, nudging Sal forward when she tried to lean back away from Maz’s hands, watched as the three women on her own side of the table got up and moved around behind the fray, blocking Sal’s exit.
Eadie let her eyes drift away as the beating progressed, to the horizon, to the stalking silhouettes in the heat haze, who stopped at the noise of the screaming, turned, looked, folded their arms, the way men will stop to appreciate a sunset, witnessing nature at its finest. Eadie remained seated. Bent a little to watch Maz’s boot going up and coming down. Thought about the science of blood coated in dust, how it formed little balls, why it didn’t soak into the earth right away, how long it took for blood to do that. Eadie witnessed, and Eadie said nothing. She put her hands on the table as they dragged Sal away toward the hose by the stables and only looked down at them when she felt the heat of Pea’s cigarette near her fingers. The old woman was watching, too.
“All right.” Pea flicked ash onto the blood-wet earth. “Back to it.”
Heinrich went into a hole. That was what you did when you were dead. He took the room that had once been Vicky’s in the attic of the house filled with giggling and whispering girls and lay under the sloped ceiling in the dark. He hurt. He slept.
In the time that passed after Bear’s death, he began to learn how his new body would work, how much strength he would have. He lay and thought about what was happening inside him, bones fusing back together from where they’d splintered apart, tissue strands reaching out and reuniting with torn brothers, blocked blood vessels shrinking and becoming clear and raging with redness again, with warmth. When once the girls came and lay on him, lifted him, held him, put their tongues and fingers into him, now he flipped and pinned them and showed them his strength, made them squeal and cry out.
Sometimes in the dark he thought about Sunday. Tried not to follow those dark paths down into the bottom of his soul where the Silence lived. It would endanger the people around him, those thoughts. The sleeping girls. Vicky with her quiet steps. The men who laughed and blundered about downstairs. No. He would save that for Sunday. He knew somehow she would come to him.
When the girls left him Heinrich used a stick to make the distance between the bed and the table by the tiny window that looked out into the crowded lanes of Surry Hills. He pushed aside the papers and letters and notes Vicky had stacked there and waited for his coffee to come. He leaned his head on his knuckles and planned. At nine each night Vicky arrived with her little brown glazed coffee set and her hair falling out of her tortoiseshell clip. Braless, waify, a whisper in the way she walked and a whisper in the way she greeted him—no lips, just brushes of fingers and nails. Heinrich didn’t think Vicky gave her lips to anyone. He would look out the tiny window and talk. Vicky would take up a pen and write.
“Who’s overseeing importations down there at the Point right now?”
“Ian Hereward. Brett’s son.”
“Brett still alive?”
“No.”
“Junior got any naughty pleasures?”
“No,” Vicky would sigh, tap the name on her list. “Straight as an arrow. Doesn’t even sip. They tell me you can’t buy that one. Not with the Queen’s gold.”
“Sometimes money’s not the price.”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Boy. Money’s all you got this early in the piece.”
Vicky always called him Boy, even though Heinrich guessed he was eighteen or nineteen now.
“Didn’t his pretty sister marry some fucking loudmouthed wog?”
“Yeah. An art dealer.”
“Junior go to the wedding?”
“No.”
Heinrich sipped his coffee. It was thin and black. All his body could take. Luckily Vicky was one of those women who had been around enough of the right kind of men to need few if any explicit directions. She looked at Heinrich as he sipped his coffee, and after a second or two made a note in her book to send someone after the loudmouthed wog.
And that’s how it went in those first couple of years, nothing but the gold light of the tiny windows. Heinrich sitting, talking, Vicky making lists, pushing money and people around down there on the earth.
“Who’s the Father down there at St. Margaret Mary’s?”
“Where?”
“Randwick. Catholic.”
“I don’t know.”
“Get to know.”
“Seen the light, have you?”
“I’d like to hear, not so much see,” Heinrich would say. “Hear some confessions. Some secret sins.”
Out there, on the surface, Heinrich’s money walked, passed, tumbled from hand to hand, bumped into other piles of money and multiplied, the way that rats will triple and triple again in narrow passageways filled with torn paper. It was gathered and presented in stacks on tables in backrooms and cardrooms and changing rooms. It arrived unexpectedly into groups of men in the shadows of crowded clubs, was passed in envelopes into bloodstained hands, was tucked into coat pockets as lips brushed against the rims of strained ears.
“That thing. From last week. You’re good to go.”
“Says who?”
“Nevermind.”
The “Nevermind” emerged into the language of prostitutes, junkies, warlords, bikers, chemists selling unlabeled boxes from their back steps and truck drivers taking back routes through the bush. The “Nevermind” trembled on the lips of theater owners on George Street, just before the lights went down, just after the lights went up again by someone’s suddenly empty back-row chair, program card on the carpet, spectacles fallen in the aisle. The “Nevermind” was whispered in dreams. In cells. On ships rounding the headlands of Watsons Bay, plunging into the gathering arms of the harbor. Men in hats knocked on the doors of the homes of prison wardens, prosecutors, journalists, men who made their livings holding keys, slamming hammers, wielding pens like swords. An envelope passed. A wink in the light of the hall.
“Who’s this from?”
“Nevermind.”
In the middle of bank robberies, a group of five became four and one comrade was tripped in the back lot before the gaping van, a foot on a heaving chest, the butt of a rifle lifted in the air.
“Sorry, bub. You need to go away for a while.”
“What? Why? Why?”
“Nevermind.”
Caesar was at dinner at Dominique’s in Potts Point the last time anyone said Nevermind to him. He retreated to Dominique’s because they kept the lights and the music low, the place was always clean, and his table always ready, tucked behind a wall of lit cabinets filled with cocktail glasses in the shapes of women and animals. It didn’t really matter to Caesar who came along, who snuck into the seats, who wrestled with whom to put something to him while he ate—some grand plan worked out to within an inch of its life, some new avenue for his bloody river to wind down into the hands of the junkies. And though he despised them, resented them, was sickened by their simple travels between self-pity and self-gain, their itchy scratchy twitchy patchy existences chasing after the blessed release he’d been importing with Savet from Nam for years, it was these creatures, the junkies, who had made him what he was.
If there had been some way to get what he wanted out of them without the exchange, Caesar was certain he’d be able to feel joy again. If he could just figure out a way of getting their lifeblood without having to touch or speak to them. He rested his chin on his knuckles. Fucking junkies. He’d be locked to them forever.
“Caesar?” Someone broke him out of his musings. Caesar blinked. Savet had been sitting beside him only moments ago, shifting his prawns around his plate with his fork, and now some sallow-eyed fool was in his place, some soldier Caesar didn’t know. Savet was the only man Caesar had ever known who would eat crisp cold prawns out of the tail with a fork. And even then he seemed to eat five or six and then give them up, like they weren’t for him. He didn’t understand it. The cop had moved down the table, was staring at his glass of whisky, plate full. Caesar felt annoyed. He gathered up another prawn from his pile and dabbed it in the sauce.
“What is it?”
“Tuesday’s, um . . .” the soldier said. “Tuesday’s shipment, the one meant for the Punchbowl guys. The one that, um, was supposed to come in with, and, um—”
“Would you learn to put some fucking words together.”
“Well there’s been a sort of, um, problem, and . . .”
“Say ‘um’ once more and see what happens to you.”
“Sorry.” The young soldier scratched his neck, hard, left red marks. A few months off being one of Caesar’s new clients. Caesar filled his mouth with prawns.
“Tuesday’s shipment has been seized.”
“No it hasn’t.” Caesar filled the gaps in his mouth with wine, swished, swallowed, sucked juice from between his teeth.
“It . . .” The soldier sat there gaping, mouth puckering like a fish. “We got word from Billy down on the wharf that the whole fucking thing’s been, uh, uh, it’s being held.”
Caesar looked around the table. There were six men and Savet, all of them talking except the copper with the restless fork. A young waitress brought a basket of bread to the table, set it within Caesar’s reach. He grabbed a roll. The man to his right, some bulbous-nosed stock-shifter-cum-hitman, grabbed one, too.
“I’m not understanding you,” Caesar told the soldier. “You’re talking gibberish. Nothing has been seized. It’s impossible.”
The soldier scratched his arms.
“Go back to Billy and tell him to stop feeding you lies.”
“Billy’s in the clink,” the soldier trembled. “Ronnie Redford came down there himself and just started gathering everybody up like sheep into a divvy van.”
The fat-nosed man to Caesar’s right coughed. Caesar looked over, frowned. Fatty looked apologetic. Spread a hand in the air.
“You’ve shocked my friend here into choking on his dinner with this despicable news,” Caesar told the soldier. He broke his bread and dabbed it in the sauce, munched it between his back teeth. “I sincerely hope what you’re telling me isn’t true. But if it is, I want you to find out exactly how ten sets of eyes that were supposed to be turned away from my shipment all suddenly turned around at the same time.”
“Billy says he heard some guys talking about the seizure over in remand. Said somebody told somebody who told somebody else it’d been cooking for a while and there was more to come.”
“And where are all these excited little whisperings leading back to?”
“They didn’t say. They just said nevermind.”
“Nevermind?” Caesar licked his lips. Glanced down the table at Savet. He wasn’t looking.
The fat man was coughing again. Short, hard coughs, like he was trying to dislodge the bread from his windpipe. “I’m hearing this more and more. This ‘nevermind.’ Someone knocks over my hockshop. Nevermind. Someone stirs up a couple of my girls. Nevermind. Someone seizes my fucking shipment. Nevermind.
“Nevermind. I mind, you little fuck. I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m really beginning to mind. And you better pay attention to things that I mind. All of you. All of you little shits. What I mind should be all that’s on your minds all the time, you understand me?”
Caesar grabbed hold of whatever he could get of the soldier, managed a collar and with it a bunch of warm, loose neck skin. Squeezed, felt the soldier tense and go limp, to lessen the pain by letting Caesar pull him within biting distance.
“Someone says ‘nevermind’ near me one more time and I’m going to snap. You understand? I’m going to snap, and they’re going to be bagging whoever’s near me when it’s said.”
The fat man fell off his chair. Caesar let the soldier go.
The men around him stood up, but Caesar didn’t need to. He could see the nameless man on the carpet beside him, see the pink foam that poured up and began cascading down his blackening cheeks. He shifted upward in his chair, threw a glance around the table. People were screaming. Caesar hadn’t seen a man’s face color like that before. It was like his cheeks were being flooded with something just below the first layer of skin—black ink injected into the fluid there and creeping across the quivering mounds. The man kicked, hard, kicked again, and then went still. Caesar looked at the men around him, the other diners uncertain whether to get up from their tables or not, hovering inches above their chairs.
Caesar pushed his chair back, got up, and reached down. He plucked the lump of crusty white bread from the fat man’s gnarled hand and raised it to his nose. Smelled something. He didn’t know what.
Something that wasn’t bread.